“Mark my words,” Joe Biden told a group of wealthy contributors. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like it did John Kennedy.” A moment later Biden added, “Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

So let's play Name That Crisis, the one Biden says will test Obama within six months of his inauguration. Understand any answer will be tentative. Even if the prognosticator correctly identifies the antagonists and the battlefield, the actual sequence of events will defy astrologers, political science-fiction scenarists and intelligence agencies.

Gomer Pyle's kitsch litany (from “The Andy Griffith Show”) will damn us once again: “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

Pyle's flabbergast served as a plot device in a family comedy. Obama's test will be an American tragedy. Hope for a better tragedy, one where the body count — friendly, enemy and in-between — is minimized and the material destruction manageable.

I know the keyword in that last sentence is “hope,” a word that plays an energizing poetic and emotional role in Obama's campaign litany.

As president, Obama was supposed to avoid nasty conflicts because he in his very person brings hope and embodies change — galvanizing hope and fundamental, perhaps utopian change. Review his primary speeches and his oration in Berlin. That's the messianic message.

Diplomatic and military planners “operationalize” a policy. Obama promised us a messianic operation: Personal negotiations conducted by himself with some of the world's worst dictators and America haters, with the implicit point that his bold and sacrificial personal diplomacy would rearrange planetary politics.

Of course, lurking behind this megalomania are two hideous assumptions that are the passionate garbage of anti-Americans everywhere. The first one is the lesser lie — the U.S. and specifically the Bush Administration “don't talk” to rogues like Iran. Recall Ambassador Ryan Crocker's testimony in September 2007 when he related, in stoic detail, the results of low- and mid-level diplomatic meetings with Iran: Iranian posturing and rhetorical thrashing.

The U.S. talks to everyone including rogues. Spies chat with spies. The State Department employs “third parties” and “the grapevine.” The trick is to avoid giving a propaganda coup to a thug. Denying gangsters and vitriolic liars equal footing with an American president isn't stupid or backward or change frustrating behavior — it's savvy procedure.

The second lie, the greater lie, is that the U.S. is somehow directly or indirectly at fault when a crisis occurs. This was the agitprop line of anti-Americans throughout the 20th century, stoked by Nazis in World War II, Communists from Stalin and Mao to Gorbachev, and America haters in general. Obama's forgotten spiritual guide, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, echoed this theme in his noxious sermon that said with the 9-11 terror attacks America's chickens were “coming home to roost.”

So what is coming home to roost with what Biden assures us is Obama's imminent test? Obama's blatant naiveté is a strong candidate for the triggering incident, and in that light Biden's speech is a “pre-emptive” inoculation. “I guarantee you,” Biden said, “it's going to happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate."

His scenarios included Afghanistan and Pakistan. Say what? Osama bin Laden challenged America from Afghanistan in 1998 when he declared war on the U.S. Pakistan? That's where Obama called for a pre-emptive invasion earlier this year. What about Iraq? The certain trigger for debacle in Iraq is wavering U.S. commitment — and Obama is committed to quitting based on his political schedule, not conditions on the ground. Perhaps a war with Iran over Iraq or the Persian Gulf or in the aftermath of an Israeli strike on Iranian nukes?

Suddenly Obama will face change — changing conditions that require blood, sweat, toil and tears to sustain hope.

To find out more about Austin Bay, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.