I still think that attacking religion directly will always be a mistake, especially in that part of the world where religion is valued more than life.And interestingly enough, Iraq officially closed its airspace about the same time as Iran did...
Not in this case. The Ayatollahs aren't as popular as they used to be. Plus, it seems that they're following the WW2 German method of different factions competing for favor to maintain control of the military. Take out enough of the corresponding faction leadership and you can enact great changes in which cliques will be in power.
Such extreme belief systems (from the Western point of view) must be softened little by little with the influence of our way of life through digital media. In my country we lived a religious dictatorship between 1939 and 1965 and I remember that what the priests in charge of education feared the most were Superman comics and American movies. They were right, today most of the sixty-five thousand churches in the country are practically empty and their restoration is perceived by taxpayers as an excessive burden on the economy.
I do not trust too much in the apparent cracks in the power of the Iranian religious, every dictatorship has an important popular base and those who silence their opinions are not as many as Western intelligence agencies would like to believe.