Military Change

“The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we’re going to have the Iranian campaign,” according to a former high-level intelligence official who spoke to reporter Seymour Hersh. The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia was working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts. This task force had been going into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear weapons installations.
In exchange for this co-operation, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had received assurances his government would not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan – the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb – to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, an organization of Iranian exiles who are opposed to Iran’s theocratic regime, is prepared to lead America’s charge for regime change the same way the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan did.

Israel is also prepared to repeat its 1981 Iraq mission and is believed to have built replicas of Bushehr and other Iranian facilities in the Negev desert for target practice. Iran has a publicly stated goal of destroying the Jewish state, something Israel cannot allow.

Iran has at least 12 nuclear-capable Kh55 cruise missiles, with a range of 2,975 km, it received from the Ukraine, putting Israel and several other U.S. allies within reach.

Iran is also quietly building a stockpile of thousands of small, hi-tech armor-piercing snipers’ rifles with scopes from Austria through the U.N. anti-drug program.

Any military action against Iran will reap dire consequences. Within minutes of any attack, Iran’s antiquated air and sea forces could threaten oil shipments in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. Iran controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway oil tankers must navigate to get out of the Gulf.

Iran could activate Hezbollah militia in Lebanon to launch attacks on Israel and operatives could also attack U.S. interests in Azerbaijan, Central Asia or Turkey. “Iran can escalate the war,” said Nasser Hadian, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tehran. “It’s not going to be all that hard to target US forces in these countries,” he added.

Iran’s trump card would be to unleash havoc in neighboring Iraq, where Iraqis who spent years in exile in Iran have assumed control of the government. Though the U.S. alleges Tehran has already been interfering in Iraq, the low-level infiltration is minor compared to the damage Iran could cause by allowing Iraqi militiamen to operate from bases in Iran, or backing extreme Islamist groups.