How many Middle Eastern leaders have to visit Brazil in one month for the U.S. State Department to figure out something’s going on? More than three, apparently. After I wrote Friday’s post on the serial visits of Peres, Abbas, and Ahmadinejad, Rick Richman called my attention to the exchange in the State Department briefing on Ahmadinejad’s visit:

QUESTION: Ahmadinejad is going to be visiting Brazil in a couple of days. Is the fact that a friendly government like that welcoming Ahmadinejad – does that tend to dilute international solidarity on the nuclear issue?

MR. WOOD: Well, President Ahmadinejad going to Brazil, that’s an issue between the Government of Brazil and the Government of Iran. What we would hope is that the Government of Brazil would raise some of these concerns that we have, many of which I’ve just laid out here, about Iran in those meetings. But beyond that, I don’t have anything to add to that.

So: Brazil is hosting the three major regional players in Middle Eastern dynamics this month. One of them is the president of Iran, the revolutionary, terrorist-sponsoring state Obama is trying to pressure on its nuclear program. Brazil – a nuclear client of Russia – has been following Venezuela’s path toward “increased economic ties” with Iran, which in literal terms means banking arrangements that circumvent sanctions, plus plenty of “legitimate” manufacturing and container shipping to obscure trade in prohibited goods. And the views of our State Department on these circumstances boil down to an absurdly banal bromide (the Ahmadinejad visit is “an issue between Brazil and Iran”) and a “hope” that Brazil will raise some of our concerns with the Iranian president.

Far from acting as our deputy, Brazil seems to be positioning itself to gain leverage with Iran regardless of how its policies undermine the P5+1’s threat of sanctions. Mahmoud Abbas probably overestimates the leverage Brazil already has with Iran, but in requesting Lula da Silva’s help with discouraging the Iran-Hamas link, he has shown a keener understanding of this month’s diplomatic flurry than Foggy Bottom.

One projection seems sound: if Brazil does go through with a line of credit for Iran, we should expect that move to bring Brazil into conflict with the U.S. Treasury Department, as Venezuela’s similar activities have in the past. What we do about such a financial arrangement between Iran and Brazil will tell both parties – and all our negotiating partners – everything they need to know about the credibility of Obama’s threats of sanctions.

It’s a busy month for Brazil. The Latin American giant hosted Shimon Peres last week, sustained a visit from Mahmoud Abbas this week, and will receive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad next week. Not exactly a random series of visitors — and at least some Americans are paying attention: the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.com have both picked up on the vociferous objections of Congressman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) to Ahmadinejad’s visit. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency cites a Brazilian press account of Engel’s call on the ambassador in Washington [emphasis added]:

The Representative … met with the Brazilian Ambassador in Washington, Antonio Patriota, and conveyed his concern regarding Ahmadinejad’s visit on November 23.  Patriota, according to a source present at the meeting, reacted brusquely, surprising Engel. … [Engel said]: “I expressed my deep displeasure with Ahmadinejad’s visit, since I always speak openly in my meetings with ambassadors, and he (Patriota) defended his position.”

Engel is right to be concerned, but the cows got out of this barn a while back. U.S. media opinion looks almost poignantly out of touch on this: when editorialists speculate that Brazil could be jeopardizing its standing as a potential mediator with Iran, the salient question is, jeopardizing it with whom?

There has, after all, been no meaningful reaction from the U.S. to Brazil’s prior outreach to Iran, to the country’s own uranium-enrichment program, or to the late-2008 nuclear accord between Russia and Brazil. America has largely ignored Iran’s (and Russia’s) growing ties to nearby Venezuela and has evinced little if any reaction to a series of signals in 2009 that Brazil could help the mullahs evade sanctions by setting up a line of credit for Iran’s Export and Development Bank. Iranian sources now refer to this credit line as a fait accompli, an impression Ahmadinejad’s state visit will certainly not revise.

It’s no wonder, then, that Abbas today is asking Brazil to intervene with Iran and get its leaders to cease their support to Hamas. Nor is it surprising that Israel, in 2009, has already sent both its foreign minister and its president to Brazil, on the nation’s first Latin American charm offensives in more than two decades.

As Congressman Engel could tell us, Brazil’s policies are trending, disquietingly, toward specific and material support for Iran and a political solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs. But the U.S. should also wake up to the fact of this revolving-door courtship and what it says about the leadership vacuum up north.

Consider that while  Brazil mulled over a line of credit for Iran, this summer the U.S. made a government-backed loan to the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, as if Brazil were not a major economic power busy undermining our policy on Iran but still an importunate Third World backwater. Congressman Engel is right: this needs adjusting — as much in Washington as in Brasilia, if not more.

Anthony’s and Rick’s posts on the now interrupted effort to recreate the Big Bang reminded me immediately of two things: Dr. Strangelove, and recent developments in climate science. Anthony’s “Dr. [THREE NAMES]” sounds, for one thing, eerily like Peter Sellers’s turn as Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous 1964 movie. For another, Rick’s quotation from the Lederman and Teresi book evokes — inevitably, once Dr. Strangelove is in view — the mushroom clouds with which the movie concludes, and the voice of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again.”

These images, with their overtones of surreal Cold War irony, are a reminder that politics is incapable of infinite sweet sadness. Politics is all about definite and identifiable causes, and effects crying out for “management.” That’s why politics can’t be entrusted with speculative cosmology — or with speculative climatology.

It now turns out that there is some French bread gumming up our effort to understand, and attach cosmological import to, the behavior of our climate. What we might call the “butter” on the French bread is this eye-opening conclusion, from a 2009 study of 15 years’ worth of satellite data by MIT scientists: that the “greenhouse effect” does not behave as predicted by climatology models. When carbon and temperatures increase, the earth releases more heat energy as opposed to trapping more of it.

Now that’s a big pat of butter. But the “French bread” itself is more informative still: an acknowledgment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that when it comes to the actual processes of climate feedback — the processes that create (or mitigate) the greenhouse effect — we have no accepted way to measure or directly analyze them. Climate scientist Roy W. Spencer calls this admission “amazing.” Citing the relevant passage in the IPCC report, he puts the inconvenient truth as follows:

Despite the fact that the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming depends mostly upon the strengths of feedbacks in the climate system, there is no known way to actually measure those feedbacks from observational data.

I’d agree that that’s amazing, particularly in light of the certainty with which global-warming proponents assert that we can not only understand but also predict those feedbacks.

It’s good to be reminded at such a time that even supercollider scientists can come off, in expressing the idea of there being a parsable algorithm at work in the universe, just like ancient Greeks explaining their cosmos through Promethean myth. Faith that there are systemic explanations for big things, if we can only demonstrate them, is a key element of scientific inquiry. We shouldn’t disdain such lines of thought.

But it’s also a relief to know about the French bread. Until the proposition of the “God particle attacking us” can be measured and tested, the “French bread in the collider” explanation will do, for the human purposes that matter. When it comes to the politics of climate science, we should keep our eyes on the French bread as well.

Why is Dmitry Medvedev now reporting himself to be losing patience with Iran? The likelihood that he is blowing hot merely as a prelude to blowing cold again is, of course, pretty strong, given his failure to demonstrate any reliable support for tougher sanctions to date. But Medvedev’s protestations to President Obama in Singapore coincided with a Russian announcement that the nuclear reactor at Bushehr, which depends on Russian technical support, will not be brought online in 2009 as previously projected. This is a material setback for Iran’s overall nuclear program – and comes on top of Moscow’s continued refusal to deliver the S-300 air-defense system Iran contracted to buy in 2007.

Nothing in Russia’s history of dealing with revolutionary Iran supports the conclusion that Medvedev wants to get tough with Iran because he shares a common purpose with the Western powers to prevent Iran’s nuclearization. But Russia is wielding bargaining chips with Tehran at the moment, and is uttering vague words that might be interpreted by optimistic Westerners as support for intensified sanctions. Is Moscow seeking to leverage something from the West – or from Iran?

The clue to this puzzle may be flowing through pipelines in Central Asia. Iran is actually the key to what is being hailed in the region as the liberation of gas-rich Turkmenistan from the stranglehold of Gazprom. Turkmenistan, with the world’s fourth-largest reserves of natural gas, is no small prize. Its gas production was second only to Russia’s in total Gazprom output, until a pipeline explosion in April prompted a cutoff by Ashgabat amid allegations that Gazprom had sabotaged the pipeline to intimidate the Turkmens. Gazprom accounts for 10 percent of Russian GDP and 25 percent of federal tax revenues, but its highest-producing Siberian fields are being quickly depleted of their recoverable gas, with production from them expected to decline to nil by as early as 2020. Control of Turkmen gas is a major financial issue for Moscow.

Turkmenistan has found pipeline partners in Iran and China, however, and next month anticipates inaugurating an increased gas flow to Iran that could ultimately connect it, through Turkey, with the Nabucco pipeline that will bypass Gazprom to bring gas to Europe. By one route or another, the pipeline through Iran promises to be a gateway to Western consumers. President Berdymukhamedov emphasized his country’s gas independence in October by replacing most of the oil- and gas-industry officials in Turkmenistan. On November 1, in a fresh start after their ugly gas-pricing dispute of 2008, Turkmenistan welcomed a delegation from Iran seeking to eliminate customs barriers, increase trade, and jointly develop oil and gas infrastructure in the Caspian Sea.

Russia has never hesitated to twist foreign arms for Gazprom, whose revenues prop up the state and make its military acquisition program possible. It’s considerably more likely that Iran is being pressured on its gas arrangements with Turkmenistan than that Russia’s government has begun seeing the Iranian nuclear problem through Western eyes.

Hugo Chavez is reportedly refusing to take phone calls from Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. Uribe’s foreign minister can’t get a shout back from his Venezuelan counterpart either. The stonewalling from Caracas comes in the wake of Chavez’s other call on November 8, in his weekly media program, for the Venezuelan army to “prepare for war.” Chavez has been making this kind of call for several months, but last week he also moved 15,000 troops to the border with Colombia. Uribe has responded with 12,000 troops deployed on his side of the border and a request for the UN Security Council and the Organization of American States to rein in Chavez.

The issue, according to Chavez, is the October 30 agreement by Colombia to allow U.S. forces to use its military bases for counter-narcotics operations. Contrary to Chavez’s formulation of the matter, this does not involve a new introduction of American forces into the region. Our forces operated from Ecuador until August 2009 and continue to operate from El Salvador. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, reelected in April after doing a “Chavez” on his country’s constitution, decided to let the basing agreement with the U.S. expire in August, and we negotiated the agreement to use Colombian bases this summer. So why is Chavez so frantic about what is, in effect, a shift of bases rather than a change in U.S. military posture?

Because he knows U.S. forces fighting the drug war in Colombia would have a pretext to pursue FARC guerrillas into Venezuela — as FARC was pursued by Colombian troops into Ecuador in 2008 — and that from Colombia, as opposed to Ecuador, American forces would be in a position to do so. It’s merely sound analysis to project that with U.S. forces using multiple Colombian bases, FARC will be increasingly pushed across borders. Venezuela’s is already hospitable; it would be extremely inconvenient to Chavez to try to close it, especially given the reliance of Hezbollah, the protégé of his great friend Iran, on its ties to FARC and the drug trade. Such developments would also interfere with Chavez’s own policy of supporting FARC as a means of weakening the center-right, U.S.-friendly Uribe government.

Ironically, the preference of many in the Obama administration for stand-off, cross-border raids and aerial attacks — as demonstrated in Pakistan — only strengthens the perception in Central America that the shift to Colombian bases will herald U.S. intervention of that kind. The U.S. preoccupation with forcing Honduras to take Manuel Zelaya back has reinforced, meanwhile, the impression that Obama will act in Latin America with a reflexive, high-handed cynicism.

Chavez would be quite correct, even without these factors, that U.S. forces based in Colombia are an impediment to his regional plans. He fears attack because he knows a valid pretext exists for attacking his territory. His antagonism should not stop us, but we had better be prepared for the actions it will prompt, and keep our own purposes and strategy clearly in mind.

Iran this week has thrown a one-two diplomatic punch in the matter of Yemen’s insurgency problem. It remains to be seen if the Islamic revolutionary state is punching above its weight; that may depend on what, if anything, the U.S. does. But Arabs in the region have taken Iran’s initiative badly, seeing it as the continuation of a trend toward Iranian meddling in Arab nations’ affairs.

On November 5, Saudi Arabia launched a counteroffensive against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, Shias with Iranian backing who have violated the Saudi border in the course of their fight against the central government in Sana’a. A Saudi officer was reportedly killed by the Houthis last week, and the Saudis are losing confidence in the ability of the Saleh government to quell the insurgency. On November 10, Iran — the Houthis’ supplier — warned “Yemen’s neighbors” against meddling in Yemeni affairs. Since “Yemen’s neighbors” amount to Saudi Arabia and Oman, this warning was quite pointed.

Today Al Jazeera reports that Iran has offered to “aid Yemeni security,” proclaiming Tehran ready to help restore peace to the insurgency-torn nation. Al Jazeera’s hostile view of this disingenuous initiative is a reliable reflection of sentiment in Arab capitals. The proposal is also a direct challenge to America’s network of partnerships in the region. Iran advancing itself as a moderator of an Arab nation’s internal affairs is, in fact, a power play, one that would not be mounted in an environment of American alertness and determination.

