Glenn Greenwald on the war party’s bizarre refusal to actually come out and say that it favors war with Iran:

For that reason, Stuttaford has been repeatedly asking the Warriors what they think we ought to do about Iran if negotiations are so misguided, and they keep refusing to answer. Finally Rubin was forced to address the question, and he began this way: “What would I suggest? When it comes to economic measures, Patrick Clawson provides some useful suggestions.” He does not, of course, say that we should confine ourselves to those “economic measures,” because that’s not what he believes. He thus proceeds to reject various other measures (while never saying which ones he favors) and then finishes with this pronouncement:

Nor do I believe it in U.S. interests to acquiesce to the Revolutionary Guard and Office of the Supreme Leader with nuclear arms. Their ideology matters; it would be unwise to project our own values upon those circles in Iran which would control such capability. With regard to much more precise options, such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so.

So Rubin is unwilling to say publicly what he thinks the U.S. should do with regard to Iran. He is willing to unveil his great insights only in secret, closed-door meetings at the AEI at shadowy gatherings of our nation’s neoconservative foreign policy geniuses, but is not willing to advocate those ideas to his fellow citizens in public forums.

Only Rubin is dumb enough to get caught up in this precise phrasing, but the basic pattern is everywhere.

This New York Times article on North Korea nuclear program intelligence is a masterpiece of reporting but written in such a way as to obscure the significance of the scoop. I’m going to try bullet points:

• The 1994 Agreed Framework froze the DPRK efforts to build a nuclear weapon using plutonium.
• In 2002, the Bush administration pulled out of the Agreed Framework, arguing that the DPRK was cheating by running a secret parallel uranium program.
• In the intervening years, the DPRK has succeeded in using its now-unfrozen plutonium program to build some bombs.
• They have not, however, had any success in building uranium bombs.
• This looked like pretty shitty policymaking for the Bush administration.
• It looks much worse, however, after we learn today that the uranium program may never have existed.

The odds look decent, in other words, that the administration effectively let the DPRK build nuclear weapons for absolutely no reason at all other than its generally bad attitude toward diplomatic agreements and “stuff Bill Clinton did.”

Good news for people in malaria-suffering countries, mostly in Africa, as a partnership between Sanofi-Aventis and Médecines sans Frontières produces a new anti-malaria drug that will be made available cheaply. I would have been interested in learning more about exactly how this partnership worked. The world of pharmaceuticals, especially pharmaceuticals for tropical diseases where the level of public health demand for drugs tends to far exceed the size of the market for them in financial terms is obviously something where the charitable sector is going to need to play a big role if you want to get things done.

But drug companies have expertise in, well, making new drugs that charities lack. So what got Sanofi-Aventis to do this and is it realistic to look for a lot more of these sorts of things in the future? Alternatively, would there be major impediments to a very well-endowed charity like the Gates Foundation just trying to set up a non-profit drug company?