Oct, 2009---The thirty-six anniversary of a Mid-East war that changed the world---bringing the world to the precipice of nuclear war and economic collapse. On October 6, 1973, during the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, the combined armies of Syria and Egypt launched a massive armored, air and infantry assault against the Israeli Northern territory of the Golan Heights and the Southern territory of Sinai. Within 24 hours, Israel was facing defeat by a refurbished, reorganized and re-energized foe, who, themselves, had been defeated six years earlier in the 1967 'six day' war. A foe that decimated Israeli armored and air power in the resulting ferocious battles.

Long before the current tensions with Iran over its nuclear program, the world teetered on the brink of full-scale nuclear war, and economic collapse by the resulting Arab oil embargo. Although Israel turned the tide militarily by retaking the Golan Heights and a great deal of the territory they had lost in the Sinai Pnninusla, the war came at a staggering cost for them, losing the equivalent of all of the soldiers the US lost in Vietnam in a month, if the US had fought the same war. The world came dangerously close to a superpower conflict with the then Soviet Union over the crisis, and the Western economies were crippled through an oil embargo that had lasting effects for years.

As a result of the 1973 war, peace came between Egypt and Israel, with the return of the Sinai Penninusla. Although several battles and wars raged between Israel and Syria, Israel never faced the fear of defeat as much as they had during the Yom Kippur War. In the 1980's, Israel's biggest foes, Iraq and Iran were embroiled in an endless war that was often compared to the trench warfare of World War I, with similar casualty rates for both sides. Israel had little to worry about---easily targeting and destroying an Iraqi nuclear reactor that may have provided Iraq with a nuclear weapon.

With the end of the Iran-Iraq war, came the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which led to the decimation and substantial weakening of Iraq's military in two resulting wars, by Coalition forces. With Iraq neutralized as a threat against Israel, Iran started to emerge as a regional superpower. Using the petro-dollars from an early 21st-century oil shock, Iran continued to drastically re-arm its military, with new long-range missiles and the specter of a nuclear-weapons armed Iran, using such missiles.

The irony of the defeat of a secular Iraq by the US-led military coalition led to the rise of a fundamentalist-Shia Iran, eager to protect its interests and potentially threaten Israel and many of the US-backed governments in the region through its nuclear capabilities and asymetrical and more conventional warfare.

With the ghostly images of the near defeat in 1973 still haunting the Israeli military and political mindset, Israel has become acutely aware that its territory has stuck out like a sore thumb for Iran to strike. The 2006 Israeli war with the Iranian proxy army of Hezbollah in Lebanon basically saw less than two divisions of Lebanese-Shia militias, trained and armed by Iran and Syria, fire thousands of missiles into Israeli towns and cities. Israeli military units suffered huge losses by the well-trained and equipped militias, decimating the main Israeli battle tank, the M-1, with a new generation of anti-tank missiles.

The Lebanon war was very ominous for Israel and the West, suggesting that if just a militia like Hezbollah could fight that well, imagine how their Iranian and Syrian masters could fight. With two wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a partial economic collapse in the West, the US was in no position to engage Iran in a war that could quickly and easily take on apocalyptic dimensions.

A war with Iran might go something like this: Nov, 2010---Israel fed up with years of stalemate over the Iranian nuclear program launches a huge air and missile strike against dozens of Iranian military and weapons development sites. Although the US is not part of the Israeli strike, the US reluctantly opens up Iraqi air space to dozens of Israeli fighter-bombers and heavy bombers. Iranian satellites pick up the coming Israeli first strike waves and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards immediately fire twenty Shihab-3, Shihab-4 missiles at pre-designated military and civilian targets in the Israeli heartland.

News of the long-predicted apocalyptic war breaks out across the world, sending the NYSE into a two thousand point tailspin and sending the price of a barrel of oil up by fifty dollars in the first few minutes after the news. The first wave of the Israeli strike ends with several Iranian nuclear sites a smouldering ruin and a Revolutionary Guards base ablaze from Israeli submarine launched missiles. Although not a military success, Iran's nuclear ambitions at the very least have been set back.

As a second wave of Israeli strike aircraft cross into Iranian territory, news and live pictures of the devastation wrought by the Shihab missiles against Israeli targets circles the globe in a nanosecond. The Israeli Arrow anti-missile system downed sixty percent of the incoming Iranian missiles, but many got through, turning parts of downtown Tel Aviv into an intense firestorm. The first day of this new and more dangerous war promised many surprises and pitfalls ahead, as all sides ratched up for an apocalyptic showdown.