Jeffrey Goldberg

Apologies for neglecting my Goldblog responsibilities, but I've been traveling through Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and conducting what feels like a thousand interviews, many, though not all, on the dominant question of the moment, Iran's nuclear program, and the possible Israeli and/or American responses to it. In the coming days, I will post interviews with Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, and Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, that I conducted together with David Bradley, the chairman and owner of the Atlantic Media Company, with whom I've been traveling this past week. (David is a fine traveling companion and questioner and, by the way, the only person in Israel currently wearing a suit.)

Lately, I've liked to come to Israel once every three months or so to try to figure out how the country's leadership and defense establishment are thinking about the question of a possible Israeli preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, and I'll have a lot more on that later as well, once David and I have had the chance to think about what we've been hearing. The short answer: It's not entirely clear what's going to happen in the next six months. I know -- not very helpful. I'll come up with something better as soon as I can.

The NATO summit last week in Chicago somehow managed to avoid completely the issue of just what will happen to the women of Afghanistan when the war against the Taliban is brought to an allegedly orderly close. The Guardian tells us what might happen is already, in fact, happening:

A brain drain of bright young women is already taking place in Afghanistan before the 2014 handover that many fear will mean a reversal of advances in women's rights.

The lack of commitment by the Afghan government to equality and to tackling the high rates of ill-treatment of women in the home and in the workplace is raising real fears they will be at the bottom of the political agenda in the push for power after Nato forces leave the country.

Worsening security for civilians - casualties among ordinary Afghans have risen year on year for the last five years with 3,021 killed in 2011, and women are thought to be suffering disproportionately - has led to rising numbers of women and girls leaving education and the workforce and staying indoors, according to Guhramaana Kakar, a gender adviser to President Hamid Karzai.

And in other news about defenseless people, the Syrian regime has murdered at least 90 of them, including 32 children, in the village of Houla. This massacre has prompted the international community to, yet again, issue incredibly strongly worded statements about just how awful it feels to see all those people die. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: 
"This appalling and brutal crime involving indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force is a flagrant violation of international law and of the commitments of the Syrian Government to cease the use of heavy weapons in population centers and violence in all its forms. Those responsible for perpetrating this crime must be held to account."

And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the U.S. would work "with the international community to intensify our pressure on Assad and his cronies, whose rule by murder and fear must come to an end."

I like the use of the word "cronies" -- very strong. That will surely scare-straight the Assad regime. Click here for what I've written about the Administration's powerful deployment of adjectives and adverbs against the Syrian regime.

So I was speaking on a panel about Iran this past weekend in Boulder, Colorado, at a very dynamic synagogue, Congregation Har HaShem, with Sen. Michael Bennet, and Rep. Jared Polis, who is a member of the synagogue. Both legislators were very thoughtful -- Goldblog's favorite senator, apart from Orrin Hatch (R.-Hannukah) is Michael Bennet, who is a friend, and also the brother of the editor-in-chief of this magazine. Goldblog had not previously met Jared Polis, who seems like an impressive guy. Both men gave nuanced answers to questions about Iran, though they were both muscular in defense of the idea that a nuclear Iran is untenable.

The rabbi who led the discussion, Joshua Rose, asked very provocative questions, and at one point, late in our conversation (after Bennet and Polis had departed the panel) I mentioned that I thought that certain politicians on the Israeli right have been drifting toward fascism. I thought this was safe thing to say in Boulder, which is to the left of Havana on many issues, but after the talk, a couple of people came up to me and said I was wrong to even mention the word "fascism" in association with Israel. One of my interlocutors also told me I shouldn't use the word "occupation" to describe the occupation. I asked if I should refer to it instead as a "Renaissance Fair," or "picnic" but that didn't go over well. In any case, "fascist" is a strong word, and obviously, Israel's democracy is still vibrant -- an independent judiciary, a free press, fair elections, and so on. But there are figures on the right who strike me as intolerant of these concepts. And then there was this, which happened earlier this week:

Knesset members engaged in a stormy debate on Monday, following comments by Interior Minister Eli Yishai that Israel should not let African asylum seekers work and that the United Nations is responsible for what happens in Eritrea and Sudan.

MK Danny Danon (Likud) and the committee's chairman, Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) confronted one another on the matter. "They are all infiltrators," said Danon. "We must drive them all out."

