Dog, Kuwait senses war, as you note.
Russia senses war and warns us against attacking Iran.
France senses war and makes secret deals with Khameinei, directly against their public position.
I may well be wrong that war is brewing, but if so, I am not wrong alone. Countries that spend a whole lot of money on intelligence gathering are preparing for the same eventualities I am.
Very good analysis, jeffers. I agree, everybody with any sense of prognostication is preparing for war. And if we run out of reasons for taking it up with Iran, I'm sure that Ahmadinejad will politely offer us more. He is a Twelver that believes it is his duty to incite a global jihad against the West. Therefore, he's looking for ways to instigate a war, but only in a way in which the West will look like the aggressor.
But here's my forecast for how it will play out. At the peak of the surge, both Syria and Iran will step up cross-border infiltrations of insurgents and weaponry. Patreus will not stand idly by, and will cross the border into Syria first, to take out insurgent training and staging areas.
While he's doing that, Iran will declare that the US is expanding the war and plans to attack Iran next, and that it won't wait around for it. It will then flood the border with semi-regular "volunteer insurgents", armed with the latest in anti-armor and AA weapons to take on US forces directly.
The US will dismiss the "volunteer" facade outright - and declare that Iran has officially attacked the US in Iraq. We will then launch major air attacks on nuclear development facilities around the country, and Iran will respond by attacking US naval forces in the Gulf, as well as tanker traffic - effectively closing off the Strait of Hormuz to one quarter of the world's exported oil supplies.
Simultaneously, Iran and Syria will activate their terrorist units worldwide to undertake extensive large-scale terrorist attacks against US and UK interests, and this will spread to Europe and Asia as well. And then - we will have global jihad.
In the interests of giving credit where credit is due, the important particulars of this scenario were actually forecast in May 2005, by a guy who's been hitting bigtime with his documented predictions ever since that spring when he gushed them all out. All I've done is take the developing situation and "interpretize" what seemed like a completely unlikely scenario 2 years ago - into the particular players and events that are moving into position today.