To win any war based on contrived motivations and shaky assumptions, we would have to compensate with an extremely elegant political strategy, a powerful military strategy, and a disciplined and creative decade of logistical and technological preparation for such a war.

We have those shaky assumptions in spades. But the US has no elegant political strategy, and employs a reactive, fragmented and uber-expensive military strategy. Most observers recognize that we were not prepared for the war we started, and are still fighting, in Iran.

Complex systems utilize more and more energy – intellectual and material – to solve increasingly complex problems. These systems – in our case, the political and military entities of the US and Israel – become brittle, unresponsive to change, fragile and prone to collapse and self-destruction. I'm paraphrasing the great Joseph Tainter, who wrote the book on this phenomenon in 1990, called "The Collapse of Complex Societies."