WASHINGTON, June 26 (UPI) -- Israel's message to its only ally, the United States, was quite clear. Either President Bush orders military action, or Israel will have to strike on its own. It can't wait till a new U.S. president is sworn in. Because the new White House tenant could well be Barack Obama. And Obama almost certainly would not approve an Israeli airstrike without first going several extra miles on the U.N. and Western diplomatic track. This could even lead to the kind of rift in Israeli-U.S. relations that occurred when President Eisenhower ordered French, British and Israeli forces out of Egypt during the 1956 Suez War.

America's allies had sprung a strategic deception surprise on the United States by invading Egypt to put the Suez Canal, nationalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser, back under international control. The Soviet Union then ordered Warsaw Pact forces to invade Hungary to suppress an anti-communist revolution.

Thus, the invasion of Suez drained whatever propaganda advantage Eisenhower could have obtained from naked Soviet aggression. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev even felt free to rattle his nuclear "rockets" at the United States and took credit for the humiliatingly hurried Franco-British-Israeli withdrawal from Egypt.

The Hungarian Revolution and the Suez Crisis were two of the most dramatic upheavals in international affairs in the post-World War II era. If Israel were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities while Bush is still the commander in chief, China and Russia might be tempted to take a page out of Khrushchev's geopolitical playbook -- and rattle a few threatening economic missiles.

This, in turn, would be designed to get Sen. Obama, D-Ill., to disassociate himself from any hostile action Israel might have taken against Iran. And if that didn't elicit the desired result, Iran's formidable asymmetrical retaliatory capabilities would be unleashed throughout the Gulf in particular and the Middle East in general. Iran also can make life hell for U.S. forces in Iraq and NATO forces in Afghanistan. With U.S. consumer confidence already at a 16-year low, oil would quickly skyrocket to $400 or $500 a barrel.