There's no point in giving a blow-by-blow account of the piece -- you should read it for yourself -- but my short take on the argument is as follows:

1) Best estimates suggest that at a minimum it would take Iran 6 to 8 years to develop a usable bomb. This means there is plenty of time to engage in smart diplomacy aimed at heading off this possibility. And since there's no evidence that Iran is currently going full speed ahead towards a bomb, this timeline may be extended.

2) As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has noted, a military strike would not end Iran's nuclear program. The most likely result would be strengthened resolve among Iran's leaders and its population to get one.

3) Persuasion beats coercion as a means of stopping a nuclear weapons program. This is what worked in Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Iraq, and Brazil, and it is what is most likely to work in Iran. Sanctions may have a role, but striking a political deal that addresses Iran's security concerns and acknowledges its role as a regional power is the best way forward.

5) The threat of Iran getting the bomb pales in comparison with the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and others joining the "club." Progress in diplomacy with Iran, combined with a concerted effort to resolve the region's "unresolved territorial, economic, and political disputes" is the best way to head off this nightmare scenario.

There will be plenty of argument and analysis on what to do about Iran and the bomb now that the Obama administration has decided to pursue a diplomatic initiative. I'll get into more detail on the issue in future posts. But Cirincione's piece is an excellent place to start.

In a prior post I exaggerated the commitment to deep reductions embodied in the draft resolution that the U.S. will bring to the Security Council tomorrow. I referred to a commitment to"make quick, deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals of the "Big Five" (the U.S., Russia, China, France, and the UK." There is no such commitmen in the resolution, as my colleague John Burroughs of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy quickly pointed out to me. The operative section calls upon UN member states to "pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures related to nuclear arms reduction and disarmament." This leaves far too much wiggle room as to whenthe major nuclear weapons states need to disarm, if at all (note "effective measures related to nuclear arms reduction and disarmament," as opposed to say, a commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons within a certain time frame, as proposed by former Egyptian Ambassador to the U.S. Nabil Fahmy in a recent essay in the Huffington Post.).

There is far to go, but Obama's willingness to push the Pentagon in the right direction could be a sign of good things to come.

More could be said about how and why we need to get rid of these weapons of mass annihilation. But the point is that for the first time in decades the U.S. has a president who is committed to doing the right thing on the nuclear issue. He deserves our support, even if it takes more than a week to see real progress.

Why does Iran want a nuclear capability in the first place? If there is any rationale other than showing it can master the technology - a point of national pride for some Iranians - it is as a deterrent against possible attacks from the United States, or Israel, or even (albeit much less likely) a resurgent Iraq. A key to capping or eliminating the Iranian nuclear program will be finding ways to assure Tehran that if it foregoes the nuclear option, it will not be vulnerable to attack.

In short, the key to blunting Iran's nuclear program is to lessen the fears on both sides, not to rattle sabers while trusting in a technological fix that is untested and probably unworkable in any case. The Obama administration's alternaive approach - a willingness to at least talk to Iran about what it would take to curb its nuclear and missile programs -- is a crucial step in the right direction.

Finally, in a point that is largely ignored by the "sky is falling" crowd, it is not as if the Obama administration has abandoned plans for any missile defenses in Europe. It has merely shifted gears towards a plan that would focus on the shorter range missiles Iran has made progress on rather than the long-range ones that may or may not ever be built. Whether or not this new missile defense plan is the best option, it is important to note that the President's critics are so wedded to ideology - rather than evidence - that they are pretending that the president's new approach doesn't even exist.

As we have seen in the case of the non-existent "death panels" that have dogged administration efforts to secure health care reform, a lie, if repeated often enough, can hijack the debate over even the most serious matter. So, even though the Obama administration has the facts on its side, it will be incumbent upon its supporters to make that clear early and often, in language that reduces fear rather than stoking it.

