So here’s an example of the danger of tying foreign policy to humanitarian aid. The US and North Korea inked a deal on nuclear inspections and negotiations that would free up food aid for the North Korean people. Then the Kim Jong-un regime announced they would engage in a long-range missile test. And as a result, the US will suspend the food aid.

Goddammit, John Bolton will not put up with this bullshit!

In the President’s press conference, he focused mostly on Iran, to the exclusion of even a single question about Eric Holder’s asserted right to kill American citizens without a trial. I think the President runs a risk asserting that he didn’t have a “containment policy” on Iran. But his focus has been on the near-term consequences of Israel acting along to strike at Iranian facilities. He also took aim at the amped-up rhetoric at home pushing the world into war; in his presser, he had some pretty strong words about that

Undercutting Israeli saber-rattling on the topic, Western leaders agreed today to new negotiations with Iran on their nuclear program. And Iran possibly agreed to new inspections. That may give diplomacy a chance for now, but the President’s speech to AIPAC, in which he ruled out a “containment policy,” may be more ominous in the long run.

Prior to all the rising tensions around Iran, the US and Israel had scheduled a large set of joint military exercises in the spring. Maybe this wasn’t necessarily a provocative act, but with everything happening around Iran, it gained a new resonance. So today, when the two sides postponed the exercises, some saw it as a way to cool those tensions.

A provocative article in Foreign Policy magazine suggests that Israeli Mossad officers recruited members of the Pakistani terrorist organization Jundallah to aid in the covert operations against Iranian targets, including bombings in the Baluchistan region and potentially the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. The Mossad officers, according to Mark Perry, posed as American intelligence agents during the recruitment, using US passports.

Anwar Malek, an Algerian member of the monitoring team, told Al Jazeera he resigned because of what he saw, and said that the mission was falling apart.

“What I saw was a humanitarian disaster. The regime is not just committing one war crime, but a series of crimes against its people,” he said.

The Internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA, bouncing around Congress don’t really work unless you apply them globally. If other countries do not vigorously protect their entertainment and high-tech industry’s copyrights in the same way as the United States, those industries will lose market share domestically. So the US has taken to pressuring other countries to pass anti-piracy laws through their legislatures. And this pressure rose to the level of threats, we have now learned from leaked letters.

The Taliban has agreed to open an office in Qatar, seen as a precursor to peace talks in Afghanistan. The Taliban want release of their prisoners from Guantanamo as part of a goodwill gesture preparatory to peace talks. Congress is going ballistic, and because of the NDAA and other bills, the process for getting clearance to release Guantanamo detainees is almost impossibly complex.

The death of Kim Jong-il comes just as the United States was about to re-engage with North Korea, a plan now thrown into doubt because of the succession to Kim Jong-un. Hours before Kim’s death, news leaked about an imminent large grain shipment to North Korea, seen as an olive branch to restart talks on the country’s nuclear program.