A new report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) — an organization dedicated to carrying out non-partisan investigations for Congress — laid out considerations that could affect an Israeli decision to attack Iran’s nuclear program, and the potential issues that the U.S. might have to deal with in the wake of such an event.

The CRS report’s (PDF) summary states:

By all accounts, such an attack could have considerable regional and global security, political, and economic repercussions, not least for the United States, Israel, and their bilateral relationship. It is unclear what the ultimate effect of a strike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime — though U.S. intelligence has not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon. The Obama administration vows to keep “all options on the table” to deal with the possibility, but the efficacy and consequences of a strike raise serious questions, leading the U.S. to pursue, for the meantime, a pressure track aimed at a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis.

An Israeli decision to carry out air strikes could hinge on the potential it sees for inflicting long-term damage on Iran’s nuclear program. One aspect of that potential — and one that gives rise to uncertainty — rests on Iran’s ability to reconstitute aspects of its program. Iran, over the years, dispersed it’s program into different locations, some shrouded in mystery.

The report honed in on Iran’s ability to preserve nuclear knowledge and the capability to rebuild its program through its opaque “workshops” for building centrifuges. Bloomberg News noted, “The possibility of dispersed facilities complicates any assessment of a potential raid’s success.” The CRS report went on to cite a former U.S. official with direct knowledge on the issue stating:

Iran’s centrifuge production is widely distributed and that the number of workshops has probably multiplied ‘many times’ since 2005 because of an increase in Iranian contractors and subcontractors working on the program.

Iran withdrew from the rigorous inspection standards of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s Additional Protocols in 2006. While the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintains access to Iranian enrichment sites, activities related to the construction of those centrifuges — before they get moved into enrichment sites — remain largely in the dark since 2006.

CRS estimated that Iran could largely rebuild its centrifuge construction “workshops” within six months of an attack. The Arms Control Association’s Peter Crail told Bloomberg news that a military strike would likely cause Iran to kick out IAEA inspectors, allowing the Islamic Republic to construct an entirely new enrichment facility dedicated to weapons-grade uranium away from international eyes. Crail told Bloomberg:

At some point they are going to reconstitute the program. It’s really just a question of can they do it within a year or two or is it going to take them a little bit longer.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said in February that he fully supports the Pentagon’s new budget, which incorporates $487 billion in cuts over 10 years, saying it will “maintain our military’s decisive edge and help sustain America’s global leadership.” Dempsey also said the corresponding strategy has “real buy-in” among top U.S. military leaders.

Despite the military’s support for President Obama’s DOD budget, the House GOP decided in its budget released last week to roll back those cuts, claiming the current levels are not sufficient to protect America’s national security.

Today at a “policy summit” hosted by the National Journal, managing editor Kristin Roberts asked the GOP’s budget guy Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) why the Republicans went “against the advice of the generals.” Ryan’s response? They were lying:

ROBERTS: Why did the committee choose to go against the advice of the generals?

RYAN: We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice. We don’t think the generals believe that their budget is really the right budget. I believe that the president’s budget by virtue of the fact that when he released his budget number of about $500 billion, the number was announced at the same time they announced the beginning of their strategy review of the Pentagon’s budget. So what we get from the Pentagon is more of a budget driven strategy, not a strategy driven budget.

“You don’t believe the generals?” Roberts later wondered, asking Ryan to explain. However, the House Budget Committee chairman dodged, throwing out general baseless platitudes like Obama’s military budget “hollows out defense.” Watch the clip:

In addition to increasing military spending, the GOP’s budget will also cut foreign affairs spending. In response, more than 70 retired military officers wrote to Congress arguing that it should not implement those cuts. It’s likely then that Ryan thinks they’re lying too.

GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney said this week that President Obama’s comment to Russian president Dimitry Medvedev that he would be more “flexible” on issues such as missile defense until after the election was “a cave to Russia.” Romney went on to attack the President’s plan in 2009 to scrap and replace President Bush’s European missile defense program. “The decision to withdrawal our missile defense sites from Poland put us in greater jeopardy in my view,” he said.