It is Obama's determination to back up his rhetoric with concrete steps towards disarmament that is driving Feith and his not-so-merry band of colleagues crazy. Whatever rhetoric they may use to disguise it, the "neo-cons for the bomb" are addicted to these weapons of mass terror and can't imagine a world without them. It's up to us to prove them wrong,

Kaplan's bottom line is as follows: "Maybe it takes a Republican defense secretary to usher in a new era of defense politics. Are we in fact on the verge of such an era? There are many reasons to be skeptical (the annals of history among them), but what happened today might be a harbinger of something genuinely new."

Writing as part of a National Security experts roundtable on the web site of the National Journal, Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information is highly critical of many aspects of the Congressional approach to the military budget --and of what mainstream pundits like Loren Thompson make of the F-22 vote. But like Kaplan, he exhibits qualified optimism:

'As for real reform, the 58-40 vote in the Senate shows that with huge effort some progress can be made. Among the 58 who voted against more F-22s are some potential leaders in Congress against the bad ideas in the defense budget that make us weaker at increasing cost. Based on what I am hearing from some of them, there is a real chance we will see more such actions. The longest journey starts with the first step."

What very few analysts have mentioned is the important role played by arms control and good government NGOs in influencing the F-22 decision. A network of organizations did important work in educating swing Senators and getting out the anti-F-22 message in the print media and the blogosphere. Key players included Women's Action for New Directions, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, Peace Action, True Majority, the Project on Government Oversight, Taxpayers for Common Sense, VoteVets.org, progressivecongress.org, the Center for Defense Information, Common Cause, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for International Policy, the Center for Arms Control and Non-prolilferation, and others (disclosure: my project, the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, was also involved in this effort). Even with the President and the Secretary of Defense on the right side, it took what President Eisenhower described as "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" to put the anti-F-22 effort over the top. These groups -- hopefully joined by others -- will be key to building on the F-22 victory.

What do these numbers mean? First, if these numbers make it into a final agreement, both the United States and Russia will still maintain massive nuclear overkill. But if a formal agreement -- a treaty -- is concluded, it would be the first such accord to be reached since the admininstration of George Bush the elder in the early 1990s. That in itself would represent progress, especially since a treaty would maintain procedures that would allow each side to verify that the other was making promised reductions -- procedures that would be the cornerstone of any agreement seeking additional cuts.

I would have liked to see much deeper reductions -- to perhaps 500 to 1,000 warheads on each side, including those being held in "reserve" -- as a first step towards eliminating these devastating weapons altogether. No doubt the Obama administration's more limited approach has been tempered by concerns about what kind of treaty could make it through Congress with a two-thirds majority, which would mean bringing along at least a half dozen Republicans. But I would have liked to see that fight -- a popular president saying we don't need thousands of nuclear bombs any more versus a few members of the Senate arguing that we should maintain them at unconscionably high levels.

Supporters of disarmament have a two-fold task going forward: to back up the Obama administration against attacks from the right, which have already begun; and to make the case for further reductions, either now or in a second round of talks that should commence later in President Obama's first term.

As the latest incarnation of Mitt Romney - the fire breathing hawk - put the right-wing case on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, "It is very clear that the president's policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren't working."

An excellent post by Ali Frick that ran on Think Progress earlier this week quotes Iraq-war advocates Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney asserting that Obama's willingness to talk to Iran about curbing its nuclear program has helped legitimize Ahmadinejad's regime and emboldened the "thugs" in Tehran due to "our weakness." And Robert Kagan has put in his two cents worth in today's Washington Post in an article entitled "Obama, Siding With the Regime."

What would the neocons do differently? What should be done in the face of Ahmadinejad's repression, and how will it influence efforts to stop Tehran from seeking a nuclear weapon?

But, if Ahmadinejad prevails, it will be with reduced power. As Joe Cirincione has noted on the Huffington Post, "he will be greatly weakened, handcuffed in his ability to play the nuclear card as a nationalist rallying cry. Pressed at home, he will need to show some gains internationally; the nuclear issue must be compromised to realize those gains." In particular, the needed economic progress that either an Ahmadinejad or a Mousavi government will need to show will depend on an opening to the West, which means putting the nuclear program on the table.

