The Hoosier Gadfly

The latest on Sarah Palin is that she may have considered censoring books at the town library when she became mayor of Wasilla, Alaska back in 1996. At present, to quote the Boston Herald), “[t]he stories are all suggestive, but facts are hard to come by.”

Did Palin actually ban books at the Wasilla Public Library? No one has adduced any evidence that she did. The Boston Herald notes that when questioned at the time by the town newspaper, Palin said her “inquiries” were rhetorical. The only reason this story has any legs is that the librarian was one of several people Palin asked to resign because they had been past supporters of her opponent in the mayoral election. This gives the appearance that Palin was punishing the librarian for being unwilling to comply with possible censorship demands. Let me reiterate that no one is claiming Palin actually called for the censorship of any book – she merely asked if the librarian would do so upon request.

If this story that Palin was trying to intimidate the librarian into censoring books is true, I would find it troubling but hardly a deal breaker. I don’t put it in the same category as Hillary Clinton in 2005, stating ex officio as the junior Senator from New York, that Congress should regulate videogames and other interactive media (see New junk science from the APA). There was absolutely no ambiguity about Hillary’s position, which directly violates the U.S. Constitution.

The fact that Palin denied back in 1996, when the issue arose, that she had any intent to censor books suggests that, even if she did, she rethought it and decided not to act. Unless this is part of a larger pattern of Clinton-style abuse of power, I’m inclined to do no more than flag it and move on.

Since my last posting, the oil bubble has indeed burst as predicted, falling nearly 1/3 from the high point. Even though this has dropped gasoline prices below $4/bbl, the public continues to favor domestic drilling.

Meanwhile, in the Presidential contest, Barack Obama picked Senator Joe Biden and McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as their respective running mates. Both picks surprised me.

It’s hard to imagine a worse pick than Biden, a pompous blowhard and non-stop gaff machine. If Obama wasn’t going to pick Hillary – a mistake in my view – then he should have picked a respected, center-left DLC type like Evan Bayh. I believe that Obama chose Biden because he wanted someone who wouldn’t upstage him and who was also from the left wing of the party.

McCain’s choice of Palin surprised me only because I didn’t even think she was on his list. I became interested in Palin a few months ago. After watching videos of a 2006 Gubernatorial debate and later interviews on news shows in which she talked about energy policy, drilling in ANWR, and suing the EPA for putting the Polar Bear on the endangered list, I decided she should be on the ticket. That McCain chose Palin indicates that developing domestic energy resources is going to be one of his key issues – she has made herself an expert in oil and natural gas. I remain convinced that this is a winning issue for the GOP.

Last night, Palin gave her acceptance speech as the GOP Vice Presidential nominee. There has been all sorts of comment on Palin’s performance throughout the blogosphere – I’ll not add to it here except to say that it was generally well received. My wife and I watched the speech on C-SPAN and we digitally recorded it at the same time in the event that there was some sort of familial interruption. In the course of the speech, there were a number of shots of Palin from behind the podium, looking out over the crowd. From some of these behind-the-back shots, it was possible to see the teleprompter. I noted early on that what was on the teleprompter tracked what she was saying. Subsequently, there were several more shots in which the teleprompter was visible and nothing appeared amiss, though I can’t aver that I was paying it close attention after the first time I saw it working.

Today, a report circulated that Palin (and previous speaker Rudy Giuliani) had problems with the teleprompter such that scroll control was lost and it ran ahead of her place in the speech, making it unusable to her. This story was carried by major media including CNN, FOX, and the Wall Street Journal. Supposedly, an early ad lib (she said the difference between a “hockey mom” and a pit bull was lipstick) was associated with this failure. Since I’m very good at picking out obscure details in movies and videos and I hadn’t seen a failure, I wondered if this story was true. The only way to know for certain was to view the recording and see it showed the teleprompter had failed.

I’ve now run through the entire DVR of Palin’s speech and I can state that there is no evidence of an early failure or a failure half the way through that forced her to spend the rest of the time relying on her memory and her notes. Following is my “log” of the recording:

10:29 EDT – speech starts. I used the clock that was on the upper right of the C-SPAN image rather than the DVR time to track things so times are only to the nearest minute. Still, this should be close enough for someone else to verify my findings.

10:41 EDT – 12 minutes into speech – first shot of teleprompter, image was indistinct.

10:42 EDT – 13 minutes into speech – teleprompter visible and working.

10:47 EDT – 18 minutes into speech – teleprompter working.

10:50 EDT – 21 minutes into speech – teleprompter working.

10:54 EDT – 25 minutes into speech – teleprompter working

11:00 EDT – 31 minutes into speech – first shot I couldn’t see the teleprompter clearly. However, a few seconds later there was another shot and this time the teleprompter was visible and working.

11:08 EDT – Speech ends.

Every time that the teleprompter was visible it was working, by which I mean that the words on the teleprompter matched what Palin was saying. The teleprompter didn’t fail halfway through and then become unusable for the remainder of the speech. It is certainly possible that it may have gotten ahead or fallen behind on a few occasions but it was clearly functional shortly thereafter.

At a minimum, the claim that Palin had to do the last half of the speech without the teleprompter is busted. Considering that the video provides a sort of random sample of the teleprompter working throughout the speech, I’d say it is reasonable to question the weaker form of the claim that the teleprompter was failing intermittently though that claim may be true.

As I write this, the nominees presumptive of their respective parties are Barack Obama and John McCain. Although I fully expect the oil bubble to burst at some point in the not too distant future, with gasoline topping $4 a gallon, McCain and the Republicans have found a very strong issue in calling for the expansion of domestic oil exploration and easing restrictions on new refinery construction. What makes this issue so strong is that two-thirds of the public believe that offshore oil exploration should resume and, further, that it would reduce gasoline prices. Moreover, for over thirty years the Democratic Party has ”been in thrall to the eco-fascists” and has resolutely opposed expanding every conventional domestic energy source in favor of expensive and utterly impractical “alternatives”. Far from being the party of the working man, the Democratic Party is the party of the snail darter, the spotted owl, and the polar bear.

The Democrats have been thrown on the defensive and, unable to change their radical environmental, anti-technology ideology, have been forced to rely on bumper sticker rhetoric: “You can’t drill your way out of scarcity”. Worse, for them, some of their confreres are beginning to say what they really think: U.S. Representatives Maxine Waters of California and Maurice Hinchey of New York have called for nationalizing the oil industry or parts thereof. With Obama being the most left-wing member of the Senate, suspected by many of being a closet Marxist, this offers the GOP the perfect opportunity for a viral video and/or a commercial calling attention to the stark difference between the two parties. Here is what I envision:

FADE IN: A red flag with hammer and sickle is waving. An a cappella male chorus sings “The Internationale” in Russian (I like the first a cappella version here). First, a picture of Karl Marx appears. This fades and is replaced with a clip of Lenin speaking. There follows a clip of Stalin reviewing a May Day Parade, Krushchev banging his shoe at the U.N., Fidel Castro haranguing a crowd, Leonid Brezhnev reviewing yet another May Day Parade, then, abruptly the music stops in mid-phrase and there stands Ronald Reagan delivering the lines, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Cut to a scene of cheering crowds tearing down the Berlin wall. FADE OUT
FADE IN: A clip of Maxine Waters threatening to [sic] “socialize” the oil companies. As she speaks, the camera should begin to pull back and it becomes apparent that the image is on a TV. This is replaced by Maurice Hinchey talking about nationalizing the oil refineries. Pulling back farther, the camera reveals a couple of guys (they should be identifiable as “Reagan Democrats” – t-shirts and/or baseball caps with union slogans) watching the TV. One turns to the other and says, “Gee, I thought we won the Cold War.”
FADE OUT: The words, “VOTE REPUBLICAN” appear.

I think this could easily be a 60 second commercial though it would work as a 2 minute viral video as well.

If anyone in the RNC reads this, I give you full rights to put it together. If anyone else wants to make it, contact me first.

Although it has been an interesting political season, even the prospect of an Obama-Hillary / Hillary-Obama shotgun wedding officiated by Howard Dean has been insufficient to motivate me to blog. However, a couple of recent events merit some commentary.

The first was from early last month when Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, admitted that the release of the Key Judgments summary of the NIE to the public created the false impression that Iran was no longer developing nuclear weapons. During the questioning by Senator Evan Bayh (D – Indiana), the following exchange occurred:

MR. MCCONNELL: I think I would change the way that we describe nuclear program; I mean, put it up front, a little diagram, what are the component parts so that the reader could quickly grasp that a portion of it, I would argue, maybe even at least significant portion, was halted and there are other parts that continue.

SEN. BAYH: Well, just to clarify the record, and I’m referring only to the public NIE. And I’ve read it. My synopsis of it — and I’d be interested if any of you would disagree with this — was that they had an active — all three components: fissile material creation, weaponization, delivery systems. All those were going forward. They decided a few years ago to suspend one component; as you characterize it, the least consequential of the three — at least temporarily they decided to suspend it. They could recommence that at any point in time.

MR. MCCONNELL: They could.

SEN. BAYH: It would be very difficult for us, as I think you pointed out, to know when they have recommenced that, and ultimately, given their industrial and technological capabilities, they are likely to be successful. We don’t know exactly when, but ultimately they’re likely to be successful.

MR. MCCONNELL: Yes, sir.

SEN. BAYH: Is that a fair synopsis?

