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I had lunch this week with Condoleezza Rice. OK, so it wasn't exactly an intimate tête-à-tête; the secretary of state was the keynote speaker at the Women's Foreign Policy Group's annual luncheon at the Ritz-Carlton, where she spoke to a crowd of about 400, including yours truly. Condi was pretty much as expected: polished, pleasant, unflappable, and on message.

Her speech began with a bland discussion of general U.S. foreign-policy issues. Yawn. Rice did draw laughs from the crowd when she got in a little dig at Thomas Jefferson, mentioning that the first secretary of state would have never anticipated that the 66th secretary of state would be an African-American woman. She had a little slip of the tongue, saying that when her 12 years in office were over, it will have been 12 years since a white male occupied the top office in Foggy Bottom. Then she laughed, said that it "only feels like 12," and gave a nod to Madeline Albright and Colin Powell, "trailblazers also in their own right."

Basically, there was not much of real substance to her speech, but at least the Q&A session, moderated by NBC's Andrea Mitchell, touched on some real items in the news. She refused to answer questions about the CIA interrogation tapes scandal, saying that she didn't know about their destruction in 2005, but not commenting on questions about what she knew about the actual interrogations, which occurred when she was national security adviser in 2002. Asked about Guantánamo later, she did mention, "no one would like to close it more than I and, I think, the president."

She handled a question about Iran with characteristic aplomb, and reiterated an offer to meet with her Iranian counterpart, anytime, anywhere ... as soon as Iran scaled back and complied with international standards. As far as the greater Middle East goes, Rice expressed her personal faith in Abbas and Olmert (conveniently not mentioning their weak domestic status in their respective homes), and said that peace talks would not have been feasible even three months ago.

What struck me the most about Rice's lunchtime talk was what she didn't say. She barely mentioned Afghanistan and Iraq. She never uttered the name "Osama bin Laden." In 50 minutes, the word "terrorism" crossed her lips but twice, and then only to muse about the challenges her successors would face. The war on terror has been the centerpiece of Bush's foreign policy, and yet she didn't mention it once in her prepared remarks. Could it be a reflection of a changing mindset inside the administration?

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James Fallows thinks Hillary Clinton's supporters need to come to terms with what the harsh realities of gender politics would mean for her foreign policy if she were elected president:

[H]aving voted five years ago for the war in Iraq, which she then continued to support for years, she went ahead this fall and voted for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which however you slice it was essentially a vote for legitimizing military action against Iran....

If she is sworn in as the first female president, she will still have to remove doubts about her "toughness." There will be the 2010 midterms to think of. And of course the 2012 reelection campaign. And if she is tough enough to get through that, then concerns about her legacy. Over the long run, is there any difference between a candidate who needs to "seem" hawkish on questions like Iraq and Iran, and a candidate who is an actual hawk?

I sympathize completely with her predicament: dealing with those atavistic voter emotions about the "weakness" of female candidates is a terrible problem. But here's the predicament it creates for voters. If I don't want the next president to be someone who had a hawkish outlook on both Iraq and Iran, do I say: Never mind, she's not really a hawk, she just has to vote like one?

This is the kind of phony trumpeting of the "gender issue" that is at once disappointing and completely unwarranted. Legitimate, substantive questions can and should be asked about Clinton's positions on Iraq and Iran. But to insinuate that as president she would attack Iran with no motive other than the fear of being called a sissy is preposterous. Andrew Sullivan apparently agrees with this cacophony, too. I know it's a boys club over at The Atlantic's blog shop, where just one of the seven "voices" is a woman, but come on, fellas. What century are you boys living in? It certainly hasn't played out that way with Condi Rice on North Korea and Iran. Angela Merkel, Germany's first female chancellor, helped convince Bush to exhaust all peaceful efforts with Tehran before seeking punitive steps. And when was the last time you saw Nancy Pelosi calling for a military strike lest she be considered weak? If you want to discuss Clinton's qualifications for the presidency, fine. But let's talk about the things that matter.

The New York Times fact-checks Rudy Giuliani's latest campaign ad on Iran.

