regardless what one think tank and a few people think. That is certainly not representative of the overwhelming majority of Arab people.
I live in the Middle East most of the year and have for close to half my life. I talk about this with people all the time. There is absolutely no popular support whatsoever for a military strike. The consequences would just be too devastating.
There is far more alarm among the vast, overwhelming majority of Arab people about the possibility of devastating war that would wreck the Gulf - completely end any possibility of a stabilized Iraq and throw the entire region into total chaos.
In fact, in spite of much mutual fear and loathing, most Arab governments have friendly relations with Iran and a great deal of mutual trade. Iranian produce fills the super markets all across the Gulf states, several flights a day connect cities throughout the Arab world with numerous Iranian cities and hundreds of thousands of Gulf Arabs and other Arabs work, travel and live in Iran as hundreds of thousands of Iranians, work, travel and live in the Arab world.
They have plenty of mutual fear and loathing, but certainly no desire for war. They do have a desire for defused tensions, better relations and more trade.
Iran would retaliate against the U.S. presence in the Gulf. For the U.S. to continue such an attack and to make the attack at least technically successful, this would require forcing the Gulf states into granting rights to air space and facilities. Thus making the Gulf states and their oil fields, refineries, infrastructure and transport network targets of devastating Iranian retaliation. Although Iran does not have particularly sophisticated weaponry, they do have a vast array of relatively unsophisticated medium range missiles positioned in hostile and unapproachable terrain and quite capable of causing enormous and crippling damage very rapidly and choking off the Straits of Hormuz.
Any attack by either the United States or Israel on Iran would have a catastrophic effect on the world's oil supply thus sending oil prices into the stratosphere way beyond anything currently imaginable thus making the current global economic collapse lead inevitably into a massive worldwide depression of catastrophic proportions.
U.S. Intelligence Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work in 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/world/middleeast/03cnd-iran.html?_r=2"But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure.”
The estimate does not say when American intelligence agencies learned that the weapons program had been halted, but a statement issued by Donald Kerr, the principal director of national intelligence, said the document was being made public “since our understanding of Iran’s capabilities has changed.”"