more Qasems from Gaza.

•  All the while, Hamas terrorists are digging a tunnel from Gaza toward a military post on the Israeli side of the border. This is not something you do overnight -- or in plain sight. The Israelis have UAVs, and they look for signs of tunneling.

•  While Hamas is digging, those thousands upon thousands of rockets and short-range missiles supplied by Iran and shipped through Syria are being clandestinely pre-positioned throughout Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah. Seppah personnel are available to train the terrorists in using these new, sophisticated weapons.

•  At about the same time the talks over Iran's nuclear weapons program are coming to a head and referral of the matter to the UN's Security Council is immanent, Hamas terrorists break through the Gaza tunnel, attack the Israeli outpost, and abduct a soldier.

•  Literally within hours, Hezbollah mounts its own complicated, sophisticated cross border strike resulting in the deaths of several Israeli soldiers and the abduction of two others. Hezbollah leadership claims it acted in solidarity with the Gaza Palestinians.

•  Tehran says that any Israeli attempt to attack Syria will evoke an unprecedented response. Undeterred, Israel mounts a vigorous ‘shock and awe' air, sea, and artillery campaign against Hezbollah, blockades the Lebanese coast, and begins a systematic destruction of Lebanese infrastructure.

•  The resulting debacle, on the cusp of the G-8 conference in St. Petersburg Russia wipes just about all mention of Iran's nuclear program out of the news, and the consciousness of most politicians.

Now I know what you're going to say. You're going to argue that it's unlikely Tehran's mullahs mounted the sort of complex, coordinated, long-range covert action program I've described simply to divert attention from their nuclear program and delay Security Council censure.

And you'd be right. It goes far deeper than that. The Iranian regime is both patient and cunning, and it understands all too well about waging asymmetrical warfare. These are the same people who painstakingly took the contents of the CIA's Tehran Station shredders back in 1979 and reconstructed hundreds of pages of top secret documents that had been destroyed prior to the US Embassy takeover. These are the same mullahs who sent suicide bombers to destroy our embassy in Beirut and kill our Marines and Sailors and dispatched Imad Mugniyah's thugs to kidnap Bill Buckley and Rich Higgins.

So far as I'm concerned, Shahram was right. Something big was coming. And its genesis was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Imad Mugniyah's January 2006 visit to Damascus. Iran I believe was attempting to set in play an audacious series of covert actions to bring about a tectonic shift in the Middle East geopolitical landscape. Its objectives: to ensure an unstable, Shia-controlled Lebanon; to divert the Israeli government from its unilateral disengagement with the Palestinians, and to use the Lebanon crisis as a distraction in order to consolidate its position vis a vis Iraq's Shia majority, who are ambivalent about Iran's long-term goals, and to give it more time to hide its nuclear weapons development program.

The one element Tehran seems not to have factored into its OPLAN was Israel's immediate, devastating, and overwhelming response to Hezbollah and Hamas. For the moment, anyway, the mullahs seem to have been rocked back on their heels. Indeed, Tehran is currently hinting that a negotiated settlement might be both possible and achievable.

The Administration should take note. For more than a quarter century, Tehran's Islamofascists have waged war against America. America has never answered them back in kind. Israel's response tells me that where Tehran is concerned, actions speak much louder than words.