From the Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2012 (emphasis added):

“The Obama administration in 2009 signed a nuclear-cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates that bound the Arab country not to enrich uranium domestically or reprocess spent plutonium fuel, the two technologies that can be used to produce atomic weapons.

Yonhap News Agency/European Pressphoto AgencyWorkers in Ulsan, South Korea, applaud the installation of the South Korean-built reactor core in July 2010.

President Barack Obama cited the U.A.E. agreement as the “gold standard” for future nuclear-cooperation pacts. Washington has used the deal to press Iran over its nuclear program, arguing that Tehran should follow the Emirates and rely on the international market for nuclear fuel.

U.S. officials involved in the policy review said the Obama administration concluded that most countries wouldn’t be willing to follow the U.A.E. model, and that insisting on it would hurt American interests.

They said Washington risked losing business for American companies seeking to build nuclear reactors overseas, and could greatly diminish its ability to influence the nonproliferation policies of developing countries.

I know why many countries in addition to the US don’t want Iran to get the bomb and see it as a threat to their security.  What I don’t know is how all these pronouncements about how it cannot be allowed to get the bomb have any meaning.

Absent going to war with it, a security-threatening step not taken when India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and, much earlier, the Soviet Union, got the bomb and in part because all the named countries and the US have it, the argument for why Iran should not get it is far from obvious.

Iran, for better or worse, is the place where conclusions about what will adequately defend it from aggression or prepare it for pre-emptive war is to be made.  It may want it for the latter purpose: to wage aggressive war against its perceived enemies but it is far from clear to me why it shouldn’t prepare for its plans, aggressive or defensive, as it chooses, if the other nuclear powers have done so.

What possible activity, especially long-term activity, short of war (which, although the US seems at times to forget its own experience, is a “long-term activity, extending beyond the engagement of troops), can stop Iran?  Agreements, inspections, and embargoes may delay the process or make it necessary for Iran to be more covert about how it secures atomic weapons but all are delaying tactics.

It looks to me like Iran will have nuclear weapons no matter what the rest of us want.  I suspect that even after “regime change” any new regime would feel obliged to continue the process of securing them, just to show it was independent and not subject to Israel and the West.

Don’t hesitate to explain where you think I misunderstand this issue.

Reblogged from One Blue Stocking:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously for a drug suspect who had an electronic tracking device attached to his car by police, who did not first get an extended warrant. The Justices said secretly placing the device and monitoring his movements for weeks constituted a government “search,” and the man’s constitutional rights were violated. Related articles SCOTUS: “Ministerial Exception” Allows Religious Organizations to Discriminate Law enforcement officials can now secretly install GPS tracking on …

Every now and then they really come through for individual rights…

The term “American Exceptionalism” has taken a real beating in our political discourse in recent years, primarily being used by the right as a club to beat the left for believing we should work with other countries and not seek international situations in which to involve ourselves militarily if we can solve the problems with other countries through diplomacy.

The idea of American exceptionalism has a real history.  It is well to know it and to know when it is being perverted or turned to partisan use.

Michael Lind writes a fine post in Salon on Christopher Hitchens, the roles ascribed to him in the US and the UK, and draws out some fine distinctions between public intellectuals, the attributes of scholarship and what much of our journalism and much of the blogosphere have come to think they represent.

At this time in the world, serious scholarship meeting high standards in its research and the logic of its conclusions is vital.

We also face the task of getting that serious work into the hands of decision makers who are willing to be moved by it.  To some extent the blogosphere seems to have been more successful getting it its work into the hands of those who will listen and follow than in doing the preliminary work to ensure the quality of what it puts forth.

While the legal case determines that capture would be impossible or at least highly impractical and the story emphasizes that this was a one-time, one person opinion, who can doubt the appeal of the rationale for killing people determined to be “bad guys” by a president and his key advisers?

Consider:

The Patriot Act and subsequent legislation when being considered by Congress included a multitude of ways in which established legal principles protecting individuals’ rights were diminished or eliminated.  These diminished protections required the police and intelligence agencies to meet high standards for carrying out their activities against you.  The 9/11 attack and the justifiable public fear and outrage provided enough public support to assure the Patriot Act’s prompt passage without serious review and discussion.  The police and agencies took advantage of that environment to seek and obtain lower standards in areas that made adherence to the standards highly inconvenient for them.  At the time, no one knew if any of them were of any importance in the ill-defined conflict that had begun on 9/11, but they were of general “convenience” to police and the agencies.