Yes, indeed, a Jewish member of Knesset used the following words: "They are all infiltrators. We must drive them all out." Just appalling.

I understand that the issue of illegal immigration is a serious challenge for Israel, as it is for many prosperous countries, and I readily understand that these immigrants (the lucky few who make it through the Egyptian gauntlet and the Sinai desert) are a strain on limited resources. But, really? We were strangers once, too, as Jewish tradition teaches. There has got to be a better way. Then came the disturbing news that in a poor neighborhood of Tel Aviv, Sudanese immigrants were set upon by Israeli hooligans. 'Fascism' might be a strong word, and of course Israel is judged by a double-standard (triple-standard, actually), but this is not what should be happening in a country that calls itself a Jewish state.

This paragaph from The New York Times's coverage today of the nuclear talks between Iran and the P5 + 1 countries (the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) in Baghdad brought me up a little short:

The six powers also want Iran to export its current stockpile of 20 percent uranium and down the road, to dismantle the once-secret Fordo enrichment plant, deep inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom, that is producing it.

It's those three words, "down the road," that stopped me. "Down the road" is not an expression that would cause the Israeli prime minister, or the defense minister, to call President Obama and tell him that they are taking the military option off the table. It would actually cause them to think -- not that they don't think this already -- that the Baghdad talks are a charade. And if they think that, and if they think that the window of opportunity is closing for action (see below to understand why the window, from their perspective, may be closing), they might take action, which is a very bad idea. (It's a bad idea in large part because I believe the U.S., if it came to it, would take military action to keep Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold, obviating the need for Israel to do it sooner).

"Down the road" isn't very appealing to President Obama, either. As much as he would like to forestall action on Iran until after November, he is fully aware of the regime's long record of deception and delay, and it's my understanding that the Administration will be reminding other members of the negotiating group that the U.S. does not want to dance with Iran for very long, especially given this news, just out:

A U.N. watchdog report is expected to show that Iran has installed more uranium enrichment centrifuges at an underground site, potentially boosting output capacity of nuclear work major powers want it to stop, Western diplomatic sources say.

Two sources said the Islamic state may have placed in position nearly 350 machines since February - in addition to the almost 700 centrifuges already operating at the Fordow facility - but that they were not yet being used to refine uranium.

Since February! I hope this gives everyone pause.

Michael Singh has some fairly depressing thoughts about potential outcomes for the talks, It's  worth reading the piece in full, but his best case scenario (and he writes in a way to suggest that he thinks this is overoptimistic)  has the parties reaching an interim agreement which, at best only begins the process of addressing the most difficult questions raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and only establishes general principles for further negotiations. Singh notes that, "Tehran currently has strong incentives to keep the negotiating process alive if only to stave off more severe punitive action. Under such circumstances, Iran has previously demonstrated a great reluctance -- if not inability -- to change course on core policies. In a sense, the regime has proven to be its own worst enemy, alienating potential allies by refusing to engage in even a show of compromise or conciliation."

On the other hand, the Atlantic Iran War Dial is now set at 37 percent -- a 37 percent chance that either Israel or the U.S. attacks Iran's nuclear facilities sometime in the next year, according to a panel of experts corralled by Dominic Tierney. This is down from 48 percent in March. So that's something.

Anthony Cordesman, via Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz, notes the centrality of Iran's nuclear program to the regime's strategic vision:

The Americans and the Europeans have chosen not to underscore, Cordesman also points out, the fact that Tehran's entire military strategy for a quarter-century has been to develop atomic weapons to compensate for an irreversible lack of conventional power. Take away the nuclear program, and Khamenei's stewardship of his country and creed looks enfeebled. Nuclear weapons are the supreme leader's legacy.

A non-bold prediction: Iran will offer concessions at talks opening in Baghdad today that do not limit its ability to make advances toward a nuclear weapon. More later.

From the Associated Press:

Despite some remaining differences, a deal has been reached with Iran that will allow the U.N. nuclear agency to restart a long-stalled probe into suspicions that Tehran has secretly worked on developing nuclear arms, the U.N. nuclear chief said Tuesday.

