Brinksmanship, Anyone?

Newsmax reports on the rising tensions between Israel and Iran:

Informed sources in Washington tell Newsmax that Israel indeed will launch a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities soon – possibly in just days as President George W. Bush prepares to leave office.

The reason: The time clock has begun to run out. Iran is close to acquiring a nuclear device under the control of its radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in June that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in as little as six months.

That six-month period has passed.

Publicly, there is no commitment to launching this attack, but Israel seldom asks permission from the international community to defend itself.  Remember that strike into Syria in the fall of 2007?  Israel flew a surprise surgical strike to destroy a nuclear facility in the Syrian boonies, obliterating the North Korea-designed facility and probably setting back Syrian nuclear ambitions by several years.  There's nothing that says Israel can't do something like that against Iran.

The U.S. has supposedly turned down Israeli requests for arms and assistance in such an attack, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support the idea that Israel may proceed anyway:

[A]n investigative report circulated by IAEA chief ElBaradei late last year disclosed that Iran was continuing to carry out uranium enrichment and had already established 6,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium, of which 3,800 were then in operation.

American intelligence officials now estimate that the figure is 4,000 to 5,000 centrifuges, enough to produce about one weapon's worth of uranium every eight months or so, according to the Times. The IAEA report estimated that Iran has obtained two tons of enriched uranium since its enrichment program was restarted at Natanz two years ago. Last year 100 Israeli jets took part in an exercise over the eastern Mediterranean that was interpreted as a dress rehearsal for a possible attack on Iran.

A number of experts think such an attack is possibly, if not likely:

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton predicted that Israel would stage a raid against Iran's nuclear facilities if Barack Obama won the presidential election. Bolton stated that he believed the Israeli attack would take place sometime between the day after Obama's win and his inauguration on January 20. In an interview with FOX News, Bolton reasoned that Israel wouldn't be able to hold off a strike on Iran any longer than that given Obama's more conciliatory approach to Iran.

William Perry, U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, said that Obama would face a major crisis in his first few months in office over Iran's nuclear weapons program. Perry, speaking at a foreign policy conference on Jan. 8, said that Iran is "moving inexorably toward becoming a nuclear power" and "it seems clear that Israel will not sit by idle while Iran takes the final steps toward becoming a nuclear power."

And former CIA officer Robert Baer, author of the new book "The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower," told Newsmax in October that Iran was at that time probably months, if not weeks, away from war with Israel.

Iran isn't taking this sitting down:

Iran has warned in the past that it would launch a "missile blitz" against Gulf states if it is attacked. And last July [Mojtaba Zolnour, the deputy of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative in Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards] said the Islamic Republic would destroy Israel and 32 U.S. military bases in the Middle East if Iran is attacked over its nuclear program.

"Israel and 32 U.S. military bases in the region would not be out of the reach of our missiles and would be destroyed," the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted  as saying in a speech.

Even more ominously, Iran has reportedly carried out missile tests for what could be a plan for a nuclear strike on the U.S.

Yet another conflict to keep your eyes on.  If it happens, we will certainly be pulled into it in some form or another, whether as an active ally of Israel or through skyrocketing world oil prices.  The Obamessiah better get some new batteries for his magic wand...he's going to need to do some serious waving from the moment he takes his oath of office.

There's my two cents.