Exit strategery.
Meanwhile, Joseph Cannon puts an unsettling story about the steam tunnels under the Capitol next to a recently passed rule regarding the decapitation of government and comes up with a brutally elegant solution to pretty much every last one of the Republicans’ problems. —And while I am well aware that indulging in this sort of conspiracy-mongering and irresponsible speculation is little more than a cheaply glowing pellet, nevertheless: we are all nutbar conspiracy theorists now. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up flaming sidecar going over a cliff with a drunken rebel yell.
My God, my God, they really are gearing up to fight the last war.
To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical US attack on Russia’s nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned US nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning.
This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington’s actual strategy, which the US government has spent decades perfecting. The real US war plan may call for first targeting Russia’s command and control, sabotaging Russia’s radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures—all of which would make the actual US force far more lethal than our model assumes.
And anyway, they’ve lied about every other goddamn thing they’ve ever done.
When pretending to be “muy borracho” so the madcap stereotypical third-world bus driver will slow down and move over, you don’t take the time to explain to the bus that no, really, you’re only projecting an implacable, irrational lethality; honest, this is merely normal, defensive driving, and your priority is a diplomatic solution to a problem everybody on the highway can recognize. —That shit’s for whoever’s sitting white-knuckled in your passenger seat, mentally running the numbers as to how fast you’re going and how quick they can get the door open and how soft the shoulder might be.
34°4'48" N, 49°42'0" E.
Arak is not an old city, though it is the capital of the Markazi Province, one of the oldest settled areas on the Iranian plateau.
That white patch in the upper-right is a sometime lake and salt-flat, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s the Kavir-e Mighan (or Miqan, or Miyqan, or MeiQan, depending), except this page says it’s the Shur Gel. I don’t remember; I do remember seeing plumes of dust rising hundreds of feet into a hard blue-white sky, the only sign of a convoy of trucks driving across it, lost somewhere in the shimmering heat-haze.
There’s a university in Arak, now: the Islamic Azad University of Arak, founded in 1985, some 23,000 students, degrees in drama, agricultural science, Islamic theology, English literature. —Actually, there’s several universities: the Arak University of Medical Sciences, the University of Arak, the Tarbiat Moallem University of Arak, a campus of the Iran University of Science and Technology. I don’t know how old any of those are. I don’t remember any of them; I remember a small town and dust and open sewers and the incongruities of an American-style suburb thrown up away from all that, platted blocks of yellow grass and red-brick houses and the high-rise apartment towers off over that way.
If I’m remembering correctly, the suburbs were at the southern end of Arak; we looked out on the mountains to the south and west. We’d drive up there and go tromping about. I spelled my name in flat rocks with letters taller than myself in the snow, but when we got back in the car and drove back down to our house and I got out and looked back, I couldn’t see them. When we went out into the country for the last day of Nawruz, I remember it looked a lot like this:
And I remember we could look out the window of our car and see farmers threshing wheat the way they had for centuries:
But if nothing changed for centuries, a lot can happen in thirty years.
Thirty miles to the northwest these days there’s a brand-new heavy water production plant. Heavy water is water made with deuterium atoms, rather than simple, light-water hydrogen; it’s used to moderate neutrons in nuclear reactors that run off natural uranium, rather than enriched uranium. Just the ticket if you’re trying to get a nuclear program off the ground.
I haven’t seen the list of 400 possible sites the president plans to attack in Iran, but I can tell you the Arak heavy water facility is on it. I don’t know if it’s hardened enough to require a nuclear bomb. If so, it’ll (probably) be a B61-11, which could generate between 25,000 and 1.5 million tons of radioactive debris—depending on the yield “dialed in”—some thirty miles northwest of a house I lived in, thirty years ago.
If not, it’ll just take a lot of conventional ordnance. —And I know, I know: who cares? The Russians loved their children, too. So did the Iraqis.
I just can’t help but take this personally. I’m only human.
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs
Mutually assured destruction.
Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about “circular errors probable” and “MIRV decoys” and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, “I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen up here.” At that point, I agreed with her.
What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho. Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.
As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as a speeding Mexican bus…
And I wish to God I could believe it was nothing more than this; nothing more than a projection of implacable, irrational lethality, a bit of cakewalk brinksmanship, steely-eyed diplomats pounding tables to distract from the inevitable blink.
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.
