"...What the US planning process will have revealed is that there is no way for the United States to win a non-nuclear war with Iran. ..."

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

Dweyer in the Dispatch:

"... When Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American officer, was asked recently on NBC's Meet the Press whether the U.S. has a military plan for an attack on Iran, he replied: "We do."

General staffs are supposed to plan for even the most unlikely contingencies. But what the planning process will have revealed is that there is no way for the United States to win a non-nuclear war with Iran.

The U.S. could "win" by dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons on Iran's military bases, nuclear facilities and industrial centers (i.e. cities) and killing 5 million to 10 million people, but short of that, nothing works. On this, we have the word of Richard Clarke, counterterrorism adviser in the White House under three administrations.

Clarke revealed to The New York Times four years ago that, in the early 1990s, the Clinton administration had considered seriously a bombing campaign against Iran, but the military professionals told them not to do it.

The Pentagon's planners have conducted war games to model an attack on Iran several times in the past 15 years, and they just can't make it come out as a U.S. victory.

There's nothing the U.S. can do to Iran, short of nuking the place, that would force Tehran to kneel and beg for mercy. It can bomb Iran's nuclear sites and military installations to its heart's content, but everything it destroys can be rebuilt in a few years.

And there is no way that the United States could invade Iran. There are some 80 million people in Iran, and although many of them don't like the present regime, almost all are fervent patriots who would resist invasion. Iran is a mountainous country four times the size of Iraq. The Iranian army is slightly smaller than the U.S. Army. But unlike the U.S. Army, its troops are not scattered across literally dozens of countries.

If the White House were to propose anything larger than minor military incursions along Iran's south coast, senior American generals would resign in protest. Without the option of a land war, the only lever the United States would have is the threat of yet more bombs - but if they aren't nuclear, they aren't persuasive.

Whereas Iran would have lots of options for bringing pressure on the United States. Just stopping Iran's own oil exports would drive the oil price sky-high in a tight market: Iran accounts for around 7 percent of internationally traded oil. But it also could block another 40 percent of global oil exports just by sinking tankers coming from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states with its lethal Noor anti-ship missiles.

The Noor anti-ship missile is a locally built version of the Chinese YJ-82. It has a 140-mile range, enough to cover all the major choke points in the Gulf. It flies at twice the speed of sound just yards above the sea's surface, and it has a tiny radar profile. Its single-shot kill probability has been put as high as 98 percent.

Iran's mountainous coastline extends along the whole northern side of the Gulf, and these missiles' mobile launchers are easily concealed. They would sink tankers with ease, and in a few days insurance rates for tankers planning to enter the Gulf would become prohibitive, effectively shutting down the region's oil exports.

Meanwhile Iran would start supplying modern surface-to-air missiles to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that would soon shut down the U.S. military effort there.

Iranian ballistic missiles would strike U.S. bases on the southern (Arab) side of the Gulf, and Iran's Hezbollah allies in Beirut would start dropping missiles on Israel. The United States would have no options for escalation other than the nuclear one, and pressure on it to stop the war would mount by the day as the world's industries and transport ground to a halt.

The end would be an embarrassing retreat by the United States and the definitive establishment of Iran as the dominant power of the Gulf region. That was the outcome of every war game the Pentagon played, and Mullen knows it. It is all bluff. It always was."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 2:44 AM

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian