AP reports:
A Russian man working for a nuclear company in Iran has been found dead after disappearing 18 days earlier, Iranian media and a Russian spokeswoman said Thursday....
Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the state-run Russian company coordinating the Bushehr project, Atomstroiexport, said the deceased was an employee and that he died in an accidental fall from a rock in the recreational area.
The Russian in question was 57 years old, which would presumably make him 1) a senior figure on the staff at Bushehr, and 2) too old to be rock-climbing in sub-freezing temperatures. Or maybe it was an accident. Two other interesting developments on this issue today: A piece in the International Herald Tribune makes the case that the CIA was wrong to assert in the 2007 NIE that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program. Given the evidence, the author concludes that rather than halting the program to design a warhead, the Iranians had simply completed their objective and moved on. Also, Haaretz reports a thinly-sourced rumor that the Obama administration will make official the policy that Hillary Clinton offered to much derision in the primary: if Iran attacks Israel, the United States will obliterate Iran. Let's call it the Hillary Doctrine.
As Haaretz points out, the premise of any official security guarantee along those lines would be a concession to the reality of a nuclear Iran. Obama still maintains that a nuclear Iran would be unacceptable, but one can see the appeal of the Hillary Doctrine -- look tough, do nothing. The left already trashed the idea when it was first put forward by Krauthammer and then picked up by Hillary, but hypocrisy won't be a stumbling block for Obama supporters. What this proposal doesn't do is offer any way to deal with the broader problem of proliferation in the Middle East. Nor does it contend with the fact that such an umbrella would almost certainly have to be extended to despotic regimes that are ostensibly American allies.
