[DEBATE] : Fox analyst: Germany's actions leave us 'no choice' but to bomb Iran

[Riaz K. Tayob]

Fox analyst: Germany's actions leave us 'no choice' but to bomb Iran
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Wednesday September 12, 2007

http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Fox_US_makes_Iran_bombing_plan_0912.html
	
	
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According to Fox News, advisers are telling the White House that 
diplomacy has failed to stop Iran's nuclear program, and as a result 
officials are making plans to attack Iran as early as next summer.

"A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new 
sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in 
Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the 
Islamic regime," Fox reported on Tuesday.

Lt. Gen. (ret.) Thomas McInerney told Fox, "Since Germany has backed out 
of helping economically, we do not have any other choice. ... They've 
forced us into the military option."

"I think the option should initially be tit-for-tat," McInerney went on. 
"For every explosively formed projectile from Iran that goes off in 
Iraq, two go off in Iran, no questions asked."

"The one I favor the most, of course, is an air campaign," he continued. 
"Forty-eight hours duration, hitting 2500 aimed points to take out their 
nuclear facilities, their air defense facilities, their air force, their 
navy, their Shahab-3 retaliatory missiles, and finally their command and 
control. And then let the Iranian people take their country back."

McInerney described such a bombing campaign as "easy" and spoke 
enthusiastically of the weaponry involved, including "a new massive 
ordnance penetrator that's 30,000 pounds, that really penetrates ... 
Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can't penetrate."

Although introduced by Fox merely as a military analyst, McInerney has 
been prominent for several years as an advocate of war against Iran and 
chairs the advisory council of the hardline Iran Policy Committee, known 
for its backing of the anti-Iranian terrorist group, MEK. McInerney was 
quoted in February 2005 as saying, "[Bush] doesn't have any choice. "He 
understands [the Iranians] are the king of terror right now. They are 
striving for nuclear weapons that can get into the hands of terrorists, 
and then it's too late."
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Excerpts from Fox article:

Germany — a pivotal player among three European nations to rein in 
Iran's nuclear program over the last two-and-a-half years through a 
mixture of diplomacy and sanctions supported by the United States — 
notified its allies last week that the government of Chancellor Angela 
Merkel refuses to support the imposition of any further sanctions 
against Iran that could be imposed by the U.N. Security Council.

Consequently, according to a well-placed Bush administration source, 
"everyone in town" is now participating in a broad discussion about the 
costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely 
timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 
months, after the presidential primaries have probably been decided, but 
well before the November 2008 elections.

The discussions are now focused on two basic options: less invasive 
scenarios under which the U.S. might blockade Iranian imports of 
gasoline or exports of oil, actions generally thought to exact too high 
a cost on the Iranian people but not enough on the regime in Tehran; and 
full-scale aerial bombardment.

On the latter course, active consideration is being given as to how long 
it would take to degrade Iranian air defenses before American air 
superiority could be established and U.S. fighter jets could then begin 
a systematic attack on Iran's known nuclear targets.
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FULL ARTICLE AT THIS LINK

The following video is from Fox's America's Newsroom, broadcast on 
September 12.