Call me naive, but...

the assurance in the last sentence of the first paragraph of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action between Iran and the E3/EU+3, while obviously not sufficient in itself, is not insignificant either:

Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any
nuclear weapons.

That's reaffirmed,  by the way, because Iran has asserted repeatedly that Khamenei declared as much in a fatwa, though that fatwa was allegedly never written down. Now, there it is, and again, standing alone as the third numbered provision in the document's preamble:

iii. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or
acquire any nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu drives his bus at Obama

Three thoughts about what Netanyahu told David Gregory on Meet the Press today.

First, Gregory failed to press Netanyahu on exactly what kind of red line  -- that is, a tripwire that would bring on a US attack if Iran crossed it -- he was calling for. Obama has already laid down a red line: Iran cannot produce a nuclear weapon.  What's Bibi's? Gregory didn't ask, exactly. He asked whether Iran had already crossed Israel's red line. Netanyahu said, "they're in the red zone" -- they're within 20 yards. But the discussion of that point remained metaphorical, and therefore close to meaningless.

Second, though both the U.S. and Israel assert that Iran cannot be allowed to produce a nuclear weapon, there is a real difference in threat perception.  Here's Bibi on the danger of a nuclear Iran:

Israel vs. Iran: the kook's on the other foot

Soaked up any sage talk lately about whether the Iranian leadership is "rational"?  Two high-level  voices from Israel's military and security services have weighed in recently on questions of rationality and religious fervor, and their comments mesh interestingly.

First, Benny Gantz, head of the Israeli Defense Force, told Haaretz, in an interview published on April 25, that he did not think Iran would build a nuclear bomb -- not now, anyway. He scoped out Khamenei's thinking in some detail:

As long as its facilities are not bomb-proof, "the program is too vulnerable, in Iran's view. If the supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants, he will advance it to the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, but the decision must first be taken. It will happen if Khamenei judges that he is invulnerable to a response. I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don't think he will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people. But I agree that such a capability, in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who at particular moments could make different calculations, is dangerous."

And now, Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's internal security service, casts a cold eye on current Israeli leadership. The Times' Jodi Rudoren reports:

Is anyone around here interested in peace?

Updated 3/18 and reposted

Call me naive, but what seems to me an important overture from Mohammad Javad Larijani, Secretary-General of Iran's Human Rights Council and, according to Christiane Amanpour, a key foreign policy advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, isn't getting much media attention -- certainly way less than all the saber-rattling at AIPAC earlier this month.

In an interview with Amanpour, Larijani said that Iran is "ready to go to full transparency" and allow "permanent human monitoring" of its nuclear sites in exchange for what he called "cooperation." Here is Amanpour's summary:

Mohammad Javad Larijani, who serves as Secretary-General of Iran's Human Rights Council and key foreign policy advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, said the West should sell Iran 20 percent enriched uranium and provide all the help that nuclear nations are supposed to provide to countries building civilian nuclear power plants. He also said the U.S. and the West should accept his country's right to continue what Iran calls its peaceful nuclear program. In return for cooperation from the West, he said, Iran would offer "full transparency."

Recognizing that Iranian pronouncements can't be taken at face value, and that policy is often pulled in multiple direction in internal struggles, the following assertions by Larijani should not be fully be discounted, either:

The president who doesn't do sound bytes

Quite a tribute to Jeffrey Goldberg to be singled out by President Obama as honest broker enough to receive the most precise and nuanced briefing on a vital foreign policy issue by a sitting president that I have ever seen or read.

While rapport is evident in this interview, with Obama's respect for Goldberg's ability to consider the interests and perspectives of all players plain, there is also a tension: Goldberg is looking for a couple of sound bytes.  And Obama doesn't do sound bytes. What he does, instead, is lay out guiding principles with precision, while maintaining strategic ambiguity on the crunch points.  Here are the key takeaways as I read them:

No ramping up of war talk.  The buzz is that Netanyahu wants new red lines: "all options are on the table" has been cast as a tired cliche. But it's good enough for Obama:

Perry letting slip the dogs of war?

Rick Perry's default modes of discourse are the smear, the lie and the threat.  All three make repeat appearances in his speech outlining his Middle East policy. To sample briefly: the smear: Obama has pursued a policy of "appeasement" of the Palestinian authority and has given "equal standing" to Palestinian "orchestrators of terrorism." Lie: that unspecified U.S. actions during the Green uprising could have unseated Iran's current rulers.  But let's spotlight in particular a noteworthy threat, cushioned though it is by some conventional policy recommendations and diplomatspeak.  It's here:

Israel’s security is critical to America’s security. We must not forget it was Israel that took out the nuclear capabilities of Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. In both instances, their actions made the free world safer.

Today, the greatest threat to the security of Israel and, by extension, a threat to America, is the Iranian government developing a nuclear arsenal. One thing is clear: we must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Economic sanctions must be tightened and increased and all options must remain on the table to stop a brutally repressive regime from acquiring a nuclear capability.

The Horrid fascination of history

Jeffrey Goldberg to Michael J. Totten:

Jews are floating around in the Persian Gulf with nuclear weapons in German subs that are aimed at the new Hitler. If you step away from your personal feelings about it, it’s just fascinating.

Reagan-Clinton in '08

Naturally, Obama is getting slammed, by Edwards and others, for praising Reagan in an interview with the editorial board of the The Reno Gazette-Journal early this week:

I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

This is absolut Obama. As with most of his flashpoints, this is the fruit of long meditation, the development of a philosophy of power that's really been a lifelong project, and a continuation of his critique of Clintonian incrementalism delivered in the pre-New Hampshire debate (and discussed here). At the same time, Obama here is telling a simple empirical truth that most Democrats don't want to hear. Reagan did catch the country's mood and did change the country's direction - directly, by articulating and sticking to a few simple principles, in contrast to Clinton, who skillfully effected incremental change under the radar. Part of the difference is that the Republicans were a harder-assed opposition than the Democrats, part of it that Clinton squandered tons of political capital early -- and then again, once he'd won reelection, through Monica Lewinsky.

Much of the difference was character - and that's not all to Clinton's detriment. He is multiples smarter than Reagan was, and in a thousand details of spending and tax policy, he made government more effective and more responsive to the needs of less privileged people. After Reagan put liberalism on a diet, Clinton figured out ways to do more with less. Obama is really breathtakingly ambitious. What he's really trying to tell us, without breaking the modesty barrier, is that he combines Reaganite clarity of vision and Clintonian intellect.

Admittedly, Obama's paean to Reagan doesn't get into the really hard part for Democrats: that Reagan's stewardship through the disintegration of the Soviet Union was remarkable, and that a large part of "what people were already feeling" when he took office was that the United States needed to confront the Soviets more aggressively. Acccording to Robert Gates, Reagan was probably the only person in his government who believed his own "peace through strength" rhetoric -- that is, believed that if we convinced the Soviets they could not outspend and outarm us, we would be able to negotiate reductions in nuclear weapons - indeed, he believed we could negotiate an end to nuclear weapons. When Gorbachev began to change Soviet behavior abroad, Reagan was ready to deal. He didn't 'cause' the Soviet breakdown but he midwifed it very skillfully, as did Bush Sr. after him.

Many brands of bipartisanship are pious blather. The deepest bipartisanship, though, is recognition that a one-party state is not a good thing, that if your side won all the time they would screw things up, and that the electorate tacks back and forth between ideological poles, much as competent presidents themselves tend to tack between rival camps within their own administrations. Obama is bidding to tap into this deep bipartisanship. That means hurting Democratic feelings.