Barnett R. Rubin with more on Iran

Administration's Iran, drug policies endanger Afghanistan

The Sunday Times of London reports from Washington a story I have not seen in any U.S. media: that "the Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days." This report, attributed to Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, is consistent with the diary on DailyKos that I cited yesterday reporting that a Naval Officer on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf warned that all operational planning for such a strike had been completed.

According to Debat, speaking at a meeting sponsored by the journal National Interest, edited by Irving Kristol, father of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol:

US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

As in the run-up to the war in Iraq, President Bush is maintaining the fiction that he is "committed for now to the diplomatic route," but many signs indicate that the decision to attack has been taken as irrevocably as the decision to attack Iraq in the fall of 2002.

The legal argument to bypass the U.S. Congress has already been floated. As I noted in my DailyKos post:

The U.S. cannot mount a ground invasion or occupation of Iran, but it might be capable of an air attack and sea embargo. The administration has prepared a legal justification by floating its plan to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Since the IRGC is under the command of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the administration, with its usual legal acuity, could claim legal authority for an attack on Iran under Senate Joint Resolution 23 of September 18, 2001,which authorized the use of military force against "those who plan, authorize, commit, or aid terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests -- including those who harbor terrorists."