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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Arkin on Iran planning

Bill Arkin has an article in the WaPo on the planning of a full-scale military campaign to attack Iran. Arkin's piece is well worth a read, but the detail is spread out, so, for brevity's sake, here's a clip from an AFP summary piece.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States began planning a full-scale military campaign against Iran that involves missile strikes, a land invasion and a naval operation to establish control over the Strait of Hormuz even before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a former US intelligence analyst disclosed.....

In June 2004, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld alerted the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, to be prepared to implement CONPLAN 8022, a global strike plan that includes Iran, according to the scholar.

"The new task force, sources have told me, mostly worries that if it were called upon to deliver 'prompt' global strikes against certain targets in Iran under some emergency circumstances, the president might have to be told that the only option is a nuclear one," Arkin said.

Arkin reports that planning was initiated by Rumsfeld in 2002 but was begun in earnest in May 2003, three months after the invasion of Iraq, and , not coincidentally I'm guessing, just after the May, 1, 2003 "mission accomplished" speech. (Maybe they really did believe they had "won" Iraq at that point. Fools.)

Also, it appears that in June 2004 in the form of CONPLAN 8022, the administration put emergency attack plans on a ready status, emergency attack plans that apparently involve nukes.

Elsewhere, Tony Blair has publicly refused to participate in any miltary action against Iran.

And repeating yesterday's post, as reported by Seymour Hersh, there's a growing murmur that US troops are already operating inside Iran.

posted by mikevotes at 7:22 AM

3 Comments:

  • If you remember the very early discussion of PNAC strategic objectives .....

    They're just being carried out.

    These guys will rationalize the use of nuclear weapons because they are "tactical" nukes, not strategic. Of course, that doesn't make a dimes worth of difference in the explosion area (or downwind), but that will be why it's "different" than a cold war type use of nukes strategically.

    In other words, it will be more Truman-esque, like Hiroshima. AFter all, Bush really does fancy himself as Truman.

    BTW, are you noticing Arkin's position shifting?

    By Blogger Greyhair, at 12:44 PM  

  • Yeah, I have. Just in this week as he's been writing in his blog on planning, he's gone from presenting it all to contingency planning to presenting it as real planning, but they're probably not going to do it.

    I don't know if it's a genuine shift of mind or whether he's getting some knowledgeable talkback that's causing the shift.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 2:53 PM  

  • On the Elsewhere: Britain’s foreign office says: "We will support the diplomatic moves, at best. But we cannot commit our own resources to a military strike."
    That is the official version, but since Berlusconi’s government was dumped in Italy Blair is reported to be running scared.
    I can’t work out the correlation here, it doesn’t relate to Blair’s domestic popularity. I suspect it is more to do with the International pecking order, or Blair simply saw the writing on the wall.

    By Blogger Cartledge, at 5:23 PM  

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