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 So will Bush nuke Iran? 
  
 Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit 
  
 sent by Dave Muller - southnews 
  
 Daily Mail (UK) - Nov 17, 2007 
  
  
 So will Bush nuke Iran? 
  
 By MICHAEL BURLEIGH 
  
 Increasingly powerful voices in the U.S. are urging war against Iran to 
 stop the country acquiring nuclear weapons. This week, in his Mansion 
 House foreign policy speech, Gordon Brown declared the U.S. to be 
 Britain's greatest ally and stressed that Iran's nuclear programme was 
 a matter of concern. But how could the West actually destroy Iran's 
 nuclear capability? Here, one of our leading academics on war and 
 terrorism warns that some in the Bush camp are considering a very 
 dangerous option... 
  
 To see how an attack on Iran might begin and then play out is not 
 difficult. 
  
 Sceptical public opinion in the West simply won't buy any 
 intelligencebased claims of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat after 
 the lies that were presented at the UN to justify the 2003 invasion of 
 Iraq. 
  
 And since 2004, the CIA has virtually no agents operating in Iran 
 anyway, certainly-none able to substantiate intelligence derived from 
 electronic surveillance and satellites. 
  
 Any attack is therefore likely to be justified by an IED (Improvised 
 Explosive Device) going off somewhere in Iraq, which kills a 
 significant number of U.S. servicemen, and has the hallmark of Iranian 
 involvement all over it. 
  
 A parallel might be the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia 
 which killed 19 U.S. soldiers and was shown to be backed by Iran. 
  
 Strenuous efforts will be made to link any such bomb to the Iranian 
 Revolutionary Guard - the elite force of Iranian President Ahmadinejad 
 - - in order to justify air strikes to suppress Iran's Russian-made air 
 defence systems. 
  
 These consist of about 14 airbases, and the missiles Iran has stationed 
 to command the Straits of Hormuz, the waterway south of Iran through 
 which some 20 per cent of the world's oil supply passes. 
  
 These attacks would be the prelude to raids on the Revolutionary Guard 
 bases and installations, which, after the Iranians respond, will 
 escalate into a sustained air assault on Iran's many nuclear facilities. 
  
 This is where things will get very dangerous. The main target at 
 Natanz, 150 miles south of Tehran, consists of chambers 75ft below 
 ground in which centrifuges are being produced to make the nuclear 
 cascade which is essential for bomb-making. 
  
 One American option is to drop Big Blu, a 30,000lb penetration bomb 
 whose shock waves would destroy everything inside. Another is the 
 B-61-11 bunker-busting nuclear bomb. 
  
 Anyone who imagines something akin to the "boomf" of an underground 
 nuclear test with no apparent effect on the surface above the test site 
 would be wrong. 
  
 There will be mushroom clouds and huge numbers of radiation victims, 
 far exceeding the 20,000 civilian casualties experts have calculated 
 would ensue from conventional bombing of Iran. 
  
 Meanwhile, Special Forces troops would be trying to stoke up tribal and 
 regional uprisings. 
  
 Some are already in Iran distributing what is called "walk around" 
 money to the people who might help stimulate rebellion, whether the 
 cash is used to recruit tribal chiefs, scouts or even shepherds. 
  
 But Iran will not sit idly by as all this goes on. Since the 1979 
 Islamic revolution, Iran has been a major state sponsor of terrorism, 
 reaching out through surrogates as far away as Argentina where Jewish 
 and Israeli targets have been attacked. 
  
 In response to the attacks, Iran will step up its support for Shiite 
 insurgents in Iraq, perhaps contributing manpower as well as the 
 sophisticated weaponry already supplied. 
  
 One U.S. officer said: "If we go [to war against Iran], the southern 
 half of Iraq will light up like a candle." 
  
 He added that ten Mullahs simply armed with a loudspeaker truck to call 
 locals to action could take Basra from the tiny force left there by the 
 British. The Iranians could also stoke up their fellow Shias in Saudi 
 Arabia and Afghanistan. 
  
 They will also play the Hezbollah card, activating one of the most 
 deadly terrorist organisations in the world. This would result in 
 Hezbollah attacking targets in the West which its operatives are 
 already known to have "pinged" - that is, targets they have already 
 recced and checked for vulnerability. 
  
 Iran will encourage the Palestinian Hamas to strike at Israel from 
 Gaza. And while the U.S. will insist Israel does not respond - just as 
 in the first Gulf War when Saddam's rockets fell on Israeli cities - 
 this time they might easily react to such provocation. 
  
 Scroll down for more... {R} 
  
 In the meantime, the U.S. might attack Syria, too, in a 
 two-for-the-price-of-one deal - for like Iran, Syria is an egregious 
 state-sponsor of terrorism. 
  
 The risk of terrorism everywhere would increase. Western intelligence 
 has no idea whether Iranian spies have established covert "black 
 stations" to carry out terrorist atrocities in our cities, but such 
 attacks are all too likely. 
  
 They do not know either what the Iranians might do with hundreds of al 
 Qaeda operatives, including two sons of Osama Bin Laden, whom they 
 claim to have under housearrest in Tehran. 
  
 What if Iran threw its weight behind al Qaeda? 
  
 An al Qaeda assisted with the resources of a major state is a more 
 terrifying prospect than an al Qaeda financed as it is by millionaire 
 Gulf Arabs or the chickenfeed it rakes in peddling jihadist videos 
 outside Pakistani mosques and madrassas. 
  
 War against Iran would be disastrous and long-lasting. So we should be 
 encouraged by the fact that, instead of going down this route to an 
 unknown destination, Gordon Brown has called for enhanced sanctions, a 
 step the Tories have been advocating for some time. 
  
 The international community has already imposed sanctions on 
 individuals and organisations - notably the Revolutionary Guard, which 
 was branded a terrorist organisation by the U.S. 
  
 But these can be bolstered by restrictions on Iran's access to 
 international capital markets and to the refined petroleum which, 
 paradoxically, it requires despite being one of the world's major 
 oil-rich nations. 
  
 Existing sanctions have so downgraded Iran's refineries that it has to 
 import 40 per cent of its petrol. 
  
 Harsh secondary sanctions could be introduced against Western firms 
 which continue to trade with Iran - their greed is effectively helping 
 to ratchet up the possibility of war. 
  
 Sanctions are not something the Iranians will take lying down either, 
 although blocked bank accounts will elicit a different response from 
 the Iranians than Western bombing raids. At a time when oil prices are 
 nudging $100 a barrel, the Iranians may curb oil exports, or at least 
 redirect them away from the West. 
  
 While Britain, France and Germany import little Iranian oil, we would, 
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
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