An aspect of this I wonder about is whether or not an order to attack Iran coming from President Bush might not provoke a crisis within the American military. One of the striking characteristics of the American political experiment is the manner in which the military has always accepted the ultimate authority of the civilian leadership. However, the strain on that acceptance became quite visible in the number of retired Army and Marine Corps generals who appeared in the press this year to complain of Donald Rumsfeld's "7,000-mile screwdriver". It would be a serious mistake to assume that it is only Colin Powell who worries that the United States Army is "about broken".
The Islamic Republic of Iran Regular Forces, while nowhere in the same league as the U.S. military, are also not in the same category as the depleted Iraqi force that the American military defeated in 2003. Would the government of Iran order them to attack U. S. forces in Iraq in response to being bombed at the behest of this White House? With all due respect, no one within this group knows the answer to that question and I would submit that no one within the Pentagon knows the answer, either.
However, I'm very confident that the senior leadership of the Army and the Marine Corps would see such an attack, if carried out on a large scale, as being an enormous and voluntarily chosen burden on our highly-stressed armed forces. They are perfectly aware that the civilian leadership is almost completely composed of people who have never worn the uniform and even the Commander in Chief's status as a military veteran is hardly secure given that his stint during the Viet Nam War was that of a safely-out-of-harm's-way Texas Air National Guard pilot. Add to that the fact that the military victory in Operation Iraqi Freedom was squandered by that same civilian leadership botching the peace and I can imagine little enthusiasm for even a "limited strike" in Iran.
I don't speak or read Farsi, but based on the information available, I think it quite likely that the biggest danger posed by the Iranian population is not to the U.S., but to its own theocratic ruling class.
As I pointed out here before, a very large percentage of that population is under 25. It's also true that the world keeps changing, and that young people are more likely to find change congenial than their elders are. The sexual frustrations imposed on the young in Iran are in themselves a major cause of social tension; when linked with other prohibitions against modernity in all its forms, they can lead to a socially explosive mix.
The mullahs clearly believe that this is manageable. They control most of the organs of state, and of industry. They also have their bully-boys with clubs to beat up students and harrass women on the streets. The deployment of a right-wing populist, Ahmedinejad, to give them cover with the middle-aged and the dispossessed was a clever stroke, if for no other reason than the effect it had of driving the inherent political instability in Iran from the front pages of Western newspapers for several years.
Still, as the recent Iranian elections seem to demonstrate, the Iranian left -- if you can call it that -- has come out of electoral hibernation after a long hiatus, and the real struggle is in the news again.
If we really want to limit Iran's influence on our own futures, we could do worse than put our hands back in our collective pockets and wait a bit. It also wouldn't hurt to solve the problem of our own overweening ambitions. The Israelis' claws must be pried loose from our foreign policy aparatus, for one thing, but above all, we must leave Iraq as soon as we can mobilize the means to do so.
Our diplomatic efforts can then be devoted to supporting a reconciliation between Sunni and Shi'a which have been set at one another's throats by the ill-conceived strategies of our own neocons and the Israelis who mistakenly think that provoking a civil war within Islam will keep the wolf from their door for another generation.