Three of CISAC's undergraduate honors students are among Stanford's handful of winners of prestigious scholarships for 2005-2006. Senior Sheena Chestnut and 2002 graduate Tarun Chhabra, both Phi Beta Kappa members, are among five Stanford students selected for 2005 Marshall Scholarships. Alex Greninger, a 2003 graduate of CISAC's honors program, is one of two Stanford graduates named as George J. Mitchell Scholars.

Marshall Scholarships go to about 40 scholars each year, in recognition of academic excellence, leadership, and commitment to public service. The awards cover all costs for students to attend the British university of their choice for two to three years.

A total of 12 Mitchell Scholars selected nationwide will receive tuition, housing, and a stipend to pursue post-graduate studies at universities in Ireland or Northern Ireland.

Chhabra served in 2003-2004 on the research staff for the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, a group convened by the U.N. secretary-general to study global threats and recommend collective security measures, including potential changes to the U.N. A double-major in Slavic languages and literatures and international relations, Chhabra wrote his honors thesis at CISAC on "The Generals' Intervention: U.S. Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia, 1992-1993." He plans to study international relations at Oxford University next year.

Greninger graduated Stanford in 2004 with co-terminal bachelor's and master's degrees in biological sciences and a bachelor's degree in international relations. His CISAC honors thesis, "Beyond the Last Move--Developing Biodefenses against Engineered Anthrax and Smallpox," for which he won the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, is one of three honors theses he wrote at Stanford. His undergraduate research served as the basis for "Biotechnology and Bioterrorism: An Unprecedented World," which he co-wrote with CISAC Co-Director Christopher Chyba and published in Survival. Greninger is now at Cambridge University on a Churchill Scholarship.

Chestnut, a political science major and creative writing minor, is researching nuclear smuggling in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) for her honors thesis. After studying at Oxford during her junior year and interning at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, she is interested in using her Marshall scholarship to study international relations at Oxford.

Earlier this month, the so-called EU Three--Britain, France and Germany-- achieved an important victory for global security, convincing Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing activities pending further negotiation on its nuclear question. Though Iran claims that it does not desire a nuclear bomb, the West has long been skeptical of the oil-rich state's contention that it seeks a nuclear fuel cycle for energy purposes alone. Europe and the United States (and of course Israel) will sleep better knowing that Tehran is not pursuing enrichment activities, whatever their alleged purpose.

But the EU3 agreement, which fails to discuss consequences for Iran if it breaks the deal, is vulnerable to being undermined not only by Iran but also by the United States; both have already raised eyebrows in the wake of the accord. Iran raced to produce uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be enriched into bomb fuel, before it began to observe the temporary suspension on Monday. And both President George W. Bush and outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell have publicly aired their suspicions that Iran will continue its drive for nuclear weapons under cover of the deal.

At the moment, administration hawks are pressing to confront the mullahs at the United Nations Security Council, where economic sanctions could be considered; calls for using force and for regime change are likely to follow.

Military action is inadvisable at this point, because of a dearth of solid intelligence and the secretive, geographically diffuse nature of Iran's nuclear sites. If the issue reaches the Security Council with the United States and Europe continuing along divergent paths, the inevitable deadlock will deal a severe and lasting blow to international security. Therefore, the agreement must be fortified to keep the Iranians honest, the Europeans effectively engaged and the U.S. hawks bridled.

This can be achieved through a U.S.-European accord laying out trigger mechanisms for specified consequences if Iran violates certain benchmarks. For example, if Iran fails to allow inspectors the access accorded by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's additional protocol--which Iran is provisionally observing pending ratification--or resumes enrichment and centrifuge-building activities, it could face severe economic sanctions, censure by the Security Council (necessitating cooperation from Russia and China), or in the event of hostility, a forceful response.

We don't know yet whether Tehran will play by the rules. The regime has mastered the art of behaving badly and then seeking rewards for getting back into line. To date, the Europeans have played into its hands, offering carrots for compliance without wielding sticks to punish violations.

Therefore, the Bush administration's apparent comfort with a military option can serve as an important deterrent against Iranian cheating, arming the EU3 agreement with teeth that it would not otherwise have. Iran desires economic incentives but does not yet desperately need them; without a credible threat of U.S.-backed sanctions imposed by the international community, the mullahs can simply decide one day that the restrictions have ceased to be worth their while, and break any deal as though it were merely a business contract.

For the United States, accepting the EU3's carrot-based approach (provided the benchmarks are added) will show the world that it still supports negotiated diplomacy and multilateralism, even in cases where military threats loom. Participating in this framework will also send a message to Iran that the United States is not ruling out renewed relations. This would resonate with the largely pro-American Iranian populace, who despise their regime and are seeking inroads to break free of it.

