Indur Goklany at the Cato blog gives us one of the genuinely dumbest arguments I’ve heard in a long time. His started point is James Hansen’s argument that the safe, sustainable level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppm. Then Goklany observes that we’re currently well above that level, and passed 350 ppm back in 1988. Then he asks “Is the world better off today compared to 1988?” and concludes that it is. Therefore, we should let catastrophic climate change move forward unabated. After all, “But would we want to go back to the world of 1988 — or even 1998 for that matter?”

I used to think it would be good if we could get the murder rate back down to 1963 levels, but now that Goklany’s so sagely pointed out that there were no HDTVs back then we can see the foolishness of wishing to travel back in time. Because, clearly, a literal reversion to 1988 living standards is the only conceivable method of reducing carbon emissions as human beings are, as is well known, utterly incapable of devising technological and organizational methods of enhancing energy efficiency or discovering less-polluting sources.

Via Justin Logan, it seems that David Frum has sketched out a non-apocalyptic scenario in which Iran might use or threaten to use nuclear weapons:

The short answer: The world oil market.

In 1986, the US waged an undeclared proxy naval war to deter Iran from attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The US won of course and Iran lacked any effective riposte. This US operation played a decisive role in compelling Iran to accept peace in the Iran-Iraq war.

And it may have prompted Iranian leaders to decide: We need an effective counter-deterrent against the US. The US would have been much more reluctant to protect Kuwaiti tankers against a nuclear Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would act as a “Keep Out” sign to frighten the US away from a now truly Persian Gulf.

Justin notes that the U.S. would hardly be standing alone in its disquiet if the Iranians started randomly blowing up Kuwaiti oil tankers, and it’s really not clear what a small Iranian nuclear arsenal would let them get away with in the face of what would be uniform hostility from every major power and every country in the region. But beyond that, why is Iran blowing up these Kuwait tankers? In the previous Gulf go-round what happened was that Saddam Hussein launched an unprovoked invasion of Iran, the invasion went poorly, the Iranians launched a counter-offensive, then the U.S. and the Gulf states started organizing to help Saddam.

Whatever you think of that series of events, it’s certainly not evidence that Iran has long-standing ambitions to mount unprovoked attacks on the world’s oil distribution networks. Most likely, what Iran would like to do is sell oil to oil-importing nations and use the resulting funds to buy stuff.

Refugees International has a new report out about Iraq’s internally displaced people and the tie-in between this and the militia issue. Ken Bacon, President of RI, noted on a conference call that there’s been “much less focus” on the internal dimension of the Iraqi refugee problem, even though it involves a huge number of people — 2.7 million are internally displaced.

Nir Rosen visited Iraq recently and explained that due to Iraq’s lack of state capacity, the primary responsibility for taking care of refugees has fallen on militia leaders who, naturally, use that situation to consolidate their power. He said that Sadrist movements “resettle displaced Shias in the homes of the Sunnis that they displaced” where they are “not charged rent, and often provided with stipends.” In turn, he reports that “very often we saw them joining the Mahdi Army, though unlike joining the Awakening groups you don’t get a salary.” You do, however, get these refugee-related benefits.

Conversely, in Baghdad’s Sunni enclaves, Awakening groups are “giving people the homes of displaced Shias, or occasionally of people they say belonged to al-Qaeda.” Rosen also described them as “running protection rackets and extorting shopkeepers.” Meanwhile, he says that “in every Sunni neighborhood that I visited, displaced Sunnis were joining the Awakening groups” which technically isn’t supposed to be allowed (they are, after all, the Concerned Local Citizens) but the Awakening groups want the recruits and they have goodies to hand out so people sign up. According to Rosen, Awakening leaders “very openly say that we have a temporary cease-fire with the Americans because we have a more important enemy — the Iranian occupation” which is how they see the current ISCI/Dawa government.

Kristele Younes from RI notes that one consequence of the political agendas of both the U.S. and Iraqi governments is that at the moment there’s no contingency planning under way to find ways to mitigate humanitarian problems in case large-scale fighting occurs. After all, such contingency planning would involve conceding that things might get worse, and at the moment all the pressure is on talking about how much things are improving and destined to improve. She called for more American humanitarian spending and also for more spending from the Iraq government: “Iraq is sitting on a lot of money and it is only fair that it would spend some of it to respond to the humanitarian crisis.”