Iran has conducted its foreign policy for years through the sponsorship of terrorism against Israel and Lebanon. It’s through gaining an insidious foothold in other nations, through coming in the back door, that Iran has sought regional influence. Now the mullahs propose to be admitted through the front door in Yemen, and have their support to the Houthi guerrillas validated by a recognized diplomatic process.

With Iran already an established presence in Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, will the Obama administration discourage this fresh initiative with any level of firmness? Or will it leave the Saudis and Yemenis to make their own arrangements for resistance to Iran’s outreach? See what you think (from the Huffington Post piece linked above):

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters [on November 5] he had no information about whether the conflict had spread across the border but expressed Washington’s concern over the situation.

“It’s our view that there can be no long-term military solution to the conflict between the Yemeni government and the Houthi rebels,” Kelly said. “We call on all parties to the conflict to make every effort to protect civilian populations and limit damage to civilian infrastructure.”

That doesn’t sound to me like a posture Iran would have to worry about colliding with. It probably didn’t sound like one to Iran either.

Anyone who has ever watched a toddler work up a howl knows the drill: Assess the situation; determine that the bargaining position would benefit from a wall-eyed fit; begin the choking sniffle; twitch the arms and shoulders; stomp the feet; screw up the face; let fly with the piercing shriek; pause to survey the effect; repeat.

One thing we must acknowledge about the Kim Jong-Il regime is that it has this sequence down. If we were honest, we would acknowledge that the ploy keeps working because we, as the psychologists say, keep enabling the behavior. Except for the brief interim in 2002 when George W. Bush cut off fuel shipments to Pyongyang, after the admission that its nuclear- enrichment program continued, the U.S. has been requiting North Korean tantrums since 1994 with cookies, candy, and regular visits from Santa Claus.

The latest series of elaborate tantrums started in 2008, when Pyongyang began reconstituting its nuclear facility at Yongbyon. It has continued, conveniently for North Korea’s weapons programs, through a rocket test launch in April, a nuclear detonation in May, and multiple launches of short-range missiles in May and October. In the wake of signals that Pyongyang might be willing to rejoin the Six Party talks — and on the eve of President Obama’s trip to Asia — North Korea today threw one of its trademark tantrums by encroaching on South Korean territorial waters and provoking an exchange of naval gunfire. Seoul’s forces got the best of this encounter, sending one North Korean ship fleeing in flames while sustaining no casualties themselves. But the larger question will be whether the U.S., once again, seeks to pacify the tantrum-throwing North by providing billions in assistance in return for a fresh round of negotiations that have no prospect of producing a decisive outcome.

Our Six Party ally China has spent the past six weeks bolstering the Kim regime, with a visit to Pyongyang by Premier Wen Jiabao, calls for stronger trade ties, an invitation to Kim Jong-Il to visit China, and the cessation of reporting on trade data with North Korea. Some analysts interpret the latter as a means of averting embarrassment for Pyongyang, but another possibility is suggested by this story outlining the military’s takeover of North Korea’s minerals industry, which sells almost exclusively to China. Secrecy about the numbers associated with that trade would be explained well by involvement from Beijing in cultivating rising regime power players inside North Korea.

China’s main concern is to preserve the status quo on the Korean peninsula, lest it shift in favor of a reunification led by a Western-oriented, U.S.-allied Seoul. As long as Beijing’s interest is in keeping a China-friendly regime viable in the North, China will not put the kind of pressure on Pyongyang that might get us all out of the tantrum-tending do-loop. We still have the option, however, of changing the terms of our own participation in it.

Middle Eastern media (Beirut-Online, Tehran Times) are picking up on the money quote from IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei in Roger Cohen’s November 5 puff piece. According to the Nobel laureate, who turns over IAEA’s reins at the end of the month, the agency’s inspectors found “nothing to be worried about” at Iran’s Fordo nuclear site near Qom, which Obama announced as a target of suspicion on September 25. “The idea was to use it as a bunker under the mountain to protect things. It’s a hole in the mountain.”

Well, of course it is. A nuclear site dug into a mountain, during the period when it contains no uranium-processing equipment yet, is in fact a hole in the mountain. This tautological proposition could have been stipulated in advance. The IAEA’s predictable findings, which will be reported by mid-November, should not further retard the momentum of the multilateral effort to interdict Iran’s nuclear program. But because of the disproportionate political significance Obama has attached to the Fordo site, they probably will.

The farcical sideshow with the Fordo site is reminiscent of another poorly played counter-proliferation hand: the Clinton administration’s, involving North Korean excavation at Kumchang-ni in the 1990s. The intelligence was much more than merely the defector testimony cited dismissively by critical journalists. The work on the site was done by the same North Korean agency that built the Yongbyon nuclear facility, and the preparations for electric power and physical security at the site were well beyond the requirements of an agricultural storage bunker.

But when inspectors were finally admitted to Kumchang-ni in 1999, they famously discovered only an elaborate network of “empty tunnels” with some grain stored in them. Clinton’s representatives thanked Pyongyang for its cooperation and dispatched a shipment of goods under the 1994 Agreed Framework. Journalists have been crowing about this “intelligence failure” ever since, using it to cast doubt on preemptive strikes in Iraq and Syria.

Of course, Kumchang-ni’s empty tunnels didn’t mean that the threat of the North Korean nuclear program was exaggerated, any more than Fordo being a hole in the mountain means Iran’s is. We can note that additional intelligence on Kumchang-ni, which inspectors have not visited since 2000, suggests it is used to vent exhaust from an underground uranium-milling facility in nearby Mount Chonma. It doesn’t matter at this point, however, whether inspections slowed down Pyongyang’s progress or caused Kumchang-ni to be repurposed. North Korea, in spite of years of negotiations and agreements, has now twice detonated a nuclear device. The main difference between Fordo and Kumchang-ni is that Iran has had, and continues to have, a lot more help with its nuclear program than North Korea gets.

It wasn’t obvious from his demeanor in the press conference at Fort Hood last night, but November 5, 2009, was probably the worst day of Lieut. General Robert Cone’s life. A commander takes every death personally, but senseless deaths of this kind hit especially hard. Administrative duties are the way ahead on this tragedy: tend to the wounded and families, honor the dead, clean up, investigate, assess. Cone will be glad of such preoccupations in the days to come.

To finish reading this COMMENTARY Web Exclusive, click here.

As the tale of the “New Karine A” develops, one alarm bell it sets off concerns the ease with which the arms transshipment was brought off in plain sight. The ship the Israelis caught with the arms was M/V Francop, a freighter operated by Cyprus-based United Feeder Services. The crew onboard didn’t know what they were carrying, and didn’t carry it from Iran anyway: they picked their cargo up in Damietta, Egypt. The Israelis had tracked Francop from Beirut to Damietta and knew the cargo was loaded there. That means the arms themselves were shipped from Iran to Egypt by other means. Sounds like a story we’ve heard before about Port Sudan and overland convoys to Gaza, right?

