Well, sometimes we in the media get out a bit ahead of ourselves. Warren reported a month ago that the Bush administration planned to announce the establishment of a U.S. Interests Section in Iran after the presidential election was over, but before year's end. The United States hasn't had a diplomatic presence in Iran for nearly three decades, and the idea was that taking such a controversial step is easier for a lame duck president.

We had this on pretty good authority,  two sources,  including one who is quite senior in the scheme of things.

But we at N&S have been hearing for about a week now that the plan has changed, and no such announcement would be forthcoming. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made it official today: Bush has decided to punt the issue to President-elect Obama.

Bush "took an in- principle decision" months ago to establish the Interests Section, similar to one the United States has in Havana, Cuba, Rice said, but  "there were intervening events that I think made it not a good time to raise this with the Iranian regime, because obviously we would have had to raise it with the Iranian regime." Rice cited the Russia-Georgia conflict, which dominated Washington's attention for most of the Fall. Others have said that Iran's alleged covert effort to derail a U.S.-Iraqi agreement on the status and withdrawal of American troops in Iraq soured the White House on the idea of diplomatic outreach to Iran--even if the idea behind it was to have more direct engagement with the Iranian people, not to reward the regime in Tehran.

Bottom line: This is one more issue Obama will have to wrestle with come January 20. Our guess is that establishing a diplomatic outpost in Iran won't be the Obama administration's first move on Iran policy.

The new National Intelligence Council's report on what the world may look like in 2025 is so dense that a lot of really interesting findings couldn't be included in the story written when the study was unveiled on Nov 20. So Nukes & Spooks thought we'd throw some out there - in no particular order - for popular consideration:

One factor that could mitigate the socio-economic impact of aging workforces in many countries over the next two decades is the economic empowerment of women. The report finds that recent improvements in health care, education and employment opportunities for women and girls have contributed as much to increased economic productivity in recent years as technological improvements. "Over the next 20 years, the increased entry of women in the workplace may continue to mitigate the economic impacts of global aging," the report said.

It added that "nowhere is the role of women potentially more important for geopolitical change than in the Muslim world." The report noted that Muslim women do far better assimilating in Europe than Muslim men and that they may in the future "help show the way to greater social assimilation and reduce the likelihood of religious extremism."

Experts expect HIV/AIDS to remain a global pandemic through 2025, with Sub-Saharan Africa continuing to be the "epicenter of infection," the report said. Even if an effective vaccine or a "self-administered microbicide" are developed by then, it is unlikely that either will be "widely disseminated," the report continued.

If prevention efforts and the effectiveness of life-extending anti-retroviral therapies remain at current levels, the world's HIV-positive population is forecast to climb from the estimated 33 million today to an estimated 50 million by 2025. Nearly half of those cases will be in Sub-Saharan Africa. If an all-out prevention campaign were in place by 2015, the world's HIV-positive cases would peak and then fall to about 25 million by 2025.

Even with a massive effort to develop clean fossil fuels and renewable energy sources, all current technologies "are inadequate for replacing traditional energy architectures on the scale needed," according to the report. "New energy technologies will probably not be commercially viable and widespread by 2025," it continued.

"Simply meeting baseline energy demand over the next two decades is estimated to require more than $3 trillion of investment in traditional hydrocarbons by companies built up over more than a century and with market capitalizations in the hundreds of billions of dollars. We expect any new form of energy to demand similarly massive investment," the report said.

The geopolitical consequences of reducing global use of oil and gas will be "immense," according to a section of the report called "Winners and Loser in a Post-Petroleum World." The biggest loser: Saudi Arabia. It will suffer "the biggest shock," and its leaders could face serious challenges from religious conservatives as they try to implement major economic reforms to diversify the economy, including full participation by women in the economy.

Another major loser would be Iran, whose populist economic policies would be undermined by reductions in oil and gas prices. Such a development could fuel demands for economic reform, including opening up the economy to Western investment and stronger ties with Western countries including the United States. "Iranian leaders might be more willing to trade their nuclear policies for aid and trade," the report said.

Experts currently consider 21 countries, whose combined populations total 600 million people, to have shortages of arrable land or fresh water. That number is forecast to rise to 36 countries, whose populations will total about 1.4 billion people, by 2025. "Lack of access to stable supplies of water is reaching unprecedented proportions in many areas of the world and is likely to grow worse owing to rapid urbanization and population growth," the report said.

We've written and posted a lot about problems with the State Department's embassy construction program. Well here's a case where something almost went very wrong, but didn't - where, in fact, the system worked.

Back on August 8, as the Beijing Olympics opened, President George W. Bush, along with his father (a former U.S. envoy in China), dedicated the new American Embassy in Beijing.

The dedication, it turns out, was mostly symbolic -- the Embassy was not scheduled to open until October 17. Well, as the real deadline for opening approached, we're told, some folks in the State Department's bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations were pressing to get the green light to occupy the new complex, even though there were concerns about whether the fire safety systems were fully ready for operation. (This will sound familiar to those of you who have followed our coverage of the construction of the new US Embassy in Baghdad.....)

