OPEC is warning that Iran, home of possibly real, as well as most assuredly recycled and photoshopped missile tests, should not be attacked by the US or Israel. Prices would go “unlimited.” IHT:

“We really cannot replace Iran’s production — it’s not feasible to replace it,” Abdalla Salem El-Badri, the OPEC secretary general, said…Iran, the second-largest producing country in OPEC, after Saudi Arabia, produces about 4 million barrels of oil a day out of the daily worldwide production of close to 87 million barrels. The country has been locked in a lengthy dispute with Western countries over its nuclear ambitions.

In recent weeks, the price of oil has risen higher on speculation that Israel could be preparing to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. The saber-rattling intensified this week with missile tests by Iran. That has further shaken oil markets because of concerns that any conflict with Iran could disrupt oil shipments from the Gulf region.

“The prices would go unlimited,” Badri said during the interview, referring to the effect of a military conflict. “I can’t give you a number.” Analysts said the timing of Badri’s remarks was noteworthy, given that the idea of an attack on Iran has been around for years.

As is usual these days, oil prices went up $5.60 immediately upon Iran’s announcing that it had launched a few more missiles. So what’s going on? Is this about oil prices and market manipulation by OPEC? Is Iran sabre-rattling because things are going well in Iraq, and it would like to provoke some action that would help it destabilize that country? Is the bluster in service of an attempt to derail the “unavoidable” Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? Or is there some obvious rationale that we are just missing?

We note that Mr. Ahmadinejad was helpful as ever in clarifying the situation. His comments seem from outer space lately. On one day he repeats he periodic threats to destroy Israel, which will “disappear off the geographical scene.” The next moment, the whole thing is a joke to him: “very funny show…These type of wars are considered as a funny joke.” And then the Iranian president starts claiming a fan club among US Generals: “Their first request was to have their picture taken with me…This official told me he holds a special place for me in his heart and said he had postponed his holidays in the United States to be able to meet me.”

Of course Mr. Ahmadinejad may be insane (he at least marches to the beat of a very different and bellicose drummer). But the real insanity is that over the last thirty years, the US government and corporations have permitted this nation to become 70% dependent on imports of its most vital economic and warmaking commodity. That is unilateral disarmament. Who is more nuts, him or us?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a group of foreign visitors ahead of the 19th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. AFP:

“I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene…Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started….I tell you that with the unity and awareness of all the Islamic countries all the satanic powers will soon be destroyed…With the appearance of the promised saviour…and his companions such as Jesus Christ, tyranny will be soon be eradicated in the world.”

In a way, we would actually like to see a meeting between President Obama and President Ahmadinejad, as terrible an idea as that is — it might be worth it just for the absurdity of the joint press conference that followed. (And maybe Ahmadinejad might have the same religious experience that our media do in the presence of Mr. Obama.)

Good news appeared in the editorial pages of the Washington Post, albeit in the form of campaign advice to the prospective Democratic nominee. But good news is still good news:

There’s been a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks — which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is — of course — too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments — and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the “this-war-is-lost” caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama…

the likely Democratic nominee needs a plan for Iraq based on sustaining an improving situation, rather than abandoning a failed enterprise. That will mean tying withdrawals to the evolution of the Iraqi army and government, rather than an arbitrary timetable…

Of course, as Bruce Kesler notes, the NYT still backs the “this-war-is-lost” caucus. Which paper’s line will Senator Obama follow? (Or should he just forget the whole Iraq thing and head straight to Iran?)

Azadeh Moaveni is a reporter covering Iran for Time magazine. She went back for a visit recently, and found that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is apparently held in low esteem by his countrymen. WaPo:

On a recent afternoon, while riding a rickety bus down Vali Asr Avenue, Tehran’s main thoroughfare, I overheard two women discussing the grim state of Iranian politics. One of them had reached a rather desperate conclusion. “Let the Americans come,” she said loudly. “Let them sort things out for us once and for all.” Everyone in the women’s section of the bus absorbed this casually, and her friend nodded in assent…

I used to hear similarly pro-American sentiments frequently back in 2001, when Iranians’ romance with the United States was at its most ardent. A poll conducted that same year found that 74 percent of Iranians supported restoring ties with the United States (whereupon the pollster was tossed into prison). You couldn’t attend a dinner party without hearing someone, envious of the recently liberated Afghans, ask, “When will the Americans come save us?”…

I lived in Iran until last summer and experienced all the reasons why Ahmadinejad has replaced the United States as Iranians’ top object of vexation. Under his leadership, inflation has spiked at least 20 percent…My old babysitter, for example, says she can no longer afford to feed her family red meat once a week. When I recently picked up some groceries — a sack of potatoes, some green plums, two cantaloupes and a few tomatoes — the bill came to the equivalent of $40.

Inflation has hit the real estate market particularly hard. Housing prices have surged by nearly 150 percent, according to real estate agents. For most Iranians, previously manageable rents have become tremendous burdens. On one of my first evenings back in Iran, I watched Ahmadinejad on television as he addressed Iranians from the holy city of Qom. He blamed everyone — the hostile West, a domestic “cigarette mafia” — for the economic downturn, just as he had previously claimed that a “housing mafia” was driving up real estate prices. Many Iranians who initially believed this kind of conspiracy talk now admit that the president’s policies and obstinacy are actually at fault…

there are the interminable lines that have accompanied the government’s new gas-rationing scheme. During the busy early evening, it takes an hour to fill up on gas, and policemen are required to direct the snarled traffic. Ahmadinejad has insinuated that the unpopular plan was a precaution against possible Western sanctions, but most people I spoke with considered it another instance of his administration’s mismanagement…

Ahmadinejad has also resurrected unpopular invasions into Iranians’ private lives. On the second day of my trip, newspapers announced that police would begin raiding office buildings and businesses to ensure that women were wearing proper Islamic dress. One of my girlfriends, an executive secretary, told me that as a precaution, her office had set up a coded warning message to be broadcast over the intercom. On the third day, police swept our street to confiscate illegal satellite dishes.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents the religious-revolutionary, warlike, and self-destructive side of Iran in its current identity crisis with the modern world. Exactly what would be accomplished by the remarkably foolish idea of meeting with the man and regime that are pushing that country to a precipice?

The US, European, and certain Middle Eastern countries have for years tried to sit down with Iran and come to agreements of various sorts, mostly without any success. Amir Taheri provides some very interesting historical context in a piece in the WSJ that should be read in its entirety:

Iran is gripped by a typical crisis of identity that afflicts most nations that pass through a revolutionary experience. The Islamic Republic does not know how to behave: as a nation-state, or as the embodiment of a revolution with universal messianic pretensions. Is it a country or a cause?

A nation-state wants concrete things such as demarcated borders, markets, access to natural resources, security, influence, and, of course, stability – all things that could be negotiated with other nation-states. A revolution, on the other hand, doesn’t want anything in particular because it wants everything.