Not really. The port of Damietta is neither a remote spot in the desert nor a sleepy Sudanese port. It’s one of Egypt’s premier seaports, located on the Mediterranean near the entrance to the Suez Canal. Damietta has some distinctive claims to fame: it’s in a heavily promoted Egyptian free-trade zone and is operated by DIPCO, an international consortium of private maritime-service companies whose pathbreaking development project at Damietta serves as a model for a global trend toward the private development and operation of ports.

Private administration of customs and cargo verification, the functions that might detect arms shipments, is not unusual. But under these conditions, transshipments of cargo through free-trade zones — shipments offloaded only to await further transportation to another country — are especially likely to receive a hand wave. The port operator’s priority is to tally containers and assess fees, not to break open containers and inspect their contents. Damietta’s convenient location in the eastern Mediterranean means that transshipments represent a large majority of its container traffic. Most of what stops there is merely waiting onward transportation and interests neither Egypt nor the port-services operator.

A big shipment from Iran, meanwhile, would raise no eyebrows in Damietta. Iran’s state shipping line, IRISL, was one of the first shipping companies to contract with DIPCO for services in Damietta, and two of IRISL’s subsidiaries make regular stops there. Containers bearing the IRISL logo are routinely present.

It would be hard to dream up a set of circumstances more conducive to perfunctory supervision of cargo. But these same circumstances represent a cash cow for Egypt. Private companies optimizing the profitability of port operations are a moneymaker, not only for growing economies but also for the Middle Eastern nations in which many of the companies (like DIPCO’s leader, Kuwait & Gulf Lines Ltd.) are based. The beneficiaries of this trend will kick hard against any inefficiency introduced by the administration of UN sanctions. Ultimately, intermediate transshipment ports aren’t going to represent effective pressure points for arms interdiction. The most effective pressure point would, as usual, be Iran itself, and that reality demands not so much administrative meticulousness as political will.

You’ll want to cue up an old vinyl LP of the Red Army Chorus for this one. Russia, as CONTENTIONS regulars know, held its largest military exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union this August and September. The maneuvers spanned Russia from the Barents Sea to the Far East, but the most politically significant aspect of this exercise by the combined forces was its intimidating footprint in Eastern Europe.

The European maneuvers, held on the shores of the Baltic Sea (“Ladoga-2009”) and in Belarus (“Zapad-2009”), have been summarized in the last week by independent media observers. For the peoples of the NATO alliance, the view these reports provide of the Russians’ concept and intentions is the opposite of reassuring. Indeed, public opinion might well conclude that Russia’s big exercises in Eastern Europe had something to do with Obama’s decision to scrap the ground-based interceptor site in Poland. It would at least deem Obama’s announcement to be ill-timed, from the standpoint of NATO integrity in the face of Russian challenges.

The first Russian troops arrived in Belarus for Zapad-2009 on September 9, sparking protests from nationalists who favor better ties with the West. Russia moved just under 26,000 total troops into Belarus and Western Russia, avoiding the threshold at which the Conventional Forces Europe treaty would oblige Moscow to invite NATO observers. The number was persuasive to Belarus, however. Minsk had, as recently as June, been resisting inclusion in Moscow’s regional collectives, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). But a month of fraternal amity from the Russian army has put them in a better frame of mind in Minsk, and on October 2 President Lukashenko declared a positive passion for joining the CSTO, a consummation realized today. We can only speculate as to the effect of Obama’s September 17 shift regarding missile-defense policy on Lukashenko’s calculations during that crucial period.

Russian activity on the border of Poland, meanwhile, sent a trenchant political message. Ladoga-2009’s notional pretext for the use of armed forces was an uprising of ethnic Poles in Belarus who, in conjunction with Lithuanian terrorists, were attacking Kaliningrad. The absurd improbability of this was matched by the operational overkill, reflected in Russian media releases, of incorporating air-delivered nuclear weapons and the strategic rocket forces in the fight to retake Russian territory. The battle for Kaliningrad also entailed an amphibious reinforcement operation and the repulsion of a NATO-like force by the 76th air-assault division.

Of course, Dmitry Medvedev says these exercises were “defensive.” Such exercises, as the Wehrmacht of the 1930s would have told us, always are. But it would have been hard for Obama to time his missile-defense announcement any worse. Belarus’s feeble resistance to Russian domination looks to be all but extinguished. Next time, Russia may well take a leaf out of Germany’s 1936 playbook: deploy as many troops as possible for these maneuvers and simply ignore any CFE obligations.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union favored certain methods: sponsoring Marxist insurrections, training guerrillas, and arming terrorists. Revolutionary Iran remains an ambitious student of these practices. Its regional outreach now extends well beyond Lebanon and Gaza, and the anti-Semitic character of Iran’s proxy campaign is impossible to miss.

In Yemen, as reported last week, Iran has been caught red-handed supplying arms to Shia rebels in the northwest. A Wall Street Journal item from the weekend also reminds us that the dwindling Jewish population of Yemen has borne much of the brunt of this proxy alliance. Over the past year, a small, centuries-old Jewish community has found itself under escalating attack. Following an explicitly anti-Semitic murder in December 2008, the nation’s Jews have been fleeing, family by family, to Israel and the U.S.

Yemen is one of only two countries on the Arabian Peninsula that still — for now — host Jewish communities with identifiable synagogues. The other is Bahrain, which has only a few dozen Jews but has been a regional leader in protecting their rights and encouraging them to remain in the country of their birth. The emir even sent his sole Jewish parliamentarian to Washington in 2008 as Bahrain’s ambassador. Following President Obama’s June 2009 appeal for Arab nations to make diplomatic overtures to Israel, Bahrain’s crown prince took the lead in exhorting the region’s Arabs on that head.

But Bahrain is a Shia majority nation and is under the perennial threat of proxy subversion by Iran, which made its first attempt at a Bahraini revolution in 1981. In February 2009, an Iranian official set off alarm bells with his comment that Bahrain is Iran’s “14th province,” prompting Bahrain to withdraw from natural-gas talks with its northern neighbor. But politics in the Sunni-ruled emirate dictate walking a narrow line, and in June Manama closed down a newspaper that was critical of the Iranian regime after its disputed election. In October, Bahrain signaled its willingness to resume the natural-gas talks. And last week its lower house of parliament, which has substantial Shia representation, voted to prohibit all contact by Bahrainis with Israel.

Within days of the Bahraini vote, an al-Shabaab militant across the region in Somalia was issuing that group’s first known threats to attack Israel. This should be no surprise; al-Shabaab is an al-Qaeda-linked group but has a long association with Iran through its parentage in the Islamic Courts Union, which seized control of southern Somalia in 2006. That was also the year Iran reportedly sponsored 700 Somali jihadists operating in Lebanon.

