Iran preparing for US attack?

The article has kind of a dumb premise -- of course the US wants to attack Iran -- but the article outlines Iranian preparations, which is itself interesting.

Incredible though it may sound, there are signs that Tehran may be preparing for a military confrontation with the United States and has convinced itself that it could win.

The first sign came last June with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of the Islamic republic, an event that completed the conquest of all levers of power by the most radical elements of the establishment.

Since then the revolutionary factions have conducted a little publicised purge of the military, the security, the civil service, state-owned corporations and media. The most significant purges have affected the military high command.

Among those replaced are the defence minister, the commander-in-chief of the regular army and his four deputies, 11 senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and five commanders of the paramilitary Mobilisation of the Dispossessed. Some of the purged officers have been 'parked' in a mysterious new organ called The Defence Guidance Commission attached to the office of the 'Supreme Guide' Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The minister of intelligence and security and the minister of the interior, who controls the police and the gendarmerie, have also been replaced.

Another sign that Tehran may be preparing for war is the appointment of military officers to posts normally held by civilians, such as governors, mayors and directors of major public corporations.

But, perhaps, the surest sign yet is the military build-up under way in the five provinces bordering Iraq. The region, with a population of 20 million, has been put under the control of the IRGC which has also taken over units of the regular army, including the 88th Division and the border police. Iran is estimated to have 250,000 troops in the area, its biggest military build-up since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

One of the first acts of the new cabinet led by Ahmadinejad was to approve an "emergency" fund of $700 million (Dh2.57 billion) to be disbursed at the discretion of "the supreme guide" for "sacred defence purposes".

But then, shouldn't everyone prepare for an American attack? Who knows what secret preemptive war prediction preparation device the American have developed? Rumors say the device is still in the early stages -- technicians from the Department of Post-Event Justifications and Quagmire Avoidance (technicians known informally as the "Dairy Queens" within DOD, the US Supreme Guide) are working on the technical problems 24-7.