I do not think war with Iran is inevitable. I think it is promoted this way in some circles and there has never been any question that the AIPAC crowd has no use for Obama. In the run-up to the election what we are seeing right now are folks throwing their cards on the table. The Iran talk is specifically designed to win Jewish voters. In fact these AIPAC related groups are attempting to tie Obama to Ahmadinejad to help elect McCain. I'll cite this article and Palin's "second holocaust" comment in pointing out the heavy handedness of this approach:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/09/palin-warns-aga.html

Having read that I would be surprised if I was the only one that found it comical that the Clinton camp claimed to have "no knowledge" that Hillary and Sarah were to appear together at this event. Nothing gets by the Clintons and they knew that they could play both sides of this by claiming not to know Palin would be there while at the same time drawing media attention to the fact that McCain-Palin supports the same issues as Hillary and thus painting Obama as "wrong on Iran" to hurt his campaign.

for a full frontal attack:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1023696.html

Basically, all that's going on here at this point is the usual Republican campaign tactics. They added Palin to grab Christian conservatives. They attempt to paint the Democrats as "weak on defense" and stir in stuff about taxes. Clearly the idea is to tie Obama to terrorists, which is crazy but people buy into it. I think this stuff combined with the fact that the Republicans are again running caging operations to remove hundreds of thousands of black voters from the voter roles in several states means this will again be a very tight election. Should be ugly as all hell.