Except that’s not what happened. There weren’t any missile defense sites in Poland at that time. “The proposed interceptors for Poland have not even been built, much less tested. The Obama administration is killing an idea, not a program, and replacing it with a more technologically-promising system,” said chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Lt. Gen. Robert Gard back in 2009.

And the Wall Street Journal reports today that European and NATO officials aren’t too concerned with Obama’s comments to Medvedev:

But broadly, officials and diplomats from across the region said they were inclined to take Mr. Obama’s remarks at face value. The U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have pledged to cooperate with Russia on the system, which is initially aimed at defending against missiles from Iran.

Diplomats haven’t expected advances on those talks in a U.S. election year.

Stefan Niesiolowski, a Polish lawmaker and chairman of the defense committee in the lower house of Parliament, blew off the hysteria over Obama’s remarks. “This is not surprising or new, and there’s no outrage in Poland,” he said, adding, “There’s no military threat, and we haven’t had a situation as secure as this in 300 years. The level of U.S. military engagement in Poland therefore isn’t of top importance.”

As for Romney’s attacks on Obama’s missile defense posture, experts hailed Obama’s shift from the Bush plan. “The decision to revamp the missile defense plan in Europe is based on technological reality rather than rigid ideology,” said John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “The Obama administration’s proposal is a better choice for U.S. and European security.”

Even the Polish foreign minister said at the time of the announcement: “When President Obama announced the new configuration of the system, we did say that we liked the new configuration better, but I think you didn’t believe us.”

And as then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, Obama’s missile defense plan has “unanimous support” of the U.S. military’s senior leadership.

So what does Obama mean when he says he will be more “flexible”? The Journal reported that Ian Kearns, chief executive of the London-based European Leadership Network, “said allies could agree to provide more transparency about the system and address Russian worries that when the system ramps up at the end of this decade, it could be big enough to blunt Moscow’s nuclear deterrent.”

The long Washington Post profile this weekend of a top Central Intelligence Agency official contained a remarkable number of details about the man that heads the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center — remarkable because the man remained shrouded in mystery, referenced only by the first name of his cover identity, “Roger.” Roger chain smokes, swears, worked in Africa, was “pudgy” in his youth, and — oh, yeah — he’s Muslim.

This last fact was too much for one of America’s foremost Islamophobes to bear: to an Islamophobe, Islamic extremist terrorism is inseparable from Islam at large, so how could a Muslim head up a counter-terrorism operation? Leave aside that Roger presides over a CIA unit that he expanded from three unmanned drone aircraft to an entire fleet firing missiles that have crippled militant networks — including Al Qaeda — in Pakistan.

Leave aside that Roger presides over a CIA unit that he brought from having three unmanned drone aircraft to a fleet of them that fire myriad missiles which crippled militant networks — including Al Qaeda — in Pakistan. Never mind that retired Gen. David Petraeus, who now heads up the CIA, said of Roger: “No officer in the agency has been more relentless, focused, or committed to the fight against al-Qaeda than has the chief of the Counterterrorism Center.”

None of that was enough to convince Robert Spencer, a long-time ally of anti-Muslim mainstay Pamela Geller, that “Roger” just might be a Manchurian candidate foisted upon the CIA by Muslim extremists looking to destroy America:

[I]f Islamic supremacists wanted to subvert the U.S. defense against jihad terror, they couldn’t do it more easily than by turning someone in a position like Roger’s. The worst part of this story is that no one is even examining that as a possibility.

Maybe the Post’s Greg Miller simply realized that a guy who blows up the actual dangerous “Islamic supremacists” on a regular basis would make an unlikely candidate to be a plant within the system. Perhaps that’s because, under Roger’s watch, “core al Qaida’s ability to perform a variety of functions — including preserving leadership and conducting external operations — has weakened significantly,” according to Capitol Hill testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

But Spencer knows all that. He even says so:

The Washington Post, of course, follows the mainstream media line that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists, and so takes for granted that “Roger” has no loyalty issues, and proffers the drone campaign and the killing of bin Laden as proof.

Why still the questions, then? Because, Spencer says, “It is impossible to tell from this how serious he is about Islam.” The obvious implication in Spencer’s thinking is that “serious(ness)” about one’s faith — when that faith is Islam — means disloyalty to the U.S. Spencer should consider that the “mainstream media” might be right about this one.