Khumeini's Poker Face

Iran has been playing cat and mouse with Europe and the US on the issue of developing nukes out of their efforts at nuclear energy production, and it looks to me like there's little chance that we and our "allies" will be able to stop them. A response scenerio often put forward has the US/Israel bombing the 20 odd suspected R&D sites into dust and then waiting to see if Khumeini blinks.

Bad idea.

Matthew Iglesias has one prediction vector:

The other element of the prediction business that people are missing is that full-scale war is nowhere near as unlikely as folks seem to believe. All it would require is for the Bushies to somewhat underestimate Iran's ability to counterstrike after we launch airstrikes. No one knows for sure what, exactly, Iran would be capable of doing in retaliation. But if they can hit us reasonably hard, our government will feel the need to escalate again in counter-retaliation, and then down the spiral we go. People forget that wars are usually started because of miscalculations on the part of the relevant actors and not because it "makes sense" to start them. There mere fact that no one in Washington wants a full-scale war with Iran is no guarantee that we won't get it. Events have a way of spinning out of control when the people guiding them are risk-friendly, arrogant, and slightly paranoid about the motives of everyone outside their circle.

We turn to Zakaria again to sum up where I'm at with it:

If coercion means American military strikes, it is an utterly counterproductive idea. Such a move would do limited damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, rally the country round the regime, isolate the United States further in the world and probably prompt the Iranians to retaliate by sponsoring terror attacks against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to trust that this president would pay much attention to this, a conservative foreign policy argument, unless it meant promoting abstinance over condom use in Africa's AIDS crisis.