The fire in Lebanon may have “ceased” but Israeli defense planners are still anticipating a wider war ahead, provoked byTeheran. In that conflict, the Israel Defense Force knows that it cannot rely on help from America’s so-called allies in the region.

The government of Lebanon is quisling. Sheik Nasrallah’s speech on Lebanese television last week, offering a hollow accommodation, was seamless falsehood. The truth was on the Hezbollah flag over his right shoulder. For the first time, on the Hezbollah flag there was, in addition the clenched fist and the AK-47, a quotation from Quran generally associated with jihad, “Prepare whatever forces of might you can muster against the enemy.” When a Shia warlord who believes in the messianic cult of the Twelfth Imam, such as Sheik Nasrallah, speaks of jihad, it is to the death and to paradise. In response to the metafiction of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, the ceasefire that never ceases fire, Sheik Nasrallah quipped, “The war has not ended.” The dismantling of Lebanon will follow, save the chance that the IDF can kill Sheik Nasrallah quickly.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, America’s great friend in the region, traveled to Istanbul recently, ostensibly for economic talks, in fact to betray America and Israel. Abdullah offered several fortunes to the Turkish government if it would abandon its treaties with America and Israel in the event of a wider war and direct conflict with Iran. Abdullah hopes that by backstabbing Washington, he can win favor with the tyrants of Teheran so that they will not burn him along with Jerusalem. First response from Turkey is that the Ankara government is most willing to take Abdullah’s money, but that the general staff of the army balks at the treachery. The general staff’s major concern is that it will need America in the event of direct war with Kurdistan. Meanwhile, the Kurds have sold out to Iran, knowing that, when they start wiping out the Turkomen of northern Iraq, the Turkish army is coming.

President Mubarak of Cairo — decrepit and failed; desperate to install his weak son, Gamal, in 2007 — has long enjoyed double-dealing with the mullahs of the new Persia. However, the events of the last months have broken down all communication between Cairo and Teheran. Teheran has ordered the Egyptian Zawahiri of al Qaeda, its chief pet gangster, to re-open links with all radical groups in Egypt in preparation for the overthrow of Mubarak’s fragile regime. Cairo, in a panic, is arresting all the wrong people, chiefly Muslim Brothers, who are radicalized to the point of explosion by this abuse. Cairo will surrender to anyone who will accept its sword.

Abdullah of Jordan has lost his country to its natural contradictions. The Palestinian refugees in the north are well armed by the Syrian agents across the border and will join in with Damascus in the wider war. The Bedouin in the south of the country, who rescued Abdullah’s father, Hussein, in the 1970 civil war, are no longer available, having been bought, compromised, or radicalized by the jihadists of Saudi Arabia. The IDF fully expects to be attacked by Iranian-led and -supplied Palestinians from Jordan in the wider war. Amman will burn or surrender.

Syrian pilots and crews are sleeping beside their aircraft in anticipation of the IDF. Syrian SCUDS and their Iranian equivalents are in trucks continually driving around the country in anticipation of the IAF. Syrian authorities are re-opening and inspecting air raid shelters in Damascus and other cities for the first time since 1973; and the public, well aware of the preparation, is making plans to evacuate the cities. The Syrian dictators, the al-Assad family and Assef Shawqat, the brotherin-law — married to the steely Dr Bushra al-Assad — are living in deep and hard sites in the Damascus region along with Khaled Mashaal of Hamas. The al-Assads have determined to gamble on the Iran war with America in order to transform Syrian military culture into a brotherhood of arms comparable to the cult that was born in the 1967-73 period under the late dictator Hafez al-Assad. The al-Assads cannot and will not negotiate.

Teheran’s chief worry is that unless it prosecutes its messianic war on America and Israel, it will lose command of the Shiite faithful to the traditional centers of piety in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq. In order to maintain the Persian Qum as spiritual authority of the Shiite masses, Iran must subjugate Iraq and undermine Ayatollah Sistani. One path for Iran is to aggrandize the warlord Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, some 100 of whom are already on the Lebanon front. Another path is to buy off the Kurds with an offer of providing a route for Kurdish oil to get to market in the event of a Turkish war.

The tyrants of Teheran are led by a messianic cult that dominates the civilian and military leadership and is in complete control of the war plan. This cult, with its spokesman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has openly broadcast that the period from sundown in Jerusalem on August 21 to sundown in Jerusalem on August 22 of this year is a profound moment that is associated with the return of the Twelfth Imam. All Iranian war plans are organized around the phenomenon of the imminent return of the Mahdi, who vanished in the Tenth Century. As of this writing, there is no good indication of what the Iranians are expecting to have happen other than that it will be nasty. The most benign it could be is Iran’s quitting the Non-Proliferation Treaty, triggering another diplomatic rumpus at the U.N. Also, Tehran as of this writing has declared a nation-wide military exercise. This exercise has no schedule and no defined period.

Aware of the sea of assassins at Israel’s borders, the IDF now fights to destroy Iran’s proxies severally before Teheran launches the next phase of its war-making to destroy Israel in total.

Mr. Batchelor is host of “The John Batchelor Show” on the ABC radio network. The show airs in New York on 770 AM from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.