The combination of Iranian aggressiveness and Western diffidence has consequences for how a containment strategy would play out against a nuclear Iran. Behavior, after all, is largely a function of experience: why would a nuclear Iran, emboldened after successfully defying years of Western threats and sanctions, believe that the U.S. was seriously prepared to enforce this or that red line for the sake of containment? More likely, the U.S. would be at continual pains trying to restrain its allies, Israel above all, from responding too forcefully against Iranian provocations, lest they “destabilize” the region.

Consider also the red lines that Lindsay and Takeyh say would be essential for a policy of containment to work. Washington, they believe, would have to “publicly pledge to retaliate by any means it chooses if Iran used nuclear weapons against Israel”; it would have to tell Tehran that it “would strike preemptively, with whatever means it deems necessary, if Iran ever placed its nuclear forces on alert”; and it “should hold Tehran responsible for any nuclear transfer, whether authorized or not.”

Merely to list these conditions underscores the risks the U.S. would be required to run to enforce a containment policy. And given its habits of provocation, Iran would almost certainly be inclined to test America’s mettle at the earliest opportunity, probably by finding ambiguous ways to transgress America’s red lines. What would the U.S. do, for instance, if Iran found ways to transfer components of a nuclear program, perhaps of a dual-use variety, to Syria? Would that suffice as a casus belliagainst a nuclear Iran as far as the Obama administration was concerned? Or, as so often has been the case in the past, would the administration be content to express “grave concern” and perhaps refer the matter to the International Atomic Energy Agency?

One might also ask why Iran shouldn’t consider making wholesale nuclear-technology transfers to other parties if that suited its needs….

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North Korea warned of an “all-out military strike” to destroy South Korean loudspeakers and other propaganda tools along their fortified border, according to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency.

South Korea’s preparation for psychological warfare, is a “direct declaration of a war” against the North, the general staff of the communist state’s military said today in a statement on KCNA. The North’s military retaliation may turn Seoul into “a sea of flame,” the statement said.

The South has already installed loudspeakers in 11 places along the border and is attempting to set up electronic displays, according to the statement.

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The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is finding himself squeezed between a ticking clock and an enemy that won’t go away.

On Thursday, during a visit to NATO headquarters here, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal admitted that preparations for perhaps the most critical operation of the war — the campaign to take control of Kandahar, the Taliban’s birthplace — weren’t going as planned. He said winning support from local leaders, some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers, was proving tougher than expected. The military side of the campaign, originally scheduled to surge in June and finish by August, is now likely to extend into the fall.

“I don’t intend to hurry it,” McChrystal told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “It will take a number of months for this to play out. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s more important we get it right than we get it fast.”

Read the whole article from the Washington Post.

The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada went on record expressing “deep concern” regarding the interception by Israeli Defence Forces of relief ships from Turkey and Ireland. The ships were attempting to disrupt the Israeli blockade of Palestinian ports to deliver relief supplies to Gaza.

Nine people were killed May 31 after the Israelis boarded ships heading toward Gaza. On June 4, an Irish Gaza-bound aid ship was forced to head towards the Israeli port of Ashdod instead.

The synod passed the motion by a show of hands after a short debate. “It’s not for us to declare to the nation of Israel how to defend themselves,” said David Parson from the diocese of the Arctic.

Bishop Dennis Drainville of Quebec argued that the synod was within its rights to object to what he considered an unjustified action. He quoted Martin Luther King as saying that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.”

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British business on Wednesday expressed alarm at the “inappropriate” and increasingly aggressive rhetoric being deployed against BP by President Barack Obama, warning that the attacks on the oil company could affect energy security and damage wider transatlantic industry relations.

Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, a leading British employers’ organisation, told the FT the presidential attack was “obviously a matter of concern ”“ politicians getting heavily involved in business in this way always is”.

He suggested the White House strategy was misplaced, stating that “apart from anything else, BP is a vital part of the US energy infrastructure. So the US has an interest in the welfare of BP, as much as the rest of the world does.”

