Is this a game of chicken with Iran?

This is escalating at a dangerous pace.

Bush reportedly has been weighing his military options for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities since early 2006.

As Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. military officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed "bunker-busting" tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities buried deep underground.

A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they're shouted down," the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]

By late April 2006, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.

"Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning," one former senior intelligence official said. [New Yorker, July 10, 2006]

The Sunday Times reported on January 7, 2007, that a way to get around the opposition of the Joint Chiefs would be to delegate the bombing operation to the Israelis. The reasoning goes something like this: an Israeli-led attack might be more politically palatable with the Congress.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has rightly called the possibility of an Iranian nuclear bomb an "existential threat" to Israel that cannot be tolerated.

Israel is reportedly stepping up preparations for air strikes against Iran, possibly including the use of tactical nuclear bombs, to destroy Natanz and other Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Sunday Times of London reported on Jan. 7 that two Israeli air squadrons are training for the mission and "if things go according to plan, a pilot will first launch a conventional laser-guided bomb to blow a shaft down through the layers of hardened concrete [at Natanz]. Other pilots will then be ready to drop low-yield one kiloton nuclear weapons into the hole."

The Sunday Times wrote that Israel would also hit two other facilities – at Isfahan and Arak – with conventional bombs. But the possible use of a nuclear bomb at Natanz would represent the first nuclear attack since the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of World War II.

The Israeli government denied that Israel has drawn up secret plans to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.

Some observers may believe that Israel or the Bush administration may be leaking details of the plans as a way to frighten Iran into accepting international controls on its nuclear program, I tend to take the possibility of nuclear war seriously and see these preparations for a wider Middle Eastern war as very serious.

Bush's actions in the past two months suggest that his future course is an escalation of the Middle East conflict and not some "graceful exit."