From A World To Win News Service

U.S. Plans for Iran:

Military Aggression, Secret Missions and Political Operations

Revolutionary Worker #1274, April 10, 2005, posted at rwor.org

Recently George Bush and his secretary of state announced that military operations against Iran are not on the agenda. But the U.S. has started carrying out secret military operations inside Iran's borders.

What are the U.S. aims in Iran? How will it apply its plan? And what is to be done?

The U.S. seeks direct control of the political situation in Iran and unconditional access to its resources and the labor of its people. The U.S. has no intention to free the people of Iran, or develop Iran's economy, or create a federal government for the Kurds, or ensure the equality of men and women, or end imprisonment and torture, or ensure freedom of the press and the media. None of these are part of the U.S. aims and policies in Iran. These claims are just a bunch of lies, propaganda to justify intervention.

In order to legitimize its intervention, the U.S. pretends that its purpose in seeking "regime change" in Iran is to bring democracy. No intelligent person can believe that after establishing its control in Iran the U.S. would allow a democratic system. This is not possible and history has never witnessed such a thing. [Keep in mind that the U.S. overthrew Iran's only elected government, in 1953 — editor]

The U.S. plan for regime change in Iran has three dimensions: Full-scale military operations, secret commando operations and political operations. The U.S. may not fully implement all three aspects at once, but in any case all are part of an overall plan.

Full-scale Military Aggression

In October 2004 George Bush approved the Pentagon's military plan against Iran. Implementation is due to begin this coming summer, according to Scott Ritter, an ex-U.S. Marines officer and former senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq. In a 19 February speech in Washington, he said that according to secret information given to him by a reliable source within the U.S. government, Bush has approved military operations in Iran beginning in June! That doesn't mean that this operation will necessarily take place then, but when military planners put forward a date, even tentatively, this is serious!

Seymour Hersh, a well-known and influential journalist, has published a comprehensive report of U.S. military aims and operations in Iran. The report is based on information that he received from a former U.S. high-ranking security official. Hersh wrote in The New Yorker magazine (January 2005) that the official told him, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this [the Middle East] as a huge war zone." Hersh reports that the Pentagon has made changes in its previous master military plan against Iran because, with the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the military geography of the Middle East has changed. The U.S. can now use these countries and its new military bases in the Central Asian republics as well as its naval bases and armada of ships stationed in the Gulf to mount a broad military assault against Iran. Some analysts say the U.S. may launch only part of this attack and invade only part of southern Iran. For this it would use the massive naval power it assembled in the Gulf during the invasion of Iraq, which was mainly on standby at that time.

Secret Operations

How much of this broad plan will be put into action, and when , is not clear yet. But the U.S. has already begun secret operations.

American and Israeli commando teams have crossed into Iran in order to "prepare the battlefield," as they put it. Hersh writes, "The President has signed. orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia." He continues, "The administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids."

Hersh says that a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told him, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible." A former high-level intelligence official told Hersh, "It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it."

Hersh writes that these operations are being carried out in close cooperation with U.S. and Pakistani special task forces using the Afghanistan border to penetrate into Iran. There is also close cooperation between U.S. and Israeli forces. The officials Hersh spoke to for this article kept that a secret, but Hersh has detailed Israeli commando operations in Kurdistan in a previous article in The New Yorker .

The greater part of these secret operations involves setting up "operational teams" in the "target" countries.

It is crucial for revolutionaries to know about this aspect of U.S. plans.

These teams are to consist of local forces carrying out operations under the supervision of U.S. officers. Part of their task is to carry out assassinations, including of opposition figures. Explaining who and what kind of people are forming these teams, a former high-level intelligence official told Hersh: "The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls 'action teams' in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? .We founded them and we financed them.. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want.. We're going to be riding with the bad boys."

This is the nature of the kind of "freedom" and "democracy" the U.S. wants to bestow on the "target" countries. Death squads plus ballot boxes! The Iranian people have already experienced this kind of "democracy" for 26 years!

Political Operations

Three years ago Bush labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea the "axis of evil." Since then the U.S. has been politically preparing for direct military and political intervention in Iran. An important part of these preparations is to divide the Islamic Republic and win over part of the regime's members, along with some of the opposition forces within the Islamic Republic, and unite them with monarchist elements, paving the way for military, security and political cooperation between these forces and the Pentagon. Even the Mujaheddin Khalq Organization is part of this whole operation, despite the fact that the U.S. has put them on its so-called terrorist list.

The U.S.'s political operations are meant to pursue two aims simultaneously: to destabilize the Islamic Republic and prepare the regime that they want to replace it with.

According to some U.S. news sources, discussions are still going on within various U.S. ruling class circles about the extent of this "regime change" and the methods to bring it about. An example of these discussions is the plan recently published by the "Committee on the Present Danger."

This committee consists of some influential Republicans. Its co-chairman is George Shultz, Secretary of State during the Reagan years. Shultz's son is a business partner of Mohsen Rafsanjani [the son of Akbar Rafsanjani, the influential Iranian Mullah and ex-president of Iran] and has close relations with the Rafsanjani family. The plan of this "committee" calls for the removal of the Islamic Republic's "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei [Ayatollah Khomeini's successor]. The authors of this document say that by implementing this plan perhaps they can remove Khamenei peacefully and "democratize" Iran just like Indonesia and Chile [two countries where the U.S. overthrew elected governments and instituted fascist military dictatorships]. This document targets Khamenei and his supporters and promises protection to the other Islamic Republic leaders. It says, "Supreme leader Ali Khamenei is a fundamental threat to peace, for all signs point to his determination to develop the nuclear weapon. a number of strategies can be put in place quickly to build pressure to both reduce the threat and to promote democratic changes in Iran." The authors suggest that the U.S. take these measures: 1) Give Khamenei an ultimatum to suspend Iran's nuclear activities, and if these activities continue, destroy its nuclear facilities. 2) Support certain opposition forces and "democrats" in removing Khamenei and make it clear that these people are the U.S.'s new chosen partners. 3) NGOs are to be told to start activity in Iran, and U.S. private and governmental human rights organizations are to be told to make Iran a budgetary priority. 4) The U.S. embassy in Tehran should be reopened to facilitate moving ahead with this plan.

This is one of the plans. Perhaps there are others, too. In any case the U.S. aim is to monopolize control over political developments in Iran and keep the initiative in their own hands. Clearly the U.S. believes that the Islamic Republic of Iran is on the verge of being overthrown. The U.S. wants to make itself the head and the architect of whatever "regime change" occurs in Iran. The purpose is, first of all, to prevent the development of the people's forces, and, secondly, to enforce its will and strengthen its forces by selecting and bringing together certain factions of the Islamic Republic and monarchists and opposition forces. The main goal of all this is to ensure the U.S.'s unrestricted military presence under any future Iranian government.