Another spate of war-with-Iran-is-imminent articles was provoked Tuesday by an article in the London Daily Telegraph reporting that the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards had "raised the operational readiness status of the country’s forces, initiating preparations for potential external strikes and covert attacks."[1] -- Con Coughlin said that "Western intelligence officials said the Islamic Republic had initiated plans to disperse long-range missiles, high explosives, artillery, and guards units to key defensive positions." -- Recent "accidents" in Iran are leading some to speak of an ongoing "campaign of assassinations and cyber war, as well as the semi-acknowledged campaign of sabotage" against Iran. -- The London Daily Mail, in fact, is already asking "Has the West's war with Iran already begun?"[2] -- "But a source senior within the Obama administration indicated that the U.S. was not involved in every action," the Daily Mail said. -- These articles reproduce Western anti-Iranian propaganda with alacrity, but in the U.S. Time is taking a more cautious stance, saying that "war talk may be overblown" and observing that the view of most informed impartial observers is that "today Tehran is still steering its nuclear course with a great deal of caution and ambiguity, without openly crossing the nuclear weapons threshold."[3] ...
1.
News
World news
Middle East
Iran
IRAN'S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS PREPARE FOR WAR
By Con Coughlin
** Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have been put on a war footing amid increasing signs that the West is taking direct action to cripple Iran’s nuclear program. **
Telegraph (London)
December 6, 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8936797/Irans-Revolutionary-Guards-prepare-for-war.html
An order from Gen Mohammed Ali Jaafari, the commander of the guards, raised the operational readiness status of the country’s forces, initiating preparations for potential external strikes and covert attacks.
Western intelligence officials said the Islamic Republic had initiated plans to disperse long-range missiles, high explosives, artillery and guards units to key defensive positions.
The order was given in response to the mounting international pressure over Iran’s nuclear program. Preparation for a confrontation has gathered pace following last month’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna that produced evidence that Iran was actively working to produce nuclear weapons.
The Iranian leadership fears the country is being subjected to a carefully co-ordinated attack by Western intelligence and security agencies to destroy key elements of its nuclear infrastructure.
Recent explosions have added to the growing sense of paranoia within Iran, with the regime fearing it will be the target of a surprise military strike by Israel or the U.S.
Its ballistic missile program suffered a major setback on Nov. 12 after an explosion at the regime’s main missile testing facility at Bidganeh, about 30 miles west of Tehran.
At least 17 people died, including Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the head of Iran’s missile research program.
The IAEA report said Iranian scientists had worked to develop a missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Security analysts described Iran’s missile advances as “a turning point” that had “profound strategic implications.”
Last week another mysterious explosion caused significant damage to Iran’s uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.
“It looks like the 21st century form of war,” said Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington think tank, told the Los Angeles Times. “It does appear that there is a campaign of assassinations and cyber war, as well as the semi-acknowledged campaign of sabotage.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, issued a directive to the heads of all the country’s military, intelligence, and security organizations to take all necessary measures to protect the regime.
Gen. Jaafari responded to this directive by ordering Revolutionary Guards units to redistribute Iran’s arsenal of long-range Shahab missiles to secret sites around the country where they would be safe from enemy attack and could be used to launch retaliatory attacks.
In addition, the Iranian air force has formed a number of “rapid reaction units,” which have been carrying out extensive exercises to practice a response to an enemy air attack.
At the weekend, Iran claimed it had succeeded in shooting down an advanced American RQ-170 drone in the east of the country. If true, this would represent a major coup for the ayatollahs, as this type of drone contains sensitive stealth technology that allows it to operate for hours without being detected.
A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan would only confirm that U.S. operators had “lost control” of a drone, without specifying the model.
Intelligence officials believe the dangerous game of cat and mouse between Iran and the West was responsible for last week’s attack on the British Embassy in Tehran. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, closed the embassy and expelled Iranian diplomats in response.
But with Iran showing no sign of backing down over its nuclear program, there is growing concern that Israel will launch unilateral military action.
At the weekend, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, warned that he would take “the right decision at the right moment” if Iran continued with its uranium enrichment program.
Israel’s uncompromising approach is viewed with alarm in Washington.
Leon Panetta, the U.S. defense secretary, has warned that a unilateral strike by Israel risked “an escalation” that could “consume the Middle East in confrontation and conflict that we would regret.”
A senior Western intelligence official said: "There is deep concern within the senior leadership of the Iranian regime that they will be the target of a surprise military strike by either Israel or the U.S.
"For that reason they are taking all necessary precautions to ensure they can defend themselves properly if an attack happens."
2.
