Is the Cold War with Iran heating up?

The Guardian (a British publication) is claiming that the ongoing cold war with Iran over their nuclear ambitions is about to flare up into full-heat, as Iran goes all-out to turn Iraq into the stage for a proxy war with America and Britain.

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.
"Certainly it [the violence] is going to pick up from their side. There is significant latent capability in Iraq, especially Iranian-sponsored capability. They can turn it up whenever they want. You can see that from the pre-positioning that's been going on and the huge stockpiles of Iranian weapons that we've turned up in the last couple of months. The relationships between Iran and groups like al-Qaida are very fluid," the official said.

I can't imagine anything more dangerous than this kind of brinksmanship from Iran. It would not take much to push Allied forced into a retaliatory strike on Iran - or to taking the leash off of Israel to allow them to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities - which could lead to all-out war. And if America is not very effective at fighting guerilla insurgency, we are quite good at fighting conventional wars with nation-states. Just ask Sadaam Hussein or the Taliban. Unfortunately, wars don't tend to stay localized in the Middle East.