Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense under former President George W. Bush, once had a lot of people in Washington scratching their heads in puzzlement when he described how the U.S. sizes up a potential military adversary: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there […]
What Do We Know About Iran and When Do We Know It?
Plugging the Leaks
There is a famous legend about the little Dutch boy who saves his town from flooding by plugging a leak in a dike with his finger. Fortunately for him (and the town), there was only one leak because, well, a boy has only so many fingers. But multiple leaks of information keep on coming out […]
Documents Show U.S. Coalition Building on Iran
There is little question that the latest batch of WikiLeaks documents, mainly from the State Department, make for fascinating reading. Examples abound: Over the past nine years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has seemingly morphed from being a rather happy fellow to a mercurial and paranoid one. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev “plays Robin to (Vladimir) Putin’s […]