There's a reason I don't like to write about politics much on the blog these days. The German newspaper Der Spiegel is reporting that Israel has plans on the table for launching a pre-emptive strike against supected nuclear weapon sites in Iran, just as it did against Iraq back in 1981. Only this time, Haaretz tells us, the Israelis have prepared for any possible fallout from such a manuever by acquiring a small fleet of German diesel submarines that can be fitted for nuclear weapons, thus giving Israel the ability to nuke Tehran, should the Iranians bristle at having its terrority bombed by the Israeli Air Force.

First Syria, now Iran - this is bad, folks; very very bad. You don't have to have a very creative imagination (or be an anti-Semite) to theorize that Israel may with all of this saber-rattling be attempting to get the United States to throw itself headlong into what the neoconservatives have been calling "World War IV". When American tanks were rolling across the Tigris and Euphrates into Baghdad with little resistance, overecstatic hawks were already claiming that this was only phase one, and that once Iraq was secure, we would move on to Damascus and then finally topple the Shiite theocracy of Iran, polishing off fundamentalist Islam once and for all. Or so they thought. This joint dream of PNAC - the Project for the New American Century, visit their website for a good Halloween fright, I dare you - and the Israeli far right started to fizzle out almost immediately in the wake of our Iraqi "victory" as the United States found itself smack in the middle of a multi-billion dollar reconstruction we claimed we could finance with Saddam's treasure and oil (which we couldn't), and a growing guerilla insurgency that we swore up and down did not exist until it blew up in our faces, literally. Well, I guess the Israelis are still following the old game plan, whether we like it or not; and unless this administration makes it clear to our so-called allies in the Middle East that they're going to ruin everything for everyone if they keep going like this, well hey, we might get that World War Four after all...

(Thanks for Daily Kos for the stories and the linkage!)