In any case, no one is suggesting that negotiations on Iran's nuclear program go forward immediately. Obviously there will need to be a pause while the current political crisis plays itself out. But when the dust settles, negotiations will still be the most viable option for curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The neocon's alternatives - from economic strangulation to military intervention - make about as much sense as their brilliant plan of invading Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction that did not in fact exist.

Who keeps an eye on the hired guns? An agency known as the Armed Contractor Oversight Directorate (ACOD). In Afghanistan, its day-to-day operations are handled not by U.S. government personnel, but by a private contractor, the Aegis corporation of the UK. This means that initial rulings on things like "escalation of force" incidents (wounding or killing civilians, for example) are dealt with by an official of a private company.

Back on the reconstruction front, you'll be happy to know that KBR -- the former unit of Halliburton that was spun off a while back -- is still doing the bulk of reconstructioni work in Iraq despite the advent of a new contract that was supposed to split up the work among several companies. The Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests that at least $3 to $5 billion in U.S. tax dollars (not to mention billions more in Iraqi funds paid to U.S. companies) have been wasted in Iraq. One obvious reason has been lack of oversight. Of the 516 personnel that are supposed to monitor KBR's big contract, only 186 are in place -- just over one-third of the mandated total.

All right, so maybe these aren't the most scintillating statistics you've ever heard. But they do give some sense of why there is so much fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan (the other obvious one being that it's easier to steal during the "fog of war" than under normal civilian circumstances).

A last point that was underscored in the Wartime Contracting Commission report was the continuing militarization of U.S. foreign aid. The Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP) has now received nearly $5 billion since 2003, for local projects that can for the most part be undertaken with just the okay of the local military commander. While there is some argument that this allows for flexibility and the ability to show an immediate impact, it is also awfully fast and loose, and it takes a large portion of development assistance out of the hands of civilian agencies, where it rightly belongs. The militarization process is even expressed in the language of the CERP program. Its manual is entitled "Money as a Weapon System." And an officer who spoke to the contracting commission referred to CERP's road building efforts with the phrase "asphalt is ammunition."

This is just the commission's initial report -- a final report with detailed recommendations will come out next year.

First, in a self-published piece on "Obama's Unreal Nuclear Agenda," Frank Gaffney - the man who never met an arms control agreement he could support, including those signed by his former boss Ronald Reagan - cites one primary objection to Obama's pledge to pursue the elimination of nuclear weapons: that it's impossible to keep other countries from secretly developing their own nuclear bombs.

Gaffney's claim may sound vaguely plausible, but upon further scrutiny, his argument falls apart. Developing and fielding a nuclear weapon is a difficult thing to do. It involves major industrial and research capabilities that cannot be hidden indefinitely. And under a regime of rigorous inspections the prospects of hiding such a weapon are near zero. Assuming an U.S. adversary were somehow to get hold of one or two bombs, they would be suicidal to use them against the United States or its close allies. Perhaps most importantly, an arms control agreement like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would make it far less likely that any new nations could get nuclear weapons, while Gaffney's vision of a "treaty-free world" would make nuclear proliferation far more likely.

Second, in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled "The Arms Control Dinosaurs Are Back," Thiessen asserts that detailed arms control agreements are too cumbersome and too unreliable to meet U.S. security needs. Instead, he promotes voluntary reductions of the sort embarked upon by the Bush administration as part of the 2002 Moscow Treaty. Essentially what Thiessen seems to be saying is that he is against treaties, unless they are as loose and unenforceable as the three-page agreement Bush entered into with Vladimir Putin - a treaty with no verification procedures and no requirement to make nuclear reductions permanent. In fact, after 2012, the Bush-Putin accord lapses and Washingon and Moscow can do whatever they want to with their nuclear arsenals. By contrast, a follow- on to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty would lock in reductions through a strict verification regime. These permanent reductions would in turn be the best building blocks for further arrangements aimed at eliminating global nuclear arsenals.

