National Security Advisor Jim Jones declared in a speech to the Atlantic Council that the recent testing of a nuclear device and firing of Taepodong missiles by North Korea “are not an imminent threat” to the United States or the regions because “they have a long way to go” in perfecting the technology to weaponize their nukes.  He added, however that “The imminent threat is the proliferation of that type of technology to other countries and potentially terrorist organizations and non-state actors.”

Rick Moran and Ed Morrissey both challenge this statement in colorful terms while  Stephen Walt, writing a day before Jones’ talk, agrees wholeheartedly.

North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests are hardly good news, but they don’t justify going into full panic mode. We already knew that North Korea had a nuclear weapons capability, and though this latest test seems to have been slightly more powerful than the initial one, it doesn’t imply a qualitative shift in the strategic environment. North Korea’s defiance is annoying, perhaps, but it’s not like the act of testing a nuclear weapon tells us something new about their regime. And let’s not forget that the United States has tested a nuclear weapons 1030 times (plus another 24 joint tests with Great Britain), while Pyongyang has tested exactly twice.

In my New Atlanticist piece, “Jones: North Korea Nukes ‘Not an Imminent Threat’,” I defend the Walt-Jones position.

Look, it’s frustrating to watch rogue regimes developing nuclear weapons.  After railing about an Axis of Evil and pledging repeatedly that “We have to have policies that prevent the world’s most dangerous people from having the world’s most dangerous weapons,” the Bush administration left office with the 2/3 of said Axis not under American occupation either possessing or in the final stages of developing nuclear weapons.  Indeed, Bush proclaimed Kim’s regime “evil” in late 2002, it was well on its way to a nuclear device by early 2003, and it successful tested its first one in late 2006.  It wasn’t because Bush’s team was insufficiently tough, dedicated, or competent but because being The World’s Sole Remaining Superpower^TM comes with much less control than people think.

Much more at the link.

“[I]f Pakistan collapses, the U.S. military is primed to enter the country and secure as many of those weapons as it can, according to U.S. officials,” report’s TIME’s Mark Thompson burying his lede three paragraphs into a story whose headline asks, “Does Pakistan’s Taliban Surge Raise a Nuclear Threat?”

As I explain in my New Atlanticist piece “U.S. Prepared to Secure Pakistani Nukes,” the answer is a qualified No.  Still, the fact that we’re even asking — and that our military is even considering the remote possibility of needing to do something about it — isn’t comforting.

I’m a couple of episodes behind on Battlestar Galactica, preferring to have multiple episodes queued up to watch sequentially, so have seen only the beginning of the plot line in question.   Nonetheless, there’s a very interesting cross-blog debate on the merits of the alliance between the humans and Cylons and the rearguard actions to undermine same by Robert Farley (taking the anti-alliance position) and Jonathan Last (making the pro-alliance case).

Obviously, the discussion is more enjoyable if you’re a fan of the show.  But, as with all good sci-fi, the questions are really allegories for real life.  In this case, there are at least loose connections with the War on Terror, the Iranian nukes debate, and our relationships with Russia and Pakistan.

Israel is taking steps to prepare for a military strike against Iran, Steve Gutkin reports for the AP.

Israel is building up its strike capabilities amid growing anxiety over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and appears confident that a military attack would cripple Tehran’s atomic program, even if it can’t destroy it.

Such talk could be more threat than reality. However, Iran’s refusal to accept Western conditions is worrying Israel as is the perception that Washington now prefers diplomacy over confrontation with Tehran.

The Jewish state has purchased 90 F-16I fighter planes that can carry enough fuel to reach Iran, and will receive 11 more by the end of next year. It has bought two new Dolphin submarines from Germany reportedly capable of firing nuclear-armed warheads — in addition to the three it already has. And this summer it carried out air maneuvers in the Mediterranean that touched off an international debate over whether they were a “dress rehearsal” for an imminent attack, a stern warning to Iran or a just a way to get allies to step up the pressure on Tehran to stop building nukes.

According to foreign media reports, Israeli intelligence is active inside Iranian territory. Israel’s military censor, who can impose a range of legal sanctions against journalists operating in the country, does not permit publication of details of such information in news reports written from Israel.

