Iran War coming?

Frida Berrigan asks on the Cheney-Bush Iran policy right now whether we have War or Rumors of War? Foreign Policy in Focus 10/04/06. She doesn't come down for either conclusion. But she sees reasons to by concerned:

The administration may well be bluffing to demonstrate its “hard-nosed” diplomatic resolve. The U.S. military does not believe that air strikes on Iran are either workable or advisable, and, as noted above, an attack would not likely hit all major Iranian nuclear sites since U.S. intelligence doesn't know where they are.

Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, argues that Iran policy may be moving along parallel tracks—one involving force as a form of pressure and the other involving plans for an actual military attack. He imagines the current situation as a dangerous game of highway chicken in which two drivers speed toward each other, head on. The winner is the one who doesn't veer off the road, and it's a tie if both drivers steer off the road. ...

The flaw in Kaplan's metaphor is that it implies two equal adversaries. Even with a nuclear weapon, Iran couldn't subject the United States to the kind of damage that Washington could inflict on it. But as we see every day in Iraq, the car that "veers off the road" can come back to fight another day, by other means that are just as deadly.

Meanwhile, Matthew Stannard gives us a preview of How an attack would unfold: A military assault on nuclear plants in Iran remains an option for U.S. San Francico Chronicle 10/01/06. Short version: lots of bombing of Iranian sites. Lots of Iranian civilian casualties. Limited effectiveness. Serious irregular-warfare retaliation by Iran. Oddly, though, he doesn't go into much detail at all on the vulnerability of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to Iranian retaliation.

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