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Joint Chiefs Chairman Says U.S. Preparing Military
Options Against Iran
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff
Writer
Friday, April 25, 2008; 1:51 PM
The nation's top military officer said today that the
Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" against Iran, criticizing
what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign
influence" in Iraq.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be "extremely stressing" but not
impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the
Navy and Air Force.
"It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat
capability," he said at a Pentagon news conference.
Still, Mullen made clear that he prefers a diplomatic
solution to the tensions with Iran and does not foresee any imminent military
action. "I have no expectations that we're going to get into a conflict with
Iran in the immediate future," he said.
Mullen's statements and others by Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates recently signal a new rhetorical onslaught by the Bush
administration against Iran, amid what officials say is increased Iranian
provision of weapons, training and financing to Iraqi groups that are attacking
and killing Americans.
In a speech Monday at West Point, Gates said Iran "is
hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." He said a war with Iran would be
"disastrous on a number of levels. But the military option must be kept on the
table given the destabilizing policies of the regime and the risks inherent in a
future Iranian nuclear threat."
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq, who was nominated this week to head all U.S. forces in the Middle East, is
preparing a briefing soon to lay out detailed evidence of increased Iranian
involvement in Iraq, Mullen said. The briefing will detail, for example, the
discovery in Iraq of weapons that were very recently manufactured in Iran, he
said.
"The Iranian government pledged to halt such activities
some months ago. It's plainly obvious they have not. Indeed, they seem to have
gone the other way," Mullen said.
He said recent unrest in the southern Iraqi city of Basra
had highlighted a "level of involvement" by Iran that had not been understood by
the U.S. military previously. "It became very, very visible in ways that we
hadn't seen before," he said.
But while Mullen and Gates have recently stated that
Tehran must know of Iranian actions in Iraq, which they say are led by Iran's
Revolutionary Guard, Mullen said he has "no smoking gun which could prove that
the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved in this."
In an incident early local time yesterday, a cargo ship
contracted by the U.S. military fired "several bursts" of warning shots at two
fast boats that approached in international waters off the Iranian coast,
defense officials said today.
The unidentified small boats approached the Westward
Venture, a ship carrying U.S. military hardware, as it headed north through the
central Persian Gulf at about 8 a.m. local time, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson,
spokeswoman for the Navy's Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain.
The U.S. ship initiated bridge-to-bridge communications,
and, after receiving no response, it fired a flare. The speed boats continued to
approach, so the ship fired warning shots with a .50-caliber machine gun and M16
rifle. The boats then left the area, she said.
"They fired several bursts, it went pretty quickly,"
Robertson said.
Soon afterwards, an Iranian coast guard boat queried the
Western Venture, Robertson said. It was unclear whether that was one of the
small boats.
"There have been some Iranian boats that have operated
this way, and some unidentified boats," said Robertson, adding that the crew had
no voice communication with the small boats.
In January, five Iranian patrol boats sped toward a U.S.
warship and dropped small, boxlike objects in the water, an incident that
alarmed military officials and that President Bush called "a provocative act."
The objects turned out to pose no threat to the USS Port Royal or two other U.S.
vessels accompanying
it.
