Israel's attack on Lebanon - Baiting Iran?

As usual, Jeff's Rigorous Intuition seems right on the money. In his post today, he wrote:

America's Countdown: Tehran has been stuck at 20 minutes and holding for a couple of months now, derailed by Iran's rational posture regarding its nuclear ambitions and the ongoing thwarting of anything approaching even the Bush administration's benchmark for a casus belli. Israel's hawks, by smashing in the back door, are baiting Iran to action, which would goad the US to crash through the front. Israeli military claims, trumpeted by FoxNews, that the Haifa rockets were fired by Iranian Guard units, and the absurd suggestion that Hezbollah intends to transport their captured soldiers to Iran, say forcefully that this isn't about Lebanon, though for now it will be mostly the Lebanese who perish. (Interestingly, The Jerusualem Post noted yesterday that "Before the attack on Haifa, CNN reported that the US Navy ordered one of their ships that was docked at the Haifa Bay to be moved to a safer location." Though the story has since been removed.)

Doesn't that make sense? The Israeli attack is way out of proportion, bespeaking some other agenda. And we know that Sy Hersh and others close to the CIA have been screaming that we're going to be at war with Iran next. But there is no pretext for war. What to do? America is overexposed. We can hardly launch any kind of unilateral, unprovoked action. So maybe we persuade a dependent ally to help us out, to provoke a reaction that could bring the United States the pretext it needs? It's plausible. It's absolutely possible. Is it true? Time will tell, perhaps. Or maybe, by talking about this, we keep it from happening, because the ploy is exposed in advance. I hope that's the effect of such speculation, in any case.

By the way - in the mid-seventies, the Pike Committee fought the CIA for 16 hours over four words they wanted to put in their report - words that indicated the CIA knew in advance that Egypt was about to attack Israel on Yom Kippur. Of course, admitting such would have endangered the all-important (from an oil perspective) relationship between the United States and Israel. If we had known, why didn't we warn our ally? (Speculation has it that the feeling was that Israel was getting a little big for its britches, and that we needed Egypt as an ally for a lot of the same reasons we needed Israel.)

On a more positive note - a quick update on electronic voting:

1. Robert Kennedy, Jr. and a team of lawyers are filing a major lawsuit - on the scale of the case against Big Tobacco, said Mike Papantonio on the Mike Malloy radio show recently - against two of the electronic voting vendors with the most egregious record of "errors" and/or fraud. Watch BradBlog for more updates.

2. Voter Action has filed lawsuits in four states (CA, AZ, NM, and CO) against the three biggest evoting system vendors - Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold.

3. The DNC is finally starting to come around. Their Voting Rights Institute issued a call for a manual count of the paper records in the hotly contested race in CA-50 (San Diego) between Francine Busby and Brian Bilbray. Read their strongly worded statement. Thanks to Howard Dean and his crew, the DNC appears to be developing a backbone at last.