... in the only way it can.

Behind Hamas and Hezbollah stands Iran and its proxy Syria, which is why Israel has always worried far more about Iran than Iraq.

We had a choice on Iran, and we chose to rerun the WMD dynamic, believing--as this Administration seems to--that it was simply a matter of showing that diplomacy can't work before setting in motion the kinetics sometime before the term is up.

Guess what? Iran doesn't care to wait on that timetable, and so it launches it's form of a pre-emptive war--well-timed and well-placed.

Hamas and Hezbollah know what buttons to push with Israel (snatch-and-grabs), and Israel is more than obliging, in its ceaseless quest for buffers, to play its role.

This "open war" will feature far more firepower than deaths (AP reporting 73 Lebanese and 12 Israelis so far, which is barely a decent train wreck). Israel will suffer minimally, mostly in diplomacy. Lebanon and the West Bank will suffer large amounts of infrastructure damage.

None of this will matter in Tehran, which is more than happy to exploit Hamas and Hezbollah to its purposes. Assad will do whatever seems to help most in tying the Americans up and diverting their attention from his failed regime, whose economic fortunes--as always--will rise or fall with Lebanon (get ready for a drop).

In the end, the Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrians and Iranians will remain impoverished and disconnected, Israel will remain prosperous and connected, the conflicts will seem all the more intractable, and Iran will have bought itself some serious time.

Bush is no longer running the Big Bang. You have to go faster than the current if you wish to steer in this river. Because if you don't, someone else inevitably will.

Interesting how all this seems to come down just as the U.S. mistakenly believes it's finally getting somewhere on putting the Iranian issue in the UN Security Council.

Still believe the "perfect peace plan" between Israel and Palestine is what's really holding up stability in the Middle East?