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The commentariat has, understandably, gone apoplectic about yesterday's news that Iran stopped its nuclear-weapons program in 2003. And several Democratic candidates, hoping to score points against frontrunner Hillary Clinton, are having a field day:

Barack Obama: "[T]he new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy."

John Edwards: "The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy."

The problem is, the NIE doesn't actually go that far. It strongly suggests that the threat of sanctions and military action is actually helpful, but makes no promises about what can be achieved through diplomacy:

Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international security and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might—if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.

The NIE's conclusion here is remarkably similar to National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley's statement, dismissed everywhere as pure spin:

The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically - without the use of force - as the Administration has been trying to do. And it suggests that the President has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests while ensuring that the world will never have to face a nuclear armed Iran. The bottom line is this: for that strategy to succeed, the international community has to turn up the pressure on Iran - with diplomatic isolation, United Nations sanctions, and with other financial pressure - and Iran has to decide it wants to negotiate a solution.

Matt Yglesias cries foul and says that the Bush administration has been hyping the threat, and that's certainly true. And it may well be that Vice President Dick Cheney discounts the intelligence community's assessment. But there may also be a defensible reason for the hysteria. If we take Hadley's statement at face value, the past year of bluster coming from the administration makes sense. The fundamental problem is that the Europeans, the Chinese, and especially the Russians are skittish about enacting U.N. sanctions. But the sanctions seem to be working! Yet to get others on board, the United States has had to sound the alarm about the program and threaten that if sanctions fail, it will turn to its Air Force for solutions. In order to be effective, this threat has to be credible: The Iranians have to believe it, and the other members of the Security Council have to believe it. In other words, the Bush administration has to convince the world that the alternative to sanctions is war, rather than a nuclear Iran that might be unpalatable but is ultimately a manageable problem.

Of course, what the administration hasn't done is offer Iran a credible package of inducements that includes security guarantees, economic incentives, and so forth. In the words of the NIE, "opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways." Hadley's mention of a "willingness to negotiate a solution that serves Iranian interests" hints that such a package might be in the offing. The trouble is, Iran's negotiators are much more irascible now than they were in 2003, so the price will be far higher than it was back then—assuming a deal is still even possible.

Oh, Iran. When will you learn to loosen up and not interpret everything coming out of the West as a threat? This week, the Ministry for Culture and Islamic Guidance began a campaign against rappers, announcing that illegal studios would be closed and artists "confronted." Normally, musicians in Iran who want to record an album or stage a performance have to apply for permission from the government. But as the hip-hop movement in Farsi has continued to grow, driven by links between Iranians and exiled Persians in places like Los Angeles or Paris, many rappers have chosen to bypass official protocol, choosing to distribute their music on the Internet instead. 

If only Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other power brokers in Iran read FP. Then they would see that the globalization of hip-hop isn't evil; it's just the continuation of a long history of youths using music and poetry to express themselves.

Not enough Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in your life? The Iranian president has been blogging on and off for about two years—and now he's looking for feedback. In his latest post, Ahmadinejad asks for more readers write to him about Iran's relationship with the rest of the world:

As you know, the purpose of running this blog is to have a direct and mutual ‎contact and communication with the viewers and even though I have received many ‎messages from the viewers to update the blog and write new notes, I preferred to write ‎less and spend more time on reading the viewers' messages – and not let this ‎communication tool become just a one-way medium.

And apparently, people are responding. Here are some of the more colorful comments, both in agreement with and opposition to Mahmoud. All errors of grammar and spelling original:

Pro	Con
I in fact think you are a great leader and I am actually contemplating moving to Iran because of the ignorance of people and the harsh things they say about all middle eastern countries... - Adara in Canada Mr. President Allow me to express my admiration for your policy. You are a great example of how one should stand up to the bullies of the world. Keep up the good fight. You are a spoksmen to all the free people, not just Muslims. - Filip in Macedonia After watching video of your experience at Columbia University I felt tryly ashamed to be an American. The ignorance and intolerance exhibited by Mr. Bollinger in his introduction speech was totally unacceptable and certainly not a befitting welcome for a world leader and scholar such as yourself. - Allison in the United States	Hey! Do all you non-Iranians realize that if you were in Iran, you wouldnt have any rights?! You couldnt serve in the military or police force...youd be discriminated against!!!! Why the hell do you support someone like this?! - Xochitl in the United States You are a terrible, despicable human being. You WILL be attacked by the US or Israel and will be destroyed! - "Your gone" in the United Kingdom How does it feel to be the most hated person on the planet? - Martha in the United States

If you read other languages, you can also check out the comments made on the non-English versions of the site. Translations of "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos" and their respective comments are also available in Arabic, Farsi, and French.

