Today, U.S. intelligence officials will give closed-door briefings to members of Congress about North Korea’s role in building a reactor in Syria. (Israel, it’s been confirmed, destroyed that nuclear facility with their air-strikes last September.)

Why are the briefings taking place now? This morning the New York Times’s David Sanger speculated that Vice President Cheney is trying to scuttle the six-party disarmament talks by highlighting Pyongyang’s proliferant behavior. Others have floated more intriguing theories. For example, Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, thinks the Bush administration is releasing the information at this time to rescue its tentative deal with the North Koreans by letting them off the hook. “If it turns out we have them dead to rights -- that we have enough information on our own -- then we can eliminate this as a point of contention,” he says. “Maybe we don’t need to negotiate transparency with North Korea because we already know enough.” 

She doesn't support missile defense or the war on terror. But Hillary Clinton pledges to defend Israel with nukes. In a tight race for the presidency, she's learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

As we've repeatedly noted, Sen. Clinton has vigorously opposed development of defensive systems that would let us shoot down Iranian missiles before they reach their targets. She has voted to slash budget requests for missile defense and has slammed Bush for "focusing obsessively on expensive and unproven missile defense technology."

If we were to attack Iran as Clinton pledges, wouldn't it be better to do it pre-emptively, using conventional weapons, as Israel did when it sent a squadron of F-16s to destroy Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor before it could go live and begin producing weapons-grade nuclear material? Wouldn't it be better to do so before Iran has the capability to launch nuclear-tipped Shahab missiles in the direction of Tel Aviv and Haifa?

Shouldn't it be before Iran has the ability to strike European and American targets? That's what Bush's plan for missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic are designed to defend against.

The Guardian describes an extraordinary manifesto authored "by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists..." At first glance, the manifesto appears to mark a return to the policy of deterrence; a rueful admission that nothing but a revival of the balance of terror can now secure the West against forces that its publics are unwilling to mobilize against. That thought will ironically comfort many of those who lived through the long shadow of East versus West. After all, if deterrence kept the West safe against the Soviets for the long duration of the Cold War might not containment and the mutual balance of terror also safeguard it indefinitely against radical Islam?

Deterrence worked because it made peace the only alternative to utter destruction. But it worked against the Soviets because for all their belligerence could always be counted on to choose life. The Commissars may have been stupid but they were not crazy. Can the same assumption be made about Islamic radicals who desire death? From the point of a theocratic zealot the rational choice may be to hasten Armageddon.

On closer inspection the manifesto might not be about deterrence at all. It is about committing to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMDs at all costs. The reason Lord Inge's remark that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence" is so significant is that it brings the trigger point back from second-strike or launch on attack to one in which WMD acquisition itself becomes the casus belli. It is almost a form of pre-deterrence. 

NATO endorses President Bush's plan for missile defense in Europe despite Russia's objections. A nervous Europe goes along. For Moscow, this is a case of deja vu all over again. If you saw the headline, "Russia to U.S.: Drop Missile Defense," you'd be forgiven if you thought someone had left a 1986 newspaper laying around. That's what former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev said to President Ronald Reagan when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland in October 1986. Gorbachev, like Putin today, demanded we drop SDI. Reagan refused.

Bush, even hampered by a Democratic Congress, is making missile defense a reality. We shudder at the prospect of a President Obama scrapping Reagan's dream in favor of his "aggressive personal diplomacy" with Tehran and Moscow. A President Obama would have supported the nuclear freeze and lost the Cold War.

A President McCain, however, would carry on Reagan's grand strategy in dealing with America's enemies -- we win, they lose. 

For those who believe that the clerics who rule Iran must never have an arsenal of nuclear weapons, the United States’ course of action ought to be clear: The Bush administration should advocate direct, unconditional talks between Washington and Tehran. Strategically, politically and morally, such meetings will help us think more clearly. Foreign-policy hawks ought to see such discussions as essential preparation for possible military strikes against clerical Iran’s nuclear facilities.