News
HAS THE WEST'S WAR WITH IRAN ALREADY BEGUN? MYSTERY EXPLOSIONS AT NUKE SITES, 'ASSASSINATED' SCIENTISTS, AND DOWNED DRONES FUEL FEARS COVERT CONFLICT IS UNDER WAY
** Iran moves long-range missiles to prevent them being targeted in an attack -- Follows mysterious blasts at military base and uranium depot in last month -- Expert says 'assassinations, cyber war and sabotage already under way' -- Advanced CIA drone crash lands in mountains -- Think-tank warns efforts to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons could fail -- UAE vice president insists Iran is not a threat to Israel or the West -- U.S. insists Iran is becoming 'pariah' state for flouting international rules
Daily Mail (London)
December 6, 2011
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070602/Iran-war-Mystery-explosions-nuke-sites-fuel-fears-covert-conflict-way.html
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard today went on to a war footing as its commander upped his troops' readiness for operations.
The move by General Mohammed Ali Jaafari, coming after the shooting down of a U.S. drone and the ransacking of the British embassy in Tehran, will raise fears among citizens in the West that the Islamists are escalating towards major conflict.
But following on from mysterious explosions at Iranian nuclear sites, the kidnapping and assassination of scientists, and possible sabotage of computers using a virus, an increasing number of experts are suggesting that combat has already broken out -- a '21st century war.'
The key area of dispute is Iran's rapidly expanding nuclear program from which President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad insists he will not budge 'one iota.'
Sanctions and mounting international pressure appear to have failed to persuade the country to slow down its pursuit of uranium enrichment.
And many observers believe the blowing-up of facilities and targeting of key scientists is a more direct way of halting their ambitions.
Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he was under no illusion as to what was occurring.
He told the *Los Angeles Times*: 'It looks like the 21st century form of war.
'It does appear that there is a campaign of assassinations and cyber war, as well as the semi-acknowledged campaign of sabotage.' What is not clear is whose hand is behind the 'attacks' on Iran's nuclear sites.
One retired U.S. official, with up to date intelligence, told the *National Journal*: 'It's safe to say the Israelis are very active.'
He added about U.S. efforts: 'Everything that [GOP presidential candidate] Mitt Romney said we should be doing -- tough sanctions, covert action, and pressuring the international community -- are all of the things we are actually doing.'
On November 12, a huge explosion flattened the Revolutionary Guard base at Bid Kaneh, killing 17 people including a founder of Iran's ballistic missile program.
A separate blast last week badly damaged the uranium enrichment facility in Isfahan.
Two nuclear physicists were killed and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, were wounded by bombs attached to their cars or detonated near them last year.
Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Germany, said the intensity of the covert war indicated that this is where the U.S. and Israel are putting their energy for now.
He said: 'If the U.S. or Israel were determined to take Iran’s nuclear installations out they wouldn’t be wasting time pinpointing individual scientists like this.'
But, he pointed out, Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor was also preceded by assassination attempts on Iraqi scientists.
Hibbs said: 'Some of the concern in the expert community is that in going down this route we’re unleashing forces we cannot control.' That is seen as a reference to the Stuxnet computer worm which infected the nuclear facilities in 2010, and was believed to be the work of U.S and Israeli engineers.
But a source senior within the Obama administration indicated that the U.S. was not involved in every action. He added: 'I wouldn’t assume that everything we do is coordinated.'
Abbasi-Davani accused Great Britain, Israel, and the U.S. of conducting attacks on him and other Iranian scientists.
He told a news conference at the annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna: 'Six years ago the intelligence service of the U.K. began collecting information and data regarding my past, my family, the number of children.'
It was the IAEA which produced a report detailing how close Iran was to producing the bomb that has racheted up tension between Washington and Tehran in recent weeks.
It culminated last week with the storming of the British embassy, during which time staff were held hostage and more than £1 million of damage caused, and led Britain to expel Iranian diplomats.
Seeing pictures of the Royal Family torn and historic paintings broken only served to fuel the enmity between the countries.
Dominick Chilcott, Britain's ambassador to Iran who lost his dog in the incident, accused the Iranians of supporting it. That theory appeared founded when the handful of protesters arrested were released without charge earlier this week.
Then, on Sunday, Bahrain's interior ministry announced that an explosion occurred inside a minibus parked near the British Embassy. However, there were no injuries.
Furthermore, a plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to Washington was uncovered and foiled in the U.S. with America blaming the Iranians, who were celebrating at the weekend the latest in the round of tit-for-tat propaganda victories with the downing on a U.S. drone so hi-tech that no pictures of it have ever been released.
