David Shorr at thebulletin reviews Trita Parsi's 'A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran'. The book is welcome in drawing attention to the myriad actors involved in pulling Obama in different directions and proving central to his consideration in dealing with Iran.
Meanwhile, Joseph Wouk runs a Debka story that is interesting in an of itself. The content is absolutely unverified but does state that after the RQ170 crashed in Iran, Obama has cancelled all drone flights over the country, relying solely on satellite relays. That led the israelis to try and fit a drone with the necessary imaging but the drone crashed and the Israelis haven't proceeded, with the accompanying loss of data being received on sensitive installations.
Yahoo! runs the story that the Israelis and US agree that Iran does not currently have a bomb, but that's good news for the Israelis, who can hence argue that they can go in without a nuclear reprisal.
Without continuous drone footage of the installations, there's going to be much less of a granular understanding of the sites, couple with the loss of the RQ170 there are going to be so many unknowns involved in a strike, which might also play into the hands of the republican nominee (israelis running wild on Obama's watch). So Obama will press stridently for diplomacy.
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