Bear in mind that this is what revolutionary Iran does without nuclear weapons. For now, a tougher and more reassuring posture by the U.S. could bolster the confidence regional leaders need to oppose these proxy threats. But an Iran with the bomb will have a shield behind which to act even more aggressively through its proxies. Every sign says that’s exactly what it will do.

John Noonan at the Weekly Standard and Max Boot fear that the compromise option Obama is considering for Afghanistan portends a bad decision. Regrettably, mainstream media reporting is unlikely to help Americans understand why. New York Times reporters faithfully reproduce the terms used by administration officials: adopting some elements from McChrystal’s plan and some from the Biden strategy of terrorist-hunting, with a lower number of additional troops presumably justified by the decision not to adopt the entire McChrystal plan. Noonan refers to it as “splitting the baby.”

These essentially methodological terms obscure the real issue, however, which is that truncating McChrystal’s plan inherently changes the objective. If Obama indeed chooses the compromise option outlined in the Times, he will not be telling McChrystal to approach the same objective in a different way. He will be telling McChrystal not to approach it at all.

Max has ably developed the essentials of the McChrystal proposal to secure areas of the Afghan countryside against the Taliban by immunizing the population against insurgent tactics through a multipronged approach, and by focusing on key terrain: transportation routes, the Helmand valley agricultural area, and selected positions in western and eastern Afghanistan that the Taliban cannot be allowed to hold. McChrystal’s plan also, of course, envisions protecting key cities and continuing to train Afghan forces. But it’s the emphasis on securing the countryside—which otherwise will be ruled and used by the Taliban—that demands the bulk of the 40,000 troops.

With only 10,000-20,000 additional troops, the countryside cannot be secured. Obama’s advisers have propounded this issue in honest terms: The Biden group avowedly sees no value in securing the Afghan countryside against the Taliban. There are vague references instead to concluding deals with “moderate” Taliban—a concept that in practice would amount to favoring some Taliban against their tribal enemies.

Given NATO’s numbers and superior armament, a handful of cities could probably be protected for some time under these conditions, although commerce and development would suffer. But a trained Afghan force, once security were turned over to it, would face the Taliban’s holding the majority of Afghan territory after just one or two years of the Obama administration’s compromise option. This option is not a strategy for leaving Afghanistan secure. It would inevitably be seen in the region as a strategy for American convenience and would complete the rollback from Bush’s transformative approach to one of retaining fortified bases from which to conduct homicidal raids against terrorists — while Central Asia is left to descend into chaos. Local rebellion against such a policy seems all but guaranteed.

The compromise option carries a fundamentally different objective from the one McChrystal’s plan seeks to achieve. The objective is the essential issue, not the methodology. This is a baby that cannot be split; it can only be thrown out with the bath water.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy of being all things to all people now faces a new roadblock: a warning from UN special investigator Philip Alston that our drone attacks on terrorists may amount to “extrajudicial executions,” and that they require, at the very least, better explanation to the UN. (H/t: Hot Air)

What the military calls a “quick-look analysis” highlights two points immediately. First, if we take this concern seriously—if we set the standard for the world in cooperation with the UN—doing so will almost certainly render the Biden strategy for standoff terrorist-hunting in Central Asia impossible to execute.

Second, we have now been elected to the UN Human Rights Council, the body that would take up a report from the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary, or Summary Executions. From this position, and given Obama’s ostentatious and categorical commitments to multilateral cooperation and national humility, stonewalling the Alston report would only amplify an appearance of hypocrisy, cynicism, and superpower arrogance.

These are the questions Mr. Alston proposes to have answered:

“I would like to know the legal basis upon which the United States is operating, in other words… who is running the program, what accountability mechanisms are in place in relation to that,” Alston said.

“Secondly, what precautions the United States is taking to ensure that these weapons are used strictly for purposes consistent with international humanitarian law.

“Third, what sort of review mechanism is there to evaluate when these weapons have been used? Those are the issues I’d like to see addressed,” the UN official said.

The question we need to ask is what precedent it would set to allow the UN to interrogate us according to a putatively supranational agenda on these matters. It’s obvious that mere compliance with the interrogation process would cede to the UN a theoretical veto over our methods of national defense. Nations that have relied on the U.S. to affirm the principles of national sovereignty will be watching very closely how we handle this; some, like France, are likely to urge Obama to weather the charge of hypocrisy and arrogance rather than submit to a UN veto.

No stars had to align to bring this conflict of commitments to a head. Obama set himself up for it with his own policies.

Iranian ships loaded with weapons keep turning up in the darnedest places. The latest report is that Yemeni authorities on Monday seized an Iranian ship in their waters trying to deliver anti-armor rounds to Yemen’s Shia Zaidi rebels. Especially noteworthy is that the ship was seized on Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Yemenis say the ship is not the first to pull into the Eritrean port of Asmara and then cross the Red Sea to deliver weapons to the Zaidi insurgents. The Yemeni press, in fact, reports that Iran is training Zaidi rebels in Eritrea. Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh insisted earlier this year that the Zaidi (or al-Houthi) rebels are being trained by Hezbollah.

Iran’s 2008 basing agreement with Eritrea has received minimal attention in the West, in part because there is little new information on any developments related to it. Radio France International reported in May that Iranian warships and a submarine had been observed in Asmara along with a unit of Iran’s Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guard’s paramilitary force. If a submarine were actually present, it would have been one of Iran’s mini-submarines, small one- or two-man submersibles with a very restricted range of operations. Iran has long cultivated a mini-submarine threat to shipping in restricted waters. As for the warships, Iran is using Asmara for the replenishment of its antipiracy patrol ships.

Israel, of course, has expressed concern over this Iranian Red Sea presence, and analysts have connected it with the overland arms route for Hamas, interdicted in a dramatic air raid over Sudan in February. Somalia watchers continue to warn that Iranian arms are flowing to al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgency in southern Somalia, through Eritrea. Riyadh is now increasingly concerned about Iran’s support to the Yemeni rebels, whose stronghold in western Yemen is on the poorly guarded border with Saudi Arabia. The rebels claimed last week that they came under attack from Saudi forces when operating near the border, a credible claim given the level of Saudi disquiet.

The evidence is relentless: arming regional insurgents and terrorists is what Iran commits its limited resources to. Arranging forward logistics for the effort in a strategically positioned port is a measure of that commitment. The same commitment is to be expected to threats like holding global shipping at risk and deploying ballistic missiles to the Red Sea coast. We are already seeing the regional initiatives Iran will feel even freer to mount once it has nuclear weapons. It is a fatal error to suppose that we will feel just as free, under those conditions, to oppose them.