On a private listserv, Columbia professor and Iran expert Gary Sick shares his thoughts on U.S. policy toward Iran (posted with permission):

ALI AL-SAADI-ALI HAIDER/AFP/Getty Images

Over the past several weeks, there has been a quiet process of apparent concessions and small gestures of approval between the United States and Iran in Iraq. General Petraeus told the Wall Street Journal that Iran "made promises at the highest levels of the Iranian government to the highest levels of the Iraqi government. These were unequivocal pledges to stop the funding, training, arming and directing of militia extremists in Iraq. It will be hugely significant to see if that's the case." Only a few weeks earlier, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had noted that the discovery and use of improvised explosive devices (IED) of suspected Iranian origin in Iraq had declined, along with the general decline of violence associated with the U.S. military surge and new counter-insurgency tactics.

In between these two announcements, the U.S. military released nine Iranians who had been arrested and held for many months. [...]

I withhold judgment for now, but I think this series of unexpected events that got very little media attention was important in several ways. First, it tends to put the lie to all the heated speculation that the United States is about to bomb Iran. [...] Second, it lays a more constructive background for the next round of U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad, which should convene in the near future. [...]

Finally, I note that U.S. foreign policy is increasingly in the hands of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is showing herself to be a consummate realist, particularly as the neo-conservative ideologues increasingly find themselves without government employ and quarantined from the policy process, and as the Office of the Vice President watches its policy influence evaporating almost by the day. I am particularly intrigued by the fact that administration policy toward North Korea and the Palestinian issue have effectively reversed in the past year (regardless of pro-forma administration claims that the policies remain steady and unchanging).

Is there room in these last months of a lame duck presidency to craft a modest opening to Iran, while maintaining a stout anti-Iranian coalition?

Well, if we are to heed the cries of alarm emanating from the neo-conservatives as they watch their grandiose plans to add a third front to the War on Terror crumple into the dustbin of history, perhaps there really is something going on here.

As I noted earlier, these diplomatic openings with Iran have a way of falling apart. Sick goes on to note that any rapprochement with Tehran will proceed under the radar to minimize the risk for both sides:

Nevertheless, since this is a policy that dare not speak its name, even if these titillating signals are true, no turning point will be announced in blaring trumpets, and the message about Iran will be cloaked in vitriol and bile to prevent creating undue alarm among American conservatives and among the Arabs who are only now signing on to a long-term strategy to counter the "Iranian threat" but who also deeply fear the possibility of a sudden deal between the United States and Iran....

Watch this space. 

HENGHAMEH FAHIMI/AFP/Getty Images

Anne Applebaum airs the familiar complaint that the Iraq mess has made real sanctions on Iran less likely. She then goes on to say:

What, then, are we left with? Fingers crossed, that those who say Iran's nuclear bomb is years away are right. Fingers crossed, that maybe Iran really does just want a civilian nuclear program. Fingers crossed, that if Iran gets nukes, its government will behave responsibly.

Fingers crossed? Anne, like many other pundits, seems to have forgotten about a well-developed doctrine called "deterrence." During the Cold War, math whizzes at places like the Rand Corporation churned out reports and game-theory matrices on the subject; in other words, we know a lot about it, and it's a lot more sophisticated than a pundit's "fingers crossed."

But you don't have to have a black belt in deterrence theory to understand the issues when it comes to Iran's would-be nukes. Let's take the case of Israel, which would theoretically be the country most threatened by an Iran with nuclear weapons. Israel reportedly has upwards of 200 nuclear bombs and/or warheads and second-strike capability. Notably, Israel has three nuclear-armed submarines; Iran has no technology that can detect them.

