Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
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 [...]
“[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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In a piece entitled “New Data and New Methods Lead to Revised View on Iran,” NYT reporter Mark Mazzetti sheds some light on how reforms in the intelligence community led to a 180 degree change in the consensus on Iran’s nuclear weapons program in only two years. Current and former intelligence officials insist that much [...]
Yesterday’s release of a National Intelligence Estimate reporting that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has, as Steven Lee Meyers points out, dramatically shifted the landscape. Rarely, if ever, has a single intelligence report so completely, so suddenly, and so surprisingly altered a foreign policy debate here. An administration that had cited Iran’s [...]
Foreign Affairs has, over the last several issues, had one major Republican and one major Democrat publish an essay under their name outlining the foreign policy agenda they would pursue if elected president. Bill Richardson was either tired of waiting or figured he wouldn’t be asked, so instead published his in the latest issue of [...]
I really wish that there were new information in the New York Times report on Israel’s air attack on a Syrian facility early in September. It looks to me as though the same info continues to be chewed over and presented in different ways: WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel’s air attack on Syria last month [...]
Thomas Barnett has a very succinct explanation of why Barack Obama’s vision for a nuclear weapons-free world is unworkable: Nukes have simply been too useful in killing great power war. I’m not giving that up for today’s minor issues with North Korea and Iran, for no other reason that both seek nukes to deter our [...]
Barack Obama has a plan to solve the nuclear issues in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere: have everyone get rid of their nukes. Senator Barack Obama will propose on Tuesday setting a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world, saying the United States should greatly reduce its stockpiles to lower the threat of [...]
More details have been reported on the raid conducted by the Israeli Air Force on a base in Syria on September 6: Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and [...]
Thomas Barnett has been generally pleased with Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy platform but thinks he’s gone a bit far with his most recent speech. Selling old Thatcher lines (“isn’t a time to go wobbly”) for pre-emptive war, resurrecting the ancient bit about Israel joining NATO ( and suggesting a bunch of Asian countries too, one [...]
Blake Hounshell transcribes Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’ comments about U.S. plans vis-a-vis Iran and Syria on yesterday’s “Fox News Sunday.” While Gates was “cagey” in his reply, using the required disclaimer that “All options are on the table,” it’s quite clear that military intervention is simply not in the cards for either set of [...]
The U.S. has quietly acknowledged that Israel did in fact bomb Syrian territory last week — apparently to take out suspected nuclear weapons installations. After days of silence from the Israeli government, American officials confirmed Tuesday that Israeli warplanes launched airstrikes inside Syria last week, the first such attack since 2003. A Defense Department official [...]
Michael Ignatieff has a rather bizarre piece in the New York Times Magazine arguing that pointy headed academics, such as himself, were wrong to support the Iraq War based on interesting theories and should, instead, have listened to the practical wisdom of those who operate in the real world of public policy and have to [...]
Well actually it was 12, but don’t tell Barack Obama that! “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died—an entire town destroyed,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser. Yeah, guess I [...]
Fred Thompson (or, more likely, a staffer) made his blogging debut at Redstate yesterday afternoon, warning of the dangers of the propaganda victory Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got from taking 15 British marines hostage. He is disgusted with the weakness shown by the international community in this affair: “The UN Security Council summoned its vaunted multilateral greatness [...]
Iran has stepped up its rhetoric in its ongoing clash with the international community over its nuclear program. Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Wednesday the country will pursue nuclear activities outside international regulations if the U.N. Security Council insists it stop uranium enrichment. “Until today, what we have done has been in accordance [...]
Naval War College professor Donald Stoker has a provocative online piece for Foreign Policy with the self-explanatory title, “Insurgencies Rarely Win — And Iraq Won’t Be Any Different (Maybe).” The intro: The cold, hard truth about the Bush administration’s strategy of “surging” additional U.S. forces into Iraq is that it could work. Insurgencies are rarely [...]
Bruce McQuain and Dale Franks invited me to join this week’s edition of the Q&O Podcast. We spent 37 minutes discussing the reports of Israeli plans to use tactical nukes to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, the proposed “surge” of forces in Iraq, and the role Republicans will play as the minority party in the [...]