One thing Jennifer’s summary suggests is that all the saga needed was a spoofable name for Iran’s lately revealed uranium-enrichment site near Qom. And here it is: Fordo. In Iran, the name commemorates a town’s war dead. In the West, of course, it not only sounds like Tolkien’s Frodo but is the name of a minor character in the Star Wars series, something you know if you have a lot of nephews who like Star Wars and Legos. Some allusive levity is not inappropriate as a response to the international community’s solemn effort at the Fordo site. President Obama’s guns have already been spiked regarding this site, and now, with the UN inspection, we’re just putting administrative checks in the block.

The salient point about the site near Qom was that it was undeclared. According to the intelligence Obama himself cited, it was not, as of the end of September, thought to be even close to operational yet. With Iran having now declared it a nuclear-related site, an IAEA inspection that reveals it to be a nuclear-related site, but not yet an operational one, will confirm nothing Iran has not already had to face up to. In a political sense, the inspection process mainly gives Iran a cheap opportunity to appear truthful, if belatedly so.

Indeed, the intelligence estimate that no enrichment has yet started at Fordo means there is not even a basis for supposing that it has been deceptively scrubbed for the inspection. We are in agreement with Iran on what we expect to find there; confirming our expectations is meaningless to building an actionable case against Tehran’s nuclear program. In that sense, the value of the dramatic Qom announcement expired as soon as it was made.

What’s next after the inspection is reported out? With the site declared and inspected, there is no new basis for insisting that it or other nuclear facilities be closed. Fordo’s size — too small to enrich uranium on the scale needed for a peaceful reactor — was mainly a talking point when it was still undeclared, and therefore suspicious. There exists no enforcement standard for demanding closure of the site, as long as Iran will accept IAEA inspections. Nothing prevents Iran from enriching uranium in multiple smaller facilities if it chooses to; the enforcement issues are verifiable declaration and openness to inspection.

The status of the Fordo site became an issue we could not leverage to our advantage as soon as Iran declared it and agreed to permit inspections. Iran, on the other hand, can leverage the official process to establish documentary bona fides — and can then very likely use the site to enrich uranium under an IAEA inspection regime. Fordo is a sideshow; the negotiations over foreign processing of Iran’s existing stock of low-enriched uranium are the center ring. We either make progress in those negotiations, or not at all.

The good news is that the multinational anti-piracy force continues to push Somali pirates eastward into the open waters of the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, that’s also the bad news. Piracy is harder to patrol and prevent in the open ocean — and it’s also harder to punish.

Suppression of Somali piracy has been largely successful in the Gulf of Aden. But with the end of the summer monsoon season, Somali pirates have gotten back to work in the Indian Ocean, attacking at least eight ships in the last month. On Monday a Chinese coaling freighter was seized nearly 700 miles east of Somalia, further from the coast than any previous hijacking. The seizure occurred, in fact, closer to the Seychelles than to Africa, a circumstance that carries its own set of challenges. The geographic shift of piracy patterns is likely to increase the already significant difficulty of prosecuting pirates: the Seychelles informed France this month that, with its minimal penal infrastructure and a surfeit of already captured pirates, it had no capacity to accept more.

But a pirate could do worse than get detained in the Seychelles. A lively incident in September highlighted what we might call “vulnerabilities” in the arrangements for regional prosecution of pirates. Reconstruction of the garbled event indicates that on September 6, a charter aircraft with 23 pirates aboard flew from the Seychelles to the African continent, apparently landing at Nairobi. The pirates transferred to smaller aircraft and proceeded to a remote airstrip in Somali Puntland, where they were to be exchanged for three Seychellian hostages held by a pirate organization.

Kenyan authorities asserted during this period that the same pirates were being held incommunicado at the Nairobi airport. The government of Puntland, in an official statement, disagreed; and the Seychelles announced on September 13 that its three hostages had been freed. Most press reporting agrees that the 23 pirates disappeared into the Puntland bush. Kenyan journalists, meanwhile, report that piracy is making money for a lot of Kenyans; they speculate, with their Somali counterparts, that the release of pirates from the Seychelles was brokered in Kenya.

Kenya, of course, is the world’s hope for pirate prosecutions, which are not going so well in Europe (e.g., Spain and the Netherlands). The pirates lost to the Puntland caper represent more than 10 percent of the 212 who have been sent to various nations for prosecution. While the soap opera continues, the pirates are growing bolder. The pirates who seized M/V De Xin Hai, the coaling freighter, issued an uncharacteristic warning to China that the crewmen would be killed if any attempt were made to rescue them. Between the pirates and their pursuers, a key difference may be whose threats are actually credible.

Joe Biden and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk agreed to a new missile-defense deal on Tuesday, touted as the improved replacement for the missile-defense plan scrapped by Obama last month. The new plan will put a land-based version of the Navy’s SM-3 — the missile used by its Aegis missile-defense ships — in Poland by 2015. The land-based version of the SM-3 is still in development, but readying it for deployment should be feasible on the administration’s time line. So presto: a missile defense for Europe. We’re back on track, right?

Well, no. We’re not on the same track. The Bush plan for silo-based interceptors in Poland would, along with the defense capability for Europe, have given North America a midcourse intercept defense against long-range ICBMs launched from the east. The SM-3 doesn’t reach the altitude for midcourse intercept of an ICBM (although it might be developed to by the end of the next decade). With the scrapping of the silos in Poland, there is a gap for the eastern approach to North America in our missile-defense concept.

This is why Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has awarded the new plan a benign, if provisional, approval. Obama’s plan does not envision defending America against ICBMs coming from our east, at least until the end of the next decade. Our silo-based interceptors in Alaska and California remain the only deployed elements of a national missile defense. Secretary Gates pointed out, after Obama’s September announcement, that under the new plan, the SM-3 would be further developed to intercept ICBMs, and R&D would continue on the silo-based interceptors. But of course those measures could have been pursued along with a deployment of silo-based interceptors in Poland, which under Bush had been scheduled to begin in 2013.

This modern missile-defense issue is analogous in some ways to the Pershing-II-missile issue of 30 years ago. Like Obama, Jimmy Carter held off deploying a system the Russians objected to, while affirming America’s vigorous intention to develop the capability and someday deploy it. The Russians of 30 years ago were unimpressed with those long-range intentions; what they found informative was Carter’s unwillingness to confront them with an actual deployment. Today’s Russians assuredly find Obama’s missile-defense approach equally informative. They will object to a future ICBM-intercept capability when it emerges — what matters to them today is that Obama has been unwilling to risk their anger by deploying the current one. The means exist for it, but we continue to have no plan in execution for a dedicated missile defense of the U.S. East Coast.

There is little question any longer that we are trying the appeasement approach with Russia. Reassuring another nation that we have absolutely no intention of doing something that might conceivably be in our interest? That’s what appeasement is. When the assurances relate to rumors that have no apparent basis in reality — when we are earnestly promising not to do things we have merely been accused of, as opposed to renouncing those we actually planned — there is an additional aspect of manipulated abjectness that can be considered, shall we say, troubling.