In 1802, when Bonaparte embarked on his campaign of world conquest, the threat did not come from France as a nation-state but from the French Revolution in its Napoleonic reincarnation. In 1933, it was Germany as a cause, the Nazi cause, that threatened the world. Under communism, the Soviet Union was a cause and thus a threat. Having ceased to be a cause and re-emerged a nation-state, Russia no longer poses an existential threat to others.

The problem that the world, including the U.S., has today is not with Iran as a nation-state but with the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary cause bent on world conquest under the guidance of the “Hidden Imam.” The following statement by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “Supreme leader” of the Islamic Republic – who Mr. Obama admits has ultimate power in Iran — exposes the futility of the very talks Mr. Obama proposes: “You have nothing to say to us. We object. We do not agree to a relationship with you! We are not prepared to establish relations with powerful world devourers like you! The Iranian nation has no need of the United States, nor is the Iranian nation afraid of the United States. We . . . do not accept your behavior, your oppression and intervention in various parts of the world.”

So, how should one deal with a regime of this nature? The challenge for the U.S. and the world is finding a way to help Iran absorb its revolutionary experience, stop being a cause, and re-emerge as a nation-state.

Whenever Iran has appeared as a nation-state, others have been able to negotiate with it, occasionally with good results. In Iraq, for example, Iran has successfully negotiated a range of issues with both the Iraqi government and the U.S. Agreement has been reached on conditions under which millions of Iranians visit Iraq each year for pilgrimage. An accord has been worked out to dredge the Shatt al-Arab waterway of three decades of war debris, thus enabling both neighbors to reopen their biggest ports. Again acting as a nation-state, Iran has secured permission for its citizens to invest in Iraq.

When it comes to Iran behaving as the embodiment of a revolutionary cause, however, no agreement is possible. There will be no compromise on Iranian smuggling of weapons into Iraq. Nor will the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps agree to stop training Hezbollah-style terrorists in Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraq and its allies should not allow the mullahs of Tehran to export their sick ideology to the newly liberated country through violence and terror.

As a nation-state, Iran is not concerned with the Palestinian issue and has no reason to be Israel’s enemy. As a revolutionary cause, however, Iran must pose as Israel’s arch-foe to sell the Khomeinist regime’s claim of leadership to the Arabs.

As a nation, Iranians are among the few in the world that still like the U.S. As a revolution, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. Last month, Tehran hosted an international conference titled “A World Without America.” Indeed, since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iran has returned to a more acute state of revolutionary hysteria. Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to truly believe the “Hidden Imam” is coming to conquer the world for his brand of Islam.

Yet another set of reasons that Senator Obama’s proposal to sit down with Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a terrible idea. Question: does Senator Obama really understand the history of the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting he refers to all the time, and does he understand the terrible consequences it led to, up to and perhaps including the origins of the Vietnam War?

We noted that rising oil inventories and falling demand have no effect on oil prices, which have now risen to $126 a barrel. They still don’t matter in this current frenzy. Glenn Reynolds notes this hoarding and withdrawing from the market of oil supplies by none other than Iran:

Iran has chartered an armada of supertankers to act as floating storage for as many as 28 million barrels of crude oil that is backing up on them. Analysts are blaming worldwide refineries yet to recover from maintenance programs. It’s not the first time that Iran has had trouble finding buyers; they temporarily floated 20 million barrels in 2006. No, I can’t explain this in light of record oil prices and continual cries for more release of OPEC crude oil.

So Iran is apparently now keeping oil from the market while continuing to produce it. Parking it offshore would appear to create some hidden inventory that might not show up in some official figures, possibly damping prices. Who else might be up to similar shenanigans? (Of course with Iran, there’s always a possibility of a super-secret war explanation.)

Meanwhile, an AP story said that analysts “struggled to explain” the continued rise in the price of tulip bulbs, er, oil. No kidding. “‘Crude oil is currently held up in a tug-of-war between the Goldman reality and the physical reality,’ said Olivier Jakob of Switzerland’s Petromatrix in a research note, adding that the investment bank’s prediction made for ‘a great story to support pension funds piling more into commodities’.” And a few years ago Moody’s and S&P said that subprime mortgages were just dandy for pension funds. So it goes.

Senator Obama criticized Senator Clinton’s position on attacking Iran in the wake of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. He did so on on MTP, according to AP:

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said April 22 in an interview with ABC. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”…On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Obama said: “It’s not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language reflective of George Bush. We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber rattling and tough talk and in the meantime have made a series strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran.”

No wonder Hamas endorsed this fellow.

The Financial Times has an interesting story on the Israeli raid of September 6 last year:

For months, the White House has maintained a shroud of secrecy around the September 6 Israeli strike on the facility, which Syria codenamed “al-Kibar”. The Central Intelligence Agency will on Thursday brief about 200 members of Congress on the mysterious incident. The US official told the Financial Times that North Korea started discussing ways to help Syria build a nuclear reactor in 1997. He said US intelligence believed construction work began in 2003.

The presentations to Congress would provide an ”eye popping, comprehensive briefing that will demonstrate how close Syria came to having a nuclear weapons making capability,” the official added. The CIA will show politicians a video that brings together a compilation of still images, including satellite imagery, ground imagery, and photographs taken inside the facility.

One photograph shows a North Korean nuclear scientist named Chon Chibu standing beside a person believed to be his Syrian counterpart. Mr Chon has worked at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which produced the material for the bomb North Korea tested in 2006, and has dealt with US officials in the past. The US official said the date of the meeting was unclear, but said the vintage of a car that appears in the background suggests it was sometime after 2005.

The official said North Korea appeared to have provided the designs for the Syrian reactor, which he said was a “dead ringer” for Yongbyon…North Korea is also believed to have probably provided engineering and construction staff for the project…While US and Israeli intelligence suggests Syria was very close to completing the physical reactor, they have no evidence that Syria had obtained plutonium to feed into the reactor.

The last point is odd. It was reported last year that Israel obtained nuclear fuel prior to the raid and presented it to the US as evidence of what was happening in Syria. Questions: what role does or did Iran have in the Syrian project? What is the meaning of the talk of a Syria and Israel peace deal in the light of these disclosures?

The AP reports on Iranians who charged US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, dropped make believe explosives and threatened “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes”:

Iranian boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to explode the American vessels. U.S. forces were on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats in the early Sunday incident, when the boats — believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s navy — turned and moved away…There were no injuries but the official said there could have been, because the Iranian boats turned away “literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire” in self defense….

The incident occurred at about 5 a.m. local time Sunday as Navy cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham were on their way into the Persian Gulf and passing through the strait — a major oil shipping route….Five small boats began charging the U.S. ships, dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships and forcing the U.S. ships to take evasive maneuvers…the Iranians radioed something like “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes.”