What does this mean? It means that Iran has found an easy way to create the appearance of progress so that it may pursue its main goal of the moment, which is to forestall an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities by convincing President Obama and other Western leaders that it is serious about compromise. If Obama and other leaders are convinced they are making genuine progress with Iran, the pressure on Israel to postpone military action will become overwhelming. When Iran agrees to stop enriching uranium to 20 percent, or agrees to shutter its centrifuge facility near Qom, that's when you can start paying attention.

The Obama Administration understands this, of course. Critics on the right believe that Obama will cave and agree to a deal that would allow Iran to continue down the path toward nuclearization, but these critics are misreading Obama, and his seriousness on this issue. On the other hand, Obama disagrees with the Israeli position, which is, no enrichment whatsoever, but the Israeli stance is more of a bargaining point than anything else. It's hard to believe the Israelis would attack if Iran were only enriching uranium to 3.5 percent.

I hadn't realized that Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, one of the leading candidates for the Egyptian presidency, was a Truther until I read this Ben Birnbaum piece:

Mr. Abolfotoh expressed his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an interview last year with Egypt scholar Eric Trager.

Mr. Trager, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted Mr. Abolfotoh as saying:

"It was too big an operation .... They [the United States] didn't bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it's part of a conspiracy."

Not a good sign. It's hard to imagine a fantasist getting a grip on Egypt's disintegrating economy, and it's hard to imagine a fantasist preserving the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

I'll have more on this later, but I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with John Pistole, the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, and I wanted to bring you some of it, via my Bloomberg View column. Bruce Schneier, Goldblog's security guru (and the guy I used to break into airports with), has argued that the recently discovered underwear bomb 2.0, a more sophisticated device than the Christmas 2009 device that failed to ignite, doesn't mean that we should necessarily increase airport security, in part because if the bomb plot matures to the point where it's two hours away from completion, and the TSA is the last line of defense, then it is probably too late. I'm sympathetic to the Schneier argument. Pistole, not really sympathetic at all. Anyway, here's some of what Pistole had to say about the scanners and their ability to detect complicated, well-disguised bombs:

...Would the TSA have been able to identify this most dangerous anomaly in the crotch area, had al-Qaeda managed to build one in the U.S.?

(Pistole) mentioned the TSA's new scanning devices, now in use at about 180 airports.

"The advanced imaging technology gives us the best chance to detect the underwear-type device," he said.

The best chance? "This is not 100 percent guaranteed," he said. "If it comes down to a terrorist who has a well- concealed device, and we have no intelligence about him, and he comes to an advanced-imaging technology machine, it is still our best technology. But it's really an open question about whether the machine, or the AIT operator, would detect the device."

You can read more here.

From the Guardian:

Recently I went to the theatre, as I am wont to do. The acting was impeccable, the direction insightful, the costumes fun, the music accomplished and the set damn sexy. Only the writing lacked salt.

It's not a parody, as one would be wont to think.

Hussein Ibish and Matt Duss address a question I brought up in this space last week: Just how powerful is Hamas in Gaza?

You're vs. Your: A surprising number of people don't understand the difference:

According to the Far News Agency, the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces has called for Israel's annihilation. I'm sure this a mistranslation, of course: What he probably meant to say was, "I would love the opportunity to visit Eilat because I understand the snorkeling is wonderful."

Addressing a defense gathering here in Tehran on Sunday, General (Hassan) Firouzabadi said that nations should realize the threats and dangers posed by the Zionist regime of Israel.

He reiterated the Iranian nation and Supreme Leader's emphasis on the necessity of support for the oppressed Palestinian nation and its causes, and noted, "The Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."

The article goes on to inform us that:

Earlier this year, Supreme Leader of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei stressed in explicit remarks Iran's direct involvement in the Palestinian and Lebanese confrontation with Israel, including the Lebanese Summer 2006 33-day resistance against the Zionist regime.

"Wherever Iran interferes, it announces it in a very straightforward manner. For instance, we interfered in confrontations against Israel, which resulted in the (Lebanese) victory in the 33-day war and (Palestinians' victory in) the 22-day (Gaza) war," Ayatollah Khamenei said, addressing millions of Friday Prayers worshippers on Tehran University Campus in February.

"In future too, we will support and help everyone who opposes the Zionist regime," the Leader underscored. "The Zionist regime is a real cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut, God Willing," Ayatollah Khamenei underscored.

