August 15, 2008
Israel, Georgia, Russia, Iran, and the US
Israel shut off arms sales to Georgia to curry favor with Russia because it wants Russian help against Iran. They know you can't pick quarrels with Russia and Iran at the same time. No doubt the Bush Administration is now figuring out the same thing. So an attack on Iran -- thank God! -- is now off the table.
July 03, 2008
July 01, 2008
Iran, Bogeyman
A 2007 book by Trita Parsi on fifty years of Israeli-Iranian-U.S. relations, published by Yale University Press, argues that Iran's external policies have been more governed by geopolitics than ideology, even when fronted by Ahmadinejad. Numerous occasions for U.S.-Iranian accommodation have been missed, only in part as a result of a political choice by Israel's Labor government in the 1990's to build up the Iranian threat to facilitate peacemaking with Palestinians and Arab governments. US policy has been more willful and ideological than that of either Israel or Iran. There are implications for near-term policy toward Iran, and also for an upgrading of American government capabilities for national security policy making.
June 24, 2008
A modest proposal: A grand nuclear bargain between Israel and Iran
Israelis are considering attacking Iran. Maybe there is a different strategy for ending Iran's nuclear capabilities.
May 03, 2008
Can we not talk about obliterating people?
Can we get through this campaign without threatening to "totally obliterate" anybody?
April 01, 2008
Big in Iran
Press TV (Iran's Russia Today/Fox News official 24-hour propaganda channel) profiles John McCain. They're not impressed:Iowa Senator Charles Grassley who was subject to McCain's "I'm calling you a f****** jerk!" said in an interview that he was so upset by the tirade that he did not speak to him for two years. Many say Americans should be worried that if...
March 18, 2008
December 03, 2007
February 21, 2007
Eugene Volokh on assassination and academic freedom
Eugene Volokh argues: 1. War is sometimes justified. 2. Assassination is sometimes more humane than war. 3. Therefore assassination is sometimes justified. 4. If assassination is sometimes justified, then advocating assassination is sometimes justified. 5. Even if the assassinations argued for would be criminal under current domestic or international law, those laws could be changed. 6. Thus advocacy of assassination...
February 16, 2007
I can't vouch for this ...
... but I'm told that Bush is head-faking his threats against Iran in order to keep the Israelis from striking on their own.
February 02, 2007
Going to do another war to prove we won the first one?
This is sounding uncomfortably familiar. The Bush team is motivating a war with Iran with the kind of hard-headed intelligence and open-eyed analysis it perfected for the Iraq disaster, but not planning for the war, with the same insouciance with which it made no particular plans for the Iraq war. Not planning for a war is not at all the...
