Do the actions in Libya mean Iran will speed up the nuclear bomb?

The words recently used by Secretary Clinton, Senator Kerry, Ambassador Rice, ... well, the list of people is endless ... the words used to describe Gaddafi range from "delusional" to a much milder "dictatorial" ...

There are lots of delusional leaders of government. North Korea's Kim Jong-Il and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe are way on top of that pyramid, along with quite a few others.  These two together have been the cause of millions of their peoples dying early deaths.

We might even bomb the hell out of Zimbabwe, but the world knows that we won't go anywhere near North Korea.  Why?  North Korea has the bomb.  Having the bomb is the ultimate security blanket for any regime that tries to hold on to power.

Libya's Gaddafi was on that same path of acquiring a bomb--even tried buying from India!  In the end, in the international games that governments play, Gaddafi decided that he might be better off extending a peaceful hand to the West and, thereby, consolidate his choke-hold over Libya.  Thus, he abandoned his nuclear "Islamic" bomb project, and won kudos from the West.

The then British PM, Tony Blair, was all cuddly with "our man in North Africa"

Blair saw political capital in embracing the monster. The ostensible reason for this bargain was that Gaddafi would graciously abandon his WMD programme – although there is no real evidence that he has. Blair believed, too, that Gaddafi would be a valuable tool in the global war against Islamist terrorists.

And there was more in this Faustian bargain. Not only would the Bush administration welcome any intelligence that could be gleaned from this obscure part of North Africa, but Shell and BP would gain extensive drilling rights in an oil and gas-rich country much nearer Europe than the Gulf.

Imagine if Gaddafi hadn't abandoned his nuclear project.

the 2003 deal removed Colonel Qaddafi’s biggest trump card: the threat of using a nuclear weapon, or even just selling nuclear material or technology, if he believed it was the only way to save his 42-year rule. While Colonel Qaddafi retains a stockpile of mustard gas, it is not clear he has any effective way to deploy it. “Imagine the possible nightmare if we had failed to remove the Libyan nuclear weapons program and their longer-range missile force,”

So, that means that we have all the more highlighted to Iran's Grand Ayatollah Khamenei and president Ahmadinejad that their theocratic regime might want to insure itself by speeding up making the bomb.  So, should we be surprised with news like this?

 This also means that Israel will now be all the more itchy to prevent Iran from getting one.  Jeffrey Goldberg's thought experiment seems more real now than when his essay was published:

What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

Happy spring, everybody :)

College graduates and unemployment.Not a pretty scenario.

The idea of Occam's Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is also most likely the best and correct one.  A related idea is that if something walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is damn well a duck.

All set?  I premise this posting with those observations because everywhere we turn, there is an ever increasing body of evidence that we are overselling higher education.  Even this blog has enough of those.  With all that evidence, one would think that that simple explanation fits.  But, it is so difficult to get people to acknowledge that.

In one of his recent columns, Paul Krugman came close to concluding about the oversell, but then veered off into a discussion of the economic stagnation of middle class.  And, yet, he himself provides additional evidence of the wasteful allocation of resources for higher education, when he writes:

Mark Thoma leads us to new research from the San Francisco Fed showing that recent college graduates have experienced a large rise in unemployment and sharp fall in full-time employment, coupled with a decline in wages. Why is this significant?
The answer is that it’s one more nail in the coffin of the notion that employment is depressed because we have the wrong kind of workers, or maybe workers in the wrong place.

Wrong kind of workers, and workers in the wrong place ... while college grads are unemployed or underemployed.  Add these and what do you get?  This is not the time to push more high school graduates into higher education, and yet that is precisely what we continue to do.

Krugman prefers to console himself with an explanation that this is demand side slump, which means that he probably thinks that stimulating the economy will somehow miraculously provide those millions of productive jobs for college grads.  I think not.  Though, in saying this, I fully recognize the futility of going against a recipient of the Swedish Central Bank Prize.  (editor: why don't you simply say a Nobel Prize recipient?  Because, it is not a Nobel Prize.)

Where are we in job losses since peak employment?  Check this out:

This is one serious slump we are in strictly in terms of employment.  By continuing to emphasize the overall growth in GDP, economists and politicians are misleading us about the depth of the problem.

Now, of course there is an element of the demand slump, and there is evidence for that--such as:

the corporate saving glut - no I didn't mean the 'global saving glut'. Furthermore, the corporate saving glut is manifesting itself into the labor market, creating high and persistent unemployment. ... unemployment is not structurally higher, it's that when firms do not reinvest corporate profits, the lack of income flow manifests itself into the unemployment rate.

Even if one wholly subscribes to this explanation, how does pushing more young adults to college help?

So, who is the real Obama? The Libyan answer is ...?

Salon's War Room is up in arms (yes, a bad pun!) against the military action in Libya, and there is very little there with which I disagree.  Particularly informative were this piece, this, and this.

One that was simply fantastic, and very depressing, contrasted Candidate Obama on presidential war powers versus President Obama exercising those very overreaching powers.  Glenn Greenwald points out the harsh contrast:

consider what candidate Barack Obama said about this matter when -- during the campaign -- he responded in writing to a series of questions regarding executive power from Charlie Savage, then of The Boston Globe:

Q. In what circumstances, if any, would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress? (Specifically, what about the strategic bombing of suspected nuclear sites -- a situation that does not involve stopping an IMMINENT threat?)
OBAMA:  The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent.

Obama's answer seems dispositive to me on the Libya question:  "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."  And he went on to say that the President could constitutionally deploy the military only "in instances of self-defense." Nobody is arguing -- nor can one rationally argue -- that the situation in Libya constitutes either an act of "self-defense" or the "stopping of an actual or imminent threat to the nation."  How, then, can Obama's campaign position possibly be reconciled with his ordering military action in Libya without Congressional approval

Awful, right?

Ralph Nader comes out of the shadows:

Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader recently rattled off a list of U.S. military and intelligence directives -- apparently including action in Libya -- that he views as egregious violations of international law and grounds for impeachment:

Why don't we say what's on the minds of many legal experts; that the Obama administration is committing war crimes and if Bush should have been impeached, Obama should be impeached.

Hey, Nader, thanks for making me aware many, many years ago that the two parties have rigged the system so much that they are nothing but tweedledum and tweedledee.