Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in the past few months, claims that hawks in the Pentagon believe that a taste of shock and awe would divide the secularists and reformers from the theocrats in Iran and that would inevitably lead to a collapse of the Iranian regime, and democracy will flourish. Former presidential security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, on the other hand, predicts that an attack would rally the Iranians behind the Islamic republic and inevitably increase the anti-American mood in the region and beyond.

Brzezinski told the Washington Post: "I think of war with Iran as the ending of America's present role in the world. Iraq may have been a preview of that, but it's still redeemable if we get out fast. In a war with Iran, we'll get dragged down for 20 or 30 years. The world will condemn us." No doubt Australia won't. Going on our record, we can pretty much guarantee that, at the very least, we will be cheering the Americans on as they lay into the Iranian branch of the axis of evil. And, "all the way", in the case of Iran, is going to be gruesome. Christopher de Bellaigue, a Briton who lives in Tehran, points out, writing for Harpers magazine, that the Tehran Research Reactor, the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre, the Nuclear Research Centre for Agriculture and Medicine in Karaj and the sole, almost completed nuclear reactor are all in or near cities. He says that an attack on these sites by some coalition of the willing would not divide the people from their theocratic rulers, but would drive them closer together. Any attack will not be seen as an attack on the regime, but as an assault on the nation because Iran, unlike Iraq, is a real nation with thousands of years of history in its consciousness.

While an Iranian bomb is not imminent, an American presidential election is. Hersh quotes a former intelligence official as saying that the Bush Administration sees the whole area — presumably from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan — as a huge war zone and the Administration and its neocon advisers and strategists believe that "this is the last hurrah — we've got four years and want to come out of this saying that we won the war on terrorism". De Bellaigue reckons that the reform movement in Iran that glowed dimly during the presidency of Mohammed Khatami was flawed by the timidity of its leaders and followers.

And, when George Bush made his axis of evil speech and invaded Iraq, it gave the mullahs all the excuse they needed for cracking down on the democrats. De Bellaigue believes that any further threats against Iran will see dissenters "smashed with an iron fist". John Howard says that the war on terrorism will go on for another generation at least. If we join in an invasion of Iran, we may assume that he is being optimistic.