Last year, in a widely debated article in the Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that based on conversations with roughly 40 current and past Israeli decision makers, as well as many American and Arab officials about a strike on Iran, “a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”

Marking today’s deadline, Salon’s Justin Elliott spoke with Goldberg about what he may have gotten wrong:

Reached by phone at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Goldberg told me that he believes the article captured the “high level of anxiety” about Iran he encountered during a month reporting in Israel last summer.

“We wrestled with how to frame it and decided to frame it in a way that would drive concentrated attention to what we thought was a serious and urgent problem,” he said. “I would point out that by saying there’s a greater than 50 percent chance, we were still suggesting there’s a 40-plus percent chance it wouldn’t happen.”

It’s true that the article was written with a number of significant caveats. But it clearly asserted an Israeli consensus about the nature of the Iranian threat and the likely Israeli response that, in light of subsequent comments from former Mossad chiefs Meir Dagan and Efraim Halevi, seems extremely questionable at best.

As to the impact made by the article, Elliott reports that Goldberg pointed to “communications between American officials and their Israeli counterparts that Goldberg said were prompted by his Atlantic story”:

[Goldberg] said that Obama officials reached out to the Israelis to reassure them that “we’ve got this” — but Goldberg added he’s not sure how much stock to put in those communications.

I’m not sure how much stock to put in those communications either. Or, more to the point, I’m not sure how much stock to put in Goldberg’s characterization of them. It’s been pretty widely reported (and, of course, strenuously ignored by Obama’s critics) that President Obama made deepening cooperation with Israel on the issue of Iran a key priority of his administration from the moment he took office. An Israeli official told me last summer (before Goldberg’s article ran) that the depth of U.S.-Israeli coordination on the Iranian nuclear program is “even better than under President Bush.” If Goldberg’s article “prompted” any communication from the Obama administration to the Israelis, it was probably something along the lines of: “Why are you trying to play us like this?”

Elliott also passes along this defensive email from Atlantic editor James Bennett:

“I’m proud of the story, and I think it holds up very well. We didn’t anticipate Stuxnet specifically, but we did emphasize that changing circumstances could affect the timeline we described in the piece. The story succeeded in provoking a tremendous amount of debate about one of the biggest foreign policy questions of our time, and nine months after we published it, it remains the definitive article on the complex strategic thinking here and abroad about Iran’s nuclear program.”

Yeah, who cares if they actually got the story right? The point is they sparked debate. And, of course, generated a lot of web hits and sold some magazines with a title screaming “ISRAEL IS GETTING READY TO BOMB IRAN.”

Last month marked the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Iraq since 2008. Fifteen American soldiers were reported killed there in June, 14 of them in hostile action.

But not only are American deaths in Iraq this month at a three-year high, the number of U.S. troops killed as a percentage of the total number of “boots on the ground” is higher this month than in June 2003 and nearly as high as in June 2004. For example, there are currently 46,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Fifteen deaths is 0.032 percent of the total. In June 2003, the U.S. had 147,400 “boots on the ground” and 36 Americans died in Iraq that month, or 0.024 percent of the total number of troops:

Some analysts have said that the primary reason attacks on U.S. troops have increased significantly in recent months is because top U.S. officials have been saying publicly that the U.S. military will stay past the Dec. 31, 2011 total withdrawal deadline. One former Iraqi U.N. diplomat said that “U.S. soldiers are likely being targeted more now because there is talk that Iraqi and American officials will try to keep additional troops” past 2011.

“That’s the primary driver,” said Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The Iranians and Sadrists are taking it very seriously.”

Former Bush administration political chief Karl Rove appeared on Fox News last night to discuss the announcement that the Obama administration welcomed “limited contacts” with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Rove told Fox viewers that the willingness to talk reflected President Obama’s desire to weaken America and help the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that renounced violence decades ago and formed a political party this spring:

ROVE:  We shouldn’t have been surprised in one sense because [Obama] made such a big deal about meeting with our enemies in the 2008 campaign. But you would have thought having been in office now for two-and-a-half years, he would have been sobered by events and made another decision. This is frankly inexplicable. Why does the administration go out of its way months before the fall elections to in essence give legitimacy and credibility to the Muslim brotherhood by announcing formal contacts? What is to be gained by doing that except to advance the Muslim brotherhood and make America look weak?

Watch the video:

But Obama isn’t the first U.S. president willing to talk to Islamist groups or even specifically the Muslim Brotherhood. Most notably, the George W. Bush administration — where Rove was a top adviser to the president — talked to Brotherhood politicians during the short-lived “Freedom Agenda.” In the New Republic this winter, reporter Eli Lake, detailing the history of U.S. engagement with Islamist groups, spoke with neoconservative ideologue and top Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams:

Some in the Bush administration agreed that the United States needed more contact with these groups. After the 2005 Egyptian elections, in which Brotherhood-affiliated candidates won 88 seats in the national assembly, the U.S. Embassy began to reach out to the new parliamentarians. “The Muslim Brotherhood was illegal in Egypt, but certain parliamentarians who were connected to the Muslim Brotherhood were, we felt, worth talking to,” says Elliott Abrams, who was a deputy national security adviser.

The Bush administration cut those ties only because now-deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak demanded that the U.S. stop speaking to opposition groups — marking the point at which Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” collapsed.

Nonetheless, one wonders if Rove’s statement about meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood means he thinks Bush and Abrams — and, by extension, himself — were also weakening America and helping the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yesterday at a forum hosted by the Institute for the Study of War on the future of Afghanistan, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) criticized the idea that there might be a negotiated settlement to the war. “Don’t hold your breath until that happens,” he said. Lieberman said that instead, the U.S. will “wear down” the enemy in Afghanistan and eventually it will become like Iraq, which Lieberman called a “success”:

LIEBERMAN: Iraq which we thought we had lost not so long ago, now looks like to me like a success. I’d say, I’d use the word victory because I’m, you know, I’m old fashioned. But victory there means that most of the Iraqis are living free self-sufficient lives. The economy is thriving. They have a cultural life, recreational life.

And they’re defending themselves. But as we see in the paper, extremists, Islamic extremists will continue to blow themselves and other people in Iraq up, and so the victory is not going to be as satisfying as it’s been in other conflicts we’ve been involved in but it is a victory over what could’ve been there and what could’ve been and was actually in Afghanistan not so long ago.

Watch it:

Aside from the fact that using the word “victory” or “winning” is something even Gen. David Petraeus is “loathed” to do when referring to Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s odd that Lieberman would say the U.S. has won, given the grim news that this month has marked the deadliest 30 days for U.S. troops there in three years.

And while the Iraqi economy is growing, that hasn’t translated to rising employment. The unemployment rate there is anywhere from 18-23 percent, with underemployment upwards of 43 percent. But if Iraqis aren’t worrying about jobs, they’re worrying about security too. The Iraqi government reported today that 271 Iraqis were killed this month in hostilities, the highest in months.

But to Lieberman, all this looks like “victory,” which is perhaps why he couched his terminology, saying, “The victory is not going to be as satisfying as it’s been in other conflicts.”