Syria’s chemical weapons pose a decade-long problem for the world

That's the title of another op-ed from me and Aaron Stein at the Globe and Mail.

Bits and Pieces - April 29, 2013

Too much stuff happening.

Jared Bernstein is collecting news stories about the damage being done by the sequester. Here's this week's collection.

Why didn't 2,400 tons of ammonium nitrate at West plant raise concerns?

The blunt logic of Russian power.

Forgiveness and reconciliation need to factor into many more international situations.

Richard Haass: How to build a second American century.

Bits and Pieces - April 28, 2013

Bush and the West explosion: the untold story of deregulating chemical plants

Charlie Stross changes his mind on nuclear disarmament.

What we need to know about Syrian chemical weapons (by me)

Bits and Pieces - April 17, 2013

This is pretty interesting.



Global Military Spending Falls For First Time Since 1998. Except in the United States. Check out this chart showing relative spending by country.

Every war must end.

Just Wondering...Polls on Spending Priorities

I suppose that the pollsters, wanting to think that they are doing something scientific, just want to measure what people think. But time and again, the results they give us are that Americans want to reduce foreign aid, believing that it is something like a quarter of the budget, whereas it is under one percent, reduce taxes, and increase spending on pretty much everything else.

Okay, so we know that.

How about asking questions that begin, "Given that the budget is finite," and go on to pose a choice: defense spending or education. Social Security or defense. Foreign aid or defense. (Sorry, I'm getting repetitive.) Housing aid or education. Scientific research or education. (That's starting to get harder.)

The objection will be, I suspect, that the pairing of the alternatives will influence the answers. Well, that might be interesting. If you set up the pairs correctly, you might get some priorities out of it. Or you might find that the American public prefers spending on education to spending on research to spending on defense to spending on education, a circular and again illogical set of preferences.

But wouldn't it be more helpful to see answers like that?

Inspired by this article.

Bits and Pieces - April 2, 2013

Nature's drone, pretty and deadly. Dragonflies. Not really drones, they know what they're doing. Some very nice videos.

When we loved Form 1040. When it was possible to fill it out without computer aid. Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.

Is this a pandemic being born? I've been wondering that about those dead pigs in China.

Michael Eisen and Richard van Noorden on the future of scholarly publishing.

Update: Today is International Autism Awareness Day.

Same-Sex Marriage in the Supreme Court

Today and tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments for and against California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

This Court is famously conservative. But the Court is not totally isolated from public opinion. Its decision could be on broad or narrow grounds; previous decisions have tended to be broader than expected.

The concern trolls are comparing this decision to Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision. Too broad a decision, they say, would result in a backlash. So they hope for an incremental decision of some kind, so as not to épater les bigots.

bmaz argues against the concern trolls. I'll agree with him, and add one more reason, although not the kind that usually sways the Supreme Court: the country needs a big decision of some kind, and this might as well be it; some clear statement that allowing people their own loves and domestic arrangements is the right thing. We've had a lot of incrementalism in such matters for what seems like a very long time. There is a time for incrementalism, and I've often argued for it. But too much feels like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the mountain, or being bitten to death by ducks.

Sarah Kliff presents a load of nice graphics that say that if the Supremes get it wrong this time, they'll simply be ignored. I'm pleased with New Mexico's unique color in that map of the United States; it's possible same-sex marriage has been legal here all along. The lawyers are working that out now.

So I'm feeling good about this. John Roberts has shown that he has enough respect for the Court and his position on it not to follow his personal reactionary instincts. And hey! there just might be a backlash if the Court does decide to go with those instincts. I'm willing to concern troll that side of things.

Bits and Pieces - March 24, 2013

Ronald Dworkin on what makes a religion.

Bringing development and sustainability goals together.

The most important thing that has been written in the past few years on cancer care.

How the "job creators" think about themselves.

A treaty to regulate trade in conventional arms.

Crappy security on the internet.

Looking at the future of energy with BP and Exxon Mobil.

Bits and Pieces - March 21, 2013

Once I started talking to the guards at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, I found that they are very interesting and committed people.

Wondering about the K's and W's of commercial radio stations in the US?

Photos of the 1970s in New York City.

But it's not the ancestor of today's birds.

What I Got Right And Wrong About The Iraq War

Ten years ago, I was not yet blogging. But I had an opinion about the accusations against Iraq. Bits and pieces of it might still be excavated from dead or dying discussion forums. I’ll expand here. I have to start by going back further than that.

The 1991 Iraq war had served up a big surprise for those of us following nuclear issues: Saddam Hussein’s electromagnetic separation project. Who’d have thought that would be the technology in today’s world? Which, of course, was a good reason for the Iraqis to go for it. After all, it helped enrich the uranium for the Little Boy bomb exploded over Hiroshima.

But after that program was dismantled and the equipment destroyed, the sanctions and overflights imposed on Iraq seemed to preclude a restart of any nuclear weapons projects. Biological and chemical agent programs might have continued at a low level, but the country was in dismal straits.