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For decades, Turkey was one of the United States’ most pliable allies, a strategic border state on the edge of the Middle East that reliably followed American policy. But recently, it has asserted a new approach in the region, its words and methods as likely to provoke Washington as to advance its own interests.

The change in Turkey’s policy burst into public view last week, after the deadly Israeli commando raid on a Turkish flotilla, which nearly severed relations with Israel, Turkey’s longtime ally. Just a month ago, Turkey infuriated the United States when it announced that along with Brazil, it had struck a deal with Iran to ease a nuclear standoff, and on Tuesday it warmly welcomed Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, at a regional security summit meeting in Istanbul.

Turkey’s shifting foreign policy is making its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a hero to the Arab world, and is openly challenging the way the United States manages its two most pressing issues in the region, Iran’s nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

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Here is one:

Re “Chosen, but Not Special” (Op-Ed, June 6):

Michael Chabon writes eloquently about his desire for Jews and Israel to shed the idea of exceptionalism. But exceptionalism is intrinsic to almost any group, and it is a fantasy to expect a nation or a religion to shed the idea, however irrational and ridiculous, that somehow it is special.

Rather than view Jewish exceptionalism as an albatross, we should view it as a way to inspire Jews and Israel to do better and to be openly critical of events and actions that fall far short of the ideal.

This ability to be self-critical is, like the belief in exceptionalism, an intrinsic part of Jewish and Israeli culture. It is precisely what is happening right now with the widespread acknowledgment that the raid on the Mavi Marmara was a tragic blunder.

Stuart Rojstaczer
Palo Alto, Calif.

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We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes. To imagine a Chelm ”” the town inhabited, according to Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, entirely by fools ”” requires a presumption of general wisdom elsewhere, as the proper imagining of Heaven requires an earthly realm of sorrow.

As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over ”” God love them ”” any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before ”” Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people ”” but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people ”” stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel ”” that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

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The lethal mishandling of Israel’s attack on a ship carrying humanitarian supplies that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza was bound to provoke outrage””and rightly so. The circumstances of the raid are murky and may well remain that way despite an inquiry…But the impression received yet again by the watching world is that Israel resorts to violence too readily. More worryingly for Israel, the episode is accelerating a slide towards its own isolation. Once admired as a plucky David facing down an array of Arab Goliaths, Israel is now seen as the clumsy bully on the block.

Israel’s desire to stop the flotilla reaching Gaza was understandable, given its determination to maintain the blockade. Yet the Israelis also had a responsibility to conduct the operation safely. The campaigners knew that either way they would win. If they had got through, it would have been a triumphant breaching of the blockade. If forcibly stopped, with their cargo of medical equipment and humanitarian aid, they would be portrayed as victims””even if some, as the Israelis contend, brought clubs, knives and poles. As it was, disastrous planning by Israel’s soldiers led to a needless loss of life.

For anyone who cares about Israel, this tragedy should be the starting point for deeper questions””about the blockade, about the Jewish state’s increasing loneliness and the route to peace. A policy of trying to imprison the Palestinians has left their jailer strangely besieged.

