Noah Millman answers one of Ferguson’s questions and poses a question of his own:
Let’s turn thequestion around: can you name any country that suffered military humiliation that didn’t, in consequence, turn to parties, forces or individuals who promised to redeem the national honor through new action? Germany, Japan and Italy weren’t “humiliated” by Wold War II; they were thoroughly and comprehensively defeated. France after 1870? Germany after 1918? Heck – America after 1975? The only example I can think of, honestly, is Serbia after 1999.
Even the Serbian example isn’t quite right. It’s true that Milosevic was forced from power after losing Kosovo, and Serbia has tried to cultivate better relations with the EU since 2000, but even President Tadic has taken an uncompromising position on Kosovo’s independence despite the likelihood that this will likely keep Serbia from joining the EU for a long time. Serbia will almost certainly never recover control of Kosovo, but despite the de facto partition of their country their government appears to be unwilling to yield on something that they regard as a matter of sovereignty.
In the Iranian case, an attack that destroys most or all of Iran’s nuclear facilities isn’t likely to lead to the toppling of the regime (because, as Noah mentioned elsewhere, Iranians are going to see an attack as unjustified aggression). Even in the unlikely event that the regime collapsed because of “humiliation,” that certainly wouldn’t make a successor regime more accommodating on the nuclear issue. If the regime survived, it would see a nuclear deterrent as a guarantee against future attacks, and a successor regime would see that its security and survival depended on being able to prevent the sort of attack that brought down its predecessor.
Yuri Klevnikov 
“The theocracy’s new legitimacy. Please send me a list of all the regimes of the past 60 years that have survived such military humiliation. Saddam Hussein’s survival of Gulf War I is the only case I can think of—and we got him the second time around.”
I think I just have a fundamental difference in perspective from a person like Ferguson, and that makes it difficult (and probably useless) to try to find the minimal common ground you need to even have an argument. This strikes me as a fundamentally inhumane thing to say. And it’s not inhumane in the sense of being cold-blooded realpolitik, because it’s also idiotic as advice on how to pursue American (or Israeli) interests.
I know Ferguson is committed, explicitly, to imperialism, and is a big fan of its British expression, so it’s no surprise to see him haughtily singing the praises of humiliation as a means of keeping weaker peoples and cultures in line. But he shouldn’t get away with it just because he’s so brazen about it. Casting the history of Iraq from 1990 through today as a story of the US first humiliating Iraq, and then “getting” Saddam Hussein, ignores:
1. The appalling human cost, in terms of dead, maimed and displaced Iraqis.
2. The fact that this sort of “let’s throw our weight around–that’ll show ‘em!” attitude not only inspired Islamists in the 1990s, but also led us down the path to the 2003 war, which was a debacle not only morally and from a humanitarian perspective, but also from the standpoint of American interests.
You’d at least expect Ferguson, as an imperialist, to be sensitive to the dangers of chaos and anarchy. He talks about destroying Iran’s government as if nothing bad could possibly come of it, despite the recent history of Iraq and plain old common sense.
Describing war as a form of “creative destruction” is I guess the sort of thing I’d expect one of Tina Brown’s house intellectuals to say. But it’s still a shocking mix of brutality and idiocy. I was going to add, “especially coming from a professional historian,” but maybe all that reading has made Ferguson a detached blowhard instead of giving him any genuine perspective.