Other than Mitt Romney, the only man who can plausibly derail President Barack Obama's increasingly likely re-election is Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose policy of "preemption" makes an Israeli military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities only a matter of time.

When that occurs, a disruption of Middle East oil production and shipments, a spike in U.S. gas prices, and a renewal of Islamic terrorist attacks also will be just a matter of time.

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a late-September address to the United Nations that his country would hold the United States responsible for any Israeli military assault. In a subsequent U.N. speech, Netanyahu said that an atom bomb in the hands of Tehran's virulently anti-Zionist Shia fundamentalists, which he says will be a reality by mid-2013, would trigger military strikes. Netanyahu drew a "red line," saying that when Iran has 90 percent of the enriched uranium needed to manufacture a weapon of mass destruction, Israel "preempts."

Luckily for Obama, whose "two-state solution" foreign policy emphatically opposes any Israeli preemption, it will not occur before the Nov. 6 election. The economic impact of a Mideast "crisis" would be severe. Interestingly, Romney supports Israel's stance. By attacking now, Israel could ensure Obama's defeat; by waiting until next year, it ensures his re-election.

Any analysis of the geographical and geopolitical Middle East begins with the "Three H's" -- history, hate and histrionics. There is no macro Middle East; there are a bunch of micro Middle Easts -- Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya, and, farther east, Afghanistan. The situation in Pakistan and India, where Muslims and Hindus are in conflict, also is combustible. Each has its own economic agenda. Each has a huge Muslim population. Each has a historical and religious animus toward Israel, Zionism and a Jewish homeland. Each has an Islamic fundamentalist movement which preaches hate toward Israel and the United States. Each has a huge underclass of jobless, whom the governments appease by blaming their plight on the Israelis.

However, ironically, there is as much Muslim hatred of each other as there is of Israel. The Sunnis, who comprise 90 percent of all Muslims, hate the Shiites. Al-Qaeda, which is Sunni, despises Hezbollah, headquartered in Lebanon, which is Shia and which is supported by Iran. Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba is a rival of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which is allied with the Taliban, which operates in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hamas, the Sunni Muslim Palestinian extremist group, has long been a bitter political rival of Fatah, the PLO-affiliated party. Hamas, the guerilla "Army of God," until recently attacked Israeli outposts in the Gaza Strip area and refuses to coordinate with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based guerillas who are funded by Iran and who attack Israel's north border.

The distinction between Sunni and Shia is that Sunnis want to create a caliphate, which is a mystical Muslim worldwide state, where the teachings of the Quran are inviolate, while the Shiites believe that Mohammed's voice on earth emanates from various imams, who interpret the Quran, and that those clerics -- like the ayatollahs in Iran -- must be obeyed.

It is estimated that 42 percent of the world's Jews, roughly 4.4 million, live in Israel, on a fertile strip of land comprising 7,800 square miles. Israel's population is about 6.9 million, of which 20 percent are Arabs, mostly Sunni Muslims. The Zionists' claim of a Jewish homeland is, at least to Arabs, highly questionable. The founding kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and the last Davidian ruler, passed in the 1st Century A.D. Thereafter, a succession of Roman, Arab, Mamluk and Ottoman invaders ruled the territory. After World War I the British seized the area, which was then known as Palestine and Trans-Jordan, thereafter creating Jordan and Syria. Under the 1917 Balfour Doctrine, the British decided that they would "establish in Palestine a natural home for Jewish people," which was a political concession to their country's Zionist movement.

But nation making is a glacial process. Jewish emigration to the British colony was meager until after World War II, when the State of Israel was finally created through a partition of Palestine, with only Gaza and the West Bank remaining under Arab control. Jerusalem, the Biblical city revered by both Muslims and Jews, was ceded to Israel. Immediately, almost 100,000 Arabs flocked across the northern border into Lebanon. After the 1967 Six Day War, Israel absorbed Gaza and the West Bank -- and about three million Arabs -- into its zone of control, but not their country.

Israel thus is surrounded by implacable enemies.