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RASHAD HUSSAIN (US Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference): Well, the Cairo speech really set out the framework for””it’s a part of the dialogue that the president started as early as Inauguration Day, when he reached out to Muslim communities. On his second day in office, he appointed Senator [George] Mitchell to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to bring a resolution to the conflict in the Middle East, and it’s something that we have been persistent on, it’s something we’ll continue to be persistent on despite recent events. That event, I think you’ll see, will just redouble our efforts, our attempts to secure a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict. Of course, the president early on””one of the first interviews he did was with al-Arabiya. Then he traveled shortly after that to Ankara, where he made clear that the United States is not at war with Islam, and then in Cairo, where he really set forth the broad framework of dealing with Muslim communities in a comprehensive way and in a manner which addresses not just the political conflicts, one of which you mentioned, but also creates partnerships in a number of areas of mutual interest. And that’s really stemmed from the president’s belief that people all around the world, whether Muslim or non-Muslim or whether they live in a Muslim country or non-Muslim country, all share the same fundamental aspirations, and that is that they want to have access to education, they want to have the ability to pursue economic opportunity, to have health care, to raise their family in a secure way. And so part of the president’s message in Cairo was that we need to establish partnerships in a number of areas, including education, entrepreneurship, health, science, and technology, to have dialogue at the interfaith level, and we’ve continued to do that in a number of ways, and also while reaching out to the domestic Muslim community. The president sent one of his top advisers, Valerie Jarrett, to speak at the Islamic Society of North America, which is the largest gathering of American Muslims. [White House national security and counterterrorism advisor] John Brennan spoke at the Islamic Center at NYU and recently spoke to outreach to Muslim communities as a part of our national security strategy. We had recently an entrepreneurship summit. So this is really an ongoing dialogue, not an ad hoc approach, where we have a concerted effort to engage Muslim communities at all levels.

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Beinart is a classic Washington scholar-journalist-pundit — a Yale and Oxford graduate who has edited the New Republic, stamped his wonk pass at the Council on Foreign Relations and now hangs out at the New America Foundation and the City University of New York. This is his second book on U.S. foreign policy, and he weighs in on politics and policy everywhere from the Daily Beast to the New York Review of Books, where he recently issued a controversial takedown of America’s pro-Israel establishment.

Unsurprisingly, this world of scholars and ideas takes on critical importance in his tale. As much as the presidents and generals who make and execute foreign policy, “The Icarus Syndrome” dwells on the thinkers, great and small, in and out of government, who have debated foreign policy throughout the decades — people such as Lippman and Kennan, as well as Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leslie Gelb, Elliott Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Wolfowitz and Beinart’s hero-foil, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..

In other words, Peter Beinart’s book is premised on the notion that people like Peter Beinart matter greatly. (One might call that a hubris of some kind.) Yet, while Beinart deftly chronicles the battles among these thinkers and their worldviews, he is somewhat less convincing at always identifying how these debates and doctrines affect real policy and action — what presidents actually do.

If anything, his account underscores how many of the best-known and most respected intellectuals either despaired at their lack of influence, watched their ideas get twisted beyond recognition or found themselves abandoned precisely at the moment when their insights could have mattered most.

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The difficulty for an embedded American trainer is trying to take away a positive lesson about Afghan leadership. Waving your gun at your troops and then firing without warning is career suicide for an American military officer. But it works in Afghanistan. Bridging this cultural gap is something we just aren’t taught in our military schools.

Given the dearth of quality Afghan commanders, how do we make progress in cultivating a leadership cadre that can carry on the fight and win in our absence? My own solution to this problem was this: I simply ignored the incompetent officers. I didn’t waste time trying to change old men who had little interest in reform. Time was short, and lives were at stake, so I devoted my time developing the junior ranking officers and NCOs with good habits of effective leadership. I didn’t include the bad leaders in planning, and I didn’t expect them to go out on missions with our troops and me. Frankly, these senior officers preferred to be ignored, as it meant more nap time and vacation time for them, and less lecturing from a young pesky American Captain.

I focused on mentoring the young junior officers and NCOs who will be the future of the Afghan army. They will eventually assume command as their seniors retire, die or are forced out. Slowly but surely, these young studs will be percolating to the top of the chain of command.

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The Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza, which left at least nine dead, was a disaster. It was poorly conceived, incompetently executed and entirely counter-productive.

Israel has a right to defend its borders, but also a responsibility towards its citizens and friends to remain a beacon of civilised conduct in the Middle East. When it fails in this responsibility, the problem is not its alone. Israel’s friends believe in Israel because they believe in the ideals that it represents. On Monday morning, Israel fell short of these ideals.

