Tournament: GSU | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dartmouth CM | Judge:
See open source

Tournament: GSU | Round: 3 | Opponent: Northwestern MV | Judge: Brian Severson
Off

Clean Debt Ceiling vote will pass
BLOOMBERG 9 – 20 – 13 Senate Budget Chief Sees Republican Yield on Debt Lifting, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-19/senate-budget-chief-sees-republican-yield-on-debt-lifting.html
Republicans seeking to curb President … Al Hunt” airing this weekend.
“The downside of not paying our bills is our credit-rating tanks,” Murray said. “That affects every family, every business, every community. It affects Main Street. It affects Wall Street.”
Murray said she also expects … Democrat in the Senate’s leadership.

Plan kills Obama’s agenda
KRINER 10 Assistant professor of political science at Boston University Douglas L. Kriner, “After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War”, page 276-77

One of the mechanisms by … have had the predicted effect.  

Losing authority would embolden the GOP on the debt ceiling fight
SEEKING ALPHA 9 – 10 – 13 “Syria Could Upend Debt Ceiling Fight” http://seekingalpha.com/article/1684082-syria-could-upend-debt-ceiling-fight

Unless President Obama can totally … from the House is a 67-75 probability.
I reach this probability by looking within the whip count. I assume the 164 declared and#34;noand#34; votes will stay in the and#34;noand#34; column. To get to 218, Obama needs to win over 193 of the 244 undecided, a gargantuan task. Within the and#34;noand#34; column, there are 137 Republicans. Under a best case scenario, Boehner could corral 50 and#34;yesand#34; votes, which would require Obama to pick up 168 of the 200 Democrats, 84. Many of these Democrats rode to power because of their opposition to Iraq, which makes it difficult for them to support military conflict. The only way to generate near unanimity among the undecided Democrats is if they choose to support the President (recognizing the political ramifications of a defeat) despite personal misgivings. The idea that all undecided Democrats can be convinced of this argument is relatively slim, especially as there are few votes to lose. In the best case scenario, the House could reach 223-225 votes, barely enough to get it through. Under the worst case, there are only 150 votes. Given the lopsided nature of the breakdown, the chance of House passage is about one in four.
While a failure in the House … minute deal can be struck.

Destroys the global economy
DAVIDSON 9 – 15 – 13 co-founder and co-host of Planet Money, a co-production of the NYT and NPR Adam Davidson, Our Debt to Society,  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/our-debt-to-society.html?pagewanted=alland_r=1and

The Daily Treasury Statement, a public accounting of what the U.S. government spends and receives each day, shows how money really works in Washington. On Aug. 27, the government took in $29 million in repaid agricultural loans; $75 million in customs and duties; $38 million in the repayment of TARP loans; some $310 million in taxes; and so forth. That same day, the government also had bills to pay: $247 million in veterans-affairs programs; $2.5 billion to Medicare and Medicaid; $1.5 billion each to the departments of Education and Defense. By the close of that Tuesday, when all the spending and the taxing had been completed, the government paid out nearly $6 billion more than it took in.
This is the definition of a … economy becomes riskier and costlier.

Global nuke wars
Kemp 10—Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Geoffrey Kemp, 2010, The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East, p. 233-4

The second scenario, called Mayhem … -thirds of the planet’s population.
Off
Using national security to justify restraints on the executive is self-defeating.  Security discourse consolidates authoritarian politics.
Aziz RANA Law at Cornell 11 “Who Decides on Security?” Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers, Paper 87, http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clsops_papers/87 p. 1-7
Today politicians and legal scholars … matters of threat and safety.

National security frame justifies extinction in the name of saving human life.
Dillon 96—Michael, University of Lancaster October 4, 1996, “Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought”

The way of sharpening and … prospect of human species extinction.

Alternative—Challenge to conceptual framework of national security.  Only our alternative displaces the source of executive overreach. Legal restraint without conceptual change is futile.  
Aziz RANA Law at Cornell 11 “Who Decides on Security?” Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers, Paper 87, http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clsops_papers/87 p. 45-51

If both objective sociological claims … to become ever more entrenched.

1NC CP 

Solvency

Their restriction is a smokescreen and … Perverse?” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 59, 2007

These assumptions are all questionable. … to fall on deaf ears. Pg. 912-913

Wartime will force Obama to … ,” Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 69, 2008, pg. 391

The critical difficulty with a contextual … of the War Powers Resolution. Pg. 407-409

Stalemate creates an antiwar congressional coalition that guts our commitment to Afghanistan
Lieberman 10—Independent Democratic senator from … , November 16, 2010, pg. http://tinyurl.com/m5z623w

This yearand#39;s midterm elections marked … and resurgent Republicans in Congress.
Seizing these opportunities will require both parties to break out of a destructive cycle that has entrapped them since the end of the Cold War and caused them to depart from the principled internationalist tradition that linked Democratic presidents like Truman and Kennedy with Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan.
During the 1990s, too many Republicans in Congress reflexively opposed President Clintonand#39;s policies in the Balkans and elsewhere. Likewise, during the first decade of the 21st century, too many Democrats came to view the post-9/11 exercise of American power under President Bush as a more pressing danger than the genuine enemies we faced in the world.
The larger truth was that the foreign policy practices and ideals of both President Clinton and Bush were within the mainstream of American history and values. And if one can see through the fog of partisanship that has continued to choke Washington since President Obama was elected in 2008, the same is true of the new administration as well.
President Obama has moved to … to our security at home.

Afghanistan’s future will be determined by decisions made during US withdrawal.  A botched withdrawal destabilizes Pakistan, fuels Afghani reprisal murders and encourages Russian adventurism.
Miller 12—Professor of International Security … -April 2012, pg. http://tinyurl.com/lnplsb7

In fact, the war is ……. … against women and religious minorities.
1NC – Modeling

No reverse casual modeling internal … that has already been set
Boot 11 (Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, leading military historian and foreign-policy analyst, “We Cannot Afford to Stop Drone Strikes,” Commentary Magazine, October 9, 2011, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/09/drone-arms-race/)
The New York Times engages … example thrown back at them.
“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Missile Contagion, who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”
This is a familiar trope of … a hit team and sending a drone?

No impact to Chinese drones -~-- not advanced enough, no manpower, and no experience
Zhou 12 (Dillon Zhou, graduate of the International Relations Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, “China Drones Prompts Fears of a Drone Race With the US,” Policymic, December 2012, http://www.policymic.com/articles/19753/china-drones-prompt-fears-of-a-drone-race-with-the-us)
There are several facts that … their drones during real operation.

Even with the tech, China won’t use drones dangerously in East Asia -~-- they fear international backlash and setting a precedent for US use
Erickson and Strange 13 (Andrew Erickson, associate professor at the Naval War College, Associate in Research at Harvard Universityand#39;s Fairbank Centre, Austin Strange, researcher at the Naval War Collegeand#39;s China Maritime Studies Institute, graduate student at Zhejiang University, “China Has Drones. Now How Will it Use Them?” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2013, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/China-has-drones-Now-how-will-it-use-them-30207095.html)
Beijing, however, is unlikely to … statements from Chinaand#39;s Defence Ministry.

China already had the chance … confidence and no political will
Erickson and Strange 13 (Andrew Erickson, associate professor at the Naval War College, Associate in Research at Harvard Universityand#39;s Fairbank Centre, Austin Strange, researcher at the Naval War Collegeand#39;s China Maritime Studies Institute, graduate student at Zhejiang University, “China Has Drones. Now How Will it Use Them?” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2013, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/China-has-drones-Now-how-will-it-use-them-30207095.html)
What about using drones outside … untested drones, systems, and operators.

Plan’s modeling restricts … Chinese strikes on Uighur separatists
Bergen and Rowland 12 (Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, Jennifer Rowland, Special to CNN, “A Dangerous New World of Drones,” CNN News, October 8, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/opinion/bergen-world-of-drones)
But without an international framework … along its border with Pakistan.

Drone strikes are key -~-- suppresses Xinjiang separatist violence and instability
Erickson and Strange 13 (Andrew Erickson, associate professor at the Naval War College, Associate in Research at Harvard Universityand#39;s Fairbank Centre, Austin Strange, researcher at the Naval War Collegeand#39;s China Maritime Studies Institute, graduate student at Zhejiang University, “China Has Drones. Now How Will it Use Them?” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2013, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/China-has-drones-Now-how-will-it-use-them-30207095.html)
Yet there is a reason why … as in the Indian Ocean.

The … impact is Chinese nuclear terrorism
Ferguson and Potter, 4 — president of the Federation of American Scientists, former project director of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University, former scientist-in-residence at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, winner of the 2003 Robert S. Landauer Lecture Award from the Health Physics Society, consultant for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, former physical scientist in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Nuclear Safety at the U.S. Department of State, co-chairman of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group, M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Boston University, AND, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies and Founding Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Policy Studies in Russia (Charles D. and William C., “The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism”, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Monterey Institute, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2004, http://jeffreyfields.net/427/Site/Blog/30F67A03-182C-4FC7-9EFD-A7C321F6DC8D_files/analysis_4faces.pdf)
China has been gradually modernizing … nuclear weapon in that country.

Chinese nuclear terrorism … leads to global nuclear war
Ayson 10 – Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
But these two nuclear worlds—a … still meet with a devastating response.

Tournament: GSU | Round: 5 | Opponent: Kansas | Judge:
1nc – kritik

Imperialist framing of non-liberal societies as unstable threats justifies eliminating non-liberal forms of life.
Adam David MORTON Politics @ Nottingham 5 “The ‘Failed State’ of International Relations” New Political Economy 10.3 p. 372-374
A pathology of deviancy, aberration and breakdown
Emergent across a host of contemporary … as humanitarian or public-spirited’.22

It’s try or die—this new colonialism dehumanizes populations resulting in unending violence
Batur 7 Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3

War and genocide are horrid, … ” are Iraq and New Orleans.

Alternative: Resist their calls for prescriptive legal modeling.  Questioning the universality of the liberal-legal model opens up alternative futures for social justice.
Kerry RITTICH Law @ Toronto 3 Enchantments of Reason/Coercions of Law 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 727, Lexis

To paraphrase Wendy Brown, legal … rules both "private" and "public."
1nc – topicality 

The Aff isn’t topical – relying on treaties to create restrictions aren’t statutory or judicial
YOO 02 Professor of Law, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley John C. Yoo, RESPONSE ESSAY: Rejoinder: Treaty Interpretation and the False Sirens of Delegation, California Law Review, July, 2002, 90 Calif. L. Rev. 1305
Professor Van Alstine's argument, however, turns on the assumption that Congress also enjoys equally sweeping power to delegate rulemaking power to the federal judiciary. He claims that if Congress can delegate such power to the judiciary by statute, then the treatymakers must similarly be able to delegate it by treaty. n174 However, the underlying assumption is flawed. Delegation of rulemaking power by Congress to the judiciary differs from delegation to the executive in several crucial respects. First, unlike the executive branch, the judiciary cannot claim to be democratically accountable. n175 Second, the judiciary does not possess technocratic expertise in specific regulatory areas, at least not in the way contemplated by Chevron v. NRDC. n176 Since Congress's delegation power is not what Professor Van Alstine presumes it to be, the analogy between Congress and the treatymakers fails.
Regardless of whether such broad … limited circumstances, to the courts.

Vote neg – expanding restrictions beyond JUDICIAL or STATUTORY makes anything topical, destroys any meaningful limit on the topic.

increase is pre-existing
Ripple, 87 (Circuit Judge, Emmlee K. Cameron, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Frances Slocum Bank and Trust Company, State Automobile Insurance Association, and Glassley Agency of Whitley, Indiana, Defendants-Appellees, 824 F.2d 570; 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 9816, 9/24, lexis)

Also related to the waiver … risk which incurred the loss.

Vote neg --- affs that don’t … the desirability of existing restrictions
1nc – cp 

COUTNERPLAN TEXT
The United States Congress should pass legislation that the opposition to Al-Bihani v. Obama that treaties ratified by the United States are a restriction on the war powers authority of the President of the United States in the area of indefinite detention.  The legislation should reference Charming Betsy decision as a foundation for their legislation.

Comparative evidence provides Congressional action solves credibility and domestic incorporation of international law better than the courts
Rooney, 06—JD, Drake University Law School  (Heather, 54 Drake L. Rev. 679, “PARLAYING PRISONER PROTECTIONS: A LOOK AT THE INTERNATIONAL LAW AND SUPREME COURT DECISIONS THAT SHOULD BE GOVERNING OUR TREATMENT OF GUANTANAMO DETAINEES,” Spring, lexis)
Will this question of whether … Supreme Court alone can resolve.
VI. Conclusion
The United States has determined that the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, do not qualify as "prisoners of war" under the Geneva Conventions. n422 Detainees who were members of the terrorist  *745  organization known as al Qaeda do not qualify as POWs because the Geneva Conventions are only applicable to "armed conflicts" - a term that does not include conflicts with terrorists. n423 While the Geneva Conventions were applicable to the armed conflict with Afghanistan, Taliban detainees have not been afforded POW status because they fail to meet certain requirements set out in Article 4 of Geneva III. n424 Because they have not been conferred POW status, both al Qaeda and Taliban detainees are ineligible to receive the important protections that the Geneva Conventions provide. n425
Nevertheless, the Guantanamo detainees are … or not at all. n430
In June of 2004, the United States Supreme Court ruled that citizen-detainees who have been classified as enemy combatants have the right to contest the factual basis for their classification. n431 Further, both American citizens and alien detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay can now petition United States federal courts for habeas corpus review. n432 Although the Supreme Court did not expressly reference the need to comply with treaties or other sources of international law, the August 2004 decisions are  *746  a tentative step in the right direction - they certainly bring the United States more in line with the requirements of treaties it has ratified and, perhaps more importantly, with the expectations of the international community.
The Supreme Court decisions pertaining … both at home and abroad.

Congressional opposition to the authority curbs Presidential action—robust statistical and empirical proof
KRINER 10 Assistant professor of political science at Boston University Douglas L. Kriner, “After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War”, page 228-231
Conclusion
The sequence of events leading … conduct of military operations accordingly.
1nc – legitimacy disad

Wartime means Obama will ignore the decision.  Noncompliance undermines the Court’s legitimacy  
Pushaw 4—Professor of law @ Pepperdine University Robert J. Pushaw, Jr., “Defending Deference: A Response to Professors Epstein and Wells,” Missouri Law Review, Vol. 69, 2004
Civil libertarians have urged the … Taney learned the hard way.59
Professor Wells understands the foregoing institutional differences and thus does not naively demand that the Court exercise regular judicial review to safeguard individual constitutional rights, come hell or high water. Nonetheless, she remains troubled by cases in which the Court’s examination of executive action is so cursory as to amount to an abdication of its responsibilities—and a stamp of constitutional approval for the President’s actions.60 Therefore, she proposes a compromise: requiring the President to establish a reasonable basis for the measures he has taken in response to a genuine risk to national security.61 In this way, federal judges would ensure accountability not by substituting their judgments for those of executive officials (as hap-pens with normal judicial review), but rather by forcing them to adequately justify their decisions.62
This proposal intelligently blends a concern … him to shoulder full responsibility. Pg. 968-970 

Fight with President devastates court legitimacy. Two centuries of judicial decisions prove they can’t solve without his support    
Devins and Fisher 98—Professor of Law … explosive) social and political setting.
A more telling manifestation of how public opinion affects Court decisionmaking is evident when the Court reverses itself to conform its decisionmaking to social and political forces beating against it.76 Witness, for example, the collapse of the Lochner era under the weight of changing social conditions. Following Roosevelt's 1936 election victory in all but two states, the Court, embarrassed by populist attacks against the Justices, announced several decisions upholding New Deal programs.' In explaining this transformation, Justice Owen Roberts recognized the extraordinary importance of public opinion in undoing the Lochner era: "Looking back, it is difficult to see how the Court could have resisted the popular urge for uniform standards throughout the country-for what in effect was a unified economy.""8
Social and political forces also … and other branches of government.'
It is sometimes argued that courts operate on principle while the rest of government is satisfied with compromises." This argument is sheer folly. A multimember Court, like government, gropes incrementally towards consensus and decision through compromise, expediency, and ad hoc actions. "No good society," as Alexander Bickel observed, "can be unprincipled; and no viable society can be principle-ridden."'95
Courts, like elected officials, cannot … system ostensibly based on consent."98 pg. 93-98

That underpins the rule of … reverse it and federal accountability
Levasseur 02 (Alain A. Levasseur, Professor of Law, Louisiana State University, “Legitimacy of Judges,” The American Journal of Comparative Law, Fall, 50 Am. J. Comp. L. 43, Lexis)
The texts, the writings, and … the Court but the Nation." 

Rule of law collapse leads to global nuclear war
Rhyne 58 (Charles S., Professor Emeritus – Reed College, ABA Net, Law Day History, 5-1, http://www.abanet.org/publiced/lawday/rhyne58.html, Gender Edited)
Law and courts exist to … nuclear war overtake our people. 

Independently, federal accountability checks extinction
Adler 96 (David Adler, Professor of Political Science, Idaho State University, “The Constitution and Conduct of American Foreign Policy,” p. 23-25)
{11} The structure of shared … executive hegemony in foreign affairs.
1nc – congressional deference disad

Precedent for war powers deliberation now.  It will check US militarism
Hunter 8/31/13 - Chair of the Council for a Community of Democracies Robert E. Hunter (US ambassador to NATO (93-98) and Served on Carter’s National Security Council as the Director of West European Affairs and then as Director of Middle East Affairs, “Restoring Congress’ Role In Making War,” Lobe Log, August 31, 2013, pg. http://www.lobelog.com/restoring-congress-role-in-making-war/
But the most remarkable element … members of Congress regularly demand.
But seeking authorization for the use of force from Congress as opposed to conducting consultations has long since become the exception rather than the rule. The last formal congressional declarations of war, called for by Article One of the Constitution, were against Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary on June 4, 1942. Since then, even when Congress has been engaged, it has either been through non-binding resolutions or under the provisions of the War Powers Resolution of November 1973. That congressional effort to regain some lost ground in decisions to send US forces into harm’s way was largely a response to administration actions in the Vietnam War, especially the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, which was actually prepared in draft before the triggering incident. The War Powers Resolution does not prevent a president from using force on his own authority, but only imposes post facto requirements for gaining congressional approval or ending US military action. In the current circumstances, military strikes of a few days’ duration, those provisions would almost certainly not come into play.
There were two basic reasons for abandoning the constitutional provision of a formal declaration of war. One was that such a declaration, once turned on, would be hard to turn off, and could lead to a demand for unconditional surrender (as with Germany and Japan in World War II), even when that would not be in the nation’s interests — notably in the Korean War. The more compelling reason for ignoring this requirement was the felt need, during the Cold War, for the president to be able to respond almost instantly to a nuclear attack on the United States or on very short order to a conventional military attack on US and allied forces in Europe.
With the Cold War now … Law Review, Vol. 54, Issue 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 685-726

Judicial abstention from war powers … courts, to do the work.
IV. Conclusion
There is much we can … , as Madison and Marshall envisioned. Pg. 724-725
Militarism risks World War III.  We must check the expansionist desires
Boyle 12 - Professor of International Law @ University of Illinois College of Law Francis A. Boyle (PhD. degrees in Political Science from Harvard University), “Unlimited Imperialism and the Threat of World War III. U.S. Militarism at the Start of the 21st Century,” Global Research, December 25, 2012, pg. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unlimited-imperialism-and-the-threat-of-world-war-iii-u-s-militarism-at-the-start-of-the-21st-century/5316852

Historically, this latest eruption of … the heads of all humanity.
1nc – solvency

Obama will disregard the Court.  He is on record
Pyle 12—Professor of constitutional law … Studies Quarterly, Volume 42, Issue 4, December 2012, Pg. 867–880

Preventive Detention
But this is not the … “enhanced interrogation techniques” (Editorial 2011b).

The ruling changes nothing.  President will win the ground game
Scheppele 12—Professor of Sociology and … or eventually, was another question.
Bad though the legal plight of suspected terrorists has been, one might well have expected it to be worse. Before 9/11, the dominant response of courts around the world during wars and other public emergencies was to engage in judicial deference. n7 Deference counseled courts to stay out of matters when governments argued that national security concerns were central. As a result, judges would generally indicate that they had no role to play once the bullets started flying or an emergency was declared. If individuals became collateral damage in wartime, there was generally no judicial recourse to address their harms while the war was going on. As the saying goes, inter arma silent leges: in war, the law is mute. After 9/11, however, and while the conflict occasioned by those attacks was still "hot," courts jumped right in, dealing governments one loss after another. n8 After 9/11, it appears that deference is dead.
 *93  But, I will argue, deference … under the constraint of constitutionalism.
Treaties Adv 

No chance the Courts enforce I-Law
Daniel Abebe and Eric A. Posner 11, Assistant … responsible for advancing international law.
*528 

1. The American Judiciary's Contribution to International Law
   Foreign affairs legalists celebrate the … the power to do so. n126

Treaties will fail
Holmes 10---VP, foreign policy and defense studies, Heritage. Frmr Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. While at the State Department, Holmes was responsible for developing policy and coordinating U.S. engagement at the United Nations and 46 other international organizations. Member of the CFR. Frmr adjunct prof of history, Georgetown. PhD in history, Georgetown (Kim, Smart Multilateralism and the United Nations, 21 Sept. 2010, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/smart-multilateralism-when-and-when-not-to-rely-on-the-united-nations)
The need for multilateralism is … States for starkly different reasons.

Judicial involvement in war power authority debates turns and escalates every impact and destroys rapid response
POSNER and VERMEULE 07 *Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor of Law at Harvard Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, Oxford University Press page 17-18
Whatever the doctrinal formulation, the … , and the judges know this.

Effective fast response and mission planning is key to deterring every conflict globally
KAGAN and O’HANLON 07 resident scholar at AEI and senior fellow in foreign policy at Brookings Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon, “The Case for Larger Ground Forces”, April 2007, http://www.aei.org/files/2007/04/24/20070424_Kagan20070424.pdf
We live at a time when … , it is also badly overdue.

Warming adv

No spillover – tech won’t be adopted by China or India – can’t solve warming without the biggest emitters on board

No extinction from warming
NIPCC 11 (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, “2011 Interim Report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change,” http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/2011report.html)
The first period they examined … than guesswork (see also Chapman, 2010). 

Warming is irreversible – consensus of most qualified scientists
Romm 3-18 Joe, PhD in Physics from MIT, Senior Fellow at American Progress, editor of Climate Progress, former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, “The Dangerous Myth that Climate Change is Reversible,” http://theenergycollective.com/josephromm/199981/dangerous-myth-climate-change-reversible
The CMO (Chief Misinformation Officer) … risks of harmful climate change.

Not anthropogenic – other factors are more important and there is a diminishing curve. Evidence to the contrary is media hysteria
Paterson 11 Norman R., Professional Engineer and Consulting Geophysicist, PhD in Geophysics from University of Toronto, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, “Global Warming: A Critique of the Anthropogenic Model and its Consequences,” Geoscience Canada, Vol 38, No 1, March, EbscoNatural phenomena comparatively have greater effects, temperature increases came before increases in CO2, cyclical warming, sun spots, magnetic fields, volcanoes, media exaggerates
The term ‘global warming’ is … in short supply until recently. 

Negative feedbacks solve
Singer et al 11 S Fred, PhD, a distinguished atmospheric physicist and first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, Craig Idso, editor of the online magazine CO2 Science and author of several books and scholarly articles on the effects of carbon dioxide on plant and animal life, Robert M Carter, marine geologist and research professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report
In the 2009 NIPCC report, Idso … CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Kim  et al. (2010) write that DMS ?represents 95 of the natural marine flux of sulfur gases to the atmosphere (Bates et al., 1992; Liss et al., 1997),? and they say it ?may be oxidized to form non sea-salt sulfate aerosols, which are known to act as cloud condensation nuclei and thereby exert a cooling effect by absorbing or scattering solar radiation.? They cite Charlson et al. (1987), who first described the intriguing and important chain of events. They also note ?DMS is generated by intracellular or extracellular enzymatic cleavage of DMSP dimethylsulfoniopropionate by DMSP-lyase, which is synthesized by algae and bacteria, following DMSP secretion from producer cells or release following autolysis or viral attack,? while noting that ?grazing activity can also result in DMSP conversion to DMS if DMSP and DMSP-lyase are physically mixed following grazing,? citing Stefels et al., 2007, and Wolfe and Steinke, 1996.
Working in the coastal waters … global warming in the future.?

Ice age is coming now – … causes extinction – only warming solves
Chapman 08 (Phil Chapman, geophysicist and astronautical engineer, bachelor of science degree in Physics and Mathematics from Sydney University, a master of science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh,” 4/23/08, The Australian, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sorry-to-ruin-the-fun-but-an-ice-age-cometh/story-e6frg73o-1111116134873)
What is scary about the … possible you may be mistaken."
Newest evidence confirms the ozone threat was a sham. Depletion hasn’t occurred and effects have been minimal.
Lieberman ‘7  (Ben, Senior Policy Analyst for Energy and Environment – Heritage Foundation, China Post, “MONTREAL PROTOCOL AND OZONE CRISIS THAT WASN'T”, 9-14, L/N)
Environmentalists have made many apocalyptic … occurred in the first place.

Tournament: tournament | Round: 2 | Opponent: Florida Frank-Prescott | Judge: Galloway
1nc – cp 

The United States Congress should pass a statutory restriction that mandates congressional oversight of the National Security Administration’s Operation Bullrun and Sigint, prohibit the placement of backdoors in encryption standards, and mandate the National Security Administration must acquire a warrant from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in adversarial process before proceeding with hacking US and European civilian software. 

Politics
Obama is selling the Iranian deal now – Stars are aligned – needs to hold off congress from more action
PARSI 2/18/14—President of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, US-Iran deal: Compromise is key, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/us-iran-deal-compromise-key-201421845935181913.html

As a new phase of nuclear talks begins between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) in Vienna on February 18, one thing is clear: From here onwards, diplomacy depends primarily on the ability of the presidents of Iran and the US to absorb and sell compromise.
The stars could not be better aligned for a US-Iran breakthrough. Regional developments - from the instability following the Arab spring to the civil war in Syria - have significantly increased the cost of continued conflict, as has the escalation of the nuclear issue with steadily growing Iranian capabilities and ever tightening economic sanctions.
Domestically, developments are also favourable for a deal. Iran's hardliners and proponents of a narrative of resistance have been put on the defensive by Hassan Rouhani's election victory in June 2013. And Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has thus far firmly backed Rouhani's negotiation strategy.
In Washington, proponents of Israeli Prime Miinister Benjamin Netanyahu's line have suffered several defeats over the past year, from the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, to the call for military action in Syria, to the failure to pass new sanctions on Iran, rendering their influence less decisive. All three defeats were, in no small part, due to the mobilisation of pro-diplomacy groups in the US. Timing-wise, striking a deal during Rouhani's first year and during Obama's last years in office is also ideal.
That doesn't mean, however, that negotiations will be easy. On the contrary, the hard part begins now.
In the interim deal, the main concessions exchanged were increased transparency and inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, halting the expansion of the enrichment program, and ending it at the 20 percent level. In return, Iran would get Western acceptance of enrichment on Iranian soil, and agreement that Iran eventually will enjoy all rights granted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as well as some minor sanctions relief.
Going forward, Obama will face severe difficulties offering relief on key sanctions such as those on oil and banking, since these are controlled by Congress.
Obama can temporarily waive Congressional sanctions, but the utility of waivers is questionable due to the proportionality principle established in the Istanbul talks in the spring of 2012.
Reversible Western concessions, the Istanbul talks established, will have to be exchanged for reversible Iranian measures and vice versa. To extract irreversible concessions, similarly irreversible measures have to be offered.
Sanctions waivers are fundamentally reversible. They usually last only six months and have to be actively renewed by the president - including by whoever occupies the White House after 2016.
If Obama can only offer Iran waivers, Tehran will likely respond in kind. Its implementation of the Additional Protocol - a pivotal transparency instrument - would be time limited and subject to continuous renewal (just like the waivers) rather than being permanent. This is tantamount to adding a self-destruction mechanism to the deal. Such a deal is harder to sell, and even harder to keep. To be durable, the deal must have strong elements of permanence to it, which requires irreversible measures. It is foreseeable that waivers could be used during the first phase of the implementation of a final deal; partly to test Iranian intentions, partly because actually lifting sanctions can take years.
Washington, however, will push for the implementation phase of the final deal to be very lengthy - up to 25 years - and for waivers to be used throughout this period. According to this plan, sanctions wouldn't be fully lifted until a quarter century after the final deal has been agreed upon, i.e. when Iran's nuclear file has been fully normalised.

Plan causes causes internal Democrat defection
LOOMIS 7—Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Department of Government at Georgetown University Dr. Andrew J. Loomis, “Leveraging legitimacy in the crafting of U.S. foreign policy”, March 2, 2007, pg 36-37, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/9/4/8/pages179487/p179487-36.php

Declining political authority encourages defection. American political analyst Norman Ornstein writes of the domestic context, In a system where a President has limited formal power, perception matters. The reputation for success—the belief by other political actors that even when he looks down, a president will find a way to pull out a victory—is the most valuable resource a chief executive can have. Conversely, the widespread belief that the Oval Office occupant is on the defensive, on the wane or without the ability to win under adversity can lead to disaster, as individual lawmakers calculate who will be on the winning side and negotiate accordingly. In simple terms, winners win and losers lose more often than not. Failure begets failure. In short, a president experiencing declining amounts of political capital has diminished capacity to advance his goals. As a result, political allies perceive a decreasing benefit in publicly tying themselves to the president, and an increasing benefit in allying with rising centers of authority. A president’s incapacity and his record of success are interlocked and reinforce each other. Incapacity leads to political failure, which reinforces perceptions of incapacity. This feedback loop accelerates decay both in leadership capacity and defection by key allies. The central point of this review of the presidential literature is that the sources of presidential influence—and thus their prospects for enjoying success in pursuing preferred foreign policies—go beyond the structural factors imbued by the Constitution. Presidential authority is affected by ideational resources in the form of public perceptions of legitimacy. The public offers and rescinds its support in accordance with normative trends and historical patterns, non-material sources of power that affects the character of U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. 

New sanctions will cause war – prefer newest comprehensive study
ARMBRUSTER 2/18/14—National Security Editor for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund Ben Armbruster, Bipartisan Expert Group Says New Iran Sanctions Will Undermine Diplomacy, http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/02/18/3300741/iran-project-sanctions-diplomacy/

A new report from a bipartisan group of experts at the Iran Project released on Tuesday finds that opponents of new sanctions on Iran at this time are largely correct in that they would lead to a break-down of diplomacy, isolate the U.S. from its negotiating partners and embolden hard-liners in Tehran.
The Iran sanctions battle in the Senate has stalled for now, but it’s unclear if the House will take up the matter again, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is reportedly working on language with other House leaders.
The Iran Project’s report analyzes arguments for and against the Senate Iran sanctions bill that was introduced last December by Sens. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who have argued that new sanctions will give the U.S. more leverage in nuclear talks with Iran.
But, the report says, “It is di?cult to argue that a new sanctions bill is intended to support the negotiations when all the countries doing the negotiating oppose it.”
Kirk, Menendez and other supporters of the bill say the sanctions have a delayed trigger and will kick in in six months or if Iran backs out of the deal. Not so, the Iran Project says. “After carefully reading the bill line by line and consulting with both current and retired Senate staff the relevant committees, it appears that the critics are correct: the change in sanctions law takes effect upon passage,” the report says, which would most likely put the United States in violation of the interim nuclear agreement reached in Geneva in November
On whether new sanctions will weaken the international coalition on imposing existing sanctions, “some countries would continue to honor some sanctions,” the Iran Project says if the Senate sanctions bill passes. “Still, it would seem that on balance, the net result would be less pressure on Iran.” The report also says that unilateral congressional action on sanctions now “would feed an unwelcome narrative” to America’s partners, the U.K., France, China, Russia, Germany and others, that the U.S. can’t live up to its promises and is an unreliable partner.
Many, like Sen. Patrick Murphy (D-CT), have argued that placing new sanctions on Iran will undermine relative moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who supports a diplomatic approach with the U.S. The Iran Project agrees. “It is very di?cult to imagine that the sanctions bill would do anything but undermine Rouhani, as he attempts to steer Iran on a di?erent path. This is an assessment shared not only by Iran experts, and Iranian expats who have opposed the regime, but also by Israeli military intelligence, which has concluded that Rouhani may represent a fundamental shift in Iranian politics.”
“It is difficult to escape the conclusion that a new sanctions bill would increase the probability of war, even if it does not guarantee such an outcome,” the report says.
The bipartisan Iran Project has issued several reports on the Iran nuclear issue. In 2012, the group concluded that attacking Iran would risk an “all out regional war” lasting “several years” and that In order to achieve regime change, the report says, “the occupation of Iran would require a commitment of resources and personnel greater than what the U.S. has expended over the past 10 years in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

That escalates to World War III
Reuveny 10 - Professor of political economy @ Indiana University Dr. Rafael Reuveny (PhD in Economics and Political Science from the University of Indiana), “Guest Opinion: Unilateral strike on Iran could trigger world depression,” McClatchy Newspaper, Aug 9, 2010,  pg. http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/news/speaking_out/reuveny_on_unilateral_strike_Iran.shtml

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely have dire consequences, including a regional war, global economic collapse and a major power clash.
For an Israeli campaign to succeed, it must be quick and decisive. This requires an attack that would be so overwhelming that Iran would not dare to respond in full force.
Such an outcome is extremely unlikely since the locations of some of Iran’s nuclear facilities are not fully known and known facilities are buried deep underground.
All of these widely spread facilities are shielded by elaborate air defense systems constructed not only by the Iranians, but also the Chinese and, likely, the Russians as well. By now, Iran has also built redundant command and control systems and nuclear facilities, developed early-warning systems, acquired ballistic and cruise missiles and upgraded and enlarged its armed forces.
Because Iran is well-prepared, a single, conventional Israeli strike — or even numerous strikes — could not destroy all of its capabilities, giving Iran time to respond.
A regional war
Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear program Israel destroyed in 1981, Iran has a second-strike capability comprised of a coalition of Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Hezbollah, Hamas, and, perhaps, Turkish forces. Internal pressure might compel Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to join the assault, turning a bad situation into a regional war.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, at the apex of its power, Israel was saved from defeat by President Nixon’s shipment of weapons and planes. Today, Israel’s numerical inferiority is greater, and it faces more determined and better-equipped opponents.
Despite Israel’s touted defense systems, Iranian coalition missiles, armed forces, and terrorist attacks would likely wreak havoc on its enemy, leading to a prolonged tit-for-tat.
In the absence of massive U.S. assistance, Israel’s military resources may quickly dwindle, forcing it to use its alleged nuclear weapons, as it had reportedly almost done in 1973.
An Israeli nuclear attack would likely destroy most of Iran’s capabilities, but a crippled Iran and its coalition could still attack neighboring oil facilities, unleash global terrorism, plant mines in the Persian Gulf and impair maritime trade in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
Middle Eastern oil shipments would likely slow to a trickle as production declines due to the war and insurance companies decide to drop their risky Middle Eastern clients. Iran and Venezuela would likely stop selling oil to the United States and Europe.
The world economy would head into a tailspin; international acrimony would rise; and Iraqi and Afghani citizens might fully turn on the United States, immediately requiring the deployment of more American troops. Russia, China, Venezuela, and maybe Brazil and Turkey — all of which essentially support Iran — could be tempted to form an alliance and openly challenge the U.S. hegemony.
Replaying Nixon’s nightmare
Russia and China might rearm their injured Iranian protege overnight, just as Nixon rearmed Israel, and threaten to intervene, just as the U.S.S.R. threatened to join Egypt and Syria in 1973. President Obama’s response would likely put U.S. forces on nuclear alert, replaying Nixon’s nightmarish scenario.
Iran may well feel duty-bound to respond to a unilateral attack by its Israeli archenemy, but it knows that it could not take on the United States head-to-head. In contrast, if the United States leads the attack, Iran’s response would likely be muted.
If Iran chooses to absorb an American-led strike, its allies would likely protest and send weapons but would probably not risk using force.
While no one has a crystal ball, leaders should be risk-averse when choosing war as a foreign policy tool. If attacking Iran is deemed necessary, Israel must wait for an American green light. A unilateral Israeli strike could ultimately spark World War III.

T

Intelligence Collection is not an OFFENSIVE cyber operation
WAXMAN 11 Associate Professor, Columbia Law School; Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. Matthew C. Waxman, Cyber-Attacks and the Use of Force: Back to the Future of Article 2(4), The Yale Journal of International Law, Summer, 2011, The Yale Journal of International Law
If these inferences about U.S. government strategic thinking are correct, the U.S. government probably prefers an effects-or consequences-based interpretation of "force" or "armed attack" with respect to cyber-attacks not only for what it includes (and therefore what the Charter prohibits and what could trigger self-defense rights), but also for what it excludes. Computer-based espionage, intelligence collection, or even some preemptive cyber-operations or  *435  countermeasures designed to disable an adversary's threatening capabilities, for example, would generally not constitute prohibited force because these activities do not produce destructive consequences analogous to a kinetic military attack. n61 Experts inside and outside the government widely agree that the United States is especially strong relative to other states with respect to its ability to penetrate and collect information from others' systems. n62 Consequently, while very concerned about U.S. vulnerabilities to these activities and eager to prevent them, U.S. planners may be reluctant to draw boundaries too tight, lest those boundaries impede their own ability to infiltrate and extract information from others' systems or to prepare to knock out hostile systems in advance of full-fledged attacks. Of course, efforts to draw clear lines between these efforts regarded as short of "force" and prohibited offensive attacks raise tough questions of how to measure and judge the consequences and causal proximity of hostile intrusions, as well as tough technical questions of distinguishing intelligence collection (e.g., extraction of data or mapping foreign information systems) from initiation of offensive operations (e.g., installing malicious code intended to disrupt those systems). In cyberspace, these activities may look identical, especially in real time. n63 

Oversight isnt a statutory restriction
KAISER 80 The Official Specialist in American National Government, Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress Congressional Action to Overturn Agency Rules: Alternatives to the Legislative Veto; Kaiser, Frederick M., 32 Admin. L. Rev. 667 (1980)
In addition to direct statutory overrides, there are a variety of statutory and nonstatutory techniques that have the effect of overturning rules, that prevent their enforcement, or that seriously impede or even preempt the promulgation of projected rules. For instance, a statute may alter the jurisdiction of a regulatory agency or extend the exemptions to its authority, thereby affecting existing or anticipated rules. Legislation that affects an agency's funding may be used to prevent enforcement of particular rules or to revoke funding discretion for rulemaking activity or both. Still other actions, less direct but potentially significant, are mandating agency consultation with other federal or state authorities and requiring prior congressional review of proposed rules (separate from the legislative veto sanctions). These last two provisions may change or even halt proposed rules by interjecting novel procedural requirements along with different perspectives and influences into the process.
It is also valuable to examine nonstatutory controls available to the Congress:

1. legislative, oversight, investigative, and confirmation hearings;
   2. establishment of select committees and specialized subcommittees to oversee agency rulemaking and enforcement;
   3. directives in committee reports, especially those accompanying legislation, authorizations, and appropriations, regarding rules or their implementation;
   4. House and Senate floor statements critical of proposed, projected, or ongoing administrative action; and
   5. direct contact between a congressional office and the agency or office in question.
   Such mechanisms are all indirect influences; unlike statutory provisions, they are neither self-enforcing nor legally binding by themselves. Nonetheless, nonstatutory devices are more readily available and more easily effectuated than controls imposed by statute. And some observers have attributed substantial influence to nonstatutory controls in regulatory as well as other matters.3

Limits – they allow offensive cyber operations to have a large scope including wiretapping – independent part of war powers that was explicity not in the topic 

Ground – no ground based off of espionage, only large-scale attacks and oversight is the status quo – means the aff doesn’t have to defend Obama won’t circumvent, which is key neg ground 

No authority for all of the things listed in the 1ac PLAN TEXT – makes then extra-topical and impossible to be negative – set a precedent and don’t just reject the extra-topical portions of the aff. We have to waste CX and 1NC time getting back to square one 

CP
The United States Federal Government should pass a concurrent Congressional resolution expressing Congressional support for restricting the President’s war powers authority for the National Security Administration’s Operation Bullrun and Sigint, prohibit the placement of backdoors in encryption standards, and mandate the National Security Administration must acquire a warrant from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in adversarial process before proceeding with hacking U.S. and European civilian software. 

The counterplan solves the aff without being overly restrictive
Gersen and Posner, 8 - Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law, The University of Chicago (Jacob and Eric, “Soft Law: Lessons from Congressional Practice” 61 Stan. L. Rev. 573, lexis)
Soft statutes can also play an important role in the allocation of authority between Congress and the President. Consider the question of how the courts should evaluate executive action at the boundaries of Article II authority. In Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, n113 Justice Jackson famously established a typology for understanding the borders of Article II power. "When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum ... ." n114 When Congress has said nothing or there is concurrent authority, there is a "zone of twilight" n115: When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain. Therefore, congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence may sometimes, at least as a practical matter, enable, if not invite, measures on independent presidential responsibility. n116 The President is on weakest ground when Congress has disapproved of the action: "When the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb, for then he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter." n117 Justice Jackson's language is instructive. He does not say "when a formal statute grants or denies presidential authority." Instead, he refers to the express or implied will of Congress, suggesting that implicit acquiescence will be enough to justify executive action in the zone of ambiguous executive authority. The soft statute should be the preferred mechanism for articulating congressional views in this setting n118 because it is a better indicator of legislative views than legislative inaction. There are dozens of reasons Congress fails to act, and negative inferences in the context of Article II powers are especially hazardous. In fact, the soft law analytic frame makes clear that Justice Jackson's typology is actually incomplete. Speaking of congressional agreement, disapproval, or silence is unnecessarily crude. The House might authorize the presidential action and the Senate might expressly disavow it (or vice versa), creating a twilight of the twilight category. In fact, Congress does sometimes use resolutions for these purposes. For example, during 2007, a concurrent resolution was introduced, "expressing the sense of Congress that the President should not initiate military action against Iran without first obtaining authorization from Congress." n119 During the same Congress, Senate Resolutions were offered to censure the President, Vice-President, and Attorney General for conduct related to the war in Iraq, detainment of enemy combatants, and wiretapping practices undertaken without warrants. n120 Another proposed resolution expressed the sense of the Senate that the President has constitutional authority to veto individual items of appropriation without additional statutory authorization. n121 These potential soft *604 statutes were not passed by majorities, but they are precisely the sort of information on the scope of permissible executive authority that would inform Justice Jackson's analysis. n122 In this scenario, legislative sentiments, expressed in nonbinding mechanisms, are taken as inputs in the decision-making processes of other institutions - the courts - that themselves generate binding rules, that is, hard law. Even without judicial involvement, however, resolutions that assert congressional authority or limitations on presidential authority may influence the way that the two political branches share power with each other - either as moves in a game where each side must both cooperate and compete, or as appeals to public opinion. n123

Avoids politics
Harvard Law Review, 11 (“A CHEVRON FOR THE HOUSE AND SENATE: DEFERRING TO POST-ENACTMENT CONGRESSIONAL RESOLUTIONS THAT INTERPRET AMBIGUOUS STATUTES” 124 Harv. L. Rev. 1507, April, lexis)

If Congress wishes to resolve a statutory ambiguity, it always has the option of passing a law via bicameralism and presentment. In reality, however, passing laws is extremely difficult, and often the legislative enactment costs are simply greater than the benefits of resolving the ambiguity correctly. n1 Indeed, these high legislative enactment costs are among the reasons that so many of our statutes set forth broad principles rather than specify concrete requirements: gaining consensus on concrete textual mandates imposes even more costs on the already difficult process of legislation. A future Congress may want to clarify these vague statutory mandates as societal, legal, or technological circumstances change, as the consequences of certain policy choices become more apparent, or as legislators simply resolve their differences of opinion. But the costs of legislating a fix are usually too high. n2 Some leading commentators argue that this problem of statutory ossification due to high legislative enactment costs requires judges to interpret statutes as living documents. Professor William Eskridge claims that a statute’s meaning changes over time, and thus judges should “dynamically” interpret statutes.3 Judge Calabresi argues that judges should “update” obsolete statutes by striking down or ignoring any statute that is “sufficiently out of phase with the whole contemporary legal framework so that, whatever its age, it can only stand if a current majoritarian or representative body reaffirms it.”4 However, most commentators have criticized such approaches as putting too much power in the hands of unelected and unaccountable judges.5 Instead, Congress has largely relied on administrative agencies to continually update the policies that implement various statutes. When charged with administering statutes, such agencies often have the authority to interpret the legislation's vague commands by translating them into more precise and concrete rules. n6 Moreover, courts have given great deference to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes under Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. n7 These agency interpretations, although the products of a more politically accountable process than judicial interpretations, nonetheless are not as publicly deliberative or as nationally representative as a congressional decision. Worse, many other statutes that are similarly indefinite are not administered by any particular agency, thus leaving courts with the primary responsibility to develop the law - and thus the policy - under these statutes, despite judges' lack of expertise and accountability. n8 But by prohibiting one house of Congress from vetoing agency actions, the Supreme Court, in INS v. Chadha, n9 limited Congress's role in administering statutes, despite its institutional advantages over courts - and, in some respects, over agencies - in developing policy. In a recent article, Professors Jacob Gersen and Eric Posner suggest that courts should pay greater attention to post-enactment congressional resolutions when interpreting statutes. n10 This Note develops their idea by proposing more modest congressional involvement than the legislative veto invalidated in Chadha: courts should defer to a *1509 House or Senate resolution that adopts a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. n11 For statutes not administered by any agency with interpretive authority, such deference to a congressional resolution would improve lawmaking by bringing to bear the legislature's policy expertise and democratic accountability. But even for statutes administered by agencies, this proposal would increase accountability. Further, this proposal would help to restore checks and balances and the Constitution's original allocation of power by making the House and Senate coequal with executive agencies in interpreting ambiguous statutory provisions. Whenever these institutions disagree, courts should simply adopt their own best reading of the statute, de novo. I. Statutes Without Agencies Courts should give Chevron-like deference to any resolution passed by either the House or the Senate that reasonably interprets a statutory ambiguity. When deciding whether to defer to such a congressional resolution, courts should engage in both steps of the Chevron analysis, just as they do for agency interpretations of statutes: First, the statute must be "silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue" addressed by the congressional resolution. n12 Second, the resolution's interpretation must be "based on a permissible construction of the statute." n13

Affirmative’s unrepealable legislation is unconstitutional – CP is legal and binds future congress.
Mitchell 08 Jonathan F. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law LEGISLATING CLEAR-STATEMENT REGIMES IN NATIONAL-SECURITY LAW George Mason University Law and Economics Research Paper Series 08-56 http://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/publications/working_papers/08-5620Legislating20Clear-Statement20Regimes.pdf
The Supreme Court has long held that Congress lacks the power to “entrench” statutes by specifying that they are unrepealable, or repealable only by a supermajority vote.38 But claims that provisions such as section 8(a)(1) “bind” future Congresses are meritless when legislators remain free to repeal the statute through the ordinary bicameralism-and-presentment process, or enact a statute that exempts itself from section 8(a)(1)’s rule of construction.39 (Such a statute need only state that “section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution shall not be applicable to the provisions of this Act.”). Perhaps the War Powers Resolution has some moral or political influence that dissuades lawmakers from repealing or circumventing it, which effectively “binds” future Congresses to section 8(a)(1)’s clear-statement regime. But that type of “binding” effect cannot make a statute unconstitutional; Congress constantly enacts laws that are politically difficult to repeal,40 and every statute renders some future course of action less politically convenient by changing the default position against which future legislation must be enacted.41 So long as it remains formally possible for future legislators to change that default position by majority vote, the mere fact that a pre-existing statute makes that course of action politically difficult cannot present constitutional problems. 

This is a moral side constraint
Levinson 00 Daryl Levinson, professor of law at University of Virginia, Spring 2000 UC Law Review
Extending a majority rule analysis of optimal deterrence to constitutional torts requires some explanation, for we do not usually think of violations of constitutional rights in terms of cost-benefit analysis and efficiency. Quite the opposite, constitutional rights are most commonly conceived as deontological side-constraints that trump even utility-maximizing government action. Alternatively, constitutional rights might be understood as serving rule-utilitarian purposes. If the disutility to victims of constitutional violations often exceeds the social benefits derived from the rights-violating activity, or if rights violations create long-term costs that outweigh short-term social benefits, then constitutional rights can be justified as tending to maximize global utility, even though this requires local utility-decreasing steps. Both the deontological and rule-utilitarian descriptions imply that the optimal level of constitutional violations is zero; that is, society would be better off, by whatever measure, if constitutional rights were never violated.
Circumvention – Courts 

Wartime means Obama will ignore the decision.  Noncompliance undermines the Court’s legitimacy and makes the plan worthless
Pushaw 4—Professor of law @ Pepperdine University Robert J. Pushaw, Jr., “Defending Deference: A Response to Professors Epstein and Wells,” Missouri Law Review, Vol. 69, 2004
Civil libertarians have urged the Court to exercise the same sort of judicial review over war powers as it does in purely domestic cases—i.e., independently interpreting and applying the law of the Constitution, despite the contrary view of the political branches and regardless of the political repercussions.54 This proposed solution ignores the institutional differences, embedded in the Constitution, that have always led federal judges to review warmaking under special standards. Most obviously, the President can act with a speed, decisiveness, and access to information (often highly confidential) that cannot be matched by Congress, which must garner a majority of hundreds of legislators representing multiple interests.55 Moreover, the judiciary by design acts far more slowly than either political branch. A court must wait for parties to initiate a suit, oversee the litigation process, and render a deliberative judgment that applies the law to the pertinent facts.56 Hence, by the time federal judges (particularly those on the Supreme Court) decide a case, the action taken by the executive is several years old. Sometimes, this delay is long enough that the crisis has passed and the Court’s detached perspective has been restored.57 At other times, however, the war rages, the President’s action is set in stone, and he will ignore any judicial orders that he conform his conduct to constitutional norms.58 In such critical situations, issuing a judgment simply weakens the Court as an institution, as Chief Justice Taney learned the hard way.59
Professor Wells understands the foregoing institutional differences and thus does not naively demand that the Court exercise regular judicial review to safeguard individual constitutional rights, come hell or high water. Nonetheless, she remains troubled by cases in which the Court’s examination of executive action is so cursory as to amount to an abdication of its responsibilities—and a stamp of constitutional approval for the President’s actions.60 Therefore, she proposes a compromise: requiring the President to establish a reasonable basis for the measures he has taken in response to a genuine risk to national security.61 In this way, federal judges would ensure accountability not by substituting their judgments for those of executive officials (as hap-pens with normal judicial review), but rather by forcing them to adequately justify their decisions.62
This proposal intelligently blends a concern for individual rights with pragmatism. Civil libertarians often overlook the basic point that constitutional rights are not absolute, but rather may be infringed if the government has a compelling reason for doing so and employs the least restrictive means to achieve that interest.63 Obviously, national security is a compelling governmental interest.64 Professor Wells’s crucial insight is that courts should not allow the President simply to assert that “national security” necessitated his actions; rather, he must concretely demonstrate that his policies were a reasonable and narrowly tailored response to a particular risk that had been assessed accurately.65
Although this approach is plausible in theory, I am not sure it would work well in practice. Presumably, the President almost always will be able to set forth plausible justifications for his actions, often based on a wide array of factors—including highly sensitive intelligence that he does not wish to dis-close.66 Moreover, if the President’s response seems unduly harsh, he will likely cite the wisdom of erring on the side of caution. If the Court disagrees, it will have to find that those proffered reasons are pretextual and that the President overreacted emotionally instead of rationally evaluating and responding to the true risks involved. But are judges competent to make such determinations? And even if they are, would they be willing to impugn the President’s integrity and judgment? If so, what effect might such a judicial decision have on America’s foreign relations? These questions are worth pondering before concluding that “hard look” review would be an improvement over the Court’s established approach.
Moreover, such searching scrutiny will be useless in situations where the President has made a wartime decision that he will not change, even if judicially ordered to do so. For instance, assume that the Court in Korematsu had applied “hard look” review and found that President Roosevelt had wildly exaggerated the sabotage and espionage risks posed by Japanese-Americans and had imprisoned them based on unfounded fears and prejudice (as appears to have been the case). If the Court accordingly had struck down FDR’s order to relocate them, he would likely have disobeyed it.
Professor Wells could reply that this result would have been better than what happened, which was that the Court engaged in “pretend” review and stained its reputation by upholding the constitutionality of the President’s odious and unwarranted racial discrimination. I would agree. But I submit that the solution in such unique situations (i.e., where a politically strong President has made a final decision and will defy any contrary court judgment) is not judicial review in any form—ordinary, deferential, or hard look. Rather, the Court should simply declare the matter to be a political question and dismiss the case. Although such Bickelian manipulation of the political question doctrine might be legally unprincipled and morally craven, 67 at least it would avoid giving the President political cover by blessing his unconstitutional conduct and instead would force him to shoulder full responsibility. Pg. 968-970 

Fight with President devastates court legitimacy. Two centuries of judicial decisions prove they can’t solve without his support    
Devins and Fisher 98—Professor of Law and Government @ College of William and Mary and Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers @ Congressional Research Service  Neal Devins and Louis Fisher, “Judicial Exclusivity and Political Instability,” Virginia Law Review Vol. 84, No. 1 (Feb. 1998), pp. 83-106
Lacking the power to appropriate funds or command the military, 73 the Court understands that it must act in a way that garners public acceptance." In other words, as psychologists Tom Tyler and Gregory Mitchell observed, the Court seems to believe "that public acceptance of the Court's role as interpreter of the Constitution that is, the public belief in the Court's institutional legitimacy enhances public acceptance of controversial Court decisions."75 This emphasis on public acceptance of the judiciary seems to be conclusive proof that Court decisionmaking cannot be divorced from a case's (sometimes explosive) social and political setting.
A more telling manifestation of how public opinion affects Court decisionmaking is evident when the Court reverses itself to conform its decisionmaking to social and political forces beating against it.76 Witness, for example, the collapse of the Lochner era under the weight of changing social conditions. Following Roosevelt's 1936 election victory in all but two states, the Court, embarrassed by populist attacks against the Justices, announced several decisions upholding New Deal programs.' In explaining this transformation, Justice Owen Roberts recognized the extraordinary importance of public opinion in undoing the Lochner era: "Looking back, it is difficult to see how the Court could have resisted the popular urge for uniform standards throughout the country-for what in effect was a unified economy.""8
Social and political forces also played a defining role in the Court's reconsideration of decisions on sterilization and the eugenics movement," state-mandated flag salutes,' the Roe v. Wade trimester standard, 8 the death penalty,' states' rights, 3 and much more.' It did not matter that some of these earlier decisions commanded an impressive majority of eight to one." Without popular support, these decisions settled nothing. Justice Robert Jackson instructed us that "the practical play of the forces of politics is such that judicial power has often delayed but never permanently defeated the persistent will of a substantial majority.""6 As such, for a Court that wants to maximize its power and legitimacy, taking social and political forces into account is an act of necessity, not cowardice. Correspondingly, when the Court gives short shrift to populist values or concerns, its decisionmaking is unworkable and destabilizing.87
The Supreme Court may be the ultimate interpreter in a particular case, but not in the larger social issues of which that case is a reflection. Indeed, it is difficult to locate in the more than two centuries of rulings from the Supreme Court a single decision that ever finally settled a transcendent question of constitutional law. When a decision fails to persuade or otherwise proves unworkable.' elected officials, interest groups, academic commentators, and the press will speak their minds and the Court, ultimately, will listen."
Even in decisions that are generally praised, such as Brown, the Court must calibrate its decisionmaking against the sentiments of the implementing community and the nation. In an effort to temper Southern hostility to its decision, the Court did not issue a remedy in the first Brown decision.' A similar tale is told by the Court's invocation of the so-called "passive virtues," that is, procedural and jurisdictional mechanisms that allow the Court to steer clear of politically explosive issues.91 For example, the Court will not "anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it," not "formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required," nor "pass upon a constitutional question... if there is... some other ground," such as statutory construction, upon which to dispose of the case.' This deliberate withholding of judicial power reflects the fact that courts lack ballot-box legitimacy and need to avoid costly collisions with the general public and other branches of government.'
It is sometimes argued that courts operate on principle while the rest of government is satisfied with compromises." This argument is sheer folly. A multimember Court, like government, gropes incrementally towards consensus and decision through compromise, expediency, and ad hoc actions. "No good society," as Alexander Bickel observed, "can be unprincipled; and no viable society can be principle-ridden."'95
Courts, like elected officials, cannot escape "the great tides and currents which engulf" the rest of us.96 Rather than definitively settling transcendent questions, courts must take account of social movements and public opinion.' When the judiciary strays outside and opposes the policy of elected leaders, it does so at substantial risk. The Court maintains its strength by steering a course that fits within the permissible limits of public opinion. Correspondingly, "the Court's legitimacy-indeed, the Constitution's-must ultimately spring from public acceptance," for ours is a "political system ostensibly based on consent."98 pg. 93-98

Weakening the court prevents sustainable development
Stein 5—Former Judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court Justice Paul Stein (International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Specialist Group on the Judiciary), “Why judges are essential to the rule of law and environmental protection,” Judges and the Rule of Law: Creating the Links: Environment, Human Rights and Poverty, IUCN Environmental Policy and Law Paper No. 60, Edited by Thomas Greiber, 2006
The Johannesburg Principles state:
“We emphasize that the fragile state of the global environment requires the judiciary, as the guardian of the Rule of Law, to boldly and fearlessly implement and enforce applicable international and national laws, which in the field of environment and sustainable development will assist in alleviating poverty and sustaining an enduring civilization, and ensuring that the present generation will enjoy and improve the quality of life of all peoples, while also ensuring that the inherent rights and interests of succeeding generations are not compromised.”
There can be no argument that environmental law, and sustainable development law in particular, are vibrant and dynamic areas, both internationally and domestically. Judge Weeramantry (of the ICJ) has reminded us that we judges, as custodians of the law, have a major obligation to contribute to its development. Much of sustainable development law is presently making the journey from soft law into hard law. This is happening internationally but also it is occurring in many national legislatures and courts.
Fundamental environmental laws relating to water, air, our soils and energy are critical to narrowing the widening gap between the rich and poor of the world. Development may be seen as the bridge to narrow that gap but it is one that is riddled with dangers and contradictions. We cannot bridge the gap with materials stolen from future generations. Truly sustainable development can only take place in harmony with the environment. Importantly we must not allow sustainable development to be duchessed and bastardized.
A role for judges?
It is in striking the balance between development and the environment that the courts have a role. Of course, this role imposes on judges a significant trust. The balancing of the rights and needs of citizens, present and future, with development, is a delicate one. It is a balance often between powerful interests (private and public) and the voiceless poor. In a way judges are the meat in the sandwich but, difficult as it is, we must not shirk our duty.  Pg. 53-54

Extinction of all complex life
Barry 13—Political ecologist with expert proficiencies in old forest protection, climate change, and environmental sustainability policy  Dr. Glen Barry (Ph.D. in "Land Resources" and Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development” from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), “ECOLOGY SCIENCE: Terrestrial Ecosystem Loss and Biosphere Collapse,” Forests.org, February 4, 2013, pg. http://forests.org/blog/2013/02/ecology-science-terrestrial-ec.asp

Blunt, Biocentric Discussion on Avoiding Global Ecosystem Collapse and Achieving Global Ecological Sustainability
Science needs to do a better job of considering worst-case scenarios regarding continental- and global-scale ecological collapse. The loss of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscape connectivity reviewed here shows clearly that ecological collapse is occurring at spatially extensive scales. The collapse of the biosphere and complex life, or eventually even all life, is a possibility that needs to be better understood and mitigated against. A tentative case has been presented here that terrestrial ecosystem loss is at or near a planetary boundary. It is suggested that a 66 of Earth's land mass must be maintained in terrestrial ecosystems, to maintain critical connectivity necessary for ecosystem services across scales to continue, including the biosphere. Yet various indicators show that around 50 of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems have been lost and their services usurped by humans. Humanity may have already destroyed more terrestrial ecosystems than the biosphere can bear. There exists a major need for further research into how much land must be maintained in a natural and agroecological state to meet landscape and bioregional sustainable development goals while maintaining an operable biosphere.
It is proposed that a critical element in determining the threshold where terrestrial ecosystem loss becomes problematic is where landscape connectivity of intact terrestrial ecosystems erodes to the point where habitat patches exist only in a human context. Based upon an understanding of how landscapes percolate across scale, it is recommended that 66 of Earth's surface be maintained as ecosystems; 44 as natural intact ecosystems (2/3 of 2/3) and 22 as agroecological buffer zones. Thus nearly half of Earth must remain as large, connected, intact, and naturally evolving ecosystems, including old-growth forests, to provide the context and top-down ecological regulation of both human agroecological, and reduced impact and appropriately scaled industrial activities.
Given the stakes, it is proper for political ecologists and other Earth scientists to willingly speak bluntly if we are to have any chance of averting global ecosystem collapse. A case has been presented that Earth is already well beyond carrying capacity in terms of amount of natural ecosystem habitat that can be lost before the continued existence of healthy regional ecosystems and the global biosphere itself may not be possible. Cautious and justifiably conservative science must still be able to rise to the occasion of global ecological emergencies that may threaten our very survival as a species and planet.
Those knowledgeable about planetary boundaries—and abrupt climate change and terrestrial ecosystem loss in particular—must be more bold and insistent in conveying the range and possible severity of threats of global ecosystem collapse, while proposing sufficient solutions. It is not possible to do controlled experiments on the Earth system; all we have is observation based upon science and trained intuition to diagnose the state of Earth's biosphere and suggest sufficient ecological science–based remedies.
If Gaia is alive, she can die. Given the strength of life-reducing trends across biological systems and scales, there is a need for a rigorous research agenda to understand at what point the biosphere may perish and Earth die, and to learn what configuration of ecosystems and other boundary conditions may prevent her from doing so. We see death of cells, organisms, plant communities, wildlife populations, and whole ecosystems all the time in nature—extreme cases being desertification and ocean dead zones. There is no reason to dismiss out of hand that the Earth System could die if critical thresholds are crossed. We need as Earth scientists to better understand how this may occur and bring knowledge to bear to avoid global ecosystem and biosphere collapse or more extreme outcomes such as biological homogenization and the loss of most or even all life. To what extent can a homogenized Earth of dandelions, rats, and extremophiles be said to be alive, can it ever recover, and how long can it last?
The risks of global ecosystem collapse and the need for strong response to achieve global ecological sustainability have been understated for decades. If indeed there is some possibility that our shared biosphere could be collapsing, there needs to be further investigation of what sorts of sociopolitical responses are valid in such a situation. Dry, unemotional scientific inquiry into such matters is necessary—yet more proactive and evocative political ecological language may be justified as well. We must remember we are speaking of the potential for a period of great dying in species, ecosystems, humans, and perhaps all being. It is not clear whether this global ecological emergency is avoidable or recoverable. It may not be. But we must follow and seek truth wherever it leads us.
Planetary boundaries have been quite anthropocentric, focusing upon human safety and giving relatively little attention to other species and the biosphere's needs other than serving humans. Planetary boundaries need to be set that, while including human needs, go beyond them to meet the needs of ecosystems and all their constituent species and their aggregation into a living biosphere. Planetary boundary thinking needs to be more biocentric.
I concur with Williams (2000) that what is needed is an Earth System–based conservation ethic—based upon an "Earth narrative" of natural and human history—which seeks as its objective the "complete preservation of the Earth's biotic inheritance." Humans are in no position to be indicating which species and ecosystems can be lost without harm to their own intrinsic right to exist, as well as the needs of the biosphere. For us to survive as a species, logic and reason must prevail (Williams 2000).
Those who deny limits to growth are unaware of biological realities (Vitousek 1986). There are strong indications humanity may undergo societal collapse and pull down the biosphere with it. The longer dramatic reductions in fossil fuel emissions and a halt to old-growth logging are put off, the worse the risk of abrupt and irreversible climate change becomes, and the less likely we are to survive and thrive as a species. Human survival—entirely dependent upon the natural world—depends critically upon both keeping carbon emissions below 350 ppm and maintaining at least 66 of the landscape as natural ecological core areas and agroecological transitions and buffers. Much of the world has already fallen below this proportion, and in sum the biosphere's terrestrial ecosystem loss almost certainly has been surpassed, yet it must be the goal for habitat transition in remaining relatively wild lands undergoing development such as the Amazon, and for habitat restoration and protection in severely fragmented natural habitat areas such as the Western Ghats.
The human family faces an unprecedented global ecological emergency as reckless growth destroys the ecosystems and the biosphere on which all life depends. Where is the sense of urgency, and what are proper scientific responses if in fact Earth is dying? Not speaking of worst-case scenarios—the collapse of the biosphere and loss of a living Earth, and mass ecosystem collapse and death in places like Kerala—is intellectually dishonest. We must consider the real possibility that we are pulling the biosphere down with us, setting back or eliminating complex life.
The 66 / 44 / 22 threshold of terrestrial ecosystems in total, natural core areas, and agroecological buffers gets at the critical need to maintain large and expansive ecosystems across at least 50 of the land so as to keep nature connected and fully functional. We need an approach to planetary boundaries that is more sensitive to deep ecology to ensure that habitable conditions for all life and natural evolutionary change continue. A terrestrial ecosystem boundary which protects primary forests and seeks to recover old-growth forests elsewhere is critical in this regard. In old forests and all their life lie both the history of Earth's life, and the hope for its future. The end of their industrial destruction is a global ecological imperative.
Much-needed dialogue is beginning to focus on how humanity may face systematic social and ecological collapse and what sort of community resilience is possible. There have been ecologically mediated periods of societal collapse from human damage to ecosystems in the past (Kuecker and Hall 2011). What makes it different this time is that the human species may have the scale and prowess to pull down the biosphere with them. It is fitting at this juncture for political ecologists to concern themselves with both legal regulatory measures, as well as revolutionary processes of social change, which may bring about the social norms necessary to maintain the biosphere. Rockström and colleagues (2009b) refer to the need for "novel and adaptive governance" without using the word revolution. Scientists need to take greater latitude in proposing solutions that lie outside the current political paradigms and sovereign powers.
Even the Blue Planet Laureates' remarkable analysis (Brundtland et al. 2012), which notes the potential for climate change, ecosystem loss, and inequitable development patterns neither directly states nor investigates in depth the potential for global ecosystem collapse, or discusses revolutionary responses. UNEP (2012) notes abrupt and irreversible ecological change, which they say may impact life-support systems, but are not more explicit regarding the profound human and ecological implications of biosphere collapse, or the full range of sociopolitical responses to such predictions. More scientific investigations are needed regarding alternative governing structures optimal for pursuit and achievement of bioregional, continental, and global sustainability if we are maintain a fully operable biosphere forever. An economic system based upon endless growth that views ecosystems necessary for planetary habitability primarily as resources to be consumed cannot exist for long.
Planetary boundaries offer a profoundly difficult challenge for global governance, particularly as increased scientific salience does not appear to be sufficient to trigger international action to sustain ecosystems (Galaz et al. 2012). If indeed the safe operating space for humanity is closing, or the biosphere even collapsing and dying, might not discussion of revolutionary social change be acceptable? Particularly, if there is a lack of consensus by atomized actors, who are unable to legislate the required social change within the current socioeconomic system. By not even speaking of revolutionary action, we dismiss any means outside the dominant growth-based oligarchies.
In the author's opinion, it is shockingly irresponsible for Earth System scientists to speak of geoengineering a climate without being willing to academically investigate revolutionary social and economic change as well. It is desirable that the current political and economic systems should reform themselves to be ecologically sustainable, establishing laws and institutions for doing so. Yet there is nothing sacrosanct about current political economy arrangements, particularly if they are collapsing the biosphere. Earth requires all enlightened and knowledgeable voices to consider the full range of possible responses now more than ever.
One possible solution to the critical issues of terrestrial ecosystem loss and abrupt climate change is a massive and global, natural ecosystem protection and restoration program—funded by a carbon tax—to further establish protected large and connected core ecological sustainability areas, buffers, and agro-ecological transition zones throughout all of Earth's bioregions. Fossil fuel emission reductions must also be a priority. It is critical that humanity both stop burning fossil fuels and destroying natural ecosystems, as fast as possible, to avoid surpassing nearly all the planetary boundaries.
In summation, we are witnessing the collective dismantling of the biosphere and its constituent ecosystems which can be described as ecocidal. The loss of a species is tragic, of an ecosystem widely impactful, yet with the loss of the biosphere all life may be gone. Global ecosystems when connected for life's material flows provide the all-encompassing context within which life is possible. The miracle of life is that life begets life, and the tragedy is that across scales when enough life is lost beyond thresholds, living systems die.

Adv 1 – Cybersecurity
Attacks
No threat of cyberattacks
Valeriano and Maness 12 Brandon, Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow,  and Ryan, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago,"The Fog of Cyberwar," 11-21, Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/articles/138443/brandon-valeriano-and-ryan-maness/the-fog-of-cyberwar?page=2
Stuxnet was followed by the Flame virus: a new form of malware that infiltrated several networks in Iran and across the Middle East earlier this year. Flame copied text, recorded audio, and deleted fileson the computers into which it hacked. Israel and the United States are again the suspected culprits but deny responsibility. These two attacks generated substantial buzz in the media and among policymakers around the world. Their dramatic nature led some experts to argue that cyberwarfare will fundamentally change the future of international relations, forcing states to rethink their foreign policy. In a speech to the New York business community on October 11, 2012, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed fear that a cyber version of Pearl Harbor might take the United States by surprise in the near future. He warned that the U.S. government, in addition to national power grids, transportation systems, and financial markets, are all at risk and that cyberdefense should be at the top of the list of priorities for President Barack Obama’s second term. The Stuxnet and Flame attacks, however, are not the danger signs that some have made them out to be. First of all, the viruses needed to be physically injected into Iranian networks, likely by U.S. or Israeli operatives, suggesting that the tactic still requires traditional intelligence and military operation methods. Second, Stuxnet derailed Iran’s nuclear program for only a short period, if at all. And Flame did nothing to slow Iran’s nuclear progression directly, because it seems to have been only a data-collection operation. Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft -- basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically. Our research shows that although warnings about cyberwarfare have become more severe, the actual magnitude and pace of attacks do not match popular perception. Only 20 of 124 active rivals -- defined as the most conflict-prone pairs of states in the system -- engaged in cyberconflict between 2001 and 2011. And there were only 95 total cyberattacks among these 20 rivals. The number of observed attacks pales in comparison to other ongoing threats: a state is 600 times more likely to be the target of a terrorist attack than a cyberattack. We used a severity score ranging from five, which is minimal damage, to one, where death occurs as a direct result from cyberwarfare. Of all 95 cyberattacks in our analysis, the highest score -- that of Stuxnet and Flame -- was only a three. To be sure, states should defend themselves against cyberwarfare, but throwing vast amounts of money toward a low-level threat does not make sense. The Pentagon estimates it spent $2.6 to $3.2 billion on cybersecurity in fiscal year 2012. And it is likely that such spending will only increase. The U.S. Air Force alone anticipates spending $4.6 billion on cybersecurity in the next year. Even if the looming “fiscal cliff” guts the Defense Department’s budget, Panetta has made clear that cybersecurity will remain a top funding priority. At a New York conference on October 12, 2012, he described the United States as being in a “pre-9/11 moment” with regards to cyberwarfare and said that the “attackers are plotting,” in reference to the growing capabilities of Russia, China, and Iran. Of the 20 ongoing interstate rivals in our study, China and the United States cybertargeted each other the most. According to our study, Beijing attacked U.S. assets 18 times and Washington returned fire twice. Two notable attacks were the 2011 Pentagon raid, which stole sensitive files from the Defense Department, and the 2001 theft of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter-jet schematics. These attacks get only a moderate severity score because they targeted specific, nonessential state documents and were not intended to affect the general public. Over the same time span, India and Pakistan targeted each other 11 times (India five times, Pakistan six), as did North and South Korea, with North Korea being the aggressor ten times and South Korea launching one return attack. These ranged from minor incidents, such as Pakistan defacing an Indian government website, to more serious ones, such as North Korea stealing sensitive state documents from South Korea. Israeli-Iranian tensions have risen in recent months, but despite all the talk, this conflict is not playing out in the cybersphere. There were only eight cyberattacks between these states from 2001 to 2011, four launched by Israel, four by Iran. Although Stuxnet and Flame were more severe, Iranian attempts to disrupt government websites have not been very sophisticated. And Israel’s near-insistence on an armed conventional attack proves that even the most sophisticated cyberattacks are not changing state behavior. Cyberattacks are rare, and when they do occur, states are cautious in their use of force. As with conventional and nuclear conflict, some of the principles of deterrence and mutually assured destruction apply. Any aggressor in cyberspace faces the acute threat of blowback: having techniques replicated and repeated against the initiator. Once developed, a cyberweapon can easily be copied and used by a tech-savvy operative with access to a critical system such as the Defense Department’s network, which foreign-government hackers have had success infiltrating. Far from making interstate cyberwarfare more common, the ease of launching an attack actually keeps the tactic in check. Most countries’ cyberdefenses are weak, and a state trying to exploit an adversary’s weakness may be similarly vulnerable, inviting easy retaliation. An unspoken but powerful international norm against civilian targets further limits the terms of cyberwarfare.

No risk of cyberwar – it’s all hype
Rid 12 (Thomas, Thomas, PhD in political science from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, previous Transatlantic Fellow at the RAND Corporation, the Institut français des relations internationales (Ifri) in Paris, and at SAIS, from 2003 to 2005, he was a Fritz-Thyssen-Fellow at the German government’s foreign policy think tank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) and at RAND,"Think Again: Cyberwar," Foreign Policy, March/April 2012, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar?page=full)  empirics, specific nature (can’t have general cyberweapons), China wants cyber arms control – control citizens
No way. "Cyberwar is coming!" John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt predicted in a celebrated Rand paper back in 1993. Since then, it seems to have arrived -- at least by the account of the U.S. military establishment, which is busy competing over who should get what share of the fight. Cyberspace is "a domain in which the Air Force flies and fights," Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne claimed in 2006. By 2012, William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary at the time, was writing that cyberwar is "just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space." In January, the Defense Department vowed to equip the U.S. armed forces for "conducting a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace." Meanwhile, growing piles of books and articles explore the threats of cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, and how to survive them.
Time for a reality check: Cyberwar is still more hype than hazard. Consider the definition of an act of war: It has to be potentially violent, it has to be purposeful, and it has to be political. The cyberattacks we've seen so far, from Estonia to the Stuxnet virus, simply don't meet these criteria.
Take the dubious story of a Soviet pipeline explosion back in 1982, much cited by cyberwar's true believers as the most destructive cyberattack ever. The account goes like this: In June 1982, a Siberian pipeline that the CIA had virtually booby-trapped with a so-called "logic bomb" exploded in a monumental fireball that could be seen from space. The U.S. Air Force estimated the explosion at 3 kilotons, equivalent to a small nuclear device. Targeting a Soviet pipeline linking gas fields in Siberia to European markets, the operation sabotaged the pipeline's control systems with software from a Canadian firm that the CIA had doctored with malicious code. No one died, according to Thomas Reed, a U.S. National Security Council aide at the time who revealed the incident in his 2004 book, At the Abyss; the only harm came to the Soviet economy.
But did it really happen? After Reed's account came out, Vasily Pchelintsev, a former KGB head of the Tyumen region, where the alleged explosion supposedly took place, denied the story. There are also no media reports from 1982 that confirm such an explosion, though accidents and pipeline explosions in the Soviet Union were regularly reported in the early 1980s. Something likely did happen, but Reed's book is the only public mention of the incident and his account relied on a single document. Even after the CIA declassified a redacted version of Reed's source, a note on the so-called Farewell Dossier that describes the effort to provide the Soviet Union with defective technology, the agency did not confirm that such an explosion occurred. The available evidence on the Siberian pipeline blast is so thin that it shouldn't be counted as a proven case of a successful cyberattack.
Most other commonly cited cases of cyberwar are even less remarkable. Take the attacks on Estonia in April 2007, which came in response to the controversial relocation of a Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier. The well-wired country found itself at the receiving end of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that emanated from up to 85,000 hijacked computers and lasted three weeks. The attacks reached a peak on May 9, when 58 Estonian websites were attacked at once and the online services of Estonia's largest bank were taken down. "What's the difference between a blockade of harbors or airports of sovereign states and the blockade of government institutions and newspaper websites?" asked Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip.
Despite his analogies, the attack was no act of war. It was certainly a nuisance and an emotional strike on the country, but the bank's actual network was not even penetrated; it went down for 90 minutes one day and two hours the next. The attack was not violent, it wasn't purposefully aimed at changing Estonia's behavior, and no political entity took credit for it. The same is true for the vast majority of cyberattacks on record.
Indeed, there is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life. No cyberoffense has ever injured a person or damaged a building. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it's not an act of war. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion; it would mean that there is no way to distinguish between World War II, say, and the "wars" on obesity and cancer. Yet those ailments, unlike past examples of cyber "war," actually do kill people.
"A Digital Pearl Harbor Is Only a Matter of Time."
Keep waiting. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta delivered a stark warning last summer: "We could face a cyberattack that could be the equivalent of Pearl Harbor." Such alarmist predictions have been ricocheting inside the Beltway for the past two decades, and some scaremongers have even upped the ante by raising the alarm about a cyber 9/11. In his 2010 book, Cyber War, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke invokes the specter of nationwide power blackouts, planes falling out of the sky, trains derailing, refineries burning, pipelines exploding, poisonous gas clouds wafting, and satellites spinning out of orbit -- events that would make the 2001 attacks pale in comparison.
But the empirical record is less hair-raising, even by the standards of the most drastic example available. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command (established in 2010 and now boasting a budget of more than $3 billion), shared his worst fears in an April 2011 speech at the University of Rhode Island: "What I'm concerned about are destructive attacks," Alexander said, "those that are coming." He then invoked a remarkable accident at Russia's Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant to highlight the kind of damage a cyberattack might be able to cause. Shortly after midnight on Aug. 17, 2009, a 900-ton turbine was ripped out of its seat by a so-called "water hammer," a sudden surge in water pressure that then caused a transformer explosion. The turbine's unusually high vibrations had worn down the bolts that kept its cover in place, and an offline sensor failed to detect the malfunction. Seventy-five people died in the accident, energy prices in Russia rose, and rebuilding the plant is slated to cost $1.3 billion.
Tough luck for the Russians, but here's what the head of Cyber Command didn't say: The ill-fated turbine had been malfunctioning for some time, and the plant's management was notoriously poor. On top of that, the key event that ultimately triggered the catastrophe seems to have been a fire at Bratsk power station, about 500 miles away. Because the energy supply from Bratsk dropped, authorities remotely increased the burden on the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant. The sudden spike overwhelmed the turbine, which was two months shy of reaching the end of its 30-year life cycle, sparking the catastrophe.
If anything, the Sayano-Shushenskaya incident highlights how difficult a devastating attack would be to mount. The plant's washout was an accident at the end of a complicated and unique chain of events. Anticipating such vulnerabilities in advance is extraordinarily difficult even for insiders; creating comparable coincidences from cyberspace would be a daunting challenge at best for outsiders. If this is the most drastic incident Cyber Command can conjure up, perhaps it's time for everyone to take a deep breath.
"Cyberattacks Are Becoming Easier."
Just the opposite. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper warned last year that the volume of malicious software on American networks had more than tripled since 2009 and that more than 60,000 pieces of malware are now discovered every day. The United States, he said, is undergoing "a phenomenon known as 'convergence,' which amplifies the opportunity for disruptive cyberattacks, including against physical infrastructures." ("Digital convergence" is a snazzy term for a simple thing: more and more devices able to talk to each other, and formerly separate industries and activities able to work together.)
Just because there's more malware, however, doesn't mean that attacks are becoming easier. In fact, potentially damaging or life-threatening cyberattacks should be more difficult to pull off. Why? Sensitive systems generally have built-in redundancy and safety systems, meaning an attacker's likely objective will not be to shut down a system, since merely forcing the shutdown of one control system, say a power plant, could trigger a backup and cause operators to start looking for the bug. To work as an effective weapon, malware would have to influence an active process -- but not bring it to a screeching halt. If the malicious activity extends over a lengthy period, it has to remain stealthy. That's a more difficult trick than hitting the virtual off-button.
Take Stuxnet, the worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2010. It didn't just crudely shut down the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility; rather, the worm subtly manipulated the system. Stuxnet stealthily infiltrated the plant's networks, then hopped onto the protected control systems, intercepted input values from sensors, recorded these data, and then provided the legitimate controller code with pre-recorded fake input signals, according to researchers who have studied the worm. Its objective was not just to fool operators in a control room, but also to circumvent digital safety and monitoring systems so it could secretly manipulate the actual processes.
Building and deploying Stuxnet required extremely detailed intelligence about the systems it was supposed to compromise, and the same will be true for other dangerous cyberweapons. Yes, "convergence," standardization, and sloppy defense of control-systems software could increase the risk of generic attacks, but the same trend has also caused defenses against the most coveted targets to improve steadily and has made reprogramming highly specific installations on legacy systems more complex, not less.
"Cyberweapons Can Create Massive Collateral Damage."
Very unlikely. When news of Stuxnet broke, the New York Times reported that the most striking aspect of the new weapon was the "collateral damage" it created. The malicious program was "splattered on thousands of computer systems around the world, and much of its impact has been on those systems, rather than on what appears to have been its intended target, Iranian equipment," the Times reported. Such descriptions encouraged the view that computer viruses are akin to highly contagious biological viruses that, once unleashed from the lab, will turn against all vulnerable systems, not just their intended targets.
But this metaphor is deeply flawed. As the destructive potential of a cyberweapon grows, the likelihood that it could do far-reaching damage across many systems shrinks. Stuxnet did infect more than 100,000 computers -- mainly in Iran, Indonesia, and India, though also in Europe and the United States. But it was so specifically programmed that it didn't actually damage those machines, afflicting only Iran's centrifuges at Natanz. The worm's aggressive infection strategy was designed to maximize the likelihood that it would reach its intended target. Because that final target was not networked, "all the functionality required to sabotage a system was embedded directly in the Stuxnet executable," the security software company Symantec observed in its analysis of the worm's code. So yes, Stuxnet was "splattered" far and wide, but it only executed its damaging payload where it was supposed to.
Collateral infection, in short, is not necessarily collateral damage. A sophisticated piece of malware may aggressively infect many systems, but if there is an intended target, the infection will likely have a distinct payload that will be harmless to most computers. Especially in the context of more sophisticated cyberweapons, the image of inadvertent collateral damage doesn't hold up. They're more like a flu virus that only makes one family sick.
"In Cyberspace, Offense Dominates Defense."
Wrong again. The information age has "offense-dominant attributes," Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote in their influential 1996 book, The Advent of Netwar. This view has spread through the American defense establishment like, well, a virus. A 2011 Pentagon report on cyberspace stressed "the advantage currently enjoyed by the offense in cyberwarfare." The intelligence community stressed the same point in its annual threat report to Congress last year, arguing that offensive tactics -- known as vulnerability discovery and exploitation -- are evolving more rapidly than the federal government and industry can adapt their defensive best practices. The conclusion seemed obvious: Cyberattackers have the advantage over cyberdefenders, "with the trend likely getting worse over the next five years."
A closer examination of the record, however, reveals three factors that put the offense at a disadvantage. First is the high cost of developing a cyberweapon, in terms of time, talent, and target intelligence needed. Stuxnet, experts speculate, took a superb team and a lot of time. Second, the potential for generic offensive weapons may be far smaller than assumed for the same reasons, and significant investments in highly specific attack programs may be deployable only against a very limited target set. Third, once developed, an offensive tool is likely to have a far shorter half-life than the defensive measures put in place against it. Even worse, a weapon may only be able to strike a single time; once the exploits of a specialized piece of malware are discovered, the most critical systems will likely be patched and fixed quickly. And a weapon, even a potent one, is not much of a weapon if an attack cannot be repeated. Any political threat relies on the credible threat to attack or to replicate a successful attack. If that were in doubt, the coercive power of a cyberattack would be drastically reduced.
"We Need a Cyberarms Control Agreement."
We don't. Cyberwar alarmists want the United States to see cybersecurity as a new challenge on a geopolitical scale. They see cyberspace becoming a new area for military competition with rivals such as Russia and China, and they believe new cyberarms limitation agreements are needed to prevent this. There are some rumblings to establish international norms on this topic: The British government convened a conference in London in late 2011, originally intended to make the Internet more secure by agreeing on new rules of the road, and Russia and China proposed at the U.N. General Assembly last September the establishment of an "international code of conduct for information security." Now, diplomats are debating whether the United Nations should try to forge the equivalent of nuclear arms control in cyberspace.
So, should it? The answer is no. Attempts to limit cyberweapons through international agreements have three principal problems. The first difficulty is drawing the line between cybercrime and potentially political activity in cyberspace. In January, for instance, a Saudi hacker stole about 20,000 Israeli credit card numbers from a shopping website and leaked the information to the public. In retaliation, a group of Israeli hackers broke into Saudi shopping sites and threatened to release private credit card information.
Where is the dividing line? Even if it were possible to distinguish criminal from state-sponsored political activity, they often use the same means. A second hitch is practical: Verification would be impossible. Accurately counting the size of nuclear arsenals and monitoring enrichment activities is already a huge challenge; installing cameras to film programmers and "verify" they don't design malicious software is a pipe dream.
The third problem is political, and even more fundamental: Cyberaggressors may act politically, but in sharp contrast with warfare, they are likely to have a strong interest in avoiding attribution. Subversion has always thrived in cyberspace because preserving one's anonymity is easier to achieve than ironclad attribution. That's the root of the political problem: Having a few states agree on cyberarms limitation is about as realistic as a treaty to outlaw espionage and about as practical as outlawing the general subversion of established order.
"The West Is Falling Behind Russia and China."
Yes, but not how you think. Russia and China are busy sharpening their cyberweapons and are already well steeped in using them. The Russian military clandestinely crippled Estonia's economy in 2007 and Georgia's government and banks in 2008. The People's Liberation Army's numerous Chinese cyberwarriors have long inserted "logic bombs" and "trapdoors" into America's critical infrastructure, lying dormant and ready to wreak havoc on the country's grid and bourse in case of a crisis. Both countries have access to technology, cash, and talent -- and have more room for malicious maneuvers than law-abiding Western democracies poised to fight cyberwar with one hand tied behind their backs.
Or so the alarmists tell us. Reality looks quite different. Stuxnet, by far the most sophisticated cyberattack on record, was most likely a U.S.-Israeli operation. Yes, Russia and China have demonstrated significant skills in cyberespionage, but the fierceness of Eastern cyberwarriors and their coded weaponry is almost certainly overrated. When it comes to military-grade offensive attacks, America and Israel seem to be well ahead of the curve.
Ironically, it's a different kind of cybersecurity that Russia and China may be more worried about. Why is it that those countries, along with such beacons of liberal democracy as Uzbekistan, have suggested that the United Nations establish an "international code of conduct" for cybersecurity? Cyberespionage was elegantly ignored in the suggested wording for the convention, as virtual break-ins at the Pentagon and Google remain a favorite official and corporate pastime of both countries. But what Western democracies see as constitutionally protected free speech in cyberspace, Moscow and Beijing regard as a new threat to their ability to control their citizens. Cybersecurity has a broader meaning in non-democracies: For them, the worst-case scenario is not collapsing power plants, but collapsing political power.
The social media-fueled Arab Spring has provided dictators with a case study in the need to patrol cyberspace not only for subversive code, but also for subversive ideas. The fall of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi surely sent shivers down the spines of officials in Russia and China. No wonder the two countries asked for a code of conduct that helps combat activities that use communications technologies -- "including networks" (read: social networks) -- to undermine "political, economic and social stability."
So Russia and China are ahead of the United States, but mostly in defining cybersecurity as the fight against subversive behavior. This is the true cyberwar they are fighting. 

AT: Grid
No impact to a cyber-attack on the grid.  Prefer our ev—their authors have an economic incentive to hype the threat.
Hallinan 12—Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist January 11, 2012, “Cyber War: Reality or Hype?” Foreign Policy in Focus, http://www.fpif.org/articles/cyber_war_reality_or_hype
But consider the sources for all this scare talk: Clarke is the chair of a firm that consults on cyber security, and McConnell is the executive vice-president of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Both are currently doing business with the Pentagon.
Arms giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and other munitions manufactures are moving heavily into the cyber security market. In 2010, Boeing snapped up Argon ST and Narus, two cyber security firms with an estimated value of $2.4 billion. Raytheon bought Applied Signal Technology, General Dynamics absorbed Network Connectivity Solutions, and Britain’s major arms firm, BAE, purchased Norkom and ETI.
“There is a feeding frenzy right now to provide products and services to meet the demands of governments, law enforcement, and the military,” says Ron Deibert, director of the Canada Center for Global Security Studies.
There are big bucks at stake. Between the Defense Department and Homeland Security, the United States will spend some $10.5 billion for cyber security by 2015. The Pentagon’s new Cyber Command is slated to have a staff of 10,000, and according to Northrop executive Kent Schneider, the market for cyber arms and security in the United States is $100 billion.
But is cyber war everything it’s cracked up to be, and is the United States really so behind the curve in the scramble to develop cyber weapons?
According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the potential for cyber mayhem has “been exaggerated,” and the Defense Department and cyber security firms have blurred the line between cyber espionage and cyber war. The former is the kind of thing that goes on, day in and day out, among governments and industry, except its medium is the Internet. The latter is an attack on another country’s ability to wage war, defend itself, or run its basic infrastructure.
Most experts say the end-of-the-world scenarios drawn up by people like Clarke are largely fiction. How could an enemy shut down the U.S. national power grid when there is no such thing? A cyber attack would have to disrupt more than 100 separate power systems throughout the nation to crash the U.S. grid.
Most financial institutions are also protected. The one example of a successful cyber attack in that area was an apparent North Korean cyber assault this past March on the South Korean bank Nonghyup that crashed the institution’s computers. But an investigation found that the bank had been extremely remiss in changing passwords and controlling access to its computers. According to Peter Sommer, author of the OECD report Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk, the cyber threat to banks “is a bit of nonsense.”
However, given that many Americans rely on computers, cell phones, smart devices, and the like, any hint that an “enemy” could disrupt access to those devices is likely to get attention. Throw in some scary scenarios and a cunning enemy—China—and it’s pretty easy to make people nervous.
But contrary to McConnell’s statement, the United States is more advanced in computers than other countries in the world, and the charge that the country is behind the curve sounds suspiciously like the “bomber gap” with the Russians in the 1950s and the “missile gap” in the 1960s. Both were illusions that had more to do with U.S. presidential elections and arms industry lobbying than anything in the real world.

AT: Meltdown
Meltdowns inevitable ----
a) Dam failure
Huffington Post, 12 (10/19/2012, “ Leaked Report Suggests Long-Known Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants, Safety Advocates Say”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/nuclear-plant-flood-threat-leak_n_1983005.html//TWR)
An un-redacted version of a recently released Nuclear Regulatory Commission report highlights the threat that flooding poses to nuclear power plants located near large dams -- and suggests that the NRC has misled the public for years about the severity of the threat, according to engineers and nuclear safety advocates. "The redacted information shows that the NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists. A redacted version of the report was posted to the NRC website on March 6. An un-redacted version was recently obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace and shared with The Huffington Post. Among other things, evidence in the report indicates that the NRC has known for a decade or longer that failure of a dam upriver from the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina would cause floodwaters to overwhelm the plant’s three reactors and their cooling equipment -- not unlike what befell Japan's Fukushima Dai-chi facility after an earthquake and tsunami struck last year. Three reactors at Fukushima experienced a full meltdown, which contaminated surrounding farmland and exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. According to the NRC's own calculations, which were also withheld in the version of the report released in March, the odds of the dam near the Oconee plant failing at some point over the next 22 years are far higher than were the odds of an earthquake-induced tsunami causing a meltdown at the Fukushima plant. "The NRC is lying to the American public," says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate. The NRC report identifies flood threats from upstream dams at nearly three dozen other nuclear facilities in the United States, including the Fort Calhoun Station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others.

b) Solar storms
Stein 12 (Matthew Stein, 3/24/12, Bachelor’s degree in engineering MIT, design engineer, green builder, “Four Hundred Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses, and Nuclear Armageddon,” http://truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon)
Our current global system of electrical power generation and distribution ("the grid"), upon which our modern lifestyles are utterly dependent, is extremely vulnerable to severe geomagnetic storms, which tend to strike our planet on an average of approximately once every 70 to 100 years. We depend on this grid to maintain food production and distribution, telecommunications, Internet services, medical services, military defense, transportation, government, water treatment, sewage and garbage removal, refrigeration, oil refining, gas pumping and all forms of commerce. Unfortunately, the world's nuclear power plants, as they are currently designed, are critically dependent upon maintaining connection to a functioning electrical grid, for all but relatively short periods of electrical blackouts, in order to keep their reactor cores continuously cooled so as to avoid catastrophic reactor core meltdowns and fires in storage ponds for spent fuel rods. If an extreme GMD were to cause widespread grid collapse (which it most certainly will), in as little as one or two hours after each nuclear reactor facility's backup generators either fail to start, or run out of fuel, the reactor cores will start to melt down. After a few days without electricity to run the cooling system pumps, the water bath covering the spent fuel rods stored in "spent-fuel ponds" will boil away, allowing the stored fuel rods to melt down and burn 2. Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) currently mandates that only one week's supply of backup generator fuel needs to be stored at each reactor site, it is likely that, after we witness the spectacular nighttime celestial light show from the next extreme GMD, we will have about one week in which to prepare ourselves for Armageddon. To do nothing is to behave like ostriches with our heads in the sand, blindly believing that "everything will be okay" as our world drifts towards the next natural, inevitable super solar storm and resultant extreme GMD. Such a storm would end the industrialized world as we know it, creating almost incalculable suffering, death and environmental destruction on a scale not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

No meltdowns—backup power
Spencer 11 (Jack Spencer, Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation “U.S. Nuclear Policy After Fukushima: Trust But Modify,” 5/18/11)http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/05/us-nuclear-policy-after-fukushima-trust-but-modify

One of the problems with the emerging dialogue is that some commentators and U.S. policymakers have assumed that America’s nuclear industry and regulatory bodies and policies mirror those of Japan. They do not. The United States has an effective, multifaceted regulatory regime that has already addressed many of the mistakes and weaknesses that Fukushima seems to have exposed, including earthquake and tsunami preparedness and the modification of older reactors to meet new and evolving safety standards. On the other hand, the accident should raise serious questions about America’s lack of nuclear-waste disposal plans.¶ Earthquakes and Tsunamis¶ While building nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis (and other severe natural phenomena) is a new issue for many Americans, the U.S. nuclear industry and U.S. nuclear regulators have spent a great deal of time developing specific protocols for just such events. American regulators mandate that all U.S. reactors be built not only to withstand the most powerful earthquake ever recorded for their respective sites, but also to withstand the strongest earthquakes that geologists think are possible for each site. Current earthquake, tsunami, and flooding regulations are now under review, as indicated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).¶ As these reviews are conducted, the NRC and policymakers must ensure that additional regulations promote true safety, not just the perception of safety. Further, policymakers must recognize that plant owners and operators are highly motivated to maintain safe operations and are in many ways better prepared to ensure public health and safety than federal regulators. Under current U.S. policy, the plant operators are primarily responsible for plant safety. That is why the best approach will be for nuclear regulators to set and enforce high standards—and allow plant operators in the industry to determine how best to meet them.¶ The Mark I Containment System¶ According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, 23 U.S. boiling-water reactors share the same basic containment design, the Mark I, as the Fukushima reactors.1 At first glance, this is troubling, especially in light of past NRC studies that had identified problems with the containment systems of those reactors. Often ignored, however, are the significant safety modifications made to these designs as a result of ongoing assessments of reactor safety.¶ The history of the Mark I containment design in the U.S. is a testament to the effectiveness of the American system of nuclear regulation for maintaining public health and safety. Federal regulators identified a number of shortcomings with the original design that posed potential safety problems. The industry responded by forming a Mark I Owners Group to determine how to change the designs to address the safety concerns; the plants were then modified accordingly. Additional reviews led to further upgrades. For example, procedures to supply off-site power and water to reactors and fuel pools have been developed in the event that all on-site power and backup power is lost. Hardened containment venting has been added to every plant to ensure that pressure can be safely released from the containment should there be a system breakdown. Recent reports indicate that a similar modification may have been added to the Japanese reactors but could have malfunctioned.2 Regardless, U.S. plants have the new venting and nuclear operators should ensure that they are working properly.

No impact to meltdowns – Fukushima proves
Wheeler 12 (John Wheeler, Producer of "This Week in Nuclear"; Manager in the Nuclear Industry; Former Senior Reactor Operator; Nuclear Workforce Planning and Workforce Development Expert, “Whos' Really to Blame for Fukushima Health Impacts?” 3/12/12)http://theenergycollective.com/johnwheeler/79128/anti-nuclear-hysterics-not-melted-reactors-blame-fukushima-health-impacts
As is often the case, the passage of time yields clarity about events, and the nuclear power plant accident at Fukushima is no different. It has become clear that the misinformation and hysterics by anti-nuclear groups and individuals were mostly wrong. Their doomsday prophesizing actually worsened human suffering and environmental impacts by contributing to unwise decisions by political leaders in Japan and elsewhere to shut down nuclear plants. In contrast, bloggers and experts from within the nuclear community accurately predicted outcomes and human health impacts.¶ As was predicted on this blog and elsewhere, the multi-barrier reactor containment design protected the public. Contrary to claims by anti-nuclear groups, the melted cores did NOT burn through the reactor vessels. The containment structures remained virtually intact. The damaged reactor fuel remained inside the reactor vessels and containment systems.¶ Despite preposterous claims by Greenpeace and others, there were no chunks of plutonium scattered across the countryside. Only radioactive gasses escaped over the land, and most of that gas was short lived Iodine that has long since decayed away.¶ As reported on Bloomberg and other news sources, no one in the public was harmed by radiation from the damaged reactors. A small number of plant workers received higher than normal radiation exposures, without lasting effects. Any hypothetical future health effects will be immeasurably low and will be indistinguishable from normal disease rates within the general population.¶ No one, not even the “Fukushima 50?, was exposed to life threatening amounts of radiation. Journalists who flew across the Pacific to cover the story received more radiation exposure from cosmic rays in flight than they received from the reactors once on the ground.

AT: Nuke Retal 

Empr denied 

Adv 2 – EU
Rel
EU-US Relations
Can’t solve – even if the US wants to engage Europe structurally cannot
Hamilton and Burwell 10 Daniel S, Executive Director of the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Executive Director of the American Consortium on EU Studies; Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Research Professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, and Frances, Vice President, Director of the Program on Transatlantic Relations at the Atlantic Council, former executive director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, "The Setting: The United States and Europe in a G20 World," Chapter 1, http://transatlantic.sais-jhu.edu/bin/k/u/shoulder-to-shoulder-book-finaltext.pdf
Barriers to a more effective partnership are also to be found in Europe. Despite ambitions of unity, Europeans often struggle to find a single voice. The European Union remains a work in progress, with uneven capabilities. Deep cleavages among member states can be found on a variety of issues large and small. It tends to act slowly, and process often substitutes for policy. “European construction” continues to absorb— almost overwhelm— European energy and attention. The resultant danger is that transatlantic issues are crowded out by a very full European plate, scope for compromise with the U.S. is reduced by the need for intra- European consensus, and the complex nature of the new transatlantic and global agenda does not match up well with EU mechanisms. obstacles to effective transatlantic coordination often have less to do with American reluctance to engage or support the EU as a strategic partner than with the limits of European capability, consensus and political will. 2 European ambivalence, in turn, only encourages American unilateralism. lacking a coherent and capable partner, the U.S. is compelled either to act on its own or to look elsewhere for support. Those looking for global celebrities to lead the EU are disappointed by recent changes. But EU foreign policy coherence depends less on new structures in Brussels than new attitudes in national capitals. The key is less whether the European Commission and Council can act in coordinated fashion and more whether national capitals and Brussels can work in a more effective way. A stronger and more unified EU role on the world stage depends less on the ability of a single High Representative than the willingness of many governments to achieve greater consensus on approaching Russia, Afghanistan and regional conflicts. Europe’s real potential will be measured by its ability to achieve greater unity of effect, not necessarily unity of structure. Its influence will depend on its capacity to be a “unitary actor plus”—forging consensus among member states and then capitalizing on variable geometry. It does this now in the economic and financial sphere by harnessing the aggregate influence of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the member states. It does not yet do this in the foreign policy sphere. In 2008 the U.S. National Intelligence Council published an assessment of the world in 2025. Europe, it suggested, risks being a “hobbled giant, distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas.” 3 Is that the future Europe sees for itself? If not, what is it prepared to do about it? Whether the transatlantic partnership can become truly strategic depends in large part on whether Europeans themselves choose to make the EU a more strategic actor. 4 The EU is not yet a strategic actor, but it could be and it is in U.S. interests that it should be. The EU will only establish its strategic credibility when it can demonstrate that it can effectively and consistently harness and deploy the combined potential of its members to address concrete challenges and advance common goals. In short, to be better at U.S.-EU, the EU has to be better at EU. How the EU structures itself is of course a matter primarily for Europeans. Yet Europeans should not be surprised to find the world— or Washington— unable to wait for the next signature on the next intra- European compact. Washington, in turn, must understand more clearly that it has a vested interest in the nature of European integration, and has always been an actor in the building of Europe. It should make it clear that however EU members organize themselves, the U.S. supports an open, democratic, Atlanticist, outward- looking EU that is capable of acting shoulder to shoulder with America as a counterpart, not a counterweight. The U.S.EU strategic partnership should evolve as “Europe” itself evolves, and in ways that support and complement the transatlantic link expressed through NATo.

Biotech
Biotech inevitable.
D'Haeze, ‘7 Wim, Bio-Engineer in Chemistry and received his Ph.D. in Biotechnology at Ghent University, Senior Technical Writer in the pharmaceutical, "Blooming Biotech and Pharmaceutical Industries," 10-15, The Science Advisory Board, http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives.193.html
Whoever regularly follows the news will recognize that the Biotech and Pharmaceutical Industry is still expanding – booming – in the United States and Europe, but also in major Asian countries such as India, China, and Japan. A pattern that is often observed for pharmaceutical companies is headquartering in a major location in the United States or Europe while branching elsewhere in the United States, Europe, and/or Asia. Those processes are highly dependent on how successfully drug candidates move through the drug development pipelines and on how the drug development process is organized, planned, and executed. Research and Development hubs are located at the East coast (e.g., New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Northern and Central New Jersey) and West coast (e.g., San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Seattle) of the United States and throughout major cities in Europe, but multinational companies have been or are stepping on land in countries throughout Asia as well. Reasons for the latter development may include substantial cheaper labor as compared to that in developed countries and the ability to produce medicines close to the market place. During recent years, India, for example, has become the home of a few hundred registered biotech and pharmaceutical companies and is now positioned within the top-5 producers of pharmaceuticals. Interestingly, the majority of its export (e.g., production of diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTP) vaccine) goes to developing countries. Companies such as Biocon, Novo Nordisk, Aventis Pharma, Chiron Behring Vaccines, GlaxoSmithKline, Novozymes, Eli Lilly and Company, and Advanced Biochemicals are all represented in major Indian cities, including Bangalore, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, and New Delhi. In 2005, Indian biotech and pharmaceutical companies represented a revenue of more than US$1 billion and the governmental goal articulated by the Indian Department of Biotechnology is to create a biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry generating US$5 billion in revenues annually and representing one million jobs by roughly three years from now. The government tries to achieve this goal in part by facilitating foreign-owned companies to establish in India, making it easier for investors by centralizing the process, creating at least ten new science parks by 2010, financially supporting new drug discovery proposals and research, and by supporting small biotech and pharmaceutical businesses and start-up companies.

Food Wars
Famine doesn’t cause war ---- it makes people too hungry to fight
Barnett in ’00 (Jon, Australian Research Council fellow and Senior Lecturer in Development Studies @ Melbourne U. School of Social and Environmental Enquiry, Review of International Studies, “Destabilizing the environment-conflict Thesis”, 26:271-288, Cambridge Journals Online)

Considerable attention has been paid to the links between population, the environment and conflict. The standard argument is that population growth will overextend the natural resources of the immediate environs, leading to deprivation which, it is assumed, will lead to conflict and instability either directly through competition for scarce resources, or indirectly through the generation of ‘environmental refugees’. For example, according to Myers: ‘so great are the stresses generated by too many people making too many demands on their natural-resource stocks and their institutional support systems, that the pressures often create first-rate breeding grounds for conflict’.37 The ways in which population growth leads to environmental degradation are reasonably well known. However, the particular ways in which this leads to conflict are difficult to prove. In the absence of proof there is a negative style of argumentation, and there are blanket assertions and abrogations; for example: ‘the relationship is rarely causative in a direct fashion’, but ‘we may surmise that conflict would not arise so readily, nor would it prove so acute, if the associated factor of population growth were occurring at a more manageable rate’.38 It is possible though, that rather than inducing warfare, overpopulation and famine reduce the capacity of a people to wage war. Indeed, it is less the case that famines in Africa in recent decades have produced ‘first rate breeding grounds for conflict’; the more important, pressing, and avoidable product is widespread malnutrition and large loss of life. 

Food prices don’t cause massive instability
Sonin ‘8 – Professor at the New Economic School, is a columnist for Vedomosti Konstantin (Sonin, Moscow Times April 29, 2008 “The Upside of High Food Prices”)

Of course, rising food prices adversely affect people from countries that import grain. But most of the poorest countries in the world do not import food, despite their typically low level of labor productivity in the agriculture sector. Domestically, of course, producers win and consumers lose from high food prices, but each of these countries as a whole benefits from rising prices. The benefits have not trickled down to all citizens, as recent riots clearly demonstrate. This means that the government has failed to properly redistribute the windfall from higher prices. Inefficiency, corruption and simple mismanagement on the government's part might lead to political instability and even to civil war, but a rise in the prices of food prices by itself is not a cause for instability in grain-exporting countries

Adv 3 – Econ
Defense 

No econ impact
Robert Jervis 11, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425countries won’t attack one another, mass opinion won’t change, economic conflict doesn’t escalate to war
Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict, it will not make war thinkable

Econ high
Reuters 1/30/14 Lucia Mutikani, “Households, trade keep U.S. economy humming in fourth quarter,” Reuters, Thu Jan 30, 2014 1:28pm EST, pg.  http://tinyurl.com/oqbeoub
(Reuters) - Strong household spending and robust exports kept the U.S. economy on solid ground in the fourth quarter, but stagnant wages could chip away some of the momentum in early 2014.
Gross domestic product grew at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the final three months of last year, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, in line with economists' expectations.
While that was a slowdown from the third-quarter's brisk 4.1 percent pace, it was a far stronger performance than had been anticipated earlier in the quarter and welcome news in light of some drag from October's partial government shutdown.
"The economy was firing on almost all cylinders as 2013 came to a close. For today, the sun is out and shining," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in New York.
Early in the quarter many economists were expecting a growth pace below 2 percent given that an inventory surge accounted for much of the increase in the July-September period.
Taking both quarters together, growth came in at a 3.7 percent pace, up sharply from 1.8 percent in the first six months of the year. It was the biggest half-year gain since the second half of 2003.
Stocks on Wall Street pushed higher on the back of the report, rebounding from the previous session's decline. U.S. Treasury debt prices fell, while the dollar rose against a basket of currencies.
Consumer spending was the main driver of fourth-quarter growth, but there was also a strong boost from trade. Business investment also lent support as did the restocking of warehouses, but not at the same scale as in the third quarter.

No impact --- no diversionary war and violence decreases
Drezner 12 (Daniel W. Drezner, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,” http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)
The final outcome addresses a dog that hasn’t barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.37 Whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict, there were genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global public disorder. The aggregate data suggests otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has constructed a “Global Peace Index” annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from the 2012 report is that “The average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.”38 Interstate violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis – as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict; the secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.39 Rogers Brubaker concludes, “the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected.”40 None of these data suggest that the global economy is operating swimmingly. Growth remains unbalanced and fragile, and has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational capital flows remain depressed compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a drying up of cross-border interbank lending in Europe. Currency volatility remains an ongoing concern. Compared to the aftermath of other postwar recessions, growth in output, investment, and employment in the developed world have all lagged behind. But the Great Recession is not like other postwar recessions in either scope or kind; expecting a standard “V”-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst characterized the post-2008 global economy as in a state of “contained depression.”41 The key word is “contained,” however. Given the severity, reach and depth of the 2008 financial crisis, the proper comparison is with Great Depression. And by that standard, the outcome variables look impressive. As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This Time is Different: “that its macroeconomic outcome has been only the most severe global recession since World War II – and not even worse – must be regarded as fortunate.”42

Institutional mechanisms check decline --- there’s massive resiliency
Drezner 12 (Daniel W. Drezner, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,” http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)
Prior to 2008, numerous foreign policy analysts had predicted a looming crisis in global economic governance. Analysts only reinforced this perception since the financial crisis, declaring that we live in a “G-Zero” world. This paper takes a closer look at the global response to the financial crisis. It reveals a more optimistic picture. Despite initial shocks that were actually more severe than the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance structures responded quickly and robustly. Whether one measures results by economic outcomes, policy outputs, or institutional flexibility, global economic governance has displayed surprising resiliency since 2008. Multilateral economic institutions performed well in crisis situations to reinforce open economic policies, especially in contrast to the 1930s. While there are areas where governance has either faltered or failed, on the whole, the system has worked. Misperceptions about global economic governance persist because the Great Recession has disproportionately affected the core economies – and because the efficiency of past periods of global economic governance has been badly overestimated. Why the system has worked better than expected remains an open question. The rest of this paper explores the possible role that the distribution of power, the robustness of international regimes, and the resilience of economic ideas might have played. 

No escalation --- economic decline solves its own impact
Nordstrom 2k – department of political science at Penn State (D Scott Bennett and Timothy Nordstrom, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44:1, “Foreign policy substitutability and internal economic problems in enduring rivalries”, ProQuest, WEA)
Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military competition between states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention. Leaders may choose to negotiate a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic economy. In a "guns versus butter" world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses associated with competition in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry. However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to develop when the economic situation sours and elites and masses are looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the pressure to cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of continuing to pay for a rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete economically with the United States.

Tournament: tournament | Round: 4 | Opponent: Kentucky Geldof-Vargason | Judge: Mulholand
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Obama is selling the Iranian deal now – Stars are aligned – needs to hold off congress from more action
PARSI 2/18/14—President of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, US-Iran deal: Compromise is key, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/us-iran-deal-compromise-key-201421845935181913.html
As a new phase of nuclear talks begins between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) in Vienna on February 18, one thing is clear: From here onwards, diplomacy depends primarily on the ability of the presidents of Iran and the US to absorb and sell compromise.
The stars could not be better aligned for a US-Iran breakthrough. Regional developments - from the instability following the Arab spring to the civil war in Syria - have significantly increased the cost of continued conflict, as has the escalation of the nuclear issue with steadily growing Iranian capabilities and ever tightening economic sanctions.
Domestically, developments are also favourable for a deal. Iran's hardliners and proponents of a narrative of resistance have been put on the defensive by Hassan Rouhani's election victory in June 2013. And Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has thus far firmly backed Rouhani's negotiation strategy.
In Washington, proponents of Israeli Prime Miinister Benjamin Netanyahu's line have suffered several defeats over the past year, from the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, to the call for military action in Syria, to the failure to pass new sanctions on Iran, rendering their influence less decisive. All three defeats were, in no small part, due to the mobilisation of pro-diplomacy groups in the US. Timing-wise, striking a deal during Rouhani's first year and during Obama's last years in office is also ideal.
That doesn't mean, however, that negotiations will be easy. On the contrary, the hard part begins now.
In the interim deal, the main concessions exchanged were increased transparency and inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, halting the expansion of the enrichment program, and ending it at the 20 percent level. In return, Iran would get Western acceptance of enrichment on Iranian soil, and agreement that Iran eventually will enjoy all rights granted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as well as some minor sanctions relief.
Going forward, Obama will face severe difficulties offering relief on key sanctions such as those on oil and banking, since these are controlled by Congress.
Obama can temporarily waive Congressional sanctions, but the utility of waivers is questionable due to the proportionality principle established in the Istanbul talks in the spring of 2012.
Reversible Western concessions, the Istanbul talks established, will have to be exchanged for reversible Iranian measures and vice versa. To extract irreversible concessions, similarly irreversible measures have to be offered.
Sanctions waivers are fundamentally reversible. They usually last only six months and have to be actively renewed by the president - including by whoever occupies the White House after 2016.
If Obama can only offer Iran waivers, Tehran will likely respond in kind. Its implementation of the Additional Protocol - a pivotal transparency instrument - would be time limited and subject to continuous renewal (just like the waivers) rather than being permanent. This is tantamount to adding a self-destruction mechanism to the deal. Such a deal is harder to sell, and even harder to keep. To be durable, the deal must have strong elements of permanence to it, which requires irreversible measures. It is foreseeable that waivers could be used during the first phase of the implementation of a final deal; partly to test Iranian intentions, partly because actually lifting sanctions can take years.
Washington, however, will push for the implementation phase of the final deal to be very lengthy - up to 25 years - and for waivers to be used throughout this period. According to this plan, sanctions wouldn't be fully lifted until a quarter century after the final deal has been agreed upon, i.e. when Iran's nuclear file has been fully normalised.

Plan causes causes internal Democrat defection
LOOMIS 7—Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Department of Government at Georgetown University Dr. Andrew J. Loomis, “Leveraging legitimacy in the crafting of U.S. foreign policy”, March 2, 2007, pg 36-37, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/9/4/8/pages179487/p179487-36.php

Declining political authority encourages defection. American political analyst Norman Ornstein writes of the domestic context, In a system where a President has limited formal power, perception matters. The reputation for success—the belief by other political actors that even when he looks down, a president will find a way to pull out a victory—is the most valuable resource a chief executive can have. Conversely, the widespread belief that the Oval Office occupant is on the defensive, on the wane or without the ability to win under adversity can lead to disaster, as individual lawmakers calculate who will be on the winning side and negotiate accordingly. In simple terms, winners win and losers lose more often than not. Failure begets failure. In short, a president experiencing declining amounts of political capital has diminished capacity to advance his goals. As a result, political allies perceive a decreasing benefit in publicly tying themselves to the president, and an increasing benefit in allying with rising centers of authority. A president’s incapacity and his record of success are interlocked and reinforce each other. Incapacity leads to political failure, which reinforces perceptions of incapacity. This feedback loop accelerates decay both in leadership capacity and defection by key allies. The central point of this review of the presidential literature is that the sources of presidential influence—and thus their prospects for enjoying success in pursuing preferred foreign policies—go beyond the structural factors imbued by the Constitution. Presidential authority is affected by ideational resources in the form of public perceptions of legitimacy. The public offers and rescinds its support in accordance with normative trends and historical patterns, non-material sources of power that affects the character of U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. 

New sanctions will cause war – prefer newest comprehensive study
ARMBRUSTER 2/18/14—National Security Editor for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund Ben Armbruster, Bipartisan Expert Group Says New Iran Sanctions Will Undermine Diplomacy, http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/02/18/3300741/iran-project-sanctions-diplomacy/

A new report from a bipartisan group of experts at the Iran Project released on Tuesday finds that opponents of new sanctions on Iran at this time are largely correct in that they would lead to a break-down of diplomacy, isolate the U.S. from its negotiating partners and embolden hard-liners in Tehran.
The Iran sanctions battle in the Senate has stalled for now, but it’s unclear if the House will take up the matter again, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is reportedly working on language with other House leaders.
The Iran Project’s report analyzes arguments for and against the Senate Iran sanctions bill that was introduced last December by Sens. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who have argued that new sanctions will give the U.S. more leverage in nuclear talks with Iran.
But, the report says, “It is di?cult to argue that a new sanctions bill is intended to support the negotiations when all the countries doing the negotiating oppose it.”
Kirk, Menendez and other supporters of the bill say the sanctions have a delayed trigger and will kick in in six months or if Iran backs out of the deal. Not so, the Iran Project says. “After carefully reading the bill line by line and consulting with both current and retired Senate staff the relevant committees, it appears that the critics are correct: the change in sanctions law takes effect upon passage,” the report says, which would most likely put the United States in violation of the interim nuclear agreement reached in Geneva in November
On whether new sanctions will weaken the international coalition on imposing existing sanctions, “some countries would continue to honor some sanctions,” the Iran Project says if the Senate sanctions bill passes. “Still, it would seem that on balance, the net result would be less pressure on Iran.” The report also says that unilateral congressional action on sanctions now “would feed an unwelcome narrative” to America’s partners, the U.K., France, China, Russia, Germany and others, that the U.S. can’t live up to its promises and is an unreliable partner.
Many, like Sen. Patrick Murphy (D-CT), have argued that placing new sanctions on Iran will undermine relative moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who supports a diplomatic approach with the U.S. The Iran Project agrees. “It is very di?cult to imagine that the sanctions bill would do anything but undermine Rouhani, as he attempts to steer Iran on a di?erent path. This is an assessment shared not only by Iran experts, and Iranian expats who have opposed the regime, but also by Israeli military intelligence, which has concluded that Rouhani may represent a fundamental shift in Iranian politics.”
“It is difficult to escape the conclusion that a new sanctions bill would increase the probability of war, even if it does not guarantee such an outcome,” the report says.
The bipartisan Iran Project has issued several reports on the Iran nuclear issue. In 2012, the group concluded that attacking Iran would risk an “all out regional war” lasting “several years” and that In order to achieve regime change, the report says, “the occupation of Iran would require a commitment of resources and personnel greater than what the U.S. has expended over the past 10 years in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

That escalates to World War III
Reuveny 10 - Professor of political economy @ Indiana University Dr. Rafael Reuveny (PhD in Economics and Political Science from the University of Indiana), “Guest Opinion: Unilateral strike on Iran could trigger world depression,” McClatchy Newspaper, Aug 9, 2010,  pg. http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/news/speaking_out/reuveny_on_unilateral_strike_Iran.shtml

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely have dire consequences, including a regional war, global economic collapse and a major power clash.
For an Israeli campaign to succeed, it must be quick and decisive. This requires an attack that would be so overwhelming that Iran would not dare to respond in full force.
Such an outcome is extremely unlikely since the locations of some of Iran’s nuclear facilities are not fully known and known facilities are buried deep underground.
All of these widely spread facilities are shielded by elaborate air defense systems constructed not only by the Iranians, but also the Chinese and, likely, the Russians as well. By now, Iran has also built redundant command and control systems and nuclear facilities, developed early-warning systems, acquired ballistic and cruise missiles and upgraded and enlarged its armed forces.
Because Iran is well-prepared, a single, conventional Israeli strike — or even numerous strikes — could not destroy all of its capabilities, giving Iran time to respond.
A regional war
Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear program Israel destroyed in 1981, Iran has a second-strike capability comprised of a coalition of Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Hezbollah, Hamas, and, perhaps, Turkish forces. Internal pressure might compel Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to join the assault, turning a bad situation into a regional war.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, at the apex of its power, Israel was saved from defeat by President Nixon’s shipment of weapons and planes. Today, Israel’s numerical inferiority is greater, and it faces more determined and better-equipped opponents.
Despite Israel’s touted defense systems, Iranian coalition missiles, armed forces, and terrorist attacks would likely wreak havoc on its enemy, leading to a prolonged tit-for-tat.
In the absence of massive U.S. assistance, Israel’s military resources may quickly dwindle, forcing it to use its alleged nuclear weapons, as it had reportedly almost done in 1973.
An Israeli nuclear attack would likely destroy most of Iran’s capabilities, but a crippled Iran and its coalition could still attack neighboring oil facilities, unleash global terrorism, plant mines in the Persian Gulf and impair maritime trade in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
Middle Eastern oil shipments would likely slow to a trickle as production declines due to the war and insurance companies decide to drop their risky Middle Eastern clients. Iran and Venezuela would likely stop selling oil to the United States and Europe.
The world economy would head into a tailspin; international acrimony would rise; and Iraqi and Afghani citizens might fully turn on the United States, immediately requiring the deployment of more American troops. Russia, China, Venezuela, and maybe Brazil and Turkey — all of which essentially support Iran — could be tempted to form an alliance and openly challenge the U.S. hegemony.
Replaying Nixon’s nightmare
Russia and China might rearm their injured Iranian protege overnight, just as Nixon rearmed Israel, and threaten to intervene, just as the U.S.S.R. threatened to join Egypt and Syria in 1973. President Obama’s response would likely put U.S. forces on nuclear alert, replaying Nixon’s nightmarish scenario.
Iran may well feel duty-bound to respond to a unilateral attack by its Israeli archenemy, but it knows that it could not take on the United States head-to-head. In contrast, if the United States leads the attack, Iran’s response would likely be muted.
If Iran chooses to absorb an American-led strike, its allies would likely protest and send weapons but would probably not risk using force.
While no one has a crystal ball, leaders should be risk-averse when choosing war as a foreign policy tool. If attacking Iran is deemed necessary, Israel must wait for an American green light. A unilateral Israeli strike could ultimately spark World War III.

