So Admiral Mike Mullen said on “Meet the Press” this weekend that military plans exist for a strike against Iran to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Anyone reading along for the last, say, year won’t be surprised to find this out. Like Matt Yglesias, I’m unimpressed that these plans exist, and I think it’s [...]

I linked to this in a Danger Room post, but Joe Klein has a column reporting that out of frustration, some military and intelligence officials are giving the idea of bombing Iran a second look. Not that they think it’s a good idea! And because no one’s making that case, Joe ends his column on [...]

Something I didn’t know about the “Axis of Evil” speech: according to Amb. Ryan Crocker, who was part of a diplomatic channel with Iran on mutual interests in Afghanistan following the fall of our mutual Taliban adversary, it had quite the unintended impact. Crocker told the CNAS annual conference that the inclusion of Iran in [...]

In an uncertain and confusing world, you can always trust Bill Kristol to be Bill Kristol. Here he fills his diaper over Adm. Mullen’s disinclination to attack Iran: Mullen’s formulation of geostrategic equivalance ignores a massive difference between the two outcomes: Even assuming the degree and kind of “destabilization” would be the same in both [...]

Apparently Roxana Saberi — the American journalist recently detained by the Iranian regime — co-wrote a film about underground rock in Iran. Unfortunately, I’m learning about this movie late and I’ll be at something else when E Street closes out its run of No One Knows About Persian Cats tonight, but if you can make [...]

Not as a bellicose document; something the Obama administration acted upon; and, yes, a method to concentrate international attention on current weaknesses in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. All will be explained if you follow this link to the Washington Independent. The New York Times cleans up after itself here. Putting “The Battle of Hampton Roads” [...]

I’m not a big fan of speculation about Who Leaked What And Why, because we’re so rarely in a position to actually know. A more fruitful enterprise is to speculate on likely effects. So it is with Secretary Gates’s January memo about lacuna in U.S. strategy toward Iranian advances in uranium enrichment. Look at what [...]

I’ll be covering Eric Holder’s showdown testimony in the Senate Judiciary Committee for the Washington Independent this morning. Just to torture me, the Senate Armed Services Committee counterprogrammed a really big hearing on Iran, with every administration witness you would want: Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint [...]

John Noonan has some concerns about the Nuclear Posture Review that I consider instructive. Recall that the document forswears the U.S.’s use of nuclear retaliation to a chemical or biological attack launched against the U.S. by a good-faith signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It would take an extraordinary — unprecedented, really — chem or [...]

@MikeDrewWhat tweets at me: I’d read a post on the situ. in Russia and how we might expect it it to affect cooperation with West on CT, Iran, other items. …don’t know if you’re the guy to write that post or not, but I’d read it. Honesty compels me to say that I’m not the [...]