Letter vs. Spirit of Our Bet

My memory on the wager regarding war with Iran is hazy. Key details that have evaded me are:

1. Timing
2. Identity of technical aggressor (but see below)
3. Stakes ;-)

But I do remember that the spirit of the thing was that Rony was claiming, "Bush is going after Iran next," i.e., Iran's gonna get the Iraq treatment. The notion that we're going to play Chamberlain (or, how many times worse, Turney) to Ahmedinijad and be passive in the face of any insult is obviously ludicrous. My impression was that we were debating whether Bush was going to perform another no-holds-barred predetermined baseless drive to war: fabricating and distorting evidence, pounding doubters into submission, manipulating Powell (even easier now that it's Rice), etc.

So let's be more precise about my position. What will happen if Iran seizes any American personnel as it seized the British sailors? War. What will happen if any Iranian missile, conventional or otherwise, explodes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the Gulf? War. What will happen if a dispute along the Iran/Iraq border gets hot? War.

That's obvious and always has been; so let's explore the more interesting scenarios. What will happen if Iran becomes an officially declared nuclear weapons power? Hmm. Note that it's already an officially declared nuclear power; and yet the drums of war beat not. The fact is that I think that this administration, and this country, have had realpolitik beaten into them with a blunt instrument in the Centcom theater. For decades on end, we tolerated an "evil empire" in Russia with a huge nuclear stockpile, and fought them by containment. For the entirety of this decade, we have done the same with a far more evil empire in North Korea, despite the relative puniness of their capability. The Chinese have a handful of devices, too.

So let's outline two possible outcomes if Iran gets a nuke or is really truly on the verge.

• We get a strong, explicit authorization of force from the Security Council along with at least a fig-leaf's-worth of military allies. Probability? Non-zero but certainly very low. I think that Bush certainly, and the next President almost certainly, will take the opportunity to wipe Lil' Squinty off the map.
• We don't. We get some wussy little resolution, again (remember how the Council couldn't even "condemn" the seizure of the British sailors??). What will happen? I'll wager a top-shelf drink - no, that's boring, a top-shelf bottle - that we'll go into containment mode and there will be no hot shooting war.