I continue to be skeptical of such reports, which we’ve been getting for going on three years now. Still, I’m ever-so-slightly less skeptical about reports of Israeli strikes than American ones.

Amusingly, if that’s the right word, Dave Schuler closed our just-concluded episode of OTB Radio (”Hamdan, Cheeks, and Paris Hilton”) encouraging listeners to “keep an eye out” on Iran after the breakdown of talks today.

Barack Obama’s speech to the throngs gathered at the Berlin Tiergarten Park was a solid effort, saying most of the right things about the Transatlantic relationship along with some unfortunate banalities.

The allusions to our shared history with Western Europe in general and Germany in particular were well done. The reminder of our efforts in the Berlin Airlift and helping rebuild a defeated foe, turning an enemy into one of our most reliable Allies, was important. This is speechmaking at its finest:

[I]n the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won…The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty…People of the world, look at Berlin!”

It simultaneously butters up the audience and reminds them that sacrifice and hardship are necessary to achieve important goals. And “duty” is a word not heard enough these days.

Steven Erlanger calls it “a tone poem” but laments that it “was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if he becomes president — issues ranging from Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on American poultry imports.” That’s a ridiculous criticism, however. The 200,000-odd assembled Germans were not there to hear about such mundane details. This was a rally to introduce Obama to Europe, not a summit meeting. And Steve Benen is right to point out how much ground was covered, at least at the ephemeral level: “Climate change, loose nukes, counter-terrorism, AIDS, poverty, free speech, religious liberty, Darfur, drug trafficking, rule of law — it was all in there.”

Tom Maguire rightly takes exception to Obama’s early applause line, “I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” He lists several notable black Americans who have spoken in Berlin, ranging from Paul Robeson to Martin Luther King to Jesse Jackson to Colin Powell and Condi Rice. It’s decades past being remarkable that a black man can get his voice heard.

Nor can I disagree with TigerHawk in wishing obama had gone beyond “The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation” and pointedly called on the Germans to loosen their rules of engagement so that the relatively small force they’re contributing to the NATO effort could actually do some good. Then again, I’m not sure a feel good stump rally is the place for that sort of thing.

On the other hand, I find Nora McAlvanah’s criticism of the “This is our time” line rather baffling. He’s campaigning about the next four years, not the instant of the speech. And, surely, it’s Germans’ time, too. While an American president’s job, first and foremost, is to see to American interests, there’s nothing wrong — and much good — in taling about “our” shared interests with our Allies.

Ed Morrissey and Donald Douglas question Obama’s cancellation of a visit to the American military hospital in Landstuhl so that he could, if Jake Tapper is right, do the tourist thing and raise some campaign cash. The campaign’s explanation that “it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign” makes no sense. Why not? And, besides, he already visited troops in Afghanistan and Iraq on this same trip. And, as Ed notes, the speech had the line “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” A bizarre choice in what was mostly a brilliantly executed tour. [UPDATE: All indications now are that it wasn't Obama's choice but the Pentagon's. ]

That line about “citizen of the world” is catching the most flak. Daniel Larison calls it “just the most prominent example of how Obama blundered in this speech.”

Obama misjudges the public mood here in the U.S. quite badly if he thinks that “this is the moment” when Americans are interested in tearing down walls and embracing globalisation.

Maybe so. But tear down the walls and embrace globalization we must. And, fortunately, since John McCain is four-square in favor of doing those things, too, that’s going to stay on the agenda regardless of the outcome in November.

Perhaps the silliest thing I’ve seen come out of this overseas tour so far is a Rasmussen poll (taken before the rally) published under the title “63% Say Trip Does Not Make Obama More Fit to be President.”

While Barack Obama has touted his travel to Afghanistan and Iraq as a “fact-finding” trip, 63% of Americans do not believe it makes the Democratic candidate any more qualified to be president.

A new Rasmussen Reports national survey, taken Monday night, also finds that less than a third (32%) think Obama will learn from his trip to Iraq. Forty percent (40%) say his mind is already made up about policies to deal with the war there. The Democrat has been accused by liberals in his party of softening his long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq in an effort to appeal to more moderate voters.

