The Obama administration announced over the weekend that it's speeding up the deployment of missile defense systems in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The White House leaked the news through David Sanger of The New York Times and Joby Warrick of the Washington Post -- two of its favorite conduits for leaking news related to Iran.
The administration didn't put a timetable on the deployments, and it insisted the new weapons are purely defensive in nature.
As we've been following today's developments regarding Iran's "secret" nuclear facility, we've left unaddressed several federal terrorism cases that, by accident or design, are popping up in the news right now, the foremost among them being the prosecution of Najibullah Zazi.
I had planned on summarizing the cases, but now I see a more useful line of analysis that connects Iran with the home-grown terrorist threat: Conservative and neoconservative ignorance.
Mostly off-topic, but that's one of the benefits of a blog: We can write whatever we want!
The big news in Washington today is the Obama administration's decision to kill off the Bush-era Eastern European missile defense system. Predictable criticism has ensued: Obama is "capitulating to Putin," "making us less safe," "throwing our allies under the bus," etc. (John Bolton thinks this was the wrong decision, which means I absolutely support it.)
Here's my gripe: Nobody can define exactly what threat the U.S. was protecting its allies against. Is Russia secretly planning to invade Poland? Is Belarus plotting an empire?
The Israeli military has been testing a missile defense system off the coast of California (playing with missiles in the heavily-populated Mediterranean being a bad idea). Here's how the AP summarizes the tests.
Tests of a missile-defense system meant to shield Israel from Iranian attack were aborted over the past week on three occasions because of various malfunctions, Israeli defense officials said Thursday... [in the latest case], communications glitches between the missile and the radar led US defense officials to abort the test before an intercepting missile could be fired, they said.
The IDF calls this a "partial success." For the sake of Californians, I hope we don't find out what the IDF considers a failure.