Israel is planning to strike Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with bunker buster nukes, Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter report in the Sunday Times of London. They cite “several Israeli military sources” who say two Israeli air force squadrons are currently training for the mission. The specifics of the purported plan: Under the plans, conventional laser-guided [...]
Retired Army LTC Andrew Krepinevich has a devastating critique of the recent Quadrennial Defense Review in the current issue of Military Officer, the trade journal of the Military Officers’ Association. Especially interesting is his assessment of how the Pentagon plans to allocate its not-all-that-scarce budget. He notes that there are several big ticket items that [...]
The latest round in the six-party talks with North Korea were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The first talks on North Korea’s nuclear program since the communist nation tested an atomic device ended Friday without an agreement to move ahead on disarmament or schedule further negotiations. During five days of meetings in Beijing, [...]
Matthew Yglesias notes that we should keep Islamist nuts in perspective, since our own president is pretty religious: [N]oting that millenarian Islam is an important strain in Iranian politics ought to be put in the context of a United States of America that features millenarian Christianity as an important political strain. I don’t see any [...]
Senator George Allen has issued a press release detailing lurid, strange, and otherwise lame scenes from the novels of his Democratic opponent, former Navy Secretary James Webb. WEBB’S WEIRD WORLD The Author’s Disturbing Writings Show a Continued Pattern of Demeaning Women · Some of Webb’s writings are very disturbing for a candidate hoping to represent [...]
North Korea is the eighth state known have tested a nuclear weapon and, with Israel a presumed possessor, brings the total of nuclear states to nine. Since every new state’s acquisition creates more pressure for its potential adversaries to join the club, the folks at Foreign Policy magazine thought this would be a good time [...]
Bill Gertz reports that the intelligence community badly botched its forecasts on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Recent U.S. intelligence analyses of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were flawed and the lack of clarity on the issue hampered U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert the underground blast detected Sunday, according to Bush administration officials. [...]
North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon, becoming the eighth open member of the nuclear club. While merely confirming what was already considered a given, this still has enormous consequences, as David Sanger explains: North Korea’s decision to conduct the test demonstrated what the world has suspected for years: the country has joined India, Pakistan [...]
It looks like North Korea has blown up a nuke, wild guesses as to the magnitude (as I’m writing this, about 5). Not a surprise, hopefully underground Monday, 10:30 AM Korea time (was underground). This was a SMALL detonation, and could have been lots of TNT, 550 tons equivalent of TNT, though the USGS hasn’t [...]
Peter King has a scathing article in, of all places, Sports Illustrated about the conditions in the poorest area of New Orleans eight months after Hurricane Katrina. His is incensed: “What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw [...]
The lefty blogosphere is abuzz over a story reported on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” (which, for reasons never quite clear to me, they ordinarily consider right wing propaganda) that Valerie Plame was working on Iranian WMD when she was outed by Bob Novak and others. Raw Story, quoting a report by David Schuster: INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY [...]
The NYT has a big story out today entitled, “Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away.” It clearly is intended to counter the claims yesterday by a high ranking State Department official that Iran could have materials to make a bomb in 16 (now, 15) days. Western nuclear analysts said yesterday that Tehran lacked [...]
Sy Hersh’s New Yorker article claiming that the Bush administration is seriously planning a limited nuclear strike on Iran has spawned several reaction pieces from the mainstream press as well as dozens of blog posts. Most of the early press pieces were merely “reports” based entirely on the Hersh piece, with this AFP story typical. [...]
Sy Hersh claims in a long New Yorker piece that the United States is on the path to war with Iran to stop them from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for [...]
A new Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll reveals that Americans believe Iran is the most dangerous threat to American security, knocking North Korea out of the top spot. Americans think Iran is the country that poses the greatest immediate danger to the United States today, taking over the number one spot from North Korea. A FOX [...]
Is Israel preparing for a military strike against Iran’s nukes? AP says they are. Israel’s defense minister hinted Saturday that the Jewish state is preparing for military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but said international diplomacy must be the first course of action. “Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability [...]