GOT IT IN ONE!!!!!
Topic: Dumb Congressional Tricks

Mr Obama warned today that if he is elected president, he would order US forces to hit extremist targets on Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan if embattled military ruler President Pervez Musharraf failed to act.

"Such statements are being made out of sheer ignorance," Pakistan's Minister of State for Information, Tariq Azeem, said.

"They are not fully apprised about the ground realities and not aware of the efforts by Pakistan."

Islamabad has bristled against a string of similar threats in recent weeks by the administration of US President George W. Bush, whose top counter-terror official in July refused to rule out US strikes in Pakistan.

Mr Musharraf, struggling to contain a wave of Islamist violence unleashed by the army's bloody storming of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad three weeks ago, himself firmly rejected any US action last week.

"We have said before that we will not allow anyone to infringe our sovereignty," Mr Azeem said.

"If there is any actionable intelligence they should tell us and only our forces will take action on it and they are quite capable of it."

The minister suggested that Mr Obama's comments were prompted by Washington's inability to curb the ongoing Taliban insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan, where US-led forces toppled the hardline regime in late 2001.

"This seems to be a reaction to their own failure in Afghanistan to control the US casualties and instead of addressing the situation there, they are finding scapegoats and damaging their own cause," Mr Azeem added.

Pakistan foreign ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam today warned against "point-scoring" by US presidential candidates on vital security issues.

Mr Musharraf abandoned Islamabad's support for the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He has said that a top US official warned that Pakistan would be bombed back to the "stone age" if it failed to join Washington's "war on terror".

Davjd Hobson (R) Ohio, vs. Our Nuclear Arsenal
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Congressional Tricks
(NOTE: Please feel free to circulate the following essay. Especially, circulate it among your elected officials in Washington. The fate of the nation might one day depend on it.)


Back in what I think was the second Presidential debate of the 2004 election, John Kerry saved up what he thought might prove a "hot button" issue with voters until the end of the show - he accused Bush of wasting money on (and for the full effect, you have to imagine a motor oil-curdling sneer combined with liberal-grade hypocritical mock indignant nasal droning) "bunker-busting nukes," as though they were a particularly loathsome sexually transmitted disease contracted in singles bars outside Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Reflecting on the ploy in my blog (this one) later, I decided that Kerry and his brain (t)rust may have reasoned that this was a good way to reclaim the possible defectors to Ralph Nader in the looney-left spectrum while not doing much damage to the center-left and centrist base of Democratic voters. Of course, the Kerryistas probably had trouble conceiving anyone in their party who actually likes nuclear weapons or a Republican who doesn't.

Well, back in my younger days, I could have named you several Democrats who, if they didn't love nuclear weapons, thought they looked pretty spiffy on top of missiles aimed at the Communist Bloc. Usually, two of them represented me in the Senate and a good few of them were our state's delegation in the House of Representatives.

And there's apparently at least one Republican in the House of Representatives who just plain hates nukes - at least the new types of nukes we'll need to fight "asymmetric wars" against terrorists and rogue states who are apt to fight us from deeply buried mountain cave-and-tunnel complexes such as Tora Bora on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or specially-prepared deep underground bunkers favored by national leaders who expect to have to hide in them one day.

We may also want to expand our capability to decapitate enemy leadership targets without significant collateral damage to enemy civilians, something we might be able to do with greater precision with ultra-small nuclear warheads optimized for specific weapons effects such as percussive shock or either low or extremely high levels of hard radiation.

The fellow against all of this is Rep. David Hobson, a Republican from Ohio, who has used his position as Chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee to eliminate the US$27.5 million the Administration requested to continue to fund a study to determine whether those nuclear bunker busters John Kerry found so repulsive could actually be made to take out deeply-buried targets without hurting civilians.

Perspective: most of a US$2.75 trillion defense appropriations bill is apt to get through Congress without too much trouble. What the Department of Energy's research labs are asking for is 1/101000 of that budget.

If the guys who make military transports and bombers with on-board toilets just got their toilet seats from Home Depot, I'm sure we could make a good start on carving out the budget for new nuclear weapon designs. Give the DoD contract for hammers and such to Sears and we're almost out of the woods.

Of course, if the House and Senate would just stop using the Department of Defense as their private travel agency, we might pick up a quarter-billion in savings, just like that.

Let 'em use Expedia.com like the rest of us - and pay for "fact-finding missions" to the French Riviera (to salve the feelings the President hurt when he defended our national security and enforced a half-dozen UN resolutions without asking "Pardon me, but may we Poupon Saddam Hussein?") or Fiji (that famous hotbed of international tension) with their own Master Cards.

If Rep. Hobson thinks the defense budget needs trimming, his time could be better spent on other things besides limiting future Presidents' options for dealing with deeply-entrenched enemy installations or countering other threats which might be best countered with a burst of energy concentrated far beyond either the capabilities of conventional or present-technology nuclear weapons.

Bunker-busting nukes aren't the only avenues of research being blocked by David Hobson - he's also using the power of the Congressional purse to deny even preliminary funding for new warhead designs in a program called the Advanced Concepts Initiative.

Now, these might be defensible choices - but so far, Hobson's only defended them to his staff and to reporters - and, of course, to weapons labs researchers and Pentagon officials who came to him asking to be able to help defend the country 20 years from now.

I don't recall the whole House ever being surveyed on the matter of developing new nuclear weapons. I certainly don't recall bunker-busting nukes coming up in a national political debate before John Kerry used them as a cheap parting shot in a Presidential debate, and I follow that sort of thing in the news.

Since having bunker busting nukes or weapons like them may one day make the difference between national security and ruinous defeat not only for us Americans, but for Western civilization, I think it's wrong to bottle the funds to develop them up in Hobson's subcommittee on what amounts to his strong personal antipathy to nuclear weapons. The problem is the strong personal affinity that rogues, tyrants and less-than-stable democracies have for nuclear weapons - they are rapidly becoming the TEC-9 automatic of developing nations.

Our edge in the technology of destroying other nations' nuclear arsenals on the ground may one day be a major component of our total national security - if the money for even small-scale studies of new nuclear weapon technologies we need to reliably kill other countries subterranean installations ever gets out of David Hobson's House subcommittee. No one else, not even the President, has been able to overrule Rep. Hobson on this matter so far, not even to protect the country.

The rationale for Rep. Hobson's refusal to fund development of radically new types of nuclear weapons is that knowledgeable people in the field say they won't work - the sort of thing said about ICBMs in the 1940s by "Knowledgeable Men" such as FDR's science advisor Vannevar Bush, who once said he wished that people would leave the idea of hitting something on the other side of the Earth with a missile out of their thinking, because it couldn't possibly happen.

Despite this authoritative death blow to the concept of the ICBM by a Knowledgeable Man, we have purchased thousands of them over the years. During this time, we have fired one or two ICBMs from our stockpile at the Pacific Test Range on Kwajalein Island at regular intervals (with the nuclear warheads replaced by practice warheads), just to make sure that FDR's science advisor wasn't right after all. So far, Vannevar Bush has proven not only wrong, but wrong time after time after time.

This being the case, and Knowledgeable Men having been dead wrong on all sorts of things before and since Vannevar Bush and the ICBM, it might be nice if Rep. Hobson had to defend this choice he's repeatedly taken out of our hands to his colleagues in the House and the nation at large, preferably on C-SPAN where we folks in the cheap seats can watch.

We deserve better than Hobson's Choice for our tax dollars.