Russian media outlets, citing a Georgian news item, have been advancing the theory that the U.S. plans to establish military bases in Georgia. This theory does not appear to have any basis in fact. Yet a seemingly stray comment from a retired Russian general, cited in an AP report today, picks up the Georgia theme:

Russian retired Gen. Viktor Yesin, the former chief of staff of the Russian military’s Strategic Missile Forces, said Russia’s reaction to [Obama’s] new missile-defense plan will likely be calm unless the U.S. takes what he called provocative moves.

He said Moscow would certainly be angered if the U.S. were to send navy ships with interceptor missiles to the Black Sea or put a missile-defense radar in Georgia.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow, visiting Georgia yesterday, was at pains to put these fears to rest. The U.S., he says, is not looking at any non-NATO nations for missile-defense installations — is in fact in consultations with Russia on missile defense — and has no plans for military bases in Georgia.

Diplomacy 101 would tell us not to let the media themes of others maneuver us into giving categorical assurances. Handing such assurances out for free is reactionary and hazardous under almost any circumstances. Beyond what the map informs us about Georgia’s interesting location, which we now cannot leverage without exhibiting bad faith, Vershbow’s uncareful formulation sends random and prejudicial signals about our broader missile-defense policy, our concept of NATO defense, and our posture on the Caucasus and Georgia’s NATO aspirations.

However the Obama administration sees this, what the Russians see is that we would rather reassure them, on their terms, than retain the latitude to affirm U.S. and NATO interests on our terms. Regardless of motive, that posture is one of appeasement. It is past time for the Obama administration to figure that out.

How about when it was not actually solicited by Israel? Most of the media have reported the Stewart Nozette case responsibly enough. The FBI arrested him yesterday in a sting operation in which an FBI agent impersonated a member of Mossad and asked Nozette to sell American secrets. Nozette, a sometime scientist for the U.S. government, has had high-level clearances in the past. Israel’s spy agency was selected for the impersonation in part because Nozette was a contractor for Israel Aerospace Industries and would find that approach credible. Nozette had reportedly also told a colleague that he would sell secrets to Israel or another unnamed country in certain circumstances. The FBI affirmed on Monday that Israel had not broken any U.S. laws. Indeed, the suspicious overseas trip taken by Nozette in January, which set the FBI’s operation in motion, was not to Israel but to another unnamed country.

So why is Marc Ambinder looking for clues about what information the Israelis might have been targeting? It is not apparent that the Israelis were targeting anything. This was a sting operation, not the interdiction of espionage solicited by a foreign government. The FBI affidavit alleges no act of targeting Nozette or his information by a foreign spy agency. Nozette’s own behavior was what alerted the FBI to his potential susceptibility. Anyone who has had clearances has secrets to sell, but nothing in this episode indicates that the Israelis were looking for the particular ones Nozette has.

Nozette will probably deserve whatever he gets. But let’s wait until espionage involves actual evidence of initiation by a foreign government — as with Cuban spies in the State Department, Chinese spies in an NSA facility in Hawaii, and cyber-espionage by Russia and China against the U.S. power grid — before attributing interests to that government in a specific incident.

Smart power spends an awful lot of its time struggling up the hills graded for it by stupid power. The latest eruption of the latter is today’s insurgent bombing in southeastern Iran, which targeted a large contingent of senior Revolutionary Guard officers who were meeting in the region. The bombing appears to have been undertaken for the simplest of insurgent reasons: a vengeful general-purpose attack on representatives of the central government. It was carried out by Baluchi insurgents, a group known as Jundallah, whose grievances are related to ethnic tribalism and the regional narcotics trade as much as to sectarian differences (the Baluchis are Sunni). But its effect on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on the conditions under which the Obama team makes its decisions on strategy and troop levels, could be enduring.

Ahmadinejad has naturally sworn vengeance for the attack, amid Iranian allegations that the U.S. and U.K. are behind it. Just as important, though, the bombing has raised Iran’s stake in the outcome of our Afghanistan policy. Besides reeling from popular unrest after the June election, the Tehran regime faces the prospect of a succession crisis on the Guardian Council. It cannot tolerate destabilization from a spillover of the Taliban guerrillas fleeing Pakistan’s internal crackdown. That spillover, probably seen as both a problem and an opportunity, is what brought the Revolutionary Guard’s leadership to the southeastern region this weekend for a strategy meeting.

Iran and Pakistan, after mutual finger-pointing, may well find their solution in a common stance on the Taliban problem. The insurgents fleeing Pakistan will have to go somewhere, and the longer we wait to strengthen our posture, the more likely that somewhere is to be Afghanistan. Iran would have no qualms, in fact, about facilitating at least some Taliban movement into Afghanistan, particularly if Pakistan were to make its western border inhospitable to Jundallah guerrillas. The incentive for Tehran and Islamabad to work together and funnel the Taliban into Afghanistan grows with each insurgent attack on their territory.

The U.S., of course, didn’t have to leave Pakistan to launch its current military push with a single-minded approach and no containment of the consequences. Neither do we have to wait for Iran and Pakistan to shape conditions in Afghanistan for us, in the pursuit of their own interests. But momentum is building for alternatives to our strategic leadership. Truly smart power would recognize that if we do not get a decision made and start shaping this situation ourselves, it will begin dictating terms to us very soon.

If the 2007 Iran NIE were a radioactive element, its half-life might extend well beyond the life spans of men and nations. A Wall Street Journal piece from Saturday reveals that its toxic emissions persist: intelligence officials are now “considering whether to rewrite” it. The piece notes, however, that it would be hard to get it rewritten before President Obama’s “informal” December deadline to Iran. Until the NIE is rewritten, its freighted conclusion affords Obama the official latitude to ignore the most threatening implications of any specific development in Iran’s nuclear program, and concentrate on the process—diplomacy, negotiations, deadlines, headlines—rather than its outcome. On paper, it all looks internally coherent.

But how much longer can we wait on this stately process? Iran has been under UN sanctions since 2006. Since the NIE was written, in the summer of 2007, the number of Iran’s operational centrifuges has increased from just under 2,000 to more than 4,500. Iran’s stock of low-enriched uranium (LEU) has increased from 70 kg in late 2007 to more than 1,300 kg by July 2009. The nuclear weapon “break-out” threshold was passed in February 2009; by February 2010 there will be enough LEU for a second weapon. Iran’s weaponization effort through 2003, known to and dismissed by the NIE’s authors as “suspended,” focused on a payload suitable for the existing Shahab-3 missile that can reach Israel. In May 2009 Iran successfully launched a longer-range Sajjil missile that could reach Europe, with a nuclear warhead, by 2015.

