According to the report by Tim Shipman, "Pentagon officials have revealed that President Bush won an understanding with Gordon Brown in July that Britain would support air strikes if they could be justified as a counter-terrorist operation. Since then discussions about what Britain might contribute militarily, to combat Iranian retaliation that would follow US air strikes, have been held between ministers and officials in the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence."

[ www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml ]

The report follows up another report Friday by The Daily Mail.

"What's on the table right now is tactical strikes," Vincent Cannistraro, intelligence chief on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council and erstwhile head of operations for the CIA's counter-terrorist center, told Shipman.

"The British Government is in accord with plans to launch limited strikes on facilities inside Iran, on the basis of counter-terrorism." While the US Air Force and naval jets could carry out raids without help from the RAF, the Pentagon is keen to have the Royal Navy's cooperation in the event of an attack, to prevent Iran from sowing mines in the Gulf to block oil exports in retaliation," he added.

Downing Street wouldn't comment on the report.

"The British have to be a major auxiliary to this plan," Cannistraro continued. "It's not just for political reasons: the US doesn't have a lot of mine clearing capability in the Gulf. The Dutch and the British do."

Bush says reports 'empty propaganda'
President Bush dismissed claims of an imminent attack when asked on the Arabic channel al Arabiya Friday.

"Empty propaganda," Bush said. "Ah, evidently there is a lot of gossip in parts of the country... the world, that's trying to scare people about me personally, my country, and what we stand for. That kind of gossip is just what it is. It's gossip. It's, uh, baseless gossip."

According to a New Yorker story last week by veteran intelligence journalist Seymour Hersh, the Bush Administration is all but set to authorize a campaign of limited, surgical airstrikes against Iranian targets. In his piece, Hersh writes, "During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British 'were on board'... Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution."

The sites in Iran being targeted, however, reflect the change in the White House's selling of armed conflict with Iran.

"Instead of... hitting the various [nuclear] facilities we know that exist, instead they're going to hit the Iranians as payback for hitting us [in Iraq]," Hersh told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in a recent interview.

Such targets, Hersh says, would include Iran's Revolutionary Guard headquarters and other sites of Iran's alleged support for the insurgency in Iraq.