It's taken just a few months for Cameron and chums to do what Blair took 4 years to do. Back in '99 Clinton & Blair fought a limited air & special ops war in support of a popular uprising in Kosovo, leading to Kosovan pseudo-independence and eventual regime change in Yugoslavia. Blair came to believe that British military might was an all conquering force for good. So he invaded Iraq and helped kill a million people.
Fastforward to the present. Neo-Cameron and Wiliam "send him to the" Hague are feeling flush following an 'easy' (for them) victory in Libya. Now, despite having scrapped most of the UK's aircraft carriers and jetplanes, powerful and idiotic members of the British political elite believe that they can go to war against Iran and win. The recent Grauniad and Torygraph stories planted by anonymous “senior officials” about joint UK-Israeli military wargames are part of the plan. The ratcheting of tensions, the protests at the British embassy in Tehran, and the UK's closure of its embassy, are steps on the way to war.
William “Gaddafi is in Venezuela” Hague is, of course, utterly wrong about the West's chances of winning such a war. Iran has 3 times the size and population of iraq, and has a modern military (complete with its own space programme) and plenty of experience in 'asymetrical warfare'. Its government is broadly popular, especially when it plays to its a conservative, nationalist, religious base. That base hates Britain almost as much as it hates Israel and the USA. Were the west to strike, Iran would be free to leave the IAEA (the UN nuclear watchdog) and build the bomb everyone's so scared of. It's hard to see how a war would lead to regime change without an occupation of Tehran. It's hard to see the western powers even making it to Tehran, let alone staying there.
But the UK government could do with a war. The home front is looking decidedly unstable, and war could be used to justify all that 'Power of Nightmares' control-by-fear politics that we had to put up with during the last decade- orange alerts, dirty bombs, bogus 45 minute claims, and the rest of that nonsense. The (Neo-)Conservative Party could do with the distraction. And they've got friends in Israel (remember that Osborne's chum Werrity got busted whilst unofficially representing Britain in secret briefings with Mossad). Mostly Israel's loony rightwing leaders want an Iran War to distract from their domestic problems and their illegal occupation of Palestine. It's dangerous to look too hard for sanity the Knesset these days- the Israeli government has 'jumped the shark' as far as rational politics goes. Their entire official political structure now consists of far right groups competing to be the most extreme. On some level they are aware that they cant go to war without America, but if Britain and Israel lobby hard together, it's uncertain whether Obama has enough leadership to stop the militarist, rightwing and Zionist lobbies from forcing his hand.
The Iran War, the scripted but never shot finale of the War on Terror trilogy, may be fast approaching. In fact, it might even already be there. Parts of Iran keep blowing up, on the 30th a second Iranian military facility was hit by a massive explosion. Israel's intel minister, Dan Meridor, explained helpfully, “There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat." “Politics by other ways” is how famous military strategist Otto Clauswitz defined war.
There is an Iranian pro-war lobby at work too- the far right, ultra-religious theocrats who have never been happy with the small amount of democracy that Iran stubbornly retains. Here too the jingoistic distraction of a war can keep the crowds under control and not protesting against bad economic policy a corrupt political system. These guys, leaders of the Basij militias, and the Revolutionary Guard, wanted the British embassy closed just as much as their ideological brethren in the UK. Now that there are no official lines of communication, it's that bit easier for a situation to escalate out of control. If the west continues to launch clandestine attacks on Iran, sooner or later a spy will be caught in the act (7 CIA spooks were caught recently in Iran). If a wannabe James Bond appears on Iranian state TV, captured, beaten and bruised we could all end up regretting the lack of communication.
On the plus side however, if the Iran War kicks off we'll only need to change the Q for an N on those old Iraq War placards before we go marching.