But if the United States instead presents itself as a unilateralist maverick, it will hinder its own interests; the only thing Iranians disdain more than the mullahs is outside meddling with their deeply nationalistic desire for self-determination. The more overtly hostile the United States acts toward Iran, the more the mullahs are able to spin America's posture to alienate Iranians against the "Great Satan."

The way to keep the Iranian regime in check while speeding its demise is to insure the nuclear agreement through benchmarks and triggers, and then give the mullahs exactly what they ask for in terms of increased access to international institutions like the World Trade Organization.

Such carrots can also be Trojan Horses, allowing the forces of democratic reform within Iran to blossom by enabling pro-democracy elements to make global connections. The U.S. and Europe should saddle up those horses together.

We've been down this road before: A crisis threatens global security, and the international community is not coming together to deal with it. Hawks in the U.S. administration see the Europeans as too timid to use force and reliant on diplomacy to a fault, while many Europeans see the United States as trigger-happy and too impatient with negotiated settlements. This lack of cohesion damaged the legitimacy of the American-led war in Iraq and left U.S.-European relations in tatters. A similar disunity jeopardizes current attempts to manage Iran's nuclear aspirations, even though both sides agree that the threat posed by a nuclear Iran is grave and real.

Departing Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage positively spun the divergent U.S. and European approaches to Iran: "The [diplomatic] incentives of the Europeans," he said, "only work against the backdrop of the United States being strong and firm on this issue. In the vernacular, it's kind of a good cop/bad cop arrangement. If it works, we'll all have been successful." The problem with Armitage's hopeful outlook is that the good cop/bad cop strategy works only if pursued consciously and in coordination, and the U.S. and European approaches do not reflect that yet. In fact, they seem headed in opposite directions.

The good cops--Britain, France and Germany--recently persuaded Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment-related activities until they reach a final accord. If the mullahs cooperate, they will receive numerous economic carrots, including possible membership in the World Trade Organization (the U.S. would have to agree) and improved trade relations.

In October 2003, when the International Atomic Energy Agency was prepared to take its negative report on Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council, the mullahs cut a similar deal with the Europeans, promising to suspend all enrichment-related activities. But Iran soon grew impatient with the agreement and resumed efforts to produce the gas that feeds uranium enrichment. It similarly rushed to make as much of that gas as possible before the latest accord's deadline, undercutting confidence in the deal on both sides of the Atlantic. In another bad-faith move, Iran announced last week that it wanted to keep operating uranium-enrichment equipment for research purposes, backing off its pledge to freeze all such activities.

Enter the bad cop--the United States. It has pushed to refer the question of Iran's nuclear aspirations to the Security Council. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell steps down, the hawkish voices in his department will probably intensify and gain influence, especially if the mullahs break the newest deal.

Armitage might be right that the discordant U.S.-European approaches will push the mullahs to hold to the deal. But the U.S. will be uncomfortable with an agreement that does not insist on any means of enforcement or verification, as is the case with the latest accord.

Iran knows that the war in Iraq colors U.S. conduct toward it. The worse Iraq gets, the less Iran worries--and the mullahs don't seem too worried at the moment. But if they break the accord with the Europeans and the Europeans respond timidly and U.S. resources are freed up as a result of an improving situation in Iraq, the U.S. could take on Iran alone--to everyone's detriment. To avoid this risk, the U.S. and Europe need to harmonize their approaches and develop a coordinated strategy for Iran. The best way to accomplish this is to agree in advance on the consequences Iran will face if it violates its commitments. For example, if the mullahs renege on the latest deal, frustrate the monitoring and verification efforts of IAEA inspectors or fail to ratify an addition to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that allows for more invasive inspections, the U.S. and Europe should go to the Security Council, impose economic sanctions or, in the worst case, take military action.

Fortunately, diplomatic disunity over Iran does not run as deep as it did over Iraq, where even the nature of the threat was a bone of contention. Both the U.S. and Europe are worried about a nuclear Iran, and they feel strongly about enforcing the rules of nonproliferation. In June 2003, European foreign ministers required only 45 minutes to approve a document that endorsed U.N.-sanctioned use of force as a last resort against proliferators, as well as "political and diplomatic preventative measures."

If the Europeans agree to leave all responses on the table and to act decisively at the first sign of Iranian mischief, the United States would be foolish not to form a partnership with them. (It's also important that the U.S. set a better example as a member of the nonproliferation community by abandoning plans to build new mini-nuclear weapons and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.)

