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."

#
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.




FULL ARTICLE AT THIS LINK:

 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,296450,00.html