MR. MCCONNELL: That’s exactly right. And that’s what the unclassified — if you read them all the way through, that’s unclassified key judgment — make that point, and then there’s the full body of the 140 pages also, and (they did make that ?) point.

SEN. BAYH: Well, so my question to you is, you know, it’s difficult when we just, you know, have one footnote that kinds of clarifies, as I say — how can you and your people go about presenting this in a way that is more likely to have a balanced presentation of your beliefs, to avoid the kind of problem we’ve now got ourselves in going forward? And how can you think through the consequences of the report? Because it’s had unintended consequences that in my own view are damaging to the national security interests of our country.

MR. MCCONNELL: Sir, it’s a challenge. We tried, in the time we had left, to do just what you said. I thought at the moment, at that point in time, we had gotten good balance. In retrospect, I — as I mentioned, I would do some things differently.

[Emphasis added, otherwise unedited]

We need not concern ourselves with the remainder of the exchange, where McConnell offers the absurd and self-serving argument that the release of the Key Judgments summary didn’t damage U.S. national security by making it more difficult to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

The establishment media gave McConnel’s admissions about the NIE scant coverage – obviously it was too embarrassing for journalists to acknowledge both their excessive credulity and ignorance about such an important topic. Besides, given the political bias of the media, the fact that so many prominent Democrats – in particular, Democratic Presidential candidates – relied on the flawed NIE to attack the Bush Doctrine undermines their claims of foreign policy expertise. It is only acceptable for the establishment media to question Bush’s expertise.

The second development is that there is good reason to question the NIE’s assertion that weaponization, in the form of warhead development, was halted by Iran in 2003. Recall that back in December, I stated my view that warhead development had not ceased at all. Now, a 13 March 2008 article in Jane’s International Defense Review (paid subscription required) titled “Evidence emerges of Iran’s continued nuclear weapons research” vindicates my assertion. Jane’s claims to have seen evidence of long term weapons development from “a source connected to a Western intelligence service” and that said evidence was “verified by a number of reliable independent sources in Vienna.” This evidence relates to developments in the implosion technology necessary for a plutonium device and essential in reducing the amount of fissile material needed for a uranium device. According to Jane’s, Iran has made “great strides” in this critical technology. Further, this weaponization program has been ongoing, which flatly contradicts the NIE “judgment” that Iran suspended that part of nuclear program back in 2003. Q.E.D.

The article goes on to discuss the organization of the weapons program (known as AMAD - full Farsi name: Sazemaneh Tarhe Amade Vije - Organisation for Planning and Special Supplies, OPSS) as well as specifics about the technologies under development. Aside from implosion technology, AMAD, is also developing a “payload with a diameter of 60 cm” with an eye toward fitting this inside the conical warhead of the Shahab-3”. Jane’s notes that this is a departure from the “tri-conic” or baby bottle warhead variants observed 3 years ago in a military parade which were thought to be a nuclear warhead design.

About the only positive thing that can be said about the state of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is that its schedule has been “moving to the right” and is progressing slower than might be expected. This is no argument in favor of complacency. Iran is obviously very close to having fully weaponized nuclear – I maintain thermonuclear – devices. If Bush doesn’t take action, it will probably be too late for the next President to do anything except develop policies for how to deal with a nuclear Iran.

I hadn’t planned to comment on the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate – others with much better credentials than I have done so (notably John Bolton in the Washington Post). However, none of them offered the best refutation, although Henry Kissinger in a 13 December editorial came close. Kissinger pointed out that the “Key Judgments” part of the NIE that was released to the public had its most widely quoted statement footnoted with information that it was the construction of warheads that Iran had halted. This, said Kissinger, is only one aspect of a nuclear weapons program and “not even the most significant one.”

The Key Judgments is only a few pages, most of which is explanatory material for a few conclusory statements. The only one that matters is “A”, which begins:

A. We judge with high confidence that in the fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program;…

This phrase is footnoted:

For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.

So, what does “design and weaponization” mean? Kissinger is correct that this relates to having a nuclear device that can be deployed in the field and used as a weapon. For example, the first true thermonuke (that is, hydrogen bomb) was a huge construction of piping and cryotanks that used liquid hydrogen. This U.S. built device could never be used a weapon. When the Soviets detonated their first thermonuke it was a lithium deuteride “dry bomb” dropped from a bomber. Thus, although the U.S. detonated the first thermonuke, the Soviets were first to weaponize.

Kissinger and the other critics have said Statement A greatly overstates the case. I believe the better argument is that the qualifying footnote’s assertion concerning design and weaponization is wrong. This can be shown by reference to open, unclassified sources.

In September of this year, the Iranians held a military parade at which a supposedly new missile called the Ghadr was put on display. Jane’s (paid subscription only) had an article about this “new” missile, which analysts said was actually a modified version of the Shahab-3 missile first seen in 2004. Here are some details from a December 2004 article in Jane’s Defense Weekly:

The missile has a modified nose section allowing it to hold a larger warhead and thus provide additional room for a nuclear device. Israeli officials have said the larger nose section is capable of separation and visually appears similar to that used on the Russian SS-9 intercontinental ballistic missile. “It is not a copy of a known missile but the new Shahab has a major-league design. It’s clear that it is the work of seasoned missile engineers, probably Russian, rather than an experimental beginners ” version, added Rubin.

Such extra room is vital as Iranian nuclear engineers would face major technical challenges in making the country’s first nuclear weapon light enough and small enough to fit on its existing missiles, particularly without benefit of having conducted full-scale nuclear weapons tests. The weapon is believed by US officials to be an indigenous design although knowledge gained from blueprints of a working, but too large nuclear weapon, provided by the Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan would be helpful to the effort. If true, the efforts would signify that IRAN is further advanced in its nuclear weapons programme than previously known.

According to the 2004 article, the program to develop the improved Shahab delivery system was called Ghadr-101. It is significant that the missile on display in 2007 is called the Ghadr. It suggests that what was seen in 2004 was a prototype and the 2007 version is the production model. Ironically, the missile in the parade had written on it, “Israel must be eliminated.”

Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve written about Iranian missile development. I’ve also said that the Iranians would almost certainly deploy 1 megaton thermonukes at the start – all it takes is 7 to obliterate Israel. Missile and warhead technology is probably the most difficult technology to master. The evidence is overwhelming that the Iranians have accomplished this. The biggest technological hurdle in building a uranium-based, first generation thermonuke is amassing enough highly enriched uranium. The Iranians have enrichment technology in hand – even the writers of the NIE acknowledge that Iran already has enough centrifuges to construct a U-235 weapon by 2009. This, too, is an overestimate - assuming that Iran installs no more centrifuges the date would be late 2008 – as I’ve shown in several previous blog entries, assuming only standard centrifuges, 3,000 will produce around 30 kg of highly enriched uranium (advanced centrifuges might produce close to twice this amount). Right now, the Iranians probably have a number of warheads waiting only for uranium, polonium-210, and tritium to turn them into weapons.

If the missile that will carry the thermonuke has been in a military parade open to the foreign press, why doesn’t the Intel bureaucracy know about it? John Bolton suggests that the writers of the NIE had a political motive. Possibly. However, I attribute it to the fact that bureaucracies are amplifiers of stupidity.

From their inception, the CIA and its siblings in civilian intelligence have demonstrated a remarkable inability to gather accurate information about our adversaries. The Soviets detonated their first A-bomb years ahead of the estimate provided by the Intel bureaucrats. The Intel bureaucrats were surprised again when the Soviets air dropped their first thermonuke – it was a double surprise because the Soviet thermonuke was fully weaponized, which briefly put the Soviets technically ahead of the U.S. Of course, most people know about the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs fiasco and there’s even a movie satirizing declassified information about the CIA’s laughable attempts to kill Castro. Most recently we have the missing stockpiles of WMD’s in Iraq. These are just a few examples off the top of my head – to properly catalogue the instances of CIA/Intel ineptitude over the past 60 years would require multiple volumes. Some historian really should undertake the task.

The evidence in the public domain that Iran is very close to having thermonukes and a way to put them on target is overwhelming. The fact that the Israeli government, which has access to classified information, has taken the unprecedented step of trying to convince the American government to repudiate the NIE’s conclusion should be considered dispositive.

At this critical time, the NIE has apparently so cowed George W. Bush that he has abandoned the Bush doctrine. We are now living in the worst of all possible worlds. The U.S. will not denuclearize Iran and, by sitting athwart the best attack routes, makes it nearly impossible for Israel to take action. If there is a nuke war in the Mid-East, what will be the consequence for the Intel agencies? The answer is: nothing. Actually, failure usually brings more funding – “if only we’d had more money we could have done a better job.” The stupidity of bureaucracies – especially government ones – is essentially limitless except for one area: self-preservation.

I’m back after a rather long hiatus. I spent the summer on involuntary vacation: I was laid off from my job at Crane. During my layoff I didn’t feel much like writing, though I did step up my exercise regimen and lost some weight. After I got a new position at Crane in September, I remained unmotivated. Yesterday, I came across an article in Jane’s – subscription through Crane – dealing with a subject I’ve previously discussed at length on this blog: whether or not Israel is capable of successfully launching a denuclearization attack on Iran. Quoting Jane’s: “While Israel’s rhetoric on this possibility is vigorous, the feasibility of such an operation is extremely low.”