I love that "underscored" business, by the way. "I'm going to murder all of you," the psychopath underscored.

Jonathan Spyer is not a romantic:

The nature of the regime created by Hamas in Gaza, and its strength and durability, has received insufficient attention in the West. This may have a political root: Western governments feel the need to keep alive the fiction of the long-dead peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. One of the necessary components of this is pretending that the historic split between nationalists and Islamists among the Palestinians has not really happened, or that it is a temporary glitch that will soon be reconciled. This fiction is necessary for peace process believers, because it enables them to continue to treat the West Bank Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas as the sole representative of the Palestinians.

But fiction it is. An Islamist one-party quasi-state has been built in Gaza over the last half-decade. The prospects for this enclave and its importance in the period ahead have been immeasurably strengthened by the advances made by Hamas' fellow Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt and elsewhere in the region.

I'm curious to see what Hussein Ibish says about this analysis. My fear is that Spyer is right, and that we will look back on this period as a transitional one, in which the Palestinian movement was thoroughly Islamicized, and in which Israel shifted further and further to the right. A reporter asked me earlier today how long I felt the two-state solution would be viable before it would be overcome by events. My answer was a kind of sidestep: There is no choice but the two-state solution, so therefore it doesn't have an expiration date. It has to be pursued until it is achieved. The other alternatives:
1) The six million Jews decide in some democratic fashion to dissolve their state and to seek a merger with the Palesitnians. The chance of this: Unlikely.
2) A third intifada, bloodier than the previous two, followed by repression, followed by bloodier uprisings, followed by repressions, leading to total, seemingly endless war.

I don't think we're at the point of explosion yet, but I'm feeling a bit grim these days. I realize that Peter Beinart and others believe that the key to peace is public, sustained pressure on the Israeli government to give up what it is not prepared to give up. But the Israeli government does not want to do what Peter and others want it to do because most Israelis don't want it to do this. Israelis see, over the past 12 years, two withdrawals, one from Lebanon and one from Gaza, that both ended-up empowering groups dedicated to Israel's destruction. They see Egypt moving toward Muslim Brotherhood rule; they see Lebanon as Hezbollah-occupied territory; they see Syria coming apart, to possibly reorganize itself as an Islamist state; and they see signs that Jordan's future is somewhat precarious as well. Then they ask: And you want to us to give up the high ground overlooking Tel Aviv?

The only interim solution is a kind of modified unilateralism, in which settlements are pulled back, leaving only the Israeli army on the high ground, until such time as its withdrawal can be negotiated. But I'm not betting on this one, either.

Here are two stories that will leave even the most committed cynic slack-jawed in wonder at America's promise, and also make you wonder if the people who think we should close our borders to immigrants are total idiots. (h/t Andrew Exum on the first story, Scott Stossel on the second).
This is from the AP, via Stars and Stripes:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Orlando Morel was 6 years old when he and his mother left Haiti on a crowded small wooden boat destined for America. Now 24, Morel remembers the blue of the ocean everywhere. And the hunger.

When a piece of bread fell into the water, Morel quickly scooped it up. "I will never forget that taste," he said, recalling the salty, soggy bread.

Nor will he forget when the Coast Guard showed up in a white boat and rescued him, his mother and other passengers.

Eternally grateful, the rescue led Morel to join the Coast Guard, and on Wednesday he will graduate from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut. He will serve on a cutter out of Florida whose mission will include migrant interdiction in the very waters where Morel was rescued nearly two decades ago.

"I can put myself in their shoes," said Morel, who can still speak Creole.

He says he would probably be dead had the Coast Guard not found him and his fellow migrants, who were lost and out of food. So, he's excited at the prospect of saving lives, just as his was saved.

"I don't think that anything I can do will be enough as payback," Morel said.

Read the whole thing; it's astonishing. Here's the second piece, from The Los Angeles Times:

NEW YORK-- For years, Gac Filipaj mopped floors, cleaned toilets and took out the trash at Columbia University.

A refugee from war-torn Yugoslavia, he eked out a living at the Ivy League school. But Sunday was payback time: The 52-year-old janitor donned a cap and gown to graduate with a bachelor's degree in classics.

As a Columbia employee, his classes were free. His favorite subject was the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca, he said during a break from his work at Lerner Hall, the student union building he cleans.