Here’s an exciting development — J Street, a new, progressive, Israel- and Mideast-focused organization has launched. The main idea behind the outfit is to address the paradox that most Jewish Americans have liberals views on the issues, including such matters as West Bank settlements and the need for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and yet the most politically influential members of our community take a very hawkish line on US policy throughout the entire region. Meanwhile, neoconservative foreign policy in America has, despite its “pro-Israel” orientation, produced nothing but disastrous results for the United States and Israel alike.

A lot of the traditional peace camp outfits are lending support to this effort, but what sets it aside is the J Street PAC which will do the kind of spadework in terms of fundraising that’s traditionally been lacking. Meanwhile, they’re also trying to build a MoveOn-style list of supporters that will be able to weigh-in on controversies as they arise, and also make the point to nervous politicians that they shouldn’t just assume that ever donor or volunteer they have with a Jewish-sounding name is committed to the Sheldon Adelson political agenda.

Something I note in Heads in the Sand is that one impediment to undertaking a reasonable response to 9/11 is that, psychologically speaking, it feels as if the response should somehow be proportionate to the devastating emotional impact of the attacks. And when you contemplate the possibility of something even more horrible, like a nuclear attack on a city, then it seems like the preventive measures taken should, again, be incredibly dramatic. And yet the nitty-gritty of serious non-proliferation policy is deadly dull.

Consider, for example, “Multilateralism as a Dual-Use Technique: Encouraging Nuclear Energy and Avoiding Proliferation”, a recent paper done by John Thomson and Geoffrey Forden. They’re writing about an incredibly important issue. For the non-proliferation regime to work, the majority of states who are neither “rogue” proliferators nor official Nuclear Weapons States need to be on board with the non-proliferation regime. But designing a regime that adequately safeguards their interest in civilian nuclear technology without opening the door to too much proliferation is difficult to do.

What Jeffrey Lewis has to say on the subject here is kind of a mouthful, and he’s deliberately keeping things simple whereas Thomson and Forden are boring deep into the details. And at the end of the day, the result is a paper you probably don’t want to read unless you have some kind of professional obligation to follow this issue. Certainly reading and writing about it doesn’t help you take out your frustration and anger at the horrible things that terrorists have done, nor does it give you good grounds on which to impugn the masculinity of your political opponents. But it is vitally important to actually stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.

Joe Lieberman says Barack Obama’s “got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.” Andrew asks what Lieberman can mean by this. I assume Lieberman is referring to Obama’s overwhelmingly majoritarian position on Iraq. After all, it’s been the key conceit of “centrists” like McCain and Lieberman ever since 2002 that to be for war in Iraq but somewhat aloof from the Bush administration is the centrist position. After all, it’s the view adhered to be John McCain and Joe Lieberman and McCain and Lieberman are well known moderates so their views must be moderate ones and mainstream and anyone to their left is “far left.”

That’s the central conceit of McCainism and Liebermanism alike, and it’s important to both of them to just keep repeating over and over again. After all, if they stop saying it someone might notice that whether or not either or both of them hold centrist views on some issues, they’re the two most extreme hawks in the Senate at a time when 60+ percent of the population agrees with the orthodox liberal view that we need to lay down a marker for leaving Iraq.

It’s worth saying that the sort of internationalist approach advocated in, say, Heads in the Sand (buy the damn book already, you read so much blog and never pay a dime) isn’t just about things like taking the U.N. Security Council mechanism more seriously. As Spencer Boyer points out for the Center for American Progress there’s a whole raft of treaties that the vast majority of countries have signed on to but that Republicans are keeping us out of: “In particular, the Senate should ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”

As he says, none of these things are perfect (what can you expect from a highly multinational negotiating process) but they’re all in our interests on balance, and they’re being opposed primarily because of ideological hostility to the whole idea of international treaties and efforts to create a world organized in a cooperative, positive-sum manner.

Photo by Flickr user Hober used under a Creative Commons license