In the extremely unlikely event that the mullahs are foolish enough to launch their unreliable missiles on Tel Aviv and/or Jerusalem (most likely killing tens of thousands of Muslims and destroying several major Islamic holy sites in the process), Israel will annihilate Iran. With their submarines, the Israelis can do so even if their entire country is destroyed first. Boom. That's deterrence.

It's that simple. And the United States offers another order of magnitude of deterrent power. Sanctions and negotiations may yet prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons; there is plenty of time, and there is no hard evidence that Iran has even made the political decision to weaponize. But even if diplomacy fails, as no less a personage than former CENTCOM commander John Abizaid said recently, "Nuclear deterrence would work with Iran." Just like it worked with the Soviets, who were vastly more powerful and much more aggressive. This is not to say that there wouldn't be problems, but they would be manageable.

SAMUEL KUBANI/AFP/Getty Images

In the next few days, the International Atomic Energy Agency plans to release its "eagerly-awaited" report on Iran's disputed nuclear activities. If the agency finds that Iran has not been sufficiently forthcoming about its nuclear program, the report could spur a drive toward further sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.

Earlier this week, Iran released documents that the IAEA has been demanding for two years: blueprints showing how to machine uranium metal into spherical shapes appropriate for the core of a nuclear weapon. When asked why it would have information that has "no value outside of a nuclear weapons program," Iran responded that it received them inadvertently while purchasing its nuclear equipment on the black market decades ago.

On the surface, this claim is plausible. The A.Q. Khan network (and presumably, any other extant illicit networks supplying nuclear material) dealt in all types of dangerous materials and information, and the nature of a black market lends itself to disorganization and mistakes like the one Iran claims occurred.

Even if Iran did not actively seek out information that could only be used in nuclear weapons, though, the real question is why the country's leaders would wait two years to comply with the IAEA's request to relinquish the documents. At best, the Iranians were holding the blueprints in reserve for situations like today's, as a bargaining chip. At worst, they were holding them to eventually use them in a weapons program. Either way, Iran was not cooperating fully with the IAEA in its attempts to ascertain the true nature of the country's nuclear program—not a good sign.

Fortunately, though, these documents apparently did not contain blueprints for an entire nuclear weapons core. Machining enriched uranium (or plutonium) metal into a perfect sphere is merely one of many engineering challenges posed by an implosion nuclear weapon—an explosives array must be carefully designed to compress the metal effectively, for instance, and as we've seen with Iran, the enrichment process itself is very difficult to perfect without help. Hopefully the IAEA report will show Iran has benign intentions or, at least, that it has not progressed further towards building a nuclear weapon. But we'll have to wait and see.

Once again, U.S. President George W. Bush is talking about World War III with Iran:

[T]his is a country that has defied the IAEA -- in other words, didn't disclose all their program -- have said they want to destroy Israel. If you want to see World War III, you know, a way to do that is to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon. And so I said, now is the time to move."

The timing of Bush's statement kind of makes you wonder. Buried on A14 of yesterday's Washington Post post was a quick story by Robin Wright on the impending release of nine Iranians who had been detained by the U.S. military in Iraq on the grounds that they were helping plot attacks on U.S. soldiers. Bush assuredly knew about the decision, Wright reports:

The status of the captured Iranians is so diplomatically and militarily sensitive that it has been reviewed by the White House. President Bush was briefed on the decision, which was made on the recommendation of military officials after weeks of deliberation, U.S. sources said.

Wright doesn't quite find a U.S. official willing to say that Iran is being less of a problem in Iraq these days, but an anonymous Iraq official apparently believes this to be so: 

A senior Iraqi official said the Iranians' release reflects growing recognition that Iran has been playing a less provocative role in Iraq recently, evident in fewer U.S. deaths caused by roadside bombs and in restraint by Shiite militias on U.S. targets.

"There is wide acceptance of the notion that over the past month or two, they have been less problematic in Iraq," he said.

What appears to be happening here is that the United States is testing Iranian intentions by releasing these nine prisoners. Are the Iranians trying to show that cooperation is in the offing? Or are they signaling that Iran has a lot of control over the violence in Iraq, and could therefore make the situation much, much worse in the event of a U.S. attack?