This development, as well as others, certainly make it look as if there was no hidden deal that triggered the strange recent NIE.

Iran is putting a lot of firepower into protecting its “peaceful” nuclear reactor at Bushehr, including the Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) and a rumored deal involving the S-300. IBD wonders why and notes, regarding the current NIE, that such reports have been rather dramatically wrong in the past:

Russia completed delivery of 29 mobile Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) short-range surface-to-air missiles in January, part of an arms deal worth $700 million. The Tor-M1 is part of a nationwide air defense system clearly designed to prevent a repeat of Israel’s 1981 strike against Iraq’s French-built Osirak reactor. That’s an awful lot of firepower to protect a peaceful nuclear power program…

The S-300 is a much more powerful and versatile weapon than the Tor-M1 missile systems that Moscow supplied earlier this year and which are capable of hitting airborne targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet. The S-300 is capable of downing aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at a distance up to 95 miles and at altitudes up to 90,000 feet…

The Bushehr deal supposedly has safeguards: Iran would return spent fuel rods to Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has surveillance cameras at various Iranian nuclear facilities. But as noted by Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served under Bush 41, the deal brings Tehran frighteningly close to a nuclear warhead.

“At any time while it is loading the fuel,” he told the Washington Times, “Tehran could seize it and have enough uranium to fuel its centrifuges at Natanz to make up to 150 crude nuclear weapons.”

A year after Bushehr is brought on line, a third of its fuel in the form of near-weapons-grade plutonium is scheduled to be removed from the reactor — enough to make 20 nukes. For a single bomb, Iran would simply have to divert just 5% of the spent fuel…

National Intelligence Estimates have been wrong before. On Sept. 19, 1962, a NIE reassured us that while it would give the Soviets a military advantage, “the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba…would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”

The strangeness of the current NIE, so completely at odds with the previous NIE, combined with the Bush administration’s rather passive attitude towards it, continue to confound and confuse us.

Todd Bensman, whose reporting on a particularly alarming strain of illegal immigration we’ve noted in the past, has discovered more illegal immigration, this time from Iran into Nicaragua:

The second military helicopter in as many days hovered over the jungle and then landed to a most unwelcome reception from several dozen angry Rama Indian and Creole villagers. Rupert Allen Clear Duncan, a leader of some 400 Creole who live along the shoreline, confronted the foreigners dressed in suits and military uniforms that day in March and demanded to know the purpose of their aerial trespasses. “This is our land; we have always lived here, and you don’t have our permission to be here,” Duncan spat, when refused the courtesy of an explanation.

Not until Duncan threatened to have his machete-waving followers damage the aircraft did they learn that some of the men were from the Islamic Republic of Iran and had come promising to establish a Central American foothold in the middle of their territory…

A mystery compound — Twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped by neat rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire protect the manicured grounds of a mansion inside. The compound is not unlike many others in the affluent Managua suburb of Las Colinas, except for a telltale identifier. From the street outside, through the wire at just the right angle, can be seen the top half of the distinctive red, white and green flag of Iran. This is the temporary embassy of Iran’s new envoy to Nicaragua, Akbar Esmaeil-Pour.

The envoy, however, hasn’t been in a talking mood lately, since local media stirred just the sort of questions that fuel Yankee fears. Last month, the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, La Prensa, published leaked government documents that showed Nicaragua’s chief immigration minister personally authorized 21 Iranian men to enter the country, without visas that would have left a record. Officials denied the report until confronted with the document but refused to explain why the men were let in that way or what became of them.

Another report named as Revolutionary Guard operatives several men who accompanied the Iranian envoy to his new digs. A Honduran newspaper in June reported that Iranians had entered that country without permission from Nicaragua…Iran’s latest move places it just a few porous borders from Texas, where illegal Nicaraguan laborers routinely travel.

Bensman adds: “on many minds is Argentina’s contention that Iran, using its embassy as cover, orchestrated two Hezbollah bombings of Israeli and Jewish community targets in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. This year, Argentina secured Interpol arrest warrants for five former Iranian officials, most of them who worked as diplomats in the Buenos Aires embassy.”

Of course Iran dismissed the charges by Argentina that it used its Buenos Aires embassy to plot and stage Hezbollah bombings as “a Zionist plot“. So that settles that. Nothing to worry about from Nicaragua and our new friends in the neighborhood.

The Iranian dissident group that exposed Natanz several years ago takes exception to a number of the NIE’s “high” and “moderate” confidence assessments, via WSJ:

According to the NCRI, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council decided to shut down its most important center for nuclear-weapons research in eastern Tehran, called Lavisan-Shian, in August 2003.

The NCRI, which claims to have intelligence sources inside Iran, said Lavisan was broken into 11 fields of research, including development of a nuclear trigger and of the technology to shape weapons-grade uranium into a warhead. But at the same meeting, the council decided to disperse pieces of the research to a number of locations around Iran, according to the NCRI. By the time international nuclear inspectors were allowed to get access to the Lavisan site, the buildings allegedly devoted to nuclear research had been torn down and the ground bulldozed.

“What the first part of the NIE says is right, that they halted their weaponization research in 2003,” said Mohammad Mohaddessin, foreign-affairs chief for the NCRI. “But the second part, that they stopped until at least the middle of 2007, is wrong. They scattered the weaponization program to other locations and restarted in 2004.”

Equipment was relocated first from Lavisan-Shian to another military compound in Tehran’s Lavisan district, the Center for Readiness and Advanced Technology, Mr. Mohaddessin said. Two devices designed to measure radiation levels were moved to Malek-Ashtar University in Isfahan and to a defense ministry hospital in Tehran, he said. Other equipment was sent to other locations the NCRI hasn’t been able to identify, he said.

“Their strategy was that if the IAEA found any one piece of this research program, it would be possible to justify it as civilian. But so long as it was all together, they wouldn’t be able to,” Mr. Mohaddessin said….

And, via Reuters: Asked how Washington’s entire intelligence community and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, could have missed evidence of this, Mohaddessin said: “Exactly as they missed Natanz (Iran’s uranium enrichment plant) and (the original) Lavisan.” Mohaddessin said the new Lavisan site hosted research on laser enrichment of uranium, while two whole-body counters — used for detecting radiation — were in use at a university in the central city of Isfahan and a hospital outside Tehran.

Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger obliquely referred to a potential strategy of sabotage in the leak of the NIE: “the deputy director for intelligence estimates explained the release of the NIE as follows: Publication was chosen because the estimate conflicted with public statements by top U.S. officials about Iran, and ‘we felt it was important to release this information to ensure that an accurate presentation is available.’ That may explain releasing the facts but not the sources and methods…”

So a dissident Iranian group insists that Iran’s nuclear program continues undiminished, while a dissident American group insists that the program has ceased. Is that a fair statment of the facts?

