Admittedly, Iran has a hard government to love, given the torture and beating death of Zahra Kazemi and the calls by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be wiped off the map -- to name just two.
However, it really does seem like the the U.S. would love to duke it out with their Persian adversaries at some point.
A BBC analysis by Paul Reynolds. He opened by talking about the anti-Iran language in last week's State of the Union address:
Such rhetoric is used partly to lay the blame for the chaos in Iraq on others but it is not just rhetoric. The State of the Union speech is a carefully considered declaration.
The new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator John Rockefeller, a Democrat, has spoken out against the verbal attacks on Iran and compared them to what happened before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
"To be quite honest, I'm a little concerned that it's Iraq again," Senator Rockefeller told the New York Times.
The anti-Iran trend in the administration was already evident when Mr Bush announced the increase in troops in Iraq on 10 January. In that speech he rejected the recommendations of the advisory Iraq Study Group that the United States should engage diplomatically with Iran (and Syria).
Instead he accused Iran and Syria of "allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq".
The president has said very clearly that the issues we have with Iran should be solved diplomatically
Stephen Hadley
National Security AdviserUS failure in Iraq, he claimed, would have a consequence: "Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons."
And he added: "We will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region."
That phrase "will work with others" is primarily a reference to the UN Security Council which has imposed sanctions on Iran, aimed at preventing it from getting technology useful for its nuclear enrichment and missile programmes.
However, if the sanctions effort (supplemented by offers of co-operation on nuclear power) do not work, the likelihood is that the US will seek support for further isolating Iran. And the question remains as to whether the US would itself in due course attack or would support an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The line from the White House, as expressed recently by the National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, is that the US is seeking a diplomatic solution.
Asked on ABC television if the US was preparing an attack on Iran, he replied: "No, the president has said very clearly that the issues we have with Iran should be solved diplomatically."
This may be true but such a formulation does not rule out a future decision to move from a diplomatic approach to a military one, if diplomacy is held to have failed.
