[Reader-list] America is preparing to attack Iran

[Taraprakash]

The reports are coming from Russia that America is planning to attack Iran 
on Good Friday. After Democrats have done the lip service by telling Bush 
government that America is not ready for attack, they are now busy defending 
their budget provisions. Sending 15 British people to Irani waters to be 
arrested must be another ploy to attack iran. Bush government is not talking 
much about Iran these days. But perhaps people in American media are doing 
the job of building a public opinion in favour of strikes on iran. Here is a 
sample article from Wall Street Journal.

Iran Escalates.

Iran Escalates. By Thomas G. McInerney.

President Reagan once famously quipped that his strategy in confronting the 
Soviet Union was "We win, they lose." Today, we need a similarly clear 
strategy
to confront Iran, if we are to successfully counter its aim to drive the 
U.S. from the Middle East and -- as we see with the 15 British sailors the 
Iranians
have taken hostage -- attempts to intimidate Western powers into inaction.

That strategy begins not with the Kabuki dance now underway at the United 
Nations. Turtle Bay is usually, and seems destined to be again in this case, 
a
diplomatic sideshow meant more to distract us than to disarm a rogue regime.

While we dither the Iranians will acquire nuclear weapons, give support to 
our enemies in Iraq and undermine our credibility with our European allies. 
We
need to demonstrate now that there are viable military options in dealing 
with a rogue regime in Tehran and that not all of those options will leave 
us
embroiled in a shooting war with yet another large, sprawling nation in the 
Middle East.

I believe that our options for dealing with Iran are more numerous and could 
be more productive than many Washington policy makers have heretofore 
argued.
Let us remember that Iran is a very diverse nation whose population is only 
51% Persian. The rest is Azari (24%), Kurdish (10%) and a mix of other 
ethnic
minorities including Turkman, Arab and others. This is a rich environment 
for unrest and one reason why there were an estimated 4,300 protest 
demonstrations
in 2005 alone. In recent weeks, we may have benefited from another form of 
protest. Former Iranian deputy defense minister Ali Reza Asgari appears to 
have
used a trip to Turkey to defect with his family. If he is now talking to 
Western intelligence officials, we'll soon know a lot more about the inner 
workings
of the Iranian regime.

And the Middle East itself is no monolithic bloc of support for Iranian 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel, of course, is a natural ally in 
gaining intelligence
and lining up support against the Iranian regime. But Iran is bent on 
destabilizing and dominating the Arabian Peninsula from Lebanon through Gaza 
into
Iraq with a stopover in Bahrain. That makes Saudi Arabia as well as Jordan 
potentially strong -- if not overt -- allies in countering Iranian 
influence.
The situation has gotten so serious that King Abdullah of Jordan called it a 
Shia crescent sweeping across the Arabian Peninsula and King Abdullah of 
Saudi
Arabia summoned Vice President Cheney to Riyadh last fall.

If we demonstrate that we are sufficiently serious in countering Iran, we 
could form a coalition of the willing with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the 
Gulf
States, Turkey, Australia and those European allies with the courage to 
consider what their future will look like with a nuclear-armed Iran within 
missile
range. No more denial or hoping Iran will negotiate their nuclear weapons 
development away. The criteria for joining this coalition would be to join 
in
making the following demands of Iran: Stop developing fissile material, 
submit to unambiguous International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, turn 
over
all al Qaeda operatives within your borders and stop supporting Hezbollah.

The hard part, of course, of forming any meaningful coalition is the 
consequences of noncompliance. And this case is no different. The obvious 
punishment
for a defiant Iran could be an air strike that aims to destroy its nuclear 
development facilities and overt support for Iranians working to overthrow 
their
government. This is where the discussion of taking stringent actions against 
Iran usually breaks down. Few people believe Saudi Arabia and other Middle
Eastern nations would join a coalition that carried out a military strike 
and there is little reason to believe many European nations would either.

This is where President Reagan in confronting the Soviets is instructive. 
The Gipper was elected in 1980 at a time when it appeared inevitable that 
the
Soviet Union would dominate world affairs and just as inevitably that the 
U.S. was unable to do anything about it short of waging a bloody, military 
campaign
that would have few allies in fighting and not every chance of success. In 
the end, as they say, Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

We have similar options now. One of which is to enact drastic economic 
sanctions that, oddly, would involve forcing a gasoline crisis in Iran. 
Tehran is
kept afloat on oil revenues, but it has done so at the expense of its oil 
industry. While it exports large quantities of crude oil, Iran imports 40% 
of
its domestically consumed gasoline, and each gallon at the pump is heavily 
subsidized. Shutting off or even restricting the supply of gasoline flowing
into the country would put the regime in a crunch and drive up public 
discontent without creating a corresponding humanitarian crisis.

We could also apply minimal military pressure without straining our 
relations with our allies. To date Iran is responsible for killing more than 
200 American
soldiers and wounding over 635 through the introduction of what the U.S. 
military calls Explosively Formed Penetrators. These EFPs are shaped charges 
specifically
designed to pierce the hulls of our armored vehicles and are much deadlier 
than what al Qaeda and run-of-the-mill insurgents could have come up with on
their own in Iraq. Enough is enough. We could develop a tit-for-tat strategy 
for each EFP that is detonated in Iraq that could target nuclear support 
facilities
or Iranian leadership or other targets calculated to put heat on the regime 
without endangering civilians. Many of these responses may be written off as
mere happenstance or accidents in a dangerous part of the world. But even as 
Iran becomes the unluckiest country in the world, our allies in the region
could hardly blame us for a calculated response.

The U.S. can also assemble a large-scale force capable of an air offensive. 
This would serve a similar role to Reagan's military buildup, forcing the 
Soviets
into an arms race that they ultimately couldn't maintain. The immediate 
strike force could be composed of some 75 stealth attack aircraft -- B2s, 
F117s
and the F22s -- and some 250 nonstealth F15s, F16s, B52s, B1s and three 
carrier battle groups. These carrier battle groups are composed of over 120 
F18s
and cruise missiles galore. We also have over 750 UAVs for intelligence, 
surveillance and reconnaissance in Iraq today. There is more than enough to 
support
a campaign aimed at demonstrating to the Iranian regime that with 48 hours 
we could hit its nuclear development facilities, command and control 
facilities,
integrated air defenses, Air Force and Navy units and the Shahab 3 missiles 
using over 2,500 aim points.

Back in Washington, Congress also needs to exercise its responsibility and 
fund missile defenses, bunker busters and other technologies specifically 
designed
to counter the Iranian regime. Tehran has the world scrambling to respond as 
it sets about assembling a nuclear weapon that may be more advanced than Fat
Man and Little Boy, but which is still far less technologically advanced 
than the weapons systems we trust 20-somethings to operate every day in our 
military.
Forcing Iran to expend its resources to keep pace with our technological 
advances is central to any strategy of defeating them.

We don't need to drop leaflets from the air spelling it out for the regime 
in Tehran that, if we were to carry out an air campaign, it would probably 
unleash
a new Iranian revolution. But the leadership in Iran has to first come to 
understand that we neither fear a Hezbollah uprising over such a strike --  
as
Hezbollah is already carrying out terrorist attacks, we'd welcome an open 
fight on our terms -- nor would we need the main-line coalition ground 
forces
we used in Iraq. Instead, we could simply use the Afghan model of precision 
airpower supporting covert and indigenous forces.

We're the United States of America. We don't threaten any nation. What Iran 
must come to realize -- and we must now decide for ourselves -- is that we 
are
in this confrontation to win it.