On Friday I mentioned that the Bush-Petraeus approach was about to go regional, and when you step back and take a look at the past few weeks, there are a lot of indications that we’re already seeing that shift into high gear. In addition to Petraeus’ promotion to CENTCOM commander, we’ve also seen a significant ratcheting up of the rhetoric towards Iran, beginning with the Petraeus-Crocker hearings, continuing on to Robert Gates’ statements of concern, and culminating with JCS Adm. Mullen’s pointed warnings about contingency planning and available military strike capacity. In some ways, the Syria-N. Korea briefing can also [...]
When talking about peace in the Middle East, the first parties that come to mind are Israelis and Palestinians. Lately, however, Syria has broken into the headlines, with conflicting news about peace and war. The talk, which alternates between ominous and promising, reflects the script of a very public performance with a very specific intended audience and a very clear desired outcome. In this case, the talk of peace and warnings of war is aimed at neither peace nor war. Its purpose is to solidify the status quo, at least for now. A couple of weeks ago, many believed war [...]
Another interesting sidenote from the Syria intel briefing was this mention of last December’s NIE on Iran’s nuclear program: When we published our NIE, we had not planned to make unclassified key judgments available to the public; therefore we wrote our estimate for a very sophisticated audience believing or understanding that they understood that in the program, it’s basically three large pieces: There is pursuit of fissile material; there is a delivery system – ballistic missiles or some other; and then there is weapons design. The only thing that the Iranians halted that we had awareness of was design of [...]