Technically, the 2007 NIE did not ignore the uranium enrichment and missile development aspects of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It did not even change the 2005 NIE’s projection of when Iran might achieve a usable nuclear weapon. What it did was unprofessionally showcase a single conclusion about a four-year-old development in the weaponization aspect of Iran’s nuclear program, with the apparent purpose of prejudicing the political debate over preemptive action. It also—again unprofessionally—detoured into policy recommendation with its segment on applying international pressure to Iran.

The community’s current foot-dragging comes off not as judicious but as a ploy to time any revised assessment, yet again, for political impact. The consequences of this practice have unfolded at a relentless pace since 2007. Something Americans need to evaluate critically is the very nature of our thinking about preemption and intelligence. Aren’t the developments the intelligence community has acknowledged to date enough of a pretext for a tougher stance with Iran, up to and including preemption? That decision belongs to our political leaders, after all. It was never intelligence’s call to make.

It’s no coincidence that the same week the U.S. and Russia sit down for our first conference on missile-defense cooperation, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s national-security council, tells Russian media that the Kremlin will retain the option for “first use” of nuclear weapons in its national-security strategy.

This might seem, on its face, a bit bellicose. But the nature of the statement is not particularly informative; it’s the timing that’s calculated for effect. Little actual change in Russian policy is detectable: Russia disavowed the Soviet-era “no first use” pledge back in 1993 and has had the option of first use embedded in its 1997 and 2000 national-security concepts. The change in policy — if it is a change at all — appears to be a marginal shift toward using nuclear weapons on vaguer and less narrowly defined pretexts.

The timing of the statement is the real story. One valid perspective is that, with Obama having relinquished the sites in Eastern Europe and agreed to missile-defense talks on Moscow’s terms, the Russians see this as the time to drive home their longstanding point that a strategic nuclear balance is the way to maintain stability — as opposed to Reagan’s concept of obviating nuclear advantage through effective defenses.

A more historical perspective emerges if we consider when Soviet Russia made the “no first strike” pledge — 1982 — and what happened the following year. Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, and his guiding principle prevailed in U.S. policy until last month, when Obama backed down unconditionally from the vision of a comprehensive global missile shield. Recent Russian statements confirm that the Kremlin’s chagrin over SDI has not receded: it regards the ability to hold the U.S. and our allies at risk with nuclear weapons as an indispensable element of Russia’s security. Obama is on the threshold of requiting one of the Russians’ longest-held aspirations, who would be very pleased to get the political debate in the West back on the footing of the “throw weight” years in the 1960s and 1970s. The more we talked about Soviet first use back then, the more we constrained ourselves in both strategic negotiations and regional competition.

History, in fact, brings us full circle, because the Soviets’ 1982 pledge was nothing but an “informational” ploy, designed to influence our behavior. Their actual intention to make first use of nukes never wavered, as post-Soviet historians have revealed. The Russians no doubt now believe that their 1982 gambit went badly for them. This week’s first-use announcement is a gambit to recover what Putin sees as their losses from a misguided move 27 years ago.

History offers other perspectives, too. As with Britain, France, and Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, it’s our declared security concept that is giving way in 2009.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post suggest that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to Iran’s imprisoned and battered reform protesters (specifically, said the Post, to Neda Agha-Soltan) instead of to Barack Obama. Both op-eds focus on the encouragement such an award would have been for the cause of political reform in Iran; the Journal also speculates that a Nobel might have made a difference to the fate of the three Iranian dissidents sentenced to death over the weekend for their participation in the post-election protests.

Iran’s reformers have unquestionably exemplified courage in their fight against a regime that, since the June 12 election, has demonstrated the depraved cruelty of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and other Marxist paradises of the last century. The death sentences handed down for political dissent cap months of reporting on the brutal torture, rape, and even beating deaths of imprisoned protesters. Iranians mounting the Qods (Jerusalem) Day protests on September 18 were already aware of the horrific fates of protesters like those outlined here, here, here, here, and here. Yet as the regime cracks down, the Web is alive with the sound of optimism about the mood in Iran and the prospects for reform, as in the chat-forum comments here and this Frontline piece from Tehran. In a like spirit, former president Mohammad Khatami, a political moderate now publicly aligned with besieged reform leaders Mousavi and Kourabi, posted a defiant declaration on his website after the death sentences were announced, assuring Iranians that the reform movement would not die.

In the face of this bravery, our Nobel-winning president has gone beyond his original hands-off posture on Iran’s internal business, and even beyond his administration’s affirmation in early August that Ahmadinejad is Iran’s “elected president.” Now Obama’s USAID organization has decided to cut off funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The IHRDC, whose principal current project is documenting abuse of reform protesters since the June election, was first funded under Bush five years ago and has extensively documented the brutality of the Islamic revolutionary regime, including its assassination campaign against dissidents abroad and the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.

The CATO Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter interprets this USAID decision as a “relatively minor concession” by the Obama administration to establish “Washington’s goodwill” in talks with Iran. The State Department has declined to give a reason for the funding cut-off. We should expect none, of course. A Nobel Peace Prize means never having to explain your lack of interest in human rights.

Critics of President Obama’s Nobel award are wrong when they say he hasn’t done anything yet. If you think the world would be safer with Russia having an effective veto over NATO’s missile defenses, you will agree Obama has already accomplished a lot.

There is more to be done, however. Russian delight over Obama’s decision to scrap the missile-defense sites in Europe is fading quickly. As many predicted, Moscow dislikes the sea-based missile-defense concept as much as it did the ground-based interceptors. One problem with a sea-based missile defense is that Aegis warships have to be deployed to set it up. Defending Europe against missiles launched from Iran dictates deploying warships in the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, or Baltic Sea, areas Russia is notoriously sensitive about.

But the other problem is the same one the Russians raised with the sites in Europe. Wherever we propose to put Aegis ships, Moscow will suspect that they can intercept missiles launched from Russia and will accuse the U.S. of “targeting Russia” with our missile defenses. This is exactly what Russia’s envoy to NATO is now doing, mere weeks after Obama’s policy concession. Indeed, Moscow now evinces an eye-opening air of entitlement to explanations on this head.

NATO, meanwhile, is renewing its search for greater cooperation with Russia on missile defense, with implications for the tactical ground-based systems assumed to be options in the Obama plan. Technological disparities between NATO and Russia make meaningful integration doubtful in the short run. This could give more prominence to technologically awkward, politically driven “solutions,” such as NATO accepting a role for Russia’s premier S-400 air defense system in its southern European defenses. Russia is already in negotiations with both Turkey and Greece over the S-400 and thus has an existing interest that is in direct competition with the U.S. Patriot. If Turkey and Greece host upgraded tactical missile-defense systems for NATO, those systems may not be ours.

A NATO missile-defense system over which Russia can exercise an inside veto is a Nobel-worthy experiment indeed. One thing we can say is that few cowboys would take a chance on it.