Evidently, Iran is convinced that the U.S. and Israel are behind the widespread Stuxnet malworm infection that has slowed their nuclear weapons program to a crawl, and
debkafile thinks that the Iranians are preparing to retaliate militarily:
Tehran is bent on military action to settle scores with Israel and the United States whom it suspects of planting the malignant Stuxnet cyber worm in the computer systems of its nuclear, military and strategic infrastructure, debkafile's military and US sources report. The timeline of this attack revolves around the state visit to Lebanon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has scheduled for Oct. 13-14, during which he will tour the Israeli border. Preying heavily on Iran too are the personal sanctions the United States has just imposed on its top military brass and ministers.
This last development is also interesting. It seems to have been timed to coincide with the chaos being produced in Iran by Stuxnet:
President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on eight top Iranian officials, accusing them of serious human rights abuses, including the killing, torture, beating and rape of Iranian citizens since the country's disputed 2009 presidential election.
This was the first time Washington had singled out top Iranian military and security figures for personal penalties:
Obama only signed the sanctions order this week, whereas the eight officials' crimes occurred more than a year ago in the wake of their crackdown on political opponents who charged the regime with falsifying the election. It would seem therefore that the US president acted with the intention of further dividing Iran's leaders and adding to the perplexity and demoralization besetting them over their powerlessness to bring the destructive cyber worm under control.
I find it difficult to believe that Iran would be so foolish as to launch overt military strikes, even through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, when such strikes would provide just the pretext needed by Israel and/or the United States to take out the Iranian nuclear program altogether. On the other hand, the Iranians may be in a panic, and panicked men do foolish things.