The role the U.S. forges for itself in dealing with Iran will have significance beyond reinvesting in international order or responding to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions. Iran's despotic regime will collapse some day, and there will be a "morning after" similar to that in Iraq, where reconstruction efforts have floundered because U.S. planners underestimated the challenge of nation-building and the need for international support to make it work. When Iran makes its move toward a better government, the U.S. should be in a position to lead a coherent, collective international effort to help it get off the ground.

Yet since the severing of U.S.-Iranian ties in 1980, the U.S. has been slack in developing a viable Iran policy. Iran's nuclear ambition should be motive enough to reverse this inattention. U.S. policy toward Iran must cease to be reactive, as it is now.

In addition to working with the Europeans to curb the mullahs' nuclear efforts, the U.S. should begin crafting a strategy to work toward--and then with--a democratic Iran. Supporting a government that complies with its international obligations is certainly preferable to containing one that thwarts them. By getting involved now, the U.S. can do much to show Iranians that it will be a friend to a free Iran. A democratic Iran may still want a nuclear bomb as a matter of national pride. But a less threatening, pro-diplomacy U.S. would be in a stronger position to argue the benefits of membership in the nonproliferation community rather than life as a rogue power.

Participating in a multilateral approach to Iran's nuclear program is a great place to start. In doing so, the U.S. will signal to Iranians that its aggressive position does not reflect a desire to remake Iran in its own image but rather a desire to achieve, alongside Europe, a substantial victory for nonproliferation and international security.

A graduation ceremony held at CISAC on June 11 recognized the 10 undergraduate students who this year have completed the center's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, and the ceremony honored four of the students with awards for excellence on their honors theses.

The award-winners are as follows:

*John Cieslewicz, a computer science major, received a William J. Perry Award for his thesis on "Attacks and Accidents: Policy to Protect the Power Grid's Critical Computing and Communication Needs."

*Elizabeth Eraker, a history major, received the John and Marjorie Hines Prize in American History for her thesis on "Cities as Critical Nodes: The Influence of Air Force Doctrine in the Targeting of the Atomic Bomb."

*Daniel Kliman, a political science major, also received a William J. Perry Award for his thesis on "Japan's Defense Policy in the Post-9/11 World: Toward a 'Normal' Nation."

*Anya Vodopyanov, who is studying history and political science, received a Firestone Award for her thesis on "A Watchful Eye Behind the Iron Curtain: The U.S. Military Liaison Mission in East Germany, 1953-61."

At a CISAC Directors' Seminar on June 9, Cieslewicz, Kliman and Vodopyanov presented their award-winning theses to fellow students, faculty members and others in the CISAC community.

The other six students who completed the CISAC Honors Program are the following:

Anne-Marie Corley, Slavic languages and literatures

Dana Craig, political science

Andrea Everett, political science

Tarek Ghani, symbolic systems

Lengsfelder, Savannah, international relations

Vaynman, Jane, international relations

Begun in 2000 to help develop the next generation of security specialists, the CISAC Honors Program accepts 12 Stanford undergraduate students each year, from all disciplines throughout the university. Those selected for the program attend the CISAC honors college in Washington, D.C., complete an internship with a security-related organization, attend a year-long core seminar on international security research, and produce an honors thesis with policy implications for international security. After fulfilling their individual department course requirements and completing the Honors Program, the participating students graduate in their major with an honors certificate in international security studies.

Although keeping score is difficult, the State Department's annual report on international terrorism, released last month, provides the best government data to answer this question. The short answer is "No," but that's not the spin the administration is putting on it.

"You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. As evidence, the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report says that worldwide terrorism dropped by 45 percent between 2001 and 2003. The report even boasts that the number of terrorist acts committed last year "represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969."

Yet, a careful review of the report and underlying data supports the opposite conclusion: The number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003 -- 36 percent -- even using the State Department's official standards. The data that the report highlights are ill-defined and subject to manipulation -- and give disproportionate weight to the least important terrorist acts. The only verifiable information in the annual reports indicates that the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years.

To be sure, counting terrorist acts is not as straightforward as counting the number of SARS victims. Specialists have not agreed to any test that would unambiguously qualify an act as one of international terrorism. But in the words of the Congressional Research Service, the State Department's annual report is "the most authoritative unclassified U.S. government document that assesses terrorist attacks."

So how did the report conclude that international terrorism is declining?

