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‘US had designs on Iran before Iraq invastion’

WASHINGTON: The United States began planning a full-scale military campaign against Iran that involves missile strikes, a land invasion and a naval operation to establish control over the Strait of Hormuz even before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a former US intelligence analyst disclosed on Sunday.

William Arkin, who served as the US Army’s top intelligence mind on West Berlin in the 1970s and accurately predicted US military operations against Iraq, said the plan is known in military circles as TIRANNT, an acronym for “Theatre Iran Near Term”.

It includes a scenario for a land invasion led by the US Marine Corps, a detailed analysis of the Iranian missile force and a global strike plan against any Iranian weapons of mass destruction, Arkin wrote in The Washington Post.

US and British planners have already conducted a Caspian Sea war game as part of these preparations, the scholar said. “According to military sources close to the planning process, this task was given to Army General John Abizaid, now commander of CENTCOM, in 2002,” Arkin wrote.

But preparations under TIRANNT began in earnest in May 2003 and never stopped, he said. The plan has since been updated using information collected in Iraq.

In June 2004, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld alerted the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, to be prepared to implement CONPLAN 8022, a global strike plan that includes Iran, according to the scholar.

“The new task force, sources have told me, mostly worries that if it were called upon to deliver ‘prompt’ global strikes against certain targets in Iran, the president might have to be told that the only option is a nuclear one,” Arkin said. The US military has been involved in contingency planning against Iran since at least the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

A US thank tank has said that new satellite imagery indicate Iran has expanded its uranium conversion site at Isfahan and reinforced its Natanz underground uranium enrichment plant against possible military strikes.

Iran has formed battalions of suicide bombers to hit American and British targets if its nuclear installations are attacked, The Sunday Times newspaper said. According to Iranian officials, 40,000 trained suicide bombers were ready to strike, the British weekly broadsheet said.

Iran is in a standoff with the West over its nuclear programme, which it insists is for peaceful purposes. The Special Unit of Martyr Seekers in the Revolutionary Guards was first spotted in March when members marched in a military parade. The force wore explosive packs around their waists and held detonators, the newspaper said.

Doctor Hassan Abbasi, head of the Centre for Doctrinal Strategic Studies in the Revolutionary Guards, said that 29 Western targets had been identified. “We are ready to attack American and British sensitive points if they attack Iran’s nuclear facilities,” he said in a speech, according to The Sunday Times. agencies

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