"I love Seneca's letters because they're written in the spirit in which I was educated in my family: not to look for fame and fortune, but to have a simple, honest, honorable life," he said.

His graduation with honors capped a dozen years of study, including readings in ancient Latin and Greek.

"This is a man with great pride, whether he's doing custodial work or academics," said Peter Awn, dean of Columbia's School of General Studies and professor of Islamic studies. "He is immensely humble and grateful, but he's one individual who makes his own future."

Filipaj, now an American citizen, was accepted at Columbia after learning English. His mother tongue is Albanian.

An ethnic Albanian and Roman Catholic, he fled Montenegro in 1992 as a brutal civil war loomed. He was about to be drafted into the Yugoslav army led by Serbs, many of whom considered Albanians their enemy. He had nearly finished law school in Belgrade.:

Today is the day Palestinians commemorate the "Nakba," the "disaster" that brought about the rebirth of Israel. I'm an advocate of a Palestinian state on 100 percent of the West Bank and Gaza (with land swaps, obviously -- the nefarious Obama plan that the majority of Israelis also endorse) and of a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, but what I won't do is label as a "nakba" a war that saw the 600,000 Jews of Palestine prevent their own slaughter at the hands of invading Arab armies.

The Middle East suffers today from the crucial mistakes made by Arab leaders in the late 1940s. The United Nations, you'll recall, voted to divide Palestine into two equal halves, one for a Jewish state, the other for an Arab state. The Jews accepted the plan; the Arab leadership, thinking its armies were strong enough to annihilate the Jews, invaded, and then proceeded to lose. As a consequence of the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees -- some were expelled by Jewish forces in the course of fighting, some fled, others were encouraged to leave by their leaders. Today, many of the descendants of these refugees are still warehoused in camps with the approval of the Arab states which, one might think, would have paid to resettle these descendants of refugees. Other refugee populations from the  tumultuous period following World War II have all been resettled, obviously.

The disaster, in other words, was the result of a series of mistakes made the leaders of the Arab states in 1948. There is not much recognition of this fact. Instead, those who romanticize the "nakba" argue that the Jews did not have a right to any slice of their historic homeland and that the Arabs were right to try to strangle the Jewish state at birth.

The Arab-Israeli parliamentarian Ahmed Tibi, speaking in commemoration of this day, said, "Recognition and empathy of the others' suffering is a lofty, humane value and a step towards peace between nations." This is absolutely true. Israelis should recognize that innocent Palestinians suffered because of their country's War of Independence. Palestinians today are not to blame for the current situation. But it is also true that men like Tibi should interrogate themselves about why the Palestinians became stateless. If Palestinian Arabs could bring themselves to recognize the simple fact that the Jewish people are from Palestine, much good would come.

This is not a commentary on Israel post-1967. The war that brought the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli control in 1967 was not of Israel's making, but efforts following that war to colonize the land with Jewish settlers in order to deny it to a future Palestinian state, well, these efforts have been a nakba for everyone. I'm not arguing that without settlements there would today be a Palestinian state on the West Bank and peace throughout the land, but I do know the chance for peace would be much greater if Israel didn't succumb to temptation and settle these territories. But "The Nakba"? Palestinians should open themselves up to the idea that this nakba was avoidable. And if this Nakba had been avoided, a lot of other disasters would have been avoided, as well.

And speaking of nakbas, here is a report about another, more silent nabka, one that caused the movement of 850,000 people across the Middle East, but one that doesn't get that much attention, in part because these refugees were cared for by their brethren. Matti Friedman writes about a different nakba, a Jewish nakba.

I have spent a great deal of time in the past four years interviewing people born and raised in Aleppo, Syria. Some of these people, most of whom are now in their eighties, are descended from families with roots in Aleppo going back more than two millennia, to Roman times. None of them lives there now.

On November 30, 1947, a day after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews, Aleppo erupted. Mobs stalked Jewish neighborhoods, looting houses and burning synagogues; one man I interviewed remembered fleeing his home, a barefoot nine-year-old, moments before it was set on fire. Abetted by the government, the rioters burned 50 Jewish shops, five schools, 18 synagogues and an unknown number of homes. The next day the Jewish community's wealthiest families fled, and in the following months the rest began sneaking out in small groups, most of them headed to the new state of Israel. They forfeited their property, and faced imprisonment or torture if they were caught. Some disappeared en route. But the risk seemed worthwhile: in Damascus, the capital, rioters killed 13 Jews, including eight children, in August 1948, and there were similar events in other Arab cities.

