In a lengthy profile of him in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication, boasts of his success at manipulating credulous journalists on the alleged virtues of the Iran deal. In doing so, he admits that—as Michael Doran has argued in these pages—the “narrative” he constructed about the origins of the deal, and the rationale behind it, was fundamentally disingenuous. John Podhoretz writes:

On Thursday, there was a fire—apparently caused by an explosion—at the uranium-enrichment facility in the Iranian city of Natanz. The incident followed closely on the heels of an explosion at the Parchin military facility, also connected to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, and another at a building in Tehran that left nineteen dead. While Israel has not commented on any of these incidents, there are reports that it was behind at least one. A few weeks earlier, Tehran set off an exchange of cyberattacks between the two countries. Yoav Limor analyzes the situation: