You’ve got to admire the administration’s political savvy. They can take a silly story and use it to make world-historical arguments against their foes. They get the right foaming endlessly about the hypocrisy of this or that and harumphing about the unfair treatment one side gets in the media. The point is less winning or losing the silly debate (they’ll always get a win or a draw in the media), but to keep the story going for as long as possible. The distraction’s the thing!

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, there are only a few critical issues, like jobs, debt, and war and peace. Our recommendation to the politicians opposed to the administration is that they carry some bright and shiny Christmas ornament in their pocket and take it out whenever some sage in the media starts asking about the distracting non-issue of the day. Hold it up and turn it in the light in front of the camera. “Oh look, a bright, shiny thing. Sorry David, we’re not going to go there. We’re only discussing jobs, debt, national security, and how to fix the mess we’re in.” It can’t work worse than what they’re currently doing.

Spengler:

Evidence of the 2010 nuclear tests in North Korea was published Feb. 3 in Nature magazine, citing the work of the Swedish nuclear physicist Lars-Erik de Geer. The Swedish scientist analyzed data showing the presence of radioisotopes that betrayed a uranium bomb explosion. De Geer took the radioisotope data and compared them with the South Korean reports, as well as meteorological records. Nature reports, “After a year of work, he has concluded that North Korea carried out two small nuclear tests in April and May 2010 that caused explosions in the range of 50–200 tonnes of TNT equivalent. The types and ratios of isotopes detected, he says, suggest that North Korea was testing materials and techniques intended to boost the yield of its weapons.”

But why should North Korea keep the nuclear tests secret? asks Rühle. North Korea proudly advertised its previous nuclear tests. But the North Korean tests of 2006 and 2009 used bombs with a plutonium core. The 2010 tests, according to Lars-Erik de Geer’s calculation, employed enriched uranium. North Korea might have secretly enriched uranium on a sufficient scale to produce sufficient explosive material for two test bombs. But the more likely explanation is this, Rühle concludes:

“The second explanation would be that North Korea conducted a nuclear test for a foreign entity, in this case, an Iranian explosive. That would be a sensation, although not quite a surprise, to be sure. Intelligence services have observed a close degree of cooperation between North Korean and Iranian experts over a period of years for the preparation of a nuclear test, although the previous assumptions centered on the prospect of an underground nuclear test in Iranian territory.”

Five years ago Israel destroyed a secret nuclear facility in Syria that was staffed by North Koreans. It wouldn’t surprise us in the least if we eventually learn that Iran had been outsourcing parts of its clandestine nuclear weapons program to two of its allies.

…says a 5000 word article. Ok then, that settles that. We’ve heard from this author previously. No problem at all. (And a picture is still worth a thousand words.)

As we were just saying. HT: GP

The Hill:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…defended his comment that Iran is a “rational actor,” which has been criticized by Republicans. Dempsey said that he doesn’t mistake Iran’s rhetoric for a lack of reason, and said that even Iran’s actions that are unacceptable to the United States fit the country’s pattern over the past 30 years. “We can’t afford to underestimate our potential adversaries by writing them off as irrational,” Dempsey said.

Of course General Dempsey may not believe a word of what he’s saying, but what if he actually believed there was a near certainty that Iran would always act rationally. How dangerous would that be? (Of course, when you’re trying to hasten the return of the Mahdi, what’s rational to you means trouble to others.) HT: Spengler

NYT:

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies…the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb…

some intelligence officials and outside analysts believe there is another possible explanation for Iran’s enrichment activity, besides a headlong race to build a bomb as quickly as possible. They say that Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call “strategic ambiguity.” Rather than building a bomb now, Iran may want to increase its power by sowing doubt among other nations about its nuclear ambitions.

Which would you prefer, a bomb or “strategic ambiguity”? There’s a lot you can do with the former that you can’t do with the latter. What planet are these people from?

The US is cravenly apologizing to a country that it is fighting a war to assist. Ridiculous. Worse, the apology is because somebody burned a book in a country where fewer than 30% of the people can even read! As we said several years ago, we should get real or get out of this miserable backwater.

Regarding Afghanistan and the book burning, Andy McCarthy adds: “If you really want to promote freedom in Islamic countries, an immigration policy based on civil-rights reciprocity would be a lot more effective, and a lot less expensive, than dispatching tens of thousands of troops to build sharia ‘democracies.’ It would also protect Americans from people whose countries and cultures have not prepared them for the obligations of citizenship in a free society.” Indeed.

Here’s a chart from four years ago, a little before oil spiked to $147 a barrel. Now we see oil prices over $100 again, and the talk is the sky’s the limit. You might be surprised to know that a mere six months after its peak in the summer of 2008, oil prices had fallen to $38 a barrel, a 75% decline.

Here are videos featuring two members of the Council on Foreign Relations. One is in the military and one is a politician. It’s a decade after 9-11. We still haven’t gotten the buildings rebuilt, and the videos demonstrate the state of discourse in this country. We’re not in a good situation.

A senator questioned the Director of National Intelligence about Iran last week:

SEN. GRAHAM: Do you think they’re building these power plants for peaceful nuclear power generation purposes?

CLAPPER: That remains to be seen.

SEN. GRAHAM: You have doubt about the Iranians’ intention when it comes to making a nuclear weapon?

CLAPPER: Uh-h, I do.–

Not the first of the Clapper Capers, and not funny at all.

