I have no  special skills when it comes to predicting the future but I thought I might as well title this post as I have when it occurred to me that many, cough, anti-Zionists, would see three posts in four days about Iran as being a sure sign that something is up. After all, this  blog is sponsored by the AJC and hey, come on, we all know what that means….

Anyway, the first piece I want to recommend is by Walter Russell Mead and it argues that Obama’s very idealism and desire to control the spread of nuclear weapons make him more likely than is usually thought to resort to force against Iran. A choice quote:

The consequences of the Iranian nuclear drive for the President’s Wilsonian project are deadly; the Iranian nuclear program can fairly be called an existential threat to the Wilsonian ideal.  In particular a nuclear Iran will kill the two dreams at the heart of President Obama’s foreign policy and indeed of his view of the world: the dream that the genie of nuclear weapons can be forced back into the bottle and the dream that the nations of the world can build a post-Westphalian international order in which the world’s governments are bound by deepening networks of laws. […]

Make no mistake about it.  If Iran gets nuclear weapons on his watch, the dream of non-proliferation comes to an end and Barack Obama will go down in history as the president who lost the fight to stop nukes.

It won’t just be Iran: if Iran defies western pressure to get nukes, every self-respecting country in the Middle East will want and need nukes.  Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and even some of the smaller fry will have to make their moves.  They won’t all get the bomb but enough of them will.  This will have a disastrous impact on America’s ability to carry out one of its principle global tasks and ensure the steady and uninterrupted flow of oil to the great industrial and commercial centers of the world - but that isn’t all.  The decisive failure of the nonproliferation agenda in the Middle East undermine nonproliferation everywhere, not only because the Bomb will become even more of a coveted symbol of first class international status than it already is, but because with all those proliferating states buying and selling the technology, it will be harder to stop countries from moving ahead.  The global black market in nuclear tech will spread like kudzu; there will be so many sources and so many destinations that the traffic will be harder than ever to stop.

The other piece to which I wish to direct your attention is by Sohrab Ahmari - an occasional contributor to this blog -  and in it he argues that the Afghanistan Wikileak  provides evidence of Tehran having closer relations with the Taliban and al-Qaeda than many would like to believe. His  article concludes like this:

New and old critics of American engagement in the AfPak region have already begun using the wikileaks to make the case for immediate disengagement. In the coming days and months, they will pressure the Administration to hew closely to its artificial timeline for pulling out. But the Iran-Taliban-al-Qaeda nexus revealed by the leaks suggests that such a move could be fatal. An al-Qaeda empowered by Iran’s state apparatus — with all the capacity for organized violence that implies — could severely harm American interests in the region and beyond.

More importantly, the revelations suggest the United States is badly in need of an Iran policy that is not based on tired cliches and unsound assumptions. We need, in other words, a truly realistic Iran policy.