Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems convinced that the End Times are about to dawn and Israel's destruction is the eschatological alarm clock. He doesn't care about Arab nationalism - Iranians aren't even Arab, save for about 3 percent of them. Land for Peace? That's for heretics. Israel could withdraw to its pre-1967 borders and these guys would declare a partial victory, high-five, and then redouble their efforts to destroy the "Zionist entity."

A popular way of thinking about all this is to believe we are at the dawn of a new religious war between the West and the Middle East. One side has launched it, Israel is fighting back, and the rest of the West is bickering about what to do and how to do it.

But this is too simplistic. At minimum, we've got two religious wars on our hands. Al-Qaida is Sunni. Hezbollah is Shiite. And relations between the two sides are growing chilly. Shiites, led by Iran, see this as their moment in the sun. Meanwhile, Sunnis - who often see nothing wrong with slipping a few bucks to al-Qaida or Hamas - are suddenly horrified by the terror threat from Hezbollah, which is why some "moderate" regimes are said to be quietly supporting Israel's effort to destroy Iran's proxy in the region. Indeed, al-Qaida-affiliated Sunni insurgents in Iraq have made it their mission to slaughter Shiites, and Shiite death squads are returning fire.

It was telling that when the Hezbollah-Israel war started, al-Qaida announced that it, too, would set its sights on Israel. Not only did this demonstrate once again that Israel isn't the "root cause" behind al-Qaida, but it also showed that two faces of the same totalitarian threat - Shia radicalism and Sunni radicalism - understand that Israel is the focal point of a new global battle between the West and its enemies.

It's clear that Israel isn't going to be a Czechoslovakia thrown over the side by the West. What's less clear is whether it might eventually become a Poland, a nation carved up under a temporary truce between twin evils (the so-called Hitler-Stalin pact) before they went at each other's throats.