Israel

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.

Jimmy Carter's talks with Hamas trigger a feud with the State Department.

Is there any living ex-president you'd less want to be trapped with on a desert island than Jimmy Carter? Judged by that yardstick, his possible prosecution under the Logan Act for his latest act of freelance diplomacy in the Middle East -- as some have come close to suggesting -- seems like a great idea. But let's be serious: the best thing you could do with this 209-year-old statute is junk it.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has suspended peace talks after the deadliest fighting in Gaza in more than a year.

At this rate, it may not be long before someone declares the third Intifada already underway. First stones, then guns and suicide-bombs, and now rockets.

With dozens of rockets fired into southern Israel -- for the first time regularly hitting the city of Ashkelon -- Hamas is once again pulling Israel into a gruesome fight in Gaza to tighten its own domestic political grip. George W. Bush's latest half-hearted peace initiative; attempts at accommodation by the moderate Palestinian leadership; the calls by Israel's realists for uprooting West Bank settlements; and those touching concerts, conferences, and student exchanges devoted to Middle East peace: all remain hostage to Hamas's ability to start a war at a time and place of its choosing.

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.