One started sounding reasonable. AP:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that it was “a step forward” that U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Tehran stopped developing its nuclear weapons program four years ago. Ahmadinejad told reporters that an “entirely different” situation between the United States and Iran could be created if more steps like the intelligence report followed.

“We consider this measure by the U.S. government a positive step. It is a step forward,” Ahmadinejad said. “If one or two other steps are taken, the issues we have in front of us will be entirely different and will lose their complexity, and the way will be open for the resolution of basic issues in the region and in dealings between the two sides,” he said.

Another started sounding irrational:

“Iran is dangerous,” Bush said after an Oval Office meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. “We believe Iran had a secret military weapons program, and Iran must explain to the world why they had such a program…Iran has an obligation to explain to the IAEA why they hid this program from them”…

A little late to be so insistent, if the horse left the barn four years ago. And if the 2007 NIE was itself wrong, then in a sense it is later still. The jury is still out on whether this entire episode has been clever or insipid. But we can’t say we have a good feeling about this.

Ynet:

“The manner in which the Americans relate to the intelligence report on Iran is similar to the way in which they viewed those reports they received during the Holocaust on railways transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death at Auschwitz,” Minister Yitzhak Cohen of Shas said during a security cabinet meeting Sunday morning on the Iranian nuclear issue.

“It can not be that (US President George W.) Bush is committed to peace as was declared at Annapolis, and then the Americans propagate such an intelligence report which contradicts the information we have proving Iran intends to obtain nuclear weapons,” Cohen said. “How can we rely on the Americans if they publish this report that emasculates what the world explicitly knows regarding Iran, and renders impotent the entire struggle against the Iranians?”

Minister Cohen asserted that the report must have been “ordered by someone who wants dialogue with Tehran” and formulated an historical analogy to express just how serious the situation is: “In the middle of the previous century the Americans received intelligence reports from Auschwitz on the packed trains going to the extermination camps. They claimed then that the railways were industrial. Their attitude today to the information coming out of Iran on the Iranians’ intention to produce a nuclear bomb reminds one of their attitude during the holocaust.”

Another vote for the grim interpretation of events.

David Horovitz describes the situation if there is no secret plan being acted out by Washington, but rather real, abrupt, and radical shifts of policy and / or tactics by the Bush administration on the 2002 Axis powers:

Ehud Olmert was notably expansive on pretty much every issue…Only on one issue did he clam up: his discussions with President Bush about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. He noted dryly that he and the president had been discussing this most critical of issues for a long time. He said vaguely that the latest conversations had been interesting. He emphatically did not repeat the assertion he frequently made until about a year ago — that he was confident Bush, one way or another, would ensure Iran did not attain nuclear weapons…

the reasons for his uncharacteristic restraint are now clear. On Monday, the US director of national intelligence released “key judgments” from an assessment backed by all 16 US spy agencies to the effect that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago and probably has not restarted it since. These startling findings, reversing an estimate two years ago that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons, were received and debated at the very top of the Bush administration two weeks ago, and plainly formed a centerpiece of the Bush-Olmert talks.

The fallout has been immense: delight in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been strengthened, his fiery defiance apparently vindicated; the immediate raising of new reservations against intensified sanctions on Iran from some of the already reluctant international players; an eruption of American criticism of Bush’s perceived exaggerated talk of the need to stop Iran or face World War III; a flood of expert analyses concluding that the report kills off any prospect of the Bush administration resorting to military intervention against Teheran in its final months; and open skepticism from Israel, where Defense Minister Ehud Barak has all but dismissed the best efforts of America’s intelligence agencies as plain wrong. No wonder Olmert preferred to stay out of Iranian territory when the Israeli press pack sought details last week.

We’re still confused. TIME quotes an Israeli cabinet member: “It looks like this ends the military option against Iran for now. Israel won’t attack alone. Iran’s facilities are too many and spread too far apart.” That would appear to be grim assessment, at least as far as Israel is concerned, if the current NIE is wrong, and the Iranian regime can be believed about their future plans for Israel.

On the other hand, there continue to be elements of this that are quite puzzling. An example is the characterization of Ehud Barak’s comments, this in the IHT:

“Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel’s own intelligence analysis indicates Iran has not stopped the program. ‘We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the Earth, even if it is from our greatest friend,’ Barak said.”

It would appear fairer to put Barak’s carefully phrased comment in a differrent category, more like a non-denial denial. He did not say that Iran had not stopped its program, but something more opaque. The more we peer through this looking glass, the less clear the picture.

UPDATE

The WSJ states pretty clearly the grim side of this issue:

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week’s intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode. In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and CIA, hanging Scooter Libby out to dry after bungling the response to Joseph Wilson’s bogus accusations, and so on. Mr. Bush has too often failed to settle internal disputes and enforce the results.

What’s amazing in this case is how the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy. The very first sentence of this week’s national intelligence estimate (NIE) is written in a way that damages U.S. diplomacy: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” Only in a footnote below does the NIE say that this definition of “nuclear weapons program” does “not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.”

In fact, the main reason to be concerned about Iran is that we can’t trust this distinction between civilian and military. That distinction is real in a country like Japan. But we know Iran lied about its secret military efforts until it was discovered in 2003, and Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, with 3,000 centrifuges, in defiance of binding U.N. resolutions. There is no civilian purpose for such enrichment. Iran has access to all the fuel it needs for civilian nuclear power from Russia at the plant in Bushehr. The NIE buries the potential danger from this enrichment, even though this enrichment has been the main focus of U.S. diplomacy against Iran.

In this regard, it’s hilarious to see the left and some in the media accuse Mr. Bush once again of distorting intelligence. The truth is the opposite. The White House was presented with this new estimate only weeks ago, and no doubt concluded it had little choice but to accept and release it however much its policy makers disagreed. Had it done otherwise, the finding would have been leaked and the Administration would have been assailed for “politicizing” intelligence. The result is that we now have NIE judgments substituting for policy in a dangerous way.

“the White House has allowed intelligence analysts to drive policy.” If that is indeed true, it is an argument for firing them all, the intelligence analysts and the those in the White House too.

If public sources are to be believed, something changed between July of this year and August in the US knowledge of Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities. In July one of the authors of the new NIE was saying the same old bellicose things to Congress. In August, President Bush said that new information was coming to light from Mike McConnell, but he didn’t know just what it was. Questions:

– (a) did the new information come from Iranian intelligence officer Ali Reza Asgari, only the latest general who had gone missing in March, and was speculated to have been a long time mole? (was the kidnapping of Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari a retaliatory measure?)

– (b) Most importantly, what pieces of information, and from whom, resulted in the mysterious but highly important clandestine raid on a joint Syrian/Korean/Iranian enterprise near the Syria Turkey border on September 6?

