WASHINGTON: Iran's progress towards building a nuclear bomb was "startling" and "eye-opening", Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei has said.

So if the United States were to sequentially invade every nuclear power and force regime change, what would be the best order? Assuming we give ourselves a bye even though we're the only country ever to actually use such a weapon, who's most dangerous? The declared powers are the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, and India. Israel has 'em. North Korea probably has 'em. Iran and Iraq are both working on them, though Iraq apparently isn't very close at all. Do we do start with the geographically convenient Iran and Israel after we do Iraq, or should we go in reverse order of threat? How many people in the Pentagon do you think are currently working on this problem?

In the course of her research Priest learned two things—that the CinCs are figures of extraordinary power throughout the territory they command, far more influential than American ambassadors; and that "the mission" of the US military has expanded enormously in the last decade or two. "The US government had grown increasingly dependent on its military to carry out its foreign affairs."

[General Zinni] concluded that "he had become a modern-day proconsul, descendant of the warrior-statesmen who ruled the Roman Empire's outlying territory, bringing order and ideals from a legalistic Rome. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus—they would have understood. His compatriots, he knew, did not."

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Zinni was often restive with Washington's half-measures, but in every other way he got what he wanted. He traveled in his own plane with an entourage of thirty or more, and he ran his mini-empire from Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida, where he was aided by a staff of more than a thousand backed by a special CinC budget of more than $50 million a year. One impression emerges clearly from Priest's account of the instrument under Zinni's control: the military is the only generously funded institution in American public life.