Like the Jedi Knights in Star Wars, much of Israel's safety depends on an absurdly small number of daring pilots and their jet planes. The Israel Air Force has managed to use that capacity with amazing skill and daring, as it showed last September when a dozen fighter bombers and support aircraft jammed Syria's Russian-supplied air defenses and destroyed a secret nuclear facility on the Euphrates river --- not far from Iran.  The nature of that target has still not been revealed, but it must have been important enough to risk triggering a missile attack from Syria. That means the target was believed to be very important: most likely a joint Iranian-Syrian-North Korean nuclear facility.

In a very odd move, the Syrians are now rebuilding that mysterious concrete cube in exactly the same location --- even though the whole world knows about it now.  Why should they spend vast amounts of money doing that, if it would only become another fat target? 

One possibility is that it's a trap for IAF jets. Surround the concrete cube with enough new Russian anti-aircraft missiles, back it up with radars based on Russian ships that just happen to be doing the biggest naval exercise in years right now in the Mediterranean,   and provoke another attack by announcing another nuclear breakthrough. It could be a baited ambush.

The whole thing smells like an Ahmadi-Nejad shell game, with Russian help: put your nuclear materials under a dozen different giant concrete shelters, and dare the enemy to attack all of them, without knowing which one has nuke materials. All of the sites would be heavily defended with state-of-the-art Russian anti-aircraft missiles. Not just one trap for attacking aircraft, but a dozen or more.

Ahmadi-Nejad constantly uses the most provocative language possible. He's a known Revolutionary Guard fanatic from the Khomeini days, when a million people were killed in the Iran-Iraq war, some of them in blind suicide charges across minefields. A'jad sounds like a religious nut, but he's shrewd enough to use even his martyrdom complex to intimidate and provoke his enemies.

So there could be method in his madness. He may be deliberately trying to draw Israel and the US into a long and costly conflict, relying on domestic political pressure to force a humiliating retreat, just as Hezbollah did in last summer's Lebanon war. As a side benefit, he may expect his own domestic opponents to be forced to rally around him. Since he is running for  re-election in the rigged Mullahcracy, war can only benefit him.