Sure, those nukes will be just fine . . . .

Perhaps I'm alone in enjoying a leisurely perusal of the Bureau of Industry and Security's monthly "Major Cases" list available at http://www.bis.doc.gov/news/index.htm#annual It's got all sorts of delicious little morsels of corporate wrong-doing, like for instance Chiquita Banana's financing of terrorism in Columbia for which they've been convicted in the US Department of Justice. But, that's really another post. What I love most about the Major Case report is the number of times "UAE" and "Iran" appear in the same case log. Essentially, every sensitive technology or piece of dual-use equipment that makes its way into Iran does so via the UAE. And it's probably with pretty high-level approval as well. Oman, the UAE neighbor, appears in a NYTimes article today on just such charges. That's why the Bush Administration's decision to sign a deal with the UAE on nuclear technology is so . . . well, stupid. FP has a story to this effect here. This comes (again, ironically) just as El Baradei points out in this Guardian article that the ME region is a nuclear powder keg just waiting for some short-sighted policy to ignite the . . . . oh wait, this UAE deal must be it.