More Nuclear Deal

Here's some more from Brian Beutler on the worsening US-India nuclear deal. As approved by congress, we were going to violate international law and give India nuclear assistance unless India made a new nuclear test. The Indians, it seems, were prepared to look that gift horse in the face, so the Bush administration is hatching one of its ignore the law schemes, whereby "Bush has agreed to go beyond the terms of the deal that Congress approved, promising to help India build a nuclear fuel repository and find alternative sources of nuclear fuel in the event of an American cutoff, skirting some of the provisions of the law."

Needless to say, we'll also be urging the international community to clamp down on Iran's nuclear weapons program. The background here is that conservative Republicans think the NPT is useless and that the correct way to prevent "bad guys" from acquiring nuclear weapons is brute force (c.f., invasion of Iraq, desire to go to war with Iran) -- a series of unprovoked, illegal, preventive wars. Liberals tend to think that's wrong, but Democratic Party elected officials are really, really good at putting important questions of principle aside in order to pander to domestic ethnic lobbies, thus most Democrats backed the bill (including Sens. Clinton and Obama -- if John Edwards or Bill Richardson has ever said anything about this please let me know)