You should re-read the Times story of this raid on a clandestine Syrian nuclear cache (also excerpted here). It seems likely to us that a Syrian nuclear facility is in effect a proxy Iranian nuclear facility.

According to reports, the Israeli military had brought specimens of nuclear material from the facility to US intelligence in August, so that its provenance could be confirmed as North Korean. Then the surgical strike was carried out by Israel on September 6, with technological and logistical support (at a minimum) from the US, on the complex. (Were workers detained for interrogation? — that would seem to be an awfully good idea.) Had Israel and the US destroyed a critical location in Syria to which Iran had outsourced nuclear weapons activity after 2003?.

In any event, what was going on at this nuclear facility was so clandestine that no one complained about its obliteration or the foreign attacks involved, or just about anything else. It became the international incident that never happened. It would not surprise us in the least if the September 6 raid were the linchpin of the administration’s turnaround, wherein the US could have gained significant insights into the nuclear capabilities of Iran, Syria and North Korea, degraded those capabilities, perhaps rounded up some knowledgeable personnel, and acquired some genuine negotiating leverage on various issues. These elements would be sufficient that all of the — otherwise loud and bellicose — parties have kept mum about just what went down on September 6.

In that classic detective story, the dog that didn’t bark was a clue. When a pack of mad dogs doesn’t bark, that might be even more than a clue.

UPDATE

On the other hand, maybe the current NIE is just wrong, September 6 was just a raid, and nothing much has changed. John Bolton: “Rarely has a document from the supposedly hidden world of intelligence had such an impact as the National Intelligence Estimate released this week. Rarely has an administration been so unprepared for such an event. And rarely have vehement critics of the ‘intelligence community’ on issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction reversed themselves so quickly…Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than ‘intelligence’ analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it.” HT: Powerline

Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for Analysis Thomas Fingar, one of the three authors of the most recent Iran NIE, said the very opposite of the current findings in July 2007, in a report to Congress:

Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons — despite its international obligations and international pressure.

A few months ago Fingar said one thing; now he apparently has the opposite opinion. While we continue to favor the view that, on balance, there appears to be some strategy at work behind the recent moves by the Bush administration, it is very difficult to explain coherently the 180 degree turnaround in opinion about Iran’s capabilities and intentions so recently put forward by very senior members of the intelligence community. (HT: Michael Goldfarb)

Like you, we’re trying to figure out what is going on with the US and Iran after the stunning news yesterday regarding Iran and the flip-flop NIE. NIE’s are an iffy business. Some of the critiques of various NIE’s over the decades and the people who prepare them are both funny and scary. A NIE has a pretty good chance of being wrong, without even adding bad intentions or ideology into the mix. And the anti-Bush agendas of some of the NIE authors are troubling. These are important things to bear in mind.

Having said that, on balance today we think that the release of the revised NIE is part of a strategy. We don’t necessarily go as far as the worthies at Stratfor, who think a deal’s already been done between the US and Iran: “The NIE indicates that Washington and Tehran have made significant progress in this back-channel back-and-forth, and that the positive signs coming out of Iraq lately have culminated in some sort of agreement.”

However, events in Iraq have indeed been promising, and often detrimental to Iranian interests, giving Iran perhaps reason to cut a deal. And the mysterious and flawlessly executed September 6 raid by Israel and the US on the Syrian/Korean/Iranian nuclear facility seems possibly to have significance in these events (was an important part of an outsourced Iranian nuclear effort destroyed in the course of one night?) But finally it was President Bush’s own words that have brought us to today’s position, subject to further revision of course. You will note in these remarks from his press conference the President’s offering certain carrots to Iran, as well as recalling in significant detail the specifics from four years ago. This is a man who is clearly engaged on the issue of Iran:

there is a better way forward for the Iranians. Now, in 2003, the Iranian government began to come to the table in discussions with the EU-3, facilitated by the United States. In other words, we said to the EU-3, we’ll support your efforts to say to the Iranians, you have a choice to make: You can continue to do policy that will isolate you, or there’s a better way forward, so that it was the sticks-and-carrots approach.

You might remember the United States said at that point in time, we’ll put the WTO on the table for consideration, or we’ll help you with spare parts for your airplanes. It was all an attempt to take advantage of what we thought was a more open-minded Iranian regime at the time — a willingness of this regime to talk about a way forward. And then the Iranians had elections, and Ahmadinejad announced that — to the IAEA that he was going to — this is after, by the way, the Iranians had suspended their enrichment program — he said, we’re going to stop the suspension, we’ll start up the program again. And that’s where we are today.

My point is, is that there is a better way forward for the Iranians. There has been a moment during my presidency in which diplomacy provided a way forward for the Iranians. And our hope is we can get back on that path again.

So President Bush is clearly signaling an openness to new negotiations with Iran — those negotiations that Stratfor believes have already been consummated, at least in broad terms. (And clearly the 2005 NIE was a stumbling block to those negotiations; it was eliminated in the most classic of Washington ways, by simply being declared inoperative.) But was perhaps most interesting about what Bush said was an apparent outright falsehood in response to a reporter’s question:

David, I don’t want to contradict an august reporter such as yourself, but I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze. Why would you take time to analyze new information? One, you want to make sure it’s not disinformation. You want to make sure the piece of intelligence you have is real. And secondly, they want to make sure they understand the intelligence they gathered: If they think it’s real, then what does it mean? And it wasn’t until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.

Nearly every word of that paragraph does not ring true, and appears absurd on top of it. The director of the DNI and formerly the NSA says he has “new information” on Iran’s nuclear ambitions that will be reduced to a NIE report, and neither party discusses it? And the rest of the paragraph makes no sense unless they had in fact discussed what the findings were. It sounds like a cover story, and a poor one at that for a man who has been deeply engaged on the issue of Iran and WMD for years. The President tortured plausible deniability until it became Implausible Deniability. But why bother to try to create deniability for the President at all, unless the decision to go public with this NIE at this time was part of a larger superstructure of negotiations with Iran that had already been put in place by an executive decision at the highest level.

It is difficult to overstate the policy and institutional significance of the new NIE report (excerpted below) declaring with “high confidence” that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. For starters, the new report is a conscious and stunning, 180 degree turn from the previous NIE of 2005. That 2005 report stated “with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons.” You can get a bad case of whiplash from all the “high confidence” in the US intelligence community. If that community is possessed of integrity, some very convincing information must have come to light in the last two years.

Moreover, the new report seems totally out of step with diplomatic initiatives of the very recent past. Indeed, it was only a few days ago that things seemed to be heading for some kind of showdown, with Iran taking a new, ultra hard line, diplomats calling Iran’s posture a “disaster,” and even China getting on board the sanctions bandwagon. But now everything seems to have changed.

Thus, one main question about the report is determining whether (a) a strategy is being acted out but not announced by the Bush administration, or (b) dangerous bumbling and internecine warfare is taking place among the administration and the intelligence community.

