That's true what you said, BB, but they still do not have the capability to effectively attack Israel. Not a chance. What they can do, if push comes to shove, is launch a quite nasty land war into Iraq and encourage the Shiite population there to rise up against the American occupation forces. They could not win it, but they could do a lot of damage. Another thing they could do is shut down oil tanker traffic in the Gulf by launching air and missile attacks on tankers and facilities there. Those actions would cause great harm to the USA, costing lives and money, and would raise the price of oil catastrophically, impacting our economy...but they would do no harm whatsoever to Israel.

All Iran can really do to Israel is help fund and assist isolated terrorist attacks, such as we have seen in the past. They could theoretically lob a few Shahabs at Israel, but they won't, unless they have nothing left to lose...because the Israelis have 200 to 400 nuclear weapons which they can hit Iran with at a moment's notice. That makes it a "no-win" proposition for Iran, and they are not stupid.

You may believe that their religious fanaticism renders them incapable of ordinary pragmatic reasoning ability, but I think you are entirely mistaken in that. They will not initiate actions which would inevitably result in their own extinction, unless they think they are going down to destruction regardless and have nothing to lose...(like the Japanese kamikazes in WWII).

(The reason the Iranians were so profligate with lives in the Iran-Iraq war was: they had the great advantage in manpower (and, yes, they used children too)...whereas the Iraqis had the great advantages in dug-in defenses, more artillery, and more modern equipment. So the Iranians used masses of individual people against hi-tech. The Russians did that many times in 1941 and '42 also, sending human wave attacks against the Germans in which only a minority of the Russian soldiers had guns! The living were instructed to pick up guns off the dead, and keep attacking. The Germans massacred them by the thousands, and yet the Russians poured in more men, and sometimes overwhelmed the German positions. That's what you do when you are more populous, but less well-armed than your opponent.)

The Japanese kamikazes were young men who expected to die...regardless of whether they fought conventionally or launched one-way missions. Their chances of survival were virtually nil in either case. Accordingly, they flew one-way missions. The Iranians will do that too, if they are attacked and know for certain it's their last shot. They won't do it otherwise, in my opinion. It would mean the total defeat of their cause, and that is not what they seek. They seek first, national survival...and after that, if possible, a decisive victory. (same as Israel)