You have two quite distinct items on this plate. My take on the real conservative / neoroyalist relationship has always been that the neoroyalists have simply been utilizing their vast, trillion dollar corporate media machine to carefully cultivate and "grow" the conservative culture, so  as to have something respectable to hide behind. Same deal with the vast pseudo-ministry that they have bought and paid for, a subversion of genuine religion, engineered to tell poor red staters whom to vote for. It is just a fact that many of these real conservatives and fundamentalists are fine people, who in many, many ways, are often rather liberal.

This March, about one month from now, the Iranian Bourse (an oil stock exchange) will open. This conceivably could lead to an end to the decades-old U.S. protection racket that has kept the U.S. awash in super-cheap petroleum for decades, and greased our otherwise quite moribund economy. A veritable mountain of Scott Ritter-style analyses put forward by the kinds of people who should have the analytical abilities to be in the know, says that the U.S. neoroyalist puppets in the Beltway are setting up to try to blow up Iran's nuclear complexes right at this moment in time.

The will try to use "bunker-buster" type weapons, or nuclear weapons. If they "succeed" in blowing up these fortified nuclear complexes, it is likely that they will set off a Chernobyl-type multiple dirty-bomb scenario, which could be maybe 100 times worse than Chernobyl itself. Millions of Chinese nationals could die in the ensuing radiological holocaust. The fallout could easily spread to Western Russia, the Koreas, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, etc., etc.

China could be expected to invade Iran to get at it's oil. And Formosa. Russia might well join them. Each of those nations possess deterrent systems that could obliterate the U.S. about 100 times over. Iran may have advanced biological weapons. As may North Korea. Who knows what the Vietnamese have? If China and Russia get hold of all that Iranian oil, the could easily end up having the Koreas and Japan as new partners.

Still, the smart talk on the street says the U.S. neoroyalist puppets are prepared to protect the dollar's hegemony at any cost, and are rapidly moving toward an air attack on Iran, probably in March. An attack by Israel would be viewed as no different than a direct attack by U.S. forces.

Of course, I believe "by their fruits ye shall know them," just to be clear that we're basically agreed.  But beyond the basics, I may have a somewhat different take.

IMHO, "True conservative principles" are always more popular than what conservative leaders actually do.  So this situation is "same as it ever was," as Talking Heads would say.  At least in that regard.  But there is a change, as I'll indicate below.

I've always believed that you have to understand conservatism in terms of producers and consumers--a construct I first encountered vis-a-vis political hysteria during the post-WWI Red Scare in Political hysteria in America; the democratic capacity for repression by Murray B. Levin.  "True conservative principles" are for consumers, and they will always be selectively invoked--or finessed--when needed by the producers.  The cult of Bush that Glenn Greenwald has been writing about arises in part from the fact that the ratio of finesses to invocations has grown well beyond a critical level. (The popular term is "tipping point," which comes from sociology, but I think it's more insightful--returning sociology to its roots as 'social physics'--to speak of a phase transition, from solid to liquid or from conductor to superconductor.)

I think that the state that conservatives are in now is more akin to the early stages of fascism than anything we've seen in this country--outside the Deep South, at least--since 1936, when FDR's sweeping re-election really took the wind out of the proto-fascist right's sails.  It's so foreign to what we've been accustomed to that we really can't see it clearly.  All the more reason to make the effort to do so.

I hope to develop the ideas here into a fully elaborated post in the next day or so.

Another irony is that we invaded Iraq partially because we thought it would remove a threat to Isarael.  But Iraq was not a threat to Israel, and our having done so makes it almost impossible to help Israel when a real, existential threat arrives in the form of the Iran nuclear program.

Iran may be a relatively large threat to Israel, that is in comparison with some other neighbors. But it is not now, and even with nuclear weapons, would not be a really serious "threat."

One real threat to Israel, and the entire Middle East, is global warming and fresh water depletion. The former "River Jordan" is now 2 feet wide. Global desertification will render up two-thirds of the currently inhabited world uninhabitable. And there will be no surplus energy to desalinize sea water.

It's not only the GOP with crazy ideas over Iran.

As, for instance, potential presidential candidate Brer Bayh - who seems to want to be a second LBJ: fight the Dems are weak on national security tag by taking the country into an enormous unwinnable war! (Salon article has more.)

Hopefully, overstretch plus the impossibility of a draft will keep the crazies at bay: but let's look out for them on both sides of the aisle.

The title of this post is misleading. Actually a majority support an air strike on Iran. The Busheviks know that and they might delude themselves into thinking it can be a "surgical" strike and bring a huge rallying boost to their 06 chances. It's clear to me that such a strike would bring rapid escalation, with probable nuclear counter strike against Iran after Iran sends missiles down on Israeli cities and American bases in Iraq. A military confrontation with Russia and China seems also likely, along with a disuption of all oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf. An uprising across the Muslim world is likely. Bush is just stupid enough and reckless enough to do this. Reputable sources say the deadline has been set for the end of March. After that Russian anti-aircraft missiles are set to be deployed in Iran.