|
Iran readies for feared attack by U.S.
Iran has begun preparing for a possible U.S. attack, announcing efforts to bolster and mobilize recruits in citizens' militias and making plans to engage in the type of "asymmetrical" warfare used against American troops in neighboring Iraq... "Iran would respond within 15 minutes to any attack by the United States or any other country," an Iranian official close to the hard-line camp, which runs the country's security and military apparatus, said on the condition of anonymity. In recent days, Iranian newspapers have announced efforts to increase the number of the country's 7-million-strong "Basiji" militia forces, which were deployed in human wave attacks against Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Iranian military authorities have paraded long-range North Korean-designed Shahab missiles before television cameras. Iranian generals have conducted massive war games near the Iraqi border. One Western military expert based in Tehran said Iran was sharpening its abilities to wage a guerrilla war. "Over the last year they've developed their tactics of asymmetrical war, which would aim not at resisting a penetration of foreign forces, but to then use them on the ground to all kinds of harmful effect," he said on the condition of anonymity. It remains unclear how much of the recent military activity amounts to an actual mobilization and how much is a propaganda ploy. Iranian officials and analysts have said they want to highlight the potential costs of an attack on Iran to raise the stakes for U.S. officials considering such a move and to frighten a war-weary American public... Iran, in addition to developing plans for guerrilla warfare against an invading army, also is attempting to give the impression that it is bolstering its conventional forces. In December, Iran announced its largest war games "ever," deploying 120,000 troops as well as tanks, helicopters and armored vehicles along its western border. More recently, Iran's press reported that the Iranian air force had received orders to engage any plane that violates Iranian airspace. These reports followed the disclosure that unmanned American drone planes have been monitoring Iranian nuclear sites. "It is obvious that with Iran surrounded by the United States forces and America pressing the nuclear issue, Iran wants to make a show of force," said a Western diplomat from Tehran, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Iran's army includes 350,000 active-duty soldiers and 220,000 conscripts. Its elite But both outside military experts and Iranians concede that the country's antiquated conventional hardware, worn down by years of U.S. and European sanctions, would be little match for the high-tech weaponry of the United States. "Most of Iran's military equipment is aging or second-rate and much of it is worn," military expert Anthony Cordesman wrote in a December 2004 assessment of Iran's military. He said Iran lost between 50 percent and 60 percent of its military equipment in the Iran-Iraq war, "and it has never had large-scale access to the modern weapons and military technology necessary to replace them." Iran's highly classified Quds forces, which have a global network of operatives and answer directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could create a myriad of woes outside Iran's borders. In neighboring Iraq, where the United States says Tehran already has been interfering, many brush off the current low-level infiltration as minor compared with the damage Tehran is capable of unleashing. "If Iran wanted, it could make Iraq a hell for the United States," Hamid al-Bayati, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, said in a recent interview. Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-02-19 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=56879 |