Following are the main points in the Jane’s analysis:

• Natanz is roughly 1550 km from the nearest Israeli base.
• The 25 F-15I aircraft have an operational range of around 2000 km without drop tanks.
• The 102 F16I aircraft delivered and on order have a comparable range when fitted with conformal fuel tanks.
• The IAF has only 4 KC-707 and 3 KC-130 tankers available, which limits the ability of Israeli jets to loiter over the target(s).
• All routes to the target lead to countries not likely to allow over flights. Most probable would be along Iraqi-Saudi border, which increases the range by around 300 kilometers.
• For the above and other reasons, any attack is likely a “one-off” single wave of strike aircraft.
• Iranian air defense capability is limited but would still create operational challenges given the limited size of the Israeli strike and possible diversion of strike aircraft to defense.
• Somewhere from 50 to 100 penetrators could be put on target at Natanz, lack of intel about the buried facility may limit the damage.
• Since the Israeli strike would fly through airspace controlled and/or monitored by the U.S., Israeli-U.S. collusion would be assumed, generating all manner of adverse political “blowback”.

There is really nothing in the Jane’s analysis that I haven’t already discussed before. I am rather more sanguine about the direct route attack on Natanz (and Arak, which Jane’s didn’t mention) being successful than is Jane’s. Otherwise, I generally concur with the analysis, with a few minor quibbles. I’ll accept Jane’s tanker number. However, one possibility I’ve considered but not heretofore written about is that Israeli might use some number of its F-16A/B/C/D aircraft as tankers by fitting them with buddy packs. This could significantly ease the operational constraints and allow the Israelis to put more bombs on target.

I doubt that Israeli intel is problematic, as the Jane’s analysis suggests. Israeli intel is generally superb and, if a History Channel documentary aired a few days ago titled “Beyond Top Secret: Iran” is accurate, the Mossad actually tipped off the Iranian dissidents about where to look for the main Iranian nuclear facilities back in 2002. The History Channel documentary also discussed how Israel could achieve better results with its bunker busters: by double targeting. Because the bunker busters are so accurate, the first one blows a hole above the buried structure and the second goes into that hole and penetrates the structure before exploding. I didn’t discuss this possibility previously either, although I did discuss it with friends offline.

Everyone knows that only the U.S. can do a thorough job against Iran - the U.S. can not only take out the entire nuclear infrastructure but attrition the military and political infrastructure as well. What I’ve previously termed “active deterrence” requires that Iran’s military capabilities be severely degraded and Bush will have to act very soon. It will be too late to do anything if it’s left to the next President whomever he or she happens to be.

I generally try to avoid religious arguments unless provoked or moved by a need to correct a misconception. Thus, in Idiotic Design versus Theistic Evolution I addressed the popular misconception that Darwin’s Theory of evolution by natural selection is incompatible with belief in a creator deity. Now comes one Doug Giles who is both provocative and wrong in his column Hey, Atheists … Get your own moral code.

Giles’ article responds to critics of an earlier article he wrote (unread by me) in which he apparently asserted that non-believers are ipso facto immoral. In other words, he retailed the common misconception of religious folk that morality cannot exist without a deity. I touched on this topic briefly in my piece on an Israeli nuclear deterrence strategy I termed MAD with a vengeance. In discussing the “morality” of massive retaliation, I said, “A more useful (that is, scientific and objective) way of looking at morality is to say that it is evolved behavior in social animals that promotes survival.” I then talked about the idea of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) and offered Hillel’s formulation of the Golden Rule as an example of an ESS. The choice of the Golden Rule was deliberate since it is found in one form or another in every religious system on Earth.

The concluding paragraph in Giles’ article states his thesis:

So what’s it going to be, my obstreperous amigos? Are you going to continue to blather on about there being no God and then live like there is one and that His word and will matters? Get consistent, why don’t ‘cha? Don’t live by the Ten Commandments. Don’t live by the Golden Rule. Don’t do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s our stuff. That’s the Judeo-Christian way. Get your own commandments that are logically deduced from the “no God” hypothesis, write your own unholy book and form your own civilization. Then let’s see how appealing it is, how it betters the planet and how far you’ll get.

Giles seems to be almost completely unaware that the moral core of Christianity predates that particular religion or its lineal progenitor, Judaism. In fact, “moral” behavior can be observed not only in our Great Ape cousins but also in other intelligent social animals. Pre-scientific explanations for what humans see in nature – and themselves – have taken the form of magic or religion. Codifying natural “moral” behavior that humans were already exhibiting into a “religion” fits into this pattern.

Giles also makes the common mistake of confusing objectively defined moral or ethical behavior (such as the Golden Rule ESS) with idiomatic religious observance. Prohibitions against intra-group violence are ubiquitous among humans. In non-humans, intra-group mating contests tend to be highly ritualized and generally non-lethal. This is because too much intra-group violence and other “anti-social” behavior compromises group solidarity and the survival/breeding advantage it confers. So the prohibition against killing found in the Ten Commandments is an obvious manifestation of an evolutionarily established “moral” behavior. But what of the admonition against worshiping other gods in the First Commandment? This is feature of one of the earliest known monotheistic religions, Judaism, but makes no sense in the context of a polytheistic religion such as Hinduism. I suppose that a fundamentalist Christian can claim that Hindus are “immoral” but there is no objective basis for such a claim. Moreover, as is painfully obvious to non-Christians (especially Jews), the idea of a Trinity doesn’t comport with the idea of One God. It may be that this idea of multiple aspects of the One God is a doctrinal remnant of the syncretism by which early Christianity spread itself. Christianity, which originated as a Jewish heresy, was able to establish itself among pagan polytheists by adopting elements of their belief systems. Since many of these systems had multiple gods (for example, the Roman and Greek pantheon, the Nordic pantheon, etc.) it was functional to adopt some of those elements into Christianity. Judaism, in contrast, doesn’t proselytize and only spreads by maintaining a reasonably high birth rate within a tight community of believers. This explains many of the contradictions one finds in the Christian variants of Jewish observance, such as the Christian modification of the First Commandment. Given the very rapid spread of Christianity its early history, it is unsurprising to find the multiple deity components are most apparent in its oldest sect: Catholicism has all manner of demi-gods or “Saints” with semi-divine powers.

But, we need not dwell on Giles’ confusion about what constitutes moral behavior to see that his central argument is uninformed. Given that science adequately explains that moral behavior is evolved behavior, the fact is that it is believers – Christians included – and not atheists and agnostics, who are “borrowing” their moral code.

A little over a month ago, Iran announced it could enrich uranium on an “industrial scale”. In short order, IAEA inspectors were shown 8 cascades, amounting to 1,312 centrifuges, operating within the bowels of the subterranean Natanz enrichment facility. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, Atomic Agency Concludes Iran is Stepping Up Nuclear Work. The IAEA now says that Iran is installing a 164 centrifuge cascade each week and could have 8,000 operating by year’s end – assuming no increase in the installation rate. The most recent report states that the IAEA was able to sample the product stream and it was low enriched, reactor grade uranium – unsuitable for a bomb which, practically speaking, needs to be in the mid-to-high 90% range (20% is theoretically enough but totally impractical for military purposes). Still, 8,000 centrifuges – even low tech ones – can produce around 80 kilograms of weapons grade uranium a year, enough for several bombs.

The New York Times article mentions that Iran may be going for “breakout” capability. In the world of nuclear non-proliferation, breakout refers to the ability of a civilian nuclear program under full IAEA safeguards to rapidly transition to a military weapons program. Many signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) having no weapons program whatsoever can go to full scale weapons production in a few months should they choose to do so (for example, Belgium, Germany, and Japan fall into this category). Should Iran manage to get the U.S. and the international community to accept its “civilian” program – and under the NPT there is really no reason why they shouldn’t – then Iran could put Natanz under full IAEA safeguards until it has its 50,000 centrifuges operating. The speed with which the cascades could be reconfigured from low enriched uranium to weapons grade uranium is speculative but let’s say that it takes a month – it should almost certainly take much less time than this. Once reconfigured, the 50,000 centrifuges would output over 40 kilograms of weapons grade uranium a month. The Iranians could play all manner of games to prevent inspectors from monitoring their activities though their intent would be obvious. The amount of time for Iran to have enough material for its first bomb could be 6 weeks. Iran would have almost certainly prepared for this breakout so 6 weeks would be the time required to insert the uranium into the completed bomb and stick it on top of a ballistic missile.

Of course, Iran could prevent inspectors from accessing the product stream at any point and switch to a slow-motion breakout strategy that would give it several weapons early next year. At present, the strategic initiative rests solely with Iran. This became the case as soon as Iran was allowed to spin up its centrifuges with impunity.

Over the lifetime of this blog and before, going back to late 2002 or early 2003, I have written that the Bush Doctrine called for neutralizing terrorist states with the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Neutralizing means either changing the government or removing the capacity to produce nuclear weapons – or both.

As the Bush administration has had to adjust to changing political fortunes, both at home and abroad, it has appeared to lose focus on the goals of the Bush Doctrine. The reasons for the administration’s political difficulties are as manifold as they are obvious, for example: the immediate failure to find “stockpiles” of poison gas in Iraq, the rise of sectarian violence in postwar Iraq, the paralysis of the Iraqi government, and so on. These and other problems – such as the President’s deficient communication skills - have made it difficult for Bush to change the subject to Iran.