Whatever the case, the Bush administration has a history of screwing up these delicate games of diplomatic semaphore, as Barbara Slavin demonstrates in a new piece for FP. Based on her original reporting for USA Today and her research at the U.S. Institute of Peace for her excellent new book, Slavin's piece offers a reminder that the White House has botched countless opportunities to engage Iran over the last 6 years. Could Bush, with all his loose talk about "World War III," be missing another chance? Check it out.

Iran's Bushehr power plant - AFP/Getty Images

Russia has been in the news a lot lately following President Vladimir Putin's big trip to Iran and what look suspiciously like efforts to stay in power after his term expires. But without much media fanfare, the Russians have been quietly working on an initiative that could do a world of good.

Over the past few years, Russia has been collaborating with the United States and other supplier nations to limit the spread of sensitive enrichment technologies that can be used to produce fuel for civilian uses as well as for nuclear weapons. Cooperation here is a matter of necessity: Efforts to halt the spread of atomic weapons simply won't get very far without Russia, one of the world's most important suppliers of nuclear technology and fuel for energy production.

The Russians are about to launch an "international fuel enrichment center" in Angarsk, a city in eastern Siberia. The precise details of the arrangement are still unclear, but it appears as if all countries will be able to participate in the center "without any political preconditions," according to Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations. In return, it was initially believed that participating states would receive assured access to nuclear fuel from Angarsk. However, a recent report by Oxford Analytica merely noted that participating countries would "share in profits" from the facility — a vague formulation that leaves open many questions about the nature of the agreement.

Assured access to fuel, though, is the main principle behind each of the handful of "multilateralization" proposals that have been put forth for the nuclear fuel cycle. Certain states, such as Iran, argue that they need to develop their own fuel-cycle capabilities (i.e. centrifuge enrichment plants) to guard against disruptions in the international market for nuclear fuel. Even though the market has never seen a notable disruption, this argument is valid to a certain degree; for a state that is heavily reliant on nuclear power, a disruption would be crippling, and just because market disruptions haven't happened doesn't mean they won't. Development of enrichment facilities, moreover, is allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

The current fuel-cycle countries hope that multilateral initiatives such as the center in Angarsk will reduce incentives for more states to build enrichment capabilities. They could also help reveal Iran's true intentions — why refuse to participate in the Angarsk center if their only concern is reliable access to fuel? With a possible renaissance for nuclear power on the horizon, initiatives like Angarsk are promising attempts to slow proliferation of dangerous technology without eviscerating the NPT.

Over the weekend, I finally had a chance to watch Frontline's recent show on Iran, and I found some of the extended comments by the new Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Mohammad Jafari to be very interesting. He said:

FRONTLINE

The problem with the U.S. intelligence system is that it receives its intelligence about Iran from Iran's enemies. This may prompt the American government to make some mistakes. And you can be sure that this is the case, too, with respect to Iraq. ...

The United States gets its intelligence [about Iran] from two sources in Iraq. One is the Mujahideen-e Khalq [MEK]; the other is the Mukhabarat intelligence [agency].

The Mukhabarat organization, created by the Americans and still not under the control of the Iraqis but under the control of Americans, is made up entirely of Baath Party officials, Saddam's old spies, who were active in spying on Iran. Outside these two sources, no one provides the intelligence they have on Iran.

So these are America's intelligence sources. It's natural -- what kind of information do they provide to the U.S. on Iran? Do they provide good intelligence about Iran to the United States, or will they try to exacerbate existing conflicts between Iran and the U.S. to further their own interests?

Facing escalating drumbeats from the United States, Iran has launched what appears to be a coordinated public diplomacy campaign. In addition to Jafari, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the interior minister, and other Iranian officials have begun explicitly charging the United States with supporting and/or sponsoring anti-Iranian "terrorism" in Iraq and Afghanistan. They darkly cite U.S. inaction regarding the PKK showdown with Turkey and alleged coddling of the MEK, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist organization, as evidence that the United States supports terrorism. There have been scattered stories from reporters like Seymour Hersh hinting that the United States is secretly using such groups to gather intelligence and "'encourage ethnic tensions'" and undermine the regime," but I am extremely skeptical that anything beyond intelligence collection is going on. I would expect we'd see a campaign of leaks in major newspapers if the United States truly were, say, backing the PJAK, Kurdish guerrillas affiliated with the PKK who are attacking Iran, or Baluchi terrorists operating out of western Pakistan. It's hard to keep something like that secret these days.

