A Wager on Iran

We're planning a buildup of naval forces in the Persian Gulf to ramp up gunboat diplomacy with Iran. I'm going to make a prediction here:

Military action of some sort will take place by the United States against Iran before George W. Bush leaves office.

Whether this will be in the form of special forces covertly entering Iran, a conflict on the actual Gulf between naval forces, or "surgical air strikes against suspected nuclear facilities", I don't know, but I have a strong feeling something is going down before too long.

I say this because of the Bush Doctrine of justifiable preemptive strikes, a loosening of the tactical nuclear doctrine, and the expressed opinion of most of the neocons who advocated for the Iraq war (and who still have influence in the White House) that the solution to the Iraq situation is to actually widen armed conflict into more of the region. Their feeling is that what is required is more invasions, more troops, more attacks, more war, to prove to the Islamo-fascist scum that we really mean business.

We're seeing the same kind of vilification of Iran that we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War, the same kind of drumbeating about weapons of mass destruction, the same kind of cherry-picked intelligence about their nuclear facilities, the same kind of "They're the enemy and we don't negotiate with enemies" rhetoric that began with Saddam shortly after 9-11.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'd be willing to put money on the table that before the end of 2007 we have some sort of military conflict with Iran. I wouldn't even be all that surprised if it got nuclear -- I think Dick Cheney and the Neo-Con Cabal have been itching to nuke somebody for a long time, and Iran or Syria are the most likely targets. I really really hope I'm wrong on that, but like I said, there's very little these people could do that would surprise me any more.