THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that 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.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

This is corroborated in a diary at Daily Kos.

I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth...

...I asked her about the attack, how limited and so forth.

"I don’t think it’s limited at all. We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens.

Is this all a big bluff? I don't know. How could I know? No 'serious' person in the Establishment is raising alarm bells. Barack Obama is too busy pandering to the pro-Israel constituency to provide any leadership.

Meanwhile, chief war-with-Iran advocate Michael Ledeen is still claiming that the administration is not serious about getting tough on Iran. I think it is just his way of goading them on. The UK Telegraph, which was so instrumental in catapulting the propaganda for the invasion of Iraq, seems to be on board for the attack on Iran. Can anyone verify their claims?

Iran seems to be getting the message. They just replaced the head of their Revolutionary Guard with an experienced war fighter.