Joe Katzman has some useful thoughts on “the surge.” He’s skeptical, as am I, for many of the reasons he states.

He makes an interesting point that I hadn’t previously considered:

Iran is arming and supporting both Sunni and Shi’ite groups, using a script I explained long ago in “Iran’s Great Game.” What does your strategy presume to do about this? The Saudis have also been sending people over to help the Sunnis for some time now, and run martyr’s profiles in the Saudi press – and now they are publicly threatening to step up their support of Iraq’s Sunnis. How does the proposed strategy plan to deal with this ongoing activity, as well as the threat of more open involvement?

So what we really have going on (among other things) is a war by proxie between SA and Iran. From our standpoint, it’s similar to the situation that we faced in the eighties, when the war between Arab and Persian was more direct, and we aided Iraq not because we wanted it to win, but because we wanted both sides to lose. That’s the case here as well.

But it also points out that Israel is in an interesting situation, in which alliances are shifting in the sands of the Middle East, with clandestine meetings between Jerusalem, and Riyadh, Amman and Cairo, to figure out how to deal with the Shia menace in Iran. I suspect that Omert’s government has been given a wink a nod by those governments against what is now recognized to be a common enemy in Tehran. And of course, it also shows that the war we’re in is really a larger Middle East cold war that they managed to export to our shores five years ago.

Oh, also over at Winds of Change–are we being probed for an attack?

[Update about 10:30 AM EST]

Here’s another interesting thought on probes and “false alarms.”