Iran war plan?

Alarming if true

Via Atrios and from an interesting original source -- the August 1 print issue of Pat Buchanan's organ The American Conservative (see this blog post, thank you justinlogan.com) -- comes an article by CIA verteran Philip Giraldi. The article is quoted as follows:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Let's couple this unconfirmed report with the following excerpt of a June 20, 2005 Aljazeera piece written by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter:

But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.

As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah's to an "axis of evil" (together with the newly "liberated" Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of "democracy" to the Iranian people.

...

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein's dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

...

To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld's interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan's role in the upcoming war with Iran....

Ritter goes on to examine the military advantages of launching air assaults and controlling airspace from bases in Azerbaijan. See Deep Blade postings here and here for more discussion of US machinations concerning Azerbaijan and the recently completed Caspian oil pipeline.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole has written about the ``extremely friendly'' state visit to Tehran paid by Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and ``eight high-powered cabinet ministers''. Could the effect of this sudden advance for political Shiism hasten the US administration's war plan? Only time will tell. However, Deep Blade's comment from some months ago that ``deep in the White House, the Iraq Shiite connection with Iran must be terribly troubling'' and that the new Iraqi government might be ``Shiite allies the US does not want'' seems apropos now.

Let's emphasize here that we do not know what the ``crazies'' in the Pentagon and Vice President's office will do. Domination of Iran with invading US troops seems highly unlikely. But air power and nukes? That's another matter. One thing we can surmise, however, is use of nukes against Iran would require an ``attack event'' on US soil after which there would be a punishing response. For propaganda purposes, the source of such a precipitating attack would be said to be Iran. And there would be no fact-check requirement on the president. We will have learned nothing from the last war.

Update 7/25: The date of the issue of The American Conservative in which the Iran war plan item appears is August 1, not July 18 as originally posted.