—Seymor Hersh, “The Iran Plans”
But we cannot trust the people we’ve put in charge of our country. Whether they’re thinking of Iran’s nascent nuclear program as John Perry Barlow’s speeding Mexican bus or not, the fact is they will not blink and they will not falter and they will not turn away.
Can I be crystal fucking clear for a moment? The destruction I mean is not some tit-for-tat exchange of container nukes for bunker-busters. (It’s not like the people we’ve put in charge of our country will miss New York and LA all that much anyway.) —What I mean is if we do this thing, the audiences of tomorrow will cheer as their pulp heroes bravely square off toe-to-toe with implacable American stormtroopers. What I mean is, there is no difference in this world or the next between dropping enough conventional and nuclear ordnance to take out 400 suspected sites and flying a couple of passenger jets into office buildings on a cloudless autumn day. Either is so monstrous as to be beyond any possible, rational measurement or comparison.
Look! See! How good we have gotten, at fighting dragons!
Shorter 2007:
Because we had to nuke Iran, we drove what was left of this country completely into the ditch.
Emir el Bahr.
The Week—Felix Dennis’ Readers’ Digest for polijunkies—had their 3rd Annual Opinion Awards ceremony last night. One of the awards they give is “Blogger of the Year”; Joshua Micah Marshall won the first one ever given out, Powerline got it last year, and last night, Ed Morrissey was so honored. “Who?” I said to myself. [Google.] Oh. Okay. Maybe I need to get out more? —Meanwhile, the Koufax winners have been announced, and Felix Dennis is selling Dennis Publishing, purveyors of Blender, Stuff, Maxim, and The Week. Chin-chin.
Still a tool after all these years.
Andrew Sullivan cranks up the conveyor belt to help mainstream the dangerously stupid and disastrously reductive bullshit attacks on ecologist Eric Pianka. Roy tells you why it’s stupid and reductive, and PZ tells you why it’s dangerous and disastrous, and the Panda’s Thumb has some links to what really went down. Death threats and creationist anti-intellectualism, ahoy!
Aphorism.
When New Yorkers say “Fuck you,” they mean “Hello,” and when Angelenos say “Hello,” they mean “Fuck you.” —When the right wing says “Fuck you,” they mean “I want to take an axe handle and beat you to death, you traitorous cunt, and hang your faggot body from a tree branch for all the world to see.”
Stupidity is a process, not a state.
Pam Spaulding patiently explains how hair works to a baldly racist smashmouth prick.
I mean, I knew somebody’s daughter went to see her father and he killed her.
According to statistics obtained from the World Bank, about 113 million total number of women are missing as a result of female infanticide (female fœtuses being aborted or newborn girls being killed) and neglect of young girls, which has led to a severe gap in the demographic composition of the population of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and Turkey.
—Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, “Making the World a More Secure Place: Combating Violence Against Women”
Just to put it in a little perspective, that’s about the number of women and girls in the US.
—zuzu
This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Women and ‘gendercide’”
I’m not intimidated by the threats and the attempts to make me shut my mouth, because living in a rich western European country like this one, I have protection that I otherwise would not have in Somalia or in Africa or in any other Islamic country.
—“Moving stories: Ayaan Hirsi Ali”
In our remaining minutes, I learned that Bill doesn’t believe that women don’t always have a choice about whether or not to have protected sex. He swore that I was the first woman ever to tell him that sometimes contraception fails. And he doesn’t believe that women who do choose to abort take that decision very seriously and aren’t happy about it. He claims that 99% of the 800+ abortions that were performed in South Dakota last year were “abortions of convenience”—whatever the heck that means.
—Nancy Goldstein, “My dinner with Napoli”
I returned to the office. Mayor Blount was sitting down, looking very tired. He had cleaned himself off. He said, “I did it for you. Do you understand?”
He seemed like my father, I can’t say it better than that. I realized he was under a terrible strain, he had taken a lot on himself for me. He went on to explain how Dr. Fay was very dangerous, she was what they call a cripto-female (crypto?), the most dangerous kind. He had exposed her and purified the situation. He was very straightforward, I didn’t feel confused at all, I knew he had done what was right.
We discussed the book, how man must purify himself and show God a clean world. He said some people raise the question of how can man reproduce without women but such people miss the point. The point is that as long as man depends on the old filthy animal way God won’t help him. When man gets rid of his animal part which is woman, this is the signal God is awaiting. Then God will reveal the new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey. He said some men here had seen an Angel of the Lord. This was very deep, it seemed like it echoed inside me, I felt it was inspiration.
