Without the active support and involvement of Saudi Arabia and Turkey there can be no war - militarily it is just not feasible.

Before anyone quotes the recent campaign against Afghanistan in defiance of that statement, consider the following factors

1. Air power alone did not, and could not have, toppled the Taliban from power. The elements required to accomplish that were air power in support of the Northern alliance forces on the ground.

2. In that campaign the carriers were operating in the Indian Ocean, a vast expanse of water, completely devoid of any threat to the naval forces assigned to the task. For a seabourne assault on Iraq they would have to operate in the closely confined waters of the Arabian Gulf. Only one way in and one way out, relatively shallow water and surrounded by potentially hostile countries.

3. The use of air power against the Taliban in Afghanistan relied heavily on the free use of air space to over-fly Pakistan, without that they could not have got there.

Fionn has twice mentioned the Suez Crisis of 1956, where the American administration of Ike forced the British and French to evacuate the canal zone which they had taken in under 72 hours. I believe that was the biggest mistake made by any American government since the end of the Second World War, as the result of which we see what is happening in the Middle East today. The daftest thing about it was that America, because of it's stance on Israel got no credit at all from the Arab world - the USSR did. I say it was their biggest mistake for the following reasons

1. Had the British and French been allowed to occupy the canal zone and safeguard its use as an international waterway, Nasser could only have attacked Israel by confronting the troops of two NATO countries, both permanent members of the UN Security Council. Not even the Russians would have contemplated that.

2. Nasser's dream of a pan-Arabic coalition against Israel would have come to nothing. There would have been no Six Day War in 1967 and no Yom Kippur War in 1973 - as a result there would be no occupied lands in dispute today.

3. Elsewhere in the region there would have been no attempt by Syria to destabilise Lebanon (America waded in there themselves in 1958 to attempt to do what they had condemned Britain and France for doing two years before in Suez). The vast majority of Arab states would not have fallen under the influence of the Soviet Union during the Cold War period, particularly those along the North African coast, which caused America for the first time in it's history to deploy a permanent fleet in the Mediterranean.