'This is a big prize in terms of technology,' a senior U.S. military source said after the downing of the RQ-170 drone.
The Iranian news agency said it was show down after illegally crossing the country's eastern border, although a U.S. military official said it had 'absolutely no indication' the drone was shot down.
Neither the Air Force nor manufacturer Lockheed Martin has released much information about the plane, which was dubbed The Beast of Kandahar in 2007 when its existence was finally confirmed.
Early reports suggested that the plane -- which supposedly has a wingspan of about 65ft and can fly at around 50,000ft -- would be made almost entirely without metal to help it dodge radar.
The White House declined to comment but officials did not seem unduly alarmed, suggesting that the drone's capture would not provide Iran with significant information about U.S. surveillance technology and techniques.
Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council in Washington, said the build-up of incidents 'add up to a very worrisome picture.'
This was, he said, in part because 'the Iranians are absorbing all of these assassinations without seeing the pace of their nuclear program slow down to the extent it would be acceptable to the West.'
But if Iranian retaliations grow serious enough, he said, they could provide 'the pretext for a much larger war' in which the Israelis, and possibly the Americans, launch a full attack on Iran.
Gen Jaafari responded by ordering Revolutionary Guard units to move long-range Shahab missile to prevent them being targeted.
The Iranian air force has also been carrying out exercises to respond to any attack from the air and says it will deal seriously with any further incursions into its airspace.
Amid all this comes a report today compiled by the American Enterprise Institute for Publc Policy Research (AEI) that suggested Western efforts to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons had a real chance of failing.
The report says the U.S. would have to 'lead an international effort to contain Iran and deter the Islamic Republic from using its nuclear capability.' The conservative think-tank will release its report, 'Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran', later today.
Vice President Danielle Pletka told *Foreign Policy* magazine: 'The report is very much an acknowledgement of the very real possibility of failure of the strategy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and any responsible party should recognize that failure is an option.'
The report says Iran could realize its nuclear ambitions before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, with the Obama administration reticent to sanction action before the November ballot.
But other Middle East countries have insisted Iran does not represent a threat to the West.
UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum told CNN: 'I don't believe that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon. Will they hit Israel? How many Palestinians will die? And you think if Iran hits Israel, their cities will be safe? They will be gone the next day.'
3.
[Blog]
Global Spin
DESPITE DOWNED U.S. DRONE CLAIMS, IRAN WAR TALK MAY BE OVERBLOWN
By Tony Karon
Time
December 5, 2011
http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/12/05/despite-downed-u-s-drone-claims-iran-war-talk-may-be-overblown/
Anyone cut off from all news media for the six months before December 2011 could be forgiven for imagining we're in the opening stages of a war between the West and Iran. Sunday's headline was Iran's claim to have captured a sophisticated U.S. surveillance drone that American officials concede may have gone missing along the Afghan-Iran border recently. It may well be, as U.S. officials reportedly suggest, that a remote control pilot had lost control of a drone on reconnaissance in western Afghanistan along the border with Iran. It's also possible that the U.S. is flying drones over Iran to gather intelligence. But coming on the back of last week's imbroglio at the British embassy, recent blasts at a missile facility (and possibly a second one at a nuclear facility in Isfahan) and on ongoing cyber attacks and assassinations directed at Iranian scientific infrastructure, there are signs that covert warfare against Iran is escalating -- and that Iran may be feeling mounting internal pressure to retaliate.
But despite the uptick in signs of escalation, the standoff over Iran's nuclear program is stuck in business as usual mode. Most of the international community doesn't share the view of the U.S. and its closest Western allies of Iran's nuclear program representing an urgent strategic security threat, and opposes the current push for an escalation of sanctions. Vice President Joe Biden's calls on that front were rebuffed by Turkish leaders during his visit to Ankara. Despite the recent IAEA report that found Iran may have been engaged, particularly before 2003, in research work on warhead design, China, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, and India recently warned in a joint statement that further sanctions would be "counterproductive" and "exacerbate" the situation, and instead urged dialogue. No new sanctions are likely via the United Nations, and Western powers may struggle to get countries that still do considerable business with Iran to back harsher unilateral measures adopted by the U.S. and Europe.
At the other end of the equation, of course, Israel's leaders are amping up the war talk (although that could also be filed under "business as usual" since it's been a recurring theme for the past five years). Israel doesn't want to attack Iran, but it may soon have no choice, said Defense Minister Ehud Barak last Thursday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday gave a speech extolling what he described as the decision of Israel's founding leader David Ben Gurion to ignore advice for restraint on declaring statehood in '48, warning that Israel's leaders had to take such unpopular decisions in order for the country to survive -- a history lesson widely viewed as a parable on Iran.
