Talk about failing to recognize Israel!

Bush blames Hezbollah for Mideast violence:

"The best way to stop the violence is for Hezbollah to lay down its arms and to stop attacking. And therefore I call upon Syria to exert influence over Hezbollah," Bush said.

And while Bush clues us in on one of the reasons as to why Israel has decided to destroy largely defenseless Lebanon (Syria), the Israelis helpfully point us to the other half--Iran.

A missile fired by Hezbollah, not an unmanned drone laden with explosives, damaged an Israeli warship off Lebanon, the army said Saturday. Iranian troops helped fire the missile, a senior intelligence official said.

One sailor was killed and three were missing.

The intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, said about 100 Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon and helped fire the Iranian-made, radar-guided C-102 at the ship late Friday.

It seems pretty obvious to me that neither Bush nor the Israelis fear that this already horrible war will escalate to include the entire Middle East. Instead, that seems to be its real purpose. The WMD ploy is stale after Iraq, especially since there is no evidence of an Iranian weapons program, and since everything Iran has done has been within the bounds of the non-proliferation treaty, which it signed years ago (and Israel didn't). So now the plan is just to provoke somebody in the Middle East to respond to Israel's aggression with an act horrible enough that it will "justify" the war on Iran--just as 9/11 was used to "justify" the pre-planned wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.