We note certain of the commentary in the mainstream media that surmises that previous Bush policies have been undercut by this new report. Here’s the Washington Post:

A Blow to Bush’s Tehran Policy — President Bush got the world’s attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

The new intelligence report released yesterday not only undercut the administration’s alarming rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear ambitions but could also throttle Bush’s effort to ratchet up international sanctions and take off the table the possibility of preemptive military action before the end of his presidency.

And the New York Times:

An administration that had cited Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as the rationale for an aggressive foreign policy — as an attempt to head off World War III, as President Bush himself put it only weeks ago — now has in its hands a classified document that undercuts much of the foundation for that approach…

Seldom do those agencies vindicate irascible foreign leaders like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who several weeks ago said there was “no evidence” that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, dismissing the American claims as exaggerated.

The biggest change, though, could be its effect on President Bush’s last year in office, as well as on the campaign to replace him. Until Monday, 2008 seemed to be a year destined to be consumed, at least when it comes to foreign policy, by the prospects of confrontation with Iran…

The White House struggled to portray the estimate as a validation of Mr. Bush’s strategy, a contention that required swimming against the tide of Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Cheney’s occasionally apocalyptic language.

We suppose that the Post and the Times could be correct, and that President Bush has been blindsided and undercut by the report, and that seems possible but somewhat unlikely to us. One of the things most striking about the NIE is that it must have taken a massive amount of coordination for a significant period of time, and that its conclusions must have been known considerably in advance of its being published. Certainly, for example, President Bush must have made his World War III comment on October 17 knowing what the NIE would say; indeed he knew what the findings were months before the formal November 28 briefing.

Perhaps (as with the much derided and ridiculed Annapolis conference?) things may not be as they seem on the surface. Is it possible that a strategy is being acted out and not announced? Stratfor certainly thinks so:

There are only two reasons the U.S. government would choose to issue a report that publicly undermines the past four years of its foreign policy: a deal has been struck, or one is close enough that an international diplomatic coalition is no longer perceived as critical. This level of coordination across all branches of U.S. intelligence could not happen without the knowledge and approval of the CIA director, the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser and the president himself. This is not a power play; this is the real deal.

The full details of any deal are unlikely to be made public any time soon because the U.S. and Iranian publics probably are not yet ready to consider each other as anything short of foes. But the deal…will allow for a permanent deployment of U.S. forces in Iraq to provide minimal national security for Iraq, but not in large enough numbers to be able to launch a sizable attack against Iran. It will allow for the training and equipping of the Iraqi military forces so that Iraq can defend itself, but not so much that it could boast a meaningful offensive force. It will integrate Iranian intelligence and military personnel into the U.S. effort so there are no surprises on either side…

The Iranians do not want the Americans to assist in the rise of another militaristic Sunni power in Baghdad — the last one inflicted 1 million Iranian casualties during 1980-1988 war. The United States does not want to see Iran dominate Iraq and use it as a springboard to control Arabia; that would put some 20 million barrels per day of oil output under a single power…

As powerful as Iran is, it is the runt of the neighborhood when one looks past the political lines on maps and takes a more holistic view. Sunnis outnumber Shia many times over, and Arabs outnumber Persians. Indeed, Persians make up only roughly half of Iran’s population, making Tehran consistently vulnerable to outside influence. Simply put, the United States and Iran — because of the former’s strategy and the latter’s circumstances — are natural allies…

A United States that does not need to contain Iran is a United States that can leverage an Iran that very much wishes to be leveraged. That potentially puts the Arabs on the defensive on topics ranging from investment to defense. The Arabs tend to get worried whenever the Americans or the Iranians look directly at them; that is nothing compared to the emotions that will swirl the first time that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. President George W. Bush shake hands…the heavy lifting has already been done and some level of understanding on Iraq’s future already is in place. All that remains is working out the “details.”

We tend to think that there indeed is a strategy being acted out but not announced, and perhaps it does involve a deal on Iraq, as well as a balancing of American interests among the Sunni and Shiite worlds. It’s too soon to make any final judgments. And of course, given the performance of the administration on a number of other issues, including previous WMD estimates, there is always the possibility that this is just a big screw-up. Haaretz:

The noise that was heard last night in Tehran, according to credible reports, was a hearty Persian laugh after looking at the U.S. intelligence service’s website. The document’s eight pages…enable the Ayatollas’ nuclear and operations officials and the heads of the Revolutionary Guards to reach this soothing conclusion - from their point of view: The Americans have no understanding of what is really happening in Iran’s nuclear program. They have no solid information, they have no high-level agents and they have nothing more than a mix of guesswork and chatter. The dissemblance and concealment have succeeded, and the real dispute is not between Washington and Tehran, but within the U.S. administration itself…

The CIA is so angry with Bush, it seems, that it is ready to go to great lengths in order to help another president. Not Ahmadinejad, God forbid, but the next president in Washington. The result is likely to be the opposite: Higher Iranian militancy along with Bush and Cheney’s determination to act - regardless of what the intelligence agencies say.

It is just too early to say whether alternative (a) or (b) above is correct. If (a) is correct, it shouldn’t take too long for events to play out, and some framework or agreements to be announced. If (b) is correct, and the NIE is a political document, possibly deeply flawed in its judgments, the consequences could be grave, and not just for the current administration.

UPDATE

f course, it is possible that the revised estimates have been made on evidence as flimsy as intercepted notes of a few meetings and the reinterpretation of some data from a laptop. Heaven help us if that’s what is really going on.

Reuters

U.S. intelligence has determined that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but believes it is continuing to develop technical capabilities that could be used for building a bomb, a government report said on Monday. The latest National Intelligence Estimate released by the Bush administration also said Iran would likely be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon “sometime during the 2010-2015 time-frame.”

UPDATE

Some text from the report

It was over three years ago that discussions of a point of no return on Iran’s capabilities began to surface. This new news is an absolutely stunning development with far ranging consequences. Stratfor speculated:

Perhaps the Iranians are ready to deal, and so decided to open up their facility for the Americans to see. Still, regardless of what the Iranians opened up, some would have argued that the United States was given a tour only of what the Iranians wanted them to see. There is a mention in the report that any Iranian program would be covert rather than overt, and that might reflect such concerns. However, all serious nuclear programs are always covert until they succeed. Nothing is more vulnerable than an incomplete nuclear program.

We are struck by the suddenness of the NIE report. Explosive new intelligence would have been more hotly contested. We suspect two things. First, the intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program consisted of a great number of pieces, many of which were inherently ambiguous and could be interpreted in multiple ways. Second, the weight of evidence for there being an Iranian nuclear program was shaded by the political proclivities of the administration, which saw the threat of a U.S. strike as intimidating Iran, and the weapons program discussion as justifying it. Third, the change in political requirements on both sides made a new assessment useful. This last has certainly been the case in all things Middle Eastern these past few days on issues ranging from the Palestinians to Syria to U.S. forces in Iraq — so why should this issue be any different?

