American contingency planning for military action against Iran’s nuclear programme was going beyond limited strikes to effectively unleash war against that country, a former US intelligence analyst said on Friday. Talking to the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington-based think tank, Wayne White, a top Middle East analyst for the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research until March 2005, said: “I have seen some of the planning . . . You’re not talking about a surgical strike . . . You’re talking about a war against Iran.”He went on to say that “We’re not talking about just surgical strikes against an array of targets inside Iran. We’re talking about clearing a path to the targets” by taking out much of the Iranian Air Force, Kilo submarines, anti-ship missiles that could target commerce or US warships in the Gulf, and maybe even Iran’s ballistic missile capability.
Even more worrying, White said, were the consequences of a US or Israeli attack against IranÂ’s nuclear infrastructure, which would prompt vigorous Iranian retaliation, worse than the ongoing civil war in Iraq, which was so far being confined to that country.
While President George W Bush has pledged commitment to seeking a diplomatic solution to the standoff, he has kept the military option on the table, with recent rhetoric, plus tougher financial sanctions and actions against Iranian involvement in Iraq reviving speculation in Washington about a possible US attack on Tehran. The US and many of its Gulf allies have expressed growing concern about IranÂ’s rising influence in the region and the prospect of it acquiring a nuclear weapon.
However, Middle East expert Kenneth Katzman argued that “Iran’s ascendancy is not only manageable but reversible” – provided that one understood the Islamic republic’s many vulnerabilities. Katzman, of the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service, stressed that Tehran’s leadership had convinced many experts that Iran was a great nation verging on “superpower” status. But in reality, he said, the country remained “very weak . . . (and) meets almost no known criteria to be considered a great nation”.
The economy, he pointed out, continued to be mismanaged and was “quite primitive”, exporting almost nothing but oil. Also, Katzman noted that Iran’s oil production capacity was fast declining and, in terms of conventional military power, “Iran was a “virtual non-entity”. He said that Washington should, therefore, not go out of its way to accommodate Iran since the country was in no position to hurt the US, adding that at some point, “it might be useful to call that bluff”. But Katzman cautioned against early confrontation with Iran, saying that if there were a “grand bargain” that met both countries’ interests, that should be pursued.