Clifford D. May

The detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was established in 2002 to hold the most dangerous of those captured in what the George W. Bush administration called the Global War on Terrorism. Controversy over the facility has simmered ever since. In recent days, it has begun to boil. One hundred detainees, at last count, are staging a hunger strike.

Two points vital to understanding the sanctions being imposed on Iran: They are unlikely to succeed -- if success is defined as stopping the regime’s rulers from developing nuclear weapons -- yet they are an essential component of any serious and strategic policy mix. Let us count the ways.

Nazir is dead. Actually, both Nazirs are dead. Earlier this month, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban and al-Qaida commander, was killed by an American drone strike in South Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan. Also recently killed: Abu Nazir, the fictional al-Qaida terrorist in the suspenseful Showtime series “Homeland.”

Robert D. Kaplan has long been among America’s most insightful analysts of global trends. I would rather argue with him than agree with most others. Right now, I’m going to do a bit of both.

Israel, as its friends and enemies never forget, is a "one-bomb country." One nuclear weapon is all it would take to wipe out a nation whose territory is smaller than Djibouti, with a population smaller than that of Burundi -- fewer than 8 million people, 20 percent of whom are Arabs who, by the way, enjoy rights denied to Arabs (not to mention non-Arab minorities) elsewhere in the Middle East.

"The fax shall make you free."

Albert Wohlstetter, the great Cold War strategist, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said that back in 1990. He was right: The advent of fax machines, Xerox copiers and other then-cutting-edge communications technologies was an enormous boon to the free flow of information. In Communist countries, the Samzidat was transformed: Dissident self-publishers, who previously would sit at typewriters copying banned books page by page, could now, with the push of a button, create dozens of copies and transmit them almost anywhere.

Fareed Zakaria is wearing his "I'm perplexed" face. On his weekly CNN program, he is noting that Saudi Arabia did not go nuclear in response to "Israel's buildup of a large arsenal of nuclear weapons." So why, he asks the camera, would the Saudis do so in response to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons?

The camera did not answer, so I will: The Saudis are not fools. They know Israel poses no threat to them. They know, too, that those who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran seek to establish hegemony over the Middle East and lead a global Islamist Ascendency.