Iran

As the most pro-Israel administration in Washington since Harry Truman enters its last six months in office, Israel faces a strategic choice. Will it use the possible indulgence of the Bush Administration to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, or will it wait and face an uncertain future with a new American president?

Halting Iran's path toward the development of a nuclear bomb appears to be one of those seemingly insoluble chess problems. The Iranians may agree to this negotiating proposal or that proposal, all the while playing for time, while they develop sufficient enriched uranium to produce a nuclear bomb. A nuclear arsenal will allow Iran to become a Middle East hegemon like the Great Persia of antiquity, yet it will also encourage countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to develop their own bombs. Iran will represent the heretofore unseen and unconventional combination of being a nuclear-armed state which supports sub-state armies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip.

Enter Israel, which is the only state that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has specifically and repeatedly threatened with annihilation.

A Nuclear Family Vacation is published by Bloomsbury.

The opening scene of the newest Indiana Jones film is set in Nevada in 1957, possibly during Operation Plumbbob, an actual nuclear-test series in which the U.S. measured the response of humans and physical structures to nuclear blasts. Satellite images give a hint of what's left: a pockmarked brown landscape of craters and broken buildings. There are smashed reinforced-concrete domes, shattered windows, as well as iron rails and bridges that the heat and explosion have twisted. It looks, I am told, like a place where Superman (or perhaps Uri Geller) had given himself over to a fit of rage.

The U.S. hatched plans to broadcast Azeri-language programming into Iran, starting later this year, as a way to fuel unrest among the country's Azerbaijani minority.

News of this enfilade of Turkic vibes arrived just as Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) was holding a Washington hearing on the status of Iran's Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis. All these minorities have some grievances against the ayatollahs, but only the Azerbaijanis have yet to resist Tehran in any meaningful way. Not coincidentally, they're also the largest and most powerful minority in Iran: they make up a third of the country's population, and they are the only ethnic minority that could bring down the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately for the U.S., the Azeris really like Iran's current government. Azerbaijanis are more religious than average (Tabriz is a city of mosques), disproportionately approve of theocratic rule, and wield enough clout that other more secular groups -- such as the Kurds -- have complained that Iran is ruled by a "Turkish government." MORE

Admiral William Fallon stepped down after a year at the head of U.S. Central Command.

The appointment of Fallon about a year ago set off alarms in many liberal minds. CENTCOM governs American military assets throughout the greater Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, and has traditionally been led by an Army or Marine general. Bringing in a Navy man looked like an effort to remind Tehran that not all of America's military assets were tied down in Iraq. Now his unusual decision to announce an early retirement is setting off alarm bells among liberals who worry that Bush may be planning to, as John McCain would put it, "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran." MORE

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's successful visit to Iraq demonstrates the growing extent of Iranian influence in the Middle East.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not only a thug: he is also a clown. He's now taken his roadshow to Iraq, where, in a display designed to delight and amuse audiences in Baghdad and around the world, he very dramatically chose to take a motorcade from the airport straight to the heart of the strife-torn capital. He was welcomed with "pomp and ceremony" by a leadership class that remains grateful to Iran for providing aid and shelter during the struggle against Saddam. No doubt Ahmadinejad sought to contrast his visits by Bush and Blair, who traveled by helicopter and generally skulked around in the hopes of not enraging the natives. One particularly credulous correspondent, Mark MacKinnon of Toronto's Globe and Mail, called Ahmadinejad's reception "a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq." Point Ahmadinejad, you might say. Except, of course, that the American mission in Iraq is rather different, and rather more difficult, than Iran's mission. MORE

A car bomb killed Imad Mughniyeh, the elusive chief of Hizbullah's military operations, in Damascus.

Who got his scalp?  Laura Rozen points out that everyone wanted him dead, even Hizbullah, who had a hard time selling the we-build-hospitals-and-schools-line with a mass murderer on its payroll.  Israel would certainly have delighted in his demise, but so would the US, and nearly every one of the Lebanese factions, which are about as numerous as air molecules, and in many cases well-armed.

Scattered among the vague reports of his life are mentions of state-actors who supported him -- principally Syria and Iran, but also Saudi Arabia, which declined to arrest him in the 1990s.  Traveling across borders without incident takes assistance from people in power.  He operated in the Triple Frontier as well, almost certainly not with the connivance of South American governments, but apparently with freedom of movement between there and the Levant.  As we reconstruct this guy's life from the wreckage in Damascus, it might pay to ask how such a wanted man managed to wrack up thousands of frequent flyer miles and collect hundreds of visa stamps before someone finally caught up with him.