AI
US Invasion of Iran
Make no mistake the invasion of Iran has already begun with the US backing the UAE in the Persian Gulf island dispute which is aligned with the proposed US blockade in the Gulf of Oman.
#msg-3136614
This I believe would be in association with the plan to deploy additional US warplanes to Incirlik the same base that was to be used for a planned guerrilla campaign in Iran.
#msg-3208349
#msg-3447668
While this may change, an amphibious attack was originally targeted against Iran from the Arabian Sea, with a provocative US blockade in the Gulf of Oman to choke Iran’s sealanes of communications. Pakistan would be the base for mounting massive air reconnaissance and surveillance of Iran, while Iranian dissidents, backed by the US army, would launch land assaults from the Iraq-Iran border. Diplomatic sources say, the main body of the plan would remain the same, although component tactics could change.
When the US says it may keep 145,000 troops in Iraq up to five years they are contemplating the invasion of Iran then Syria.
http://www.thedailystar.net/2004/07/03/d40703100483.htm
We will not come out of this war we seek.
-Am
Terror & regime change
Any US invasion of Iran will have terrible consequences.
11 June 2004: On the one hand, the so-called war against terror has been more or less given up, outside pockets in Pakistan, especially in the FATA areas, where the Pakistan army is facing huge resistance from dug in foreign terrorists. On the other hand, the US is preparing to invade Iran early next year if president George W.Bush is re-elected and later possibly if John Kerry comes in (Intelligence, “US to invade Iran before 2005 Christmas,” 9 June 2004), with the outer deadline being Christmas of 2005.
The giving up on the terror war while Iran invasion plans are drawn up makes no sense, especially since the previous invasion and current occupation of Iraq has further fuelled Al-Qaeda terrorism after 9/11. The Al-Qaeda strategy for the coming years, researched and analysed by the FBI for the US government (Intelligence, “Pak, Saudis will sustain Al-Qaeda: FBI,” 28 May 2004), is to make virtue of its forced dispersion after the October-2001 Afghan War, raise sleeper calls with logisticians and suicide bombers all over America and Europe, and target the militaries particularly of Islamic countries for subversion.
In the Islamic and especially Arab militaries, it hopes to convert men trained in arms and with access to weapons to jihad, in the lower officer levels, and this plan is already underway in Saudi Arabia. The triple car bombing of a Riyadh expatriate residential compound last year has been linked to the Saudi army, as too the October-2000 USS Cole attack to the Yemeni military, and the December-2002 Bali bombing to the Indonesian armed forces.
The two attacks on General Pervez Musharraf, one of them days before the SAARC Summit in Islamabad earlier this year, is also linked to elements within the Pakistani military. In an extraordinary statement sometime back, Musharraf made bold to expose his would-be assassins as military officers, while earlier, he would have shied at fingerpointing at the forces, which after all remain his principal power base and constituency. While it is early to say if the attacks on Musharraf fall into the Al-Qaeda pattern of subverting the Islamic militaries to capture power, there is little to dissuade that it does not.
Now, Musharraf is not the lone target. Yesterday, the Karachi corps commander, Ahsan Saleem Hayat, perilously escaped with his life, while ten of his bodyguards, including seven soldiers, were killed, when terrorists ambushed them near a bridge. The attack comes right in the midst of the flush-out operations in the FATA areas, in which, so far, at least twenty foreign terrorists and an unspecified number of servicemen have been killed.
Targeting Musharraf is a big thing in itself, but not so big too, because he is the obvious target for the Al-Qaeda as the symbol of alliance with the US, and he has detractors for his policies in the higher reaches of the military. It is the bane of all high political and politico-military leadership, as in Musharraf’s case. The number-one man or women, PM or putschist, is also the most vulnerable, the highest on the threat list.
But by attacking one of the corps commanders, the terrorists have opened more fronts against themselves, because the army now is threatened as an institution, and would have to take institutional retaliatory action. This should not be unknown to the terrorists, so it means they are prepared to face the extreme of having to take on the might – and no mean might, too – of the Pakistan army. What this tells is the grown power and reach of the Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups operating in Pakistan because of the US misadventure and preoccupation with Iraq and the neglect of the war against terror.
Pakistan is not the only case of Al-Qaeda terrorism gone out of control. The impunity with which terrorists attack and get away in Saudi Arabia is shocking, with the Al-Khobar shootout last week ending in a carnage of hostages, while at least two of the killer terrorists escaped and no news of capture. In Afghanistan, the Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants have stepped up the killings to disrupt the first direct elections in years, with a Medicines sans Frontiers team of five wiped out in the Baghdis Province last week, and eleven Chinese construction workers gunned down yesterday near the city of Kunduz.