Reuters reports on some projected additional cuts in US war capabilities:

Obama — a proponent of eventually ridding the world of nuclear weapons — secured a landmark arms control treaty with Russia in 2010, agreeing to slash each country’s nuclear arsenals by a third from the previous ceiling of 2,200…details emerged about options under consideration that include an 80 percent reduction in the number of warheads…A U.S. official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, confirmed leaked details…These include cutting the total numbers of strategic, deployed nuclear weapons to around 1,000-1,100, 700-800 or 300-400.

Let’s see if we understand this. A budget cut is really a lowering of rate of increase in spending, or a “cut” in imaginary spending. On the other hand, a military cut is an actual decrease of up to 80% in warmaking capability, creating a rather leaky nuclear umbrella. Help!

Telegraph:

The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”. In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”…A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security…Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist –- we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”

For what it’s worth, nineteen audio cassettes of Abu Qatada’s sermons were found in the apartment of one Mohamed Atta some years back.

The US lost a security council vote on Syria. Russia has a Syrian naval base, among its many other ties to the Assad regime, so it was going to veto the measure all along. China opposed the resolution against Iran’s ally for reasons of its own. (China imports over half a million barrels of oil per day from Iran.) And the US response to all this was to complain about being held hostage. We fail to understand what purpose is served by the US losing a diplomatic battle so publicly and then whining about it. Please explain.

CNN reports on the Vetters getting on a train in Charlotte, NC:

they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…

The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.

To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…

Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…

A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense

Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!

Two English tourists flew to LAX. Daily Mail:

Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America’…Despite telling officials the term ‘destroy’ was British slang for ‘party’, they were held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes’ and had their passports confiscated…

Leigh was also quizzed about another tweet which quoted hit US comedy Family Guy which read: ’3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up! Federal agents even searched his suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming Emily was planning to act as Leigh’s ‘look out’ while he raided Marilyn’s tomb.

Bar manager Leigh, from Coventry, and Emily, 24, from Birmingham, were then quizzed for five hours at LAX before they were handcuffed and put into a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight. They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells…’They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. ‘I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.

Leigh’s charge sheet, alongside a police mug shot and finger print, added: ‘He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.’

We think twitter is an invitation to get caught up in unpleasant things, but this is ridiculous. It would appear that it’s not just the TSA that has lost all sense of proportion and common sense. (Oh, and by the way, it’s impossible to dig up Marilyn Monroe, since she’s not underground.)

A modest lede from CBS: “A military judge has recommended no time in confinement for a Marine sergeant.” The underlying story can’t have been such a big deal, but then why then did it take seven years to adjudicate? (Bruce Kesler has been covering this story since it began so long ago in 2005. It looked pretty fishy to us too, way back when.) Again, why such a long time to get to a conclusion? Among other things, a US congressman went on the record in November 2005: “they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” And the clock began to tick.

The deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post:

the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas….Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.

Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.

Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.

Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.

This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes…

In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.

The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.

The Post offers no explanation for the litany of failures it cites. Remarkable enough that a Democrat wrote the piece. We’ll leave it to VDH to provide a rationale: “American foreign policy is now becoming an extension not of classically liberal values, but of progressive suspicions of constitutional government, capitalism, and the historical role of the United States in particular and the West in general. The bowing to foreign potentates, the sad historical fabrications in the Cairo speech, the self-serving nonsense that arose in the first Al-Arabiya interview, and the so-called ‘apology tour’ were simply superficial manifestations of a deeper ambiguity about America.” He’s being charitable.

Not Tom Friedman:

it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting…as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Egypt is a country with no democratic tradition, over 40% illiteracy and grinding poverty. Terrible unemployment and underemployment. And a 65% vote in favor of more of the same. So who is closer to understanding Egypt, the Tom above or the NYT’s Tom?

Tom Friedman in the NYT:

the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.

Flashback: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

VDH discusses the military budget:

The drawdown is not occurring in a vacuum, but is the bookend of a loud new ‘reset’ / ‘lead from behind’ strategy that deprecates traditional allies like Britain and Israel while failing miserably in outreach to supposedly new neutrals like Syria and Iran — all in a landscape of bowing, apologizing, and Cairo speechifying. All of these developments serve as force multipliers to the military retrenchment and confirm the impression of our enemies that the world is now entirely negotiable in a way not true four years ago.

The unspoken irony is that the military and our anti-terrorism protocols served Obama well when he arrived: he found a quiet Iraq with almost no monthly American casualties, a decimated al Qaeda (largely destroyed in Iraq), anti-terrorism measures that had foiled over 30 plots against the mainland (and were all demagogued by candidate Obama before President Obama embraced them), major powers like China, Russia, and Iran wary of pressing the U.S., allies like Japan, Taiwan, Germany, and South Korea secure under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and the most seasoned and experienced U.S. military in generations…

The new $500 billion cuts must be considered against the nearly $5 trillion Obama has borrowed since assuming office, in addition to what he will borrow this next year. A defense budget that was tolerable prior to 2008 becomes apparently unsustainable with expenditures for Obamacare, vast new green projects like Solyndra, expansions in food stamps and unemployment insurance, and vast increases in the size of the non-military federal government. At least with the military our money earns safety and deterrence

The college professor continues his work. It’s as though the country elected not Jimmy Carter, but George McGovern. In any event the choice couldn’t be clearer this year. An America that might choose a McGovern administration is both unfathomable to us and, sadly, possible.