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Judicial review doesn’t remove authority
GILBERT 98 Lieutenant Colonel USAF Academy; MSBA, Boston University; J.D., McGeorge School of Law; LL.M., Harvard Law School Michael H. Gilbert, The Military and the Federal Judiciary: an Unexplored Part of the Civil-Military Relations Triangle, USAFA Journal of Legal Studies, 8 USAFA J. Leg. Stud. 197
Conclusion
The judiciary can perform the critical function of judicial review of cases involving the military without unconstitutionally impinging upon the authority of Congress and the President. In matters of policy  *224  concerning the conduct or preparation of war, courts can cautiously examine the facts to determine the propriety of their review. The greater the nexus to national security and to the conduct of purely military affairs, the greater the hesitancy courts should exercise in their review. In today's military, which is increasingly used for actions other than military operations, the concern with harming good order and discipline is less material.
By interpreting the framers' intent to grant virtually exclusive, plenary control of the military to the Congress, which regulates and maintains the armed forces, and to the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, the Supreme Court removes the judiciary from the issue of civil-military relations. Entrusting the other two branches of the government to lawfully care for the military results in strengthening the authority of civilian control by two branches of Government but only at the cost of removing civilian control which should be exercised by the courts.

VOTE NEG ---
A) Limits --- allowing review without restricting authority expands aff ground --- justifies tons of “modify policies” affs and affs that require conditions for use which access distinct and unpredictable advantages --- makes it impossible to debate 

B) Ground --- review affs skirt core negative disads about authority and strong judicial acts --- independently STEALS neg CP ground because review CP’s test the desirability of RESTRICTIONS on authority 

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Congress DA 

Precedent for war powers deliberation now.  It will check US militarism
Hunter 8/31/13 - Chair of the Council for a Community of Democracies Robert E. Hunter (US ambassador to NATO (93-98) and Served on Carter’s National Security Council as the Director of West European Affairs and then as Director of Middle East Affairs, “Restoring Congress’ Role In Making War,” Lobe Log, August 31, 2013, pg. http://www.lobelog.com/restoring-congress-role-in-making-war/
But the most remarkable element of the President’s statement is the likely precedent he is setting in terms of engaging Congress in decisions about the use of force, not just through “consultations,” but in formal authorization. This gets into complex constitutional and legal territory, and will lead many in Congress (and elsewhere) to expect Obama — and his successors — to show such deference to Congress in the future, as, indeed, many members of Congress regularly demand.
But seeking authorization for the use of force from Congress as opposed to conducting consultations has long since become the exception rather than the rule. The last formal congressional declarations of war, called for by Article One of the Constitution, were against Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary on June 4, 1942. Since then, even when Congress has been engaged, it has either been through non-binding resolutions or under the provisions of the War Powers Resolution of November 1973. That congressional effort to regain some lost ground in decisions to send US forces into harm’s way was largely a response to administration actions in the Vietnam War, especially the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, which was actually prepared in draft before the triggering incident. The War Powers Resolution does not prevent a president from using force on his own authority, but only imposes post facto requirements for gaining congressional approval or ending US military action. In the current circumstances, military strikes of a few days’ duration, those provisions would almost certainly not come into play.
There were two basic reasons for abandoning the constitutional provision of a formal declaration of war. One was that such a declaration, once turned on, would be hard to turn off, and could lead to a demand for unconditional surrender (as with Germany and Japan in World War II), even when that would not be in the nation’s interests — notably in the Korean War. The more compelling reason for ignoring this requirement was the felt need, during the Cold War, for the president to be able to respond almost instantly to a nuclear attack on the United States or on very short order to a conventional military attack on US and allied forces in Europe.
With the Cold War now on “the ash heap of history,” this second argument should long since have fallen by the wayside, but it has not.  Presidents are generally considered to have the power to commit US military forces, subject to the provisions of the War Powers Resolution WPR, which have never been properly tested. But why? Even with the 9/11 attacks on the US homeland, the US did not respond immediately, but took time to build the necessary force and plans to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (and, anyway, if President George W. Bush had asked on 9/12 for a declaration of war, he no doubt would have received it from Congress, very likely unanimously).
As times goes by, therefore, what President Obama said on August 29, 2013 could well be remembered less for what it will mean regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria and more for what it implies for the reestablishment of a process of full deliberation and fully-shared responsibilities with the Congress for decisions of war-peace, as was the historic practice until 1950. This proposition will be much debated, as it should be; but if the president’s declaration does become precedent (as, in this author’s judgment, it should be, except in exceptional circumstances where a prompt military response is indeed in the national interest), he will have done an important and lasting service to the nation, including a potentially significant step in reducing the excessive militarization of US foreign policy.
There would be one added benefit: members of Congress, most of whom know little about the outside world and have not for decades had to take seriously their constitutional responsibilities for declaring war, would be required to become better-informed participants in some of the most consequential decisions the nation has to take, which, not incidentally, also involve risks to the lives of America’s fighting men and women.

Dismantling war powers justiciability undermines deliberation.  Our link is unique
Broughton 01 – Asst Attorney General of Texas Broughton, J. Richard (LL.M., with distinction, Georgetown University Law Center), “What Is It Good For--War Power, Judicial Review, and Constitutional Deliberation,” Oklahoma Law Review, Vol. 54, Issue 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 685-726
Judicial abstention from war powers disputes can mitigate the effects of the judicial overhang by encouraging Congress and the President to think more seriously about constitutional structure."' In the Vietnam era, for example, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution to assert its own constitutional prerogatives only after the courts had consistently refused to intervene. Perhaps this was no accident. Without resort to the judiciary, Congress was forced to take responsibility for using its Article I powers in its own defense. Whatever the other flaws of the War Powers Resolution, it at least represents Congress's assertiveness in attempting to define the boundaries of constitutional war power, as the Constitution provides. (Wther Congress got it right is a separate matter, beyond the scope of this article.) Similarly, rather than resort to the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the Resolution, presidents since Nixon have simply deployed troops at their discretion, forcing Congress to either authorize the action, reject such authorization, withdraw funding, or, perhaps as a last resort, impeach the President. Thus, the modem trend of cases leaving war powers controversies to the political branches has produced somewhat more responsible political institutions, though much work must still be done to truly effectuate the Constitution's vision of prudent and reasoned constitutional discourse among the Congress and the White House.' In keeping therefore with constitutional history and design, political actors best serve republican government when they give careful attention to constitutional boundaries and constitutional weapons in the course of adopting military and foreign policy. Political actors will be more likely to do so if they have only themselves, and not the courts, to do the work.
IV. Conclusion
There is much we can learn from Madison and Marshall, statesmen who understood the value of prudent constitutional reasoning to the practical governance of a large republic. Importantly, not all such reasoning occurs in the courts, nor should it. Those matters not "of a judiciary nature," in Madison's words, must find resolution in other fora. Controversies between Congress and the President regarding the Constitution's allocation of war powers are among this class of disputes. This is not to say that courts must leave all cases involving foreign affairs to the vicissitudes of political institutions; the Constitution explicitly vests the judiciary with authority over admiralty and maritime cases, as well as cases affecting ambassadors, public ministers, and consuls, all of which may invariably touch upon foreign relations. War powers disputes are constitutionally unique, however, because the Constitution itself commits the resolution of those disputes to legislators and the chief executive. The courts have, for the most part, appropriately left these disputes where they belong, in the hands of the political branches. Through the doctrine of justiciability, courts have helped to preserve the separation of powers by recognizing both the limits on their Article In authority and the broa prerogatives that the Constitution grants to political actors who are charged with making and effecting American military and foreign policy. By continuing this trend, as the District of Columbia Circuit did in Campbell, the judiciary can encourage deliberation about constitutional structure in the political branches, as Madison and Marshall envisioned. Pg. 724-725

Global nuclear war
Boyle 12 - Professor of International Law @ University of Illinois College of Law Francis A. Boyle (PhD. degrees in Political Science from Harvard University), “Unlimited Imperialism and the Threat of World War III. U.S. Militarism at the Start of the 21st Century,” Global Research, December 25, 2012, pg. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unlimited-imperialism-and-the-threat-of-world-war-iii-u-s-militarism-at-the-start-of-the-21st-century/5316852
Historically, this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898.  Then the Republican administration of President  William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidal conditions.  Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy.   But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the “Pacific” would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War.
Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr. administration and now the Democratic Obama administration are threatening to set off World War III.
By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001 9/11, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect.  Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:  control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas.  The Bush Jr./ Obama  administrations  have  already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation.  In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration  announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species.  Libya and the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the last.
This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):
“The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind… “
 It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
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Counterplan text: The United States Federal Judiciary should conduct judicial ex post review of United States’ targeted killing operations, with liability falling on the government for any constitutional violation, on the grounds that current bars to justiciability of cases against the military violates substantive due process. 

CP solves the case --- substantive Due Process is at risk of unraveling – it is critical to check tyranny and rights abuses – legal precedent also means in the world of the permutation the Supreme Court would only rule on procedural due process which destroys the substantive due process doctrine
Peter J. Rubin, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University 103 Colum. L. Rev. 833 May, 2003
The concept of "substantive due process" has long since earned its place as a crucial constraint on the untrammeled power of those who govern and a vital source of protection for the dignity and autonomy of those who are governed. Yet at the same time that there is substantial evidence of a slow but growing acceptance by the Supreme Court of the role of the doctrine in our constitutional structure, the Court continues sporadically to generate rules that seem to undermine its very legitimacy, rules that appear to reflect continuing deep discomfort with the project of substantive due process. Discomfort in the application of substantive due process - while understandable and even appropriate for a judicial actor - cannot justify limitations that threaten to render the doctrine incoherent, that fail to come to terms with its internal logic and structure, *834 or that, ultimately, are in deep tension with the structural rules governing claims of federal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet that discomfort appears to have been given concrete expression not only in some of the rhetoric that has surrounded invocation of substantive due process, and in the Court's reluctance to expand the substantive scope of the doctrine, but in largely unexamined restrictions that have been placed or urged upon the use of substantive due process, restrictions that have just these characteristics. In this Article, I will examine two such restrictions that involve superficially different but deeply connected doctrinal moves. The first involves a rule, announced by the Supreme Court in Graham v. Connor, 1 that substantive due process may not be invoked where a claim is "covered by" another, more explicit, constitutional provision.

Decision rule – reject every instance
Petro 74 (Sylvester, Professor of Law at NYU, Toledo Law Review, Spring, p. 480, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200304/0783.html)
However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in only one thing: liberty." And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume's observation: "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no importance because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Dijas. In sum, if one believed in freedom as a supreme value and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.

Ruling on the Political Question Doctrine still leaves it intact --- ruling that it’s not okay in some instances is the same as saying it is okay in others --- this grounds is rooted in legal exceptionalism
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
Kennedy begins by coldly contradicting those opponents of the Bush administration ‘that have routinely claimed that the United States has disregarded these rules’ (p. 40) by pointing out that both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war as well as both opponents and supporters of the great panoply of US legal measures related to the war on terror ‘were playing with the same deck’ (p. 40) in presenting ‘professional arguments about how recognised rules and standards, as well as recognised exceptions and jurisdictional limitations, should be interpreted’ (p. 40). The author’s only concession with reference to the Bush administration’s legal advisers is to point out that ‘as professionals, these lawyers failed to advise their client adequately about the consequences of the interpretations they proposed, and about the way others would read the same texts – and their memoranda’ (p. 39).Thus Kennedy does not adopt any legal position to the detriment of any other, as his assessment does not seemingly pretend to persuade his reader at the level of the world of legal validity presented in the vocabulary of the UN Charter. The extent to which that excludes the author from the category of being a ‘true jus-internationalist’, according to A. Canc¸ado Trindade’s understanding of those who actually ‘comply with the ineluctable duty to stand against the apology of the use of force which is manifested in our days through distinct “doctrinal” elaborations’,42 is not for us to judge. Suffice it to note that the starting point of Kennedy’s convoluted perspective on the matter is that ‘the law of force’ is a form of ‘vocabulary for assessing the legitimacy’ (p. 41) of a form of conduct (e.g. amilitary campaign) or ‘for defending as well as attacking the “legality”’ (p. 41) of an act (e.g. distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate targets) in which the same law of force becomes a two-edged sword, everybody’s and no one’s strategic partner in a contemporary world where ‘legitimacy has become the currency of power’ (p. 45). For the author, in today’s age of ‘lawfare’ (p. 12), ‘to resist war in the name of law . . . is to misunderstand the delicate partnership of war and law’ (p. 167). In Kennedy’s view, therefore, ‘there is little comfort in knowing that law has become the vernacular for evaluating the legitimacy of war and politics where it has done so by itself becoming a strategic instrument of war and the continuation of politics by similar means’ (p. 132). 3. LAW AS A MODERN LEGAL INSTITUTION Of War and Law seems, indeed, to be animated by a certain philosophical perplexity regarding the ambiguous relation between the apparently antithetical nature of the terms appearing in its title. Since antiquity both jurists and philosophers have taught that the law’s raison d’eˆ tre is that of making social peace possible, of overcoming what would later be commonly known as the Hobbesian state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes. Kant noted that law should be perceived first and foremost as a pacifying tool – in other words, ‘the establishment of peace constitutes, not a part of, but the whole purpose of the doctrine of law’43 – and Lauterpacht projected that same principle onto the international sphere: ‘the primordial duty’ of international law is to ensure that ‘there shall be no violence among states’.44 The paradox lies, of course, in that law performs its pacifying function not by means of edifying advice, but by the threat of the use of force. In this sense, as Kennedy points out, ‘to use law is also to invoke violence, at least the violence that stands behind legal authority’ (p. 22). Hobbes himself never concealed the fact that the state, ‘that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defence’,would succeed in eradicating inter-individual violence precisely due to its ability to ‘inspire terror’;45 but Weber – ‘the State is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’46 – Godwin,47 and Kelsen48 have also provided support for the same proposition. This ambivalent and paradoxical relationship between law and violence,which is obvious in the domestic or intra-state realm, becomes even more obvious in the interstate domain with its classical twin antinomy of ubi jus, ibi pax and inter arma leges silent until the law in war emerges as a bold normative sector which dares to defy this conceptual incompatibility; even war can be regulated, be submitted to conditions and limitations. The hesitations of Kant in addressing jus in bello49 or the very fact that the Latin terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello were coined, as R. Kolb has pointed out,50 at relatively recent dates, seem to confirm that this has never been per se an evident aspiration.51 Kennedy explains his own calling as international lawyer as being partly inspired by his will to participate in the law’s civilizing mission (p. 29)52 as something utterly distinct from war: We think of these rules law in war as coming from ‘outside’ war, limiting and restricting the military. We think of international law as a broadly humanist and civilizing force, standing back from war, judging it as just or unjust, while offering itself as a code of conduct to limit violence on the battlefield. (p. 167) The author notes how this virginal confidence in the pacifying efficiency of international law – its presumed ability to forbid, limit, humanize war ‘from outside’ – becomes progressively nuanced, eroded, almost discredited by a series of considerations. The disquieting image of the ‘delicate partnership of war and law’ becomes more and more evidenced; the lawyer who attempts to regulate warfare inevitably also becomes its accomplice. As Kennedy puts it, The laws of force provide the vocabulary not only for restraining the violence and incidence of war – but also for waging war and deciding to go to war. . . . Law no longer stands outside violence, silent or prohibitive. Law also permits injury, as it privileges, channels, structures, legitimates, and facilitates acts of war. (p. 167) Unable to suppress all violence, law typifies certain forms of violence as legally admissible, thus ‘privileging’ them with regard to others and investing some agents with a ‘privilege to kill’ (p. 115). Law thereby becomes, in Kennedy’s view, a tool not so much for the restriction of war as for the legal construction of war.53 Elsewhere we have labeled Kennedy ‘a relative outsider’54 who, peering from the edge of the vocabulary of international law, tries to ‘highlight its inherent structural limits, gaps, dogmas, blind spots and biases’, as someone ‘specialised in speaking the unspeakable, disclosing ambivalences and asking awkward questions’.55 The ‘unspeakable’, in the case of the ‘law of force’, is precisely, in Kennedy’s view, this process of involuntary complicity with the very phenomenon one supposedly wants to prohibit. Prepared to ‘stain his hands’ a` la Sartre, in his attempt to humanize the military machine from within, to walk one step behind the soldier reminding him constantly, as an imaginary CNN camera, of the legal limits of the legitimate use of force, the lawyer starts to realize, in the author’s view, that he is becoming but an accessory to the war machine. Kennedy maintains that law, in its attempt to subject war to its rule, has been absorbed by it and has now become but another war instrument (p. 32);56 law has been weaponized (p. 37).57 Contemporary war is by definition a legally organized war: ‘no ship moves, no weapon is fired, no target selected without some review for compliance with regulation – not because the military has gone soft, but because there is simply no other way to make modern warfare work. Warfare has become rule and regulation’ (p. 33).War ‘has become a modern legal institution’ (p. 5), with the result that the international lawyer finds himself before an evident instance of Marxian reification, in other words ‘the consolidation of our own products as a material power erected above us beyond our control that raises a wall in front of our expectations and destroys our calculations’.58 Ideas and institutions develop ‘a life of their own’, an autonomous, perverted dynamism.

This notion of exception within the Political Question Doctrine is the root cause of the aff and makes global violence inevitable
MCGOWAN 2009 (Todd McGowan, Associate Professor, film theory, University of Vermont, PhD, Ohio State University, studies the intersection of Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism and cinema, “The Exceptional Darkness of The Dark Knight,” Jump Cut, No. 51, Spring 2009, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/darkKnightKant/text.html)
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees the great danger inherent in the exception. It leads not just to abuses of civil rights but to large-scale horrors like the Holocaust, which functions as a major point of reference for Agamben’s thought. Exceptionality, for Agamben, launches a legal civil war and thereby plays the key role in the transition from democracy to fascist authoritarianism. The declaration of the state of exception attempts “to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible.”10 The problem is that the exceptional time never comes to an end, and the disappearance of the distinction between an emergency and everyday life pushes the society toward a state of civil war that the very exception itself was supposed to quell. Rather than acting as a temporary stopgap for a society on the brink of self-annihilation, the state of exception actually pushes the society further down the path to this annihilation by undermining the distinction between law and criminality and thereby helping to foster a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which every act of sovereign power becomes justified in the name of order. The Dark Knight begins with a focus on the problem engendered by the state of exception embodied by Batman. He is a figure outside the law on whom the law relies to respond to the most recalcitrant criminal elements in Gotham. But Batman’s very success at fighting crime outside the law has, when the film opens, spawned numerous imitators — vigilantes who dress like Batman and spend their nights fighting crime. The result is an increased degree of lawlessness and insecurity in the city. Through these copycat vigilantes, the film begins by making clear the danger of the sanctioned exception that exists outside the law. Once one embraces the exception, the need for exceptionality will constantly expand insofar as the exception augments the very problem that it is created to fight against.
Off
The United States federal government should
---conduct judicial ex post review of United States’ targeted killing operations, with liability falling on the government for any constitutional violation. This decision should explicitly not rule on the grounds that the political question doctrine should not bar justiciability of cases against the military
---take any legal efforts to adopt legal standards in the context of targeted killing that matches relevant European legal interpretations
---give the Department of Defense flexibility to manage sequestration cuts
---substantially increase its development and utilization of carbon dioxide scrubbers, super chimneys for the purpose of offsetting global warming, deep-sea sediment storage for CO2 emissions, and autonomous ships for necessary enhancement of cloud albedo
---increase public service announcemenjts about the dangers of global warming and climate change, and pass legislation that mandates consistently declining emissions levels while simultaneously propping up replacement sources of energy
---increase accountability and transparency regulations and restrictions on private military contractors

CP solves CMR way better than the aff
Feaver 13 - professor of political science and public policy @ Duke University. He is a leading scholar in civil-military relations Peter Feaver, “How to Better Navigate the Coming Civil-Military Challenges,” Foreign Policy, OCTOBER 14, 2013 - 03:00 PM, pg. http://tinyurl.com/nyjau3m
Curiously, Zenko left off what is arguably the most important driver of civil-military tensions, now and especially going forward: the persistent fiscal crisis that has resulted in sequestration.
Sequestration was designed to be something so horrible that it never would be implemented. Almost everyone in the Defense Department, whether in or out of uniform, still views it that way. But there is a growing sense that the White House, and the commander in chief in particular, has come to view the first round of sequestration as tolerable. Worse, the president's refusal to negotiate with Republicans has raised fears that perhaps he is willing to prolong sequestration, at least insofar as it applies to the Defense Department.
This is a real civil-military problem -- much more consequential than the Obama administration's odd decision to prevent World War II veterans from visiting their open-air monument as a way of ratcheting up pressure on Republicans. Harassing wheelchair vets makes for compelling television, but imposing arbitrary cuts on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars across the FYDP undermines national security. There is no question which hurts civil-military relations more.
Restoring the lost funding would go a long way to improving civil-military relations, but that is not plausible. What, short of that, could the administration do?
First, the Obama administration should seek a deal that would give the Defense Department greater flexibility in managing the cuts. Republicans are willing to grant that, but the Obama administration has been unwilling to accept it unless it can get similar flexibility for favored domestic programs. In today's partisan climate, we may not be able to get such a grand bargain. Let's take the incremental improvements on offer and build out from there.
Second, if the administration will not provide the resources its strategy requires, it must issue a new strategy that is viable at the funding levels that are achievable. The prevailing strategic guidance for the U.S. military is the one Obama issued in January 2012. I had my quibbles with it at the time, but in retrospect it was better than the absence of guidance that prevails right now. Let us be clear: That strategy was designed to accommodate the deep cuts Obama ordered before the sequester took effect. The administration claimed the strategy would be viable, provided there were no further cuts. None. Since then, the sequester has taken effect, with no relief in sight. Worse, another round of sequestration could be looming. There is simply no way that the old strategy could be viable in a post-sequester environment. The administration has to come to terms with this, and do so candidly.
Third, while the president is free to decide issues of policy irrespective of the advice he receives from the military, he should take greater pains not to misrepresent what that advice actually is. As far as civil-military relations go, this was Obama's biggest foul in the Syria episode. When Obama decided to reverse course and delay the planned airstrikes, he explicitly claimed that Gen. Martin Dempsey had told him the delay would not matter. Obama and his White House staff went on at some length to justify the decision in Dempsey's counsel, but in doing so they fundamentally misrepresented the content of Dempsey's advice, as Dempsey's subsequent congressional testimony makes clear (see also here). The president's prerogative to overrule his generals is a precious aspect of civilian control. But it will lead to civil-military conflict when the military believes that civilians are not just choosing to go in a direction other than what the military advises, but are actively misleading others about what that advice was in the first place. The more budget cuts require civilians to make painful choices across military programs and choose between competing military counsels, the more important preserving this principle, and all its associated obligations on civilians, will become. 

Deep-sea sediments solve warming
House et al 06 (Kurt Zenz House, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Daniel P. Schrag, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Charles F. Harvey, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Klaus S. Lackner, Earth Engineering Center, Columbia University, “Permanent Carbon Dioxide Storage in Deep-Sea Sediments,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 6, 2006, http://www.pnas.org/content/103/33/12291.abstract)
Stabilizing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 may require storing enormous quantities of captured anthropogenic CO2 in near-permanent geologic reservoirs. Because of the subsurface temperature profile of terrestrial storage sites, CO2 stored in these reservoirs is buoyant. As a result, a portion of the injected CO2can escape if the reservoir is not appropriately sealed. We show that injecting CO2 into deep-sea sediments 3,000-m water depth and a few hundred meters of sediment provides permanent geologic storage even with large geomechanical perturbations. At the high pressures and low temperatures common in deep-sea sediments, CO2 resides in its liquid phase and can be denser than the overlying pore fluid, causing the injected CO2 to be gravitationally stable. Additionally, CO2 hydrate formation will impede the flow of CO2 (l) and serve as a second cap on the system. The evolution of the CO2 plume is described qualitatively from the injection to the formation of CO2 hydrates and finally to the dilution of the CO2(aq) solution by diffusion. If calcareous sediments are chosen, then the dissolution of carbonate host rock by the CO2(aq) solution will slightly increase porosity, which may cause large increases in permeability. Karst formation, however, is unlikely because total dissolution is limited to only a few percent of the rock volume. The total CO2 storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the U.S. coastline is enormous, capable of storing thousands of years of current U.S. CO2 emissions.

The CP solves warming – it only takes 10 chimneys to pull it off
ABC 08 (Atlanta Business Chronicle, “Super Chimney: A Unique Way to Resolve Global Warming, Generate Clean Energy and Irrigate Deserts.” 11-11-08. http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/prnewswire/press_releases/national/New_Jersey/2008/11/11/NY44841)
With the world's attention focusing more acutely on global warming and energy diversity, former engineer Michael Pesochinsky has developed the idea of utilizing super-chimney technology as a unique way to avert a global warming catastrophe at the same time as lucratively generating clean energy and desert irrigation. There is no shortage of information on global warming scenarios where climate and ecological changes are depicted along with gloomy predictions for the future. Yet, there is hardly any information on how to deal with the problem. The only viable solution being discussed now is to do away with fossil fuels. But even the most optimistic predictions agree that, for many years to come, humankind will continue to use fossil fuels, which will continue to emit greenhouse gases that advance global warming. Moreover, we are running out of time because at some point global warming will become irreversible. However, according to Pesochinsky, "there is a feasible solution to the problem which, if implemented, will not only stop global warming, but will also bring those involved substantial profits." The mysterious remedy is based on the utility of a structure called Super-Chimney. "Upon proper explanation, many will be able to understand how this technology works," says Pesochinsky. "In fact, it's based on a relatively simple scientific concept such that I suspect that some may wonder why nobody else previously suggested it." In this regard, the invention uses the natural property of hot air to rise and suggests using extremely tall chimneys as facilitators of that upward air-movement. "Suppose we construct a super-chimney three miles tall," theorizes Pesochinsky, such a structure will yield the following positive results: * produce as much energy as 15 super powerful nuclear stations; * induce rain generation in surrounding areas and will produce millions of tons of fresh water precipitation * it will transform at least 300 square miles of desert into arable land, will allow trap approximately 1,500,000 tons of CO2 per year in the newly created arable area. Pesochinsky recently launched a website at www.SuperChimney.org which details his invention, and he encourages all interested parties to visit. According to Pesochinsky, "Just 10 chimneys like the one I propose will offset global warming." 

The CP captures CO2 from the atmosphere – solves warming
Jacquot 08 (Jeremy Elton Jacquot, PhD, Marine Environmental Biology, University of Southern California, “Scientists Develop Air ‘Scrubber’ Capable of Sucking Up One Ton of CO2 a Day,” May 31, 2008, http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/scientists-develop-air-scrubber-capable-of-sucking-up-one-ton-of-co2-a-day.html)
This sounds too good to be true: a machine that can vacuum the equivalent of a ton of atmospheric carbon dioxide a day in a cost-effective way. We've seen our fair share of CO2 "sucking" devices in the past -- everything from modified plastic membranes to industrial-scale paper mill "scrubbers" -- but they've typically tended toward the expensive or unwieldy. So how does this particular device stand out? Well, for one thing, its inventors, a team of U.S. scientists led by Columbia University's Klaus Lackner, say they'll be able to get a prototype up and running within the next 2 years. Secondly, they claim that the device, which is small enough to fit inside a shipping container, will be able to capture a ton of CO2 a day from the air -- at a fraction of the cost of similar technologies. The initial cost of the device, roughly $200,000, would be more than offset by the amount of carbon each would trap, they assert. "Our project has reached the stage where it is quite clear we can do it. We need to start dealing with all these emissions. I'd rather have a technology that allows us to use fossil fuels without destroying the planet, because people are going to use them anyway," Lackner told The Guardian's David Adam.

Allied Coop

They solve nothing—Europe doesn’t like any drone use and thinks U.S. policy is illegal.  They want us to articulate transparent standards for how we go about TK.  Plus they want zones restrictions—not ex post review
Dworkin, 1ac author, 7/17/13 (Anthony, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “Actually, drones worry Europe more than spying” http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/17/actually-drones-worry-europe-more-than-spying/)  
Relations between the United States and Europe hit a low point following revelations that Washington was spying on European Union buildings and harvesting foreign email messages. Behind the scenes, though, it is not data protection and surveillance that produces the most complications for the transatlantic intelligence relationship, but rather America's use of armed drones to kill terrorist suspects away from the battlefield. Incidents such as the recent killing of at least 17 people in Pakistan are therefore only likely to heighten European unease. In public, European governments have displayed a curiously passive approach to American drone strikes, even as their number has escalated under Barack Obama’s presidency. Many Europeans believe that the majority of these strikes are unlawful, but their governments have maintained an uneasy silence on the issue. This is partly because of the uncomfortable fact that information provided by European intelligence services may have been used to identify some targets. It is also because of a reluctance to accuse a close ally of having violated international law. And it is partly because European countries have not worked out exactly what they think about the use of drones and how far they agree within the European Union on the question. Now, however, Europe’s muted stance on drone strikes looks likely to change. Why? For one thing, many European countries are now trying to acquire armed drones themselves, and this gives them an incentive to spell out clearer rules for their use. More importantly, perhaps, Europeans have noticed that drones are proliferating rapidly, and that countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia are soon likely to possess them. There is a clear European interest in trying to establish some restrictive standards on drone use before it is too late. For all these reasons, many European countries are now conducting internal reviews of their policy on drones, and discussions are also likely to start at a pan-European level. But as Europeans begin to articulate their policy on the use of drones, a bigger question looms. Can Europe and the United States come together to agree on when drone strikes are permissible? Until now, that would have seemed impossible. Since the September 11 attacks, the United States has based its counterterrorism operations on the claim that it is engaged in a worldwide armed conflict with al Qaeda and associated forces — an idea that President Obama inherited from President George W. Bush and has been kept as the basis for an expanded drone strike campaign. European countries have generally rejected this claim. However, the changes to American policy that President Obama announced in May could open the way to at least the possibility of a dialogue. Obama suggested that he anticipated a time in the not-too-distant future when the armed conflict against al Qaeda might come to an end. More substantially, he made clear that his administration was in the process of switching its policy so that, outside zones of hostilities, it would only use drone strikes against individuals who posed a continuing and imminent threat to the U.S. That is a more restrictive standard than the claim that any member of al Qaeda or an associated force could lawfully be killed with a drone strike at any time. European countries might be more willing to accept an approach based on this kind of “self-defense” idea. However, there remain some big stumbling blocks. First, a good deal about Obama’s new standards is still unclear. How does he define a “zone of hostilities,” where the new rules will not apply? And what is his understanding of an “imminent” threat? European countries are likely to interpret these key terms in a much narrower way than the United States. Second, Obama’s new approach only applies as a policy choice. His more expansive legal claims remain in the background so that he is free to return to them if he wishes. But if the United States is serious about working toward international standards on drone strikes, as Obama and his officials have sometimes suggested, then Europe is the obvious place to start. And there are a number of steps the administration could take to make an agreement with European countries more likely. For a start, it should cut back the number of drone strikes and be much more open about the reasons for the attacks it conducts and the process for reviewing them after the fact. It should also elaborate its criteria for determining who poses an imminent threat in a way that keeps attacks within tight limits. And, as U.S. forces prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014, it should keep in mind the possibility of declaring the war against al Qaeda to be over. All this said, Europe also has some tough decisions to make, and it is unclear whether European countries are ready to take a hard look at their views about drone strikes, addressing any weaknesses or inconsistencies in their own position. If they are, the next few years could offer a breakthrough in developing international standards for the use of this new kind of weapon, before the regular use of drones spreads across the globe.

Spying alt cause
Skinner 10/25/13—Kiron K. Skinner is the director of the Center for International Relations and Politics at Carnegie Mellon University and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution October 25, 2013, “Diplomacy Requires Trust Among Allies,” http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/10/24/if-were-spying-are-we-still-allies/diplomacy-requires-trust-among-allies
Trust is so central to maintaining a healthy alliance that the alleged U.S. policy of monitoring the phone conversations or phone records of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French citizens should be curtailed.
Since the 1963 Elysée Treaty was signed, France and Germany have been the anchors for Europe’s democracies. Without these two leading economies, the European Union could not function and a peaceful Europe would be all but impossible to maintain.
Their membership in NATO is vital on both sides of the Atlantic. They have provided troops to the U.S.-led international security forces in Afghanistan. Even when they differ, they work together, as in the case of France’s intervention in Mali, when Germany ultimately offered the use of its cargo planes.
Diplomacy is based on trust, so when trust is compromised, cooperation -- no matter how longstanding -- gives way to discord. The Obama administration contends that a large portion of U.S. espionage activities are carried out to combat terrorism, but this does not justify the actions brought to light by the recent Edward Snowden-originated revelations. If Washington undermines its own leadership or that of its allies, the collective ability of the West to combat terrorism will be compromised. Allied leaders will have no incentive to put their own militaries at risk if they cannot trust U.S. leadership. Foreign leaders and their publics -- not just the ideological and murderous nonstate actors that have made terrorism a global phenomenon -- may demand retribution against Washington.
Robust U.S. counterterrorism policies are premised on credibility with those who join the U.S. on the front lines. Even though spying on allies has always occurred (U.S. spying on France provided important intelligence in World War II, for example), the digital age allows public revelations of classified behavior to happen in real time -- not decades after the fact. It is little wonder that President Obama has been on the phone with his European counterparts this week. U.S. credibility is on the line.

Their Brzezinski evidence doesn’t actually provide a warrant for NATO solving anything—it just lists a bunch of problems and then says “NATO is globally significant.” 

NATO fails
Hartung 13 (Farina Hartung, Master Thesis International and European Relations, Linköping University, “Case-study of NATO: Is NATO a redundant international organization or not?”, http://www.liu.se/utbildning/pabyggnad/F7MME/student/courses/733a27masterthesis/filarkiv/spring-2013/theses-june/1.464731/MasterThesisFinalVersionFarinaHartung.pdf)
Just as mentioned above, NATO has gone through a process of changes since it was first established. It can be said that the changes where necessary or as a matter of fact that they were not - it always depends on the view one takes. The position of this paper has been stated before that it is going to investigate the question if NATO is redundant and to show proof that it is. As history has shown, it can be argued that the organization is redundant and has survived much longer passed its due time. From this point of view, it can be argued that this is what hurts the organization; they need to reform before they have a chance to act.
It is quite difficult to claim that NATO is not redundant, but as mentioned before, this Thesis will take a look at the opposite side of this claim. Instead of trying to prove that NATO is needed, I will try to show that it is not needed and has long surpassed its duty. That has become clear over the past years. NATO has reformed itself in order to ensure that it will stay relevant enough in order to play an impacting role in politics and international relations. Although they have taken the initiative to stay relevant, they seem to have failed. There have been different voices, such as Theo Sommer and Kenneth Waltz, who claim and argue that NATO is as a matter of fact redundant.
One could always ask what is redundancy and how can it be measured. Redundancy is not self-evident, and it also cannot really be defined. Neither can redundancy be measured. Redundancy is what one makes out of it and what others understand of redundancy is left open for discussion. But in regards to this paper, redundancy is just the fact that NATO is not really needed any longer. The task it is currently doing, such as the peacekeeping, can be done by other international organizations, such as the United Nations There is no longer the need for just one international organization to have its sole focus and propose on collective security. Security is something that is desired by so many countries and there is no need that NATO needs to be the one organization that will provide this to all the countries in the world. And as mentioned before, NATO already goes outside its territorial borders in order to provide security to the world (“NATO in the 21st Century).
NATO is a redundant international organization simply because it has lost its endeavor. It strives to do so much in order to provide its member states with the necessary certainty that in case of a threat, there is a whole community that will act and protect each member state. But how should NATO really do that in reality? The member states have cut down their size of military they have. In time of great danger, one country might not want to act because there could be a conflict of interests. Currently, there is just not such a big threat as the Soviet Union was that there needs to be a military alliance. In case that such a great threat rises to the surface again, it is just simply as easy to create a new international military organization which can then function according to the actual needs, because it is always during the time of threat that new alliances are created.
As mentioned above, the main purpose of NATO has vanished when the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Since the Cold War and the threat that the Soviet Union posed so close to European borders dissolved in the beginning of the 1990s, NATO just has lost its main function. According to Theo Sommer, NATO has ever since then been in a constant stage of “transformation”, never really knowing what it should achieve and what its goal is (17). In addition to that, one could argue that NATO is facing more problems that seem to have come along with the problem of the lacking threat.
This Thesis argues that NATO is neither necessary to fulfill a defensive function or that of providing security for its members. NATO is an international organization that is in fact no longer permissible. It has surpassed its life expectancy by many years. Moreover, it can be said that since it has surpassed its reason of existence, it will step down from the position it holds in regards of an international security organization. It is no longer the main focus of the member states. NATO should also no longer be the main focus. Other organizations have emerged over the past decades that show that they are able to do the necessary work without having to go through a process of transformation. For example regional international organization, such as the European Union could take over this task, since most of the members are located on the European continent to begin with. Furthermore, it can be claimed that NATO should be able to see that they are no longer fit for modern times. Before NATO is able to act on any kind of problem or concern, it has to go through a process of transforming itself; otherwise, it might not be able to act. This point of view may seem a bit exaggerated; however, it is suitable for NATO since it is pragmatic. NATO is not the same since the end of the Cold War. It can be said that the main reason why the NATO was established was to be able to encounter the Soviet Union in a time of crisis. According to Lindley-French, NATO today is a strategic and defensive focal point that can project both military and partnership power worldwide (89). She continuous her argument by noting that the job the alliance has to done is the same as ever and has not changed (Ibid). The job of the alliance has always been to safeguard the freedom and security of its member nations through political and security needs, instituted by the values of “democracy, liberty, rule of law and the peaceful resolution to disputes” (Ibid). Yet another point he claims is that NATO provides a strategic forum for consultation between North Americans and Europeans on security issues of common concern and the facility for taking joint action to deal with them (Ibid).
To repeat, NATO has lost its power and maybe even its standpoint in the modern day time politics. There are many different international organizations that all could take over the work of NATO or even could continue it in a better manner than NATO is currently doing. Claiming that NATO is not redundant just does not seem to follow the actual fact of the position that NATO is currently in. They have missed indeed the point where it was time to either dissolve the whole international organization or the time to reform which would have actually created positive outcomes. The latter point, however, seems impossible now. It just is impossible for NATO to change yet again. In the time of its existence, NATO has undergone so many different changes and reforms, altogether a total of six. There is just no logical reason why NATO is able to successfully undergo another process of changes and transformation. New reforms always bring changes and if they actually will help NATO is left in the open.
As Theo Sommer puts it, NATO has served its time simply because the world has changed (9). The threats are no longer the same and to some extend may not even exist anymore. There are of course new threats, such as terrorism, piracy, and cyber-attacks, now that have emerged and rose to the surface of international politics. However, those are not really the same as they were when NATO was created. Hence, NATO is not suitable to tackle new issues and problems. They can try to reform, but it will never be the same because NATO itself will have to adjust to the new situation. But this is not what this once great military alliance was intended to do.

They don’t fix accountability or standards of imminence—Goldsmith is about needing Congress to force transparency regarding the targeting process.  Ex post review doesn’t do that
Goldsmith, 1ac author, 13 (Jack Goldsmith teaches at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, “How Obama Undermined the War on Terror,”  http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112964/obamas-secrecy-destroying-american-support-counterterrorism)
For official secrecy abroad to work, the secrets must be kept at home as well. In speeches, interviews, and leaks, Obama's team has tried to explain why its operations abroad are lawful and prudent. But to comply with rules of classified information and covert action, the explanations are conveyed in limited, abstract, and often awkward terms. They usually raise more questions than they answer—and secrecy rules often preclude the administration from responding to follow-up questions, criticisms, and charges. ¶ As a result, much of what the administration says about its secret war—about civilian casualties, or the validity of its legal analysis, or the quality of its internal deliberations—seems incomplete, self-serving, and ultimately non-credible. These trust-destroying tendencies are exacerbated by its persistent resistance to transparency demands from Congress, from the press, and from organizations such as the aclu that have sought to know more about the way of the knife through Freedom of Information Act requests.¶ A related sin is the Obama administration's surprising failure to secure formal congressional support. Nearly every element of Obama's secret war rests on laws—especially the congressional authorization of force (2001) and the covert action statute (1991)—designed for different tasks. The administration could have worked with Congress to update these laws, thereby forcing members of Congress to accept responsibility and take a stand, and putting the secret war on a firmer political and legal foundation. But doing so would have required extended political efforts, public argument, and the possibility that Congress might not give the president precisely what he wants.¶ The administration that embraced the way of the knife in order to lower the political costs of counterterrorism abroad found it easier to avoid political costs at home as well. But this choice deprived it of the many benefits of public argumentation and congressional support. What Donald Rumsfeld said self-critically of Bush-era unilateralism applies to Obama's unilateralism as well: it fails to "take fully into account the broader picture—the complete set of strategic considerations of a president fighting a protracted, unprecedented and unfamiliar war for which he would need sustained domestic and international support." ¶ Instead of seeking contemporary congressional support, the administration has relied mostly on government lawyers' secret interpretive extensions of the old laws to authorize new operations against new enemies in more and more countries. The administration has great self-confidence in the quality of its stealth legal judgments. But as the Bush administration learned, secret legal interpretations are invariably more persuasive within the dark circle of executive branch secrecy than when exposed to public sunlight. On issues ranging from proper targeting standards, to the legality of killing American citizens, to what counts as an "imminent" attack warranting self-defensive measures, these secret legal interpretations—so reminiscent of the Bushian sin of unilateral legalism—have been less convincing in public, further contributing to presidential mistrust.¶ Feeling the heat from these developments, President Obama promised in his recent State of the Union address "to engage with Congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention, and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world." So far, this promise, like similar previous ones, remains unfulfilled. ¶ The administration has floated the idea of "shifting the CIA's lethal targeting program to the Defense Department," as The Daily Beast reported last month. Among other potential virtues, this move might allow greater public transparency about the way of the knife to the extent that it would eliminate the covert action bar to public discussion. But JSOC's non-covert targeted killing program is no less secretive than the CIA's, and its congressional oversight is, if anything, less robust. ¶ A bigger problem with this proposed fix is that it contemplates executive branch reorganization followed, in a best-case scenario, by more executive branch speeches and testimony about what it is doing in its stealth war. The proposal fails to grapple altogether with the growing mistrust of the administration's oblique representations about secret war. The president cannot establish trust in the way of the knife through internal moves and more words. Rather, he must take advantage of the separation of powers. Military detention, military commissions, and warrantless surveillance became more legitimate and less controversial during the Bush era because adversarial branches of government assessed the president's policies before altering and then approving them. President Obama should ask Congress to do the same with the way of the knife, even if it means that secret war abroad is harder to conduct.

Allied terror coop is high now, despite frictions
Archick 9/4—Kristin Archick, European affairs specialist at CRS September 4, 2013, “U.S.-EU Cooperation Against Terrorism,” Congressional Research Service, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS22030.pdf
As part of the EU’s efforts to combat terrorism since September 11, 2001, the EU made improving law enforcement and intelligence cooperation with the United States a top priority. The previous George W. Bush Administration and many Members of Congress largely welcomed this EU initiative in the hopes that it would help root out terrorist cells in Europe and beyond that could be planning other attacks against the United States or its interests. Such growing U.S.-EU cooperation was in line with the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations that the United States should develop a “comprehensive coalition strategy” against Islamist terrorism, “exchange terrorist information with trusted allies,” and improve border security through better international cooperation. Some measures in the resulting Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-458) and in the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-53) mirrored these sentiments and were consistent with U.S.-EU counterterrorism efforts, especially those aimed at improving border controls and transport security. U.S.-EU cooperation against terrorism has led to a new dynamic in U.S.-EU relations by fostering dialogue on law enforcement and homeland security issues previously reserved for bilateral discussions. Despite some frictions, most U.S. policymakers and analysts view the developing partnership in these areas as positive. Like its predecessor, the Obama Administration has supported U.S. cooperation with the EU in the areas of counterterrorism, border controls, and transport security. At the November 2009 U.S.-EU Summit in Washington, DC, the two sides reaffirmed their commitment to work together to combat terrorism and enhance cooperation in the broader JHA field. In June 2010, the United States and the EU adopted a new “Declaration on Counterterrorism” aimed at deepening the already close U.S.-EU counterterrorism relationship and highlighting the commitment of both sides to combat terrorism within the rule of law. In June 2011, President Obama’s National Strategy for Counterterrorism asserted that in addition to working with European allies bilaterally, “the United States will continue to partner with the European Parliament and European Union to maintain and advance CT efforts that provide mutual security and protection to citizens of all nations while also upholding individual rights.” 

Drone court won’t solve—it’s proceedings are secret.
Johnson 13—Jeh Johnson, former Pentagon General Counsel March 18, 2013, “Keynote address at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School: A “Drone Court”: Some Pros and Cons,” http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/03/jeh-johnson-speech-on-a-drone-court-some-pros-and-cons/
The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst. They see dark images of civilian and military national security personnel in the basement of the White House—acting, as Senator Angus King put it, as “prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner”—going down a list of Americans, deciding for themselves who shall live and who shall die, pursuant to a process and by standards no one understands. Our government, in speeches given by the Attorney General,2 John Brennan,3 Harold Koh,4 and myself,5 makes official disclosures of large amounts of information about its efforts, and the legal basis for those efforts, but it is never enough, because the public doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, but knows there are things their government is still withholding from them. The revelation 11 days ago that the executive branch does not claim the authority to kill an American non-combatant—something that was not, is not, and should never be an issue—is big news, and trumpeted as a major victory for congressional oversight. A senator who filibusters the government’s secrecy is compared in iconic terms to Jimmy Stewart. At the same time, through continual unauthorized leaks of sensitive information, our government looks to the American public as undisciplined and hypocritical. One federal court has characterized the government’s position in FOIA litigation as “Alice in Wonderland,”6 while another, this past Friday, referred to it as “neither logical nor plausible.”7 An anonymous, unclassified white paper leaked to NBC News prompts more questions than it answers. Our government finds itself in a lose-lose proposition: it fails to officially confirm many of its counterterrorism successes, and fails to officially confirm, deny or clarify unsubstantiated reports of civilian casualties. Our government’s good efforts for the safety of the people risks an erosion of support by the people. It is in this atmosphere that the idea of a national security court as a solution to the problem—an idea that for a long time existed only on the margins of the debate about U.S. counterterrorism policy but is now entertained by more mainstream thinkers such as Senator Diane Feinstein and a man I respect greatly, my former client Robert Gates—has gained momentum. To be sure, a national security court composed of a bipartisan group of federal judges with life tenure, to approve targeted lethal force, would bring some added levels of credibility, independence and rigor to the process, and those are worthy goals. In the eyes of the American public, judges are for the most part respected for their independence. In the eyes of the international community, a practice that is becoming increasingly controversial would be placed on a more credible footing. A national security court would also help answer the question many are asking: what do we say to other nations who acquire this capability? A group of judges to approve targeted lethal force would set a standard and an example. Further, as so-called “targeted killings” become more controversial with time, I believe there are some decision-makers within the Executive Branch who actually wouldn’t mind the added comfort of judicial imprimatur on their decisions. But, we must be realistic about the degree of added credibility such a court can provide. Its proceedings would necessarily be ex parte and in secret, and, like a FISA court, I suspect almost all of the government’s applications would be granted, because, like a FISA application, the government would be sure to present a compelling case. So, at the same time the New York Times editorial page promotes a FISA-like court for targeted lethal force, it derides the FISA court as a “rubber stamp” because it almost never rejects an application.8 How long before a “drone court” operating in secret is criticized in the same way?

They don’t solve NATO—problem is competing legal regimes for whether the U.S. and its allies are at war with al Qaeda.  Their Parker ev is about indefinite detention, not just TK, and is 2 years old.  Either NATO isn’t going to collapse, or it already has an it’s irrelevant
Parker, 1ac author, 9/17/12 (Tom, former policy director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA. He is also a former officer in the British Security Service (MI5), “U.S. Tactics Threaten NATO” http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/us-tactics-threaten-nato-7461?page=1)  
A growing chasm in operational practice is opening up between the United States and its allies in NATO. This rift is putting the Atlantic alliance at risk. Yet no one in Washington seems to be paying attention. The escalating use of unmanned aerial vehicles to strike terrorist suspects in an increasing number of operational environments from the Arabian Peninsula to Southeast Asia, coupled with the continued use of military commissions and indefinite detention, is driving a wedge between the United States and its allies. Attitudes across the Atlantic are hardening fast. This isn’t knee-jerk, man-on-the-street anti-Americanism. European governments that have tried to turn a blind eye to U.S. counterterrorism practices over the past decade are now forced to pay attention by their own courts, which will restrict cooperation in the future. As recently as last month, the German federal prosecutor’s office opened a probe into the October 2010 killing of a German national identified only as “Buenyamin E.” in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. There are at least four other similar cases involving German nationals and several reported strikes involving legal residents of the United Kingdom. In March, Polish prosecutors charged the former head of Polish intelligence, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, with “unlawfully depriving prisoners of the their liberty” because of the alleged role he played in helping to establish a CIA secret prison in northeastern Poland in 2002–2003. Last December, British Special Forces ran afoul of the UK courts for informally transferring two Al Qaeda suspects detained in Iraq, Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali, to U.S. forces. The British government has been instructed to recover the men from U.S. custody or face legal sanctions that could result in two senior ministers being sent to prison. Perhaps the most dramatic example illustrating the gap that has opened up between the United States and its European allies concerns the 2009 in absentia conviction of twenty-three U.S. agents in an Italian court for the role they played in the extraordinary rendition of radical Imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from Milan to Cairo. Britain, Poland, Italy and Germany are among America’s closest military partners. Troops from all four countries are currently serving alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but they are now operating within a very different set of constraints than their U.S. counterparts. The European Court of Human Rights established its jurisdiction over stabilization operations in Iraq, and by implication its writ extends to Afghanistan as well. The British government has lost a series of cases before the court relating to its operations in southern Iraq. This means that concepts such as the right to life, protection from arbitrary punishment, remedy and due process apply in areas under the effective control of European forces. Furthermore, the possibility that intelligence provided by any of America’s European allies could be used to target a terrorism suspect in Somalia or the Philippines for a lethal drone strike now raises serious criminal liability issues for the Europeans. The United States conducts such operations under the legal theory that it is in an international armed conflict with Al Qaeda and its affiliates that can be pursued anywhere on the globe where armed force may be required. But not one other member of NATO shares this legal analysis, which flies in the face of established international legal norms. The United States may have taken issue with the traditional idea that wars are fought between states and not between states and criminal gangs, but its allies have not. The heads of Britain’s foreign and domestic intelligence services have been surprisingly open about the “inhibitions” that this growing divergence has caused the transatlantic special relationship, telling Parliament that it has become an obstacle to intelligence sharing. European attitudes are not going to change—the European Court of Human Rights is now deeply embedded in European life, and individual European governments cannot escape its oversight no matter how well disposed they are to assist the United States. The United States has bet heavily on the efficacy of a new array of counterterrorism powers as the answer to Al Qaeda. In doing so it has evolved a concept of operations that has much more in common with the approach to terrorist threats taken by Israel and Russia than by its European partners. There has been little consideration of the wider strategic cost of these tactics, even as the Obama administration doubles down and extends their use. Meanwhile, some of America’s oldest and closest allies are beginning to place more and more constraints on working with U.S. forces. NATO cannot conduct military operations under two competing legal regimes for long. Something has to give—and it may just be the Atlantic alliance.

PQD
The plan doesn’t repudiate the PQD— they just expand the interpretation of what is justiciable to include causes of action against U.S. TK policy. They don’t fiat the Court will continue to assert itself in targeting decisions. The Court will just defer to the executive post-plan
Scheppele 12—Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs @ Princeton University Kim Lane Scheppele (Dir. of the Program in Law and Public Affairs @ Princeton University),  “The New Judicial Deference,” Boston University Law Review, 92 B.U.L. Rev. 89, January 2012
In this Article, I will show that American courts have often approached the extreme policies of the anti-terrorism campaign by splitting the difference between the two sides—the government and suspected terrorists. One side typically got the ringing rhetoric (the suspected terrorists), and the other side got the facts on the ground (the government). In major decisions both designed to attract public attention and filled with inspiring language about the reach of the Constitution even in times of peril, the Supreme Court, along with some lower courts, has stood up to the government and laid down limits on anti-terror policy in a sequence of decisions about the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. But, at the same time, these decisions have provided few immediate remedies for those who have sought the courts' protection. As a result, suspected terrorists have repeatedly prevailed in their legal arguments, and yet even with these court victories, little changed in the situation that they went to court to challenge. The government continued to treat suspected terrorists almost as badly as it did before the suspected terrorists "won" their cases. And any change in terrorism suspects' conditions that did result from these victorious decisions was slow and often not directly attributable to the judicial victories they won.
Does this gap between suspected terrorists' legal gains and their unchanged fates exist because administration officials were flouting the decisions of the courts? The Bush Administration often responded with sound and fury and attempted to override the Supreme Court's decisions or to comply minimally with them when they had to. n6 But, as this Article will show, these decisions did not actually require the government to change its practices very quickly. The decisions usually required the government to change only its general practices in the medium term. Judges had a different framework for analyzing the petitioners' situation than the petitioners themselves did; judges generally couched their decisions in favor of the suspected terrorists as critiques of systems instead of as solutions for individuals. In doing so, however, courts allowed a disjuncture between rights and remedies for those who stood before them seeking a vindication of their claims. Suspected terrorists may have won  *92  in these cases—and they prevailed overwhelmingly in their claims, especially at the Supreme Court—but courts looked metaphorically over the suspects' heads to address the policies that got these suspects into the situation where the Court found them. Whether those who brought the cases actually got to benefit from the judgments, either immediately or eventually, was another question.
Bad though the legal plight of suspected terrorists has been, one might well have expected it to be worse. Before 9/11, the dominant response of courts around the world during wars and other public emergencies was to engage in judicial deference. n7 Deference counseled courts to stay out of matters when governments argued that national security concerns were central. As a result, judges would generally indicate that they had no role to play once the bullets started flying or an emergency was declared. If individuals became collateral damage in wartime, there was generally no judicial recourse to address their harms while the war was going on. As the saying goes, inter arma silent leges: in war, the law is mute. After 9/11, however, and while the conflict occasioned by those attacks was still "hot," courts jumped right in, dealing governments one loss after another. n8 After 9/11, it appears that deference is dead.
 *93  But, I will argue, deference is still alive and well. We are simply seeing a new sort of deference born out of the ashes of the familiar variety. While governments used to win national security cases by convincing the courts to decline any serious review of official conduct in wartime, now governments win first by losing these cases on principle and then by getting implicit permission to carry on the losing policy in concrete cases for a while longer, giving governments a victory in practice. n9 Suspected terrorists have received  *94  from courts a vindication of the abstract principle that they have rights without also getting an order that the abusive practices that have directly affected them must be stopped immediately. Instead, governments are given time to change their policies while still holding suspected terrorists in legal limbo. As a result, despite winning their legal arguments, suspected terrorists lose the practical battle to change their daily lives.
Courts may appear to be bold in these cases because they tell governments to craft new policies to deal with terrorism. But because the new policies then have to be tested to see whether they meet the new criteria courts have laid down, the final approval may take years, during which time suspected terrorists may still be generally subjected to the treatment that courts have said was impermissible. Because judicial review of anti-terrorism policies itself drags out the time during which suspected terrorists may be detained, suspected terrorists win legal victories that take a very long time to result in change that they can discern. As a result, governments win the policy on the ground until court challenges have run their course and the courts make decisions that contribute to the time that the litigation takes. This is the new face of judicial deference.
This Article will explore why and how American courts have produced so many decisions in which suspected terrorists appear to win victories in national security cases. As we will see, many judges have handled the challenges that terrorism poses for law after 9/11 by giving firm support, at least in theory, to both separation of powers and constitutional rights. Judges have been very active in limiting what the government can do, requiring substantial adjustments of anti-terrorism policy and vindicating the claims of those who have been the targets. But the solutions that judges have crafted—often bold, ambitious, and brave solutions—nonetheless fail to address the plights of the specific individuals who brought the cases.
This new form of judicial deference has created a slow-motion brake on the race into a constitutional abyss. But these decisions give the government leeway to tackle urgent threats without having to change course right away with respect to the treatment of particular individuals. New deference, then, is a mixed bag. It creates the appearance of doing something—an appearance not entirely false in the long run—while doing far less in the present to bring counter-terrorism policy back under the constraint of constitutionalism.

CMR impact is about the need for civilian oversight, specifically the Court, over the military.  Plan doesn’t change that relationship

CMR is screwed – conflict is inev
Davidson 13 (Janine Davidson is assistant professor at George Mason University’s Graduate School of Public Policy. From 2009-2012 she served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Plans in the Pentagon, Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2013, " Civil-Military Friction and Presidential Decision Making: Explaining the Broken Dialogue", Vol. 43, No. 1, Ebsco)
Such mutual frustration between civilian leadership and the military is not unique to the Obama administration. In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously chastised the military for its resistance to altering the invasion plan for Iraq. The military criticized him for tampering with the logistical details and concepts of operations, which they claimed led to the myriad operational failures on the ground (Gordon and Trainor 2006; Ricks 2007; Woodward 2004). Later, faced with spiraling ethnic violence and rising U.S. casualties across Iraq, George W. Bush took the advice of retired four-star General Jack Keane and his think tank colleagues over the formal advice of the Pentagon in his decision to launch the so-called surge in 2007 (Davidson 2010; Feaver 2011; Woodward 2010). A similar dynamic is reflected in previous eras, from John F. Kennedy’s famous debates during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Allison and Zelikow 1999) to Lyndon Johnson’s quest for options to turn the tide in Vietnam (Berman 1983; Burke and Greenstein 1991), and Bill Clinton’s lesser-known frustration with the military over its unwillingness to develop options to counter the growing global in?uence of al-Qaeda.2 In each case, exasperated presidents either sought alternatives to their formal military advisors or simply gave up and chose other political battles. Even Abraham Lincoln resorted to simply ?ring generals until he got one who would fight his way (Cohen 2002). What accounts for this perennial friction between presidents and the military in planning and executing military operations? Theories about civilian control of the military along with theories about presidential decision making provide a uskentuckeful starting point for this question. While civilian control literature sheds light on the propensity for friction between presidents and the military and how presidents should cope, it does not adequately address the institutional drivers of this friction. Decision-making theories, such as those focused on bureaucratic politics and institutional design (Allison 1969; Halperin 1974; Zegart 2000) motivate us to look inside the relevant black boxes more closely. What unfolds are two very different sets of drivers informing the expectations and perspectives that civilian and military actors each bring to the advising and decisionmaking table. This article suggests that the mutual frustration between civilian leaders and the military begins with cultural factors, which are actually embedded into the uniformed military’s planning system. The military’s doctrine and education reinforce a culture of “military professionalism,” that outlines a set of expectations about the civil-military decision-making process and that defines “best military advice” in very speci?c ways. Moreover, the institutionalized military planning system is designed to produce detailed and realistic military plans for execution—and that will ensure “victory”—and is thus ill suited to the rapid production of multiple options desired by presidents. The output of this system, framed on specific concepts and definitions about “ends,” “ways,” “means,” and expectations about who provides what type of planning “guidance,” is out of synch with the expectations of presidents and their civilian advisors, which in turn have been formed from another set of cultural and institutional drivers. Most civilian leaders recognize that there is a principal-agent issue at work, requiring them to rely on military expertise to provide them realistic options during the decision-making process. But, their definition of “options” is framed by a broader set of political objectives and a desire to winnow decisions based, in part, on advice about what various objectives are militarily feasible and at what cost. In short, civilians’ diverse political responsibilities combined with various assumptions about military capabilities and processes, create a set of expectations about how advice should be presented (and how quickly), how options might be defined, and how military force might or might not be employed. These expectations are often considered inappropriate, unrealistic, or irrelevant by the military. Moreover, as discussed below, when civilians do not subscribe to the same “hands off” philosophy regarding civilian control of the military favored by the vast majority of military professionals, the table is set for what the military considers “meddling” and even more friction in the broken dialogue that is the president’s decision-making process. This article identifies three drivers of friction in the civil-military decision-making dialogue and unpacks them from top to bottom as follows: The first, civil-military, is not so much informed by theories of civilian control of the military as it is driven by disagreement among policy makers and military professionals over which model works best. The second set of drivers is institutional, and reflects Graham Allison’s organizational process lens (“model II”). In this case, the “outputs” of the military’s detailed and slow planning process fail to produce the type of options and advice civilians are hoping for. Finally, the third source of friction is cultural, and is in various ways embedded into the first two. Powerful cultural factors lead to certain predispositions by military planners regarding the appropriate use of military force, the best way to employ force to ensure “victory,” and even what constitutes “victory” in the American way of war. These cultural factors have been designed into the planning process in ways that drive certain types of outcomes. That civilians have another set of cultural predispositions about what is appropriate and what “success” means, only adds more fuel to the flame.

Internal disputes about Afghanistan withdrawal policies proves CMR doesn’t spillover and is resilient 

No impact to CMR --- it doesn’t solve war and won’t hurt the military
Murdie 12 (Department of Political Science, Kansas State University, Jan 18, 2012 “The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly: The Curvilinear Effects of Civil?Military Conflict on International Crisis Outcome Armed Forces and Society 2013 39: 233 originally published online 18 January 2012)
What explains the crisis defeats in these situations? Did civil–military relations¶ play a part in the crisis outcomes here? For Pakistan, the typical answer is a resounding¶ yes. The military ineffectiveness of Pakistan during the Kargil conflict, together¶ with the coup later that year, are events long thought to be linked to issues of bad or¶ unhealthy civil–military relations.4 Without civilian control of the military, military¶ forces cannot be used advantageously by civilian leadership, leading to fewer victories¶ in international crises.5 Additionally, without civilian control, civilians run the¶ risk of being overrun by the very forces designed to protect them. In short, too much¶ civil–military conflict leads to military ineffectiveness, as well as a host of domestic¶ problems, including increased risk of military coup.
In this article, the author first develops the theoretical underpinnings of this argument¶ and then empirically tests the somewhat controversial ‘‘Goldilocks’’ hypothesis¶ using newly created data that captures quantitatively the extent and degree of¶ conflict between the armed forces and executive leaders for all countries involved¶ in an international crisis from 1990 to 2004. Using this new data, the author finds¶ much support for the idea that not all civil–military conflict is problematic for military effectiveness. Intermediate levels of civil–military conflict, hereafter¶ referred to as civil–military ‘‘friction,’’ can heighten the probability of victory in¶ crisis bargaining situations.7

CMR disputes won’t collapse hegemony
Hooker 4 (Colonel Richard, Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in IR and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Winter 2004, “Soldiers of the State: Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations,” Parameters, DA: 7/22/2010, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IBR/is_4_33/ai_111852934////)
The arguments advanced herein attempt to show that the dynamic tension which exists in civil-military relations today, while in many cases sub-optimal and unpleasant, is far from dangerous. Deeply rooted in a uniquely American system of separated powers, regulated by strong traditions of subordination to civilian authority, and enforced by a range of direct and indirect enforcement mechanisms, modern US civil-military relations remain sound, enduring, and stable. The American people need fear no challenge to constitutional norms and institutions from a military which—however aggressive on the battlefield—remains faithful to its oath of service. Not least of the Framer’s achievements is the willing subordination of the soldiers of the state.

Warming is irreversible
Romm 13 Joe, PhD in Physics from MIT, Senior Fellow at American Progress, editor of Climate Progress, former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, “The Dangerous Myth that Climate Change is Reversible,” March 18, http://theenergycollective.com/josephromm/199981/dangerous-myth-climate-change-reversible
The CMO (Chief Misinformation Officer) of the climate ignorati, Joe Nocera, has a new piece, “A Real Carbon Solution.” The biggest of its many errors comes in this line:¶ A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than — dare I say it? — blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline.¶ Memo to Nocera: As a NOAA-led paper explained 4 years ago, climate change is “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe (if we don’t slash emissions ASAP).¶ This notion that we can reverse climate change by cutting emissions is one of the most commonly held myths — and one of the most dangerous, as explained in this 2007 MIT study, “Understanding Public Complacency About Climate Change: Adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter.”¶ The fact is that, as RealClimate has explained, we would need “an immediate cut of around 60 to 70 globally and continued further cuts over time” merely to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of CO2 – and that would still leave us with a radiative imbalance that would lead to “an additional 0.3 to 0.8ºC warming over the 21st Century.” And that assumes no major carbon cycle feedbacks kick in, which seems highly unlikely.¶ We’d have to drop total global emissions to zero now and for the rest of the century just to lower concentrations enough to stop temperatures from rising. Again, even in this implausible scenario, we still aren’t talking about reversing climate change, just stopping it — or, more technically, stopping the temperature rise. The great ice sheets might well continue to disintegrate, albeit slowly.¶ This doesn’t mean climate change is unstoppable — only that we are stuck with whatever climate change we cause before we get desperate and go all WWII on emissions. That’s why delay is so dangerous and immoral. I’ll discuss this further below the jump.¶ First, though, Nocera’s piece has many other pieces of misinformation. He leaves people with the impression that coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a practical, affordable means of reducing emissions from existing power plants that will be available soon. In fact, most demonstration projects around the world have been shut down, the technology Nocera focuses on would not work on the vast majority of existing coal plants, and CCS is going to be incredibly expensive compared to other low-carbon technologies — see Harvard stunner: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 (20 cents per kWh)! And that’s in the unlikely event it proves to be practical, permanent, and verifiable (see “Feasibility, Permanence and Safety Issues Remain Unresolved”).¶ Heck, guy who debated me on The Economist‘s website conceded things are going so slowly, writing “The idea is that CCS then becomes a commercial reality and begins to make deep cuts in emissions during the 2030s.” And he’s a CCS advocate!!¶ Of course, we simply don’t have until the 2030s to wait for deep cuts in emissions. No wonder people who misunderstand the irreversible nature of climate change, like Nocera, tend to be far more complacent about emissions reductions than those who understand climate science.¶ The point of Nocera’s piece seems to be to mock Bill McKibben for opposing the idea of using captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): “his answer suggests that his crusade has blinded him to the real problem.”¶ It is Nocera who has been blinded. He explains in the piece:¶ Using carbon emissions to recover previously ungettable oil has the potential to unlock vast untapped American reserves. Last year, ExxonMobil reportedthat enhanced oil recovery would allow it to extend the life of a single oil field in West Texas by 20 years.¶ McKibben’s effort to stop the Keystone XL pipeline is based on the fact that we have believe the vast majority of carbon in the ground. Sure, it wouldn’t matter if you built one coal CCS plant and used that for EOR. But we need a staggering amount of CCS, as Vaclav Smil explained in “Energy at the Crossroads“:¶ “Sequestering a mere 1/10 of today’s global CO2 emissions (less than 3 Gt CO2) would thus call for putting in place an industry that would have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or (with higher compression) equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by the petroleum industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a single generation.”¶ D’oh! What precisely would be the point of “sequestering” all that CO2 to extract previously “ungettable oil” whose emissions, when burned, would just about equal the CO2 that you supposedly sequestered?¶ Remember, we have to get total global emissions of CO2 to near zero just to stop temperatures from continuing their inexorable march toward humanity’s self-destruction. And yes, this ain’t easy. But it is impossible if we don’t start slashing emissions soon and stop opening up vast new sources of carbon.¶ For those who are confused on this point, I recommend reading the entire MIT study, whose lead author is John Sterman. Here is the abstract:¶ ¶ Public attitudes about climate change reveal a contradiction. Surveys show most Americans believe climate change poses serious risks but also that reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sufficient to stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations or net radiative forcing can be deferred until there is greater evidence that climate change is harmful. US policymakers likewise argue it is prudent to wait and see whether climate change will cause substantial economic harm before undertaking policies to reduce emissions. Such wait-and-see policies erroneously presume climate change can be reversed quickly should harm become evident, underestimating substantial delays in the climate’s response to anthropogenic forcing. We report experiments with highly educated adults–graduate students at MIT–showing widespread misunderstanding of the fundamental stock and flow relationships, including mass balance principles, that lead to long response delays. GHG emissions are now about twice the rate of GHG removal from the atmosphere. GHG concentrations will therefore continue to rise even if emissions fall, stabilizing only when emissions equal removal. In contrast, results show most subjects believe atmospheric GHG concentrations can be stabilized while emissions into the atmosphere continuously exceed the removal of GHGs from it. These beliefs-analogous to arguing a bathtub filled faster than it drains will never overflow-support wait-and-see policies but violate conservation of matter. Low public support for mitigation policies may be based more on misconceptions of climate dynamics than high discount rates or uncertainty about the risks of harmful climate change.

Court will ultimately rule in favor of EPA now because of deference.
Robert Percival, 2/6/2014. Robert F. Stanton Professor of Law and Director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “Symposium: The climate wars return to the Court as a narrower skirmish,” SCOTUS Blog, http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/02/symposium-the-climate-wars-return-to-the-court-as-a-narrower-skirmish/#more-204967.
The starting point for handicapping the greenhouse gas cases is to consider the line-up of Justices in the Court’s previous GHG decisions.  The four dissenters in Massachusetts v. EPA remain on the Court.  In American Electric Power they continued to assert their belief that climate change did not give rise to standing, though only Justices Alito and Thomas registered continuing disagreement with the Massachusetts holding that GHGs are covered by the CAA.  Two Justices from the Massachusetts majority (Justices Stevens and Souter) no longer are on the Court, but their successors (Justices Kagan and Sotomayor) are likely to adhere to the same views.  This could leave Justice Kennedy in his familiar position as the decisive vote.
If the Court applies normal doctrines of judicial deference, this should not produce another five-to-four decision.  The Justices do not relish delving into the intricacies of the CAA because it is one of the most complex regulatory statutes on the planet.  Indeed CAA regulations are what spawned the Chevron doctrine of deference to agency decisions. The papers of the late Justice Blackmun reveal that Justice Stevens, the author of Chevron, declared at conference “when I get so confused, I go with the agency.”
Congress gave the D.C. Circuit exclusive venue to review challenges to CAA regulations.  The D.C.  Circuit panel that heard the case included Chief Judge Sentelle, who is no fan of environmental regulation, and it unanimously upheld the EPA’s actions.
The cert. grant here likely was inspired by Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc, which Judge Brown joined.   Kavanaugh concluded that the phrase “any air pollutant” should not be interpreted to refer to any pollutant regulated under the CAA but rather only to the six pollutants for which EPA has promulgated national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS).  While acknowledging that EPA’s interpretation initially appears “plausible,” he concluded that it cannot be correct because it would produce absurd results by requiring millions of small sources to obtain permits.  But this is precisely why the EPA promulgated the Tailoring Rule, which avoids this problem by initially applying PSD permit requirements only to the largest sources of GHGs.  Even if the Court views the statutory language “any air pollutant” to be ambiguous, the EPA’s position should be entitled to Chevron deference.

Solves warming
Pooley 12 – Senior vice president for strategy and communications @ Environmental Defense Fund. Eric Pooley, “Natural Gas – A Briefing Paper for Candidates,” Environmental Defense Fund, Published: August 10, 2012, pg. http://tinyurl.com/buveju2
Reducing Methane Leakage
In the absence of responsible natural gas oversight, increased reliance on the resource could result in a future in which the U.S. emits as much or more climate disrupting pollution as it does with our current energy mix. This outcome is possible if enough uncombusted natural gas is allowed to leak into the atmosphere from well sites, gas processing plants, pipelines and distribution systems. Though it burns cleaner than coal, uncombusted natural gas is extremely damaging to the climate: It is mostly made up of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. (For the first 20 years after it is emitted, a pound of methane is 72 times more potent as a heat-trapping emission than a pound of carbon dioxide. Over 100 years, a pound of methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than a pound of carbon dioxide.) Small amounts of natural gas are lost into the air as it makes its way from the wells and through the processing and pipeline system that brings it to consumers; the cumulative impact of those leaks is highly significant. The potential for damaging methane leakage will only grow if, as expected, the use of natural gas expands in the coming years. Now and in the future, the United States cannot afford to be wasting a valuable American energy resource by allowing unchecked leakage to occur. As Americans, none of us should be content to stand idly by and let this important resource be squandered through fugitive emissions and unnecessary venting. Nor can we ignore the national security consequences of allowing our climate to deteriorate through easily avoidable greenhouse gas pollution. Reducing methane emissions isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s an important part of any candidate's plan for domestic energy security. Uncertainty remains about just how much methane is currently being emitted along the supply chain, from the well site to the end-user. Estimates vary widely — from less than 2 to more than 7 of total production. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated the methane leak rate at about 2.3, while a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggested that in northern Colorado it might be roughly twice as high. If the higher estimates turn out to be correct, the leaks could eat up the short-term climate benefit equivalent to closing one-third of the nation’s coal plants. If the lower EPA estimate is correct, leak rates of two to three percent still leave significant and cost-effective greenhouse gas reductions on the table. Accurate measurement of actual leakage rates is a crucial next step. A recent paper by Alvarez et al. published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified the critical leak rates at which use of natural gas would produce climate benefits at all points in time. The study found that natural gas can always produce a greenhouse gas advantage over other fossil fuels for electric power and transportation, including the conversion of much of the nation’s 3.2 million big rig trucks, if methane leakage rates are capped at 1.* Though methane is a far more potent climate disruptor than carbon dioxide, it is also more short-lived; it breaks down in the atmosphere over time. The permanent, long-term solution to climate change involves stabilizing CO2 emissions. However, the shorter time frames affected by methane emissions are also crucially important because they increase the risk of undesirable climate outcomes in the near future. Accelerated rates of warming mean ecosystems and humans have less time to adapt to climate change. Given the dire need for concerted global action on climate change, current energy policy should, at a minimum, abide by a "Do No Harm" policy: no policy should contribute to increased climate forcing on any time frame. There is no technological barrier to reducing leakage. We just have to do it. That's enormously encouraging. As mentioned above, many practices and technologies are already being used in states such as Colorado and Wyoming to reduce gas losses, which result in greater recovery and sale of natural gas, and thus increased economic gains. The return on the initial investment for many of these practices is sometimes as short as a few months and almost always less than two years. In these tough economic times, it would seem wise to eliminate waste, save money and reduce environmental impact. Candidates should come out in favor of rules to measure and limit methane leakage at a level that avoids short term climate damage. In the coming days, Environmental Defense Fund would be pleased to present the elements of a possible approach. As crucial voices in the public debate, candidates have the opportunity to take a leadership position on the methane leakage issue; if influential office-seekers choose to do so, others will likely follow. This would mark a major step on the road to safe and sustainable development of America's shale gas resource. The first order of business is getting the data necessary to better understand where the leaks are occurring and under what conditions, then using that data to reduce leaks and ensure that natural gas will help mitigate climate change. Such as strategy could yield enormous environmental and health benefits on a global basis. No candidate in 2012 can afford to stand against transparency and public access to data. Such a candidate would be out of step with the public mood and the public interest. We need to get information on methane leakage out there. It needs to be presented in useful, user-friendly formats so the public can look at it and start to understand what’s going on. We need our regulators to be able to slice and dice this data, so they can identify challenges and opportunities. As mentioned, the good news is that leaks can be detected, measured – and reduced. EDF is currently collaborating with industry and academic partners on a series of five major scientific studies designed to quantify the methane leakage rate across the natural gas supply chain. The five studies are on: the production of natural gas, natural gas processing, long-distance pipelines and storage, local distribution systems and natural gas vehicles. For the production study, we are working with the University of Texas and nine major natural gas companies to determine the leak rates from their wells. For the local distribution module we are working with Duke University, Harvard University and Boston University. EDF aims to complete the entire study by December 2013 and to submit the results of each module for publication. Conclusion: Improving Corporate Performance The natural gas industry has a credibility problem. This diverse industry, made up of hundreds of drilling companies ranging from tiny operations to huge multinationals, cannot afford to regard strong environmental performance as a luxury or a marketing strategy. It is a public right, and a requirement for continued corporate operation. Improved performance is clearly in industry’s bottom-line interest, whether by reducing wasted product lost to leaks, reducing regulatory and financial risk, or earning back the public trust. Companies will benefit from this too. First, because good data and good science lays the foundation for having fact-based conversations about risks and how to mitigate them. And second, because transparency is an end in itself. Candidates should encourage natural gas executives not to wait for slow-moving producer associations to reach agreement. By speaking in favor of common-sense environmental strategies, such as disclosure and green completions, some leaders in the natural gas industry are already charting the path forward. They are proving that industry can meet new standards, such as the EPA’s air quality rules for oil and gas drilling, and thrive. Pg. 5-8

Deference prevents nuclear first strikes
Green 97 – Associate at McNair Law Firm, JD Magna Cum Laude at Univ of South Carolina (Tracey Cotton, South Carolina Environmental Law Journal, 6 S.C Envtl. L.J. 137, Fall)
The deployment of nuclear weapons, however, is a DoD action for which secrecy is crucial and, thus, is classified by Executive Order. 59 According to the American policy of deterrence through mutually assured destruction (MAD), nuclear weapons are essential to an effective deterrent. 60 If DoD disclosed the location of these weapons, disclosure would reduce or destroy the deterrent. An adversary could destroy all nuclear weapons with an initial strike, leaving the country exposed to nuclear terror. 61 Additionally, terrorists would know where to strike to obtain material for nuclear blackmail. In short, secrecy regarding nuclear weapons has enormous implications for national security. While the armed services must consider the environmental effects of maintaining nuclear weapons, they cannot release any information regarding the storage of these weapons. However, some public interest groups have an agenda at odds with DoD and see NEPA's review process as a method of achieving their goals. Environmental groups generally distrust the efforts of federal agencies, and arms control groups want to hamper or stop weapons deployment. These groups sue the Army or Navy in court, requesting that the judiciary review the agency's actions, review or order the preparation of an EIS, and order the agency to conform to NEPA. 62 Through the suit, public review accompanies judicial review. In these situations, a conflict arises between the judiciary's duty to avoid interfering with national security and its duty to enforce federal law passed by Congress. 63 *145

Judicial intervention breakdown leads to international instability --- rogue states will escalate
Nzelibe and Yoo 6 (Jide Nzelibe, Professor of Law at Northwestern and John Yoo, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, “Rational War and Constitutional Design,” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 115, No. 9, The Most Dangerous Branch? Mayors, Governors, Presidents, and the Rule of Law: A Symposium on Executive Power (2006), pp. 2512-2541, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20455704)
D. The Dangers of judicial Intervention Faced with the prospect that congressional participation can sometimes play a salutary role in avoiding unnecessary wars, an antecedent question naturally arises. Should the courts decide if such a congressional role would be appropriate? Indeed, a recurring theme running through much of the Congress-first literature is that judicial intervention is necessary to vindicate the congressional role in initiating conflicts. But if one accepts the signaling model developed here, there are significant reasons why one ought to be wary of a judicial role in resolving war powers controversies. First, under our model of international crisis bargaining, judicial review would likely undermine the value of signals sent by the President when he seeks legislative authorization to go to war. In other words, it is the fact that the signal is both costly and discretionary that often makes it valuable. Once one understands that regime characteristics can influence the informational value of signaling, it makes sense that the President should have the maximum flexibility to choose less costly signals when dealing with rogue states or terrorist organizations. The alternative- a judicial rule that mandates costly signals in all circumstances, even when such signals have little or no informational value to the foreign adversary-would dilute the overall value of such signals. Second, judicial review would preclude the possibility of beneficial bargaining between the President and Congress by forcing warmaking into a procedural straitjacket. In this picture, judicial review would constrain the political branches to adopt only the tying hands type of signal regardless of the nature or stage of an international crisis. But the supposed restraining effect attributed to the tying hands signal can vary considerably depending on whether the democracy is deciding to initiate an international crisis or is already in the midst of an escalating crisis. Requiring legislative authorization may make it less likely that the democracy will be willing to back out of a conflict once it starts. Thus, tying hand signals and judicial insistence that the President seek legislative authorization will contribute to greater international instability once a conflict has already started.

Deference key to military cohesion and readiness—judicial interference kills it
Wilkinson 96 – Chief Judge US Court of Appeals (Thomasson v. Perry, Fourth Circuit, Majority Opinion, 80 F.3d 915, 4/5, http://www.ncgala.org/cases/thomasson.htm, AD)
Aside from the Constitution itself, the need for deference also arises from the unique role that national defense plays in a democracy. Because our nation's very preservation hinges on decisions regarding war and preparation for war, the nation collectively, as expressed through its elected officials, faces "'the delicate task of balancing the rights of servicemen against the needs of the military.'" Weiss, supra (quoting Solorio v. United States, 483 U.S. 435, 447-48 (1987)). To the degree that the judiciary is permitted to circumscribe the national security options of our elected officials, it "decreases the ability of the political branches to impose their will on another nation and at the worst, it permits the imposition of the will of another nation on the United States." James M. Hirschhorn, “The Separate Community: Military Uniqueness and Servicemen's Constitutional Rights,” 62 N.C. L. Rev. 177, 237-238 (1983). After all, "unless a society has the capability . . . to defend itself from the aggressions of others, constitutional protections of any sort have little meaning." Wayte v. United States, 470 U.S. 598, 612 (1985). National defense decisions not only implicate each citizen in the most profound way. Such decisions also require policy choices, which the legislature is equipped to make and the judiciary is not. "Congress, working with the Executive Branch, has developed a system of military criminal and administrative law that carefully balances the rights of individual servicemembers and the needs of the armed forces." Sam Nunn, “The Fundamental Principles of the Supreme Court's Jurisprudence in Military Cases,” 29 Wake Forest L. Rev. 557, 566 (1994). While Congress and the President have access to intelligence and testimony on military readiness, the federal judiciary does not. While Congress and the members of the Executive Branch have developed a practiced expertise by virtue of their day-to-day supervision of the military, the federal judiciary has not. The judiciary has no Armed Services Committee, Foreign Relations Committee, Department of Defense, or Department of State. As the Supreme Court has noted, "the lack of competence on the part of the courts with respect to military judgments is marked." Rostker, supra. In fact, It is difficult to conceive of an area of governmental activity in which the courts have less competence. The complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force are essentially professional military judgments, subject always to civilian control of the Legislative and Executive Branches. Gilligan v. Morgan, 413 U.S. 1, 10 (1973). Finally, the imprimatur of the President, the Congress, or both imparts a degree of legitimacy to military decisions that courts cannot hope to confer. Even when there is opposition to a proposed change --as when Congress abolished flogging in the 19th century or when President Truman ended the military's racial segregation in 1948, see Hirschhorn, supra --the fact that the change emanates from the political branches minimizes both the likelihood of resistance in the military and the probability of prolonged societal division. In contrast, when courts impose military policy in the face of deep social division, the nation inherently runs the risk of long-term social discord because large segments of our population have been deprived of a democratic means of change. In the military context, such divisiveness could constitute an independent threat to national security. Parallel to the deference owed Congressional and Presidential policies is deference to the decision-making authority of military personnel who "have been charged by the Executive and Legislative Branches with carrying out our Nation's military policy." Goldman v. Weinberger, 475 U.S. 503, 508 (1986). Judicial interference with the subordinate decisions of military authorities frustrates the national security goals that the democratic branches have sought to achieve. The Supreme Court has recognized the need for deference when facing challenges to a variety of military decisions: a policy that prohibited the wearing of headgear in certain circumstances, Goldman, supra (noting that the military is "a specialized society separate from civilian society"); an Air Force regulation that required service members to obtain permission before circulating petitions on bases, Brown v. Glines, 444 U.S. 348, 357 (1980) (noting that "the military must possess substantial discretion over its internal discipline"); a base policy that prohibited certain political activity on base premises, Greer v. Spock, 424 U.S. 828, 837 (1976) (noting "the special constitutional function of the military in our national life"); and military court-martial proceedings, Schlesinger v. Councilman, 420 U.S. 738, 757 (1975) (noting that "to prepare for and perform its vital role, the military must insist upon a respect for duty and discipline without counterpart in civilian life"). The need for deference also derives from the military's experience with the particular exigencies of military life. Among these is the attainment of unit cohesion--"the subordination of personal preferences and identities in favor of the overall group mission" and "the habit of immediate compliance with military procedures and orders." Goldman, supra. Should the judiciary interfere with the intricate mix of morale and discipline that fosters unit cohesion, it is simply impossible to estimate the damage that a particular change could inflict upon national security--"there is no way to determine and correct the mistake until it has produced the substantial and sometimes irreparable cost of military failure." Hirschhorn, supra.

Military effectiveness is key to deter large-scale aggression and prevent conflict escalation
Spencer 3 (Jack, Senior Defense Policy Analyst @ Heritage, "Focusing Defense Resources to Meet National Security Requirements," 3/21, www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg1638.cfm)
Be prepared to fight with little or no warning in unanticipated places. The emergence of global communications, advances in technology, and the globalization of terrorism provide many opportunities for surprise attacks against the United States and its interests. Maintaining the ability to fight and win wars in diverse situations and environments can discourage many of America's enemies from hostile acts. Maintain adequate capability to deter aggression against America's allies. America faces enduring threats beyond terrorism, as demonstrated by North Korea's nuclear weapons program. There are nations in every region of the world that threaten America's vital interests in the near term. Assuring stability in those regions and protecting U.S. interests requires the ability to defeat any nation or group that threatens America's allies, which itself provides effective deterrence against large-scale aggression. This should include both conventional forces and other capabilities such as an effective ballistic missile defense and reliable nuclear forces. The Administration should take every step to strengthen its important alliances and be ready to respond forcefully and immediately to aggression against America's allies. 

Aff leads to disclosure of special ops intel --- devastates special ops effectiveness  
VFW 10 (The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Brief of The veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States As amicus curiae in support of defendants and dismissal, 09/30/10, http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/VFW_Brief_PACER.pdf)
D. Special Operations Require Protection From This Type of Suit Finally, the VFW’s membership includes many current and former members of the U.S. armed forces’ elite special operations forces—Army Rangers and Special Forces, Navy SEALs, Air Force parajumpers and combat controllers, and Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance personnel, among others. These elite warriors conduct highly dangerous missions today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries around the world. By definition, special operations “are operations conducted in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments to achieve military, diplomatic, informational, and/or economic objectives employing military capabilities for which there is no broad conventional force requirement. These operations often require covert, clandestine, or low-visibility capabilities.” U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Pub. 3-05, Doctrine for Joint Special Operations, at I-1 (2003), available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp3_05.pdf. Special operations are differentiated from conventional operations in many ways, but foremost among these are their “degree of physical and political risk, operational techniques, mode of employment, independence from friendly support, and dependence on detailed operational intelligence and indigenous assets.” Id. “Surprise is often the most important principle in the conduct of successful special operations and the survivability of employed special operations forces,” and the very nature of special operations requires “high levels of security . . . to protect the clandestine/covert nature of missions.” Id. at I-6. More than mission accomplishment is at stake—“given their operating size, special operations teams are more vulnerable to potential hostile reaction to their presence than larger conventional units,” and therefore the protection of sources and methods is essential for the survival of special operations forces. Id. To preserve this element of surprise, special operations forces must broadly conceal their tactics, techniques and procedures, including information about unit locations and movements, targeting decisions, and operational plans for future missions. Disclosure of this information would allow this nation’s adversaries to defend themselves more effectively, potentially inflicting more casualties upon U.S. special operations forces. Such disclosure would also provide information about how the U.S. military gathers information about its adversaries, enabling terrorist groups like Al Qaeda to alter its communications and activities in order to evade future detection and action by the U.S. Government. Such harm would not be limited to just this instance or terrorist group group; these disclosures would also provide future terrorist adversaries and military adversaries with insight into U.S. special operations capabilities which would enable them to counter such capabilities in future conflicts. Cf. Public Declaration of Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, Govt. Exhibit 4, September 23, 2010, at ¶¶ 6-7. In this matter, the Plaintiff asks the Court to pull back the veil on the U.S. special operations community, exposing special operations sources and methods to the public, including this nation’s enemies. This would do tremendous harm to current special operations personnel, including VFW members, who are operating abroad in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and who depend on stealth, security and surprise for their survival and mission accomplishment. Further, in his prayer for relief, Plaintiff asks the Court to order the disclosure of “the criteria that are used in determining whether the government will carry out the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen.” As Secretary Gates states in his public declaration filed by the Government, without confirming or denying any allegation made by Plaintiff, this type of information “constitutes highly sensitive and classified military information that cannot be disclosed without causing serious harm to the national security of the United States.” Id. at ¶ 5. These criteria necessarily reflect the sources, methods and analytic processes used to produce them, and would tend to reveal other information about military sources and methods which are essential to the success and survival of special operations personnel. 

Special forces readiness and effectiveness key to solve nuclear war
Jim Thomas 13, Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and Chris Dougherty is a Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013, “BEYOND THE RAMPARTS THE FUTURE OF U.S. SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES,” http://www.csbaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/SOF-Report-CSBA-Final.pdf
WMD do not represent new threats to U.S. security interests, but as nascent nuclear powers grow their arsenals and aspirants like Iran continue to pursue nuclear capabilities, the threat of nuclear proliferation, as well as the potential for the actual use of nuclear weapons, will increase. Upheaval in failing or outlaw states like Libya and Syria, which possess chemical weapons and a range of missiles, highlights the possibility that in future instances of state collapse or civil war, such weapons could be used by failing regimes in an act of desperation, fall into the hands of rebel forces, or be seized by parties hostile to the United States or its interests. SOF can contribute across the spectrum of counter-WMD efforts, from stopping the acquisition of WMD by hostile states or terrorist groups to preventing their use. The global CT network SOF have built over the last decade could be repurposed over the next decade to become a global counter-WMD network, applying the same logic that it takes a network to defeat a network. Increasing the reach and density of a global counter-WMD network will require expanding security cooperation activities focused on counter-proliferation. Finally, SOF may offer the most viable strategic option for deposing WMD-armed regimes through UW campaigns should the need arise.

Tournament: tournament | Round: 6 | Opponent: Wake Forest Manchester-Shaw | Judge: Mathis
Obama is selling the Iranian deal now – Stars are aligned – needs to hold off congress from more action
PARSI 2/18/14—President of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, US-Iran deal: Compromise is key, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/us-iran-deal-compromise-key-201421845935181913.html
As a new phase of nuclear talks begins between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) in Vienna on February 18, one thing is clear: From here onwards, diplomacy depends primarily on the ability of the presidents of Iran and the US to absorb and sell compromise.
The stars could not be better aligned for a US-Iran breakthrough. Regional developments - from the instability following the Arab spring to the civil war in Syria - have significantly increased the cost of continued conflict, as has the escalation of the nuclear issue with steadily growing Iranian capabilities and ever tightening economic sanctions.
Domestically, developments are also favourable for a deal. Iran's hardliners and proponents of a narrative of resistance have been put on the defensive by Hassan Rouhani's election victory in June 2013. And Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has thus far firmly backed Rouhani's negotiation strategy.
In Washington, proponents of Israeli Prime Miinister Benjamin Netanyahu's line have suffered several defeats over the past year, from the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, to the call for military action in Syria, to the failure to pass new sanctions on Iran, rendering their influence less decisive. All three defeats were, in no small part, due to the mobilisation of pro-diplomacy groups in the US. Timing-wise, striking a deal during Rouhani's first year and during Obama's last years in office is also ideal.
That doesn't mean, however, that negotiations will be easy. On the contrary, the hard part begins now.
In the interim deal, the main concessions exchanged were increased transparency and inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, halting the expansion of the enrichment program, and ending it at the 20 percent level. In return, Iran would get Western acceptance of enrichment on Iranian soil, and agreement that Iran eventually will enjoy all rights granted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as well as some minor sanctions relief.

Plan causes causes internal Democrat defection
LOOMIS 7—Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Department of Government at Georgetown University Dr. Andrew J. Loomis, “Leveraging legitimacy in the crafting of U.S. foreign policy”, March 2, 2007, pg 36-37, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/9/4/8/pages179487/p179487-36.php

Declining political authority encourages defection. American political analyst Norman Ornstein writes of the domestic context, In a system where a President has limited formal power, perception matters. The reputation for success—the belief by other political actors that even when he looks down, a president will find a way to pull out a victory—is the most valuable resource a chief executive can have. Conversely, the widespread belief that the Oval Office occupant is on the defensive, on the wane or without the ability to win under adversity can lead to disaster, as individual lawmakers calculate who will be on the winning side and negotiate accordingly. In simple terms, winners win and losers lose more often than not. Failure begets failure. In short, a president experiencing declining amounts of political capital has diminished capacity to advance his goals. As a result, political allies perceive a decreasing benefit in publicly tying themselves to the president, and an increasing benefit in allying with rising centers of authority. A president’s incapacity and his record of success are interlocked and reinforce each other. Incapacity leads to political failure, which reinforces perceptions of incapacity. This feedback loop accelerates decay both in leadership capacity and defection by key allies. The central point of this review of the presidential literature is that the sources of presidential influence—and thus their prospects for enjoying success in pursuing preferred foreign policies—go beyond the structural factors imbued by the Constitution. Presidential authority is affected by ideational resources in the form of public perceptions of legitimacy. The public offers and rescinds its support in accordance with normative trends and historical patterns, non-material sources of power that affects the character of U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. 

New sanctions will cause war – prefer newest comprehensive study
ARMBRUSTER 2/18/14—National Security Editor for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund Ben Armbruster, Bipartisan Expert Group Says New Iran Sanctions Will Undermine Diplomacy, http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/02/18/3300741/iran-project-sanctions-diplomacy/

A new report from a bipartisan group of experts at the Iran Project released on Tuesday finds that opponents of new sanctions on Iran at this time are largely correct in that they would lead to a break-down of diplomacy, isolate the U.S. from its negotiating partners and embolden hard-liners in Tehran.
The Iran sanctions battle in the Senate has stalled for now, but it’s unclear if the House will take up the matter again, as Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) is reportedly working on language with other House leaders.
The Iran Project’s report analyzes arguments for and against the Senate Iran sanctions bill that was introduced last December by Sens. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who have argued that new sanctions will give the U.S. more leverage in nuclear talks with Iran.
But, the report says, “It is di?cult to argue that a new sanctions bill is intended to support the negotiations when all the countries doing the negotiating oppose it.”
Kirk, Menendez and other supporters of the bill say the sanctions have a delayed trigger and will kick in in six months or if Iran backs out of the deal. Not so, the Iran Project says. “After carefully reading the bill line by line and consulting with both current and retired Senate staff the relevant committees, it appears that the critics are correct: the change in sanctions law takes effect upon passage,” the report says, which would most likely put the United States in violation of the interim nuclear agreement reached in Geneva in November
On whether new sanctions will weaken the international coalition on imposing existing sanctions, “some countries would continue to honor some sanctions,” the Iran Project says if the Senate sanctions bill passes. “Still, it would seem that on balance, the net result would be less pressure on Iran.” The report also says that unilateral congressional action on sanctions now “would feed an unwelcome narrative” to America’s partners, the U.K., France, China, Russia, Germany and others, that the U.S. can’t live up to its promises and is an unreliable partner.
Many, like Sen. Patrick Murphy (D-CT), have argued that placing new sanctions on Iran will undermine relative moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who supports a diplomatic approach with the U.S. The Iran Project agrees. “It is very di?cult to imagine that the sanctions bill would do anything but undermine Rouhani, as he attempts to steer Iran on a di?erent path. This is an assessment shared not only by Iran experts, and Iranian expats who have opposed the regime, but also by Israeli military intelligence, which has concluded that Rouhani may represent a fundamental shift in Iranian politics.”
“It is difficult to escape the conclusion that a new sanctions bill would increase the probability of war, even if it does not guarantee such an outcome,” the report says.
The bipartisan Iran Project has issued several reports on the Iran nuclear issue. In 2012, the group concluded that attacking Iran would risk an “all out regional war” lasting “several years” and that In order to achieve regime change, the report says, “the occupation of Iran would require a commitment of resources and personnel greater than what the U.S. has expended over the past 10 years in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”

That escalates to World War III
Reuveny 10 - Professor of political economy @ Indiana University Dr. Rafael Reuveny (PhD in Economics and Political Science from the University of Indiana), “Guest Opinion: Unilateral strike on Iran could trigger world depression,” McClatchy Newspaper, Aug 9, 2010,  pg. http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/news/speaking_out/reuveny_on_unilateral_strike_Iran.shtml

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely have dire consequences, including a regional war, global economic collapse and a major power clash.
For an Israeli campaign to succeed, it must be quick and decisive. This requires an attack that would be so overwhelming that Iran would not dare to respond in full force.
Such an outcome is extremely unlikely since the locations of some of Iran’s nuclear facilities are not fully known and known facilities are buried deep underground.
All of these widely spread facilities are shielded by elaborate air defense systems constructed not only by the Iranians, but also the Chinese and, likely, the Russians as well. By now, Iran has also built redundant command and control systems and nuclear facilities, developed early-warning systems, acquired ballistic and cruise missiles and upgraded and enlarged its armed forces.
Because Iran is well-prepared, a single, conventional Israeli strike — or even numerous strikes — could not destroy all of its capabilities, giving Iran time to respond.
A regional war
Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear program Israel destroyed in 1981, Iran has a second-strike capability comprised of a coalition of Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Hezbollah, Hamas, and, perhaps, Turkish forces. Internal pressure might compel Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to join the assault, turning a bad situation into a regional war.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, at the apex of its power, Israel was saved from defeat by President Nixon’s shipment of weapons and planes. Today, Israel’s numerical inferiority is greater, and it faces more determined and better-equipped opponents.
Despite Israel’s touted defense systems, Iranian coalition missiles, armed forces, and terrorist attacks would likely wreak havoc on its enemy, leading to a prolonged tit-for-tat.
In the absence of massive U.S. assistance, Israel’s military resources may quickly dwindle, forcing it to use its alleged nuclear weapons, as it had reportedly almost done in 1973.
An Israeli nuclear attack would likely destroy most of Iran’s capabilities, but a crippled Iran and its coalition could still attack neighboring oil facilities, unleash global terrorism, plant mines in the Persian Gulf and impair maritime trade in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
Middle Eastern oil shipments would likely slow to a trickle as production declines due to the war and insurance companies decide to drop their risky Middle Eastern clients. Iran and Venezuela would likely stop selling oil to the United States and Europe.
The world economy would head into a tailspin; international acrimony would rise; and Iraqi and Afghani citizens might fully turn on the United States, immediately requiring the deployment of more American troops. Russia, China, Venezuela, and maybe Brazil and Turkey — all of which essentially support Iran — could be tempted to form an alliance and openly challenge the U.S. hegemony.
Replaying Nixon’s nightmare
Russia and China might rearm their injured Iranian protege overnight, just as Nixon rearmed Israel, and threaten to intervene, just as the U.S.S.R. threatened to join Egypt and Syria in 1973. President Obama’s response would likely put U.S. forces on nuclear alert, replaying Nixon’s nightmarish scenario.
Iran may well feel duty-bound to respond to a unilateral attack by its Israeli archenemy, but it knows that it could not take on the United States head-to-head. In contrast, if the United States leads the attack, Iran’s response would likely be muted.
If Iran chooses to absorb an American-led strike, its allies would likely protest and send weapons but would probably not risk using force.
While no one has a crystal ball, leaders should be risk-averse when choosing war as a foreign policy tool. If attacking Iran is deemed necessary, Israel must wait for an American green light. A unilateral Israeli strike could ultimately spark World War III.

T
Interpretation – restriction requires prohibition of an authority
Restriction means prohibition
Corpus Juris Secundum 31
Volume 54, p. 735
RESTRICT:  To confine; to limit; to prevent (a person or thing) from passing a certain limit in any kind of action; to restrain; to restrain without bounds.
Authority is power delegated to an agent
Kelly 3 - judge for the State of Michigan
(JOSEPH ELEZOVIC, Plaintiff, and LULA ELEZOVIC, Plaintiff-Appellant/Cross-Appellee, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY and DANIEL P. BENNETT, Defendants-Appellees/Cross-Appellants., No. 236749, COURT OF APPEALS OF MICHIGAN, 259 Mich. App. 187; 673 N.W.2d 776; 2003 Mich. App. LEXIS 2649; 93 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 244; 92 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 1557, Lexis)
Applying agency principles, a principal is responsible for the acts of its agents done within the scope of the agent's authority, "even though acting contrary to instructions." Dick Loehr's, Inc v Secretary of State, 180 Mich. App. 165, 168; 446 N.W.2d 624 (1989). This is because, in part, an agency relationship arises where the principal *36  has the right to control the conduct of the agent. St Clair Intermediate School Dist v Intermediate Ed Ass'n/Michigan Ed Ass'n, 458 Mich. 540, 558 n 18; 581 N.W.2d 707 (1998) (citations omitted). The employer is also liable for the torts of his employee if "'the servant purported to act or to speak on behalf of the principal and there was reliance upon apparent authority, or he was aided in accomplishing the tort by the existence of the agency relation,'" McCann v Michigan, 398 Mich. 65, 71; 247 N.W.2d 521 (1976), quoting Restatement of Agency, 2d § 219(2)(d), p 481; see also Champion v Nation Wide Security, Inc, 450 Mich. 702, 704, 712; 545 N.W.2d 596 (1996), citing Restatement of Agency, 2d § 219(2)(d), p 481 ("the master is liable for the tort of his servant if the servant 'was aided in accomplishing the tort by the existence of the agency relation'"). In Backus v  *213  Kauffman (On Rehearing), 238 Mich. App. 402, 409; 605 N.W.2d 690 (1999), this Court stated:  The term "authority" is defined by Black's Law Dictionary to include "the power delegated by a principal to an agent." Black's Law Dictionary (7th ed), p *37  127. "Scope of authority" is defined in the following manner: "The reasonable power that an agent has been delegated or might foreseeably be delegated in carrying out the principal's business." Id. at 1348.

increase requires pre-existing
Ripple, 87 (Circuit Judge, Emmlee K. Cameron, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Frances Slocum Bank and Trust Company, State Automobile Insurance Association, and Glassley Agency of Whitley, Indiana, Defendants-Appellees, 824 F.2d 570; 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 9816, 9/24, lexis)
Also related to the waiver issue is appellees' defense relying on a provision of the insurance policy that suspends coverage where the risk is increased by any means within the knowledge or control of the insured. However, the term "increase" connotes change. To show change, appellees would have been required to present evidence of the condition of the building at the time the policy was issued. See 5 J. Appleman and J. Appleman, Insurance Law and Practice, § 2941 at 4-5 (1970). Because no such evidence was presented, this court cannot determine, on this record, whether the risk has, in fact, been increased. Indeed, the answer to this question may depend on Mr. Glassley's knowledge of the condition of the building at the time the policy was issued, see 17 J. Appleman and J. Appleman, Insurance Law and Practice, § 9602 at 515-16 (1981), since the fundamental issue is whether the appellees contemplated insuring the risk which incurred the loss.

Ground – Not pre-existence makes the topic about potential executive action they can preempt rather than the desirability of existing restrictions

Violations – the affirmative doesn’t prohibit, they regulate Obama’s authority

Voting issue –
Limits – absent a prohibition, every single condition or regulation acts as a functional restriction on some single process of war powers authority – dozens of tiny mechanisms creates an infinite number of affs that core lit doesn’t check.

Ground – Not pre-existence makes the topic about potential executive action they can preempt rather than the desirability of existing restrictions

Bidirectionality – absent a prohibition, the aff can create meaningless “conditions” that EXPAND presidential power – 

Off
Deference
Judicial involvement in war power authority debates turns and escalates every impact
POSNER and VERMEULE 07 *Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor of Law at Harvard Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, Oxford University Press page 17-18
Whatever the doctrinal formulation, the basic distinction between the two views is that our view counsels courts to provide high deference during emergencies, as courts have actually done, whereas the civil libertarian view does not. During normal times, the deferential view and the civil libertarian view permit the same kinds of executive action, and during war or other emergencies, the deferential view permits more kinds of executive action than the civil libertarian view does. We assume that courts have historically provided extra deference during an emergency or war because they believe that deference enables the government, especially the executive, to act quickly and decisively. Although deference also permits the government to violate rights, violations that are intolerable during normal times become tolerable when the stakes are higher. Civil libertarians, on the other hand, claim either that government action is likely to be worse during emergencies than during normal times, or at least that no extra deference should be afforded to government decisionmaking in times of emergency-and that therefore the deferential position that judges have historically taken in emergencies is a mistake.
The deferential view does not rest on a conceptual claim; it rests on a claim about relative institutional competence and about the comparative statics of governmental and judicial performance across emergencies and normal times. In emergencies, the ordinary life of the nation, and the bureaucratic and legal routines that have been developed in ordinary times, are disrupted. In the case of wars, including the "war on terror," the government and the public are not aware of a threat to national security at time 0. At time 1, an invasion or declaration of war by a foreign power reveals the existence of the threat and may at the same time cause substantial losses. At time 2, an emergency response is undertaken.
Several characteristics of the emergency are worthy of note. First, the threat reduces the social pie-both immediately, to the extent that it is manifested in an attack, and prospectively, to the extent that it reveals that the threatened nation will incur further damage unless it takes costly defensive measures. Second, the defensive measures can be more or less effective. Ideally, the government chooses the least costly means of defusing the threat; typically, this will be some combination of military engagement overseas, increased intelligence gathering, and enhanced policing at home. Third, the defensive measures must be taken quickly, and-because every national threat is unique, unlike ordinary crime-the defensive measures will be extremely hard to evaluate. There are standard ways of preventing and investigating street crime, spouse abuse, child pornography, and the like; and within a range, these ways are constant across jurisdictions and even nation-states. Thus, there is always a template that one can use to evaluate ordinary policing. By contrast, emergency threats vary in their type and magnitude and across jurisdictions, depending heavily on the geopolitical position of the state in question. Thus, there is no general template that can be used for evaluating the government's response.
In emergencies, then, judges are at sea, even more so than are executive officials. The novelty of the threats and of the necessary responses makes judicial routines and evolved legal rules seem inapposite, even obstructive. There is a premium on the executive's capacities for swift, vigorous, and secretive action. Of course, the judges know that executive action may rest on irrational assumptions, or bad motivations, or may otherwise be misguided. But this knowledge is largely useless to the judges, because they cannot sort good executive action from bad, and they know that the delay produced by judicial review is costly in itself. In emergencies, the judges have no sensible alternative but to defer heavily to executive action, and the judges know this.

Effective fast response and mission planning is key to deterring every conflict globally
KAGAN and O’HANLON 07 resident scholar at AEI and senior fellow in foreign policy at Brookings Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon, “The Case for Larger Ground Forces”, April 2007, http://www.aei.org/files/2007/04/24/20070424_Kagan20070424.pdf
We live at a time when wars not only rage in nearly every region but threaten to erupt in many places where the current relative calm is tenuous. To view this as a strategic military challenge for the United States is not to espouse a specific theory of America’s role in the world or a certain political philosophy. Such an assessment flows directly from the basic bipartisan view of American foreign policy makers since World War II that overseas threats must be countered before they can directly threaten this country’s shores, that the basic stability of the international system is essential to American peace and prosperity, and that no country besides the United States is in a position to lead the way in countering major challenges to the global order. Let us highlight the threats and their consequences with a few concrete examples, emphasizing those that involve key strategic regions of the world such as the Persian Gulf and East Asia, or key potential threats to American security, such as the spread of nuclear weapons and the strengthening of the global Al Qaeda/jihadist movement. The Iranian government has rejected a series of international demands to halt its efforts at enriching uranium and submit to international inspections. What will happen if the US—or Israeli—government becomes convinced that Tehran is on the verge of fielding a nuclear weapon? North Korea, of course, has already done so, and the ripple effects are beginning to spread. Japan’s recent election to supreme power of a leader who has promised to rewrite that country’s constitution to support increased armed forces—and, possibly, even nuclear weapons— may well alter the delicate balance of fear in Northeast Asia fundamentally and rapidly. Also, in the background, at least for now, Sino Taiwanese tensions continue to flare, as do tensions between India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Venezuela and the United States, and so on. Meanwhile, the world’s nonintervention in Darfur troubles consciences from Europe to America’s Bible Belt to its bastions of liberalism, yet with no serious international forces on offer, the bloodletting will probably, tragically, continue unabated. And as bad as things are in Iraq today, they could get worse. What would happen if the key Shiite figure, Ali al Sistani, were to die? If another major attack on the scale of the Golden Mosque bombing hit either side (or, perhaps, both sides at the same time)? Such deterioration might convince many Americans that the war there truly was lost—but the costs of reaching such a conclusion would be enormous. Afghanistan is somewhat more stable for the moment, although a major Taliban offensive appears to be in the offing.
Sound US grand strategy must proceed from the recognition that, over the next few years and decades, the world is going to be a very unsettled and quite dangerous place, with Al Qaeda and its associated groups as a subset of a much larger set of worries. The only serious response to this international environment is to develop armed forces capable of protecting America’s vital interests throughout this dangerous time. Doing so requires a military capable of a wide range of missions—including not only deterrence of great power conflict in dealing with potential hotspots in Korea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Persian Gulf but also associated with a variety of Special Forces activities and stabilization operations. For today’s US military, which already excels at high technology and is increasingly focused on re-learning the lost art of counterinsurgency, this is first and foremost a question of finding the resources to field a large-enough standing Army and Marine Corps to handle personnel intensive missions such as the ones now under way in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us hope there will be no such large-scale missions for a while. But preparing for the possibility, while doing whatever we can at this late hour to relieve the pressure on our soldiers and Marines in ongoing operations, is prudent. At worst, the only potential downside to a major program to strengthen the military is the possibility of spending a bit too much money. Recent history shows no link between having a larger military and its overuse; indeed, Ronald Reagan’s time in office was characterized by higher defense budgets and yet much less use of the military, an outcome for which we can hope in the coming years, but hardly guarantee. While the authors disagree between ourselves about proper increases in the size and cost of the military (with O’Hanlon preferring to hold defense to roughly 4 percent of GDP and seeing ground forces increase by a total of perhaps 100,000, and Kagan willing to devote at least 5 percent of GDP to defense as in the Reagan years and increase the Army by at least 250,000), we agree on the need to start expanding ground force capabilities by at least 25,000 a year immediately. Such a measure is not only prudent, it is also badly overdue. 

Off
Congress DA 

Precedent for war powers deliberation now.  It will check US militarism
Hunter 8/31/13 - Chair of the Council for a Community of Democracies Robert E. Hunter (US ambassador to NATO (93-98) and Served on Carter’s National Security Council as the Director of West European Affairs and then as Director of Middle East Affairs, “Restoring Congress’ Role In Making War,” Lobe Log, August 31, 2013, pg. http://www.lobelog.com/restoring-congress-role-in-making-war/
But the most remarkable element of the President’s statement is the likely precedent he is setting in terms of engaging Congress in decisions about the use of force, not just through “consultations,” but in formal authorization. This gets into complex constitutional and legal territory, and will lead many in Congress (and elsewhere) to expect Obama — and his successors — to show such deference to Congress in the future, as, indeed, many members of Congress regularly demand.
But seeking authorization for the use of force from Congress as opposed to conducting consultations has long since become the exception rather than the rule. The last formal congressional declarations of war, called for by Article One of the Constitution, were against Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary on June 4, 1942. Since then, even when Congress has been engaged, it has either been through non-binding resolutions or under the provisions of the War Powers Resolution of November 1973. That congressional effort to regain some lost ground in decisions to send US forces into harm’s way was largely a response to administration actions in the Vietnam War, especially the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, which was actually prepared in draft before the triggering incident. The War Powers Resolution does not prevent a president from using force on his own authority, but only imposes post facto requirements for gaining congressional approval or ending US military action. In the current circumstances, military strikes of a few days’ duration, those provisions would almost certainly not come into play.
There were two basic reasons for abandoning the constitutional provision of a formal declaration of war. One was that such a declaration, once turned on, would be hard to turn off, and could lead to a demand for unconditional surrender (as with Germany and Japan in World War II), even when that would not be in the nation’s interests — notably in the Korean War. The more compelling reason for ignoring this requirement was the felt need, during the Cold War, for the president to be able to respond almost instantly to a nuclear attack on the United States or on very short order to a conventional military attack on US and allied forces in Europe.
With the Cold War now on “the ash heap of history,” this second argument should long since have fallen by the wayside, but it has not.  Presidents are generally considered to have the power to commit US military forces, subject to the provisions of the War Powers Resolution WPR, which have never been properly tested. But why? Even with the 9/11 attacks on the US homeland, the US did not respond immediately, but took time to build the necessary force and plans to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (and, anyway, if President George W. Bush had asked on 9/12 for a declaration of war, he no doubt would have received it from Congress, very likely unanimously).
As times goes by, therefore, what President Obama said on August 29, 2013 could well be remembered less for what it will mean regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria and more for what it implies for the reestablishment of a process of full deliberation and fully-shared responsibilities with the Congress for decisions of war-peace, as was the historic practice until 1950. This proposition will be much debated, as it should be; but if the president’s declaration does become precedent (as, in this author’s judgment, it should be, except in exceptional circumstances where a prompt military response is indeed in the national interest), he will have done an important and lasting service to the nation, including a potentially significant step in reducing the excessive militarization of US foreign policy.
There would be one added benefit: members of Congress, most of whom know little about the outside world and have not for decades had to take seriously their constitutional responsibilities for declaring war, would be required to become better-informed participants in some of the most consequential decisions the nation has to take, which, not incidentally, also involve risks to the lives of America’s fighting men and women.

