“As tensions between Tehran and Washington have increased over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology, Iran has begun publicly preparing for a possible US attack, announcing efforts to bolster and mobilize recruits in citizens’ militias and making plans to engage in the type of ‘asymmetrical’ warfare that has plagued American troops in neighboring Iraq, officials and analysts say,” reports the Boston Globe .

No, not the worn-out claim that Iran is working feverishly on nukes, something dismissed by the International Atomic Energy Agency last week, but the fact Iran is preparing for asymmetrical warfare , understanding full well the all-consuming desire of the Bushcons and the Likudites in Israel to attack their country.

“One Western military specialist based in Tehran said on condition of anonymity that over the last year, Iran was sharpening its abilities to wage a guerrilla war,” the Boston Globe adds. “But most analysts agree that the biggest trump card Iranians could play is to unleash havoc in neighboring Iraq, where Iraqis who spent years in Iran as exiles are about to assume a dominant role in the government.”

In other words, the U.S. will be confronted with a large number of resistance fighters in Iraq, conceivably upward to a million or more, and not the paltry 200,000 or so it currently faces and finds overwhelming. On the day after the Pentagon stupidly bombs Iran’s illusory nuclear facilities there will be hell to pay in Iraq.

Iran’s Muslims are Shia and the Shia, as Israel discovered in southern Lebanon, are ruthless and dedicated fighters who do not give up easily. The Shia Hezbollah literally ran Israel out of Lebanon. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran sent human waves against Iraqi defenses. Saddam Hussein’s only defense against human wave invasions was to use chemical weapons against them (chemical weapons, incidentally, sold to them by U.S. and European corporations). So tenacious was the Sunni resistance in Fallujah, it appears the United States resorted to the use of chemical weapons, phosphorus bombs, and napalm . If the United States found it necessary to use chemical weapons in Fallujah, where there was at the most only a few thousand resistance fighters, imagine what their response would be to hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Shia fighters streaming across the Iranian border and besieging their camps and bases.

Iran has thrown down the gauntlet. If the U.S. attacks Iran—or even increases its covert operations to a degree Iran believes threatens its national security—all hell will break loose in Iraq. Car and suicide bombs going off in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq will sound like popcorn in a microwave.