It is obvious that sucked into Iraq, the US has limited military manpower left to combat the Al-Qaeda elsewhere in the Middle East and South Central Asia, and this is strictly about manpower, close-quarter engagements, because Al-Qaeda and Taliban terror is low-tech, labour-intensive if you like, and NATO is so seriously cross with America that it hesitates to provides troops in Iraq, and no other country is willing to bail out America outside its immediate allies like Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan.
The Al-Qaeda scores in urban terrorism too, as in Al-Khobar, the earlier attacks in Saudi Arabia, Bali, etc, because Western, especially US intelligence, has not been able to penetrate it, as devastatingly exposed in 9/ 11, for which George Tenet, the CIA director, has now been asked to go. Against terror in the American homeland, the US is reasonably secure, though not entirely, and there is orange alert for an Al-Qaeda strike before the presidential elections to swing it Kerry-wards.
But outside the US, the intelligence network is as strong as its weakest link, and the links are weak in the Islamic countries whose governments, sheikdoms and others, cannot justify the Iraqi occupation, or take a hard line against terror for fear of their own survival, or whose undercover agencies are contaminated. Throughout the Afghan war, for example, the US and British forces had to depend on Indian intelligence inputs because the Pakistani ISI was pervasively compromised to the Al-Qaeda and Taliban.
To this intelligence drought against world terror, and US manpower shortages caused by Iraq, America is adding a new disaster, which is the plans to invade Iran. The Pentagon plan, ironically, was leaked by the Pentagon stooge, the Iraqi Shiite politician, Ahmad Chalabi, to the Iranian leadership, which is why he was disgraced with Iraqi police raids on his offices in mid-May. But despite the leak, the Pentagon is going ahead with substantial parts of the invasion plan.
While this may change, an amphibious attack was originally targeted against Iran from the Arabian Sea, with a provocative US blockade in the Gulf of Oman to choke Iran’s sealanes of communications. Pakistan would be the base for mounting massive air reconnaissance and surveillance of Iran, while Iranian dissidents, backed by the US army, would launch land assaults from the Iraq-Iran border. Diplomatic sources say, the main body of the plan would remain the same, although component tactics could change.
At least with Saddam Hussein, there was the spurious excuse of WMDs to attack, but with Iran, there is none, especially after it has more or less agreed to denuke on the lines suggested by the US-British-controlled IAEA. The Iran clergy, particularly Al-Khameini, has attacked the post-June-30 power dispensation in Iraq for being secular and excluding Shia high priests, but the Iranian foreign office, at the same time, has welcomed the changeover, for it does reduce American control, and transfers more authority to the UN. Clearly, Iran is sending mixed signals, calculated not to upset the US very much, but establish its own independent line on Iraq, which any sovereign country would. So where is the provocation for attack?
The US burned its hands with Shah Pehlavi of Iran, and in a sense was responsible for the Khomeini revolution, and the late former US president, Ronald Reagan, had to put himself out in his first term in the early Eighties to restore American morale. If it intervenes again, it is absolutely certain it will not be able to improve the situation – Iraq shows America has not the depth or patience to create a new civil society – and will only make matters worse. You have the Sunni Bathists and Shias up in arms in Iraq, and to that will add the Shias of Iran, and anyone who joins the battle will be exposed to sectarian fighting, as for example, pitched battles between Shias and Sunnis in Pakistani streets if Pakistani bases are used by American warplanes. Like wildfire, the Middle East and Muslim Asia would be engulfed by holy wars, and they will explode on the world with Al-Qaeda terror. It is frightening, the unfolding consequences of attacking Iran after the mayhem in Iraq.
There is a better way, as the constructive engagement of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has shown. Gaddafi’s own immediate family and a solid phalanx of world leaders, including Benazir Bhutto, convinced him to give up his weaponisation programme, and open up to the world. Iran is obviously a more complex case than Libya, because power resides in the clergy, and Iran has not been entirely transparent about its nuclear programme, but the sensible way is to take it gently, and nudge it to moderation. Regime change will only worsen global Islamist terror, and in any case, Saudi Arabia is a fitter case for democratic intervention, if at all.
http://www.indiareacts.com/archivedebates/nat2.asp?recno=908&ctg=World
Make no mistake the invasion of Iran has already begun with the US backing the UAE in the Persian Gulf island dispute which is aligned with the proposed US blockade in the Gulf of Oman.