Now, I happen to believe all those things to be true (i.e., that going on a week long campaign trip didn’t increase his foreign policy competence, that he didn’t learn much, that his mind is made up, and that he’s trying to appeal to moderates). But the purpose of the trip wasn’t to inject Obama with instant foreign policy credentials but rather to make it easier for Americans to envision him as their president. We’ll see if it accomplishes that goal but it’s hard to see how spending this much time in the spotlight and carrying it off well can hurt.

Photo credits: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press and Sebastian Willnow/AFP/Getty Images

Update (Alex Knapp): I agree with a lot of what James said above about Obama’s speech. But one thing I did want to point out is that this flak over Obama’s “citizen of the world” line shows a remarkable ignorance of Presidential parlance. Obama has been compared more than once to Reagan, and Reagan used the line frequently in his speeches. Here’s Obama’s use of the line in context:

Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

Now here’s Ronald Reagan, speaking before the United Nations in 1982.

Mr. Secretary-General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen:

I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world. I come with the heartfelt wishes of my people for peace, bearing honest proposals and looking for genuine progress.

I now await the blogosphere to posthumously eviscerate Reagan for his use of the line.

Update (Dave Schuler)

I have no particular opinion on the speech. I’m sure it was a fine speech—Sen. Obama is a good public speaker and quite charismatic. What I’d mightily like to know is how President Obama plans to encourage the Germans to do things that I don’t believe they have the slightest interest in doing and which would throw their domestic policy and their foreign policy into a cocked hat.

Saddam’s supply of yellowcake has been secretly sold to a Canadian energy firm and flown safely to Montreal.

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program – a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium – reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” – the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment – was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

[...]

While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called “dirty bomb” – a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material – it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment.

[...]

Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts. Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Daniel De Groot notes that “this uranium a) was not weapons grade and b) was well known to the UN and IAEA and was being stored legally by Saddam’s government. It was legally in Iraq according to international law.” Barbara O’Brien adds, “The critical point is that Saddam Hussein couldn’t do anything with this uranium because he lacked the equipment and technology to enrich it. So it had been sitting around for years in drums sealed by the IAEA. No nuclear program.” Here’s an extensive listings of IAEA Key Findings on Iraq’s Nuclear Program, listing extensively the materials we knew about before the invasion.

I’d add that the key line from the AP report is, “There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991.” So, while Joe Wilson may have lied about many things, the movement of yellowcake from more than a decade before his infamous fact finding trip isn’t evidence of a new one.

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern.

Dave Schuler and will be joining me tonight to talk about diplomacy in Iran, the dumbing of the presidency, the power of Google, and various other topics.

• Dumbing the Presidency
• Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Blogs
• Iranian Nukes Breakthrough?
• North Korea Nukes Breakthrough: A Roadmap for Iran?

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his gang of mullahs are said to be “seriously considering” the latest EU 5+1 proposals on resolving the international standoff on the Iranian nuclear program and are telling President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to pipe down.

Warren Strobel:

Iran’s senior diplomat said Tuesday that Tehran was seriously considering a new offer from six world powers to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program, and he praised the package as “constructive.” The unusually positive remarks by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to a small group of reporters raised hope that a negotiated solution can be found to defuse the crisis.

[...]

During a 90-minute luncheon at Iran’s United Nations mission, Mottaki dismissed the growing speculation that Israel or the United States will strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities during President Bush’s last six months in office. He described news reports to that effect as part of a long-running campaign of “psychological warfare.” The chance that Israel will attack Iran “is almost nil,” Mottaki said. As for a U.S. strike, he said there was little public support in this country for a new conflict. “The consequences of such an attack cannot be predicted,” he said.

Mottaki is a much keener observer of American politics than most Western observers, it would seem.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, conveyed the offer to Tehran two weeks ago. It essentially repackages a two-year-old proposal by Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States to give Iran political, economic and security rewards if it “verifiably suspends its enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.”

Presumably, the passage of two years has made it plain that no better offer would be forthcoming. Mottaki’s colleague, Ali Akbar Velayati, who serves as the top foreign policy advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered some amusingly twisted logic as a face-saving explanation:

“Americans wanted Iran not to accept Solana,” Velayati told the hard-line daily newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Therefore our interests imply that we should embrace Solana.”

