A day after speaking at the AIPAC conference, President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today. The telegraphed message from the President for this meeting was to tell Netanyahu that he has a friend in the United States, that sanctions should be given time to work, and that Israel should not seek a [...]

The President has a couple options when it comes to high gas prices. Eliminating oil industry tax breaks, while a decent policy generally, has nothing to do with it. In fact, it could raise gas prices, if oil companies demand the same profits after they lose their welfare benefits. That’s not a reason not to [...]

The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran has become more realistic in recent weeks. Israeli officials told the AP that they would not even inform the United States in the event of a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And there’s a sense that the window for an attack that would actually damage the nuclear [...]

In a reminder that negotiation and diplomacy is a far preferable course to war and belligerence, North Korea, still in flux after the death of Kim Jong-il, has agreed to suspend its nuclear testing and uranium enrichment, as well as an agreement to allow nuclear weapons inspectors back into the country. In exchange, the North [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, to the extent that the federal government has a role to play in lowering gas prices, one of the biggest things they can do is stop making the world believe that Iran faces an imminent attack on their nuclear facilities that will potentially inflame the entire Middle East and threaten the [...]

I’m sure this will be given as evidence that Obama “lost” Iran: International nuclear inspectors reported on Friday that Iran is moving rapidly to produce nuclear fuel at a deep underground site that Israel and the United States have said is virtually invulnerable to attack. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that [...]

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 [...]