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Okay, I'll bite.

First off, the comparison with Stalingrad is way off. Stalingrad was a tactical mistake made a military dictatorship with political motives, not strategic ones. The allure of Stalingrad, in Hitler's mind, had more to do with capturing something with Stalin's name on it than anything else (despite the city's strategic location). Hitler, and by extension, the Army became obsessed with the political point being made,rather than with the military considerations.

The second problem with the Stalingrad reference is that the German army became fixated on the battle to the exclusion of all other considerations, and sent more and mroe troops into a meat grinder, when a strategic withdrawl and encirclement of the city were perhaps a better way to go. Hitler's fanatic belief that not one inch of ground should be given up once German blood had been spilled in taking it handcuffed his commanders who came to the belated realization that they were in trouble. It was not the first time such stupidity hampered the Wermacht, and would not be the last time.

Our troops are not "tied down in Iraq", as I see it, as much as they are hamstrung by a lack of numbers. It is my belief that we went into Iraq with not enough INFANTRY, let alone enough troops, to provide the security that would have allowed many of the problems in Iraq to have been squashed already. We may have 150,000 troops in Iraq, but just how many of them are actual warfighters? Using a rule of thumb that 1 soldier in the field requires a minimum of 10 support troops (for everything from boots, to beans, to bullets, to bandages to someone filling in the paperwork), I believe there aren't enough actual fighters.

An invasion of Iran cannot repeat that mistake. The question then becomes; where do you find those necessary warfighters? I don't believe they exist, evenif we pulled every last swinging one from Korea, Europe and Japan. On the ground is where we run into problems, in my opinion, because we don't have the numbers and right types to secure what we have taken in any meaningful way.

As for my Navy (12 years as an aviation ordnanceman), we would not be "trapped" in the Straits. Iran cannot enforce a blockade of the Straits, only threaten to nuke or use SSM's against anything that passes through. SSM's (Chinese Silkworms, mostly) can be pinpointed and taken out from the air or by Spec Ops. The nuke is another story altogether, although if they do so, they would be harming themselves far more than they would us. As for disrupting world trade, that's an issue the United States is better economically equipped to handle than our European and Japanese allies. So, we can expect help from them, I believe, should this happen. That was the case back in the late 80's (when the US flagged Kuwaiti tankers and escorted them through the Straits -- I was there for that).

Our supply routes into Iraq can be bolstered or replaced by supply routes entering Iraq from the north through Turkey, or the south through Saudi Arabia. The difference is that these are overland routes which naturally means it will take longer for supplies to get to where they are needed,a and the security problem now becomes a bigger headache.

Stateside, I can only tell you that short of putting a military presance, with a wall, on the border and implementing a "shoot on sight" policy, I do not know how to correct that particular problem.

I don't believe they can hit us "big time" with anything here in the United States. They can certinaly make life interesting on the one hand, and damned right inconvenient on the other. They don't need nukes or dirty bombs either; hijack gas trucks, derail trains, or drive a cement mixer into a local hospital, and it has the same effect of spreading fear and paralysis.

As for going after the Iranians, the Iranian Navy is not all that great a threat, although they do have a number of diesel-electric subs that could spell big trouble.

I'd run three or four of our SSN's into the Gulf, (at least one armed with mines) and keep a CVN force circling just outside, ready to rush in if needed. You use the SSN's to hunt down their subs and mine harbors, and you augment the surface ASW force presently in the Gulf with Naval ASW (from the CVN) or from bases in Saudi, Kuwait and UAE. On the surface, the Iranians don't have much to stand up to our forces. Any Iranian Naval commander who seriously considers a surface battle against the US Navy is not worth his uniform.

Similarly, the Iranian Air Force is not all that great. It does have some of the newer Soviet designs and Chinese missiles, but they don't have numbers, nor do they have the experience and qualitative edge, that our pilots do. I don't expect there to be great air battles over Tehran or the Gulf, because the Iranians are more likely to get shot down or destroyed on the ground within minutes of hostilities opening.

As for the Iranian Army, they may have revolutionary and Islamic zeal, but they are limited to how they get at US Forces in Iraq. Overland, there is but one way (through the border region near Basra). I wouldn't count on the Iranisn dropping masses of Paratroops or mustering anything close to an amphibious invasion of Iraq. The Iranian army would be chewed up by American air power, and countered by American and British Armor the second they passed the border. Logisitcally, they probably could manage to maintain the offensive for very long.

I don't mean to pain a rosy scenario for us, because that would be stupid, but realistically, in a conventional military fight, Iran is on the short end of the stick. They will certainly kill some of us, and we a lot of them, but nothing will be solved because neither of the sides with the present array of forces available to them, can take and maintain the initiative, or maintain a regular tempo of attack.

Any American attack on Iran assumes a long lead time to build up forces and supplies, and when the attack is launched, it must be an effort at delivering total war to the Iranians, not the mere achievement of a few politically-strategic landmarks. "Surgical" won't work here -- it (the assault) has to be an all-out effort with the main goal of laying waste to everything in it's path, sapping the enemy's ability and means to fight, until he's prostrate and begging for peace.