#msg-3136614
This I believe would be in association with the plan to deploy additional US warplanes to Incirlik the same base that was to be used for a planned guerrilla campaign in Iran.
#msg-3208349
#msg-3447668
While this may change, an amphibious attack was originally targeted against Iran from the Arabian Sea, with a provocative US blockade in the Gulf of Oman to choke Iran’s sealanes of communications. Pakistan would be the base for mounting massive air reconnaissance and surveillance of Iran, while Iranian dissidents, backed by the US army, would launch land assaults from the Iraq-Iran border. Diplomatic sources say, the main body of the plan would remain the same, although component tactics could change.
When the US says it may keep 145,000 troops in Iraq up to five years they are contemplating the invasion of Iran then Syria.
http://www.thedailystar.net/2004/07/03/d40703100483.htm
We will not come out of this war we seek.
-Am
Terror & regime change
Any US invasion of Iran will have terrible consequences.
11 June 2004: On the one hand, the so-called war against terror has been more or less given up, outside pockets in Pakistan, especially in the FATA areas, where the Pakistan army is facing huge resistance from dug in foreign terrorists. On the other hand, the US is preparing to invade Iran early next year if president George W.Bush is re-elected and later possibly if John Kerry comes in (Intelligence, “US to invade Iran before 2005 Christmas,” 9 June 2004), with the outer deadline being Christmas of 2005.
The giving up on the terror war while Iran invasion plans are drawn up makes no sense, especially since the previous invasion and current occupation of Iraq has further fuelled Al-Qaeda terrorism after 9/11. The Al-Qaeda strategy for the coming years, researched and analysed by the FBI for the US government (Intelligence, “Pak, Saudis will sustain Al-Qaeda: FBI,” 28 May 2004), is to make virtue of its forced dispersion after the October-2001 Afghan War, raise sleeper calls with logisticians and suicide bombers all over America and Europe, and target the militaries particularly of Islamic countries for subversion.
In the Islamic and especially Arab militaries, it hopes to convert men trained in arms and with access to weapons to jihad, in the lower officer levels, and this plan is already underway in Saudi Arabia. The triple car bombing of a Riyadh expatriate residential compound last year has been linked to the Saudi army, as too the October-2000 USS Cole attack to the Yemeni military, and the December-2002 Bali bombing to the Indonesian armed forces.
The two attacks on General Pervez Musharraf, one of them days before the SAARC Summit in Islamabad earlier this year, is also linked to elements within the Pakistani military. In an extraordinary statement sometime back, Musharraf made bold to expose his would-be assassins as military officers, while earlier, he would have shied at fingerpointing at the forces, which after all remain his principal power base and constituency. While it is early to say if the attacks on Musharraf fall into the Al-Qaeda pattern of subverting the Islamic militaries to capture power, there is little to dissuade that it does not.
Now, Musharraf is not the lone target. Yesterday, the Karachi corps commander, Ahsan Saleem Hayat, perilously escaped with his life, while ten of his bodyguards, including seven soldiers, were killed, when terrorists ambushed them near a bridge. The attack comes right in the midst of the flush-out operations in the FATA areas, in which, so far, at least twenty foreign terrorists and an unspecified number of servicemen have been killed.
Targeting Musharraf is a big thing in itself, but not so big too, because he is the obvious target for the Al-Qaeda as the symbol of alliance with the US, and he has detractors for his policies in the higher reaches of the military. It is the bane of all high political and politico-military leadership, as in Musharraf’s case. The number-one man or women, PM or putschist, is also the most vulnerable, the highest on the threat list.
But by attacking one of the corps commanders, the terrorists have opened more fronts against themselves, because the army now is threatened as an institution, and would have to take institutional retaliatory action. This should not be unknown to the terrorists, so it means they are prepared to face the extreme of having to take on the might – and no mean might, too – of the Pakistan army. What this tells is the grown power and reach of the Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups operating in Pakistan because of the US misadventure and preoccupation with Iraq and the neglect of the war against terror.
Pakistan is not the only case of Al-Qaeda terrorism gone out of control. The impunity with which terrorists attack and get away in Saudi Arabia is shocking, with the Al-Khobar shootout last week ending in a carnage of hostages, while at least two of the killer terrorists escaped and no news of capture. In Afghanistan, the Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants have stepped up the killings to disrupt the first direct elections in years, with a Medicines sans Frontiers team of five wiped out in the Baghdis Province last week, and eleven Chinese construction workers gunned down yesterday near the city of Kunduz.
