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Is the US planning to strike Iran?
Link: Daily Times -
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: The declaration by the Bush administration that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is to be placed on the terrorism list could either be “bluster” or “a wind-up for a strike on Iran,” according to former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Middle East official and author Robert Baer.
He writes in the online site Information Clearing House that officials he has talked to in Washington vote for a hit on Iran, perhaps within the next six months. They believe that as long as the US has bombers and missiles in the air, it can hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. What they have in mind is a lighter version of “awe and shock campaign”, used against Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein. He is of the view that as with Iraq and its imagined nuclear weapons, the administration’s case against Iran is circumstantial. The US military suspects, but cannot prove that Iran is the main supplier of sophisticated improvised explosive devices to insurgents killing US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most sophisticated version, explosive formed projectiles or shape charges, are capable of penetrating the armour of an Abrams tank, disabling the tank and killing the crew.
Baer was told by a former CIA explosives expert who still works in Iraq, “The Iranians are making them. End of story.” His argument was that only a state is capable of manufacturing such weapons, which involve a complicated process. He was also convinced that Iran is helping Iraqi Shia militias sight in their mortars on Baghdad’s Green Zone. A second part of the administration’s case against Iran is that it has had a long, established history of killing Americans, starting with the attack on the Marines in Beirut in 1983. Iran also backed Hizballah in its 34-day war against Israel last year. The feeling in the Bush administration is that the US should have taken care of Iran a long, long time ago.
Baer writes that strengthening the administration’s case for a strike on Iran, there’s a belief among neocons that the present order in Tehran is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if the US were to get rid of the Islamic regime, the clerics would fall, and America’s 30-year war with Iran will be over. “It’s another neocon delusion, but still it informs White House thinking,” he adds. Baer asks, “And what do we do if just the opposite happens - a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it’s not even a consideration.”
