The IAEA issued its latest Iran report yesterday. Here’s the report itself (.pdf) from the ISIS site, here’s Elaine Sciolino’s write-up for the IHT. The short version is that little has changed in the way of Iranian compliance since the last report. So, declared materials are still accounted for, the nuclear fuel at Bushehr is still under IAEA seal, and Iran’s declared facilities have not been altered or engaged in suspect activity. But it has continued its enrichment program, gaining substantially in the efficiency of its centrifuge cascades and expanding their operation, and has done almost nothing to increase transparency [...]
The Arabic Media Shack blog has launched a five-part series on the social, political and historical context of Al Qaeda. Parts One and Two are already up and they’re worth a read. The short version is that regardless of its relative operational strength today as opposed to seven years ago, Al Qaeda is at its very origins an essentially weak movement, issued from a longer historical current that had largely spent itself by the time its last lingering fanatics switched tactics to target the U.S. directly. Tactically dangerous by the nature of the terrorist threat, yes, but not a longterm [...]
To follow up a little bit on my post from Tuesday, it’s already obvious that “the Surge” has become a sort of political shorthand that means different things for different people. I was using it as shorthand for the political message it sent to the various Iraqi factions, namely that American forces would have to factored into the cost-benefit analysis of armed conflict so long as President Bush was in office. The problem of assigning causality, of course, is that the decision to increase troop strength in Baghdad didn’t happen in a vacuum, but rather in the aftermath of the [...]