And then came the United Nations inspections. The request for volunteers went out to the national laboratories, and I thought about it for a while, but decided that my life was exciting enough.

A place like the Los Alamos National Laboratory has its own kind of grapevine. Some information filtered into the grapevine from the UN inspectors.The common wisdom, based on that and other information, was that Hussein might have some small and residual bio or chem weapon capability, but nuclear? No way.

So when the war drums began to beat after 9/11, I dismissed them. I looked at the supporting evidence.

The aluminum tubes seemed to me unlikely to be used for centrifuges, but I am not fully informed on centrifuge specs. Reports from sources I considered to be knowledgeable were that they were for rockets, and that sounded about right. I had met people from Oak Ridge who were experts in centrifuge design, and I knew that they contributed to intelligence assessments.

Then came Judy Miller and the New York Times: intelligence assessments say that the aluminum tubes are for centrifuges. I read the articles carefully, looking for mentions of assessments from the Department of Energy. I never saw them. But, I guessed, the multiagency assessments must have included them, and the Oak Ridge guys knew what they were doing. So maybe---???

Even if that maybe came down on the side of centrifuges, I thought, it would be some time before Iraq could have a nuclear weapon, so issuing ultimatums and pulling the inspectors out so that the US could bomb Iraq seemed unwarranted.

I was also dubious about the claim that once Saddam Hussein was gone, the people of Iraq would naturally form a democratic government with no problems. Some of what was said by people by Paul Wolfowitz used the Baltic States after the Soviet Union as an analogy. But I had spent some time learning how Estonia left the Soviet Union. I interviewed people who had participated in the process, including then-President Arnold Rüütel, in the hopes of writing a book.

[I never wrote the book; the story is well told by the film “The Singing Revolution,” and parts of it are treated in several book chapters, but I think a book is still needed.]

The transition depended upon an informed populace who had some experience of democratic rule. It ran over several years, from street protests allowed by perestroika to forming political parties that couldn’t call themselves that, to the Supreme Soviet’s declaring sovereignty (not independence!) and renaming itself the Parliament of Estonia and then to independence quickly declared as the coup unfolded against Gorbachev. As people participated in those actions, they learned more about governing. It wasn’t a matter of waking up one day and finding the government gone, much less was it done during a war.

I cringed every time the comparison was made. How could people so allegedly smart not be able to see the enormous historical differences?

Then there was Colin Powell’s presentation. I had some experience working with aerial photos when I managed environmental restorations. I thought the evidence was thin – closed trucks may be carrying anything – but, again, was not an expert in the area.

Perhaps there was something I was missing – something classified – that made the case more persuasive. So I wasn’t too vocal about my misgivings, although I would offer them up when given a chance. And I didn’t have a blog for a platform.

Some time after the war was started, several years, it became obvious why Miller and the New York Times didn’t mention the Oak Ridge or DOE intelligence assessments. They said that the tubes were unsuitable for centrifuges. In fact, that was in the original National Intelligence Estimate. The public didn’t know that until much later.

And we have seen that democracy is indeed not so easily achieved. There were, of course, no WMDs beyond a few buried chemical shells, rotting in the sand.

So I had been right. I have become more wary of what the government says, particularly in regard to matters that could lead to war. I look for confirmation outside the government.

I couldn’t have stopped the march to war all by myself, but if all those who felt as I did had spoken up, maybe it could have been slowed, might have been stopped. So now I am more vocal, particularly in areas that I know something about and that could lead to war. Or other damage to my country.

Here’s some ten-year commentary from others. The neocons are unrepentant, and I link only one summary of their comments because we’ve heard them before. Whatever went wrong wasn’t their fault.

Others who supported the war have been more forthcoming.

David Ignatius says he owes “readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense” and calls the war “one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history.”

Ezra Klein:

But at the core of my support for the war was an analytical failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support -- an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration.

Relevant documents, including the National Intelligence Estimate, from The National Security Archive.

Others who didn’t believe Iraq had WMDs.

What it was like to oppose the war.

The Lowy Institute Interpreter (I love the header photo!) has a symposium on many aspects of the war.

Numerous articles at Duck of Minerva.

Addendum (3/22/13): Short reactions from several people who were for or against the war. What I find shocking is that three of them refer to the large numbers of people (presumably the people they mostly talked to) who believed that Hussein did indeed have WMD (ill-defined, but apparently sometimes implying nuclear weapons).

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Looking back, it is hard to remember just how convinced many of us were that weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Leon Weiseltier: Those of us who supported the Iraq war ten years ago because we believed that Saddam Hussein—who had already used chemical weapons—possessed weapons of mass destruction must forever ponder the fact that he did not possess them. That we joined, or helped to establish, a near-universal consensus does not exonerate us from the unpleasant truth that President Bush took the United States into a major war on fraudulent grounds.

