ANALYSIS: Options for U.S. Limited As Mideast Crises Spread, by Robin Wright, Washington Post, 13 July 2006, p. A19.

ANALYSIS: U.S., Needing Options, Finds Its Hands Tied, by Helene Cooper, New York Times, 15 July 2006, p. A1.

EDITORIAL: Iran's First Strike, Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2006, p. A14.

ARTICLE: Syrian President May Hold Key To Mideast Crisis: As Diplomatic Steps Begin, Assad's Choices Could Fan Or Defuse Regional Violence, by Karby Leggett, Mariam Fam, and Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal, 18 July 2006.

There is a growing consensus that begins to see this mini-war as having little to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict and mostly to do with the settling out of the U.S.-rogue regime relationships in the region. In other words, this is still all about the Big Bang.

Many have called that strategy "failed," and yet look how it still plays out. Iran and Syria, both openly named as potential "who's next?" candidates, are clearly pre-emptively striking out. Some will naturally see this as Iran's answer to the offer made by the Bush Administration recently--thus the logic of direct action against Iran looms larger.

Me? I just see the logic of the Big Bang giving us what we always wanted: decision points for the region's dictators. The choice right now is to force some larger security engagement (the settling of issues that Iran has signalled it is interested in pursuing, but not in any venue that discusses ONLY their pursuit of nukes--go figure!) or to take action pre-emptively to rule out American-led invasions.

Our tie-down in Iraq is real, and everyone in the region knows it, so if we're not willing to engage the larger regional security agenda (and that's the signal we send with this myopic focus on WMD that's perverted our foreign and security policies almost like abortion has perverted our foreign aid agenda), then we give off the vibe that our diplomacy is fake, largely designed to buy time and consensus for ultimate military action. And guess what? The pigeons in question aren't going to wait around for that plan to unfold on Bush's watch, so their socialize their problem quite effectively through Hamas and Hezbollah.

As the NYT article pointed, it gets tough to seek diplomatic solutions when your basic foreign policy strategy is that we don't talk directly to rogues, we just threaten them and let others speak on our behalf.

Right now our approach comes off as rather bassawkwards: we decide who's bad and we threaten them directly, then we sort of backtrack to having our key allies (basically the G-8 crowd plus China) try and work the diplomacy. But we're leading with the military threat as the big prod both to our enemies and our allies, and that puts both in the position of being reactive, so the dialogue stays rather stale when our focus is so heavy on just this notion of WMD prevention.

Russia and China, no surprise, are acting like they won't let us track this war back to Iran. That leaves Assad as the weak link, so our focus will likely turn there. But if it does, Iran's already won what it really wanted: to move this discussion off their WMD pursuit, pushing the conversation back in the direction of Israel.

When I wrote last year in Esquire that Iran can basically veto our peace efforts in Beirut and Baghdad and Jerusalem, this is exactly what I had in mind. We go myopic, they socialize the problem, and our only option is diplomacy to achieve the same ends that we earlier vowed never to accept, or we fight, which we can't really pull off right now.

Iran remains the key, but this Administration hasn't expressed any interest in trying to unlock that particular door, so this war is what gets lobbed over the transom instead, and now Israel is running America's Middle East policy--which is exactly where Tehran wants us.