Netanyahu's speech may also reinforce the idea that Israel won't necessarily wait for a U.S. go-ahead and could initiate military action on their own should they deem it necessary. But key voices in the military and security establishment in both the U.S. and Israel are pouring cold water on the "military option" so popular among politicians and pundits in both countries.
During an appearance at the Brookings Institution last week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he believed that a military strike on Iran would "at best ... postpone [Iran's ability to build nuclear weapons by] maybe one, possibly two years." He cited the difficulty of reaching some of the many facilities that would have to be destroyed. Doubts over the effectiveness of air strikes against dispersed and sometimes hardened facilities are multiplied considerably in the scenario where Israel undertakes such action alone: Such a mission would require hundreds of sorties flown over a number of days, which might be a tall order for an air force based 800 miles away.
Panetta also warned of the "unintended consequences" of bombing Iran, including strengthening a regime that is already being weakened from within and leaving Israel and the U.S. facing furious retaliation. Panetta's predecessor, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, also warned last year that a military strike would actually convince Iran to go ahead and build nuclear weapon -- a decision that, according to the consensus of Western intelligence agencies, has not been taken as yet.
Gates' warning is underscored by Professor Avner Cohen, an Israeli non-proliferation expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. "A military attack on Iran is probably what would make nuclear Iran and regional proliferation real," Cohen wrote last week. "Such action would obligate Iran to abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), heighten its determination to pursue accelerated nuclear weapons development, and most important, would create a situation of a declared and deployed nuclear Iran, in the Pakistani style. If today Tehran is still steering its nuclear course with a great deal of caution and ambiguity, without openly crossing the nuclear weapons threshold, an Israeli military attack would fundamentally change the nature of Iranian nuclear activity." Cohen argued earlier that all the Osirak attack achieved was to make Saddam Hussein's nuclear program more dangerous by forcing it underground, bringing Iraq far closer to nuclear weapons capability than anyone had imagined it to be before Saddam blundered into Kuwait and lost a war that resulted in his weapons programs being dismantled under international supervision.
Also back in the fray last week was Meir Dagan, who retired a year ago as head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency and has repeatedly warned that attacking Iran would be a catastrophic strategic error for Israel, embroiling it in a regional war which it could neither win nor easily end, a high price to pay for simply of delaying Iran's progress. "I'm concerned about possible mistakes and I prefer to speak out before there is a catastrophe," Dagan told an Israeli TV interviewer last week. "I think that engaging, with open eyes, in a regional war is warranted only when we are under attack or when the sword is already cutting against our live flesh." Dagan clearly has little faith in those empowered to make Israel's fateful strategic decisions on Iran. Of course they would counter that his critique reinforces his openly stated ambition to run for office in a couple of years.
Those in the corridors of power pushing back against demands for military action, however, tend to rely on the argument that other coercive measures will be more effective. Today, when the Obama Administration talks of prioritizing diplomacy over force on the Iran issue, by diplomacy it means, as Secretary Panetta confirmed last week, "organizing unprecedented sanctions and strengthening our security partnerships with key partners in the Gulf and in the broader Middle East." The message from Turkey, Russia, China, and others, of course, is that this "diplomacy" is unlikely to achieve its goals, and could nonetheless bring on the very confrontation it is ostensibly designed to avoid. There's no sign that existing sanctions will change Iran's decisions, they reason, and measures to throttle Iran's economy, or a serious escalation of covert warfare, might prompt Tehran to retaliate as if to an act of war.
But the Obama administration, facing a tough reelection battle in a season in which willingness to confront Iran is this year's version of the test of loyalty to Israel, isn't going to find much room for the diplomatic engagement with Iran he promised in 2008. Last Thursday, the U.S. Senate in a 100-0 vote ignored objections from the Obama administration and approved new sanctions that would penalize foreign financial institutions for doing business with Iran's central bank. If implemented (the bill has a six-month grace period, and includes a provision for President Obama to waive the measures if U.S. national security interests were at stake) it would amount to an economic blockade in which the U.S. would try to use its own leverage in the international financial system to impose its sanctions policy on more reluctant third parties such as China, Russia, Turkey, India, and Brazil. Iran has threatened to treat measures such as these, which would prevent it trading on oil markets, as acts of war. More importantly, it remains to be seen whether China will allow its prime debtor nation to use the world's banking system to force Beijing and others to reluctantly comply with U.S. foreign policy. So expect the drumbeat of war to continue, for now. Hopefully there won't be a crescendo any time soon.
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