The Israelis blowing something up is hardly news worthy. But when they punched a hole in the paper thin Syrian air defense and leveled something in late September 2007, it became a story because the Israelis seemed to be doing back flips to get it out of the spotlight.

First it was nothing, then an air strike, then the online analysts started putting things together and thinking this was something big. But something big didn’t make sense either; if the Syrians were two rods away from a nuke it only seems logical that the U.S. and Israel would be yelling it from the rooftops.

Instead, we got more stories about the event than the local VFW. Until the other day when President Bush started beating the Syria nuclear drums again. The intelligence was unveiled for a number of really damn odd reasons. “One would be to the North Koreans to make it abundantly clear that we may know more about you than you think,” was the President’s reason du jure. I’m not entirely sure what it is “we know that they don’t know that we know,” but even I know that the fat man from Pyongyang already has  nukes, he made them and tested them in the face of some of the most furious finger-shaking I’ve seen since Catholic school. So we’ve really got nothing explained here.

If the war voices hadn’t been evangelizing Iranian nukes for a year or so I might be able to get a grip on why the lid was kept on the information. It’s not like we’re cozy with the Syrians. We can’t even get them to control their border, which has been a huge entry point into Iraq for various and sundry bad guys since the beginning. So why wouldn’t there be singing and dancing in Washington for a good solid reason to slap Syria around?

When you get down to possible reasoning there’s not a lot of cause to celebrate. We’ve already pretty much figured out that withholding the information doesn’t make any sense. So what are we left with?

One possibility is that Syria had managed to put a nuke program together and almost put together a bomb without anyone noticing. If this is the case it probably qualifies as one of the biggest intelligence blunders in a long, soiled history of intelligence blunders. Given that the intel now claims the Syrians built their stuff using North Korean technology, this really makes the Ballgunner’s head turn backwards. If North Korea, a country we’re supposedly watching like 20 hawks, managed to sneak it’s nuke program out of the country and set it up, right next to a gigantic U.S. theater of operations without anyone noticing then that implies a whole slew of people asleep at an impressive array of switches.

The other possibility, and one the Ballgunner hopes is accurate, is that a story is being cooked up to cover butts from the Potomac River to the Golan Heights. It could be the Israelis acted on bad intel, the Syrians had something they weren’t necessarily supposed to have (doesn’t have to be nukes), maybe a high ranking terror leader popped his head up for a second, who in the world knows? Syria, for its part in the mess, hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with details. They assure us they are the victims just as loud as we assure them they were the aggressors. For all I know it was a wink and a nod at Iran to not get too froggy. But none of these make much sense in the grand scheme.

The Ballgunner is going to be waiting to see what’s next in this field. There are lots of conflicting stories bumping around that only look good right at the surface.