It does not mean an attack is certain, but the United States could not attack Iran so long as four-star Adm. Fallon was the head of U.S. Central Command, which covers Iraq and Iran. That obstacle is now gone.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East tour was another indicator. According to a report in The American Conservative, on his previous trip Cheney told U.S. allies, including the Saudis, that President George W. Bush would attack Iran before the end of his term. If that report was correct, then his current tour might have the purpose of telling them when it is coming.

Why not just do that through the State Department? State may not be in the loop, nor all of the U.S. Department of Defense for that matter. The State Department, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. intelligence agencies, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps are all opposed to war with Iran. Of the U.S. armed services, only the Air Force reportedly is in favor, seeking an opportunity to show what air power can do. As always, it neglects to inform the decision-makers what it cannot do.

The purpose of this column is not to warn of an imminent assault on Iran, though personally I think it is coming, and soon. Rather, it is to warn of a possible consequence of such an attack. Let me state it here, again, as plainly as I can: an American attack on Iran could cost the United States the whole army it now has in Iraq.

Lots of people in Washington are pondering possible consequences of an air and missile assault on Iran, but few if any have thought about this one. The American military's endless "we're the greatest" propaganda has convinced most people that the U.S. armed forces cannot be beaten in the field. They are the last in a long line of armies that could not be beaten, until they were.

Here's roughly how it might play out. In response to American air and missile strikes on military targets inside Iran, Iran moves to cut the supply lines coming up from the south through the Persian Gulf -- can anyone in the Pentagon guess why it's called that? -- and Kuwait on which most U.S. Army units in Iraq depend. The U.S. Marines, however, get most of their stuff through Jordan.

Iran does this by hitting shipping in the Gulf, mining key choke points and destroying the port facilities the U.S. armed forces depend on, mostly through sabotage. It also hits oil production and export facilities in the Gulf region as a decoy: The U.S. armed forces focus most of their response on protecting the oil, not guarding the U.S. Army's supply lines.

Simultaneously, Iran activates the Shiite militias in southern Iraq to cut the roads that lead from Kuwait to Baghdad. Both the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr and the Badr Brigades -- the latter now supposedly U.S. allies -- enter the war against the U.S. forces with their full strength. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite Muslim cleric in Iraq, but also an Iranian, calls on all Iraqi Shiites to fight the Americans wherever they find them.

Instead of fighting the 20 percent of Iraq's population that is Sunni, the U.S. forces find themselves battling the 60 percent of the population that is Shiite. Worse, the Shiites' logistics lie directly across those logistics lines coming up from Kuwait.

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)

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