Last week, Brig, Gen Mohammad Hejazi, a Pasdar officer who is the Number Two officer in the Iranian military by virtue of being deputy commander of the Joint Staff of the Armed Forces, proclaimed a policy of pre-emptive war, reversing three decades of Iranian military policy under the Islamic Republic. 
(See last week’s Iran Times, page three.)
The regime has always before stated that it would never start a war but would respond forcefully to any attack on Iran.
Hejazi reversed that, telling the Fars news agency: “Our strategy now is that, if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s interests and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions.”
But in an interview the very next day, the Iranian ambassador to Russia, Mahmud-Reza Sajjadi, told Bloomberg news: “We have no policy of taking action to pre-empt attacks against us.” He mocked the Fars news agency, which had carried the Hejazi story, saying, “Fars is not an official agency of the government.” But that ignored the fact that Hejazi is.
The real story, however, is that two second-ranking officials of the government are publicly arguing over first-rank policy. A first-strike policy is of such major significance that it should be announced by the Supreme Leader or president.
But instead it is announced by a one-star general—and denounced by an ambassador.
In the week since Hejazi spoke out, no other official has commented on the fundamental question of pre-emptive war, leaving a monumental policy of state hanging in the air.
Some analysts said the relatively low level of the official announcing such an immense change in policy suggested there really was no change in policy, just a new rhetorical flourish intended to frighten Iran’s enemies and perhaps lead them to back off the new level of pressure that has been unveiled with stiff new sanctions in the last two months.
Others, however, cautioned that the Islamic Republic might be getting desperate. “The West has gone too far and pushed Tehran into a corner where the leadership may feel it is being left with nothing but a black-and-white choice between surrendering and attacking,” said another. “And it won’t surrender.”
But others responded that, if Iran had really decided it had no choice but to risk war, it would not announce it in advance.
Last month, a senior US intelligence officer told Congress that American intelligence analysts believe Iran will respond violently if attacked, but think it highly unlikely the country would ever initiate a conflict with the United States.
The only major targets Iran can hit are American. It can reach Israel only by firing missiles with non-nuclear warheads and limited accuracy. Iraq in 1991 fired 39 missiles at Israel and killed one person. Without a nuclear warhead, the missile threat is not taken seriously. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak publicly dismissed it last month.
The big target for Iran would be the US Navy in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The US Navy normally has about two dozen ships operating there. It now has more with two aircraft carrier groups assigned there.
Naval analysts have long said the Islamic Republic has been arming and practicing to bag a few US warships in any conflict. That would be difficult if the Iranian Navy was responding to a raid on nuclear sites when the US warships would all be in a wartime readiness mode. It would be easier if the Iranian Navy launched a pre-emptive attack and struck when the US Navy was in peacetime mode.