Whatever works, I guess. This, though, is what got everyone’s attention:

In a sign of apparent high-level debate in Iran, a top aide to the country’s supreme religious leader made a veiled swipe Tuesday at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s used belligerent rhetoric to defend Iran’s nuclear work. “Officials … should avoid illogical and provocative sloganeering,” Ali Akbar Velayati, a foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in published remarks, Reuters reported. His remarks seemed targeted at Ahmadinejad, although he didn’t mention the president by name.

While Ahmadinejad is the public face of the Iranian government, he’s by no means its most important player, despite the obsession with him by the media and some American politicians. As has been the case since the 1979 revolution, the clerics run the show with the Supreme Leader as the first among equals.

This, via Laura Rosen, strikes me as a fair read:

“What Velayati is presenting is a softening up of Iranian opinion as to why Iran might accept some sort of suspension without him going into that,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, interprets Velayati’s remarks. “And then Velayati goes on to say that under the current circumstances, Iran can do this because of the fact that the international community has recognized Iran’s right to enrich. So in effect, Velayati is saying, Iran can declare victory and compromise, and that if it doesn’t do this, there will be a stronger case for war against Iran and a continuation of economic sanctions, which it’s very clear are hurting Iran’s economy.”

Of course, as Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of the Iranian atomic energy organization, reminds us “as in everything in Iran, things could change tomorrow.”

Photo credit: Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty via TIME

Update (Dave Schuler)

I believe Iranian acceptance of this offer would be a benign development for all sorts of reasons of proverbial prudence including “jar-jar is better than war-war” and “half a loaf is better than none”. The offer should have a sell-by date or I see no reason that they’ll not deliberate it forever.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly enough. The Iranian regime really needs to be more forthcoming about their past and present nuclear development activities for us to have any confidence that whatever nuclear development activity they cease is the nuclear development activity they have. Otherwise we’ll just be subsidizing their R&D.

The greatest danger I see in it is that European countries, blinded by a fog of Euro signs, will see Iranian acceptance of this baby stuff as big enough to take the pressure off Iran. 43% of Iranian imports are from the EU. That dwarfs China, the next largest vendor, by a considerable amount.

However, Iran’s import partners who are probably most able to influence the regime may well also be those necks are most on the line in the face of rising Iranian power in the region, Oman and Saudi Arabia (13th and 17th on the list, respectively). I don’t have detailed stats on the exports of these countries to Iran but I suspect their exports are mostly gasoline. Most of what Iran uses it does not refine itself.

John Bolton, President Bush’s former UN ambassador, is not at all pleased with last week’s deal with North Korea on the nuclear stalemate.

With much fanfare and choreography, but little substance, the administration has accepted a North Korean “declaration” about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism or an enemy of the United States. In a final flourish, North Korea has undertaken a reverse Potemkin Village act, destroying the antiquated cooling tower of the antiquated Yongbyon reactor. In the waning days of American presidencies, this theater is the stuff of legacy.

North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North’s creation. The Bush administration provides no reason why this one will not be added to that long list except the audacity of hope. Where have we heard that recently? Barack Obama and John Kerry both announced support for the deal, and Mr. Obama said he intended to apply Bush’s policy to other rogue states, thus confirming the early start of the Obama administration.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Bolton will suddenly become a legitimate authority on international diplomacy among his former enemies on the Left while his cheering section among Bush Republicans will quiet considerably.  (See-Dubya, blogging at Michelle Malkin’s place, meanwhile, still adores him.)

While I have no reason to think Kim Jong Il is more trustworthy now than he was two weeks ago, I’m befuddled by the reaction of Bolton and others who dismiss this agreement altogether.  (As to Bolton specifically, Steve Clemons notes that there has been quite a bit of bad blood between him and Ambassador Christopher Hill, who negotiated this deal.  I’m willing to give Bolton the benefit of the doubt, though, and chalk it up to his rather obstreperous view of international diplomacy.) In exchange for some progress in stopping the DPRK from proliferating nuclear weapons technology, most notably getting China on board as a key player, we’ve taken them off of one of our many lists of naughty states.  If they cross us, we can put them back on just as easily.

