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In one of the clearest statements of US intentions towards Iran, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, talked on a visit to Iraq in December about the inherent unpredictability of war. If they had learned anything from the past six years in Iraq, he said, it was that. Mr Gates said that military strikes would only delay Iran's nuclear programme by about "two or three years" and that significant additional sanctions were the best of a series of bad options. If Mr Gates' view still holds, yesterday's reports that the US administration was fast-forwarding deployment of anti-missile defences in at least four Arab countries, and placing ships off the Iranian coast, should be seen as a preparation not for war, but for more sanctions. Unfortunately, any US military buildup in the Persian Gulf...