My Iranian colleague said some Iranian generals promised that any bombing of Iran (even by the US) would mean the flattening of Israel. I don't think the US could simultaneously knock out all of their missle sites in time to prevent this. The result of attacking Iran would be like Iraq on speed.

I'm afraid I agree with the poster who states you got the military aspects all wrong. Your predictions lie in the camp of those who predicted that the fall of Baghdad would be like Stalingrad and that upwards of 10,000 coalition forces would die, when more like 50 did in that particular assault.

Any assault on Iran would consist of the bunker-busters mentioned, a drop of special forces to focus on the harder-to-destroy targets, and a suppression of airforce and anti-air forces. This is imminently "manageable" and would probably be largely successful.

The problems arise in the degree of collateral damage. If the actions release substantial nuclear material (either from damaged facilities, or, god forbid, use of tactical nuclear weapons) and the wholesale evacuations of people out of radiation harm's way, we will have crossed a threshold that will result in the sort of international condemnation and hostility we really can't imagine.

- Oil would rocket way past $100

- Industrial economies would slip into recessions/depressions over the next year

- Our interests in the Mid-east would be knocked out for years. We would see nationalizations of assets, eviction of civilians from many countries, anti-American riots and embassy burnings, the works.

- Possible/probably retaliation using nuclear materials. Iran doesn't have the bomb,yet, but they have substantial nuclear assets and a dirty bomb is about twenty minutes of work for them. You could expect the use of such devices, probably over Israel, and certainly over US assets in Iraq, everywhere. It would be catastrophic and force the sort of retreat Conason speaks of.

- The rest of the world would pull back from us, not just diplomatically but economically and militarily. You could expect exports of US goods to fall through the floor as the world boycotts them, and we would be tarnished for a decade.

Unfortunately, it would be very difficult for the US to acheive its goals of damaging Iranian nuclear capability without release of nuclear materials. As a result, we face a calamity, but not exactly the sort projected by Conason.

Just to pick a nit on this sentence-

"Soon we will hear that Tehran is allied not only with the Palestinian group Hamas but with al-Qaida (although the latter are Sunnis and the former are Shiites)."

I think what you meant by "the former" (being Shiites) is the Iranians, but the way the sentence is constructed it sort of implies that al-Qaida is Sunni and Hamas is Shiite. Palestinian Muslims are in the vast majority Sunni, and thus Hamas is a Sunni Islamist movement.

jf

The problem with pieces like Conason's (and contrary to one writer below, they have been popping up in other places) is that he doesn't ask what do we lose if we don't attack Iran. Without focussing on that aspect of the problem, of course it seems insane to fool with that country. But even the multiculturalists who inhabit this site will not sleep well once there is an Islamist bomb.

There already are Islamicist bombs. Perhaps you may have heard of a country called Pakistan?

As a military historian, I can say one thing with conviction: handicapping an escalating confrontation with Iran will not tell you much in the particulars, but the trend ain't pretty. Iran will not sit on its hands after enduring an American sneak attack. Their response may be as feeble as a set of bombings around the world and a stepped-up support of the insurgency in Iraq, or as bad as a full-scale intervention in Iraq similar to China's in Korea. Either hundreds of people will die, or tens of thousands. Bush will not suffer a Dien Bien Phu in the desert, because he has the conventional, chemical, and nuclear means to avoid one, although that will push the death count into the hundreds of thousands--I doubt he will lose any sleep over the dead Iranian conscripts and Iraqi "collateral damage." So we can expect it all to go rather badly, with many people dead who would not otherwise be. Iran is stuck in a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" scenario--they legitimately fear US aggression, so they are trying to build an a-bomb to prevent it, but in trying to defend themselves, they invite American aggression. Bush gains points with his base by being tough and inflexible; the President of Iran is locked in the same bad dynamic with his supporters--the more he sounds like a nut to our ears, the happier the poorly educated rural masses feel. I fear for the future.

"Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the Iranians can probably make this happen so long as they've prepared for it in advance and can coordinate their forces. They have a large air force, some of it in bad shape but most of it very useful. These planes would have to help the navy and missile units shut down the Persian Gulf, as well as providing cover just long enough for the ground forces to close the distance with Iraq's cities and/or U.S. bases."

Iran has no airforce compared to the US. Most of Iran's planes would destroyed within a manner of hours, within days none would be left.

The concept of Iran's army cutting off Southern Iraq is laughable, not because Iran's soldiers are not brave and willing to fight, but because the level of training, coordination and equipment is totally in the favor of the United States.

Most people who don't deal with the US military discount the amount of training they receive and they contingencies for which they are trained. While it may seem odd there are actually mobile ground to air assets in Iraq, despite the fact there are no planes to fight against.

As I said earlier, it would be lunacy to attack Iran, but it doesn't help when facts are clearly overstated.

The huge problem in attacking Iran isn't that we wouldn't win the ground battles, it's that "victory" would require killing so many Iranians that we'd be the 21st century Nazis.

Iran is years away from producing a nuclear weapon. They currently have 164 centifuges working in a cascade. It takes a cascade of 64,000 to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and it become exponetially harder as you add more.

Plus, it produces a very primative bomb such as the first dropped on Japan. While this bomb is powerful, it is huge. They weigh over 20 tons and would be damn near impossible for Iran to deliver.

Iran may possibly have rockets that could deliver a modern warhead, but they are decades away from that type of warhead.

The Bush administration is again lying about the nuclear capablities of a nation to aroze public anger.