Dismantling war powers justiciability undermines deliberation.  Our link is unique
Broughton 01 – Asst Attorney General of Texas Broughton, J. Richard (LL.M., with distinction, Georgetown University Law Center), “What Is It Good For--War Power, Judicial Review, and Constitutional Deliberation,” Oklahoma Law Review, Vol. 54, Issue 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 685-726
Judicial abstention from war powers disputes can mitigate the effects of the judicial overhang by encouraging Congress and the President to think more seriously about constitutional structure."' In the Vietnam era, for example, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution to assert its own constitutional prerogatives only after the courts had consistently refused to intervene. Perhaps this was no accident. Without resort to the judiciary, Congress was forced to take responsibility for using its Article I powers in its own defense. Whatever the other flaws of the War Powers Resolution, it at least represents Congress's assertiveness in attempting to define the boundaries of constitutional war power, as the Constitution provides. (Wther Congress got it right is a separate matter, beyond the scope of this article.) Similarly, rather than resort to the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the Resolution, presidents since Nixon have simply deployed troops at their discretion, forcing Congress to either authorize the action, reject such authorization, withdraw funding, or, perhaps as a last resort, impeach the President. Thus, the modem trend of cases leaving war powers controversies to the political branches has produced somewhat more responsible political institutions, though much work must still be done to truly effectuate the Constitution's vision of prudent and reasoned constitutional discourse among the Congress and the White House.' In keeping therefore with constitutional history and design, political actors best serve republican government when they give careful attention to constitutional boundaries and constitutional weapons in the course of adopting military and foreign policy. Political actors will be more likely to do so if they have only themselves, and not the courts, to do the work.
IV. Conclusion
There is much we can learn from Madison and Marshall, statesmen who understood the value of prudent constitutional reasoning to the practical governance of a large republic. Importantly, not all such reasoning occurs in the courts, nor should it. Those matters not "of a judiciary nature," in Madison's words, must find resolution in other fora. Controversies between Congress and the President regarding the Constitution's allocation of war powers are among this class of disputes. This is not to say that courts must leave all cases involving foreign affairs to the vicissitudes of political institutions; the Constitution explicitly vests the judiciary with authority over admiralty and maritime cases, as well as cases affecting ambassadors, public ministers, and consuls, all of which may invariably touch upon foreign relations. War powers disputes are constitutionally unique, however, because the Constitution itself commits the resolution of those disputes to legislators and the chief executive. The courts have, for the most part, appropriately left these disputes where they belong, in the hands of the political branches. Through the doctrine of justiciability, courts have helped to preserve the separation of powers by recognizing both the limits on their Article In authority and the broa prerogatives that the Constitution grants to political actors who are charged with making and effecting American military and foreign policy. By continuing this trend, as the District of Columbia Circuit did in Campbell, the judiciary can encourage deliberation about constitutional structure in the political branches, as Madison and Marshall envisioned. Pg. 724-725

Global nuclear war
Boyle 12 - Professor of International Law @ University of Illinois College of Law Francis A. Boyle (PhD. degrees in Political Science from Harvard University), “Unlimited Imperialism and the Threat of World War III. U.S. Militarism at the Start of the 21st Century,” Global Research, December 25, 2012, pg. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unlimited-imperialism-and-the-threat-of-world-war-iii-u-s-militarism-at-the-start-of-the-21st-century/5316852
Historically, this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898.  Then the Republican administration of President  William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidal conditions.  Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy.   But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the “Pacific” would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War.
Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr. administration and now the Democratic Obama administration are threatening to set off World War III.
By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001 9/11, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect.  Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:  control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas.  The Bush Jr./ Obama  administrations  have  already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation.  In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration  announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species.  Libya and the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the last.
This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):
“The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind… “
 It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
1nc – disad 

The plan’s ruling on the Geneva Convention eviscerates court legitimacy and turns the case because it destroys the signal of the aff
Sanchez 5 Ernesto J., B.A. University of Pennsylvania, 1998; M.Phil. University of Cambridge; J.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2004. I would like to thank the Pacific Legal Foundation for its generous sponsorship of this project, which began as the first prize submission to its Fifth Annual Program for Judicial Awareness Writing Competition on public policy issues facing the federal judiciary. I particularly acknowledge the assistance of Mr. R.S. Radford, the Director of the Foundation's Program for Judicial Awareness, in coordinating the revision and publication of this Article, “ARTICLE: A Case Against Judicial Internationalism,” 38 Conn. L. Rev. 185
Proponents of the internationalist approach to constitutional interpretation that such cases as Lawrence and Roper illustrated would do well to consider whether this prospect is truly consistent with the concept of a sovereign nation. Judges who choose to use their power to pick and choose foreign legal principles to impose on the American people may face a well-deserved backlash from at least some segments of the general population. These sorts of crises are not unprecedented. One recent news article noted that many representatives and senators regard recent Supreme Court decisions as unconstitutional and unwarranted usurpations of power that only legislators may rightfully exercise. 259 And what members of a certain generation of attorneys can forget the popular movement, which some congressmen and senators supported, to impeach Earl Warren and William O. Douglas, who were supposedly guilty of the crime of excessive judicial activism? Yet to ask Americans to put up with court decisions because foreigners happen to approve of them would risk a far greater backlash. As Professor Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell University has stated: We implicitly appeal to our citizens to put up with court rulings they find objectionable in the interest of maintaining a common constitutional framework. Accordingly, it is a *236 big leap beyond this understanding to ask Americans to put up with a ruling because it is what foreigners happen to approve. 260 It is easy to dismiss such concerns about this internationalist approach as bitter complaints regarding the results of decisions with which one does not agree. But to refer to legal sources other than the Constitution in interpreting law simply threatens to make the judiciary into less of an institution of judges and more of a group of policymakers. The simple fact remains that effective research can probably find some foreign legal source to support any possible conclusion, in the absence of any neutral, guiding principle. Legislatures, then, remain the proper forum to examine whether the United States should emulate other countries' practices concerning a specific issue. 

Ruling on the Geneva Convention destroys the rule of law
Kochan 6 Donald R., Assistant Professor of Law, Chapman University School of Law; J.D., Cornell Law School; B.A., Western Michigan University. Former Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law, 2002-2003; Olin Research Fellow, University of Virginia School of Law, 2003-2004. I thank my assistants Kristi Collins, Amanda Collopy, and Miles Brandon Fuller for their assistance in preparation for portions of this Article, “ARTICLE: SOVEREIGNTY AND THE AMERICAN COURTS AT THE COCKTAIL PARTY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE DANGERS OF DOMESTIC JUDICIAL INVOCATIONS OF FOREIGN AND INTERNATIONAL LAW,” Fordham University School of Law, 29 Fordham Int'l L.J. 507
There are multiple problems with the judiciary's reliance on extraterritorial and extra-constitutional foreign or international sources to guide its decisions. 9 Perhaps the most fundamental flaw is its interference with rule of law values. 10 To borrow from *509 Judge Harold Leventhal, the use of international sources in judicial decision-making might be described as "the equivalent of entering a crowded cocktail party and looking over the heads of the guests for one's friends." 11 When judges are allowed to cherry-pick from laws around the world to define and interpret their laws at home, activism is emboldened and the rule of law is diminished. 12 The "cocktail party" analogy and debate recently reached the U.S. Senate floor when the newly appointed Chief Justice John Roberts went through his confirmation hearings. 13 Responding to questions on the trend of using foreign or international laws, Chief Justice Roberts rejected its legitimacy and cautioned its dangers: Domestic precedent can confine and shape the discretion of the judges. Foreign law, you can find anything you want. If you don't find it in the decisions of France or Italy, it's in the decisions of Somalia or Japan or Indonesia or wherever. As somebody said in another context, looking at foreign law for support is like looking out over a crowd and picking out your friends. You can find them. They're there. And that actually expands the discretion of the judge. It allows the judge to incorporate his or her own personal preferences, cloak them *510 with the authority of precedent - because they're finding precedent in foreign law - and use that to determine the meaning of the Constitution. 14

The impact is terrorism and disease
Greco 5 (Michael S., President – American Bar Association, Miami Daily Business Review, 52.42, 12-5,  Factiva)
What makes the rule of law so important that it attracted such a distinguished community† First, because the rule of law is so central to everything the legal community stands for, both in the United States and around the world. And second, because we increasingly find that our nation's top international priorities-defeating terrorism, corruption and even the spread of deadly diseases-are being undone at the ground level by poor governance and lawlessness. As Rice eloquently told the gathering, "In a world where threats pass even through the most fortified boundaries, weak and poorly governed states enable disease to spread undetected, and corruption to multiply unchecked, and hateful ideologies to grow more violent and more vengeful." The only real antidote to these global threats is governments, in all corners of the world, that operate with just, transparent and consistent legal systems that are enforced by fair and independent judiciaries. These issues are not just the province of distant foreign governments. Building the rule of law must begin at home. Recent revelations in our own country-that the CIA has maintained secret prisons for foreign detainees-underscore the urgent need for an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate our treatment of such prisoners.

Mutations ensure diseases cause extinction
Darling 12 (David, Astronomer, “9 Strange Ways the World Really Might End”, Seattle's Big Blog, 3-18, http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2012/03/18/9-strange-ways-the-world-really-might-end/?fb_xd_fragment, Washington State University)
Our body is in constant competition with a dizzying array of viruses, bacteria, and parasites, many of which treat us simply as a source of food or a vehicle for reproduction. What’s troubling is that these microbes can mutate and evolve at fantastic speed – the more so thanks to the burgeoning human population – confronting our bodies with new dangers every year. HIV, Ebola, bird flu, and antibiotic-resistant “super bugs” are just a few of the pathogenic threats to humanity that have surfaced over the past few decades. Our soaring numbers, ubiquitous international travel, and the increasing use of chemicals and biological agents without full knowledge of their consequences, have increased the risk of unstoppable pandemics arising from mutant viruses and their ilk. Bubonic plague, the Black Death, and the Spanish Flu are vivid examples from history of how microbial agents can decimate populations. But the consequences aren’t limited to a high body count. When the death toll gets high enough, it can disrupt the very fabric of society. According to U.S. government studies, if a global pandemic affecting at least half the world’s population were to strike today, health professionals wouldn’t be able to cope with the vast numbers of sick and succumbing people. The result of so many deaths would have serious implications for the infrastructure, food supply, and security of 21st century man. While an untreatable pandemic could strike suddenly and potentially bring civilization to its knees in weeks or months, degenerative diseases might do so over longer periods. The most common degenerative disease is cancer. Every second men and every third women in the western world will be diagnosed with this disease in their lifetime. Degeneration of our environment through the release of toxins and wastes, air pollution, and intake of unhealthy foods is making this problem worse. If cancer, or some other form of degenerative disease, were to become even more commonplace and strike before reproduction, or become infectious (as seen in the transmitted facial cancer of the Tasmanian Devil, a carnivorous marsupial in Australia) the very survival of our species could be threatened.
1nc – counterplan

The United States federal government should
--restrict the authority of the President of the United States to indefinitely detain by ruling that executive indefinite detention violates the Suspension Clause including a closure of Guantanamo Bay
--ban policies authorizing nuclear use against a government for inadvertently releasing nuclear material used in an attack against the United States or its allies
--prevent global deforestation by engaging in binding international partnerships and regulations and providing economic incentives and compensation for international countries
--reaffirm commitment to counterterrorism intelligence sharing with NATO, the EU and 5 EYES partners by no longer exploiting legal loopholes, ending use of unnecessary extraordinary renditions, and improvements in intelligence security among other cooperative concessions as explained by the McGill evidence below and expand commitment to the operations of the NATO-Russia Council’s Cooperative Airspace Initiative and further counterterrorism intelligence sharing coordination
--pass, sign and ratify existing and future environmental protection treaties and ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child
The President should release a presidential directive, announce, and commit to the United States being bound by ratified human rights treaties including but not limited to the Geneva Convention as described by our Shattuck evidence below.

CP solves Geneva Convention advantage
Shattuck 08 (John Shattuck is CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and a lecturer on U.S. foreign policy at Tufts University, Human Rights Magazine, 2008, Vol. 35)
Mr. President, you can restore U.S. influence by reconnecting the nation’s values and policies on human rights and the rule of law. Among the initiatives that you might take are the following.
Human Rights Law Enforcement. You should announce that the United States is bound by the human rights treaties and con-ventions that it has ratified and adopted as domestic law, including the Geneva Conventions, the Torture Convention, and the Interna-tional Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. You should follow through with your commitment to close the detention center at Guan-tanamo and transfer detainees to this country for determinations whether to try them in U.S. courts or release them. Fully complying with the Geneva Conventions would not preclude the United States from trying detainees in military commissions under constitutional standards of due process, nor would it restrict the government’s authority to conduct lawful interrogations to obtain intelligence in-formation about terrorist activities.

Domestic Habeas Corpus ruling sends the same signal to solve the aff
Shattuck 08 (John Shattuck is CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and a lecturer on U.S. foreign policy at Tufts University, Human Rights Magazine, 2008, Vol. 35)
The gap between America’s values and actions revealed by this polling data has severely eroded U.S. global influence. How can you and your administration gain it back?
First, you should make it clear that one of our country’s bedrock principles is the international rule of law. Human rights are de-fined and protected by the Constitution and international treaties ratified and incorporated into our domestic law. In flaunting basic rules—such as habeas corpus, the Convention against Torture, and the Geneva Conventions—the previous administration created a series of “law-free zones.” Within these zones, detainees were abused, thousands were held indefinitely without charges, and human rights were trampled.

Terrorism only goes nuclear when we have a doctrine of retaliating with our own nuclear weapons --- the CP solves the motivation
Beljac 08 (Marko, PhD at Monash University, Teaches at LaTrobe University and the University of Melbourne, “Pakistan and the prospects for nuclear terrorism”, Australian Policy Online, February 8th, http://apo.org.au/commentary/pakistan-and-prospects-nuclear-terrorism)
One disturbing option that has been opened up by nuclear forensics and has been seriously considered in the White House is the promulgation of a “negligence doctrine” to deter nuclear terrorism. The idea here is that if a state were to lose control over fissile materials or nuclear weapons through “negligence,” and these materials were stolen and used in a nuclear explosive device by a terrorist group, then the United States would hold such a state “responsible” for the terrorist attack and strike back with nuclear weapons.
The possibility of such a nuclear strike, it’s argued, would deter “negligence.” But the concept makes “negligence” sound like a conscious choice made at the very highest policy levels, which it need not be. Sometimes at US nuclear weapons plants people have been caught sleeping on the job but surely the negligence doctrine would not apply if Bin Laden got his nuclear device because of a Homer Simpson.
In reality, a “negligence doctrine” would make an act of nuclear terrorism more likely. Jihadi groups like Al Qaeda are revolutionary - or, more accurately, counter-revolutionary - vanguards who see their main strategic task as mobilising a dissatisfied but apathetic population. In this sense they have been highly influenced by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It is not hard to see how a “negligence doctrine,” rather than deterring nuclear terrorism, would actually encourage Jihadi groups to attempt to get their hands on the necessary fissile materials for a nuclear device because the prospect of a US nuclear counter-strike on such obviously immoral grounds would enrage, and hopefully radicalise, the entire Islamic world.

Repeal of negligence doctrine enables better cooperation with other countries over nuclear security, and results in BETTER intel sharing
Levi 08 (Michael A., PhD in war studies, University of London, David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energ and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. former fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Institute, "Deterring State Sponsorship of Terrorism", Council Special Report No. 39, September 2008)
Threatening retaliation against countries like Russia and Pakistan in response to terrorist attacks stemming from lax security practices is unwise. It undercuts efforts to work cooperatively with those states to improve their nuclear security; dissuades those states from informing others if they discover that their nuclear weapons or materials are ever stolen, thus undermining any efforts to recover them; and makes it difficult to work with those states in the aftermath of an attack to prevent further detonations. At the same time, U.S. threats are likely to do little to actually encourage many critical states to take nuclear terrorism more seriously—Russia and Pakistan, in particular, face terrorist threats of their own, and the prospect of nuclear attacks on Moscow or Islamabad by Chechen separatists or Islamist radicals is surely greater motivation for strengthened nuclear security than the possibility that, following an attack on Washington, the United States might somehow retaliate. (To the extent that retaliatory threats are military in nature, they will also often be incredible; it is implausible, for example, that the United States would retaliate militarily against Russia. On the other hand, more plausible threats, such as economic or political ones, are far weaker.) Adapting deterrence to cases of lax security is likely to increase, rather than decrease, the nuclear terrorist threat. The United States should, in most cases, emphasize cooperation instead while explicitly ruling out retribution.

CP solves terrorism through expanding allied cooperation and making intel sharing resilient
McGill 12 (Anna-Katherine Staser McGill, School of Graduate and Continuing Studies in Diplomacy, Norwich University, “Challenges to International Counterterrorism Intelligence Sharing,” Global Security Studies, Summer 2012, Volume 3, Issue 3, http://globalsecuritystudies.com/McGill20Intel20Share.pdf)
Conclusion It is clear that diplomacy will continue to be a key component in US counterterrorism coalition building. Intelligence sharing, as a by-product of these efforts, will likely improve for as long as trust is maintained or improved and compromises are made in the greater interest of combating the shared threat of terrorism. However, the US is also likely to face continuing foreseeable challenges from the ever expanding breadth of its international allies, its increasing dependence on its counterterrorism coalitions, and unpredictable setbacks to international trust like WikiLeaks. There are ways, however, to allay the impact of these challenges if not overcome them all together. With regards to traditional allies the United States must continue to negotiate a close working relationship with its NATO, EU, and 5 EYES partners. Great strides have been made but future disagreements on policy, tactics, and strategy for the war on terrorism are inevitable. The best way to prepare for such future issues is to continue to foster a positive collaborative relationship with these nations so that mutual trust will prevent arguments from threatening the survival of the alliance. This means that the US must carefully manage its international position. It cannot exploit legal loopholes like exporting suspects to other nations for questionable interrogations; it cannot bully its friends nor act unilaterally against their wishes; and it must hold itself to high moral standards befitting a liberal democracy. For new and non-traditional allies, Reveron states that “the long-term challenge for policymakers will be to convert these short-term tactical relationships into meaningful alliances while protecting against counterintelligence threats” (467). Traditional alliances have to start somewhere and over time these new relationships can turn in to tried and tested cooperation. In order to further develop these relationships the US should attempt to iron out policy differences in other arenas rather than turn a blind eye to them and continue providing technical and material support to their development of effective intelligence programs. The US should not however hold CT cooperation supreme over other critical issues such as nuclear and conventional arms proliferation and human rights violations. Nations like Iran and Syria may be helpful in the short term and for limited purposes but this does not negate their less desirable practices. Finally, the US will also need to look inward to prevent more classified information leaks. The US needs to be more critical in the issuance of security clearances, employ digital monitoring of who is downloading information and in what amount to prevent mass dumps, and give greater importance to curtailing the “insider threat” of US citizens leaking information overall. Improving intelligence security will help to mitigate the blowback from WikiLeaks and will go a long way to advancing US credibility and trust building.

CP solves the environment
CCTF 09 (Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests. “Major bipartisan Commission calls for U.S. leadership to protect ‘climate forests’” October 7, 2009, http://www.climateforestscommission.org/news/major-bipartisan-commission-calls-for-us-leadership-to-protect-climate-forests.html)
The Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, co-chaired by John Podesta and Senator Lincoln Chafee, is a bipartisan group of leaders from business, government, advocacy, conservation, global development, science and national security that has developed recommendations on the inclusion of tropical forest conservation in broader U.S. climate change policies. Tropical deforestation accounts for 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and protecting tropical forests is integral to combating climate change. The Commission’s recommendations are designed to help ensure U.S. climate policies provide the most effective response to this issue and are aligned with global solutions. Report Recommendations Halve deforestation within a decade. The United States should lead a global partnership to cut tropical deforestation in half within a decade and achieve zero net emissions from the forest sector by no later than 2030. Create the financial incentives for forest protection. With the right policy mechanisms, the U.S. could alter the financial incentives that lead to tropical deforestation. To unlock cost savings, the United States should invest at least $1 billion by 2012, and U.S. policy should mobilize $5 billion annually by 2020 in public funding and $9 billion annually from the private sector.

Guantanamo plank solves Geneva impact
Ratner, 8 (Law Prof-Michigan, “Think Again: Geneva Conventions,” 2/19, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2008/02/19/think_again_geneva_conventions?page=0,6)
"The Conventions Require Closing Guantánamo"
No, but changes must be made. The Geneva Conventions allow countries to detain POWs in camps, and, if someone in enemy hands does not fit the POW category, he or she is automatically accorded civilian status, which has its own protections. But none of the residents of Guantánamo's military prison qualifies as either, according to the Bush administration, thus depriving the roughly 275 detainees who remain there of the rights accorded by the conventions, such as adequate shelter and eventual release.
The possibility that detainees could remain in legal limbo indefinitely at Guantánamo has turned the issue into a foreign-relations disaster for the United States. But let’s be clear -- the Geneva Conventions don't require the United States to close up shop in Cuba. The rules simply insist that a working legal framework be put in place, instead of the legal vacuum that exists now.
There are several options worth consideration. The prison at Guantánamo could be turned into a pre-trial holding area where detainees are held before they are brought before U.S. courts on formal charges. (The hiccup here is that most of the detainees haven’t clearly violated any U.S. law.) Alternatively, the U.S. Congress could pass legislation installing a system of preventive detention for dangerous individuals. The courts could occasionally review detainees' particular circumstances and judge whether continued detention is necessary and lawful. (The problem here is that such a system would run against 200 years of American jurisprudence.) In the end, closing Guantánamo is probably the only option that would realistically restore America's reputation, though it isn't required by any clause in the conventions. It's just the wisest course of action.

1NC Afghan ADV

Do NOT default aff on a risk of solving this advantage – there can actually be ZERO RISK 

Alt causes from THEIR OWN EVIDENCE.  
ICG ev – bribes, endemic problems with communications, transport, infrastructure and lack of electricity mean that it is likely that the afghan justice system will remain dysfunctional for some time to come.”  

Alt causes to credibility
-drones
-war on terror
Civilian casualties
We are never going to be credible with Afghanistan 

And, more alt cause ev from Aff authors-- Bribery is the key.
Eviatar 12 - Senior counsel in the Law and Security Program of Human Rights First Daphne Eviatar, “U.S. must aid Afghan judicial system,” Politico, March 13, 2012 09:38 PM EDT, pg. http://tinyurl.com/cmvkfkv  
Afghanistan’s justice system, meanwhile, is notoriously corrupt, failing to provide even the most basic elements of fair trials, including defense lawyers. When I was in Kabul last year, Afghan defense lawyers and human-rights activists told me that defense lawyers for the accused are still a rarity in much of the country. Even when a defense lawyer is assigned, that attorney often can’t meet with his client for many months, particularly in national security cases. In the meantime, the suspect may be tortured into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.
Once the case gets to court, getting a judge to even listen to a defense lawyer’s objections or allow presentation of real evidence is challenging. Most Afghans I interviewed insist that evidence is irrelevant in any case. The popular sentiment is that with money, anyone can buy his way out of jail. Those without, guilty or innocent, will be left to rot in prison.
The United States is aware of these problems. Washington knows that a successful U.S. withdrawal depends on the Afghan government’s eventual ability to deliver law, order and justice to its people.
To the U.S. military’s credit, it’s been trying to improve Afghan trials in national security cases by providing mentoring and training for judges and prosecutors handling trials in a U.S.-built facility on the Bagram Air Base and ensuring the accused get a lawyer. But that’s made only small improvements so far, judging from the poor quality of the Afghan trial I observed at Bagram last year. It’s also not clear if that project will continue after the U.S. hands authority to Afghanistan.
It should. Despite mounting pressure to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the United States needs to remain involved by providing assistance not only to the military and police, as it’s doing now, but also to the Afghan justice system.
This judicial system needs far more than a few mentors for judges and prosecutors. It needs investigators trained to produce reliable evidence, prosecutors who understand its value and defense lawyers trained to demand that evidence and challenge confessions resulting from torture. It also needs to be able to ensure the safe and humane treatment of detainees.

No modeling
Hope not facts
Solvecy is from Evitar – who works for a human rights organization chastising the US

And, their impact ev isn’t about the aff—Cronin evidence is about proxy conflict over Afghanistan as the US leaves—rule of law does nothing to prevent other countries from intervening once we’re out of there.

Here’s the conclusion to their Cronin evidence—it’s about asking Afghanistan to be neutral like Switzerland, about afghan IR, and concludes the US can’t solve:
Cronin, “aff” author, 13 (Audrey Kurth Cronin is Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of How Terrorism Ends and Great Power Politics and the Struggle over Austria. Thinking Long on Afghanistan: Could it be Neutralized? Center for Strategic and International Studies The Washington Quarterly • 36:1 pp. 55_72 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2013.751650)
With ISAF withdrawal inevitable, a sea change is already underway: the¶ question is whether the United States will be ahead of the curve or behind it.¶ Under current circumstances, key actions within Afghanistan by any one state¶ are perceived to have a deleterious effect on the interests of other competing¶ states, so the only feasible solution is to discourage all of them from interfering in¶ a neutralized state. As the United States draws down over the next two years,¶ yielding to regional anarchy would be irresponsible. Allowing neighbors to rely¶ on bilateral measures, jockey for relative position, and pursue conflicting¶ national interests without regard for dangerous regional dynamics will result in a¶ repeat of the pattern that has played out in Afghanistan for the past thirty¶ years/except this time the outcome could be not just terrorism but nuclear war.

WAKE’S evidence that’s not even a little bit about the plan ENDS

Neutralization is the best strategic solution for the future of Afghanistan. It¶ maintains the integrity of the state, deters intervention, and draws regional¶ powers into stabilizing rather than destabilizing behavior. It is not a panacea:¶ within Afghanistan (as in Switzerland), neutralization may involve the violent¶ emergence of new (or very old) confederate forms of governance. But the¶ outcome of this struggle for modern statehood is up to the Afghans, not NATO¶ or the United States/or Pakistan, China, or Russia for that matter/under any¶ circumstances. Neutralization is the only way, over time, to stabilize the region¶ and maximize the chances for Afghan self-/determination to evolve.¶ 

And, No one will model our courts, Afghanistan included—their ev is hopes and dreams
Black 12—Eric Black writes Eric Black Ink for MinnPost, analyzing politics and government of Minnesota and the United States, the historical background of topics and other issues September 27, 2012, “Some ideas to limit the ‘supremacy’ of the U.S. Supreme Court,” http://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2012/11/some-ideas-limit-supremacy-us-supreme-court
It seems to be part of our national DNA. We see ourselves as so unlike the rest of the world that we have developed a semi-religious belief in what we call “American exceptionalism.” Maybe the upside is some kind of boost to our collective self-esteem. But one of the downsides is a reluctance to look around the world and see if anyone (especially not France) has a good idea from which we might benefit.
Especially on democracy. We see ourselves as the world’s model for democracy and the “rule of law.” We expect others to copy us, although they have long since stopped doing so with reference to the specifics of how to design a government. We grumble a good deal about the breakdowns in our system, but we are not much open to ideas for improving it.
University of Minnesota political scientist Lisa Hilbink, whose specialties include comparative constitutional systems around the world, said that basically, since the end of World War II, most of the world outside of Latin America came to the conclusion that the U.S. system was “pretty crazy.”
A great many new constitutions have been written since then, in emerging democracies and in old democracies that wrote new constitutions. In many ways, the foreign framers did benefit from our example, often in deciding what not to do. As I have mentioned in previous installments, no other country thinks our Electoral College example is worth following and likewise no one has designed a system of “veto points” like ours in which it is much easier to block action than to get anything done.

No impact to Afghanistan
Haass 10/11/09 – President, Council on Foreign Relations, former Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff
(Richard N. “In the Afghan War, Aim for the Middle.” Washington Post Op-Ed. http://www.cfr.org/publication/20383/in_the_afghan_war_aim_for_the_middle.html)
Why does Afghanistan matter? We generally hear four arguments. First, if the Taliban returns to power, Afghanistan will again be a haven for terrorist groups. Second, if the Taliban takes over, Afghanistan will again become a human rights nightmare. Third, a perceived defeat of the United States in Afghanistan would be a blow to U.S. prestige everywhere and would embolden radicals. Fourth, an Afghanistan under Taliban control would be used by extremists as a sanctuary from which to destabilize Pakistan. None of these assumptions is as strong as proponents maintain. Afghanistan certainly matters -- the question is how much. Al-Qaeda does not require Afghan real estate to constitute a regional or global threat. Terrorists gravitate to areas of least resistance; if they cannot use Afghanistan, they will use countries such as Yemen or Somalia, as in fact they already are. No doubt, the human rights situation would grow worse under Taliban rule, but helping Afghan girls get an education, no matter how laudable, is not a goal that justifies an enormous U.S. military commitment. And yes, the taking of Kabul by the Taliban would become part of the radicals' narrative, but the United States fared well in Asia after the fall of South Vietnam, and less than a decade after an ignominious withdrawal from Beirut, the United States amassed the international coalition that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. There are and always will be opportunities to demonstrate the effectiveness of U.S. power.

Others will fill in to solve stability.
Prashad ‘9  (Vijay, George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History – Trinity College, GazetteNET, “Don't escalate Afghanistan war, reach out to country's neighbors”, 12-5, http://www.gazettenet.com/2009/12/05/dont-escalate-afghanistan-war?SESSf793588a8482ac7b45e5aa116b4d4c76=gnews)
Instead, the U.S. backed one group of nasty warlords (the Northern Alliance) against the Taliban, throwing to the wind the progressive forces within Afghan society. The SCO was also disregarded.  This was a costly mistake.  The SCO continues to have influence in the region. This summer, elements in the Taliban insurgency sent a letter to the SCO, asking it to intervene against the occupation. Of course the SCO is sitting on its hands, but it is able. The regional solution will be difficult, given that it would have to scrub off the effects of 30 years of warfare. Right after the Taliban fled in 2001, the U.S. convened a "donor's conference" in Bonn, where Europe, Japan and the U.S. gathered to promise money for the reconstruction of the country.  No one invited the SCO players. This has not changed. Europe, Japan and the U.S., the countries with the least legitimacy in Afghanistan are the ones calling the shots.  Rather than conference calls with Brussels (the NATO headquarters), Paris, London and Kabul (with the shaky government of Karzai), the Obama administration should have called a political conference of the SCO, to see what it would have taken to hand over the Afghan imbroglio to them. The SCO met in Bishkek (capital of Kyrgyzstan) on Nov. 24 to discuss the problem of the region, and made all kinds of suggestions. None of these are operational till the U.S.-NATO forces withdraw from Kabul.  China is the only power in the region with the wealth and expertise to genuinely rebuild Afghanistan (people might criticize its development policy in Africa, but mark this: Chinese investment enters countries in Africa without IMF-type conditionalities and Chinese engineers and managers live in modest conditions, not creating the kind of high-overhead NGO lifestyles of the European and U.S. humanitarian workers).  The U.S. media has portrayed the escalation of the occupation in a very simplistic fashion: Either the U.S. solves the problem, or the Taliban returns. This is a false choice, one that assumes that only the U.S. can act, the White Knight riding in to save the world.  Others are ready. But they don't want to act unless they have a commitment that the U.S. is not going to use their blood and treasure to build its empire.

Central asia war 

No escalation
Clais, ‘10
Jonas, United States Institute of Peace, “Preventing Conflict in the “Stans”,” 4-23, http://www.usip.org/files/resources/PB202120Preventing20Conflict20in20the20Stans.pdf
Despite this litany of conflict drivers, Central Asia has remained relatively peaceful for the past 20 years, apart from the 1992 Tajik civil war. Unlike most regions at low risk of conflict, Central Asia cannot rely on its institutional capacity to pave the road to self-sustainable peace. Although very effective in the short term, some of the factors mitigating conflict are unsustainable sources of stability. The Soviet legacy, characterized by extreme deprivation and violent suppression, nonetheless operates as a conflict-managing factor in Central Asia. Quantitative studies established a quasi-consensus among scholars on the negative effect of both extreme democracy and extreme autocracy on the risk of civil war, anocracies being most conflict-prone. 6 The brutal Soviet practices hardened and intimidated the population, discouraging popular uprisings. Current law enforcement tools used in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are often Soviet-inherited and serve as effective yet inhumane conflict management instruments. A recent report by the United Nations Human Rights Committee condemned the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, stressing the excessive use of torture. The Kyrgyz security forces, on the other hand, are rather ineffective, providing a safe-haven to militant groups based in the region. In Tajikistan, the civil conflict bred war fatigue, reducing the odds that an opportunistic leader will be able to mobilize Tajiks to violently undermine their government. Though they cannot assure stability in the long term, some of the region’s financial and socioeconomic lifelines also mitigate conflict in the short term. International, regional, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as individual countries, provide vital assistance to Central Asia’s development. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of the aid is lost to corruption before it reaches its targets. Chinese and Russian capital injections offer some breathing space, as well as crucial investments in economic infrastructure. Yet, as indicated earlier, these benefactors may demand political concessions in return. Migrant remittances also serve as an important source of revenue for the region, especially in Tajikistan, where remittances make up almost half of the country’s gross domestic product—by far the highest number worldwide.
7

Assumes resource competition
Oliker, ‘3
Olga, Senior International Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation, “CONFLICT IN CENTRAL ASIA AND SOUTH CAUCASUS: IMPLICATIONS OF FOREIGN INTERESTS AND INVOLVEMENT,” http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1598/MR1598.ch7.pdf
It is therefore highly likely that coming years will see continued competition among outside powers over the region and its resources and allegiances. This does not necessarily mean, however, that great power conflict will result. In fact, as the exploration of the interests and motivations of various actors undertaken in this chapter will show, competition is moderated by the many shared interests of the outside powers in question. But strategic and economic interests will also cause foreign states to be increasingly active in the region diplomatically, economically, and militarily. This means that if other factors spur conflict in the region, as analysis elsewhere in this report suggests is likely, there is significant potential for outside powers to get involved—even if their interests are not themselves the reason that conflict emerges. Because there is room for many states to gain from the region’s potential and because regional stability is a shared goal as well, there will be high in centives to cooperate as well as compete. Strategic reasons to maintain good ties among interested third parties will also temper the likelihood of conflict. But because there is also little doubt that some will gain more than others, it is likely that competition will remain a significant factor—and may at times be fierce. Moreover, the existence of incentives for cooperation among outside powers does not imply that third parties cannot be potential sources of regional conflict in other ways, or that one or more of them will not get involved in conflict if it occurs for other reasons.

SCO checks war
Maksutov in ‘6 (Ruslan, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A Central Asian Perspective”, August, http://www.sipri.org/contents/worldsec/Ruslan.SCO.pdf/download)
As a starting point, it is fair to say that all Central Asian countries—as well as China and Russia—are interested in security cooperation within a multilateral framework, such as the SCO provides. For Central Asia this issue ranks in importance with that of economic development, given the explosive environment created locally by a mixture of external and internal threats. Central Asia is encircled by four of the world’s eight known nuclear weapon states (China, India, Russia and Pakistan), of which Pakistan has a poor nuclear non-proliferation profile and Afghanistan is a haven for terrorism and extremism. Socio-economic degradation in Central Asian states adds to the reasons for concern and makes obvious the interdependence between progress in security and in development. Some scholars argue that currently concealed tendencies evolving in various states of Central Asia—such as the wide-ranging social discontent with oppressive regimes in the region, and the growing risks of state collapse and economic decline—all conducive to the quick growth of radical religious movements, could have far-reaching implications for regional stability once they come more into the light. 41 At first sight, the instruments established by the SCO to fulfil its declared security- building objectives seem to match the needs that Central Asian states have defined against this background. While the existence of the SCO further reduces the already remote threat of conventional interstate war in the region, 42 it allows for a major and direct focus on the non-state, non-traditional and transnational threats that now loom so large by comparison.

Alt causes to instability
Richard A. Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, 4/26/200“U.S. Policy in Central Asia: Balancing Priorities (Part II),” Statement to the House International Relations Committee, http://www.state.gov/p/sca/rls/rm/2006/65292.htm.
Central Asia faces numerous threats to its stability, including Islamic extremism, a population that remains poor and has little economic opportunity, the post-Soviet legacy of authoritarianism, public perceptions of injustice, and high levels of corruption. As a consequence, nurturing both economic and democratic reform in the region is difficult, even daunting. Furthermore, the repressive and backward-looking authoritarian regimes in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan may further challenge our efforts to integrate the region and encourage reform and development.

Geneva 

Card about Geneva key to stop conflict is about why we need to stop violating treaties to cooperate with others
1 – nto about Geneva
2 – other treties alt causes 

First – WTO treaties
Shauk 13 (Zain, writer for fuelfix.com, fuelfix.com/blog/2013/12/03/lng-delays-could-violate-world-treaty-group-says/
HOUSTON — A group of manufacturers argued Tuesday that the U.S. government is moving too slowly to approve new export facilities for natural gas and coal, potentially exposing the nation to legal action from members of the World Trade Organization. The National Association of Manufacturers, with the backing of Cheniere Energy Corp., released a report contending that the process has left the United States in violation of a WTO trade treaty.

Other international treaties
Mears 9 (Bill, "U.N. court rules U.S. execution violated treaty," www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/19/mexican.execution.violation/
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A United Nations court has found that the United States violated an international treaty and the court's own order when a Mexican national was executed last year in a Texas prison. Jose Ernesto Medellin was executed by lethal injection for raping and murdering two girls aged 14 and 16. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a ruling Monday in an unusual case that pitted President Bush against his home state in a dispute over federal authority, local sovereignty and foreign treaties. Mexico had filed a formal complaint against U.S. state and federal officials "The United States of America has breached the obligation incumbent upon it" to stop the execution, the ICJ announced in a unanimous opinion. Jose Ernesto Medellin's death by lethal injection in August followed a 15-year legal dispute after his conviction for two brutal slayings. At issue was whether Texas and other states had to give in to a demand by the president that the prisoner be allowed new hearings and resentencing. Bush made that request reluctantly after the international court in 2004 concluded that Medellin and about 50 other Mexicans on various states' death rows were improperly denied access to their consulate upon arrest, a violation of a treaty signed by the United States decades ago. 

Environmental cooperation they facilitate leads to binding emission cuts
Newsmax 12 Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/ASIAX-BBEXCLUDE-BNALL-BNCOPY/2012/12/02/id/466154#ixzz2P2CzPioR Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!
As leaders in Washington obsess about the fiscal cliff, President Barack Obama is putting in place the building blocks for a climate treaty requiring the first fossil- fuel emissions cuts from both the U.S. and China. State Department envoy Todd Stern is in Doha this week working to clear the path for an international agreement by 2015. While Obama failed to deliver on his promise to start a cap-and-trade program in his first term, he’s working on policies that may help cut greenhouse gases 17 percent in 2020 in the U.S., historically the world’s biggest polluter. Obama has moved forward with greenhouse-gas rules for vehicles and new power plants, appliance standards and investment in low-emitting energy sources. He’s also called for 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from clean energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, by 2035. “The president is laying the foundations for real action on climate change,” Jake Schmidt, who follows international climate policy for the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview in Doha. “Whether or not he decides to jump feet first into the international arena, we’ll see.” Envoys from more than 190 nations are entering their second week of talks today at the United Nations conference working toward a global warming treaty. Their ambition is to agree to a pact in 2015 that would take force in 2020. It would supersede limits on emissions for industrial nations under the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. never ratified. Quiet Effort Obama’s push is being pursued without fanfare as the administration and Congress grapple to avert a budget crisis and $607 billion in automatic spending cuts. Unlike 2009, when Obama failed to prevent the collapse of climate talks in Copenhagen, the U.S. can point to more concrete actions it’s taking in the fight global warming. He has more ammunition at hand. The Environmental Protection Agency is required under the Clean Air Act to move ahead with regulations on emissions from existing power plants. Those are responsible for about a third of U.S. emissions, the largest chunk. Measures such as those, along with continued low natural gas prices and state actions, can cut emissions 16.3 percent by 2020, Resources for the Future, a research firm, estimates. Emissions already are down 8.8 percent from 2005 levels, according to Jonathan Pershing, a State Department negotiator in Doha. `Stronger Position' “The U.S. is in a much stronger position going into the Doha talks despite failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation,” said Trevor Houser, a former U.S. climate negotiator who served during the Copenhagen meeting. “For countries like China that were able to hide behind a perception of U.S. inaction, the fact that U.S. emissions are falling helps increase pressure. It takes away the excuse that action is stalled because of the U.S.”

That causes protectionism and violates the WTO
Rivkin 09 Attorney David B. Rivkin, Jr., has studied the U.S. Constitution and related historical documents with
scholarly rigor, and has authored critical commentary on critical constitutional issues of our day. In private practice and partner at Baker Hostetler in Washington, D.C., Mr. Rivkin has had a lengthy career distinguished by service under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, in the U.S. Department of Justice, and in the U.S. Department of Energy. He is a well-known writer and media commentator on matters of constitutional and international law, as well as foreign and defense policy. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Nixon Center, Contributing Editor at the National Review, and a member of the Advisory Council at The National Interest magazine. He currently serves as Co-Chairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He previously served on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. A trusted representative of conservative viewpoints, he frequently testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee and other Congressional committees. On July 30, 2009, Mr. Rivkin testified as a minority party witness in the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor. He had previously testified on June 9, 2009, before the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution regarding "The Legal, Moral, and National Security Consequences of 'Prolonged Detention.'" His extensive legal opinion articles and commentary include more than 350 articles and numerous guest appearances on radio, and network and cable televisions programs, such as CNN, NPR, BBC, Fox News, NBC, ABC, CBS, Al Jazeera, and The Laura Ingraham Show. Mr. Rivkin's editorial contributions include constitutional law, international law, defense and national security, intelligence, foreign policy, energy policy, and healthcare reform. He develops his positions on critical public and legal matters not from political ideology, but from a reasoned interpretation of the U.S. constitution, legislation, judicial rulings, and legal opinions. David's Senate Committee Testimony on Climate Change Thursday, 30 July 2009 17:26 Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works Hearings On Climate Change and National Security July 30, 2009 http://davidrivkin.com/index.php?option=com_contentandview=articleandid=50
D. Attempting To Enforce GHG Emissions Reductions Through Trade Penalties Would Be Highly Problematic. Having made it all but impossible to obtain a comprehensive GHG emissions limitation treaty by trading concessions with other governments, advocates of the unilateral cap-and-trade approach must rely on either the moral example of the United States imposing emission limits on itself, or on the threat or use of trade penalties, to induce other countries to reduce their emissions. These strategies are unlikely to work. The moral example? of U.S. abstention from GHG emissions will have little impact on foreign leaders who must worry about feeding their populations. The leaders of more developed societies “particularly in Europe“ have long been able to call for U.S. reduction of GHG emissions secure in the knowledge that the prior Administration of President George W. Bush was unlikely to take any action in the area. It is an open question whether Europe's enthusiasm for emissions reductions will persist once, as is likely, the moral example of Waxman-Markey proves, in fact, to be a cautionary one. Trade penalties are similarly unlikely to be a very effective tool in this context, for a number of reasons. First, carbon tariffs are very likely illegal under WTO rules. Numerous countries, as well as senior U.N. officials, have already denounced the possibility of carbon tariffs as a violation of WTO principles. See Dina Capiello, U.N. Climate Expert Warns Against Carbon Tariffs, The Washington Post (July 22, 2009).7 They will be able to make a strong argument that a carbon tariff is trade protectionism in the disguise of environmental protection.? See Remarks by Yao Jian, Spokesman for Ministry of Commerce of People's Republic of China, reported in Alan Beatie and Kathrin Hille, China joins carbon tax protest,? The Financial Times (July 3, 2009).8 This argument draws strength from the popularity of the Waxman-Markey bill among protectionist labor groups. Whether illegal under the WTO or not, it is a certainty that carbon tariffs would be challenged “repeatedly and acrimoniously“ before the WTO Dispute Resolution System. Climate-based protectionism would carry with it all the negative consequences of other forms of protectionism. If the United States puts carbon tariffs in place, other countries will likely retaliate. Protectionism pries countries apart. It widens oceans, divides friends and pushes rivals further apart. Trade would be impaired just as the world economy is struggling to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression (which was itself largely caused by retaliatory tariffs). Attempts to pressure other countries into reducing emissions through tariffs will also complicate relations with countries from whom the United States needs help on a range of issues, many of which have little to do with the environment. If, for example, the United States is shackled by a unilateral cap-and-trade scheme, its foreign policy will increasingly be dominated by a desperate need to get India, China, and others to commit to emissions reductions, lest U.S. competitiveness be entirely lost. This will put the U.S. in a far worse position vis-a-vis such countries with regard to extracting cooperation on counterterrorism, counter-proliferation programs, human rights, and a legion of other concerns. In other words, it can be argued that Waxman-Markey drives the U.S. to adopt a demanding and confrontational strategy, even while greatly reducing the leverage that would be available to the U.S. in dealing with other major emitters. 

Extinction
Pazner, 8 (Michael J., Faculty – New York Institute of Finance, Financial Armageddon: Protect Your Future from Economic Collapse, p. 137-138)
The rise in isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas, and other key commodities as well as factors of production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic industries or basic necessities such as food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply. Disputes over the misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to full-scale military encounters, often with minimal provocation. In some instances, economic conditions will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and religious differences. Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing the threat of random violence to a whole new level. Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also take on a new, more heated sense of urgency. China will likely assume an increasingly belligerent posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt colonization of its neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, a political scientists at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an “intense confrontation” between the United States and China is “inevitable” at some point. More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological. Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles soaked in blood. Long-simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly, spurring the basest of human instincts and triggering genocidal acts. Terrorists employing biological or nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret stepped-up conflicts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a new world war.

1nc – Geneva

Their ev says they don’t solve Geneva
Koh 4, dean of Yale Law School and professor of international agreement, 9/20/2004 (Harold, “On America's Double Standard,” http://prospect.org/article/americas-double-standard)
When the United States holds Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without Geneva Convention hearings, then decries the failure of others to accord Geneva Convention protections to their American prisoners, it supports a double standard. When George W. Bush tries to “unsign” the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty that Bill Clinton signed in 2000, yet expects other nations to honor signed treaties, he does the same. When U.S. courts ignore an International Court of Justice decision enjoining American execution of foreign nationals, even as we demand that other countries obey international adjudications that favor American interests, the United States is using its vast power and wealth to promote a double standard. In these and other instances, the United States proposes that a different rule should apply to itself than to the rest of the world.

U.S. air strikes would destroy North Korea’s nuclear arsenal
Baker 3—Rear Admiral, Senior Fellow at the Center for Defense Information, Distinguished Service Medal, Bronze Star—AND—Colin Robinson, CDI Research Analyst, Master of Arts in War Studies degree from King’s College London (Stephen H., no date given but latest cited is 2003, “Stand-off with North Korea: War Scenarios and Consequences,” http://www.cdi.org/north-korea/north-korea-crisis.pdf)
U.S. air strikes upon the North Korean nuclear facilities at Yongbyon were under consideration during the 1993-1994 crises and again the last few months. At the present time, the main objective of such an attack would probably be to stop DPRK use of the plutonium-using reactor at the site, and to prevent its capability to reprocess into weapons grade material the large number of spent plutonium fuel rods stored there. U.S. officials, citing satellite photographs, said on Feb. 26, 2003, that North Korea had restarted the Yongbyon reactor, though there was no evidence the DPRK was reprocessing spent fuel rods. A surgical air strike on the reactor or re-processing facilities would be possible with a high likelihood of success. It is less certain what the long-term consequences of the attack in terms of possible radiation release would be. There is a concern that hitting the reprocessing facility and spent fuel rods could create radioactive fallout over China, Japan, Russia or the Korean Peninsula itself.17

We have to destroy them now --- within 5 years, North Korea will have a strong nuclear capability – turns their impact
Sanger 11—Chief Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, appointed adjunct professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard AND Elisabeth Bumiller, national affairs correspondent at NYT (David E., 11 January 2011, Gates Warns of North Korea Missile Threat to U.S., http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/world/asia/12military.html)
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned Tuesday that North Korea was within five years of being able to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, and said that, combined with its expanding nuclear program, the country “is becoming a direct threat to the United States.” Mr. Gates is a former director of the C.I.A., and his statement, officials said, reflected both a new assessment by American intelligence officials and his own concern that Washington had consistently underestimated the pace at which the North was developing nuclear and missile technologies. 

War now key to human rights and Chinese democracy
Park 10—Professor, Korea National Defense University (Changhee, October 2010, “North Korean Contingency and Prospects of China's Military Intervention,” http://asiasecurity.macfound.org/images/uploads/blog_attachments/wp05.pdf, RBatra) note: “hepingyanbian” means “Western countries' attempt to bring about a communist regime's collapse peacefully, without resorting to the means of war, by disrupting the inside of a communist state.”
A North Korean contingency may bring immense damage to China's national interest, as follows. The first is the possibility of hepingyanbian. 9 Cuba and North Korea are both socialist states, but a Cuban collapse and a North Korean collapse will clearly differ in their impact. A contingency in the North will translate into the collapse of the neighboring socialist brother state with which it has a "blood-forged relationship." A manifestation of the limits of a one-party system based on Marx-Leninism, a North Korean contingency may pressure China to embrace Western values, such as democracy and human rights. In addition, it may serve as an opportunity for the Chinese people to explicitly express their disgruntlement with the myriads of socioeconomic problems plaguing China, for example corruption, the gap between the rich and the poor, and unbalanced development. Furthermore, as the two Koreas step closer to unification, the liberal democratic principles of a unified Korea may set off demands in China for democratization and political reform, thus serving as a catalyst for hepingyanbian.10

Chinese democracy prevents nuclear war
Menges 05 (Constantine C. Menges, PhD, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Former Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, 2005, “In China: The Gathering Threat,” p. 510-511)
History offers no guarantees about the future. China may become democratic in the next years or not for decades. We know that a nuclear-armed Communist China, where the regime controls an economy with an advanced technology sector and is far better armed, would be a state that could become ever more dangerous. We know that economic and commercial relations do not in themselves produce political liberalization or political democracy. We know that Communist regimes can reform and evolve from reform Communism to political democracy. We know that this is better for their people and for peace—these are the lessons of the transformations in Eastern Europe since 1989 and in Western Europe and Japan since 1945. The possibility that the people of China could follow the path of peaceful self liberation from Communism as shown by the peoples of Eastern Europe would be much greater if the United States were to establish an institution such as the Program for Democracy in China. It could then work to encourage a peaceful transition in that vast land where Communist rule imposed such tragic suffering for decades. We do know that a democratic China is likely to be a peaceful China. These are goals we should seek. Relations among the United States, Russia and China in the coming years will have immense consequences both globally and regionally in the fields of democratic development, economic well-being, security, and human rights. The policy of the United States toward China and Russia has the possibility of having either a profoundly positive or extremely dangerous negative impact on their political evolution and foreign policies. With realistic leadership, skill, foresight, and effective action, it is possible to turn back the momentum by hardliners in both China and Russia that would lead to aggression and confrontation. The realistic U.S. policies that we have discussed could increase the prospects for peaceful relations with both Russia and China by maintaining the U.S. and allied military capabilities needed for effective deterrence, while also encouraging the positive internal political evolution of both countries. On the other hand, failure to engage in a realistic, principled, and comprehensive policy on the part of the West in general and the United States in particular will lead us to the most disastrous of situations in terms of our economy, our own way of life, and our geostrategic position in the world. Most importantly, though, is the very real threat as outlined in this book of a war of mutual miscalculation that could quickly spiral out of control from a local conventional conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea to a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China, in which the whole world would end up losing. So let us go forward learning from history and not repeating the same mistakes that Churchill spoke about when he said, "There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action ... but no one would listen.... We surely must not let that happen again."
Bio d

No impact and resilient
Easterbrook ‘95 (Distinguished Fellow, Fullbright Foundation (Gregg, A Moment on Earth pg 25)
IN THE AFTERMATH OF EVENTS SUCH AS LOVE CANAL OR THE Exxon Valdez oil spill, every reference to the environment is prefaced with the adjective "fragile." "Fragile environment" has become a welded phrase of the modern lexicon, like "aging hippie" or "fugitive financier." But the notion of a fragile environment is profoundly wrong. Individual animals, plants, and people are distressingly fragile. The environment that contains them is close to indestructible. The living environment of Earth has survived ice ages; bombardments of cosmic radiation more deadly than atomic fallout; solar radiation more powerful than the worst-case projection for ozone depletion; thousand-year periods of intense volcanism releasing global air pollution far worse than that made by any factory; reversals of the planet's magnetic poles; the rearrangement of continents; transformation of plains into mountain ranges and of seas into plains; fluctuations of ocean currents and the jet stream; 300-foot vacillations in sea levels; shortening and lengthening of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis; collisions of asteroids and comets bearing far more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on, and petals unfold still. Were the environment fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of the industrial affronts of the dreaming ape. Human assaults on the environment, though mischievous, are pinpricks compared to forces of the magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting. 

Litany of alt causes to environment
Deforestation
Oil drilling
Coal
Global warming
Methane release
Terror
Terrorists can’t get nukes
Topychkanov 1/25/14 (Pyotr  PhD in History, Associate in the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Nonproliferation Program, “Nuclear Terrorism: Bogeyman or Real Threat?”, http://russiancouncil.ru/en/inner/?id_4=3045andactive_id_11=39#top)
Nuclear terrorism involves using fissile weapons-grade materials: Uranium-235 enriched to over 90 and plutonium-239 with an isotopic purity of at least 94. According to current estimates, in the five countries that have nuclear weapons, building a nuclear device requires 8kg of plutonium or 25kg of highly-enriched uranium (HEU); although some specialists suggest 4kg to 5kg of plutonium or 16kg of HEU would be sufficient. With 20 enriched uranium, it would take 800kg of material to reach the critical mass needed for a nuclear explosion, which is believed to be technically implausible 3.
Obtaining fissile weapons grade materials is no easy matter for terrorists, chiefly for the following reasons.
Enriching uranium or producing the necessary quantity of plutonium requires scientific and technological facilities that no terrorist organisation has.
Acquiring the necessary quantities of fissile weapons-grade materials on the black market would require the relevant supply, which is not currently there (the IAEA receives about 150-200 reports from Member States each year of fissile materials that are lost, stolen or otherwise out of their control, but, first, most incidents are unrelated to weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and, secondly, in all reported incidents the fissile materials are returned under proper control).
Should terrorists nevertheless succeed in obtaining the requisite quantity of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, as a study commissioned in 1977 by US Congress showed, a small group of people who had never had any access to classified information could develop and build a primitive nuclear explosive device 4. To do so, according to estimates at that time, they would need up to US$ 1 million, a medium-size workshop, at least one specialist who is conversant with the relevant literature, and an engineer.
Today, some solutions are within an easier reach for terrorists compared to the 1970s, largely thanks to information technologies. However, any active application of such technologies leads to higher risk of detection. Queries regarding nuclear weapons development made using internet browsers can be traced by intelligence services 5.
Importantly, nuclear devices built under such conditions can hardly be expected to be reliable, since given the lack of specialists, high-precision equipment, and testing capabilities, it would be difficult to avoid errors during the development or assembly of any such device. In addition, handling major amounts of cash or sourcing fissile weapons-grade materials in the required quantities would inevitably put the terrorist cell on the radars of the intelligence services of a number of countries. As a result, having risked substantial amounts of money and possible detection, an organisation planning to commit an act of nuclear terrorism would have to accept that the outcome is uncertain, at best.

No impact
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)
In the ensuing decades, massive exaggerations of the physical effects of nuclear weapons have been very much the rule. Words like "liquidate," "annihilate," and "vaporize," not to mention "Armageddon" and "apocalypse," have been commonly applied in scenarios where those sorts of extreme characterizations are simply not sound. As with Oppenheimer in 1946, it remains a massive overstatement to confidently insist, as the prominent foreign policy analyst Joseph Cirincione docs today, that "a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city," or to conclude with Robert Gallucci that a single terrorist atom bomb would be capable of “obliterating a large portion of a city." Nor is it correct to casually assert, as journalist Lawrence Scott Sheets does, that an atomic bomb of the size exploded at Hiroshima (or smaller) could, in the hands of terrorists, "kill millions of people."" And defense analyst Brian Jenkins is (presumably knowingly) engaging in rather extravagant hyperbole when he says that America's "awesome nuclear arsenal" during the cold war could have "destroyed the planet." But his auditors are likely to take him literally, and they are likely to do so as well for Cirincione when he asserts that the world's remain-arsenal of 26,000 nuclear weapons is enough "to destroy the planet several times over." By contrast, as one physicist points out, "the largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was sixty megatons, and that is one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane."

No retaliation
Crowley, 10 (Michael, Senior Editor the New Republic, “Obama and Nuclear Deterrence”, http://www.tnr.com/node/72263)
Others argue that the United States should promise that it would never use nuclear weapons first, but only in response to a nuclear attack. As the story notes, some experts don't place much weight on how our publicly-stated doctrine emerges because they don't expect foreign nations to take it literally. And the reality is that any decisions about using nukes will certainly be case-by-case. But I'd still like to see some wider discussion of the underlying questions, which are among the most consequential that policymakers can consider. The questions are particularly vexing when it comes to terrorist groups and rogue states. Would we, for instance, actually nuke Pyongyang if it sold a weapon to terrorists who used it in America? That implied threat seems to exist, but I actually doubt that a President Obama--or any president, for that matter--would go through with it.

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Suo-Bolman | Judge: Munoz
1nc – kritik

The aff falls victim to the culture of dissent --- we participate in an intellectual game of criticism rather than real world revolt --- this merely maintains the system that the 1ac criticizes
Zizek 2 (Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance”, p. 59-61)
In a strict Lacanian sense of the term, we should thus posit that 'happiness' relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness fully to confront the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we 'officially' desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the happiness of dreaming about things we do not really want. When today's Left bombards the capitalist system with demands that it obviously cannot fulfil (Full employment! Retain the welfare state! Full rights for immigrants!), it is basically playing a game of hysterical provocation, of addressing the Master with a demand which will be impossible for him to meet, and will thus expose his impotence. The problem with this strategy, however, is not only that the system cannot meet these demands, but that, in addition, those who voice them do not really want them to be realized. For example when, 'radical' academics demand full rights for immigrants and opening of the borders, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate developed Western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent working-class racist backlash which would then endanger the privileged position ofthese very academics? Of course they are, but they count on the fact that their demand will not be met - in this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position. In 1994, when a new wave of emigration from Cuba to the USA was on the cards, Fidel Castro warned the USA that if they did not stop inciting Cubans to emigrate, Cuba would no longer prevent them from doing it - which the Cuban authorities in effect did a couple of days later, embarrassing the USA with thousands of unwanted newcomers.... Is this not like the proverbial woman who snapped back at a man who was making macho advances to her: 'Shut up, or you'll have to do what you're boasting about!' In both cases, the gesture is that of calling the other's bluff, counting on the fact that what the other really fears is that one will fully comply with his or her demand. And would not the same gesture also throw our radical academics into a panic? Here the old '68 motto 'Soy0ns realistes, demandons l'impossible!' acquires a new cynical and sinister meaning which, perhaps, reveals its truth: 'Let's be realists: we, the academic Left, want to appear critical, while fully enjoying the privileges the system offers us. So let's bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that these demands won't be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and we'll maintain our privileged status!' If someone accuses a big corporation of particular financial crimes, he or she is exposed to risks which can go right up to murder attempts; if he or she asks the same corporation to finance a research project into the link between global capitalism and the emergence of hybrid postcolonial identities, he or she stands a good chance of getting hundreds ofthousands of dollars. 

This turns the case --- we’ve identified enough of the problems with the unitary executive --- what debate needs is normative engagement to reclaim democracy
Ellis, et al, 09 Richard, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, degree completed December 1989, M.A. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1984, B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, Politics, 1982, Debating the Presidency: Conflicting Perspectives on the American Executive, p. google books
In 1969 the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky published a hefty reader on the American presidency. He prefaced it with the observation that “the presidency is the most important political institution in American life” and then noted the paradox that an institution of such overwhelming importance had been studied so little. “The eminence of the institution,” Wildavsky wrote, “is matched only by the extraordinary neglect shown to it by political scientists. Compared to the hordes of researchers who regularly descend on Congress, local communities, and the most remote foreign principalities, there is an extraordinary dearth of students of the presidency, although scholars ritually swear that the presidency is where the action is before they go somewhere else to do their research.”1 Political scientists have come a long way since 1969. The presidency remains as central to national life as it was then, and perhaps even more so. The state of scholarly research on the presidency today is unrecognizable compared with what it was forty years ago. A rich array of new studies has reshaped our understanding of presidential history, presidential character, the executive office, and the presidency’s relationship with the public, interest groups, parties, Congress, and the executive branch. Neglect is no longer a problem in the study of the presidency. In addition, those who teach about the presidency no longer lack for good textbooks on the subject. A number of terrific books explain how the office has developed and how it works. Although students gain a great deal from reading these texts, even the best of them can inadvertently promote a passive learning experience. Textbooks convey what political scientists know, but the balance and impartiality that mark a good text can obscure the contentious nature of the scholarly enterprise. Sharp disagreements are often smoothed over in the writing. The primary purpose of Debating the Presidency is to allow students to participate directly in the ongoing real-world controversies swirling around the presidency and to judge for themselves which side is right. It is premised philosophically on our view of students as active learners to be engaged rather than as passive receptacles to be filled. The book is designed to promote a classroom experience in which students debate and discuss issues rather than simply listen to lectures. Some issues, of course, lend themselves more readily to this kind of classroom debate. In our judgment, questions of a normative nature —asking not just what is, but what ought to be—are likely to foster the most interesting and engaging classroom discussions. So in selecting topics for debate, we generally eschewed narrow but important empirical questions of political science—such as whether the president receives greater support from Congress on foreign policy than on domestic issues—for broader questions that include empirical as well as normative components—such as whether the president has usurped the war power that rightfully belongs to Congress. We aim not only to teach students to think like political scientists, but also to encourage them to think like democratic citizens. Each of the thirteen issues selected for debate in this book’s second edition poses questions on which thoughtful people differ. These include whether the president should be elected directly by the people, whether the media are too hard on presidents, and whether the president has too much power in the selection of judges. Scholars are trained to see both sides of an argument, but we invited our contributors to choose one side and defend it vigorously. Rather than provide balanced scholarly essays impartially presenting the strengths and weaknesses of each position, Debating the Presidency leaves the balancing and weighing of arguments and evidence to the reader. The essays contained in the first edition of this book were written near the end of President George W. Bush’s fifth year in office; this second edition was assembled during and after Barack Obama’s first loo days as president. The new edition includes four new debate resolutions that should spark spirited classroom discussion about the legitimacy of signing statements, the war on terror, the role of the vice presidency, and the Twenty-second Amendment. Nine debate resolutions have been retained from the first edition and, wherever appropriate, the essays have been revised to reflect recent scholarship or events. For this edition we welcome David Karol, Tom Cronin, John Yoo, Lou Fisher, Peter Shane, Nelson Lund, Doug Kriner, and Joel Goldstein, as well as Fred Greenstein, who joins the debate with Stephen Skowronek over the importance of individual attributes in accounting for presidential success. In deciding which debate resolutions to retain from the first edition and which ones to add, we were greatly assisted by advice we received from many professors who adopted the first edition of this book. Particularly helpful were the reviewers commissioned by CQ Press: Craig Goodman of Texas Tech University, Delbert J. Ringquist of Central Michigan University, Brooks D. Simpson of Arizona State University, and Ronald W. Vardy of the University of Houston. We are also deeply grateful to chief acquisitions editor Charisse Kiino for her continuing encouragement and guidance in developing this volume. Among the others who helped make the project a success were editorial assistants Jason McMann and Christina Mueller, copy editor Mary Marik, and the book’s production editor, Gwenda Larsen. Our deepest thanks go to the contributors, not just for their essays, but also for their excellent scholarship on the presidency.

This political strategy is ultimately a self-serving means of perpetuating the status quo --- despair at the present, and provide no future --- this method marginalizes the Left
Gitlin 05  (Todd, Former Pres. Students for a Democratic Society, Former Prof. Soc. and Dir. Mass Comm. Program – UC Berkeley, Former Prof. Culture, Journalism, Soc. – NYU and Prof. Journalism and Soc. and Chair Ph.D. Program in Comm. – Columbia U. “The Intellectuals and the Flag”, p. 2-4)
During this period the hallmark of left-wing thought has been negation—resistance is the more glamorous word. Intellectuals of the left have been playing defense. It is as if history were a tank dispatched by the wrong army, and all that was left to do was to stand in its way and try to block it. If we had a manual, it would be called, What Is Not to Be Done. We are the critics—it is for others to imagine a desirable world and a way to achieve it. The left has gotten comfortable on the margins of political life, and for intellectuals it has been no different. The left speaks of "resistance" and "speaking truth to power." But resistance presupposes that power has the initiative—resistance is its negative pole. "Speaking truth to power," an old Quaker ideal of virtuous conduct, is a more problematic approach than it appears at first blush, for it presupposes that the party of power is counterposed to the party of truth. In this scenario the intellectual is the torchbearer of opposition, invulnerable to the seductions of powerindeed, hindeed, the left posits that one can recognize the truth by being indifferent to power. That indifference verges on the definitional. Being powerful is proof that one has sold out. So there is a purity to the will. There is also more than a little futility—what Herbert Marcuse in 1964 called the "Great Refusal," the absolute rejection of the social order.' At a time when the civil rights movement was on the brink of triumph and the New Left was ascendant, Marcuse was convinced that the United States exemplified a "one-dimensional" society, a state of intellectual impoverishment so all embracing as to have seeped into the seemingly inviolable identity of the person, body-snatched him so thoroughly as to have devoured his soul, and converted the denatured remnant into—in the title of Marcuse's once-influential book—a onedimensional man. The Great Refusal plays to a hope of redemption in some glimmering future because it despairs of the present. Because the present is slammed shut, one finds solace in an imagined future—an act of faith that is, at the very least, naive, given the refuser's conviction that closure is fate. The Great Refusal is the triumph of German romanticism. (Even the initials are apt.) Inside the idea of the Great Refusal lives a despair that the left can—or, in truth, needs to—break out of the prison of its margins. The Great Refusal is a shout from an ivory tower. It presupposes that the intellectuals live in a play with two characters: the speakers of truth and the powers. The play challenges the onlookers to declare themselves: which side are you on? But in the world of ordinary life, the overwhelming bulk of the populace belong to neither camp. Most people live in an apolitical world and rarely feel that they need to choose sides. Moral purity tends to leave them cold. Indeed, as most of them see it, the intellectuals are more alien than the powers, who at least can feign "speaking their language." Despite the growing percentage of Americans who graduate from college—between 1960 and 2003, the percentage of college graduates in the adult population almost quadrupled, from 7.7 to 27.2 percent of those aged twenty-five and older2— anti-intellectualism has not receded: far from it. The powers' demagogic techniques—their propagandistic smoothness, combined with the media's deference—match up well with popular credulity. So those who do not normally concern themselves with poli- tics feel closer to the powers than to the intellectuals. It is to the powers—or to celebrities or to each other—that they turn when they feel fearful, embattled, needy. To them the intellectuals tend to look like a sideshow of sneering, self-serving noisemakers.

Vote negative to politicize the 1AC’s criticism while embracing uncertainty --- the impact is cascading crises that include and exceed the 1AC’s impacts --- we need to reinvigorate a strategy of politics that doesn’t merely situate itself within a culture of dissent
Boggs 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6, http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges.  Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other.  While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s.  Despite their different outlooks and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation.  The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change.  As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future.  And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets, finance, and communications.  Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence.  In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones.  By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74  In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance.  The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies.   This last point demands further elaboration.  The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives.  Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries.  The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure.  In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75
1nc – kritik

The 1AC argues that social acceleration produces a “global concentration camp.”  Turning concentration camps into an abstract and generic rhetorical gesture denies specificity of experiences and strategies of victims of the Nazi concentration camps.  

Dominick LaCAPRA Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies @ Cornell ‘4 History in Transit: experience, identity, critical theory p.  162-168
Agamben takes the Muselmann in isolation from his or her context— the historical conditions of emergence, which cannot be seen only in terms of a homogeneous idea of Auschwitz or a few restricted refer¬ences to the SS. (This diremption or decontextualization may be nec¬essary for the figuration of the Muselmann as a sublime object.) Indeed Agamben almost seems to come upon the Muselmann as one might discover a creature in the wild or on another planet—planet Auschwitz as it has sometimes been called, to distinguish it from anything we have hitherto known on planet Earth. And in Agamben the planets collide and interpenetrate to the point of indistinction. One difficulty in treating the Muselmann as an objet trouve is that Agamben offers no sustained inquiry into the ideology and practice of perpetrators in the creation of the historical state of affairs that brought the Muselmann into being. One gets almost no sense of the perpetrator-victim dynamic, which was crucial in the emergence of, or the erosive process leading to, the Muselmann. One would think that the perpe¬trators and their role in the genesis of the Muselmann would also be among the remnants of Auschwitz that are deserving of contempo¬rary understanding and relevance. Indeed Agamben's use of the his¬torical for transhistorical purposes postulates the Muselmann as the prototype of the split subject, and in the process Auschwitz itself tends to become a paradoxically abstract counter or philosophical Lehrstiick. Agamben has a general conception of the modern age as one tending toward or even embodying the combination of sovereignty and mere, bare, or naked life—of unlimited power and the reduction of the human being to a being denuded of possibilities and in a con¬dition of ultimate abjection. (One might compare naked life to Hei¬degger's conception of the Geste11, or reduction of all things to a standing stock or reserve of raw material, perhaps even to Marx's notion of abstract exchange value.) Auschwitz and the Muselmann are the fullest realization to date of this extreme or excessive state of affairs, which Agamben both severely criticizes and at times seems to  approximate or even replicate, at least in part, in his own all-or¬-nothing, insistently evacuating, postapocalyptic assumptions or assertions. Indeed in Agamben the immanent sacred is denuded of all traditional dimensions of the sacred (its ambivalence, its attraction- repulsion, its elation or ecstasy, its limit-setting and limit-transgress¬ing power).18 It is reduced to bare or naked life. Instead of seeing this reduction as one important effect of recent history (related to devel¬opments within religion and to modes of secularization, including capitalism and positivism)—an effect nonetheless countered by other significant forces, he at times seems to postulate it as a general theory of the sacred in transhistorical terms. Insofar as this postulation occurs, he discloses, apparently as a belated, posttraumatic effect of Auschwitz, what putatively was the case all along: the sacred pre¬sumably always already was bare or naked life.' The begged question is whether, to what extent, and in what specific ways, this is the case even now.20 Elaborating this theory is a basic project in Homo Sacer, where Porn¬peius Festus's On the Significance of Words becomes the basis of a con¬ception of the "sacred man" as a victim or outsider, subject to being killed at will by anyone but not to being sacrificed (in any traditional sense) or murdered (in any criminal or legal sense of homocide).' The result in that book is a rather reduced understanding of the Holocaust in terms of biology, medicalization, and eugenics, related to a Fou¬cauldian notion of biopower and biopolitics. This line of argument continues in Remnants of Auschwitz (see, for example, 82-86), and, as in the earlier book, it leads to an excessively one-sided or analytically reduced understanding of the victim as mere or naked life. Hence the camps are "the site of the production of the Muselmann, the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum. Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber" (85). Agamben's notion of mere, bare, or naked life may in important ways apply to the reduced state of the Muselmann and to one dimension of other victims insofar as they were considered mere raw material or stock, treated as vermin, or hunted as "mere" game by perpetrators and bystanders. (It may also apply to recent conceptions of the other-than¬human animal, for example, in the mass production of foodstuff.)' But, as I shall try to indicate, it eliminates or ignores other aspects of Nazi ideology and practice with regard to victimization. Agamben himself, moreover, sees the Muselmann not as mere life but as a thresh¬old figure: he or she "marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman" (55). How the notions of Muselmann as naked life and as marker of a threshold relate to each other is not clear, but in any case, for Agamben, "the sight of Muselmanner is an absolute new phe¬nomenon, unbearable to human eyes" (51). In the Muselmann we pre¬sumably behold and bear witness to the absolutely, blindingly, even apocalyptically new. And in our relation to Auschwitz and the Musel¬mann, we are decidedly within a postapocalyptic condition of exis¬tence, a condition of remnants or perhaps of ruins.' Here one may mention the importance for Agamben of Carl Schmitt's notion of the state of exception.24 He does not examine to any significant extent Schmitt's ideas on secularization as the dis¬placement of the religious to the secular which, I think, might in certain ways inform a treatment of the sublime, including unthema¬tized dimensions of Agamben's own thought, for example, its insis¬tence, if not fixation, on the dubious human/nonhuman opposition and its relation to the sublimely apocalyptic and postapocalyptic. In the runaway state of exception (which seems close to Schmitt's state of emergency), the exception becomes the rule (hence the distinction between rule and exception becomes blurred or breaks down), and preexisting normative and legal orders are suspended. The sovereign is one who declares and decides on the state of exception. Agamben sees this condition as generalized or rampant in the post-Auschwitz world, and this allows him to assert that the camp is the prototype of modern life and that Auschwitz is now everywhere. As he puts the point in one of his more resounding declamations: "Behind the pow¬erlessness of God peeps the powerlessness of men, who continue to cry 'May that never happen again!' when it is clear that 'that' Auschwitz is, by now, everywhere." The postapocalyptic Auschwitz-now-everywhere hyperbole is one insistently repeated and variously reformulated feature of Agamben's account that lends itself to an elated, seemingly radical, breathlessly ecstatic discourse of the sublime. Hence in his chapter "The Witness," after putting forth a pathos-charged, participatory evocation of Levi's discussion of the wordless child Hurbinek (who utters an "obstinately secret" word whose meaning is undecidable—the word mass-kb o or matisklo, which Agamben approximates to "the secret word that Levi discerned in the 'background noise' of Celan's poetry" 381), he ends with these intri¬cately straining (unsayable?) words (reminiscent of certain passages in Foucault's Histoire de la folie): "The trace of that to which no one has borne witness, which language believes itself to transcribe, is not the speech of language. The speech of language is born where language is no longer in the beginning, where language falls away from it simply to bear witness: 'It was not light, but was sent to bear witness to the light— (39).25 One might, however, also argue that the hyperbole (even the cryptic prophetic mode) allows for a justifiable sense of urgency and indi¬cates the limitations of ethics or politics as usual or indeed of any useful, easy, or even immediately accessible approach to problems. Indeed if one agrees with Agamben, he is not being hyperbolic but lucid in the arresting manner of the child who sees that the emperor has no clothes—that the post-Auschwitz world is itself utterly bereft or bankrupt, irremediably ruined and in dire need of some incon¬ceivably new politics and ethics. In any event, one (or at least I) would like to know more than Agamben provides about the usual or con¬ventional state of ethics and its relation to traditions. One result of his procedure is that he offers little room for immanent critique or decon¬struction based on a careful analysis of the past and the "unre¬deemed" possibilities it may offer for action in the present and future (the possibilities that interested Walter Benjamin in his historical and critical dimension—Benjamin's more decidedly apocalyptic-mes¬sianic moments are the ones that captivate Agamben). One may well argue that Auschwitz itself provided no such possibilities either in itself or in its aftermath, and this would seem to be Agamben's view. But one may contest this view without going to the other extreme of spiritual uplift or fixation on the moments of resistance (the Warsaw ghetto uprising, for example) or of mutual aid in the most dire of cir¬cumstances (some instances of which Levi recounts and which appear in many survivor testimonies). One may also contest Agamben's view while recognizing the importance of sustained reflection on the Musel¬mann and, more generally, on the question of posttraumatic repetition of the conditions and experience of victimization, including extreme disempowerment and harrowing isolation, even in survivors who have in certain significant respects reconstructed a life "after Auschwitz."'
Analogizing contemporary violence to a global concentration camp turns into a victory for fascism. Their framing erases specific experiences, survival tactics, and suffering of concentration camp innmates.

Dominick LaCAPRA Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies @ Cornell ‘4 History in Transit: experience, identity, critical theory p.  180-185

Agamben not only sees Primo Levi as speaking for the Muselmann but he generalizes the gray zone in a manner that threatens to undo significant distinctions and to eventuate in a view of all existence in terms of the limit event or situation as a state of exception, if not emer¬gency or crisis, in which the exception becomes the rule. I have noted that, from Agamben's postapocalyptic perspective, "Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm" and "Levi, who bears witness to the drowned, speaking in their stead, is the cartographer of this new terra ethica, the implaca¬ble land-surveyor of Muselmannland" (69). Of Levi, Agamben also writes: "He is the only one who consciously sets out to bear witness in place of the Muselmanner, the drowned, those who were demol¬ished and touched bottom" (59). The problem here is not the argu¬ment that Auschwitz, or the Muselmann in particular, poses distinctive problems for ethics or that it is dubious to impute essential dignity to the Muselmann, especially for self-serving reasons. What is problem¬atic pertains to the synecdochic use of the Muselmann as a theoretical cypher to disprove human dignity and to discredit all preexisting (perhaps all presently conceivable) forms of ethics. What remains of ethics (if it still can be called ethics) in Agamben is dissociated from law and voided of all forms of normativity (including responsibility and guilt). It seems to eventuate in an empty utopianism and a form of political romanticism ("as Spinoza knew, the doctrine of the happy life" 24). In any case, Agamben takes a potential in humanity and, rather than examining closely its historical role in Auschwitz and comparing it carefully to other situations and possibilities, actualizes it in universal terms by generalizing the Muselmann as the prototype or exemplar of humanity. This condition humaine, as "life in its most extreme degradation," becomes "the touchstone by which to judge and measure all morality and dignity" (ibid.). The result is an unsi-tuated, extreme mode of victimology or identification with the abject and utterly disempowered—something that, despite its transhistori¬cal cast, might most generously be seen as a radical reversal of, or perhaps an overcompensation for, extreme victimization under the Nazis. See also Slavoj 2i2ek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), chap. 2. One difficulty with Agamben's generalization of the gray zone is that it allows an illegitimate metaleptic slippage from the defensible view that there is an impor¬tant sense in which everyone is a potential Muselmann (or, for that matter, perpetra¬tor) to the dubious view that the Muselmann is everyman. In his brief but trenchant reflections on ethics, Agamben apparently takes Auschwitz as an apocalyptic divide between past and present that delegitimates all uses in the present of past ethical assumptions or discourses. He even attributes such a view to Levi: "The Musel¬mann, as Levi describes him, is the site of an experiment in which morality and humanity themselves are called into question" (63). Moreover: The unprecedented discovery made by Levi at Auschwitz concerns an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility, an area in which Levi succeeded in isolating something like a new ethical element. Levi calls it the "gray zone." It is the zone in which the "long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner" comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim. A gray, incessant alchemy in which good and evil and, along with them, all the metals of traditional ethics reach their point of fusion. (21) There are many contestable features in these statements to which I shall return. Here I would point out the dubiousness of seeing total ethical meltdown in Levi, who drew from traditional culture and ethics both to provide him with sustenance in the camps and, in a manner that was, if anything, perhaps insufficiently informed by the concerns that preoccupy Agamben, to inform his postwar reflections on his experience. If one recalls the quotation from Himmler's Posen speech, one may well sympathize with Agamben when he asserts of the Muselmeinner: "To speak of dignity and decency in their case would not be decent." Sympathy wavers when he adds, in his prevalent turn to a kind of free indirect style or middle voice: "The survivors including Levi as Agamben speaks with(in) and for him are not only 'worse' in com¬parison with the best ones—those whose strength rendered them less fit in the camp—they are also 'worse' in comparison with the anony¬mous mass of the drowned, those whose death cannot be called death. This is the specific ethical aporia of Auschwitz: it is the site in which it is not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed them¬selves to preserve their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not" (6o). Auschwitz epitomizes the absolute impossibility of "death with dignity" in the modern world, the way in which death gives way to the manufacture of corpses. "This means that in Auschwitz it is no longer possible to distinguish between death and mere decease, between dying and 'being liqui¬dated" " (76).3' More generally, in the modern world one's unease about dying is related to its privatization, deritualization, and con¬cealment from public view. Agamben is touching on important issues here—issues that should not be obliterated by any reservations about his approach. Still, Agamben is so concerned with the problem of death that he pays scant attention to processes of killing among the Nazis and their rela¬tions to specific objects of victimization. In the relatively few refer¬ences to the SS, even they undergo, rather than activate, processes and are often framed in the passive voice or in something approximating a bystander position or a position that almost seems to place them (as in the soccer game) on a gray on gray, level playing field with victims. "The SS could not see the Muselmann, let alone bear witness to him" (78). Or again: "Both the survivor's discomfort and testimony concern not merely what was done or suffered, but what could have been done or suffered. It is this capacity, this almost infinite potentiality to suffer that is inhuman—not the facts, actions, or omissions. And it is pre¬cisely this capacity that is denied to the SS" (77). There may be a worthwhile shock or scandal induced by accusing the SS of an incapacity to be inhuman—a shock relating to an attempt to rethink the threshold between the human and the inhuman or non¬human and to reposition ethics as other than purely humanistic. Agamben does not make explicit and explore the implications of this unsettling, seemingly paradoxical idea, for example, concerning the "rights" or claims of other-than-human animals. (Indeed, one danger of Agamben's sharp binary between the human and the inhuman or nonhuman, which he maps onto the opposition between the speak¬ing being and mere or naked life, is the exclusion or even scapegoating of nonhuman animals who, by implication, seem reduced to mere life or raw material.) Moreover, pace Agamben and whatever may be the case concerning almost infinite potentiality, the capacity to suffer is something humans share with other animals, and it is related to empathy, which the SS did not have for victims. But this capacity (or Agamben's postulated incapacity, for that matter) was not simply denied the SS as passive recipients. It was actively countered, blocked, or eliminated through ideological and related practical forces as well as through the dynamic of victimization that brought victims to the abject state Nazi ideology, in circular and self-fulfilling fashion, attrib¬uted to them. A particularly questionable feature of Agamben's ori¬entation is that the deficit of the SS, in terms of a lack of inhumanity, is itself construed in terms of an almost infinite (quasi-divine?) capac¬ity or potentiality for suffering. No known being, human or other¬wise, has this infinite capacity. Beyond a certain threshold of suffering, one blacks out, and it would seem that Agamben strives to write from, or even from beyond, that threshold. Once again we seem to be in the vicinity of ethics understood in paradoxical terms as supraethical, supererogatory excess rather than in more socially and politically viable terms. Does empathy for both human and other-than-human beings require an infinite capacity for suffering, or does the latter rad¬ically transcend empathy into an ecstatically indistinct realm of sub¬limity that would itself seem, in any social or political terms, to be isolating? (Almost involuntarily, I think of the unimaginably suffer¬ing but transfigured Christ ascending into heaven.) Agamben's related understanding of the meaning of Himmler's Posen speech is curious at best. He sees it in line with his idea of the SS as not having the inhuman, almost infinite capacity to suffer. He relates the latter to another passive position with a paradoxical twist: the Befehlnotstand. "The executioners unanimously continue to repeat that they could not do other than as they did, that, in other words, they simply could not; they had to, and that is all. In German, to act without being capable of acting is called Befehlnotstand, having to obey an order" (77-78). Agamben then relates the perpetrator's claim to submit to orders that one must obey, thereby acting without really acting, to the passage from Himmler's Posen speech (which I earlier quoted in a somewhat different translation): "Most of you know what it means when ioo corpses lie there, or when 500 corpses lie there, or from a few exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us great. That is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and which will never be written" (quoted 78). Himmler himself shows a preference for passive or indeterminate constructions that veil somewhat the fact that those whom he addresses not only have beheld a scene but are responsible for having brought it about. One may analyze the functions of such a construc¬tion but one ought not simply to repeat it transferentially in one's own analysis. Moreover, Himmler in this passage is not altogether like Eichmann on trial appealing to a distorted Kantian sense of duty in doing one's job and obeying orders; he does not simply appeal to a Befehlnotstand or the inability to do otherwise. There are in his words an appeal to the sublime (notably a mathematical sublime in the geo¬metrically increasing expanse of corpses), to the fascination with excess and radical transgression in the form of unheard-of mass destruction, to the glory that the uninitiated will never understand, to the quasi-sacrificial allure of victimization in the absolute injunc¬tion to kill all Jews without exception (by definition there is no such thing as a good Jew), and to the superhuman ability to become hard (interestingly mistranslated in the above quotation as "great"— "absolute greatness" characterized the sublime for Kant) by enduring (durchstehen) the aporia or combining in oneself the antinomic features of decency and radical transgression.' In other words, for Himmler, Nazis did look the Gorgon directly in the face, and this "sublime," petrifying gaze made them hard in a sense they desired. What is inter¬esting is Agamben's inability to detect these aspects of the Posen speech and to focus instead on what would seem unaccentuated in, if not projectively inserted into, it." There is also a problem with respect to what might be termed, for lack of a better word, subject positions. For Levi as survivor to say that not he but the Muselmann is the true witness is, I think, an accept¬able hyperbole. For Agamben to identify with Levi and hence speak for (or in the stead of) Levi and hence for the Muselmann (as he believes Levi does) may be hyperbolic in an objectionable sense.' Moreover, the idea that Auschwitz radically delegitimates all preex¬isting ethics and all present appeals to them, including all notions of decency and dignity, paradoxically runs the risk of granting a posthu¬mous (postapocalyptic?) victory to the Nazis. In any event it obviates a careful inquiry into the uses of such concepts by victims and sur¬vivors themselves as well as their attempts to preserve some sense of dignity and decency in impossible situations (for example, by washing themselves with filthy water). It also risks handing the concept of decency over to Himmler as his heritage rather than to struggle for and to rethink it (for example, by criticizing any invidi¬ous use of it to distinguish the human from the other-than-human, including the animal, which should not itself be reduced to bare or naked life or be understood in neo-Heideggerian terms as not having a world or a form of life).
Globalizing the camp annihilates spatial and temporal difference.  This turns the case – compressing different phenomena into a singular coherent logical structure accelerates political activity into a messianic moment.
Ichiro TAKAYOSHI English @ Tufts ’11 “Can philosophy explain Nazi violence? Giorgio Agamben and the problem of the ‘historico-philosophical’ method” Journal of Genocide Research 13 p. 60-62
The second lesson is related to the larger problem that frames this case study: Can philosophy explain Nazi violence? The above assessment of Agamben’s treatment of the ‘euthanasia’, the camp system, and Hitler’s law revealed many tendencies characteristic of his ‘historico-philosophical’ method. Among the most important are: (1) literalism; (2) failure to consider partial explanations; (3) de-contextualization; and (4) the naturalization of logic (that is, conflation of conceptual reasoning with the logic of events).41 These tactics can be traced to as many corresponding assumptions about the nature of historical investigation and the investigator’s relation to it. The first technique enables the philosopher to contrive a linguistic unity out of diverse phenomena. If one attaches the same label to different objects, the oneness of these objects, no matter how incommensurable in other respects, is established verbally. This explains why Agamben tends to take rhetorical plays of historical documents on faith, when doing so furthers the amalgamation of disparate objects, events, sites, and actors. Also, the verbal unification of objective phenomena—the creation of the verbal ‘zone of indistinction’— reflects another assumption underlying the second shortcoming. As his impatience with partial answers attests, Agamben imagines the causes and goals behind the various instances of Nazi violence as singular. This faith in the single cause and single purpose, when the unity in operation cannot be found, leads the philosopher to supply the missing unity in language. The faith in the unity of phenomena is a progenitor of the unity in discourse; the latter is a methodological necessity for the former. Agamben’s penchant for de-contextualization is quite expected in a thinker who defines ‘historico-philosophical’ method by opposition to historicism. By historicism I mean a pessimistic credo prevalent among researchers that a void in the body of knowledge can be partially filled over the long course of a cumulative process, but because this process is only additive and never transformative the void will remain open forever. It presupposes the imperfectability hard-wired in all research projects, and this presupposition is in turn informed by a secularist view that there will never come the Day of Judgement when humankind is redeemed and all moments in the past become citable.42 This hopelessness contrasts with Agamben’s optimism; he tells us that the truth has eluded his predecessors, including Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, the two main sources of inspiration in Homo Sacer, because they chose to occupy a wrong vantage point. The inevitable implication is that an adjustment to the theoretic perspective, not an endless muddling through, opens the passageway to historical truth. This messianic perspectivism partially explains the unusual proliferation of the ‘only from this perspective can we understand’ type of sentence constructions throughout Homo Sacer. An esoteric truth discloses itself ‘only if’ it is contemplated from a special ‘perspective’ he recommends. Contra historicism, this modality of investigation conceives of truth as an instantaneous and eternal epiphany (the two adjectives mean the same thing), a holographic figure that flashes before the eye of the spectator when gazed at from an appropriate angle. The whole secret would remain, Agamben warns the reader, ‘otherwise unintelligible’. And the secret Agamben discovers is often troubling. In one of the most uncertain passages in Homo Sacer, Agamben writes: The stadium in Bari into which the Italian police in 1991 provisionally herded all illegal Albanian immigrants before sending them back to their country, the winter cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities gathered the Jews before consigning them to the Germans, the Konzentrationslager fur Auslander in Cottbus-Sielow in which the Weimar Government gathered Jewish refugees from the East, or the zones d’attentes in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained will then all equally be the camps. (174) If we were to believe Agamben, all these dissimilar sites scattered across time and space share one decisive feature: they all exemplify the ‘creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction’ (174). But the unity of these objects is perspectival, existing only in the mind of the Knower by virtue of their contiguity and juxtaposition in his experience of knowing, the experience whose psychological reality overrides the reality of physical disjunctions and blockages among these objects of contemplation. This passage can be also read as an illustration of the fourth and last tactic, namely, Agamben’s tendency to naturalize the logic of thinking. The quote conveys a vivid feel of a certain style of thinking that is assured of its unmolested automaticity because it knows that its intellectual life is independent of the world, history, and experience. ‘If this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception . . . then’, so Agamben reasons. Logic in human thought, however, often deviates from logic in nature and history, even if its starting-point is anchored in a robust referentiality. When one’s premise does not bottom out on historical experience in any meaningful way, as is often the casewith Agamben’s speculations, the best one could hope is to gain historical truth by happenstance.
Vote negative to endorse a radical embrace of uncertainty in place of a unitary executive and unitary theory of the structure of contemporary political space.
Framing executive overreach and acceleration as globalizing the paradigm of the concentration camp precludes effective political responses.  Our alternative is a pre-requisite for an effective confrontation with the unitary executive.  

Ernesto LACLAU Political Theory @ Essex ‘7 in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli p. 21-22 

Needless to say, we fully reject Agamben's third thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the nomos or fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. He asserts: The birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. It is produced at the point at which the politi¬cal system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. . . . Something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order—or, rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine. (HS, 174-75) This series of wild statements would only hold if the following set of rather dubious premises were accepted: I. That the crisis of the functional nexus between land, State, and the automatic rules for the inscription of life has freed an entity called "biological—or bare—life" That the regulation of that freed entity has been assumed by a single and unified entity called the State That the inner logic of that entity necessarily leads it to treat the freed entities as entirely malleable objects whose archetypical form would be the ban Needless to say, none of these presuppositions can be accepted as they stand. Agamben, who has presented a rather compelling analysis of the way in which an ontology of potentiality should be structured, clos¬es his argument, however, with a naïve teleologism, in which potentiality appears as entirely subordinated to a pre-given actuality. This teleologism is, as a matter of fact, the symmetrical pendant of the "ethymologism" we have referred to at the beginning of this essay. Their combined effect is to divert Agamben's attention from the really relevant question, which is the system of structural possibilities that each new situation opens. The most summary examination of that system would have revealed that: (1) the crisis of the "automatic rules for the inscription of life" has freed many more entities than "bare life," and that the reduction of the latter to the former takes place only in some extreme circumstances that cannot in the least be considered as a hidden pattern of modernity; (z) that the pro¬cess of social regulation to which the dissolution of the "automatic rules of inscription" opens the way involved a plurality of instances that were far from unified in a single unity called "the State"; (3) that the process of State building in modernity has involved a far more complex dialec¬tic between homogeneity and heterogeneity than the one that Agamben's ‘`camp-based" paradigm reflects. By unifying the whole process of mod¬ern political construction around the extreme and absurd paradigm of the concentration camp, Agamben does more than present a distorted his¬tory: he blocks any possible exploration of the emancipatory possibilities opened by our modern heritage. Let me conclude with a reference to the question of the future as it can be thought from Agamben's perspective. He asserts: "Only if it is pos¬sible to think the Being of abandonment beyond every idea of law (even that of the empty form of laws being in force without significance) will we have moved out of the paradox of sovereignty towards a politics freed from every ban. A pure form of law is only the empty form of relation. Yet the empty form of relation is no longer a law but a zone of indistinguishabil¬ity between law and life, which is to say, a state of exception" (HS, 59). We are not told anything about what a movement out of the paradox of sover¬eignty and "towards a politics freed from every ban" would imply. But we do not need to be told: the formulation of the problem already involves its own answer. To be beyond any ban and any sovereignty means, simply, to be beyond politics. The myth of a fully reconciled society is what governs the (non-)political discourse of Agamben. And it is also what allows him to dismiss all political options in our societies and to unify them in the concentration camp as their secret destiny. Instead of deconstructing the logic of political institutions, showing areas in which forms of struggle and resistance are possible, he closes them beforehand through an essentialist unification. Political nihilism is his ultimate message.
1nc – case

Speed is good --- it provide redundancy and openness which internal link turns their automated Accident impacts --- the impact to the aff is wrong
Grove 08 – Jairus Victor Grove is a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins University in International Relations and Political Theory. His research focuses on the new materialities of politics and warfare. He studies the effects of new forms of warfare on soldiers and civilian populations in urban settings. Chapter 1: A Schmittian Century?: From Nuclear Leviathan to Nuclear-Sovereign-Assemblage – March 17, 2008 – http://becomingwar.blogspot.com/2008/03/chapter-1-schmittian-century-from.html
Initially nuclear weapons seemed to solidify even complete the decisionistic model of sovereignty once and for all. In Virilio’s reading of Schmitt’s the state of emergency became permanent and democracy ended once it became possible for a single individual to decide to go to war and to finish that war in 30 minutes. At first glance Virilio’s apocalyptic diagnosis seems accurate. Nuclear weapons at their current numbers could destroy the entire planet and given the structure of the United States nuclear command any Congressional or popular attempt to stop the war would be in vain. This is the backbone of Virilio’s argument. Politics and a democratic balance of power require time. Time to react, time to respond, time to debate, time to strategize, time to implement and ICBMS nullify time. But Virilio is wrong. The threat of the extreme case has obscured the actual or present case that presents new opportunities for intervention. Politics, whether micro or macro, does not begin and end with the sovereign decision; the sovereign decision (both expressively and in its enactment) emerges from a relay of forces, connections, and other previous decisions, resonances, forces, and actants that are presupposed in each subsequent iteration of the sovereign decision, and layered in multiple streams of time. Even an increasingly automated nuclear arsenal requires the participation of literally millions of people and countless networks, objects, tectonic stability, stable solar flare activity and on and on. The decision only appears singular when Virilio truncates time to the moment the president ‘pushes the button.’ We are not as of yet in that moment so other temporal rhythms abound and each part of the nuclear assemblage follows a different temporal course. Certainly the sovereign decision is a powerful, expressive, performative act of individuation for the sovereign and highly affective in mobilizing populations, but it is not self-constituted or self-causal. The process of individuation and mobilization necessitates a field of relations and resonances from which the sovereign decision emerges. The decision is also not decisive. Instead it territorializes the relations from which it emerges through its resonant modulation. The enunciation of a sovereigndecision (a distinct inquiry from the ‘making of a decision. Certainly no less emeshed but nonetheless ought to remain analytically different) is something like a refrain, the sovereign—in so far as it is constituted by the enunciation of decisions—is a condensation point for national ethos, affect, and institutional identity making. Each decision is constitutive not of the ‘sovereign’ as is the case in Schmitt’s analysis but of a sovereign point of identification or reified, dogmatic consistency which can be recognized but need not remain static or immobile. Again however such a node is only possible because of its attachments whether physical or resonant (both material) to the complex system of tradition, culture, wires, telephones, satellites, nuclear silos, television cameras, previous sovereign decisions, personal affective characteristics, character, etc. This list is not exhaustive by any measure however it gestures in the direction of what I am trying to get at. The sovereign is not an individual, at best it is an iterative series of moments of performative or expressive individuation resulting from a complex interface with machines, networks, affective fields. The assemblage has a life of its own that cannot and should not be reduced to a single point simply because that is most consistent with our common sensibilities. In some sense the sovereign is a prosthesis or interface to be worn by whoever is elected to office. (President as first-person-shooter?) This does in part explain why there is so little transition time between each sovereign and so little variation in war powers. It is reference point or index for a history of actions and events made more complex by the function it is meant or believed to serve. It is the titular focal point of an assemblage that if recognized as such would undermine its own function. An assemblage that function because it can inspire belief in it is unity not its dispersed and multivalent organization. The irony is that the development of miles of fiberoptic networks, new technological interfaces and mobility was supposed to save the centralized and hierarchical sovereign form from its obvious strategic liability—that of being an easy target. However in increasing its ‘survivability’ it has also opened innumerable points of access to the supposed center. Each access point whether it be technological, affective, or economic that can recenter, or reterritorialize the sovereign assemblage. I do not want to make this sound ‘easy’ or ‘painless’ however as this ‘dispersed’ or redundant network system has become ‘everyday’ increasingly the President has been unaware of exactly who is in control or even at how many levels the Nuclear-sovereign-assemblage can be engaged or reterritorialized.

The criticism of speed is self-referential and tautological --- it means their impact claims are epistemologically bankrupt
McAllister ‘8
Kirsten Emiko McAllister teaches in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 33 (2008) p. 567-589
But I am less concerned with what is obviously Virilio’s ideal human subject than with the way his work appears to be trapped in mourning, in melancholy. He seems unable to let go of something he assumes has been lost. Grieving this loss, he refuses to reach beyond the terms of the model for the world. The inability to engage with the contemporary changing world is evident in his inability to contemplate anything other than the degeneration of human life. Even if his aim is to blow apart the fantasies of academics who blindly embrace technoscience, his focus on the techniques to effectively blow apart their fantasies point to the way he is enthralled by the destructive forces of modernity.10 And while Virilio asserts “Resistance is always possible!” (quoted in Armitage, 2000, p. 194, emphasis in original), resistance seems impossible in the worlds he paints in his texts. Wendy Brown writes about the melancholy of left intellectuals, what Walter Benjamin referred to as “left melancholia,” pointing out that “we come to love our Left passions and reasons, our Left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms” (Brown, 2003, pp. 460). Benjamin defines left melancholia as “a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist” (quoted in Brown, 2003, p. 460). It issues from an “unaccountable loss, some unadvowedly crushed ideal” (p. 460). Brown identifies many losses for the Left over the last century, including labour and class, socialist regimes, the legitimacy of Marxism, a unified movement, and alternatives to capitalism (p. 460). Although many on the Left can acknowledge these losses, Brown contends there is an unavowed loss, the loss of the promise that “Left analysis and . . . commitment would supply its adherents with a clear and certain path towards the good the right and the true” (p. 460). She claims that this was the basis for the pleasure of being on the Left and the basis of our “self-love as Leftists.” To give up this love up would require a radical transformation of the self. Brown turns to Freud to explain that if the love for the dead object or destroyed ideal cannot be given up, it takes its refuge in narcissistic identification, and hate comes into operation on this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. (quoted in Brown, 2003, p. 460) Brown claims that identity movements as well as post-structuralism and post-modernism have become the substitutive objects blamed for the Left’s weakness and its inability to generate coherent authoritative accounts of the world. This scorn safeguards the critics from recognizing the inadequacy of their own analyses. With regard to Virilio, as mentioned above, his energies are focused on mimetically capturing the destructive drive of modern technology rather than considering what is necessary for a new basis for life, for example, non-humanist modes of eco-centred living (for example, see Heyd, 2005; Katz, Light, and Rothenberg, 2000; Plumwood, 1993; Shiva, 1999; Wong, 2008). Caught in mourning for the loss of pre-modern techn¯e, which, for Virilio, is tied to the sacred, he seems to refuse to let go of that to which he is profoundly attached, to accept its death. As a result, he views the world around him in terms of painful absence and is unable to realize that life continues to undergo transformation rather than just destruction (Freud, 1984).11 His zeal in describing the collapse of the human world, atrophied human bodies, the mad worship of speed, and the penetrating reach of the antithesis of life at its most infinitesimal level suggests that humans have become his substitute object. His imagery debases the human body as he sadistically describes our reduction to neurologically simple organisms capable only of a few feeble winks and squirms. The danger of melancholy is that it makes it impossible to accept the loss. The subject thus becomes locked in stasis, unable to realize the adaptive and transformative potential of life forms and cultural practices: what might be the basis for new forms of techn¯e that instantiate sustainable relations between life forms and socio-political technologies. For example, as I have suggested, he refuses to engage with the work by feminist scholars and artists who have critically theorized techno-body interfaces. What is “other” and “not yet” is all of what escapes and transmutes the relentless colonization of life that he so vividly paints.

Their impact is too sweeping and ignores that human agency is resilient and checks that state of Pure War
Adria ‘8
(Marco Adria – Director of the Graduate Program in Communications and Technology University of Alberta – The Journal of Community Informatics – Vol 4, No 1 (2008) – http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/426/392)
A totalizing view of technology is evident in the work of Virilio, as it is in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, and Marshall McLuhan. From this perspective, technology is seen as a demiurge, that is, as ultimately influencing and shaping all human experience. Such a view underestimates the diversity of technological forms, the varying intentions of users, and the resiliency of human agency. The method employed by these theorists, however, is to uncover the unrecognized structuring influences of technology as a means of understanding its full scope in human life. Achieving such an understanding need not be grounded in an anti-technological stance, but may be rooted in the conviction that without understanding of what is at stake in technological change, meaningful social action in response is impossible. If the gestalt of medium theory could be stated in a word, it might well be to understand. Medium theory provides a route to insight and rich description, from which strategies for action may be devised. 

They’ve inaccurately identified the cause of the unitary executive --- speed doesn’t destroy democracy, it reinforces it
Kellner 03 – critical theorist in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education in the GSEI at UCLA (Douglas, “Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections”, illuminations: the critical theory project, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina20Folder/kell29.htm) BZ
But while there are still threats to world peace and even human survival from the dark forces of military capitalism, one of the surprising events of the past decade is the emergence of a new form of Microsoft capitalism, of less lethal and more decentralized new technologies, of new modes of peaceful connection and communication. The project of this new form of technocapitalism is the development of an information-entertainment society that we might call the infotainment society and which is sometimes described as the "information superhighway." This form of capitalism is a softer capitalism, a less violent and destructive one, a more ecological mode of social organization, based on more flexible, smaller-scale, and more ludic technologies.6 The differences between hard military capitalism and a softer Microsoft capitalism are evident in the transformation of the computer from a top-down, highly centralized, specialized machine controlled by big organizations to the smaller scale, more flexible, and more ludic personal computer (see Turkle 1996 for elaboration of this distinction). Moreover, the surprising development of the Internet opens up new public spheres and the possibility of political intervention by groups and individuals excluded from political dialogue during the era of Big Media, controlled by the state and giant corporations (for elaboration of this argument see Kellner 1995, 1996, and forthcoming). Of course, Microsoft capitalism has its own dangers ranging from economic worries about near-monopoly control of economic development through software domination to the dangers of individuals getting lost in the proliferating terrains of cyberspace and the attendant decline of individual autonomy and initiative, social relations and interaction, and community. Yet the infotainment society promises more connections, interactions, communication, and new forms of community. The project is in far too early stages to be able to appropriately evaluate so for now we should rest content to avoid the extremes of technophobia which would reject the new technologies out of hand as new forms of alienation or domination contrasted to technophilic celebrations of the information superhighway as the road to a computopia of information, entertainment, affluence, and democracy.

Speed doesn’t produce Accidents, it solves them --- technology already exists which means that acceleration only provides redundancy and rapid reaction
Thrift, 4 (“But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona”, Nigel is the head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oxford, http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/malice_aforethought.pdf)
Recently, this general hum of activity has been powered up by information technology. True, the speed and interconnectedness of information and communications technology may have produced new vulnerabilities but, generally speaking, information and communications technology has probably made cities more robust by adding more degrees of redundancy. Simple things like risk analysis and other institutionalised forms of diligence, booking systems, etc. have made the business of maintenance and repair easier to carry out and, indeed, is beginning to automate at least some of this activity (as in, for example, the instance of machines that send messages that they are breaking down). More to the point, in situations of breakdown, whether epic or mundane, the humble mobile phone has extended the city’s interactivity and adaptability in all kinds of ways and may well have been the most significant device to add to a city’s overall resilience by adding an extra thread to the urban knot. In addition, all kinds of knowledges of maintenance and repair which are heavily dependent upon information and communications technologies are coming to the fore, all the way from logistics to disaster planning itself (which, in certain senses, is a branch of logistics). I want to argue that this activity constitutes an urban technological unconscious which helps to keep cities as predictable objects in which things turn up as they are meant to, regularly and predictably (THRIFT, 2004a). Modern Western cities are in many ways mass engineerings of time and space and this engineering increasingly involves working with very small spaces (of the order of millimetres) and times (of the order of milliseconds). At this scale, this means working on the structure of anticipation, producing a comforting sense of regularity and a corresponding (and probably amplified historically) sense of annoyance when things do not play out exactly as it is intended that they should. In a sense, speed has produced a new landscape of anticipation. Some commentators see this landscape as a threat, likely to institute a new «dromocracy». I am more ambivalent. It seems to me that it offers possibilities too, and not least in providing rapid reaction to problems large and small. Indeed, as information technology systems come in which are based on continuous updating of information, some degree of capacity to track and trace and the ability to forecast forward in a very limited way (for example, through profiling systems), so it seems to me that cities will add another landscape to their repertoire, one which works a few seconds or minutes or, in extreme cases, hours ahead of the present and which will add markedly to their resilience. Of course, there is a new repertoire of risk associated with this landscape of foresight but whether it is that much larger than many other developments remains to be seen. Computer systems are vulnerable to attack just like any other system but it is also important to remember the continuous amount of repair and maintenance which goes into these systems anyway and reactions to attacks by worms or viruses are rapidly being incorporated into this burgeoning structure.

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 5 | Opponent: Louisville Lattimore-Barnett | Judge: Murillo
1nc – kritik

The aff has the right idea but provides the wrong solution --- the 1AC’s assumption that the starting point of legal change through statutory restrictions on the NDAA is in any way a true embrace of the Other only rearranges the legal card deck by reaffirming the sovereignty of the law and the state --- this sanitizes violence, marginalization of the Other, and turns the case
Krasmann 12 (Susanne Krasmann, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg, “Law's knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters,” Theoretical Criminology 2012 16: 379 originally published online 4 June 2012, pg. 380)
In the face of these developments, a new debate on how to contain governmental interference in the name of security has emerged. What is remarkable about this debate is that, on the one hand, it aims at establishing more civil and human rights and attendant procedural safeguards that allow for systematically calling into question the derogation of laws and the implementation of new laws in the name of security. On the other hand, it recognizes the existence of a new dimension of threats, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. As John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino (2004: 228), for instance, contend: We are faced, nowadays, with serious threats to the public safety that can occur anywhere and that cannot terminate definitively. ... If we think that the capacity to deal effectively with emergencies is a precondition for republican government, then it is necessary to ask how emergency powers can be controlled in modern circumstances. Adequate legal frameworks and institutional designs are required that would enable us to ‘reconcile’ security with (human) rights, as Goold and Lazarus (2007b: 15) propose, and enduring emergency situations with the rule of law. Traditional problems in the relationship between law and security government within this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations:2 emergency government today, rather than facing the problem of gross abuses of power, has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional becoming normal (see Poole, 2008: 8). Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as ‘necessary’.3 Hence, law not only constrains, but at the same time also authorizes governmental interference. Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try to balance security and liberty are rarely able, or willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative presuppositions: ‘The metaphor of balance is used as often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them’ (Zedner, 2005: 510). Finally, political responses to threats never overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events. To ignore this uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They establish political spaces of dispute and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a ‘culture of justification’, as David Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be ‘justified by law’, in a fundamental sense of a commitment to ‘the principles of legality and respect for human rights’ (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most of these accounts, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and institutional arrangements that are well known to us. To frame security as a public good and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example demand, is a promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be ‘civilized’, though, once again echoes the truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality and a political ‘culture of justification’ (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the following section. Those normative endeavours will be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice. Contrary to the idea that law can be addressed as an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to normative aspirations, the present account renders law’s reliance on forms of knowledge more discernable. Law is susceptible, in particular to security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms itself and, notably, articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of knowledge brought into play. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this perspective enables us, on the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law in a way that goes largely unnoticed. This point will be discussed on the example of automated surveillance technologies, which facilitate a particular rationality of pre-emptive action. The conception of law as a practice, on the other hand, may also be understood as a tool of critique and dissent. The recent torture debate is an extreme example of this, whereby torture can be regarded as a touchstone of law’s resistance to its own abrogation.

To attempt to invert the law on itself is to misunderstand the connections between securitization and law --- the aff subscribes to a form of lawfare in the name of immigration rights which promotes violence and pacifies broader resistance  
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
Kennedy begins by coldly contradicting those opponents of the Bush administration ‘that have routinely claimed that the United States has disregarded these rules’ (p. 40) by pointing out that both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war as well as both opponents and supporters of the great panoply of US legal measures related to the war on terror ‘were playing with the same deck’ (p. 40) in presenting ‘professional arguments about how recognised rules and standards, as well as recognised exceptions and jurisdictional limitations, should be interpreted’ (p. 40). The author’s only concession with reference to the Bush administration’s legal advisers is to point out that ‘as professionals, these lawyers failed to advise their client adequately about the consequences of the interpretations they proposed, and about the way others would read the same texts – and their memoranda’ (p. 39).Thus Kennedy does not adopt any legal position to the detriment of any other, as his assessment does not seemingly pretend to persuade his reader at the level of the world of legal validity presented in the vocabulary of the UN Charter. The extent to which that excludes the author from the category of being a ‘true jus-internationalist’, according to A. Canc¸ado Trindade’s understanding of those who actually ‘comply with the ineluctable duty to stand against the apology of the use of force which is manifested in our days through distinct “doctrinal” elaborations’,42 is not for us to judge. Suffice it to note that the starting point of Kennedy’s convoluted perspective on the matter is that ‘the law of force’ is a form of ‘vocabulary for assessing the legitimacy’ (p. 41) of a form of conduct (e.g. amilitary campaign) or ‘for defending as well as attacking the “legality”’ (p. 41) of an act (e.g. distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate targets) in which the same law of force becomes a two-edged sword, everybody’s and no one’s strategic partner in a contemporary world where ‘legitimacy has become the currency of power’ (p. 45). For the author, in today’s age of ‘lawfare’ (p. 12), ‘to resist war in the name of law . . . is to misunderstand the delicate partnership of war and law’ (p. 167). In Kennedy’s view, therefore, ‘there is little comfort in knowing that law has become the vernacular for evaluating the legitimacy of war and politics where it has done so by itself becoming a strategic instrument of war and the continuation of politics by similar means’ (p. 132). 3. LAW AS A MODERN LEGAL INSTITUTION Of War and Law seems, indeed, to be animated by a certain philosophical perplexity regarding the ambiguous relation between the apparently antithetical nature of the terms appearing in its title. Since antiquity both jurists and philosophers have taught that the law’s raison d’eˆ tre is that of making social peace possible, of overcoming what would later be commonly known as the Hobbesian state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes. Kant noted that law should be perceived first and foremost as a pacifying tool – in other words, ‘the establishment of peace constitutes, not a part of, but the whole purpose of the doctrine of law’43 – and Lauterpacht projected that same principle onto the international sphere: ‘the primordial duty’ of international law is to ensure that ‘there shall be no violence among states’.44 The paradox lies, of course, in that law performs its pacifying function not by means of edifying advice, but by the threat of the use of force. In this sense, as Kennedy points out, ‘to use law is also to invoke violence, at least the violence that stands behind legal authority’ (p. 22). Hobbes himself never concealed the fact that the state, ‘that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defence’,would succeed in eradicating inter-individual violence precisely due to its ability to ‘inspire terror’;45 but Weber – ‘the State is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’46 – Godwin,47 and Kelsen48 have also provided support for the same proposition. This ambivalent and paradoxical relationship between law and violence,which is obvious in the domestic or intra-state realm, becomes even more obvious in the interstate domain with its classical twin antinomy of ubi jus, ibi pax and inter arma leges silent until the law in war emerges as a bold normative sector which dares to defy this conceptual incompatibility; even war can be regulated, be submitted to conditions and limitations. The hesitations of Kant in addressing jus in bello49 or the very fact that the Latin terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello were coined, as R. Kolb has pointed out,50 at relatively recent dates, seem to confirm that this has never been per se an evident aspiration.51 Kennedy explains his own calling as international lawyer as being partly inspired by his will to participate in the law’s civilizing mission (p. 29)52 as something utterly distinct from war: We think of these rules law in war as coming from ‘outside’ war, limiting and restricting the military. We think of international law as a broadly humanist and civilizing force, standing back from war, judging it as just or unjust, while offering itself as a code of conduct to limit violence on the battlefield. (p. 167) The author notes how this virginal confidence in the pacifying efficiency of international law – its presumed ability to forbid, limit, humanize war ‘from outside’ – becomes progressively nuanced, eroded, almost discredited by a series of considerations. The disquieting image of the ‘delicate partnership of war and law’ becomes more and more evidenced; the lawyer who attempts to regulate warfare inevitably also becomes its accomplice. As Kennedy puts it, The laws of force provide the vocabulary not only for restraining the violence and incidence of war – but also for waging war and deciding to go to war. . . . Law no longer stands outside violence, silent or prohibitive. Law also permits injury, as it privileges, channels, structures, legitimates, and facilitates acts of war. (p. 167) Unable to suppress all violence, law typifies certain forms of violence as legally admissible, thus ‘privileging’ them with regard to others and investing some agents with a ‘privilege to kill’ (p. 115). Law thereby becomes, in Kennedy’s view, a tool not so much for the restriction of war as for the legal construction of war.53 Elsewhere we have labeled Kennedy ‘a relative outsider’54 who, peering from the edge of the vocabulary of international law, tries to ‘highlight its inherent structural limits, gaps, dogmas, blind spots and biases’, as someone ‘specialised in speaking the unspeakable, disclosing ambivalences and asking awkward questions’.55 The ‘unspeakable’, in the case of the ‘law of force’, is precisely, in Kennedy’s view, this process of involuntary complicity with the very phenomenon one supposedly wants to prohibit. Prepared to ‘stain his hands’ a` la Sartre, in his attempt to humanize the military machine from within, to walk one step behind the soldier reminding him constantly, as an imaginary CNN camera, of the legal limits of the legitimate use of force, the lawyer starts to realize, in the author’s view, that he is becoming but an accessory to the war machine. Kennedy maintains that law, in its attempt to subject war to its rule, has been absorbed by it and has now become but another war instrument (p. 32);56 law has been weaponized (p. 37).57 Contemporary war is by definition a legally organized war: ‘no ship moves, no weapon is fired, no target selected without some review for compliance with regulation – not because the military has gone soft, but because there is simply no other way to make modern warfare work. Warfare has become rule and regulation’ (p. 33).War ‘has become a modern legal institution’ (p. 5), with the result that the international lawyer finds himself before an evident instance of Marxian reification, in other words ‘the consolidation of our own products as a material power erected above us beyond our control that raises a wall in front of our expectations and destroys our calculations’.58 Ideas and institutions develop ‘a life of their own’, an autonomous, perverted dynamism.

Their method for change in mired in bureaucratic vernacular which displaces more effective solutions and cedes agency over violence which guarantees failure
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
War’s ubiquity, its discontinuity, and the blurring of its outline are not without psychological and moral consequences in the military: ‘Experts have long observed that when warfare itself seems to have no clear beginning or end, no clear battlefield, no clear enemy, military discipline, as well as morale, breaks down’ (p. 119). This dispiriting confusion that affects soldiers also concerns the international lawyer, who sees the old rules of jus belli evaporate and be replaced by much vaguer ‘standards’. The last pages of Of War and Law convey, in fact, a clear feeling of defeat or loss, showing the demoralization of the international lawyer who still tries to take the law of war seriously: ‘How can ethical absolutes and instrumental calculations be made to lie down peacefully together? How can one know what to do, how to judge, whom to denounce?’ (p. 117). The former categorical imperatives (‘thou shalt not bomb cities’, ‘thou shalt not execute prisoners’, etc.) give way to an elastic and blurred logic of more and less, within which instrumental might triumphs definitively over the ethical (p. 132).89 As the new flexible ‘standards’ seem more susceptible to strategic exploitation and modulation than do the old strict rules, the various actors will play with the labels of jus belli – now definitively versatile – according to their strategic needs: Ending conflict, calling it occupation, calling it sovereignty – then opening hostilities, calling it a police action, suspending the judicial requirements of policing, declaring a state of emergency, a zone of insurgency – all these are also tactics in the conflict. . . . All these assertions take the form of factual or legal assessments, but we should also understand them as arguments, at once messages and weapons. (p. 122)90 Kennedy reiterates a new aspect of the ‘weaponization of the law’: the legal qualification of facts appears as a means of conveying messages to the enemy and to public opinion alike, because in the age of immediate media coverage, wars are fought as much in the press and opinion polls as they are on the battlefield. The skilled handling of jus belli categories will benefit one side and prejudice the other (p. 127);91 as the coinage of the very term ‘lawfare’ seems to reflect, the legal battle has already become an extension of the military one (p. 126).92 In cataloguing some of the dark sides of the law of war, Kennedy also stresses how the legal debate tends to smother and displace discussions which would probably be more appropriate and necessary. Thus the controversy about the impending intervention in Iraq, which developed basically within the discursive domain of the law of war, largely deprived lawyers of participating in an in-depth discussion on the neo-conservative project of a ‘great Middle East’ – more democratic and Western-friendly and less prone to tyranny and terrorism – the feasibility of ‘regime change’, an adequate means of fostering democracy in the region, and so on: We never needed to ask, how should regimes in the Middle East . . . be changed? Is Iraq the place to start? Is military intervention the way to do it? . . .Had our debates not been framed by the laws of war, we might well have found other solutions, escaped the limited choices of UN sanctions, humanitarian aid, and war, thought outside the box. (p. 163) 6. CONCLUSIONS Those familiar with the author’s previous works93 will certainly have already identified the Derridean streak in Kennedy’s thought in the underlying claim that every discourse generates dark zones and silences or represses certain aspects, renders the formulation of certain questions impossible (a Foucauldian streak in the author could be suspected as well: every discourse – be it administrative, legal, medical, or psychiatric – implies simultaneously ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’; each discourse amounts somehow to a system of domination, insofar as it defines ‘conditions of admission’ into the realm of the legally valid, the ‘sane society’, etc.).94 In the picture resulting from the application of this analytical framework to the domain of the use of force, international lawyers and humanitarian professionals appear gagged, restricted by the language they try to utter effectively to themselves and others. As if the legal language had imposed on them its own logic, it now speaks through their voices and what is, evidently, once again, the Marxian-structuralist idea of cultural products gaining a life of their own and turning against their own creators. Kennedy, however, does not stop at noting that jurists have become ‘spoken’ by their language amidst a dramatically changing war scenario. More disquietingly, he stresses the evident corollary of the previous proposition: the evaporation of a sense of individual moral responsibility: All these formulations, encouraged by the language of law, displace human responsibility for the death and suffering of war onto others . . . . In all these ways, we step back from the terrible responsibility and freedom that comes with the discretion to kill. . . .Violence and injury have lost their author and their judge as soldiers, humanitarians, and statesmen have come to assess the legitimacy of violence in a common legal and bureaucratic vernacular. (pp. 168–9) While depersonalization and a lack of sense of personal responsibility are evidently also favoured by external structural factors, among which is the bureaucratic political complexity of modern states themselves (p. 17),96 Kennedy stresses that the language of international law would thus trivialize and conceal the gravity of decisions: In all these ways, we step back from the terrible responsibility and freedom that comes with the discretion to kill. . . . The problem is loss of the human experience of responsible freedom and free decision – of discretion to kill and let live. (p. 170).