The success or failure of the Bush Doctrine hinges on Iran and the range of options available to the administration has been significantly reduced over the past two years. Congress is never going to authorize the sort of open ended authority it gave the President for dealing with Iraq – authority that amounted to a declaration of war. The only option remaining is for the President to use his authority as Commander in Chief to launch an aerial campaign designed to eliminate the nuclear threat and, perhaps, to attrition the Iranian military in the process. Most Democrats in Congress would welcome such a campaign as would Sunni Arab states and most, if not all, of the member states of the European Union. None are willing to support it publicly – “let Bush do it and take the heat” seems to be the consensus view.

Can “Bush do it” without Congressional approval? The short answer is, “yes”. In Libertarians! Embrace your inner Republican!, I said that Jefferson’s undeclared war against the Barbary Pirates was based upon Article II powers given to the President as Commander-in-Chief. Presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden has said that the President may launch preemptive strikes to defend U.S. forces from attacks originating in or supported by Iran. Even if some members of Congress want to oppose the President, under the War Powers Act, the President can commit troops for 60 days before Congress can force a withdrawal. The focus of the War Powers Act seems to be ground troops – boots on the ground – and an air campaign, even with SpecOps, probably wouldn’t activate its provisions (even if it does, there would be plenty of room for legalistic wrangling that could take months to resolve).

Assuming that Bush still intends to destroy Iran’s nuclear program before it fabricates its first nuke, the question is, when? Since Bush & Co. didn’t attack before the first centrifuge spun inside the hardened facility, it means that some threshold number of centrifuges must exist before military action will be sanctioned. At 50,000 centrifuges, Iran could easily produce its first bomb between inspections, such would be the production rate. Irrespective of the breakout problem, allowing Iran to install all 50,000 would so undermine the U.S. position as to make it unlikely that the U.S. would do anything to prevent Iran from going nuclear. The threshold must, therefore, be less than 50,000.

At 8,000 centrifuges, Iran could produce its first bomb in two or three months. This offers very little time for the U.S. to respond, particularly with Iran’s likely gaming of the inspections regime. Thus, 8,000 would have to be the upper threshold for U.S. action. I’d put it lower – around 6,000 – assuming regular assays of the output stream by the IAEA. In any case, this means that we are fast approaching the point at which the U.S. will strike. If the MOP (which I mentioned in this article) is deployed on schedule, it would be available for use on the Natanz bunkers around the time Iran crosses the centrifuge threshold – sometime in the September or October time frame.

If the U.S. doesn’t attack by that point, it’s not going to attack. That’s when Israel will step up to the plate if it hasn’t already done so.

On 23 March 2004, a buddy of mine sent me Iraq One Year Later by Republican Representative Ron Paul of Texas. He wanted to know what I thought of it. I sent him back a response in the form of my comments interlineated with Paul’s article. Now that Paul is a candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination and highly ranked in the non-scientific Pajamas Media Presidential Straw Poll, I thought it might be a good time to post this. My responses are in “red” font.

The Iraq war began about one year ago with the swift and decisive overthrow of Baghdad and the Hussein regime. We are only beginning to understand, however, the true scope of our ongoing occupation of a nation rife with civil, ethnic, and tribal conflict. July stands as the deadline for our provisional government to relinquish control to an emerging Iraqi government, but we are kidding ourselves about just how long American forces will need to remain involved.

More than 580 Americans have died in Iraq; roughly 10,000 have been wounded. American taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars. We must not be afraid to face these facts and understand the terrible cost of war.

Were these sacrifices worth it? To answer that question, we have to look at the justifications given for our invasion of Iraq.

One justification was that Saddam Hussein ignored United Nations Security Council resolutions. Whether this was true or not was none of our concern. America should never act at the behest of the UN or help enforce its illegitimate edicts. America should never commit troops to any UN action. We should not even be a member of the UN, but rather should ignore it completely. Membership in the UN is incompatible with our Constitution and national sovereignty. It was nonsensical for conservatives suddenly to cite Iraq’s purported lack of cooperation with the UN as justification for war.

I basically agree with Paul here with respect to the U.N. — the U.S. should have never promoted the organization and/or joined it. I’d like to see the U.S. extricate itself from the U.N. In my view, we didn’t need to involve the U.N. to go into Iraq. Having said that, had I been the President, instead of Bush, I would have followed a similar strategy — with the exception being that I would have asked for a declaration of war. I would have used the intrasigence of the U.N. permanent Security Council members to provide political cover for getting the U.S. out of the U.N. American antitudes toward the U.N. in the run-up to Gulf War II were such that pulling out would have been easy. Even now, all of the dirt that is coming out about the Oil-for-Food program could be useful in discrediting the U.N., though I think the moment has passed to whip up public support for getting out.

The second justification for invading Iraq was that Mr. Hussein posed a threat to the United States. This was not true. Hussein had only a small army, and virtually no navy or air force. He had no long-range weapons and no ability to strike the US 6,000 miles away. He was not working with bin Laden or al Qaeda terrorists. He was a despicable tyrant at home, but the liberation of Iraq from his clutches was given as a new justification only after the American public had absorbed overwhelming evidence that he posed no threat to us.

I’m glad that Paul didn’t say “imminent threat”. However, Hussein was going to be a threat at some point in the future. Let’s review a little history. In 1947 or thereabouts, the Cold War got started. The Soviets had a huge conventional army but we had the bomb and we had a delivery system. The U.S. had the power at that point to say to the Soviets, “Get the hell out of Europe and get behind your borders. And, by the way, we’re going to send in inspection teams to keep tabs on you because, we’re not going to allow you to have either nuclear weapons or the means to deliver them.” Russia would have collapsed a hell of a lot faster if we’d done that. Alternatively, we could have acted just as soon as they detonated their first bomb and presented them with an ultimatum along the lines of the above. This would have been rational policy because (1) the Soviets were expansionist and (2) would have eliminated us in a New York minute if they had the power to do so. Allowing a mortal enemy to have nukes was not a far-sighted policy.

What Ron Paul fails to understand is how implacable our enemy is. They really want to destroy us, just as the Soviets did. This makes pre-emption the best strategy.

Is America better off as a result of our war in Iraq? The young men and women who were hurt or killed certainly are no better off. Their families are no better off. Taxpayers are no better off. Whether we are safer from terrorism here at home is an open question. We all hope and pray nothing happens. But even our own intelligence forces cautioned that an invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq could breed resentment among sympathetic Muslims and serve as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda. As commentator Lew Rockwell states, “It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive.”

America is better off. Libya has opened up its WMD programs for inspection and halted nuke development. The Iranians have reluctantly agreed to closer inspections. There are massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Syria. There are massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran as well. The internal contradictions of radical Islam are starting to tear it apart. This is a good thing. Ron Paul also fails to acknowledge that the opinion polls of the Iraqis indicate that they don’t harbor a lot of resentment against the U.S. Even more revealing is that the actual opinions of the U.S. in the Arab world are better now than they were pre-Gulf War II, though they are still negative. European opinions of the U.S. are way down but I say, “screw ‘em”.

The bee analogy is actually very good. The fact is, the Islamofascists are like killer bees and they were already buzzing. We had already been stung in 1993, then in 1998, and finally in 2000 before being stung in 2001. Once agitated these bees can’t be reasoned with, they can’t be bargained with, they don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and they absolutely will not stop until you are dead. How many times are we going to allow ourselves to be stung before we whip out the DDT?

Are the Iraqis better off? Saddam is gone, along with his murderous cohorts, and that certainly presents a positive opportunity for the Iraqi people. But we cannot be sure that the Hussein regime will be replaced by something better. Iraq is still very unstable and divided between Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd factions. Civil war could ensue upon the departure of American troops.

Except that Iraq is going to become a semi-permanent U.S. base. I know that Ron Paul thinks we should pull out but that isn’t going to happen and our libertarian President wouldn’t do it in any case. The Iraqis should be given autonomy — as is happening — and a basing agreement should be signed. U.S. troops a short march away from every major Arab capital will send the appropriate message and embolden the pro-democracy elements in the respective countries.

Even if we assume that anything will be an improvement over the Hussein regime, the fundamental question remains: Why should young Americans be hurt or killed to liberate foreign nations? I have never heard a convincing answer to this question. If we sacrifice 500 lives to liberate Iraq, should we sacrifice five million American lives to liberate the people of North Korea, Taiwan, Tibet, China, Cuba, and countless African nations? Should we invade every country that has an oppressive government? Are nation-building and empire part of our national credo? Those who answer yes to these questions should have the integrity to admit that our founders urged the opposite approach, namely a foreign policy rooted in staying out of the affairs of other nations.

Americans have to die because we are at war and we have to win. Libertarianism is, first and foremost, based upon the idea that human nature doesn’t change. Experience tells us that utopian schemes based upon perfecting human nature will always fail. Ron Paul has fallen prey to a particular brand of utopianism — a quasi-pacifist isolationism that assumes that if we just go away, Islamofascism will no longer target us. If we pull out, we merely show weakness and validate the Islamofascist idea that we are decadent. Eventually, they will attack us again, and it will be worse the next time because we won’t be able to hit them back — they’ll be under their nuclear umbrella. I respect Ron Paul but I respectively disagree with both his characterization of the current situation and his analysis of how to address it.

Because Fred Thompson is not running…yet.

In Preemptive war against Iran (7 March 2005), I wrote:

From the perspective of the mullahs, Western culture is a mortal threat. Against the freedom, affluence, and vitality of the West, the mullahs can only offer a decadent medievalism that was on the way out 500 years ago. The mullahs realize that without nukes, Iran will be unable to maintain its closed society and the theocracy will collapse of its own weight.