If this thesis is correct, then we should start seeing some movement on Iraq between the United States and Iran. Certainly the major blocker from the U.S. side has been removed and the success of U.S. policies of late should motivate the Iranians. In any case, the entire framework for U.S.-Iranian relations would appear to have shifted, and with it the structure of geopolitical relations throughout the region.

Of course, one question lingers above all others: why is this new intelligence inherently any more reliable than yesterday’s? Those who have suspicions of this nature may ponder them with Thomas Joscelyn and Norman Podhoretz.

Reuters reports on a new warning from Iran that notably included the Q word:

Iran warned the United States on Wednesday it would find itself in a “quagmire deeper than Iraq” if it attacked the Islamic state…The warning by the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, a target of new U.S. sanctions announced last week, added to angry rhetoric…”If the enemies show inexperience and want to invade Islamic Iran, they will receive a strong slap from Iran,” Jafari said…”The enemy knows that if it attacks Iran it, will be trapped in a quagmire deeper than Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will have to withdraw with defeat”…

Jafari should be advised that the use of the Q word, Quagmire, is not a good omen for him. Though it has a certain resonance in American political circles, and indeed more than that if there is mission creep from military action to nation building, the median distance between the appearance of Quagmire in the US press and actual military defeat of an enemy is less than two weeks.

Linda Heard in Gulf News excoriates Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani. One of the interesting things about the article is that it reads almost equally well as an indictment or endorsement of Giuliani, depending on which perspective you bring to the table:

In recent months the mask has come off. In short, Giuliani is no benign patriotic do-gooder. He’s a hawkish, sabre-rattling, pro-Israel, nationalistic neocon. A clue to Giuliani’s leanings emerged during the visit of Prince Al Walid Bin Talal to Ground Zero in October 2001. Bearing a $10 million donation for disaster relief, the Saudi prince suggested the US reexamine its Middle East policies and adopt a balanced stance towards Palestinian aspirations. Giuliani’s response was to hand back the cheque…

Giuliani makes no bones about the fact he would use military force to set-back Iran’s nuclear programme. In September, he promised to use America’s military might to prevent Iran pursuing its nuclear ambitions should he be elected president…

Giuliani is talking tough when it comes to Pakistan, too. He recently urged the president to be more aggressive in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden within Pakistan even if such a move would result in alienating the Pakistani government. On Iraq, Giuliani has been consistently gung ho. He supported the war from the outset, backed the so-called surge and believes American troops should stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. And if my worst fears are realised and Giuliani moves into the White House there will be no Palestinian state for the foreseeable future either. He has declared in no uncertain terms his antipathy towards a two-state solution because a Palestinian entity would “support terrorism” and threaten US security…

in 1995, he banned the former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat from attending events held in New York to celebrate the UN’s 50th anniversary and ordered his removal from a concert held at the Lincoln Centre. It’s not surprising that a panel of eight Israeli experts assembled by the daily Ha’aretz determined Giuliani is the best presidential candidate for Israel…His team, says the [NYT] article, includes “Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran as soon as it is logically possible; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinising American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin who has written in favour of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination”. Giuliani recently took the Democrats to task for avoiding use of the term “Islamic terrorism” during four debates; an omission he describes as taking political correctness to extremes.

A Giuliani presidential tenure would also be extremely bad news for Americans who value the few civil liberties they have left. He strongly backs the controversial Patriot Act; is an advocate for wire-tapping and domestic spying, and isn’t sure whether “water-boarding” or sleep deprivation should be considered as “torture”.

In a letter to a blog, Ms. Heard had some other observations on the so-called “democratic” and “free” United States, as well as on the relations among the major religions, which might also provide a little context for her criticisms of Mr. Giuliani.

For the record, and amusingly, Giuliani foreign policy adviser, Professor Charles Hill of Yale noted: “I don’t know of a single person on the campaign besides Norman who is a self-identified, card carrying member of this neocon cabal with its secret handshakes.”

There are signs that things are coming to a head with Iran, according to Caroline Glick:

when faced with a real possibility that the US or Israel or a combination of states are ready and willing to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, elBaradei seeks to undermine them by questioning the salience of the threat. ElBaradei’s statement of course was not made in a vacuum. It came against the backdrop of an increasing unanimity of opinion among top Bush administration members that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. Last Thursday, President George W. Bush said that a nuclear armed Iran would foment World War III.

The next day, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who until recently was known to oppose military action against Iran and to minimize the danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute to the US, said at a press briefing that a nuclear-armed Iran would likely spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and was liable to foment a major war. Gates added that in light of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stated desire to destroy Israel, “Washington couldn’t trust that Iran would handle nuclear weapons responsibly.” Standing next to Gates last Thursday was Admiral Michael Mullen, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen rebuffed assertions that the US campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have strained military resources to the point that the US today cannot mount an effective campaign against Iran. As he put it, “From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve” to mount an attack against Iran’s nuclear installations.

While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues to champion negotiations with the mullahs, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday Rice acknowledged that “the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge for American security interests in the Middle East and possibly around the world.” And then there is Israel. It appears that both the IDF and the government are earnestly preparing for the possibility of war. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s sudden visits to Moscow, Paris and London, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s trip to Washington this week were all devoted to the Iranian nuclear project…it seems reasonable to assume that Olmert and Barak did not fly to those foreign capitals empty-handed. Indeed by some accounts they brought with them new and incriminating information regarding the current status of Iran’s nuclear program…

it is important to note Barak’s crash-program aimed at purchasing and deploying missile defense systems capable of covering all of Israel as quickly as possible, and last week’s media reports that US, British and Australian commandos are fighting Iranian forces inside of Iran close to the Iran-Iraq border by Basra.

Assuming that all of these developments do in fact mean that the day is quickly approaching where Iran’s nuclear installations come under attack, a discussion of some of the likely outcomes of such a strike seems in order….Iran will direct a counter-strike against Israel that will include a ballistic missile attack carried out jointly by Iran, Syria and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Furthermore, Iran will direct Hizbullah terror cells throughout the world to carry out attacks against Jewish and American targets.

A little more on Iran’s possible response via Stratfor:

Iran has commissioned Imad Fayez Mugniyah, a notorious Hezbollah leader, to organize cells of Shiite operatives in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to fight against the United States and pro-U.S. Arabs in the event of war against Iran, a source said Oct. 25. Trainees from the Persian Gulf region reportedly have arrived in Lebanon and are conducting drills in the Bekaa Valley…Mugniyah is spending most of his time these days in Lebanon and has in many ways overshadowed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as the organization’s strongman…

Iran has a clear interest in raising the cost of a U.S. attack against the Islamic Republic by demonstrating its ability to retaliate through Shiite militant assets throughout the region, giving the Gulf states something to consider during their discussions with the U.S. defense officials who are seeking their cooperation. A U.S. attack against Iran would spark Hezbollah attacks against Israel from Lebanon, as well as a series of attacks by these Shiite operatives against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Iraq — carrying serious repercussions for the global energy market. Qatar, which has followed a much more measured approach in dealing with Iran, was notably not on the list of countries where Shia were being picked up to train in Mugniyah’s camp.

