Washington's plan for military action against Iran goes far beyond limited air strikes on its nuclear facilities and would effectively unleash a war against the country, a former US intelligence analyst told Reuters on January 21.
Wayne White, who worked as a top analyst for the US State Department's own intelligence agency, told the wire service: "I've seen some of the planning ... You're not talking about a surgical strike. You're talking about a war against Iran that likely would destabilise the Middle East for years."
White thus added confirmation to the report made in the January 16, 2005, New Yorker by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that Bush had ordered the Pentagon to draw up a plan for a full-scale "regime change" invasion of Iraq's oil- and gas-rich eastern neighbour.
Hersh reported that, "Strategists at the headquarters of the US 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".
Hersh added that in interviews with past and present US intelligence and military officials, "I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran".
This was indirectly confirmed four days after the publication of Hersh's article, when US Vice-President Dick Cheney declared in a radio interview: "You look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list."
In order to provide a pretext for a "regime change" war against Iran, Washington has run a repeat of the lies it used to justify its March 2003 invasion of oil-rich Iraq — that Iran, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, has been seeking to produce nuclear weapons.
However, Bush has been unable to mobilise majority support among the US public on his Iran WMD scare campaign. On December 7, for example, the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland released the results of a survey that found 75% of US voters surveyed thought that Washington should seek "to build better relations" with Iran rather than trying to pressure it "with implied threats that the US may use military force".
The poll also found that 55% of US voters were in favour of Washington agreeing to Iran's demand that it be allowed to enrich uranium under UN supervision to the low levels necessary for nuclear power generation.
In his January 10 speech announcing his new counterinsurgency war plan for Iraq, Bush added a new pretext for a war against Iran. Vowing to guarantee Iraq's "territorial integrity", Bush declared: "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
Speaking a few hours after US troops abducted six Iranian diplomats in a pre-dawn January 11 raid on an Iranian consulate building in Iraqi Kurdistan, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Washington was determined to crack down on Iran's alleged "regional aggression".
"I don't want to speculate on what operations the United States may be engaged in, but you will see that the United States is not going to simply stand idly by and let these activities continue", Rice said.
Washington's claim that Iran is providing training and weapons to the "Sunni insurgents" and to Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia is disputed by British officials.
"I have not myself seen any evidence — and I don't think any evidence exists — of government-supported or instigated armed support on Iran's part in Iraq", British defence secretary Des Browne said in an interview last August.
"I saw evidence that Moqtada al Sadr was in contact with Sunni Arab insurgents in western Iraq, but I never saw evidence of Iran in that loop", Wayne White told January 4 New York Times.
"No-one denies that weapons of Iranian origin are constantly turning up in Iraq", Germany's Spiegel magazine observed on January 22, but added: "The Kurds, in particular, are doing a steady trade with Iran, including illegal weapons shipments across the border. How much of that trade consists purely of smuggled goods and how much of it is deliberate support for the insurgency is a matter of speculation."