Their method for change necessarily calls on ‘normal’ rights to be universally applied. This ignores how the normal law treats all prisoners, immigrants, and upholds suffering. Vote negative to challenge the normalization of law --- this can include the cognitive-behavioral intervention they speak of but it shouldn’t be limited to an attempt to affect the law. Instead of changing the law, we must change ourselves. Our alternative ends indefinite detentions of the Other by fighting against the law, not within the law.
Johns 05 Fleur Johns is a lecturer, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, Sydney, Australia. Email: fleurj@law.usyd.edu.au. The author would like to thank the organizers of, and audience members and co-panelists at, each of the following events for insightful comments on, and interrogations of, oral presentations of earlier versions of this article: the Second Joint Workshop of Birkbeck Law School and the Foundation for New Research in International Law (9–11 May 2004, London, UK), the Inaugural Conference of the European Society of International Law (13–15 May 2004, Florence, Italy), the 12th Annual Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law Conference (18–20 June 2004, Canberra, Australia), and the 22nd Annual Australian Law and Society Conference (13–15 Dec. 2004, Brisbane, Australia). The author is also indebted to Professor Peter Fitzpatrick for generous and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article and to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/16/4/311.pdf
Is Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as one scholar has described it, an ‘anomalous zone’?1 In international legal terms, does Guantánamo Bay embody law’s absence, suspension or withdrawal – a ‘black hole’, as the English Court of Appeal has stated?2 Is it a space that international law ‘proper’ is yet to fill and should be implored to fill – a jurisdiction maintained before the law, against the law or in spite of the law? These are some of the questions with which I began the research from which this article emanates. I commenced, too, with a sense of unease with the responses to these questions that may be elicited from the surrounding international legal literature. Implicit or explicit in most international legal writing on Guantánamo Bay is a sense that it represents an exceptional phenomenon that might be overcome by having international law scale the heights of the Bush administration’s stonewalling. Guantánamo Bay’s presence and persistence on the international legal scene, such accounts imply, may be understood as a singular, grotesque instance of law’s breakdown – an insurgence of ‘utter lawlessness’ in the words of Lord Steyn of the House of Lords.3 Of this, I am not so sure. By my reading, the plight of the Guantánamo Bay detainees is less an outcome of law’s suspension or evisceration than of elaborate regulatory efforts by a range of legal authorities. The detention camps of Guantánamo Bay are above all works of legal representation and classification. They are spaces where law and liberal proceduralism speak and operate in excess. 4 This article will probe this intuition by examining law’s efforts in constituting the jurisdictional order of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (and, more specifically, Camps Delta and America at that Base). It will consider, in particular, the claim that the jurisdictional order of Guantánamo Bay renders permanent a state of the exception, in the sense (derived from the work of Carl Schmitt) of a space that ‘defies codification’ and subjects its occupants to the unfettered exercise of sovereign discretion.5 Such a claim has been put forward (usually without an express invocation of Schmitt) by a range of international legal commentators.6 It has also been famously put forward, with distinct and in many ways divergent implications, in the writings of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This article argues against that characterization, in both its legal scholarly and its Agamben-esque forms. It will be contended here that understanding Guantánamo Bay as a domain of sovereign exception (and, as such, of political decision-making) in a Schmittian sense is a misnomer. Rather, Guantánamo Bay may be more cogently read as the jurisdictional outcome of exhaustive attempts to domesticate the political possibilities occasioned by the experience of exceptionalism – that is, of operating under circumstances not pre-codified by pre-existing norms. Far from emboldening sovereign and non-sovereign forms of political agency under conditions of radical doubt, the legal regime of Guantánamo Bay is dedicated to producing experiences of having no option, no doubt and no responsibility. Accordingly, in Schmittian terms, the contemporary legal phenomenon that is Guantánamo Bay may be read as a profoundly anti-exceptional legal artefact. The normative regime of Guantánamo Bay is one intensely antithetical to the forms of decisional experience contemplated by Schmitt in Political Theology and to modes of decisional responsibility articulated by other writers before and since.7 It is by reason of its norm-producing effects in this respect, I would argue, that the legal regime of the Guantánamo Bay detention camps and its replication beyond Cuba merit interrogation and resistance. Section 1 of this article will present a brief sketch of the jurisdictional order of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, as constructed primarily in the final decade of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st. Section 2 will examine the claims to exceptionalism made in respect of this order, first as those claims are circulating in international legal scholarship, and second as they have been advanced in Giorgio Agamben’s writings. Section 3 will put forward a critique of these diagnoses (both international legal scholars’ and Agamben’s), advancing an argument that the legal order of Guantánamo Bay is noteworthy for its insistence upon constraining or avoiding experiences of the exceptional, rather than for its rendering permanent and all-encompassing a sense of the exceptional. Finally, in Section 4, a further argument will be made for resistance to the necessitarian normative architecture of Guantánamo Bay through a re-invigoration of that sense of the exception that may be derived from the work of Carl Schmitt. This final argument will be predicated on a reading of the exception as a political experience that may be de-linked from notions of centralized, sovereign authority, reading Schmitt’s decisionism away from Schmitt’s fetishism of the state. 1 The Legal Order of ‘Anomaly’ Guantánamo Bay is a 45 square mile area of Cuba occupied by the United States pursuant to a perpetual lease agreement entered into in 1903.8 Under that lease, the US obtained the right to use the area for coaling and naval operations.9 The text of the lease agreement provides inter alia that ‘the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within such areas’ while reserving to Cuba ‘ultimate sovereignty’.10 Accordingly, since December 1903, Guantánamo Bay has been operated as a US naval base, its area closed to private use, access and navigation without US authorization.11 The base maintains its own schools, power system, water supply and internal transportation system.12 According to recent accounts, ‘the base population has grown to 6,000, and . . . “in addition to McDonald’s, there are now Pizza Hut, Subway and KFC franchises. Another gym is being built, and town houses, and a four-year college opens next month”. . . The base commander describes it as “small-town America” ’.13 Having previously been dedicated wholly to military and related purposes, in the early 1990s this ‘small town’ was refashioned as a detention camp for those seeking asylum in the United States.14 Between 1991 and 1996, more than 36,000 Haitian and more than 20,000 Cuban asylum-seekers were interned for varying periods in Guantánamo Bay, pursuant to US immigration policies of interdiction, administrative detention, off-shore processing and, wherever possible, repatriation.15 Thereafter, other than short-term operations in 1996 and 1997, the migrant processing operation at Guantánamo Bay was wound down. In January 2002, however, shortly after initiating a military campaign in Afghanistan, the United States began transferring hundreds of persons captured during military operations in Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, where they have since been held without charge as ‘unlawful combatants’.16 According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay held approximately 550 detainees as of 5 November 2004.17 In a 2001 Military Order and a series of subsequent orders issued by the Department of Defense, the US Executive has constructed an elaborate legal regime surrounding these persons.18 The particular, tailored features of this regime have been justified, above all, by the detainees’ unorthodox and peculiarly threatening status: hence the language of compound illegality. As ‘unlawful combatants’, Guantánamo Bay detainees are cast both beyond the pale of non-violent political discourse and beyond the legal bounds of warfare. Yet although the terminology applied to the Guantánamo Bay detainees implies an extra-legal status, these detainees have, since the outset, been the focus of painstaking work of legal classification. In a press briefing on 13 February 2004, given by Paul Butler, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Mr. Butler detailed an elaborate, multi-stage screening and evaluation process through which each detainee is passed. In Mr. Butler’s description, an ‘integrated team of interrogators, analysts, behavioural scientists and regional experts’ works alongside military lawyers and federal law enforcement officials to decipher and consider ‘all relevant information’. ‘We have a process’, Mr Butler announced confidently, ‘and . . . that process will take its own course’.19 Thus, even before the 28 June 2004 rulings of the US Supreme Court in Hamdi v Rumsfeld20 and Rasul v Bush21 affirmed the entitlement of Guantánamo Bay detainees to a ‘meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for their detention before a neutral decisionmaker’ and their capacity to invoke the jurisdiction of US federal courts,22 the Department of Defense had produced a panoply of regulations concerning the handling of detainees. These include mechanisms for annual administrative review of the necessity of each enemy combatant’s detention and procedures for detainees’ trial before specially convened Military Commissions.23 Since the US Supreme Court’s 28 June 2004 rulings, the normative and institutional network at Guantánamo Bay has become even denser. On 7 July 2004, the Deputy Secretary of Defense promulgated an order establishing a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. This Tribunal was charged with determining whether persons detained at Camps Delta and America (the detention camps now maintained at Guantánamo Bay, the former comprising six separate camps) have been properly classified as enemy combatants.24 This, alongside the Military Commissions and the Administrative Review Board, added a third body to the line-up of specialist legal institutions convened at Guantánamo Bay. Later in the same month, the Secretary of the Navy produced a lengthy memorandum outlining procedures to govern this Tribunal’s hearings, including (rather bizarrely) a standard form script for the conduct of a hearing.25 Furthermore, by order of the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on 16 July 2004, a new Office of Detainee Affairs was created within the Pentagon to coordinate ‘around 100 inquiries, investigations, or assessments’ that were then said to be ongoing in respect of detainees’ handling by US military police.26 Far from a space of ‘utter lawlessness’ then, one finds in Guantánamo Bay a space filled to the brim with expertise, procedure, scrutiny and analysis. Amid the work of the Military Commissions, the Administrative Review Board, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal and the other inquiries mentioned above, it is not upholding the rule of law that seems tricky. Rather it is the possibility of encountering the yet-to-begoverned exception that seems difficult to contemplate. 2 The Claim to Exceptionalism As framed by Carl Schmitt (primarily in his 1922 work, Political Theology), the exception is that domain within jurisprudence in which decision-making ‘cannot be subsumed’ by existing norms.27 It is that space in which such norms are held open to suspension or transformation, and where programs of norm-implementation and norm-compliance cease to govern action and decision-making. Accordingly, the exception is synonymous with the attempt to exercise momentarily decisive agency or, as Schmitt put it, ‘principally unlimited authority’.28 I will argue in Section 3 of this article that it is precisely this sort of agency that the legal regime of Guantánamo Bay is designed to negate.29 To many commentators, however, the extraordinary procedural characteristics of the three primary legal institutions installed at Guantánamo Bay render the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base effectively ‘a prison outside the law’ (to quote the petitioners in Rasul v Bush) 30 or at least outside the pre-existing order of legality.31 Two eminent US constitutional lawyers, Professors Katyal and Tribe have, for instance, observed that ‘the November 2001 Military Order’s procedural protections fall conspicuously short of those most Americans take for granted’. They concluded, further, that ‘its vagueness invites arbitrary and potentially discriminatory determinations’, it ‘installs the executive branch as lawgiver as well as law-enforcer, law-interpreter, and law-applier’ and, accordingly, it ‘authorizes a decisive departure from the legal status quo’. Faced with what they construe as executive acts that ‘do not comport with the US Constitution’s structure’ being justified by ‘unilaterally defined emergency’, these commentators propose recourse to the US Congress to ensure legislative extension to Guantánamo Bay detainees of constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process of law, thereby ‘reestablishing the rule of law’.32 Public international lawyers have, to a significant degree, echoed and compounded these concerns, lamenting that the Military Commissions ‘fail  to deliver to justice that the world at large will find credible’ by ‘authorizing the US Department of Defense to dispense with the basic procedural guarantees required by the Bill of Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Third Geneva Convention of 1949’.33 Following is an overview and brief analysis of such claims to exceptionalism made in respect of Guantánamo Bay, first in prevailing international legal scholarship, and second in the work of Giorgio Agamben. A Appeals to the Exception in International Legal Scholarship As indicated by the foregoing remarks, the exceptional status of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base has been a recurring theme of legal critiques of the internment, trial and interrogation practices that have been put into effect there.34 In international legal literature, development of this theme typically entails a two-part discursive move. First, the regime of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is isolated and distanced from the ambit of routine legality. By expressly disavowing the entitlement of detainees to certain due process guarantees enshrined in international law and US constitutional law, the US executive has, it is said, sought to create an abomination: a ‘legal no man’s land’;35 a place ‘beyond the rule of law’.36 The current US administration, such accounts report, ‘wants its own exceptional “rights-free zone” on Guantánamo’.37 At Guantánamo Bay, judgments are said to be ‘based on politics, not legal norms’.38 Guantánamo Bay is cast as a ‘black hole’ and ‘the nature of that black hole’, it is said, ‘is that there is no way out, except through the good grace of the military’.39 Next, this severance of Guantánamo Bay from the prevailing legal order – or the normative emptying out of this jurisdiction, ostensibly to make way for the political – is identified per se as a critical source of concern. As one scholar has observed, ‘human rights law abhors a vacuum’.40 Horror is directed as much towards the apparent refutation of law’s claim to completeness as it is towards the perceived effects of this, namely, the inability to subject detainees’ indefinite detention, torture and degradation to third party question or constraint. Thus, Professor Jordan Paust has insisted ‘under international law, no locale is immune from the reach of relevant international law’. ‘Despite claims that certain persons, including “enemy combatants” or so-called “unlawful combatants,” have no rights’, he continued, ‘no human being is without protection under international law . . . in every circumstance, every human being has some forms of protection under human rights law’.41 The notion of a domain from which law has withdrawn (or where it has been forced into exile) is thus first generated as a definitive diagnosis of the Guantánamo Bay ‘problem’, then cast as intolerable. The encounter with this prospect has, in turn, occasioned two main types of response, each dedicated to affirming the comprehensiveness of the systemic order of national-international legality. One response among legal critics has been to appeal to a variety of legal institutions to subject the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base to their purview, under the rubric of existing law and institutional procedures. Thus, while Professors Katyal and Tribe advocate congressional action within the US, international lawyers and others have instigated litigation and complaint procedures in a wide range of settings, from the US and UK courts to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.42 Others, like Paust above, have turned to the law review as a forum in which to avow the breadth of international law’s reach and the pertinence and inviolability of its precepts.43 A second approach has been to insist upon the necessity of reshaping the law to fit the ostensibly novel phenomena thrown up by the events of 11 September 2001, including the demand for indefinite detention of those suspected of terrorist allegiances. This too is based upon the invocation of emergency or exceptional circumstances, albeit to a very different end. ‘Terrorist attacks’, US constitutional law scholar Bruce Ackerman has written, ‘will be a recurring part of our future. The balance of technology has shifted . . . and we urgently require new constitutional concepts to deal with the protection of civil liberties. Otherwise, a downward cycle threatens’. Ackerman goes on to propose ‘a newly fashioned emergency regime’ so as to permit ‘short-term emergency measures, but drawing the line against permanent restrictions’, thereby ‘rescuing the concept of emergency power from fascist thinkers like Carl Schmitt, who used it as a battering ram against liberal democracy’.44 Oren Gross has likewise announced, quoting Fred Schauer, that ‘the exception is no longer invisible’. Recent confrontations with ‘acute exigency’ have, according to Gross, demanded that law be reformulated in profound ways. ‘Taken together, the panoply of counterterrorism measures put in place since September 11th has created’, he writes, ‘ “an alternate system of justice” aimed at dealing with suspected terrorists’.45 Gross, however, diverges from Ackerman in the following significant respect. Although, according to Gross, ‘separation between normalcy and emergency along geographic lines has once again been resorted to’ and ‘the anomalous nature of Guantánamo . . . has been invoked once again’, those juridical mechanisms designed to keep emergency and normalcy separate have, in Gross’ view, repeatedly broken down.46 ‘The exception has merged with the rule’, in Gross’ account, such that ‘belief in our ability to separate emergency from normalcy . . . is misguided and dangerous’.47 Gross nevertheless reaffirms the necessity and tenability of just such a distinction when he argues for the imperative of ‘going outside the legal order’ in order to tackle ‘extremely grave national dangers and threats’.48 While purporting to reject a normalcy-emergency distinction, Gross reinstates it in the form of a division between, on the one hand, ‘extremely grave . . . dangers’ such as require ‘extra-legal’ adventures and, on the other, conditions under which such adventures are not justifiable. Coming full circle, Gross argues that accommodating such extra-legal adventures will serve the ultimate goal of ‘preserving enduring fidelity to the law’ by fostering a combination of frank political self-explanation on the part of government officials, open and informed public deliberation, and robust individual rights protection on the part of courts in all but the overt extra-legal case.49 Among international lawyers, as opposed to US constitutional lawyers, reform discussions tracing their impetus to exigency have tended to focus on the question of international humanitarian law’s possible obsolescence.50 On the whole, however, international lawyers seem reluctant to engage in the sort of thought experiments in which Ackerman and Gross trade, that is, to entertain the prospect of international law’s wholesale reconfiguration to accommodate the apparent exigencies of recent times. Regardless of the divergence in proposals that have emerged (or not) from the foregoing writings, these legal scholarly characterizations of Guantánamo Bay overwhelmingly rely on the archetype of the exception, taking a separation from normalcy and an apparent play-off between legal and political power as their starting points.51 In almost all of the preceding accounts, both the configuration of Guantánamo Bay as a detention camp, and the violence that has accompanied this, are imagined as nonlegal or quasi-legal phenomena. The encounter with such phenomena, moreover, is understood to necessitate some effort of conquest or accommodation on the part of law and lawyers, so as to close the circle of legal systematicity once more. But for efforts in this respect, they – law and lawyers – are imagined to stand well apart from the events under way at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and (with a few significant exceptions, namely those who have advised the Bush administration) to remain exempt from responsibility for conditions there. It is this set of assumptions with which I will take issue in Section 3 of this article, after first discussing the further theorization of the exception, and its relationship to the detention camp, in the work of Giorgio Agamben. B Giorgio Agamben and the State of the Exception Giorgio Agamben has argued that the Military Order of November 2001 (by which the indefinite detention and trial of alleged enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay was authorized) ‘produced a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being’ in the person of the detainee.52 This rendered each detainee ‘the object of a pure de facto rule’, subject to ‘a detention . . . entirely removed from the law’.53 According to Agamben, this embodies a juridical phenomenon – the ‘state of exception – that arose historically from the merging of two precepts: the extension of military power into the civil sphere (under the rubric of a state of siege) and the suspension of constitutional norms protecting individual liberties by governmental decree.54 This merger, Agamben characterizes as bringing into being a ‘kenomatic space, an emptiness of law’55 in which the sovereign affirms its authoritative locus within the legal order by acting to suspend the law altogether.56 As such, it is expressive of a ‘dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’.57 ‘US President George W. Bush’, Agamben claims, ‘is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war . . . becomes impossible’.58 Unlike the commentators cited in the preceding section, Agamben is at pains to point out that this ‘state of exception’ is neither removed from the legal order, nor creates ‘a special kind of law’. Rather, it ‘defines law’s threshold or limit concept’.59 Agamben maintains that the ‘state of exception’ is juridical in form and effect – a vital scene for the development and deployment of governmental techniques of rule. Within the juridical order, the state of exception is said to embody an emptiness of law, ‘a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations . . . are deactivated’.60 More precisely, the state of exception is ‘neither external nor internal to the juridical order’; it is rather a ‘zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other’.61 In Agamben’s account, law ‘employs the exception . . . as its original means of referring to and encompassing life’ so as to ‘bind  and, at the same time, abandon  the living being to law’.62 Law binds itself to ‘bare life’ – zo3 or biological life as such – in the space of the exception, whereby every outside, every limit of life and every possibility of transgression comes to be included within the purview of ‘a new juridico-political paradigm’.63 Of the November 2001 Military Order, Agamben observes that ‘it radically erases any legal status of the individual’ by reason of the detainees held thereunder enjoying neither ‘the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Conventions’ nor ‘the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws’.64 Accordingly, Agamben declares the operations at Guantánamo Bay ‘de facto proceedings, which are in themselves extra- or antijuridical’ but which have nonetheless ‘passed over into law’ such that ‘juridical norms blur with mere fact’.65 Agamben thus endorses, albeit in his own distinct terms, the claim that much of the legal scholarship surrounding Guantánamo Bay makes: that this jurisdiction represents a special, original case within the juridical order: ‘a zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide’.66 In so doing, Agamben implies the existence, or preexistence, of a juridical zone – a space of non-exceptional character – in which fact and law do not coalesce; a secondary sphere in which maintaining ‘the very distinction between peace and war’ is or was possible. Agamben’s discussion of the ‘nourishment’67 that the exception affords law suggests some other domain where, but for the exception, law might hold back (or be held back) from its voracious colonization of the preconditions of life and of politics (‘the normal situation’).68 Following the work of Duncan Kennedy and other legal scholars, however, one may read the juridical deployment of fact/law, peace/war, detainee/prisoner of war, law/politics, law/life ‘argument-bites’ as one of those operations by which ‘legal arguers generate the experience of necessity’.69 Read according to Kennedy’s semiotic schema, Agamben’s suggestion that, but for the state of exception, these sort of oppositions might hold and remain separable (however ‘fictitiously’70) seems, itself, a necessitarian ‘argument-bite’ (state of exception/normal situation) open to cataloguing and interrogation within this very grid. This, as Kennedy points out, does not entail any overarching assertion of indeterminacy,71 nor does it indicate that Agamben’s analysis does not work or must be corrected.72 Agamben’s characterization of the state of the exception might work so well precisely because it more or less replicates, rather than upsets, familiar, necessitarian operations of legal argumentation.73 Reading Agamben in this way suggests that he might be ‘at least somewhat naïve about legal argument’s simultaneously structured and indeterminate (floating) character’, that is, about the characteristic operations of law and legal argument.74 From this vantage point, the ‘Eureka!’ tone of Agamben’s recent writings, his claim to be remedying the woeful shortcomings of public law theory, and his heralding the ‘deactivation’ of law’s hold on life and the ‘decontamination’ of politics from law might be approached with some scepticism.75 One might question too Agamben’s assertion that the Guantánamo Bay detainees have been stripped of legal status, and thereby of all but bare life.76 Law frequently declares (indeed celebrates) a dearth of the normative where critical scrutiny discloses a hyper-regulatory abundance. Consider the rhetoric of the ‘free market’. The legal emptiness of the market is declared repeatedly and used to justify the erosion or suppression of regulatory initiatives pertaining to consumer protection, workers’ rights and environmental standards.77 At the same time, laws and rules of many sorts – securities laws, antitrust laws, contract laws, accounting standards, etc. – proliferate unabated in the very same space.78 In a comparable way, the records surrounding Guantánamo Bay suggest that the interactions of detainee and detainer in that jurisdiction are experienced as almost entirely pre-codified by the dictates of legal status.79 It is by this means, rather than, as Agamben has suggested, through ‘obliteration and contradiction’ of the normative aspect of law, that governmental violence is being effected, or so it will be argued in Section 3 of this article.80 By focusing, at the outset, on the ‘abandoned’ being of the detainee in isolation (a humanitarian rather than a political impulse),81 Agamben neglects the particular, precarious experience of deciding that remains central to Schmitt’s theory of the exception. For Schmitt, on whose work Agamben purports to draw,82 the exception ‘cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law’.83 The decision on and in the exception cannot, accordingly, be derived from the content of any code or norm, nor can responsibility for its taking be deflected; it is ‘a decision in the true sense of the word’.84 Agamben likewise maintains that the sovereign decision that occurs in the space of the exception – President Bush’s decision in relation to Guantánamo Bay, as he casts it at one instance85 – ‘is the position of an undecidable’.86 The ‘necessity’ triggering a state of the exception, Agamben writes, ‘ultimately comes down to a decision, but that on which it decides is, in truth, something undecidable in fact or law’.87 The law remains in force in the state of exception, Agamben maintains, but ‘the normative aspect of law’ is ‘obliterated’.88 Yet Agamben’s characterization of the state of exception amounts, in effect, to an insistence upon the historical and theoretical pre-codification of the decision thereon – pre-codification that negates its exceptionalism in Schmittian terms. Tracing a number of historical and etymological lineages, Agamben declares these to have culminated in an ‘extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen’,89 such that ‘the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment’.90 On one hand, Agamben declares the Military Order of November 2001 to have created a compulsion to decide upon the undecidable. On the other, he characterizes the space of that decision (and of detainee-detainer interaction) so as to suggest that its dynamics have been pre-codified and rendered ‘permanent’ by the onward march of history and language.91 Agamben imagines the camp (and the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay, specifically)92 as ‘the structure in which the state of the exception – the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power – is realized normally’.93 From this ‘extreme phase’, Agamben would lead his readers in ‘clearing the way for a longoverdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights’.94 What is this if not a (partially) pre-codified program, or at least a call for compliance and implementation? What is this if not an affirmation of the norm in the sense of an ‘attempt to spell out in detail the case in which law suspends itself’?95 Agamben would nevertheless have us believe that the telos of his account runs in a contrary direction: Of course, the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it . . . To live in the state of exception means . . . ceaselessly to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.96 3 The Order of Exceptionalism and the Annihilation of the Exception In arguing against Agamben and others that the experience of the exception anticipated by Schmitt is in retreat at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the legal order of Guantánamo Bay often looks and sounds like a domain operating as one of ‘pure’ sovereign discretion and thus exceptionalism. Lawyers for the US Justice Department have asserted that the US President has unlimited discretion to determine the appropriate means for interrogating enemy combatants detained at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.97 Likewise, counsel for the US Government contended, before the US Supreme Court, that ‘a commander’s wartime determination that an individual is an enemy combatant is a quintessentially military judgment, representing a core exercise of the Commander-in-Chief authority’.98 By assuming the affect of exceptionalism, the normative order of Guantánamo Bay has soaked up critical energies with considerable effectiveness, for it is the exception that rings liberal alarm bells. Accordingly, the focus falls on less than 600 persons being abused in Cuba, rather than upon the millions subjected to endemic sexual, physical and substance abuse in prisons across the democratic world. In a similar way, attention is captured by the violation of rights of asylum-seekers, rather than by the over-representation of immigrants in the most informal and vulnerable sectors of the contemporary economy.99 For detention decisions taken at Guantánamo Bay to correspond to Schmitt’s understanding of the exception, however, ‘the precondition as well as the content of jurisdictional competence in such a case must necessarily be unlimited’. ‘From the liberal constitutional point if view’, Schmitt wrote, ‘there would be no jurisdictional competence at all. The most guidance the constitution can provide is to indicate who can act in such a case.’100 Yet in respect of Guantánamo Bay, both the content and competence of the US executive is repeatedly cast as pre-codified in presidential and governmental statements. At times, the ‘code’ is said to be that of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ or ‘justice’.101 At other times, it is that of God.102 On still further occasions, constitutional norms are invoked to frame a decision.103 The acts of the would-be sovereign, in each case, are characterized by repeated references to some higher source of competence and direction, overt deference to a pre-determined programme in the course of implementation, and insistence upon the conduit or vessel-like status of executive authority. A little lower down the hierarchy, Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, speaking about the annual administrative review process at a press briefing on 23 June 2004, conceded: ‘There’s no question there’s judgment involved. I doubt if many of these are black and white cases. I would expect most are going to be gray’. When pressed to define his role in the process, he confirmed that he was the one to make the final decision regarding release, transfer or continued detention in respect of each detainee, in the wake of an Administrative Review Board assessment. ‘I operate and oversee, organise the process, and I also make the ultimate decision’, he stated.104 Secretary England went on, however, to convey an impression of this judgment as one cabined by broad policy directives, notions of reasonableness, and the institutional demand for standardization: ‘We do have some guidelines; . . . the boards do have some guidelines’, he assured the audience, ‘every board doesn’t have a different standard’. He continued: ‘It will be a judgment based on facts, data available . . . the best decision a reasonable person can make in this situation’. ‘It’s what is the situation today and going forward in terms of a threat to America. And that is what we will decide, and that’s what the decision will be based on’.105 From expressing the decision he would be taking in personal, case-specific terms, Secretary England thus moved rapidly into the mode of generalization, depersonalization and necessity. ‘His’ decision became ‘the’ decision of the reasonable person, made not to assess the individual detainee’s responsibility, but rather to assess his or her proximity to a generalized ‘threat to America’. Such an approach is also discernible in the Military Order issued by President Bush in 2001, pursuant to which the Military Commissions were convened before which Guantánamo Bay detainees were, until their suspension in November 2004, in the process of being tried. The ‘findings’ upon which the jurisdiction created by that order is predicated cast the steps taken thereby as inexorable reactions to a state of affairs of immeasurable proportions and persistent duration. Attacks by international terrorists are said to have ‘created a state of armed conflict that requires the use of the United States Armed Forces’.106 Likewise, it is said to be ‘necessary for individuals subject to the order . . . to be detained’, just as the issuance of the order itself is stated to be ‘necessary to meet the emergency’.107 Although expressed in terms of ‘an extraordinary emergency’, this order frames the Presidential decisions embodied in its text as matters of exigency – in other words, as non-decisions – dictated by a ‘state of armed conflict’. The only acknowledgement of discretion is buried in the final paragraph of the order’s ‘findings’, where the President is said to have ‘determined that an extraordinary emergency exists for national defense purposes’. The exercise of sovereign discretion is, accordingly, cast as a derivative matter: a question of classification after the fact. One could, of course, read these claims as exercises in public relations, designed to cloak the deployment of unfettered sovereign power in the guise of liberal proceduralism. Yet regardless of how one might characterize the ‘real’ intent behind the military mandates governing Guantánamo Bay, the experience of decision-making reported by figures such as Secretary England seems, to a significant degree, to be one of deferral and disavowal – as though his job were more a matter of implementation than decision. Speaking of the determination, by the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, that one of the first 30 detainees to be heard by the Tribunal was not, in fact, an ‘enemy combatant’, Secretary England explained: ‘In this case we – we set up a process, we’re following that process, we’re looking at all the data . . . Determinations were made he was an enemy combatant. We now have set up another process; more data is available. Time has gone by . . . I believe the process is doing what we asked the process to do, which is to look at the data as unbiased as you can, from a reasonable person point of view . . . and I believe the process is working . . . ’108 This is not the language of Schmittian exceptionalism. Rather, it is suggestive of efforts to construct a series of normatively airtight spaces in which the prospect of agonizing over an impossible decision may be delimited and, wherever possible, avoided. As such, the jurisdiction created at Guantánamo Bay is constituted, in Schmittian terms, in the liberal register of the norm (indeed, an overdetermined version thereof).109 This brings me to my final point, which is to sketch a reading of Schmitt whereby the experience of exceptional decisionism that his work evokes may be de-linked from the notion of self-founding, all-encompassing sovereignty and, as such, deployed against the centralization of political authority. I wish to suggest, moreover, that the political possibilities attendant upon such a de-frocked, wayward sense of the exceptional are ripe for reinvigoration in resistance to the initiatives being undertaken at Guantánamo Bay. The legally sanctioned, indefinite detention of persons at Guantánamo Bay might be countered not through a return to the normative, but through an insistence upon the prevalence of the exception in these terms. 4 Of the Exception, the Decision and Resistance When Schmitt wrote of the ‘independent meaning of the decision’, he rejected the assumption (attributed to Robert von Mohl) ‘that a decision in the legal sense must be derived entirely from the content of a norm’. Likewise, as noted above, Schmitt observed that the exception occasioning a decision ‘cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law’.110 He went on, nevertheless, to attempt to do precisely this. Envisaging the jurisdictional competence exercised in the decisional space of the exception as ‘necessarily unlimited’ and insisting on its correspondence with an absolute, indivisible sovereignty, Schmitt himself sought to anchor the exception to a preformed law of political order.111 Accordingly, the prospect of sovereignty operating as ‘a play between two or more parties’ was, in Schmitt’s assessment ‘contrary to all reason and all law’.112 ‘The law’ in this context seemingly referred to some predetermined mandate higher than the law of liberal constitutionalism that would, according to Schmitt’s account, always be susceptible to suspension by the sovereign. Schmitt’s resistance to the diffusion of decisional power on the exception was undoubtedly bound up with his critique of the pluralism of the Weimar Republic and his hopes for a state order beyond it.113 Yet one need not follow the suggestive perplexities of Schmitt’s exception down his particular centralizing route. Instead one could identify the absence of precodification characteristic of the exception with immersion in the contingencies of the social and the ubiquity of power. Far from circumscribing the exception, acknowledgement of the immersion of decision-making in the social, and thus the impossibility of a sovereign state retaining a monopoly on decision, allows the exception to retain its exceptional character. Schmitt himself acknowledged this when he wrote: ‘There is no irresistible highest or greatest power that operates according to the certainty of natural law’. 114 Only when the question ‘who decides?’ forms part of the ‘concrete case that the law cannot factually determine in any definitive manner’ is the potential of the exception to ‘confound the unity and order of the rationalist scheme’ held open, as Schmitt contemplated.115 Schmitt himself wrote: ‘a distinctive determination of which individual person or which concrete body can assume the authority to decide cannot be derived from the mere legal quality of a maxim’.116 Were authority to decide on the exception already known to be monopolized, then the exception would no longer embody ‘the power of real life to break  through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition’: that is, the crust of acceptance of the norm or, what Kierkegaard termed ‘comfortable superficiality’.117 Schmitt’s exception, accordingly, evokes a political experience that is amenable to delinking from Schmitt’s fetishism of the state. The exception, in this sense, arises from the vertiginous combination of, on one hand, responsibility assumed and, on the other, faith in one’s determinative authority and autonomy relinquished. In this mode, I believe, it offers scope for interruption of the normative order of Guantánamo Bay. To delink the experience of deciding on/in the exception from the sovereign state is not to deny Schmitt’s claim that such a decision entails (indeed, derives its political character from) an effect of ‘grouping . . . according to friend and enemy’; that is, that every decision involves a would-be exclusion.118 Nor is it to configure the state as ‘an association that competes with other associations’, the sort of pluralism targeted by Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. 119 Rather, it is to argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not necessarily contingent upon an insistence upon the state’s (or any selfsustaining sovereign’s) monopolization of all political decisions (that is, decisions in/ on the exception).120 Nor, for that matter, is it contingent upon any theorization of the structure of the political order per se (whatever Schmitt might say).121 Rather, it is possible to conceive – indeed, proceeding from Schmitt’s open characterization of the exception,122 it is almost impossible not to conceive – as both political and exceptional a much broader range of decisions, approached by or among a much broader range of agents, aggregations or arrogations, than those which Schmitt entertained as such. That is, in the sense of their ‘defying general codification’, involving, potentially, a ‘thinking of the general with intense passion’ and thereby ‘becoming instantly independent of argumentative substantiation’.123 5 Conclusion International lawyers’ and activists’ appeals to the Geneva Conventions124 and the appeals by legal theorists, activists and commentators to the work of Giorgio Agamben125 both lay claim to the juridical phenomenon of Guantánamo Bay by way of invoking a code and seeking to follow that code to an exit point and/or a point of origination. The foregoing critique has been directed against this particular invocation of Agamben’s work, and its relationship to prevailing invocations of international law, rather than to that work or that law as such (amenable, as it is, to many readings that would defy the accounts presented above). In so far as it pursues this end, the effect of such commentary is to compound efforts to curtail the experience of deciding on/in the exception – efforts that are already well under way at Guantánamo Bay. For notwithstanding all the liberal heartache that they provoke, the law and legal institutions of Guantánamo Bay are working to negate the exception in tandem with, rather than in opposition to, what Schmitt identified as ‘the tendency of liberal constitutionalism to regulate the exception as precisely as possible’.126 To corrode the experience of the exception in this way is to eviscerate the experience of politics as Schmitt characterized it. That is, it is to lose or avoid the experience of deciding in circumstances where no person or rule offers assurance that the decision that one takes will be the right one or, indeed, whether one does in fact exert the decisive authority that one envisages oneself to hold. The exception poses, as Schmitt observed, ‘a case of extreme peril’ because it permits both righteousness and self-knowledge to be placed at risk; because the decision taken remains ‘independent of the correctness of its content’.127 Notwithstanding all the talk of threats that surrounds Guantánamo Bay, it is this sense of peril that is lacking within its legal order. Moreover, it may be, in part, the absence of such a risk that contributes to the strange assurance with which Secretary England announces, as he did at a press briefing on 8 September, ‘we have a lot of very bad people’ in detention at Guantánamo Bay.128 It is, therefore, to a renewed sense of the exception and the decision that ‘emanates from nothingness’129 within law, rather than to a vehement insistence upon the norm, that I suggest turning in order to raise doubts about the work of Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary England and the other ‘good’ people of Guantánamo Bay. By understanding Guantánamo Bay as a legal order dedicated to the annihilation or codification of the exception, we may come to appreciate the scope for political action within such a juristic zone. Recognizing in herself or himself Schmitt’s exceptional decision-maker, the functionary implementing a programme might come to experience that programme as a field of decisional possibility and impossibility, with all the danger and difference that that implies. It is precisely this experience that critics of the Guantánamo Bay programme might strive to evoke in Secretary England and in the other officials upon whose concrete decisions that programme depends, as well as in the audiences with which they – critics and officials alike – perpetually dance.
1nc – kritik

We advocate that the United States Federal Government should increase the statutory restrictions on the War Powers Authority of the president by repealing NDAA sections 1021 and 1022. Do not endorse a cognitive-behavioral intervention as if the persons in both the government and within the debate space have behavioral and cognitive diseases that must be “intervened” to be fixed. See them as people. 

Allen Barbour says ---
"See your patient as a person, not a disease." This is the essential message of an experienced and compassionate physician who questions the prevailing medical model of patient care - that every illness has a physical cause that can be identified and treated medically - and who argues for the necessity of taking the psychological and social circumstances of the patient into account in the process of diagnosis and treatment.

The CBT methodology is a triumph of rationalism and medicalization --- it propagates the dominance of the rational over what is deemed the non-rational
David Pilgrim says in 11  (David Pilgrim, The hegemony of cognitive-behaviour therapy in modern mental health care. Health Sociology Review: Vol. 20, Mental Health and Illness: Practice and Service Issues, pp. 120-132)
 Cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) has been a central plank in the mental health policies of many Anglophone countries in recent years. This emphasis reflects the triumph of modern rationalism in two senses. First, the appeal of CBT to policy makers rests largely on its claims of being evidenced-based and quickly effective. Second, it is committed to a view of eudemonia (the good life) in which rationality predominates over non-rationality to generate the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Both aspects, which appeal to policy makers, warrant sociological interrogation. This article provides a brief history of CBT to highlight the rhetoric of rationalism it has espoused successfully. Then, using the UK Depression Report as a point of departure, it compares this success of CBT with the criticisms it has encountered. Both positions of advocacy and critique are examined in relation to disciplinary knowledge and professional interest work. These orientations from poststructuralist accounts of the modern episteme, on the one hand, and neo-Weberian sociology of the professions, on the other, help us understand the current controversy surrounding CBT.

This triumph of rationalism is the defeat of enchantment with the world, with the Other --- it reduces life to one stamped with meaninglessness for which only calculative thought can be used
BENNETT 2001 (Jane Bennett, professor of political theory, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, “The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics,” Princeton University Press, 2001, http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7208.html)
For that story has itself contributed to the condition it describes. Its rhetorical power has real effects. The depiction of nature and culture as orders no longer capable of inspiring deep attachment inflects the self as a creature of loss and thus discourages discernment of the marvelous vitality of bodies human and nonhuman, natural and artifactual. While I agree that there are plenty of aspects of contemporary life that fit the disenchantment story, I also think there is enough evidence of everyday enchantment to warrant the telling of an alter-tale. Such sites of enchantment today include, for example, the discovery of sophisticated modes of communication among nonhumans, the strange agency of physical systems at far-from-equilibrium states, and the animation of objects by video technologies--an animation whose effects are not fully captured by the idea of "commodity fetishism." To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday. Starting from the assumption that the world has become neither inert nor devoid of surprise but continues to inspire deep and powerful attachments, I tell a tale designed to render that attachment more palpable and audible. If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others. In the cultural narrative of disenchantment, the prospects for loving life--or saying "yes" to the world--are not good. What's to love about an alienated existence on a dead planet? If, under the sway of this tale, one does encounter events or entities that provoke joyful attachment, the mood is likely to pass without comment and thus without more substantial embodiment. The disenchantment tale does reserve a divine space for enchantment; in my alter-tale, even secular life houses extraordinary goings-on. This life provokes moments of joy, and that joy can propel ethics.3 I experiment in this book with a fable of everyday marvels in order to uncover and to assess the ethical potential of the mood of enchantment. A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment As I'm using the term, enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound. Philip Fisher describes this as a "moment of pure presence": The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.4 Thoughts, but also limbs (to augment Fisher's account), are brought to rest, even as the senses continue to operate, indeed, in high gear. You notice new colors, discern details previously ignored, hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify. The world comes alive as a collection of singularities. Enchantment includes, then, a condition of exhilaration or acute sensory activity. To be simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense, to be both caught up and carried away--enchantment is marked by this odd combination of somatic effects. Fear, accompanying such an extraordinary state, also plays a role in enchantment. The thirteenth-century writer Albertus Magnus described wonder as " 'shocked surprise' . . . before the sensible appearance of a great prodigy, so that the heart experiences systole. Thus wonder is somewhat similar to fear "5 But fear cannot dominate if enchantment is to be, for the latter requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience; it is a state of interactive fascination, not fall-to-your-knees awe. Unlike enchantment, overwhelming fear will not becalm and intensify perception but only shut it down. The mood I'm calling enchantment involves, in the first instance, a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage. Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a moreunheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one's default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness, a sense of having had one's nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up or recharged6--a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life. Historians Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park note that, in early modern Europe, the terms for wonder and wonders--admiratio, mirabilia, miracula--"seem to have their roots in an Indo-European word for 'smile.' "7 One also notes that the word enchant is linked to the French verb to sing: chanter. To "enchant": to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream. The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe the refrain as having a transformative or "catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to assure indirect interactions between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form new organized masses." In other words, the repetition of word sounds not only exaggerates the tempo of an ordinary phrase and not only eventually renders a meaningful phrase nonsense--it can also provoke new ideas, perspectives, and identities. In an enchanting refrain, sense become nonsense and then a new sense of things. The refrain, say Deleuze and Guattari, "turns back on itself, opens onto itself, revealing until then unheard-of potentialities, entering into other connections, setting things . . . adrift in the direction of other assemblages."8 I emphasize throughout the book the ethical relevance of such "sonority." The last two chapters focus on the sonorous dimension of language, which makes possible plays on words, the spell-binding effect of stories told aloud, the enchantment power of chants. Reuse and Recycle Near the beginning of Franz Kafka's The Trial, it is mentioned that an old woman stands at the window directly across the way from Joseph K.'s room. A bit later, we are told that she peers in at K. "with truly senile inquisitiveness." Then, after K. has been informed of his arrest, we read that the old woman has "dragged to the window an even older man, whom she was holding round the waist." Finally, we learn that "the two old creatures . . . had enlarged their party, for behind them, towering head and shoulders above them, stood a man with a shirt open at the neck and a reddish, pointed beard, which he kept pinching and twisting with his fingers."9 The old lady and her entourage are not mentioned again in the story; neither is there the slightest intimation of their relevance to the plot, which ostensibly concerns K.'s dogged pursuit of his accusation. Indeed, it was only after several readings that it occurred to me to wonder about them at all. The onlookers are easy to ignore because they do not participate in the narrative quest--for justice, for someone in charge, for insight into the law--in which K. and I are caught up. The onlookers and their actions might be explained as red herrings, were it not for the fact that everything in Kafka's book is one, at least with regard to the mystery of K.'s crime. Every decision, event, proclamation, project, and scene are described with precision, but each is ultimately as rheumy as the old woman's eyes. It seems, then, that Kafka crafts his story of the trial from the bits of experience ordinarily discarded as irrelevant to such a story. Instead of recounting those events that contribute to the reader's narrative preoccupation, Kafka names other contemporaneous events that constitute other stories. The Trial is less a photograph of Joseph K.'s trial than its negative: "background" objects are vivid, while one strains to discern the slightest trace of the "foreground." You wake up one day and are arrested without cause; your indignation grabs you by the throat and motivates your quest for vindication. But even as the warders make the charge against you, even as your affect kicks in, even as you hurry to clear your name, someone across the street glances out of her window, and someone near that woman puts on his shirt, leaves it open at the neck, and twists the hairs of his beard. These acts fall into the shadow of your rushing, indignant body. You note them--they are within the purview of your experience--but you pass them by. But if you were to gather up these dark, discarded scraps and peer into them, you would be on a different path, the path of a Kafkan tale. Kafka's stories might thus be read as a literary form of garbage-picking, or "reusing and recycling." What I try to do in this book is something similar: to pick up some of the experiences that lie in the wake of a familiar story--not the tale of a man wronged, but of a civilization somehow wronged because it has been "disenchanted." The disenchantment of modernity is, I contend, a powerful and rather pervasive narrative in contemporary politics and political theory. It goes something like this: There was once a time when Nature was purposive, God was active in the details of human affairs, human and other creatures were defined by a preexisting web of relations, social life was characterized by face-to-face relations, and political order took the form of organic community. Then, this premodern world gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism, and the bureaucratic state--all of which, combined, disenchant the world.10 The disenchantment tale figures nonhuman nature as more or less inert "matter"; it construes the modern West as a radical break from other cultures; and it depicts the modern self as predisposed toward rationalism, skepticism, and the problem of meaninglessness. Its versions vary according to what is identified as the primary target of the disenchantment process: selves can be disenchanted with ideals once held or heroes once admired, and so disenchantment can name an unhappy psychological state; the culture can be disenchanted, in that collective life no longer operates according to the cyclical logic of premodern or traditional forms and instead organizes itself along the lines of a linear mathematics or rationality; or nature can be the object of disenchantment, in that a spiritual dimension once found in plants, earth, sky is now nowhere to be seen.11 There are more or less subtle, more or less convincing, versions of this tale, all of which posit some kind of absence or loss in the modern condition. The tale is flexible enough to accommodate both positive and negative valuations of the disenchantment process; it is told both by those who celebrate it as the fall of superstition and confusion and by those who lament it as the loss of contact with a meaningful moral universe. Even the celebrators, however, convey a sense of loss: the inevitable price for rationalization or scientization is, they say, the eclipse of wonder at the world. Max Weber makes this point when he says that life in a disenchanted world is stamped with "the imprint of meaninglessness."12 In this world, "there are no mysterious, incalculable forces that come into play, but rather…one can, . . . in principle, master all things by calculation."13 Weber and other griots of enchantment are the focus of chapter 4. Surely the very prevalence of the disenchantment story, even if it can be resisted, reveals something about contemporary experience. Although I want to weaken its hold, I am less its critic than its trash collector. With Kafka as my inspiration, I dust off and shine up what it discards, that is, the experiences of wonder and surprise that endure alongside a cynical world of business as usual, nature as manmade, and affect as the effect of commercial strategy. The experiences that I recycle, like those of Kafka's three onlookers, are not invaders of the major tale but underground or background residents of it. Kafka himself chooses not to give coherence to what Deleuze and Guattari might call the "minor tales" of these residents: he prefers them as fragments. Kafka also refrains from allowing the underground men to explain themselves: he prefers to let the scrappy onlookers stand silently as witnesses to the contingency of the plot that is getting all of the attention. Neither does Kafka explore the affect that their counterstory might spark, he does not allow the reader to take the flights that it might propel, and he does not experiment with how their minor story, with different affects and propulsions, might rewire the political or ethical circuitry. But I try to do these things. I weave the moments of enchantment that I find into an alter-tale, and I imagine the impact on ethical relations that such an alternative narrative might have.

Additionally, the medicialization of patients and cognitive illnesses is the same process of the reduction of patients to sub-human that justifies mass violence
Alfred Ndi says---  University Of Bamenda, Republic Of Cameroon (  Alfred  2012   Setting The Stage Of 'Ab/Normality' In Rehabilitative Narratives: Rethinking Medicalization Of The Disabled African Body http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3195/3066)bs
 The presumption underlying modern rehabilitation was that the effects, functions and uses that would be made of the medicalization of impairments and disability would be rationalizable and utilitarian. This turned out to be false because the post-modern uses of medicalization had to do more with social control and public 'hygiene' than with rehabilitation of the disabled person. For example, the medicalization method led to the direct ill-treatment of mentally deranged persons in African countries like Kenya where patients, seen as sub-humans (abnormal) by a Charity Society, were 'locked up and forgotten' for several years resulting in the infliction of bodily injuries and psychological humiliation (see, for example, the programme titled 'World Untold Stories' in website CNN.com/WUS). Although this handling of the body was considered as cruel and uninformed by society, it continued to exist in different forms in several African countries where deranged persons were arrested from public spaces of 'normality' like streets, particularly prior to and during important political and social events. This action was often justified by the claim that activities of mentally ill persons were unhygienic and the public space needed to be cleaned to render it agreeable for 'normal' society. In this way, medicalization led to new forms of social discrimination, control and stigma that really had nothing to do with their brains but more to do with their minds, that is, their moods, attitudes and conducts considered to be 'abnormal'. Yet, it was not their minds that were sick (for which they were being detained and drugged) but their mental faculties that did not need incarceration to be treated or cured. The brain was treated as if it was the same thing as the mind; whereas one could be sick in the brain without necessarily being sick in the mind. Even when these incidents of abusive confinement were reported to the media, and photographed in public, the deprivation of their freedom was seen as a normal requirement whereas there was nothing normal in equating mentally deranged people with imprisoned criminals.
I argue here that this modernist model from which rehabilitation was inspired created these kinds of postmodern conditions of violation of human rights based on the presumption that the 'normal' public was at risk of potentially fatalistic contact with the 'abnormal' population of the mentally deranged population. Consequently, the latter's rights to freedom were waived or withdrawn without subjecting them to due processes of the law on protection of those rights. In addition, with disconnectedness between processes of the brain and the thoughts and sensitivities of the human mind, it was very easy for various organizations to take advantage of this very fluid situation to claim that they had remedies for the problem. For example, in Bamenda city of the North West region of Cameroon, different associations were created to mobilize mentally ill patients to beg for money from the public. In this way, the intention was to take advantage of the medically abnormalized conditions of patients for economic gains rather than to treat or cure them. However, over and beyond economic gains, was the vitally important fact that there was no documented follow-up process of engagement with the associations to see if the technologies of control they had evolved could be developed further and supported for the benefit of the mentally insane persons. Understandably, these associations sought financial support from the public but when the flows were not regular, they had to end their activities that could have been explored for the benefit of the mentally ill persons.

Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 1 | Opponent: Indiana Ferguson-Hoffman | Judge: Hall
1nc – disad 

Court legitimacy DA
Plan sets the precedent for Article III violations of case and controversy --- this risks the legitimacy of the entire court system
Epps 13 (Garrett Epps, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, “Why a Secret Court Won’t Solve the Drone-Strike Problem,” The Atlantic, February 16, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/why-a-secret-court-wont-solve-the-drone-strike-problem/273246/)
Washington's idea of the week is a secret court, based on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which issues secret wiretap warrants in certain espionage cases. Executive officials would go before the drone court and present their evidence that an individual abroad, perhaps a U.S. citizen, is an Al Qaeda affiliate and an imminent danger. Judges on the panel would issue, in effect, a secret death warrant--a certification that lethal force can be used against the "enemy combatant."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein spoke favorably about the idea at confirmation hearings for C.I.A. Director-designate John Brennan. So did former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Thursday, the New York Times joined in the chorus.
Americans love courts and judges. But they trust them because, in our system, they are independent of elected officials--not part of the political machine. They are also what lawyers call "courts of limited jurisdiction." In carefully chosen language, Article III of the Constitution extends "the judicial power" of the United States to a specific and limited set of "cases and controversies." Federal courts decide cases; they do not fight wars, collect the garbage, or set health-care policy. And most particularly, they may not become an advisory agency of the executive branch.
The idea of a "drone court" would send federal courts into areas they have never gone before, and indeed from which, I think, the text of the Constitution bars them. It could also put the integrity of our court system at risk.
Let's frame the issue properly. The present administration does not claim that the president has "inherent authority" to attack anyone anywhere. Instead, from the documents and speeches we've seen, the administration says it can order drone attacks only as provided by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed by Congress after the September 11 attacks--that is, against "those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."
Unlike the fictional President Bennett in Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, then, President Obama can't suddenly send the drone fleet down to take out, say, Colombian drug lords or the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. That's a marked change from the overall position of the last administration, and it's an important limitation on the president's claimed authority.
But because of that limitation, a court would be supervising the president's command decisions in a time of authorized military action--after, that is, the legal equivalent of a "declaration of war." As commander in chief, the president has been given a mission by Congress. By passing the AUMF, Congress has delegated to him its full war power to use in that mission. Nothing in the AUMF is directed to the courts; in fact, I have trouble finding authority for target selection anywhere in Article III. And whatever the technological changes, constitutionally I see no difference between targeting an enemy with a drone and doing the same thing with a Cruise missile or a SEAL Team. Courts simply aren't equipped to decide military tactics.
The FISA Court, on the other hand, doesn't really reach beyond Article III--judges since ancient times have issued warrants for searches and arrests, and the individuals being spied on are suspected of crimes against the United States. But I don't know of a deep-rooted tradition of common-law courts telling the shire reeve he can hunt someone down and kill him without trial.
There's yet another problem: what criteria would a "drone court" apply? In the "white paper" obtained by NBC News earlier this month, the Department of Justice says that a decision to order a strike involves three requirements: (1) the target represents "an imminent threat of violent attack"; (2) capturing the target would be "infeasible"; and (3) a lethal attack can be carried out "in a manner consistent with law of war principles." A court might be able to apply the first criterion, though just barely; but there is simply no precedent for an Article III judge balancing the prospective risks of a capture operation vs. that of a missile, or assessing the probability of "collateral damage" if the strike goes forward. We have left "the judicial power" behind altogether, and created a panel of poorly trained generals in sloppy black uniforms.
Finally, in time of war, there will be occasions when a target emerges and decisions must be made too quickly for even a secret court proceeding. And thus the "drone court" would not be able to rule on some cases; an ambitious president could find many exceptions.
In addition, an ambitious executive might also use the secret court as a means to extend the drone-strike authority beyond actions in time of authorized military action. With such a review mechanism in place, the argument might go, there's no danger in ceding the president's authority to use drones against enemies not so designated by Congress.
What about after the fact, then? Could there be a secret court that would hear the administration's case for a drone strike and then decide whether that strike had been justified?
Not hardly, I think.
A court that meets in secret, hears only one side of a dispute, and issues a final judgment without notifying other parties is not any kind of Article III court I recognize. It is not deciding cases; it is granting absolution.

Weakening the court prevents sustainable development
Stein 5—Former Judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court Justice Paul Stein (International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Specialist Group on the Judiciary), “Why judges are essential to the rule of law and environmental protection,” Judges and the Rule of Law: Creating the Links: Environment, Human Rights and Poverty, IUCN Environmental Policy and Law Paper No. 60, Edited by Thomas Greiber, 2006
The Johannesburg Principles state:
“We emphasize that the fragile state of the global environment requires the judiciary, as the guardian of the Rule of Law, to boldly and fearlessly implement and enforce applicable international and national laws, which in the field of environment and sustainable development will assist in alleviating poverty and sustaining an enduring civilization, and ensuring that the present generation will enjoy and improve the quality of life of all peoples, while also ensuring that the inherent rights and interests of succeeding generations are not compromised.”
There can be no argument that environmental law, and sustainable development law in particular, are vibrant and dynamic areas, both internationally and domestically. Judge Weeramantry (of the ICJ) has reminded us that we judges, as custodians of the law, have a major obligation to contribute to its development. Much of sustainable development law is presently making the journey from soft law into hard law. This is happening internationally but also it is occurring in many national legislatures and courts.
Fundamental environmental laws relating to water, air, our soils and energy are critical to narrowing the widening gap between the rich and poor of the world. Development may be seen as the bridge to narrow that gap but it is one that is riddled with dangers and contradictions. We cannot bridge the gap with materials stolen from future generations. Truly sustainable development can only take place in harmony with the environment. Importantly we must not allow sustainable development to be duchessed and bastardized.
A role for judges?
It is in striking the balance between development and the environment that the courts have a role. Of course, this role imposes on judges a significant trust. The balancing of the rights and needs of citizens, present and future, with development, is a delicate one. It is a balance often between powerful interests (private and public) and the voiceless poor. In a way judges are the meat in the sandwich but, difficult as it is, we must not shirk our duty.  Pg. 53-54

Leads to every scenario for ecological collapse and extinction
Barry 13—Political ecologist with expert proficiencies in old forest protection, climate change, and environmental sustainability policy  Dr. Glen Barry (Ph.D. in "Land Resources" and Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development” from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), “ECOLOGY SCIENCE: Terrestrial Ecosystem Loss and Biosphere Collapse,” Forests.org, February 4, 2013, pg. http://forests.org/blog/2013/02/ecology-science-terrestrial-ec.asp

Blunt, Biocentric Discussion on Avoiding Global Ecosystem Collapse and Achieving Global Ecological Sustainability
Science needs to do a better job of considering worst-case scenarios regarding continental- and global-scale ecological collapse. The loss of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscape connectivity reviewed here shows clearly that ecological collapse is occurring at spatially extensive scales. The collapse of the biosphere and complex life, or eventually even all life, is a possibility that needs to be better understood and mitigated against. A tentative case has been presented here that terrestrial ecosystem loss is at or near a planetary boundary. It is suggested that a 66 of Earth's land mass must be maintained in terrestrial ecosystems, to maintain critical connectivity necessary for ecosystem services across scales to continue, including the biosphere. Yet various indicators show that around 50 of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems have been lost and their services usurped by humans. Humanity may have already destroyed more terrestrial ecosystems than the biosphere can bear. There exists a major need for further research into how much land must be maintained in a natural and agroecological state to meet landscape and bioregional sustainable development goals while maintaining an operable biosphere.
It is proposed that a critical element in determining the threshold where terrestrial ecosystem loss becomes problematic is where landscape connectivity of intact terrestrial ecosystems erodes to the point where habitat patches exist only in a human context. Based upon an understanding of how landscapes percolate across scale, it is recommended that 66 of Earth's surface be maintained as ecosystems; 44 as natural intact ecosystems (2/3 of 2/3) and 22 as agroecological buffer zones. Thus nearly half of Earth must remain as large, connected, intact, and naturally evolving ecosystems, including old-growth forests, to provide the context and top-down ecological regulation of both human agroecological, and reduced impact and appropriately scaled industrial activities.
Given the stakes, it is proper for political ecologists and other Earth scientists to willingly speak bluntly if we are to have any chance of averting global ecosystem collapse. A case has been presented that Earth is already well beyond carrying capacity in terms of amount of natural ecosystem habitat that can be lost before the continued existence of healthy regional ecosystems and the global biosphere itself may not be possible. Cautious and justifiably conservative science must still be able to rise to the occasion of global ecological emergencies that may threaten our very survival as a species and planet.
Those knowledgeable about planetary boundaries—and abrupt climate change and terrestrial ecosystem loss in particular—must be more bold and insistent in conveying the range and possible severity of threats of global ecosystem collapse, while proposing sufficient solutions. It is not possible to do controlled experiments on the Earth system; all we have is observation based upon science and trained intuition to diagnose the state of Earth's biosphere and suggest sufficient ecological science–based remedies.
If Gaia is alive, she can die. Given the strength of life-reducing trends across biological systems and scales, there is a need for a rigorous research agenda to understand at what point the biosphere may perish and Earth die, and to learn what configuration of ecosystems and other boundary conditions may prevent her from doing so. We see death of cells, organisms, plant communities, wildlife populations, and whole ecosystems all the time in nature—extreme cases being desertification and ocean dead zones. There is no reason to dismiss out of hand that the Earth System could die if critical thresholds are crossed. We need as Earth scientists to better understand how this may occur and bring knowledge to bear to avoid global ecosystem and biosphere collapse or more extreme outcomes such as biological homogenization and the loss of most or even all life. To what extent can a homogenized Earth of dandelions, rats, and extremophiles be said to be alive, can it ever recover, and how long can it last?
The risks of global ecosystem collapse and the need for strong response to achieve global ecological sustainability have been understated for decades. If indeed there is some possibility that our shared biosphere could be collapsing, there needs to be further investigation of what sorts of sociopolitical responses are valid in such a situation. Dry, unemotional scientific inquiry into such matters is necessary—yet more proactive and evocative political ecological language may be justified as well. We must remember we are speaking of the potential for a period of great dying in species, ecosystems, humans, and perhaps all being. It is not clear whether this global ecological emergency is avoidable or recoverable. It may not be. But we must follow and seek truth wherever it leads us.
Planetary boundaries have been quite anthropocentric, focusing upon human safety and giving relatively little attention to other species and the biosphere's needs other than serving humans. Planetary boundaries need to be set that, while including human needs, go beyond them to meet the needs of ecosystems and all their constituent species and their aggregation into a living biosphere. Planetary boundary thinking needs to be more biocentric.
I concur with Williams (2000) that what is needed is an Earth System–based conservation ethic—based upon an "Earth narrative" of natural and human history—which seeks as its objective the "complete preservation of the Earth's biotic inheritance." Humans are in no position to be indicating which species and ecosystems can be lost without harm to their own intrinsic right to exist, as well as the needs of the biosphere. For us to survive as a species, logic and reason must prevail (Williams 2000).
Those who deny limits to growth are unaware of biological realities (Vitousek 1986). There are strong indications humanity may undergo societal collapse and pull down the biosphere with it. The longer dramatic reductions in fossil fuel emissions and a halt to old-growth logging are put off, the worse the risk of abrupt and irreversible climate change becomes, and the less likely we are to survive and thrive as a species. Human survival—entirely dependent upon the natural world—depends critically upon both keeping carbon emissions below 350 ppm and maintaining at least 66 of the landscape as natural ecological core areas and agroecological transitions and buffers. Much of the world has already fallen below this proportion, and in sum the biosphere's terrestrial ecosystem loss almost certainly has been surpassed, yet it must be the goal for habitat transition in remaining relatively wild lands undergoing development such as the Amazon, and for habitat restoration and protection in severely fragmented natural habitat areas such as the Western Ghats.
The human family faces an unprecedented global ecological emergency as reckless growth destroys the ecosystems and the biosphere on which all life depends. Where is the sense of urgency, and what are proper scientific responses if in fact Earth is dying? Not speaking of worst-case scenarios—the collapse of the biosphere and loss of a living Earth, and mass ecosystem collapse and death in places like Kerala—is intellectually dishonest. We must consider the real possibility that we are pulling the biosphere down with us, setting back or eliminating complex life.
The 66 / 44 / 22 threshold of terrestrial ecosystems in total, natural core areas, and agroecological buffers gets at the critical need to maintain large and expansive ecosystems across at least 50 of the land so as to keep nature connected and fully functional. We need an approach to planetary boundaries that is more sensitive to deep ecology to ensure that habitable conditions for all life and natural evolutionary change continue. A terrestrial ecosystem boundary which protects primary forests and seeks to recover old-growth forests elsewhere is critical in this regard. In old forests and all their life lie both the history of Earth's life, and the hope for its future. The end of their industrial destruction is a global ecological imperative.
Much-needed dialogue is beginning to focus on how humanity may face systematic social and ecological collapse and what sort of community resilience is possible. There have been ecologically mediated periods of societal collapse from human damage to ecosystems in the past (Kuecker and Hall 2011). What makes it different this time is that the human species may have the scale and prowess to pull down the biosphere with them. It is fitting at this juncture for political ecologists to concern themselves with both legal regulatory measures, as well as revolutionary processes of social change, which may bring about the social norms necessary to maintain the biosphere. Rockström and colleagues (2009b) refer to the need for "novel and adaptive governance" without using the word revolution. Scientists need to take greater latitude in proposing solutions that lie outside the current political paradigms and sovereign powers.
Even the Blue Planet Laureates' remarkable analysis (Brundtland et al. 2012), which notes the potential for climate change, ecosystem loss, and inequitable development patterns neither directly states nor investigates in depth the potential for global ecosystem collapse, or discusses revolutionary responses. UNEP (2012) notes abrupt and irreversible ecological change, which they say may impact life-support systems, but are not more explicit regarding the profound human and ecological implications of biosphere collapse, or the full range of sociopolitical responses to such predictions. More scientific investigations are needed regarding alternative governing structures optimal for pursuit and achievement of bioregional, continental, and global sustainability if we are maintain a fully operable biosphere forever. An economic system based upon endless growth that views ecosystems necessary for planetary habitability primarily as resources to be consumed cannot exist for long.
Planetary boundaries offer a profoundly difficult challenge for global governance, particularly as increased scientific salience does not appear to be sufficient to trigger international action to sustain ecosystems (Galaz et al. 2012). If indeed the safe operating space for humanity is closing, or the biosphere even collapsing and dying, might not discussion of revolutionary social change be acceptable? Particularly, if there is a lack of consensus by atomized actors, who are unable to legislate the required social change within the current socioeconomic system. By not even speaking of revolutionary action, we dismiss any means outside the dominant growth-based oligarchies.
In the author's opinion, it is shockingly irresponsible for Earth System scientists to speak of geoengineering a climate without being willing to academically investigate revolutionary social and economic change as well. It is desirable that the current political and economic systems should reform themselves to be ecologically sustainable, establishing laws and institutions for doing so. Yet there is nothing sacrosanct about current political economy arrangements, particularly if they are collapsing the biosphere. Earth requires all enlightened and knowledgeable voices to consider the full range of possible responses now more than ever.
One possible solution to the critical issues of terrestrial ecosystem loss and abrupt climate change is a massive and global, natural ecosystem protection and restoration program—funded by a carbon tax—to further establish protected large and connected core ecological sustainability areas, buffers, and agro-ecological transition zones throughout all of Earth's bioregions. Fossil fuel emission reductions must also be a priority. It is critical that humanity both stop burning fossil fuels and destroying natural ecosystems, as fast as possible, to avoid surpassing nearly all the planetary boundaries.
In summation, we are witnessing the collective dismantling of the biosphere and its constituent ecosystems which can be described as ecocidal. The loss of a species is tragic, of an ecosystem widely impactful, yet with the loss of the biosphere all life may be gone. Global ecosystems when connected for life's material flows provide the all-encompassing context within which life is possible. The miracle of life is that life begets life, and the tragedy is that across scales when enough life is lost beyond thresholds, living systems die.
1nc – topicality

The aff’s not topical --- increase requires pre-existing --- creating a new drone court isn’t
Ripple, 87 (Circuit Judge, Emmlee K. Cameron, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Frances Slocum Bank and Trust Company, State Automobile Insurance Association, and Glassley Agency of Whitley, Indiana, Defendants-Appellees, 824 F.2d 570; 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 9816, 9/24, lexis)
Also related to the waiver issue is appellees' defense relying on a provision of the insurance policy that suspends coverage where the risk is increased by any means within the knowledge or control of the insured. However, the term "increase" connotes change. To show change, appellees would have been required to present evidence of the condition of the building at the time the policy was issued. See 5 J. Appleman and J. Appleman, Insurance Law and Practice, § 2941 at 4-5 (1970). Because no such evidence was presented, this court cannot determine, on this record, whether the risk has, in fact, been increased. Indeed, the answer to this question may depend on Mr. Glassley's knowledge of the condition of the building at the time the policy was issued, see 17 J. Appleman and J. Appleman, Insurance Law and Practice, § 9602 at 515-16 (1981), since the fundamental issue is whether the appellees contemplated insuring the risk which incurred the loss.

Vote neg --- affs that don’t expand a pre-existing restriction on the executive’s authority double the topic by allowing a proliferation of small new courts cases to be ruled upon and courts to be created on a window of executive authority --- destroys ground and makes the topic about what potential executive action they can preempt rather than the desirability of existing restrictions
1nc – disad

Readiness DA 

The plan compromises operations effectiveness --- interferes with the military
Johnson 13 (Jeh Charles Johnson, former General Counsel of the Department of Defense, “A ‘Drone Court’: Some Pros and Cons,” Keynote Address at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School,” March 18, 2013, http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/623760/johnson-speech-to-fordham-ls.pdf)
Judges are accustomed to making legal determinations based on a defined, settled set of facts – a picture that has already been painted;  not a moving target, which is what we are literally talking about here.  These are not one-time-only judgments and we want military and national security officials to continually assess and reassess these two questions up until the last minute before an operation.  If these types of continual reassessments must be submitted to a member of the Article III branch of government for evaluation, I  believe we compromise our government’s ability to conduct these operations effectively. The costs will outweigh the benefits.  In that event, I believe we will also discourage the type of continual reevaluation I’m referring to.

Rapid response is the key internal link --- effective operations solve a host of nuclear wars check the escalation of the entirety of the 1AC
GERSON 09 research analyst in the Strategic Initiatives Group. Michael S. Gerson, “Conventional Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age”. Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Autumn 2009. http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/09autumn/gerson.pdf
This article seeks to expand the current debate about the role and utility of conventional forces in US deterrence strategies by reexamining the traditional logic of conventional deterrence, which focuses on deterrence by denial, in the context of the modern international security environment. It is primarily concerned with the role of US conventional forces in extended deterrence, defined as the threat of force to protect allies and friends, rather than “central” or “homeland” deterrence. 3 This focus on extended deterrence—and especially on the role of deterrence by denial in extended deterrence—highlights the central importance of protecting territory from attack and invasion. Historically, the desire for control over specific territory has been a frequent motivator of interstate crises and conflict. 4 While interstate conventional wars have significantly declined since the end of the Second World War, the potential for conflict over Taiwan or on the Korean Peninsula, the prospect of future clashes over control of scarce natural resources, and the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia attest to the continued possibility of conflict over specific territory that has important strategic, economic, political, religious, historical, or socio-cultural significance. Consequently, this article examines how US conventional military power can be used to deter conventional aggression against friends and allies by threatening to deny an adversary its best chance of success on the battlefield—a surprise or short-notice attack with little or no engagement with American military forces. The ability to prevent an opponent from presenting the United States with a fait accompli—that is, from striking quickly and achieving victory before substantial US (and perhaps coalition) forces can be deployed to the theater—is a central component of modern conventional deterrence.
Conventional Deterrence in US Strategy
Broadly defined, deterrence is the threat of force intended to convince a potential aggressor not to undertake a particular action because the costs will be unacceptable or the probability of success extremely low. This threat has always been one of the central strategic principles by which nations attempted to prevent conflict. 5 Even so, the development and rigorous analysis of deterrence as a discrete strategic concept did not occur until the advent of nuclear weapons. Deterrence theory was developed against the backdrop of the Cold War nuclear arms race and focused on the prevention of nuclear conflict. Yet, while the majority of academic research and public debate was concerned with the prevention of nuclear war—the net result was that deterrence became synonymous with nuclear weapons—conventional deterrence, appropriately, assumed an increasingly important role in the development of military strategy during this period. 6 As the Soviet Union began to amass a large and survivable nuclear arsenal that was capable of global reach in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the credibility of the Eisenhower Administration’s policy of “Massive Retaliation,” which threatened an overwhelming nuclear response to virtually any Soviet aggression, was brought into question. Once the Soviet Union developed survivable nuclear capabilities that could reach the US homeland, many defense officials and analysts argued that the threat of Massive Retaliation lacked credibility against anything other than an all-out Soviet nuclear attack. 7 As a result, western military strategy eventually shifted from total reliance on nuclear weapons as a means of deterring both Soviet conventional and nuclear aggression to a strategy of “Flexible Response,” which included conventional and nuclear elements. From the mid-1960s onward, NATO relied on conventional power, backed by the threat of nuclear escalation, to deter any conventional assault on Europe by the numerically superior Warsaw Pact, and relied on nuclear weapons to deter nuclear attacks. 8 By incorporating “direct defense”—the ability to respond to Warsaw Pact aggression, especially conventional aggression, with proportionate (i.e., conventional) force—into NATO strategy, the concept of Flexible Response sought to create a more credible means of deterrence across the entire spectrum of conflict Following the Cold War, conventional greater role in US national security strategy. With the demise of the Soviet Union and significant advancements in conventional precision-guided munitions, many defense analysts concluded that “smart” weapons could provide a powerful deterrent against a wide variety of threats. While some commentators argued that nuclear weapons were still necessary to prevent nuclear attacks, and others contended that conventional weapons were “the only credible deterrent” even against nuclear threats, almost all agreed that technologically advanced conventional weapons could now take the place of nuclear weapons in many missions. 9
Following the remarkable success of sophisticated conventional firepower in Operation Desert Storm, William Perry declared, “This new conventional military capability adds a powerful dimension to the ability of the United States to deter war.” 10 In the current international security environment, conventional deterrence can be useful against nonnuclear and nuclear-armed adversaries. For regimes that do not possess nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, US conventional capabilities will likely be the most credible and potent deterrent. History suggests that, in general, nations without weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are not intimidated by an opponent’s nuclear capabilities. For example, nuclear weapons did not give the United States significant advantages before or during the Korean and Vietnam wars; nor did they dissuade Egypt from attacking Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War 11 or Argentina from attacking the British-controlled Falkland Islands in 1982. 12 This circumstance is due in part to the perceived impact of the “nuclear taboo,” a moral and political aversion to using nuclear weapons that has emerged due to the long absence of nuclear use in time of war. The nuclear taboo reduces the credibility—and therefore the utility—of nuclear weapons, especially against regimes not possessing nuclear weapons or other WMD. 13 Although implicit or explicit nuclear threats may lack credibility against non-WMD regimes, many potential adversaries believe that the United States will use conventional firepower, especially because America has conventional superiority and a demonstrated willingness to use it. Consequently, when dealing with non-WMD-related threats, conventional deterrence will be the most likely mechanism for deterring hostile actions. 36
Parameters
According to Admiral Michael Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “A big part of credibility, of course, lies in our conventional capability. The capability to project power globally and conduct effective theater-level operations . . . remains essential to deterrence effectiveness.” 14 Conventional deterrence also plays an important role in preventing nonnuclear aggression by nuclear-armed regimes. Regional nuclear proliferation may not only increase the chances for the use of nuclear weapons, but, equally important, the possibility of conventional aggression. The potential for conventional conflict under the shadow of mutual nuclear deterrence was a perennial concern throughout the Cold War, and that scenario is still relevant. A nuclear-armed adversary may be emboldened to use conventional force against US friends and allies, or to sponsor terrorism, in the belief that its nuclear capabilities give it an effective deterrent against US retaliation or intervention. 15  For example, a regime might calculate that it could undertake conventional aggression against a neighbor and, after achieving a relatively quick victory, issue implicit or explicit nuclear threats in the expectation that the United States (and perhaps coalition partners) would choose not to get involved. In this context, conventional deterrence can be an important mechanism to limit options for regional aggression below the nuclear threshold. By deploying robust conventional forces in and around the theater of potential conflict, the United States can credibly signal that it can respond to conventional aggression at the outset, and therefore the opponent cannot hope to simultaneously achieve a quick conventional victory and use nuclear threats to deter US involvement. Moreover, if the United States can convince an opponent that US forces will be engaged at the beginning of hostilities—and will therefore incur the human and financial costs of war from the start—it can help persuade opponents that the United States would be highly resolved to fight even in the face of nuclear threats because American blood and treasure would have already been expended. 16 Similar to the Cold War, the deployment of conventional power in the region, combined with significant nuclear capabilities and escalation dominance, can help prevent regimes from believing that nuclear possession provides opportunities for conventional aggression and coercion.
1nc – kritik

Imperialist framing of non-liberal societies as unstable threats justifies eliminating non-liberal forms of life.
Adam David MORTON Politics @ Nottingham 5 “The ‘Failed State’ of International Relations” New Political Economy 10.3 p. 372-374
A pathology of deviancy, aberration and breakdown
Emergent across a host of contemporary institutions is a policy-making consensus linked to the threat posed by ‘failed states’ and the new set of associated security, development and humanitarian challenges. Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development in the UK, has recently stated that ‘weak states present a challenge to our system of global governance. For the international system to work, it depends on strong states . . . that are able to deliver services to their populations, to represent their citizens, to control activities on their territory, and to uphold international norms, treaties, and agreements.’ By contrast, ‘weak and failing states provide a breeding ground for international crime’, harbour terrorists and threaten the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals with the spread of HIV/AIDS, refugee flows and poverty.3 This identified perfusion of warlords, criminals, drug barons and terrorists within ‘failed states’ has become a central policy-making concern within the UK and the US.4 Institutions in the UK such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) support the view of ‘failed states’ as representing deviancy from the norms of Western statehood. The aforementioned CRI programme emerging from Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit develops a focus on ‘fragile states’ in conditions of crisis. Preliminary policy documents have highlighted the breakdown of political, economic and social institutions; the loss of territorial control; civil unrest; mass population displacement; and violent internal conflict in states as diverse as Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Coˆte d’Ivoire. At the centre of the most recently launched Commission for Africa report, Our Common Interest, is also ‘the long-term vision for international engagement in fragile states . . . to build legitimate, effective and resilient state institutions’.6 As Blair indicated in launching this report, ‘to tackle the instability, conflict, and despair which disfigures too much of Africa and which can fuel extremism and violence, is to help build our own long-term peace and prosperity’.7 Elsewhere, the putative ‘better effects of empire’ (such as inward investment, pacification and impartial administration) have been heralded as central to United Nations strategy on state-building within weak states based on a re-consideration of models of trusteeship.8 The United States National Security Strategy has also announced that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has similarly produced a ‘Fragile States Strategy’ focusing on the problems of governance and civil conflict arising from poor state capacity and effectiveness.9 This policy-making approach represents a pathological view of conditions in colonial states as characterised by deviancy, aberration and breakdown from the norms of Western statehood.10 It is a view perhaps most starkly supported in the scholarly community by Robert Kaplan’s vision of the ‘coming anarchy’ in West Africa as a predicament that will soon confront the rest of the world. In his words: The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering.11 Hence a presumed reversion ‘to the Africa of the Victorian atlas’, which ‘consists now of a series of coastal trading posts . . . and an interior that, owing to violence, and disease, is again becoming . . . “blank” and “unexplored”’.12 Similarly, Samuel Huntington has referred to ‘a global breakdown of law and order, failed states, and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world’, yielding a ‘global Dark Ages’ about to descend on humanity. The threat here is characterised as a resurgence of non-Western power generating conflictual civilisational faultlines. For Huntington’s supposition is that ‘the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc . . . from the bulge of Africa to central Asia . . . has bloody borders’ and ‘bloody innards’.13 In the similar opinion of Francis Fukuyama: Weak or failing states commit human rights abuses, provoke humanitarian disasters, drive massive waves of immigration, and attack their neighbours. Since September 11, it also has been clear that they shelter international terrorists who can do significant damage to the United States and other developed countries.14 Finally, the prevalence of warlords, disorder and anomic behaviour is regarded by Robert Rotberg as the primary causal factor behind the proliferation of ‘failed states’. The leadership faults of figures such as Siakka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mobutu Sese Seko (Za?re), Siad Barre (Somalia) or Charles Taylor (Liberia) are therefore condemned. Again, though, the analysis relies on an internalist account of the ‘process of decay’, of ‘shadowy insurgents’, of states that exist merely as ‘black holes’, of ‘dark energy’ and ‘forces of entropy’ that cast gloom over previous semblances of order.15 Overall, within these representations of deviancy, aberration and breakdown, there is a significant signalling function contained within the metaphors: of darkness, emptiness, blankness, decay, black holes and shadows. There is, then, a dominant view of postcolonial states that is imbued with the imperial representations of the past based on a discursive economy that renews a focus on the postcolonial world as a site of danger, anarchy and disorder. In response to such dangers, Robert Jackson has raised complex questions about the extent to which international society should intervene in ‘quasi-’ or ‘failed states’ to restore domestic conditions of security and freedom.16 Indeed, he has entertained the notion of some form of international trusteeship for former colonies that would control the ‘chaos and barbarism from within’ such ‘incorrigibly delinquent countries’ as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti and Sudan with a view to establishing a ‘reformation of decolonisation’.17 Andrew Linklater has similarly stated that ‘the plight of the quasi-state may require a bold experiment with forms of international government which assume temporary responsibility for the welfare of vulnerable populations’.18 In the opinion of some specialists, this is because ‘such weak states are not able to stand on their own feet in the international system’.19 Whilst the extreme scenario of sanctioning state failure has been contemplated, the common response is to rejuvenate forms of international imperium through global governance structures.20 Backers of a ‘new humanitarian empire’ have therefore emerged, proposing the recreation of semi-permanent colonial relationships and the furtherance of Western ‘universal’ values, and, in so doing, echoing the earlier mandatory system of imperial rule.21 In Robert Keohane’s view, ‘future military actions in failed states, or attempts to bolster states that are in danger of failing, may be more likely to be described both as self-defence and as humanitarian or public-spirited’.22

It’s try or die—this new colonialism dehumanizes populations resulting in unending violence
Batur 7 Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3

War and genocide are horrid, and taking them for granted is inhuman. In the 21st century, our problem is not only seeing them as natural and inevitable, but even worse: not seeing, not noticing, but ignoring them. Such act and thought, fueled by global racism, reveal that racial inequality has advanced from the establishment of racial hierarchy and institutionalization of segregation, to the confinement and exclusion, and elimination, of those considered inferior through genocide. In this trajectory, global racism manifests genocide. But this is not inevitable. This article, by examining global racism, explores the new terms of exclusion and the path to permanent war and genocide, to examine the integrality of genocide to the frame-work of global antiracist confrontation. GLOBAL RACISM IN THE AGE OF “CULTURE WARS” Racist legitimization of inequality has changed from presupposed biological inferiority to assumed cultural inadequacy. This defines the new terms of impossibility of coexistence, much less equality. The Jim Crow racism of biological inferiority is now being replaced with a new and modern racism (Baker 1981; Ansell 1997) with “culture war” as the key to justify difference, hierarchy, and oppression. The ideology of “culture war” is becoming embedded in institutions, defining the workings of organizations, and is now defended by individuals who argue that they are not racist, but are not blind to the inherent differences between African-Americans/Arabs/Chinese, or whomever, and “us.” “Us” as a concept defines the power of a group to distinguish itself and to assign a superior value to its institutions, revealing certainty that affinity with “them” will be harmful to its existence (Hunter 1991; Buchanan 2002). How can we conceptualize this shift to examine what has changed over the past century and what has remained the same in a racist society? Joe Feagin examines this question with a theory of systemic racism to explore societal complexity of interconnected elements for longevity and adaptability of racism. He sees that systemic racism persists due to a “white racial frame,” defining and maintaining an “organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate” (Feagin 2006: 25). The white racial frame arranges the routine operation of racist institutions, which enables social and economic repro-duction and amendment of racial privilege. It is this frame that defines the political and economic bases of cultural and historical legitimization. While the white racial frame is one of the components of systemic racism, it is attached to other terms of racial oppression to forge systemic coherency. It has altered over time from slavery to segregation to racial oppression and now frames “culture war,” or “clash of civilizations,” to legitimate the racist oppression of domination, exclusion, war, and genocide. The concept of “culture war” emerged to define opposing ideas in America regarding privacy, censorship, citizenship rights, and secularism, but it has been globalized through conflicts over immigration, nuclear power, and the “war on terrorism.” Its discourse and action articulate to flood the racial space of systemic racism. Racism is a process of defining and building communities and societies based on racial-ized hierarchy of power. The expansion of capitalism cast new formulas of divisions and oppositions, fostering inequality even while integrating all previous forms of oppressive hierarchical arrangements as long as they bolstered the need to maintain the structure and form of capitalist arrangements (Batur-VanderLippe 1996). In this context, the white racial frame, defining the terms of racist systems of oppression, enabled the globalization of racial space through the articulation of capitalism (Du Bois 1942; Winant 1994). The key to understanding this expansion is comprehension of the synergistic relationship between racist systems of oppression and the capitalist system of exploitation. Taken separately, these two systems would be unable to create such oppression independently. However, the synergy between them is devastating. In the age of industrial capitalism, this synergy manifested itself imperialism and colonialism. In the age of advanced capitalism, it is war and genocide. The capitalist system, by enabling and maintaining the connection between everyday life and the global, buttresses the processes of racial oppression, and synergy between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation begets violence. Etienne Balibar points out that the connection between everyday life and the global is established through thought, making global racism a way of thinking, enabling connections of “words with objects and words with images in order to create concepts” (Balibar 1994: 200). Yet, global racism is not only an articulation of thought, but also a way of knowing and acting, framed by both everyday and global experiences. Synergy between capitalism and racism as systems of oppression enables this perpetuation and destruction on the global level. As capitalism expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. In colonized and colonizing lands, global racism has been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist concepts and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were antagonistic opposites. Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized “other,” as the adversary and challenger of the “the ideal self,” not only identification but also segregation and containment were essential to racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the “inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism. Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the aggregation of violence during and after colonialism: “Manichaeism division of the universe into opposites of good and evil goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes” (Fanon 1963:42). Within this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new “geography of hunger” and exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which oppression and exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this “geography of hunger and exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans.

Alternative: Resist their calls for prescriptive legal modeling.  Questioning the universality of the liberal-legal model opens up alternative futures for social justice.
Kerry RITTICH Law @ Toronto 3 Enchantments of Reason/Coercions of Law 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 727, Lexis

To paraphrase Wendy Brown, legal analysis need not march only in the service of an immediate political dilemma; to try to make it so may be to fall into a trap. There is an important place for distanced reflection on legal rules and reforms. Although such efforts may be discounted as not immediately helpful, even beside the point, critical reflection is far from disengagement from politics or the dilemmas of the "real world." 23 Given law's intimate connection with social organization and social power, even critique is unlikely to entirely shed its normative charge. Critical scholars have often resisted the normative move, the efforts to extrude the political and ideological from accounts about law, and the idea that particular legal conclusions follow from commitments to rights or efficiency such that "right answers" simply become a matter of professional  *736  skill or craft. Indeed, resistance to the quick slippage into the prescriptive mode is central to the critical project. The basis of this resistance is not merely an uncontrolled subversive or oppositionist instinct; rather, it emanates primarily from the sense that the overwhelming compulsion to answer the question in the terms in which it is posed allows many assumptions that are crucial to the pertinence or intelligibility of the question itself to remain unquestioned and intact. 24 Almost as often as critical scholars have made such observations, they have faced the following criticism: It is not enough to be critical of the content of legal rules or the structure of legal argumentation; you have to offer an alternative, a prescription by which it can be fixed. Otherwise, the critique is empty, even worthless. 25 Yet, as Schlag observes, "One might think that destruction is inherently bad and construction inherently good, but this view, while pervasive, is woefully inadequate. Indeed, it all depends upon what is being destroyed and what is being constructed." 26 From the standpoint of those not entirely invested in the current order, critique may be regarded as constructive; in the process of critical reflection, roads now foreclosed may be opened. What follows are four possible critical optics or strategies, not all of which are entirely distinct. It is obvious that at least some of them may be compatible with existing reform proposals, as what they foreclose is not any particular rule or reform, but rather the arguments of entailment which, whether on the basis of the rule of law, efficiency, or even human rights, currently give them primacy and legitimacy. All are predicated on the idea that it may be more useful to try to uncover and trace what we are doing when we pursue different types of law reform than to prescribe precisely what to do, and that the role of midwife, whether to efficiency or human rights, does not exhaust the functions of those with legal expertise in the context of global law reform efforts. All propose a much chastened normative role for the legal professional and all challenge the hyper-investment in the reason of law to resolve social, political, or economic issues. At the same time, all of these proposals at least implicitly resituate law as a site of political conflict and a place in which some of the work of its resolution might take place. All, however, discourage investment in the pious or moral dimension of law, especially to  *737  the extent that it forecloses the exploration of competing arguments and alternatives. A cautionary note seems in order. The relative absence of critical reflexivity to date is not accidental. The policing of alternative legal analyses comes from the fact that what is acknowledged, even emphasized, in such analyses—the distributive dimension of reforms, the ideological character of reform proposals, the cultural particularity of "universal" rules—is normally excluded. Because such elements may be excluded as a matter of the structure and integrity of claims about the role of law in development, and even the status of the discipline itself, to venture into this territory is to risk speaking the voice of unreason, the classic place to which dissenters of all stripes are consigned. Notwithstanding, there remains a useful role for legal academics in uncovering the assumptions behind reforms, reflecting on their biases, and trying to foresee their consequences along multiple axes. In particular, it seems important to try to project how rule and institutional changes might reallocate resources and power in specific contexts. Far from forays into new territory, these tasks primarily involve recuperating some of the most basic insights and techniques of legal analysis. 1. Resisting the Project of Law Generation/Demoting the Lawyers and Economists  One possibility is to simply state that, for reasons of legitimacy and basic democratic control, lawyers should have no privileged place in determining many of the questions that are currently cast as matters of lawyerly expertise. Put another way, there should be an active effort to disenchant the world about sole reliance on the professional tools of law and reason to solve the problems of development, and to demote the role of lawyers (as well as other technocrats) in governance ventures. It needs to be emphasized that this is not a rejection of law, or the rule of law, or even the importance of law. "Rejecting the law" is not an option; we live in a world structured at every turn by legal rules. Nor does it necessarily compel disengagement on the part of legal academics from a process that, like it or not, is in full swing, although some are sure to find that an appropriate response. It is a rejection of the claims about law's insulation from politics and, in particular, a contestation of the idea that there is a broad framework of laws that is simply required to be modern or civilized, and is for that reason properly excluded from the forces of politics and democratic deliberation. To say that such questions can and should be answered by economists, lawyers, or other technocrats is to participate in the fiction that they can be successfully  *738  divorced from questions about the organization of social life, the distribution of social power, and the allocation of social resources. Lawyers should simply come clean about the impossibility of this. Paradoxically, such an admission is unlikely to end the role of the lawyer in the legal reform process; it may even encourage more legal advice and greater participation, though on less problematic terms. Among its salutary effects might be deeper reflection on the desirability of proposed reforms, greater skepticism toward what is offered, interrogation of the interests that are affected, for either better or worse, consideration of the expected consequences, as well as open assessment of alternatives. Despite the tendency to dismiss those who fail to offer a well-formulated alternative, there may be considerable virtues in not having a fully articulated positive program, all of which parallel concerns that have been raised in development theory. 27 First, it can be a deliberate choice to reject the uncritical export of law and avoid the imperial tendencies present in such ventures. Second, progressive lawyers might want to create space for local alternatives. As law expands, more and more issues are moved out of the zone of democratic deliberation and into the zone governed by reason or efficiency, the expansion of law may legitimately be resisted where it represents the compression of politics. Third, lawyers may (and probably often should) feel unequipped to offer formulaic answers from afar, as there can be a deep artificiality about reform proposals which are generated by those who will not experience their effects. The intuition behind the norm of self-determination is that important social decisions, legal reforms among them, should be made not simply with attention to how they will be received and play out in given contexts and histories, but also by those who will have to live with the consequences. Such consequences impose a singular discipline on the decision maker, so much so that eliminating them fundamentally denatures the decision making process. It is simply a mistake to think that the outcomes will remain untouched, or that they will be better in some global sense, when this element is absent from the process. 2. Critical Readings/Multiple Readings  As compared to discussions in domestic contexts, debates around  *739  law reform "for export" to date have been remarkably flat and one-dimensional. Right now, the economic lens predominates. Even from within the economic optic, efficiency concerns control, crowding out distributive considerations, although redistribution is a persistent and inevitable effect of reform. Thus, one useful role lies in simply deepening and complexifying the accounts of the legal reform process; much more attention could be profitably paid to the multiple dimensions of legal rules. These efforts also might aid rather than impair the law and development project, if only because they may provide insight into why and how reforms routinely produce unforeseen outcomes. There is a range of methods that could be employed to this end. Law and development projects need to be looked at in cultural terms. Specific claims should be analyzed empirically. The path of reforms should be traced historically and genealogically. Dominant arguments could be analyzed semiotically, with attention to the narrative they project about the world. Historical work is particularly valuable in tracing the contingency of even the most well-entrenched legal rules and uncovering the rhetorical and ideological shifts in the structure of legal argumentation over time. Multiplying the types of legal analyses would permit us to detail the different functions and properties of laws, even where greater efficiency is the motivation behind their implementation. In sum, it would enable us to better trace the flow of resources, the creation of new powers through law, and the emergence of new social groups and political constituencies. Critical analysis directs our attention to the role of law in constituting social relations and practices, rather than merely regulating them after the fact; it reminds us that legal rules stand to be implicated in the production of the very social phenomena to which law is called to respond. Attention to this role raises a whole series of inquiries in the context of reform. How might reforms affect existing social groups? Workers? Women? Ethnic or national minorities? How might they affect sexual identities, racial affiliations? What new social formations might they produce? Critical readings should aim to bring to the surface, rather than repress, the tradeoffs that are involved in different reform paths. One of the most pernicious dimensions of simplistic rule of law and good governance narratives is the claim that there are no conflicts among desirable values and ends. Resistance is sure to arise from contesting what is dogma, to wit, that the implementation of efficiency enhancing rules is an uncontentious goal, that everyone stands to gain from free trade, that property and contract rights are the paramount legal entitlements, and that rule-based regimes "level the playing field" and ensure fairness  *740  among otherwise unequal parties. Treating such claims as interrogatories rather than simply facts, however, is likely to engender better attention to the actual effects of reforms. Although transformative projects backed by law are often imagined as inherently progressive, they are not necessarily so. In addition, there is inevitable uncertainty and risk in law reform. If there is a comparative advantage that lawyers bring to the table, it is familiarity with the varied and unpredictable path of legal rules in operation. Indeed, no one else can be expected to possess the intimate knowledge of the fate of legal rules that lawyers and legal academics acquire in the course of their professional lives. In short, to the extent that we get involved in law and development ventures, at a minimum we should export the critique too. It seems at best negligent, at worst disingenuous, to fail to speak candidly about the conflicts within the discipline, and to suppress the wide variety of opinions about whether particular reforms are a good or bad idea. To do so is patronizing and unnecessarily mystifying; it also seems unlikely to be persuasive, at least for long. 3. Alternative Institutional Possibilities  Another possibility is to trace alternative futures, by positing regulatory and institutional scenarios that are equally compatible with the rule of law. 28 To put it another way, lawyers could play a role in countering the "false necessity" of reforms, whether advanced in the name of law or growth simpliciter. 29 Some of these alternatives may be defended in the name of furthering the project of progress-through-economic-growth, although they are different from those conventionally put forward. But whether or not they are congruent with the aims of current governance and market reform projects, a central task should be to resist the idea that the rule of law, good governance, and market reform are institutionally interchangeable, or that any one configuration of laws is required to create market regimes based on the rule of law. Lawyers have a useful professional role to play in detailing the myriad ways in which market norms have been institutionalized in different contexts and at different periods of time in the same jurisdiction. Perhaps at the present time, one of the most important tasks is to simply point out the variety of different legal rules that might be available to respond to the challenges and dilemmas posed by globalization. Fetishism about particular rules and institutions may stand in the *741  way of some otherwise needed or desired social transformation. For example, changes may be foreclosed because they are said to trespass on property rights, because they differ from the rules and institutions conventionally found in model market societies, or because they overtly further a particular social or distributive interest rather than a "general" or "universal" interest. All such claims, however, rest on assumptions that close analyses of law easily disturb. Legal scholars might point out that property rights, for example, are routinely disaggregated and allocated among different groups, reconstituted by a variety of regulatory structures, and restrained by the operation of other legal rules both "private" and "public."
1nc – counterplan 

Text: The United States federal government should not substantially increase statutory restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States by establishing a federal court with jurisdiction over targeted killing orders. Instead, the United States federal government should pass a statute granting a right to sue in any federal court on claims that the government improperly unleashed drones with subsequent damages if legal rules were found to be violated. The United States federal government should assign jurisdiction to specific judicial districts and strip the executive of the invocation of the “state secrets” and “political question” doctrines. 

The CP solves the case through ex post review rather than ex ante or before the fact judicial interference
Epps 13 (Garrett Epps, Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, “Why a Secret Court Won’t Solve the Drone-Strike Problem,” The Atlantic, February 16, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/why-a-secret-court-wont-solve-the-drone-strike-problem/273246/)
Finally, some scholars have suggested that the Congress create a new "cause of action"--a right to sue in an ordinary federal court on a claim that the government improperly unleashed drones on a deceased relative. The survivors of the late Anwar al-Awlaki tried such a suit, and the Obama administration has so far insisted that it concerns "political questions," not fitted for judicial proceedings. Congress could pass a statute specifically granting a right to sue in a federal district court.
Without careful design, that would actually not make things any better. The survivors will file their complaint; the administration will claim state secrets and refuse to provide information. A court might reject the secrets claim and order the government to produce discovery. The administration would probably refuse to comply. The court's recourse would be to order judgment for the plaintiffs. The dead person's family would get some money, but we'd be no closer to accountability for the drone-strike decision.
Professor Stephen I. Vladeck of American University has offered a remedy to this problem. He proposes a statute in which Congress assigns jurisdiction to a specific judicial district, probably the District Court for the District of Columbia. Congress in the statute would strip the executive of such defenses as "state secrets" and "political question." Survivors of someone killed in a drone attack could bring a wrongful-death suit. The secret evidence would be reviewed by the judge, government lawyers, and the lawyers for the plaintiff. Those lawyers would have to have security clearance; the evidence would not be shown to the plaintiffs themselves, or to the public. After review of the evidence, the court would rule. If the plaintiffs won, they would receive only symbolic damages--but they'd also get a judgment that the dead person had been killed illegally.

The government should refrain from foreclosing claims --- only after the fact review provides effective judicial restriction
HRF 13 (Human Rights First, “How to Ensure that the U.S. Drone Program does not Undermine Human Rights,” updated April 2013, http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/blueprints2012/HRF_Targeted_Killing_blueprint.pdf)
A court could, however, provide meaningful judicial review of targeting decisions after the fact, when claims for liability for unlawful killings are brought by survivors. Those wrongfully targeted, or their survivors, are entitled to remedy, and the Administration should refrain from claiming that “state secrets” or the “political question” doctrine should foreclose such claims.
1nc – disad 

War Powers DA 

The plan would require a revolutionary re-write of the constitution --- it will cause a massive fight
Rona 13 (Gabor Rona, international legal director at Human Rights First, “The Pro-Rule of Law Argument Against a ‘Drone Court,’” The Hill, February 27, 2013, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/285041-the-pro-rule-of-law-argument-against-a-drone-court)
But the assertion of unilateral, executive war powers to justify killing in the fight against terrorism is questionable. Policymakers wonder if they ought to “tinker with the machinery of death” before allowing the president to impose the ultimate penalty. So as the House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on “Drones and the War on Terror,” a seemingly appealing but dangerous idea is making the rounds: the establishment of a federal court to authorize putting names on a “kill list.”
The instinct to regulate the government's claimed unilateral killing power is understandable. But a U.S. court empowered to issue death warrants against people who have not been charged, let alone convicted, would be a revolutionary re-write of separation of powers and of the very meaning of judicial review. It would be unjust, ineffective, and counterproductive. It may be unconstitutional as well.
A “drone court” would be unjust because the proposed target would be unable to appear and make the case for preserving his life. A secret judicial process in which the right to life is at stake but the owner of that life has no say is an affront both to American values and international legal principles.
While doing much harm, a “drone court” would do little, if any, good. Supporters like the idea because it appears to provide some check on the President’s secretive exercise of this lethal unilateral power. But what judge would risk preventing the interception of a terrorist? What’s more likely is that the drone court would be a rubber stamp, creating only the appearance, not the reality, of justice.
In wartime, the president may authorize killing of members of enemy armed forces or anyone else directly participating in hostilities. In an unconventional war such as this one, where the definition of the “enemy” and its “armed forces” isn’t always clear, the president needs to disclose how he defines that enemy and determines who is a member of its armed forces or otherwise participating in its fight against the United States, so that we can have some assurance he’s not killing the wrong people. A secret court would have no special expertise in making that determination.
Outside an active armed conflict, the legal standards are different: a suspect can be targeted for death only if he poses an “imminent threat” to human life that cannot be thwarted by non-lethal means. Here a “drone court” would be especially useless. We wouldn’t want the military to have to jump through judicial hoops to thwart a truly imminent attack. If the threat is imminent, there is, by definition, no time to seek judicial review, and if there is time, the threat is, by definition, not imminent.
But a “drone court” would be worse than ineffective: it would harm national security. Throughout the “war on terror,” policies that offend international law, including the broad scope of the government's claimed authority to kill, have inhibited allies from sharing essential intelligence with the United States and damaged the country’s reputation as a beacon on human rights. A secret court would only reinforce the perception that the United States concocts its own secret rules while insisting that other countries follow the international public ones.
Pre-targeting judicial intervention is also probably unconstitutional because the U.S. constitution empowers courts to hear "cases and controversies," but not to render "advisory opinions." Adjudication of an act to take place in the future would seem to violate this restriction.

Wartime will force Obama to resist.  The intractable battle creates a national diversion and impairs military wartime decisions
Lobel 8—Professor of Law @ University of Pittsburgh Jules Lobel, “Conflicts Between the Commander in Chief and Congress: Concurrent Power over the Conduct of War,” Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 69, 2008, pg. 391

The critical difficulty with a contextual approach is its inherent ambiguity and lack of clarity, which tends to sharply shift the balance of power in favor of a strong President acting in disregard of congressional will. For example, the application of the Feldman and Issacharoff test asking whether the congressional restriction makes realistic sense in the modern world would yield no coherent separation of powers answer if applied to the current Administration’s confrontation with Congress. It would undoubtedly embolden the President to ignore Congress’s strictures. The President’s advisors would argue that the McCain Amendment’s ban on cruel and inhumane treatment, or FISA’s requirement of a warrant, does not make realistic sense in the context of the contemporary realities of the war on terror in which we face a shadowy, ruthless nonstate enemy that has no respect for laws or civilized conduct, a conclusion hotly disputed by those opposed to the President’s policies. Focusing the debate over whether Congress has the power to control the treatment of detainees on the President’s claim that the modern realities of warfare require a particular approach will merge the separation of powers inquiry of who has the power with the political determination of what the policy ought to be. Such an approach is likely to encourage the President to ignore and violate legislative wartime enactments whenever he or she believes that a statute does not make realistic sense—that is, when it conflicts with a policy the President embraces. 53
The contextual approach has a “zone of twilight” quality that Justice Jackson suggested in Youngstown. 54 Often constitutional norms matter less than political realities—wartime reality often favors a strong President who will overwhelm both Congress and the courts. While it is certainly correct— as Jackson noted—that neither the Court nor the Constitution will preserve separation of powers where Congress is too politically weak to assert its authority, a fluid contextual approach is an invitation to Presidents to push beyond the constitutional boundaries of their powers and ignore legislative enactments that seek to restrict their wartime authority.
Moreover, another substantial problem with a contextual approach in the war powers context is that the judiciary is unlikely to resolve the dispute. 55 The persistent refusal of the judiciary to adjudicate the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution strongly suggests that courts will often refuse to intervene to resolve disputes between the President and Congress over the constitutionality of a statute that a President claims impermissibly interferes with her conduct of an ongoing war. 56 This result leaves the political branches to engage in an intractable dispute over the statute’s constitutionality that saps the nation’s energy, diverts focus from the political issues in dispute, and endangers the rule of law.
Additionally, in wartime it is often important for issues relating to the exercise of war powers to be resolved quickly. Prompt action is not usually the forte of the judiciary.
If, however, a constitutional consensus exists or could be consolidated that Congress has the authority to check the President’s conduct of warfare, that consensus might help embolden future Congresses to assert their power. Such a consensus might also help prevent the crisis, chaos, and stalemate that may result when the two branches assert competing constitutional positions and, as a practical matter, judicial review is unavailable to resolve the dispute.
Moreover, the adoption of a contextual, realist approach will undermine rather than aid the cooperation and compromise between the political branches that is so essential to success in wartime. In theory, an unclear, ambiguous division of power between the branches that leaves each branch uncertain of its legal authority could further compromise and cooperation. However, modern social science research suggests that the opposite occurs. 57 Each side in the dispute is likely to grasp onto aspects or factors within the ambiguous or complex reality to support its own self-serving position. This self-serving bias hardens each side’s position and allows the dispute to drag on, as has happened with the ongoing, unresolved dispute over the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. Pg. 407-409

Stalemate creates an antiwar congressional coalition that guts our commitment to Afghanistan
Lieberman 10—Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut Joseph I. Leiberman, “Back to a Bipartisan Foreign Policy,” Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2010, pg. http://tinyurl.com/m5z623w

This year's midterm elections marked the first time since 9/11 that national security was not a major consideration for American voters. But it is precisely in the realm of foreign policy and national security that we may have the greatest opportunities for bipartisan cooperation between President Obama and resurgent Republicans in Congress.
Seizing these opportunities will require both parties to break out of a destructive cycle that has entrapped them since the end of the Cold War and caused them to depart from the principled internationalist tradition that linked Democratic presidents like Truman and Kennedy with Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan.
During the 1990s, too many Republicans in Congress reflexively opposed President Clinton's policies in the Balkans and elsewhere. Likewise, during the first decade of the 21st century, too many Democrats came to view the post-9/11 exercise of American power under President Bush as a more pressing danger than the genuine enemies we faced in the world.
The larger truth was that the foreign policy practices and ideals of both President Clinton and Bush were within the mainstream of American history and values. And if one can see through the fog of partisanship that has continued to choke Washington since President Obama was elected in 2008, the same is true of the new administration as well.
President Obama has moved to the internationalist center on several key issues of national security. Although both parties are hesitant to acknowledge it, the story of the Obama administration's foreign policy is as much continuity as change from the second term of the Bush administration—from the surge in Afghanistan to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, and from drone strikes against al Qaeda to a long-term commitment to Iraq.
Republicans have also stayed loyal to the internationalist policies they supported under President Bush. When they have criticized the Obama administration, it has reflected this worldview—arguing that the White House has not been committed enough in its prosecution of the war in Afghanistan or done enough to defend human rights and democracy in places like Iran and China.
The critical question now, as we look forward to the next two years, is whether this convergence of the two parties towards the internationalist center can be sustained and strengthened. There are three national security priorities where such a consensus is urgently needed.
The first is the war in Afghanistan. To his credit, President Obama last December committed more than 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as part of a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign, despite opposition within the Democratic Party.
Having just returned from Afghanistan, I am increasingly confident that the tide there is turning in our favor, with growing signs of military progress. But as Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has warned, success will come neither quickly nor easily, and there is still much tough fighting ahead. It is all but certain that no more than a small number of U.S. forces will be able to withdraw responsibly in July 2011, and that success in Afghanistan is going to require a long-term commitment by the U.S. beyond this date.
Sustaining political support for the war in Afghanistan therefore will increasingly require President Obama and Republicans in Congress to stand together. Failure to sustain this bipartisan alliance runs the risk that an alternative coalition will form in Congress, between antiwar Democrats and isolationist Republicans. That would be the single greatest political threat to the success of the war effort in Afghanistan, which remains critical to our security at home.

Afghanistan’s future will be determined by decisions made during US withdrawal.  A botched withdrawal destabilizes Pakistan, fuels Afghani reprisal murders and encourages Russian adventurism.
Miller 12—Professor of International Security Affairs and Director for the Afghanistan-Pakistan program @ National Defense University Paul D. Miller (Former Director for Afghanistan on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Bush and Obama), “It’s Not Just Al-Qaeda: Stability in the Most Dangerous Region,” World Affairs Journal, March-April 2012, pg. http://tinyurl.com/lnplsb7
In fact, the war is only now entering its culminating phase, indicated by the willingness of both US and Taliban officials to talk openly about negotiations, something parties to a conflict do only when they see more benefit to stopping a war than continuing it. That means the war’s ultimate outcome is likely to be decided by the decisions, battles, and bargaining of the next year or so. And its outcome will have huge implications for the future of US national security. In turn, that means the collective decision to ignore the war and its consequences is foolish at best, dangerous at worst. While Americans have lost interest in the war, the war may still have an interest in America. Now is the time, more than ten years into the effort, to remind ourselves what is at stake in Afghanistan and why the United States must secure lasting stability in South Asia.
It was, of course, al-Qaeda’s attack on the US homeland that triggered the intervention in Afghanistan, but wars, once started, always involve broader considerations than those present at the firing of the first shot. The war in Afghanistan now affects all of America’s interests across South Asia: Pakistan’s stability and the security of its nuclear weapons, NATO’s credibility, relations with Iran and Russia, transnational drug-trafficking networks, and more. America leaves the job in Afghanistan unfinished at its peril.
The chorus of voices in the Washington policy establishment calling for withdrawal is growing louder. In response to this pressure, President Obama has pledged to withdraw the surge of thirty thousand US troops by September 2012—faster than US military commanders have recommended—and fully transition leadership for the country’s security to the Afghans in 2013. These decisions mirror the anxieties of the electorate: fifty-six percent of Americans surveyed recently by the Pew Research Center said that the US should remove its troops as soon as possible.
But it is not too late for Obama (who, after all, campaigned in 2008 on the importance of Afghanistan, portraying it as “the good war” in comparison to Iraq) to reformulate US strategy and goals in South Asia and explain to the American people and the world why an ongoing commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan and the region, however unpopular, is nonetheless necessary.
The Afghanistan Study Group, a collection of scholars and former policymakers critical of the current intervention, argued in 2010 that al-Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan and is unlikely to return, even if Afghanistan reverts to chaos or Taliban rule. It argued that three things would have to happen for al-Qaeda to reestablish a safe haven and threaten the United States: “1) the Taliban must seize control of a substantial portion of the country, 2) Al Qaeda must relocate there in strength, and 3) it must build facilities in this new ‘safe haven’ that will allow it to plan and train more effectively than it can today.” Because all three are unlikely to happen, the Study Group argued, al-Qaeda almost certainly will not reestablish a presence in Afghanistan in a way that threatens US security.
In fact, none of those three steps are necessary for al-Qaeda to regain its safe haven and threaten America. The group could return to Afghanistan even if the Taliban do not take back control of the country. It could—and probably would—find safe haven there if Afghanistan relapsed into chaos or civil war. Militant groups, including al-Qaeda offshoots, have gravitated toward other failed states, like Somalia and Yemen, but Afghanistan remains especially tempting, given the network’s familiarity with the terrain and local connections. Nor does al-Qaeda, which was never numerically overwhelming, need to return to Afghanistan “in strength” to be a threat. Terrorist operations, including the attacks of 2001, are typically planned and carried out by very few people. Al-Qaeda’s resilience, therefore, means that stabilizing Afghanistan is, in fact, necessary even for the most basic US war aims. The international community should not withdraw until there is an Afghan government and Afghan security forces with the will and capacity to deny safe haven without international help.
Setting aside the possibility of al-Qaeda’s reemergence, the United States has other important interests in the region as well—notably preventing the Taliban from gaining enough power to destabilize neighboring Pakistan, which, for all its recent defiance, is officially a longstanding American ally. (It signed two mutual defense treaties with the United States in the 1950s, and President Bush designated it a major non-NATO ally in 2004.) State failure in Pakistan brokered by the Taliban could mean regional chaos and a possible loss of control of its nuclear weapons. Preventing such a catastrophe is clearly a vital national interest of the United States and cannot be accomplished with a few drones.
Alarmingly, Pakistan is edging toward civil war. A collection of militant Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and Tehrik-e Nafaz-e Shariat-e Mohammadi (TNSM), among others, are fighting an insurgency that has escalated dramatically since 2007 across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Baluchistan. According to the Brookings Institution’s Pakistan Index, insurgents, militants, and terrorists now regularly launch more than one hundred and fifty attacks per month on Pakistani government, military, and infrastructure targets. In a so far feckless and ineffectual response, Pakistan has deployed nearly one hundred thousand regular army soldiers to its western provinces. At least three thousand soldiers have been killed in combat since 2007, as militants have been able to seize control of whole towns and districts. Tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and militants—the distinction between them in these areas is not always clear—have been killed in daily terror and counterterror operations.
The two insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan are linked. Defeating the Afghan Taliban would give the United States and Pakistan momentum in the fight against the Pakistani Taliban. A Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, on the other hand, will give new strength to the Pakistani insurgency, which would gain an ally in Kabul, safe haven to train and arm and from which to launch attacks into Pakistan, and a huge morale boost in seeing their compatriots win power in a neighboring country. Pakistan’s collapse or fall to the Taliban is (at present) unlikely, but the implications of that scenario are so dire that they cannot be ignored. Even short of a collapse, increasing chaos and instability in Pakistan could give cover for terrorists to increase the intensity and scope of their operations, perhaps even to achieve the cherished goal of stealing a nuclear weapon.
Although our war there has at times seemed remote, Afghanistan itself occupies crucial geography. Situated between Iran and Pakistan, bordering China, and within reach of Russia and India, it sits on a crossroads of Asia’s great powers. This is why it has, since the nineteenth century, been home to the so-called Great Game—in which the US should continue to be a player.
Two other players, Russia and Iran, are aggressive powers seeking to establish hegemony over their neighbors. Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons, has an elite military organization (the Quds Force) seeking to export its Islamic Revolution, and uses the terror group Hezbollah as a proxy to bully neighboring countries and threaten Israel. Russia under Vladimir Putin is seeking to reestablish its sphere of influence over its near abroad, in pursuit of which it (probably) cyber-attacked Estonia in 2007, invaded Georgia in 2008, and has continued efforts to subvert Ukraine.
Iran owned much of Afghan territory centuries ago, and continues to share a similar language, culture, and religion with much of the country. It maintains extensive ties with the Taliban, Afghan warlords, and opposition politicians who might replace the corrupt but Western-oriented Karzai government. Building a stable government in Kabul will be a small step in the larger campaign to limit Tehran’s influence.
Russia remains heavily involved in the Central Asian republics. It has worked to oust the United States from the air base at Manas, Kyrgyzstan. It remains interested in the huge energy reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Russia may be wary of significant involvement in Afghanistan proper, unwilling to repeat the Soviet Union’s epic blunder there. But a US withdrawal from Afghanistan followed by Kabul’s collapse would likely embolden Russia to assert its influence more aggressively elsewhere in Central Asia or Eastern Europe, especially in the Ukraine.
A US departure from Afghanistan will also continue to resonate for years to come in the strength and purpose of NATO. Every American president since Harry Truman has affirmed the centrality of the Atlantic Alliance to US national security. The war in Afghanistan under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the Alliance’s first out-of-area operation in its sixty-year history, was going poorly until the US troop surge. Even with the limited success that followed, allies have complained that the burden in Afghanistan has been distributed unevenly. Some, like the British, Canadians, and Poles, are fighting a shooting war in Kandahar and Helmand, while others, like the Lithuanians and Germans, are doing peacekeeping in Ghor and Kunduz. The poor command and control—split between four regional centers—left decisionmaking slow and poorly coordinated for much of the war. ISAF’s strategy was only clarified in 2008 and 2009, when Generals David McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal finally developed a more coherent campaign plan with counterinsurgency-appropriate rules of engagement.
A bad end in Afghanistan could have dire consequences for the Atlantic Alliance, leaving the organization’s future, and especially its credibility as a deterrent to Russia, in question. It would not be irrational for a Russian observer of the war in Afghanistan to conclude that if NATO cannot make tough decisions, field effective fighting forces, or distribute burdens evenly, it cannot defend Europe. The United States and Europe must prevent that outcome by salvaging a credible result to its operations in Afghanistan—one that both persuades Russia that NATO is still a fighting alliance and preserves the organization as a pillar of US national security.
For some critics, organizing US grand strategy around the possible appearance of Russian tanks across the Fulda Gap is the perfect example of generals continuing to fight the last war. For them, the primary threat to US national security comes from terrorists, insurgency, state failure, ecological disaster, infectious pandemic disease, cyber attacks, transnational crime, piracy, and gangs.
But if that view of the world is right, it is all the more reason to remain engaged in Afghanistan, because it is the epicenter of the new, asymmetric, transnational threats to the US and allied national security. Even those who deny al-Qaeda could regain safe haven in Afghanistan cannot deny how much power, and capacity for damage, the drug lords have acquired there. In some years they have controlled wealth equivalent to fifty percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and produced in excess of ninety percent of the world’s heroin. Today, their products feed Europe’s endemic heroin problem, and the wealth this trade generates has done much to undermine nine years of work building a new and legitimate government in Kabul. In their quest for market share, the drug lords will expand wherever there is demand for their product or potential to grow a secure supply, almost certainly starting in Pakistan, where the trade was centered in the 1980s. Where the drug lords go, state failure, along with its accompanying chaos and asymmetric threats, will follow, as the violence and anarchy currently wracking parts of Mexico suggest. Imagine the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as a failed narco-state with the profits funding the revival of al-Qaeda or its many terror offshoots.
South Asia’s narcotics-smuggling cartels are dangerously close to seizing control of an entire state and using it to undermine law, order, and stability across an entire region. The poppy and heroin kingpins are fabulously wealthy and powerful; they oppose US interests, weaken US allies, and are headquartered in Afghanistan. Defeating them is a vital interest of the United States.
The allied mission in Afghanistan also aims to encourage the growth of democracy. Some cringe at the very thought of democratization being a part of US foreign policy, so discredited is the idea, for some, by the Iraq War, by the enduring corruption of the Afghan government, and by neoconservatives’ supposed naïveté and arrogance in assuming that this part of the world would yield so easily to democratic reform. But fostering democracy is still a vital American national security interest. However daunting the experience of trying to grow democracy in hostile soil may be, it is nonetheless true that genuine democratic change brings stability. Democracies tend to ally and trade with each other; they see the world in similar ways, and settle disputes peacefully. Spreading democracy decreases the frequency of war, creates potential allies, widens zones of stability, and as a consequence makes America safer. This is why we dare not give up on democracy promotion in South Asia.
The process of transitioning to democracy is hard, time-consuming, and even risky—it can temporarily increase the chances of instability as the experience in Iraq, among other recent examples, has shown. The difficulties of democratization are particularly well dramatized by events in Afghanistan, which has held four elections in ten years that have not made the country stable or the government honest. Continued inefficiency and corruption has undermined Afghans’ confidence in the government—although not their belief in the idea of democracy—with predictable results on voter turnout.
There is nothing inevitable about democracy’s success, as neoconservatives appeared to believe after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Taliban, or the Baathist regime in Iraq. But there is also nothing inevitable about its failure, as realists have argued in the years since these events. Democracies require longer time lines than an electoral cycle or deployment timetable, and they require security and institutional capacity, not just elections.
Afghanistan will not become a model of democracy within the foreseeable future, thanks to persistent problems of insecurity, corruption, and poverty. But the opportunity for some form of rough democracy in Afghanistan is real. Polling consistently shows that Afghans welcome greater accountability and representation in their government. Their main complaint is not that Kabul is too democratic, but that it is not democratic enough, failing to follow the rules of democratic fair play. That gives the United States the opportunity to continue to encourage genuinely local efforts to build a new democracy through capacity building, technical assistance, and training programs. Given the choice between planting democratic seeds today and accepting a tyranny imposed by a minority, the United States should choose the former every time.
Finally, the United States should remain involved in Afghanistan to prevent the reemergence of a humanitarian catastrophe. If Kabul collapses, civil war will almost certainly erupt and, at bare minimum, the warlords will reestablish their brutal fiefdoms. During Afghanistan’s civil wars, from 1992 to 2001, warlords at the head of sectarian militias regularly committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing, as the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch, and the UN have well documented. The Taliban amassed a long record of massacring civilians and targeting the Hazara for ethnic cleansing, notably at Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998, Robatak Pass in 2000, and Yakawlang in 2001. But their crimes were not unique; Ittihad-e-Islami, for example, was accused of ethnic cleansing against the Hazara during a battle in the West Kabul neighborhood of Afshar in 1993. And if the Taliban take power over part or all of Afghanistan, reprisal murders against supporters of the Karzai government, including perhaps whole tribes, are likely to be widespread and swift, especially against women and religious minorities.
Terrorism Adv
Middle East War 

Alt causes to middle eastern instability – arab spring proves and disproves escalation 

Empirics prove no war
Cook 07 – CFR senior fellow for MidEast Studies. BA in international studies from Vassar College, an MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and both an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania (Steven, Ray Takeyh, CFR fellow, and Suzanne Maloney, Brookings fellow, 6 /28, Why the Iraq war won't engulf the Mideast, http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=6383265)
Underlying this anxiety was a scenario in which Iraq's sectarian and ethnic violence spills over into neighboring countries, producing conflicts between the major Arab states and Iran as well as Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government. These wars then destabilize the entire region well beyond the current conflict zone, involving heavyweights like Egypt. This is scary stuff indeed, but with the exception of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds, the scenario is far from an accurate reflection of the way Middle Eastern leaders view the situation in Iraq and calculate their interests there. It is abundantly clear that major outside powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey are heavily involved in Iraq. These countries have so much at stake in the future of Iraq that it is natural they would seek to influence political developments in the country. Yet, the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war either to protect their own sect or ethnic group or to prevent one country from gaining the upper hand in Iraq. The reasons are fairly straightforward. First, Middle Eastern leaders, like politicians everywhere, are primarily interested in one thing: self-preservation. Committing forces to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the conflict went badly, could threaten domestic political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared toward regime protection rather than projecting power and thus have little capability for sending troops to Iraq. Second, there is cause for concern about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis returning from Iraq destabilize their home countries, plunging the region into conflict. Middle Eastern leaders are preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the 1990s, when Arab fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services are being vigilant about who is coming in and going from their countries. In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested approximately 200 people suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall along part of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom. Finally, there is no precedent for Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they are not directly involved. The Iraqis and the Saudis did send small contingents to fight the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either ineffective or never made it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a compelling interest in establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect the Lebanese from the Israelis or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was regarded as someone else's fight. Indeed, this is the way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American fight. As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have long preferred to press their interests through proxies as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran has access and influence over powerful Shiite militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely and unnecessary. So Iraqis will remain locked in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may abet, but will remain within the borders of Iraq. The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil wars. But given its experience with ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability to contain its civil strife and prevent local conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East.

