"How Iran Would Go to War against America" Topic

"While all sides here in Washington battle to shape public opinion over the Iran nuclear deal, we should not kid ourselves—this is not Obama's "Nixon goes to China" moment, nor should we expect Air Force one to touch down in Tehran anytime soon.

Call me a pessimist, but I am not that impressed. There is a long way to go from a "framework" to an actual hard deal—with decades of mistrust making the road to a deal even longer and tougher. So before we start awarding Nobel Prizes, a hard look at the facts when it comes to the U.S.-Iranian relationship are in order.

The facts are simple: Washington and Tehran are locked into a long-term geopolitical contest throughout the Middle East that will span decades—a similar contest in many ways to Washington and Beijing's battle for influence in the Asia-Pacific and wider Indo-Pacific regions. While President Barack Obama and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei might be toasting one another from afar, the geopolitical showdown between these two countries is certainly not over—no nuclear framework will change that…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Asymmetric warfare using non-state third parties would be Iran's approach. Oh, and a nuke or two "borrowed from Pakistan or the Sovi…er…Russians that get put into place via cargo ship (one in biggest port on east coast and one in biggest port on west coast) if things need to get pushed along in the wrong direction. With deniability and no obviously state sponsor of the attacks, no publicly acceptable target of retaliation is open for a counter strike.

But that's just my "really really bad case" (note, not quite worst case) scenario.

Rob

Same way they've been doing it for 30+ years, through proxies.

I agree vtsaogames …Plus the US could not invade Iran with any real success as it is bigger than and not Iraq, etc., among other things. A naval battle may have more success, but what is the endgame ? No clear answers, many shades of gray … Of course the gaming possiblities has a lot of potential. Especially on the tactical level, in the air, sea and land, IMO.

To think that we have anything to do with whether Iran gets the bomb or not is a good bit of puffery on our part.
When they get close Israel will scramble 4 F-16s and go make some holes. Don't know why we are making such a big deal over this. From what I remember the last raid they did it was a close run thing with them landing with about a gallon of fuel on board.

@Grossman: Thing is, there are something like 20 different facilities that would need to be struck to take out the entire program. And they're more than twice the distance from Israel, so impossible to strike without either landing and refueling (maybe in Saudi) or mid-air refueling.

Not to mention how deeply buried some of those facilities are. Deep enough that I suspect that there's little chance of destroying them with anything less than a nuclear bunker-buster deployed via ICBM.