UK Times: US Perfecting Plan for Iran Strike

If we're going kill 1,000s, destabilize the world, and break international law, then let's do it right.

The Sunday Times carries a heartening story about a secret US Air Force team perfecting the plan for an Iran air strike. One can't help but thinking: Are Bush and Cheney really that freaking dumb?

Sarah Baxter reports:

THE United States Air Force has set up a highly confidential strategic planning group tasked with “fighting the next war” as tensions rise with Iran.

Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June.

It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Detailed contingency planning for a possible attack on Iran has been carried out for more than two years by Centcom (US central command), according to defence sources.

More at the Sunday Times.

Meanwhile, the commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East says "No" to war with Iran.

###

Iran's Coming Disaster: The Partisan Tactic

We know that even through their own hegemonic sights, Bush's neocons calculate badly. So do they.

In the wake of the Iraq fiasco, even Bush's chickenhawk war planners know well the unpredictable, chaos-inducing consequences of war.

But that's okay: Creating the conditions of unpredictability and disorder are precisely the aims of this desperate administration.

Reports indicate that Bush is laying the groundwork for a massive strike on Iran:

Sarah Baxter at the Sunday Times writes: "The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Ray McGovern at Consortiumnews analyzes Bush's late August bellicose speech:

It’s not about putative Iranian “weapons of mass destruction” — not even ostensibly. It is about the requirement for a scapegoat for U.S. reverses in Iraq, and the felt need to create a casus belli by provoking Iran in such a way as to “justify” armed retaliation — perhaps extending to an attempt to destroy its nuclear-related facilities.
Bush’s Aug. 28 speech to the American Legion came five years after a very similar presentation by Vice President Dick Cheney.

An invasion of Iran would set off an explosion of rage through the streets of the Islamic world, possibly disrupt several authoritarian Arab states, and provoke military attacks on American soft targets.

But the invasion would just as well supply the necessary political conditions domestically for furtherance of executive power, new intrusions on civil liberties, massive new influxes into the high-tech, military-service-industrial complex, and, Republicans hope, a partial restoration of public confidence (in the midst of their fear and unthinking reaction) in the Republican leadership on national security, a traditional Republican political advantage.

Striking Iran is not a fait accompli; there are limits to the pure insanity that is being contemplated, meaning Bush can be stopped.

Whether these limits come from the American people, the American military brass, and democrats during the 2008 presidential campaign remains to be seen.

###