Nothing that has happened in the intervening years has changed my assessment. Although I have long argued in favor of direct military action by the U.S. to depose the mullahs, I have never doubted that containment, if pursued actively, will eventually bring down the theocracy. “Active” containment of Iran, unlike the strategy used successfully against the Soviets during the Cold War, requires periodic surgical strikes to destroy and continually suppress the Iranian nuclear program. Active containment might also entail interdiction of insurgent supply lines on the Iranian side of the Iran-Iraq border as well as of Iranian naval assets in the event that Iran attempts to shut down the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Given there would be some limited military action to contain Iran, call it a Cool War.

Despite the partisan battles taking place over U.S. policy in Iraq, there is a bipartisan consensus in favor of active containment, at least as far as the Iranian nuclear program is concerned. Every major Democratic Party candidate and Congressional leader has said that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable and none has ruled out the use of force as a “last resort.” For example, retired General and past Presidential candidate Wesley Clark on his StopIranWar.com site begins by saying, “All Americans want to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons and interfering on the ground inside Iraq.” He goes on to say, “Military force against Iran is not the solution now, and if we adopt the right strategy, perhaps it need never be.” Nowhere does Clark rule military action out. Both Presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have repeatedly said that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable.”

Even if it is possible to find a prominent Democrat who is so opposed to military action that a nuclear Iran is deemed acceptable – I haven’t found one – no Democrat has said that all sanctions should be lifted and Iran allowed to do whatever it wants in the Middle East. Given that Democrats favor some form of containment strategy, how can they logically call for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq?

Were the U.S. to pull out of Iraq, the country would either become finlandized or an Iranian satellite under someone like Moqtada al-Sadr. Giving up Iraq today would be akin to fighting the Cold War by first surrendering Western Europe to the Soviets. Even if all of the Democrats sincerely believe that attacking Iraq was a mistake, the strategy of containment necessitates that Iraq now be held.

I don’t believe that the Democrats are stupid, just cynically duplicitous. A close reading of the House and Senate versions of the withdrawal legislation reveals there is interpretive wiggle room for a sizeable U.S. contingent – probably at least the equivalent of 3 divisions – to remain in Iraq. So, the Democrats, no matter what they are currently saying, have no intention of pulling out of Iraq. To do so is totally incompatible with containing Iran and they obviously know it else the Democrat-sponsored legislation would provide for a 100% pull-out in 2008 with no exceptions.

Why doesn’t anyone in the media point to the strategic incoherence of the Democrats and ask them for clarification? It’s a very simple question, really: “How can you surrender Iraq and expect to contain Iran?” If Democrats admit they aren’t surrendering Iraq then the extreme left of their own party will turn against them. If they say they are surrendering Iraq, they’ll have to explain how containment can possibly work. I don’t care how Democrats answer the question, only that they be made answer it.

I’ve listened for several years to eco-fascist troglodytes claiming the hated Bushitler and his Republican cronies are somehow responsible for anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In reality, if AGW is a problem or is destined to become one, it is the eco-fascists themselves and their enablers in the Democratic Party who are responsible. This is no idle claim. Were it not for the Democratic Party, the U.S. would almost certainly be producing at least a third less CO₂ than it is currently – probably less than that.

Before I substantiate my claim, some background. I first began to take AGW from CO₂ seriously in the 1970’s, around the time the global cooling scare was beginning to abate. My interest derived from research I did over a roughly two-year period from the late 1970’s to early 1980 on environmentalism, nuclear power, and the anti-nuclear movement. The research was for a book that would analyze the anti-nuclear movement – my undergraduate degree was sociology and I’ve had a long fascination with mass movements. To understand the movement entailed understanding all of the technical issues surrounding nuclear energy since the validity of the anti-nukes’ assertions had to be tested. Because I found the subject of nuclear power interesting in and of itself, I probably devoted as much effort to it as someone studying for an undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering. (Until August 1979, I was using the resources of Cornell University and one of the people I interviewed was professor emeritus and Nobel Prize winner, Hans Bethe. I recall that he corrected some technical details in my understanding of Doppler broadening.) For a number of reasons – most revolving around money - I abandoned the book in 1980 and decided to go to grad school in computer science. (The only tangible fruit of my research was this article.) Suffice it to say that my research on all facets of nuclear power, from reactor engineering to the nuclear fuel cycle, convinced me that every claim of the environmentalist anti-nukes was either greatly exaggerated or erroneous. Perversely, environmentalist anti-nukes opposed the most environmentally benign energy source available.

Of the many environmental arguments I advanced in favor of nuclear energy, the one I considered the most compelling was AGW. The idea that increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere might cause the Earth to warm wasn’t new - the hypothesis actually dates back to a paper by Svante Arrhenius at the end of the nineteenth century that postulated changes in atmospheric CO₂ concentration as the cause of ice ages. Since Arrhenius was wrong, the idea amounted to an obscure footnote in the history of science and nothing more – or so I thought.

At some point while researching at Cornell, I ran across several papers that reexamined the idea that rising CO₂ levels might cause global warming. One of these, by Ralph M. Rotty of the Institute for Energy Analysis (IEA) at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, showed that human industrial activity was increasing the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ and postulated that a doubling of CO₂ would increase average global temperatures by around 1 degree Celsius. The IEA was a think tank established by physicist Alvin M. Weinberg. Weinberg was at the forefront of developments in advanced nuclear reactor design, including the innovative, thorium-fueled Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), which was stupidly killed by the Carter administration. The fact that Weinberg and other Oak Ridge scientists and engineers saw nuclear power as an environmental solution to the world’s energy problems probably explains why IEA did seminal work on AGW.

I vividly recall speaking to a contingent of Cornell anti-nukes in 1979 and presenting the AGW hypothesis as a potential problem that nuclear power could solve. I received only blank stares. I wasn’t surprised. The scientifically illiterate anti-nukes had missed the romance of the 60’s anti-war movement and were trying to recreate it by opposing the materialist, capitalist evils of nuclear energy – facts were a distraction from that exercise. “Romance” is the operative term here. The unfortunately obscure 1970 movie Getting Straight made the observation that college protest was “sexy”. There was more than a little truth to the idea that a lot of the anti-war and other college protest movements were as much about getting laid as anything else. But I digress . . .

It wasn’t until the late 1980’s that AGW became a major issue nationally and, naturally, upon discovering it, the eco-fascists and their fellow travelers in government bureaucracy and the media exaggerated AGW beyond all reason. (Ironically, they were also completely ignorant of its genesis in a think tank that promoted nuclear energy.) Whether or not AGW will ever prove to be a problem, the people who now so fervently believe it will should come to their senses and push nuclear power.

Why would nuclear power solve the problem? In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, fossil fuels, mostly coal, accounted for the vast majority of electricity production in the U.S. and, overall, electric power generation was responsible for close to 40% of the total carbon produced from fossil fuel consumption. At that time, France was well on the way to producing nearly all of its electricity from nuclear power – today, between 80% and 90% of electric power in France is nuclear generated. The U.S. didn’t follow that path – except for nuclear plants already licensed and “in the pipeline”, after the Three Mile Island accident, nuclear power development died in the U.S. More accurately, nuclear power development was murdered. Irrational hysteria over Three Mile Island, fomented by eco-fascists and the technically ignorant media was translated into action by the political party representing those yahoos: the Democratic Party. Going to the 1980 Democratic Party Platform we find this section:

We must make conservation and renewable energy our nation’s energy priorities for the future. Through the federal government’s commitment to renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, and as alternative fuels become available in the future, we will retire nuclear power plants in an orderly manner. [Emphasis mine]

The idea that nuclear power should be abandoned is pure eco-fascism.

Over the years, the Democratic Party softened its position on nuclear energy a trifle but has remained largely in thrall to the eco-fascists and functionally anti-nuclear. Where does that leave things today? According to the DoE Energy Information Administration, in 2004 total emissions from consumption and flaring of fossil fuels was 5912.21 million metric tonnes (MMT) of carbon, of which 2456.93 MMT was for electricity generation or 41.5% of the total. Nuclear power could essentially eliminate this source of carbon, particularly given than advanced reactors could manage load following – current (old) technology nuclear plants are really only suitable for base loading. Electric power production is growing faster than other energy sectors and, without nuclear power, the percentage of CO₂ produced from that source will increase over time. Advanced nuclear power plants, such as High Temperature Gas Reactors (including the pebble bed design I discussed in Oh, Heck!) could replace fossil fuels in some industrial process heat applications so the percentage of carbon reduction could approach 50%.

Let us now consider an alternative universe where eco-fascism didn’t take over the Democratic Party in the 1970’s. In that universe, Jimmy Carter, who started the anti-nuke trend by killing key nuclear technologies (such as Oak Ridge’s Molten Salt Reactor), would either have lost the 1976 election or operated rationally. No additional impediments would have been placed on licensing nuclear power plants. Indeed, because of the environmental advantages of nuclear, the Democratic Congress would have repealed laws allowing citizen intervention in the regulatory process. This would have prevented the eco-fascist nut-fringe from artificially raising costs by using pseudo- and junk science to delay licensing. Construction of nuclear power plants would have accelerated and new reactor technologies would have been introduced. A federal nuclear waste repository would be taking all of the reprocessed waste generated by nuclear reactors. By 2007, the alternate U.S. with no other changes, could be producing at least 40% less carbon, putting it way ahead of the most optimistic Kyoto scenarios. Even if the Democrats had done nothing more than ignore the eco-fascists, the alternate U.S. would have substantially reduced carbon production over the real U.S.

