Iran will not be the pushover Iraq was. We will lose planes and their crews. We will also probably suffer the worst attack on a carrier since WWII. Iran has been working on stealth detection technology for about 20 years and I believe it is now operational. They can find B-2's and target them.
Our ground forces are stretched too thin as it is and they cannot stop a mass Iranian evacuation to Iraq that would cause complete havoc in Iraq. Iran must collapse from the inside. It is the only viable option - unless of course we go nuclear and there is no way in hell W has the balls for that.
"Our ground forces are stretched too thin as it is and they cannot stop a mass Iranian evacuation to Iraq that would cause complete havoc in Iraq. Iran must collapse from the inside."
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
The forces we have in Iraq would stop the Iranian Army dead were it to try to invade Iraq.
Perhaps you mean that an American military attack on Iran would cause Iranian civilians to flee en masse for the Iraqi desert.
Why?
The US isn't going to be destroying Iranian cities, but military sites. There isn't the ethnic and religious diversity in Iran that would cause a government breakdown to provoke an ethnic civil war. Why would Farsi-speaking ethnic Persians flee Persia for a piece of Arabia, in the desert, in a bloody civil war?
It makes no sense.
The Persians will hunker down and stay put even as we gut their government from the air...were we to do that...but we won't.
There is no gas in the tank for that sort of third war.
And the talk about ISRAEL doing it is just fantasy. Israel is too far away and does not have the long range strike forces to be effective at taking down Iran. They could perhaps get a raid or two into Iran, which would only enrage the country ... and enrage Iraq, over which the Israelis would have to fly.
Truth is, we're going to make a lot of noise, and Iran is going to get the atomic bomb, because they're not going to back down, and they know we don't have the gas in the tank to start a war with them. It's finished. We screwed up at the outset of this war, and we can't walk that cat back now.
There are lessons learned here for the next one, but we already are determinedly not learning them.