A couple of months ago--before I began blogging here--I considered on my own blog, www.bernardavishai.com, the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations. More recently, the Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote a remarkable (and for many of us, remarkably irresponsible) op-ed in the New York Times, justifying an attack, even a preemptive nuclear strike. I tried to answer Morris's article right away, but knew a more serious response would be necessary, since so much of what Morris was saying presumed a deep knowledge of the Mullah-regime, and seemed to imply that any Iranian nuclear bomb should be considered a kind of jihadist's exploding belt. So my friend Reza Aslan, the Iranian-American author of No God But God, and I published a fuller rejoinder in the Washington Post. The fraught reactions to that piece have been playing out on my own blog, and are work a look.

By the way, you can also find an archive of nine months of posts on my blog, and I'd be please to hear from you about any of them at b1@bernardavishai.info. In future, I'll be posting simultaneously here and there.

My wife's extraordinary daughter-in-law, Christina Ezrahi, has been a student of Russia and the Caucasus for many years. Born in Munich to a Pan-European industrial family, she recently completed her doctorate in Russian history at the University of London, writing about Communism's political uses of classical ballet. A few years back, she worked for the United Nations in Moscow, and traveled often to war-torn Chechnya.

Christina sent us this email this morning, in despair about Western coverage of the Russian conflict with Georgia:

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