Well, folks at State's upper echelons refused to issue what is known as a Certificate of Occupancy until more tests were done. Ambassador Clark T. Randt Jr., (that's him above, second from right), insisted on personally observing the test. And ... as Randt and others watched, the pump that provides water for the embassy's fire-fighting systems broke.

The problems were duly fixed, and today, U.S. diplomats and other government officials have moved into the New Embassy Compound, which consolidates 1,100 people who had been working at 22 locations across Beijing into a single site, with more than 600,000 feet of office space.

As they say, all's well that ends well. 

The Pentagon these days is on a four-star bonanza. Last week, the Army named its first female four-star Army general, Ann Dunwoody, in an emotional ceremony that sparked hopes across the ranks that the military was finally turning another historic corner. Today, the military appointed its first four-star chief of the National Guard bureau in a long, long time, Gen. Craig R. McKinley. He replaces Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum.

So why is this a big deal? That the chief is now a four star is a bold statement about the growing role of the National Guard. In a way, the job of the National Guard is far more complicated than the other forces. After all, they are no longer tasked only with dealing with domestic emergencies and preparing for the off-chance they are called overseas. These days, they traverse both worlds. They have literally deployed to Iraq one month and returned to the United States the next to handle a natural disaster, most notably Hurricane Katrina.

Most agree the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could not have been fought without them. Indeed, these days, they are deployed to more than 40 countries.

And yet serving is not their full-time jobs. They have to balance the needs of their countries with their own domestic jobs. Before 9/11 the Guard could only be deployed one year active duty in five years; now they can be called up for 24 months in the same period.

The Guard is feeling the pinch of all those competing demands. Their equipment is worn out; their forces are exhausted; and they need to retrain to adapt to their new role.

Simply put, the demands on the Guard are unprecedented. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the new chief is a four star. 

The real question becomes: What will the fourth star really bring to the Guard? Will they get more attention and resources? Will they be on equal footing with the other rank? During the campaign, vice president-elect Joe Biden said the National Guard should be part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which suggests that major changes are afoot.

It’s just another thing to watch for in the next administration.

Today's reading:  Mark Lynch over at Abu Aardvark has an interesting take on how advanced information technology is affecting Al Qaida. There's a lot there, but bottom-line, Lynch concludes that AQ is losing its edge here, and the very technological forces that helped propel the terrorist group to prominence could prove to be an Achilles' Heel.

"Overall, those technologies which have empowered AQ to date seem to have largely run their course," he writes.

N&S blogged on this same theme a few months ago. Comments welcome on this important issue.

The Bush administration will soon be history, but that hasn't stopped its senior members from trying to rewrite history for the next couple of months ... and no doubt, long after.

We were watching a video of CSPAN's interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when we had to suddenly stop and hit the rewind button. Rice said this, and we quote:

When I go to Europe, I no longer see any difference in the view that a stable and secure Iraq is in everybody’s interest, and that an Iraq that is democratic and in which Saddam Hussein, that brutal monster that caused three wars in the region, including dragging us in twice, that used – who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, that an Iraq that is democratic and friendly to the West is better for the Middle East. I don’t see much disagreement about that.

Dragging us in twice?

Pause. Think about that.

I mean, everyone--or most everyone--agrees that former President George H.W. Bush had to respond after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and threatened to go further south, into the Saudi oil fields. That's once. I suppose it's possible that by "twice," Rice was referring to U.S. involvement in the Iran-Iraq war, when the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers to protect them from threats to shipping, and got involved in various other ways (including by suppling intel to our-then friend Saddam Hussein to help him fight Iran).

But it seems more likely that Rice was arguing that Saddam "dragged us in" to the Iraq War. That's not our memory here at Nukes and Spooks. In fact, the record is now clear (as we reported at the time) that President George W. Bush had decided to go to war against Iraq in early 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction or significant, operational ties to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. The Bush administration dismissed Saddam's accounting of his WMD, ignored offers of mediation, and used bogus and false intelligence to make the case for war. It didn't let the U.N. Security Council or opposition from Europeans get in the way. All that makes for an odd definition of "dragging us in."

Elsewhere, in the interview, Rice acknowledges mistakes in the Iraq War, while arguing the Bush administration eventually learned from them:

There are a lot of things that could have been done differently. I think that it took awhile to really understand how to help a country that was really completely destroyed in its fabric, not just its institutions, but the fabric of society by the years of tyranny under Saddam Hussein and how to help it recover. In retrospect, we did a lot from Baghdad, a lot from the top down. The provinces and the tribes were clearly part of the answer. And it took a while to recognize that the complete integration of the civilian and military effort through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams would empower the provinces to create friends, for instance, the sons of Iraq and Anbar, who would then themselves with our help expel al-Qaida.

Rice said she will return to Stanford after Jan. 20, where she will write a book about American foreign policy--doesn't sound like a kiss-and-tell-type tome to us--and one about her late parents, John and Angelena, whom she called "educational evangelists."

Striking a theme that has been present in many of her recent speeches, and perhaps providing a hint of her future activities, RIce said education is an important national security issue:

If I am concerned about one core issue for America, we’ll get through the many challenges and difficulties that we have, but the state of education in this country is a challenge that we better meet, and we’d better meet it soon.

