Iran: It's Getting Real

Charles Krauthammer is a policy wonk first and a Foxified partisan second. In this column, he keeps Obama-bashing to a minimum while painstakingly analyzing Anthony Cordesman's three-step plan for deterring Iran's weapons program, if any, without war: Making clear the U.S. will attack if necessary, showing Iran that it can't win by going nuclear, and offering the mullahs incentives for abandoning nuclear weapons that sound a lot like Nixonian detente.

Wrapping up, Krauthammer sounds worried that war is looming -- and if he's worried, so am I:

If we simply continue to drift through kabuki negotiations...one thing is certain: Either America, Europe, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis will forever be condemned to live under the threat of nuclear blackmail (even nuclear war) from a regime the State Department identifies as the world's greatest exporter of terror. Or an imperiled Israel, with its more limited capabilities, will strike Iran – with correspondingly greater probability of failure and of triggering a regional war.

All options are bad. Doing nothing is worse. "The status quo may not prevent some form of war," concludes Cordesman, "and may even be making it more likely."

A $140 Billion Question For The Next GOP Debate

Anthony H. Cordesman says no one, neither President Obama nor the GOP candidates, is talking about what it will cost to keep Afghanistan from descending into chaos after control of military operations is transferred to the Afghans in 2014, as Obama has promised they will be:

It may be fair to argue that the last thing the nation needs at the start of an election year is yet another budget crisis and another decade of war. Yet this is the path the United States appears to be taking in Afghanistan. U.S. officials are talking about removing all American troops from Afghanistan and about massive cuts in military spending as part of the “transition” to Afghan control of combat and civil governance operations in 2014. Given the lead times involved in funding and implementing such massive changes within two to three years, Washington really has only a few months in which to decide whether we will take on the burden of funding the Afghan government through 2014 and beyond, and whether we will provide most of the funds, advisers and partners that Afghan forces will need until 2020 and beyond.