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CORRECTION:

Having read Atrios this morning, I realized that I also made the mistake of referring to the Pollack book as ” The Gathering Storm ” when I should have written ” The Threatening Storm “, the correct title. Oops. Sorry about that Mr. Pollack – hopefully you regard being confused with Winston Churchill as a backhanded compliment.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

” Look to the End ”

– Solon

WE DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT IRANIAN NUCLEAR AMBITIONS ? Check out this article from 1992. Again a longstanding rogue state problem that the bureaucracy and politicians have attempted to muddle through, ignore, minimize, downplay rather than deal with forthrightly. We need to assert the doctrine, even more clearly than President Bush has done implicitly, that irresponsible dictatorships will not be permitted to possess nuclear arms and that attempts to do so could mean war with the United States. Currently there is ambiguity on this point in foreign capitols that this policy is a phase that will pass once the Bush administration is out of office and would-be nuclear tyrants can wait America out until a Democrat gets into the Oval Office. There can be no confusion on the point that this is a permanent American policy unless we wish to live in a world twenty years from now where Burkino Faso is hurtling nuclear bombs on Ghana and terrorist groups or perhaps even multinational corporations acquire nuclear weapons.

REGIME CHANGE GETS DOWN TO THE ISSUE OF VARIABLES AND PROBABILITY: There are a few rogue state regimes but there are a zillion ways for them to kill large numbers of people, often by misusing objects and substances with legitimate purposes ( see for example Biological Weapons of Mass Destruction ). Rocket science is * not* required unless your aim is constructing a thermonuclear device small enough to fit into a cruise missile or car trunk; all that is needed to wreck immense amounts of havoc is the equivalent of a good High School level knowledge of physics and an undergraduate level education in microbiology. It is far easier to deal with a handful of regimes than to attempt to police all the goods and knowledge that could potentially cross their frontiers.