Nuclear Terrorism 

Too many barriers – empirically denied 

The risk of nuclear terrorism is vanishingly small --- terrorists must succeed at each of twenty plus stages --- failing at one means zero risk.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)
LIKELIHOOD In his thoughtful, influential, and well-argued 2004 book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe—a work Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times finds "terrifying"—Graham Allison relayed his "considered judgment" that "on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not." He repeated that judgment in an article published two years later—albeit without reducing the terminal interval to compensate—and he had presumably relied on the same inspira-tional mechanism in 1995 to predict: "In the absence of a determined program of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade is out."1 He has quite a bit of company in his perpetually alarming conclusions. In 2003, UN Ambassador John Negroponte judged there to be a "a high probability" that wandJjjn two years al-Qaeda would attempt an attack using a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction. When some 85 foreign policy experts were polled by -Senator Richard Lugar in 2004 and 2005, they concluded on aver-age that there was a 29 percent likelihood a nuclear explosion would occur somewhere in the world within the next ten years, and they overwhelmingly anticipated that this would likely be carried out by terrorists, not by a government. And in 2007, physicist Richard Garwin put the likelihood of a nuclear explosion on an American or European city by terrorist or other means at 20 percent per year, which would work out to 87 percent over a ten-year period.2 In late 2008, after working for six months and interviewing more than 250 people, a congressionally mandated task force, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (possibly known as COPWOMDPAT to its friends) issued its report, portentously entitled World at Risk. It led by expressing the belief that "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013." Although the report is careful to reassure its readers that it does not intend to frighten them about the current state of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, it failed miserably in that admirable goal almost immediately. Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, proclaimed shortly after the report was issued, that it "scared the pants off of most of us."3 In its dire forecast, the report's phraseology echoes, of course, Allison's formulation of 2004, and this may owe something to the fact that he was one of the commission's nine members. There are a couple of differences, however. In Allison's earlier rendering, bad things happen only if we stay on "the current path." Thus, should bad things fail to occur, this happy result could be taken as proof that we somehow managed somewhere along the line to alter our path, and who, pray, will be able exactly to designate what a "current path" actually is (or was)? The commission, in stark contrast, claims bad things are likely to happen "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency" something, experience suggests, that is next to impossible. On the other hand, the commission artfully broadens its definition of bad things from Allison's "acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets" to the use of a "weapon of mass destruction" by terrorists "some-where in the world." As one critic points out, there is certainly a good chance that someone somewhere will release some germs, killing few, if any, or, as insurgents have done in Iraq, ineffectually lace the occasional bomb with chlorine. Although no normal person would consider either act to constitute "mass destruction," the report can, strictly speaking, claim vindication. Actually, the report is on even safer ground. A man in Rockford, Illinois, who purchased some bogus hand grenades from an FBI informant with the intent to detonate them at a local shopping mall, has been convicted of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction under laws that creatively define hand grenades to be weapons of mass destruction.4 Even those who decidedly disagree with such scary-sounding, if somewhat elusive, prognostications about nuclear terrorism often come out seeming like they more or less agree. In his Atomic Bazaar, William Langewiesche spends a great deal of time and effort assessing the process by means of which a terrorist group could come up with a bomb. Unlike Allison—and, for that matter, the considerable bulk of accepted opinion—he concludes that it "remains very, very unlikely. It's a possibility, but unlikely." Also: The best information is that no one has gotten anywhere near this. I mean, if you look carefully and practically at this process, you see that it is an enormous undertaking full of risks for the would-be terrorists. And so far there is no public case, at least known, of any appreciable amount of weapons-grade HEU highly enriched uranium disappearing. And that's the first step. If you don't have that, you don't have anything. The first of these bold and unconventional declarations comes from a book discussion telecast in June 2007 on C-SPAN and the second from an inter-view on National Public Radio. Judgments in the book itself, however, while consistent with such conclusions, are expressed more ambiguously, even coyly: "at the extreme is the possibility, entirely real, that one or two nuclear weapons will pass into the hands of the new stateless guerrillas, the jihad-ists, who offer none of the retaliatory targets that have so far underlain the nuclear peace" or "if a would-be nuclear terrorist calculated the odds, he would have to admit that they are stacked against^ffen," but they are "not impossible."5 The previous chapter arrayed a lengthy set of obstacles confront-: v ,„ ing the would-be atomic terrorist—often making use in the process of Langewlesche's excellent reporting. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if often with great difficulty, surmount each obstacle—that doing so in each case is, in Langewiesche's phrase, "not impossible."6 But it is vital to point out that, while it may be "not impossible" to surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them could quickly approach impossibility. If the odds are "stacked against" the terrorists, what are they? Lange-wiesche's discussion, as well as other material, helps us evaluate the many ways such a quest—in his words, "an enormous undertaking full of risks"— could fail. The odds, indeed, are stacked against the terrorists, perhaps massively so. In fact, the likelihood a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small. ARRAYING THE BARRIERS Assuming terrorists have some desire for the bomb (an assumption ques-tioned in the next chapter), fulfillment of that desire is obviously another matter. Even the very alarmed Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier contend that the atomic terrorists' task "would clearly be among the most difficult types of attack to carry out" or "one of the most difficult missions a terrorist group could hope to try" But, stresses the CIA's George Tenet, a terrorist atomic bomb is "possible" or "not beyond the realm of possibility." In his excellent discussion of the issue, Michael Levi ably catalogues a wide array of difficulties confronting the would-be atomic terrorist, adroitly points out that "terrorists must succeed at every stage, but the defense needs to succeed only once," sensibly warns against preoccupation with worst-case scenarios, and pointedly formulates "Murphy's Law of Nuclear Terrorism: What can go wrong might go wrong." Nevertheless, he holds nuclear terrorism to be a "genuine possibility," and concludes that a good defensive strategy can merely "tilt the odds in our favor."7 Accordingly, it might be useful to take a stab at estimating just how "difficult" or "not impossible" the atomic terrorists' task, in aggregate, is— that is, how far from the fringe of the "realm of possibility" it might be, how "genuine" the possibilities are, how tilted the odds actually are. After all, lots of things are "not impossible." It is "not impossible" that those legendary monkeys with typewriters could eventually output Shakespeare.8 Or it is "not impossible"—that is, there is a "genuine possibility"—that a colliding meteor or comet could destroy the earth, that Vladimir Putin or the British could decide one morning to launch a few nuclear weapons at Ohio, that an underwater volcano could erupt to cause a civilization-ending tidal wave, or that Osama bin Laden could convert to Judaism, declare himself to be the Messiah, and fly in a gaggle of mafioso hit men from Rome to have himself publicly crucified.9 As suggested, most discussions of atomic terrorism deal in a rather piecemeal fashion with the subject—focusing separately on individual tasks such as procuring HEU or assembling a device or transporting it. However, as the Gilmore Commission, a special advisory panel to the president and Congress, stresses, setting off a nuclear device capable of producing mass destruction presents "Herculean challenges," requiring that a whole series of steps be accomplished: obtaining enough fissile material, designing a weapon "that will bring that mass together in a tiny fraction of a second" and figuring out some way to deliver the thing. And it emphasizes that these merely constitute "the minimum requirements." If each is not fully met, the result is not simply a less powerful weapon, but one that can't produce any significant nuclear yield at all or can't be delivered.10 Following this perspective, an approach that seems appropriate is to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome by a terrorist group in order to carry out the task of producing, transporting, and then successfully detonating an improvised nuclear device, an explosive that, as Allison acknowledges, would be "large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient." Table 13.1 attempts to do this, and it arrays some 20 of these— all of which must be surmounted by the atomic aspirant. Actually, it would be quite possible to come up with a longer list: in the interests of keeping the catalogue of hurdles down to a reasonable number, some of the entries are actually collections of tasks and could be divided into two or three or more. For example, number 5 on the list requires that heisted highly enriched uranium be neither a scam nor part of a sting nor of inadequate quality due to insider incompetence, but this hurdle could as readily be rendered as three separate ones. In contemplating the task before them, woixftlsbe atomic terrorists effectively must go through an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do so, they are likely to find the prospects daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. "

Only causes small-scale destruction.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)

In the ensuing decades, massive exaggerations of the physical effects of nuclear weapons have been very much the rule. Words like "liquidate," "annihilate," and "vaporize," not to mention "Armageddon" and "apocalypse," have been commonly applied in scenarios where those sorts of extreme characterizations are simply not sound. As with Oppenheimer in 1946, it remains a massive overstatement to confidently insist, as the prominent foreign policy analyst Joseph Cirincione docs today, that "a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city," or to conclude with Robert Gallucci that a single terrorist atom bomb would be capable of “obliterating a large portion of a city." Nor is it correct to casually assert, as journalist Lawrence Scott Sheets does, that an atomic bomb of the size exploded at Hiroshima (or smaller) could, in the hands of terrorists, "kill millions of people."" And defense analyst Brian Jenkins is (presumably knowingly) engaging in rather extravagant hyperbole when he says that America's "awesome nuclear arsenal" during the cold war could have "destroyed the planet." But his auditors are likely to take him literally, and they are likely to do so as well for Cirincione when he asserts that the world's remain-arsenal of 26,000 nuclear weapons is enough "to destroy the planet several times over." By contrast, as one physicist points out, "the largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was sixty megatons, and that is one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane."

Nuclear use is just a theoretical possibility --- terrorists are not interested.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)

In this spirit, alarm about the possibility that small groups could fabricate and then set off nuclear weapons have been repeatedly raised at least since 1946, when, as noted in chapter 2, atomic bomb maker J. Robert Oppenheimer contended that if three or four men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could "destroy New York." Assertions like that proliferated after the 1950s, when the "suitcase bomb" appeared to become a something of a practical possibility. And it has now been well over three decades since a prominent terrorism specialist, Brian Jenkins, published his (not unreasonable) warnings about how "the world's increasing dependence on nuclear power may provide terrorists with weapons of mass destruction " and since a group empowered by the Atomic Energy Commission darkly noted that "terrorist groups have increased their professional skills, intelligence networks, finances, and levels of armaments throughout the world." And because of "the widespread dissemination of instructions for processing special nuclear materials and for making simple nuclear weapons," the group warned, "acquisition of special nuclear material remains the only substantial problem facing groups which desire to have such weapons."2 At around the same time, journalist John McPhee decided that, although only a small proportion of nuclear professionals expressed a "sense of urgency" about the issue, he would devote an entire book to a physicist he was able to find who did (nothing, of course, is as boring as a book about how urgent something isn't). That was Theodore Taylor, who proclaimed the problem to be "immediate" and who explained to McPhee at length "how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it into a bomb." To fabricate a crude atomic bomb, Taylor patiently, if urgently, pointed out, was "simple": all one needed was some plutonium oxide powder, some high explosives, and "a few things that anyone could buy in a hardware store." "Everything is a matter of probabilities," Taylor assured his rapt auditor, and at the time he thought either that it was already too late to "prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then," or that "in another ten or fifteen years, it will be too late."3 Thirty-five years later, we continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their "simple" task. In the wake of 9/11, concerns about the atomic terrorist surged, even though the terrorist attacks of that day used no special weapons. "Nothing is really new about these perils” notes the New York Times' Bill Keller, but 9/11 turned "a theoretical possibility into a felt danger," giving "our nightmares legs." Jenkins has run an Internet search to discover how often variants of the term al-Qaeda appeared within ten words of nuclear. There were only seven hits in 1999 and eleven in 2000, but this soared to 1,742 in 2001 and to 2,931 in 2002.4 In this spirit, Keller relays the response of then Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge when asked what he worried about most: Ridge "cupped his hands prayerfully and pressed his fingertips to his lips. 'Nuclear/ he said simply." On cue, when the presidential candidates were specifically asked by Jim Lehrer in their first debate in September 2004 to designate the "single most serious threat to the national security of the United States," the candidates had no difficulty agreeing on one. It was, in George W. Bush's words, a nuclear weapon "in the hands of a terrorist enemy." Concluded Lehrer, "So it's correct to say the single most serious threat you believe, both of you believe, is nuclear proliferation?" George W. Bush: "In the hands of a terrorist enemy." John Kerry: "Weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation....There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia.... there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates contends that every senior leader in the government is kept awake at night by "the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, espe-cially nuclear"5 If there has been a "failure of imagination" over all these decades, however, perhaps it has been in the inability or unwillingness to consider the difficulties confronting the atomic terrorist. Thus far, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes to go atomic, they, unlike generations of alarmed pundits, have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful.

It’s incredibly difficult to build a bomb. And stolen material wouldn’t be effective.
Slate ‘9  (Timothy Noah, “The Burden-of-Success Theory”, 2-28, L/N)
Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist of some renown, wrote in his 2004 book Nuclear Terrorism that "a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not." When the paperback came out, he wrote in an afterword that "the likelihood, indeed inevitability, of a nuclear terrorist attack absent a major departure for current policy and practice" had increased over the previous year. In "World At Risk," a report about proliferation and terrorism released in December 2008, Allison and his fellow members of a congressional blue-ribbon panel pushed the deadline back to 2013, broadened the location to "somewhere in the world," and broadened the weapons category to include biological and chemical agents. Such predictions cause other terrorism experts to roll their eyes. John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State who believes the terrorism threat is overstated, twitted Allison for predicting as far back as 1995 that "acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade i.e., the 1990s is out."  In fact, the likelihood of nuclear terrorism isn't that great. Mueller points out that Russian "suitcase bombs," which figure prominently in discussions about "loose nukes," were all built before 1991 and ceased being operable after three years. Enriched uranium is extremely difficult to acquire; over the past decade, Mueller argues, there were only 10 known thefts. The material stolen weighed a combined 16 pounds, which was nowhere near the amount needed to build a bomb. Once the uranium is acquired, building the weapon is simple in theory (anti-nuclear activist Howard Morland published a famous 1979 article about this in the Progressive) but quite difficult in practice, which is why entire countries have had to work decades to acquire the bomb, only sometimes meeting with success. (Plutonium, another fissile material, is sufficiently dangerous and difficult to transport that nonproliferation experts seldom discuss it.)  Gathering material for a biological weapon may be somewhat easier, but actually fashioning that weapon would be harder, as witnessed by the fact that such weapons have scarcely ever been deployed, even by nations. On the rare occasions when they have been, they've failed to live up to their billing as weapons of mass destruction. "Perhaps the greatest disincentive to using biological weapons," John Parachini of the RAND Corporation testified before Congress in 2001, "is that terrorists can inflict (and have inflicted) many more fatalities and casualties with conventional explosives than with unconventional weapons." The same argument applies to chemical weapons. In theory, journalist Gregg Easterbrook has noted (citing a congressional report), under perfect conditions, one ton of sarin could kill up to 8,000 people. But it's "reasonably unlikely" that a terrorist group could acquire that much sarin, and perfect conditions mean no wind and no sun. Even light winds would reduce casualties to 800. You'd be better off detonating a conventional bomb in a city square.

Insider sources confirm Al Qaeda has no intention to go beyond the internet. They aren't going for a nuke seriously.
Mueller ’10  (John, Prof. Pol. Sci. – Ohio State U., American Conservative, “Nuclear Bunkum”, 1-1, http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/jan/01/00020/)
To show al-Qaeda’s desire to obtain atomic weapons, many have focused on a set of conversations that took place in Afghanistan in August 2001 between two Pakistani nuclear scientists, bin Laden, and three other al-Qaeda officials. Pakistani intelligence officers characterize the discussions as “academic.” Reports suggest that bin Laden may have had access to some radiological material—acquired for him by radical Islamists in Uzbekistan—but the scientists told him that he could not manufacture a weapon with it. Bin Laden’s questions do not seem to have been very sophisticated. The scientists were incapable of providing truly helpful information because their expertise was not in bomb design but in processing fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities of a non-state group. Nonetheless, some U.S. intelligence agencies convinced themselves that the scientists provided al-Qaeda with a “blueprint” for constructing nuclear weapons.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, reportedly said that al-Qaeda’s atom-bomb efforts never went beyond searching the Internet. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts from the CIA and the Department of Energy examined information uncovered in Afghanistan and came to similar conclusions. They found no credible proof that al-Qaeda had obtained fissile material or a nuclear weapon and no evidence of “any radioactive material suitable for weapons.” They did uncover, however, a “nuclear related” document discussing “openly available concepts about the nuclear fuel cycle and some weapons related issues.” Physicist and weapons expert David Albright concludes that any al-Qaeda atomic efforts were “seriously disrupted”—indeed, “nipped in the bud”—by the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. After that, the “chance of al-Qaeda detonating a nuclear explosive appears on reflection to be low.”

Bioterror

Can’t solve – plan is functionally the status quo – no definition of imminent threat – CX proves 

Deployment of bioweapons dramatically reduces their death toll.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)

Properly developed and deployed, biological weapons could potentially, if thus far only in theory, kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people. The discussion remains theoretical because biological weapons have scarcely ever been used. For the most destructive results, they need to be dispersed in very low-altitude aerosol clouds. Since aerosols do not appreciably settle, pathogens like anthrax (which is not easy to spread or catch and is not contagious) would probably have to be sprayed near nose level. Moreover, 90 percent of the microorganisms are likely to die during the process of aerosolization, while their effectiveness could be reduced still further by sunlight, smog, humidity, and temperature changes. Explosive methods of dispersion may destroy the organisms, and, except for anthrax spores, long-term storage of lethal organisms in bombs or warheads is difficult: even if refrigerated, most of the organisms have a limited lifetime. Such weapons can take days or weeks to have full effect, during which time they can be countered with medical and civil defense measures. In the summary judgment of two careful analysts, delivering microbes and toxins over a wide area in the form most suitable for inflicting mass casualties-as an aerosol that could be inhaled-requires a delivery system of enormous sophistication, and even then effective dispersal could easily be disrupted by unfavorable environmental and meteorological conditions.

Terrorism—AT: Retaliation 

Public anxiety prevents retaliation
Huddy et al. 5 – Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY), Charles Taber (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY) and Gallya Lahav (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY), “Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3, July 2005, Pp. 593–608

The findings from this study lend further insight into the future trajectory of support for antiterrorism measures in the United States when we consider the potential effects of anxiety. Security threats in this and other studies increase support for military action (Jentleson 1992; Jentleson and Britton 1998;Herrmann,Tetlock, and Visser 1999). But anxious respondents were less supportive of belligerent military action against terrorists, suggesting an important source of opposition to military intervention. In the aftermath of 9/11, several factors were consistently related to heightened levels of anxiety and related psychological reactions, including living close to the attack sites (Galea et al. 2002; Piotrkowski and Brannen 2002; Silver et al. 2002), and knowing someone who was hurt or killed in the attacks (in this study). It is difficult to say what might happen if the United States were attacked again in the near future. Based on our results, it is plausible that a future threat or actual attack directed at a different geographic region would broaden the number of individuals directly affected by terrorism and concomitantly raise levels of anxiety. This could, in turn, lower support for overseas military action. In contrast, in the absence of any additional attacks levels of anxiety are likely to decline slowly over time (we observed a slow decline in this study), weakening opposition to future overseas military action. Since our conclusions are based on analysis of reactions to a single event in a country that has rarely felt the effects of foreign terrorism, we should consider whether they can be generalized to reactions to other terrorist incidents or to reactions under conditions of sustained terrorist action. Our answer is a tentative yes, although there is no conclusive evidence on this point as yet. Some of our findings corroborate evidence from Israel, a country that has prolonged experience with terrorism. For example, Israeli researchers find that perceived risk leads to increased vilification of a threatening group and support for belligerent action (Arian 1989; Bar-Tal and Labin 2001). There is also evidence that Israelis experienced fear during the Gulf War, especially in Tel Aviv where scud missiles were aimed (Arian and Gordon 1993). What is missing, however, is any evidence that anxiety tends to undercut support for belligerent antiterrorism measures under conditions of sustained threat. For the most part, Israeli research has not examined the distinct political effects of anxiety. In conclusion, the findings from this study provide significant new evidence on the political effects of terrorism and psychological reactions to external threat more generally. Many terrorism researchers have speculated that acts of terrorist violence can arouse fear and anxiety in a targeted population, which lead to alienation and social and political dislocation.8 We have clear evidence that the September 11 attacks did induce anxiety in a sizeable minority of Americans. And these emotions were strongly associated with symptoms of depression, appeared to inhibit learning about world events, and weakened support foroverseas military action. This contrasted, however, with Americans’ dominant reaction, which was a heightened concern about future terrorist attacks in the United States that galvanized support for government antiterrorist policy. In this sense, the 9/11 terrorists failed to arouse sufficient levels of anxiety to counteract Americans’ basic desire to strike back in order to increase future national security, even if such action increased the shortterm risk of terrorism at home. Possible future acts of terrorism, or a different enemy, however, could change the fine balance between a public attuned to future risks and one dominated by anxiety. 

Obama won’t retaliate --- he knows the costs.
Crowley, 10 (Michael, Senior Editor the New Republic, “Obama and Nuclear Deterrence”, http://www.tnr.com/node/72263)

Others argue that the United States should promise that it would never use nuclear weapons first, but only in response to a nuclear attack. As the story notes, some experts don't place much weight on how our publicly-stated doctrine emerges because they don't expect foreign nations to take it literally. And the reality is that any decisions about using nukes will certainly be case-by-case. But I'd still like to see some wider discussion of the underlying questions, which are among the most consequential that policymakers can consider. The questions are particularly vexing when it comes to terrorist groups and rogue states. Would we, for instance, actually nuke Pyongyang if it sold a weapon to terrorists who used it in America? That implied threat seems to exist, but I actually doubt that a President Obama--or any president, for that matter--would go through with it.

Pakistain Instability
Alt causes to stability
Northam, 2012.
(Jackie Northam is Foreign Affairs correspondent for NPR news. “Faltering Economy Threatens Pakistan’s Stability.” October 7, 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/10/04/162232742/faltering-economy-threatens-pakistans-stability)
If you want to gain a good insight into Pakistan's economic situation, just look at a few of the country's newspaper headlines on any given day. The language says it all: prices soar, stocks plunge, budget deficit swells, foreign investment evaporates — and the list goes on.¶ Now, analysts are increasingly worried that the faltering economy could join Pakistan's pervasive insurgency and repeated political upheavals as another serious threat to the country's stability.¶ A recent report issued at the World Economic Forum says Pakistan ranks in the bottom 20 out of the world's economies. Nadeem Ul Haque, deputy chairman of the state Planning Commission, says nobody really wants to talk about economic reform, or draw up new fiscal policies.¶ "The debate is always so charged with religion and geopolitics and war on terror, just talking about economics takes second place — in fact fifth place, in fact seventh place, 10th place," Haque says. "Nobody really wants to talk about economics."¶ And while the government avoids making difficult economic policy decisions, key industries in Pakistan are taking a hit.¶ A Target For Extremist Recruitment¶ At the Sitara textile mill in the eastern city of Faisalabad, huge panels of cotton are imprinted with pictures of Spider-Man and Justin Bieber. They will be turned into duvet covers and sent to the U.S., says the plant's general manager, Ashfaq Ahmad.¶ He says his mill is the only one in Pakistan that has two machines for doing flatbed printing — but only one of them is running. The other is closed, he says, because of a gas shutdown.¶ Ahmad says serious gas and electricity shortages mean that this and other plants in Faisalabad can only operate four days a week. Power outages can last up to six hours a day.¶ Rehan Naseem Bharara, vice president of Faisalabad's Chamber of Commerce, says many textile factories have shut down, and another just recently reduced staff.¶ "They had about 13,000 people in their factory three years back, but now only 3,400 people are working," Bharara says.¶ He says the cutbacks have had a huge impact on the community, especially the jobless, who become an "easy target for ... people who promote terrorism in this country."¶ Western analysts say the decaying economy is as much of a threat to Pakistan's stability as the Taliban because widespread poverty and unemployment could lead to more political instability and an increase in extremism.

No loose nukes
Siddiqi, 10 (Shahid R., Axis of Logic Columnist, former Paki Air Force and former Bureau Chief – Pakistan and Gulf Economist, “Critical Analysis Are Pakistan’s Strategic Nuclear Assets Threatened by Terrorists?” 2-22, http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_58619.shtml)
"This is all overblown rhetoric. Even if the country's leadership were to be incapacitated, Pakistan's protections are so strong that the arsenal could never slip from the hands of the country's National Command Authority”, General Kidwai told David Sangers of New York Times.  Pakistan has successfully put its strategic weapons program under formalized institutional control and oversight. National Command Authority effectively controls, manages and monitors strategic organizations, prevents tangible and intangible transfers or leakage of sensitive technologies and material - measures in line with IAEA safeguards. An over 8000-men strong Security Division secures nuclear assets and materials and guards against malevolent activities. Supported by the strategic forces, it is fully capable of ensuring nuclear security of components even in transit.  Prevention of theft of nuclear assets or fissile material  Like other nuclear states, Pakistan also faces the security challenge of preventing Non-State Actors and terror groups from gaining access to nuclear assets. Its preventive measures are no less effective than those of others.  Commenting on security of nuclear weapons, Congressional Research Service Report (RL-31589) on Nuclear Threat Reduction Measures for India and Pakistan; observes, “Fissile material components (pits) are thought to be kept separately from the rest of the warhead. Such a physical separation helps deter unauthorized use and complicates theft”.  Pakistan is believed to have incorporated certain technical safety features into the weapon design which coupled with de-mated status of the weapons, wherein the warhead and the fissile core are stored in separate locations, discourages and denies seizure or theft of an intact nuclear device, guards against accidental or unauthorized launch and prevents diversion of fissile material in the form of weapon components.  Pakistan’s nuclear controls also include the functional equivalent to the two-man rule and Permissive Action Links (PALs) that most nuclear states rely on to protect against loss of control, inadvertent weapons use, accidents, and other mishaps.  Pakistan’s nuclear material or radioactive sources have remained safe from theft or pilferage nor has there been any attempt by terrorist elements to gain access to weapons or materials. Lamenting the Western attitude Peter Lavoy (National Intelligence for Analysis) states, “Since the 1998 tests, various pronouncements, publications in the Western press, and events in the region have eroded the credibility of Pakistan’s nuclear command and control, overshadowing the efforts that have been made since 1999 to harness a coherent command system to ensure management of its nuclear capabilities….”  Guarav Kampani of Center for Nonproliferation Studies says, “Despite such speculative scenario building among policy and security analysts, there is little public evidence to suggest that the safety or the security of Pakistan’s nuclear installations or its nuclear command and control mechanism was ever in jeopardy from internal political instability or Islamists or terrorists forces inside Pakistan or nearby in Afghanistan, either during the American ‘War against Terrorism‘ in Afghanistan or during the 2001-2002 India-Pakistan military standoff.  In their analysis of threats from Islamic fundamentalism, Scott Parrish and William C. Potter of the WMD Commission opined, “……. while many states may view Islamic fundamentalism as a significant threat, there appears to be much less agreement on the nature of that threat and its relationship to nuclear terrorism or proliferation”. 

Yemen Instability
AQAP lacks the means and motive to escalate
Friedman 11 (Benjamin H., staff writer, “Al Qaeda's Mythical Unity” National Interest 6/6  http://nationalinterest.org/print/blog/the-skeptics/al-qaedas-mythical-unity-5575
The real 4 al-Qaeda is a fragmented and unmanageable movement. In the 1990s, it achieved limited success 5 in getting other jihadists to join in attacking the West. It was not managerial innovation but the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and other governments’ pressures that destroyed the limited hierarchy al-Qaeda Central had achieved. Its scattered remnant in Pakistan controls little locally and less abroad. The leaders have cachet but lack the material incentives that real managers distribute to exercise authority. Al-Qaeda became bunches of guys 6 with diminished capability.* The myth is destructive to counterterrorism. Because tightly-run organizations are better at mass violence than disparate movements, the myth creates needless fear that encourages overly ambitious and expensive policies, like the war in Afghanistan. The myth increases the number of enemies we face, taking focus from real ones. Most jihadist militants hate Americans but don’t try to kill us. They fight locally. Attacking them risks making them into what we fear they are and stoking nationalistic resentment that increases their popularity. My anecdotal sense is that events since 9/11 have increasingly brought commentators around to truth. Even so, the media, for simplicity’s sake, tends towards the myth. And the Obama administration, despite improving 7 upon its predecessors’ absurdly 8 broad definition of our terrorist enemies, still overstates al-Qaeda Central’s unity and control of affiliates. More importantly, U.S. policies still pay insufficient attention to the distinction among various al-Qaeda entities. Here are three recent examples of this rhetorical error and its consequences: (1) Since bin Laden’s death, U.S. officials 9, analysts 10, and 11 pundits 12 have claimed that the cache of emails found in his compound contradict recent intelligence reports downplaying his control. The emails, we are told, show that he was still running the show and that al-Qaeda Central remained potent. Last week, however, McClatchy quoted 13 more anonymous officials suggesting that to al-Qaeda types in Pakistan and beyond, bin Laden was like a “cranky old uncle” that you respectfully listen to and ignore. The Washington Post reported 14 that the emails show al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan complaining about depleted funds, declining popularity, and CIA drones decimating their ranks. The White House seems conflicted about which view of al-Qaeda to take. It commendably wants to belittle al-Qaeda, robbing it of mystique by portraying bin Laden as pathetic and weak 15. On the other hand, it needs the threat of a powerful al-Qaeda to justify the war in Afghanistan and other controversial policies. (2) Media reports 16 often give the impression that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are the core of the militant group (Ansar al-Sharia) revolting in Yemen’s south. The implication is al-Qaeda could soon control territory for the first time. Too little attention is given to the uncertain role AQAP plays among Yemen’s militants and its limited ties to al-Qaeda Central. Bin Laden apparently asked 17 AQAP’s leader to attack Americans rather than gathering territory locally, suggesting that its commitment to attacking us may be limited. The point is not that we should ignore al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen. But uncertainty about their role in Yemen and intent cautions against undifferentiated assaults on their leaders, let alone those of Ansar al-Sharia.

Yemen instability key to US-Saudi military cooperation
Blanchard 12 Christopher M. Blanchard Specialist in Middle Eastern Affairs Saudi Arabia: Background and U.S. Relations November 27, 2012 http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33533.pdf
In recent years, Saudi Arabia has been drawn more closely into the affairs of its problematic southern neighbor, as Yemen’s government has struggled to defeat northern Al Houthi rebels amid continuing attacks from a resurgent Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A Saudi military campaign against Al Houthi fighters along the border in 2009 exposed several weaknesses in U.S.-trained and supplied Saudi military forces, and the unrest in Yemen in 2011 raised the prospect of chaos that could directly destabilize the kingdom. In response, Saudi officials intervened forcefully to direct Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to accept the terms of a GCCnegotiated transition agreement. Whether the agreement will be implemented as planned remains unclear. Saudi authorities pledged $3.25 billion in support to Yemen at the May 2012 Friends of Yemen conference in Riyadh.
Instability in Yemen and the presence there of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) are of mutual concern to the United States and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has long sought to shape political and security conditions in Yemen as a means of preventing discrete threats from emerging on the kingdom’s southern flank. Many Yemenis view Saudi involvement in Yemen— particularly Saudi patronage relationships with various Yemeni tribal groups—as an attempt to perpetuate divisions in Yemeni society and prevent a unified Yemen from threatening Saudi interests. At present, there appears to be significant U.S.-Saudi intelligence cooperation with regard to the AQAP threat. Unverified press reports suggest that Saudi intelligence services are using double agents to collect information and sabotage AQAP operations. AQAP’s leadership and many of its senior operatives are Saudis who fled to Yemen after the failure of the 2003-2008 Al Qaeda campaign in the kingdom. Saudi officials in Yemen were targeted in assassinations and kidnappings during 2012.
While recent events suggest that significant changes have occurred in Yemen, the core dilemmas facing the United States look very much the same as they have since Yemeni unification in the early 1990s. Saudi Arabia and the United States share an interest in eliminating transnational terrorist threats in Yemen, but may differ on their preferred ends and means regarding Yemen’s long term stability and development. 

Solves multiple scenarios for Middle East war and internal link turns the adv  
Cordesman 10 Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. http://csis.org/publication/us-saudi-security-cooperation-and-impact-us-arms-sales
U.S.-Saudi security cooperation is becoming steadily more important as Iran expands its capabilities for asymmetric warfare in the Gulf, increases its long-range missile forces, and moves toward a capability to build and deploy nuclear weapons. The same is true of the enduring threat from terrorism, dealing with Iraq’s weakness and uncertain political leadership, the problems of Yemen, and instability and piracy in the Red Sea area and Indian Ocean.
The United States needs all the friends it can find in the Gulf. It faces serious uncertainties in reshaping its security posture in the region as its forces depart from Iraq. These include Iraq’s uncertain future political stance and government, the inability to predict Iranian actions and alignments, the uncertain outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and uncertainties surrounding the success or failure of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Saudi Arabia and Reshaping the U.S. Strategic Posture in the Gulf
At the same time, several factors are clear. There is no possible “end state” to the U.S. presence in the Gulf nor an end to the need for the strongest possible U.S. security ties to Saudi Arabia and other friendly states in the region.
The United State as must reshape its military posture in the Gulf as it withdraws from the Gulf, as well as reshape its power projection capabilities and contingency plans. It must shape its force posture and cooperation with its regional allies to become more effective in hybrid warfare and in a spectrum of conflicts ranging from covert and proxy warfare to long-range missile defenses and extended regional deterrence—addressing the military side of the risk that Iran may become a nuclear power and giving its allies an incentive not to acquire their own nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
Iran remains an emerging challenge. It is deeply involved in strategic competition with the United States and its friends and allies in the region. It is developing steadily better capabilities to attack shipping, targets in the Gulf, and targets on the Saudi and southern Gulf coast, and it is using asymmetric warfare in doing so. It is fielding significant long-range missile forces and may acquire nuclear weapons.
If the United States is to deter other regional states from proliferation in reaction to Iran, and make its statements about offering “extended regional deterrence” a credible option, it must show it will do its best to create effective regional partners in the southern Gulf, as well as try to build a strategic partnership with Iraq.
At the same time, neither the United States nor its Gulf allies have any reason to seek open confrontation with Iran. This is particularly true of the Gulf states. “Speak softly and carry a big stick” may not be an old Arab proverb, but Arab leaders have long practiced this with considerable success.
The United States can still count on some support from allies like Britain and France, but the fact remains that it will have to rely on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The same forces that have made the United States and Saudi Arabia key de facto partners in Gulf security will become even more important in the future.
Regardless of the outcome of Iraq’s effort to forge a new government, it will not become a major regional military power again for at least a decade. If the United States is to have any major strategic partner in the Gulf, it is going to be Saudi Arabia.
As General David Petraeus and others have explained, the war against terrorism and extremism is going to be a long war, likely to go on for the next 10 to 20 years. The Gulf region is going to be one of the centers of this conflict. Al Qa’ida is not suddenly going away, and new organizations are certain to emerge. Nations like Yemen and Somalia present serious long-term risks of becoming centers of terrorist activity.
The United States faces growing pressures to limit its military spending and commitments, and it has steadily increasing needs for regional allies with strong and interoperable forces to deter and contain regional threats and fight alongside U.S. forces if necessary.
It may or may not be possible to move forward quickly in an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, but it is vital to minimize the tensions between our Arab allies and Israel. King Abdullah’s peace plan may differ sharply with Israel’s position, but it shows that the United States can sell arms to Saudi Arabia with minimal risk of this impacting on Israel’s security. In fact, strong U.S. security ties to Saudi Arabia offer Israel a far better alternative than Saudi Arabia turning to European or other suppliers and questioning U.S. support if it faces a crisis with Iran.

Drone Prolif Adv
China-US War

China can’t catch up and no risk of war
Zenko and Cohen 12 (Micah Zenko, Fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, and MIchael Cohen, Senior Fellow at the American Security Project, serves on the board of the National Security Network and has taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, served in the U.S. Department of State, former Senior Vice President at the strategic communications firm of Robinson, Lerer and Montgomery, bachelor’s degree in international relations from American University and a master’s degree from Columbia University, 3/14/2012, "Clear and Present Safety", yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/clear-and-present-safety) US spends more money, cooperation, US alliances check, economic interdependence
As the threat from transnational terrorist groups dwindles, the United States also faces few risks from other states. China is the most obvious potential rival to the United States, and there is little doubt that China’s rise will pose a challenge to U.S. economic interests. Moreover, there is an unresolved debate among Chinese political and military leaders about China’s proper global role, and the lack of transparency from China’s senior leadership about its long-term foreign policy objectives is a cause for concern. However, the present security threat to the U.S. mainland is practically nonexistent and will remain so. Even as China tries to modernize its military, its defense spending is still approximately one-ninth that of the United States. In 2012, the Pentagon will spend roughly as much on military research and development alone as China will spend on its entire military. While China clumsily flexes its muscles in the Far East by threatening to deny access to disputed maritime resources, a recent Pentagon report noted that China’s military ambitions remain dominated by “regional contingencies” and that the People’s Liberation Army has made little progress in developing capabilities that “extend global reach or power projection.” In the coming years, China will enlarge its regional role, but this growth will only threaten U.S. interests if Washington attempts to dominate East Asia and fails to consider China’s legitimate regional interests. It is true that China’s neighbors sometimes fear that China will not resolve its disputes peacefully, but this has compelled Asian countries to cooperate with the United States, maintaining bilateral alliances that together form a strong security architecture and limit China’s room to maneuver. The strongest arguments made by those warning of Chinese influence revolve around economic policy. The list of complaints includes a host of Chinese policies, from intellectual property theft and currency manipulation to economic espionage and domestic subsidies. Yet none of those is likely to lead to direct conflict with the United States beyond the competition inherent in international trade, which does not produce zero-sum outcomes and is constrained by dispute-resolution mechanisms, such as those of the World Trade Organization. If anything, China’s export-driven economic strategy, along with its large reserves of U.S. Treasury bonds, suggests that Beijing will continue to prefer a strong United States to a weak one. 

US-China won't go nuclear.
Aga ‘9  (Clifford, “Top 10 Military Powers of the World”, 10-28, http://totopereira.blogspot.com/2009/10/top-10-military-powers-of-world.html)
The above table gives us an overview of the strengths and fire power of the top 10 military powers of the world. The chart is just to view numbers, and rankings take into consideration many aspects such as intelligence, actual combat experience, training, skill, back-up, movement of troops and weapons, etc. Also as mentioned earlier, numbers will not be absolutely accurate, as they keep changing regularly according to specific needs and situations. An interesting fact is that, out of all the countries in the world, Israel has a reserve army that can be mobilized into actual combat more quickly than anyone else. Just numbers are not enough, and this is something that can be citied in a good example in the table regarding the USA and China. Though China has an army nearly twice the size of the USA, the strike power of the USA is double that of China. This is due to many other factors as we have mentioned, like training, skill, modernized equipment, strategy, intelligence, etc. Though, it can be safely said that these are the 10 top militaries in the world as we speak.  There are also many other things that need to be taken into consideration regarding the top ten. For example, the United States indulges in combat mainly in other countries, and for the purpose of quashing terrorism, rouge armies, and peacekeeping ventures. Some countries are engaged in continuous small skirmishes with their neighbors, and are active in protecting their own borders. Nuclear weapons are also a key factor, something that has never been used since the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. God forbid, even if a war breaks out in which multiple countries are involved, it is very unlikely that they will be used, and the war(s) will be fought in the conventional ways itself. Another aspect is type of weaponry, the advanced military weapons that a state possesses.

Deterrence solves
Glaser ’11, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University (Charles, Will China's Rise Lead to War? Foreign Affairs, Vol. 90 Issue 2, ebsco)
What does all this imply about the rise of China? At the broadest level, the news is good. Current international conditions should enable both the United States and China to protect their vital interests without posing large threats to each other. Nuclear weapons make it relatively easy for major powers to maintain highly effective deterrent forces. Even if Chinese power were to greatly exceed U.S. power somewhere down the road, the United States would still be able to maintain nuclear forces that could survive any Chinese attack and threaten massive damage in retaliation. Large-scale conventional attacks by China against the U.S. homeland, meanwhile, are virtually impossible because the United States and China are separated by the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, across which it would be difficult to attack. No foreseeable increase in China's power would be large enough to overcome these twin advantages of defense for the United States. The same defensive advantages, moreover, apply to China as well. Although China is currently much weaker than the United States militarily, it will soon be able to build a nuclear force that meets its requirements for deterrence. And China should not find the United States' massive conventional capabilities especially threatening, because the bulk of U.S. forces, logistics, and support lie across the Pacific.

No pre-emptive strikes
Weitz 11 (Richard, director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis and a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. “Mapping Asia’s Nuclear Future.” The Diplomat, February 13, 2011. http://thediplomat.com/2011/02/13/mapping-asiaE28099s-nuclear-future/?all=true.)
Last April, Washington hosted the first ever nuclear security summit, which was attended by numerous Asian leaders. Next year’s meeting will be hosted by Seoul, which will give South Korea and other Asian governments a chance to address issues generally overlooked at last year’s summit, such as the danger of nuclear proliferation to additional countries and the need to prevent terrorists from gaining access to less dangerous radiological materials that they can use to construct nuclear terrorist devices such as ‘dirty bombs.’
In the meantime, though, there have been some other positive steps. China, Japan, India, and other Asian countries with advanced civil nuclear energy programmes have been establishing nuclear security centres where foreign nationals can join their own citizens in researching proliferation-resistant nuclear technologies, as well as training nuclear personnel in safety and security techniques. These nuclear security centres are typically funded by their host government, but receive technical assistance from the IAEA and foreign governments, especially the United States.
Indeed, US support for China’s new nuclear centre, formalized in a recent bilateral agreement, highlights how, even in the absence of an official China-US nuclear arms control agreement—and despite years of strained military relations—nuclear security has emerged as a core area of Sino-American cooperation in recent years. Chinese and US representatives at both the governmental and nongovernmental level have entered into regular bilateral dialogues on strategic stability to discuss these and other nuclear concerns. The fear exists, for example, that the two nuclear establishments might misperceive nuclear signalling. What would this mean? In an extreme case, it could mean that although one side may be raising its alert level for its nuclear forces as a deterrent, the other might misunderstand such a move as foreshadowing an imminent attack—and launch a pre-emptive strike in response.

1nc – drone prolif adv.

China won’t use drones to trigger Asian war --- they fear international backlash and setting a precedent for US drone use in East Asia
Erickson and Strange 13 (Andrew Erickson, associate professor at the Naval War College, Associate in Research at Harvard University's Fairbank Centre, Austin Strange, researcher at the Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute, graduate student at Zhejiang University, “China Has Drones. Now How Will it Use Them?” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2013, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/China-has-drones-Now-how-will-it-use-them-30207095.html)
Beijing, however, is unlikely to use its drones lightly. It already faces tremendous criticism from much of the international community for its perceived brazenness in continental and maritime sovereignty disputes. With its leaders attempting to allay notions that China's rise poses a threat to the region, injecting drones conspicuously into these disputes would prove counterproductive. China also fears setting a precedent for the use of drones in East Asian hotspots that the United States could eventually exploit. For now, Beijing is showing that it understands these risks, and to date it has limited its use of drones in these areas to surveillance, according to recent public statements from China's Defence Ministry.

Drone strikes are key --- suppresses Xinjiang separatist violence and instability
Erickson and Strange 13 (Andrew Erickson, associate professor at the Naval War College, Associate in Research at Harvard University's Fairbank Centre, Austin Strange, researcher at the Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute, graduate student at Zhejiang University, “China Has Drones. Now How Will it Use Them?” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2013, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/China-has-drones-Now-how-will-it-use-them-30207095.html)
Yet there is a reason why the United States has employed drones extensively despite domestic and international criticism: it is much easier and cheaper to kill terrorists from above than to try to root them out through long and expensive counterinsurgency campaigns. Some similar challenges loom on China's horizon. Within China, Beijing often considers protests and violence in the restive border regions, such as Xinjiang and Tibet, to constitute terrorism. It would presumably consider ordering precision strikes to suppress any future violence there. Even if such strikes are operationally prudent, China's leaders understand that they would damage the country's image abroad, but they prioritise internal stability above all else. Domestic surveillance by drones is a different issue; there should be few barriers to its application in what is already one of the world's most heavily policed societies. China might also be willing to use stealth drones in foreign airspace without authorisation if the risk of detection were low enough; it already deploys intelligence-gathering ships in the exclusive economic zones of Japan and the United States, as well as in the Indian Ocean.

The impact is Chinese nuclear terrorism --- triggers their Ayson impact
Ferguson and Potter, 4 — president of the Federation of American Scientists, former project director of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University, former scientist-in-residence at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, winner of the 2003 Robert S. Landauer Lecture Award from the Health Physics Society, consultant for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, former physical scientist in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Nuclear Safety at the U.S. Department of State, co-chairman of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group, M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Boston University, AND, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies and Founding Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Policy Studies in Russia (Charles D. and William C., “The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism”, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Monterey Institute, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2004, http://jeffreyfields.net/427/Site/Blog/30F67A03-182C-4FC7-9EFD-A7C321F6DC8D_files/analysis_4faces.pdf)
China has been gradually modernizing its nuclear arsenal. However, at this time, it is unclear whether this modernization program will in- crease or decrease security risks that terrorists might exploit. While more Chinese nuclear weapons might mean more opportunities for theft, a modernized force might incorporate more up-to-date security proce- dures. Isolated storage and transportation links could pose increased risks for any nation’s nuclear weapons security program. China is be- lieved to assemble nuclear warheads at a number of nuclear facilities, and the Lop Nur test site may contain a storage facility for Chinese nuclear weapons (although it is probably unused, since China has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996).56 Lop Nur is remotely located in northwest Xinjiang province, where nationalist/separatist organizations have been campaigning for autonomy from Beijing. Although Xinjiang separatist groups have not openly expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, some reports have alleged that Uighur separatists may have stolen radioactive sources from Lop Nur in 1993.57 It is difficult to offer an overall assessment of the security of China’s nuclear arms against terrorists because Beijing has a long-standing prac- tice of not publishing sensitive information. In addition, China shows little concern (at least openly) that nuclear terrorism can occur on Chinese soil. While this lack of concern may be justified, the Chinese government still has to factor in security threats posed by Xinjiang separatists and other groups that may engage in terrorism in China. Nonetheless, the dominant role of the Chinese Communist Party and its security ap- paratus in Chinese society, and the limited presence of terrorist groups in China, appear to reduce substantially the danger that a terrorist or- ganization might gain control of an intact nuclear weapon in that country.

Plan’s modeling restricts Russian strikes on Eastern European energy terrorism
Roberts 13 (Kristin Roberts, News Editor for National Journal, M.A. in security studies from Georgetown University, “When the Whole World Has Drones,” The National Journal, March 22, 2013, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/when-the-whole-world-has-drones-20130321)
Hyperbole? Consider this: Iran, with the approval of Damascus, carries out a lethal strike on anti-Syrian forces inside Syria; Russia picks off militants tampering with oil and gas lines in Ukraine or Georgia; Turkey arms a U.S.-provided Predator to kill Kurdish militants in northern Iraq who it believes are planning attacks along the border. Label the targets as terrorists, and in each case, Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara may point toward Washington and say, we learned it by watching you. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
This is the unintended consequence of American drone warfare. For all of the attention paid to the drone program in recent weeks—about Americans on the target list (there are none at this writing) and the executive branch’s legal authority to kill by drone outside war zones (thin, by officials’ own private admission)—what goes undiscussed is Washington’s deliberate failure to establish clear and demonstrable rules for itself that would at minimum create a globally relevant standard for delineating between legitimate and rogue uses of one of the most awesome military robotics capabilities of this generation.

The impact is Russian political and economic security --- energy terrorism disrupts the entire network
Ratliff 03 (William E. Ratliff, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, lecturer at Stanford University, “Russia’s Oil in America’s Future: Policy, Pipelines, and Prospects,” Hoover Press, January 1, 2003, pgs. 4-8)
Finally, U.S. leaders believe that helping Russia update and develop this critical natural resource and industry will contribute to the stability of the country during a dif?cult transition period and that this, in turn, will provide the foundation for its active and productive participation in the global economy, though at present to a very large extent this depends on a continuation of the high levels of oil prices. It is reasoned that economic stability and Russia’s forthcoming membership in the World Trade Organization will increase the chances that Russia will develop along democratic and market-oriented paths. Washington’s oil initiative with Moscow has involved both government agencies and private industry. The role of the latter, a central and innovative element in the bilateral relationship, was emphasized at the October 2002 U.S.- Russia Commercial Energy Summit in Houston, which in turn set up the Commercial Energy Working Group, which met again in mid-September 2003 in St. Petersburg. Though in 2002 U.S. economic ties with Russia were roughly comparable to ties with Costa Rica, Americans could soon play a critical role in funding development of the Russian oil industry, as well as providing technology and expertise. There is considerable U.S. government and business interest in doing so, and already there is some movement in that direction.
Oil and the Russian Economy
Russian oil exploration began in the 1840s near Baku on the Caspian Sea. Oil production did not take off under communism until after World War II when it became increasingly productive and ef?cient. During the late Soviet period Russia was the world’s top exporter of oil, a distinction it may have recovered in the past year.8 At its peak in the 1980s, Soviet production was about 10 million barrels per day, of which about half was used domestically. The production and use of energy declined after the fall of communism even as the economy also suffered from the virtual collapse of the second leg of the Soviet economic system, the defense industry. Restructuring of the state-controlled Russian oil sector began in the early 1990s, building on changes that had occurred under Mikhail Gorbachev, and surged in and after the mid1990s when major portions of the state industry were sold to private buyers in auctions. Today the private companies (including Yukos, Tyumen Oil TNK) are more ef?ciently run than state companies, and this is one of the reasons the government reportedly intends to divest itself of its remaining minority holdings in oil companies by 2006.9 This will, of course, further decrease central control over the vital industry.
After the 1998 ?nancial crisis, and particularly since the beginning of Putin’s presidency, energy has become the engine of Russian growth, for resources, mostly oil and natural gas, constitute more than 40 percent of Russia’s exports and almost 15 percent of its GDP. During the ?rst seven months of 2003, oil output averaged 8.26 million barrels per day, and in August it rose to 8.6 million barrels per day,10 of which about two-thirds is exported, in part because domestic prices for oil are very low. The recent increase in production is not due mainly to tapping new ?elds, though new reserves have been found, but to reviving and streamlining the Soviet period production, in large part through privatization, and exporting a higher percentage of the product. Still, major new investments in technological renovation will be required for Russia to maintain its high levels of production in the decades that follow and much of that must come via merger and acquisition, both within the Russian domestic market and with international industries. At the energy session in St. Petersburg in September 2003, Russia’s energy minister Igor Yusufov said that in the next twenty years Russia will need about $500 billion to develop its fuel and energy sector.11
During the Soviet period most exports went to Soviet-bloc countries, from Eastern Europe to Cuba, but those countries are less attractive today because most cannot pay their bills. With the revival of the oil industry, exports to the European Union (EU) have risen to 39 percent because the demand there is high, and payments are in cash. An energy summit with the EU in October 2000 brought a European pledge to help develop Russian reserves in return for a long-term energy commitment to the EU. Thus shipments to the EU are projected to rise to some 45 percent in the years ahead.12 In mid-2003 the Russian government produced a study on energy strategy to 2020. It projected a 30–35 percent increase in the production of primary fuel and energy resources, the continued importance of the European market, an expansion of oil deliveries to Asia from the current 3 percent to 30 percent of sales, and greater attention to the Americas.13
Russian Oil Fields and Production
Russia is the largest country in the world, and most of it is undeveloped. That means it is often very dif?cult to explore, extract, process and transport oil from a site.14 The ?elds today can be divided into two categories. There are the older ?elds, mainly in western Siberia, that while they still produce the bulk of the product know that their years are numbered.15 And there are the new or “green” ?elds on the fringes of the older ones, ranging geographically from the Antarctic to Russian territory on the eastern Paci?c coast. There is much disagreement as to how extensive Russia’s reserves are in these areas, due in part to a lack of accurate information and differing yardsticks. Estimates range from the eighth largest to perhaps the largest in the world.16
Russia’s most important oil areas, both producing and potential, are the following.
• western Siberia, where most of the early and 70 percent of current production takes place, particularly in the Nizhnevartovsk/Surgut area;
• the western basins between the Caspian and Barents Seas;
• eastern Siberia, where the reserves are considered particularly rich but “green” and dif?cult to access;
• the Arctic domain; and
• the currently booming basin of Sakhalin on the Paci?c margin.17
The Russians have strong interest also in the oil produced in neighboring countries, and in pipelines passing through other countries, most of which were part of the now defunct Soviet Union. For example, in late August 2003 TNK-BP shareholders expressed interest in the privatization of 66 percent in the Turkish oil company Tupras. Since 9/11 in particular, Russian leaders have promoted closer bilateral and multilateral relations in central Asia and the Caucasus and negotiated, as yet unsuccessfully, which of the ?ve countries bordering on the Caspian Sea (Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan) own how much of its oil-rich bed. Private and state-owned energy companies have also become very active throughout the region.18
Two additional problems require comment here, and very substantial government and private attention. First, the vulnerability of Russia’s industry generally, and its thousands of miles of oil pipelines in particular, to sabotage. The impact of terrorist attacks on the oil industry, which was the subject of the 1999 James Bond ?lm The World Is Not Enough, became reality in post–Saddam Hussein Iraq and could become enormously disruptive to the Russian system. Also, threats to the environment have resulted in destruction and promise more. Governments and environmental groups have responded, with reasonable and sometimes unreasonable demands. Nordic and Baltic states say Russian tankers in northern seas are a threat to the Arctic environment. Therefore, they will apply to the United Nations to get the Baltic Sea designated a “Particularly Sensitive Sea Area” so that the tankers will have to stick to narrow lanes and use pilots near the coasts. On the other side of the world, a Russian/Japanese team has charged that exploration and drilling in the Sakhalin region in Russian east Asia are threatening the sea eagle population and in violation of treaties to protect migratory birds. Some pressure groups have advanced environmental interests, while others have weakened them.19

Extinction
Filger 09 (Sheldon Filger, author and blogger for the Huffington Post, “Russian Economy Faces Disastrous Free Fall Contraction”, http://www.globaleconomiccrisis.com/blog/archives/356)
In Russia, historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted with their nation's history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia's economic crisis will endanger the nation's political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union. Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama's national security team has already briefed him about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all, the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already concluded that the Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United States, due to its facilitating political instability in the world. During the years Boris Yeltsin ruled Russia, security forces responsible for guarding the nation's nuclear arsenal went without pay for months at a time, leading to fears that desperate personnel would illicitly sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations. If the current economic crisis in Russia were to deteriorate much further, how secure would the Russian nuclear arsenal remain? It may be that the financial impact of the Global Economic Crisis is its least dangerous consequence.

Rampant drone prolif creates massive export opportunities for the US --- it drives and sustains industrial base growth and leadership
GAO 12 (Government Accountability Office, “Nonproliferation: Agencies Could Improve Information Sharing and End-Use Monitoring on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exports,” September 12, 2012, http://www.gao.gov/assets/650/647578.txt)
Additionally, DOD has noted the importance of allowing selected transfers of UAV technology in order to strengthen the U.S. industrial base for UAV production. According to some U.S. government officials, the ability to sell American UAVs to foreign purchasers helps defray the U.S. government's acquisition costs. U.S. government officials also noted that opening larger potential markets to American UAV producers provides additional incentives for producers to invest resources in the research and development of UAV systems, and helps the United States retain a technological lead over foreign UAV producers. According to private sector representatives, UAVs are one of the most important growth sectors in the defense industry and provide significant opportunities for economic benefits if U.S. companies can remain competitive in the global UAV market. 

Sector decline leads to miscalculation --- causes global warfare
Cooper 07 (Horace Cooper, Senior Fellow and deputy director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, “Making it in America”, April 04, 2007, http://www.americanmanufacturing.org/articles/making-it-america)
But perhaps greater than the economic disruption in the lives of the workforce and their companies is the incalculable loss of a manufacturing base for our nation as a whole. There are those in Washington who fail to appreciate the attendant decline in our nation’s security and flexibility in foreign affairs that results from the collapse of this sector. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the unipolarity that resulted presents the United States far greater responsibilities and concerns than those that existed during the Cold War. Yet, our failure to sustain our domestic manufacturing base and instead pursuing a strategy of relying on other countries for military products and technologies isn’t just short-sided, it’s dangerous. This decline in our country’s military readiness is a signal to the rest of the world that we may not be capable of defending our interests or allies. And perhaps one of the greatest lessons of the 20th century is that weakness at home is provocative. Essentially, we provoke rogue nations into taking ill-advised actions that must inevitably be countered by America’s military might. A policy that results in a diminished security for Americans, fewer jobs, a declining tax base for communities and states and that rejects our nation’s history is a policy that should be reassessed. Supporters of liberty and freedom recognize that American ingenuity and know-how is a core ingredient of our manufacturing sector and has led to much of the high standard of living we Americans take for granted.
Drone Prolif Defense
No reverse casual modeling internal link --- we can’t reverse the precedent that has already been set
Boot 11 (Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, leading military historian and foreign-policy analyst, “We Cannot Afford to Stop Drone Strikes,” Commentary Magazine, October 9, 2011, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/09/drone-arms-race/)
The New York Times engages in some scare-mongering today about a drone arms race. Scott Shane notes correctly other nations such as China are building their own drones and in the future U.S. forces could be attacked by them–our forces will not have a monopoly on their use forever. Fair enough, but he goes further, suggesting our current use of drones to target terrorists will backfire:
If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.
“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Missile Contagion, who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”
This is a familiar trope of liberal critics who are always claiming we should forego “X” weapons system or capability, otherwise our enemies will adopt it too. We have heard this with regard to ballistic missile defense, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, land mines, exploding bullets, and other fearsome weapons. Some have even suggested the U.S. should abjure the first use of nuclear weapons–and cut down our own arsenal–to encourage similar restraint from Iran.
The argument falls apart rather quickly because it is founded on a false premise: that other nations will follow our example. In point of fact, Iran is hell-bent on getting nuclear weapons no matter what we do; China is hell-bent on getting drones; and so forth. Whether and under what circumstances they will use those weapons remains an open question–but there is little reason to think self-restraint on our part will be matched by equal self-restraint on theirs. Is Pakistan avoiding nuking India because we haven’t used nuclear weapons since 1945? Hardly. The reason is that India has a powerful nuclear deterrent to use against Pakistan. If there is one lesson of history it is a strong deterrent is a better upholder of peace than is unilateral disarmament–which is what the New York Times implicitly suggests.
Imagine if we did refrain from drone strikes against al-Qaeda–what would be the consequence? If we were to stop the strikes, would China really decide to take a softer line on Uighurs or Russia on Chechen separatists? That seems unlikely given the viciousness those states already employ in their battles against ethnic separatists–which at least in Russia’s case already includes the suspected assassination of Chechen leaders abroad. What’s the difference between sending a hit team and sending a drone?

No impact --- drones are ineffective and there’s no incentive for them be used on a wide-scale --- they’ll be easily countered even if they are with limited escalation
Lewis 11 (Michael W. Lewis, professor of international law and the law of war at Ohio Northern University School of Law, former Navy fighter pilot, and coauthor of ‘The War on Terror and the Laws of War: A Military Perspective,’ “Unfounded Drone Fears,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/17/opinion/la-oe~-~-lewis-drones-20111017)
Almost since the United States began using the unmanned aerial vehicles known as drones, their use has drawn criticism. The latest criticism, which has received considerable attention in the wake of the drone strike on Anwar Awlaki, is that America's use of drones has sparked a new international arms race.
While it is true that some other nations have begun developing their own unmanned aerial vehicles, the extent of the alarm is unjustified. Much of it rests on myths that are easily dispelled.
Myth 1: Drones will be a threat to the United States in the hands of other nations. Drones are surveillance and counter-terrorism tools; they are not effective weapons of conventional warfare. The unmanned aerial vehicles are slow and extremely vulnerable to even basic air defense systems, illustrated by the fact that a U.S. surveillance drone was shot down by a 1970s-era MIG-25 Soviet fighter over Iraq in 2002. Moreover, drones are dependent on constant telemetry signals from their ground controllers to remain in flight. Such signals can be easily jammed or disrupted, causing the drone to fall from the sky. It's even possible that a party sending stronger signals could take control of the drone. The drones, therefore, have limited usefulness. And certainly any drone flying over the U.S. while being controlled by a foreign nation could be easily detected and either destroyed or captured.
Myth 2: Terrorists could effectively use drones to strike targets that are otherwise safe. Though it would be preferable if terrorist groups did not acquire drones, the technology required to support them is not particularly advanced. If organizations such as Al Qaeda were intent on acquiring the technology, they probably could. One of the reasons Al Qaeda may not have spent the time and resources necessary to do so is that drones would be of limited value. In addition to being very vulnerable to even basic air defense systems, drones require a great deal of logistical support. They have to be launched, recovered and controlled from a reasonably large and secure permanent facility. Wherever Al Qaeda's drones landed would immediately become a target.
It is true that a small, hand-launched drone capable of delivering a small warhead over a reasonably short distance could be, like radio-controlled model airplanes, launched in a public park or other open area and flown to a target several miles away. However, the amount of explosives that such a drone can carry is very limited (at most a few pounds) and pales in comparison to the amount of explosives that can be delivered by a vehicle or even a suicide bomber. It seems likely that terrorist groups will continue to deliver their explosives by vehicle or suicide bomber.
Myth 3: The U.S. use of drones in cases such as the Awlaki killing in Yemen serves to legitimize their use by China or Russia. International law places the same restrictions on the use of drones that it places on any other use of military force. The U.S. used a drone on Yemeni territory to kill Awlaki because it was given permission to do so by the Yemeni government, and because Awlaki was an active member of an Al Qaeda affiliate who had repeatedly been involved in operations designed to kill Americans at home and abroad. With such permission, the U.S. could instead have employed special forces or a conventional airstrike.
Numerous commentators have suggested that U.S. drone use legitimizes Russian drone use in Chechnya or Chinese drone use against the Uighurs. If China or Russia were facing genuine threats from Chechen or Uighur separatists, they might be allowed under international law to use drones in neighboring states if those states gave them permission to do so. However, given the fact that Chechen separatists declared an end to armed resistance in 2009, and that the greatest concern Russians currently have with Chechnya is with the lavish subsidies that Russia is currently providing it, the likelihood of armed Russian drones over Chechnya seems remote at best.
Likewise, there is no Uighur separatist organization that even remotely resembles Al Qaeda. Uighur unrest has taken the form of uprisings in Urumqi and other areas, similar to the Tibetan unrest of a few years ago. The Chinese eliminated such unrest with widespread arrests and disappearances, which raised serious human rights concerns. But there has been no time in which Uighur opposition has met the threshold established by international law that would allow for the use of armed drones in response to Uighur actions.
It is important to recognize drones for what they are: slow, relatively low-tech anti-terrorism tools that would be of limited use on most modern battlefields and are particularly unsuited to use by terrorist organizations.

Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 3 | Opponent: Kansas State Klucas-Mays | Judge: Gonzalez
1NC – T 

The aff’s not topical --- increase requires pre-existing
Ripple, 87 (Circuit Judge, Emmlee K. Cameron, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Frances Slocum Bank and Trust Company, State Automobile Insurance Association, and Glassley Agency of Whitley, Indiana, Defendants-Appellees, 824 F.2d 570; 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 9816, 9/24, lexis)
Also related to the waiver issue is appellees' defense relying on a provision of the insurance policy that suspends coverage where the risk is increased by any means within the knowledge or control of the insured. However, the term "increase" connotes change. To show change, appellees would have been required to present evidence of the condition of the building at the time the policy was issued. See 5 J. Appleman and J. Appleman, Insurance Law and Practice, § 2941 at 4-5 (1970). Because no such evidence was presented, this court cannot determine, on this record, whether the risk has, in fact, been increased. Indeed, the answer to this question may depend on Mr. Glassley's knowledge of the condition of the building at the time the policy was issued, see 17 J. Appleman and J. Appleman, Insurance Law and Practice, § 9602 at 515-16 (1981), since the fundamental issue is whether the appellees contemplated insuring the risk which incurred the loss.

statutory restriction can: Overturn authority, alter the jurisdiction, limit authorization, require inter-agency consultation, or require prior notification.
KAISER 80 The Official Specialist in American National Government, Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress Congressional Action to Overturn Agency Rules: Alternatives to the Legislative Veto; Kaiser, Frederick M., 32 Admin. L. Rev. 667 (1980)

In addition to direct statutory overrides, there are a variety of statutory and nonstatutory techniques that have the effect of overturning rules, that prevent their enforcement, or that seriously impede or even preempt the promulgation of projected rules. For instance, a statute may alter the jurisdiction of a regulatory agency or extend the exemptions to its authority, thereby affecting existing or anticipated rules. Legislation that affects an agency's funding may be used to prevent enforcement of particular rules or to revoke funding discretion for rulemaking activity or both. Still other actions, less direct but potentially significant, are mandating agency consultation with other federal or state authorities and requiring prior congressional review of proposed rules (separate from the legislative veto sanctions). These last two provisions may change or even halt proposed rules by interjecting novel procedural requirements along with different perspectives and influences into the process.
It is also valuable to examine nonstatutory controls available to the Congress:

1. legislative, oversight, investigative, and confirmation hearings;
   2. establishment of select committees and specialized subcommittees to oversee agency rulemaking and enforcement;
   3. directives in committee reports, especially those accompanying legislation, authorizations, and appropriations, regarding rules or their implementation;
   4. House and Senate floor statements critical of proposed, projected, or ongoing administrative action; and
   5. direct contact between a congressional office and the agency or office in question.
   Such mechanisms are all indirect influences; unlike statutory provisions, they are neither self-enforcing nor legally binding by themselves. Nonetheless, nonstatutory devices are more readily available and more easily effectuated than controls imposed by statute. And some observers have attributed substantial influence to nonstatutory controls in regulatory as well as other matters.3
   It is impossible, in a limited space, to provide a comprehensive and exhaustive listing of congressional actions that override, have the effect of overturning, or prevent the promulgation of administrative rules. Consequently, this report concentrates upon the more direct statutory devices, although it also encompasses committee reports accompanying bills, the one nonstatutory instrument that is frequently most authoritatively connected with the final legislative product. The statutory mechanisms surveyed here cross a wide spectrum of possible congressional action:
2. single-purpose provisions to overturn or preempt a specific rule;
   2. alterations in program authority that remove jurisdiction from an agency;
   3. agency authorization and appropriation limitations;
   4. inter-agency consultation requirements; and
   5. congressional prior notification provisions.

Judicial means the court
WEST’S LAW 08 West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/judicial
Relating to the courts or belonging to the office of a judge; a term pertaining to the administration of justice, the courts, or a judge, as in judicial power.
A judicial act involves an exercise of discretion or an unbiased decision by a court or judge, as opposed to a ministerial, clerical, or routine procedure. A judicial act affects the rights of the parties or property brought before the court. It is the interpretation and application of the law to a particular set of facts contested by litigants in a court of law, resulting from discretion and based upon an evaluation of the evidence presented at a hearing.
Judicial connotes the power to punish, sentence, and resolve conflicts.

Vote negative –
Limitis – it is impossible to limit what is a statutory or judicial restriction outside of that interpretation and it kills neg ground since other changes aren’t as legally binding. And absent a pre-existing restriction on the executive’s authority double the topic by allowing a proliferation of small new courts cases to be ruled upon and courts to be created on a window of executive authority --- destroys ground and makes the topic about what potential executive action they can preempt rather than the desirability of existing restrictions. 

Extra T – even if ontological inquiry is part of restrictions, it goes beyond that
1NC—FRAMEWORK—MUST BE USFG

Interpretation --- the aff has to defend USFG should take action on transportation infrastructure --- ‘resolved’ means to enact a policy by law.
Words and Phrases, 1964  (Permanent Edition)
Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.

Our interpretation is best ---
A. Predictability --- ignoring the resolution opens up an infinite number of frameworks --- this undermines our ability to have in-depth research on their arguments destroying clash and the value of debate.

B. Ground --- the resolution exists to create fair division of aff and neg ground --- any alternative framework allows the aff to pick a moral high ground that destroys neg offense.

C. Education --- academics must learn to engage the public’s line of thinking --- abstract moralism without addressing how to get our policies passed is useless.
Jeffrey Isaac, Spring 2002. Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=601.
What is striking about much of the political discussion on the left today is its failure to engage this earlier tradition of argument. The left, particularly the campus left—by which I mean “progressive” faculty and student groups, often centered around labor solidarity organizations and campus Green affiliates—has become moralistic rather than politically serious. Some of its moralizing—about Chiapas, Palestine, and Iraq—continues the third worldism that plagued the New Left in its waning years. Some of it—about globalization and sweatshops— is new and in some ways promising (see my “Thinking About the Antisweatshop Movement,” Dissent, Fall 2001). But what characterizes much campus left discourse is a substitution of moral rhetoric about evil policies or instit*utions for a sober consideration of what might improve or replace them, how the improvement might be achieved, and what the likely costs, as well as the benefits, are of any reasonable strategy. One consequence of this tendency is a failure to worry about methods of securing political support through democratic means or to recognize the distinctive value of democracy itself. It is not that conspiratorial or antidemocratic means are promoted. On the contrary, the means employed tend to be preeminently democratic—petitions, demonstrations, marches, boycotts, corporate campaigns, vigorous public criticism. And it is not that political democracy is derided. Projects such as the Green Party engage with electoral politics, locally and nationally, in order to win public office and achieve political objectives. But what is absent is a sober reckoning with the preoccupations and opinions of the vast majority of Americans, who/ are not drawn to vocal denunciations of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization and who do not believe that the discourse of “anti-imperialism” speaks to their lives. Equally absent is critical thinking about why citizens of liberal democratic states—including most workers and the poor—value liberal democracy and subscribe to what Jürgen Habermas has called “constitutional patriotism”: a patriotic identification with the democratic state because of the civil, political, and social rights it defends. Vicarious identifications with Subcommandante Marcos or starving Iraqi children allow left activists to express a genuine solidarity with the oppressed elsewhere that is surely legitimate in a globalizing age. But these symbolic avowals are not an effective way of contending for political influence or power in the society in which these activists live. The ease with which the campus left responded to September 11 by rehearsing an all too-familiar narrative of American militarism and imperialism is not simply disturbing. It is a sign of this left’s alienation from the society in which it operates (the worst examples of this are statements of the Student Peace Action Coalition Network, which declare that “the United States Government is the world’s greatest terror organization,” and suggest that “homicidal psychopaths of the United States Government” engineered the World Trade Center attacks as a pretext for imperialist aggression. See http://www.gospan.org). Many left activists seem more able to identify with (idealized versions of) Iraqi or Afghan civilians than with American citizens, whether these are the people who perished in the Twin Towers or the rest of us who legitimately fear that we might be next. This is not because of any “disloyalty.” Charges like that lack intellectual or political merit. It is because of a debilitating moralism; because it is easier to denounce wrong than to take real responsibility for correcting it, easier to locate and to oppose a remote evil than to address a proximate difficulty. The campus left  says what it thinks. But it exhibits little interest in how and why so many Americans think differently. The “peace” demonstrations organized across the country within a few days of the September 11 attacks—in which local Green Party activists often played a crucial role—were, whatever else they were, a sign of their organizers’ lack of judgment and common sense. Although they often expressed genuine horror about the terrorism, they focused their energy not on the legitimate fear and outrage of American citizens but rather on the evils of the American government and its widely supported response to the terror. Hardly anyone was paying attention, but they alienated anyone who was. This was utterly predictable. And that is my point. The predictable consequences did not matter. What mattered was simply the expression of righteous indignation about what is wrong with the United States, as if September 11 hadn’t really happened. Whatever one thinks about America’s deficiencies, it must be acknowledged that a political praxis preoccupation with this is foolish and self-defeating. The other, more serious consequence of this moralizing tendency is the failure to think seriously about global politics. The campus left is rightly interested in the ills of global capitalism. But politically it seems limited to two options: expressions of “solidarity” with certain oppressed groups—Palestinians but not Syrians, Afghan civilians (though not those who welcome liberation from the Taliban), but not Bosnians or Kosovars or Rwandans—and automatic opposition to American foreign policy in the name of anti-imperialism. The economic discourse of the campus left is a universalist discourse of human needs and workers rights; but it is accompanied by a refusal to think in political terms about the realities of states, international institutions, violence, and power. This refusal is linked to a peculiar strain of pacifism, according to which any use of military force by the United States is viewed as aggression or militarism. case in point is a petition circulated on the campus of Indiana University within days of September 11. Drafted by the Bloomington Peace Coalition, it opposed what was then an imminent war in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda, and called for peace. It declared: “Retaliation will not lead to healing; rather it will harm innocent people and further the cycle of violence. Rather than engage in military aggression, those in authority should apprehend and charge those individuals believed to be directly responsible for the attacks and try them in a court of law in accordance with due process of international law.” This declaration was hardly unique. Similar statements were issued on college campuses across the country, by local student or faculty coalitions, the national
Campus Greens, 9- 11peace.org, and the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition. As Global Exchange declared in its antiwar statement of September 11: “vengeance offers no relief. . . retaliation can never guarantee healing. . . and to meet violence with violence breeds more rage and more senseless deaths. Only love leads to peace with justice, while hate takes us toward war and injustice.” On this view military action of any kind is figured as “aggression” or “vengeance”; harm to innocents, whether substantial or marginal, intended or unintended, is absolutely proscribed; legality is treated as having its own force, independent of any means of enforcement; and, most revealingly, “healing” is treated as the principal goal of any legitimate response. None of these points withstands serious scrutiny. A military response to terrorist aggression is not in any obvious sense an act of aggression, unless any military response—or at least any U.S. military response—is simply defined as aggression. While any justifiable military response should certainly be governed by just-war principles, the criterion of absolute harm avoidance would rule out the possibility of any military response. It is virtually impossible either to “apprehend” and prosecute terrorists or to put an end to terrorist networks without the use of military force, for the “criminals” in question are not law-abiding citizens but mass murderers, and there are no police to “arrest” them. And, finally, while “healing” is surely a legitimate moral goal, it is not clear that it is a political goal. Justice, however, most assuredly is a political goal. The most notable thing about the Bloomington statement is its avoidance of political justice. Like many antiwar texts, it calls for “social justice abroad.” It supports redistributing wealth. But criminal and retributive justice, protection against terrorist violence, or the political enforcement of the minimal conditions of global civility—these are unmentioned. They are unmentioned because to broach them is to enter a terrain that the campus left is unwilling to enter—the terrain of violence, a realm of complex choices and dirty hands. This aversion to violence is understandable and in some ways laudable. America’s use of violence has caused much harm in the world, from Southeast Asia to Central and Latin America to Africa. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” was the product of a real learning experience that should not be forgotten. In addition, the destructive capacities of modern warfare— which jeopardize the civilian/combatant distinction, and introduce the possibility of enormous ecological devastation—make war under any circumstances something to be feared. No civilized person should approach the topic of war with anything other than great trepidation. And yet the left’s reflexive hostility toward violence in the international domain is strange. It is inconsistent with avowals of “materialism” and evocations of “struggle,” especially on the part of those many who are not pacifists; it is in tension with a commitment to human emancipation (is there no cause for which it is justifiable to fight?); and it is oblivious to the tradition of left thinking about ends and means. To compare the debates within the left about the two world wars or the Spanish Civil War with the predictable “anti-militarism” of today’s campus left is to compare a discourse that was serious about political power with a discourse that is not. This unpragmatic approach has become a hallmark of post–cold war left commentary, from the Gulf War protests of 1991, to the denunciation of the 1999 U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo, to the current post–September 11 antiwar movement. In each case protesters have raised serious questions about U.S. policy and its likely consequences, but in a strikingly ineffective way. They sound a few key themes: the broader context of grievances that supposedly explains why Saddam Hussein, or Slobodan Milosevic, or Osama bin Laden have done what they have done; the hypocrisy of official U.S. rhetoric, which denounces terrorism even though the U.S. government has often supported terrorism; the harm that will come to ordinary Iraqi or Serbian or Afghan citizens as a result of intervention; and the cycle of violence that is likely to ensue. These are important issues. But they typically are raised by left critics not to promote real debate about practical alternatives, but to avoid such a debate or to trump it. As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It is assumed that U.S. military intervention is an act of “aggression,” but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace, but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime—the Taliban—that rose to power through brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most “peace” activists would prefer not to ask: What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally  compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.

And a limited topic of discussion that provides for equitable ground is key to productive inculcation of decision-making and advocacy skills in every and all facets of life---even if their position is contestable that’s distinct from being valuably debatable---this still provides room for flexibility, creativity, and innovation, but targets the discussion to avoid mere statements of fact
Steinberg and Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp45-
Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007.
Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.
Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.

1nc – pic 

Instead of ontological inquiry, Nate and I advocate an unconditional surrender to all past, previous, and future targets of drone strikes for targeted killing on the basis that the war powers authority of the President of the United States to use drone strikes for targeted killing is unethical. 

Our response of ethical surrender and infusion of it into a micropolitical stance is the only way to solve material concerns and break down the scientific gaze of the status quo – focus on ontology cannot make material change or alter existing systems – this evidence is comparative
Kioupkiolis 11 Alexandros, Lecturer in Political Organization at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, “Keeping it open: Ontology, ethics, knowledge and radical democracy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism vol. 37 no. 6
As he understands it, the ‘political’ implies primarily the subversion of social fixity, the questioning of established order, transformative praxis and the construction of new subjectivities and social aggregations. Therefore, politics should break loose from ontology, which is entangled with order, stabilization, unity. 45 Critchley takes issue with notions and practices that ontologize politics and its agent, the people, by tying them up with a unified Volk or a state grounded in a communal essence. He assails Marx’s communism on the grounds that it is informed by an essentialist metaphysic of species-being which comes laden with an organicist notion of community and recalls ideas of fusion, fullness and harmony. 46 Politics, by contrast, is a manifestation of the multiplicity of the people who challenge established relations of power with various demands, 47 expressing a dissensus that disturbs and antagonizes instituted forms of society. Hence, politics should not be confused with any given order. Politics is at one with democracy construed as the ‘deformation of society from itself through the act of material political manifestation’. 48 A further reason for minding the gap between politics and ontology is that political action does not emanate from systemic laws and ontological determinations. It requires the intervention of a subject that is vested with powers of imagination and the will to fight and endure. No ontology can initiate political action and secure its outcomes. ‘We are on our own and what we do we have to do for ourselves.’ 49 Political agency is focused on the creation of a collective will, and this can only be the product of invention, struggle, negotiation and hegemony in specific situations, not the windfall of any pre-given ontology. After the collapse of grand revolutionary aspirations, the politics of resistance, emancipation and empowerment moves, for Critchley, in a particular direction. If the breakdown of the revolutionary proletarian subject has dashed the hopes of a final dissolution of the state, the politics of self-determination in autonomous associations should situate itself at a distance from the state, which operates vertical hierarchies of control and seeks to tighten its grip on society as a whole, stifling human freedom. 50 The politics of radical democracy should strive to bring about fissures in the order of ‘police’ and to carve out spaces of freedom within state-controlled society. Political resistance should undertake transformative praxis by bringing together dissenting subjects that struggle to attenuate the perverse effects of state politics and want to enact relations of conviviality and freedom. ‘True democracy would be an enactment of cooperative alliances . . . that materially deform the state power that threatens to saturate them.’ 51 Ethics in the guise of ‘anarchic meta-politics’ is lodged at the centre of this democratic vision. 52 Critchley’s anarchic ethics captures and upholds the political moment of democracy in which existing relations of control are questioned and unsettled by the dissenting demos – the moment when the contestability and mutability of social institutions are acknowledged and acted upon. But a narrower ethical dimension is equally pivotal for Critchley: the experience of an infinite demand of the other that calls on me to act in the name of my responsibility to the other, in response to particular injustices and conditions of distress. Anarchic meta-politics is propelled by the ‘exorbitant demand at the heart of my subjectivity that defines that subjectivity by dividing it and opening it to otherness’, 53 a demand which is posed concretely in particular situations and can arouse feelings of anger at the injustices suffered by others. In Critchley’s view, this ethical inflection, inspired by Levinas’ ethics of an infinite responsibility to the other, should provide the guide, the fuel and the glue for democratic resistances today. 54 If ontological schemata or structural laws cannot sustain radical politics today, anarchic, Levinasian ethics should step into their shoes. This ethical conception chimes with the disorderly, contestatory politics of democracy as it registers the experience of unruly encounters with multiple singularities, which elude full grasp and could not be contained within a single collective structure. 55 Moreover, if politics is not the outcome of objective mechanisms but consists in uncertain action and struggle, an ethics of responsibility can offer the guidance and motivation that are required for political agency. 56 Critchley commends his Levinasian ethics for these purposes because it stands out as a cogent expression of ethical experience, it can be detected on the ground of contemporary activism, it articulates a demand which is not arbitrary but universal in scope and it is energized by a feeling of anger at a situation of global injustice. 57 These features make the ethics of infinite responsibility well suited to produce the hegemonic glue that will hold the various dissident groups together in collective aggregations that fight global inequities.

And, our act of surrender leads to an embrace of change and a willingness to think differently.  It changes our psyche.  The psychic wound and shock people will feel is an opportunity for growth.  A voluntary act of authentic surrender is key.

Moze 2007 Mary Beth, Ph.D. in Personal Development and Transformation, “¶ Surrender: An Alchemical Act in Personal Transforma¶ tion ¶ “, Journal of Conscious Evolution, http://www.cejournal.org/GRD/Surrender.pdf
Surrender¶ and the Ego ¶ Surrender provides a willing path toward greater un¶ derstandings. Surrender allows for ¶ flexibility and movement in relation to a polarized¶ Other and is a voluntary choice to not resist. ¶ Such a choice is as much a part of ego development ¶ as choosing ¶ to¶ resist (LaMothe, 2005). The ¶ wise use of our will can get us to the edge of the ¶ Ego and beyond; we can will ourselves into the ¶ act of surrender that carries us into the flow of possibilities and growth (Hart, 2000).
We ¶ think¶ we live by virtues and influences that we can control, but we are governed by ¶ more than ourselves (Hawkins, 2002). World religion¶ s teach that the Ego interferes with ¶ detection of truth and cannot engage the bigger, systemic view of things (Leary, 2004). Central ¶ to personal development is the management of the Ego and surrendering to a more universal ¶ identity (Hidas, 1981). In lieu of more culturally ¶ sanctioned spiritual practices in the West, our ¶ need for universal identity and spiritual sustenanc¶ e comes by way of therapy (Some’, 1999), but ¶ Western therapy focuses heavily on ego strengthenin¶ g and can inadvertently build up the Ego’s ¶ narcissistic muscles.
Recovery from any dysfunction as well as growth fr¶ om places of normality is dependent ¶ on the willingness to explore new ways of looking a¶ t things: to endure inner fears when belief  systems are shaken (Hawkins, 2002). By quieting the¶ Ego, we can soften its rigid influence and ¶ help to strengthen the health of the ego and assist¶ the act of surrender (Hidas, 1981; Leary, ¶ 2004). It is an act of ego strength void of Ego fix¶ ation (Hart, 2000). Surrender is the exercise of ¶ moral muscles. In surrender, the Ego may feel like ¶ it is dying, but the ego is sustained. In the ¶ initial efforts to exercise moral muscles, the Ego  will feel torn, but it is through that wound – a  sacred wound - that new ways of understanding arrive (Branscomb, 1991).
We are complex systems. Systems are made up of systems and exist within ever larger ¶ systems within which paradox is characteristic and ¶ can be understood (Laszlo, 1996; Morin, ¶ 1999; Rowland, 1999). As long as the Ego functions ¶ with its narrow view, the paradox of human ¶ behavior can not be sufficiently contextualized and¶ it causes frustration. Curiously enough, ¶ motives to embrace change arise when the mind is challenged and puzzles are perceived ¶ (Baumeister and Vohs, 2002; Hawkins, 2002), and paradoxes are puzzles. The very fears and  obstacles that we perceive and resist ironically po¶ int us in the very direction of our own growth ¶ and serve as portals for surrender (Hart, 2000). Each surrender exposes us to a part of the larger ¶ systems within which we function. Through surrender¶ , the Ego can grasp paradox and greater ¶ truths.
It is beneath the fears of the narrow Egoic system ¶ where one finds the curiosity and ¶ courage that is willing to risk and accept what unfolds, driven by a desire to connect (Grant, ¶ 1996). Surrender releases the perceived control to ¶ which the Ego clings and simultaneously ¶ releases of the burden ¶ of ¶ being in control (Branscomb, 1991). Surrender eases¶ the burden and ¶ grip of Egoic boundary control, relaxing narcissistic muscles in order to also flex and build the ¶ unintentionally neglected moral muscles.
2ac – sci-tech rationality good

The alternative’s rejection of an epistemology of instrumental rationality collapses science and leads to epistemological fabrication --- this internal link turns error replication and policy failure
MARSHALL 2008 (Brent K. Marshall, associate professor of sociology, University of Central Florida, J. Steven Picou, Professor of Sociology and Past Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at the University of South Alabama, PhD, “Postnormal Science, Precautionary Principle, and Worst Cases: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century Catastrophes,” Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 78, No. 2, May 2008, pgs. 230-247, http://www.stevenpicou.com/pdfs/postnormal-science.pdf)
Organizations analyze problems by transforming scienti?c uncertainty into risks (Clarke 1999). Simply de?ned, risk refers to the “combination of two factors: the probability that a potentially harmful event will occur; and the potential damage such an occurrence would cause” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, 2003:30). Ideally, for organizations to POSTNORMAL SCIENCE, PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE, AND WORST CASES 237 maintain legitimacy as problem solvers astutely guided by scienti?c-technical rationality, they must (1) solve problems as reservoirs of expert knowledge and wielders of instrumental rationality; and (2) convince others that they can solve problems as purveyors of symbolic rationality (Clarke 1999). We suggest that when scienti?c uncertainty and decision stakes are low, applied scientists can effectively maintain instrumental and symbolic rationality and, as a result, organizational legitimacy is not threatened. As scienti?c uncertainty increases, organizations are charged with the “onerous task of effectively transforming uncertainty into risk even without a suf?cient experiential base or conceptual scheme appropriate for interpreting history” (Clarke 1999:12, italics in original). Under such conditions, the uncertainty-to-risk transformation fails to solve the problem and the professional consultant may forsake instrumental rationality, instead seeking to maintain organizational legitimacy through symbolic planning and the creation of “fantasy documents” (Clarke 1999).
2ac – scientific objectivity good

Criticisms of science legitimize right wing takeovers- this prevents pragmatic action to protect the Earth
Berube 11 (Michael, Paterno Family Professor in Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches cultural studies and American literature, “The Science Wars Redux,” http://www.democracyjournal.org/pdf/19/BERUBE.pdf)
But what of Sokal’s chief post-hoax claim that the academic left’s critiques of science were potentially damaging to the left? That one, alas, has held up very well, for it turns out that the critique of scientific “objectivity” and the insistence on the inevitable “partiality” of knowledge can serve the purposes of climate change deniers and young-Earth creationists quite nicely. That’s not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical antifoundationalism (whose leading American exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered nature of the academic left. It was as if we had tacitly assumed, all along, that we were speaking only to one another, so that whenever we championed Jean-François Lyotard’s defense of the “hetereogeneity of language games” and spat on Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a conversation oriented toward “consensus,” we assumed a strong consensus among us that anyone on the side of heterogeneity was on the side of the angels. But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists, just as I predicted—and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the leftpopulist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research. For example, when Andrew Ross asked in Strange Weather, “How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?,” everyone was supposed to understand that he was referring to alternative medicine, and that his critique of “scientists” was meant to bring power to the people. The countercultural account of “metaphysical life theories” that gives people a sense of dignity in the face of scientific authority sounds good—until one substitutes “astrology” or “homeopathy” or “creationism” (all of which are certainly taken seriously by millions) in its place. The right’s attacks on climate science, mobilizing a public distrust of scientific expertise, eventually led science-studies theorist Bruno Latour to write in Critical Inquiry: Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth...while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good? Why, indeed? Why not say, definitively, that anthropogenic climate change is real, that vaccines do not cause autism, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that Adam and Eve did not ride dinosaurs to church? At the close of his “Afterword” to “Transgressing the Boundaries,” Sokal wrote: No wonder most Americans can’t distinguish between science and pseudoscience: their science teachers have never given them any rational grounds for doing so. (Ask an average undergraduate: Is matter composed of atoms? Yes. Why do you think so? The reader can fill in the response.) Is it then any surprise that 36 percent of Americans believe in telepathy, and that 47 percent believe in the creation account of Genesis? It can’t be denied that some science-studies scholars have deliberately tried to blur the distinction between science and pseudoscience. As I noted in Rhetorical Occasions and on my personal blog, British philosopher of science Steve Fuller traveled to Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 to testify on behalf of the local school board’s fundamentalist conviction that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science. “The main problem intelligent design theory suffers from at the moment,” Fuller argued, “is a paucity of developers.” Somehow, Fuller managed to miss the point—that there is no way to develop a research program in ID. What is one to do, examine fossils for evidence of God’s fingerprints? So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine. And if you’ll go further, and acknowledge that some circumspect, well-informed critiques of actually existing science have merit (such as the criticism that the postwar medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth had some ill effects), I’ll go further too, and acknowledge that many humanists’ critiques of science and reason are neither circumspect nor well-informed. Then perhaps we can get down to the business of how to develop safe, sustainable energy and other social practices that will keep the planet habitable. Fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that the Sokal Hoax was making that kind of deal impossible, deepening the “two cultures” divide and further estranging humanists from scientists. Now, I think it may have helped set the terms for an eventual rapprochement, leading both humanists and scientists to realize that the shared enemies of their enterprises are the religious fundamentalists who reject all knowledge that challenges their faith and the free-market fundamentalists whose policies will surely scorch the earth. On my side, perhaps humanists are beginning to realize that there is a project even more vital than that of the relentless critique of everything existing, a project to which they can contribute as much as any scientist—the project of making the world a more humane and livable place. Is it still possible? I don’t know, and I’m not sanguine. Some scientific questions now seem to be a matter of tribal identity: A vast majority of elected Republicans have expressed doubts about the science behind anthropogenic climate change, and as someone once remarked, it is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it. But there are few tasks so urgent. About that, even Heisenberg himself would be certain.
Security Good 

Strategic planning to prevent crisis escalation avoids future spirals of insecurity.  Total descuritization is impossible. 

PH Liotta, Pell Center for IR and Public Policy, ‘5 Security Dialogue 36.1, “Through the Looking Glass: Creeping Vulnerabilities and the Reordering of Security,” p. 65-6

Although it seems attractive to focus on exclusionary concepts that insist on  desecuritization, privileged referent objects, and the ‘belief’ that threats and  vulnerabilities are little more than social constructions (Grayson, 2003), all  these concepts work in theory but fail in practice. While it may be true that  national security paradigms can, and likely will, continue to dominate issues  that involve human security vulnerabilities – and even in some instances  mistakenly confuse ‘vulnerabilities’ as ‘threats’ – there are distinct linkages  between these security concepts and applications. With regard to environ-  mental security, for example, Myers (1986: 251) recognized these linkages  nearly two decades ago:
National security is not just about fighting forces and weaponry. It relates to water-sheds, croplands, forests, genetic resources, climate and other factors that rarely figure  in the minds of military experts and political leaders, but increasingly deserve, in their  collectivity, to rank alongside military approaches as crucial in a nation’s security.  Ultimately, we are far from what O’Hanlon and Singer (2004) term a global  intervention capability on behalf of ‘humanitarian transformation’. Granted,  we now have the threat of mass casualty terrorism anytime, anywhere – and  states and regions are responding differently to this challenge. Yet, the  global community today also faces many of the same problems of the 1990s:  civil wars, faltering states, humanitarian crises. We are nowhere closer to  addressing how best to solve these challenges, even as they affect issues of  environmental, human, national (and even ‘embedded’) security.  Recently, there have been a number of voices that have spoken out on what  the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty has  termed the ‘responsibility to protect’:10 the responsibility of some agency or  state (whether it be a superpower such as the United States or an institution  such as the United Nations) to enforce the principle of security that sovereign  states owe to their citizens. Yet, the creation of a sense of urgency to act – even  on some issues that may not have some impact for years or even decades to come– is  perhaps the only appropriate first response. The real cost of not investing in  the right way and early enough in the places where trends and effects are  accelerating in the wrong direction is likely to be decades and decades of  economic and political frustration – and, potentially, military engagement.  Rather than justifying intervention (especially military), we ought to be justifying investment.
Simply addressing the immensities of these challenges is not enough.  Radical improvements in public infrastructure and support for better  governance, particularly in states and municipalities (especially along the  Lagos–Cairo–Karachi–Jakarta arc), will both improve security and create the  conditions for shrinking the gap between expectations and opportunity.  A real debate ought to be taking place today. Rather than dismissing ‘alternative’ security foci outright, a larger examination of what forms of security  are relevant and right among communities, states, and regions, and which  even might apply to a global rule-set – as well as what types of security are  not relevant – seems appropriate and necessary. If this occurs, a truly  remarkable tectonic shift might take place in the conduct of international  relations and human affairs.
Perhaps, in the failure of states and the international community to respond  to such approaches, what is needed is the equivalent of the 1972 Stockholm  conference that launched the global environmental movement and estab-  lished the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), designed to  be the environmental conscience of the United Nations. Similarly, the UN  Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996 focused on the themes of finding  adequate shelter for all and sustaining human development in an increas-  ingly urbanized world. Whether or not these programs have the ability to  influence the future’s direction (or receive wide international support) is a  matter of some debate. Yet, given that the most powerful states in the world  are not currently focusing on these issues to a degree sufficient to produce  viable implementation plans or development strategies, there may well need  to be a ‘groundswell’ of bottom-up pressure, perhaps in the form of a global  citizenry petition to push the elusive world community toward collective  action.
Recent history suggests that military intervention as the first line of response  to human security conditions underscores a seriously flawed approach.  Moreover, those who advocate that a state’s disconnectedness from globalization is inversely proportional to the likelihood of military (read: US)  intervention fail to recognize unfolding realities (Barnett, 2003, 2004). Both  middle-power and major-power states, as well as the international com-  munity, must increasingly focus on long-term creeping vulnerabilities in  order to avoid crisis responses to conditions of extreme vulnerability.  Admittedly, some human security proponents have recently soured on the  viability of the concept in the face of recent ‘either with us or against us’ power  politics (Suhrke, 2004). At the same time, and in a bit more positive light, some  have clearly recognized the sheer impossibility of international power politics  continuing to feign indifference in the face of moral categories. As Burgess  (2004: 278) notes, ‘for all its evils, one of the promises of globalization is the  unmasking of the intertwined nature of ethics and politics in the complex  landscape of social, economic, political and environmental security’.  While it is still not feasible to establish a threshold definition for human  security that neatly fits all concerns and arguments (as suggested by Owen,  2004: 383), it would be a tragic mistake to assume that national, human, and  environmental security are mutually harmonious constructs rather than  more often locked in conflictual and contested opposition with each other.  Moreover, aspects of security resident in each concept are indeed themselves  embedded with extraordinary contradictions. Human security, in particular,  is not now, nor should likely ever be, the mirror image of national security.  Yet, these contradictions are not the crucial recognition here. On the  contrary, rather than focusing on the security issues themselves, we should  be focusing on the best multi-dimensional approaches to confronting and  solving them. One approach, which might avoid the massive tidal impact  of creeping vulnerabilities, is to sharply make a rudder shift from constant  crisis intervention toward strategic planning, strategic investment, and  strategic attention. Clearly, the time is now to reorder our entire approach to  how we address – or fail to address – security.  

Turn: Our scenario-evaluations are crucial for ethically responsible politics.  Theoretical kritik is insufficient—we need realistic as if stories to generate changes in practice.  

Michael C. WILLIAMS International Politics @ Wales (Aberystwyth) ‘5 The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations p.165-167

Moreover, the links between sceptical realism and prevalent post-modern themes go more deeply than this, particularly as they apply to attempts by post-structural thinking to reopen questions of responsibility and ethics. In part, the goals of post-structural approaches can be usefully characterised, to borrow Stephen White's illuminating contrast, as expressions of 'responsibility to otherness' which question and challenge modernist equations of responsibility with a 'responsibility to act'. A responsibility to otherness seeks to reveal and open the constitutive processes and claims of subjects and subjectivities that a foundational modernism has effaced in its narrow identification of responsibility with a 'responsibility to act?' Deconstruction can from this perspective be seen as a principled stance unwilling to succumb to modernist essentialism which in the name of responsibility assumes and reifies, subjects and structures, obscures forms of power and violence which are constitutive of them, and at the same time forecloses a consideration of alternative possibilities and practices.
Yet it is my claim that the wilful Realist tradition does not lack an understanding of the contingency of practice or a vision of responsibility to otherness. On the contrary. its strategy of objectification is precisely  an attempt to bring together a responsibility to otherness and a responsibility to act within a wilfully liberal vision. The construction of a realm of objectivity and calculation is not just a consequence of a need to act - the framing of an epistemic context for successful calculation. It is a form of responsibility to otherness, an attempt to allow for diversity and irreconcilability precisely by - at least initially - reducing the self and the other to a structure of material calculation in order to allow a structure of mutual intelligibility, mediation, and stability. It is, in short, a strategy of limitation: a wilful attempt to construct a subject and a social world limited - both epistemically and politically - in the name of a politics of toleration: a liberal strategy that John Gray has recently characterised as one of modus vivendi.  If this is the case, then the deconstructive move that gains some of its weight by contrasting itself to a non- or apolitical objectivism must engage with the more complex contrast to a sceptical Realist tradition that is itself a constructed, ethical practice. This issue becomes even more acute if one considers Iver Neumann's incisive questions concerning postmodem constructions of identity, action, and responsibility. 83 Neumann points out, the insight that identities are inescapably contingent and relationally constructed, and even the claim that identities
Inescapably indebted to othemess, do not in themselves provide a foundation for practice, particularly in situations where identities are 'sedimented' and conflictually defined. In these cases, deconstruction alone will not suffice unless it can demonstrate a capacity to counter in practice (and not just in philosophic practice) the essentialist dynamics it confronts)44 Here, a responsibility to act must go beyond deconstruction to consider viable alternatives and counter-practices.
To take this critique seriously is not necessarily to be subject yet again to the straightforward 'blackmail of the Enlightenment' and a narrow 'modernist' vision of responsibility." While an unwillingness to move beyond a deconstructive ethic of responsibility to otherness for fear that an essentialist stance is the only (or most likely) alternative expresses a  legitimate concern, it should not license a retreat from such questions or their practical demands. Rather, such situations demand also an evaluation of the structures (of identity and institutions) that might viably be mobilised in order to offset the worst implications of violently exclusionary identities It requires. as Neumann nicely puts it, the generation of compelling 'as if' stories around which counter-subjectivities and political practices can coalesce. Wilful Realism, 1 submit, arises out of an appreciation of these issues, and comprises an attempt to craft precisely such 'stories' within a broader intellectual and sociological analysis of their conditions of production, possibilities of success, and likely consequences. The question is, to what extent are these limits capable of success-and to what extent might they be limits upon their own aspirations to responsibility? These are crucial questions, but they will not be addressed by retreating yet again into further reversals of the same old dichotomies. 

We should evaluate likely consequences in the international system as presently constituted.  Even if reality is socially constructed those constructions impose limits on possible action.

Michael C. WILLIAMS International Politics @ Wales (Aberystwyth) ‘5 The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations p.175-176

Seen in this light, the Realist commitment to objectivity appears quite differently, Objectivity in terms of consequentialist analysis does not simply take the actor or action as given, it is a political practice - an attempt to foster a responsible sell, undertaken by an analyst with a commitment to objectivity which is itself based in a desire to foster a politics of responsibility. Objectivity in the sense of coming to terms with the 'reality' of contextual conditions and likely outcomes of action is not only necessary for success, it is vital for self-reflection, for sustained engagement with the practical and ethical adequacy of one's views. The blithe, self-serving, and uncritical stances of abstract moralism or rationalist objectivism avoid self-criticism by refusing to engage with the intractability of the world 'as it is'. Reducing the world to an expression of their theoretical models, political platforms, or ideological programmes, they fail to engage with this reality, and thus avoid the process of self-reflection at the heart of responsibility. By contrast, Realist objectivity takes an engagement with this intractable 'object' that is not reducible to one's wishes or will as a necessary condition of ethical engagement, self-reflection, and self-creation .7 Objectivity is not a naïve naturalism in the sense of scientific laws or rationalist calculation; it is a necessary engagement with a world that eludes one's will. A recognition of the limits imposed by 'reality' is a condition for a recognition of tine's own limits - that the world is not simply an extension of one's  own will. But it is also a challenge to use that intractability as a source of possibility, as providing a set of openings within which a suitably chastened and yet paradoxically energised will to action can responsibly be pursued. In the willul Realist tradition, the essential opacity of both the self and the world are taken as limiting principles Limits upon understanding provide chastening parameters for claims about the world and actions within it. But they a so provide challenging and creative openings within which diverse forms of life can be developed; the limited unity of the self and the political order is the precondition for freedom. The ultimate opacity of the world is not to be despaired of: it is a condition of possibility for the wilful, creative construction of selves and social orders which embrace the diverse human potentialities which this lack of essential or intrinsic order makes possible." But it is also to be aware of the less salutary possibilities this involves. Indeterminacy is not synonymous with absolute freedom - it is both a condition of and imperative toward. responsibility.  From the wilful Realist position I have attempted to sketch here, consequentialism can be seen as an element of a multifaceted ethic centred around plurality, individuality, and limitation.  Paradoxical as it may sound, for wilful Realists, the essence of responsibility is to be limited by ones responsibility to the sense of limits. The universality denied by scepticism at the level of determinate epistemic or moral principles (quite literally, clear sell-knowledge about the limits of knowledge) is transformed into an ethic bearing responsibility for the freedom and plurality which scepticism Yields, along with a commitment to act in the difficult contingent circumstances which will allow this diversity to flourish with a minimum degree of violence. This is supported by a consequentialist vision that stresses the destructive implications of not  adopting a politics of limits at both the domestic and the international levels. These consequences are not themselves enough to ensure limitation, but they can support its wilful adoption.

Security key to avoid fascism—We should manage violence instead of trying to create a metapolitics of difference and peace.

Ole WAEVER Senior Research Fellow @ Copenhagen Peace Research Inst. ‘2K in International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration eds. Kelstrup and Williams p. 284-285

The other main possibility is to stress responsibility. Particularly in a field like security one has to make choices and deal with the challenges and risks that one confronts - and not shy away into long-range or principled trans- formations. The meta-political line risks (despite the theoretical commitment to the concrete other) implying that politics can be contained within large 'systemic' questions. In line with the classical revolutionary tradition, after the change (now no longer the revolution but the meta-physical transformation), there will he no more problems whereas in our situation (until the change) we should not deal with the 'small questions' of politics, only with the large one cf. Rorty 1996). However, the ethical demand in post- structuralism (e.g. Derrida's 'justice') is of a kind that can never be instantiated in any concrete political order - it is an experience of the undecidable that exceeds any concrete solution and re-inserts politics. Therefore, politics can never be reduced to meta-questions; there is no way to erase the small, particular, banal conflicts and controversies.
In contrast to the quasi-institutionalist formula of radical democracy which one finds in the 'opening' oriented version of deconstruction, we could with Derrida stress the singularity of the event. To take a position, take part, and 'produce events' (Derrida 1994: 89) means to get involved in specific struggles. Politics takes place 'in the singular event of engagement' (Derrida 1996: R3).  In contrast to the quasi-institutionalist formula of radical democracy which one finds in the 'opening' oriented version of deconstruction, we could with Derrida stress the singularity of the event. To take a position, take part, and 'produce events' (Derrida $994: 89) means to get involved in specific struggles. Politics takes place 'in the singular event of engagement' (Derrida 1996: 3),
Derrida's politics is focused on the calls that demand response/responsibility contained in words like justice, Europe and emancipation. Should we treat security in this manner? No, security is not that kind of call. 'Security' is not a way to open (or keep open) an ethical horizon. Security is a much more situational concept oriented to the handling of specifics. It belongs to the sphere of how to handle challenges - and avoid 'the worst' (Derrida 1991). Here enters again the possible pessimism which for the security analyst might be occupational or structural. The infinitude of responsibility (Derrida 1996: 86) or the tragic nature of politics (Morgenthau 1946, Chapter 7) means that one can never feel reassured that by some 'good deed', '1 have assumed my responsibilities' (Derrida 1996: 86).  If I conduct myself particularly well with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of one nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of another family, of  my friends to the detriment of other friends or non-friends, etc. This is the infinitude that inscribes itself within responsibility; otherwise there would he no ethical problems or decisions. (ibid.) and parallel argumentation in Morgenthau 1946; Chapters 6 and 7)  Because of this there will remain conflicts and risks - and the question of how to handle them. Should developments be securitized (and if so, in what terms)? Often, our reply will he to aim for de-securitization and then politics meet meta-politics, but occasionally the underlying pessimism regarding the prospects for orderliness and compatibility among human aspirations will point to scenarios sufficiently worrisome that responsibility will entail securitization in order to block the worst. As a security/securitization analyst, this means accepting the task of trying to manage and avoid spirals and accelerating security concerns, to try to assist in shaping the continent in a way that creates the least insecurity and violence - even if this occasionally means invoking/producing 'structures' or even using the dubious instrument of securitization. In the case of the current European configuration, the above analysis suggests the use of securitization at the level of European scenarios with the aim of pre- empting and avoiding numerous instances of local securitization that could lead to security dilemmas and escalations, violence and mutual vilification. 

Their role of the ballot claims construct an omnipotent theorist—this construct is more dangerous than the provisional and limited claims of security.  

Ole WAEVER Senior Research Fellow @ Copenhagen Peace Research Inst. ‘2K in International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration eds. Kelstrup and Williams p. 282-283

This chapter has largely taken its questions train the traditional agenda and its answers from a much less traditional quarters. The establishment is likely to have some problems accepting the logic a1 the reply (even if it might like where it ends) - and the post-structuralist will hesitate before granting the terms for the question, the phrasing of the problematique. Who says we need security systems? Isn't this to accept 'the anarchy problematique'? Does it presuppose a need for arrangements to curtail sonw kind of natural or inherent violence and anarchy? Yes and no. Yes, world politics is indeed complex unstable - and could easily be called anarchic. Many unpleasant possibilities can be imagined, and some are sufficiently likely to justify a term like pessimism. Still, this is exactly not the anarchy problematique in its traditional IR sense, because as Richard Ashley has pointed out, the anarchy problematique of 'cooperation under anarchy' and other rational choice themes 'assumes to be solved, the burner part of the problem it purports to state' (1988: 229). The lack of central rule can easily be admitted, but the dominant IR agenda is produced by moving immediately from this - the real anarchy - to a specific articulation of the question in the form of sovereign states rationally calculating their mutual relations. Resisting the 'heroic practice' of the sovereignty/anarchy blackmail, we do not get an ordered, peaceful world order - quite the contrary, we are left with that excessive amount of openness and indecision which is mostly held to be intolerable and therefore absorbed into the anarchy problematique. 'The absence of a central agency of rule would mean only that, an absence of a central agency of rule' jibed.. 2391.  Like classical realism, this anarchy without the anarchy problematique points to a world of little stability, few guarantees and much violence of many sans. Mainstream canstructivists only avoid this confusing world by de facto riding on much of the disciplining and promises of the anarchy problematique: state-centredness (allegedly only as an academic assumption), domestic order and an agenda of inter-state co-operation. If the existing order is - as the classical realist secretly suspect Ashky 1999, 1996) and the post-structuralists claim - built on ultimately arbitrary instalments of self-evidence, meaning and problems, one should be prepared for change to mean nor necessarily gentle improvement but possibly (or most  likely) quite dramatic changes which no-one can guarantee will be for the better. This Ashleyan image of realists as almost knowingly fighting an abyss of indeterminancy, creating limitations but not out of rigidity or narrow- mindedness but in order to create order, contrasts strongly with the dominant self-image of most critical international relationists (most constructivists and some post-structuralists). They usually picture the problem of realism and rationalism as one of superstition or religion, of the main- stream dogmatically holding on to positivist limitations. This naturally endows the critical theorist with a much nicer position: the one of criticizing, transgressing and thinking the new. Paradoxically, this is the arch- modernist position, the Enlightenment rhetoric in pure form. In contrast, we could admit that realists and other rationalists are actually Enlightenment- inspired thinkers - often progressives - who want to improve and transgress but of course have problematized in the dual sense of questioning and of imposing a certain set of limitations by defining the relevant problem. When realists and others resist the openings and modifications suggested by critical theorists, it is often not because of pure epistemological conservativism, but on the contrary a political practice based on their sense that their order is arbitrary and therefore in need of protection, that e.g. the channelling of violence into a state-based order has been an enormous historical gain that is too lightly given up if the implied ontological and epistemological decisions are reversed Walker 1993; Williams 1998)? Then, the decision to go ahead, to question and thereby re-open the historical resolution of difficult political problems, is not taken lightly with a sense of progressing towards a new (liberal-constructivist) dawn, but rather with a diffident sense of making a difficult political choice with unknown consequences

Completely embracing openness to otherness re-creates problems of enlightment rationality—strongest internal link to their impact is faith in positive progress regardless of political difference.

Ole WAEVER Senior Research Fellow @ Copenhagen Peace Research Inst. ‘2K in International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration eds. Kelstrup and Williams p. 283-284

Just as this task and this impossible decision are accepted at the meta- theoretical level, they should be accepted in concrete political struggles. Two main lines are available to a post-structuralist. One is to answer with meta-politics: much of post-structuralism takes an ethical or political stance for opening, pluralization, unfixing, and radical democratization - it wants to open up the space for new thoughts, new actions, for transgression. This is an obvious way to translate post-structuralism into politics. However, if not carefully done, this politics of opening appears as necessarily good, as somehow metapolitically true, and thus - paradoxically - politically innocent. Problematically, this stance implies that one can deduce a progressive political position from a philosophical premise. At a meta-level, it consistently contributes to a questioning of authorities and experts, and thus abstractly to the development of radical democracy, but a political situation is always unique and concrete, a field of forces, a situation demanding a choice, a choice that has consequences. To take the specific situation seriously includes the possibility that one would for other (non-meta) reasons favour other choices than opening and rather close off  some options (the easy illustrations: trying to close off fascism and racism; cf. Derrida 1996, 831). To assume that general 'opening' and democratization lead to people resisting the bad and choosing the good would be a surprising Enlightenment optimistic audacity. No formula can ensure in advance that one's action is 'good' or 'progressive'. As argued most elegantly by Arendt (1958), the meaning of an action is constituted after- wards, by the storyteller not in the action, because politics is inter-action and therefore unpredictable and one cannot know what one does (cf. also Morgenthau 1946: Chapters 7-8),  

Robo Good 

Drones and other robotic warfare is ethical
Pryer 13 (Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, “The Rise of Machines,” Military Review, April 2013, http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20130430_art001.pdf)
In this essay, I will not argue that waging war remotely does not have ethical advantages, for it clearly does. For one, armed drones and other robots are incapable of running concentration camps and committing rape and other crimes that still require human troops on the ground. Indeed, removing combat operators from the stress of life-threatening danger reduces their potential to commit those crimes that they could still conceivably commit via drones. Neuroscientists are ?nding that the neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to stress.2 When these circuits shut down, primal impulses go unchecked.3 This means that soldiers under extreme physical duress can commit crimes that they would normally be unable to commit.

Comparatively a better alternative
Pryer 13 (Lieutenant Colonel Douglas A. Pryer, U.S. Army, “The Rise of Machines,” Military Review, April 2013, http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20130430_art001.pdf)
Another ethical advantage is that, compared to most other modern weapons systems, armed drones do a better job of helping combat operators to distinguish and target combatants instead of noncombatants. The New America Foundation, a nonpro?t, nonpartisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C., and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), a British nonpro?t news organization, provide the best known, most comprehensive estimates of civilian casualties from America’s armed drones. In Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the New America Foundation estimates that the ratio of noncombatant to combatant deaths is about 1:5 (one noncombatant death for every ?ve combatant deaths).4 The TBIJ estimates that this same ratio in the FATA is 1:4, a ratio their estimates hold roughly true for America’s drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia as well.5 This kill ratio is not nearly as clean as proclaimed by some UAV enthusiasts, but it is much better than what is delivered by other modern weapons systems, which in total is something like a 1:1 ratio.6

1NC TK Good DA (short)
Targeted killing’s vital to counterterrorism—disrupts leadership and makes carrying out attacks impossible
Anderson 13—Kenneth, Professor of International Law at American University May 24, 2013, “The Case for Drones,” Commentary Magazine, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/24/the_case_for_drones_118548.html

Targeted killing of high-value terrorist targets, by contrast, is the end result of a long, independent intelligence process. What the drone adds to that intelligence might be considerable, through its surveillance capabilities—but much of the drone’s contribution will be tactical, providing intelligence that assists in the planning and execution of the strike itself, in order to pick the moment when there might be the fewest civilian casualties.
Nonetheless, in conjunction with high-quality intelligence, drone warfare offers an unparalleled means to strike directly at terrorist organizations without needing a conventional or counterinsurgency approach to reach terrorist groups in their safe havens. It offers an offensive capability, rather than simply defensive measures, such as homeland security alone. Drone warfare offers a raiding strategy directly against the terrorists and their leadership.
If one believes, as many of the critics of drone warfare do, that the proper strategies of counterterrorism are essentially defensive—including those that eschew the paradigm of armed conflict in favor of law enforcement and criminal law—then the strategic virtue of an offensive capability against the terrorists themselves will seem small. But that has not been American policy since 9/11, not under the Bush administration, not under the Obama administration—and not by the Congress of the United States, which has authorized hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the war on terror aggressively. The United States has used many offensive methods in the past dozen years: Regime change of states offering safe havens, counterinsurgency war, special operations, military and intelligence assistance to regimes battling our common enemies are examples of the methods that are just of military nature.
Drone warfare today is integrated with a much larger strategic counterterrorism target—one in which, as in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, radical Islamist groups seize governance of whole populations and territories and provide not only safe haven, but also an honored central role to transnational terrorist groups. This is what current conflicts in Yemen and Mali threaten, in counterterrorism terms, and why the United States, along with France and even the UN, has moved to intervene militarily. Drone warfare is just one element of overall strategy, but it has a clear utility in disrupting terrorist leadership. It makes the planning and execution of complex plots difficult if only because it is hard to plan for years down the road if you have some reason to think you will be struck down by a drone but have no idea when. The unpredictability and terrifying anticipation of sudden attack, which terrorists have acknowledged in communications, have a significant impact on planning and organizational effectiveness.