I’m willing to accept that Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency was a prerequisite for the rise of eco-fascism as a political power. Still, it was the conversion of the Democratic Party into the political arm of eco-fascism that was necessary for that power to be realized It is the Democratic Party – the party that explicitly repudiated nuclear power in its 1980 platform - that bears ultimate responsibility for billions of additional metric tonnes of carbon dumped into the atmosphere over the past nearly 30 years.

So, next time some eco-fascist Democrat excoriates Republicans for AGW, set the record straight. The party of AGW and global warming is the Democratic Party.

The American Psychological Association (APA) has just released this report from the APA’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. The report claims that girls are being “sexualized” at younger ages and that this is harmful because, for females 18 and older, “sexualization” has been linked to “three of the most common mental health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.” The report admits that there haven’t been any systematic studies of young girls - although that is the putative concern in a lurid press release that has been picked up by the national media. The press release invites exactly the sort of anecdote-based fear mongering in evidence in the WaPo’s Goodbye to Girlhood.

The APA report claims that advertising and entertainment media (TV, movies, videogames) intrusively “sexualize” young females, producing feelings of inadequacy and self-image. The report uses charged terminology, no doubt to conjure up the image of something akin to rape by media. The reader is skillfully led to conclude, despite some carefully worded qualifying language buried in the report, that a vast bulk of research indicates that “sexualization” results in more risky sex, less condom use, more out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and a higher incidence of STD’s.

There are many reasons why one should be skeptical about the claims made by this report, starting with the term “sexualize”. The definition is so nebulous that there doesn’t seem to be any methodologically consistent way of operationalizing it. Thus, two different researchers looking at identical data but applying differing assumptions about what constitutes “sexualization” will draw completely different conclusions. Even if we were to accept that “sexualization” is a well characterized phenomenon that can be studied objectively, there is no reason to assume that “sexualization” harms females 18 and over.

Before I continue my discussion about this latest offering from the APA, it is instructive to look at the organization’s previous campaign of science by press release directed against violence in popular media, with special focus on videogames. The APA enjoyed great success with this campaign, convincing most of the American public that there is a direct correlation between violence in the media and violence in society. The APA intends to accomplish the same goal with “sexualization” as it suggests in the report’s Executive Summary:

In 2005,APA adopted the policy resolution on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media, which documented the negative impact of exposure to violent interactive media on children and youth and called for the reduction of violence in these media. These resolutions and reports addressed how violent media and advertising affect children and youth, but they did not address sexualization.

Here, for your edification, is the link to the 2005 APA policy on violence in video games. This policy provided everything needed by censors on the extreme right and left to restrict, regulate, and/or control videogames and provide a wedge against First Amendment protections. Among the politicians at the head of the censorship mob was the junior Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. The following is from a report by CBS News:

Clinton said through a spokesman that she was developing legislation to make the ratings systems of video games better enforced. Clinton justified her stance, saying, “I am emphasizing that ratings should have meaning and they should be enforced. A 7-year-old should not be able to walk into Wal-mart and buy Grand Theft Auto.”

Clinton added, “There have been four decades of research on the effect of media violence on our kids and it all points to the same conclusion — media violence leads to more aggression, anti-social behavior and it desensitizes kids to violence” [emphasis mine].

Not even close to being true but this, after all, is the woman I like to describe as Lady Macbeth without a conscience. The reality is that TV and movie violence
may have increased in terms of the way psychological researchers operationalized it – media violence may have even increased in ways that most non-psychologists would agree upon – but it has had no effect outside of the laboratory. If someone wants to claim an effect, then it has been negative: since the mid-1970’s, the trend in violent crime has been down. I wrote about this in Crime and the Drug War: The Politics of Hysteria, quoting from Samuel Walker’s criminology text, Sense and Nonsense about Crime and Drugs: A Policy Guide (1994):

The news media constantly run stories about “soaring” crime rates. This characterization is inaccurate. The idea that violent crime is constantly rising is a myth. In fact, serious crime has been declining for over 15 years. The National Crime Survey’s victimization data … indicate that robbery declined 17.2 percent between 1973 and 1991; rape fell by 11.6 percent; household burglary dropped by 42.1 percent. Violent crime against the elderly fell by 61 percent between 1974 and 1991. This is one of the longest and most significant declines in the crime rate in American history [emphasis in the original]. Much of the public hysteria about crime is misplaced.

Psychologists, when they bothered to address actual social problems, claimed exactly the opposite. Media Violence and the American Public: Scientific Facts versus Media Misinformation, in the June/July 2001 issue of American Psychologist, asserts that there is a connection between “reel” violence and “real” violence – that is, excessive violence in media is associated with increased violence in society. Notice figure 1, which shows violent crime steeply rising and then dropping somewhat starting in the early 90’s. This is flatly contradicted by these violent crime statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The graph shows violent crime declining until the mid-1980’s, rising until the early 90’s and then precipitously declining to what is described as the “lowest level ever” rate in 2005. Why do these two sets of statistics disagree? The cynical answer is that a long term decline leading to the “lowest ever” violent crime rate in 2005 at a minimum eliminates all sense of urgency for controls or legislation on media depictions of violence. The decline in “real” violence, even as “reel” violence is increasing, might also lead to more government scrutiny of federal research grants in this area, in the manner of former Democrat Senator William Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece” awards.

The non-cynical answer is that criminologists long ago recognized that relying exclusively on police data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (the source for the graph in the article) understates the actual crime rate – not all crimes are reported to the police for a variety of reasons. Police arrest data are also subject to phenomenological effects. As more police are added to a jurisdiction they “detect” more crime. If measured in this fashion, crime rates can appear to increase against a steady state or declining background crime rate. Thus, criminologists developed the victimization survey in order come up with crime rates more reflective of reality. I won’t get into the methodology of the victimization survey except to point out that the federal government now relies on it as the best estimate of actual crime rates available. Psychologists should be aware of what’s going on in a related field but the combination of academic insularity coupled with a strong dose of cognitive dissonance produces what can only be described as salutary ignorance: knowledge might derail the funding gravy train.

There is a lot more I could say about this, given my background in the social sciences and the research I did when I was on the ICLU Board back in the 1990’s. Even though I have my problems with the ACLU, the organization is spot on when it states that there has never been empirical research showing a connection between media violence and violence in the overall society. All of which brings us back to the APA’s “sexualization” report.

As I noted in A plague of parasites, a variety of sources, including Planned Parenthood, agree that the trend in teen pregnancy rates has been down over the past 20 years. STD rates are trending down as well. The authors of the “sexualization” report don’t mention this inconvenient truth (to coin a phrase) as they call for more research into early pregnancy and STDs (Report, p.43, point 4).

Because the report expresses concern about increased rates of depression among young females, presumably attributable to “sexualization”, one would expect that it would address teen suicide rates. Yet the word “suicide” appears nowhere in it. This is not surprising because female suicide rates aren’t going up. Here are the female suicide rates per 100,000 from 1995 to 2003 for the ages of concern in the report (source, 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States).

1995=3.6; 1996=3.5; 1997=3.4; 1998=3.3; 1999=3.0; 2000=3.0; 2001=2.9; 2002=2.9; 2003=3.0

There is no upward trend to be seen – overall the trend is slightly down, leveling off in recent years.

If the trends we see in important social problems like teen pregnancy, STDs, and suicide among young women are generally downward then what is the point of the APA report? Logically, one could argue that more rather than less “sexualization” is desirable because it produces healthier sexual (and other) behavior in the society as a whole.

About the only bad social trend I could find was this comparison of male/female suicide rates for ages 15-24 from 1900 to 2000 (p. 4), followed by the ratio of male to female suicide rates (p. 5). The claimed increase in “sexualization” of young females seems to match a major increase in the ratio of males to females ages 15-24 committing suicide. Perhaps the “sexualized” young females are becoming so adept at presenting themselves as attractive “sex objects” that they are forcing young men into intense competition for their favors, thereby increasing male stress levels and causing more to commit suicide. Silly, right? Sadly, it makes more sense than the conclusions the APA report wants us to reach.

How is it that so many people with three letters after their names can be so consistently wrong about what is behind a particular set of social problems? It’s important to understand that psychology, which studies the behavior of individual humans, may not always generalize upward to sociology, criminology, and related disciplines that study the behavior of humans in groups. Extrapolating across system boundaries, as the APA has done, can lead to error and must be validated with socioeconomic and demographic data. It turns out that whatever may be going on inside the laboratory, when subjects walk out the door their behavior changes. More violent stimuli don’t produce more violent behavior in the real world; more sexual stimuli don’t produce more risky sexual behavior in the real world.

The final explanation for the APA’s inability to get things right is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance – a phenomenon elucidated by psychologists – occurs when conflicting ideas arise. One way of dealing with the conflict is to suppress one of the ideas – to literally not see it. Many psychologists believe that depictions of sex and violence should have an effect on society, therefore, they fail to see clear evidence that their assumptions are wrong. Added to this is the fact that psychologists have an organization, in the form of the APA, whose primary function is to act as a professional voice for psychology as “big science”. This is the body that generates public support for the activities of the profession, lobbies the federal and state governments for money and influence, and otherwise keeps the gravy train on track. The APA is more about politics than it is about science. A political body like the APA also tends to promote ideological conformity within the discipline, at the expense of free scientific inquiry. For example, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, the APA pushed the idea that homosexuality was a mental disease for decades, only finally acknowledging it was wrong in the mid-1970’s. Cognitive dissonance plus political orthodoxy is a lethal combination.