In assuming that we can somehow live with a world filled with nuclear weapons without even attempting to do anything to get rid of them it is the neo-conservatives who are naïve. Their only apparent solution -- bombing or threatening to bomb countries that appear to be seeking nuclear weapons -- would make matters much worse, while killing tens or even hundreds of people in the process.

But before we give Lockheed Martin a medal for accepting the reality that Gates and the Air Force aren't likely to budge on this issue (and therefore will not help them lobby for a reprieve), it should be pointed out that the new Pentagon budget offers plenty of good news for them to counterbalance the F-22 cut, from accerated development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to more C-130 and C-5 transport planes, to an increase in funding for the "Littoral combat ship." A company that brings in $26 billion a year from the Pentagon has plenty of options.

As for the Lockheed Martin work force, many of them work at the same factories that will benefit frrom the F-35 and transport plane increases. So much for the company's fraudulent claim that "95,000 jobs" were on the line if the F-22 was canceled.

The larger question is why -- given the cuts announced by Gates -- the Obama Pentagon budget is still coming in at 2 to 3% more than the record post-World War levels reached during the last year of the Bush administration. The biggest reasons involve spending on people -- mililtary health care, pay raises for troops, and increasing the Army and Marines by tens of thousands of personnel. These are expensive propositions, but other than the troops increases -- which are only necessary if we intend to fight future Iraq-style wars -- its better to spend on miiltary pay and benefits than on weapons we don't need.

So where is our best hope for achieving actual reductions in military spending? We need to see real reductions in our $12 billion per month commitment in Iraq, or overall miitary spending (the regular Pentagon budget plus special allocations for Iraq and Afghanistan) will not come down in any meaningful way. So, while applauding the weapons cuts, we also need to revive the debate about getting out of Iraq sooner rather than later -- a topic that has been missing in action in the press as the economic mess and Afghanistan/Pakistan have grabbed the headlines.

So, Lockheed Martin and its partners in the project are essentially manipulating immediate economic fears to get money that won't make it's way into the economy until late 2011. Somehow the company's slick adds and letters to Congress fail to make that clear. Do the dozens of Senators and one hundred-plus House members who have signed onto "save the F-22" letters to President Obama know this? Do they care?

Second, in a world where the greatest threats to human life -- such as climate change, epidemics of disease, and entrenched poverty -- are not amenable to military solutions, it would make more sense to "re-balance" our security spending to move funding from the Pentagon towards programs aimed at dealing with these broader challenges. A report from a task force coordinated by Foreign Policy in Focus and the Center for Defense Information has suggested a detailed program along these lines that would shift over $60 billion in unneeded spending from the Pentagon budget to fund diplomacy, foreign assistance, alternative energy, public health, and programs to secure and eliminate loose nuclear weapons and bomb-making materials. Spending along these lines would do far more to protect us than spending on missile defense, nuclear weapons, or redundant combat aircraft.

Finally, it should be noted that military spending creates fewer jobs than virtually any other form of public investment, from weatherization of buildings, to building mass transit lines, to expanding education and health services.

So, to sum up, Pentagon spending should be limited to items that will actually defend us; and, if we are looking to create jobs, there are plenty of needed public projects that can do far more in that respect than throwing money at the military budget. Some of this may seem obvious to TPM Cafe readers, but we will need to disseminate these arguments early and often to deal with the conservative "echo chamber" on this issue.

This blatant exercise in pork barrel spending comes at a time when the NNSA has been pushing a "modernization" and upgrade of the nuclear weapons complex under the antiseptic phrase "Complex Transformation." The plan includes the construction of at least three new nuclear weapons factories, and could cost up to $200 billion over the next two decades. It is incumbent upon the Obama administration to put the brakes on this ill-conceived initiative and send the agency back to the drawing boards to come up with a plan to put the weapons complex on a low-level, standby status appropriate to a time of deep reductions -- or ideally, total elimination -- of nuclear weapons.

But first things first -- Senate Appropriations Committee's attempt to slip $7.8 billion to the nuclear weapons complex must be rejected. Then we need to get on with the job of reducing the size and scope of the complex to reflect the reality that nuclear weapons can and should be eliminated once and for all.