As noted in the articles comments, it would be a lot cheaper than a shooting war (and not nearly the quagmire of occupying and pacifying a much larger country than Iraq. ) And, again, it's going to happen anyway, and not only in Iraq. It's just too much easier to have a few satellites in geosynchronous orbit over population centers, either as routers or full blown servers with databases, than crisscross the planet with ever denser miles of fiberoptic cables. Depending on atmospheric delays we're looking at a lag of light speed through a couple hundred miles each way. Basically nothing. Even if Iran DID try to ban satellite dishes (and they probably would) it would only take a few of them at any time to provide whole communities with access via WiFi. We may not be able to jack in with our cyberdecks yet, but the day is coming, and nations from the US to Iran will either get out ahead of that curve or be run over by it.

Perhaps that's the most ominous trend, the possibility that future wars will be largely about information as the whole planet encounters the problem of politicos here and in Europe: With so many competing perspectives, so much information and so much MISINFORMATION, it's often less a question of how you get your message out there than of how you convince people of it in the face of a multi-million dollar media blitz from the other side.