It would be mean, very mean, of us to suggest that a proper accounting of history, even recent history, is a critical ingredient of a good education.

Relations between the United States and Russia may be their worst since the end of the Cold War, but that hasn’t stopped the sides from forging ahead with efforts to prevent nuclear weapons-grade materials from falling into the hands of terrorists.

In the latest measure of progress, U.S. and Russian experts have completed a project to strengthen security at one of Russia’s largest facilities for storing nuclear weapons-grade materials, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The facility is located at the Mayak Nuclear Association, a sprawling decades-old nuclear weapons plant that suffered accidents in the 1950s and 1960s that exposed workers and residents in the surrounding area of Chelyabinsk to radiation.

The security upgrades at the storage facility, which contains the largest amount of nuclear weapons-grade material of any such site in Russia, were funded by the United States at a cost of $15 million under an agreement that President Bush signed in February 2005 with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin while Putin was president.

Russia refuses to disclose how much material is being kept at Mayak. Rosatom, Russia’s state-run nuclear energy agency, and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy agency that oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal, completed the work at Mayak three months ahead of deadline.

The Bush-Putin accord, known as the Bratislava Initiative, bolstered U.S.-Russian cooperation in upgrading the security of nuclear weapons-grade materials, improving emergency responses to nuclear mishaps and converting reactors around the world from using highly enriched uranium, the fuel used in nuclear bombs, to low-enriched uranium.

The work has continued unhindered despite grave tensions between Moscow and Washington over the installation of U.S. missile defense sites in Eastern Europe and this summer’s Russian invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

“It’s absolutely clear that the United States and Russia are committed to taking steps to preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism,” NNSA Deputy Administrator Will Tobey told Nukes and Spooks in a telephone interview.

Tobey said the United States has spent close to $2 billion since the mid-1990s on helping Russia secure its nuclear weapons-grade materials, destroy excess Cold War era nuclear warheads, missiles and chemical and biological weapons and nuclear bombers, and employ Russian weapons scientists.

The United States also has a “second line of defense” program of installing radiation detectors at Russian ports, airports and border crossings to detect attempts to smuggle nuclear weapons-grade materials out of the country, he said.

U.S. and Russian experts have converted 62 research reactors in 31 countries from using highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium, and returned almost 2 metric tons of fresh and spent fuel to Russia, Tobey recounted.

On his last Veterans Day as president, George W. Bush went to New York to speak on board the Intrepid, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that now houses a museum.  He told the audience that when he leaves office Jan. 20, he will miss being commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. His exact words were: “The truth of the matter is, I will miss being the commander in chief of such a fabulous group of men and women, those who wear the uniform of the United States military.”

As your humble Pentagon correspondent, it seemed only appropriate to post the video for those who want to hear from the President on such an important day to those serve. So here you go. He makes the comment about three minutes in.

Happy Veterans Day!

Three weeks ago, the Defense Department put out its latest field manual 3-07, which outlined how the military should go about carrying out stability operations. Now I know that sounds drier than toast but it is an important manual. In the previous manual, 3-0, the military acknowledged that stability operations – which include things like nation building – is as important as traditional defense operations. That is, the U.S. military must not only train to fight other major military powers but learn how to rebuild communities, too. FM 3-07 spells out how the military should go about doing that.

It’s been a controversial publication because it really is the military official declaration that it will do things differently. The U.S. military cannot no longer only prepare to fight major wars, it says. And that causes much consternation for some. After all, stability operations are a lot more complicated than traditional wars. Traditional wars are linear. There is a battlefield, a line and eventually a declaration of victory. But stability operations are a lot more nebulous. They don’t just require the best fighting force, but street-savvy soldiers, political reconciliation and so on. And there is no clear line of success. For example, Veterans Day (which the United States recognizes tomorrow) began as a celebration of the end of World War I, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918. That is, there was a very clear end in that traditional fight. Such declarations are not as clear in this war. When did Iraq’s Anbar province become a rebuilt area? It all depends on who you ask.

Anyway, I learned today that more than 250,000 people have downloaded the manual in three weeks. Those are New York Times bestselling numbers. And it says something about how much people are looking at this manual. Some authors toil for years for such numbers. So the military is considering publishing the manual and selling it in bookstores, just as it did for 3-0. If you want to check it out, click here.

   Four years after he was killed in Iraq, a Marine Corps lance corporal has been selected as the first recipient of the Intelligence Community Medal of Valor.

   Lance Cpl. James E. Swain, an intelligence analyst with Company K, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regimental Combat Team, 1st Marine Divison, died during the Battle of Fallujah on Nov. 15, 2004, according to an announcement issued by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. He was from Kokomo, Ind.

   According to McConnell, Swain was manning a vehicle mounted machine gun during an operation to collect targeting intelligence. As his colleagues were about to enter a building, he noticed that insurgents had set up an ambush and he opened fire. His shots alerted the other Marines and averted the ambush, but left Swain exposed, and he was mortally wounded.

   Swain's family is to be presented with the award, which recognizes heroism and courage, at a ceremony at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., on Nov.14.