It accomplishes this sleight of hand by combining significant and nonsignificant acts of terrorism. Significant acts are clearly defined and each event is listed in an appendix, so readers can verify the data. By contrast, no explanation is given for how nonsignificant acts are identified or whether a consistent process is used over time -- and no list is provided describing each event. The data cannot be verified.

International terrorism is defined in the report as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets" involving citizens or property from multiple countries, "usually intended to influence an audience." An event "is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons" or "major property damage."

A panel determines whether an event meets this definition, but the State Department refused to tell us the members of the panel or the practices used to count nonsignificant terrorist acts.

We do know that the definition leaves much room for discretion. Because "significant events" include such things as destroying an ATM in Greece or throwing a molotov cocktail at a McDonald's in Norway without causing much damage, it is easy to imagine that nonsignificant events are counted with a squishy definition that can be manipulated to alter the trend.

The alleged decline in terrorism in 2003 was entirely a result of a decline in nonsignificant events.

Another curious feature of the latest report is that its catalogue of events does not list a single significant terrorist act occurring after Nov. 11, 2003, despite averaging 16 such acts a month in the rest of the year.

The representation that no terrorist events occurred after Nov. 11 is patently false. The bombings of the HSBC Bank, British Consulate, and Beth Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues in Istanbul by individuals associated with al Qaeda occurred on Nov. 20 and Nov. 15, respectively. Additionally, the report mentions the bombing of the Catholic Relief Services in Nasiriyah, Iraq, on Nov. 12 but somehow omits it from the official list of significant events.

So the record number of 169 significant international terrorist events for 2003 is undoubtedly an understatement. It is impossible to know if these and other terrorist events were left out of the State Department's total of events.

Despite the lack of transparency and the rose-colored graphs, the department's data reveal that administration policies in the past year have not turned the terrorist tide. Of course, it is impossible to know how many terrorist acts would have occurred absent the war on terrorism, but it is unambiguous that the number of significant international terrorist acts is on the rise.

The fact that the number of nonsignificant terrorist acts has headed down -- even if true -- is, well, nonsignificant. What matters for security is the number of significant acts. It is regrettable that one casualty in the war against terrorism has been the accurate reporting of statistics. This seems to be another fight we are losing.

After all the fashionable sneering at the United Nations for its lack of effectiveness in our new, dangerous world, what former U.S. chief weapons inspector David Kay's testimony to Congress makes crystal clear is that the U.N. system did work. It worked precisely where the need is greatest today, in finding out weapons of mass destruction and preventing their use. And it worked just as the derided French, despised Germans and chided Russians said it did -- effectively, without the loss of more than 500 Americans and thousands of others, and at a small fraction of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq operation so far.

Kay said that the combination of inspectors on the ground and intelligence assets overhead could not be beat for first detecting and then verifying -- and, if necessary, destroying -- nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It's just what the U.N.-U.S. combination was providing when the Bush administration decided to disregard all intelligence to that point, which had shown no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and follow its prejudices to war. Saddam, in fact, had nothing, and the U.N. inspectors, assisted by intelligence assets, were on the way to prove it. Kay noted that Iraq was in disarray, with Saddam's key lieutenants disregarding his increasingly fanciful orders. Couldn't or didn't U.S. and British intelligence know that? Disarray at the top is manifested in a thousand ways, both to the educated observer and to the person in the street. Iraq before the war was not a closed country. Not only were hundreds of U.N. inspectors there, but also thousands of people from all walks of life and many Western countries were also in Iraq. Learning that the government was in disarray was not like penetrating the KGB.

Kay was polite in his testimony and pointed only to an intelligence failure. It clearly was a lot more. Both in the United States and Britain, analysts who knew there was no evidence of any weapons capability could not get their message past the lowest levels of the intelligence bureaucracy. The administration, or the dominant players in it, were determined to let no alternative story surface, except the one that would justify war. Under those circumstances, the truth, which is generally a messy thing that doesn't fit well into any story, had no chance of getting a hearing.

The "intelligence failure'' cost the lives and health of thousands of men and women, and left families in America and around the world grieving -- all for nothing. It has cost the American people $200 billion and counting. Saddam is gone, perhaps a few months ahead of when he would have been gone anyway, but the United States is saddled with an Iraq that will take a long time to find its way, assuming the United States does not desert it again. Heads should roll, but not just at the top of the intelligence community. Heads should roll also among those who would not hear the truth; who would not investigate the truth while they could; who preferred, and still prefer, to bad-mouth the U.N., the French, the Germans and many others who had continued to put their faith in the institutions the United States built to maintain world peace and who, sad to say, were entirely right.