TK is key to prevent existential terrorism
Beres 11—Louis René Beres, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue, Ph.D. from Princeton 2011, “Roundtable Discussion: Is the President Bound by International Law in the War Against Terrorism? A Ten-Year Retrospective: After Osama bin Laden: Assassination, Terrorism, War, and International Law,” 44 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 93, Lexis

Even after the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden, we are still left with the problem of demonstrating that assassination can be construed, at least under certain very limited circumstances, as an appropriate instance of anticipatory self-defense. Arguably, the enhanced permissibility of anticipatory self-defense that follows generally from the growing destructiveness of current weapons technologies in rogue hands may be paralleled by the enhanced permissibility of assassination as a particular strategy of preemption. Indeed, where assassination as anticipatory self-defense may actually prevent a nuclear or other highly destructive form of warfare, reasonableness dictates that it could represent distinctly, even especially, law-enforcing behavior.
For this to be the case, a number of particular conditions would need to be satisfied. First, the assassination itself would have to be limited to the greatest extent possible to those authoritative persons in the prospective attacking state. Second, the assassination would have to conform to all of the settled rules of warfare as they concern discrimination, proportionality, and military necessity. Third, the assassination would need to follow intelligence assessments that point, beyond a reasonable doubt, to preparations for unconventional or other forms of highly destructive warfare within the intended victim's state. Fourth, the assassination would need to be founded upon carefully calculated judgments that it would, in fact, prevent the intended aggression, and that it would do so with substantially less harm  *114  to civilian populations than would all of the alternative forms of anticipatory self-defense.
Such an argument may appear manipulative and dangerous; permitting states to engage in what is normally illegal behavior under the convenient pretext of anticipatory self-defense. Yet, any blanket prohibition of assassination under international law could produce even greater harm, compelling threatened states to resort to large-scale warfare that could otherwise be avoided. Although it would surely be the best of all possible worlds if international legal norms could always be upheld without resort to assassination as anticipatory self-defense, the persisting dynamics of a decentralized system of international law may sometimes still require extraordinary methods of law-enforcement. n71
Let us suppose, for example, that a particular state determines that another state is planning a nuclear or chemical surprise attack upon its population centers. We may suppose, also, that carefully constructed intelligence assessments reveal that the assassination of selected key figures (or, perhaps, just one leadership figure) could prevent such an attack altogether. Balancing the expected harms of the principal alternative courses of action (assassination/no surprise attack v. no assassination/surprise attack), the selection of preemptive assassination could prove reasonable, life-saving, and cost-effective.
What of another, more common form of anticipatory self-defense? Might a conventional military strike against the prospective attacker's nuclear, biological or chemical weapons launchers and/or storage sites prove even more reasonable and cost-effective? A persuasive answer inevitably depends upon the particular tactical and strategic circumstances of the moment, and on the precise way in which these particular circumstances are configured.
But it is entirely conceivable that conventional military forms of preemption would generate tangibly greater harms than assassination, and possibly with no greater defensive benefit. This suggests that assassination should not be dismissed out of hand in all circumstances as a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense under international law.  *115
What of those circumstances in which the threat to particular states would not involve higher-order (WMD) n72 military attacks? Could assassination also represent a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense under these circumstances? Subject to the above-stated conditions, the answer might still be "yes." The threat of chemical, biological or nuclear attack may surely enhance the legality of assassination as preemption, but it is by no means an essential precondition. A conventional military attack might still, after all, be enormously, even existentially, destructive. n73 Moreover, it could be followed, in certain circumstances, by unconventional attacks.

1nc – china drones

Plan’s modeling restricts Chinese strikes on Uighur separatists
Bergen and Rowland 12 (Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, Jennifer Rowland, Special to CNN, “A Dangerous New World of Drones,” CNN News, October 8, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/01/opinion/bergen-world-of-drones)
But without an international framework governing the use of drone attacks, the United States is setting a dangerous precedent for other nations with its aggressive and secretive drone programs in Pakistan and Yemen, which are aimed at suspected members of al Qaeda and their allies.
Just as the U.S. government justifies its drone strikes with the argument that it is at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates, one could imagine that India in the not too distant future might launch such attacks against suspected terrorists in Kashmir, or China might strike Uighur separatists in western China, or Iran might attack Baluchi nationalists along its border with Pakistan.

Drone strikes are key --- suppresses Xinjiang separatist violence and instability
Erickson and Strange 13 (Andrew Erickson, associate professor at the Naval War College, Associate in Research at Harvard University's Fairbank Centre, Austin Strange, researcher at the Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute, graduate student at Zhejiang University, “China Has Drones. Now How Will it Use Them?” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2013, http://www.nationmultimedia.com/opinion/China-has-drones-Now-how-will-it-use-them-30207095.html)
Yet there is a reason why the United States has employed drones extensively despite domestic and international criticism: it is much easier and cheaper to kill terrorists from above than to try to root them out through long and expensive counterinsurgency campaigns. Some similar challenges loom on China's horizon. Within China, Beijing often considers protests and violence in the restive border regions, such as Xinjiang and Tibet, to constitute terrorism. It would presumably consider ordering precision strikes to suppress any future violence there. Even if such strikes are operationally prudent, China's leaders understand that they would damage the country's image abroad, but they prioritise internal stability above all else. Domestic surveillance by drones is a different issue; there should be few barriers to its application in what is already one of the world's most heavily policed societies. China might also be willing to use stealth drones in foreign airspace without authorisation if the risk of detection were low enough; it already deploys intelligence-gathering ships in the exclusive economic zones of Japan and the United States, as well as in the Indian Ocean.

The impact is Chinese nuclear terrorism
Ferguson and Potter, 4 — president of the Federation of American Scientists, former project director of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, adjunct professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University, former scientist-in-residence at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, winner of the 2003 Robert S. Landauer Lecture Award from the Health Physics Society, consultant for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the National Nuclear Security Administration, former physical scientist in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Nuclear Safety at the U.S. Department of State, co-chairman of the U.S.-Japan Nuclear Working Group, M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Boston University, AND, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies and Founding Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Policy Studies in Russia (Charles D. and William C., “The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism”, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Monterey Institute, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2004, http://jeffreyfields.net/427/Site/Blog/30F67A03-182C-4FC7-9EFD-A7C321F6DC8D_files/analysis_4faces.pdf)
China has been gradually modernizing its nuclear arsenal. However, at this time, it is unclear whether this modernization program will in- crease or decrease security risks that terrorists might exploit. While more Chinese nuclear weapons might mean more opportunities for theft, a modernized force might incorporate more up-to-date security proce- dures. Isolated storage and transportation links could pose increased risks for any nation’s nuclear weapons security program. China is be- lieved to assemble nuclear warheads at a number of nuclear facilities, and the Lop Nur test site may contain a storage facility for Chinese nuclear weapons (although it is probably unused, since China has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996).56 Lop Nur is remotely located in northwest Xinjiang province, where nationalist/separatist organizations have been campaigning for autonomy from Beijing. Although Xinjiang separatist groups have not openly expressed interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, some reports have alleged that Uighur separatists may have stolen radioactive sources from Lop Nur in 1993.57 It is difficult to offer an overall assessment of the security of China’s nuclear arms against terrorists because Beijing has a long-standing prac- tice of not publishing sensitive information. In addition, China shows little concern (at least openly) that nuclear terrorism can occur on Chinese soil. While this lack of concern may be justified, the Chinese government still has to factor in security threats posed by Xinjiang separatists and other groups that may engage in terrorism in China. Nonetheless, the dominant role of the Chinese Communist Party and its security ap- paratus in Chinese society, and the limited presence of terrorist groups in China, appear to reduce substantially the danger that a terrorist or- ganization might gain control of an intact nuclear weapon in that country.

Chinese nuclear terrorism leads to global nuclear war
Ayson 10 – Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41 Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response.
1nc – russia drones 

Drone prolif is good --- plan’s modeling restricts Russian strikes on Eastern European energy terrorism
Roberts 13 (Kristin Roberts, News Editor for National Journal, M.A. in security studies from Georgetown University, “When the Whole World Has Drones,” The National Journal, March 22, 2013, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/when-the-whole-world-has-drones-20130321)
Hyperbole? Consider this: Iran, with the approval of Damascus, carries out a lethal strike on anti-Syrian forces inside Syria; Russia picks off militants tampering with oil and gas lines in Ukraine or Georgia; Turkey arms a U.S.-provided Predator to kill Kurdish militants in northern Iraq who it believes are planning attacks along the border. Label the targets as terrorists, and in each case, Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara may point toward Washington and say, we learned it by watching you. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
This is the unintended consequence of American drone warfare. For all of the attention paid to the drone program in recent weeks—about Americans on the target list (there are none at this writing) and the executive branch’s legal authority to kill by drone outside war zones (thin, by officials’ own private admission)—what goes undiscussed is Washington’s deliberate failure to establish clear and demonstrable rules for itself that would at minimum create a globally relevant standard for delineating between legitimate and rogue uses of one of the most awesome military robotics capabilities of this generation.

The impact is Russian political and economic security --- energy terrorism disrupts the entire network
Ratliff 03 (William E. Ratliff, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, lecturer at Stanford University, “Russia’s Oil in America’s Future: Policy, Pipelines, and Prospects,” Hoover Press, January 1, 2003, pgs. 4-8)
Finally, U.S. leaders believe that helping Russia update and develop this critical natural resource and industry will contribute to the stability of the country during a dif?cult transition period and that this, in turn, will provide the foundation for its active and productive participation in the global economy, though at present to a very large extent this depends on a continuation of the high levels of oil prices. It is reasoned that economic stability and Russia’s forthcoming membership in the World Trade Organization will increase the chances that Russia will develop along democratic and market-oriented paths. Washington’s oil initiative with Moscow has involved both government agencies and private industry. The role of the latter, a central and innovative element in the bilateral relationship, was emphasized at the October 2002 U.S.- Russia Commercial Energy Summit in Houston, which in turn set up the Commercial Energy Working Group, which met again in mid-September 2003 in St. Petersburg. Though in 2002 U.S. economic ties with Russia were roughly comparable to ties with Costa Rica, Americans could soon play a critical role in funding development of the Russian oil industry, as well as providing technology and expertise. There is considerable U.S. government and business interest in doing so, and already there is some movement in that direction.
Oil and the Russian Economy
Russian oil exploration began in the 1840s near Baku on the Caspian Sea. Oil production did not take off under communism until after World War II when it became increasingly productive and ef?cient. During the late Soviet period Russia was the world’s top exporter of oil, a distinction it may have recovered in the past year.8 At its peak in the 1980s, Soviet production was about 10 million barrels per day, of which about half was used domestically. The production and use of energy declined after the fall of communism even as the economy also suffered from the virtual collapse of the second leg of the Soviet economic system, the defense industry. Restructuring of the state-controlled Russian oil sector began in the early 1990s, building on changes that had occurred under Mikhail Gorbachev, and surged in and after the mid1990s when major portions of the state industry were sold to private buyers in auctions. Today the private companies (including Yukos, Tyumen Oil TNK) are more ef?ciently run than state companies, and this is one of the reasons the government reportedly intends to divest itself of its remaining minority holdings in oil companies by 2006.9 This will, of course, further decrease central control over the vital industry.
After the 1998 ?nancial crisis, and particularly since the beginning of Putin’s presidency, energy has become the engine of Russian growth, for resources, mostly oil and natural gas, constitute more than 40 percent of Russia’s exports and almost 15 percent of its GDP. During the ?rst seven months of 2003, oil output averaged 8.26 million barrels per day, and in August it rose to 8.6 million barrels per day,10 of which about two-thirds is exported, in part because domestic prices for oil are very low. The recent increase in production is not due mainly to tapping new ?elds, though new reserves have been found, but to reviving and streamlining the Soviet period production, in large part through privatization, and exporting a higher percentage of the product. Still, major new investments in technological renovation will be required for Russia to maintain its high levels of production in the decades that follow and much of that must come via merger and acquisition, both within the Russian domestic market and with international industries. At the energy session in St. Petersburg in September 2003, Russia’s energy minister Igor Yusufov said that in the next twenty years Russia will need about $500 billion to develop its fuel and energy sector.11
During the Soviet period most exports went to Soviet-bloc countries, from Eastern Europe to Cuba, but those countries are less attractive today because most cannot pay their bills. With the revival of the oil industry, exports to the European Union (EU) have risen to 39 percent because the demand there is high, and payments are in cash. An energy summit with the EU in October 2000 brought a European pledge to help develop Russian reserves in return for a long-term energy commitment to the EU. Thus shipments to the EU are projected to rise to some 45 percent in the years ahead.12 In mid-2003 the Russian government produced a study on energy strategy to 2020. It projected a 30–35 percent increase in the production of primary fuel and energy resources, the continued importance of the European market, an expansion of oil deliveries to Asia from the current 3 percent to 30 percent of sales, and greater attention to the Americas.13
Russian Oil Fields and Production
Russia is the largest country in the world, and most of it is undeveloped. That means it is often very dif?cult to explore, extract, process and transport oil from a site.14 The ?elds today can be divided into two categories. There are the older ?elds, mainly in western Siberia, that while they still produce the bulk of the product know that their years are numbered.15 And there are the new or “green” ?elds on the fringes of the older ones, ranging geographically from the Antarctic to Russian territory on the eastern Paci?c coast. There is much disagreement as to how extensive Russia’s reserves are in these areas, due in part to a lack of accurate information and differing yardsticks. Estimates range from the eighth largest to perhaps the largest in the world.16
Russia’s most important oil areas, both producing and potential, are the following.
• western Siberia, where most of the early and 70 percent of current production takes place, particularly in the Nizhnevartovsk/Surgut area;
• the western basins between the Caspian and Barents Seas;
• eastern Siberia, where the reserves are considered particularly rich but “green” and dif?cult to access;
• the Arctic domain; and
• the currently booming basin of Sakhalin on the Paci?c margin.17
The Russians have strong interest also in the oil produced in neighboring countries, and in pipelines passing through other countries, most of which were part of the now defunct Soviet Union. For example, in late August 2003 TNK-BP shareholders expressed interest in the privatization of 66 percent in the Turkish oil company Tupras. Since 9/11 in particular, Russian leaders have promoted closer bilateral and multilateral relations in central Asia and the Caucasus and negotiated, as yet unsuccessfully, which of the ?ve countries bordering on the Caspian Sea (Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan) own how much of its oil-rich bed. Private and state-owned energy companies have also become very active throughout the region.18
Two additional problems require comment here, and very substantial government and private attention. First, the vulnerability of Russia’s industry generally, and its thousands of miles of oil pipelines in particular, to sabotage. The impact of terrorist attacks on the oil industry, which was the subject of the 1999 James Bond ?lm The World Is Not Enough, became reality in post–Saddam Hussein Iraq and could become enormously disruptive to the Russian system. Also, threats to the environment have resulted in destruction and promise more. Governments and environmental groups have responded, with reasonable and sometimes unreasonable demands. Nordic and Baltic states say Russian tankers in northern seas are a threat to the Arctic environment. Therefore, they will apply to the United Nations to get the Baltic Sea designated a “Particularly Sensitive Sea Area” so that the tankers will have to stick to narrow lanes and use pilots near the coasts. On the other side of the world, a Russian/Japanese team has charged that exploration and drilling in the Sakhalin region in Russian east Asia are threatening the sea eagle population and in violation of treaties to protect migratory birds. Some pressure groups have advanced environmental interests, while others have weakened them.19

Extinction
Filger 09 (Sheldon Filger, author and blogger for the Huffington Post, “Russian Economy Faces Disastrous Free Fall Contraction”, http://www.globaleconomiccrisis.com/blog/archives/356)
In Russia, historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted with their nation's history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia's economic crisis will endanger the nation's political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union. Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama's national security team has already briefed him about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all, the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already concluded that the Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United States, due to its facilitating political instability in the world. During the years Boris Yeltsin ruled Russia, security forces responsible for guarding the nation's nuclear arsenal went without pay for months at a time, leading to fears that desperate personnel would illicitly sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations. If the current economic crisis in Russia were to deteriorate much further, how secure would the Russian nuclear arsenal remain? It may be that the financial impact of the Global Economic Crisis is its least dangerous consequence.

1nc – turkey drones

Drone prolif is good --- plan’s modeling restricts Turkish strikes on Kurdish militants
Roberts 13 (Kristin Roberts, News Editor for National Journal, M.A. in security studies from Georgetown University, “When the Whole World Has Drones,” The National Journal, March 22, 2013, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/when-the-whole-world-has-drones-20130321)
Hyperbole? Consider this: Iran, with the approval of Damascus, carries out a lethal strike on anti-Syrian forces inside Syria; Russia picks off militants tampering with oil and gas lines in Ukraine or Georgia; Turkey arms a U.S.-provided Predator to kill Kurdish militants in northern Iraq who it believes are planning attacks along the border. Label the targets as terrorists, and in each case, Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara may point toward Washington and say, we learned it by watching you. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
This is the unintended consequence of American drone warfare. For all of the attention paid to the drone program in recent weeks—about Americans on the target list (there are none at this writing) and the executive branch’s legal authority to kill by drone outside war zones (thin, by officials’ own private admission)—what goes undiscussed is Washington’s deliberate failure to establish clear and demonstrable rules for itself that would at minimum create a globally relevant standard for delineating between legitimate and rogue uses of one of the most awesome military robotics capabilities of this generation.

PKK resurgence threatens Northern Iraq and collapses regional stability
Clark 08 (Perry Clark, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army, U.S. Army War College, “Reassessing U.S. National Security Strategy: the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK),” Strategy Research Project, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA478197andLocation=U2anddoc=GetTRDoc.pdf)
The PKK is a recognized terrorist organization by the U.S. and the international community. It continues to threaten regional stability in northern Iraq through terrorist actions, and through its associations with transnational criminal organizations, it now threatens economic stability in Europe. Current USG policy against the PKK is achieving short-term goals with Turkey; however, achieving long-term regional stability will require the elimination of PKK terrorist capabilities and their known links to terrorist transnational criminal organizations. Both President Bush and the Turkish Prime Minister want to eliminate the PKK. In order to comply with President Bush’s policy, senior policy makers will need to reassess their strategies and take a more committed position to eradicate the PKK. As stated in the recommendation, the implementation of an International PKK Taskforce (IPKKTF) with the authority to implement policy and actions using the elements of national and multi-national power could effectively eliminate the PKK as a terrorist and transnational criminal threat. The IPKKITF would demonstrate U.S. resolve and commitment to allies on a global scale. The NSS (2007) states, The fight must be taken to the enemy, to keep them on the run. To succeed in our own efforts, we need the support and concerted action of friends and allies. We must join with others to deny the terrorists what they need to survive: safe haven, financial support, and the support and protection that certain nation-states historically have given them.61 By effectively synchronizing national and international interagency resources and assets, the IPKKTF will fracture, delink and deresource the PKK, thus, eliminating the PKK threat to regional stability and global economic corruption. This effort primarily uses soft power to succeed against the PKK. Military involvement (hard power) would be limited to SOF units with unique irregular warfare capabilities to use against the PKK. As the Honorable Colin Powell (2004) stated, “As the President made clear on May 1, 2003, we use all the tools of diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence, and finance….The use of force has been – and remains – our last resort.”62 For the past several months, the Turkish military has conducted both air and limited ground attacks against PKK targets, but this will not eliminate the PKK. It may have some affect towards fracturing the PKK, but these actions will not delink or deresource their efforts. Turkey is concerned about Kurdish autonomy and the situation with the PKK only fuels aggression. By implementing aggressive diplomacy through SC and an effective IO campaign, the IPKKTF could build alliances and media support against the PKK. Militarily, the use of SOF could restrict terrorist movements and reduce capabilities through PKK interdiction. Economics and finance would build and strengthen regional economies while disrupting PKK finance methods. Intelligence would continue to support all elements of national and international power to disrupt the PKK power base. Finally, the use of law enforcement can interdict and arrest those conducting transnational criminal activities to support the PKK, while training regional Kurds in checkpoint security operations at border crossings. There are a myriad of tasks to coordinate for IPKKTF support to succeed. Once successful the Turkish government would have to reevaluate its governmental and military policy concerning troops on the northern Iraq border. Stability and security could again gain momentum. Additionally, interdicting the PKK’s ability to manage their legal and illegal funding streams would restore a sense of assurance to our European allies. A threat to European economies is a threat to US economies. Powell (2004) commented, “Everyone knows America and Europe needs each other...”63 Situational threats, like those posed by the PKK, are becoming more prevalent within the 21st century. If regional stability, security, and growth are to continue then the USG needs to align its policies and strategies internationally to achieve effective results. Chiarelli with Smith (2007) noted, “In the increasing interconnected, interdependent, and dangerous world we live in, the U.S. cannot assume that it will be able to retreat from other nations’ problems for very long.”64 This is becoming evident regarding the Turkey, KRG, Iraq, and PKK situation in northern Iraq. Although the US National Security Strategy is clear concerning U.S. desires to eliminate terrorism, what is not clear in terms of policy is the level of U.S. intervention. In order to retain regional stability within northern Iraq and reaffirm alliances the USG needs to reassess its strategies, increase the level of intervention, and employ all its elements of power against the PKK. As a future concern to USG policy makers and importance to Kurdish issues, Aliza Marcus (2007) noted, “The crisis in Iraq and tensions over potential Kurdish separatist interests there underscore that the region’s some 28 million Kurds will long remain a source of instability for the governments that rule them and the western powers that try to influence events there.”65

Global nuclear war
Corsi 07 (Jerome, Ph.D. in Political Science – Harvard University, “War with Iran is Imminent”, World Net Daily, 1-8, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53669)
If a broader war breaks out in Iraq, Olmert will certainly face pressure to send the Israel military into the Gaza after Hamas and into Lebanon after Hezbollah. If that happens, it will only be a matter of time before Israel and the U.S. have no choice but to invade Syria. The Iraq war could quickly spin into a regional war, with Israel waiting on the sidelines ready to launch an air and missile strike on Iran that could include tactical nuclear weapons. With Russia ready to deliver the $1 billion TOR M-1 surface-to-air missile defense system to Iran, military leaders are unwilling to wait too long to attack Iran. Now that Russia and China have invited Iran to join their Shanghai Cooperation Pact, will Russia and China sit by idly should the U.S. look like we are winning a wider regional war in the Middle East? If we get more deeply involved in Iraq, China may have their moment to go after Taiwan once and for all. A broader regional war could easily lead into a third world war, much as World Wars I and II began.
1nc – us aviation 

Rampant drone prolif creates massive export opportunities for the US --- it drives and sustains industrial base growth and leadership
GAO 12 (Government Accountability Office, “Nonproliferation: Agencies Could Improve Information Sharing and End-Use Monitoring on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exports,” September 12, 2012, http://www.gao.gov/assets/650/647578.txt)
Additionally, DOD has noted the importance of allowing selected transfers of UAV technology in order to strengthen the U.S. industrial base for UAV production. According to some U.S. government officials, the ability to sell American UAVs to foreign purchasers helps defray the U.S. government's acquisition costs. U.S. government officials also noted that opening larger potential markets to American UAV producers provides additional incentives for producers to invest resources in the research and development of UAV systems, and helps the United States retain a technological lead over foreign UAV producers. According to private sector representatives, UAVs are one of the most important growth sectors in the defense industry and provide significant opportunities for economic benefits if U.S. companies can remain competitive in the global UAV market. 

This military export growth underpins deterrence
O’Hanlon 11 (Mackenzie Eaglen, American Enterprise Institute Rebecca Grant, IRIS Research Robert P. Haffa, Haffa Defense Consulting Michael O'Hanlon, The Brookings Institution Peter W. Singer, The Brookings Institution Martin Sullivan, Commonwealth Consulting Barry Watts, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments “The Arsenal of Democracy and How to Preserve It: Key Issues in Defense Industrial Policy January 2012,” pg online @ http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/1/2620defense20industrial20base/0126_defense_industrial_base_ohanlon)
The current wave of defense cuts is also different than past defense budget reductions in their likely industrial impact, as the U.S. defense industrial base is in a much different place than it was in the past. Defense industrial issues are too often viewed through the lens of jobs and pet projects to protect in congressional districts. But the overall health of the firms that supply the technologies our armed forces utilize does have national security resonance. Qualitative superiority in weaponry and other key military technology has become an essential element of American military power in the modern era—not only for winning wars but for deterring them. That requires world-class scientific and manufacturing capabilities—which in turn can also generate civilian and military export opportunities for the United States in a globalized marketplace.

Sector decline leads to miscalculation --- causes global warfare
Cooper 07 (Horace Cooper, Senior Fellow and deputy director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, “Making it in America”, April 04, 2007, http://www.americanmanufacturing.org/articles/making-it-america)
But perhaps greater than the economic disruption in the lives of the workforce and their companies is the incalculable loss of a manufacturing base for our nation as a whole. There are those in Washington who fail to appreciate the attendant decline in our nation’s security and flexibility in foreign affairs that results from the collapse of this sector. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the unipolarity that resulted presents the United States far greater responsibilities and concerns than those that existed during the Cold War. Yet, our failure to sustain our domestic manufacturing base and instead pursuing a strategy of relying on other countries for military products and technologies isn’t just short-sided, it’s dangerous. This decline in our country’s military readiness is a signal to the rest of the world that we may not be capable of defending our interests or allies. And perhaps one of the greatest lessons of the 20th century is that weakness at home is provocative. Essentially, we provoke rogue nations into taking ill-advised actions that must inevitably be countered by America’s military might. A policy that results in a diminished security for Americans, fewer jobs, a declining tax base for communities and states and that rejects our nation’s history is a policy that should be reassessed. Supporters of liberty and freedom recognize that American ingenuity and know-how is a core ingredient of our manufacturing sector and has led to much of the high standard of living we Americans take for granted. 

Ontology
--1AR Ontology Focus Bad

Ontology focus bad, leads to tyranny
Gauthier 04 (David, Phd Candidate in Poly Sci @ Lousiana State, "MARTIN HEIDEGGER, EMMANUEL LEVINAS, AND THE POLITICS OF DWELLING," http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-11052004-163310/unrestricted/Gauthier_dis.pdf)   
As this chapter has noted, Levinas’s emphasis on “the reality of persecuted people in the daily history of the world” informs his critique of Heidegger.  Levinas’s critique of Heideggerian ontology identifies how the ontological, anti-humanistic, and pagan cast of the latter’s thought is inherently totalizing.  This can be viewed as the first of Levinas’s two principal objections to fundamental ontology.  The second major objection, which I have ignored until now, relates to its political consequences.  In sum, fundamental ontology necessarily leads to tyranny:  “Even though it opposes the technological passion issued forth from the forgetting of Being hidden by the existent, Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relationship with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny.” 62 Viewed from the perspective of Levinas’ critique of the Occidental ontological tradition, such a conclusion is to be expected.  For Levinas, Heideggerian Being represents merely the latest arche utilized by Western ontologists to eliminate the alterity of the Other and promote the freedom of the self.  As the political manifestation of the totalization of the Other that ontology perpetrates in the realm of thought, tyranny represents the diluted essence of ontological politics.  Much as ontological thought facilitates the domination of the other person by the autonomous ego, so too does it enable the state to totalize its “Other”– its subjects – in a comparatively comprehensive manner:  “For the philosophical tradition the conflicts between the same and the other are resolved by theory whereby the other is reduced to the same – or, concretely, by the community of the state where by anonymous power, though it be intelligible, the I rediscovers war in the tyrannic oppression it undergoes from the totality.” 63   In this light, the tyrannical rule of the modern state extends into the political realm the violent, thematizing tendencies that characterize ontology generally.  Nor is this conclusion shocking in light of the anti-humanistic cast of Heidegger’s thought.  In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anti-humanistic thinkers often posited grandiose schemes designed to put an end to the alienation supposedly engendered by subjective humanism.  Much like earlier theoretical anti-humanists such as Marx and Nietzsche, Heidegger accuses past humanisms of contributing to modern estrangement by overlooking a pivotal aspect of the human condition. 64   A key difference between Heidegger and his anti-humanistic forebears lies in the fact that, for him, it is metaphysical inquiry into the Being of beings that engenders modern alienation rather than philosophical idealism or slave-morality.  Nonetheless, the comparison remains instructive:  like Marx, Heidegger anticipates a future historical epoch in which man will finally recover his original ontological unity free from the obfuscating effect of past philosophical distortions.  And like Marx and Nietzsche, Heidegger provides an ample supply of metaphysical pathos that unwittingly complements the violent political objectives of totalitarian political movements.  In this sense, Heidegger’s rectorship merely repeats the Marxist tragedy as farce.   

Prior focus on ontology causes policy failure – having “good enough knowledge” is a sufficient condition for action
Kratochwil, professor of international relations – European University Institute, ‘8
(Friedrich, “The Puzzles of Politics,” pg. 200-213)
The lesson seems clear. Even at the danger of “fuzzy boundaries”, when we deal with “practice” ( just as with the “pragmatic turn”), we would be well advised to rely on the use of the term rather than on its reference (pointing to some property of the object under study), in order to draw the bounds of sense and understand the meaning of the concept. My argument for the fruitful character of a pragmatic approach in IR, therefore, does not depend on a comprehensive mapping of the varieties of research in this area, nor on an arbitrary appropriation or exegesis of any specific and self-absorbed theoretical orientation. For this reason, in what follows, I will not provide a rigidly specified definition, nor will I refer exclusively to some prepackaged theoretical approach. Instead, I will sketch out the reasons for which a prag- matic orientation in social analysis seems to hold particular promise. These reasons pertain both to the more general area of knowledge appropriate for praxis and to the more specific types of investigation in the field. The follow- ing ten points are – without a claim to completeness – intended to engender some critical reflection on both areas.
Firstly, a pragmatic approach does not begin with objects or “things” (ontology), or with reason and method (epistemology), but with “acting” (prattein), thereby preventing some false starts. Since, as historical beings placed in a specific situations, we do not have the luxury of deferring decisions until we have found the “truth”, we have to act and must do so always under time pressures and in the face of incomplete information. Pre- cisely because the social world is characterised by strategic interactions, what a situation “is”, is hardly ever clear ex ante, because it is being “produced” by the actors and their interactions, and the multiple possibilities are rife with incentives for (dis)information. This puts a premium on quick diagnostic and cognitive shortcuts informing actors about the relevant features of the situ- ation, and on leaving an alternative open (“plan B”) in case of unexpected difficulties. Instead of relying on certainty and universal validity gained through abstraction and controlled experiments, we know that completeness and attentiveness to detail, rather than to generality, matter. To that extent, likening practical choices to simple “discoveries” of an already independently existing “reality” which discloses itself to an “observer” – or relying on optimal strategies – is somewhat heroic.
These points have been made vividly by “realists” such as Clausewitz in his controversy with von Bu?low, in which he criticised the latter’s obsession with a strategic “science” (Paret et al. 1986). While Clausewitz has become an icon for realists, only a few of them (usually dubbed “old” realists) have taken seriously his warnings against the misplaced belief in the reliability and use- fulness of a “scientific” study of strategy. Instead, most of them, especially “neorealists” of various stripes, have embraced the “theory”-building based on the epistemological project as the via regia to the creation of knowledge. A pragmatist orientation would most certainly not endorse such a position.
Secondly, since acting in the social world often involves acting “for” some- one, special responsibilities arise that aggravate both the incompleteness of knowledge as well as its generality problem. Since we owe special care to those entrusted to us, for example, as teachers, doctors or lawyers, we cannot just rely on what is generally true, but have to pay special attention to the particular case. Aside from avoiding the foreclosure of options, we cannot refuse to act on the basis of incomplete information or insufficient know- ledge, and the necessary diagnostic will involve typification and comparison, reasoning by analogy rather than generalization or deduction. Leaving out the particularities of a case, be it a legal or medical one, in a mistaken effort to become “scientific” would be a fatal flaw. Moreover, there still remains the crucial element of “timing” – of knowing when to act. Students of crises have always pointed out the importance of this factor but, in attempts at building a general “theory” of international politics analogously to the natural sci- ences, such elements are neglected on the basis of the “continuity of nature” and the “large number” assumptions. Besides, “timing” seems to be quite recalcitrant to analytical treatment.

Don’t evaluate ontology first
David Owen, Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of Southampton,  Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p. 655-7
Commenting on the ‘philosophical turn’ in IR, Wæver remarks that ‘a frenzy for words like “epistemology” and “ontology” often signals this philosophical turn’, although he goes on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with the philosophical turn is that it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast, wholly dependent on these philosophical commitments. Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice theory to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded. It may, of course, be the case that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational choice theory) and, if this is the case, it is a philosophical weakness—but this does not undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice theory may provide the best account available to us. In other words, while the critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.

Philip Graham School of Communication Queensland University of Technology, Heidegger’s Hippies Sep 15 1999  http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html
Societies should get worried when Wagner’s music becomes popular because it usually means that distorted interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not far away. Existentialists create problems about what is, especially identity (Heidegger 1947). Existentialism inevitably leads to an authoritarian worldview: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without a goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself – do you want a name for this world? A solution to all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men? – This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides! (Nietzsche 1967/1997). Armed with a volume of Nietzsche, some considerable oratory skills, several Wagner records, and an existentialist University Rector in the form of Martin Heidegger, Hitler managed some truly astounding feats of strategic identity engineering (cf. Bullock, 1991). Upon being appointed to the Freiberg University, Heidegger pronounced the end of thought, history, ideology, and civilisation: ‘No dogmas and ideas will any longer be the laws of your being. The Fuhrer himself, and he alone, is the present and future reality for Germany’ (in Bullock 1991: 345). Heidegger signed up to an ideology-free politics: Hitler’s ‘Third Way’ (Eatwell 1997). The idealised identity, the new symbol of mythological worship, Nietzsche’s European Superman, was to rule from that day hence. Hitler took control of the means of propaganda: the media; the means of mental production: the education system; the means of violence: the police, army, and prison system; and pandered to the means of material production: industry and agriculture; and proclaimed a New beginning and a New world order. He ordered Germany to look forward into the next thousand years and forget the past. Heidegger and existentialism remain influential to this day, and history remains bunk (e.g. Giddens , 1991, Chapt. 2).Giddens’s claims that ‘humans live in circumstances of … existential contradiction’, and that ‘subjective death’ and ‘biological death’ are somehow unrelated, is a an ultimately repressive abstraction: from that perspective, life is merely a series of subjective deaths, as if death were the ultimate motor of life itself (cf. Adorno 1964/1973). History is, in fact, the simple and straightforward answer to the “problem of the subject”. “The problem” is also a handy device for confusing, entertaining, and selling trash to the masses. By emphasising the problem of the ‘ontological self’ (Giddens 1991: 49), informationalism and ‘consumerism’ confines the navel-gazing, ‘narcissistic’ masses to a permanent present which they self-consciously sacrifice for a Utopian future (cf. Adorno 1973: 303; Hitchens 1999; Lasch 1984: 25-59). Meanwhile transnational businesses go about their work, raping the environment; swindling each other and whole nations; and inflicting populations with declining wages, declining working conditions, and declining social security. Slavery is once again on the increase (Castells, 1998; Graham, 1999; ILO, 1998). There is no “problem of the subject”, just as there is no “global society”; there is only the mass amnesia of utopian propaganda, the strains of which have historically accompanied revolutions in communication technologies. Each person’s identity is, quite simply, their subjective account of a unique and objective history of interactions within the objective social and material environments they inhabit, create, and inherit. The identity of each person is their most intimate historical information, and they are its material expression: each person is a record of their own history at any given time. Thus, each person is a recognisably material, identifiable entity: an identity. This is their condition. People are not theoretical entities; they are people. As such, they have an intrinsic identity with an intrinsic value. No amount of theory or propaganda will make it go away. The widespread multilateral attempts to prop up consumer society and hypercapitalism as a valid and useful means of sustainable growth, indeed, as the path to an inevitable, international democratic Utopia, are already showing their disatrous cracks. The “problem” of subjective death threatens to give way, once again, to unprecedented mass slaughter. The numbed condition of a narcissistic society, rooted in a permanent “now”, a blissful state of Heideggerian Dasein, threatens to wake up to a world in which “subjective death” and ontology are the least of all worries.

Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 8 | Opponent: Georgia Boyce-Feinberg | Judge: Cram Helwich
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Obama will win the debt ceiling fight – strength and resolve are key to forcing the GOP to bend
POLITICO 10 – 1 – 13 “Government shutdown: President Obama holds the line” http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-president-obama-holds-the-line-97646.html?hp=f3
President Barack Obama started September in an agonizing, extended display of how little sway he had in Congress. He ended the month with a display of resolve and strength that could redefine his presidency. All it took was a government shutdown. This was less a White House strategy than simply staying in the corner the House GOP had painted them into — to the White House’s surprise, Obama was forced to do what he so rarely has as president: he said no, and he didn’t stop saying no. For two weeks ahead of Monday night’s deadline, Obama and aides rebuffed the efforts to kill Obamacare with the kind of firm, narrow sales pitch they struggled with in three years of trying to convince people the law should exist in the first place. There was no litany of doomsday scenarios that didn’t quite come true, like in the run-up to the fiscal cliff and the sequester. No leaked plans or musings in front of the cameras about Democratic priorities he might sacrifice to score a deal. After five years of what’s often seen as Obama’s desperation to negotiate — to the fury of his liberal base and the frustration of party leaders who argue that he negotiates against himself. Even his signature health care law came with significant compromises in Congress. Instead, over and over and over again, Obama delivered the simple line: Republicans want to repeal a law that was passed and upheld by the Supreme Court — to give people health insurance — or they’ll do something that everyone outside the GOP caucus meetings, including Wall Street bankers, seems to agree would be a ridiculous risk. “If we lock these Americans out of affordable health care for one more year,” Obama said Monday afternoon as he listed examples of people who would enjoy better treatment under Obamacare, “if we sacrifice the health care of millions of Americans — then they’ll fund the government for a couple more months. Does anybody truly believe that we won’t have this fight again in a couple more months? Even at Christmas?” The president and his advisers weren’t expecting this level of Republican melee, a White House official said. Only during Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) 21-hour floor speech last week did the realization roll through the West Wing that they wouldn’t be negotiating because they couldn’t figure out anymore whom to negotiate with. And even then, they didn’t believe the shutdown was really going to happen until Saturday night, when the House voted again to strip Obamacare funding. This wasn’t a credible position, Obama said again Monday afternoon, but rather, bowing to “extraneous and controversial demands” which are “all to save face after making some impossible promises to the extreme right wing of their political party.” Obama and aides have said repeatedly that they’re not thinking about the shutdown in terms of political gain, but the situation’s is taking shape for them. Congress’s approval on dealing with the shutdown was at 10 percent even before the shutters started coming down on Monday according to a new CNN/ORC poll, with 69 percent of people saying the House Republicans are acting like “spoiled children.” “The Republicans are making themselves so radioactive that the president and Democrats can win this debate in the court of public opinion” by waiting them out, said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who has previously been critical of Obama’s tactics. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said the Obama White House learned from the 2011 debt ceiling standoff, when it demoralized fellow Democrats, deflated Obama’s approval ratings and got nothing substantive from the negotiations. “They didn’t gain anything from that approach,” Greenberg said. “I think that there’s a lot they learned from what happened the last time they ran up against the debt ceiling.” While the Republicans have been at war with each other, the White House has proceeded calmly — a breakthrough phone call with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani Friday that showed him getting things done (with the conveniently implied juxtaposition that Tehran is easier to negotiate with than the GOP conference), his regular golf game Saturday and a cordial meeting Monday with his old sparring partner Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that the shutdown wasn’t really affecting much of anything. “It’s busy, but it’s always busy here,” Carney said. “It’s busy for most of you covering this White House, any White House. We’re very much focused on making sure that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act continues.” Obama called all four congressional leaders Monday evening — including Boehner, whose staff spent Friday needling reporters to point out that the president hadn’t called for a week. According to both the White House and Boehner’s office, the call was an exchange of well-worn talking points, and changed nothing. Manley advised Obama to make sure people continue to see Boehner and the House Republicans as the problem and not rush into any more negotiations until public outrage forces them to bend. “He may want to do a little outreach, but not until the House drives the country over the cliff,” Manley said Monday, before the shutdown. “Once the House has driven the country over the cliff and failed to fund the government, then it might be time to make a move.” The White House believes Obama will take less than half the blame for a shutdown – with the rest heaped on congressional Republicans. The divide is clear in a Gallup poll also out Monday: over 70 percent of self-identifying Republicans and Democrats each say their guys are the ones acting responsibly, while just 9 percent for both say the other side is. If Obama is able to turn public opinion against Republicans, the GOP won’t be able to turn the blame back on Obama, Greenberg said. “Things only get worse once things begin to move in a particular direction,” he said. “They don’t suddenly start going the other way as people rethink this.”

Losing military authority will embolden the GOP to fight on the debt ceiling
SEEKING ALPHA 9 – 10 – 13 “Syria Could Upend Debt Ceiling Fight” http://seekingalpha.com/article/1684082-syria-could-upend-debt-ceiling-fight

Unless President Obama can totally change a reluctant public's perception of another Middle-Eastern conflict, it seems unlikely that he can get 218 votes in the House, though he can probably still squeak out 60 votes in the Senate. This defeat would be totally unprecedented as a President has never lost a military authorization vote in American history. To forbid the Commander-in-Chief of his primary power renders him all but impotent. At this point, a rebuff from the House is a 67-75 probability.
I reach this probability by looking within the whip count. I assume the 164 declared "no" votes will stay in the "no" column. To get to 218, Obama needs to win over 193 of the 244 undecided, a gargantuan task. Within the "no" column, there are 137 Republicans. Under a best case scenario, Boehner could corral 50 "yes" votes, which would require Obama to pick up 168 of the 200 Democrats, 84. Many of these Democrats rode to power because of their opposition to Iraq, which makes it difficult for them to support military conflict. The only way to generate near unanimity among the undecided Democrats is if they choose to support the President (recognizing the political ramifications of a defeat) despite personal misgivings. The idea that all undecided Democrats can be convinced of this argument is relatively slim, especially as there are few votes to lose. In the best case scenario, the House could reach 223-225 votes, barely enough to get it through. Under the worst case, there are only 150 votes. Given the lopsided nature of the breakdown, the chance of House passage is about one in four.
While a failure in the House would put action against Syria in limbo, I have felt that the market has overstated the impact of a strike there, which would be limited in nature. Rather, investors should focus on the profound ripple through the power structure in Washington, which would greatly impact impending battles over spending and the debt ceiling.  Currently, the government loses spending authority on September 30 while it hits the debt ceiling by the middle of October. Markets have generally felt that Washington will once again strike a last-minute deal and avert total catastrophe. Failure in the Syrian vote could change this. For the Republicans to beat Obama on a President's strength (foreign military action), they will likely be emboldened that they can beat him on domestic spending issues.  Until now, consensus has been that the two sides would compromise to fund the government at sequester levels while passing a $1 trillion stand-alone debt ceiling increase. However, the right wing of Boehner's caucus has been pushing for more, including another $1 trillion in spending cuts, defunding of Obamacare, and a one year delay of the individual mandate. Already, Conservative PACs have begun airing advertisements, urging a debt ceiling fight over Obamacare. With the President rendered hapless on Syria, they will become even more vocal about their hardline resolution, setting us up for a showdown that will rival 2011's debt ceiling fight.
I currently believe the two sides will pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open, and then the GOP will wage a massive fight over the debt ceiling. While Obama will be weakened, he will be unwilling to undermine his major achievement, his healthcare law. In all likelihood, both sides will dig in their respective trenches, unwilling to strike a deal, essentially in a game of chicken. If the House blocks Syrian action, it will take America as close to a default as it did in 2011. Based on the market action then, we can expect massive volatility in the final days of the showdown with the Dow falling 500 points in one session in 2011.  As markets panicked over the potential for a U.S. default, we saw a massive risk-off trade, moving from equities into Treasuries. I think there is a significant chance we see something similar this late September into October. The Syrian vote has major implications on the power of Obama and the far-right when it comes to their willingness to fight over the debt ceiling. If the Syrian resolution fails, the debt ceiling fight will be even worse, which will send equities lower by upwards of 10.
Investors must be prepared for this "black swan" event.  Looking back to August 2011, stocks that performed the best were dividend paying, less-cyclical companies like Verizon (VZ), Wal-Mart (WMT), Coca-Cola (KO) and McDonald's (MCD) while high beta names like Netflix (NFLX) and Boeing (BA) were crushed. Investors also flocked into treasuries despite default risk while dumping lower quality bonds as spreads widened. The flight to safety helped treasuries despite U.S. government issues. I think we are likely to see a similar move this time.  Assuming there is a Syrian "no" vote, I would begin to roll back my long exposure in the stock market and reallocate funds into treasuries as I believe yields could drop back towards 2.50. Within the stock market, I think the less-cyclical names should outperform, making utilities and consumer staples more attractive. For more tactical traders, I would consider buying puts against the SandP 500 and look toward shorting higher-beta and defense stocks like Boeing and Lockheed Martin (LMT). I also think lower quality bonds would suffer as spreads widen, making funds like JNK vulnerable. Conversely, gold (GLD) should benefit from the fear trade.  I would also like to address the potential that Congress does not vote down the Syrian resolution. First, news has broken that Russia has proposed Syria turn over its chemical stockpile. If Syria were to agree (Syria said it was willing to consider), the U.S. would not have to strike, canceling the congressional vote. The proposal can be found here. I strongly believe this is a delaying tactic rather than a serious effort. In 2005, Libya began to turn over chemical weapons; it has yet to complete the hand-off. Removing and destroying chemical weapons is an exceptionally challenging and dangerous task that would take years, not weeks, making this deal seem unrealistic, especially because a cease-fire would be required around all chemical facilities. The idea that a cease-fire could be maintained for months, essentially allowing Assad to stay in office, is hard to take seriously. I believe this is a delaying tactic, and Congress will have to vote within the next two weeks.  The final possibility is that Democrats back their President and barely ram the Syria resolution through. I think the extreme risk of a full-blown debt stand-off to dissipate. However, Boehner has promised a strong fight over the debt limit that the market has largely ignored. I do believe the fight would still be worse than the market anticipates but not outright disastrous. As such, I would not initiate short positions, but I would trim some longs and move into less cyclical stocks as the risk would still be the debt ceiling fight leading to some drama not no drama.  Remember, in politics everything is connected. Syria is not a stand-alone issue. Its resolution will impact the power structure in Washington. A failed vote in Congress is likely to make the debt ceiling fight even worse, spooking markets, and threatening default on U.S. obligations unless another last minute deal can be struck.

Destroys the global economy
DAVIDSON 9 – 15 – 13 co-founder and co-host of Planet Money, a co-production of the NYT and NPR Adam Davidson, Our Debt to Society,  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/our-debt-to-society.html?pagewanted=alland_r=1and

The Daily Treasury Statement, a public accounting of what the U.S. government spends and receives each day, shows how money really works in Washington. On Aug. 27, the government took in $29 million in repaid agricultural loans; $75 million in customs and duties; $38 million in the repayment of TARP loans; some $310 million in taxes; and so forth. That same day, the government also had bills to pay: $247 million in veterans-affairs programs; $2.5 billion to Medicare and Medicaid; $1.5 billion each to the departments of Education and Defense. By the close of that Tuesday, when all the spending and the taxing had been completed, the government paid out nearly $6 billion more than it took in.
This is the definition of a deficit, and it illustrates why the government needs to borrow money almost every day to pay its bills. Of course, all that daily borrowing adds up, and we are rapidly approaching what is called the X-Date — the day, somewhere in the next six weeks, when the government, by law, cannot borrow another penny. Congress has imposed a strict limit on how much debt the federal government can accumulate, but for nearly 90 years, it has raised the ceiling well before it was reached. But since a large number of Tea Party-aligned Republicans entered the House of Representatives, in 2011, raising that debt ceiling has become a matter of fierce debate. This summer, House Republicans have promised, in Speaker John Boehner’s words, “a whale of a fight” before they raise the debt ceiling — if they even raise it at all.
If the debt ceiling isn’t lifted again this fall, some serious financial decisions will have to be made. Perhaps the government can skimp on its foreign aid or furlough all of NASA, but eventually the big-ticket items, like Social Security and Medicare, will have to be cut. At some point, the government won’t be able to pay interest on its bonds and will enter what’s known as sovereign default, the ultimate national financial disaster achieved by countries like Zimbabwe, Ecuador and Argentina (and now Greece). In the case of the United States, though, it won’t be an isolated national crisis. If the American government can’t stand behind the dollar, the world’s benchmark currency, then the global financial system will very likely enter a new era in which there is much less trade and much less economic growth. It would be, by most accounts, the largest self-imposed financial disaster in history.
Nearly everyone involved predicts that someone will blink before this disaster occurs. Yet a small number of House Republicans (one political analyst told me it’s no more than 20) appear willing to see what happens if the debt ceiling isn’t raised — at least for a bit. This could be used as leverage to force Democrats to drastically cut government spending and eliminate President Obama’s signature health-care-reform plan. In fact, Representative Tom Price, a Georgia Republican, told me that the whole problem could be avoided if the president agreed to drastically cut spending and lower taxes. Still, it is hard to put this act of game theory into historic context. Plenty of countries — and some cities, like Detroit — have defaulted on their financial obligations, but only because their governments ran out of money to pay their bills. No wealthy country has ever voluntarily decided — in the middle of an economic recovery, no less — to default. And there’s certainly no record of that happening to the country that controls the global reserve currency.
Like many, I assumed a self-imposed U.S. debt crisis might unfold like most involuntary ones. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised by X-Day, I figured, the world’s investors would begin to see America as an unstable investment and rush to sell their Treasury bonds. The U.S. government, desperate to hold on to investment, would then raise interest rates far higher, hurtling up rates on credit cards, student loans, mortgages and corporate borrowing — which would effectively put a clamp on all trade and spending. The U.S. economy would collapse far worse than anything we’ve seen in the past several years.
Instead, Robert Auwaerter, head of bond investing for Vanguard, the world’s largest mutual-fund company, told me that the collapse might be more insidious. “You know what happens when the market gets upset?” he said. “There’s a flight to quality. Investors buy Treasury bonds. It’s a bit perverse.” In other words, if the U.S. comes within shouting distance of a default (which Auwaerter is confident won’t happen), the world’s investors — absent a safer alternative, given the recent fates of the euro and the yen — might actually buy even more Treasury bonds. Indeed, interest rates would fall and the bond markets would soar.
While this possibility might not sound so bad, it’s really far more damaging than the apocalyptic one I imagined. Rather than resulting in a sudden crisis, failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to a slow bleed. Scott Mather, head of the global portfolio at Pimco, the world’s largest private bond fund, explained that while governments and institutions might go on a U.S.-bond buying frenzy in the wake of a debt-ceiling panic, they would eventually recognize that the U.S. government was not going through an odd, temporary bit of insanity. They would eventually conclude that it had become permanently less reliable. Mather imagines institutional investors and governments turning to a basket of currencies, putting their savings in a mix of U.S., European, Canadian, Australian and Japanese bonds. Over the course of decades, the U.S. would lose its unique role in the global economy.
The U.S. benefits enormously from its status as global reserve currency and safe haven. Our interest and mortgage rates are lower; companies are able to borrow money to finance their new products more cheaply. As a result, there is much more economic activity and more wealth in America than there would be otherwise. If that status erodes, the U.S. economy’s peaks will be lower and recessions deeper; future generations will have fewer job opportunities and suffer more when the economy falters. And, Mather points out, no other country would benefit from America’s diminished status. When you make the base risk-free asset more risky, the entire global economy becomes riskier and costlier.

Global nuke wars
Kemp 10—Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Geoffrey Kemp, 2010, The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East, p. 233-4

The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario; everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The world economic situation weakens rather than strengthens, and India, China, and Japan suffer a major reduction in their growth rates, further weakening the global economy. As a result, energy demand falls and the price of fossil fuels plummets, leading to a financial crisis for the energy-producing states, which are forced to cut back dramatically on expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to political unrest: and nurtures different radical groups, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists. The internal stability of some countries is challenged, and there are more “failed states.” Most serious is the collapse of the democratic government in Pakistan and its takeover by Muslim extremists, who then take possession of a large number of nuclear weapons. The danger of war between India and Pakistan increases significantly. Iran, always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and weaponizes its nuclear program. That further enhances nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and Iran as nuclear states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases, and the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack in either the Western world or in the oil-producing states may lead to a further devastating collapse of the world economic market, with a tsunami-like impact on stability. In this scenario, major disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for two-thirds of the planet’s population.

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Wartime means Obama will ignore the decision.  Noncompliance undermines the Court’s legitimacy and guts plan solvency
Pushaw 4—Professor of law @ Pepperdine University Robert J. Pushaw, Jr., “Defending Deference: A Response to Professors Epstein and Wells,” Missouri Law Review, Vol. 69, 2004
Civil libertarians have urged the Court to exercise the same sort of judicial review over war powers as it does in purely domestic cases—i.e., independently interpreting and applying the law of the Constitution, despite the contrary view of the political branches and regardless of the political repercussions.54 This proposed solution ignores the institutional differences, embedded in the Constitution, that have always led federal judges to review warmaking under special standards. Most obviously, the President can act with a speed, decisiveness, and access to information (often highly confidential) that cannot be matched by Congress, which must garner a majority of hundreds of legislators representing multiple interests.55 Moreover, the judiciary by design acts far more slowly than either political branch. A court must wait for parties to initiate a suit, oversee the litigation process, and render a deliberative judgment that applies the law to the pertinent facts.56 Hence, by the time federal judges (particularly those on the Supreme Court) decide a case, the action taken by the executive is several years old. Sometimes, this delay is long enough that the crisis has passed and the Court’s detached perspective has been restored.57 At other times, however, the war rages, the President’s action is set in stone, and he will ignore any judicial orders that he conform his conduct to constitutional norms.58 In such critical situations, issuing a judgment simply weakens the Court as an institution, as Chief Justice Taney learned the hard way.59
Professor Wells understands the foregoing institutional differences and thus does not naively demand that the Court exercise regular judicial review to safeguard individual constitutional rights, come hell or high water. Nonetheless, she remains troubled by cases in which the Court’s examination of executive action is so cursory as to amount to an abdication of its responsibilities—and a stamp of constitutional approval for the President’s actions.60 Therefore, she proposes a compromise: requiring the President to establish a reasonable basis for the measures he has taken in response to a genuine risk to national security.61 In this way, federal judges would ensure accountability not by substituting their judgments for those of executive officials (as hap-pens with normal judicial review), but rather by forcing them to adequately justify their decisions.62
This proposal intelligently blends a concern for individual rights with pragmatism. Civil libertarians often overlook the basic point that constitutional rights are not absolute, but rather may be infringed if the government has a compelling reason for doing so and employs the least restrictive means to achieve that interest.63 Obviously, national security is a compelling governmental interest.64 Professor Wells’s crucial insight is that courts should not allow the President simply to assert that “national security” necessitated his actions; rather, he must concretely demonstrate that his policies were a reasonable and narrowly tailored response to a particular risk that had been assessed accurately.65
Although this approach is plausible in theory, I am not sure it would work well in practice. Presumably, the President almost always will be able to set forth plausible justifications for his actions, often based on a wide array of factors—including highly sensitive intelligence that he does not wish to dis-close.66 Moreover, if the President’s response seems unduly harsh, he will likely cite the wisdom of erring on the side of caution. If the Court disagrees, it will have to find that those proffered reasons are pretextual and that the President overreacted emotionally instead of rationally evaluating and responding to the true risks involved. But are judges competent to make such determinations? And even if they are, would they be willing to impugn the President’s integrity and judgment? If so, what effect might such a judicial decision have on America’s foreign relations? These questions are worth pondering before concluding that “hard look” review would be an improvement over the Court’s established approach.
Moreover, such searching scrutiny will be useless in situations where the President has made a wartime decision that he will not change, even if judicially ordered to do so. For instance, assume that the Court in Korematsu had applied “hard look” review and found that President Roosevelt had wildly exaggerated the sabotage and espionage risks posed by Japanese-Americans and had imprisoned them based on unfounded fears and prejudice (as appears to have been the case). If the Court accordingly had struck down FDR’s order to relocate them, he would likely have disobeyed it.
Professor Wells could reply that this result would have been better than what happened, which was that the Court engaged in “pretend” review and stained its reputation by upholding the constitutionality of the President’s odious and unwarranted racial discrimination. I would agree. But I submit that the solution in such unique situations (i.e., where a politically strong President has made a final decision and will defy any contrary court judgment) is not judicial review in any form—ordinary, deferential, or hard look. Rather, the Court should simply declare the matter to be a political question and dismiss the case. Although such Bickelian manipulation of the political question doctrine might be legally unprincipled and morally craven, 67 at least it would avoid giving the President political cover by blessing his unconstitutional conduct and instead would force him to shoulder full responsibility. Pg. 968-970 

---Fight with President devastates court legitimacy. Two centuries of judicial decisions prove they can’t solve without his support    
Devins and Fisher 98—Professor of Law and Government @ College of William and Mary and Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers @ Congressional Research Service  Neal Devins and Louis Fisher, “Judicial Exclusivity and Political Instability,” Virginia Law Review Vol. 84, No. 1 (Feb. 1998), pp. 83-106
Lacking the power to appropriate funds or command the military, 73 the Court understands that it must act in a way that garners public acceptance." In other words, as psychologists Tom Tyler and Gregory Mitchell observed, the Court seems to believe "that public acceptance of the Court's role as interpreter of the Constitution that is, the public belief in the Court's institutional legitimacy enhances public acceptance of controversial Court decisions."75 This emphasis on public acceptance of the judiciary seems to be conclusive proof that Court decisionmaking cannot be divorced from a case's (sometimes explosive) social and political setting.
A more telling manifestation of how public opinion affects Court decisionmaking is evident when the Court reverses itself to conform its decisionmaking to social and political forces beating against it.76 Witness, for example, the collapse of the Lochner era under the weight of changing social conditions. Following Roosevelt's 1936 election victory in all but two states, the Court, embarrassed by populist attacks against the Justices, announced several decisions upholding New Deal programs.' In explaining this transformation, Justice Owen Roberts recognized the extraordinary importance of public opinion in undoing the Lochner era: "Looking back, it is difficult to see how the Court could have resisted the popular urge for uniform standards throughout the country-for what in effect was a unified economy.""8
Social and political forces also played a defining role in the Court's reconsideration of decisions on sterilization and the eugenics movement," state-mandated flag salutes,' the Roe v. Wade trimester standard, 8 the death penalty,' states' rights, 3 and much more.' It did not matter that some of these earlier decisions commanded an impressive majority of eight to one." Without popular support, these decisions settled nothing. Justice Robert Jackson instructed us that "the practical play of the forces of politics is such that judicial power has often delayed but never permanently defeated the persistent will of a substantial majority.""6 As such, for a Court that wants to maximize its power and legitimacy, taking social and political forces into account is an act of necessity, not cowardice. Correspondingly, when the Court gives short shrift to populist values or concerns, its decisionmaking is unworkable and destabilizing.87
The Supreme Court may be the ultimate interpreter in a particular case, but not in the larger social issues of which that case is a reflection. Indeed, it is difficult to locate in the more than two centuries of rulings from the Supreme Court a single decision that ever finally settled a transcendent question of constitutional law. When a decision fails to persuade or otherwise proves unworkable.' elected officials, interest groups, academic commentators, and the press will speak their minds and the Court, ultimately, will listen."
Even in decisions that are generally praised, such as Brown, the Court must calibrate its decisionmaking against the sentiments of the implementing community and the nation. In an effort to temper Southern hostility to its decision, the Court did not issue a remedy in the first Brown decision.' A similar tale is told by the Court's invocation of the so-called "passive virtues," that is, procedural and jurisdictional mechanisms that allow the Court to steer clear of politically explosive issues.91 For example, the Court will not "anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it," not "formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required," nor "pass upon a constitutional question... if there is... some other ground," such as statutory construction, upon which to dispose of the case.' This deliberate withholding of judicial power reflects the fact that courts lack ballot-box legitimacy and need to avoid costly collisions with the general public and other branches of government.'
It is sometimes argued that courts operate on principle while the rest of government is satisfied with compromises." This argument is sheer folly. A multimember Court, like government, gropes incrementally towards consensus and decision through compromise, expediency, and ad hoc actions. "No good society," as Alexander Bickel observed, "can be unprincipled; and no viable society can be principle-ridden."'95
Courts, like elected officials, cannot escape "the great tides and currents which engulf" the rest of us.96 Rather than definitively settling transcendent questions, courts must take account of social movements and public opinion.' When the judiciary strays outside and opposes the policy of elected leaders, it does so at substantial risk. The Court maintains its strength by steering a course that fits within the permissible limits of public opinion. Correspondingly, "the Court's legitimacy-indeed, the Constitution's-must ultimately spring from public acceptance," for ours is a "political system ostensibly based on consent."98 pg. 93-98

Weakening the court prevents sustainable development
Stein 5—Former Judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court Justice Paul Stein (International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Specialist Group on the Judiciary), “Why judges are essential to the rule of law and environmental protection,” Judges and the Rule of Law: Creating the Links: Environment, Human Rights and Poverty, IUCN Environmental Policy and Law Paper No. 60, Edited by Thomas Greiber, 2006
The Johannesburg Principles state:
“We emphasize that the fragile state of the global environment requires the judiciary, as the guardian of the Rule of Law, to boldly and fearlessly implement and enforce applicable international and national laws, which in the field of environment and sustainable development will assist in alleviating poverty and sustaining an enduring civilization, and ensuring that the present generation will enjoy and improve the quality of life of all peoples, while also ensuring that the inherent rights and interests of succeeding generations are not compromised.”
There can be no argument that environmental law, and sustainable development law in particular, are vibrant and dynamic areas, both internationally and domestically. Judge Weeramantry (of the ICJ) has reminded us that we judges, as custodians of the law, have a major obligation to contribute to its development. Much of sustainable development law is presently making the journey from soft law into hard law. This is happening internationally but also it is occurring in many national legislatures and courts.
Fundamental environmental laws relating to water, air, our soils and energy are critical to narrowing the widening gap between the rich and poor of the world. Development may be seen as the bridge to narrow that gap but it is one that is riddled with dangers and contradictions. We cannot bridge the gap with materials stolen from future generations. Truly sustainable development can only take place in harmony with the environment. Importantly we must not allow sustainable development to be duchessed and bastardized.
A role for judges?
It is in striking the balance between development and the environment that the courts have a role. Of course, this role imposes on judges a significant trust. The balancing of the rights and needs of citizens, present and future, with development, is a delicate one. It is a balance often between powerful interests (private and public) and the voiceless poor. In a way judges are the meat in the sandwich but, difficult as it is, we must not shirk our duty.  Pg. 53-54

Extinction of all complex life
Barry 13—Political ecologist with expert proficiencies in old forest protection, climate change, and environmental sustainability policy  Dr. Glen Barry (Ph.D. in "Land Resources" and Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development” from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), “ECOLOGY SCIENCE: Terrestrial Ecosystem Loss and Biosphere Collapse,” Forests.org, February 4, 2013, pg. http://forests.org/blog/2013/02/ecology-science-terrestrial-ec.asp

Blunt, Biocentric Discussion on Avoiding Global Ecosystem Collapse and Achieving Global Ecological Sustainability
Science needs to do a better job of considering worst-case scenarios regarding continental- and global-scale ecological collapse. The loss of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscape connectivity reviewed here shows clearly that ecological collapse is occurring at spatially extensive scales. The collapse of the biosphere and complex life, or eventually even all life, is a possibility that needs to be better understood and mitigated against. A tentative case has been presented here that terrestrial ecosystem loss is at or near a planetary boundary. It is suggested that a 66 of Earth's land mass must be maintained in terrestrial ecosystems, to maintain critical connectivity necessary for ecosystem services across scales to continue, including the biosphere. Yet various indicators show that around 50 of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems have been lost and their services usurped by humans. Humanity may have already destroyed more terrestrial ecosystems than the biosphere can bear. There exists a major need for further research into how much land must be maintained in a natural and agroecological state to meet landscape and bioregional sustainable development goals while maintaining an operable biosphere.
It is proposed that a critical element in determining the threshold where terrestrial ecosystem loss becomes problematic is where landscape connectivity of intact terrestrial ecosystems erodes to the point where habitat patches exist only in a human context. Based upon an understanding of how landscapes percolate across scale, it is recommended that 66 of Earth's surface be maintained as ecosystems; 44 as natural intact ecosystems (2/3 of 2/3) and 22 as agroecological buffer zones. Thus nearly half of Earth must remain as large, connected, intact, and naturally evolving ecosystems, including old-growth forests, to provide the context and top-down ecological regulation of both human agroecological, and reduced impact and appropriately scaled industrial activities.
Given the stakes, it is proper for political ecologists and other Earth scientists to willingly speak bluntly if we are to have any chance of averting global ecosystem collapse. A case has been presented that Earth is already well beyond carrying capacity in terms of amount of natural ecosystem habitat that can be lost before the continued existence of healthy regional ecosystems and the global biosphere itself may not be possible. Cautious and justifiably conservative science must still be able to rise to the occasion of global ecological emergencies that may threaten our very survival as a species and planet.
Those knowledgeable about planetary boundaries—and abrupt climate change and terrestrial ecosystem loss in particular—must be more bold and insistent in conveying the range and possible severity of threats of global ecosystem collapse, while proposing sufficient solutions. It is not possible to do controlled experiments on the Earth system; all we have is observation based upon science and trained intuition to diagnose the state of Earth's biosphere and suggest sufficient ecological science–based remedies.
If Gaia is alive, she can die. Given the strength of life-reducing trends across biological systems and scales, there is a need for a rigorous research agenda to understand at what point the biosphere may perish and Earth die, and to learn what configuration of ecosystems and other boundary conditions may prevent her from doing so. We see death of cells, organisms, plant communities, wildlife populations, and whole ecosystems all the time in nature—extreme cases being desertification and ocean dead zones. There is no reason to dismiss out of hand that the Earth System could die if critical thresholds are crossed. We need as Earth scientists to better understand how this may occur and bring knowledge to bear to avoid global ecosystem and biosphere collapse or more extreme outcomes such as biological homogenization and the loss of most or even all life. To what extent can a homogenized Earth of dandelions, rats, and extremophiles be said to be alive, can it ever recover, and how long can it last?
The risks of global ecosystem collapse and the need for strong response to achieve global ecological sustainability have been understated for decades. If indeed there is some possibility that our shared biosphere could be collapsing, there needs to be further investigation of what sorts of sociopolitical responses are valid in such a situation. Dry, unemotional scientific inquiry into such matters is necessary—yet more proactive and evocative political ecological language may be justified as well. We must remember we are speaking of the potential for a period of great dying in species, ecosystems, humans, and perhaps all being. It is not clear whether this global ecological emergency is avoidable or recoverable. It may not be. But we must follow and seek truth wherever it leads us.
Planetary boundaries have been quite anthropocentric, focusing upon human safety and giving relatively little attention to other species and the biosphere's needs other than serving humans. Planetary boundaries need to be set that, while including human needs, go beyond them to meet the needs of ecosystems and all their constituent species and their aggregation into a living biosphere. Planetary boundary thinking needs to be more biocentric.
I concur with Williams (2000) that what is needed is an Earth System–based conservation ethic—based upon an "Earth narrative" of natural and human history—which seeks as its objective the "complete preservation of the Earth's biotic inheritance." Humans are in no position to be indicating which species and ecosystems can be lost without harm to their own intrinsic right to exist, as well as the needs of the biosphere. For us to survive as a species, logic and reason must prevail (Williams 2000).
Those who deny limits to growth are unaware of biological realities (Vitousek 1986). There are strong indications humanity may undergo societal collapse and pull down the biosphere with it. The longer dramatic reductions in fossil fuel emissions and a halt to old-growth logging are put off, the worse the risk of abrupt and irreversible climate change becomes, and the less likely we are to survive and thrive as a species. Human survival—entirely dependent upon the natural world—depends critically upon both keeping carbon emissions below 350 ppm and maintaining at least 66 of the landscape as natural ecological core areas and agroecological transitions and buffers. Much of the world has already fallen below this proportion, and in sum the biosphere's terrestrial ecosystem loss almost certainly has been surpassed, yet it must be the goal for habitat transition in remaining relatively wild lands undergoing development such as the Amazon, and for habitat restoration and protection in severely fragmented natural habitat areas such as the Western Ghats.
The human family faces an unprecedented global ecological emergency as reckless growth destroys the ecosystems and the biosphere on which all life depends. Where is the sense of urgency, and what are proper scientific responses if in fact Earth is dying? Not speaking of worst-case scenarios—the collapse of the biosphere and loss of a living Earth, and mass ecosystem collapse and death in places like Kerala—is intellectually dishonest. We must consider the real possibility that we are pulling the biosphere down with us, setting back or eliminating complex life.
The 66 / 44 / 22 threshold of terrestrial ecosystems in total, natural core areas, and agroecological buffers gets at the critical need to maintain large and expansive ecosystems across at least 50 of the land so as to keep nature connected and fully functional. We need an approach to planetary boundaries that is more sensitive to deep ecology to ensure that habitable conditions for all life and natural evolutionary change continue. A terrestrial ecosystem boundary which protects primary forests and seeks to recover old-growth forests elsewhere is critical in this regard. In old forests and all their life lie both the history of Earth's life, and the hope for its future. The end of their industrial destruction is a global ecological imperative.
Much-needed dialogue is beginning to focus on how humanity may face systematic social and ecological collapse and what sort of community resilience is possible. There have been ecologically mediated periods of societal collapse from human damage to ecosystems in the past (Kuecker and Hall 2011). What makes it different this time is that the human species may have the scale and prowess to pull down the biosphere with them. It is fitting at this juncture for political ecologists to concern themselves with both legal regulatory measures, as well as revolutionary processes of social change, which may bring about the social norms necessary to maintain the biosphere. Rockström and colleagues (2009b) refer to the need for "novel and adaptive governance" without using the word revolution. Scientists need to take greater latitude in proposing solutions that lie outside the current political paradigms and sovereign powers.
Even the Blue Planet Laureates' remarkable analysis (Brundtland et al. 2012), which notes the potential for climate change, ecosystem loss, and inequitable development patterns neither directly states nor investigates in depth the potential for global ecosystem collapse, or discusses revolutionary responses. UNEP (2012) notes abrupt and irreversible ecological change, which they say may impact life-support systems, but are not more explicit regarding the profound human and ecological implications of biosphere collapse, or the full range of sociopolitical responses to such predictions. More scientific investigations are needed regarding alternative governing structures optimal for pursuit and achievement of bioregional, continental, and global sustainability if we are maintain a fully operable biosphere forever. An economic system based upon endless growth that views ecosystems necessary for planetary habitability primarily as resources to be consumed cannot exist for long.
Planetary boundaries offer a profoundly difficult challenge for global governance, particularly as increased scientific salience does not appear to be sufficient to trigger international action to sustain ecosystems (Galaz et al. 2012). If indeed the safe operating space for humanity is closing, or the biosphere even collapsing and dying, might not discussion of revolutionary social change be acceptable? Particularly, if there is a lack of consensus by atomized actors, who are unable to legislate the required social change within the current socioeconomic system. By not even speaking of revolutionary action, we dismiss any means outside the dominant growth-based oligarchies.
In the author's opinion, it is shockingly irresponsible for Earth System scientists to speak of geoengineering a climate without being willing to academically investigate revolutionary social and economic change as well. It is desirable that the current political and economic systems should reform themselves to be ecologically sustainable, establishing laws and institutions for doing so. Yet there is nothing sacrosanct about current political economy arrangements, particularly if they are collapsing the biosphere. Earth requires all enlightened and knowledgeable voices to consider the full range of possible responses now more than ever.
One possible solution to the critical issues of terrestrial ecosystem loss and abrupt climate change is a massive and global, natural ecosystem protection and restoration program—funded by a carbon tax—to further establish protected large and connected core ecological sustainability areas, buffers, and agro-ecological transition zones throughout all of Earth's bioregions. Fossil fuel emission reductions must also be a priority. It is critical that humanity both stop burning fossil fuels and destroying natural ecosystems, as fast as possible, to avoid surpassing nearly all the planetary boundaries.
In summation, we are witnessing the collective dismantling of the biosphere and its constituent ecosystems which can be described as ecocidal. The loss of a species is tragic, of an ecosystem widely impactful, yet with the loss of the biosphere all life may be gone. Global ecosystems when connected for life's material flows provide the all-encompassing context within which life is possible. The miracle of life is that life begets life, and the tragedy is that across scales when enough life is lost beyond thresholds, living systems die.

Off
The United States federal government should
---not affirm the District of New York's ruling against the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act
---fund the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Material, Protection, Control and Accounting program and its Global Threat Reduction Initiative
---increase funding for development of new military and intelligence capabilities as per the 1AC Myhrvold evidence and the scientific investments of the Paarlberg evidence
---support development and deployment of the Agile Combat Support System and all necessary components of the ForceNet program and the AirSea battle doctrine
---substantially increase its sea-basing capabilities, including pre-deployment and interoperability with Marine forces.
---establish and fully comply with an international governance regime in the Arctic based on a voluntary Polar Code as noted in the Bert evidence, increase new funding for polar icebreakers and naval support facilities in the Arctic as described by Talmadge, and make it illegal for United States companies to strike joint-venture deals with any drilling company in the Arctic
---establish the Joint Data Exchange Center with Russia
---release national security and military strategy guidance documents that reorient national security strategy to deprioritize protection of Middle Eastern oil supplies and instead focus on counter-proliferation and security efforts in places including but not limited to South Asia and East Asia modeled off of the status quo Asia Pivot
---implement pilot programs throughout the globe to promote the development of clean water access projects focusing on regions most at need while increasing public-private partnerships to mobilize resources and technologies to improve global access to water.

NNSA imitative solves the first advantage
Newmann and Bunn, 2009  Andrew, Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom, Kennedy School, and Matthew, Associate Professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “Funding for U.S. Efforts to Improve Controls Over Nuclear Weapons, Materials, and Expertise Overseas: A 2009 Update,” http://www.nti.org/e_research/cnwm/2009_Nuclear_Budget_Final.pdf, June
SECURING NUCLEAR WARHEADS AND MATERIALS As noted earlier, if President Obama’s objective of securing all nuclear weapons and weapons- usable materials worldwide within four years is to be achieved, NNSA’s MPCandA and GTRI programs will play a central role, along with the smaller warhead site security and warhead transportation security programs in DOD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) effort. In May, the administration requested $700 million in FY 2010 funding for these and other programs to improve security and accounting for nuclear weapons and materials, $45 million below the FY 2009 appropriation.5 Some highlights: MPCandA: Remarkably, the FY 2009 omnibus appropriation, the first in many years with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was also the first in many years in which the Congress cut the request for the International Nuclear Material Protection and Cooperation. (The administration, however, chose to take these cuts in the Second Line of Defense component of the effort, discussed below under interdicting nuclear smuggling, rather than in the MPCandA program itself.) The Obama administration’s FY 2010 request of $280 million for the MPCandA program is $55 million more than the FY 2009 appropriation, but $87 million less than the FY 2008 appropriation and a substantial decline from the FY 2007 peak of $406 million.6 (The Obama administration’s FY 2009 supplemental request, approved by the House on May 12 and the Senate on May 14, adds $55 million to the MPCandA and brings total FY 2009 funding to $280 million, the same as the FY 2010 request.7) For the out-years, the budget documents envision steadily declining funding, as currently planned work in Russia and elsewhere is completed; even in the out-year projections, no funds have been included for expanded efforts to implement the President’s four-year goal. In essence, to avoid being criticized for carrying large unspent balances from one year to the next, the budget includes funding only for those areas where NNSA already has foreign countries’ agreement to do work, or was confident (when the budget was being prepared) that such agreement would be forthcoming, rather than including not-yet-agreed activities likely to be needed to implement a four-year plan to achieve effective nuclear security worldwide.  GTRI: While the FY 2010 request of $354 million is $41 million less than the FY 2009 appropriation, Congress had boosted the FY 2009 appropriation to an unusually high level, far beyond either the FY 2008 appropriation or the request for FY 2009. (The Congressional appropriation was $53 million above the $140 million request for FY 2008 and $55 million above the $340 million request for FY 2009.8) It appears that the GTRI budget includes some accelerated activities meant to meet the four-year target for parts of GTRI’s agenda. But as with the MPCandA program, the funds that would be needed to expand GTRI’s coverage to ensure that the full range of facilities and materials were addressed, or to provide incentives to countries and facili- ties to allow their weapons-usable material to be shipped away, are not included in the FY 2010 GTRI request. Indeed, under current plans, GTRI would be spending dramatically more after the four-year plan is over ($1.1 billion in 2014) than it would be in FY 2010 or FY 2011. (This is in part because high-density fuels required to convert some 27 of the reactors GTRI hopes to convert will not be available until the latter part of this period, requiring substantial spending on converting reactors and shipping away irradiated HEU once this high-density fuel becomes available.) It seems certain that if the four-year goal is to be achieved, GTRI’s budgets for FY 2010 and FY 2011 will have to be substantially higher than those in the current request. In particular, more money would be needed to accelerate conversion of the 38 HEU-fueled research reactors that could convert to proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium (LEU) with LEU fuels already available. GTRI is planning to provide funds to accelerate private sector efforts to establish fabrication capability for the new high-density LEU fuels, and that is likely to be costly. Additional funds could also accelerate the pace of removing nuclear material from vulnerable sites around the world (in part because here, too, prices are escalating). More money is also needed to secure radiological sources and research reactors around the world—including in the United States, where upgrades are needed for some 1,800 locations with sources of 1,000 curies or more, and for the nation’s 32 domestic research reactors, both of which have now been included in GTRI’s scope.9 Moreover, GTRI is so far planning to return only a small fraction of the U.S.-origin HEU abroad; while most of the remainder is in developed countries, in many cases there is good reason to bring this material back as well, and more funds would be required to give these facilities incentives to give up their HEU. Finally, NNSA does not yet have a program focused on giving underutilized HEU-fueled reactors incentives to shut down—in many cases likely to be a quicker and easier approach than conversion. All told, an increase of $200 million or more would be needed for GTRI to move forward as rapidly as possible in reducing these risks—though managing such a large single-year increase would pose a challenge.10  

New investments in new technologies can solve
Paarlberg 04 (Robert L. Paarlberg, “Science, Military Dominance, and U.S. Security,” International Security 29.1, 2004, pgs. 122-151, Conclusion: Smart Weapons, and Policies, against Asymmetric Threats)
Military primacy today rests on scientific primacy, and the scientific primacy of the United States rests on a remarkably durable foundation. Rather than threatening U.S. primacy in science, globalization has strengthened it. Yet science-based military primacy on the battlefield is clearly not a guarantee of security. Determined adversaries can innovate increasingly asymmetric tactics against an endless list of soft targets, and the more domination and resentment they feel under U.S. conventional military hegemony, the more incentive they will have to move toward these unconventional responses. Conventional victories that make new enemies may encourage a dangerous shift toward asymmetry, and if the United States then responds by indiscriminately denying foreigners access to the homeland, U.S. primacy in science could itself be critically weakened. The war against international terror should be fought with science, rather than at the expense of science. The homeland security strategy of the United States should include much larger science investments in disciplines such as chemistry, physics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology, where promising new counterterror applications are sure to be found. Smart societies can develop not only smart new weapons for conventional use abroad, but also smart new capabilities for threat detection and soft target protection End Page 150 at home. For example, nanofabrication may hold the key to a timely detection system for some terror bombing threats. Silicon polymer nanowires 2,000 times thinner than a human hair can cheaply detect traces of TNT and piric acid in both water and air, and might someday be developed and deployed into "smart" cargo containers, to protect against terrorist bombs. New information technologies using powerhouse terascale computing capabilities may soon be able to help in tracking and anticipating the behavior of terror networks.90 New systems capable of detecting dangerous amounts of radiation are increasingly affordable and unobtrusive, and the Department of Homeland Security has proposed development of a fully networked national sensor system to monitor the air continuously for pathogens, dangerous chemicals, and other public hazards. One line of defense already in place in thirty cities is a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-designed system for monitoring the air for biological attack.

Alternative fleet bolsters hegemony and makes it effective
Johnson and Stuart 05 (Stuart Johnson, Center for Tech and National Security Policy at National Defense University, Arthur Cebrowski, Former Director Office of Force Transformation for Office of Secretary of Defense, “Alternative Fleet Architecture Design,” August 2005, http://www.ndu.edu/CTNSP/docUploaded/DTP201920Alternative20Fleet20Architecture20Design.pdf)
Nature of the Future Fleet The alternative fleet architectures utilize ship designs of lower unit cost. The ships make extensive use of modularity to provide the ability to adapt quickly to changes in operational or strategic requirements. Accent is put on hull designs that are fast and maneuverable with a standardized interface to allow a variety of combat modules to be exchanged rapidly. The architectures take advantage of networking, speed, numbers, and dispersal to deliver future fleets that are highly capable, adaptable, and relevant to the spectrum of challenges that lie on the horizon. With these attributes, especially networking, future fleets are empowered with relevance, present complexity to the adversary, preserve an increased number of options, and generate increased transaction rates and higher learning rates. The architectures include a generous component of small ships and a strategy of modularity is adopted rather than integration of many systems within a single hull. The “speed” of the fleet is not only the speed of craft motion but speed in swapping out modules on the spot to ensure relevance and to present complexity and uncertainty with which an enemy must contend. Such module exchange speeds are achieved by carrying modules on larger ships that support the smaller ones forward. The large deck ships in the alternative architectures can be configured either to carry aviation or large numbers of vertical launch systems (VLS) and advanced guns (eventually electro-magnetic launch guns and perhaps high-energy lasers) that deliver large volumes of firepower. This contributes to the speed of response and as necessary to the defense of the fleet formations. The alternative fleet architectures presented here are designed to take advantage of extensive networking among spatially distributed forces. Simply put, they emphasize greater numbers of ships that draw their power from their ability to execute network-centric warfare (NCW). See Appendix B for a discussion of the power of networking and the emerging theory of NCW. The programmed Navy with its emphasis on large multi-mission integrated ships can also realize advantages from networking. Its ForceNet program includes aggressive plans to introduce as much of this as possible. Nonetheless, the high unit cost of programmed combatants coupled with reduced shipbuilding budgets will limit the size of the fleet and therefore the extent to which it can exploit the advantages of networking.

The CP provides a framework that checks Arctic conflict
Bert 12 (Captain Melissa Bert, US Coast Guard, Military Fellow, “A Strategy to Advance the Arctic Economy,” Council on Foreign Relations, Policy Innovation Memorandum No. 14, February 2012, http://www.cfr.org/arctic/strategy-advance-arctic-economy/p27258)
The United States needs a comprehensive strategy for the Arctic. The current National/Homeland Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-66 / HSPD-25) is only a broad policy statement. An effective Arctic strategy would address both governance and capacity questions. To generate effective governance in the Arctic the United States should ratify LOSC and take the lead in advocating the adoption of Arctic shipping requirements. The IMO recently proposed a voluntary Polar Code, and the United States should work to make it mandatory. The code sets structural classifications and standards for ships operating in the Arctic as well as specific navigation and emergency training for those operating in or around ice-covered waters.

Water program plank solves heg and their impact
CSIS 05 Center for Strategic and International Studies “Addressing our Global Water Future” White Paper, September 30th (http://water.csis.org/050928_ogwf.pdf)
Finding 13: Water can be a powerful and effective foreign policy tool. Effective engagement of international water issues can significantly support many U.S. foreign strategic objectives. Strategies to address geopolitical and regional instabilities economic development, humanitarian concerns and democracy are more likely to succeed by elevating the issue of water. Water is a missing element for support of many U.S. strategic pursuits abroad. Enabling and supporting other countries as they establish integrated strategies for managing water supplies is important for maintaining and fostering peace and stability between and within countries. This is particularly true as trends in population and natural resource consumption continue to put pressure on economies and governance structures. Because water is so integral to every aspect of human life and activity, many strategies to promote economic development or humanitarian relief (e.g., poverty reduction or HIV/AIDS relief) cannot be achieved without pronounced attention to water. By fostering inclusive decision-making and management processes at a local scale, water projects can also strengthen democracy-building projects in areas where such projects are not well received. Water should be a key component in any short-term or long-term regional stabilization and reconstruction effort. Water scarcity, water quality, and water management could both positively and negatively impact every major U.S. strategic priority in every key region of the world. For all of these reasons, water can no longer be regarded exclusively as a function of U.S. humanitarian and foreign assistance policies. It has significant security, political, social, economic and commercial implications for U.S. interests as well. For this reason, there is a strong argument to be made that U.S. policymakers should elevate water on the list of enduring U.S. interests. Water has become a strategic and foundational element of U.S. international interests. ¬ Finding 14: An integrated, comprehensive international U.S. water policy is essential: The United States has the technical capacity, knowledge, and wealth to help relieve water scarcity problems in countries and regions around the world. However, a lack of coordination and prioritization among all the different agencies involved in the decision making and policy implementation process has lead to a largely ad hoc approach to global water issues. The United States should therefore develop a coherent, comprehensive water strategy for meeting global water challenges in order to maximize its impact and achieve broader U.S. foreign policy objectives. The United States is well positioned to take the lead in addressing global water issues. The U.S. already contributes a significant amount of resources to international water issues—an estimated $3 billion between 2000 and 2004. However, it remains unclear whether these commitments adequately reflect the absolute importance of water to overall foreign policy goals. Official Development Assistance has vacillated significantly in the past decade. The increase in funding by the Bush administration through the “Water for the Poor Initiative” and the commitment made at the World Summit on Sustainable Development are noteworthy, but represent one-time commitments without the accompanying evaluation of needs, priorities, and internal coordination necessary to adequately address the challenges. On the other hand, two attempts have been made by Congress in the past year to elevate the strategic importance of water and to improve coordination—but these risk becoming unfunded mandates. At the operational level, nearly every federal agency or research institution has conducted an international water project. Yet each applies this expertise and experience on a limited, ad-hoc basis. Significant research and development is taking place within the United States in an effort to address our own water scarcity and water quality problems, and these efforts can be usefully applied in regions around the world. Furthermore, the majority of official development assistance for water is conducted on a bilateral basis through USAID and does not reach some of the countries with the greatest water needs. Development of an integrated and cohesive international policy on water will be a major step forward in mobilizing and coordinating the vast resources of the U.S. Government already engaged on global water issues. Such a step may also be critical to achieving many U.S. foreign policy goals.  CONCLUSIONS and RECOMMENDATIONS Natural resource availability and sustainability are precursors to global economic and political stability, which, in turn, are precursors to U.S. national security interests. The findings described above offer the components for a comprehensive and ultimately sustainable approach to managing water resources at the local, regional and global levels. These findings address not only physical water scarcity and water quality issues, but also the capacity building, policy-making, economic and governance issues that are interwoven with the water challenges. The implementation of these findings will not only help resolve water scarcity problems, but will also contribute to greater regional and global stability, improved governance, and the greater spread of democratic principles—all of which will strengthen the sustainable management of water and other resources. Water weaves together international goals for human development, economic prosperity, peace and stability, no matter what the region, what the circumstances, or what the goal. These water challenges present important risks and opportunities for U.S. international strategic interests. Failure to act could lead toward continued economic stagnation. Failure to engage could contribute to domestic and international tensions or unrest, and it could result in further human suffering and death across the planet. Proactive, innovative, and coordinated actions by the United States, on the other hand, will advance every major strategic priority of U.S. foreign policy—most notably economic development and the building of democratic institutions and practices. Water can no longer be regarded solely as a tool or by-product of U.S. development and humanitarian programs. Instead, it should be recognized as a lynchpin for the broader international engagement strategy of the United States. Policies focused on water in regions across the planet must be regarded as a critical element in U.S. national security strategy. Such policies should be part of a broader, comprehensive, and integrated U.S. strategy toward global water challenges. In the light of these considerations, the CSIS-SNL Global Water Futures project offers the following policy recommendations on how to proceed: a. The United States is in critical need of a long-range, integrated strategy for international water. In order to develop such a strategy the U.S. government will need to carry out an inventory of existing international water-related policies and projects, identify a lead agency to coordinate the development of an integrated strategy, convene the many departments and agencies in the U.S. Government with established interests and activities relating to water, undertake a global region by region review of resources and needs engaging regional experts, and consult with third-party groups— i.e., the private sector and the NGO community—to get their feedback and input. b. As a foundation for the development of an integrated strategy for the United States, we must acknowledge that U.S. international water policy has implications that transcend traditional humanitarian and foreign assistance interests. Water is already a critical element in broader U.S. foreign policy and security interests. It will become all the more significant in the future, especially if the dislocations are allowed to become even more acute. c. The proposed U.S. international water strategy must be informed by a detailed understanding of the potential impacts of emerging, new technologies and the need for a differentiated approach to the deployment of technology in various regions across the world. This implies the development of partnerships—between government, the private sector, and NGOs—in the development of ideas to “match” technologies with conditions on the ground. This technological plan should be informed by an assessment of optimal use of current technology and by the potential impact of emerging new technology. d. One key characteristic of the proposed U.S. international water strategy is the identification of realistic goals and metrics to gauge progress and to enable periodic and regular assessments of progress. Such indicators are essential to recalibrating goals and approaches, if necessary. This process should include thorough review and analysis of successes and failures associated with previous water projects. e. The U.S. international water strategy should include the implementation of pilot projects in different regions and at different scales. These will test the approaches and applications described in this White Paper, promote the continued development of better approaches and applications, and inform the development of larger-scale projects. Regions that should be of highest priority are sub-Saharan Africa, where the flow of funds from international donors has been substantially smaller than the objectively defined needs of water access and water sanitation, and the Middle East, where secure, sustainable water resources are already widely seen as key to political stability. f. In order to bring such a strategy to fruition, the United States should significantly expand the financial resources it allocates to international water projects. Furthermore, it should redouble its efforts to mobilize public-private partnerships to mobilize resources and deploy technologies. Finally, working with the other G-8 member states and the broader international community, it should intensify its efforts to catalyze international support to address the challenge of water. g. The strategy should include a strong awareness and education campaign to elevate water as a foreign policy priority.

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Court affs must specify the grounds of the ruling. Evaluate this through competing interpretations.

Education—the rationale is important part—they moot literature without specification
SUTTON 1—Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Sutton, Jeffrey S. Michigan Law Review April 2010
The opinion-writing process provides another constraint. Unlike the democratically elected branches of the federal government, federal appellate judges must explain their decisions in writing. The processnot only improves the decision-making process, but it also disciplines judges to ensure that their votes amount to more than intuition and impulse. No doubt, as Posner rightly points out, this still leaves considerable room for rationalization and "fig-leafing" (p. 350)--giving decisions the veneer, if not the substance, of legal reasoning. Iagree with Posner that the courts should be more candid about the key explanations for their decisions. All too often opinions amount to a blurring array of citations, which obscure rather than highlight the critical choices made by the court. Most issues in most cases usually turn on one point, whether a pragmatic or a legalistic one. Posneris right to suggest that judges should feature and develop these points rather than bury them in a haystack of citations. One reason Posner's opinions are so influential is that they do just that. Others should follow his example.

Key to ground—all court arguments about the rulings—not abstract deicisons—not specifying structurally biases the literature for the aff.

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Imperialist framing of non-liberal societies as unstable threats justifies eliminating non-liberal life.
Adam David MORTON Politics @ Nottingham 5 “The ‘Failed State’ of International Relations” New Political Economy 10.3 p. 372-374
A pathology of deviancy, aberration and breakdown
Emergent across a host of contemporary institutions is a policy-making consensus linked to the threat posed by ‘failed states’ and the new set of associated security, development and humanitarian challenges. Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development in the UK, has recently stated that ‘weak states present a challenge to our system of global governance. For the international system to work, it depends on strong states . . . that are able to deliver services to their populations, to represent their citizens, to control activities on their territory, and to uphold international norms, treaties, and agreements.’ By contrast, ‘weak and failing states provide a breeding ground for international crime’, harbour terrorists and threaten the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals with the spread of HIV/AIDS, refugee flows and poverty.3 This identified perfusion of warlords, criminals, drug barons and terrorists within ‘failed states’ has become a central policy-making concern within the UK and the US.4 Institutions in the UK such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Ministry of Defence (MOD), the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) support the view of ‘failed states’ as representing deviancy from the norms of Western statehood. The aforementioned CRI programme emerging from Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit develops a focus on ‘fragile states’ in conditions of crisis. Preliminary policy documents have highlighted the breakdown of political, economic and social institutions; the loss of territorial control; civil unrest; mass population displacement; and violent internal conflict in states as diverse as Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Coˆte d’Ivoire. At the centre of the most recently launched Commission for Africa report, Our Common Interest, is also ‘the long-term vision for international engagement in fragile states . . . to build legitimate, effective and resilient state institutions’.6 As Blair indicated in launching this report, ‘to tackle the instability, conflict, and despair which disfigures too much of Africa and which can fuel extremism and violence, is to help build our own long-term peace and prosperity’.7 Elsewhere, the putative ‘better effects of empire’ (such as inward investment, pacification and impartial administration) have been heralded as central to United Nations strategy on state-building within weak states based on a re-consideration of models of trusteeship.8 The United States National Security Strategy has also announced that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has similarly produced a ‘Fragile States Strategy’ focusing on the problems of governance and civil conflict arising from poor state capacity and effectiveness.9 This policy-making approach represents a pathological view of conditions in colonial states as characterised by deviancy, aberration and breakdown from the norms of Western statehood.10 It is a view perhaps most starkly supported in the scholarly community by Robert Kaplan’s vision of the ‘coming anarchy’ in West Africa as a predicament that will soon confront the rest of the world. In his words: The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering.11 Hence a presumed reversion ‘to the Africa of the Victorian atlas’, which ‘consists now of a series of coastal trading posts . . . and an interior that, owing to violence, and disease, is again becoming . . . “blank” and “unexplored”’.12 Similarly, Samuel Huntington has referred to ‘a global breakdown of law and order, failed states, and increasing anarchy in many parts of the world’, yielding a ‘global Dark Ages’ about to descend on humanity. The threat here is characterised as a resurgence of non-Western power generating conflictual civilisational faultlines. For Huntington’s supposition is that ‘the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc . . . from the bulge of Africa to central Asia . . . has bloody borders’ and ‘bloody innards’.13 In the similar opinion of Francis Fukuyama: Weak or failing states commit human rights abuses, provoke humanitarian disasters, drive massive waves of immigration, and attack their neighbours. Since September 11, it also has been clear that they shelter international terrorists who can do significant damage to the United States and other developed countries.14 Finally, the prevalence of warlords, disorder and anomic behaviour is regarded by Robert Rotberg as the primary causal factor behind the proliferation of ‘failed states’. The leadership faults of figures such as Siakka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mobutu Sese Seko (Za?re), Siad Barre (Somalia) or Charles Taylor (Liberia) are therefore condemned. Again, though, the analysis relies on an internalist account of the ‘process of decay’, of ‘shadowy insurgents’, of states that exist merely as ‘black holes’, of ‘dark energy’ and ‘forces of entropy’ that cast gloom over previous semblances of order.15 Overall, within these representations of deviancy, aberration and breakdown, there is a significant signalling function contained within the metaphors: of darkness, emptiness, blankness, decay, black holes and shadows. There is, then, a dominant view of postcolonial states that is imbued with the imperial representations of the past based on a discursive economy that renews a focus on the postcolonial world as a site of danger, anarchy and disorder. In response to such dangers, Robert Jackson has raised complex questions about the extent to which international society should intervene in ‘quasi-’ or ‘failed states’ to restore domestic conditions of security and freedom.16 Indeed, he has entertained the notion of some form of international trusteeship for former colonies that would control the ‘chaos and barbarism from within’ such ‘incorrigibly delinquent countries’ as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti and Sudan with a view to establishing a ‘reformation of decolonisation’.17 Andrew Linklater has similarly stated that ‘the plight of the quasi-state may require a bold experiment with forms of international government which assume temporary responsibility for the welfare of vulnerable populations’.18 In the opinion of some specialists, this is because ‘such weak states are not able to stand on their own feet in the international system’.19 Whilst the extreme scenario of sanctioning state failure has been contemplated, the common response is to rejuvenate forms of international imperium through global governance structures.20 Backers of a ‘new humanitarian empire’ have therefore emerged, proposing the recreation of semi-permanent colonial relationships and the furtherance of Western ‘universal’ values, and, in so doing, echoing the earlier mandatory system of imperial rule.21 In Robert Keohane’s view, ‘future military actions in failed states, or attempts to bolster states that are in danger of failing, may be more likely to be described both as self-defence and as humanitarian or public-spirited’.22

This new colonialism dehumanizes and results in unending violence
Batur 7 Pinar, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Sociology @ Vassar, The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide, Handbook of The Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 441-3

War and genocide are horrid, and taking them for granted is inhuman. In the 21st century, our problem is not only seeing them as natural and inevitable, but even worse: not seeing, not noticing, but ignoring them. Such act and thought, fueled by global racism, reveal that racial inequality has advanced from the establishment of racial hierarchy and institutionalization of segregation, to the confinement and exclusion, and elimination, of those considered inferior through genocide. In this trajectory, global racism manifests genocide. But this is not inevitable. This article, by examining global racism, explores the new terms of exclusion and the path to permanent war and genocide, to examine the integrality of genocide to the frame-work of global antiracist confrontation. GLOBAL RACISM IN THE AGE OF “CULTURE WARS” Racist legitimization of inequality has changed from presupposed biological inferiority to assumed cultural inadequacy. This defines the new terms of impossibility of coexistence, much less equality. The Jim Crow racism of biological inferiority is now being replaced with a new and modern racism (Baker 1981; Ansell 1997) with “culture war” as the key to justify difference, hierarchy, and oppression. The ideology of “culture war” is becoming embedded in institutions, defining the workings of organizations, and is now defended by individuals who argue that they are not racist, but are not blind to the inherent differences between African-Americans/Arabs/Chinese, or whomever, and “us.” “Us” as a concept defines the power of a group to distinguish itself and to assign a superior value to its institutions, revealing certainty that affinity with “them” will be harmful to its existence (Hunter 1991; Buchanan 2002). How can we conceptualize this shift to examine what has changed over the past century and what has remained the same in a racist society? Joe Feagin examines this question with a theory of systemic racism to explore societal complexity of interconnected elements for longevity and adaptability of racism. He sees that systemic racism persists due to a “white racial frame,” defining and maintaining an “organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate” (Feagin 2006: 25). The white racial frame arranges the routine operation of racist institutions, which enables social and economic repro-duction and amendment of racial privilege. It is this frame that defines the political and economic bases of cultural and historical legitimization. While the white racial frame is one of the components of systemic racism, it is attached to other terms of racial oppression to forge systemic coherency. It has altered over time from slavery to segregation to racial oppression and now frames “culture war,” or “clash of civilizations,” to legitimate the racist oppression of domination, exclusion, war, and genocide. The concept of “culture war” emerged to define opposing ideas in America regarding privacy, censorship, citizenship rights, and secularism, but it has been globalized through conflicts over immigration, nuclear power, and the “war on terrorism.” Its discourse and action articulate to flood the racial space of systemic racism. Racism is a process of defining and building communities and societies based on racial-ized hierarchy of power. The expansion of capitalism cast new formulas of divisions and oppositions, fostering inequality even while integrating all previous forms of oppressive hierarchical arrangements as long as they bolstered the need to maintain the structure and form of capitalist arrangements (Batur-VanderLippe 1996). In this context, the white racial frame, defining the terms of racist systems of oppression, enabled the globalization of racial space through the articulation of capitalism (Du Bois 1942; Winant 1994). The key to understanding this expansion is comprehension of the synergistic relationship between racist systems of oppression and the capitalist system of exploitation. Taken separately, these two systems would be unable to create such oppression independently. However, the synergy between them is devastating. In the age of industrial capitalism, this synergy manifested itself imperialism and colonialism. In the age of advanced capitalism, it is war and genocide. The capitalist system, by enabling and maintaining the connection between everyday life and the global, buttresses the processes of racial oppression, and synergy between racial oppression and capitalist exploitation begets violence. Etienne Balibar points out that the connection between everyday life and the global is established through thought, making global racism a way of thinking, enabling connections of “words with objects and words with images in order to create concepts” (Balibar 1994: 200). Yet, global racism is not only an articulation of thought, but also a way of knowing and acting, framed by both everyday and global experiences. Synergy between capitalism and racism as systems of oppression enables this perpetuation and destruction on the global level. As capitalism expanded and adapted to the particularities of spatial and temporal variables, global racism became part of its legitimization and accommodation, first in terms of colonialist arrangements. In colonized and colonizing lands, global racism has been perpetuated through racial ideologies and discriminatory practices under capitalism by the creation and recreation of connections among memory, knowledge, institutions, and construction of the future in thought and action. What makes racism global are the bridges connecting the particularities of everyday racist experiences to the universality of racist concepts and actions, maintained globally by myriad forms of prejudice, discrimination, and violence (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991; Batur 1999, 2006). Under colonialism, colonizing and colonized societies were antagonistic opposites. Since colonizing society portrayed the colonized “other,” as the adversary and challenger of the “the ideal self,” not only identification but also segregation and containment were essential to racist policies. The terms of exclusion were set by the institutions that fostered and maintained segregation, but the intensity of exclusion, and redundancy, became more apparent in the age of advanced capitalism, as an extension of post-colonial discipline. The exclusionary measures when tested led to war, and genocide. Although, more often than not, genocide was perpetuated and fostered by the post-colonial institutions, rather than colonizing forces, the colonial identification of the “inferior other” led to segregation, then exclusion, then war and genocide. Violence glued them together into seamless continuity. Violence is integral to understanding global racism. Fanon (1963), in exploring colonial oppression, discusses how divisions created or reinforced by colonialism guarantee the perpetuation, and escalation, of violence for both the colonizer and colonized. Racial differentiations, cemented through the colonial relationship, are integral to the aggregation of violence during and after colonialism: “Manichaeism division of the universe into opposites of good and evil goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes” (Fanon 1963:42). Within this dehumanizing framework, Fanon argues that the violence resulting from the destruction of everyday life, sense of self and imagination under colonialism continues to infest the post-colonial existence by integrating colonized land into the violent destruction of a new “geography of hunger” and exploitation (Fanon 1963: 96). The “geography of hunger” marks the context and space in which oppression and exploitation continue. The historical maps drawn by colonialism now demarcate the boundaries of post-colonial arrangements. The white racial frame restructures this space to fit the imagery of symbolic racism, modifying it to fit the television screen, or making the evidence of the necessity of the politics of exclusion, and the violence of war and genocide, palatable enough for the front page of newspapers, spread out next to the morning breakfast cereal. Two examples of this “geography of hunger and exploitation” are Iraq and New Orleans.

Alternative: Resist their calls for prescriptive legal modeling.  Questioning the universality of the liberal-legal model opens up alternative futures for social justice.
Kerry RITTICH Law @ Toronto 3 Enchantments of Reason/Coercions of Law 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 727, Lexis  
To paraphrase Wendy Brown, legal analysis need not march only in the service of an immediate political dilemma; to try to make it so may be to fall into a trap. There is an important place for distanced reflection on legal rules and reforms. Although such efforts may be discounted as not immediately helpful, even beside the point, critical reflection is far from disengagement from politics or the dilemmas of the "real world." 23 Given law's intimate connection with social organization and social power, even critique is unlikely to entirely shed its normative charge. Critical scholars have often resisted the normative move, the efforts to extrude the political and ideological from accounts about law, and the idea that particular legal conclusions follow from commitments to rights or efficiency such that "right answers" simply become a matter of professional  *736  skill or craft. Indeed, resistance to the quick slippage into the prescriptive mode is central to the critical project. The basis of this resistance is not merely an uncontrolled subversive or oppositionist instinct; rather, it emanates primarily from the sense that the overwhelming compulsion to answer the question in the terms in which it is posed allows many assumptions that are crucial to the pertinence or intelligibility of the question itself to remain unquestioned and intact. 24 Almost as often as critical scholars have made such observations, they have faced the following criticism: It is not enough to be critical of the content of legal rules or the structure of legal argumentation; you have to offer an alternative, a prescription by which it can be fixed. Otherwise, the critique is empty, even worthless. 25 Yet, as Schlag observes, "One might think that destruction is inherently bad and construction inherently good, but this view, while pervasive, is woefully inadequate. Indeed, it all depends upon what is being destroyed and what is being constructed." 26 From the standpoint of those not entirely invested in the current order, critique may be regarded as constructive; in the process of critical reflection, roads now foreclosed may be opened. What follows are four possible critical optics or strategies, not all of which are entirely distinct. It is obvious that at least some of them may be compatible with existing reform proposals, as what they foreclose is not any particular rule or reform, but rather the arguments of entailment which, whether on the basis of the rule of law, efficiency, or even human rights, currently give them primacy and legitimacy. All are predicated on the idea that it may be more useful to try to uncover and trace what we are doing when we pursue different types of law reform than to prescribe precisely what to do, and that the role of midwife, whether to efficiency or human rights, does not exhaust the functions of those with legal expertise in the context of global law reform efforts. All propose a much chastened normative role for the legal professional and all challenge the hyper-investment in the reason of law to resolve social, political, or economic issues. At the same time, all of these proposals at least implicitly resituate law as a site of political conflict and a place in which some of the work of its resolution might take place. All, however, discourage investment in the pious or moral dimension of law, especially to  *737  the extent that it forecloses the exploration of competing arguments and alternatives. A cautionary note seems in order. The relative absence of critical reflexivity to date is not accidental. The policing of alternative legal analyses comes from the fact that what is acknowledged, even emphasized, in such analyses—the distributive dimension of reforms, the ideological character of reform proposals, the cultural particularity of "universal" rules—is normally excluded. Because such elements may be excluded as a matter of the structure and integrity of claims about the role of law in development, and even the status of the discipline itself, to venture into this territory is to risk speaking the voice of unreason, the classic place to which dissenters of all stripes are consigned. Notwithstanding, there remains a useful role for legal academics in uncovering the assumptions behind reforms, reflecting on their biases, and trying to foresee their consequences along multiple axes. In particular, it seems important to try to project how rule and institutional changes might reallocate resources and power in specific contexts. Far from forays into new territory, these tasks primarily involve recuperating some of the most basic insights and techniques of legal analysis. 1. Resisting the Project of Law Generation/Demoting the Lawyers and Economists  One possibility is to simply state that, for reasons of legitimacy and basic democratic control, lawyers should have no privileged place in determining many of the questions that are currently cast as matters of lawyerly expertise. Put another way, there should be an active effort to disenchant the world about sole reliance on the professional tools of law and reason to solve the problems of development, and to demote the role of lawyers (as well as other technocrats) in governance ventures. It needs to be emphasized that this is not a rejection of law, or the rule of law, or even the importance of law. "Rejecting the law" is not an option; we live in a world structured at every turn by legal rules. Nor does it necessarily compel disengagement on the part of legal academics from a process that, like it or not, is in full swing, although some are sure to find that an appropriate response. It is a rejection of the claims about law's insulation from politics and, in particular, a contestation of the idea that there is a broad framework of laws that is simply required to be modern or civilized, and is for that reason properly excluded from the forces of politics and democratic deliberation. To say that such questions can and should be answered by economists, lawyers, or other technocrats is to participate in the fiction that they can be successfully  *738  divorced from questions about the organization of social life, the distribution of social power, and the allocation of social resources. Lawyers should simply come clean about the impossibility of this. Paradoxically, such an admission is unlikely to end the role of the lawyer in the legal reform process; it may even encourage more legal advice and greater participation, though on less problematic terms. Among its salutary effects might be deeper reflection on the desirability of proposed reforms, greater skepticism toward what is offered, interrogation of the interests that are affected, for either better or worse, consideration of the expected consequences, as well as open assessment of alternatives. Despite the tendency to dismiss those who fail to offer a well-formulated alternative, there may be considerable virtues in not having a fully articulated positive program, all of which parallel concerns that have been raised in development theory. 27 First, it can be a deliberate choice to reject the uncritical export of law and avoid the imperial tendencies present in such ventures. Second, progressive lawyers might want to create space for local alternatives. As law expands, more and more issues are moved out of the zone of democratic deliberation and into the zone governed by reason or efficiency, the expansion of law may legitimately be resisted where it represents the compression of politics. Third, lawyers may (and probably often should) feel unequipped to offer formulaic answers from afar, as there can be a deep artificiality about reform proposals which are generated by those who will not experience their effects. The intuition behind the norm of self-determination is that important social decisions, legal reforms among them, should be made not simply with attention to how they will be received and play out in given contexts and histories, but also by those who will have to live with the consequences. Such consequences impose a singular discipline on the decision maker, so much so that eliminating them fundamentally denatures the decision making process. It is simply a mistake to think that the outcomes will remain untouched, or that they will be better in some global sense, when this element is absent from the process. 2. Critical Readings/Multiple Readings  As compared to discussions in domestic contexts, debates around  *739  law reform "for export" to date have been remarkably flat and one-dimensional. Right now, the economic lens predominates. Even from within the economic optic, efficiency concerns control, crowding out distributive considerations, although redistribution is a persistent and inevitable effect of reform. Thus, one useful role lies in simply deepening and complexifying the accounts of the legal reform process; much more attention could be profitably paid to the multiple dimensions of legal rules. These efforts also might aid rather than impair the law and development project, if only because they may provide insight into why and how reforms routinely produce unforeseen outcomes. There is a range of methods that could be employed to this end. Law and development projects need to be looked at in cultural terms. Specific claims should be analyzed empirically. The path of reforms should be traced historically and genealogically. Dominant arguments could be analyzed semiotically, with attention to the narrative they project about the world. Historical work is particularly valuable in tracing the contingency of even the most well-entrenched legal rules and uncovering the rhetorical and ideological shifts in the structure of legal argumentation over time. Multiplying the types of legal analyses would permit us to detail the different functions and properties of laws, even where greater efficiency is the motivation behind their implementation. In sum, it would enable us to better trace the flow of resources, the creation of new powers through law, and the emergence of new social groups and political constituencies. Critical analysis directs our attention to the role of law in constituting social relations and practices, rather than merely regulating them after the fact; it reminds us that legal rules stand to be implicated in the production of the very social phenomena to which law is called to respond. Attention to this role raises a whole series of inquiries in the context of reform. How might reforms affect existing social groups? Workers? Women? Ethnic or national minorities? How might they affect sexual identities, racial affiliations? What new social formations might they produce? Critical readings should aim to bring to the surface, rather than repress, the tradeoffs that are involved in different reform paths. One of the most pernicious dimensions of simplistic rule of law and good governance narratives is the claim that there are no conflicts among desirable values and ends. Resistance is sure to arise from contesting what is dogma, to wit, that the implementation of efficiency enhancing rules is an uncontentious goal, that everyone stands to gain from free trade, that property and contract rights are the paramount legal entitlements, and that rule-based regimes "level the playing field" and ensure fairness  *740  among otherwise unequal parties. Treating such claims as interrogatories rather than simply facts, however, is likely to engender better attention to the actual effects of reforms. Although transformative projects backed by law are often imagined as inherently progressive, they are not necessarily so. In addition, there is inevitable uncertainty and risk in law reform. If there is a comparative advantage that lawyers bring to the table, it is familiarity with the varied and unpredictable path of legal rules in operation. Indeed, no one else can be expected to possess the intimate knowledge of the fate of legal rules that lawyers and legal academics acquire in the course of their professional lives. In short, to the extent that we get involved in law and development ventures, at a minimum we should export the critique too. It seems at best negligent, at worst disingenuous, to fail to speak candidly about the conflicts within the discipline, and to suppress the wide variety of opinions about whether particular reforms are a good or bad idea. To do so is patronizing and unnecessarily mystifying; it also seems unlikely to be persuasive, at least for long. 3. Alternative Institutional Possibilities  Another possibility is to trace alternative futures, by positing regulatory and institutional scenarios that are equally compatible with the rule of law. 28 To put it another way, lawyers could play a role in countering the "false necessity" of reforms, whether advanced in the name of law or growth simpliciter. 29 Some of these alternatives may be defended in the name of furthering the project of progress-through-economic-growth, although they are different from those conventionally put forward. But whether or not they are congruent with the aims of current governance and market reform projects, a central task should be to resist the idea that the rule of law, good governance, and market reform are institutionally interchangeable, or that any one configuration of laws is required to create market regimes based on the rule of law. Lawyers have a useful professional role to play in detailing the myriad ways in which market norms have been institutionalized in different contexts and at different periods of time in the same jurisdiction. Perhaps at the present time, one of the most important tasks is to simply point out the variety of different legal rules that might be available to respond to the challenges and dilemmas posed by globalization. Fetishism about particular rules and institutions may stand in the *741  way of some otherwise needed or desired social transformation. For example, changes may be foreclosed because they are said to trespass on property rights, because they differ from the rules and institutions conventionally found in model market societies, or because they overtly further a particular social or distributive interest rather than a "general" or "universal" interest. All such claims, however, rest on assumptions that close analyses of law easily disturb. Legal scholars might point out that property rights, for example, are routinely disaggregated and allocated among different groups, reconstituted by a variety of regulatory structures, and restrained by the operation of other legal rules both "private" and "public." 

*Terror* 

The risk of nuclear terrorism is vanishingly small --- terrorists must succeed at each of twenty plus stages --- failing at one means zero risk.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)
LIKELIHOOD In his thoughtful, influential, and well-argued 2004 book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe—a work Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times finds "terrifying"—Graham Allison relayed his "considered judgment" that "on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not." He repeated that judgment in an article published two years later—albeit without reducing the terminal interval to compensate—and he had presumably relied on the same inspira-tional mechanism in 1995 to predict: "In the absence of a determined program of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade is out."1 He has quite a bit of company in his perpetually alarming conclusions. In 2003, UN Ambassador John Negroponte judged there to be a "a high probability" that wandJjjn two years al-Qaeda would attempt an attack using a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction. When some 85 foreign policy experts were polled by -Senator Richard Lugar in 2004 and 2005, they concluded on aver-age that there was a 29 percent likelihood a nuclear explosion would occur somewhere in the world within the next ten years, and they overwhelmingly anticipated that this would likely be carried out by terrorists, not by a government. And in 2007, physicist Richard Garwin put the likelihood of a nuclear explosion on an American or European city by terrorist or other means at 20 percent per year, which would work out to 87 percent over a ten-year period.2 In late 2008, after working for six months and interviewing more than 250 people, a congressionally mandated task force, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (possibly known as COPWOMDPAT to its friends) issued its report, portentously entitled World at Risk. It led by expressing the belief that "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013." Although the report is careful to reassure its readers that it does not intend to frighten them about the current state of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, it failed miserably in that admirable goal almost immediately. Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, proclaimed shortly after the report was issued, that it "scared the pants off of most of us."3 In its dire forecast, the report's phraseology echoes, of course, Allison's formulation of 2004, and this may owe something to the fact that he was one of the commission's nine members. There are a couple of differences, however. In Allison's earlier rendering, bad things happen only if we stay on "the current path." Thus, should bad things fail to occur, this happy result could be taken as proof that we somehow managed somewhere along the line to alter our path, and who, pray, will be able exactly to designate what a "current path" actually is (or was)? The commission, in stark contrast, claims bad things are likely to happen "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency" something, experience suggests, that is next to impossible. On the other hand, the commission artfully broadens its definition of bad things from Allison's "acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets" to the use of a "weapon of mass destruction" by terrorists "some-where in the world." As one critic points out, there is certainly a good chance that someone somewhere will release some germs, killing few, if any, or, as insurgents have done in Iraq, ineffectually lace the occasional bomb with chlorine. Although no normal person would consider either act to constitute "mass destruction," the report can, strictly speaking, claim vindication. Actually, the report is on even safer ground. A man in Rockford, Illinois, who purchased some bogus hand grenades from an FBI informant with the intent to detonate them at a local shopping mall, has been convicted of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction under laws that creatively define hand grenades to be weapons of mass destruction.4 Even those who decidedly disagree with such scary-sounding, if somewhat elusive, prognostications about nuclear terrorism often come out seeming like they more or less agree. In his Atomic Bazaar, William Langewiesche spends a great deal of time and effort assessing the process by means of which a terrorist group could come up with a bomb. Unlike Allison—and, for that matter, the considerable bulk of accepted opinion—he concludes that it "remains very, very unlikely. It's a possibility, but unlikely." Also: The best information is that no one has gotten anywhere near this. I mean, if you look carefully and practically at this process, you see that it is an enormous undertaking full of risks for the would-be terrorists. And so far there is no public case, at least known, of any appreciable amount of weapons-grade HEU highly enriched uranium disappearing. And that's the first step. If you don't have that, you don't have anything. The first of these bold and unconventional declarations comes from a book discussion telecast in June 2007 on C-SPAN and the second from an inter-view on National Public Radio. Judgments in the book itself, however, while consistent with such conclusions, are expressed more ambiguously, even coyly: "at the extreme is the possibility, entirely real, that one or two nuclear weapons will pass into the hands of the new stateless guerrillas, the jihad-ists, who offer none of the retaliatory targets that have so far underlain the nuclear peace" or "if a would-be nuclear terrorist calculated the odds, he would have to admit that they are stacked against^ffen," but they are "not impossible."5 The previous chapter arrayed a lengthy set of obstacles confront-: v ,„ ing the would-be atomic terrorist—often making use in the process of Langewlesche's excellent reporting. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if often with great difficulty, surmount each obstacle—that doing so in each case is, in Langewiesche's phrase, "not impossible."6 But it is vital to point out that, while it may be "not impossible" to surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them could quickly approach impossibility. If the odds are "stacked against" the terrorists, what are they? Lange-wiesche's discussion, as well as other material, helps us evaluate the many ways such a quest—in his words, "an enormous undertaking full of risks"— could fail. The odds, indeed, are stacked against the terrorists, perhaps massively so. In fact, the likelihood a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small. ARRAYING THE BARRIERS Assuming terrorists have some desire for the bomb (an assumption ques-tioned in the next chapter), fulfillment of that desire is obviously another matter. Even the very alarmed Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier contend that the atomic terrorists' task "would clearly be among the most difficult types of attack to carry out" or "one of the most difficult missions a terrorist group could hope to try" But, stresses the CIA's George Tenet, a terrorist atomic bomb is "possible" or "not beyond the realm of possibility." In his excellent discussion of the issue, Michael Levi ably catalogues a wide array of difficulties confronting the would-be atomic terrorist, adroitly points out that "terrorists must succeed at every stage, but the defense needs to succeed only once," sensibly warns against preoccupation with worst-case scenarios, and pointedly formulates "Murphy's Law of Nuclear Terrorism: What can go wrong might go wrong." Nevertheless, he holds nuclear terrorism to be a "genuine possibility," and concludes that a good defensive strategy can merely "tilt the odds in our favor."7 Accordingly, it might be useful to take a stab at estimating just how "difficult" or "not impossible" the atomic terrorists' task, in aggregate, is— that is, how far from the fringe of the "realm of possibility" it might be, how "genuine" the possibilities are, how tilted the odds actually are. After all, lots of things are "not impossible." It is "not impossible" that those legendary monkeys with typewriters could eventually output Shakespeare.8 Or it is "not impossible"—that is, there is a "genuine possibility"—that a colliding meteor or comet could destroy the earth, that Vladimir Putin or the British could decide one morning to launch a few nuclear weapons at Ohio, that an underwater volcano could erupt to cause a civilization-ending tidal wave, or that Osama bin Laden could convert to Judaism, declare himself to be the Messiah, and fly in a gaggle of mafioso hit men from Rome to have himself publicly crucified.9 As suggested, most discussions of atomic terrorism deal in a rather piecemeal fashion with the subject—focusing separately on individual tasks such as procuring HEU or assembling a device or transporting it. However, as the Gilmore Commission, a special advisory panel to the president and Congress, stresses, setting off a nuclear device capable of producing mass destruction presents "Herculean challenges," requiring that a whole series of steps be accomplished: obtaining enough fissile material, designing a weapon "that will bring that mass together in a tiny fraction of a second" and figuring out some way to deliver the thing. And it emphasizes that these merely constitute "the minimum requirements." If each is not fully met, the result is not simply a less powerful weapon, but one that can't produce any significant nuclear yield at all or can't be delivered.10 Following this perspective, an approach that seems appropriate is to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome by a terrorist group in order to carry out the task of producing, transporting, and then successfully detonating an improvised nuclear device, an explosive that, as Allison acknowledges, would be "large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient." Table 13.1 attempts to do this, and it arrays some 20 of these— all of which must be surmounted by the atomic aspirant. Actually, it would be quite possible to come up with a longer list: in the interests of keeping the catalogue of hurdles down to a reasonable number, some of the entries are actually collections of tasks and could be divided into two or three or more. For example, number 5 on the list requires that heisted highly enriched uranium be neither a scam nor part of a sting nor of inadequate quality due to insider incompetence, but this hurdle could as readily be rendered as three separate ones. In contemplating the task before them, woixftlsbe atomic terrorists effectively must go through an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do so, they are likely to find the prospects daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. "

Only causes small-scale destruction.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)
In the ensuing decades, massive exaggerations of the physical effects of nuclear weapons have been very much the rule. Words like "liquidate," "annihilate," and "vaporize," not to mention "Armageddon" and "apocalypse," have been commonly applied in scenarios where those sorts of extreme characterizations are simply not sound. As with Oppenheimer in 1946, it remains a massive overstatement to confidently insist, as the prominent foreign policy analyst Joseph Cirincione docs today, that "a nuclear 9/11 would destroy an entire city," or to conclude with Robert Gallucci that a single terrorist atom bomb would be capable of “obliterating a large portion of a city." Nor is it correct to casually assert, as journalist Lawrence Scott Sheets does, that an atomic bomb of the size exploded at Hiroshima (or smaller) could, in the hands of terrorists, "kill millions of people."" And defense analyst Brian Jenkins is (presumably knowingly) engaging in rather extravagant hyperbole when he says that America's "awesome nuclear arsenal" during the cold war could have "destroyed the planet." But his auditors are likely to take him literally, and they are likely to do so as well for Cirincione when he asserts that the world's remain-arsenal of 26,000 nuclear weapons is enough "to destroy the planet several times over." By contrast, as one physicist points out, "the largest bomb that has ever been exploded anywhere was sixty megatons, and that is one-thousandth the force of an earthquake, one-thousandth the force of a hurricane."