At the time of the UN vote, there were about 10,000 Jews in Aleppo. By the mid-1950s there were 2,000, living in fear of the security forces and the mob. By the early 1990s no more than a handful remained, and today there are none. Similar scripts played out across the Islamic world. Some 850,000 Jews were forced from their homes.

Read the whole thing.

Here's the quote of the day (from yesterday), from a story by the New York Times' man in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrinck:

"Without violating any international laws or the nonproliferation treaty, we have managed to bypass the red lines the West created for us," said Hamidreza Taraghi, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is close to the negotiating team.

There's been a lot of happy talk about the possibilities of real breakthrough at the upcoming P5 + 1 talks in Baghdad next week, in which the members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, try to steer Iran to an off-ramp. I've even been cautiously pessimistic (as opposed to vociferously pessimistic). But I keep hearing this little whisper from them that know: "The Iranians are better at negotiating than the West."

The Israelis are aware of this, and are worried that Iran will game the system until the point at which they have entered the so-called "zone of immunity," in which their nuclear program is so hardened and buried that no Israeli attack could set it back. This is precisely the worry of the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, and President Obama is keenly aware of Barak's worry. This is from my Bloomberg View column today:

Obama believes that Barak, and not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is the Israeli leader agitating most vociferously for a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, a strike the Obama administration thinks would be grossly premature and quite possibly catastrophic. (Your humble columnist concurs with this assessment.)

If Barak sees these talks as productive -- especially in light of evidence that the U.S. and its allies are doing a credible job of keeping Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold -- then Obama will have successfully pushed off an Israeli strike, at least until after the U.S. presidential election in November.

Barak has made clear that he seeks one thing above all in the nuclear talks: for Iran to shut down its formerly secret nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, near the city of Qom. Obama has made Barak's preoccupation with Fordo his own.

Anthony Cordesman of the The Center for International and Strategic Studies has published an extremely thorough report about Iran's nuclear program that should quell the doubts of those who believe that Iran's nuclear pursuits are benign or even TBD. The report, based on close readings of past IAEA reports as well as other declassified documents, paints a very sober, Monday-ruining kind of picture about the advanced scope of the Iranian program, the inadequacy of the current P5+1 agenda, and the limited efficacy of a potential strike on the program.

This report, taken with last week's news of the suspicious scrubbing of an Iranian nuclear site (along with the release yesterday of a drawing of an even more suspicious explosives containment chamber), have raised considerable alarm. In Haaretz, Anshel Pfeffer writes about the report in an article that, in the spirit of Israeli subtlety, is titled "The most important report on nuclear Iran that you are likely to read." A bit of the summary here:

Anyone who believes that Iran is not yet actively pursuing a nuclear-weapons program and merely developing the capabilities is committing an act of willful delusion. The intelligence supplied to the IAEA and verified by different "member countries," is clear on that Iran has been working on a wide range of projects for over a decade, all of which are specifically aimed at acquiring the capabilities necessary not only to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, but to assemble a nuclear advice that can be launched by long-range missile. Talk of a fatwa against nuclear weapons is just that: talk.

Despite sanctions and international monitoring, Iran has received highly specialized instruments and equipment, benefited from the knowledge of foreign nuclear weapons designers and made impressive advance in its own scientific centers, so as to be able to carry out most of the necessary testing for a nuclear device, without actually creating a nuclear detonation. There has also been preparation for an actual nuclear test.

Ahmed Rashid, writing in Haaretz, outlines what he sees as a highly likely response in the Muslim world to an Israeli, or American, strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. It's a worst-case scenario, but nevertheless a plausible one (h/t Hussein Ibish). Rashid says the locus of rage would be in Shia communities, but Sunnis might also erupt, as well. By the way, if someone has a compelling counter-argument, please send it along. Rashid:

In countries that border Iran, such as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, all of which are subject to a powerful U.S. military or political presence, Iran, to protect itself against possible American incursions or sabotage, has trained local militants to attack U.S. targets in their respective countries in the event of any attack on Iran. This program had its origins during the second term of the Bush administration, when Vice President Dick Cheney spoke openly about attacking Iran. Iran organized and planned for retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets everywhere that it was in a position to arm and fund clandestine groups.