APA junk science has been used in the past to fuel a groundless panic about violence in media, which in turn led to assaults on the First Amendment by unscrupulous politicians. Now the APA has begun to engender a whole new panic about “sexualization”. Which politicians will be the first to call for hearings and propose legislation to deal with the problem? My bet would be that Hillary will jump on this if the APA report begins to get any traction. Keep watching the skies.

The Daily Telegraph reports Israel seeks all clear for Iran air strike. As I demonstrated in Gaming an Israeli conventional strike on Iran: Scenario 1 and Gaming an Israeli conventional strike on Iran: Scenario 2, a direct attack, flying through Iraqi airspace, is relatively easy for the Israeli Air Force to accomplish but an attack that entails flying the long way, around the Arabian Peninsula, is very challenging with no margin for error.

In response to the Daily Telegraph story, Fox News says that Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister, has denied the report. Whether or not the Israeli government is discussing use of Iraqi airspace with the U.S., there is no way the Israelis would admit to such a thing. It would put too much pressure on the U.S. to declare Iraqi airspace off limits.

Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Israeli officials were secretely talking with the U.S., I think it more likely that the Israelis would wait until the planes were already in transit on the assumption that “it is better to ask forgiveness than ask permission.” Secretary of Defense Gates would almost certainly counsel the President to deny permission if there was time to deliberate and I daresay that he wouldn’t be alone in the recommendation.

In the FT Interview: Mohamed ElBaradei, the redoubtable Nobel Peace Prize winner states two mutually contradictory positions. The first is that Iran is 5 to 10 years away from nukes. The second is that Iran may have its first nukes next year. The Financial Times interviewer, Daniel Dombey, tries to clarify ElBaradei’s statements in the following exchange:

FT: If you define industrial capacity as a cascade of 3,000 centrifuges or more, since if that was fully functioning it would take a year to get enough fissile material for a bomb, how far away do you think they are at the current stage of progress?

ElBaradei: I think they are still far away.

FT: A year, two years?

ElBaradei: It’s difficult, I really like not to take numbers, to speculate, but away from what, from developing the three thousand [centrifuges]?

FT: From getting three thousand functioning smoothly.

ElBaradei: I don’t know, it could be a year, it could be six months. It could be a year, but we need to remember but as long as even they have 3,000 [centrifuges], as long as these 3,000 are under [NPT] safeguards, they cannot go beyond five per cent, people forget that… it’s really a risk assessment more of tomorrow more than it is of today…

As I demonstrated in Intel Chief oversees bureaucratic Type II error, using very conservative assumptions, 1,000 centrifuges will produce around 10 kg of weapons grade U-235 per year - 3,000 centrifuges will produce three times as much. Assuming that Iranian weaponeers are more sophisticated than trained orangutans, this is enough for a nuke and ElBaradei agrees. So, Iran isn’t 5 years away from a nuke - it has the technical capability to turn out its first nuke next year. Q.E.D.

ElBaradei’s last point - that with safeguards enrichment can’t go above 5% - is misleading because Iran isn’t under full safeguards and he really can’t say how many centrifuges are operating or how enriched the output stream is. If the Iranians can frustrate the inspection process long enough, eventually the issue becomes moot because they’ll have all the U-235 they need. The NPT (non-proliferation treaty) never had a mechanism under UN auspices to punish non-compliance beyond mild sanctions and, as ElBaradei admits, “everybody knows that sanctions are not going to resolve the issue in and of itself.”

Since sanctions won’t work – and even the feckless ElBaredei acknowledges this – the only recourse is military, as I’ve been saying for over three years. Only one country that can do the job right: the U.S.

Picking up where I left off in Gaming an Israeli conventional strike on Iran: Scenario 1, I set up and ran Scenario 2 – the no overflight scenario. It became immediately apparent that 5 KC-707 tankers was an insufficient number for a one-shot strike. There is no problem putting all 25 F-15I’s on the target but including enough F-16I’s to carry two 900 kg GBU-31/BLU-109 penetrator bombs, provide escort, and suppress air defenses can’t be done. For the scenario, the bombers have to go in without escort. Just one more tanker makes a 50% difference in the size of the raid. The reason is that it is necessary to refuel twice: once on the way to the target and once on the way back. A six tanker fleet makes three tankers available for each leg. One less tanker means that one leg will have only two tankers.

How accurate is Scenario 2? I used the identical Iranian setup from Scenario 1, which greatly overestimates Iranian defensive capabilities. If I scale the defense back to something close to reality then it becomes just possible for an Israeli raid of 40 or so planes to make it to Natanz.

The buried enrichment buildings in Scenarios 1 and 2 are very strong – it takes around 12 of the 2100 kg GBU-28/BLU-113 bombs, carried by 12 F-15I’s, plus 22 [corrected 14-Feb] of the BLU-109 bombs to destroy one of them. I suspect that Harpoon3 has a simplified way of modeling weapon effects versus target types. In the real world, there would be a depth below which the BLU-109 would have no effect. I’m not sure that Harpoon3 handles this. Even if the model is accurate, there is the question of how protected the enrichment buildings really are. Perhaps they are more vulnerable in the real world than in the scenarios, perhaps not. Various sources seem to agree that the enrichment buildings are capped with 2.5 meters of reinforced concrete above which is 8 meters of packed earth. If this information is correct, then the scenario is too conservative and the F-15’s alone can do the job.

To sum up, the excessive difficulty I built into Scenario 2 indicates that Israel could actually manage a one-shot, no overflight attack against Iran’s enrichment facility but it would be “close-run thing” with little margin for error. What the Israeli’s need most is an extra tanker.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the U.S. is developing the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). This 6 meter long, 13.6 metric tonne behemoth will be deployed later this year and carried by the B-2 bomber. Any guesses as to its probable targets?

At the conclusion of my previous post, I said I was going to analyze Israeli capabilities for carrying out a conventional strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities because I had come around to the view that “Israel wouldn’t allow a little thing like U.S. disapproval to prevent it from attacking.”

Now that Iran has begun or is about to begin the installation of 3,000 centrifuges in its Natanz facility, little time remains for a diplomatic solution. As the cascades start to come on line, the daily output of weapons grade uranium will first be measured in milligrams, then grams, and finally kilograms – a deadly progression that Israel must stop long before kilograms per day is reached. The Israelis see that time arriving much, much sooner than the U.S. – at least 3 or 4 years sooner. The Israelis will, therefore, attack sometime in the next few months if the U.S. doesn’t do so first.

I’ve said for years that Israel cannot conduct an extended air campaign, in significant part for political reasons. A single strike is, however, politically feasible because the Bush administration is not going to actively prevent it. This is not to say that the Bush administration might not place impediments before the Israeli attack planners. The most serious of these would be an announcement that Israeli aircraft would not be granted access to Iraqi or Gulf State airspace. Absent that, the Israeli attack would take the shortest route, over Jordan and Iraq, and Israeli officials would alert the U.S. only after Israeli jets have begun taking off. Although the Israelis would undoubtedly prefer, for reasons of operational security, to not alert anyone, there is a significant risk that security would be compromised even more as aircraft in a large scale attack are challenged by U.S. forces. Without alerting U.S. forces the attack is underway, it is even possible for a misunderstanding to produce an accidental shoot down of one or more Israeli planes.

Because only one strike is possible, the Israeli plan must limit its targets to the most dangerous ones. The Natanz enrichment facility constitutes the most immediate threat so it heads any target list.

If a single strike is politically feasible, is it militarily feasible? My “back-of-the-envelop” estimate was that the direct route – overflying Iraq – was. The indirect route – flying around the Arabian Peninsula seemed much more problematic. Back-of-the-envelop for something as complex as a deep air strike into Iran isn’t good enough so I decided to dust off Harpoon 3 and design two scenarios: (1) Israel uses the direct route and (2) Israel uses the indirect route.

I began with scenario 1, setting D-Day as 18 March 2007, 2000 hrs GMT (new moon is in the early morning hours of 19 March). My primary source for forces available to each side was Jane’s. I already had good information on the Iranian side (see U.S. versus Iran: the tale of the tape) – for Israel I came up with the following:

1. 25 F-15I’s, capable of carrying the GBU-28 Paveway III Deep Penetration (bunker buster) bomb.
2. Israel purchased 102 F-16I, long-range fighters with conformal fuel tanks. Delivery rate is two per month, first delivery was Feb 2004. That would mean 72 available for service by March.
3. 135 F-16C’s and D’s. Slightly shorter range than the F-16I.
4. 75 F-16 A’s and B’s. Shorter range than the C’s and D’s.

Jane’s also says that Israel has KC-707 and KC-130H tankers but that the actual numbers are unknown. At this point, I consulted Global Security as a backup source. It gave 5 tankers of each type. Tankers are important because the enrichment plant lies close to the operational limit of the F-16I’s. Jane’s also indicated that Israel has aircraft carrying the AN/ALQ-99 tactical jammer pod for electronic countermeasures (ECM) but exact numbers are unknown. Global security gave 3 707’s so outfitted.

The Arak heavy water facility and plutonium production reactor will not emerge as threats for at least a couple of years but they are much easier to reach from Israeli bases and would make good targets for F-16C’s and D’s. Accordingly, I added Arak to the target list.

For my scenario, the final numbers for Israel were 135 combat aircraft, which included 2 jammers. To this, 10 tankers were added for a grand total of 145.

