In the final weeks before the election, Barack Obama's lead over John McCain apparently has become so sustained and solid the only qualifier for a Republican win next month is that instantly shopworn preface, "Barring some disaster..."

The obvious scenarios - assassination of a candidate, a terrorist attack, an asteroid strike - are built around outside actors suddenly taking control of our future, changing the course of our political reality. Whether this "disaster" is from a terror group, a lonely armed psycho or even dead-rock cosmic intervention, the results would be as unfortunate as they would be impervious to our prevention; it can't be a successful surprise if we see it coming, after all.

That is... unless the disaster springs from our move on the chessboard... is a game-changing crisis engineered by this administration, or its very good friends.

In the Sunday Times yesterday, former British Foreign Secretary David Owen writes,

"Some key decision makers in Israel fear that unless they attack Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities in the next few months, while George W Bush is still president, there will not be another period when they can rely on the United States as being anywhere near as supportive in the aftermath of a unilateral attack."

This alternative "October Surprise" outline has been bandied about by a number of Mideast watchers - from all political camps - for most of this year. It has the Bush Administration launching an attack against the much-ballyhoo'd-seldom-seen Iran nuclear weapons facilities. Or, more likely, approving such an attack by Israel. In that event, it is impossible to expect the United States could avoid involvement.

In the eventuality of an expanded, and much more violent, conflict in the Middle East, electorate focus would shift from our perilous economic situation to foreign policy as the central issue of the campaign. Foreign affairs and big-stick tough stuff is supposedly John McCain's métier, and could give him a late-game edge come Election Day.

As we know, cavalierly linking military strategy to domestic politics is utterly soulless and despicable - and nothing new for any country.

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate has proposed that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons project at least five years ago, and the UN's nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA, cannot confirm the existence of an Iranian bomb program. Nevertheless, Israel and its formidable lobby in the United States has become practically hysterical warning that a military strike against Iranian nuclear sites is the only way to stymie that country's development of the dread weapon.

This bizarre, counterintuitive strategy evidently would entail periodic future attacks on Iran, or any other threatening country, since there are no real alternatives that would guarantee a Persian Bomb won't someday rear its loathsome, mushroom head.

As evidence of the effectiveness of anti-nuclear air strikes, Israel points to its 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein's bomb facility, which utterly destroyed the Osirik plant. Despite the fact that subsequent intelligence has proved the attack actually spurred Hussein to speed up development of nuclear weapons in a program not halted until Iraq was devastated in the first Gulf War, the Osirik attack has attained a deliriously mythic status among American chickenhawks. These are, remember, the same folks who said the current Iraq War would be a "cakewalk".

But... there is an alternative to all this dubious, militant voodoo, of course: negotiation. Obama has promised to talk with the Iranians; McCain has promised to continue Bush's tired scheme of setting the precondition bar for diplomacy so high that such sit-downs are rendered nonstarter.

With Israel, the issue is not merely preventing a Nuclear Iran. It has been estimated that Israel has produced hundreds of weapons at its super-secret Dimona site, yet Israel neither admits possessing such weapons nor submits itself IAEA inspection by signing international nuclear treaties, to which, oddly, Iran is a signatory. Once another country in Middle East acquires such a weapon - after all, we can't bomb them all into eternity - the game would change forever; Israel would be forced to admit possessing its own arsenal, sign treaties... and negotiate.

Question is, how much is the U.S. willing to gamble for its Mideast partner to continue flouting international, strategic reality? And how much are we willing to lose?