Such a betrayal invites a roar of disapproval, all the more damaging to Israel’s interests because of that which it drowns out. Just as the intransigence of the blockade around Gaza has allowed the vile regime of Hamas to escape the scrutiny that it deserves, so has Israel’s blundering savagery on the high seas allowed those on board the flotilla to appear unimpeachable. This is inaccurate and also dangerous.

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The U.S. aircraft carrier USS George Washington will participate in a joint naval exercise with South Korea next week in the Yellow Sea, the same waters west of the Korean peninsula where North Korea is accused of sinking a South Korean warship last March, ABC News has learned.

A U.S. official said the carrier, which operates from its home port in Japan, “will be sent to the waters off South Korea within coming days to participate in joint exercises” with the South Korean navy.

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They called it the Green Zone because within its fortified blast walls lay a sanctuary for Americans, a place so secure that weapons could safely be left unloaded ”” or green, in military parlance.

Outside was the Red Zone, the rest of Iraq, where bombs exploded, bullets flew, ordinary Iraqis lived and endured and no American soldier or official was permitted to venture without a heavily armored convoy.

But the Green Zone now is American no longer. On Tuesday, Iraq took full control of the 4-square-mile enclave in the heart of Baghdad that, to many Iraqis, symbolized so much of what went wrong with the U.S. military presence in Iraq….

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A day after Israeli commandoes raided an aid flotilla seeking to breach the blockade of Gaza, Israel held hundreds of activists seized aboard the convoy on Tuesday as news reports said activists may be planning a fresh attempt to ferry supplies to the Hamas-run enclave.

At the same time, the Israeli military said troops clashed with two militants who infiltrated from Gaza, killing them both. While such occurrences are almost routine along the volatile border between Israel and Gaza, the incident underscored the tensions seizing the region after Monday’s confrontation at sea, which strained relations between Israel and the United States just as American-sponsored proximity talks involving Palestinians and Israelis were getting under way.

The developments in Israel and Gaza came hours after the United Nations Security Council condemned “acts” leading to the loss of life in Israel’s operation in international waters on Monday that claimed the lives of nine civilians, many of them Turks. After hours of late-night negotiations, the Security Council urged an impartial inquiry ”” a call echoed in a separate forum by Russia and the European Union on Tuesday at a meeting of senior officials in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

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Israel faced furious international condemnation on Monday after naval commandos attacked a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, killing at least nine pro-Palestinian activists and wounding many more.

Three of the boats were flying the Turkish flag and several of the passengers killed are believed to have been Turkish citizens. The Turkish government recalled its ambassador from Israel and gave warning that relations between the two countries had suffered irreparable damage.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, accused Israel of “inhuman state terror” and said: “Turkey will not remain silent in response.”

“In the name of the Turkish people and of our government, we strongly condemn [these attacks],” Bulent Arinc, deputy prime minister, said in a televised news conference, calling the raids “inhuman” and a “stain on the history of humanity”.

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It is time to worry rather more, by focusing instead on China and its policy towards North Korea. For what China’s reaction should tell us is that China’s interests in the Korean Peninsula are different from those of the West, of South Korea or of Japan. And in that divergence of interest lies danger: it makes North Korea the likeliest flashpoint for a potential conflict between China and America.

On other issues, the Chinese leadership is widely lauded for its fast and effective decision making ”” on bulldozing old city centres, for example, or building motorways and power stations, or giving aid to African governments in return for mining rights. Far better than those fusty old democracies, mutter the admirers. So why, we should all be asking, are they so slow to make up their minds about North Korea and its acts and threats of war?

The official line is that China is concerned about stability in North Korea and fears a huge influx of refugees across its long border with that country if Mr Kim’s regime should collapse. A further line, peddled more quietly by Chinese officials, is that China doesn’t really have much influence over those strange, unpredictable Koreans. So all it can do is take part in the six-party talks over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, an on-off exercise that gathers together America, China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas, urge everyone to show restraint, and hope for the best.

