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The PA premier, Abbas, is increasingly becoming isolated and powerless. Even President Bush's recent convening of the Annapolis summit (and his subsequent trip to the Mid East)did little to jolt the Mid-East process back to life. With President Bush mired in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deteriorating US economy, there's little chance that the current administration will be viewed as a viable peace maker with less then a year in office. President Obama is set to inherit two wars in the region, possibly a third or even a fourth.

The drums of war are beating increasngly strongly in the Middle East. The Iranian-Syrian alliance is receiving huge amounts of increasingly sophisticated weapons, that can reach further and further into the heartland of Israel, targeting its major population centers with relative ease. Ominously the voices for peace and moderation are starting to quiet. Hamas is raining down a fusilade of missiles against Israel every day, while Hezbollah continues to build itself into a stronger force than ever before, in its environs of Southern Lebanon.

Tension between Iran and the USA continues to ratchet up, even though the recent intelligence report was far less harsh on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Syria is poised at any moment to move its heavy armored divisions, once again, across the rugged Golan Heights, backed up by powerful commando strikes from formidable Special Forces divisions...much like it did when they stormed the Golan Heights in 1973. In an ominous repeat of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 that crippled the world economy in inflationary surges through the Arab oil embargo, and almost drew the then Soviet Union and USA into a Superpower conflict.

Another large war is only a matter of time. Israel, a very small nation with small territorial depth, could suffer catastrophic civilian and military deaths, as its infrastructure is pummeled into the ground by a mass Syrian-Iranian missile attack. Israel, for the first time in its history, may need direct US intervention to save it. But the odds are the US will already be fighting Iran. The only saving grace for the world would be if the conflict doesn't escalate into a full-scale nuclear war. But the entire Middle East could be reduced to a grave yard as biological and chemical weapons enter the fray.
Update as of Dec. 2008-Hamas and Israel are fighting a vicious war in the Gaza Strip that has ominous overtones for the entire Middle East. Israel succeeded in launching a surprise attack that killed hundreds of Hamas forces. However, the bulk of Hamas escaped death and injury by hiding in an elaborate series of Iranian-designed tunnels under Gaza. The dogs of war again bark ominously in that troubled region of the world, only showing that a true, lasting and just peace is still as far away as ever and war will reign supreme over a tiny strip of land that is the center of the world's three major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam...that will continue to have implications for the world, perhaps much more then ever before, with new weapons, strategies and alliances.

Learn more about this author, Todd Daigneault.
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