In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports that the Bush administration has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Sources told Hersh that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.One of the military's initial option plans calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon against suspected underground nuclear sites. Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner says a military operation has already begun inside Iran. Gardiner says, "It's a very serious question about the constitutional framework under which we are now conducting military operations in Iran."
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Meanwhile on April 11th, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that the country had succeeded for the first time in enriching uranium on a small scale. Juan Cole writes:
Despite all the sloppy and inaccurate headlines about Iran "going nuclear," the fact is that all President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday was that it had enriched uranium to a measely 3.5 percent, using a bank of 180 centrifuges hooked up so that they "cascade."
The ability to slightly enrich uranium is not the same as the ability to build a bomb. For the latter, you need at least 80% enrichment, which in turn would require about 16,000 small centrifuges hooked up to cascade. Iran does not have 16,000 centrifuges. It seems to have 180. Iran is a good ten years away from having a bomb...
The crisis is not one of nuclear enrichment, a low-level attainment that does not necessarily lead to having a bomb.... What is really going on here is a ratcheting war of rhetoric. The Iranian hard liners are down to a popularity rating in Iran of about 15%. They are using their challenge to the Bush administration over their perfectly legal civilian nuclear energy research program as a way of enhancing their nationalist credentials in Iran.
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In January, Muqtada al-Sadr pledged the support of his militia, the Mahdi Army, to Iran in case that country were attacked by the United States. Juan Cole writes: "SCIRI's Badr Corps militia, it was alleged by Newsweek, is still on the Iranian payroll. Any attack by the US or Israel on Iran's nuclear energy facilities would certainly bring massive crowds into the streets in protest in neihboring Iraq. The resulting violence and the attacks on US troops are not important demographically, but they could cost the Republican Party its majority in Congress, if the American public becomes alarmed that the US is losing (even more) control."
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