Two separate, unrelated items — both concerning issues that I know Steve will continue to cover upon his return to active blogging… The first concerns Iran.

I have not read all of the posts and commentary made by a roster of diverse and fascinating guest-bloggers, but from a few emails I have been able to quickly glance at, I know that there has been some intense debate — a good thing.

The PR contortions over shifting the slogan of the anti-terrorist war from GWOT, to GWOE, to GSAVE, to ‘what-the-hell-ever’ has backfired so badly that it is only reinforcing the perception of administration failure to craft an effective communications campaign to exist side-by-side with its military campaigns.

OK, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines watching the fur fly. A new article in the New York Review of Books prompts me to post. Tony Judt takes a very dim view of where things are headed, even to the point of likening, at least implicitly, the U.S.

Before he left for his “undisclosed location,” Steve had alerted TWN readers about the launch of a new bipartisan initiative, the Partnership for A Secure America. This group had its debut this week (see Jonathan Kaplan’s report in The Hill, at ), and Scot Lehigh’s op-ed in today’s Boston Globe.

The inaugural issue of the Yale Journal of International Affairs contains an interview with David Brooks.

Steve should be returning to these here parts sometime soon. I thank him for letting me say a few things around here. It’s certainly been an interesting group sitting in — including Bolton-agnostic conservatives such as yours truly and Bolton-supporting war-skeptical conservatives such as the illustrious and always provocative Doug Bandow.

I spent 6,000 words last week in search of an explanation for the Bush administration’s atrociously lax behavior toward nuclear proliferation, and I concluded that its conservative ideology — with its insistent focus on the character, rather than the capability, of states — was the culprit.

Mark Goldberg suggests below that Bolton poses a serious threat to US security interests, because he’s likely to pursue his own agenda with regard to Iran and other issues.

John Bolton once declared “I don’t do carrots.” To the extent that this is a quite concise distillation of the Bush Doctrine, it should surprise no one that Bolton was on Bush’s short-list of people to serve as UN ambassador.