From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.
Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.
This buys time to do the right thing, but it isn't the same thing as stopping Iran's mullahs from their nuclear nightmare ambitions. "I once flamed a man for blogging about me funny" isn't quite the same as cowboying up.
But hey, at least on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.
UPDATE: Krauthammer on the thumb up/thumb down process of the related drone campaign revelations:
The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.
So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America’s having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.
The next thing you know, the New York Times will be explaining how President Obama asserted to his national security team that the best thing about ordering drone strikes is that he can crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentation of their women.
