My contacts there have stopped responding to emails, because the risk of being branded a foreign spy right now is very high. Government censorship is preventing a lot of outside warnings from being read, but people know the score.
There is a panicky move afoot to remove Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, or at least constrain him. Former president Rafsanjani is the most prominent advocate of this, but many others support it. The problem seems to be that Supreme Guardian Ayatollah Khamenei won't permit it, so Ahmadinejad continues to rant about nuclear power being Iran's inalienable right, while the people who voted for him wait in vain for him to relieve the increasing domestic inflation. As noted here many times before, it will be such internal economic pressure that truly change the regime in Iran, not cruise missiles or nukes.
But with a (possibly nuclear) attack on Natanz or other Iranian reactor facilities still in a hypothetical future, the unease is still vague. There is the constant hope that something will derail it, such as a late diplomatic initiative by the Europeans, or a move away from brinkmanship by Khamenei. This hope is faint, but the fact that nothing other than questionable intelligence information about centrifuges has been offered so far places hostilities in an unknown future time.
President Bush has no authority to launch an attack, but if he chooses to do so, it's done, and what happens then? Rare is the Democrat who would dare accuse the man of treason against the United States, despite the probability of his exposing his country and its allies to years of reprisals. The Saudis and Jordanians might cheer with relief that a nascent Shi'a power is humbled, but in Middle Eastern politics, there is no such thing as a definitive outcome.
Meantime, we wait. Where the invasion of Iraq was a drawn-out inevitability after late 2002, there is still trepidation about stirring up Iran. Nobody today, except perhaps some senior denizens of the White House, is sanguine about the predictability of a major military intervention in the Persian Gulf. Iran has a large military which, while its weaponry is not up to U.S. standards, nevertheless has bite. And Iran's population is almost triple that of Iraq.
So we wait. Michael T. Klare, a professor at Hampshire College in the U.S. and author Blood and Oil, recently stated his belief that an attack is now inevitable, since all the signs mimic the propaganda techniques employed before Iraq was attacked. (See www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=169271). He isn't alone, just more outspoken than some.
I don't doubt that Iran is involved in the Iraqi insurrection(s), and eventually it will produce a viable nuclear weapon, though clearly not in this decade. But since other nations in the Middle East are widely reported to be revisiting their no-nukes policies, the absence of a specifically Iranian bomb would confer little security on the rest of the world. And despite its belligerent attitudes towards Israel, Iran is still much less of a source of radical Jihadism than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or even Egypt.
But this kind of reality-based thinking is still not in fashion at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. So, as diehard neo-con bloggers and pundits continue to insist that Iran must be stopped now, and perpetuate the delusion this can be accomplished by force of arms, the rest of us get to hope, or at least pretend, the worst might not happen.
As it might not. I hope.