Nuclear use is just a theoretical possibility --- terrorists are not interested.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)

In this spirit, alarm about the possibility that small groups could fabricate and then set off nuclear weapons have been repeatedly raised at least since 1946, when, as noted in chapter 2, atomic bomb maker J. Robert Oppenheimer contended that if three or four men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could "destroy New York." Assertions like that proliferated after the 1950s, when the "suitcase bomb" appeared to become a something of a practical possibility. And it has now been well over three decades since a prominent terrorism specialist, Brian Jenkins, published his (not unreasonable) warnings about how "the world's increasing dependence on nuclear power may provide terrorists with weapons of mass destruction " and since a group empowered by the Atomic Energy Commission darkly noted that "terrorist groups have increased their professional skills, intelligence networks, finances, and levels of armaments throughout the world." And because of "the widespread dissemination of instructions for processing special nuclear materials and for making simple nuclear weapons," the group warned, "acquisition of special nuclear material remains the only substantial problem facing groups which desire to have such weapons."2 At around the same time, journalist John McPhee decided that, although only a small proportion of nuclear professionals expressed a "sense of urgency" about the issue, he would devote an entire book to a physicist he was able to find who did (nothing, of course, is as boring as a book about how urgent something isn't). That was Theodore Taylor, who proclaimed the problem to be "immediate" and who explained to McPhee at length "how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it into a bomb." To fabricate a crude atomic bomb, Taylor patiently, if urgently, pointed out, was "simple": all one needed was some plutonium oxide powder, some high explosives, and "a few things that anyone could buy in a hardware store." "Everything is a matter of probabilities," Taylor assured his rapt auditor, and at the time he thought either that it was already too late to "prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then," or that "in another ten or fifteen years, it will be too late."3 Thirty-five years later, we continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their "simple" task. In the wake of 9/11, concerns about the atomic terrorist surged, even though the terrorist attacks of that day used no special weapons. "Nothing is really new about these perils” notes the New York Times' Bill Keller, but 9/11 turned "a theoretical possibility into a felt danger," giving "our nightmares legs." Jenkins has run an Internet search to discover how often variants of the term al-Qaeda appeared within ten words of nuclear. There were only seven hits in 1999 and eleven in 2000, but this soared to 1,742 in 2001 and to 2,931 in 2002.4 In this spirit, Keller relays the response of then Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge when asked what he worried about most: Ridge "cupped his hands prayerfully and pressed his fingertips to his lips. 'Nuclear/ he said simply." On cue, when the presidential candidates were specifically asked by Jim Lehrer in their first debate in September 2004 to designate the "single most serious threat to the national security of the United States," the candidates had no difficulty agreeing on one. It was, in George W. Bush's words, a nuclear weapon "in the hands of a terrorist enemy." Concluded Lehrer, "So it's correct to say the single most serious threat you believe, both of you believe, is nuclear proliferation?" George W. Bush: "In the hands of a terrorist enemy." John Kerry: "Weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation....There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia.... there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates contends that every senior leader in the government is kept awake at night by "the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, espe-cially nuclear"5 If there has been a "failure of imagination" over all these decades, however, perhaps it has been in the inability or unwillingness to consider the difficulties confronting the atomic terrorist. Thus far, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes to go atomic, they, unlike generations of alarmed pundits, have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful.

It’s incredibly difficult to build a bomb. And stolen material wouldn’t be effective.
Slate ‘9  (Timothy Noah, “The Burden-of-Success Theory”, 2-28, L/N)
Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist of some renown, wrote in his 2004 book Nuclear Terrorism that "a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not." When the paperback came out, he wrote in an afterword that "the likelihood, indeed inevitability, of a nuclear terrorist attack absent a major departure for current policy and practice" had increased over the previous year. In "World At Risk," a report about proliferation and terrorism released in December 2008, Allison and his fellow members of a congressional blue-ribbon panel pushed the deadline back to 2013, broadened the location to "somewhere in the world," and broadened the weapons category to include biological and chemical agents. Such predictions cause other terrorism experts to roll their eyes. John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State who believes the terrorism threat is overstated, twitted Allison for predicting as far back as 1995 that "acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade i.e., the 1990s is out."  In fact, the likelihood of nuclear terrorism isn't that great. Mueller points out that Russian "suitcase bombs," which figure prominently in discussions about "loose nukes," were all built before 1991 and ceased being operable after three years. Enriched uranium is extremely difficult to acquire; over the past decade, Mueller argues, there were only 10 known thefts. The material stolen weighed a combined 16 pounds, which was nowhere near the amount needed to build a bomb. Once the uranium is acquired, building the weapon is simple in theory (anti-nuclear activist Howard Morland published a famous 1979 article about this in the Progressive) but quite difficult in practice, which is why entire countries have had to work decades to acquire the bomb, only sometimes meeting with success. (Plutonium, another fissile material, is sufficiently dangerous and difficult to transport that nonproliferation experts seldom discuss it.)  Gathering material for a biological weapon may be somewhat easier, but actually fashioning that weapon would be harder, as witnessed by the fact that such weapons have scarcely ever been deployed, even by nations. On the rare occasions when they have been, they've failed to live up to their billing as weapons of mass destruction. "Perhaps the greatest disincentive to using biological weapons," John Parachini of the RAND Corporation testified before Congress in 2001, "is that terrorists can inflict (and have inflicted) many more fatalities and casualties with conventional explosives than with unconventional weapons." The same argument applies to chemical weapons. In theory, journalist Gregg Easterbrook has noted (citing a congressional report), under perfect conditions, one ton of sarin could kill up to 8,000 people. But it's "reasonably unlikely" that a terrorist group could acquire that much sarin, and perfect conditions mean no wind and no sun. Even light winds would reduce casualties to 800. You'd be better off detonating a conventional bomb in a city square.

Insider sources confirm Al Qaeda has no intention to go beyond the internet. They aren't going for a nuke seriously.
Mueller ’10  (John, Prof. Pol. Sci. – Ohio State U., American Conservative, “Nuclear Bunkum”, 1-1, http://www.amconmag.com/article/2010/jan/01/00020/)
To show al-Qaeda’s desire to obtain atomic weapons, many have focused on a set of conversations that took place in Afghanistan in August 2001 between two Pakistani nuclear scientists, bin Laden, and three other al-Qaeda officials. Pakistani intelligence officers characterize the discussions as “academic.” Reports suggest that bin Laden may have had access to some radiological material—acquired for him by radical Islamists in Uzbekistan—but the scientists told him that he could not manufacture a weapon with it. Bin Laden’s questions do not seem to have been very sophisticated. The scientists were incapable of providing truly helpful information because their expertise was not in bomb design but in processing fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities of a non-state group. Nonetheless, some U.S. intelligence agencies convinced themselves that the scientists provided al-Qaeda with a “blueprint” for constructing nuclear weapons.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, reportedly said that al-Qaeda’s atom-bomb efforts never went beyond searching the Internet. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts from the CIA and the Department of Energy examined information uncovered in Afghanistan and came to similar conclusions. They found no credible proof that al-Qaeda had obtained fissile material or a nuclear weapon and no evidence of “any radioactive material suitable for weapons.” They did uncover, however, a “nuclear related” document discussing “openly available concepts about the nuclear fuel cycle and some weapons related issues.” Physicist and weapons expert David Albright concludes that any al-Qaeda atomic efforts were “seriously disrupted”—indeed, “nipped in the bud”—by the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. After that, the “chance of al-Qaeda detonating a nuclear explosive appears on reflection to be low.”

*Venezuela*
Arctic Conflict

No arctic war
Mahony 3/19 (Honor, editor of the EUobserver in Brussels, “Fears of Arctic conflict are 'overblown',” March 19, 2013, http://euobserver.com/foreign/119479)  regulations, territorial jurisdiction, business incentives – assumes resources and cites experts
BRUSSELS - The Arctic has become a new frontier in international relations, but fear of potential conflict in the resource-rich region is overblown, say experts.¶ For long a mystery because of its general impenetrability, melting ice caps are revealing more and more of the Arctic region to scientists, researchers and industry.¶ Climate change experts can take a more precise look at a what global warming is doing to the planet, shipping trade routes once considered unthinkable are now possible, and governments and businesses are in thrall to the potential exploitation of coal, iron, rare earths and oil.¶ The interest is reflected in the growing list of those wanting to have a foot in the Arctic council, a forum of eight countries with territory in the polar region.¶ While the US, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and Canada form the council, the EU commission, China, India, South Korea and Japan have all expressed an interest in having a permanent observer status.¶ "The Arctic has become a new meeting place for America, Europe and the Asia Pacific," says Damien Degeorges, founder of the Arctic Policy and Economic Forum.¶ During a recent conference on Arctic shipping routes in the European Parliament, Degeorges noted that "China has been the most active by far in the last years."¶ He points to its red-carpet treatment of politicians from Greenland, a territory that recently got full control over its wealth of natural resources. Bejing also cosied up to Iceland after the island's financial meltdown. The two undertook a joint expedition to the North Pole and the Chinese have the largest foreign embassy in Reykjavik.¶ Meanwhile, South Korea's president visited Greenland last year and shipping hubs like Singapore are holding Arctic conferences.¶ The interest is being spurred by melting icebergs.¶ Last year saw a record low of multi-year ice - permanent ice - in the polar sea. This means greater shipping and mineral exploitation potential. There were 37 transits of the North East Passage (NEP), running from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the top of Russia, in 2011. This rose to 47 in 2012.¶ For a ship travelling from the Netherlands to China, the route around 40 percent shorter than using the traditional Suez Canal. A huge saving for China, where 50 percent of its GDP is connected to shipping. Russia is also keen to exploit the route as the rise in temperatures is melting the permafrost in its northern territory, playing havoc with its roads and railways.¶ According to Jan Fritz Hansen, deputy director of the Danish shipowners’ association, the real breakthrough will come when there is a cross polar route. At the moment there are are two options - the North East Passge for which Russia asks high fees for transiting ships - or the much-less developed North West Passage along Canada.¶ His chief concern is that "trade up there is free. We don't want protectionism. Everyone should be allowed to compete up there."¶ And he believes the biggest story of the Arctic is not how it is traversed but what will be taken out of it. According to the US Geological Survey (2009), the Arctic holds 13 percent of undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered gas supplies.¶ Greenland is already at the centre of political tussle between the EU and China over future exploitation of its rare earths - used in a range of technologies such as hybrid cars or smart phones.¶ "The biggest adventure will be the Arctic destination. There is a lot of valuable goods that should be taken out of nature up there," he said.¶ This resource potential - although tempered by the fact that much of it is not economically viable to exploit - has led to fears that the Arctic region is ripe for conflict.¶ But this is nonsense, says Nil Wang, a former Danish admiral and Arctic expert.¶ Most resources have an owner¶ "There is a general public perception that the Arctic region holds great potential for conflict because it is an ungoverned region where all these resources are waiting to be picked up by the one who gets there first. That is completely false," he said.¶ He notes that it is an "extremely well-regulated region," with international rules saying that coastal states have territorial jurisdiction up to 12 nautical miles off their coast.¶ On top of that is a further 200 nautical miles of exclusive economic zone "where you own every value in the water and under the seabed."¶ "Up to 97 percent of energy resources is actually belonging to someone already," says Wang.¶ He suggest the actors in the region all want to create a business environment, which requires stable politics and security.¶ But he concedes there are "risk factors." These include "ambiguous communication" (so that there is an impression of a security conflict), and possible fishing wars as fish stocks move further north because of rising temperatures into areas with no fishing rules.¶ A fall-out in relations between the China and the US could also impact the Arctic region but the "Arctic itself will not create conflict."¶ As for the EU, it has been seeking to gain a foothold in the region. It spends millions of euros each year on research, environmental and social programmes in the Arctic area.¶ A European Commission strategy paper last year noted that giving the commission permanent observer status - it applied in 2008 - in the Arctic Council would allow the EU "to gain detailed understanding of the concerns of Arctic partners."¶ But Wang reckons it has little chance for now.¶ "Russia is the biggest boy in the school yard. And in this case you don't normally invite anyone from a neighbouring school yard that is bigger than you. And Canada is more or less of the same opinion," he noted.

Russia needs Western technology to exploit Arctic Oil – ensures Arctic peace.
Pate 10 – US Air Force Major, Master of Arts in Security Studies (Chad P., “Easing the Arctic Tension: An Economic Solution”, writing for Naval Postgraduate School, December 2010; http://www.hsdl.org/?viewanddid=11038)//AB
With the United States emerging from a recession, there is little chance that that the military buildup outlined in NSPD-66 and the Navy Arctic Roadmap will come to fruition. Businesses in the United States stand to gain from investment overseas, yet Russia has traditionally made such investment difficult and unpredictable.49 A key issue with Arctic oil and natural gas exploration is that Russian industry technology lags at least 10 years behind its Western counterparts.50 Because of this lag, Russia has in the past allowed Western corporations to share in its energy resources in exchange for technological assistance only to mistreat the investors later on and force them out. As will be explained in Chapter III, Russia’s energy resources are dwindling so it is essential that the state bring new production locations on line as soon as possible. Because of this need, the Russian leadership may consider reducing the barriers to investment and accept that the nation will reap fewer rewards as Western corporations share their technology. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the potential for establishing a capitalist peace between Russia and its Arctic neighbors against the backdrop of Russia’s declining hydrocarbon extraction capabilities. The work’s hypothesis is that there is little potential for conflict in the Arctic due to Russia’s inability to harvest the newly uncovered hydrocarbons on its own. With Western corporations possessing the necessary technology, Russian aggression in the North would likely block the inflow of FDI and harm the state’s long-term economic viability. If economic interconnectedness is established, the resultant capitalist peace would likely ease tensions in the region and the United States may not be forced to increase significantly its military presence in the North, thereby allaying realist concerns regarding the imbalance of Arctic military power. Intentional or accidental encroachment by the enlarged Russian military into sensitive U.S. areas would be less likely to escalate beyond diplomatic exchanges with the nations linked by economic bonds. Without the ability to counter the Russian military directly should tensions escalate, relying on globalized production platforms—what Brooks argues is a “reserve stabilizer”— may offer an alternative means of maintaining the security of the United States’ northernmost border.51 48

No extinction
Nick Bostrom, 2007 Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, Faculty of Philosophy and James Martin 21st Century School. “The Future of Humanity,” New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, http://www.nickbostrom.com/.

Extinction risks constitute an especially severe subset of what could go badly wrong for humanity. There are many possible global catastrophes that would cause immense worldwide damage, maybe even the collapse of modern civilization, yet fall short of terminating the human species. An all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States might be an example of a global catastrophe that would be unlikely to result in extinction. A terrible pandemic with high virulence and 100 mortality rate among infected individuals might be another example: if some groups of humans could successfully quarantine themselves before being exposed, human extinction could be avoided even if, say, 95 or more of the world’s population succumbed. What distinguishes extinction and other existential catastrophes is that a comeback is impossible. A non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilization is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback: a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind. 

No arctic war – their authors exaggerate
Economist 12 (“Too much to fight over,” June 16, 2012, The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/21556797) profit motive, high costs, Law of the Sea
Yet the risks of Arctic conflict have been exaggerated. Most of the Arctic is clearly assigned to individual countries. According to a Danish estimate, 95 of Arctic mineral resources are within agreed national boundaries. The biggest of the half-dozen remaining territorial disputes is between the United States and Canada, over whether the north-west passage is in international or Canadian waters, hardly a casus belli.¶ The risks of Arctic conflict have been exaggerated. Far from violent, the development of the Arctic is likely to be uncommonly harmonious¶ Far from violent, the development of the Arctic is likely to be uncommonly harmonious, for three related reasons. One is the profit motive. The five Arctic littoral countries, Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway, would sooner develop the resources they have than argue over those they do not have. A sign of this was an agreement between Russia and Norway last year to fix their maritime border in the Barents Sea, ending a decades-long dispute. The border area is probably rich in oil; both countries are now racing to get exploration started.¶ Another spur to Arctic co-operation is the high cost of operating in the region. This is behind the Arctic Council's first binding agreement, signed last year, to co-ordinate search-and-rescue efforts. Rival oil companies are also working together, on scientific research and mapping as well as on formal joint ventures.¶ The third reason for peace is equally important: a strong reluctance among Arctic countries to give outsiders any excuse to intervene in the region's affairs. An illustration is the stated willingness of all concerned to settle their biggest potential dispute, over their maritime frontiers, according to the international Law of the Sea (LOS). Even the United States accepts this, despite its dislike for treaties—though it has still not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, an anomaly many of its leaders are keen to end.¶ The LOS entitles countries to an area of seabed beyond the usual 200 nautical miles, with certain provisos, if it can be shown to be an extension of their continental shelf. Whichever of Russia, Canada and Denmark can prove that the Lomonosov ridge is an extension of its continental shelf will therefore have it. It will be up to the countries themselves to decide this: the UN does not rule on disputed territories. The losers will not do too badly, though: given the Arctic's wide continental shelves, the LOS guarantees each a vast amount of resource-rich seabed.¶ The 2007 furore over the Russian flag led to an important statement of Arctic solidarity, the Ilulissat Declaration, issued by the foreign ministers of the five countries adjoining the Arctic Ocean (to the chagrin of the Arctic Council's other members, Sweden, Iceland and Finland). This expressed their commitment to developing the Arctic peacefully and without outside interference. Possible defence co-operation between Arctic countries points in the same direction. Their defence chiefs met for the first time in Canada in April in what is to become an annual event.

Hegemony – Generic 

No impact to heg decline --- their epistemology is flawed
Friedman 10 – research fellow in defense and homeland security, Cato. PhD candidate in pol sci, MIT (Ben, Military Restraint and Defense Savings, 20 July 2010, http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-bf-07202010.html)
Another argument for high military spending is that U.S. military hegemony underlies global stability. Our forces and alliance commitments dampen conflict between potential rivals like China and Japan, we are told, preventing them from fighting wars that would disrupt trade and cost us more than the military spending that would have prevented war. The theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim is weak. It overestimates both the American military's contribution to international stability and the danger that instability abroad poses to Americans. In Western Europe, U.S. forces now contribute little to peace, at best making the tiny odds of war among states there slightly more so.7 Even in Asia, where there is more tension, the history of international relations suggests that without U.S. military deployments potential rivals, especially those separated by sea like Japan and China, will generally achieve a stable balance of power rather than fight. In other cases, as with our bases in Saudi Arabia between the Iraq wars, U.S. forces probably create more unrestthan they prevent. Our force deployments can also generate instability by prompting states to develop nuclear weapons. Even when wars occur, their economic impact is likely to be limited here.8 By linking markets, globalization provides supply alternatives for the goods we consume, including oil. If political upheaval disrupts supply in one location, suppliers elsewhere will take our orders. Prices may increase, but markets adjust. That makes American consumers less dependent on any particular supply source, undermining the claim that we need to use force to prevent unrest in supplier nations or secure trade routes.9 Part of the confusion about the value of hegemony comes from misunderstanding the Cold War. People tend to assume, falsely, that our activist foreign policy, with troops forward supporting allies, not only caused the Soviet Union's collapse but is obviously a good thing even without such a rival. Forgotten is the sensible notion that alliances are a necessary evil occasionally tolerated to balance a particularly threatening enemy. The main justification for creating our Cold War alliances was the fear that Communist nations could conquer or capture by insurrection the industrial centers in Western Europe and Japan and then harness enough of that wealth to threaten us — either directly or by forcing us to become a garrison state at ruinous cost. We kept troops in South Korea after 1953 for fear that the North would otherwise overrun it. But these alliances outlasted the conditions that caused them. During the Cold War, Japan, Western Europe and South Korea grew wealthy enough to defend themselves. We should let them. These alliances heighten our force requirements and threaten to drag us into wars, while providing no obvious benefit. 

Human rights and due process are not the lynchpin of hegemony --- it’s resilient and decline is impossible
Norrlof 10 – an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto (Carla, “ America’s Global Advantage US Hegemony and International Cooperation” p. 1-2)
We have seen erroneous predictions of American decline before. In the 1970s, the combination of high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, the Vietnam War, political and military challenges from China and the Soviet Union, and the economic rise of Japan led to eerily similar forecasts. Pessimists then, as today, underestimated the longevity of American power. The main reason the United States has continued to occupy a unique place in the international system is because a sufficient number of major and lesser powers have a strong interest in maintaining America at the top of the hierarchy. To bring America down would take a deliberate, coordinated strategy on the part of others and this is simply not plausible. As much as the United States benefits from the space it has carved out for itself in the current world order, its ability to reap unequal gains will remain unless and until allies start to incur heavy losses under American dominance. Even that, by itself, will not be sufficient to sink American hegemony. A strong alternative to American rule will have to come into view for things to fundamentally change. At present, no credible alternative is in sight. The United States is not invincible but its dominance is currently steady. Those who are inclined to think that American hegemony will persist – at least for a while – tend to dwell on the claim that the United States is providing a range of public goods to the benefit of all at its own expense. This is a chimera. The United States is self-interested, not altruistic. The illusion of benevolence has meant that very little attention has been given to uncovering the mechanism through which the United States gains disproportionately from supplying a large open market, the world’s reserve currency, and a military machine capable of stoking or foiling deadly disputes. This book exposes the mechanism through which the United States reaps unequal gains and shows that the current world system, and the distribution of power that supports it, has built-in stabilizers that strengthen American power following bouts of decline. Although all dominant powers must eventually decline, I will show that the downward progression need not be linear when mutually reinforcing tendencies across various power dimensions are at play. Specifically, I will demonstrate how the United States’ reserve currency status produces disproportionate commercial gains; how commercial power gives added flexibility in monetary affairs; and, finally, how military preponderance creates advantages in both monetary and trade affairs.

Multipolarity now --- plus no transition wars
Ikenberry 11 (May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, G. John, PhD, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, “The Future of the Liberal World Order,” http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67730/g-john-ikenberry/the-future-of-the-liberal-world-order)
For all these reasons, many observers have concluded that world politics is experiencing not just a changing of the guard but also a transition in the ideas and principles that underlie the global order. The journalist Gideon Rachman, for example, says that a cluster of liberal internationalist ideas -- such as faith in democratization, confidence in free markets, and the acceptability of U.S. military power -- are all being called into question. According to this worldview, the future of international order will be shaped above all by China, which will use its growing power and wealth to push world politics in an illiberal direction. Pointing out that China and other non-Western states have weathered the recent financial crisis better than their Western counterparts, pessimists argue that an authoritarian capitalist alternative to Western neoliberal ideas has already emerged. According to the scholar Stefan Halper, emerging-market states "are learning to combine market economics with traditional autocratic or semiautocratic politics in a process that signals an intellectual rejection of the Western economic model." Today's international order is not really American or Western--even if it initially appeared that way. But this panicked narrative misses a deeper reality: although the United States' position in the global system is changing, the liberal international order is alive and well. The struggle over international order today is not about fundamental principles. China and other emerging great powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership within it. Indeed, today's power transition represents not the defeat of the liberal order but its ultimate ascendance. Brazil, China, and India have all become more prosperous and capable by operating inside the existing international order -- benefiting from its rules, practices, and institutions, including the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the newly organized G-20. Their economic success and growing influence are tied to the liberal internationalist organization of world politics, and they have deep interests in preserving that system. In the meantime, alternatives to an open and rule-based order have yet to crystallize. Even though the last decade has brought remarkable upheavals in the global system -- the emergence of new powers, bitter disputes among Western allies over the United States' unipolar ambitions, and a global financial crisis and recession -- the liberal international order has no competitors. On the contrary, the rise of non-Western powers and the growth of economic and security interdependence are creating new constituencies for it. To be sure, as wealth and power become less concentrated in the United States' hands, the country will be less able to shape world politics. But the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive. Indeed, now may be the best time for the United States and its democratic partners to update the liberal order for a new era, ensuring that it continues to provide the benefits of security and prosperity that it has provided since the middle of the twentieth century. 

Heg fails – we cant assert our influence effectively
Maher 11-12-2010 (Richard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at Brown University. “The Paradox of American Unipolarity: Why the United States May Be Better Off in a Post-Unipolar World” Science Direct) BW
And yet, despite this material preeminence, the United States sees its political and strategic influence diminishing around the world. It is involved in two costly and destructive wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where success has been elusive and the end remains out of sight. China has adopted a new assertiveness recently, on everything from U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, currency convertibility, and America's growing debt (which China largely finances). Pakistan, one of America's closest strategic allies, is facing the threat of social and political collapse. Russia is using its vast energy resources to reassert its dominance in what it views as its historical sphere of influence. Negotiations with North Korea and Iran have gone nowhere in dismantling their nuclear programs. Brazil's growing economic and political influence offer another option for partnership and investment for countries in the Western Hemisphere. And relations with Japan, following the election that brought the opposition Democratic Party into power, are at their frostiest in decades. To many observers, it seems that America's vast power is not translating into America's preferred outcomes.¶ As the United States has come to learn, raw power does not automatically translate into the realization of one's preferences, nor is it necessarily easy to maintain one's predominant position in world politics. There are many costs that come with predominance – material, political, and reputational. Vast imbalances of power create apprehension and anxiety in others, in one's friends just as much as in one's rivals. In this view, it is not necessarily American predominance that produces unease but rather American predominance. Predominance also makes one a tempting target, and a scapegoat for other countries’ own problems and unrealized ambitions. Many a Third World autocrat has blamed his country's economic and social woes on an ostensible U.S. conspiracy to keep the country fractured, underdeveloped, and subservient to America's own interests. Predominant power likewise breeds envy, resentment, and alienation. How is it possible for one country to be so rich and powerful when so many others are weak, divided, and poor? Legitimacy—the perception that one's role and purpose is acceptable and one's power is used justly—is indispensable for maintaining power and influence in world politics.¶ As we witness the emergence (or re-emergence) of great powers in other parts of the world, we realize that American predominance cannot last forever. It is inevitable that the distribution of power and influence will become more balanced in the future, and that the United States will necessarily see its relative power decline. While the United States naturally should avoid hastening the end of this current period of American predominance, it should not look upon the next period of global politics and international history with dread or foreboding. It certainly should not seek to maintain its predominance at any cost, devoting unlimited ambition, resources, and prestige to the cause. In fact, contrary to what many have argued about the importance of maintaining its predominance, America's position in the world—both at home and internationally—could very well be strengthened once its era of preeminence is over. It is, therefore, necessary for the United States to start thinking about how best to position itself in the “post-unipolar” world.

Oil
Receding oil dependence causes global collapse and creates multiple scenarios for global warfare
Lawrence 08 (Andrew Lawrence, Stanford, International Relations, “‘The Most Inconvenient Truth:’ The Necessity of Good Governance in Oil-Exporters,” Stanford Journal of International Relations, Fall/Winter 2008, http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjir/pdf/Oil_Governance_REAL_final.pdf)
Yet because “oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes” 9 that sometimes remain in power for decades at a time, oil-dependent countries may lack a viable political alternative to the status quo should the government collapse. In fact, even if the government exercises an autocratic, unpopular grip on power, opposition movements remain largely untested and could prove equally inept. For example, as the rampant violence in the immediate aftermath of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq demonstrated, any abrupt political change in an oil-exporter can lead to a power vacuum and the dangerous revitalization of embedded social conflicts (i.e. sectarian violence). Furthermore, with a military budget near $500 billion and a military stretched thin by simultaneous wars, the United States cannot afford to shock the international oil regime by ceasing its expenditures on oil without precipitating conflict – conflicts that would likely require foreign (most probably American) military intervention. In addition, because expenditures on military and security forces as a percentage of revenues are greater in oil-exporting countries than those of their importing counterparts, 10 a trauma to the international oil system may allow for the proliferation of heavily-armed factions in otherwise lawless environments. Especially with populations historically plagued by widespread poverty, the availability of weapons in oil-exporting countries could potentially create insurgencies composed of poor citizens seeking to address grievances against the prosperous political elites. The Niger Delta, for example, currently contains heavily-armed, anti-government factions aggrieved by their exclusion from petroleum revenues. 11 As such, should the United States hastily abandon the current oil regime and withdraw its military and political support from the oil export-dependent Nigerian government, the long-oppressed yet oil-rich communities in the Delta region may seize upon the opportunity to exact revenge for historical injustices. Nigeria is not the only country susceptible to conflict as oil revenues diminish. Just as the oil market developed onto an international scale, so too did the resource curse symptoms that so often accompany oil exporters proliferate from country to country. Russia, for instance, needs high oil prices to keep its economy afloat, as nearly 40 percent of export revenue derives from oil and gas. 12 Saudi Arabia – a country that produced fifteen of the nineteen hijackers in the 9/11 terrorist attacks – depends on oil revenues for 44 percent of its GDP. 13 Iran’s oil rents allow the government to subsidize food and gas at a rate that “accounted for 12 percent” of the nation’s GDP. 14 Because oil wealth sustains the economies of so many oil-producing countries, the collapse of oil prices that would surely accompany the US withdrawal from the international oil regime could have profound and potentially devastating effects in these countries and, by extension, throughout the world.

US oil dependence is the lynchpin of US-Saudi relations
Moorse 09 (Edward L. Moorse, Managing Director of Louis Capital Markets. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Energy Policy in 1979-81, “Low and Behold Making the Most of Cheap Oil,” 88 Foreign Aff, 36 2009, http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/fora88anddiv=72andg_sent=1andcollection=journals)
The U.S.-Saudi energy dialogue, which Washington has neglected for years, needs to be reinvigorated. Now that Saudi Arabia has a huge spare production capacity and thus the tools to advance Washington's economic and political goals, it should be easier to establish between the two governments better and higher-level communications about the oil market and the global political economy. Such a dialogue cannot take place at the level of energy ministers. It requires the kind of political attention that can come only from the Department of State or the White House. Saudi Arabia appears to want to keep oil prices between $40 and $75 a barrel in order to promote global economic growth and limit the revenues of rival producers while nonetheless adequately funding its own budget. Washington's relations with Riyadh involve other difficult diplomatic issues, such as the creation of a Palestinian state and how to secure participatory governance in Iraq after the withdrawal of U.S. troops. With its spare production capacity, which is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, Riyadh has earned itself special standing with Washington. Neither China nor any other country can do as much as Saudi Arabia can to bring change to the global energy sector. Thus, aggressively seeking to end oil imports to the United States from the Middle East-a policy articulated by Obama during and after his election campaign-is not the way to harvest the potential fruits of U.S.-Saudi relations. Other critical areas will also require coordinated government action. The G-8 (the group of highly industrialized states) appears to be working on one of these areas: it is looking for ways to tame financial flows into energy markets and limit price volatility by promoting greater transparency and greater controls over swaps and derivatives. Financial reform in the United States is already heading in this direction. The United States should also use international institutions to promote transparency and better governance in energy-producing countries that have been weakened by lower oil prices-such as Nigeria and many sub-Saharan African states. Transparency in markets must also be encouraged in China, as a lack of basic data about the oil market there-are China's oil imports put into storage or consumed?-places undue pressure on world prices. The opportunities presented by lower oil prices should not detract from the important goals of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, enhancing the United States' energy security, and building a new generation of energy-efficient nonhydrocarbon fuel sources. But they should not be overlooked; it would be dangerous to ignore oil and "old energy." However laudable it might be to pursue clean energy, energy efficiency, and alternatives to oil and coal, oil will continue to be a critical factor in the world's economic stability and security. Defanging those that use oil as a weapon, prolonging moderate prices, and anticipating supply disruptions require an activist and global approach to energy, not a parochial and national one. It is time for Obama to publicly recognize that bringing energy independence to the United States is an impossible task and that pursuing more modest goals is a better way to ensure the country's energy security.

Break in relations leads to Saudi prolif
McDowell 03 (Steven , Lt, US navy, “Is Saudi Arabia a Nuclear Threat?” Naval Postgrad Thesis, November http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/research/theses/McDowell03.pdf)
This thesis examines the potential for the Saudis to replace their aging missile force with a nuclear-tipped inventory. The United States has provided for the external security of the oil Kingdom through informal security agreements, but a deterioration in U.S.-Saudi relations may compel the Saudis to acquire nuclear weapons in order to deter the ballistic missile and WMD capabilities of its regional adversaries. Saudi Arabia has been a key pillar of the U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf, however, a nuclear Saudi Arabia would undermine the efforts of the NPT and could potentially destabilize the Persian Gulf by initiating a new arms race in the region.

Nuclear war
Edelman 11 — Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (Eric, “The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran: The Limits of Containment”, Foreign Affairs, 2011, proquest)
There is, however, at least one state that could receive significant outside support: Saudi Arabia. And if it did, proliferation could accelerate throughout the region. Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been geopolitical and ideological rivals. Riyadh would face tremendous pressure to respond in some form to a nuclear-armed Iran, not only to deter Iranian coercion and subversion but also to preserve its sense that Saudi Arabia is the leading nation in the Muslim world. The Saudi government is already pursuing a nuclear power capability, which could be the first step along a slow road to nuclear weapons development. And concerns persist that it might be able to accelerate its progress by exploiting its close ties to Pakistan. During the 1980s, in response to the use of missiles during the Iran-Iraq War and their growing proliferation throughout the region, Saudi Arabia acquired several dozen CSS-2 intermediate-range ballistic missiles from China. The Pakistani government reportedly brokered the deal, and it may have also offered to sell Saudi Arabia nuclear warheads for the CSS-2s, which are not accurate enough to deliver conventional warheads effectively. There are still rumors that Riyadh and Islamabad have had discussions involving nuclear weapons, nuclear technology, or security guarantees. This "Islamabad option" could develop in one of several different ways. Pakistan could sell operational nuclear weapons and delivery systems to Saudi Arabia or it could provide the Saudis with the infrastructure, material, and technical support they need to produce nuclear weapons themselves within a matter of years, as opposed to a decade or longer.Not only has Pakistan provided such support in the past, but it is currently building two more heavy-water reactors for plutonium production and a second chemical reprocessing facility to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. In other words, it might accumulate more fissile material than it needs to maintain even a substantially expanded arsenal of its own. Alternatively, Pakistan might offer an extended deterrent guarantee to Saudi Arabia and deploy nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and troops on Saudi territory, a practice that the United States has employed for decades with its allies. This arrangement could be particularly appealing to both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It would allow the Saudis to argue that they are not violating the npt since they would not be acquiring their own nuclear weapons. And an extended deterrent from Pakistan might be preferable to one from the United States because stationing foreign Muslim forces on Saudi territory would not trigger the kind of popular opposition that would accompany the deployment of U.S. troops. Pakistan, for its part, would gain financial benefits and international clout by deploying nuclear weapons in Saudi Arabia, as well as strategic depth against its chief rival, India. The Islamabad option raises a host of difficult issues, perhaps the most worrisome being how India would respond. Would it target Pakistan's weapons in Saudi Arabia with its own conventional or nuclear weapons? How would this expanded nuclear competition influence stability during a crisis in either the Middle East or South Asia? Regardless of India's reaction, any decision by the Saudi government to seek out nuclear weapons, by whatever means, would be highly destabilizing. It would increase the incentives of other nations in the Middle East to pursue nuclear weapons of their own. And it could increase their ability to do so by eroding the remaining barriers to nuclear proliferation: each additional state that acquires nuclear weapons weakens the nonproliferation regime, even if its particular method of acquisition only circumvents, rather than violates, the npt. N-PLAYER COMPETITION Were Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons, the Middle East would count three nuclear-armed states, and perhaps more before long. It is unclear how such an n-player competition would unfold because most analyses of nuclear deterrence are based on the U.S.- Soviet rivalry during the Cold War. It seems likely, however, that the interaction among three or more nuclear-armed powers would be more prone to miscalculation and escalation than a bipolar competition. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union only needed to concern themselves with an attack from the other.Multipolar systems are generally considered to be less stable than bipolar systems because coalitions can shift quickly, upsetting the balance of power and creating incentives for an attack. More important, emerging nuclear powers in the Middle East might not take the costly steps necessary to preserve regional stability and avoid a nuclear exchange. For nuclear-armed states, the bedrock of deterrence is the knowledge that each side has a secure second-strike capability, so that no state can launch an attack with the expectation that it can wipe out its opponents' forces and avoid a devastating retaliation. However, emerging nuclear powers might not invest in expensive but survivable capabilities such as hardened missile silos or submarinebased nuclear forces. Given this likely vulnerability, the close proximity of states in the Middle East, and the very short flight times of ballistic missiles in the region, any new nuclear powers might be compelled to "launch on warning" of an attack or even, during a crisis, to use their nuclear forces preemptively. Their governments might also delegate launch authority to lower-level commanders, heightening the possibility of miscalculation and escalation. Moreover, if early warning systems were not integrated into robust command-and-control systems, the risk of an unauthorized or accidental launch would increase further still. And without sophisticated early warning systems, a nuclear attack might be unattributable or attributed incorrectly. That is, assuming that the leadership of a targeted state survived a first strike, it might not be able to accurately determine which nation was responsible. And this uncertainty, when combined with the pressure to respond quickly, would create a significant risk that it would retaliate against the wrong party, potentially triggering a regional nuclear war. Most existing nuclear powers have taken steps to protect their nuclear weapons from unauthorized use: from closely screening key personnel to developing technical safety measures, such as permissive action links, which require special codes before the weapons can be armed. Yet there is no guarantee that emerging nuclear powers would be willing or able to implement these measures, creating a significant risk that their governments might lose control over the weapons or nuclear material and that nonstate actors could gain access to these items. Some states might seek to mitigate threats to their nuclear arsenals; for instance, they might hide their weapons. In that case, however, a single intelligence compromise could leave their weapons vulnerable to attack or theft. 

Drilling
Drilling is good --- Arctic methane hydrate blowout inevitable absent drilling --- solves extinction
Light 12 (Malcolm P.R. Light, Center for Polar Observation and Modeling, University of London, polar climate modeling and methane hydrates in the permafrost and submarine Arctic, “Charting Mankind’s Arctic Methane Emission Exponential Expressway to Total Extinction in the Next 50 Years,” Arctic News, August 10, 2012, http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/08/charting-mankinds-expressway-to-extinction.html)
If left alone the subsea Arctic methane hydrates will explosively destabilize on their own due to global warming and produce a massive Arctic wide methane “blowout” that will lead to humanity’s total extinction, probably before the middle of this century (Light 2012 a, b and c). AIRS atmospheric methane concentration data between 2008 and 2012 (Yurganov 2012) show that the Arctic has already entered the early stages of a subsea methane “blowout” so we need to step in as soon as we can (e.g. 2015) to prevent it escalating any further (Light 2012c). The Arctic Natural Gas Extraction, Liquefaction and Sales (ANGELS) Proposal aims to reduce the threat of large, abrupt releases of methane in the Arctic, by extracting methane from Arctic methane hydrates prone to destabilization (Light, 2012c). After the Arctic sea ice has gone (probably around 2015) we propose that a large consortium of oil and gas companies/governments set up drilling platforms near the regions of maximum subsea methane emissions and drill a whole series of shallow directional production drill holes into the subsea subpermafrost “free methane” reservoir in order to depressurize it in a controlled manner (Light 2012c). This methane will be produced to the surface, liquefied, stored and transported on LNG tankers as a “green energy” source to all nations, totally replacing oil and coal as the major energy source (Light 2012c). The subsea methane reserves are so large that they can supply the entire earth’s energy needs for several hundreds of years (Light 2012c). By sufficiently depressurizing the Arctic subsea subpermafrost methane it will be possible to draw down Arctic ocean water through the old eruption sites and fracture systems and destabilize the methane hydrates in a controlled way thus shutting down the entire Arctic subsea methane blowout (Light 2012c).

Drilling’s good --- key to massive economic growth
Mills 12 Mark, member of the advisory council of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University and serves on the board of directors of the Marshall Institute, 7/9, “Could the United States Become the World’s Energy-Export Powerhouse?”, http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/press_release_pgi_01.pdf
Unleashing 20 billion barrels of cumulative oil from Alaska’s ANWR and some currently off-limits regions of the outer continental shelf would bring over $1 trillion of net benefits to the U.S. economy. 36 In general, both history and recent analyses show that for every billion barrels of oil produced (or oil-equivalent in natural gas, and similar range for coal), there are about $75 billion in broad economic benefits. 37 A number of recent studies have explored the implications of the new hydrocarbon trajectory, should it continue unimpeded: o Citi’s analysis concludes that the oil and gas extraction sector could add as many as 3.6 million net new jobs by 2020 (for North America, both direct and indirect) and shrink the deficit by 60 percent. 38 o Wood Mackenzie 39 finds in its scenario report for the American Petroleum Institute a cumulative $800 billion in increased revenues to governments (federal, state, local) and another 1.5 million U.S. jobs, direct and indirect, over the coming two decades. o IHS Global Insight, 40 in its analysis for America’s Natural Gas Alliance, estimates that the shale gas industry alone will add more than 1 million jobs across the U.S. economy over the coming two decades and provide over $900 billion in cumulative additional federal, state, and local government tax revenues ($465 federal, $460 state and local). While there are differences in assumptions and boundaries among these and similar analyses, the order-of magnitude benefits are similar and similarly impressive: millions of jobs and hundreds of billions in revenues to government coffers. None of the above accounts for the economic contributions thus far from coal, nor does it countenance expanding coal production, North America’s third great hydrocarbon resource. Some 600,000 jobs are associated with the coal industry, a fuel that already contributes some $60 billion annually to the U.S. economy, not the least of which is the increasingly vital role of low-cost electricity in an information centric economy. 41 The U.S. uses about three BBOE of coal per year, while the world consumes about 20 BBOE of coal annually. Expanding coal exports by an amount comparable with the increase in the oil and gas sectors would add several hundred thousand more jobs and several hundred billion more dollars in cumulative tax receipts. 42 While expanding hydrocarbon production will require significant investment, it will be supplied by the private sector, generating benefits to the public sector, to private citizens, and to businesses. These kinds of benefits, which accrue without cost to taxpayers, come at a particularly important time, considering the current state of persistent unemployment and underemployment, the losses in net worth for many citizens, and the budget deficits in most states and the federal government. Economic benefits from expanding hydrocarbon production will be felt widely given the structural and geographic diversity of hydrocarbon resources and the associated industries. In contrast to other parts of the world, benefits here won’t flow to a handful of oligarchs but will involve thousands of businesses and ripple broadly throughout the economy.  Expanding hydrocarbon production may be the single most important opportunity for near-term economic growth in North America and a beneficial resetting of energy geopolitics.

Ptx mpx

Tournament: Bulldogdebates | Round: 8 | Opponent: James Madison Bosley-Miller | Judge: Atchison, Hagwood, Neighbors
1nc – 1

Momentum preventing sanctions – Obama’s capital is key – failure means the US strikes Iran and starts a war
WEBER 1 – 30 – 14 senior editor at TheWeek.com Peter Weber, What sank the Senate's Iran sanctions bill? After Obama's State of the Union speech, it looks like Democrats are going to give peace a chance, after all, http://theweek.com/article/index/255771/what-sank-the-senates-iran-sanctions-bill
In mid-January it appeared that a bipartisan Senate bill threatening Iran with new sanctions was a foregone conclusion. Yes, President Obama opposed the legislation and promised to veto it, but supporters of the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act strongly hinted that they had a veto-proof majority — and with 59 senators (43 Republicans and 16 Democrats) co-sponsoring the bill, that seemed eminently plausible.
They would only need eight more votes (and action in the House) to thwart Obama's veto pen, and momentum appeared to be on their side.
If there is any momentum on the bill now, it's on the other side. Obama reiterated his veto threat in the very public setting of his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, saying that "for the sake of our national security, we must give diplomacy a chance to succeed." Jan. 20 marked the beginning of a six-month period of negotiations between the U.S., Iran, and five other world powers aimed at preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
The negotiations won't be easy, and "any long-term deal we agree to must be based on verifiable action," not trust, Obama said. But "if John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan could negotiate with the Soviet Union, then surely a strong and confident America can negotiate with less powerful adversaries today."
After the speech, at least four Democratic cosponsors — Sens. Chris Coons (Del.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), and Ben Cardin (Md.) — said they didn't want to vote on the bill while negotiations are ongoing. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) had already adopted that position earlier in the month.
The distance these cosponsors put between themselves and the bill wasn't uniform. Cardin punted to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who is opposed to bringing the bill to the floor for a vote. (Cardin "wants to see negotiations with Iran succeed," a spokeswoman's said. "As for timing of the bill, it is and has always been up to the Majority Leader.")
Manchin, on the other hand, told MSNBC that he didn't sign on to the bill "with the intention that it would ever be voted upon or used upon while we were negotiating," but rather "to make sure the president had a hammer if he needed it." He added: "We've got to give peace a chance here."
With the list of Democratic cosponsors willing to vote for the bill shrinking by five, the dream of a veto-proof majority in the next six months appears to be dead. Even Republican supporters of the legislation are pessimistic of its chances: "Is there support to override a veto?" Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told National Journal on Wednesday. "I say, 'No.'"
So, what happened to the Iran sanctions bill? The short version: Time, pressure, and journalism.
The journalism category encompasses two points: First, reporters actually read the legislation, and it doesn't quite match up with the claims of lead sponsors Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who say the sanctions would only take effect if Iran was found to be negotiating in bad faith. A much-cited analysis by Edward Levine at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation showed that the Iran sanctions would kick in unless Obama certified a list of impossible or deal-breaking conditions.
Journalists also started asking the cosponsors about their intentions. It's possible there were never 59 votes for the bill, but the legislation was filed right before Christmas and many reporters (not unreasonably) conflated cosponsorship with support for the bill, regardless of what was happening with the negotiations. They only asked on Tuesday night and Wednesday because Obama brought up the issue in his State of the Union speech.
Time without action always saps momentum, but with the Iran sanctions bill it also allowed events to catch up with the proponents of new sanctions. When they filed the bill Dec. 20, the interim Iran deal was just a talking point; a month later it was reality. The Obama administration, U.S. intelligence community, and outside analysts agree that new sanctions would scuttle the deal, and its harder to take that risk when that deal is in effect.
Finally, critics of the bill — including the White House and J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobbying group — had time to mount a counterattack. Starting Jan. 6, J Street and other groups opposed to the legislation "reached out to senators who were on the fence and senators who'd cosponsored on day one," says Slate's David Weigel. "The message was the same: Have you guys read this thing?" Dylan William, J Street's director of government relations, describes the strategy in more depth:
We made especially prodigious use of our grass tops activists. These are people who have longstanding relationships with members of Congress to express two things. One: The bill is bad policy. Two: There was no political reason that these senators should feel they need to support the bill. There is deep political support in communities for members of Congress and senators who want to reserve this peaceably. Slate
So take a bow, J Street — for now, the David of the Israel lobby has slain its Goliath, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is pushing for the legislation. That could all change if the interim Iran deal falls apart or some other event intercedes to change the equation for lawmakers. But momentum is hard to un-stall, and lawmakers are now considering changing the bill into a non-binding resolution.
John Judis at The New Republic is relieved, and counts Obama's veto threat Tuesday night as the boldest part of his speech. "If these negotiations with Iran fail, the United States will be left with very unsatisfactory alternatives," he writes:
Use military force to stop Iran, which might only delay Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and will potentially inflame the region in a new war, or allow Iran to go ahead and hope to contain Iran as we have contained other potentially hostile nuclear powers. Obama may not be able to secure authorization for the first alternative... and if he opts for the second, he will leave open the possibility of regional proliferation or of Israel going to war against Iran. It's in America's interest — and, incidentally, Israel's as well — to allow the current negotiations to take their course — without malignant interference from Congress and AIPAC. New Republic

Plan destroys Obama
Loomis 07 Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Department of Government at Georgetown University Dr. Andrew J. Loomis, “Leveraging legitimacy in the crafting of U.S. foreign policy”, March 2, 2007, pg 36-37, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/9/4/8/pages179487/p179487-36.php
Declining political authority encourages defection. American political analyst Norman Ornstein writes of the domestic context, In a system where a President has limited formal power, perception matters. The reputation for success—the belief by other political actors that even when he looks down, a president will find a way to pull out a victory—is the most valuable resource a chief executive can have. Conversely, the widespread belief that the Oval Office occupant is on the defensive, on the wane or without the ability to win under adversity can lead to disaster, as individual lawmakers calculate who will be on the winning side and negotiate accordingly. In simple terms, winners win and losers lose more often than not. Failure begets failure. In short, a president experiencing declining amounts of political capital has diminished capacity to advance his goals. As a result, political allies perceive a decreasing benefit in publicly tying themselves to the president, and an increasing benefit in allying with rising centers of authority. A president’s incapacity and his record of success are interlocked and reinforce each other. Incapacity leads to political failure, which reinforces perceptions of incapacity. This feedback loop accelerates decay both in leadership capacity and defection by key allies. The central point of this review of the presidential literature is that the sources of presidential influence—and thus their prospects for enjoying success in pursuing preferred foreign policies—go beyond the structural factors imbued by the Constitution. Presidential authority is affected by ideational resources in the form of public perceptions of legitimacy. The public offers and rescinds its support in accordance with normative trends and historical patterns, non-material sources of power that affects the character of U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. 

Strikes go nuclear
Hirsch ‘6 (Jorge, Prof. Physics @ UC San Diego, “America and Iran: At the Brink of the Abyss”, 2-20, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8577)
The U.S.  has just declared that it will defend Israel militarily against Iran if needed. Presumably this includes a scenario where Israel would initiate hostilities by unprovoked bombing of Iranian facilities, as it did with Iraq's Osirak, and Iran would respond with missiles targeting Israel. The U.S. intervention is likely to be further bombing of Iran's facilities, including underground installations that can only be destroyed with low-yield nuclear bunker-busters. Such nuclear weapons may cause low casualties,  perhaps only in the hundreds .pdf, but the nuclear threshold will have been crossed. Iran's reaction to a U.S. attack with nuclear weapons, no matter how small, cannot be predicted with certainty. U.S. planners may hope that it will deter Iran from responding, thus saving lives. However, just as the U.S. forces in Iraq were not greeted with flowers, it is likely that such an attack would provoke a violent reaction from Iran and lead to the severe escalation of hostilities, which in turn would lead to the use of larger nuclear weapons by the U.S. and potential casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Witness the current uproar over cartoons and try to imagine the resulting upheaval in the Muslim world after the U.S. nukes Iran. - The Military's Moral Dilemma -  Men and women in the military forces, including civilian employees, may be facing a difficult moral choice at this very moment and in the coming weeks, akin to the moral choices faced by Colin Powell and Dan Ellsberg. The paths these two men followed were radically different. Colin Powell was an American hero, widely respected and admired at the time he was appointed secretary of state in 2001. In February 2003, he chose to follow orders despite his own serious misgivings, and delivered the pivotal UN address that paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq the following month. Today, most Americans believe the Iraq invasion was wrong, and Colin Powell is disgraced, his future destroyed, and his great past achievements forgotten. Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, played a significant role in ending the Vietnam War by leaking the Pentagon Papers. He knew that he would face prosecution for breaking the law, but was convinced it was the correct moral choice. His courageous and principled action earned him respect and gratitude. The Navy has just reminded .pdf its members and civilian employees what the consequences are of violating provisions concerning the release of information about the nuclear capabilities of U.S. forces. Why right now, for the first time in 12 years? Because it is well aware of moral choices that its members may face, and it hopes to deter certain actions. But courageous men and women are not easily deterred. To disobey orders and laws and to leak information are difficult actions that entail risks. Still, many principled individuals have done it in the past and will continue to do it in the future ( see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.) Conscientious objection to the threat and use of nuclear weapons is a moral choice. Once the American public becomes fully aware that military action against Iran will include the planned use of nuclear weapons, public support for military action will quickly disappear. Anything could get the ball rolling. A great catastrophe will have been averted. Even U.S. military law recognizes that there is no requirement to obey orders that are unlawful. The use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country can be argued to be in violation of international law, the principle of just war, the principle of proportionality, common standards of morality (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and customs that make up the law of armed conflict. Even if the nuclear weapons used are small, because they are likely to cause escalation of the conflict they violate the principle of proportionality and will cause unnecessary suffering. The Nuremberg Tribunal, which the United States helped to create, established that "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." To follow orders or to disobey orders, to keep information secret or to leak it, are choices for each individual to make – extremely difficult choices that have consequences. But not choosing is not an option. - America's Collective Responsibility - Blaming the administration or the military for crossing the nuclear threshold is easy, but responsibility will be shared by all Americans. All Americans knew, or should have known, that using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country like Iran was a possibility given the Bush administration's new policies. All Americans could have voiced their opposition to these policies and demand that they be reversed. The media will carry a heavy burden of responsibility. The mainstream media could have effectively raised public awareness of the possibility that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons against Iran. So far, they have chosen to almost completely hide the issue, which is being increasingly addressed in non-mainstream media. Members of Congress could have raised the question forcefully, calling for public hearings, demanding public discussion of the administration's plans, and passing new laws or resolutions. So far they have failed to do so and are derelict in their responsibility to their constituents. Letters to the president from some in Congress 1, 2 are a start, but are not likely to elicit a meaningful response or a change in plans and are a far cry from forceful action. Scientific organizations and organizations dealing with arms control and nuclear weapons could have warned of the dangers associated with the Iran situation. So far, they have not done so (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). Scientists and engineers responsible for the development of nuclear weapons could have voiced concern .pdf when the new U.S. nuclear weapons policies became known, policies that directly involve the fruits of their labor. Their voices have not been heard. Those who contribute their labor to the scientific and technical infrastructure that makes nuclear weapons and their means of delivery possible bear a particularly heavy burden of moral responsibility. Their voices have barely been heard. - The Nuclear Abyss - The United States is preparing to enter a new era: an era in which it will enforce nuclear nonproliferation by the threat and use of nuclear weapons. The use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran will usher in a new world order. The ultimate goal is that no nation other than the U.S. should have a nuclear weapons arsenal. A telltale sign that this is the plan is the recent change in the stated mission of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are developed. The mission of LANL used to be described officially as "Los Alamos National Laboratory's central mission is to reduce the global nuclear danger" 1 .pdf, 2 .pdf, 3 .pdf. That will sound ridiculous once the U.S. starts throwing mini-nukes around. In anticipation of it, the Los Alamos mission statement has been recently changed to "prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to protect our homeland from terrorist attack." That is the present and future role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, to be achieved through threat (deterrence) and use of nuclear weapons. References to the old mission are nowhere to be found in the current Los Alamos documents, indicating that the change was deliberate and thorough. It is not impossible that the U.S. will succeed in its goal. But it is utterly improbable. This is a big world. Once the U.S. crosses the nuclear threshold against a non-nuclear country, many more countries will strive to acquire nuclear weapons, and many will succeed. The nuclear abyss may turn out to be a steep precipice or a gentle slope. Either way, it will be a one-way downhill slide toward a bottomless pit. We will have entered a path of no return, leading in a few months or a few decades to global nuclear war and unimaginable destruction. But there are still choices to be made. Up to the moment the first U.S. nuclear bomb explodes, the fall into the abyss can be averted by choices made by each and every one of us. We may never

1nc – 2

Obama is shifting from drones to detention --- this way he can avoid killing
Dillow 13 (Clay, “Obama Set To Reboot Drone Strike Policy And Retool The War On Terror “, 5/23/13, http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-05/obama-set-reboot-drone-strike-policy-and-retool-war-terror)
These three topics are deeply intertwined, of course. With the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and a reduced American presence in the regions regarded as power bases for the likes of al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and the Taliban, American security and intelligence forces have only two real options. Strike at suspected terrorists with drones, or somehow capture those suspects and detain them (at some place like Guantanamo). It would seem that if the war on terror is going to continue (and it is--for another 10 or 20 years according to one recently-quoted Pentagon official) then it seems that either detention or the use of lethal strikes must increase. But that’s not really the case, and in today’s speech Obama is expected to outline why the administration thinks so. In his first major counterterrorism address of his second term, the President is expected to announce new restrictions on the unmanned aerial strikes that have been the cornerstone of his national security agenda for the last five years. For all the talk about drone strikes--and they did peak under Obama--such actions have been declining since 2010. And it seems the administration finally wants to come clean (somewhat) about what it has been doing with its drone program, acknowledging for the first time that it has killed four American citizens in its shadow drone wars outside the conflict zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, something the public has known for a while now but the government has refused to publicly admit. The Obama administration will also voluntarily rein in its drone strike program in several ways. A new classified policy signed by Obama will more sharply define how drones can be used, the New York Times reports, essentially extending to foreign nationals the same standards currently applied to American citizens abroad. That is, lethal force will only be used against targets posing a “continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and who cannot be feasibly captured or thwarted in any other way. This indicates that the administration’s controversial use of “signature strikes”--the killing of unknown individuals or groups based on patterns of behavior rather than hard intelligence--will no longer be part of the game plan. That’s a positive signal, considering that signature strikes are thought to have resulted in more than a few civilian casualties. Reportedly there’s another important change in drone policy in the offing that President Obama may or may not mention in today’s speech: the shifting of the drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere (likely Yemen and Somalia as well) from the CIA to the military over the course of six months. This is good for all parties involved. The CIA’s new director, John Brennan, has publicly said he would like to transition the country’s premier intelligence gathering agency back to actual intelligence gathering and away from paramilitary operations--a role that it has played since 2001 but that isn’t exactly in its charter. Putting the drone strike program in the Pentagon also places it in a different category of public scrutiny. The DoD can still do things under the veil of secrecy of course, but not quite like the CIA can (the military is subject to more oversight and transparency than the clandestine services in several respects, and putting drones in the hands of the military also changes the governing rules of engagement). So what does this all mean for the war on terror? If Obama plans to create a roadmap for closing Guantanamo Bay and draw down its drone strike program, it suggests that the administration thinks we are winning--as much as one can win this kind of asymmetric war. It appears the war on terror is shifting toward one in which better intelligence will lead to more arrests and espionage operations to thwart terrorists rather hellfire missile strikes from unseen robots in the sky. 

The policy of detention is key --- the plan’s restriction changes the military incentive to increase the use of drones for lethal force
Chesney 11 (Robert, Charles I. Francis Professor in Law, University of Texas School of Law, “ARTICLE: WHO MAY BE HELD? MILITARY DETENTION THROUGH THE HABEAS LENS”, Boston College Law Review, 52 B.C. L. Rev 769, Lexis)
The convergence thesis describes one manner in which law might respond to the cross-cutting pressures associated with the asymmetric warfare phenomenon—i.e., the pressure to reduce false positives (targeting, capture, or detention of the wrong individual) while also ensuring an adequate capacity to neutralize the non-state actors in question. One must bear in mind, however, that detention itself is not the only system of government action that can satisfy that latter interest. Other options exist, including the use of lethal force; the use of rendition to place individuals in detention at the hands of some other state; the use of persuasion to induce some other state to take custody of an individual through its own means; and perhaps also the use of various forms of surveillance to establish a sort of constructive, loose control over a person (though for persons located outside the United States it is unlikely that surveillance could be much more than episodic, and thus any resulting element of “control” may be quite weak).210¶ From the point of view of the individual involved, all but the last of these options are likely to be far worse experiences than U.S.-administered detention. In addition, all but the last are also likely to be far less useful for purposes of intelligence-gathering from the point of view of the U.S. government.211 Nonetheless, these alternatives may grow attractive to the government in circumstances where the detention alternative becomes unduly restricted, yet the pressure for intervention remains. The situation is rather like squeezing a balloon: the result is not to shrink the balloon, but instead to displace the pressure from one side to another, causing the balloon to distend along the unconstrained side. So too here: when one of these coercive powers becomes constrained in new, more restrictive ways, the displaced pressure to incapacitate may simply find expression through one of the alternative mechanisms. On this view it is no surprise that lethal drone strikes have increased dramatically over the past two years, that the Obama administration has refused to foreswear rendition, that in Iraq we have largely (though not entirely) outsourced our detention operations to the Iraqis, and that we now are progressing along the same path in Afghanistan.212¶ Decisions regarding the calibration of a detention system—the¶ management of the convergence process, if you will—thus take place in the shadow of this balloon-squeezing phenomenon. A thorough policy review would take this into account, as should any formal lawmaking process. For the moment, however, our formal law-making process is not directed at the detention-scope question. Instead, clarification and development with respect to the substantive grounds for detention takes place through the lens of habeas corpus litigation.

This would globalize masculinity and feminizing the Other which makes endless violence inevitable and turns the case
Volo, 13 (Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder, Unmanned?: Drones and the Revolution in Gender-Military Affairs, 2013, http://www.ecpg-barcelona.com/sites/default/files/Ppr-Unmanned-ECPG.pdf, EGM)
At the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama told a not-so-funny joke about his command of drone strikes as he introduced the Jonas Brothers, a pop band. In mock seriousness, he warned the band members to steer clear of his daughters: “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You’ll never see it coming.” The logic of patriarchal masculine protection in national security is rarely expressed so literally, but the anecdote is faithful to the general narrative (Young 2003). In brief, the patriarch (national leader or state) assumes protection of the feminized weak (figurative but not necessarily embodied women and children at home or abroad) in the face of a menacing or predatory masculine threat. However, one person’s masculine predator is another’s masculine protector. Not only is U.S. drone power experienced by many abroad as the menacing predator against which one needs protection, but this it arguably counterproductive for U.S. national security. Becker and Shane attest that drones have become “a provocative symbol of American power” (Becker and Shane 2012). A prominent example is the U.S. Justice Department White Paper released in 2013, declaring that the president will not be constrained by national sovereignty, as a drone strike will proceed “with the consent of the host nation’s government or after a determination that the host nation is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat” (Department of Justice. n.d.). That is, drone strikes will proceed with or without the host nation’s consent. Pakistan and Yemen, unable to protect their own borders against penetration by U.S. drones or Al Qaeda, are demasculinized in the process. Wishing to avoid domestic acknowledgement of its weakened position, Pakistan secretly gave conditional permission for drone strikes in the FATA region. There is a paternalistic expression in rescuing feminized regions of the world. On the one hand, the U.S. as masculinist protector expressed through predators and reapers directs U.S. public attention away from civilian terrain bloodied by drone strikes (Shaw and Akhter 2012, 1502). On the other hand, demasculinization creates conditions for resentment and resistance abroad.

1nc – 3

The aff’s not topical --- authority over indefinite detention is the authority TO DETAIN, not release
GLAZIER 06 Associate Professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, California David Glazier, ARTICLE: FULL AND FAIR BY WHAT MEASURE?: IDENTIFYING THE INTERNATIONAL LAW REGULATING MILITARY COMMISSION PROCEDURE, Boston University International Law Journal, Spring, 2006, 24 B.U. Int'l L.J. 55
President Bush's decision to consider the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as an act of war has significant legal ramifications. Endorsed by Congress in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force ("AUMF"), n1 this paradigm shift away from treating terrorism as a crime to treating terrorism as an armed conflict allows the United States to exercise "fundamental incidents of waging war." n2 Among these fundamental war powers are the authorities to detain enemy personnel for the duration of hostilities, to subject law of war violators to trials in military tribunals, and to exercise subject matter jurisdiction over the full scope of the law of war, rather than over only those offenses defined in U.S. criminal statutes. n3

This means they explode limits and allow affs to suspend immigration authority which is distinct from war powers
Chow 11 (Samuel, JD Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, “THE KIYEMBA PARADOX: CREATING A JUDICIAL FRAMEWORK TO ERADICATE INDEFINITE, UNLAWFUL EXECUTIVE DETENTIONS”, 19 Cardozo J. Int'l and Comp. L. 775 2011)
The facts that legitimized the Court's holding in Munaf are substantially different from the facts in Kiyemba. In Kiyemba, the D.C. Circuit Court also held that it did not have the authority to order the petitioners' release into the United States, but for different reasons from those espoused in Munaf. There, the circuit court determined that such release would violate the traditional distribution of immigration authority-a problem that did not exist with the American petitioners in Munaf.2 z As in Munaf, the government concluded that the Kiyemba petitioners' request amounted to a request for "release-plus. ' 23 Unlike Munaf, however, a troubling paradox is raised under the Kiyemba facts as it now stands, the Executive has determined that certain detainees being held unlawfully may, nonetheless, remain indefinitely detained.24 There are three primary elements that contributed to the Uighur 25 plaintiffs' dilemma. First, because of the high risk of torture, the Uighurs could not return to their home country of China.26 Second, diplomatic solutions had failed and no third-party country had been willing to accept them.27 Third, the D.C. Circuit Court determined that release into the United States would violate immigration laws and undermine the Executive's ability to administer those laws. 28 Lacking refuge and possibility of asylum, the Uighurs were forced to remain, indefinitely, as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

That is a voting issue ---
a) Limits --- if the aff isn’t held to war powers authority any action becomes topical making it literally impossible to be neg --- destroys clash and fairness 

b) Disproves the resolution --- extra-topicality proves the resolution is insufficient which should result in a negative ballot

c) Don’t just reject extra-topical parts of the plan --- forcing the negative to invest time in CX and the 1NC trying to pin the aff down to the topic wastes precious neg time and becomes a zero risk option for the aff to read extra-topical planks with no punishment --- set a precedent and hold the line
1nc – 4

Focusing on an extra-judicial form of state violence assumes that it is worse than other violence the state commits. It is necessary to challenge the system of global ordering, not just one example.
Comaroff 07, Doctoral candidate in geography at the University of California-Los Angeles, 2007 Joshua, “Terror and Territory: Guantánamo and the Space of Contradiction,”  Public Culture 19:2
More important, however, is the question of whether exception is necessary for the exercise of repressive force. Bull (2004: 5) observes that “it remains wholly unclear why . . . Agamben thinks extra-judicial state violence differs fundamentally from judicial state violence, on the one hand, and other forms of extrajudicial violence, on the other.” Why does the presence of state violence alone testify to a state of exception? Walter Benjamin, whose essay collection Agamben edited for the publisher Einaudi, would surely point out that there is tyranny enough under the law. Its suspension is hardly required for repressive acts to occur, hence the revelation, post-Abu Ghraib, that the famous torture techniques were imported, at least in part, from the American prison system. What seemed grotesque and exceptional was actually standard operating procedure, common practice, and de facto legal — all of which raises some profound concerns about the usefulness of this theory. Given the number of inmates on death row in Texas, why should the state of exception be relevant? Agamben might wish to believe that capital punishment marks the institutionalization of a state of exception, but that does not really make the case for its exceptionality one way or the other; in fact, Benjamin (1978: 286) argued that the violence of the death penalty was a guarantor of the originary force of the law, sui generis. 

Appeals to the exceptionality of indefinite detention normalize the larger project of world ordering. The result is the constant prison state.
Smith 08 Caleb Smith Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut Detention without Subjects: Prisons and the Poetics of Living Death http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/texas_studies_in_literature_and_language/v050/50.3.smith.html
In a recent study of “Indefinite Detention,” Judith Butler shows how, according to the authority that holds them, “the humans who are imprisoned in Guantánamo do not count as human.” She writes, “They are not subjects protected by international law. . . . They are not subjects in any legal or normative sense” (xvi). The Guantánamo captives—called “detainees,” not prisoners—are outside the conventions of criminal justice and military conflict, outside the state, outside subjectivity. Drawing from Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Butler describes Guantánamo as an “exception” to ordinary procedures, created in a wartime state of emergency. Guantánamo is not a conventional modern prison, designed to discipline and punish; it is a “camp” whose inmates have lost the protections of citizenship and now endure, in an “indefinite” time and space, as “bare life.”1 Working with the same materials, Donald Pease describes the detainees as “persons outside the existing juridical categories and refused the basic dignities of legal process” and as “exceptions to the human condition” reduced to mere “animated flesh” (14, 15). For Pease, the wartime suspension of judicial process that magically creates such monsters is an “unprecedented” breach of the social contract (6). Exploring “Guantánamo’s Symbolic Economy,” Susan Willis, too, invokes Agamben and refers to the detainees as “humans who are less than chattel; who have no status” (128, 124). In short, the prevailing account of Guantánamo in American Studies represents what Butler calls the “new war prison” as an historical anachronism, a violation of the established order that inaugurates a terrifying new state.
Much has been illuminated by such interpretations. We see, especially, how the tremendously influential thesis of Michel Foucault’s Discipline End Page 243 and Punish (1975)—that prisons produce self-governing subjects through isolation and surveillance—loses its explanatory power in the age of Guantánamo. As sovereignty eclipses subjectivity as the key analytic concept, incarceration seems to concern not the “soul” but war, citizenship, and the boundaries of the body politic. In the war prison, we find none of the techniques of training, labor discipline, or rehabilitation associated with the penitentiary. We confront, instead, detention without subjects: a captivity that strips away rights and mortifies subjectivity. Yet the revealing concept of the “exception” has also created some significant blind spots. Using words like “unprecedented” to protest the Bush administration’s policies, we gain a certain rhetorical force, but we risk normalizing all that came before. If the terms “exception” and “bare life” allow us to see the limits of Foucault’s “disciplinary” regime, they also tempt us to assume that such a regime was, until quite recently, the actual order of things.
The news and pictures from the war on terror are shocking, but legal and carceral dehumanization has a long history.2 In this essay I will argue that a version of detention without subjects, stripping away rights and mortifying subjectivity, is not the “exception” but the very premise of the American prison. The classic penitentiary, unlike the contemporary war prison, held offenders who had been convicted through due process, and it claimed to restore some of them to citizenship, godliness, and a place in the lawful community. On these distinctions rests the claim that Guantánamo is an unprecedented institution. Yet the distinctions are less substantial than they may appear. The great penitentiaries of the early nineteenth century, the foundations of the modern prison system, were built around a myth of rebirth—the fallen convict resurrected as a worthy citizen—but such a myth demanded that the prisoner must first pass through a virtual death. The legal, material, and symbolic violence of the penitentiary regime, therefore, worked to turn the convict into a kind of animate corpse. The prisoner in the penitentiary was not only a subject in the making; he was also a figure of exclusion and decay, provoking both pity and terror.

The question of this debate is not if the plan is good, but if their epistemology is good – the alternative is to challenge the epistemology of the burrow
Gorelick 08 Nathan Gorelick is a Ph.D. student of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he holds a Presidential Fellowship. His research concerns theories of excess from Blanchot, Bataille and Foucault, and these thinkers' indebtedness to 18th century literatures of death and sexuality in England and France. “Imagining Extraordinary Renditions: Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature” http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v011/11.2.gorelick.html
III. Literature Beyond Ethics
Extraordinary rendition, torture, the war on terror and the security of the state are thus various nodal points within the larger epistemology of liberal humanism -- a humanism that produces its dark chambers in its flight from the black void at its own core. Césaire's "thingification" is the product of this flight. It would therefore be misguided to assume that the violence endemic to the war on terror can be cured by simply exposing its contradictions. If images from Abu Ghraib become a common rallying cry against American militarism for disparate political factions around the globe, this cry is unheeded. If legal challenges to abominable state violence are successful, inventive re-interpretations of the law emerge, or lawlessness is simply driven underground. Instead, it is necessary to challenge the systems of thought from which these practices emerge; the task of criticism must be to interrupt the epistemology of the burrow. The dark chamber (extraordinary rendition) ought to be understood as a metaphor for this epistemology, and ethical criticism must expose the totality of violence that this metaphor represents without enabling morally totalizing recuperations of the larger world ordering project currently embodied and deployed by the United States. Such a project entails a reconfiguration of the political terrain, or a reconstitution of the limits of political antagonism, but it also implies the need for an even more profound challenge to the ways in which discourses and representations of "self" and "other" are constituted. The task is not simple: as Michael J. Shapiro suggests, "Recognition of the extraordinary lengths to which one must go to challenge a given structure of intelligibility, to intervene in resident meanings by bringing what is silent and unglimpsed into focus, is an essential step toward opening up possibilities for a politics and ethics of discourse."45 If, however, an ethical regard is rendered possible through the work of rigorous critique -- through the establishment of a critical distance between the critic and the object of criticism then the question for critique concerns the very nature of the ethical itself. Because the crisis in representation by which the dark chamber is constantly being suppressed is constitutive of politics as such, then the problem, as Coetzee reminds us, is "how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one's own terms."46 Coetzee's suggestion that torture and death might be "imagined" implies that an effective intervention should not adopt a strategy of representational verisimilitude -- the goal should not be to take and disseminate photographs of Uzbek or Russian torture chambers, or to produce comprehensive, anatomical descriptions of horrendous state-sanctioned violence. Such efforts risk a different kind of satisfaction than that which is demonstrated by a smiling prison guard at Abu Ghraib, a voyeuristic pleasure in consuming images of a suffering other and a dangerous appropriation of that suffering as something to be easily understood and made one's own. The image thus commodified, its subject's pain is reduced to a political bargaining chip, a source for aesthetic elaboration, a sensational news item; the singularly unrepresentable experience of torture -- the reason for which it is inexcusable -- is polluted by its representation. So, it is necessary to expose and criticize torture, but the brutality of the experience must somehow be represented in its unrepresentability. A criticism in search of ethical possibilities, in whatever form, must find ways to avoid "either looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall or turning one's eyes away."47 It must situate itself at the level of epistemology, rather than fixating on singular eruptions of violence and state brutality. Otherwise, critique is already "playing the game by the rules of the state," operating within the dialectic of visibility endemic to the epistemology of the burrow.
1nc – 5

The form of the affirmative’s content cannot challenge imperial sovereignty as it positions the “tortured body” of Guantanamo and Bagram as the object of law in direct opposition to sovereign violence --- this recreates Western erasure of the agency and political resistance of the detainee Other which turns the case while simultaneously erasing non-Western forms of re-engaging the political --- it sidelines more effective forms of resistance that bring new forms outside of the hegemonic status quo --- vote negative to reject the form of the 1AC to instead endorse the form of politicized poetry to deliver the content of the 1AC
TRAPP 2011 (Erin Trapp, theorist of the poetic rearrangement of language, “Estranging Lyric: Postwar Aggression and the Task of Poetry,” Postmodern Culture, Vol. 21, No. 3, May 2011, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.emory.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v021/21.3.trapp.html)
As documents of the “enemy combatant,” the poems collected in Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak are unique to post-9/11 literature. Concerned centrally with the “world-changing” impact of trauma and spectacle, post-9/11 literature reinforces the testimonial function of witnessing implicit in human rights discourse.1 This testimonial function figures the suffering human as an object of the law, and therefore cannot challenge imperial sovereignty and its extralegal legality. Take the second of “Two Fragments,” by Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost: Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body, So I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life. Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free, But they are slaves. I am flying on the wings of thought, And so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom. Dost’s poem describes the hypocrisy of the liberalism that has informed the “justice” of oppressive measures, leading to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and to extralegal practices at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The poem’s tropes display the suffering body and thereby present the body as an object to observe. Dost testifies to the imprisonment of the “I” and to the “I”’s persistence as a “beating heart”; these conditions of confinement are portrayed to be witnessed. The speaker seems to affirm the persistence of the human spirit in the face of suffering, invoking a central and pervasive idea about the sufferer’s humanity. In the poems, the various layers of testimony—of the enemy combatant who testifies as a criminal, as a victim, and as a witness—create a legal situation outside of which none of the poems’ readers can think and which makes it impossible for them to see the relation between aesthetics and politics. If we consider the poems’ aesthetics, however, instead of reading them only as extensions of the discourses of human rights and of political resistance, then we can get a better idea of the political subject and of the torture and suffering to which he testifies. But how does the poem caution against the reader’s identification with the figure of suffering that it simultaneously invokes? How does it question the “authentic ‘I’” that it also presents, stages, and puts on display? Dost’s poem, which is notably silent on the role of the witness (the spectator, the world, the bystander), remains ambiguous about the way its “body” can be read. Looking closely at the ways in which the materiality of the “body” is constructed in writing, we can advance some tentative theses about the way the function of testimony is called into question here. In Dost’s poem, the heart is a synecdoche for the “I,” and establishes an analogy between the “dark body” and the cage or prison cell. This rhetorical move places the heart in the cage, its beating a figure of the nonhuman aspect of a speaker whose bird-like insistence on flight brings to mind the image of the winged heart. The popular tattoo of a winged heart (a form of inscription that resonates with the method, used by many detainees, of inscribing Styrofoam cups with their verse before they were allowed pens and paper) is properly called the Tughra Inayati, the symbol of faith for Universal Sufism, the mystical expression of Islam. Tughra, in fact, refers to the act of writing; in Arabic it means “finely ornamented writing,” describing the detailed calligraphic script comprising the wings and the heart. A kind of object poem, then, Dost’s fragment produces this mystical symbol as a generic and universal emblem.2 As a riddle, the poem creates distance between the author and the speaker and thereby challenges the principles that define the human being both by means of the extralegal law of imperial sovereignty, which isolates the body of the individual as the object of the law, and by means of the universalist and abstract notion of “human rights,” which can only respond through this same figure. Accordingly, the poetic speaker can be read as a cipher for the ways that the structure of oppression produces and enforces our identification with and as depoliticized subjects. The uniqueness of the collection lies, then, in asking us how to read the writing of the enemy and in the challenge it thereby poses to received ideas about the testimonial function in both 9/11 and human rights literature. The collection, which has generated much discussion about inaccessible originals, translation, bad poetry, and the capacity of poetry to transmit “secret messages,” was gathered and edited by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer of some of the prisoners. By arguing that the central provocation of the publication is how to read the “enemy,” I challenge the popular assumption that its main question is how a tortured, traumatized body speaks. Instead, I ask how the “enemy combatant” comes to be redefined when he is understood as a lyric subject. To read the enemy combatant as a poet is to reject common images of the detainee as a victim of torture, on the one hand, or, on the other, as a fundamentalist terrorist. The “enemy combatant,” a term employed to obscure and efface the identity of the person to whom it refers, designates the “barbarian” of our times, a figure whose alien otherness and position “before the law” announces opposition to the civilization implicit in empire. According to the logics of sovereignty and visibility that are predominant among critical efforts to understand the post-9/11 era, the enemy combatant is seen to reveal the barbarism of empire itself.4 Although these logics have been invoked by the Left to expose the hypocrisy of power, their shortcomings are apparent in readings that see the enemy combatant, like the poetic subject, as little more than a placeholder for opposition to empire. In contrast to reading the poetic speaker within the framework of the “state of exception,” I ask how a political subject emerges from a position of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant, as I describe him, denotes not only the unnamable negativity of empire, but also the duplicitous position of being assumed guilty and of assuming guilt for the crimes of others. The poems confront the historical rewriting of the subject of human rights literature as a victim rather than as an opponent of oppression, and introduce the paradoxical status of being at once victim and political subject. These considerations for reading the political subject must also include the complex history of the relationships between written and oral traditions, and between traditional and non-traditional forms of poetry. In his introduction to the collection, “Arab Prison Poetry,” Flagg Miller explains that the poems participate in various histories of poetic form, of Arab liberation, of prison literature, and of human rights discourse.6 As illustrated by Dost’s example, the poetic speaker takes place within a history of forms that is irreducible to the enunciation of a universal human subject. The ambiguity of this poetic speaker resists discernible efforts to provide a “close-up” of the terrorist turned victim, and in this way, the poems operate critically in a milieu otherwise rife with naïve assumptions about the self-evidence of testimony in expressive work. Along these lines, I find that the poems are not merely documents of barbarism—neither of the barbarism suspected of their authors, nor of the barbaric captivity to which they testify—but are in addition works that think through this “final,” post-9/11 stage of the dialectic between culture and barbarism.7 Reading the enemy combatant lyrically, as an anonymous and nonhuman subject, I explore the political alternatives that become imaginable with the poems’ publication and that are occluded by the term “enemy combatant” and by a dismissal of the enemy combatant as poet. The Testimonial Function Reviewers of the poems in Western media regard them as testimonies that “make visible” the crimes of the U.S. war on terror.8 In considering the assumptions and accusations of these disparate readers, I explore how this politics of exposure and visibility is undergirded by a dismissal of the poems’ specific “content and format.”9 The testimonial conflation of biography and speaker is accomplished in a dismissal of poetic form, a move that depoliticizes the poems and turns the resistant enemy into a tortured body. Robert Pinsky’s bland pronouncement that there “are no Mandelshtams here” serves as a model of this dismissal. Pinsky uses “Mandelshtam” to refer to the shared theme of imprisonment, but his reference emphasizes aesthetic form over political content. Pinsky’s judgment, which relies on a separation of aesthetics and politics that has been challenged by both poststructuralism and Marxist literary theory, indicates the poems’ embeddedness in the testimonial function, their tendency to be read as biographies of human suffering even when their readers purport to read them as “literary” documents.10 By reading the poems as more than testimonies, however, we can appreciate them not as biographical texts about universal human suffering, but as connected to the world differently and more singularly than this legalist, discursive abstraction of the human subject allows. The production of a human subject—if not of humanity—was, however, the aim shared by Falkoff and the other human rights lawyers who saw the volume through to publication.11 As Falkoff notes, this, and not the danger of coded messages in the original Pashto or Arabic versions, constituted the real threat posed by the poetry. He writes, If the inmates were writing words like “the Eagle flies at dawn,” the censors might have a case, but they are not… What the military fears is not so much the possibility of secret messages being communicated, but the power of words to make people outside realize that these are human beings who have not had their day in court. As Falkoff argues, the “power of words” is not in the words themselves, not in what they say, but in what they do: they allow us to perceive the “human beings” behind them. For Falkoff, the merit of the poems is their self-evidence as testimonies, and this testimony produces the subject as human. The question of what constitutes a recognizable human being in this context is raised by critics on the academic Left as well. As Anne McClintock demonstrates in her essay “Paranoid Empire,” the endpoint of such critical, post-9/11 work is to shift from exposing the corrupt foundations of the oppressors to making visible the plight of the oppressed. In describing the paradigm of morality that followed Abu Ghraib, she extends Falkoff’s ideas about exposing the common humanity of the prisoners by pointing to how such an exposure intensifies our focus on ourselves. She writes, The pornography argument turned the question of torture abroad back to a question about us in the United States: our morality, our corrupt sexualities, our loss of international credibility, our gender misrule. In the storm of moral agitation about our pornography and our loss of the moral high ground, the terrible sufferings of ordinary, innocent people in two occupied and devastated countries were thrown into shadow. (100) McClintock claims that “our” moral crisis competes with and displaces the suffering of others. Distinguishing between these two areas—morality versus suffering—McClintock seems to present the task of radical politics as the choice between two projects, but what emerges more tellingly is the extent to which these two choices are not really distinct. They are located rather in two subject positions—those of a moral self and a suffering other—that are both congruous with figures of testimony in human rights discourse. The identity between poet and sufferer is enforced in the editorial decision to include a brief biography of each prisoner alongside his poem or poems (and it comes as no surprise that many find these “more evocative than the poems themselves” Chiasson). The insistently visual rhetoric of torture, which has become an integral part of the discourse on terrorism, makes its way in this manner into the poetic frame, by giving each name a figure.12 Through the biographical “close-up,” we get what seems to be missing in the translated poems: the original, innocent prisoner—a victim of anti-terrorism and not a terrorist.13 The “sufferer” who testifies in Jumah al Dossari’s “Death Poem,” by contrast, questions his own status as a human being. The poetic speaker considers his death, presenting the public display of his body as signs of an “innocent” and “sinless” soul: Take my blood. Take my death shroud and The remnants of my body. Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely. Send them to the world, To the judges and To the people of conscience, Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded. And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world, Of this innocent soul. Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history, Of this wasted, sinless soul, Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.” The speaker narrates a fantasy of his death, preparing his body as an offering to the world, and the poem thus engages its own polarization of guilt and innocence to assert the speaker’s innocence. He describes how his body should be sent to “judges and / To the people of conscience.” In an ironic appeal to habeas corpus, the innocent body thus bears a guilt which is not his own. At first seeming to sediment the opposition between guilt and innocence, ending with the hypocrisy of the “protectors of peace,” the poem attacks the supposed objectivity of conscience, and with it, the idea that guilt and innocence can be extricated from one another. The judges, who should be impartial, bear “the guilty burden, before the world, / Of this innocent soul.” The poem, which asserts the innocence of its speaker, does so by calling into question the function of “bearing the burden” of his “wasted, sinless soul.” The speaker does not bare his soul, but makes apparent the difference between what belongs to the first person and what belongs to the world. Al Dossari’s poem employs a thematic concern with journey—the ironic and impossible journey of a body, of “sending” a body as a document to the world. The merit of the poem lays in the construction of the body as a site of elegy, as much an object as a subject of the poem. It asks how the body can be produced as a site of justice, or how human rights— figured in the world, in conscience, and in the judges—has failed to provide justice. Al Dossari’s fantasy of what the poetic body can do is the opposite of what Shirley Dent imagines in her review of the poems in her Guardian “Books blog” post, “We should look to democracy, not poetry, to deliver justice.” Dent claims that a properly functioning democracy is more possible, and more realistic, than a political subjectivity that would arise in poetry.14 She also claims that the poems don’t do enough, either as political documents or as aesthetic works. She does not mean, however, that poetry should do more, but rather that justice, this form of doing, should be left to democracy. Although acknowledging that we live in the “absence of real democracy,” her argument that the truths of poetry should be “objective, universal, and complex” serves to articulate the aesthetic principles that underlie her strict separation of aesthetics and politics. These principles do not leave room for the idea that poetry could in fact challenge ideas of justice, and especially that challenges to justice could come in aesthetic form. Like other reviews, Dent’s argument, which also faults readers who want this type of affective evidence associated with poetry, relies on a dismissal of the literary value of the poetry. One of the most prominent of these reviews, “Notes on Prison Camp,” written by poet Dan Chiasson, appeared in the New York Times shortly after the publication of the poems. Chiasson, who finds the poets innocent, the poems bad, and the politics of publication “liberal,” indicts the poems on the basis of their generic universality.15 He claims that the bulk of the poems are “so vague, their claims so conventional, they mimic the kinds of things sad or frustrated people have always written.” Although Chiasson suggests that it would be wrong to judge the aesthetic merit of poems written by people under these conditions, this disclaimer functions to justify his sustained dismissal of the poems. The mimicry of which Chiasson accuses the poems is a matter not only of his ignorance of the form from which the poems derive, but of the extent to which an insistence on innocence depoliticizes the “human” subject. Chiasson seems to conclude that the lack of literary merit in the poems can be separated from the identity of the poets, but when he suggests that Falkoff is part of a conspiracy with the U.S. government, for example, he explicitly invokes the idea that the poems can be read unambiguously and transparently as reflections of the prisoner biographies. His interpretation is openly supported by longtime activist and poet Maxine Kumin, who writes in a letter to the editor “commending” Chiasson for his “forthright, intelligent review.”16 She states: “Surely the press and the editor must have believed they were doing the public a service, though their combined naiveté in the light of the facts is overwhelming.” Kumin’s position is especially conflicted, not only because she also goes on to write her own “torture” poems—from the point-of-view of the detainees—but, as Falkoff claims, because she seems to be saying, “leave the poetry about Guantanamo to me” (Worthington). In asserting that the detainees should not be writing, and in extending the criteria of innocence to the “naive” press and editor, Kumin perhaps unintentionally suggests that testimonies cannot also be political. The mutually reinforcing theses of the lack of literary merit and of innocence as an attribute of human suffering lead to a separation of aesthetics and politics that many of these reviewers would deny in other contexts. In response to these reviews, George Fragopoulos discusses the need to remove the “dividing line” between aesthetics and politics. As Falkoff acknowledges in his conversation with Andy Worthington, Fragopoulos argues that aesthetics and politics do not intersect in straightforward ways. It strikes me, however, that the separation of aesthetics and politics is not the crux of the problem. It seems rather that the disregard of aesthetic form is symptomatic of a conflation of biographical and poetic speaker, and that this conflation allows the reader to project his or her ideas about the identifiable human onto the subject of the poems. In her essay on Paul de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” Barbara Johnson describes the similarity of anthropomorphism and aesthetic identification by comparing lyric poetry and the Supreme Court case of Rowland v. California Men’s Colony. She concludes that anthropomorphism is more than a tropological figure—more than an establishment of likeness—because it extends as “known” the “properties of the human.” Johnson thus defines the projective extension of what is known as fundamental to the identification of personhood. Her insight reminds us that the “I” is not a transparent subject, but rather a figure that is often the product of multiple projections. The reviews that I have discussed project a knowable human subject and therefore dwell on aesthetic sentiments that arise from this schema of intelligibility. In her recent book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler applies the testimonial function of the poems to a different end; she argues that the poems, and their authors, constitute the opposition to U.S. empire. Butler takes human suffering, or the suffering victim of human rights discourse, and gives it political agency without addressing the aesthetic dynamic of activity and passivity at work in the poems themselves. Her collapse of the “I” into a “we” results in the projection of her own political ideals onto the subject.17 She adopts Falkoff’s appeal that the poems “testify” to the wrongs of detention and the humanity of the subjects. Butler finds that the poems attest to an alternative, non-Western form of ethical interaction; that is, they exhibit a particularhumanity, the inspiring capacity for collective human interaction. She reads the poems as evidence of a “sense of solidarity, of interconnected lives that carry on each others’ words, suffer each others’ tears, and form networks that pose an incendiary risk not only to national security, but to the form of global sovereignty championed by the U.S.” (62). Butler derives this reading not from poetic form but from “the repeated and open question” of al Haj’s and others’ poems, “How does a tortured body form such words?” Butler’s point is that a tortured body does not form “such words,” by which she means poetry, but that it speaks the pain of an other: the words of the poem attest to the sufferings of an other and of others. Butler identifies the political potential of the poetry in its capacity to represent resistant humanity in the face of global sovereignty. Butler extends the political implications of Falkoff’s project, but in a manner that continues to think about the poems, and about the political subjectivity they represent, as a symptom of the internal antagonism and demise of American empire. Butler, Chiasson, and Dent avoid the poems’ poetic qualities, all the while making strong claims about what the poems do or do not do as aesthetic documents, as if the politics are synonymous with the author’s biographical blurbs.18 The reviews are thus exemplary of the postwar depoliticization of art, which Adorno laments, for example, in his critique of the industry of culture. Along these lines, Arendt critiques not the separation of art and politics, which she understands as a conflict fundamental to society, but the role of the mediating faculty, the cultura animi, the “cultivated and trained mind” of culture. She describes how this faculty— taste—humanizes, and also how it can “de-barbarize” the world, in contrast to the way that society makes culture complicit, “monopolizing culture for its own purposes.” Arendt’s move to make art (and other activity) political is to count taste “among man’s political abilities” (220). Taste, the capacity to be in the position “to forget ourselves,” represents the role of the reader. To think of the poems not just as “documents,” or as “prison literature” and to include them within the purview of post-9/11 literature requires the aesthetic activity of forgetting oneself, of bringing the category of the “I”—like that of the “enemy combatant”—into question. The Qasidah Form In contrast to the interpretations discussed above, which emphasize the performative dimension of poetic work and thus place the poems firmly in the realm of contested visuality that is democratic politics, I now discuss a lyric activity that emerges where poetry and human rights intersect. I do so by asking what is particular to the poetic “content and format” of this writing. As I noted in the context of the reviews, the poetic “I”—here an ethnic “I,” to follow John Kim’s discussion of the way that the autobiographical “self” returns as a figure of “social collectivity” (337)—is made more powerfully human through an almost irresistible process of identification that collapses the distance between enunciating “I” and enunciated “I.” The “I” is the juncture of these concerns about the relation between aesthetics and politics: that figure, as Adorno found and as Dost’s poem illustrates, of “subjectivity turning to objectivity” (“Lyric Poetry” 46). As I show, the intricacy of aesthetics and politics contained in the lyric ambiguity of the poetic speaker—the indeterminacy of the “I”—disrupts these humanist models for thinking about the status and identity of the detainees. I focus on ways in which the poems’ recurring structure of the classical qasidah extends this mediation between aesthetics and politics by refusing the very terms of universal human rights that are invoked by the poems. Classical forms, and the neoclassical revival of these forms during the colonial period in the early twentieth century, thus retain an elusive, ambiguous, and somewhat spectral relationship to contemporary poetry, even as they are also rejected in the formally experimental free verse poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century. The poems of Guantanamo loosely represent the variety of these poetic forms; the collection includes poems that are traditional, formal, and experimental, and that reflect influences from diverse prison writings, all the while negotiating questions about the role of the human voice in writing. Contextualizing the poems within the history of Arabic poetic forms particularizes and modifies some of the attributes of human rights literature and the transnational genres of prison and resistance literature, all of which are legible in the poems. The poems demonstrate how questions of form and of literary history can be brought to bear on larger political and social discourses. Flagg Miller’s introduction to the collection, which places the poems in the context of Arab liberation and Israeli occupation, focuses on the particular history of the qasidah, a form of Arabic poetry that is often compared to the ode. The traditional qasidah, according to Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, is a metered poem in monorhyme that is usually composed of fifteen to eighty lines (3–4).19 The qasidah is recognizable through its thematic units, which Stetkevych, in her foundational text on Arabic poetry, The Mute Immortals Speak, likens to the passage of ritual: the nasib, which consists of a description of the “abandoned encampment” (3); the rahil, which describes the poet’s journey; and the fakhr, the praise of self and tribe. Several of the poems from the collection—Emad Abdullah Hassan’s “The Truth,” Sami al Haj’s “ Humiliated in the Shackles,” Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea,” and Abdulla Majid al Noaimi’s “My Heart was Wounded by the Strangeness”—function as contemporary variations of the qasidah. Scholars of the qasidah, including Flagg Miller and Hussein Kadhim, who take up the overt political and social uses of these poetic forms, discuss these variations and experimentations of form. Kadhim, for example, considers the neoclassical revival of the qasidah in the early twentieth century as a form of “incitement poetry” (shi ‘r al-tahrid) against colonialism.20 In his reading, the rahil is a transitional part that links the elegiac nasib to the gharad, the poem’s main part and the locus of the political message. In his work on Yemeni poets, Miller describes a dialogic variation of the qasidah, the initiation-and-response poetry of the bid ‘wa jiwab. Miller focuses on the role of the messenger, who functions as a mediator between poet and receiver and thereby establishes the authority of the written text. Miller is thus attentive to what he calls the “scriptographic tropes” of the qasidah, those metaphorical and thematic indications of the process of writing within the text itself, and this kind of reading involves an elaboration of additional sections, such as a riddle following the main section, which serve as a provocation for the receiver to formulate his response. Kadhim’s and Miller’s discussions also take up the question of the relationship between the classical form of the qasidah and the innovations of the “free verse” movement in the fifties, which experimented with traditional and non-traditional forms of verse.21 Recognizing these traditional forms is central to reading the poems of Guantanamo, not because the poems mimic or allude to tradition as such, but because the persistence of these forms as fragments and variations presents a valid alternative to the human rights problem of how writing (after catastrophe or after torture) is possible.22 Many of the poems in the collection explicitly assert the expressive power of the human voice, inviting the testimonial function that they have been accorded. But the force of this voice emerges from its paradoxical production of the poem as written text. In his poem “The Truth,” Emad Abdullah Hassan depicts the expressive force of the speaker’s “song” as the ability to restore the singing of birds: “Oh Night, my song will restore the sweetness of Life: / The birds will again chirp in the trees.” Here, “chirping” is an effect of the speaker’s song and of the human voice, and these two forms of expression—the human and the nonhuman—are conflated and collapsed. Hassan’s poem begins by asserting the redemptive value of the song: Oh History, reflect. I will now Disclose the secret of secrets. My song will expose the damned oppression, And bring the system to collapse. The speaker’s “song” is thus the embodiment and expression of resistance, emerging at the limits of a system that it also aims to collapse. Here it begins to present a problem for the discourse of human rights that it also represents, troubling the aims of a discourse that attempts to bring the margins to its center. The “secret of secrets” is presented not as an elusive, mystical sign to be read, but as something that cannot be understood by the speaker’s enemies. Hassan tells us what his enemy cannot understand: “that all we need is Allah, our comfort.” The secret betrays the ambiguity of the very call for universality within the poems—that they neither simply speak the universal nor speak a coded universal but instead challenge the discourse of human rights to which they also appeal. Hassan’s poem lays out the problem of the poetic subject who is situated at the crossroads of human rights and resistance literature. His speaker, like many others, announces an intention to use poetry as a vehicle for assuaging wounds and for lifting oppression. Here, the irony of human rights discourse is not only that its moral principles are also its offenses, but also that its victims must appear without contradiction as innocent, a pose at odds with political resistance, which, as we will see, assumes a condition of guilt. The double task of the poet obscures the self-evidence of the speaker who seems to emerge as biography, and in the case of these poems, which invoke traditions of form, this is a tropological process, a process of “borrowing.”23 The forms of response initiated by the qasidah involve the “primal, nonhuman” figure of the messenger in the rahil (Miller, “Moral Resonance” 172). Miller finds that this section differs for the bid ‘wa-jiwab because in the traditional rahil, the poet often imagines himself traveling across a landscape. The bid ‘wa-jiwab instead invokes a third party, a figure of the messenger who journeys between two correspondents. Miller’s distinction points to how the imagined “self,” the enunciated “I,” takes place in this ambiguous human/nonhuman role. The affective landscape of the journey has a nonhuman aspect; birdsong is also the voice of the nonhuman, and poetry is not only testimony to human experience or humanity but is also, as Daniel Tiffany writes in Infidel Poetics, “a distant expression, or recollection, of the inhuman voice” (152).24 Tiffany points to the artifice of this process by which voice is humanized, highlighting the non-self-evident nature of the human being. These observations indicate how nonhuman figures can help to break up the unity—the unity of universal, human suffering—supposed by the discourse of modern poetics. In poems such as “Death Poem,” or “The Truth,” the ambiguity of the human messenger as poet allows the poem to present questions about what constitutes human being and belonging. In Sami al Haj’s poem, “Humiliated in the Shackles,” the messenger is figured as a bird who “witnesses” the testimony of the speaker: When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees, Hot tears covered my face. When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed A message for my son. The lyric image of birdsong, which has long been associated with the songlike or aural quality of poetry, serves as a muse, transforming nonhuman song into human tears. The poem goes on to pair the chirping of larks with the writing of the poem, establishing the process of empathic identification by which the cooing “bar-bar” of the other in the figure of the bird spurs the tears of the speaker, a cathartic identification that produces the possibility of writing. In such a model, there is no resistance to the other; he is hardly recognized as such, because within the context of the poem, and in the testimonial order it prescribes, the bird’s song is subordinated to (and sublated in) the voice of the speaker. Following this schema, the ability to “chirp” represents the healthy internalization of “cooing” and its expression as an active and embodied voice. In contrast, the nonhuman or “becoming-animal” element involves the Kafkaesque condition of assuming guilt and being assumed guilty. As I have indicated, the image of the “caged bird” and other common tropes of imprisonment gain much of their power not only by extending the position of the first person to the third, and thereby creating a community of sufferers, but also by radicalizing the human subject that is implicated in this community.25 In The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic Qasidah, Kadhim describes how the Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi (1869–1932) uses the ancient motif of doves to establish the theme of mourning unjust death. Here, the traditional use of birdsong as a trope and as an image in the qasidah serves the function, Kadhim notes, of keeping atrocities alive “in the memory of the people” (32). Kadhim’s argument pertains to the association between birdsong in an ancient qasidah and in a modern one, but also implies that reference to the “cooing/wailing of the doves” extends a local act of injustice to a national atrocity and thus calls for identification through injustice as well as remembrance. As Kadhim argues, such invocations played a role in anti-colonial resistance writing, inviting the production of a subject whose identification with the pathos of nature implicitly recognized the usefulness of such images for mobilizing a collective response.26Kadhim details the manipulation of pre-Islamic motifs that are contemporanized in post-1948 resistance poetry through the conventions and formal structure of the qasidah. Read in this way, the “hot tears” belong not to al Haj, and also not to the speaker, but to the elegiac nas?b, the qasidah’s short prelude, which is established traditionally through the imagery of shedding tears. The tears thus mark not the experience of human suffering, but the process of writing poetry, to which the speaker also later refers. From the outset, writing remains at the level of composition or arrangement, and not of expression. The “thoughts” of the speaker abstract his voice from the composition of the poem. The reference to “thoughts” as an object, instead of as an activity of the “I” as speaking subject, indicates the disunity of expression. The introduction of the materiality of thought as the agent of expression furthermore casts off the automatic process by which nonhuman birdsong becomes internalized in the expression of human suffering, as if bird and human correspond to one another and to the binary of freedom and imprisonment. Instead, the speaker foregrounds the processes of internalization and projection that delimit not the suffering subject, but the subject who “speaks” in writing, the poetic speaker. Kadhim’s observations about the way that traditional poetic motifs are mobilized as national symbols help us to think about the way that birdsong, which is not merely a motif but is rather the “universal” motif of poetic voice, is related to the universalization of atrocity. Such a movement indexes the discourse of universal human rights that Flagg Miller identifies in his introductory essay as the “language” for which the poems strive. In this way, barbarism is associated with atrocity, with the performance of an act so alien in its terribleness that it defies language, but one that, by virtue of this defiance, is expressed only as a universal. The “cooing” doves are transformed into “chirping,” and so writing qua “chirping” refers to the capacity of expressive force to restore justice by expressing its universality. The reading that is given by the testimonial function—by this sequencing of inhuman suffering, human emotion, and human expression—is thereby challenged, in the absence of a transparent human subject, by the questions that have been raised about the unity and power of human voice. Assuming Guilt The double task of the poet to assuage wounds and lift oppression has to do, in no small part, with his condition of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant is assumed guilty, which refers to the ground of his imprisonment, but he also “assumes” the guilt of exposing the hypocrisy of his oppressor, a position that suggests he is an active participant in his guilt. In fact, however, it is the ambivalence of this passive/active, involuntary/voluntary assumption of guilt that defines the indeterminacy of the enemy combatant as poetic speaker. The poems raise questions about the relation between guilt and responsibility that were also presented by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in his 1940 essay, “Discussion of War Aims.” Winnicott explains how the emergence of the “good,” moral citizen involves a moment of identification and projection. The supposed overcoming of a moment of barbaric conflict elides the possibility of identifying a “bad” feeling in a “good” person. He provides the example of the Englander who asserts his indifference to politics by naming both an enemy and others who are responsible for this enemy. He concludes that if the Englander were to take responsibility, the action would be equivalent to not seeing a difference between ally and enemy: At the present time we Englanders are in the apparently fortunate position of having an enemy who says, ‘I am bad; I intend to be bad’, which enables us to feel, ‘We are good’. If our behaviour can be said to be good, it is by no means clear that we can thereby slip out of our responsibility for the German attitude and the German utilization of Hitler’s peculiar qualities. In fact, there would be actual and immediate danger in such complacency, since the enemy’s declaration is honest just where ours is dishonest. As Winnicott illuminates so strikingly, the problem with exposing the enemy is that it reinforces the falseness of one’s own position. The mistake of the civilian, the “good” Englander, according to Winnicott, is to judge guilt and innocence through a splitting of good and bad. The move allows one to “thereby slip out of” responsibility for the oppressor, and the complacency with which this happens—not the issue of complicity or collusion—is the problem that Winnicott identifies. This raises questions about the neutrality of the witness, and in particular about the limits of moral responsibility and the role that guilt plays in taking responsibility. Moreover, Winnicott suggests that the guilt required is not redemptive (the pangs of conscience), but that the proper or more meaningful form of responsibility comes from the assumption of guilt. The notion of guilt that I would like to explore is indicated by the main section of al Haj’s poem, which follows an initial supplication to both nonhuman birdsong and to the poem’s messenger, the poet’s son. According to Kadhim’s assessment of the anti-colonial qasidah, this main section contains the political message; in this case, it details the temptation and hypocrisy of oppression rather than the experience of torture. In its treatment of temptation, the main section is reminiscent of the Qur’anic story of Joseph, which Susan Slyomovics recounts in her book, Performing Human Rights in Morocco. She writes, “even though Joseph is vindicated, his innocence is of no moment; in some sense he is guilty of having exposed the master’s wife as sinful and the master retaliates: ‘then it occurred to the men… (that it was best) to imprison him for a time’” (4).27 Joseph, in this example, is guilty not of a crime but of being in a position to expose the guilt of another. The guilt assumed by al Haj’s speaker lies similarly in his exposure of the hypocrisy of freedom. Al Haj’s speaker, like the other speakers in the collection, is guilty of the crime of exposing the crimes of the oppressors. His subjectivity arises from this guilt, not from the crime that he exposes, although, as I have indicated, the act of exposure is often read as an expression of the human subject. A similar distinction can be made regarding what the poems do: they do not “expose” the corrupt morality of the oppressors, but instead describe this pervasive yet inscrutable context of guilt (Schuldzusammenhang) that lies just at the margins of perception.28 “Humiliated in the Shackles” articulates the guilt of being tempted by the offerings of empire: The oppressors are playing with me, As they move freely about the world. They ask me to spy on my countrymen, Claiming it would be a good deed. They offer me money and land, And freedom to go where I please. Their temptations seize my attention Like lightning in the sky. But their gift is an evil snake, Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom. They have monuments to liberty And freedom of opinion, which is well and good. But I explained to them that Architecture is not justice. America, you ride on the backs of orphans, And terrorize them daily. Bush, beware. The world recognizes an arrogant liar. To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears. I am homesick and oppressed. Mohammad, do not forget me. Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man. I was humiliated in the shackles. How can I now compose verses? How can I now write? After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears, How can I write poetry? The poem’s tropes of the restraints and excesses of movement are the vehicle for its expression of the hypocrisy of freedom. As in Dost’s poem, these are presented by the first person as the experience of confinement. The “world” surely includes the actions of the oppressors, figured through an entrenched vocabulary of first-person singular and third-person plural: “they” “are playing with me,” they “ask me,” they “offer me.” The paradox of freedom exposes the false guilt of the imprisoned: while the oppressors move about freely, they do so by holding the speaker’s freedom captive. The speaker proclaims his independence from these temptations, but his concern lies with the appearance of turning into the enemy of the oppressed, and thus he presents himself as a subject who actively takes on his condition of oppression by enumerating his refusals of the “world” he is offered. Al Haj creates a figure of someone whose captivity does not desensitize him, but makes him more sensitive: to nature, to the hypocrisy of temptation, and also to his own feeling. In the penultimate stanza, he describes his soul as “like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish, / Violent with passion.” Distance, the enforced separation of diaspora, is here equated with emotional states that allow “nature” to stand in for or to represent the speaker. Like the first lines, prototypical images of the distance and familiarity of foreign nature follow the conventions of the qasidah, and the poet writes himself into this tradition by reasserting the generic identity of the poet: the poet who is a sensitive poet can write poetry—here are the birds, here is the message, here is Allah, here are my tears, here is the sea. The poem, which invokes Allah, points through the language of religious redemption to the problems of human rights. Freedom here is not freedom from imprisonment. The freedom that is the object of criticism is not a freedom that can be granted, like a right, but the freedom that wealth bestows: the ability to circulate freely, to exchange money and land, to achieve transparency between global and individual being. In other poems, the language of universal human rights is pursued through the figure of the “world” as an impartial judge or law outside the prison: a world “that will wait for us,” to which “photographs of my corpse at the grave” will be sent, “before” which men will bear a “burden” and, finally, as an implied addressee, if “justice and compassion remain in this world.” “Where is the world to save us from torture? / Where is the world to save us from the fire and sadness? / Where is the world to save the hunger strikers?”29 In these formulations, the world becomes a figure for human rights, the neutral observer who is there to witness suffering. The positing of a “world” outside the prison and as a “universal” idea of justice also occurs, as Kadhim points out, in the anti-colonial qasidah and implies a stable presence that can be equated with the stable identity of the human being.30 But al Haj’s “world” challenges this stability and the idea of the world—of witnessing—as a form of justice. The “world,” “freely” moved about, is double-faced. Trampled upon and given the power to recognize, if not truth, then at least lies, the world becomes a figure for the oppressed. The duplicity of the world as both ground and figure constitutes the economy of oppression, and what al Haj depicts is a world that cannot safeguard acts of witnessing. Power, or profit, is generated through the exploitation of this duplicity, in which the world appears both as a given place in which actions occur and as an actor who not only takes part in the struggle but also functions as an arbiter. The stakes of such a profit game are thus not only control of the “world” as land or as a land, but also the persistent equation between civil and political rights and justice, and the persistent exclusion of social and economic rights.31 The fantasy of restoring justice to the “world,” like the fantasy of an identity between author and speaker, relies on the figuring of its good and bad through the seemingly neutral, but increasingly split images of universality—here, human song, the world, and the sea. In Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea,” the qasidah’s oft-invoked metaphor of the sea is taken up as a figure of a distance that is both beautiful and aggressive, its “calm” and its “stillness” no longer merely sources of contemplation, but forces, “like death,” that “kill.”32 The sea, which depicts the mediatable distance between poet and reader, between the speaker and his family, has become a force of alienation and strangeness. Al Rubaish writes, O Sea, give me news of my loved ones. Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you, And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms. Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice. Your bitterness eats away at my patience. Your calm is like death, your sweeping waves are strange. The silence that rises up from you holds treachery in its fold. Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists, And the navigator will drown in your wave. Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming, You carry graves. If the wind enrages you, your injustice is obvious. If the wind silences you, there is just the ebb and flow. O Sea, do our chains offend you? It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go. Do you know our sins? Do you understand we were cast into this gloom? O Sea, you taunt us in our captivity. You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us. Don’t the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst? Doesn’t Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you? You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained? Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart. The poet’s words are the font of our power; His verse is the salve of our pained hearts. What has held ground as “the world,” neutral but overtaken by oppressors in al Haj’s poem, is here presented in the figure of the “sea” as complicit with oppression. Al Rubaish turns away from a politics of “making visible”; the sea depicts a form of guilt that is like the guilt of the enemy combatant, both passive and active. Forming the borders of the island prison, the sea’s “frame” is perspectival but also incriminating.33 Its neutral juxtaposition also becomes the source of its own guilt. This structure of self-incrimination and incrimination of the other describes the position of subjectivity faced by the enemy combatant. The task of the poet is brought into question as the poem turns to ask who stands to gain from suffering. The speaker’s inquiry about what the sea has gained is in this manner a form of self-inquiry. Al Rubaish underscores the ambiguous morality by depicting the sea as a medium in which poetry is sustained despite its alienation. It is the silence and stillness of the sea as a figure of distance that offends and is offended. The speaker does not place blame, however, but rather feels taunted; he is moved about by the sea, not just held captive by it. The speaker reduces himself to the “poet’s words”: as “boats,” the poems mediate the distance between neutral waters and the imprisoned enemy combatant. Collusion, in this case, is a moment of guilt, the contradictory experience of being unable to be neutral. The sea embodies the distance between freedom and imprisonment and in this way becomes a figure for the mind and for the turmoil of the soul. Appeals to the world instead of morality are important because they acknowledge the split condition of guilt and responsibility and the fact that responsibility is often the name for the neutrality imputed to human rights discourse. The Poet Messenger The consequences of thinking about the psychological aspect of moral situations become evident when considering enemy combatants more explicitly as poets. As we have seen, al Haj’s poem not only exposes the acts of oppression that Empire undertakes (no free ride, the “ride” is on the “backs of orphans”), but realigns the terms of justice. He writes, “But I explained to them that / Architecture is not justice.” Architecture refers to the phrase “monuments to liberty” in the preceding stanza, and thus to the absence of freedom writ by its memorialization. Empty monumentality is another figure for the hypocrisy of American culture, a part of the logic of the false appearance of freedom. The reference to architecture has two further significant associations. First, it cannot help but refer in its context both to the destruction of the twin towers and to the symbolic nature of their destruction as “monuments of liberty.” In pointing to this destruction negatively, al Haj also indicates ambivalence about seeing such acts of destruction as justice. Second, the language of building is a metaphor for poetic activity; in the qasidah, architectural concepts are the conventional terms for poetic form.34 Al Haj’s opposition to the oppressors thus challenges not only the symbols of power and political representation, but the politics of representation itself. In keeping with Miller’s description of the thematic structure of the dialogic qasidah, which commonly includes a riddle after the main part, the “explanation” of the justice of architecture turns out to be a riddle instead of a moral lesson. If architecture is a figure for writing, the question to ask is not how is writing (or representation) possible after atrocity, but how is writing a form of justice? Al Haj’s poem is a poem that ostensibly seeks justice, testifying to the speaker’s innocence in consorting with the enemy, of taking enemy bribes, and of doing evil deeds. Along these lines, the speaker’s testimony serves as an assurance to his “countrymen” that he has not betrayed them. The riddling question, however, underscores the poem’s ambivalent relation to the world. Until he “explained to them that / Architecture is not justice,” the speaker has occupied the position of responding in opposition to the oppressors. He is the “me” and the “I”; he is not “they,” and yet the plurality of the world is on his side.35 Here, taking the position of the subject, his explanation serves as a reminder that his innocence is of no matter. Evidence of his innocence betrays his responsibility for exposing the injustice of symbolic power. In raising the question of whether writing is justice, al Haj addresses his poem towards an audience with whom he does not identify and who does not identify with him, and thereby rejects the tropes of humanity and the religious imagery that his poem simultaneously invokes. In the poems from Guantanamo, textual authority becomes a metaphor for ensuring justice, for “taking responsibility” for the condition of guilt one assumes. “Humiliated in the Shackles” builds upon its script of praise and invective to invoke the oppressor directly; the speaker apostrophes “America” at a turning point in the poem. The inversion of the structural relationship between you and them—“America, you ride on the backs of orphans, / And terrorize them daily” changes the terms of the “them.” Here, “them” does not refer, as it has, to the oppressors, but instead to “the backs of orphans,” a synecdoche for the oppressed. No longer identifying with the oppressed, the speaker turns directly to “you, America,” and ends up locating the oppressed in the position of the object. The poem’s description of the ambivalence of these positions--and of the ambivalence inhering in the very process of identification that forges a relationship between the speaker and the reader--hinges on the figure of the poet as messenger and as someone who can recast the “I”’s projection of himself onto the other. The poet as messenger is described more explicitly still in Abdulla Majid al Noaimi’s poem, “My Heart was Wounded by the Strangeness.” Al Noaimi’s poem begins with several verses of prose before he moves into the form of the qasidah. This prelude explains how the poet received a greeting from a fellow detainee who expressed that he was trying to write a poem for him. Al Noaimi writes, “I felt guilty about this. Will he write a poem for me when he is no poet, while I, who claim to be a poet, have written nothing for him?” The guilt expressed by the speaker is, in a way, a continued provocation of al Haj’s question about the justice of writing. Not affirming immediately the role of the poet, the speaker continues to describe how the poem became difficult to write, and how the poet turned to memorizing the Qur’an. “With my mind divided,” he then writes, “time began to pass. And then I was inspired.” This prose verse is a frame story for the poem; depicting the poet as a messenger, it functions to enforce the continuity between biography and poem established in the collection’s format by describing how the poet has come to write the poem. The frame, however, also establishes the poem’s authority as a written document; pointing out the poem’s textuality and the processes of constructing text, it highlights the artifice of writing. In referring to the “division” of his mind between the task of memorization and the task of creation, the speaker invokes poetry’s role as “the profane antitext to the Qur’anic sacred text.”36 This detail about the poem’s process of composition alludes to my larger questions about how the poem elucidates its politics. Here, the authority of the speaker as messenger arises from the contradictory methods of memorization and creation that inform not only his composition, but also his constitution as subject. The qasidah form begins where the prose leaves off: My heart was wounded by the strangeness. Now poetry has rolled up his sleeves, showing a long arm. Time passes. The hands of the clock deceive us. Time is precious and the minutes are limited. Do not blame the poet who comes to your land, Inspired, arranging rhymes. Oh brother, who need not be named, I send you My gift of greetings. I send heavily falling rains To quench your thirst and show my gratitude. My poem will comfort you and ease your burdens. If you blame yourself, my poem will appease you. My mind is not heavy with animosity. The first three verses assert the resurgence of poetry as a figure of healing, the aftermath of being wounded. The speaker describes a temporal shift in this first verse, indicating the recovery of poetry’s power and demonstrating its embodiment of resistance. These verses comprise the poem’s nasib, its opening supplication and prelude. So the nasib, the elegiac moment of the qasidah, here describes the “strangeness” of loss and ruin—of “passed” time and a “wounded” heart. In an oblique apostrophe, the speaker then entreats the reader not to blame “the poet who comes to your land.” The poem, which has so far seemed to recall the setting of imprisonment, extends the interior of this position to its outside—quite literally, again, America—through the figure of the poet as messenger. Yet the poem falls back into the address that it has claimed in the prose section, addressing the manifest recipient of the poem, the speaker’s friend and brother, “who need not be named.” This section makes use of the typically liquid imagery of the rahil—the “heavily falling rains”—to transfer blame again, as a means of establishing correspondence between the speaker and his addressee.37 The speaker claims that his poem will act as a comfort, most importantly to appease his brother’s guilt. The ambiguous reference “outside” the poem causes us to doubt the singularity of the poem’s recipient, performing the paranoia it has warned its reader against. That poet—the poet as messenger, wounded by “strangeness” and now inspired—is no longer mentioned, as the poem moves to these more explicit ideas about the function of the poem: its ability to appease, to shift blame, to make pain “captive,” to hide “in our hearts” what is “expressed in my words.” These functions, which have very little to do with exposure or with testifying, refuse the position of the poet as victim of suffering. Guilt and its attendant figures make room for a consideration of the way that the textual space invites obscurity, contradiction, and resistance as alternative forms of subjectivity. The questions that al Haj’s and al Noaimi’s speakers pose are equally “How can I write poetry as a survivor of torture?” and “At what distance between oppression and opposition does the subject take place?” Al Haj’s speaker exposes not only the enemy who is the object of the poem, but also the projections of his enemy readers, who are far more diverse than Bush, the “arrogant liar.” These readers are oppressive not solely because of their literary declamations, but also because they conflate the speaker’s identity with the identity of the enemy combatant and because they need a seemingly “neutral” world to do so. In contrast, the poems present a figure who raises the question of just who is responsible for oppression. Such a reading moves beyond asking how the U.S. is responsible for the conditions of “evil,” which has been the subject of the past decade’s critiques of U.S. global power, and asks instead about the guilt that both reinforces and resists these moral and aesthetic pronouncements.
1nc – catch 22

The aff doesn’t fix the culture of masculine domination --- they are PSEUDO progress which masks real change
WILLIAMS 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321-343)
The impediments to establishing democratic justice in contemporary American society have caused a national paralysis; one that has recklessly spawned an aporetic1 existence for minorities. The entrenched ideological complexities afflicting under- and nonrepresented groups (e.g., poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, crime) at the hands of political, legal, cultural, and economic power elites have produced counterfeit, perhaps even fraudulent, efforts at reform: Discrimination and inequality in opportunity prevail (e.g., Lynch and Patterson, 1996). The misguided and futile initiatives of the state, in pursuit of transcending this public affairs crisis, have fostered a reification, that is, a reinforcement of divisiveness. This time, however, minority groups compete with one another for recognition, affirmation, and identity in the national collective psyche (Rosenfeld, 1993). What ensues by way of state effort, though, is a contemporaneous sense of equality for all and a near imperceptible endorsement of inequality; a silent conviction that the majority still retains power. The “gift” of equality, procured through state legislative enactments as an emblem of democratic justice, embodies true (legitimated) power that remains nervously secure in the hands of the majority. The ostensible empowerment of minority groups is a facade; it is the ruse of the majority gift. What exists, in fact, is a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981, 1983) of equality (and by extension, democratic justice): a pseudo-sign image (a hypertext or simulation) of real sociopolitical progress.

