Quote: .... As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.

[Shades of the PNAC's pre-911 'In the absence of a new Pearl Harbour' eh?]

For purposes of this analytic exercise, we assume that a U.S. invasion of Iran is not triggered by an overt, incontrovertible, and unforgivable act of aggression—something on the order of an Iranian-backed 9/11, in which the planes bore Iranian markings and Tehran boasted about its sponsorship. First, this seems exceptionally unlikely given Iran’s history of avoiding such acts, at least since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Second, were that ever to happen, the circumstances of an invasion would become almost easy—the United States would suddenly have enormous domestic and (perhaps grudging) international support for undertaking an invasion. Indeed, the entire question of “options” would become irrelevant at that point: what American president could refrain from an invasion after the Iranians had just killed several thousand American civilians in an attack in the United States itself?

Quote:
a ground invasion of iran designed to overthrow
the government would be onerous but rather
straightforward. indeed, it would likely have con-
siderable parallels with the overthrow of saddam’s
regime in iraq and the taliban regime in afghan-
istan. Because the United states probably could
not mount the invasion using bases in any of
iran’s neighboring countries (discussed in greater
detail below), a U.S. Marine force would first have
to seize control of a regional port, after which the
United states could establish a logistical base and
build up its ground and air forces before embark-
ing on a “march” of several hundred miles north
to tehran.

Magda Hassan Wrote:American forces have attempted to take over an Iranian oil field near the country's western border with Iraq, a security official says.

“US forces backed by tanks entered the Mousian area of the Dehloran County, laying around 100 meters of pipeline in Iranian territory," the source, talking on condition of anonymity, said Monday.

The source added that the pipes, marked with Iraqi flags, were blocked after Iranian forces pushed the “intruders” back across the border.