What’s the harm?  Yes, twenty-one years ago, when Kim’s dad was running the place, they blew up Korean Airlines Flight 858.  That’s, to say the least, old news.  Meanwhile, Pakistan is letting al Qaeda run amok and Saudi Arabia is financing them.   We call them our “allies” in the war on terrorism.  Somehow, I think we can live with the consequences of taking North Korea off the list.  (Technically, as Michael Kraft details at great length, it won’t happen for 45 days, during which time Congress has the right to intervene.

The news over the past 48 hours or so about movement in solving the nuclear arms standoff with North Korean has been stunning. Not only is President Bush taking the DPRK off the “state sponsors of terrorism” list but the Kim government has taken major steps to dismantle their program and provide with stringent verification regimes.

The administration fully admits that it is well short of achieving all its goals and that much more work needs to be done. Still, the world is a bit safer today and, more significantly, this shows the way for similar rapprochement with Iran.

The White House — which emphasized that the agreement could not have been reached without the help of its allies in the talks — said American officials would verify the North’s declaration over the next 45 days, a process that could eventually remove North Korea from the terrorism list and make the North eligible for American aid and for loans from international institutions like the World Bank, a goal long sought by the cash-starved country.

[...]

Thursday’s developments reflected the change in the Bush administration’s policy towards the North. After years of confronting the North — Mr. Bush famously said he “loathed” the North’s leader, Kim Jong-il, and described him as a “pygmy” — Mr. Bush allowed Christopher R. Hill, an assistant secretary of state, to start engaging in full-fledged negotiations with Pyongyang in early 2007, under the guidance of Ms. Rice.

So, what happened? Phil Carter has an interesting thesis:

What I’m hearing through the grapevine is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan required so much attention from senior decision makers that it allowed career diplomats and junior political appointees to do their work in East Asia. In essence, the six-party talks needed less attention to work well, so that diplomats and national leaders could get down to business without all of the posturing that goes along with highly public diplomacy. This may or may not be true, but it’s an interesting view of how diplomacy can work.

Steve Clemons agrees that Chris Hill deserves the lion’s share of the credit.

There are still a lot of questions ranging from the interesting issue of North Korea cooperation with Syria’s alleged nuclear facility that was destroyed by Israel and other issues — but when President Bush gave Colin Powell the positive nod in the first week of April 2003 to proceed with the Six Party Talks, Bush and Cheney ignored Iran’s offer of a structure for normalized US-Iran relations the very same week in 2003.

The contrast in circumstances between where America is today with North Korea and where we are with Iran is vital to note. We ‘engaged’ North Korea and blew it with Iran.

And, he notes, “for those who want to knock China around, they should know that this entire process was impossible without China’s impressive, collaborative diplomacy.” That’s certainly true. The key there is not Chinese altruism but rather the harnessing of common interests.

Clemons also asserts, “Barack Obama’s inclination towards engagement with problematic leaders around the world now is now buttressed by an experience of the George W. Bush administration.” But engagement with preconditions is what got us here. Bush steadfastly refused to relent to the DPRK’s demands for bilateral negotiations and insisted on a six-party process that included South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia.

But I agree that it looks as if we’ve blown it with Iran. My only caveat is that I am not privy to what’s happening behind the scenes. It may well be that the administration is much closer to a deal with Iran than we realize. Indeed, Condi Rice is currently overseeing a very similar process, involving China, Russia, the UK, and Germany in trying to simultaneously pressure Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions and allay its economic and security concerns. (See Richard Perle’s WaPo op-ed today and Rice’s statement from last month.)

Ambassador Hill, who has brilliantly overseen the negotiations with North Korea, spoke at the Atlantic Council three months ago and foreshadowed some of the recent news. In addition to emphasizing the work done by others, including his predecessor Nick Burns and the other partners in the six-party negotiations, he pointed out that there was a genuine spirit of reciprocity. One can’t expect a country to give up nuclear weapons, which confer all manner of advantages, without something substantial in return.

North Korea does not have a lot of fossil fuels at its command. Energy is a huge problem for North Korea, and we would be prepared, once they are out of the nuclear business and into the NPT and have established a record of no-proliferation, we would be prepared to talk to them about aspirations for a civil nuclear program. We are also prepared to work with them on retraining opportunities for their scientists. North Korea has many scientists who have been engaged in these nuclear programs over the years. We’d be prepared to sit down and see what can be done in terms of getting them out of these fields and into other scientific fields.