Still, Jafari's complaints do raise questions about the quality of the intelligence the U.S. military is getting on Iranian involvement in Iraq and feeding to reporters. In his interview, Jafari was evasive when asked specific questions about the role of the Quds Force and the alleged Iranian supplying of so-called "explosively formed penetrator" bombs in Iraq. If he had been forthright in answering those questions, his protestations might come across as more credible.

MUSTAFA OZER/AFP/Getty Images

Turkish troops continue massing along Iraqi border, preparing for possible cross-border assaults on safe havens of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party. The United States, among other countries, has urged Turkey to back off, fearing an attack could destabilize the one relatively stable region in Iraq.

What is less known is that Iraqi Kurdistan is already under attack from Iran, which is targeting the Party for Freedom and Life in Kurdistan (PJAK). Members of the party, which calls for a separate Kurd state, have clashed repeatedly with Iranian forces in recent years. The confrontations had been taking place in northwestern Iran, where PJAK forces were attempting to expel Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard from Kurdish area. But last month, Tehran acknowledged it had begun shelling PJAK bases inside Iraq. When asked about the attacks, Gen. Yayha Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said:

Some of their bases are 10 kilometers deep inside Iraqi territory, so this is part of our natural right to secure our borders. Of course we issued warnings to the Iraqi government and told it to take them [PJAK members] away from the border and respect its obligations. But unfortunately the Kurdistan region, the northern part of Iraq, did not listen, so we feel entitled to target military bases of PJAK and they have been under our artillery fire.

Now, there are reports that Revolutionary Guard troops are gathering at the Iraqi border, readying for an assault. So Iraq's Kurds face attacks on two fronts. One attack could destabilize the region. A second could send it spiraling toward all-out war.

President Bush reiterated yesterday that he doesn't want Turkey in Iraq. But oddly, he's been silent on Iran. Some reports suggest the United States is preparing war plans against Iran. Could an overt strike by Iran on Iraq be the public justification for the United States to put these plans into action?

Did you know that Encyclopedia Britannica has a blog?

I didn't either, but this week, Britannica Blog is hosting a discussion about U.S. policy toward Iran. The discussion, which lasts through Friday, features an odd assortment of analysts, from Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute to Scott Ritter, the outspoken former weapons inspector who famously warned all and sundry before the Iraq war that Saddam had no nuclear weapons. Ledeen and Ritter offer no surprises, for those familiar with their arguments: Ledeen wants "regime change" via a democratic revolution (fat chance), and Ritter says that Iran is not a threat to the United States and that the whole thing comes down to Israel and U.S. demand for oil in any case.

The most useful commentary comes from Wayne White, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute who was, among other things, principal Iraq analyst at the State Department's highly respected Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 2003-2005. Most of his post is a fairly straightforward synopsis of the state of play. But here's an interesting nugget:

If the U.S. attacks Iran, for either reason, it would most likely do so during the days of maximum darkness in order to capitalize on its significant advantage in night warfare. That period begins around now and ends next March. The following winter, the president would be in office for only a portion of that militarily advantageous period, and also would have to consider the awkwardness of ordering an attack during an election campaign or in the period between the election and when he leaves office on January 20, 2009.

Unless last month's IAEA "work plan" with Iran (aimed at clearing up some matters by November) shows real progress, offering genuine hope that the diplomatic logjam over nuclear enrichment can be broken, this December through March could be the first period during which U.S. military action against Iran becomes a real possibility. Because of the military considerations noted earlier, roughly the same period would be the most likely timing for a fairly robust and mainly aerial assault against IRGC targets inside Iran.

But as William Arkin notes here in a skeptical WaPo post on Seymour Hersh's latest article about Iran, if the United State goes to war with Iran, "it will most likely be because Iran does something stupid." As in, its proxy forces in Iraq kill a large number of U.S. soldiers and there is smoking-gun evidence that Iran is guilty. Is Iran that foolish? We'll find out.