...move closer:
The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."
The White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq....
Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling in Iraqi elections.
The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will 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.
Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA's covert activities overseas.
The complete article is here, which also notes:
The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.
Provocation of a war with Iran is one of the more likely precipitating events that will be used as rationale for reinstatement of a military draft. If, as we speculated previously, the Israelis are charged with the task of an initial military strike against Iranian nuclear capabilities, the predictable retalitation by the Iranians against a "valued U.S. ally" will form an easy pretext for calling for conscription, given the over-extension of U.S. forces as a consequence of the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Since Iran, unlike Iraq at the time of the U.S. assault, is not a decimated country with non-existent military capabilities, the need for more cannon fodder will be essential if the war-mongers in the current Administration are to realize their ambitions. I shall go out on a limb and hazard a guess that the Bush twins will not be the first to enlist when the time comes.
UPDATE: Ironically, Thomas "no ideas and the ability to express them" Friedman is already beginning the process of getting us accustomed to the new horrors on the horizon, with a line buried in today's column, in which he refers to "Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq." The childish idiocy of this remark almost defies belief, coming as it does from a "liberal" columnist in a "liberal" newspaper. There are many Iranians still alive who no doubt recall the consequences of the last U.S. invasion of their country; more importantly--and this is what makes this offhand remark so disgusting--to remark blithely that people would welcome the horrors of war, like that visited upon their neighbor, and to suggest that on the basis of no evidence, suggests a kind of moral callousness and defect of empathetic capacity which might stand as emblematic of the place of the United States in the world today.
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