This line, always pretty thin, is looking ever thinner….

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Washington’s unprecedented backing for a UN resolution for a nuclear-free Middle East that singles out Israel has both angered and deeply worried the Jewish state although officials are cagey about openly criticising their biggest ally.

The resolution adopted by the United Nations on Friday calls on Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and urges it to open its facilities to inspection.

It also calls for a regional conference in 2012 to advance the goal of a nuclear-free Middle East.

Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, with around 200 warheads, but has maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its capabilities since the mid-1960s.

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Hezbollah is running weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles, from secret arms depots in Syria to its bases in Lebanon, according to security sources.

The Times has been shown satellite images of one of the sites, a compound near the town of Adra, northeast of Damascus, where militants have their own living quarters, an arms storage site and a fleet of lorries reportedly used to ferry weapons into Lebanon.

The military hardware is either of Syrian origin or sent from Iran by sea, via Mediterranean ports, or by air, via Damascus airport. The arms are stored at the Hezbollah depot and then trucked into Lebanon.

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North Korea said on Friday the peninsula was heading toward war and it was ready to tear up all agreements with the South after it accused the reclusive state of torpedoing a navy ship near their disputed border.

South Korea said on Thursday it had overwhelming evidence that a North Korean submarine had entered its waters in March and attacked the Cheonan corvette, killing 46 sailors.

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The Obama administration announced Tuesday a deal with other powers, including Russia and China, to impose a fourth set of sanctions on Iran in as many years, touching off a contest with Tehran to win support in the United Nations Security Council.

The announcement came just a day after Iranian leaders announced a tentative deal with Turkey and Brazil to turn over, for a year, about half of Iran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel, part of an effort to undermine the sanctions resolutions. But even if the new sanctions pass the Security Council it is unclear whether its provisions ”” including a mandate to inspect ships suspected of entering foreign ports with nuclear-related technology or weapons ”” will cause enough pain to force the country to halt uranium enrichment and cooperate with international inspectors.

“We have reached agreement on a strong draft with the cooperation of both Russia and China,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday morning. Later in the day, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, presented the resolution to the Security Council, the first step in what promises to be weeks of debate.

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The White House on Monday showed deep skepticism about Iran’s new deal to ship low-enriched uranium off its soil, saying it has the chance to be “positive step” but warning that the deal still allows Iran to keep enriching uranium toward the pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

“Given Iran’s repeated failure to live up to its own commitments, and the need to address fundamental issues related to Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and international community continue to have serious concerns,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a written statement to the media.

In a deal struck with Turkey and Brazil, Iran said it would export much of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey. In return, Iran would get fuel rods of medium-enriched uranium to use in a Tehran medical research reactor. The move was seen as an attempt by Iran to prevent a looming round of United Nations sanctions.

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In what could be a stunning breakthrough in the years-long diplomatic deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran has agreed to send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of an exchange meant to ease international concerns about the Islamic Republic’s aims and provide fuel for an ailing medical reactor, the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry told state television Monday morning.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told state television that a letter describing the deal would be sent to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency within a week.

“After a final agreement is signed between Iran and the Vienna group, our fuel will be shipped to Turkey under the supervision of Iran and the IAEA,” he told journalists on the sidelines of a conference of developing nations. “Then we will dispatch 1,200 kilograms [2,640 pounds] of 3.5% enriched uranium to Turkey to be exchanged for 120 kilograms [264 pounds] of 20% enriched uranium from the Vienna group.”

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What with the Fort Hood mass murderer, the Christmas Pantybomber and now the Times Square Bomber, you may have noticed a little uptick in attempted terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland in the last few months.

Representative Lamar Smith did, and, at the House Judiciary Committee, was interested to see if the Attorney-General of the United States thought there might be any factor in common between these perplexingly diverse incidents.

“In the case of all three attempts in the last year, the terrorist attempts, one of which was successful, those individuals have had ties to radical Islam,” said Congressman Smith. “Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?”

