Iranian bluster is bad enough. When Tehran is able to put substance behind it, American interests will truly be in peril. The question for Obama and the Republicans seeking to replace him is whether the United States can bear an Iranian challenge which will grow exponentially once Iran goes nuclear.

In withdrawing all but a tiny few U.S. forces from Iraq and indicating that he is weighing an accelerated drawdown from Afghanistan, President Obama is reversing a generation’s course in American strategy and policy.

In one of his last acts as prime minister, Barham Salih symbolically launched the Aras Publishing House’s book fair in Erbil. The event featured important Kurdish classics, translations of Western works, as well as children’s books. Book fairs are important.

The rapid ticking of the Iran nuclear clock also marks an increasingly dark hour for the United States and its closest allies and partners, because it coincides with a third clock that Pollack did not imagine in 2004: the timetable of retreat set in motion by Barack Obama.

For almost a third of a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has confounded American presidents. It has taken hostages, conducted terrorism, undermined the Middle East peace process, and worked unrelentingly to become a nuclear power and develop missiles with global reach.

Absent outside intervention, Iran in 2025 will be an increasingly ideological and militaristic nuclear power, and it is foolhardy to assume that any nation can accommodate the extraordinarily dangerous Islamic Republic as it will be in 15 years.

Recent advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program show that events are moving extraordinarily swiftly, as Tehran nears the end of its decades-long quest to possess a lethal WMD capability.

Five years after the events of September 11, 2001, the United States must engage in the most important debate of our time that goes well beyond such awful possibilities as another set of 9/11-style airliner attacks. It rivals both Winston Churchill's argument in the 1930s about the nature of Hitler...