Government Dirt

War tensions have been triggered most recently by the crisis over the seized British sailors and the large-scale US sea, air and amphibious exercises in the Gulf. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and General Rahim Safavi, commander of the Revolutionary Guards whose naval wing performed the seizure, are in charge of the British hostages reducing the prospects of their imminent release.

The Iranians have acquired not just a propaganda tool but a military asset that they intend on using as long as the Americans insist on throwing their military might into the fray. So far Washington has refused to risk a full-scale war confrontation with the Revolutionary Guards for the sake of the British sailors.

The Iranians tested the British response to kidnapping and holding hostages by arranging for the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in broad daylight by gunmen in Palestinian Gaza nearly three weeks ago. There was barely any response. Revolutionary Guards serving with Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza no doubt filed a full report on the Johnston case to Tehran, which drew its own conclusions. Blair is trying to get the sailors back but through diplomacy which is fine with the Iranians. They can talk about releasing hostages as long as they need to.

The USS Nimitz and its support ships will be departing San Diego Monday, April 2, to join the John C. Stennis Strike Group in the Persian Gulf. The nuclear carrier is due to relieve the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, but all three US carriers will likely stay put if tensions continue to climb or if fighting breaks out involving American, British and Iranian forces. The Nimitz group is composed of the Princeton guided-missile cruiser, four guided missile destroyers – the Higgins, Chafee, John Paul Jones and Pinckney. The strike force is armed with two helicopter squadrons and a special unit for dismantling sea mines and other explosive devices.

The mighty American armada is further supported by the USS Bataan and USS Boxer strike groups that are already in the Persian Gulf. Taking part in the big demonstration of American naval, air and marine force launched March 27 are the two nuclear carrier strike forces Stennis and Eisenhower, thousands of marines and 100 warplanes. Maneuvers on this scale in the tight, overcrowded waters of the Persian Gulf carry risks of a collision between American and Iranian craft.

US Central Command 5th Fleet officers headquartered at Manama spoke of security tension, a hint at an approaching war with Iran. Arab sources report the positioning of a Patriot anti-missile battery in Bahrain this week; they say occupancy at emirate hotels has soared past 90% due mostly to the influx of US military personnel. They also report Western media crews normally employed in military coverage are arriving in packs. Thursday, March 29, General Khaled al-‘Absi, Bahrain’s chief of air defense operations disclosed that new alarm networks had been installed and air defense systems upgraded to handle chemical, biological and radioactive attacks.

Moscow sources have predicting that a US strike against Iranian nuclear installations codenamed Operation Bite has been scheduled for April 6 at 4 AM until 4 PM local time. Friday is a holiday in Iran. In the course of the attack, about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories. Missiles and air raids will conduct strikes designed to be devastating enough to set Tehran’s nuclear program back several years. The US attack plan reportedly calls for the Iranian air defense system to be degraded, for numerous Iranian warships to be sunk in the Persian Gulf, and for the most important headquarters of the Iranian armed forces to be wiped out. Massive air attacks with the goal of annihilating Iran's capacity for military resistance, the centers of administration, the key economic assets, and quite possibly the Iranian political leadership, or at least part of it.

This attack is sanctioned by the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives because they removed language from the just-passed Iraq supplemental military appropriations bill that would have demanded that Bush come to Congress before launching an attack on Iran.

The goal is for these attacks to paralyze everyday life, create panic in the population, and generally produce an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty all over Iran. This will unleash a struggle for power inside Iran, and then there will be a peace delegation sent in to install a pro-American government in Teheran. One of the US goals is to burnish the image of the current Republican administration, who would now be able to boast that they had wiped out the Iranian nuclear program. Among the other goals is to a partition Iran along the same lines as Iraq, and subsequently carving up of the Near and Middle East into smaller regions. This concept worked well for the US in the Balkans and will now be applied to the greater Middle East.

http://debka.com/headline.php?hid=3990
http://www.rense.com/general75/bite.htm