If I was just slightly more paranoid than I am, I'd swear Bush is using a hinted attack on Iran as blackmail to squeeze from voters a GOP win in November - kind of cudgeling us with a gas hose: Vote my way, or we Stone-Age the Persians.

I know... it sounds crazy.

But over the past several weeks, there's been talk - grapevine/whisper stuff - that the Administration will launch a post election-day attack if the White House falls to the Democrats. And last week, the Israelis staged a mock Iranian air raid in the Mediterranean just to let the Mullahs know they mean bidness with that "no, dammit, you can't have the bomb" stuff.

Now we have the irrepressible Williams Kristol opining that an Obama win would guarantee a U.S. attack. In fact, the publisher of the Weekly Standard said on Fox News Sunday that Bush will let the eagles fly even if it seems like Obama will win. If that isn't an elbow in voters' ribs, I don't know what is. Faced with $15 a gallon gasoline if the Mideast go boom, how many will heed the threat and swerve off the "hope and change" highway.

Just to add his two cents of fear, John Bolton (no... there's no getting rid of him) chimes in with a Daily Telegraph interview today saying much the same thing:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/2182070/Israel-%27will-attack-Iran%27-before-new-US-president-sworn-in,-John-Bolton-predicts.html

Bolton, whose hairbrush white mustache and zany persona makes him seem a little like a warmongering Captain Kangaroo, tells the foremost neocon rag in Britain that the Arab world would be "pleased" by Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

If that argument sounds queasily familiar, it's because the same nonsense helped "ground-work" the Iraq invasion in the pre-war build-up of 2002. We are constantly told, as we were about Iraq, that an assault on the Iranian regime will prompt a grassroots insurrection by the restive Persian citizenry, who secretly yearn for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fall, establishment of representative democracy and some Cheetah Girls bookings.

Bolton also managed to spit in the eye of that silly little bitch Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, who said Friday that military action against Iran would turn the Middle East into a "fireball" and accelerate Iran's nuclear programme. For Bolton, that's just "scaremongering."

"The key point would be for the Israelis to break Iran's control over the nuclear fuel cycle and that could be accomplished for example by destroying the uranium conversion facility at Esfahan or the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz," Bolton told the Telegraph.

"That doesn't end the problem but it buys time during which a more permanent solution might be found.... How long? That would be hard to say. Depends on the extent of the destruction."

'Course, if no "permanent solution" is immediately forthcoming (aside from any kooky ideas about invasion/occupation), that will lock the Great Alliance into a regular routine of bombing hell out of Iran every 3-5 years until they cave and play marbles our way - or get the bomb.

And... no... that policy doesn't make a lot of sense.

There is also a lot of military chatter of late about the advisability of Israel attempting such an attack. It would take a LOT of sorties, for one thing. There would be the problem of missiles launched from Iran programmed for Israeli targets. And no one really knows what kind of "exo-nuclear WMD" the Iranians might possess - chemical and biological weapons, for instance.

The Israeli attack on the French-built Iraqi reactor in 1981 has achieved almost legendary status in the IDF. Fighter-bomber ordnance totally destroyed Saddam's admitted bomb-making facility, and legitimized the idea that nuclear gamesmanship in the Mideast could rest not on signed agreements, but by decisive military action.

But 30 years have passed since Osirak. The constant rule is simple: Times change, and if we don't change along with them - we get stomped. Iran is not Iraq. It's not distracted by war, as Iraq was in 1981. The world is not on the side of such an attack; in fact, the world is getting more and more repelled by Mideast policy driven by the mirage of regime change.

And three decades ago, Israel's redoubtable ally wasn't filled with drivers already buffeted by exploding gas prices - who'll see the dollars-a-gallon figure shoot skyward like a SAM missile should an Iran attack commence.

That fireball vision doesn't seem so far off.