Why has the United States not bombed Iran? The domestic politics of America's response to Iran's nuclear programme

Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis—informed by Graham Allison's famous bureaucratic politics model—of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear sites. I argue that America's abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Iran's nuclear programme but rather as (in Allison's terms) an ‘intra-national political outcome’ resulting from the ‘pulling’ of ‘Iran Threat’ interests—primarily Vice President Cheney's camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—and the countervailing ‘hauling’ of the Pentagon, the military's top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the ‘haulers’, who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish ‘pullers’.     

Development of Latent Fingermarks from Rocks and Stones

Since the beginning of recorded history, stones have been used in the commission of crimes due to their widespread availability. Stones can be used as a lethal weapon that sometimes might be the only evidence in a serious case. The common perception, even in professional fingermark circles, is that stones do not yield identifiable latent fingermarks. The authors of this research paper examined the feasibility of developing fingermarks from seven types of stones using three latent fingermark techniques: magnetic powder, cyanoacrylate fuming, and ninhydrin. The paper will demonstrate that by classifying stones and rocks according to their natural properties (porosity, permeability, and the nature of surface area), even application of the simplest development techniques can produce good results. In conclusion, chert and limestone yielded the most qualitative and quantitative results using magnetic powder. The time factor is also important in recovering latent fingermarks on stones and rocks.     

The Double Paradox of Juvenile Justice

This article considers the history of a century of juvenile justice. Illinois 'invented' the separate 'children's court' in 1899 and this concept was spearheaded in Northern America, Great Britain and continental Europe in the first decades of the new century. However, a century after its foundation the future of the juvenile court is in doubt everywhere in the Western world. Some conclude that there is a cyclical pattern in juvenile justice policies. That proposition is rejected in this article. The proposition of a cyclical pattern also presupposes that there is no real problem at stake in treating juvenile offenders. The main point of this article, however, is that juvenile justice cannot escape trying to solve a very complicated foundational issue. This issue is a double paradox, that is, juvenile justice has to solve two philosophical questions: the justification of punishment and the justification of punishment for non-adults. This diagnosis presents a new conceptual framework for an analysis of the history of juvenile justice.     

A Fifth Wave of Terrorism? The Emergence of Terrorist Semi-States

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Rapoport’s four waves thesis, this study asks whether the emergence of terrorist semi-states (TSS) in the 21st-century MENA region and Pakistan mean that we are seeing the beginning of a new (fifth) wave. We define a TSS as a rebel group that a) has control over portions of a weak state’s territory, maintaining governance there; b) but still launches terrorist attacks against third-party states. To be considered a fifth wave, the new terrorism phenomenon at hand must both fit Rapoport’s criteria of a wave (be global, have the same driving force) and also be significantly different from the prior wave. Clearly, the TSSs are different from the religious terror groups of the fourth wave in key respects: they prioritize territorial control, they engage in a much wider array of governance activities (not just social services), most of their victims have been members of the same religion—namely, Muslims (which suggests that they are driven more by the pursuit of power than by Jihad); and finally, their behavior (though not their statements) shows they have a local rather than a universal agenda. The main counter-argument is that TSSs are all Islamic and have so far not been exported globally.     

WMD: The Career of a Concept

The danger posed by “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) was the Bush administration's chief justification for invading Iraq. Amid the din of the chorus that ceaselessly repeated this phrase in 2002–2003, hardly anyone stopped to ask: what is “WMD” anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than a timeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsche's view of the truth as a “mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms… which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,” we present a history of the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was “transposed” and “enhanced” throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, “WMD” did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather “embellished poetically and rhetorically” in ways that produced and inflated the threat.