Iran is in the deciding stages regarding how it wants to deal with the United States over Iraq. Its options range from entering into serious negotiations with Washington to sticking to its guns and reaching out to the Russians for some short-term security guarantees. In any case, Iran has no solid guarantees against a U.S. attack and needs a good contingency plan. If Iran is going to be taken down by the United States, it intends to try to bring the Arab neighborhood down with it.

It would be unwise to judge prematurely what is being said in certain meetings. Perhaps the clock is ticking toward a showdown a little faster than many of us think.

Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek sees Iran as far less a threat than some others do:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn’t have a nuclear button yet and won’t for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can’t be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a “residual rationality,” he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad…

Mr. Zakaria may be correct of course. It’s hard to know for sure. However, his case would be strengthened a bit (a) if we did not live in an age characterized by a particular brand of asymmetrical warfare; and (b) if Mr. Ahmadinejad would be a tad less millenarian and paranoid in his rhetoric, as well as less insistent on revolutionary purity.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to avoid having 9-11 turned into “another false idol like the Holocaust”. He’s all for “examining what really happened in this incident”:

9/11 has led to many significant changes. It was used as a pretext to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the reason for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people. It is only natural for us to respond in an appropriate manner. I wanted to visit there last year, but there was no time for that. So I decided to visit there this year to pay my respect to the casualties and convey my sympathy to the families.

I also wanted to raise several questions and express my views. I wanted to say that in my opinion, this incident is the result of the mismanagement of the world, and the result of the inhuman management of the world. Why did such an incident take place? We need to get to the root causes. We don’t want them to turn this incident, in 20 years’ time, into another false idol like the Holocaust, which they would use as a pretext to kill peoples, and prevent anybody from opening this [Pandora’s] box and examining what really happened in this incident. They might turn 9/11 into something sacred, and whoever does not accept it would be considered an infidel, whereas whoever accepts it would have to accept all the ensuing crimes.

In any event, we must express our views. I believe that this way, we would have formed cordial relations with the American people, and could have opened this issue up for discussion. Well, this is exactly what they want to prevent…

This preventing of “discussion” seems to be a recurring theme of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who appears to see conspiracies all around him, preventing the various important truths of the world from getting out. There are some sound reasons for thinking that Mr. Ahmadinejad and some of the clerisy around him may be less susceptible to the traditional rules of deterrence than was seen in the Cold War.

The philosopher André Glucksmann thinks about terrorism and the dangers of asymmetrical warfare in City Journal (HT: LGF) in a piece called “From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb”:

The only thing that counts is the intention to wipe out random victims. The systematic resort to the car bomb, to suicide attacks, randomly killing as many passersby as possible, defines a specific style of engagement. When, after Saddam Hussein’s fall, terrorist attacks multiplied in Iraq, they spared no one, especially not Iraqis: schoolchildren in buses or on sidewalks, men and women at the market, the faithful at prayer.

When the naive, the falsely naive, and the downright evil blur categories in support of their ideological prejudices and christen the killer of innocents a “resistance fighter,” more lucid minds disclose a different landscape. Consider an editorial published in a Lebanese paper on August 20, 2003, the day after a bomb-laden cement truck destroyed the United Nations’ center of operations in Baghdad: “Yesterday’s operation against the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations exemplifies this mentality of destruction. Expel all mediators. Banish every international organization. Let things collapse. Let electricity and water be cut off, and the pumping of oil cease. Let theft prevail. Let universities and schools close. Let businesses fail. Let civic life cease. And at the end of the day the occupation will fail. ‘No!’ protests Joseph Samara, ‘at the end of the road, there will be a catastrophe for Iraq. . . . The attack against the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad belongs to another world: it is a form of nihilism, of absurdity, and of chaos hiding behind fallacious slogans, which proves the convergence among those responsible for this action, their intellectual limitation and their criminal behavior.’ ”

We have entered another world. The threat of a new Ground Zero, small or great, advances behind a mask. The human bomb claims the power to strike anywhere, by any means, at any time, spreading his nocturnal threat over the globe, invisible and thus unpredictable, clandestine and thus untraceable. The terrorist without borders makes us think about him always, everywhere. Without an accidental delay on the tracks—just a few minutes—the pulverization of two trains in Madrid, at the Atocha station, would have claimed 10,000 victims, three times more than in Manhattan. Then there was London. Whose turn is next? Each of us waits for the next explosion.

The business of terrorists, after all, is to terrorize—so said Lenin, an uncontested master in the field. The ultimate refinement lies in the inversion of responsibility. Operating instructions: I take hostages, I cut off their heads, I show them on video; those who beg for mercy must address themselves to their governments, who alone are to blame for my crimes: my hubris is their problem…

global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,” the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,” the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred.

Of course, the most horrific things that Glucksman thinks of may never in fact take place. The Human Bomb may prove to be a self-limiting phenomenon. But it would also appear fair to say that the weight of human history seems to be on the side of “if an awful thing can happen, it probably will.” That is the danger after all, and the bad guys use their weakness versus the great powers as a strategic weapon. As we have said, the logic of nuclear terrorism is that retaliation becomes the crime.

In a speech the other day Vice President Cheney said, pretty definitively it would seem, “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” AP:

“Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions…the regime continues to practice delay and deceit in an obvious effort to buy time…We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon”

The AP story gives the last word to another perspective: “Last month the Senate approved a resolution urging the State Department to label Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., said he feared the measure could be interpreted as authorizing a military strike in Iran, calling it Cheney’s ‘fondest pipe dream’.”

We have previously mentioned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mentor, the hardline Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Messbah-Yazdi. Here is some more, via Pajamas:

One of the most powerful figures in this despotism, and one of the least known in the West, is the hardline Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Messbah-Yazdi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s spiritual advisor. To understand the power and influence of Messbah-Yazdi, one needs to learn a bit about the Hojjatieh sect of Shi’ite Islam. The Hojjatiyeh movement was founded in the early ‘50s by Mahmoud Halabi, a cleric of Arab ancestry and Iranian nationality. The movement believes in the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, Mehdi (a.k.a The Mahdi, the 12th Imam or Sawheb’o’zaman, which means the lord and master of all time). The Mahdi is the 12th descendant of the prophet Mohammad, whose reappearance is predicted for a time when the Muslims are suffering from disaster and i