Thus, the Shia protest in the Muslim world would likely be organized and widespread, and would target Americans and Israelis, and include major acts of terrorism and extreme violence.

At the same time, anti-Americanism is reaching dangerous levels in predominantly Sunni countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Both countries have extremist Sunni groups that engage in terrorism, as well as conservative Islamic parties that participate in electoral politics. Any attack on Iran could see a merging of all these Sunni elements as well as of the broader Sunni population, and one could expect widespread anger in the streets.

Such widespread and angry protests could make it almost impossible for Americans or Israelis to travel, work or do business across the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent. Such protests would almost invariably wipe out the gains and aspirations of the democratic movements within the Arab Spring countries, and lead to a reinforcing of Islamic fundamentalist parties, which could be expected to jump on the anti-American bandwagon. Widespread Sunni protests would invariably make the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan planned for 2014 much more difficult and possibly lead to the strengthening of the Taliban. It also could lead to a possible new intifada among the Palestinians, who in any case see little hope of an agreement with Israel on a two-state solution.

Sorry about the slow output here, I'm tied-up at the moment working on a longer piece for The Atlantic, plus Peter Beinart and I have to plan our gay wedding (picking a rabbi has been difficult, but I have a feeling that President Obama might agree to perform a civil ceremony -- or semi-civil ceremony, at least) but here are a few of things worth reading:

1) Talya Minsberg's piece on the Atlantic.com about the new Israeli ban on underweight models. V. interesting;

2) Aaron David Miller on how to successfully negotiate a peace deal;

3) A story about an 18-month-old child on the TSA's no-fly-list (really);

4) This argument, from the International Crisis Group, about why a hiatus in the Middle East peace process is actually a good thing;

5) A report from Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman about certifiably insane ideas floating around a Defense Department staff college;

6) David Makovsky's analysis of the new Israeli governing coalition, in which he argues that Iran is a key to understanding why Netanyahu brought onboard Shaul Mofaz;

7) And this piece, it which it is noticed that The Atlantic runs a lot of articles about men and their shortcomings.

Jonathan Tobin writes in praise of my Bloomberg View column yesterday, in which I noted that the Obama Administration is rhetorically quite opposed to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's slaughter of his own citizens, but that it doesn't match the rhetoric with actions that would hasten Assad's departure. Tobin contrasts my understanding of Obama's inaction on Syria with my views on Administration policy toward Iran:

This is, after all, the same Jeffrey Goldberg who has consistently sought to assure friends of Israel that President Obama's stance on Iran is more than mere rhetoric though, in fact, it has consisted of little but a collection of ominous adverbs punctuated by defenses of engagement and diplomacy since he took office. Granted, the president has reluctantly embraced sanctions on Iran (though he was way behind France and Britain on this score), but it is fairly obvious that he did so only to maneuver Israel into a situation where it could not attack the Islamist regime on its own.

Goldberg rightly dismisses the notion that Obama's rhetoric about Syria consists of anything more than lip service, yet he believes Obama can be trusted to eventually escalate his stance on the Islamist ayatollahs from rhetoric to action. When people wonder why many in Israel have little faith in the president's word on Iran, especially once he gets the "flexibility" that a second term would provide, perhaps we should refer them to Goldberg's column on the administration's verbal offensive against Assad.

The reason I criticize Obama's Syria policy and don't criticize his Iran policy is that they are two different policies.  Obama, in my opinion, has been resolute in seeking crippling sanctions against the Iranian regime; he has supported many acts of subterfuge and sabotage against Iran's nuclear program; he has supported a strong Israeli defense and he has funded various anti-missile programs that directly aid Israel; and he has gone on record numerous times saying that he will not allow Iran to cross the nuclear threshold. The Syria policy flummoxes me, for the obvious reason that the downfall of the Assad regime would be very damaging to its Iranian ally. I hope Obama toughens his Syria policy. But what he's doing in Iran is different than what he's doing in Syria. If you don't believe me, ask the leadership of the Israeli defense establishment, many of whom believe Obama when he suggests he will stop Iran by force, if necessary, from developing nuclear weapons.