Then the medical party drove up and I told Dr. Premack that Dr. Fay had been taken care of and sent away, and I got in the car to drive them out of the Liberated Zone. However four of the six soldiers from the roadblock refused to leave. Capt. Parr tried to argue them out of it but finally agreed they could stay to guard the oil-drum barrier.
I would have liked to stay too the place was so peaceful but they needed me to drive the car. If I had known there would be all this hassle I never would have done them the favor. I am not crazy and I have not done anything wrong and my lawyer will get me out. That is all I have to say.
—Racoona Sheldon, “The Screwfly Solution”
Yup. Still trying, Ringo.
“I will no longer link to any writer who does not disclose his identity and affiliations in an obvious place or manner, or reply to online commenters who decline to disclose their names.”
Stupid fucking bigots.
Remember when they told us the ban on “a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effect of marriage” in Ohio’s anti–same-sex marriage amendment wouldn’t affect domestic violence protections for unmarried couples? —Turns out they’re as good at crafting amendments as they are at balancing budgets, or running wars. (Or spotting satire. Or plucking beams from their eyes. Or getting ahead without cannibalizing their own. Or anything at all but dazzling a handful of pundits at Beltway cocktail parties. Well, that, and bleeding us all dry.)
Quis custodiet ipsos immane?
During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the US Constitution or international conventions, adding he was “astounded” at the “hypocritical” reaction in Europe to Gitmo. “War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,” he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. “Give me a break.” Challenged by one audience member about whether the Gitmo detainees don’t have protections under the Geneva or human-rights conventions, Scalia shot back: “If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”
—Newsweek, “Should Scalia Recuse Himself from the Gitmo Case?”
There are now about 490 prisoners at Gitmo, and “55 percent of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or coalition allies.
“Only 8 percent of the detainees were characterized as Al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40 percent have no definitive connection with Al Qaeda at all and 18 percent have no definitive affiliation with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
“Only 5 percent of the detainees were captured by United States forces. [A total of] 86 percent of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86 percent of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were turned over to the United States at a time at which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.”
—Nat Hentoff, “Gitmo: The Worst of the Worst?”
Cheney shuns Electoral College requirement
In written statement, he says results may impede performance of the executive’s constitutional duties
Mon Dec 15, 2008
When Vice President Cheney received the tallies of electoral votes from the fifty states and the District of Columbia, he issued a statement saying that he did not feel bound by requirements that he inform Congress as to the results of the election.
Cheney indicated that he felt he could withold the information if he decided that disclosure would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.”
Cheney wrote, citing President Bush: “The executive branch shall construe the provisions… that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch… in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withold information…”
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which the Bush administration has cited its constitutional authority to bypass a law.
After The New York Times disclosed in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the military to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans’ international phone calls and emails without obtaining warrants, as required by law, Bush said his wartime powers gave him the right to ignore the warrant law.
And when Congress passed a law forbidding the torture of any detainee in US custody, Bush signed the bill but issued a signing statement declaring that he could bypass the law if he believed using harsh interrogation techniques was necessary to protect national security.
Past presidents occasionally used such signing statements to describe their interpretations of laws, but Bush has expanded the practice. He has also been more assertive in claiming the authority to override provisions he thinks intrude on his power, legal scholars said.
Bush’s expansive claims of the power to bypass laws have provoked increased grumbling in Congress. Members of both parties have pointed out that the Constitution gives the majority the right to select the electors who choose the president, and the executive branch the duty to abide by that choice.
“Can you imagine the turmoil if the electoral college upholds the results of the popular vote?” said Cheney at the reception ceremony, referring to the November election which saw unprecedented landslide victories for Democrats at state and national levels.
“Some Democrats in Congress have decided this president is the enemy and the work he’s done keeping this nation safe and secure is grounds for removing him from office,” Cheney said. “The American people have already made their decision. They agree with the president.”
When asked if the electoral college votes would ever be tallied, Cheney was quick to add: “I never said never. This is a long war we’re facing. National security has to be taken into account. We’re examining every option. Nothing’s off the table.”
He went on to say, regarding the Democrats: “If they are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol.”
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee agreed with the vice president, saying: “It’s true. Cheney can’t sing a note.”
This newspaper did not respond to repeated Democratic requests for a chance to comment on this story.