Finally, and this goes back to the first point I started with, we’re prepared to create a Northeast Asia peace and security mechanism, whether it looks like the OSCE, whether it looks like some other institution from some other part of the world, will depend on the participants, I would say. We at this point cannot say with any precision what it would look like, but North Korea could be one of the founding members of this Northeast Asia peace and security mechanism. So all of these elements would go on the table. And what North Korea needs to decide is does it want to keep its aspirations for nuclear weapons in lieu of all these other elements.

This, again, strikes me as the way ahead with Iran. We need to engage regional actors (who have an even greater interest than we do in wanting to forestall a nuclear Iran) on the basis of common interests and understand that Iran is a formidable regional actor with legitimate concerns and aspirations of its own. As Dave Schuler and I discussed on last evening’s episode of OTB Radio, finding the right combination of carrots and sticks will be difficult. One presumes, though, that security guarantees and a solution to Iran’s civil energy needs are a major part of the former.

Remember that National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program years ago? It turns out that Iran is as little as six months away from nukes. And it’s not some neo-con warmonger saying thus but none other than International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

In an interview with Al-Arabiya, he said, “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty], expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least… six months to one year…”

Noah Shactman says we shouldn’t be surprised. Not only were reliable intelligence community dissenters — including those from the decidedly non-hawkish State Department — saying this when the NIE came out but the IAEA has been sending signals that Iran has become less cooperative for quite some time.

The top two men in the United States Air Force have been sacked for not keeping track of nuclear missiles, bomb fuses, and such.

The military and civilian chiefs of the Air Force are resigning, U.S. officials said Thursday. Defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates asked Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne to step down. A public announcement was expected later in the day.

[...]

Wynne is the second civilian chief of a military service to be forced out by Gates. In March 2007 the defense secretary pushed out Francis Harvey, the Army secretary, because Gates was dissatisfied with Harvey’s handling of revelations of inadequate housing conditions and bureaucratic delays for troops recovering from war wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The Air Force has endured a number of embarrassing setbacks over the past year. In August, for instance, a B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown across the country. The pilot and crew were unaware they had nuclear arms aboard. The error was considered so grave that Bush was quickly informed. Moseley later announced that in response to flaws exposed during the nuclear weapons error, the Air Force would change the way bomber crews organize for their nuclear training mission.

Gates also has been trying to learn more about how fuses for Air Force ballistic missiles were mistakenly shipped to Taiwan. Gates has been briefed on the conclusions of an internal investigation of that matter but the results have not been made public. Four cone-shaped electrical fuses used in intercontinental ballistic missile warheads were shipped to the Taiwanese instead of the helicopter batteries they had ordered. The fuses originated at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the mix-up apparently occurred after the parts were shipped to Hill Air Force Base in Utah.

In another incident, the Pentagon inspector general found in April that a $50 million contract to promote the Thunderbirds aerial stunt team was tainted by improper influence and preferential treatment. No criminal conduct was found. Moseley was not singled out for blame, but the investigation laid out a trail of communications from him and other Air Force leaders that eventually influenced the 2005 contract award. Included in that were friendly e-mails between Moseley and an executive in the company that won the bid.

“It is my sense that General Moseley’s command authority has been compromised,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at the time.

So, let me get this straight: Three incredibly high profile, big-time screw-ups is enough to get you fired from a high Pentagon post nowadays?

Who knew?

Photo: Tim Sloan, AFP/Getty Images

UPDATE: Noah Shachtman suggests the issues behind this are even more complicated.

The move, initially reported by Inside Defense and Air Force Times, isn’t exactly a shocker. The Air Force has come under fire for everything from mishandling nukes to misleading ad campaigns to missing out on the importance of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Most importantly, the Air Force’s leadership has been on the brink of open conflict for months with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. That’s because in the halls of the Air Force’s chiefs, the talk has been largely about the threats posed by China and a resurgent Russia. Gates wanted the service to actually focus on the wars at hand, in Iraq and Afghanistan. “For much of the past year I’ve been trying to concentrate the minds and energies of the defense establishment on the current needs and current conflicts,” he told the Heritage Foundation. “In short, to ensure that all parts of the Defense Department are, in fact, at war.”

