Sam is dead on craig. And they aren''t going to close down the straits. We aren't the only nation or economy that gets oil out of the region. Iran is a huge country with alot of people who depend on it's economy functioning to some degree. The government there don't want to have to deal with it getting much worse than it is.
If Iran runs into a potential military conflict (unrelated to the perpetual Israel ticking time bomb) it will come out of Europe, not North America. And the largely seculat Iranian population won't stand for a religious war. They put up with the clerics, but the civilian government would face serious revolt. It won't be good for anybody, so won't be likely to happen. Isreal might decide they want to start something, but probably can't drag us in.. Helps now, also, that we've got a genuine diplomacy stud in our Secretary of State.
Back to what I said before about the campaign......if the GOP candidates continue to beat on Obama/Clinton foreign policy they will lose boatloads of potential votes from traditional Republicans and independents, by the day.
There area number of things to NOT like about what is going on...the new (BIPARTISAN detention law, drone warfare, GITMO not having been turned into a baseball camp for disadvantaged Cuban youth (Is there any other knd?). A bunch of things. But the neoconservtives are being held at bay. People like that. Don't like what they did to us, to our economy, our image...both self and external... our collective spirit, not to mention the mortality and physical and mental condition of 10s of thousands of our finest young citizens, AKA our most valuable resource.
All of the stuff that should of or could have been done or been done better aside, the sitting party has more to run on than you give it credit for.
"distain for how the system works", what happened in my two above examples was dirty politics, like shooting a unarmed man in cold blood. In the not so behind the scenes your team with admit that getting those UNpopular measures through and hope that the opposition runs out of steam when they get the power to over-turn it. Dirty tricks like that have made the modren Democrat party the most corupt outfit on the planet and you guys wonder why you can`t win an election, even with fraud. As to the gay military deal if the Generals and Admirals were on board, they could have certainly waited an extra 5 weeks...don`t insult my intelligence.