James P. Rubin: At the time no one really doubted the intelligence reports showing Iraq with substantial stocks of deadly viruses, germs and toxins (By contrast, the nuclear threat, “the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud,” was irresponsible scare-mongering by the Bush team).

Convinced. Consensus. No one really doubted. Wow.

These are policy people, who probably are unashamed of their lack of knowledge of scientific and technical aspects of those claims. But they might be expected to know that the Department of Energy analyzes quite a bit of intelligence from precisely those aspects. They might have wondered, as I did, what the DOE analysis said about the WMD claims.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

Bits and Pieces - March 16, 2013

So Richard Nixon talked the South Vietnamese into leaving the negotiations so he'd have an issue to work against Lyndon Johnson. And today we have the Republicans refusing to do their jobs in Congress because we have a black president.

And here's what we can be proud of as a result of all those taxes we don't have to pay.

The VIDA survey of the gender of authors of articles and reviewed books in literary magazines. Not pretty.

It's The War On Terror, Stupid!

Rand Paul did a good thing last night by filibustering on the subject of killing Americans on American soil by drones. It may open up the discussion. Unfortunately…well, there are a number of unfortunate aspects.

Helmut and I have discussed writing a series on the issues raised by drones. Unfortunately, there are many ways to look at them, and the discussion is freqently muddled by conflation of those aspects.

There’s a creepy, science-fiction feeling about drones. Impersonal, death from the sky, or maybe only surveillance. If that comes out to “only” for you.

Drones are being used, covertly, to pursue US goals in Pakistan and other countries. The goals of the action are covert or poorly defined.

Drones are the newest weapon of war, one more step in the attempt to remove participants from danger while wreaking death on the other side.

Paul’s filibuster was aimed at a single, narrow question: can the President decide to kill Americans on American soil?  Unfortunately, Rand Paul is a racist who holds the adolescent-boy fantasy of Libertarianism, which puts him on the Other Side from the liberals who have mostly been the ones complaining about the uses of drones. Being against drones puts him on the Other Side from conservatives who are invested in the War on Terror. So he is being excoriated for all that today on my Twitter feed.

There have been a great many misuses of federal power in the name of the War on Terror, from humiliation by the TSA as a requirement for air travel through torture at black sites and the continuing detention of prisoners at Guantanamo to various aspects of drone warfare. It’s time to stop all this and start acting like the great nation we would like to think we are.

The question of whether Americans can be killed on American soil is part of that, a very small part, with the wrong slant: but what if they target meeee? Get beyond that, kids. There are more important issues here, like what kind of country you want to live in. Figure that out, and the meeee question goes away. Or becomes something you have agreed to live with, depending on your answer.

There are a ton of issues about drones that need to be considered, but until we decide we want to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we’re not going to get any useful answers.

Spring Is Coming

Robins don't leave the area in winter in New Mexico the way they do back East. They wander up and down the mountains. So mid-winter, we will get a flock of robins in the yard. Or whenever.

I particularly liked this group of four today: two males front and back, two females to the side. The females are particularly pale. I thought earlier that one of them was a Townsend's solitaire, which I was lucky enough to see at the birdbath yesterday.

The real sign of spring was the rock squirrel I saw today. They go into torpor over winter, don't quite hibernate. And they destroy anything containing chlorophyll and dig holes.

And daylight saving starts this weekend.

Op-Ed in Globe and Mail

Canada's international newspaper, The Globe and Mail, asked me to write an op-ed on Iran's nuclear program. Here it is.

And I should apologize to Phron's readership. I've been writing fairly regularly at Nuclear Diner, and other aspects of my life have been getting busier. But I have been neglecting this page. I was just about to write a post here when the e-mail from the Globe and Mail came.

Bits and Pieces - February 11, 2013

What's wrong with evolutionary psychology.

Photos of snowy Moscow.

Dan Drezner is automating his blog posts about Iran. I've been thinking of doing this, too.

A US - Iran interactive time line from the New York Times.

If you really want to get down into the Iranian nuclear weeds, I'm working out carefully what we know about the Parchin facility now deadlocking the IAEA and Iran. There have been some ugly fights over what we know and what it implies. Here's the latest of three posts, with links back to the earlier ones. Four or five more posts to come.

How Gun News Has Changed

Joe Nocera this morning gave us a roundup of last week's gun news. The news of various deaths and injuries by gun, that is.

When the NRA declared January 19 Gun Appreciation Day, most of the news was about the accidental shootings at gun shows across the nation.

This is really a turnaround in how gun news is covered and an example of the change that Barack Obama has brought to the nation as president. It's what I wrote about in my recent post: the national discussion, and particularly the media had to change before legislative changes could be made.

Think back: No national paper would have run a column like Nocera's, and the coverage of Gun Appreciation Day would have struggled to link it to Martin Luther King and the inauguration. "In the best tradition of American independence..." Yeah, I can hear it.