Car bomb attacks on workers at two Israeli embassies in India and Georgia could help provide a pretext for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel immediately blamed Iran and Hezbollah for the attacks, which occurred overnight. There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But if the Israeli accusations are verified they would represent [...]

Israel is getting really nervous that they just might not have enough time to bomb Iran, which would just be terrible. They claim that the new international sanctions have closed the window for them to act. I wonder if this has anything to do with it: the fact that the latest intelligence estimates, both in [...]

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, said today that Israel was “very far off” from any attack on Iran. More important, Israeli intelligence indicates that they have not yet determined that Iran has decided even to build a nuclear weapon. These are things you don’t hear much in the US press, so let’s run the [...]

Prior to all the rising tensions around Iran, the US and Israel had scheduled a large set of joint military exercises in the spring. Maybe this wasn’t necessarily a provocative act, but with everything happening around Iran, it gained a new resonance. So today, when the two sides postponed the exercises, some saw it as [...]

Glenn Greenwald has a follow-up on his story about the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, and he calls the incidents what they actually are: Terrorism. Part of the problem here is the pretense that Terrorism has some sort of fixed, definitive meaning. It does not. As Professor Remi Brulin has so exhaustively documented, the meaning [...]

One important part of the suspected covert war with Iran, in addition to the drone surveillance and cyberwarfare, concerns the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Several scientists have been murdered under questionable circumstances over the past several months. And now, another death has been reported: An Iranian university professor working at a key nuclear facility [...]

It must be an election year, because the noise about war with Iran has quite suddenly elevated. You have Republican Presidential candidates talking about blockades and putting missiles on high alert, threats to block the Strait of Hormuz, and the like. And Iran is doing its best to avoid an apocalyptic rhetoric gap, by announcing [...]

The reports out of Syria just get worse and worse. One opposition groups says that among the 1,000-plus dead are 25 children, some of them tortured. One Syrian man who was beaten by security forces in a memorable YouTube clip suddenly showed up on state TV so the Syrians could prove he was alive. This [...]

Talks aimed at a resolution between Iran and the West over their nuclear program collapsed today, with no progress and no timetable for future talks. Overall the negotiations sounded like a huge waste of time. Western officials expressed disappointment, but not surprise. They reiterated that their proposals, including a modified deal under which Iran would [...]

The Senate is about to vote on the new START nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, and all expectations are that the treaty will pass. This caps off a very productive lame duck session with a major foreign policy victory for the Obama Administration. But it’s important to place new START in the proper perspective. [...]

After the defeat of three amendments to the START treaty yesterday, Republican support has lined up for the nuclear arms reduction measure. Yesterday Scott Brown gave his support; today it was Lamar Alexander, the number 3 ranking Republican in the Senate, to give his blessing. It was a compassionate statement: “I will vote to ratify [...]