Palestine, which was created in 1988, is the autonomous governing body in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, with a population of 4.4 million, of which more than 40 percent are under the age of 15. Once the breeding ground of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, it is now the staging area for Hamas, a political and military faction which controls the Gaza Strip, with a population of 1.7 million, while Fatah dominates the West Bank, with a population of 2.5 million.

From a demographic standpoint, assimilation of the occupied Arab areas by Israel is an impossibility. Arabs already outnumber Jews. By 2025 Israel would be a Muslim-majority nation. So, too, is a Palestinian nation. The Obama Administration wants a "two-state solution," with reversion to the 1967 borders, and a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. It will never happen. Israel wants the occupied areas for a buffer zone, and it could never tolerate a Hamas-governed and armed Palestine.

For some, Israel's preoccupation with Iran is simply a diversion, taking focus away from military suppression of the Palestinians.

Lebanon, to the north, beyond the Golan Heights, has a population of 3.8 million and is riddled with religious division between Maronite Christians (30 percent) and Muslims, of which Sunni are 60 percent. However, since the days of Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran has been funding the Shiite Hezbollah, a military force dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The Sunni Palestinians who flocked to Lebanon in 1948 are still confined to settlement camps at Sabra, Shatilah and Ayn Al-Hilweh. They cannot be citizens, vote, own property, attend schools or work in the professions. Al-Qaeda uses the camps to recruit terrorists.

Egypt, with a population of 70 million, which was a secular, military-run dictatorship and a quiet ally of Israel and the U.S., now is a fundamentalist Sunni Islamic state dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks to cleanse the country of all Western influence and restore the Islamic status of women. Not good for Israel. If Israel attacks Iran, Egypt likely will attack Israel.

Syria, with a population of 17 million, just northeast of Israel, is a fragile dictatorship with a 74 percent Sunni majority, and the socialist Baath Party, with military support, has governed since 1983, after Israel's invasion.

Iran, with a population of 68 million, is a Muslim democracy, with Shiites comprising 89 percent of the population and Sunnis 10 percent. Ahmadinejad is supposed to leave office next year, but the capacity to build a nuclear bomb is imminent. There are well over a dozen "hardened" refining sites throughout the country, so an Israeli air strike eradication is problematical. An Iranian strike would unleash immediate retaliation by Hezbollah and Hamas.

However, it should be noted that Israel's surgical strikes in Syria in 1982 and in Lebanon in 1996 did not produce a conflagration.

Jordan, to the west of Israel, with a population of 5.5 million, is a monarchy with a 96 percent Sunni Muslim majority.

Iraq, with a population of 25 million, is 65 percent Shia and 35 percent Sunni. The late dictator Saddam Hussein maintained sectarian peace. "We took out the wrong guy" is a current refrain. The U.S. props up a "democratic" leader in a country where there can be no unity.

Saudi Arabia, with a population of 24 million, is a monarchy. Oil exports generate more than $50 billion in revenue. The royal family, to blunt any insurrection, funds various terrorist groups, who direct their ire elsewhere.

Israel, obviously, is a country besieged. It is surrounded by more than 200 million Muslims, every government is hostile, and an Iranian atomic bomb delivered on Tel Aviv could wipe out a third of the nation's population and render the country a radioactive wasteland.

Without sophisticated U.S. weaponry and subsidies and American Jewish donations, Israel could not survive. Israel is America's most reliable ally in the Middle East, but how will the Obama Administration react when Iran has nuclear weapons? Netanyahu has doubts.

Getting back to U.S. politics, Jews comprise about 2 percent of America's population of roughly 315 million, or six million. Of that number almost half are Orthodox, for which the preservation of Israel is paramount. Almost 80 percent of Jewish voters supported Obama in the 2008 election.

Now it's crunch time. Romney and the Republicans are the pro-Zionist, anti-Palestine-independence, take-out-Iran's-nukes party, while Obama and the Democrats are equivocators and vacillators. The Democrats' national party platform, initially, excised Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The question is this: When Israel attacks Iran in 2013, who do American Jews want as U.S. president?