-------- Original Message --------
Subject: IRAN - Closer and Closer to the Brink
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 18:28:27 -0500
From: MER - Mid-East Realities - MiddleEast.Org <MERL@...>
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Closer and Closer to the Brink

"Both outside military experts and Iranians concede that
the country's antiquated conventional hardware, worn down
by years of U.S. and European sanctions, would be little
match for the high-tech wizardry of the United States.
'Most of Iran's military equipment is aging or second-
rate, and much of it is worn.' "

Israel Air Force Commander-in-Chief Major General
Eliezer Shakedi said Monday that Israel must be prepared
for an air strike on Iran in light of its nuclear activity.

Scott Ritter dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk
delivered to a packed house in Olympia’s Capitol Theater.
The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that
George W. Bush has 'signed off' on plans to bomb Iran in
June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the
results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.

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Iran readies military, fearing a U.S. attack
Tensions with Bush administration surge over Tehran's disputed nuclear
ambition
Borzou Daragahi, Chronicle Foreign Service

San Francisco Chronicle - 21 Feb - Page A1 -Tehran -- Iran has begun
publicly preparing for a possible U.S. attack, as tensions mount between
the Bush administration and this country's hard-line leaders over
Tehran's purported nuclear weapons program.

"Iran would respond within 15 minutes to any attack by the United States
or any other country," an Iranian official close to the conservative
clerics who run the country's security and military apparatus said on
condition of anonymity.

The Tehran government has announced efforts to bolster and mobilize
recruits in its citizens' militia and is making plans to engage in the
type of "asymmetrical" warfare that has bogged down U.S. troops in
neighboring Iraq, officials and analysts say.

Iran insists it needs nuclear technology to meet its burgeoning domestic
energy requirements and bolster its scientific community. But the United
States accuses it of using nuclear energy as a fig leaf for a weapons
program.

"Iran remains the world's primary state sponsor of terror, pursuing
nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and
deserve," President Bush said in his State of the Union address earlier
this month.

France, Great Britain and Germany, also suspicious of Iran's nuclear
ambitions, have insisted on strict inspections and have urged Iran to
give up components of its nuclear program, specifically its effort to
establish what is called the nuclear fuel cycle, lest it provoke a
military attack.

Fuel cycle technology has peaceful applications -- energy production and
medicine, for example -- but it is also viewed as the foundation for
weapons development.

The United States has criticized the approach taken by Europe and the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, as
too soft on Iran. Generally, however, Bush administration officials
insist they support European diplomatic efforts, but refuse to rule out
military options if Iran refuses to acknowledge and give up its alleged
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

The Pentagon recently revealed that, as a matter of routine
preparedness, it had upgraded its Iranian war plans, and the Washington
Post has reported that unmanned U.S. drones have been flying over
suspected nuclear sites in Iran.

Iranian authorities, too, say they have been getting ready for a
possible attack. Newspapers have announced efforts to increase the
number of the country's 7 million-strong "Basiji" volunteer militia,
which was deployed in human-wave attacks during the Iran-Iraq war in the
1980s. Iranian military authorities have paraded long-range North
Korean-designed Shahab missiles before television cameras.

The Iranian military also is attempting to give the impression that it
is bolstering its conventional forces. In December, it staged a massive
war game -- deploying 120,000 troops as well as tanks, helicopters and
armored vehicles near its western border with Iraq. More recently,
Iran's press reported that the Iranian air force had received orders to
engage any plane that violates Iranian airspace, just after the reports
emerged of U.S. spy planes monitoring Iran's skies.

One Western military expert based in Tehran said Iran was sharpening its
abilities to wage a guerrilla war. "Over the last year, they've
developed their tactics of 'asymmetrical' war, which would aim not at
resisting a penetration of foreign forces, but to then use them on the
ground to all kinds of harmful effect," he said, on condition of anonymity.

It remains unclear how much of the recent military activity amounts to a
mobilization and how much is propaganda. Iranian officials and analysts
have said they want to highlight the potential costs of an attack on
Iran to raise the stakes for U.S. officials considering an assault and
to frighten a war- weary American public.

"Right now it's a psychological war," said Nasser Hadian, a University
of Tehran political science professor who recently returned from a
three-year stint as a scholar at New York's Columbia University.

"If America decides to attack, the only ones who could stop it are
Iranians," he said. "Pressure from other countries and inside America is
important, but it won't prevent an attack. The only thing that will
prevent an attack is that if America knows it will pay a heavy price."

Iran's army includes 350,000 active-duty soldiers and 220,000
conscripts. Its elite Revolutionary Guards number 120,000, many of them
draftees. Its navy and air force total 70,000 men. The armed forces have
about 2,000 tanks, 300 combat aircraft, three submarines, hundreds of
helicopters and at least a dozen Russian-made Scud missile launchers of
the type Saddam Hussein used against Israel during the 1991 Gulf War.
Iran also has an undetermined number of Shahab missiles that have a
range of more than 1,500 miles.

Yet both outside military experts and Iranians concede that the
country's antiquated conventional hardware, worn down by years of U.S.
and European sanctions, would be little match for the high-tech wizardry
of the United States.

"Most of Iran's military equipment is aging or second-rate, and much of
it is worn," Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, wrote in a
December 2004 assessment of Iran's military.

The Western military expert said he spotted 30-year-old American-made
M113 armored vehicles at recent military demonstration in the
northwestern city of Qazvin. "Those tanks were able to go a few meters
in front of us," he said. "But in a combat situation? I don't know."

Despite the state of its equipment, Iran could create myriad troubles
for the United States and the world.

Its security forces include a number of intelligence agencies with
extensive overseas experience and assets, experts say. Iran's highly
classified Quds forces, which answer directly to Iran's spiritual
leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are believed to have operations in
Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
India, Turkey, the Persian Gulf region, Central Asia, North Africa,
Europe and North America, according to a December 2004 report prepared
by CSIS.

Within minutes of any attack, Iran's air and sea forces could threaten
oil shipments in the Persian Gulf as well as the Gulf of Oman. Iran
controls the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway
through which oil tankers must navigate, and could sink ships, mine sea
routes or bomb oil platforms, according to the CSIS report.

Iran could activate Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, whom it supports, to
launch attacks on Israel. It could have operatives attack U.S. interests
in Azerbaijan, Central Asia or Turkey.

"Iran can escalate the war," said Hadian. "It's not going to be all that
hard to target U.S. forces in these countries."

But most analysts agree that Iran's biggest trump card would be to
unleash havoc in neighboring Iraq, where Shiites who spent years in Iran
as exiles are assuming control of the government.

Although the Bush administration charges that Tehran already has been
interfering in Iraq, many Iranians brush off the low-level infiltration
as minor compared to the damage it could cause by allowing Iraqi
militiamen to take heavy weapons into Iran, by backing the most extreme
Islamist groups instead of the moderates it now supports, or by
dispatching operatives across the long, porous border between the two
countries.

Any Iranian retaliation "would surely start with attempts to mobilize
Shia partisans in Iraq to try to turn the Iraqi south into an extension
of the insurgency in the Sunni triangle," Gary Sick, professor of Middle
East studies at Columbia University and former National Security Council
adviser to then President Jimmy Carter, told a congressional panel last
week.

Iraqi officials, wary of their country becoming a battleground for the
conflicting ambitions of Tehran and Washington, concede the damage Iran
could do in their country, which now hosts 150,000 U.S. troops.

"If Iran wanted, it could make Iraq a hell for the United States," Hamid
al-Bayati, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, said recently.




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