Will the US attack Iran ?

I mentioned earlier in the year that an American attack on Iran was a key risk to the world economy. What are the chances now of such an attack?

Well, the signs are not good. Iran has just missed the deadline for suspension of uranium enrichment set by the UN Security Council last December. Washington is steadily ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran's going down the nuclear route. Two aircraft carriers have been despatched to the Gulf.

Last week, the British journal, New Statesman, carried an article by Dan Plesch, a leading defence and security expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies, that warned that American preparations for an all-out attack on Iran were "complete". The article, which received wide publicity, quoted British military sources as saying that the U.S. has been preparing for an armed confrontation with Iran for four years.

The idea is to decimate Iran's political, economic and military infrastructure through an attack of some 10,000 sites all over Iran.Other reports that have appeared earlier have spoken of a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons. Plesch believes that the war will involve only conventional weapons. Huge funding has helped improved the accuracy and effectiveness of these weapons over the past few years.

The article does not mention any prolonged occupation of Iran following an attack. Maybe key oil sites will be secured and the principal cities left to themselves. The government may remain but it will preside over a ghost country bombed back to the Stone Age. Iran as it exists today will be disemembered. Plesch talks of a "federal Iran" that will be allowed to rise from the ashes.

The Economist (February 10) has an article, "A countdown to confrontation" that analyses the chances of an American attack on Iran.There is, as usual, a two-pronged strategy: a toughening of sanctions accompanied by the threat of war. Iran is said to be two to three years away from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Economist cites a study by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that suggests that an attack on nuclear sites alone would only delay Iran's progress towards nuclear weapons. It would not eliminate that capability. That would imply that only an all-out assault can achieve American objectives.

I am not a strategic affairs expert. I will say this: there is a disconcerting similarity to the way the ground was prepared for the invasion if Iraq. There is the pretence of giving diplomacy a chance; the demonisation of the regime in Teheran and assertion of its links to global terrorism; calculated leaks about Iran's growing nuclear capability. It is all eerily familiar.

President Bush spoke long ago of the 'axis of evil'- Iraq, Korea and Iran. Iraq has been taken out. There is some progress towards the objective of neutering Korea after the recent pact with the Korean regime on freezing its programme. Iran remains. The neocons in the US will not sleep peacefully until they have a puppet regime in Iran. They just can't stomach the idea of a hostile regime sitting on the world's second largest reserves of oil.

Will the Americans succeed? Sceptics point to the bungled operation in Iraq. Note, however, that it is bungled only in humanitarian or nation-building terms. There is suffering in Iraq. But who cares? A dismembered Iraq perfectly suits the US and Israel. Lives will be lost in Iran; the country may end up as a seething cauldron of sectarian strife. But that will be Iran's problem, not America's.

As for the chances of a successful military operation in Iran, it is wise not to under-estimate the US. America's military might, honed over a decade of some of the most spectacular innovations in military history, is today unquenchable in its potency. There were many who sceptical about America's attack on Afghanistan and Iraq. They were proved emphatically wrong. Unpleasant as it is, I can't shrug off the feeling that an attack is highly likely and it will succeed - in military terms. If UK's Tony Blair is looking to go out in a blaze of glory, the attack could happen sooner rather than later.