Yeah, Saddam was not particularly religious and was considered a secular dictator. I think not even welcome to visit Mecca after some attacks on the Saudis.

My understanding is the Iran has Uranium deposits that they hope to develop into fuel rods, but something about the nature of the way their particular strains of Uranium appear in the earth makes it unfriendly to refinement, so their own nuclear material is only marginally cost effective for nuclear power production, and the centrifuges they make for refining the Uranium to be used in more advanced reactors and nuclear weapons grade materials somehow don't react well with the stuff, throw them out of balance and they self destruct. That is the main reason the Iranians are constantly in the market for those big centrifuges.

The issue being that if the Iranians operate functioning nuclear facilities for a decade or two in full compliance with all international nuclear regulations, they would in theory be able to sell their less pure Uranium product at below current market prices for nuclear fuel, and then simply purchase the more enriched product in varying amounts for "research and power production purposes" gradually getting into the nuclear weapons realm once everyone sort of trusts them, but on their way to it, would be an economic threat to other countries (US included) which currently produce and sell nuclear fuel.

If we are talking limited air war, then we are talking about what people would be presenting as punitive airstrikes on economic targets which might not even be very populated, and would quite likely not be sufficient to cause regime change there.

I know how the plan on this must go, it involves drawing the Iranian military out of the population centers, up to their border areas to face the possibility of a US invasion, then possibly annihilating their military leadership and a big chunk of their conventional forces while the Persian variant of the "Arab Spring" takes over the cities in the power vacuum left behind. That's a gamble, a very very hard gamble.

My problem with that gamble is that the survival of our forces depends entirely on middle eastern allies staying on our side while operating behind Iranian lines.