On the top of the front page of today's Washington Post, in response to reports that Iran has abandoned its nuclear weapons program, one of the headline reads "A Blow to Bush's Tehran Policy." Though perhaps not entirely wrong, this seems like an odd first take on the story -- sort of the reverse of the old joke Washington Post headline "World Ends, Independent Counsel Appointed To Investigate."If Iran actually has abandoned its program to build nuclear weapons, that's great news for the Bush administration and just about everyone else. And rather than a blow to Bush policy, this news (if true) should be viewed in the first instance as vindication of the administration -- both its use of force in 2003 against a neighbor of Iran's that was thought to possess WMD and its insistence that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Even former CIA man and Bush administration critic Paul Pillar (my college roommate) told the Post that there's good reason to see matters this way.
More analysis from VDH and Michael Ledeen, NRO and Thomas Joscelyn, Weekly Standard. I'm sure we'll be debating this for days, if not years.
UPDATE: Robert Baer in Time:
So how far is Iran from a nuke? The new NIE says 10 to 15 years, maybe. But that's a wild guess. The truth is that Iran is a black hole, and it's entirely conceivable Iran could build a bomb and we wouldn't know until they tested it.
Yet for now we should at least be happy with the good news: Armageddon is postponed.
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