Like the Pep Boys and brownbanded cockroaches, Larry Franklin evidently is in it for the long haul - even if it means blogging from the pokey.

You remember Franklin. He's the only defendant imprisoned in the abandoned "AIPAC spy scandal". A Defense Department functionary and part of Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans staff, he took the hit for passing on secret information about Iran to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while co-defendants (and AIPAC honchos) Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman walked.

This week, in a Foreign Policy post, My Secret Plan to Overthrow the Mullahs, Franklin offers part apologia and part rabble-rousing from his lonely prison cell.

Interestingly, he reveals his own reservations about the infatuation Feith and his cronies had for Iraqi Shiite (and, as it turned out, Iranian agent) Ahmed Chalabi in the run-up to the Iraq invasion:

In fact, I knew from my sources that Tehran had already prepared an entire network of operatives, proxies, and weapons ready to challenge the United States as soon as it toppled Saddam Hussein. I also knew it would be foolish to assume - as many in the Bush administration did - that Iraq's many pro-Iranian political and religious leaders could be trusted to cooperate with the United States' stated goal of building "a peaceful ... democratic, and united Iraq." ... I suspected that many of these individuals were essentially Iranian agents -- including the opportunistic "man for all factions" Ahmad Chalabi, a suspicion eventually confirmed when I was later told he had encouraged the pro-Iranian Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to "dig in" against the U.S. Marines in Najaf.

Franklin maintains his whole part in the AIPAC "information sharing" was to slow the rush to war in Iraq - and push the U.S. to move against the Persian republic. For the neocons in the White House and Pentagon, the battle order was just the opposite.

And still is. Just as those cockroaches have stayed the course, little changed by evolution in 200 million years, so, too, the neoconservative soul (and regime-change template) remains durable:

I often wonder what would have happened had we fully committed to overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Inside the Pentagon, I had long argued that regime change, not accommodation or war, would be our best policy... My plan was designed to shake the foundations of Iran's mullahcracy without resorting to military action. I urged the United States to recognize a government in exile, perhaps in a nearby Central Asian country with a Persian heritage. I proposed a sophisticated propaganda offensive, planting stories both true and otherwise in the Persian-language media to undermine Iranians' confidence in their leaders.

We can be pretty sure that strategy is at work today in Iran. Opposition so lionized by the Western media in June's still-disputed national elections even has its own color code - green - just like the Western-tweaked "democracy" movements that triumphed - and now stagnate - throughout eastern Europe and southwestern Asia over the past decade or so.

Trouble is, Iran's opposition isn't exactly warm and cozy regarding Western ambitions in the region. Former prime minister Mir-Hussein Mousavi, who's current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's chief rival, supports Iran's nuclear program and detests Israel with all the passion of the everyday "Arab on the street". That keeps up, and we'll eventually have to regime change the changed regime.

That faction also knows how to play the U.S. like an oud: The Obama Adminstration clearly wants the Iran opposition movement to shift away from those troublesome policies on nukes and Israel, but as soon as the U.S. announced it was suspending funding for Iran opposition, the "green" camp said it would mark the 30th anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis this week by apologizing to the U.S. for that inconvenience (and Reagan boon in 1980). How can we let such nice folks twist slowly in the wind?

Obama is stretched to the limit on domestic issues like health care and the economy, and Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy cesspit with which he must deal, so he seems willing to let Iran's Mullahs fade on their own; if that's the case, history shows he may be in for a long wait.

On the other hand, Israel's seizure of a purported arms ship this week shows that long, drawn-out cold war could go hot any moment. Israel claims weapons it recovered came from Iran and were destined for Lebanon and Hezbollah and/or Palestine and Hamas; everyone else denies it, evidence is sketchy, blah, blah, blah. At the same time, the Israeli defense minister vows threats to attack Iran are sincere, there's a much-ballyhoo'd "report" that Israel will attack next month... blah, blah, blah.

In the event of war with Iran - a petroleum-producing dynamo sitting atop the maritime bottleneck through which most Gulf Oil transports - we can look forward to gasoline at $10-$15 a gallon, blowback in the form of terrorist violence in our own backyards and more enmity from the rest of the world. Israel may attack, but you can be damn sure we'll be left to clean up the mess.

That's one handicap, I think, that's stymied such a bomb run on Iran's nuclear facilities so far: We simply can't afford it. Maybe it's the blessing from the ongoing recession - we can't very well launch a new stage in the neocon/Likud Mideast pacification plan on a maxed-out credit card. Perhaps, if Wall Street news gets any brighter, we should get ready to duck. 

Franklin's own fever-dream war game would be less pyrotechnic, and have us supplying the opposition with GPS and high-tech video technology to spur a stealth regime change; he even suggests hiring opposition snipers to take out Iranian military snipers (!) that so plague anti-establishment marches. Some eggs must shatter, after all. 

Finally, let's play with fire and provoke a government backlash:

U.S. action might well precipitate a massive crackdown, though such a move by the clerical-military junta could spark widespread resistance. At last, the great majority of Iranians who oppose tyranny might rebel. In one scenario, the regime would end with a bang of terrible bloodshed, chaos, and reprisals. But if Iranians were coaxed into mobilizing a long-lasting general strike, the regime would end in a whimper. Then, we could finally toss Iran's vicious Islamic Republic -- a regime that has murdered and wrongly imprisoned thousands of its own citizens -- on the ash heap of history.

As Lenin put it, "worse is better".

But... better for who?