Overlooked in my earlier remarks on Hanson and Kurdistan was this slightly puzzling claim:

Israel lost some of its precious capital of deterrence in the last war, but ultimately the real loser was a bankrupt Iran who lost far more materially than did a far wealthier Israel.

I call this puzzling for two reasons.  One reason is that the “real loser” of the war in Lebanon last year was, um, Lebanon, which had its infrastructure severely damaged, 1,000 of its people killed, hundreds of thousands made into refugees and its political life thrown into ever greater convulsions.  The next biggest loser in material terms was Hizbullah, which lost many of its men and expended much of the armament the Iranians had provided them in the latter’s expectation that Hizbullah would use those weapons for Iranian ends.  Materially, the third biggest loser was Israel, which did, after all, suffer a smaller but not inconsiderable number of civilian and military casualties, in addition to having the northern reaches of their country more or less paralysed by random bombardment.  Iran takes fourth place, so to say, in a war in which there were basically four parties (plus, I suppose, Syria and, a little more indirectly, the U.S.). 

The other reason it is puzzling is that if Iran is “bankrupt,” this would also remind us of Iran’s economic difficulties and its energy crunch.  Namely, Iran has to import refined oil because it cannot process it on its own on account of the feeble and run-down state of its industry, and it is no longer able to translate vast reserves of natural resources into resources to offset the economic disorder that has been plaguing the country for decades.  If we remember all this, the Iranian claim to be pursuing a nuclear program for the purposes of generating power seems plausible.  That doesn’t rule out additional Iranian nuclear weapons programs, but it makes their stated reason that much more plausible.