In order to complicate things for the Israelis, I assumed that the Iranians had an exemplary maintenance program and that all fighter aircraft in the inventory were available. In reality, the Iranians would be lucky to get 50% of their aircraft in the air, with 25% to 30% being the most likely percentages. Even so, I wanted the scenario to represent a worst case for the Israelis. For the same reason, I based the Iranian fighters so as to maximize defensive coverage for the two sites. If the Iranians are smart, they would do likewise. The Iranian air defense system is pathetic but I compensated by placing a heavy concentration of SAMs around Arak and Natanz.

I ran the scenario once and, frankly, my Israeli attack plan stank – coordination was terrible. I was more concerned with answering the question of whether or not Israel can reach the targets than with limiting my casualties in the simulation and so spent little effort on planning. The Israelis had an attrition rate of 15% but took out both targets. With some reasonable planning I’m sure I could reduce that to only a couple of planes, max. That I could manage a 135 plane raid is quite impressive – my back of the envelop guess assumed that tankers would be a major constraint but they proved not to be.

One of the unknowns is the effectiveness of the bunker busters. In the scenario I used extremely strong buried structures as stand-ins for the enrichment buildings – it took on average 12 F-15I’s and 11 F-16I’s (a total of 23 aircraft) to take out each one (there are two). I hope I have, once again, been overly conservative in my estimates.

I’ll finish scenario 2 soon. Arak is clearly not a viable target for that scenario so the Israeli attack will be limited to Natanz. For that raid I’ll probably include the 3 Israeli Type 800 “Dolphin” class subs outfitted with cruise missiles. I didn’t include them in scenario 1 although in a real attack the Israelis would probably use them.

Addendum: layouts/locations for the Arak and Natanz facilities were obtained from satellite photos available on the web. The satellite photos also had the logitude and latitude of the sites so distances in the scenario should be accurate to within a couple of nautical miles or so.

In my article, MAD with a vengeance (MADWAV), I argued that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Israel should announce a modified version of the MAD doctrine: in the event Iran hits Israel with nuclear weapons, Israel will not limit its retaliatory strike to Iran but will target other hostile Muslim states as well, even if those states did not participate in the Iranian attack. At the time I propounded MADWAV, I assumed I was the first person to discuss it. I’m happy to say that is not the case.

Today, while doing research for an article on whether or not an Israeli conventional preempt against Iran is feasible, I stumbled across a reference to a study group called “Project Daniel” in What makes Iran tick?, 9 May 2006, by the Iran Policy Committee. In its final report the Project Daniel group offered a number of policy recommendations, including this one:

To meet its “ultimate” deterrence objectives – that is, to deter the most overwhelmingly destructive enemy first-strikes, Israel must seek and achieve a visible second-strike capability to target approximately 15 enemy cities. Ranges would be to cities in Libya and Iran, and recognizable nuclear bomb yields would be at a level sufficient to fully compromise the aggressor’s viability as a functioning state. The Group points out that Israel must also convince all relevant adversaries that it has complete control over its nuclear forces. The purpose of such convincing would be to reduce or remove any adversarial considerations of preemption against Israel.

The Group notes again that where nuclear targeting is concerned, Israel should focus its resources on counter-value warheads, targeting between 10 and 20 city assets of crucial importance to the enemy, but excluding religious assets wherever possible.

I’d describe this strategy as “MADWAV lite”. (Note: I think the exclusion of “religious assets” is a mistake. Islamic holy cities should be on the target list to increase the cost to the aggressor.) Although the target list is smaller and limited to Middle Eastern states, this Project Daniel recommendation (from April 2004) embraces the same basic approach to deterrence I articulated. That’s why I consider the discovery of the Project Daniel report felicitous: there are other people thinking along the same lines and they have an in with Israeli policy makers.

Of course, Israel should never be put in the situation where it has to adopt such a policy, which is the reason that military action against Iran’s nuclear program is so urgently needed. In MADWAV, I wrote, “[I]t now appears that the U.S. will dither and allow Iran to go nuclear while, at the same time, preventing the Israelis from taking preemptive action.” When I wrote that, I was rather depressed by several months of Bush administration inaction and, therefore, succumbed to the negative assessment that an Israeli non-nuclear preempt wasn’t feasible. In large part, this view came about because I had never imagined that the U.S. wouldn’t attack so there was no reason to consider whether or not the Israelis could actually pull it off. I couldn’t stay depressed for long – eventually I realized that Israel wouldn’t allow a little thing like U.S. disapproval to prevent it from attacking. I did a quick back-of-the-envelop analysis and decided that a one-shot strike can work. I am now in the process of doing a more careful analysis, the results of which will be the subject of my next posting, tentatively titled “18 March 2007”.

I caught a news item on the local NPR affiliate a couple of days ago about a meeting between Indiana 9^th District Representative Baron Hill (D) and members of the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition. Hill refused to accept their call for an immediate pullout from Iraq. The BPAC folks were livid - one interviewee could best be described as fighting mad. Imagine that: a fighting mad pacifist. (After a number of dealings with these people over the years, I consider the whole lot to be at best hypocritical, ersatz pacifists anyway. I vividly recall an encounter I had with one of the leaders – a loathsome crypto-fascist, crypto-anti-Semite – back in 2004 at a political event. It occurs to me I’m probably giving too much benefit of the doubt to use the prefix “crypto”.)

I was pretty harsh (though accurate) in my criticism of Hill during the 2006 race so I’m taking this opportunity to say that whatever our other disagreements you did good. Any time you can get the BPAC folks that riled up, you’re on the side of the angels.

This article in Slate by Jacob Weisberg starts off good, talking about the “two clocks” ticking off the time remaining until Iran has nukes and until the theocracy falls.

It rapidly deteriorates:

The most common estimates of the time needed for Iran to get enough fissile material and assemble a bomb range from three to eight or 10 years. (The Iraqi example counsels skepticism about all such forecasts.)

To this I respond do the math. Assuming conventional, not state-of-the-art, centrifuge technology and 3,000 centrifuges, you get around 30 kg of weapons grade U-235 per year. Iran will have its first 3,000 centrifuges up and running in a few months. If they are at the trained orangutan level of competence they can produce a tactical nuke in a little over a year-and-a-half. If they are reasonably competent as weaponeers, which is the way to bet, they can produce at least a single 1 megaton thermonuke in less than a year. In realistic planning, you go on the basis of capabilities, and 30 kg of weapons grade U-235 confers some pretty serious capability. Enrichment could start before all 3,000 are running. One of the nice things about centrifugation over gaseous diffusion is modularity. So the time to get 30 kg is probably less than a year. And, there is also the simple fact that Iran is going to keep adding more centrifuges up to a final number of 50K+. That’s over 500 kg/year of weapons grade U-235.

At the moment, the Bush administration’s policy seems to be taken straight from the self-sabotage playbook—quite a thick volume when it comes to America’s relations with Iran. Were our goal to persuade the Iranian regime to hasten its nuclear race while binding it more closely to a weary and discontented populace, it’s hard to see how we could be advancing it more effectively.

If you believe that we have 10 years - or even 3 years - to play around with, maybe you can make this statement. Iran couldn’t “hasten its nuclear race” under any circumstances because it is already pushing things as fast and as hard as it can. If Iran stops its enrichment activities and that can be verified (given the IAEA’s track record, I consider reliable verification a dubious possibility) then and only then can we sit down and talk.

Such belligerence seems unlikely to produce the result we desire for a variety of reasons. For one, our bluster is essentially empty. The United States lacks plausible military options for taking out Iran’s nuclear program and dealing with the potential reaction, especially now that we are bogged down in Iraq.

Unbelievable. Hell, I put together the attack plan 3 1/2 years ago and it was probably overkill given that I required total destruction of all Iranian facilities plus ancillary targets in less than 24 hours. Here was how I described the plan:

My scenario envisioned a disarming attack targeting all nuclear facilities, airfields, SAM installations, and anti-ship missile installations, along with some military formations, bridges, and command & control facilities. My final version was completed in June 2003. Since my computer at the time was a 1.1 Ghz P3 running Windows ME, I scaled things back a bit on the U.S. side. In the scenario, I used only 2 carrier battle groups (CVBGs) – I figure an actual attack will use 6. TLAMs (tomahawk land attack missiles) were limited accordingly. I assumed limited land-based air - about a quarter of what would likely be used - but included a squadron of B1B’s and 6 B-2s from Diego Garcia. I threw in special ops for attacks on selected installations. Attack date was mid-2006. After running the scenario several times, my worst result on the U.S. side was 2 helos and an F-18.

Give me 4 carrier battle groups and I could come up with the same basic plan without using land-base air (except for the B1B’s and B-2’s). The CW folks have no conception of the military power we have at our disposal. If you destroy all of the facilities necessary to produce weapons grade uranium and plutonium then you really do have several years to pursue diplomatic options.

Under this proposal, Iran would suspend its efforts at uranium enrichment, the United States would hold off pushing for further U.N. sanctions, and we’d all settle in for a long palaver over mint tea and pistachio nuts.

OK by me - I said the same thing above. The U.S. has always said to the Iranians that they had to stop their enrichment activities. My question to Weisberg is, “What do we do if they don’t stop?” The nuclear alarm will be going off in months, not years. Arguably, you need to attack long before that alarm is set to go off.

Here’s a great final quote: “you cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.” The person quoted has probably never heard of Germany or Japan.