Faced with the deadly menace posed by transnational terror organizations, the nations of the world must redouble their cooperative efforts. The tasks ahead -- to disrupt terror groups and preempt their attacks -- require intense coordination among a multitude of national intelligence, national law enforcement, and military organizations. Unprecedented cooperation among all of the nuclear powers is needed to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terror groups.

Yet, paradoxically, the two nations that have suffered the worst terror attacks -- the United States and Russia -- are regressing more and more to national strategies. They have been unwilling to make the extra effort to reap the benefits of real international cooperation.

I believe that the United States' strategic vision of the war on terrorism is flawed. I fear it is following the isolationist path of the United States after World War I rather than pursuing the broad international programs it successfully undertook to protect its security interests after World War II.

The terrorists posing the greatest threat to the United States and to Russia are transnational, with cells in many different countries. To support their training and operations, they raise funds in many countries and maintain these in international bank accounts. They use satellite-based television as their principal means of propaganda, the World Wide Web as their principal means of communication and international airlines as their principal means of transportation. Their efforts to get weapons of mass destruction are based on penetrating the weakest security links among the nations possessing these weapons, and their successful guerrilla operations depend on their ability to get support from sympathizers among the more than 1 billion Islamic people around the world.

An international operation is clearly needed to successfully deal with this threat. But the United States is not making full use of other nations and international institutions to dry up the terrorists' funds in international bank accounts, to gain intelligence on their planning for future attacks, to penetrate their cells so that it has a chance of preempting these attacks, to organize all nuclear powers with effective security of their nuclear weapons and fissile material, and to conduct counterinsurgency operations wherever they are needed. Dealing effectively with transnational terror groups that operate with impunity across borders requires an international operation with the full cooperation of allies and partners in Europe and Asia.

This is not "mission impossible." In 1993, the United States was able to get all of the former members of the Warsaw Pact to join up with NATO in forming the Partnership for Peace to cooperate in peacekeeping operations. In 1994, the United States with the full cooperation of Russia was able to negotiate an agreement by which all nuclear weapons were removed from Uzbekistan, Belarus and Kazakhstan and by which substantial improvements were made in the security of nuclear weapons in Russia. In 1995, the United States was able to get an agreement under which NATO took responsibility for the peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, an operation that was believed at the time to be as dangerous and filled with religious and sectarian strife as Iraq today, and it was able to get dozens of non-NATO nations -- notably including Russia -- to join it in that operation.

Securing Russian cooperation required listening to Russian views and making accommodations wherever possible. As U.S. defense secretary, I had to meet with my Russian counterpart four different times before I came to understand how to structure the command in Bosnia in a way acceptable to both Russians and NATO. The general lesson from this example, which is still applicable today, was best expressed by Winston Churchill, who observed during World War II, "The problem with allies is they sometimes have ideas of their own." But in reflecting on that problem, he also said, "The only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is trying to fight a war without allies."

What lessons can we learn from Churchill today? Had the Bush administration understood better the dangers of the post-conflict phase, surely it would have worked harder to get the support of those countries before invading Iraq. In any event, after the war it would have reached out to them and tried to achieve an accommodation that would have allowed their support during the reconstruction phase.

Instead, the administration took the position that any nation that was not with the United States during the war would not have a role in the reconstruction. To compound the problem, the United States did not seek meaningful assistance from the United Nations. Today, in the light of the difficulties experienced in restoring security in Iraq, the administration is reaching out to the United Nations and requesting that it play a major role in the political reconstitution of Iraq, but it is still not working effectively with the governments of France, Germany and Russia.

Just as the United States erred in believing that it did not need more international support in Iraq, so did the Russian government err in believing that it did not need more international support as it reconstituted its government after the Soviet era. The Putin administration believed -- correctly -- that it could turn around the Russian economy without significant assistance from other countries, and it believed that it could deal most effectively with its terrorist threat without interference from other countries. It also apparently believed that moving toward a level of democracy conflicted with the controls necessary for economic recovery and for fighting its terror war. So today we see a Russia that has enjoyed a healthy 7 percent growth rate each of these past five years, but has stopped -- indeed reversed -- its move towards becoming a liberal democracy. This reversal over the long term will have profoundly negative consequences for the Russian economy and for the Russian people, and unquestionably it is setting Russia on a course that will alienate it both from the United States and the European Union.

Both the Bush administration and the Putin administration have apparently made the decision that they can achieve their goals without broad international support. Both governments have erred in that judgment. But it is not too late to correct the judgment, and I fervently hope that both of governments will do so. The most important step in that process is reviving cooperation between the United States and Russia.