US:Limited US air strikes could be carried out in Iran as early as this summer, according to the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Mr Ritter estimates that there is an "80 per cent" chance that the United States will take military action against Iran over its nuclear programme.
Mr Ritter, who was a weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, says he believes military intervention is inevitable.
"I hope I'm wrong," he told The Irish Times yesterday. "But I'm an intelligence analyst and if I were providing assessment to a political leader anywhere in the world I would say . . . that there is an 80 per cent likelihood that the Bush administration will launch a minimum limited air strikes designed to neutralise the Iranian nuclear programme sometime this summer."
He describes Iran as a "regional irritant" that poses no strategic threat to the US, but expects the US to launch strategic raids focused on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
"I think that given the dire situation that exists in Iraq, the Bush administration would not be likely to initiate major aerial bombardment of Iran," he said. "I think that was at one time the plan but the stress that's been placed on the resources of the US military by the ongoing debacle in Iraq has made it difficult to speak of a large scale military involvement."
The UN Security Council recently imposed further sanctions on Iran for failing to stop the enrichment of uranium but Mr Ritter believes this approach can only facilitate military intervention. "As soon as you pass a Chapter VII resolution you've bought into the notion that Iran is a threat worthy of not only global concern but global intervention," the former US army intelligence officer said.
"The next step . . . is the authorisation of severe sanctions or military use of force."
Mr Ritter, who was speaking ahead of a talk at the Royal College of Surgeons to mark the first anniversary of its Molecular and Cellular Therapeutics Department yesterday, said that, as with Iraq, the US had always been planning regime change in Iran.
Mr Ritter also said he expected the US to be "stuck in Iraq" for the foreseeable future. "This is not something that we're going to get out of in a year or two. I think we're there for a decade."