It seems Iran is following the playbook from the 1st Gulf War - alienate all the other Arab states. And also, threaten Israel with missile attacks. Worked as a great strategy for Saddam. The only issue will be the role of Russia and cHina in all this.
Imagine...a true Sunni "believer" is supposed to want the destruction of Shiite political Islam. The Iraqi insurgency exists largely because the US is correctly seen as weakening Sunni political Islam relative to Shiite Political Islam over the past 3 years. Remember: when the US soldiers were fighting Sadr's forces in Najaf...the Sunni Iraqi insurgency gave the US soldiers a respite so a maximum amount of Shiite militiamen could be killed by the Americans (similar to the Russians pausing outside of Warsaw in order to allow the Nazis to put down the Jewish uprising there). Theoretically, you could get the average conservative Sunni Muslim Al Jazeera viewer *cheering* for US soldiers as they wipe out the Shiite Mullahs in Iran...all televised in the Sunni arab states and Pakistan.
But this scenario assumes a logical Sunni arab street.
I contend that it is not only an imperative that we remove the head of Shiite political Islam...but we do so in a manner that wins us the respect of the Sunni street for taking their more serious political enemy from them.