Thus far, there has been no public appetite to look carefully at the implications of these laws and more that are proposed.  Civil libertarians are a group at the margin of legal debate currently (although there do seem to be a few more voices of concern lately).

Drone and missile technology advances apace with precision increasing dramatically from what it was early in the Afghanistan War.  How precise it can be is, I’m almost certain, both classified and increasing rapidly.

One might easily enough make the case that the risks to the SEALS associated with killing Bin Laden were justified by his prominence in the events of 9/11 and the same case for his successor who was then his deputy, if or when that happens, as necessary for the public to satisfy its retributive passion as well as be satisfied that he is not out there somewhere planning another big attack on us.

What becomes more difficult as time passes and the identity of significant terrorist leaders is less well-known generally is the risk of American lives to capture and/or kill them if capture is impossible at the point of engagement.

If a drone can simply remove completely the risk of American (and allied) casualties and the leaders are many, distributed, and having information to yield about their small group only, well, send the drone to kill them.

At this point killing them becomes purely convenient and unrelated to capture.  And, if they are Americans, the justification for killing them remains in the hands of the executive and secret from the public.

We have seen the new “convenience” powers of the government divorced from exclusively “terrorist” suspicions and made available for more general criminal use against Americans domestically without suspicion.

Who can imagine that, with a few tweaks here and there, the “one-time-only” opinion can permit killing of people domestically, for no better reason than capturing risks police casualties?  Police casualties are risks and police operations are often “inconvenient.”

I think it can be “tweaked” and, unless Americans show greater concern about these issues, if not sooner, then later, it will be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/secret-us-memo-made-legal-case-to-kill-a-citizen.html?_r=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes&pagewanted=all

Reblogged from JONATHAN TURLEY:

Thad Holmes and Clem Parnell are Alabama conservation enforcement officers . . . and part-time human ballistic burial experts. Holmes and Parnell have founded Holy Smoke, LLC, a company that loads the ashes of your fried or loved one in shotgun shells, and rifle and pistol cartridges to be used in one last hunting trip or just target practice. For a small sum, it is resurrection and reload . . . …

I don’t ordinarily reblog but this deserves attention and is too good to pass up!

With few exceptions, the financial regulators already in place when the financial system exhibited symptoms of weakness, failed either to read the signs or to respond to them before it was too late.

Dodd-Frank can stay wholly in place to nearly no constructive effect if the regulations implementing its provisions are not reasonably well-enforced.  Not every regulation must be enforced to its extreme and not all can be enforced given the volume of issues but a diligent regulatory authority committed to avoiding any future problems of the kind we’ve had will be essential to keep Dodd-Frank from being dead whatever its official status.

For the record, this does not mean that people from the financial industry and economists should be excluded as biased, they are essential.  Without them our regulators are amateurs likely to have only a superficial grasp of the consequences of their decisions – and they too suffer from biases as we all do.  Understanding the present and near past as well as anticipating the near and long term future are difficult in the extreme and will still include mistakes.  We need our best efforts to do them.

“It’s also important to keep in mind that the president—and politicians generally—have limited control over economic growth. Though Obama and other contenders tout job numbers or GDP growth during their time in office, ultimately those indicators reflect more about the normal ups and downs of the business cycle than any one politician’s economic prowess.”

I’ve been waiting for some media source to say something like this for years.  It is one of the most understandable of things that the public, politicians (at least those of the party out of office) and presidents seem determined to deny.

The president doesn’t have enough influence over the economy to make it obey his will.  All the forces of the government, including the Federal Reserve cannot make it do what they might want it to do (even if there were agreement among all parties to the conversation about what is desirable).

Whether we like it or not, we live in an international economy which is “free market,” because all the other players, whatever their internal economic systems, are free to respond in what they see as their own best interests, to whatever we do.

Politicians would have you think otherwise; when there is good economic news the party in power is quick to take credit for it; when there is bad news, the opposition party is quick to point it out.  There is not enough truth in most of these assertions to take them very seriously but many among us do.

This kind of talk deserves not just a grain of salt but with a block of salt, no matter which side is talking.

http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/our-guide-to-the-best-coverage-on-president-obama-and-the-economy

http://jonathanturley.org/2011/09/06/nuremburg-revisited-and-revised-the-legitimation-of-torture-in-the-united-states/

I had never heard of this man but this quotation nails it for our present time, reminds us that this is not the first time this has happened and raises the suspicion in me that it may always be true.

Bio information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Arany