Depending on your Twitter addiction, you either went to sleep or woke up with the news that America had assassinated Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds force. Suleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran, and the driver of its activities in the...
Colin Kahl sent me a list of recent work he's done on the US-Iran standoff. The first is a CNAS report, Risk and Rivalry: Iran, Israel, and the Bomb (PDF). The abstract:As Iran's nuclear progress...
This is cross-posted from the University of Texas website.As the March 6 Super Tuesday Republican primary looms, foreign policy issues understandably are likely to play a marginal role in the...
The CFR public-relations office certainly thinks they've got a winner in the "attack Iran debate." Here's a video of the recent "live" debate between Colin and Matt on the subject.
Conservatives have a fundamental misunderstanding of appeasement. While it should refer to specific concessional policies offered to aggressors in order to avoid war, conservatives use the phrase haphazardly as a political bludgeon against domestic foes who favor negotiation and arms control instruments over more hawkish policies. The inevitable comparison is to Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler.Everyone knows how that turned out.In 1988, even conservative icon Ronald Reagan was attacked by right wing critics for his successful negotiation of an Intermediate Nuclear Force agreement with...
Political Scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received a lot of heat for their recent work about the power of the Israeli lobby inside the United States.Mearsheimer and Walt raised issues that are rarely discussed in the United States. Indeed. some describe this topic as "the third rail" of US foreign policy debate.Now that the power of "the Lobby" has been made part of the US public debate, Israel's nuclear weapons program should also be scrutinized more publicly. Ordinarily, that subject is taboo. Lew Butler (who used to chair the Ploughshares Fund) explained in an op-ed in the SF...
Last week, in the much-maligned Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, Senator Hillary Clinton said that she would greatly expand the US nuclear umbrella in the Middle East: Well, in fact, George [Stephanopoulos], I think that we should be looking to create an umbrella of deterrence that goes much further than just Israel. Of course I would make it clear to the Iranians that an attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation from the United States, but I would do the same with other countries in the region.You know, we are at a very dangerous point with Iran. The Bush policy has failed. Iran...
By now you've probably read about the new NIE saying that Iran almost certainly halted its nuclear weapons program some time in 2003. There are, of course, bound to be people who disagree with this assessment--after all, it is an "estimate", which is another way of saying "our best guess". Although the report indicates varying levels of confidence associated with each piece of the report, it's not like we know for sure. Disagreeing with some parts of the report (or even the entire report) is a legitimate position.However, I am disappointed that the New York Times would published an op-ed...
[UPDATED -- see last paragraphs below the fold, which take into account Bush's latest comments on Iran.]Startling news out of the American intelligence community today:Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a [nuclear] weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”Hmm. After months, even years, of "Ahmadinejad, like all of those people, is a crazy ideologue who does what he does because he hates our freedoms," maybe things are changing a little bit? Maybe we're on a track towards regarding Ahmadinejad to be -- wait for it -- human,...
I'm curious what our readers make of the newly declassified part of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE): "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" [pdf]. In particular, its claim that:We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear...
Dan Drezner calls this piece in today's New York Times "the story that will occupy the blogosphere for today -- Baghdad is safer."Then, Dan excerpts a bit of the story by Damien Cave and Alissa J. Rubin that makes a point I've been stressing since General Petraeus made his optimistic report in September. Fewer Iraqis are dying because they fled the war zone: About 20,000 Iraqis have gone back to their Baghdad homes, a fraction of the more than 4 million who fled nationwide, and the 1.4 million people in Baghdad who are still internally displaced, according to a recent Iraqi Red Crescent...
I'm late in commenting on Joshua Muravchik's long defense of neconservatism in the October issue of Commentary (republished by the Wall Street Journal here). If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so. Muravchik outlines the basic tenets of neoconservatism, explains why neocons find the war on terror so compelling (he compares it explicitly to the long cold war struggle against an evil empire), and defends the decision to attack Iraq. He also claims -- like many other neocons -- that the US must confront Iran.Muravchik's punchline certainly attempts to justify all the ink he spills. In...