It is obvious that sucked into Iraq, the US has limited military manpower left to combat the Al-Qaeda elsewhere in the Middle East and South Central Asia, and this is strictly about manpower, close-quarter engagements, because Al-Qaeda and Taliban terror is low-tech, labour-intensive if you like, and NATO is so seriously cross with America that it hesitates to provides troops in Iraq, and no other country is willing to bail out America outside its immediate allies like Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan.
The Al-Qaeda scores in urban terrorism too, as in Al-Khobar, the earlier attacks in Saudi Arabia, Bali, etc, because Western, especially US intelligence, has not been able to penetrate it, as devastatingly exposed in 9/ 11, for which George Tenet, the CIA director, has now been asked to go. Against terror in the American homeland, the US is reasonably secure, though not entirely, and there is orange alert for an Al-Qaeda strike before the presidential elections to swing it Kerry-wards.
But outside the US, the intelligence network is as strong as its weakest link, and the links are weak in the Islamic countries whose governments, sheikdoms and others, cannot justify the Iraqi occupation, or take a hard line against terror for fear of their own survival, or whose undercover agencies are contaminated. Throughout the Afghan war, for example, the US and British forces had to depend on Indian intelligence inputs because the Pakistani ISI was pervasively compromised to the Al-Qaeda and Taliban.
To this intelligence drought against world terror, and US manpower shortages caused by Iraq, America is adding a new disaster, which is the plans to invade Iran. The Pentagon plan, ironically, was leaked by the Pentagon stooge, the Iraqi Shiite politician, Ahmad Chalabi, to the Iranian leadership, which is why he was disgraced with Iraqi police raids on his offices in mid-May. But despite the leak, the Pentagon is going ahead with substantial parts of the invasion plan.
While this may change, an amphibious attack was originally targeted against Iran from the Arabian Sea, with a provocative US blockade in the Gulf of Oman to choke Iran’s sealanes of communications. Pakistan would be the base for mounting massive air reconnaissance and surveillance of Iran, while Iranian dissidents, backed by the US army, would launch land assaults from the Iraq-Iran border. Diplomatic sources say, the main body of the plan would remain the same, although component tactics could change.
At least with Saddam Hussein, there was the spurious excuse of WMDs to attack, but with Iran, there is none, especially after it has more or less agreed to denuke on the lines suggested by the US-British-controlled IAEA. The Iran clergy, particularly Al-Khameini, has attacked the post-June-30 power dispensation in Iraq for being secular and excluding Shia high priests, but the Iranian foreign office, at the same time, has welcomed the changeover, for it does reduce American control, and transfers more authority to the UN. Clearly, Iran is sending mixed signals, calculated not to upset the US very much, but establish its own independent line on Iraq, which any sovereign country would. So where is the provocation for attack?
The US burned its hands with Shah Pehlavi of Iran, and in a sense was responsible for the Khomeini revolution, and the late former US president, Ronald Reagan, had to put himself out in his first term in the early Eighties to restore American morale. If it intervenes again, it is absolutely certain it will not be able to improve the situation – Iraq shows America has not the depth or patience to create a new civil society – and will only make matters worse. You have the Sunni Bathists and Shias up in arms in Iraq, and to that will add the Shias of Iran, and anyone who joins the battle will be exposed to sectarian fighting, as for example, pitched battles between Shias and Sunnis in Pakistani streets if Pakistani bases are used by American warplanes. Like wildfire, the Middle East and Muslim Asia would be engulfed by holy wars, and they will explode on the world with Al-Qaeda terror. It is frightening, the unfolding consequences of attacking Iran after the mayhem in Iraq.
There is a better way, as the constructive engagement of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has shown. Gaddafi’s own immediate family and a solid phalanx of world leaders, including Benazir Bhutto, convinced him to give up his weaponisation programme, and open up to the world. Iran is obviously a more complex case than Libya, because power resides in the clergy, and Iran has not been entirely transparent about its nuclear programme, but the sensible way is to take it gently, and nudge it to moderation. Regime change will only worsen global Islamist terror, and in any case, Saudi Arabia is a fitter case for democratic intervention, if at all.
http://www.indiareacts.com/archivedebates/nat2.asp?recno=908&ctg=World
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