Last fall, the Pentagon’s civilian chiefs shot down an Air Force move to take over almost all of the military’s big unmanned aircraft. “There has to be a better way to do this,” Moseley complained at the time. Things only got more tense when Gates said that the future of conflict is in small, “asymmetric” wars — wars in which the Air Force takes a back seat to ground forces. Then Gates noted that the Air Force’s most treasured piece of gear, the F-22 stealth fighter, basically has no role in the war on terror. And when a top Air Force general said the service was planning on buying twice as many of the jets — despite orders from Gates and the rest of the civilian leadership — he was rebuked for “borderline insubordination.”

Relations between Gates and the Air Force chiefs soured further when the Defense Secretary called for more spy drones to be put into the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force complained that all those extra flight hours were turning the roboplane’s remote pilots into virtual “prisoners.” Gates then publicly chastised the service during the drone buildup, comparing it to “pulling teeth.”

Much more, including several links to previous stories about these turf wars, at the link.

Erick Erickson and the gang at Red State join forces with Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi to implore President Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies.

We know some on the right who tend to view the world mostly in economic terms will disagree with us. Yes, we recognize that China is a large trading partner. We recognize how much of our debt they hold. We also recognize the arguments of some that if the President were to go, the media would be inclined to shed the spotlight on China’s abuses.

None of these arguments contradict the fact that our President, who has spent eight years liberating parts of the world from tyranny, should not give the seal of approval on China’s behavior — approval his presence at the Olympics would most certainly give to the Chinese people.

Steve Benen offers the counter-argument, which he directs at Hillary Clinton:

America and the world have a serious brewing problem with Iran and an ongoing challenge with North Korea. China has secured strategic footholds in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and is spreading its influence in the Caucuses. China is not a natural ally of Russia – in fact, quite the reverse – and yet bumbling American policy seems to be throwing them together in common circumstances in ways that should not be happening.

Hillary Clinton or any President needs to avoid the temptation to pander to the American public when crises with the key global powers emerge. They need to demonstrate an awareness of our core interests with China and what we most want from China in the arena of international affairs.

Nukes should be at the top of that list – and then there should be a cascading set of second and third and fourth and fifth priorities with a state like China. A new or revised economic arrangement with China would be second on my list – and then perhaps a serious commitment to climate change in third or fourth place. Human rights should be on the list — but make the pursuit of Chinese subscription to a higher human rights bar a serious effort characterized by consultations, encouragement, deal-making that involves incentives and yes, disincentives. But Clinton gave no sense of a fuller, serious game plan on the human rights front.

Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics was one of the more embarrassing moments of his presidency. It devastated the American athletes who’d dedicated their lives training for their shot at the Games and resulted in a counter-boycott of the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. And it did nothing to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, it’s ostensible goal.

It’s simply inconceivable that poking a stick in Beijing’s eye will cause them to suddenly become a Jeffersonian democracy, free Tibet, or, indeed, do anything that we want them to do.

China’s domestic human rights record is abysmal, to be sure, but it’s much better than it was a generation ago. They’ve gradually implemented market reforms which, naturally, required loosening the reins a bit. We’re far better off, then, if our goal is to make life better for the average Chinese, to continue to engage them as trading partners and as a regional great power, using the carrots of access to the world market and participation in major international regimes like WTO rather than the dull sticks of childish publicity stunts.

Joe Carter, in an interesting reflection on his 30 days working for the Huckabee campaign, makes this observation:

The Ron Paul Phenomenon is Not About Ron Paul — It will take a more astute political mind than I possess to comprehend this Ron Paul phenomenon. All I know is that it has less to do with the candidate than about people’s desire for something different. When Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan, Vox Day, John Derbyshire, and the 9/11 Truthers all agree on a candidate its safe to say that they aren’t all seeing the same thing.

On last night’s episode of OTB Radio, I likened it to the Ross Perot phenomenon in 1992, which was also more about “Something Different” than about Perot. There, though, there was also a minor cult of personality going on; Paul can’t be accused of that.

