I agree with your analysis but I think that bombing Iran is still more than zero . This is based on my "telepathically communing" with the Dick Cheney and the Neocons still left in the White House and also based on my knowledge of what has happened in Yugoslavia.

(Note: I do no agree with bombing Iran).

The preview of this policy of bombing Iran was the 2006 war in Lebanon, where the bombing of Beirut was designed to ignite a civil war against the Shia (Hezbollah) by the Sunnis and Christians.

The Sunnis and Christians have seen that movie before, knew how it ended and decided not to play the part that was scripted for them by Olmert and Bush.

Even though it didn't really work that well in Lebanon, destabilization will be retooled for Iraq, Syria and Iran.

For Iraq, the first step will be to promote tripartite "federalism" dividing Iraq into three distinct federal units which has been championed by US Senator Biden (NYT Op-Ed, May 1, 2006, WaPo August 24, 2006 ironically named "A Plan to Hold Iraq Together"). This is basically, partition lite, because Iraqis will have to define new boundaries for each of the three provinces. This process, in itself, will be the catalyst for ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.

Pundits will not have to ask whether Iraq is in a state of civil war. Like the war in Bosnia, it will be easy to determine when Iraq slips into civil war. The Kurdish Members of Parliament will leave for Kirkuk; the Shias MPs will leave for Basra; the Sunni MPs will leave for Fallujah. There will be convoys of people on donkeys leaving mixed neighborhoods for ethnically pure neighborhoods. Baghdad will look like Beirut or Sarajevo.

Then American politicians will say "things have changed"! The will ask now ... "who do we support, who do we betray"? (The Kurds had better hold on to their hats because US policy can change on a dime.)

This is the "Lord Owen" solution, which was applied during the Bosnian war when he proposed new internal borders for Bosnia that recognized ethnic cleansing as "the facts on the ground". This in turn led to a new round of ethnic cleansing, especially between Croats and Bosniaks.

For Syria, it means the overthrow, with the aid of some bombs, of Assad regime and his minority Alawite religious group and handing power the Sunni majority. This should pry Syria away from the hold that Iran has on it and stop the shipments of arms from Iran through Syria to Hezbollah.

Iran is the hardest nut to crack. It would be too costly, in terms of manpower and money, for the US to attempt to get ride of the Iranian mullahs by itself. Instead, using Yugoslavia as a model, the US will bomb Iran, giving cover to local separatist groups such as the Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis and you guessed it the Arabs bordering on southern Shia dominated Iraq (where all the Iranian oil is).

When Washington makes it known to all concerned that it will break Iran into pieces, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and you guessed it the Shia in Iraq will join the US and all descend on Iran to get their part of the spoils. Similar to the German invasion of Yugoslavia during WW2.

Iran's infrastructure will be destroyed, it oil province gone. Its Persian population representing 60% of current Iran will have lost the will to carry on. (Let that be a lesson to those call Bush the evil Satan.)

So what kind of Middle East will we have? There will be no talk about democracy in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Lebanon will have a cowed Hezbollah, which will have lost access to Iranian money and weapons. A Sunni lead Syrian government will be crippled after a civil war with the Alawites. In Iraq, after a protracted civil war three separate states will emerge: Kurdistan, Shia Iraq and Sunni Iraq. Finally there will be a rump Iran that has lost almost half of its territory and population. Everyone will be at each other's throats and all will look to the US to find favour so that each country can get whatever scraps the US will through at it.

Just like in the Balkans. Just like Yugoslavia.

Turkey will be the wild card. Will it try to intervene to stop the emergence of an independent Kurdistan. I don't think so. The US will make it clear that it is in the US national interest that these countries should "liberated". Turkey will be given the option of being with the US or against it. I think that Turkey will go with the US.

The quandry in how apt the comparison to Yugoslavia and the Balkans applies to so much of the middle east is the fact that the "ignition" event in all cases would be the removal of totalitarian rule which had, for a time, supressed internal conflicts which later re-erupted when they became free to do so.

When the Brits re-drew the map of the middle east after WW1, they weren't quite ready to abandon the "divide and conquer" philosophy which had helped them colonize the region in the first place, and the borders in many cases were drawn around poulations which it was known were unlikely to be capable of cooperating to enough of an extent to constitute a threat to the outside world, and to the U.K. in particular (probably not a bad plan if there's no historical precedent for voluntaily de-colonizing so much land, and if your primary concern at the time is preventing any severe backlash from former colonies).

Unfortunately, if this is the case, then we may be left with the primary options of either;

1) propping up these totalitarian regimes indefinitely in the name of preserving "stability" (this option seems to be popular with the left in the U.S. over the last several years, although it also seems to be anathema to what they usually claim are their own core principles)

2) accepting that some amount of ethnic cleansing may be unavoidable in some regions at some point in the future, and just trying to minimize the damage and try to buffer the effects of history uncoiling when and where it happens. (I can't imagine who would find this option to be desirable on any level, although it may be part of what the neocons believe they're going for as some sort of realist approach since the other two possibilities seem untenable over the long term going forward)

3) just going completely isolationist and pretending that the problems of the world beyond our borders doesn't and can't affect us if we don't want them to, which also pretty much means tacit acceptance of ethnic cleansing and genocide as long as it happens somewhere else (this has historically been a popular position of the right wing and parts of the left, and was always the position of the actual U.S. far right with respect to Iraq, although it has also historically proven to not work well in the context of large-scale conflicts, as it was the stated policy of the U.S. for several years prior to entry into WW1, and then again during the first several years of WW2)

I realze these are "borad strokes" options, and there are ways to nuance any or all of them, but at some point much of that nuance is just lipstick on a pig.