CONSISTENT with its penchant for extraordinarily violent reaction to anything that it perceives as a challenge to its overlordship of the region, Israel, conceivably at the US behest, has been consistently threatening military strikes to take out Iran's uranium enrichment facilities. Washington, spearheading the anti-Iranian campaign to clamp ever more stringent sanctions on Tehran for its refusal to wind up its enrichment programme geared to provide fuel to its nuclear power plants, has for some time past refrained from making direct warmongering calls. The job has now been assigned to its protg Israel. Tel Aviv's latest move to cow down Tehran was the military exercise it carried out over eastern Mediterranean and Greece earlier this month, employing over 100 F-16 and F-15, helicopters, refuelling tankers, etc, focused on manoeuvres, as reported to have been stated by a Pentagon official, for a possible attack on Iranian nuclear installations and long-range conventional missiles. However, one would like to believe that the US officials, who felt that Israel was not contemplating any attack, were right and the massive exercise was just a threatening gesture; for otherwise this highly sensitive region would literally turn into a ball of fire. A foolhardy raid by Israel would have a snowball effect and the entire world would be caught up in extremely deleterious fallout from whose grip the attacker itself find it hard to escape. The Iranians have warned of delivering a "strong blow" if attacked that would "make you (Israel) regretforever". The disruption of the flow of oil at the Strait of Hormuz of the bombing of oilfields would send the global economy, already sagging under an unprecedented oil-price hike, into a tailspin and worst possible recession. Israeli vital installations and US forces in the region could be likely hit. The scenario is too scary to imagine. Tehran's insistence on enriching uranium for running nuclear power plants must be seen in the context of the global energy picture as well as the moral dimension of its right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The US, Europe and many other countries are growing their dependence on the nuclear source. There is no logic in debarring it from taking that course. Efforts must be focused on ensuring that it keeps on the peaceful track.