“Because of …?”

“Radical Islam,” repeated Smith.

“There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions,” replied Eric Holder non-committally. “I think you have to look at each individual case….”

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Saying they obtained new evidence, senior White House officials said Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban were behind the failed Times Square bombing.

The attempt marks the first time the group has been able to launch an attack on U.S. soil. And while U.S. officials have downplayed the threat ”” citing the bomb’s lack of sophistication ”” the incident in Times Square and Christmas Day airline bomber indicate growing strength by overseas terrorist groups linked to al-Qaida even as the CIA says their operations are seriously degraded.

The finding also raises new questions about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which is widely known to have al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operating within its borders.

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There are two conventional narratives of Mr. Awlaki’s path to jihad. The first is his own: He was a nonviolent moderate until the United States attacked Muslims openly in Afghanistan and Iraq, covertly in Pakistan and Yemen, and even at home, by making targets of Muslims for raids and arrests. He merely followed the religious obligation to defend his faith, he said.

“What am I accused of?” he asks in a recent video bearing the imprint of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?”

A contrasting version of Mr. [Anwar al-]Awlaki’s story, explored though never confirmed by the national Sept. 11 commission, maintains that he was a secret agent of Al Qaeda starting well before the attacks, when three of the hijackers turned up at his mosques. By this account, all that has changed since then is that Mr. Awlaki has stopped hiding his true views.

The tale that emerges from visits to his mosques, and interviews with two dozen people who knew him, is more complex and elusive….

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When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walks up to the podium today in New York to deliver another blast of venom, the only proper response is for the US to hit Iran’s economy with much tougher sanctions than anyone has yet tried. That means targeting its oil industry, not just its leaders and its banks.

Otherwise, Iran’s President will deliver real injury, not just insult, to this crucial conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He has taken Iran to the brink of having nuclear weapons, and if it does soon get them (despite protestations that it only wants nuclear power), that will trigger a Middle East arms race.

The only country able to impose tough sanctions quickly is America. It should do so now. The brutal truth is that the time for dissuading Iran has probably passed. But if it hasn’t, the US needs to act now. It’s a tribute to the success of the NPT, in force since 1970 and signed by 189 countries, that these five-yearly reviews are usually dusty talks about the inspection of power stations. Meetings have tried to patch up ”” but not rewrite ”” the lopsided bargain built into the treaty. This says that the original five nuclear weapons states (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France) promise to help others to get nuclear power (but not weapons), while cutting their own stockpiles.

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Small bands of elite American Special Operations forces have been operating with increased intensity for several weeks in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan’s largest city, picking up or picking off insurgent leaders to weaken the Taliban in advance of major operations, senior administration and military officials say.

The looming battle for the spiritual home of the Taliban is shaping up as the pivotal test of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, including how much the United States can count on the country’s leaders and military for support, and whether a possible increase in civilian casualties from heavy fighting will compromise a strategy that depends on winning over the Afghan people.

It will follow a first offensive, into the hamlet of Marja, that is showing mixed results. And it will require the United States and its Afghan partners to navigate a battleground that is not only much bigger than Marja but also militarily, politically and culturally more complex.

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Every year, Israelis approach the joy of their Independence Day right after immersing themselves in a 24-hour period of grief for fallen soldiers. Before the fireworks burst across the skies Monday night to celebrate the country’s 62nd birthday, the airwaves filled with anguished stories of servicemen and -women killed, the Kaddish prayer of mourning and speeches placing the deeply personal losses of a small country into the sweep of Jewish history.

So there is nothing new or unusual about Israelis’ marking their collective accomplishments with sorrow and concern. It happens all the time, especially among those on the political left who are angry that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians shows no sign of ending.

But there is something about the mood this year that feels darker than usual. It has a bipartisan quality to it. Both left and right are troubled, and both largely about the same things, especially the Iranian nuclear program combined with growing tensions with the Obama administration.

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