My paranoia may be getting the better of me. I was looking over my last post about Pat Robertson and his direct line (it must be dial-up) to gawd and thinking I should make some predictions of my own for 2007. Hell, Pat has shown that you don't even have to be good at it to make a ton of cash. So I put on my thinking cap and the first thing that popped into my head was Iran.

I remember reading somewhere that the US had dispatched a carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf (in addition to the one already there). Normally I would assume that this is a normal turnover of one battle group arriving on station before the other's departure, but like I said, I'm feeling a little paranoid. Two battle groups in the Gulf and dubya presumably getting ready to increase troop levels in Iraq by 20 to 40 thousand to try to quell sectarian violence, a lot of which is being perpetrated by Iranian-backed Shias. I can't help thinking that we may be about to do something even stupider than our invasion of Iraq. If we were to carry out an air assault against Iran's nuclear facilities, we would definitely need a few thousand more troops to deal with the inevitable backlash in Iraq. I know we recently pushed sanctions through the United Nations to try to force Iran to stop uranium enrichment, but this administration is on record as believing that sanctions aren't effective (see Iraq) and they've demonstrated their belief that all problems have a military solution (see Katrina), so am I really going out on a limb in predicting that the Beta version of Shock and Awe 2.0 - The Persian Carpet Bomb will be released in 2007? I don't think so.

I guess I'll just use the Pat Robertson/Jeanne Dixon method and make a more ambiguous prediction. Mark my words. The situation in the Middle East will get worse in 2007. The Flying Spaghetti Monster told me so.