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.” 

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. 

That is how I would characterize the thought of putting Condi Rice on the Republican ticket.I am sympathetic to the idea that McCain needs a veep candidate to satisfy conservatives. I expect most self-identified Republicans will ultimately vote for him in November, but their enthusiasm would be an asset. It would be good if he can firm them up with his veep choice.However, McCain should not nominate anybody with strong attachments to the Bush administration.

George Bush's job approval rating is in the cellar. It has been in the cellar for two years, and there seems to me to be no reason to think that it will be anywhere but the cellar come Election Day. This means that the "median voter" -- the guy or gal right smack dab in the middle of the electorate who will essentially decide the whole thing -- disapproves of George W. Bush. If McCain wants to win this election, this is the person whose vote he must win. And nominating Bush's Secretary of State will hinder, rather than help him. 

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. 

Democrats continue to charge that the administration wants “blanket immunity” for the telecoms (much the way they misleadingly repeated that warrantless eavesdropping on cross-border al-Qaeda communications was “domestic spying”). In fact, the proposed immunity is very limited. It applies only to telecoms that either did nothing to help the government or that helped only on the basis of a written representation by the government that the program had been reviewed by the president and determined legal.

Thus, the immunity would not protect, say, a telecom that permitted surveillance on an informal request from a rogue agent without a written assurance of lawfulness -- which, in fairness, is the only type of conduct over which it might be appropriate to hold them liable.