The bottom line is that there are a huge number of people simply fed up with the major parties, a trend that has been visible at least since George Wallace’s 1968 campaign when he famously asserted that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the national Democrat and Republican parties. While that feeling is, in my view, exaggerated it’s certainly true that there’s far less choice in American politics than in most Western democracies. Both of our parties would fit comfortably within the British Conservative Party, for example.

Both Micah Sifry and Matt Yglesias point to this political polarization network visualization which shows that books by Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs occupy the center in American political thought, not the extreme fringe that they do in terms of elected officials.

Matt gets it just right:

[I]nsofar as there’s some kind of excluded middle in our current political situation it’s not the brand of Bloomberg-style “centrism” that the bemoaners of partisanship tend to favor. Instead, it’s something akin to Dobbs-style populist nationalism. It’s not a point of view I favor, but unlike Bloombergism it is a point of view that has a lot of support and only a little representation.

A lot of those folks are gravitating to Paul, not because he’s necessarily one of them, but because he’s as close as they’re likely to find in a respectable candidate. Given that the presidential nominating processes of both parties favor the activist Right/Left base, though, there’s virtually no chance that a Paul (or Buchanan) would get the nomination.

Although it’s not a new idea, Christopher Hitchens has seemingly united the blogosphere with his suggestion the it’s time to abolish the CIA and start over.

His argument, in a nutshell, is that the Agency is simultaneously incompetent and venal. Its turnaround on the Iran weapons program is just the latest instance of it proving spectacularly wrong and, worse yet (to Hitchens’ thinking) they’ve now given the incorrect impression that Iran is no longer in the market for nukes. Further, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it sees itself as above the law, with numerous instances of attempting to undermine the sitting administration through skulduggery and now, in destroying interrogation tapes, engaging in “mutiny and treason.” (The treason charge is simply laughable and is disappointing coming from a word smith such as Hitchens.)

Hitchens figures that there have been too many attempts to fix this via reform, so we should just “shut the whole thing down and start again.”

Most of the blogs commenting on this thus far that have been aggregated at Memorandum are on board.

• Ed Morrissey hopes the CIA has managed to unite the White House and Congress so that we can finally streamline intelligence, preferably under “the non-partisan world of the Pentagon.” Given the freshness of Don Rumsfeld’s tenure, though, that seems incredibly far-fetched; indeed, further consolidation under the Director of National Intelligence would seem the more likely outcome.

• Bruce McQuain focuses on the CIA’s penchant for cooking the books to suit its own interests — and conduct an internecine “war against DoD with no regard for ‘collateral damage’” — and thinks we need to build an “intelligence gathering agency which supports the best interests of the United States instead of subverting it.”

• Victor Davis Hanson sees the CIA as a “Three-Letter Menace,” citing the adventures of Joe Wilson and Michael Scheuer as prime examples.

• AJ Strata doesn’t much care about destroyed tapes but thinks providing a lifeline to Iran’s mullahs inexcusable. He does agree with the conclusion, though: “This cold war relic seems to have become too dysfunctional and laden with career egos willing to play political games as opposed to protect the nation from harm.”

• The lone dissenter, Cernig, believes it’s “not a good idea to entirely dismantle the main civilian intelligence gathering arm of the USA in favor of purely military intel” and dismisses the idea that the CIA is cooking the books on Iran.

I’ve long thought that a massive overhaul of our intelligence apparatus made sense, with taking counter-terrorism out of the hands of the FBI and separating the analysis and operations functions of CIA as the major components. But I’m not sure breaking up the CIA would have much impact on either the politicization or efficacy of intelligence.

For one thing, as a practical matter, we’re just going re-hire most of the same people and issue them new badges and stationery. We’re not going to waste billions of dollars and years and years of training, especially while in the midst of a multi-front war. Plus, since our security screening process is broken, anyone with a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance would be snapped up in an instant.

Moreover, while it’s easy to blame the CIA for all the problems, the fact of the matter is that Congress has done an abysmal job over the years of providing oversight. To the extent that CIA is a rogue agency that feels immune from consequences, it’s because there have been few consequences for failure. Indeed, we already know that the recent torture tape destruction scandal came with the foreknowledge of the leadership of the congressional intelligence committees, who did precisely nothing.

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Correction: Re-edited the blog summary slightly to more accurately summarize Cernig’s argument.