Pentagon said drawing up plans for strike on Iranian camp John Byrne

Published: Saturday May 3, 2008



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Print This Email This Military focus shifts from nuclear facilities to Revolutionary Guard The Pentagon is drawing up plans for a "surgical strike" against an alleged insurgent training camp in Iran, according to the UK Sunday Times' Michael Smith. Attributing the assertion to Western intelligence officials, Smith asserts that US officials have become increasingly frustrated with Iran's Republican Guard force -- an elite corps of the country's military -- which the Bush Administration has designated a terrorist group. Western officials have accused Iran of helping arming rebel militias in Iraq, and have accused Iran of supplying IEDs. Smith was the first to reveal the Downing Street Minutes, an account of a secret 2002 meeting between Bush Administration officials and British intelligence surrounding Iraq, in which MI6 director Richard Dearlove remarked that facts around Iraq were being "fixed" around a policy for war. "US commanders are increasingly concerned by Iranian interference in Iraq and are determined that recent successes by joint Iraqi and US forces in the southern port city of Basra should not be reversed by the Quds Force," Smith writes."'If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,'" he quotes a defense official as saying. Nuclear facilities 'not targets' Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and RAW STORY 's Larisa Alexandrovna revealed internal Pentagon planning in a buildup to a potential Iran conflict. Since the reports ran, however, rhetoric about Iran has been toned down and concerns of a potential all-out war have diminished. American officials are opposed to any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Smith says. They believe, however, that an attack on a militant camp could send a message to the Republican Guard. CBS News reported last week about a potential strike on Iran. "Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq," they wrote. "U.S. officials are also concerned by Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf as well as Iran's still growing nuclear program," CBS adds. "New pictures of Iran's uranium enrichment plant show the country's defense minister in the background, as if deliberately mocking a recent finding by U.S. intelligence that Iran had ceased work on a nuclear weapon." Sources told Smith that no attack was planned on Iranian nuclear facilities. Such attack plans have been criticized, because many of Iran's facilities are located underground and not all locations might be neutralized by an airstrike. ï¿½If an attack happens it will be on a training camp to send a clear message to Iran not to interfere," one intelligence officer said.