The Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution have issued a report directed at the new president warning of the potential for an Iranian nuclear weapon "in the first year" of his administration:

Iran poses the greatest foreign policy challenge to Barack Obama, the President-elect, with Tehran on course to produce a nuclear bomb in the first year of an Obama administration, a coalition of top think-tanks gave warning yesterday.

Mr Obama must keep his promises of direct talks with Tehran and engage the Middle East region as a whole if he is to halt a looming crisis that could be revisited on the US, the experts said.

“Diplomacy is not guaranteed to work,” Richard Haass, one of the authors said. “But the other options – military action or living with an Iranian weapon are sufficiently unattractive for it to warrant serious commitment.”

The warnings came in a report entitled Restoring the Balance. The Middle East strategy for the President-elect was drafted by the Council for Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution.

Evidently the report makes no mention of what good the authors believe talks with Iran or Syria would do except that meeting with the leaders of the two terrorist states is better than the alternative - military action or doing nothing.

Well, duh. It took guys with 5,000 candlepower intellects to tell us this? It appears that the only difference between the Bush and Obama approach they would like to see would be in atmospherics. No mention is made of what Syria would want in return for any rapproachment with the west (hands off democratic Lebanon) nor is there any acknowledgement that meeting with Iranian leaders would not slow their nuclear program one iota.

The report also appears to say that "living with" an Iranian nuke is prefferable to bombing. With that kind of attitude going in to discussions, the Iranians will make sure they fail.

It never ceases to amaze me the capacity for the left to delude itself. The military option used against Iran would be tragic. It would do nothing to destroy the will of the Iranians to keep building nukes and the monumental problems such action would cause us in Iraq , the Gulf, and with friendlier Arab states like Egypt and Jordan makes the military option a decision of absolute last resort.

As John McCain said the only thing worse than bombing Iran would be them getting their hands on the bomb. And no amount of sophistry - even from the brilliant minds at Brookings - can change that statement.