SKIP
They also assume a position of “responsibility” to challenge the law --- this recreates hegemonic sovereignty on a micropolitical level
WILLIAMS 2k (Christopher R. Williams, PhD, forensic psychology, professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at Bradley University, Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, administration of justice, professor of criminology, law, and society, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina, Faculty Associate in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, “The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the ‘Gift’ of the Majority,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, August 2000, pgs. 321-343)
Reciprocation on your part is impossible. Even if one day you are able to return our monetary favor twofold, we will always know that it was us who first hosted you; extended to and entrusted in you an opportunity given your time of need. As the initiators of such a charity, we are always in a position of power, and you are always indebted to us. This is where the notion of egoism or conceit assumes a hegemonic role. By giving to you, a supposed act of generosity in the name of furthering your cause, we have not empowered you. Rather, we have empowered ourselves. We have less than subtlely let you know that we have more than you. We have so much more, in fact, that we can afford to give you some. Our giving becomes, not an act of beneficence, but a show of power, that is, narcissistic hegemony! Thus, we see that the majority gift is a ruse: a simulacrum of movement toward aporetic equality and a simulation of democratic justice. By relying on the legislature (representing the majority) when economic and social opportunities are availed to minority or underrepresented collectives, the process takes on exactly the form of Derrida’s gift. The majority controls the political, economic, legal, and social arenas; that is, it is (and always has been) in control of such communities as the employment sector and the educational system. The mandated opportunities that under- or nonrepresented citizens receive as a result of this falsely eudemonic endeavor are gifts and, thus, ultimately constitute an effort to make minority populations feel better. There is a sense of movement toward equality in the name of democratic justice, albeit falsely manufactured. 18 In return for this effort, the majority shows off its long-standing authority (this provides a stark realization to minority groups that power elites are the forces that critically form society as a community), forever indebts under- and nonrepresented classes to the generosity of the majority (after all, minorities groups now have, presumably, a real chance to attain happiness), and, in a more general sense, furthers the narcissism of the majority (its representatives have displayed power and have been generous). Thus, the ruse of the majority gift assumes the form and has the hegemonical effect of empowering the empowered, relegitimating the privileged, and fueling the voracious conceit of the advantaged. 

Can’t challenge broader structural biases – masculinity, etc. 

No risk of endless warfare
Gray 7—Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, Founder and Senior Associate to the National Institute for Public Policy, formerly with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson Institute (Colin, July, “The Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A Reconsideration”, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf)
7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so. Most controversial policies contain within them the possibility of misuse. In the hands of a paranoid or boundlessly ambitious political leader, prevention could be a policy for endless warfare. However, the American political system, with its checks and balances, was designed explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive from excessive folly. Both the Vietnam and the contemporary Iraqi experiences reveal clearly that although the conduct of war is an executive prerogative, in practice that authority is disciplined by public attitudes. Clausewitz made this point superbly with his designation of the passion, the sentiments, of the people as a vital component of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that power can be, and indeed is often, abused, both personally and nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste for the apparent swift decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the option. One might argue that the easy success achieved against Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a similarly rapid success against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In other words, the delights of military success can be habit forming. On balance, claim seven is not persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A country with unmatched wealth and power, unused to physical insecurity at home—notwithstanding 42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crime—is vulnerable to demands for policies that supposedly can restore security. But we ought not to endorse the argument that the United States should eschew the preventive war option because it could lead to a futile, endless search for absolute security. One might as well argue that the United States should adopt a defense policy and develop capabilities shaped strictly for homeland security approached in a narrowly geographical sense. Since a president might misuse a military instrument that had a global reach, why not deny the White House even the possibility of such misuse? In other words, constrain policy ends by limiting policy’s military means. This argument has circulated for many decades and, it must be admitted, it does have a certain elementary logic. It is the opinion of this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy which includes the preventive option might lead to a search for total security is not at all convincing. Of course, folly in high places is always possible, which is one of the many reasons why popular democracy is the superior form of government. It would be absurd to permit the fear of a futile and dangerous quest for absolute security to preclude prevention as a policy option. Despite its absurdity, this rhetorical charge against prevention is a stock favorite among prevention’s critics. It should be recognized and dismissed for what it is, a debating point with little pragmatic merit. And strategy, though not always policy, must be nothing if not pragmatic.

Structural barriers to solving – socio-economic, political, racism, etc. --- all thigns the aff doesn’t sovle 

1nc – body in pain

Their restriction is a smokescreen and will not be enforced
Nzelibe 7—Professor of Law @ Northwestern University Jide Nzelibe, “Are Congressionally Authorized Wars Perverse?” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 59, 2007
These assumptions are all questionable. As a preliminary matter, there is not much causal evidence that supports the institutional constraints logic. As various commentators have noted, Congress's bark with respect to war powers is often much greater than its bite. Significantly, skeptics like Barbara Hinckley suggest that any notion of an activist Congress in war powers is a myth and members of Congress will often use the smokescreen of "symbolic resolutions, increase in roll calls and lengthy hearings, and addition of reporting requirements" to create the illusion of congressional participation in foreign policy.' 0 Indeed, even those commentators who support a more aggressive role for Congress in initiating conflicts acknowledge this problem," but suggest that it could be fixed by having Congress enact more specific legislation about conflict objectives and implement new tools for monitoring executive behavior during wartime. 12 Yet, even if Congress were equipped with better institutional tools to constrain and monitor the President's military initiatives, it is not clear that it would significantly alter the current war powers landscape. As Horn and Shepsle have argued elsewhere: "Neither specificity in enabling legislation ... nor participation by interested parties is necessarily optimal or self-fulfilling; therefore, they do not ensure agent compliance. Ultimately, there must be some enforcement feature-a credible commitment to punish ....Thus, no matter how much well-intentioned and specific legislation Congress passes to increase congressional oversight of the President's military initiatives, it will come to naught if members of Congress lack institutional incentives to monitor and constrain the President's behavior in an international crisis. Various congressional observers have highlighted
electoral disincentives that members of Congress might face in constraining the President's military initiatives. 14 Others have pointed to more institutional obstacles to congressional assertiveness in foreign relations, such as collective action problems. 15 Generally, lawmaking is a demanding and grueling exercise. If one assumes that members of Congress are often obsessed with the prospect of reelection, 16 then such members will tend to focus their scarce resources on district-level concerns and hesitate to second-guess the President's response in an international crisis. 17 Even if members of Congress could marshal the resources to challenge the President's agenda on national issues, the payoff in electoral terms might be trivial or non-existent. Indeed, in the case of the President's military initiatives where the median voter is likely to defer to the executive branch's judgment, the electoral payoff for members of Congress of constraining such initiatives might actually be negative. In other words, regardless of how explicit the grant of a constitutional role to Congress in foreign affairs might be, few members of Congress are willing to make the personal sacrifice for the greater institutional goal. Thus, unless a grand reformer is able to tweak the system and make congressional assertiveness an electorally palatable option in war powers, calls for greater congressional participation in war powers are likely to fall on deaf ears. Pg. 912-913

President will not abide. Congress will inevitably fall in line
Bell 4—Professor of Political Science @ Randolph-Macon College Lauren Cohen Bell, “Following the Leaders or Leading the Followers? The US President's Relations with Congress,” Journal of Legislative Studies, Summer/Autumn, 2004, Vol. 10 Issue 2/3, pg. 193-205

As noted ahove. Article I of the Constitution grants to the Congress the sole authority to make declarations of war. However, the president has the power to command US military personnel based on the provisions of Article II. Over the course of US history, the commander-in-chief power has been interpreted to permit presidents to commit troops to areas of conflict even in the absence of a formal declaration of war. Today, formal declarations of war are the exception rather than the rule; separation of powers expert Louis Fisher notes that through 1991 only five wars had ever been declared and that "in only one (the War of 1812) did members of Congress actually debate the merits of entering into hostilities'.'^ As Samuel Kemell and Gary Jacohson note: "SJince 1989 U.S. armed forces have been almost continuously engaged somewhere in the world.''^
This was not always the case. Fisher points out that there is evidence of presidential restraint with regard to war-making by relating the story of President Grover Cleveland (1885-89; 1893-97), who refused to mobilise troops for a conflict with Cuba despite Congress' intention to declare war. In Fisher's account, Cleveland told the Congress: 'I will not mobilize the army ... I happen to know that we can buy the island of Cuba from Spain for $100,000,000, and a war will cost vastly more than that and will entail another long list of pensioners. It would be an outrage to declare war.''^ Yet, in the modem history of presidential-congressional relations, it is much more frequently the president who has mobilised American troops without consultation with the Congress and in the absence of a formal declaration of war. And it is clear that even when we consider Cleveland's actions, the president has been far more important to the conduct of American foreign policy than the Congress.
This circumstance led, in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, to congressional passage of the War Powers Resolution in 1973. The War Powers Resolution (WPR) was an attempt to constrain presidential discretion with regard to committing troops oversees. Section 3 of the WPR requires that 'The president in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances".' Section 4 of the WPR gives the president 48 hours to provide a report to both Chambers of the Congress detailing the reason for committing troops, the authority under which he committed them and his prediction conceming the duration of the troops' engagement abroad.'^ Once the president has informed the Congress of the commitment of troops, and in the event that the Congress does not declare war, the WPR requires the president to end the engagement within 60 days, with the possibility of an additional 30 days' commitment in the event that the president certifies to the Congress that the additional time is necessary.^ According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the research branch of the Library of Congress, since the War Powers Resolution was enacted over President Richard M. Nixon's 1973 veto, it has been invoked on 107 occasions (to 23 July 2003).^' Figure 2 illustrates both the absolute number of times as well as the rate of each president's exercise of war powers. As Figure 2 demonstrates, the rate of War Powers Resolution uses has continually increased since it took effect in 1974.
A reading of the WPR would seem to clarify the relationship between Congress and the president with regard to the exercise of national war powers. A close reading would also suggest that the president and Congress share war-making power. Yet no president has ever recognised the WPR as a constraint on his ability to move American armed forces around the globe or keep them in place as long as necessary. Moreover, presidents rarely abide by the provisions of the Resolution that require their consultation with the Congress. As CRS researcher Richard F. Grimmett notes, 'there has been very little consultation with Congress under the Resolution when consultation is defined to mean seeking advice prior to a decision to introduce troops'.^" And while the Congress has, from time to time, expressed its sense that troops should be withdrawn from conflicts or engagements abroad, in truth the Congress has relatively few options for dealing with a president that violates the WPR. Indeed, as the late presidency scholar Aaron Wildavsky notes, the Congress is much less likely to challenge presidents" foreign policy actions than it is willing to challenge presidents" domestic policy actions.'^'^ This is because presidents oversee an enormous national security apparatus and because the constituents represented by members of Congress rarely hold strong opinions on matters of foreign policy. As a result, congressional challenges to violations of the WPR consist mostly of holding oversight hearings and passing symbolic resolutions.''* Moreover, once troops are committed abroad. Congress almost always falls in line with the president’s vision of the scope of the conflict and the need for a military presence. The members of Congress become reluctant to challenge a president who has troops on the ground and typically acquiesce to the president’s wishes when it comes to provisions for support. In this way, the president is able to exercise some leadership over the Congress, whose members generally find it politically expedient to follow the president on matters pertaining to the military or the conduct of America's relations with other countries. Pg. 200-202

The statutory language will be nonbinding.  It will do nothing
Fisher 97—Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers @ Congressional Research Service Louis Fisher, “ARTICLE: Presidential Independence and the Power of the Purse,” U.C. Davis Journal of International Law and Policy, Spring 1997,  3 U.C. Davis J. Int'l L. and Pol'y 107, Spring 1997

The shift of the war power from Congress to the President belies a core belief by the framers that each branch would protect its own prerogatives. They believed that a powerful dynamic of institutional self defense would safeguard the system of separation of powers.9 Instead, Congress repeatedly surrenders its powers to the President. Congress contributes to presidential independence by conferring substantial spending discretion by statute and by declining to challenge the growing customary spending discretion that Presidents assume. 92
While custom changes power and relationships, at least in the area of the war power, it does not change the Constitution. If Congress slept for decades and allowed President to singlehandedly commit the nation to war, and one day Congress awoke from its slumbers to pass legislation telling the President that he may not use funds for a pending military action, that is the end of it. The congressional action, no matter how late in the day, would prevail.
If we want to reestablish some of the fundamental principles established by the framers, several steps are necessary. For reasons that have both constitutional and practical dimensions, U.S. foreign policy must be conducted only with funds appropriated by Congress. Allowing the President to carry out foreign policy with private or foreign contributions would create a political system the framers feared most: the union of purse and sword. The framers deliberately separated those powers to protect individual liberties. Fusing the powers in today's world creates dangers far greater than in 1787. At the Iran-Contra hearings, Secretary of State George Shultz repudiated the idea of using nonappropriated funds for foreign policy: "You cannot spend funds that the Congress doesn't either authorize you to obtain or appropriate. That is what the Constitution says, and we have to stick with it." 93 The President may not spend funds "in the name of the United States except as appropriated by Congress. " 94
Members of Congress continue to use the power of the purse to direct the President in foreign affairs and war, but increasingly they exhibit a lack of institutional self-confidence. They do not function like a coequal branch. A greater number of legislators believe that the Constitution, whatever its original purpose, now gives the lion's share (if not the exclusive share) of foreign policy and the war power to the President. The result is statutory language and legislative histories that are conspicuously vague and contradictory. It is not unusual to see legislative principles expressed in nonbinding form, merely announcing the "sense" of Congress on a matter of national urgency.
Non-binding resolutions are not totally without effect. They at least can be cited as evidence that Congress has not completely acquiesced to presidential actions. 9 But if members of Congress want to participate in questions of war and peace on a coequal basis and with maximum effectiveness, they must do so through explicit statutory commands, not sense-of-Congress resolutions. The framers did not create Congress-the  first branch of government-to debate and release general, non-binding declarations. Nor is it consistent with the Constitution for executive officials to merely "consult" legislators before they act. The purpose of Congress is to authorize national policy, especially in military affairs.

Courts can’t block – congress will backlash
Vladeck 11—Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Scholarship @ American University Stephen I. Vladeck, “Why Klein (Still) Matters: Congressional Deception and the War on Terrorism,” Journal of National Security Law, Volume 5, 6/16/2011,  9:38 AM 

Six weeks later, Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT Act, which included a series of controversial revisions to immigration, surveillance, and other law enforcement authorities.34 But it would be over four years before Congress would again pass a key counterterrorism initiative, enacting the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA)35 after—and largely in response to—the Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.36 In the five years since, Congress had enacted a handful of additional antiterrorism measures, including the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006,37 as amended in 2009,38 the Protect America Act of 2007,39 and the 2008 amendments40 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, known in shorthand as the FAA.41 And yet, although Congress has spoken in these statutes both to the substantive authority for military commissions and to the scope of the government’s wiretapping and other surveillance powers, it has otherwise left some of the central debates in the war on terrorism completely unaddressed.42 Thus, Congress has not revisited the scope of the AUMF since September 18, 2001, even as substantial questions have been raised about whether the conflict has extended beyond that which Congress could reasonably be said to have authorized a decade ago.43 Nor has Congress intervened, despite repeated requests that it do so, to provide substantive, procedural, or evidentiary rules in the habeas litigation arising out of the military detention of noncitizen terrorism suspects at Guantánamo.44
As significantly, at the same time as Congress has left some of these key questions unanswered, it has also attempted to keep courts from answering them. Thus, the DTA and the MCA purported to divest the federal courts of jurisdiction over habeas petitions brought by individuals detained at Guantánamo and elsewhere.45 Moreover, the 2006 MCA precluded any lawsuit seeking collaterally to attack the proceedings of military commissions,46 along with “any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”47 And although the Supreme Court in Boumediene invalidated the habeas-stripping provision as applied to the Guantánamo detainees,48 the same language has been upheld as applied elsewhere,49 and the more general non-habeas jurisdiction-stripping section has been repeatedly enforced by the federal courts in other cases.50
Such legislative efforts to forestall judicial resolution of the merits can also be found in the telecom immunity provisions of the FAA,51 which provided that telecom companies could not be held liable for violations of the Telecommunications Act committed in conjunction with certain governmental surveillance programs.52 Thus, in addition to changing the underlying substantive law going forward, the FAA pretermitted a series of then-pending lawsuits against the telecom companies.53
Analogously, Congress has attempted to assert itself in the debate over civilian trials versus military commissions by barring the use of appropriated funds to try individuals held at Guantánamo in civilian courts,54 and by also barring the President from using such funds to transfer detainees into the United States for continuing detention or to other countries, as well.55 Rather than enact specific policies governing criteria for detention, treatment, and trial, Congress’s modus operandi throughout the past decade has been to effectuate policy indirectly by barring (or attempting to bar) other governmental actors from exercising their core authority, be it judicial review or executive discretion.
Wasserman views these developments as a period of what Professor Blasi described as “constitutional pathology,” typified by “an unusually serious challenge to one or more of the central norms of the constitutional regime.” Nevertheless, part of how Wasserman defends the “Klein vulnerable” provisions of the MCA and FAA is by concluding that the specific substantive results they effectuate can be achieved by Congress, and so Klein does not stand in the way. But if Redish and Pudelski’s reading of Klein is correct, then the fact that Congress could reach the same substantive results through other means is not dispositive of the validity of these measures. To the contrary, the question is whether any of these initiatives were impermissibly “deceptive,” such that Congress sought to “vest the federal courts with jurisdiction to adjudicate but simultaneously restrict the power of those courts to perform the adjudicatory function in the manner they deem appropriate.”56 pg. 257-259

Tournament: Bulldogdebates | Round: 2 | Opponent: James Madison Miller-Lepp | Judge: Nagy
1nc – disad 

Momentum preventing sanctions – Obama’s capital is key – bill would start a war with Iran
WEBER 1 – 30 – 14 senior editor at TheWeek.com Peter Weber, What sank the Senate's Iran sanctions bill? After Obama's State of the Union speech, it looks like Democrats are going to give peace a chance, after all, http://theweek.com/article/index/255771/what-sank-the-senates-iran-sanctions-bill
In mid-January it appeared that a bipartisan Senate bill threatening Iran with new sanctions was a foregone conclusion. Yes, President Obama opposed the legislation and promised to veto it, but supporters of the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act strongly hinted that they had a veto-proof majority — and with 59 senators (43 Republicans and 16 Democrats) co-sponsoring the bill, that seemed eminently plausible.
They would only need eight more votes (and action in the House) to thwart Obama's veto pen, and momentum appeared to be on their side.
If there is any momentum on the bill now, it's on the other side. Obama reiterated his veto threat in the very public setting of his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, saying that "for the sake of our national security, we must give diplomacy a chance to succeed." Jan. 20 marked the beginning of a six-month period of negotiations between the U.S., Iran, and five other world powers aimed at preventing Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.
The negotiations won't be easy, and "any long-term deal we agree to must be based on verifiable action," not trust, Obama said. But "if John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan could negotiate with the Soviet Union, then surely a strong and confident America can negotiate with less powerful adversaries today."
After the speech, at least four Democratic cosponsors — Sens. Chris Coons (Del.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), and Ben Cardin (Md.) — said they didn't want to vote on the bill while negotiations are ongoing. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) had already adopted that position earlier in the month.
The distance these cosponsors put between themselves and the bill wasn't uniform. Cardin punted to Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who is opposed to bringing the bill to the floor for a vote. (Cardin "wants to see negotiations with Iran succeed," a spokeswoman's said. "As for timing of the bill, it is and has always been up to the Majority Leader.")
Manchin, on the other hand, told MSNBC that he didn't sign on to the bill "with the intention that it would ever be voted upon or used upon while we were negotiating," but rather "to make sure the president had a hammer if he needed it." He added: "We've got to give peace a chance here."
With the list of Democratic cosponsors willing to vote for the bill shrinking by five, the dream of a veto-proof majority in the next six months appears to be dead. Even Republican supporters of the legislation are pessimistic of its chances: "Is there support to override a veto?" Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told National Journal on Wednesday. "I say, 'No.'"
So, what happened to the Iran sanctions bill? The short version: Time, pressure, and journalism.
The journalism category encompasses two points: First, reporters actually read the legislation, and it doesn't quite match up with the claims of lead sponsors Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who say the sanctions would only take effect if Iran was found to be negotiating in bad faith. A much-cited analysis by Edward Levine at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation showed that the Iran sanctions would kick in unless Obama certified a list of impossible or deal-breaking conditions.
Journalists also started asking the cosponsors about their intentions. It's possible there were never 59 votes for the bill, but the legislation was filed right before Christmas and many reporters (not unreasonably) conflated cosponsorship with support for the bill, regardless of what was happening with the negotiations. They only asked on Tuesday night and Wednesday because Obama brought up the issue in his State of the Union speech.
Time without action always saps momentum, but with the Iran sanctions bill it also allowed events to catch up with the proponents of new sanctions. When they filed the bill Dec. 20, the interim Iran deal was just a talking point; a month later it was reality. The Obama administration, U.S. intelligence community, and outside analysts agree that new sanctions would scuttle the deal, and its harder to take that risk when that deal is in effect.
Finally, critics of the bill — including the White House and J Street, the liberal pro-Israel lobbying group — had time to mount a counterattack. Starting Jan. 6, J Street and other groups opposed to the legislation "reached out to senators who were on the fence and senators who'd cosponsored on day one," says Slate's David Weigel. "The message was the same: Have you guys read this thing?" Dylan William, J Street's director of government relations, describes the strategy in more depth:
We made especially prodigious use of our grass tops activists. These are people who have longstanding relationships with members of Congress to express two things. One: The bill is bad policy. Two: There was no political reason that these senators should feel they need to support the bill. There is deep political support in communities for members of Congress and senators who want to reserve this peaceably. Slate
So take a bow, J Street — for now, the David of the Israel lobby has slain its Goliath, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is pushing for the legislation. That could all change if the interim Iran deal falls apart or some other event intercedes to change the equation for lawmakers. But momentum is hard to un-stall, and lawmakers are now considering changing the bill into a non-binding resolution.
John Judis at The New Republic is relieved, and counts Obama's veto threat Tuesday night as the boldest part of his speech. "If these negotiations with Iran fail, the United States will be left with very unsatisfactory alternatives," he writes:
Use military force to stop Iran, which might only delay Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and will potentially inflame the region in a new war, or allow Iran to go ahead and hope to contain Iran as we have contained other potentially hostile nuclear powers. Obama may not be able to secure authorization for the first alternative... and if he opts for the second, he will leave open the possibility of regional proliferation or of Israel going to war against Iran. It's in America's interest — and, incidentally, Israel's as well — to allow the current negotiations to take their course — without malignant interference from Congress and AIPAC. New Republic

It’s a war powers fight that Obama wins – but failure greenlights Israel strikes
Merry, 1/1/14 - Robert W. Merry, political editor of the National Interest, is the author of books on American history and foreign policy (Robert, “Obama may buck the Israel lobby on Iran” Washington Times, factiva)

Presidential press secretary Jay Carney uttered 10 words the other day that represent a major presidential challenge to the American Israel lobby and its friends on Capitol Hill. Referring to Senate legislation designed to force President Obama to expand economic sanctions on Iran under conditions the president opposes, Mr. Carney said: “If it were to pass, the president would veto it.”
For years, there has been an assumption in Washington that you can’t buck the powerful Israel lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, whose positions are nearly identical with the stated aims of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t like Mr. Obama’s recent overture to Iran, and neither does AIPAC. The result is the Senate legislation, which is similar to a measure already passed by the House.
With the veto threat, Mr. Obama has announced that he is prepared to buck the Israel lobby — and may even welcome the opportunity. It isn’t fair to suggest that everyone who thinks Mr. Obama’s overtures to Iran are ill-conceived or counterproductive is simply following the Israeli lobby’s talking points, but Israel’s supporters in this country are a major reason for the viability of the sanctions legislation the president is threatening to veto.
It is nearly impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Senate legislation is designed to sabotage Mr. Obama’s delicate negotiations with Iran (with the involvement also of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) over Iran’s nuclear program. The aim is to get Iran to forswear any acquisition of nuclear weapons in exchange for the reduction or elimination of current sanctions. Iran insists it has a right to enrich uranium at very small amounts, for peaceful purposes, and Mr. Obama seems willing to accept that Iranian position in the interest of a comprehensive agreement.
However, the Senate measure, sponsored by Sens. Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat; Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat; and Mark Kirk, Illinois Republican, would impose potent new sanctions if the final agreement accords Iran the right of peaceful enrichment. That probably would destroy Mr. Obama’s ability to reach an agreement. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani already is under pressure from his country’s hard-liners to abandon his own willingness to seek a deal. The Menendez-Schumer-Kirk measure would undercut him and put the hard-liners back in control.
Further, the legislation contains language that would commit the United States to military action on behalf of Israel if Israel initiates action against Iran. This language is cleverly worded, suggesting U.S. action should be triggered only if Israel acted in its “legitimate self-defense” and acknowledging “the law of the United States and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force,” but the language is stunning in its brazenness and represents, in the view of Andrew Sullivan, the prominent blogger, “an appalling new low in the Israeli government’s grip on the U.S. Congress.”
While noting the language would seem to be nonbinding, Mr. Sullivan adds that “it’s basically endorsing the principle of handing over American foreign policy on a matter as grave as war and peace to a foreign government, acting against international law, thousands of miles away.”
That brings us back to Mr. Obama’s veto threat. The American people have made clear through polls and abundant expression (especially during Mr. Obama’s flirtation earlier this year with military action against Bashar Assad’s Syrian regime) that they are sick and weary of American military adventures in the Middle East. They don’t think the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been worth the price, and they don’t want their country to engage in any other such wars.
That’s what the brewing confrontation between Mr. Obama and the Israel lobby comes down to — war and peace. Mr. Obama’s delicate negotiations with Iran, whatever their outcome, are designed to avert another U.S. war in the Middle East. The Menendez-Schumer-Kirk initiative is designed to kill that effort and cedes to Israel America’s war-making decision in matters involving Iran, which further increases the prospects for war. It’s not even an argument about whether the United States should come to Israel’s aid if our ally is under attack, but whether the decision to do so and when that might be necessary should be made in Jerusalem or Washington.
2014 will mark the 100th anniversary of beginning of World War I, a conflict triggered by entangling alliances that essentially gave the rulers of the Hapsburg Empire power that forced nation after nation into a war they didn’t want and cost the world as many as 20 million lives. Historians have warned since of the danger of nations delegating the power to take their people into war to other nations with very different interests.
AIPAC’s political power is substantial, but this is Washington power, the product of substantial campaign contributions and threats posed to re-election prospects. According to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website, Sens. Kirk, Menendez and Schumer each receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in pro-Israel PAC money and each of their states includes concentrations of pro-Israel voters who help elect and re-elect them.
Elsewhere in the country, AIPAC’s Washington power will collide with the country’s clear and powerful political sentiment against further U.S. adventurism in the Middle East, particularly one as fraught with as much danger and unintended consequence as a war with Iran. If the issue gets joined, as it appears that it will, Mr. Obama will see that it gets joined as a matter of war and peace. If the Menendez-Schumer-Kirk legislation clears Congress and faces a presidential veto, the war-and-peace issue could galvanize the American people as seldom before.
If that happens, the strongly held opinions of a democratic public are liable to overwhelm the mechanisms of Washington power, and the vaunted influence of the Israel lobby may be seen as being not quite what it has been cracked up to be.

Plan destroys Obama
Loomis 07 Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and Department of Government at Georgetown University Dr. Andrew J. Loomis, “Leveraging legitimacy in the crafting of U.S. foreign policy”, March 2, 2007, pg 36-37, http://citation.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/9/4/8/pages179487/p179487-36.php

Declining political authority encourages defection. American political analyst Norman Ornstein writes of the domestic context, In a system where a President has limited formal power, perception matters. The reputation for success—the belief by other political actors that even when he looks down, a president will find a way to pull out a victory—is the most valuable resource a chief executive can have. Conversely, the widespread belief that the Oval Office occupant is on the defensive, on the wane or without the ability to win under adversity can lead to disaster, as individual lawmakers calculate who will be on the winning side and negotiate accordingly. In simple terms, winners win and losers lose more often than not. Failure begets failure. In short, a president experiencing declining amounts of political capital has diminished capacity to advance his goals. As a result, political allies perceive a decreasing benefit in publicly tying themselves to the president, and an increasing benefit in allying with rising centers of authority. A president’s incapacity and his record of success are interlocked and reinforce each other. Incapacity leads to political failure, which reinforces perceptions of incapacity. This feedback loop accelerates decay both in leadership capacity and defection by key allies. The central point of this review of the presidential literature is that the sources of presidential influence—and thus their prospects for enjoying success in pursuing preferred foreign policies—go beyond the structural factors imbued by the Constitution. Presidential authority is affected by ideational resources in the form of public perceptions of legitimacy. The public offers and rescinds its support in accordance with normative trends and historical patterns, non-material sources of power that affects the character of U.S. policy, foreign and domestic. 

Global war
Reuveny, 10 – professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University (Rafael, “Unilateral strike could trigger World War III, global depression” Gazette Xtra,  8/7, - See more at: http://gazettextra.com/news/2010/aug/07/con-unilateral-strike-could-trigger-world-war-iii-/#sthash.ec4zqu8o.dpuf)

A unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would likely have dire consequences, including a regional war, global economic collapse and a major power clash.
For an Israeli campaign to succeed, it must be quick and decisive. This requires an attack that would be so overwhelming that Iran would not dare to respond in full force.
Such an outcome is extremely unlikely since the locations of some of Iran’s nuclear facilities are not fully known and known facilities are buried deep underground.
All of these widely spread facilities are shielded by elaborate air defense systems constructed not only by the Iranians but also the Chinese and, likely, the Russians as well.
By now, Iran has also built redundant command and control systems and nuclear facilities, developed early warning systems, acquired ballistic and cruise missiles and upgraded and enlarged its armed forces.
Because Iran is well-prepared, a single, conventional Israeli strike—or even numerous strikes—could not destroy all of its capabilities, giving Iran time to respond.
Unlike Iraq, whose nuclear program Israel destroyed in 1981, Iran has a second-strike capability comprised of a coalition of Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Hezbollah, Hamas, and, perhaps, Turkish forces. Internal pressure might compel Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority to join the assault, turning a bad situation into a regional war.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, at the apex of its power, Israel was saved from defeat by President Nixon’s shipment of weapons and planes. Today, Israel’s numerical inferiority is greater, and it faces more determined and better-equipped opponents. After years of futilely fighting Palestinian irregular armies, Israel has lost some of its perceived superiority—bolstering its enemies’ resolve.
Despite Israel’s touted defense systems, Iranian coalition missiles, armed forces, and terrorist attacks would likely wreak havoc on its enemy, leading to a prolonged tit-for-tat.
In the absence of massive U.S. assistance, Israel’s military resources may quickly dwindle, forcing it to use its alleged nuclear weapons, as it had reportedly almost done in 1973.
An Israeli nuclear attack would likely destroy most of Iran’s capabilities, but a crippled Iran and its coalition could still attack neighboring oil facilities, unleash global terrorism, plant mines in the Persian Gulf and impair maritime trade in the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
Middle Eastern oil shipments would likely slow to a trickle as production declines due to the war and insurance companies decide to drop their risky Middle Eastern clients. Iran and Venezuela would likely stop selling oil to the United States and Europe.
From there, things could deteriorate as they did in the 1930s. The world economy would head into a tailspin; international acrimony would rise; and Iraqi and Afghani citizens might fully turn on the United States, immediately requiring the deployment of more American troops.
Russia, China, Venezuela, and maybe Brazil and Turkey—all of which essentially support Iran—could be tempted to form an alliance and openly challenge the U.S. hegemony.
Russia and China might rearm their injured Iranian protege overnight, just as Nixon rearmed Israel, and threaten to intervene, just as the U.S.S.R. threatened to join Egypt and Syria in 1973. President Obama’s response would likely put U.S. forces on nuclear alert, replaying Nixon’s nightmarish scenario.
Iran may well feel duty-bound to respond to a unilateral attack by its Israeli archenemy, but it knows that it could not take on the United States head-to-head. In contrast, if the United States leads the attack, Iran’s response would likely be muted.
If Iran chooses to absorb an American-led strike, its allies would likely protest and send weapons but would probably not risk using force.
While no one has a crystal ball, leaders should be risk-averse when choosing war as a foreign policy tool. If attacking Iran is deemed necessary, Israel must wait for an American green light. A unilateral Israeli strike could ultimately spark World War III.

1nc – CP
Text: The United States federal government should not use drones for targeted killing except for when targeted killing is necessary for avoiding genocide 

Teson 11 (Fernando R., S.J.D., Northwestern University School of Law, 1987 LL.M., Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, 1982 J.D., Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1975Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University, "Targeted Killing in War and Peace: A Philosophical Analysis," April 30, 2011, www.elac.ox.ac.uk/downloads/tk20tesF3n20oup.pdf
Targeted killing in peacetime can only start to make moral sense if it is likely is to spare the lives of a significant number of innocent persons.7 In general, this happens when the targeted killing avoids war or a similar catastrophe such as genocide. Several examples come readily to mind; the most obvious is the morality of killing Hitler before the Second World War: arguably, that act would have spared the world terrible ordeals. Notice that killing Hitler in early 1939 would have been a targeted killing in peacetime. If the contemplated target, vile as he may be, is not threatening innocent lives, then he may not be permissibly killed; the default prohibition against murder resurfaces. Let’s set up two imaginary examples, both of which involve targeted killing in the form of assassinating a political leader. Genocide in Rhodelia: Rhodelia is ruled by Caligula, a vicious dictator who is perpetrating genocide8 against his own population. His neighbor, Freeland, is a liberal democracy with the military capability to stop the atrocities. The government of Freeland can do one of three things. It can do nothing; it can invade Rhodelia and fight a predictably successful war of humanitarian intervention; or it can kill Caligula and thus end the genocide. Let us assume that doing nothing is morally problematic. Invading Rhodelia to stop the atrocities, while predictably successful, will result in significant collateral deaths of civilians, 9 deaths of combatants on both sides, and physical destruction. However, sending a special operations team to kill Caligula will end his crimes and restore peace without any of these consequences. What should the government of Freeland do? Planned aggression in the Chosen Kingdom: King Vlad, a charismatic absolutist monarch with delusions of grandeur, rules over The Chosen Kingdom, a militarily powerful nation. Against his advisers’ best judgment, Vlad is planning a massive invasion of his neighbors, all liberal democracies, who are dreading the impending catastrophe. The government of Sunland, the most powerful of these democracies, is considering action. It can do three things: wait for the aggression and then react defensively; invade preemptively; or send a sniper to kill Vlad and predictably avoid the war. Again, the impending war is likely to have terrible costs in blood and treasure, whether started by the Kingdom or by Sunland’s preemptive strike. What should the government of Sunland do? These examples show why a blanket prohibition of targeted killing in peacetime is, on closer inspection, too quick. Moral considerations may favor targeted killing over war. Targeted killing, a prima facie immoral act, may appear as preferable because it will avoid genocide or war while placing the cost on a culpable person. Many people die in war. Those who bear arms to resist unjust attacks against themselves or others put their lives at risk for a just cause. Every one of those deaths is murder because inflicted by an unjust warrior.10 Importantly, war also brings about the incidental deaths of civilians. As is well known, this is a highly problematic aspect of war. One important pacifist objection is that any war, no matter how “clean,” will bring about the deaths of civilians. These persons have not given up their right to life, so starting a war that predictably will kill them is morally problematic, even if the country that initiates it has a just cause. Maybe this worry can be addressed by a properly formulated version of the doctrine of double effect, but the worry persists nonetheless, because even if one reluctantly thinks that bringing about those collateral deaths is permissible under the right circumstances, surely achieving the same results with no deaths is morally preferable. In the Rhodelia example, killing Caligula will save Caligula’s present victims, plus the innocent lives (both just combatants and civilians on both sides) that would be lost should Freeland decide to start a war. It will also avoid the terrible physical destruction that war typically causes. In the Chosen Kingdom example, killing Vlad would have similar effects: it would avoid the terrible losses that the impending aggression would cause. The difference between these two peacetime cases is that Caligula is not threatening his neighbors yet killing his own citizens, while Vlad is not killing its own citizens yet threatening its neighbors. 

1nc – kritik

The affirmative’s fear of the Cyborg and claim to “return” to being real humans once more presupposes a state of “human” that exists outside of the external forces that act upon us --- we have never been human, we are always already cyborg
Nordquist 10 (Michael Andrew, PhD in Philosophy @ University of Minnesota, February 2010, “Environmental Participation: Immanence, Cosmopolitics, and the Agency of Environmental Assemblages,” http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/59600/1/Nordquist_umn_0130E_10977.pdf)
Human action and human agency are only possible through the combination of nonhumans into what is understood as the human, and then only through ignoring all of the nonhuman entities that went into the process of making a human. Human bodies are the most obvious product of the process of nonhumans making and making possible the idea of the human being. The organs that constitute bodies, the biochemical processes that occur without consciousness, and the relations among all these parts and processes are all nonhuman entities that enable the figure of the human to be understood as a whole. Human skin, typically considered to be a container for our “internal” organs, physically connects bodies and their environments, exchanging air, water, and chemical compounds with whatever it comes into contact. The interconnection of these bodies with food, air, and water further attach “humans” to their environments through the literal combination of these “external” things with “internal” bodily processes. The many forms of material attachment to environments point not only to the differences among “humans,” but also to the ways in which people are radically transformed by the things they are attached to. The walker from the previous chapter with her shoes, street, laws, leg muscles, etc.—is radically different from a driver who, with an automobile and all of its attendant connections to laws, norms, and physical power, can accomplish a different set of things through her combination with them. A person who uses a cellular phone is not merely using a tool or technology to talk to someone around the planet, but he becomes something different, a network of attachments, material and otherwise, that transform a “human” into an entity that can do much more than simply “be human.” The driver is not a human being in an automobile, but is a car-street-law-mobility assemblage. The cell phone user is a communicating- wireless-electricity-phone company assemblage. The distinctively “human” things they are doing can only be accomplished through the enrollment of things that fall outside of the definition of human, such as phones, cars, and telephone companies. By detaching all of these “internal” and “external” connections that “human” life depends upon, it is easy to overlook and underestimate the role other-than-human entities play in everyday life. These are not tools we use to accomplish our pre- established goals or ranked preferences, but they modify us, what we want to do, and what we are capable of doing. Envisioning the human as a rights-bearing and reason- and language-using sentient being actively eliminates the environmental connections that a human being has. Thinking the human being as a universalizable norm necessarily cuts off these connections among entities that are integral aspects of their existences. As Latour notes, “no one can define in advance what a human being is, detached from what makes him sic be.”26 As noted earlier, just as we have never been modern according to Latour, we have also never been human, relying on the relations we have with the entities that enable us to do things that “the human” on its own is incapable of. Subsuming the variously connected and constituted human assemblages into a model of human existence radically transforms them into something they do not see themselves as and eliminates a particular set of environmental relations.27 As a concept open to contestation and disagreement, it is important to push the limits of these conceptual forms of a politics of cosmos to understand what exactly cosmopolitanism makes possible and what it cuts off. Just as Honig argues for an “agonistic cosmopolitics” in contrast to the “subsumptive normative cosmopolitanism” of neo-Kantians,28 I aim to make clear that these Kantian-inspired and human-based cosmopolitanisms need not be the only form that a politics of cosmos can take, and they are in fact rather limited, anthropocentric means of acting in a world. This is particularly the case when what it means to be human is constantly challenged and redefined through the infinite relations with entities that produce what we take to be humans.29

The aff portrays a Hollywood depiction of Terminator-esque drone-cyborgs that can only be remedied by a return to humanity --- instead, our alternative asks you to do the opposite --- vote negative to reject the 1AC’s distinction between human and cyborg and embrace the cyborg Other --- the aff’s forced separation risks recreating and masking hierarchal binaries perpetuating anthropocentricism, environmental destruction, and violence --- only our alternative solves the case by forcibly reexamining our own “monstrosity”
Corbett 09 (Austin Corbett, Journal of Evolution and Technology, “Beyond Ghost in the (Human) Shell,” Vol. 20, Issue 1 – March 2009 - pgs 43-50, http://jetpress.org/v20/corbett.htm)
This discourse of Techno-Orientalism, which placed Japan as the new home of the cyborg, failed to account for the differences in Western and Japanese depictions of the cyborg, particularly in the early 1990s. In Hollywood, the cyborg continued to be conceptualized along the same lines as it had been for a century, “male” and violently dominant, through characters such as Darth Vader, the Terminator, Robocop, and the Cybermen of Dr. Who. Furthermore, these cyborgs continued to be posited as ab-human, and the desirability of rejecting cyborgization was routinely brought to the forefront. In Japanese depictions, the nature of the cyborg as antithetical to humans is lost, replaced with a concern for the subjectivity of monstrosity and hybridity. Sharalyn Orbaugh links this to a “Frankenstein Syndrome”; like the monster, Japan is forced to recognize its “own ‘monstrosity’ vis-á-vis/within the discursive hegemony of the already developed nations of the West” (Orbaugh 2005, 62). These discursive streams regarding the cyborg coalesce as a politics and practice in Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Haraway’s cyborg is at once monstrous, multiple, contradictory, Western and Japanese, biological and mechanistic, male and female. It is universal, in the sense that “we are all cyborgs” (Haraway 1991, 150). Indeed, the mind seems to be hardwired for cyborgization; we write our memories down, build shelters, and reshape the fabric of the world around us (Clark 2003, 3). Haraway uses this conception of the cyborg to break drown traditional dichotomies and ontologies, much as the cyborg itself transgresses boundaries. By taking on the politics of the cyborg, we are liberated from “the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture” (Haraway 1991, 150). The cyborg “is a creature in a post-gender world” whose ontology skips any mythical link to nature or an “original unity” (150-51). The cyborg is “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” (151) or in other terms, Western capitalist and scientific progress. Haraway continues by linking her conception of the cyborg to the discursive streams mentioned earlier. The cyborg (like the Gothic monster) collapses the boundary between animal and human: “the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed” (Haraway 1991, 152). Similarly, it collapses the boundary between man and machine, a movement first visible in the creation of post-human cyborgs such as Astro Boy. Finally, and most importantly, Haraway links the figure of the cyborg to “The Informatics of Domination,” an historical process closely linked with neo-Marxist readings of contemporary capitalism, such as Hardt and Negri’s Empire. This conception is also closely linked to Foucault’s biopolitics, and his analysis of structures of power relations in the West. As the global economy moves from a “Disciplinary” society to a “Control” society, many important changes take place. Hierarchical structures of institutional domination, such as the factory, the hospital, etc., which previously reified gender roles, races, and class, are reduced to network structures of control which shape a free and hybrid flow of information. While other theorists focus on the political and economic ramifications of this late-capitalist “Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2000), Haraway focuses on the “coding of information” and biotechnology as cyborgian processes. “Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures” (Haraway 1991, 165). Just as the cyborg integrates human and machine, these networks integrate work and home; the Fordist factory economy is replaced by the Toyotaist, just-in-time contract-work model. Most importantly, just like the cyborg body itself, economies and nations are rendered permeable, mobile, hybrid and networked. It is in this simultaneity, between the world political economy and our cyborg bodies, that a liminal space can be opened up for contestation. Rather than reinscribing traditional dualisms and dichotomies, the cyborg collapses ontological distinctions, rendering them all vulnerable. By acting as “monsters” that define the limits (and conversely the center) of community, cyborgs can take on the responsibility of technology, rather than rejecting or being victimized by it. Cyborg politics is a politics of survival for people in a world for cyborgs. This brings us to Major Kusanagi Motoko, the main character of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Kusanagi leads a secret group of para-military police called Section 9 who specialize in investigating cyber-crime. She seems almost self-consciously over-determined to fit into Haraway’s conception of the cyborg. She embodies Haraway’s idea that “The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (Haraway 1991, 180). Several particular elements of her character should be highlighted. Her dress is particularly interesting, as she generally wears only a leotard, coat and boots. This dress, while seemingly provocative, is not sexualized by other characters in the narrative, and seems to imply a freedom from traditional conceptions of femininity. She is both overtly feminine, and clearly non-female. In the famous first scene of the film Ghost in the Shell, when she is told over her internal radio that she has a lot of static on the brain today, she responds, “Yeah, it’s that time of the month.” Of course, as a full cyborg, she does not menstruate; “the sexed body as reproductive body has no meaning – or, at least, should have no meaning – in her cyborg state” (Orbaugh 2005, 67). Other examples from the Stand Alone Complex TV series reinforce this strange link between the imagined, or remembered, body and the reality of life as a cyborg. In Episode 4, we learn that Batou continues to buy and use exercise equipment, even though as a cyborg, he does not need to work out. In other scenes, Batou and other members of the team consume “cyborg food,” artificial (and nutrionally empty) sandwiches designed merely to ease the realization that the cyborg body has no digestive functions. Unlike the cyborgs in the West, which seem completely ab-human, these cyborgs remain connected to biological experience. The ambivalent portrayal of Kusanagi’s femininity continues throughout the series, as we regularly see her push her own body past its limits, ripping her own arms off, jumping off buildings, and being shot and stabbed. She seems to embody the “partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment” (Haraway 1991, 180). She is always in control, ordering and orchestrating the other members of the team. She embodies many aspects of traditional masculinity, while also appearing stereotypically female. Similarly, Batou, her muscular second-in-command, is highly masculine yet he always defers to Kusanagi. “Both male and female cyborgs are thus visually exaggerated in order to account for the lack of substance they have to confront” (Kakoudaki 2000, 183). This lack of substance is the non-corporeal realm of cyberspace, which Kusanagi travels through with ease. In the action sequences which often end the episodes, she takes what Haraway (1991, 180) would call “Intense pleasure in skill.” She is also given the power to penetrate and override the identity of others, through her skill at cyber-brain hacking. This last skill is particularly troubling for Kusanagi, as she has trouble determining her own identity. As a full cyborg, she continually wrestles with the possibility that her entire identity may be fabricated, a position that seems to draw her closer to other full cyborgs such as Kuze Hideo in the second season of the TV series. Finally, Kusanagi also embodies the conflict implicit in a Harawayian cyborg, as she is quite clearly “illegitimate offspring.” Her position at Section 9 is generally uncertain, and twice in the series she leaves the organization to pursue her search for emergent life through the net. The differences between the TV series and the feature length films directed by Mamoru Oshii are numerous. The movies are a slow paced, introspective look at what it means to be human, in line with the “cyberpunk” genre. By contrast, the TV series can be considered an example of the “post-cyberpunk” genre, as it continues the exploration of cyborgization, personal identity, and Artificial Life, while expanding its scope to include the probable effects of these technological changes on society. The characters in Stand Alone Complex do far more to protect and improve the existing social order than they do in the films. The Tachikoma, or “think-tanks” also return in the TV series (they were omitted from the feature length films). The series goes to great lengths in exploring the emergent intelligence of these AIs.3 But in contrast to Hollywood portrayals which show AI as a vicious competitor and danger to humanity, the Tachikoma, like cyborgs, are treated very differently; although not human, they become Harawayian cyborgs. They gain intelligence throughout the first season, in large part due to the interference of Batou, who gives them “natural oil” and plays favourites. He encourages the tanks to develop a sense of individuality despite the limitations of their programming: they are designed to synchronize their experiences at the end of the day. Kusanagi at first rejects this developing intelligence as a weakness, dismantling the tanks and sending them back for repair, due in part to her own uncertain identity. Her identity as a human is closely tied in to her possession of a “ghost,” the spirit that is said to be the true source of identity and “personhood” in the show; the tanks, with their growing individuality based on purely artificial intelligence, seem to challenge this ideal. Reflecting her pragmatism, however, once the tanks prove their individuality is an asset at the end of the first season, she relents, granting them full individuality in the second season, through the use of a satellite that records their experiences and memories. The Tachikoma repay this, and become fully “human” in the last episode of the second season, when they sacrifice themselves to save the refugees from nuclear annihilation. As Kusanagi ponders eating an apple, and reasserting her own humanity, and as Batou asserts his humanity by trying to save Kusanagi, the Tachikoma sing: “It’s because we’re all alive that we are sad. When we raise our hands and let the sunlight filter through, we can see our blood coursing through them a vivid red.” The message is clear; they may have started as artificial intelligences, but like humans, and “Earthworms, mole crickets and water striders, they are all alive.” In other words, they “must have ghosts within” (Kamiyama 2002-2003, Episode 26). This theme of emergent life is further developed through the character of Kuze Hideo. Originally a member of the Individualist Eleven, a group of men infected by a virus that forces them to commit suicide and call for the removal of Asian refugees living in Japan, Kuze becomes the leader of these same refugees by the end of the second season. He is also a full cyborg since childhood, a fact that leads him to form his “revolution.” His character truly comes out in the last two episodes as he tells Kusanagi, that he feels “a disparity between my body and my mind.” Proclaiming that he wants to leave his body behind and sail on the net, he is beset by doubt, as his artificial face may express his “ghost.” In the end, though, like the Tachikoma, he wishes to evolve into a higher form, by incorporating and sustaining the memories and ghosts of the refugees who reside in his cyberbrain. Faced with imminent nuclear destruction, many of these refugees agree, wishing to be liberated from reality to live solely on the net. As Agamben highlights in Homo Sacer, these refugees are an example of “bare life,” life that “may be killed but not sacrificed” (Agamben 1998, 8). Invited by the Japanese government to fill a labor shortage, they have no rights and must live on a separate island. When they revolt, the government shows little compunction about shelling and attacking them, giving further impetus to Kuze Hideo’s goal. Their desire to escape this corporeal nightmare clearly connects with the liberatory and transhumanist impulses of Haraway’s cyborg (although obviously not the bodily aspects), and notably is completely different from a Hollywood interpretation, which would bring a return to “humanness,” through a re-integration of the refugees in Japanese society. Instead, after they are saved by the sacrifice of the Tachikoma, we learn that many died anyway, and the situation remains unresolved. The cyborg can no longer be considered a niche character, present only in science fiction or radical feminist theory.Stand Alone Complex takes pains on many levels to demonstrate how close to its vision of the future we already are. If we are all cyborgs, then a modern cyborg politics becomes a pressing concern. Kusanagi Motoko embodies much of this politics, not only through her literal cyborgization, but through her actions and her representation. But it is the character of Kuze Hideo, and the Tachikoma that take Haraway’s cyborg politics even further, celebrating life in many different forms, embracing a “personhood” theory (Hughes 2004). These characters radically open up Haraway’s vision of the cyborg, extending it in all directions to encompass new forms of life. As we create ever more complex lifeforms, whether genetically engineered, cyborg, artificially alive, or otherwise, it is these bioethical issues that will come to play a leading role. We should strive for a vision of the future that is realistic and optimistic, likeStand Alone Complex, rather than the destructive dystopias of Hollywood.

Our embrace of the absolute otherness of every Other is the only moral imperative and is critical to rupture violence
Introna 10 (Lucas, Professor of Organization, Technology, and Ethics @ Lancaster University, AI and Soc, 2010, Vol. 25, “The ‘Measure of a Man’ and the Ethos of Hospitality: Towards an Ethical Dwelling with Technology,” Pg. 93-102)
Instead of creating value systems in our own self-image, the absolute otherness of every Other should be the only moral imperative, so argues Levinas and Derrida. We need an ethics of the artificial that is beyond the self-identical of human beings. Such an ethics beyond anthropocentric metaphysics need as its ‘ground’, not a system for comparison, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of any comparison—every comparison is already violent in its attempt to render equal what could never be equal (Levinas 19911974). How might we encounter the other, ethically, in its otherness? This is what I will no turn to. 3 Hospitality as the ethics of a community that have nothing in common ‘‘Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos... ethics is hospitality; ethics is entirely coextensive with the experience of hospitality, whichever way one expands or limits that.’’—Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, p. 16–17. The fundamental problem for the android Data is that the question of the ethical, its imperative, is already colonised by humans. In this ethical landscape, it becomes impossible for Data to state his case unless it is made in human terms—terms such as ‘machine’, ‘property’, ‘sentience’, etc. It is us humans who are making the decisions about the validity, or not, of any criteria or category for establishing the ethical significance of a being. It is Data— and by extension all non-humans—that is on trial, not we humans. Our moral worth is taken for granted. As such we are the measure. For example we often take ‘sentience’ as criteria for considering moral significance or worth because we argue that it is a necessary condition for the feeling of pain (Singer 1977). Why should pain be a criterion for moral significance? Is it because we can feel pain? Are not all our often-suggested criteria such as originality, sentience, rationality, autonomy, and so forth, not somehow always already based on that which we humans by necessity comply with? Is not the essential criterion for moral worthiness (in most ethical thought) a being in our image, like us? Is our ethics not always an ethics of those with whom we have something in common? Obviously one can legitimately ask whether it is at all possible for us humans to escape our own moral prejudices—especially if we realise the intimate link between ethics and politics. Furthermore, it seems that every attempt one might have to define common inclusive ethical categories or criteria for all things will fail, as it already violates every entity by exactly denying that which is most significant—its radical otherness. Indeed, as was suggested, most attempts (even some radical environmental ethics) are mostly informed by the assumption that at some level we can indeed compare the incomparable—and, ultimately that the only legitimate reference point for such comparison is that which is in the image of the human Other. But what about the non-human Other, the inanimate, the artificial? What about the community of those with whom we have nothing in common? 2 There has been many attempts to define more inclusive ethical categories and values such as a biocentric ethics (Goodpaster 1978; Singer 1977), an ecocentric ethics (Leopold 1966; Naess 1995) or even an infocentric ethics by Floridi (2003). The non-human (inanimate) other One might suggest that, for us human beings, a wholly Other, that is indeed wholly Other, is the inanimate Other. In many respects, the destitute face of the human Other, in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas for example, is already in some sense a reflection of the human face opposite it. We can indeed substitute ourselves for the Other (become her hostage) because we can imagine—at least in some vague sense—what it must be like for the human Other to suffer violence because we suffer violence. It is possible for us to substitute ‘us for them’ because it could have been my friend, my child, my partner, etc.). As Husserl (1970/1929) argues, in his Cartesian Mediations, through empathy, ‘‘we project ourselves into the alien cultural community and its culture’’ (p. 135) in which the ‘‘the Other’’ exists ‘‘phenomenologically as a ‘modification’ of myself’’ (p. 115). Through empathy, our egos constitutes a ‘‘single universal community’’ of human intersubjectivity (p. 140)—a community with a common unity. As human beings, that also encounter ourselves as Other, we know that we always exceed and overflow the caricatures that the intentionality of consciousness endeavours to impose on us, that we are always infinitely more (or radically other) than any and all such caricatures. It is this infinity that Levinas points to when he claims ethics as ‘first philosophy.’ What about the inanimate Other? In his book Technology and Lifeworld Ihde (1990) argues for an extension of Levinas’ notion of alterity (or quasi-otherness) to inanimate things.3 He argues that the ‘religious object’ ‘‘does not simply ‘represent’ some absent power but is endowed with the sacred. Its aura of sacredness is spatially and temporally present within the range of its efficacy’’ (98). Ihde argues, however, that this quasi-otherness always remains in the domain of human invention. In other words, it is still within the realm of that which we humans bring to it—even if it is unintentional or not for instrumental purposes, hence his designation of the object as quasi-other. One might say it is plausible to see the religious object as an Other in some way (even if it is quasi-other) but what about everyday objects such as the table? I want to suggest with Harman (2002, 2005) that the table (and all other inanimate objects) are also infinitely other, always more than that which human intentionality brings to it. In Tool-Being Harman (2002) argues that even the table, in the fullness of its being, is infinite. Although the intentional acts of consciousness transform it by necessity into a caricature (into some form of present-at-hand being), such acts do not, and never can, exhaust it. As Harman (2002) suggests: ‘‘However, deeply we meditate on the table’s act of supporting solid weights, however, tenaciously we monitor its presence, any insight that is yielded will always be something quite distinct from this act of being itself’’ (22)—what he calls its tool-being. The table, here before me, is always more than all the perspectives, levels or layers that we can enumerate, more than all the uses we can put it to, more than all possible perspectives, levels, layers or uses. Harman (2002, 2005) argues that any and all possible relations between humans and things will inevitably fail to grasp them as they are; they are, in the fullness of their being, irreducible to any and all of these relations.4 In short: they are, in the fullness of their being, infinite and wholly Other. Indeed, as was suggested above, one might claim that they are in a sense more Other (if one can say this at all) than the human Other since we can never in any sense put ourselves ‘in their shoes,’ as it were. Thus, if the infinitely otherness of the Other is what compels us—puts our own right to existence into question, as Levinas argues—then we have no basis for excluding the inanimate Other from the kingdom of Others—even if Levinas did not arrive at this conclusion. His Other is always the humanistic, or ultimately, the theistic Other. This paper endeavours to go beyond this boundary, to forsake all boundaries, to enter into a community that have nothing in common (Lingis 1994). Is such a community possible? How is it is at all possible to approach the wholly Other, in any way whatsoever, without turning the Other into an image (or project) of the self (or the same). Differently stated: is it at all possible to be altruistic, wholly Other (Autrui) centred? Is there an ethic that takes the irreducible and wholly Other as its only imperative? To this question, Derrida responds with the aporia5 of hospitality (an ethics of hospitality one might say). 5 Ethics is hospitality According to Levinas (1996), it is the always already otherness of the Other is what moves ethics.
1nc – disad

Wartime will force Obama to resist and circumvent the plan.  The intractable battle creates a national diversion and impairs military wartime decisions
Lobel 8—Professor of Law @ University of Pittsburgh Jules Lobel, “Conflicts Between the Commander in Chief and Congress: Concurrent Power over the Conduct of War,” Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 69, 2008, pg. 391
The critical difficulty with a contextual approach is its inherent ambiguity and lack of clarity, which tends to sharply shift the balance of power in favor of a strong President acting in disregard of congressional will. For example, the application of the Feldman and Issacharoff test asking whether the congressional restriction makes realistic sense in the modern world would yield no coherent separation of powers answer if applied to the current Administration’s confrontation with Congress. It would undoubtedly embolden the President to ignore Congress’s strictures. The President’s advisors would argue that the McCain Amendment’s ban on cruel and inhumane treatment, or FISA’s requirement of a warrant, does not make realistic sense in the context of the contemporary realities of the war on terror in which we face a shadowy, ruthless nonstate enemy that has no respect for laws or civilized conduct, a conclusion hotly disputed by those opposed to the President’s policies. Focusing the debate over whether Congress has the power to control the treatment of detainees on the President’s claim that the modern realities of warfare require a particular approach will merge the separation of powers inquiry of who has the power with the political determination of what the policy ought to be. Such an approach is likely to encourage the President to ignore and violate legislative wartime enactments whenever he or she believes that a statute does not make realistic sense—that is, when it conflicts with a policy the President embraces. 53 The contextual approach has a “zone of twilight” quality that Justice Jackson suggested in Youngstown. 54 Often constitutional norms matter less than political realities—wartime reality often favors a strong President who will overwhelm both Congress and the courts. While it is certainly correct— as Jackson noted—that neither the Court nor the Constitution will preserve separation of powers where Congress is too politically weak to assert its authority, a fluid contextual approach is an invitation to Presidents to push beyond the constitutional boundaries of their powers and ignore legislative enactments that seek to restrict their wartime authority. Moreover, another substantial problem with a contextual approach in the war powers context is that the judiciary is unlikely to resolve the dispute. 55 The persistent refusal of the judiciary to adjudicate the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution strongly suggests that courts will often refuse to intervene to resolve disputes between the President and Congress over the constitutionality of a statute that a President claims impermissibly interferes with her conduct of an ongoing war. 56 This result leaves the political branches to engage in an intractable dispute over the statute’s constitutionality that saps the nation’s energy, diverts focus from the political issues in dispute, and endangers the rule of law. Additionally, in wartime it is often important for issues relating to the exercise of war powers to be resolved quickly. Prompt action is not usually the forte of the judiciary. If, however, a constitutional consensus exists or could be consolidated that Congress has the authority to check the President’s conduct of warfare, that consensus might help embolden future Congresses to assert their power. Such a consensus might also help prevent the crisis, chaos, and stalemate that may result when the two branches assert competing constitutional positions and, as a practical matter, judicial review is unavailable to resolve the dispute. Moreover, the adoption of a contextual, realist approach will undermine rather than aid the cooperation and compromise between the political branches that is so essential to success in wartime. In theory, an unclear, ambiguous division of power between the branches that leaves each branch uncertain of its legal authority could further compromise and cooperation. However, modern social science research suggests that the opposite occurs. 57 Each side in the dispute is likely to grasp onto aspects or factors within the ambiguous or complex reality to support its own self-serving position. This self-serving bias hardens each side’s position and allows the dispute to drag on, as has happened with the ongoing, unresolved dispute over the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. Pg. 407-409

That will undermine US deterrence
Newton 12—Professor of Law @ Vanderbilt University Michael A. Newton, “Inadvertent Implications of the War Powers Resolution,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Vol. 45, No. 1, 2012
The corollary to this modern reality, and the second of three inadvertent implications of the Resolution, is that our enemies now focus on American political will as the Achilles heel of our vast capabilities. Prior to the War Powers Resolution, President Eisenhower understood that it was necessary to "seek the cooperation of the Congress. Only with that can we give the reassurance needed to deter aggression." 62 President Clinton understood the importance of clear communication with the Congress and the American people in order to sustain the political legitimacy that is a vital element of modern military operations. Justifying his bombing of targets in Sudan, he argued that the "risks from inaction, to America and the world, would be far greater than action, for that would embolden our enemies, leaving their ability and their willingness to strike us intact."13 In his letter to Congress "consistent with the War Powers Resolution," the president reported that the strikes "were a necessary and proportionate response to the imminent threat of further terrorist attacks against U.S. personnel and facilities" and "were intended to prevent and deter additional attacks by a clearly identified terrorist threat."6 ' The following day, in a radio address to the nation, the president explained his decision to take military action, stating, "Our goals were to disrupt bin Laden's terrorist network and destroy elements of its infrastructure in Afghanistan and Sudan. And our goal was to destroy, in Sudan, the factory with which bin Laden's network gas."*6 Citing "compelling evidence that the bin Laden network was poised to strike at us again" and was seeking to acquire chemical weapons, the president declared that we simply could not ignore the threat posed, and hence ordered the strikes. 66 Similarly, President Clinton understood that intervention in Bosnia could not be successful absent some national consensus, which had been slow to form during the long Bosnian civil war.6 1
Secretary of State George Schultz provided perhaps the most poignant and pointed example of this truism in his testimony to Congress regarding the deployment of US Marines into Lebanon to separate the warring factions in 1982. On September 21, 1983, he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and provided a chilling premonition of the bombing that would come only one month later and kill 241 Americans, which was the bloodiest day in the Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima.6" Seeking to bolster legislative support and to better explain the strategic objectives, he explained that:
It is not the mission of our marines or of the Multinational Force in Lebanon as a whole to maintain the military balance in Lebanon by themselves. Nevertheless, their presence remains one crucial pillar of the structure of stability behind the legitimate Government of Lebanon, and an important weight in the scales.
To remove the marines would put both the Government and what we are trying to achieve in jeopardy. This is why our domestic controversy over the war powers has been so disturbing. Uncertainty about the American commitment can only weaken our effectiveness. Doubts about our staying power can only cause political aggressors to discount our presence or to intensify their attacks in hopes of hastening our departure.
An accommodation between the President and Congress to resolve this dispute will help dispel those doubts about our staying power and strengthen our political hand."  Pg. 189-190

That risks nuclear war. Deterrence prevents Kim Jong-Un from igniting the tinder box   
Kline 13—Comment Editor and Writer @ National Post Jesse Kline (Master of Journalism degree from the University of British Columbia), “Deterrence is the best way to prevent war with North Korea,” National Post, April 9, 2013, pg. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/04/09/jesse-kline-deterrence-is-the-best-way-to-prevent-war-with-north-korea/
Another day, another provocation from North Korea. Last week the reclusive regime threatened to launch a nuclear strike against the United States, blocked South Korean workers from entering the Kaesong industrial complex and evacuated the Russian and British embassies, warning Western diplomats the country could not ensure their safety in the event of war. This week, the North has reportedly moved missile launchers to its east coast and threatened to shut down the industrial complex it jointly operates with the South. On Tuesday it warned1 foreigners to get out of South Korea because of the threat of "thermonuclear war." This all sounds bad, but there's little reason to panic, so long as the Obama administration makes it abundantly clear that any act of war will result in the full might of the U.S. military bearing down on North Korea.
Ever since the Korean War ended in 1953, the Kim regime has been bringing the peninsula to the brink and then backing off once the international community agrees to concessions. This is especially true any time South Korea elects a new president or conducts war games with the United States—two events that have taken place in recent weeks.
Appeasement seemed like a viable option until it became apparent that the North was developing weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, constantly giving in to the North Koreans failed to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon and only encouraged the regime to continue playing games with the international community.
The North keeps playing these game because it works. By ratcheting up the rhetoric against the U.S. and South Korea, Kim Jong-Un is able to keep his population in a constant state of fear—always worried about the enemy at the gates. He is also able to shore up support from the military and justify spending money on defence instead of feeding the population, while pressuring the international community into giving aid to the cash-strapped country.
Kim Jong-Un is moving the world to the brink of war only because past experience has shown that he'll get something out of it. The truth is that there is very little chance of North Korea deliberately starting a conflict, as the regime is surely aware that it would be crushed by the American army in a head-to-head conflict.
The U.S. has put South Korea under its nuclear umbrella—i.e., a first strike against the South would trigger an American second strike. Barack Obama has also done a fairly good job of not showing weakness in the face of North Korean aggression by continuing joint war games with the South and flying nuclear-capable bombers to the peninsula. The only real threat of war occurs if either side trips up. And by preparing his forces for war, Kim Jong-Un has created a situation in which one wrong move by edgy soldiers guarding the demilitarized zone could ignite the tinder box.
Yet there is no reason to believe that standard deterrence mechanisms will not work in this situation. During the Cold War there was a very real threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it was prevented largely because of deterrence programs such as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Other nuclear-armed rivals such as India and Pakistan have also prevented war using the same principals.  Kim Jong-Un may appear crazy, but there's no indication that he has a death wish.
However, as former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger once said, "Deterrence requires a combination of power, the will to use it, and the assessment of these by the potential aggressor. Moreover, deterrence is the product of those factors and not the sum. If any one of them is zero, deterrence fails."
The North Koreans are betting that the American publicare in no mood for war, following Iraq and Afghanistan. And although war should be prevented at all costs, there probably would be support in the U.S. for the kind of fight the Americans are best at: Go in, kick ass and get out—nation building be damned. Flying B-2 bombers to Korea indicated that Washington was in no mood for games, but the announcement Sunday that the Pentagon will be delaying a planned missile test sends the opposite signal.
In order for deterrence to work, Washington has to be abundantly clear that any act of war will provoke a swift, and deadly, American response. And that any nuclear weapon—detonated anywhere in the world—using North Korean technology will result in Washington turning Pyongyang into a wasteland.
So long as Kim Jong-Un and his cronies believe there is a real and credible threat from the United States, there is very little to worry about. Cancelling planned displays of American firepower and not being explicit about U.S. support for countries such as South Korea and Japan, will only embolden North Korea—making the powder keg more likely to blow.
1nc – disad

Targeted killing is vital to prevent multiple types of nuclear and biological warfares --- it’s an existential risk
Beres 11—Louis René Beres, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue, Ph.D. from Princeton 2011, “Roundtable Discussion: Is the President Bound by International Law in the War Against Terrorism? A Ten-Year Retrospective: After Osama bin Laden: Assassination, Terrorism, War, and International Law,” 44 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 93, Lexis
Even after the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden, we are still left with the problem of demonstrating that assassination can be construed, at least under certain very limited circumstances, as an appropriate instance of anticipatory self-defense. Arguably, the enhanced permissibility of anticipatory self-defense that follows generally from the growing destructiveness of current weapons technologies in rogue hands may be paralleled by the enhanced permissibility of assassination as a particular strategy of preemption. Indeed, where assassination as anticipatory self-defense may actually prevent a nuclear or other highly destructive form of warfare, reasonableness dictates that it could represent distinctly, even especially, law-enforcing behavior. For this to be the case, a number of particular conditions would need to be satisfied. First, the assassination itself would have to be limited to the greatest extent possible to those authoritative persons in the prospective attacking state. Second, the assassination would have to conform to all of the settled rules of warfare as they concern discrimination, proportionality, and military necessity. Third, the assassination would need to follow intelligence assessments that point, beyond a reasonable doubt, to preparations for unconventional or other forms of highly destructive warfare within the intended victim's state. Fourth, the assassination would need to be founded upon carefully calculated judgments that it would, in fact, prevent the intended aggression, and that it would do so with substantially less harm *114 to civilian populations than would all of the alternative forms of anticipatory self-defense. Such an argument may appear manipulative and dangerous; permitting states to engage in what is normally illegal behavior under the convenient pretext of anticipatory self-defense. Yet, any blanket prohibition of assassination under international law could produce even greater harm, compelling threatened states to resort to large-scale warfare that could otherwise be avoided. Although it would surely be the best of all possible worlds if international legal norms could always be upheld without resort to assassination as anticipatory self-defense, the persisting dynamics of a decentralized system of international law may sometimes still require extraordinary methods of law-enforcement. n71 Let us suppose, for example, that a particular state determines that another state is planning a nuclear or chemical surprise attack upon its population centers. We may suppose, also, that carefully constructed intelligence assessments reveal that the assassination of selected key figures (or, perhaps, just one leadership figure) could prevent such an attack altogether. Balancing the expected harms of the principal alternative courses of action (assassination/no surprise attack v. no assassination/surprise attack), the selection of preemptive assassination could prove reasonable, life-saving, and cost-effective. What of another, more common form of anticipatory self-defense? Might a conventional military strike against the prospective attacker's nuclear, biological or chemical weapons launchers and/or storage sites prove even more reasonable and cost-effective? A persuasive answer inevitably depends upon the particular tactical and strategic circumstances of the moment, and on the precise way in which these particular circumstances are configured. But it is entirely conceivable that conventional military forms of preemption would generate tangibly greater harms than assassination, and possibly with no greater defensive benefit. This suggests that assassination should not be dismissed out of hand in all circumstances as a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense under international law. *115 What of those circumstances in which the threat to particular states would not involve higher-order (WMD) n72 military attacks? Could assassination also represent a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense under these circumstances? Subject to the above-stated conditions, the answer might still be "yes." The threat of chemical, biological or nuclear attack may surely enhance the legality of assassination as preemption, but it is by no means an essential precondition. A conventional military attack might still, after all, be enormously, even existentially, destructive. n73 Moreover, it could be followed, in certain circumstances, by unconventional attacks.

Independently key to Afghanistan stability post-withdrawal
Byman 13—Daniel Byman is a Professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution “Why Drones Work,” Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug2013, Vol. 92 Issue 4, p. 32-43, EBSCO
In places where terrorists are actively plotting against the United States, however, drones give Washington the ability to limit its military commitments abroad while keeping Americans safe. Afghanistan, for example, could again become a Taliban-run haven for terrorists after U.S. forces depart next year. Drones can greatly reduce the risk of this happening. Hovering in the skies above, they can keep Taliban leaders on the run and hinder al Qaeda's ability to plot another 9/11.

Extinction
James Jay Carafano 10 is a senior research fellow for national security at The Heritage Foundation and directs its Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, “Con: Obama must win fast in Afghanistan or risk new wars across the globe,” Jan 2 http://gazettextra.com/news/2010/jan/02/con-obama-must-win-fast-afghanistan-or-risk-new-wa/
We can expect similar results if Obama’s Afghan strategy fails and he opts to cut and run. Most forget that throwing South Vietnam to the wolves made the world a far more dangerous place. The Soviets saw it as an unmistakable sign that America was in decline. They abetted military incursions in Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and Latin America. They went on a conventional- and nuclear-arms spending spree. They stockpiled enough smallpox and anthrax to kill the world several times over. State-sponsorship of terrorism came into fashion. Osama bin Laden called America a “paper tiger.” If we live down to that moniker in Afghanistan, odds are the world will get a lot less safe. Al-Qaida would be back in the game. Regional terrorists would go after both Pakistan and India—potentially triggering a nuclear war between the two countries. Sensing a Washington in retreat, Iran and North Korea could shift their nuclear programs into overdrive, hoping to save their failing economies by selling their nuclear weapons and technologies to all comers. Their nervous neighbors would want nuclear arms of their own. The resulting nuclear arms race could be far more dangerous than the Cold War’s two-bloc standoff. With multiple, independent, nuclear powers cautiously eyeing one another, the world would look a lot more like Europe in 1914, when precarious shifting alliances snowballed into a very big, tragic war. The list goes on. There is no question that countries such as Russia, China and Venezuela would rethink their strategic calculus as well. That could produce all kinds of serious regional challenges for the United States. Our allies might rethink things as well. Australia has already hiked its defense spending because it can’t be sure the United States will remain a responsible security partner. NATO might well fall apart. Europe could be left with only a puny EU military force incapable of defending the interests of its nations.
1nc – cyborgs adv.

The idea drones result in a desensitization toward death is wrong—all war requires some distancing, drones are just the best option
Anderson 13—Kenneth, Professor of International Law at American University May 24, 2013, “The Case for Drones,” Commentary Magazine, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/24/the_case_for_drones_118548.html
The most offensively foolish (though endlessly repeated) objection raised against drones was the one made by Jane Mayer in her influential 2009 New Yorker article, “The Predator War”: that drone pilots are so distant from their targets that they encourage a “push-button,” video-game mentality toward killing. The professional military find the claim bizarre, and it fails to take into account the other kinds of weapons and platforms in use. Note, the pilot of a manned craft is often thousands of feet away and a mile above a target looking at a tiny coordinates screen. And what of the sailor, deep in the below-decks of a ship, or a submarine, firing a cruise missile with no awareness of any kind about the target hundreds of miles away?
For that matter, the common perception of drones as a sci-fi combination of total surveillance and complete discretion in where and when to strike is simply wrong. The drone pilot might sit in Nevada, but the drone itself has a limited range, requires an airstrip, fuel, repairs, and 200 or so personnel to keep it in the air. All this physical infrastructure must be close to the theater of operations. Stress rates among drone pilots are at least as high as those of manned aircraft pilots; they are far from having a desensitized attitude toward killing. This appears to be partially because these are not mere combat operations but fundamentally and primarily intelligence operations. Drone pilots engaged in targeted killing operations watch their targets from a very personal distance via sensor technology, through which they track intimate, daily patterns of life to gather information and, perhaps, to determine precisely the best moment to strike, when collateral damage might be least.
As one drone operator told me, it is not as if one sees the terrible things the target is engaged in doing that made him a target in the first place; instead, it feels, after a few weeks of observation, as though you are killing your neighbor.
In any case, the mentality of drone pilots in targeted-killing ops is irrelevant to firing decisions; they do not make decisions to fire weapons. The very existence of a remote platform, one with long loiter times and maximum tactical surveillance, enables decisions to fire by committee. And deliberately so, notes Gregory McNeal, a professor of law at Pepperdine University, who has put together the most complete study of the still largely secret decision-making process—the so-called disposition lists and kill matrix the New York Times has described in front page stories. It starts from the assessment of intelligence through meetings in which determinations, including layers of legal review, are made about whether a potential target has sufficient value and, finally, whether and when to fire the weapon in real time. The drone pilot is just a pilot.
Targeting is therefore a bureaucratized process that necessarily relies on judgment and estimations of many uncertainties. Its discretionary and bloodless nature alarms critics, as does its bureaucratic regularization. Yet it is essential to understand, as McNeal observes, that this is not fundamentally different from any other process of targeting that takes place in conventional war, save that it seeks to pinpoint the targets. Conventional war targeting, by contrast, seeks not individuals, but merely formations of hostile forces as groups. In either case, targeting is inherently intelligence-driven and a highly organized activity, whether in the military or across the broader national-security agencies.
Concerns about the nature of the warfare itself leads to a sharing and checking of that discretion among actors; in turn, this leads to committees’ making decisions; and by the time this process of bureaucratic rationalization is complete, it looks like military targeting processes in conventional war, with an extra dollop of intelligence assessments, not some mysterious Star Chamber assassination committee. After all, any group of generals deciding where to hit the enemy in war is, by definition, a “kill list” committee.

They don’t solve their Wilcox internal link --- they don’t restrict the visual capabilities of the US because we still have satellite monitoring capabilities, airship radars, and surveillance drones because the aff only restricts drones for targeted killing

Turn—Drone distancing is good—battlefield pressure makes soldiers more likely to commit unethical actions and demonize the enemy—removal from the field of battle causes restraint
Holmes 13—Stephen Holmes, the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University School of Law July 2013, “What’s in it for Obama?” The London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/stephen-holmes/whats-in-it-for-obama
But Obama can make an even subtler case for drones. Well-meaning but imperfectly informed critics sometimes claim that the absence of risk to US forces explains the recklessness with which American drone operators kill combatants and noncombatants alike. Mazzetti quotes, in this context, Richard Clarke’s comment on the routinisation of asymmetry in drone warfare: ‘if the Predator gets shot down, the pilot goes home and fucks his wife. It’s OK. There’s no POW issue here.’ That noncombatants are regularly killed by pilots of unmanned aircraft sticking to their routines is widely acknowledged. But does it make sense to argue that such documented overkill results from the absence of risk to the pilots’ own lives and limbs? Obama and his supporters, rightly in my view, dismiss this line of attack as theoretically confused and empirically unproven. For one thing, the stress, panic and fear experienced on combat missions can easily increase rather than decrease the number of mistaken hair-trigger strikes on noncombatants. Reckless endangering of civilians results more often from heat-of-battle fear than from above-the-battle serenity. The drone operator is freed from the pressures of kill or be killed that can easily distort interpretations of what one sees, or thinks one sees, on the battlefield. The faux cockpits from which drones are remotely piloted are unlikely to be commandeered by berserkers.
An even more powerful, if still flawed, argument in favour of Obama’s campaign is the way heavy losses in any war can subconsciously put pressure on civilian politicians to inflate irrationally the aims of the conflict in order to align them with the sacrifices being made. War aims are not fixed ex ante but are constantly evolving for the simple reason that war is essentially opportunistic. Initial objectives that prove unrealistic are discarded as new opportunities emerge. Far from inducing greater caution in the use of force, heavy losses of one’s own troops may exacerbate a tendency to demonise the enemy and to hype the goals of the struggle.
Formulated more abstractly, the way we fight has a marked impact on when and why we fight. This is true despite what experts in the laws of war tell us about a theoretically watertight separation between jus in bello and jus ad bellum. Fighting in a way that limits the risk to one’s own troops makes it possible to fight limited-aims wars that don’t spiral into all-out wars for national survival. This, I think, is Obama’s best case for drone warfare. Land wars are ‘dumb’ because they almost inevitably involve mission creep as well as postwar responsibilities that US forces are poorly equipped to assume. Drone warfare is smart because, while helping dismantle terrorist organisations and disrupt terrorist plots, it involves less commitment on the American side, and is therefore much less likely to escalate out of control.

Distancing isn’t the internal link to masculinized violence—they are historically inaccurate
Ken BOOTH IR @ Aberystwyth 7 Theory of World Security p. 120-122
One of the dangers I want to warn against in this discussion is of flawed reasoning about the past and its embedding into regressive myths." Giving in to such dangers will obscure the real achievements of human society, and in so doing will contribute to subverting a politics of hope - an essential collective resource.62 With this in mind, a defence of progress must engage with the myth that elides Enlightenment and totalitarianism. One place to start is the influential attack made on the Enlightenment's ostensible dark side from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who in the late 1980s equated the Holocaust with modernity: 'The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a Problem of that society, civilization and culture.'63 Bauman went on to interpret the mass slaughter of Jews by Nazi Germany not as a shocking event completely alien to the sensibility of the Enlightenment, but as an integral part of it. His argument was that key features of what he described (vaguely) as 'modernity' were essential to the Holocaust. In Nazi Germany, reason and rationality combined with bureaucratic record-keeping and modern technology to construct the bureaucratisa- tion of mass murder. History records that politically or racially motivated slaughter, regardless of the perpetrator, is committed with the technology at hand. So it was with the ethnic cleansing of the '500 nations' on the western frontier by the US cavalry and their repeating rifles in the nineteenth century; and so it was, more recently, in the genocidal attacks on the Tut- sis in Rwanda in 1994 by the machetes of the genocidairesY4 The Nazis also used what was at hand. At the beginning of the Second World  War Jews were massacred in pre-industrial ways, as in Kovno at the end of June 1941, where thousands were beaten to death," here and elsewhere, racist killing took place in ways that were neither bureaucratic nor technological." Before 1939 exile had been the chosen way of dealing with 'the Jewish problem', not extermination ,ó Even when the system of death-camps was functioning at the maximum, the tour- denng of Jews continued by other means. Bureaucratic and industrial slaughter were not necessary features of genocide under what is called 'modernity', though the\ did become emblematic. Other genocides have not conformed to Nazi industrial modalities, and they are unlikely to. Historical specifics are crucial to such behaviour. 68 The role of anti-Semitism in German history was central to what happened. Bauman's thesis shifted the blame for the increasingly shameful treatment of the Jews (and other victims of the camps) away from the focus on Nazi racist ideology and the history of anti-Semitism in Germany, to a general criticism of the problems of rational modern society. His book was well received in Germany when it first came out, in con- trast to that by Daniel Jonah Goidhagen. Hitler's Willing Executioners. Ordinor. G. and the Holocaust` was not a title to win friends in Germany, however much the country had char aed over the half-century since the l9iJs/40s. What the Willing Exec did importantly insist upon was the centrality in any account of the lolocaust of giving due weight to historical specifics, particularly the strength of anti-Semitism in Germany and the unfolding momentum of events after 1933. In the interwar years, according to Goldhagen, 'the German people were more dangerously oriented towards Jews than they had been during any other time since the dawn of modernity', and this fed 'eliminationist  antisemitism'/0 If the soil for the brutal treatment of the Jews was fer-' tile, the extent to which eliminationist views were able to grow has to be understood in relation to the momentum of events, and especially the course of the war. Once war had broken out, in 1939, the earlier policies adopted by the Nazis for dealing with their Jewish problem -- notably their expulsion from the Reich were no longer possible. A different solution had to be found, and possibilities opened up after 1941, when total victory over the Soviet Union appeared likely, and created the space to conceive the final solution. 71 To emphasise historical specificity (in the manner of the historian Goidhagen) rather than sweeping explanations such as 'modernity' (in the manner of the sociologist Bauman) inevitably draws attention to the site of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany. No false conclusions should be drawn from this about 'Germans', however. Prime, Levi, with the authority of the victim, made this point, arguing that the historical speci- ficity of the Holocaust should never become an excuse to stereotype all Germans or all German history72 It was certainly not the case that all Germans, nor all those from other nations living in Nazi-dominated Europe, became clones of Adolf Eichmann, despite the pressures to conform. The names of Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and Mies Giep are famous among those recognised as Righteous 'Among the Nations' in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Thou- sands of other rescuers, not remembered, 'did what we had to do' as one said.73 Among political communities under Nazi domination dur- ing the Second World War, Bulgaria was notable for its efforts to resist the deportation of its Jews. In June 1943 the German Ambassador to Sofia (Adolf-I-leinz Beckerle) lamented that the Bulgarian people 'lacked the ideological enlightenment that we have', and that the Bulgarian man in the street 'does not see in the Jews any flaws justifying taking spe- cial measures against them'. When Beckerle was on trial in 1948 for wartime crimes, the defence lawyers noted that in Bulgaria there was no anti-Semitism in the conventional sense of the word' In pointing  Security, emancipation, community out the historical specificity of the Bulgarian rescuers, these German jurists were inadvertently underlining the historical specificity of the Nazi perpetrators The intoxicating brew of Teutonic romanticism and racism in Nazi ideology as it developed in the interwar years sought to abolish the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and solidarity. The persecution and attempted destruction of the Jews (and other targets) represented a complete rejection of the Enlightenment's spirit of tolerance, rights, and democracy. The emancipation of Jews had been an important manifesta- tion of enlightened politics in the nineteenth century, with anti-Semitism being what Bronner called 'the philosophy of those who choose to think with their gut'. Such bigotry always stood, he said, in 'inverse relation to the support for Enlightenment ideals' .75 Nazi propaganda played on medieval (pre-Enlightenment) mythology, while from the beginning their politics and laws - contrary to Enlightenment sensibility - crushed tolerance and embedded racial discrimination. It is therefore difficult to understand why, in trying to explain the Holocaust, Enlightenment critics give such priority to the Nazi culture of bureaucratic efficiency (involving practices more or less shared with other industrialised states) as opposed to the Nazi negation of the Enlightenment's core values (which it shared only with other fascist regimes). The argument that the Holocaust was a 'legitimate resident' in the 'house of modernity', as Bauman claimed, is as flawed as it has been influential .7' The most one can say in defence of Bauman's thesis is that if 'modernity' was doing any work at all as an explanatory factor, its impact was very uneven. Given the universal horror (with the exception of those belonging to the disagreeable rump of Holocaust deniers) that greeted, and con- tinues to greet, the emblematic image of Auschwitz, it is fanciful of sociologists such as Bauman to regard the Holocaust a 'legitimate resident' of the house of modernity. If it was so, how is its uniqueness to be explained? Why have other societies, fellow residents in the house of modernity, resisted engineering industrial-scale genocide against despised minorities? Why have they instead committed themselves to the promotion of human rights (if not always consistently their practice)?
1nc – casualties adv.

Drones are ethically the best option.  They reduce civilian casualties and raise the bar for ethical warfare
Shane 12—Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times July 15, 2012, “The Moral Case For Drones,” The New York Times, Lexis
FOR streamlined, unmanned aircraft, drones carry a lot of baggage these days, along with their Hellfire missiles. Some people find the very notion of killer robots deeply disturbing. Their lethal operations inside sovereign countries that are not at war with the United States raise contentious legal questions. They have become a radicalizing force in some Muslim countries. And proliferation will inevitably put them in the hands of odious regimes.
But most critics of the Obama administration's aggressive use of drones for targeted killing have focused on evidence that they are unintentionally killing innocent civilians. From the desolate tribal regions of Pakistan have come heartbreaking tales of families wiped out by mistake and of children as collateral damage in the campaign against Al Qaeda. And there are serious questions about whether American officials have understated civilian deaths.
So it may be a surprise to find that some moral philosophers, political scientists and weapons specialists believe armed, unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare.
''I had ethical doubts and concerns when I started looking into this,'' said Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School. But after a concentrated study of remotely piloted vehicles, he said, he concluded that using them to go after terrorists not only was ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory, because of their advantages in identifying targets and striking with precision.
''You have to start by asking, as for any military action, is the cause just?'' Mr. Strawser said. But for extremists who are indeed plotting violence against innocents, he said, ''all the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.''
Since drone operators can view a target for hours or days in advance of a strike, they can identify terrorists more accurately than ground troops or conventional pilots. They are able to time a strike when innocents are not nearby and can even divert a missile after firing if, say, a child wanders into range.
Clearly, those advantages have not always been used competently or humanely; like any other weapon, armed drones can be used recklessly or on the basis of flawed intelligence. If an operator targets the wrong house, innocents will die.
Moreover, any analysis of actual results from the Central Intelligence Agency's strikes in Pakistan, which has become the world's unwilling test ground for the new weapon, is hampered by secrecy and wildly varying casualty reports. But one rough comparison has found that even if the highest estimates of collateral deaths are accurate, the drones kill fewer civilians than other modes of warfare.
AVERY PLAW, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, put the C.I.A. drone record in Pakistan up against the ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths in other settings. Mr. Plaw considered four studies of drone deaths in Pakistan that estimated the proportion of civilian victims at 4 percent, 6 percent, 17 percent and 20 percent respectively.
But even the high-end count of 20 percent was considerably lower than the rate in other settings, he found. When the Pakistani Army went after militants in the tribal area on the ground, civilians were 46 percent of those killed. In Israel's targeted killings of militants from Hamas and other groups, using a range of weapons from bombs to missile strikes, the collateral death rate was 41 percent, according to an Israeli human rights group.
In conventional military conflicts over the last two decades, he found that estimates of civilian deaths ranged from about 33 percent to more than 80 percent of all deaths.
Mr. Plaw acknowledged the limitations of such comparisons, which mix different kinds of warfare. But he concluded, ''A fair-minded evaluation of the best data we have available suggests that the drone program compares favorably with similar operations and contemporary armed conflict more generally.''
By the count of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, which has done perhaps the most detailed and skeptical study of the strikes, the C.I.A. operators are improving their performance. The bureau has documented a notable drop in the civilian proportion of drone casualties, to 16 percent of those killed in 2011 from 28 percent in 2008. This year, by the bureau's count, just three of the 152 people killed in drone strikes through July 7 were civilians.
The drone's promise of precision killing and perfect safety for operators is so seductive, in fact, that some scholars have raised a different moral question: Do drones threaten to lower the threshold for lethal violence?
''In the just-war tradition, there's the notion that you only wage war as a last resort,'' said Daniel R. Brunstetter, a political scientist at the University of California at Irvine who fears that drones are becoming ''a default strategy to be used almost anywhere.''
With hundreds of terrorist suspects killed under President Obama and just one taken into custody overseas, some question whether drones have become not a more precise alternative to bombing but a convenient substitute for capture. If so, drones may actually be encouraging unnecessary killing.
Few imagined such debates in 2000, when American security officials first began to think about arming the Predator surveillance drone, with which they had spotted Osama bin Laden at his Afghanistan base, said Henry A. Crumpton, then deputy chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, who tells the story in his recent memoir, ''The Art of Intelligence.''
''We never said, 'Let's build a more humane weapon,' '' Mr. Crumpton said. ''We said, 'Let's be as precise as possible, because that's our mission -- to kill Bin Laden and the people right around him.' ''
Since then, Mr. Crumpton said, the drone war has prompted an intense focus on civilian casualties, which in a YouTube world have become harder to hide. He argues that technological change is producing a growing intolerance for the routine slaughter of earlier wars.
''Look at the firebombing of Dresden, and compare what we're doing today,'' Mr. Crumpton said. ''The public's expectations have been raised dramatically around the world, and that's good news.''

Civilian casualty claims are overstated and rapidly declining—best research proves
Cohen 13—Michael A Cohen, regular columnist for the Guardian and Observer on US politics, he is also a fellow of the Century Foundation May 23, 2013, “Give President Obama a chance: there is a role for drones,” The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/23/obama-drone-speech-use-justified
Drone critics have a much different take. They are passionate in their conviction that US drones are indiscriminately killing and terrorizing civilians. The Guardian's own Glenn Greenwald argued recently that no "minimally rational person" can defend "Obama's drone kills on the ground that they are killing The Terrorists or that civilian deaths are rare". Conor Friedersdorf, an editor at the Atlantic and a vocal drone critic, wrote last year that liberals should not vote for President Obama's re-election because of the drone campaign, which he claimed "kills hundreds of innocents, including children," "terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis" and "makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels".
I disagree. Increasingly it appears that arguments like Friedersdorf makes are no longer sustainable (and there's real question if they ever were). Not only have drone strikes decreased, but so too have the number of civilians killed—and dramatically so.
This conclusion comes not from Obama administration apologists but rather, Chris Woods, whose research has served as the empirical basis for the harshest attacks on the Obama Administration's drone policy.
Woods heads the covert war program for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), which maintains one of three major databases tabulating civilian casualties from US drone strikes. The others are the Long War Journal and the New America Foundation (full disclosure: I used to be a fellow there). While LWJ and NAJ estimate that drone strikes in Pakistan have killed somewhere between 140 and 300 civilians, TBIJ utilizes a far broader classification for civilians killed, resulting in estimates of somewhere between 411-884 civilians killed by drones in Pakistan. The wide range of numbers here speaks to the extraordinary challenge in tabulating civilian death rates.
There is little local reporting done on the ground in northwest Pakistan, which is the epicenter of the US drone program. As a result data collection is reliant on Pakistani news reporting, which is also dependent on Pakistani intelligence, which has a vested interest in playing up the negative consequences of US drones.
When I spoke with Woods last month, he said that a fairly clear pattern has emerged over the past year—far fewer civilians are dying from drones. "For those who are opposed to drone strikes," says Woods there is historical merit to the charge of significant civilian deaths, "but from a contemporary standpoint the numbers just aren't there."
While Woods makes clear that one has to be "cautious" on any estimates of casualties, it's not just a numeric decline that is being seen, but rather it's a "proportionate decline". In other words, the percentage of civilians dying in drone strikes is also falling, which suggests to Woods that US drone operators are showing far greater care in trying to limit collateral damage.
Woods estimates are supported by the aforementioned databases. In Pakistan, New America Foundation claims there have been no civilian deaths this year and only five last year; Long War Journal reported four deaths in 2012 and 11 so far in 2013; and TBIJ reports a range of 7-42 in 2012 and 0-4 in 2013. In addition, the drop in casualty figures is occurring not just in Pakistan but also in Yemen.
These numbers are broadly consistent with what has been an under-reported decline in drone use overall. According to TBIJ, the number of drone strikes went from 128 in 2010 to 48 in 2012 and only 12 have occurred this year. These statistics are broadly consistent with LWJ and NAF's reporting. In Yemen, while drone attacks picked up in 2012, they have slowed dramatically this year. And in Somalia there has been no strike reported for more than a year.
Ironically, these numbers are in line with the public statements of CIA director Brennan, and even more so with Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairman of the Select Intelligence Committee, who claimed in February that the numbers she has received from the Obama administration suggest that the typical number of victims per year from drone attacks is in "the single digits".
Part of the reason for these low counts is that the Obama administration has sought to minimize the number of civilian casualties through what can best be described as "creative bookkeeping". The administration counts all military-age males as possible combatants unless they have information (posthumously provided) that proves them innocent. Few have taken the White House's side on this issue (and for good reason) though some outside researchers concur with the administration's estimates.
Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University has long maintained that civilian deaths from drones in Pakistan are dramatically overstated. She argues that considering the alternatives of sending in the Pakistani military or using manned aircraft to flush out jihadists, drone strikes are a far more humane method of war-fighting.

Current checks against civilian casualties are so effective that we divert missiles in the air if there’s a risk they’ll kill civilians
McNeal 13—Gregory McNeal, Associate Professor of Law, Pepperdine University March 5, 2013, “Targeted Killing and Accountability,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819583
In contemporary operations, the government has repeatedly emphasized that their planned target lists are frequently updated and vetted against the most up-to-date intelligence.261 This vetting is likely aimed at ensuring that individuals targeted are still members of an organized armed group.262 Moreover, in targeted killing operations that utilize UAVs, the intelligence supporting the attack will oftentimes come from the same UAV combat platform (Predators or Reapers) that may ultimately serve as the launch vehicle for weapons used in the targeted killing operation.263 Government officials even claim they have diverted missiles off target after launching but before impact in an effort to avoid harm to collateral persons within the blast radius of a weapon.264 To further illustrate the point, prior to the targeting operation that killed al Aulaqi, the government suggested that if Anwar al Aulaqi chose to renounce his membership in al Qaeda he would cease to be on the U.S. target list (likely because he would no longer have the status of a member of an organized armed group and, if he truly renounced his affiliation with al Qaeda, he could not be directly participating in hostilities).265 This statement illustrates the dynamic nature of the positive identification process as practiced by the U.S. military.266 The CIA’s process, extensively reviewed by operational lawyers who are oftentimes forwardly deployed in theaters of conflict and co-located with drone operators, would similarly require positive identification and a reassessment of available intelligence prior to a strike.267 Of course, if al Aulaqi chose to surrender, then he would automatically be rendered hors de combat and could not be targeted—though whether an individual could surrender to an aircraft remains an open question.268 Taken together, what this means is that if positive identification of a target fails, and the target is no longer a lawful one, no operation will take place.269 Moreover, when doubt arises as to whether a person is a civilian, there exists a presumption that he is, hence the requirement of positive identification in U.S. operations.270 The military objective requirement of the law of armed conflict as implemented in U.S. practice reflects the fact that the drafters of these standards intended them to be a binding set of rules that could simultaneously guide decision-making in warfare when bright line rules and fixed borderlines between civilian and military objectives may be murky.271 The burden is on military commanders to exercise discretion and caution; however, the standards by which those commanders are judged are reasonableness and honesty in the exercise of those responsibilities.272 Italics in original

Alternatives to drones are worse for civilian casualties
Byman 13—Daniel Byman is a Professor in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution “Why Drones Work,” Foreign Affairs, Jul/Aug2013, Vol. 92 Issue 4, p. 32-43, EBSCO
Despite the obvious benefits of using drones and the problems associated with the alternatives, numerous critics argue that drones still have too many disadvantages. First among them is an unacceptably high level of civilian casualties. Admittedly, drones have killed innocents. But the real debate is over how many and whether alternative approaches are any better. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that in 2011 alone, nearly 900 noncombatants, including almost 200 children, were killed by U.S. drone strikes. Columbia Law School's Human Rights Clinic also cites high numbers of civilian deaths, as does the Pakistani organization Pakistan Body Count. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation oversees a database of drone casualties culled from U.S. sources and international media reports. He estimates that between 150 and 500 civilians have been killed by drones during Obama's administration. U.S. officials, meanwhile, maintain that drone strikes have killed almost no civilians. In June 2011, John Brennan, then Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, even contended that U.S. drone strikes had killed no civilians in the previous year. But these claims are based on the fact that the U.S. government assumes that all military-age males in the blast area of a drone strike are combatants -- unless it can determine after the fact that they were innocent (and such intelligence gathering is not a priority).
The United States has recently taken to launching "signature strikes," which target not specific individuals but instead groups engaged in suspicious activities. This approach makes it even more difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians and verify body counts of each. Still, as one U.S. official told The New York Times last year, "Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization -- innocent neighbors don't hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs." Of course, not everyone accepts this reasoning. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, who runs Pakistan Body Count, says that "neither the United States nor Pakistan releases any detailed information about the victims … so although the United States likes to call everybody Taliban, I call everybody civilians."
The truth is that all the public numbers are unreliable. Who constitutes a civilian is often unclear; when trying to kill the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, for example, the United States also killed his doctor. The doctor was not targeting U.S. or allied forces, but he was aiding a known terrorist leader. In addition, most strikes are carried out in such remote locations that it is nearly impossible for independent sources to verify who was killed. In Pakistan, for example, the overwhelming majority of drone killings occur in tribal areas that lie outside the government's control and are prohibitively dangerous for Westerners and independent local journalists to enter.
Thus, although the New America Foundation has come under fire for relying heavily on unverifiable information provided by anonymous U.S. officials, reports from local Pakistani organizations, and the Western organizations that rely on them, are no better: their numbers are frequently doctored by the Pakistani government or by militant groups. After a strike in Pakistan, militants often cordon off the area, remove their dead, and admit only local reporters sympathetic to their cause or decide on a body count themselves. The U.S. media often then draw on such faulty reporting to give the illusion of having used multiple sources. As a result, statistics on civilians killed by drones are often inflated. One of the few truly independent on-the-ground reporting efforts, conducted by the Associated Press last year, concluded that the strikes "are killing far fewer civilians than many in Pakistan are led to believe."
But even the most unfavorable estimates of drone casualties reveal that the ratio of civilian to militant deaths -- about one to three, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism -- is lower than it would be for other forms of strikes. Bombings by F-16s or Tomahawk cruise missile salvos, for example, pack a much more deadly payload. In December 2009, the United States fired Tomahawks at a suspected terrorist training camp in Yemen, and over 30 people were killed in the blast, most of them women and children. At the time, the Yemeni regime refused to allow the use of drones, but had this not been the case, a drone's real-time surveillance would probably have spotted the large number of women and children, and the attack would have been aborted. Even if the strike had gone forward for some reason, the drone's far smaller warhead would have killed fewer innocents. Civilian deaths are tragic and pose political problems. But the data show that drones are more discriminate than other types of force.

Tournament: Vanderbilt | Round: 1 | Opponent: Georgia Feinberg-Boyce | Judge: Green
1nc – 1

The aff focuses on the institutional solution to war powers ignoring the individual’s role – this re-entrenches gendered IR
Sylvester 12 (Christine Sylvester is Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, USA and Professorial Affiliate of the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.) War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory
What if International Relations (IR) were to turn its usual view of war around and start not with states, fundamentalist organisations, strategies, conventional security issues and a weapons system, and not with the aim of establishing the causes of war, as has so often been the case? What if we think of war as experience, as something ordinary people observe and suffer physically and emotionally depending on their locations? To date, much of IR has been operating comfortably in a world of theoretical abstractions – states, systems, power, balances, stakeholders, decision-makers, peace, war – tacitly leaving people and war to journalists, novelists, memoirists, relief workers, anthropologists, women’s studies and social history to flesh out.1 This means that IR is not addressing one of the key elements of war: its actual mission of injuring human bodies and destroying normal patterns of social relations. Neglecting the human elements for strategic and interest politics renders the injurious nature of war a consequence rather than the actual focal point of war.2 It also makes it more difficult to appreciate the decentralised aspects of many contemporary wars, which is to say the dispersal of authority to people who are routinely off IR’s grid – like the Liberian peace women who forced Charles Taylor into peace talks and the kidnapped war women led by Black Diamond, who simultaneously gained notoriety as fierce combatants in the bush.3 As well, IR knows about the political economies and security mercenaries of war,4 but often finds the individuals who sustain and benefit from war less pertinent than the international web of interactions they create, thus potentially missing links in chains that start and end with people.
Much of IR actually seems unprepared for the presence, let alone the power, of ordinary people in international relations, whether those people walk through the Berlin Wall and help shift Cold War polarity, or toss out autocrats in the Arab Spring revolutions. Ordinary people are overwhelmingly absent in IR because they are not seen as key stakeholders in IR’s versions of international relations. My challenge to the field is to pay more attention to war as experience, on two grounds: war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people and not only studied down from places that sweep blood, tears and laughter away, or assign those things to some other field to look into; and people demonstrate time and again that they too comprise international relations, especially the relations of war, and cannot therefore be ignored or relegated to a collateral status. IR’s feminist wing of war studies, which is still taking shape, has implicitly made those kinds of propositions the touchstones of its war research. As well, scholars from a number of IR’s many camps work the boundaries of IR theories in ways that can reveal the people of war. Even IR traditions that make a point of operating above people (neorealism) can briefly mention people in war situations, albeit without elaborating their experiences or building them into IR theories.

AND their representations create structural violence – that outweighs and turns the case – only evaluating IR can solve
Shepherd 09 Laura J. Dept of Political Science and International Studies, U of Birmingham (UK), “Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies,” Political Studies Review, V7 I2, Apr
According to conventional accounts of international relations (IR), scholars focus on war (predominantly as a means to providing the sovereign state with security) and the existence of war's corollary is a foundational assumption that goes largely unquestioned. Peace must exist, for international relations are not characterised by perpetual conflict. However, peace is implicitly defined, in dichotomous terms, by the absence of violent conflict, as 'not-war'. Of more analytical interest is conflict, which is always a possibility and which, moreover, occurs between states. International relations as a discipline, narrowly conceived, is largely unconcerned with activities that occur within the state. Minimally, feminist and other critical approaches to IR seek to correct such disciplinary myopia. While classical realism theorises the political actor –Hans Morgenthau's 'political man' (1973, pp. 15–6) – in order to construct the state as actor, the now dominant neo-realism abstracts the human subject from its disciplinary musings, leading to the infamous 'black box' model of the state. Early feminist scholarship challenged this assumption as well, arguing that individuals, as human subjects in all their messy complexity, are an integral part of international relations (see Shepherd, 2007, pp. 240–1). Attention to the human subject in I/international R/relations – or, as Christine Sylvester phrases it, 'relations international', to emphasise the embedded nature of all kinds of relations in the international sphere, including power relations and gender relations (Sylvester, 1994, p. 6; see also Enloe, 1996) – allows critical scholars to look beyond the disciplinary obsession with war. Further, it allows us to investigate one of the simplest insights of feminist IR, which is also one of the most devastating: the war/peace dichotomy is gendered, misleading and potentially pathological. In this essay, I address each of these concerns in turn, developing a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007) Globalization and Militarism, David Roberts' (2008) Human Insecurity, and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008). Drawing on the insights of these books, I ask first how violence is understood in global politics, with specific reference to the gendered disciplinary blindnesses that frequently characterise mainstream approaches. Second, I demonstrate how a focus on war and peace can neglect to take into account the politics of everyday violence: the violences of the in-between times that international politics recognises neither as 'war' nor 'peace' and the violences inherent to times of peace that are overlooked in the study of war. Finally, I argue that feminist security studies offers an important corrective to the foundational assumptions of IR, which themselves can perpetuate the very instances of violence that they seek to redress. If we accept the core insights of feminist security studies – the centrality of the human subject, the importance of particular configurations of masculinity and femininity, and the gendered conceptual framework that underpins the discipline of IR – we are encouraged to envisage a rather different politics of the global. From Boudica to Bhopal As Sjoberg and Gentry recount (2008, pp. 38–9), Boudica was an Iceni queen who led an uprising against the Roman forces occupying the British Isles circa 61 AD. Prior to launching the attack, Boudica's refusal to allow a Roman general to claim ownership of her land resulted in the rape of her two daughters as punishment. However, 'many inherited tales about Boudica do not emphasise her personal or political motivations, but the savage and unwomanly brutality of her actions' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 39). Almost two thousand years later and half a planet away, a toxic gas leak in 1984 at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India caused the immediate deaths of approximately 3,000 people and left tens of thousands suffering the after-effects for decades (Roberts, 2008, p. 10). At first reading, little links these two accounts of quite different forms of violence. The first is an instance of violent resistance against imperial oppression, and Boudica has been vilified, her efforts delegitimised, in much the same way as many actors in 'small wars' tend to be in global politics today (see Barkawi, 2004). The second is perhaps more usefully seen as the result of structural violence, following Johan Galtung's explanation of the same, as 'violence where there is no such actor' (cited in Roberts, 2008, p. 18). However, by asking questions about Boudica and Bhopal that are born of a 'feminist curiosity' (Enloe, 2007, p. 1, p. 11), these texts demonstrate connections beyond the simplistic equation that is applicable to both: actor/structure plus violence equals death. In Human Insecurity, Roberts poses the question, 'What is violence?' (2008, p. 17). This is a question rarely asked in international relations. Violence is war: large-scale, state-dominated, much studied, war. However, the three texts under review here all offer more nuanced theories of violence that focus analytical attention on complex constructions of agency (institutional and international), structure, and the global context that is product and productive of such violence. Through an intricate and beautifully accessible analysis of modernity –'that pot of gold at the end of the global rainbow' (Enloe, 2007, p. 64) – Enloe encourages her readers to seek the connections between globalisation and militarisation, arguing that at the heart of this nexus lie important questions about violence and security. Roberts notes a broad dissatisfaction with the concept of 'human security' (2008, pp. 14–7), offering instead his investigative lens of 'human insecurity', defined as 'avoidable civilian deaths, occurring globally, caused by social, political and economic institutions and structures, built and operated by humans and which could feasibly be changed' (p. 28). Placing the human at the centre of concerns about security immediately challenges a conventional state-based approach to security, as Enloe explains. In a convincing account of the hard-fought expansion of the concept of security, mapped on to strategic and organisational gains made by various feminist organisations, Enloe reminds us that if we take seriously the lives of women – their understandings of security – as well as on-the-ground workings of masculinity and femininity, we will be able to produce more meaningful and more reliable analyses of 'security'– personal, national and global (Enloe, 2007, p. 47). This latter quote typifies an approach for which Enloe has become somewhat famous. In the early 1980s, Enloe began asking the questions for which she is rightly acknowledged as a key figure in feminist security studies, including Does Khaki Become You? (Enloe, 1983) and 'where are the women?' (Enloe, 2000; see also Enloe, 2004). Inspired by her own curiosity about the roles played by women and the functions performed by gender in the militarisation of civilian life, Enloe has explored prostitution, marriage, welfare and war making with an eye to the representation (both political and symbolic) of women. In Globalization and Militarism she offers detailed vignettes that illuminate just how interwoven violence is with the quest for (various types of) security, and demands that nothing is left unquestioned in a critical analysis of these concepts. Even baby socks (embossed with tiny fighter planes, a gift to the parent of a small boy) have something to tell us about gender, militarism and the casual representations of violence and war that society accepts (Enloe, 2007, pp. 143–4). Following a similar logic, although he initially defines human insecurity as avoidable civilian deaths, Roberts focuses on 'preventable female deaths ... and avoidable deaths in children under five' (2008, p. 31). While this conflation of 'civilian' with 'women and children' is rather problematic (see Carpenter, 2006), in asking not only, where are the women? but also, why are they dying in such disproportionate numbers? Roberts enhances his critique of 'most security studies ... that largely miss the scale of avoidable human misery and avoidable human death' (2008, p. 4). As mentioned above, Roberts uses Galtung's concept of structural violence to draw attention to the manifest ways in which an increasingly interconnected global system relies on gender and violence (and gendered violence) for its perpetuation: 'The process of globalization, to which few are ideologically or otherwise opposed, is an essential conveyor and articulator of the masculinity that underpins andrarchy' (Roberts, 2008, p. 157). Whereas Enloe offers a persuasive and accessible account of patriarchy, a concept familiar to feminist and non-feminist scholars alike (Enloe, 2007, pp. 66–8), Roberts suggests 'andrarchy' as an alternative, which he defines as 'the gender-partisan ideological domination and rule structure that determines and sustains the general relative power of males over females globally' (Roberts, 2008, p. 140). However, it is difficult to see how this reformulation either differs substantively from patriarchy as an analytical tool or assists in the construction of an alternative theory of global violence that centralises the individual, and therefore takes gender seriously, in that it seems to essentialise violent actors (males) and violated victims (females). In contrast, Enloe's explanation of patriarchy challenges such essentialism as its first point of critical intervention. That is, the assumption of essential differences between men and women is part of patriarchal ideology, feeding into stereotypical notions of how such men and women should behave, which in turn constitute recognisable discourses of gender: sets of narratives about masculinity and femininity and how these are, in general, respectively privileged and marginalised. The most theoretically coherent account of gender and violence offered in these three texts comes from Sjoberg and Gentry and employs the notion of discourse to great effect. Whereas Roberts seeks to map out a consciously structural account of global violence, where the structure in question is a hybrid of andrarchy and a 'rapacious, increasingly competitive and hyper-masculine' neoliberalism (Roberts, 2008, p. 118), Sjoberg and Gentry offer a more sophisticated analysis of structure and agency in their 'relational autonomy framework' that accounts for both individual agency and structural constraint (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, pp. 189–98). When people perform acts of political violence, they argue, this is a conscious choice, but crucially individuals 'choose within a specified spectrum of socially acceptable choices' (p. 190). 'In its simplest form, relational autonomy is the recognition that freedom of action is defined and limited by social relationships' (p. 194) and this has profound implications for the study of violence in global politics. Sjoberg and Gentry use this insight to demonstrate that women's violence in global politics is rendered unintelligible, through narrative representations of the perpetrators as mothers, monsters or whores (in media discourse and academic discussion), rather than as autonomous agents. From the abuses of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, via the 'black widows' of Chechnya, to female perpetrators of genocidal violence in Rwanda, the authors show how representations of women's violence conform to and further confirm the stereotypes of violent women as either mothers (supporting or vengeful), monsters or sexually deviant whores (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, pp. 30–49). The very different theories of violence outlined in these three texts all contribute to the development of a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of violence in global politics. By insisting that international relations are also gender relations – by demanding that we recognise that states are an analytical abstraction and politics is practised or performed by gendered bodies – all of the authors put forward theories of violence that are corrective of gender blindness, in that the violences in question are simultaneously gendered and gendering (see Shepherd, 2008, pp. 49–54). They are gendered because they have different impacts on male and female bodies (Enloe, 2007, p. 13), both materially as people experience violence differently depending on their gender (and race, class, sexuality and so on) and also discursively, as what we expect of men and women in terms of their behaviours, violent and otherwise, is limited by the meaning(s) ascribed to male and female bodies by society. Regarding the former, Roberts proposes that we term the global victimisation of women 'structural femicide' (Roberts, 2008, p. 65), but does not sufficiently engage with the question of whether defining gendered violence as violence against women (and children) functions to constitute the subject of 'woman' as a perpetual victim, in need of protection and lacking in agency (Shepherd, 2008, p. 41). In contrast, Sjoberg and Gentry neatly articulate the interplay between material and discursive violence as they write a theory that accounts 'for people's impact on global politics and for the impact of narratives others construct for and about them' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 216, emphasis in original). Thus, violence is gendering as our understanding of politics is in part reproduced through violent actions. Through discursive violence against individuals – for example, representing Chechen women suicide terrorists as 'black widows', which demands that they are attributed the characteristics of the venomous and deadly black widow spider and, further, that their violence is grounded in familial loss, 'born directly of a desire for vengeance for the deaths of their husbands and sons' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 100) rather than as the result of a process of political decision making – our understanding of that individual and of the act of violence itself is produced. Similarly, through material acts of violence, discourses of gender are given physical form; the detainees at Abu Ghraib who were forced to simulate oral sex with each other were forced to do so in part because of crude cultural understandings of homosexuality as deviant and homosexuals as lesser men – that is, as women. To force a man to perform oral sex on another man is to undermine his masculinity and simultaneously to reinforce the gendered power relations that claim privilege for masculinity over femininity, heterosexuality over homosexuality – power relations that render such an act intelligible in the first instance. Such understandings of violence are beyond the remit of conventional state-based approaches to international relations. However, 'it is by tracking the gendered assumptions about how to wield feminization to humiliate males' (Enloe, 2007, p. 115) and how to represent gendered individuals in such a way as to render some acts of violence intelligible as political and others as monstrous that we can begin to piece together a useful feminist account of global violence, which is a necessary component of understanding security. Everyday Violence and In-Between Days In addition to questioning what violence is, how it is represented and with what effects, feminist security studies scholarship also asks which violences are considered worthy of study and when these violences occur. Expanding the concept of violence that underpins feminist analysis, as outlined above, allows us to take seriously what Arthur Kleinman (2000) refers to as 'the violences of everyday life'. Beyond a narrow focus on war and state-based violence lies a plethora of everyday violences that feminist security studies seeks to address. In the field of security studies the broadening and deepening of the concept of security, such that it is no longer assumed to apply only to the sovereign state, has demonstrated the multiple insecurities experienced by individuals and social collectives (Booth, 2005, pp. 14–5). The development of the concept of 'human security' largely took place within the parameters of a wider disciplinary debate over the appropriate referent object for security studies (the individual, society, the state) and the types of threat to the referent object that would be recognised. In a move similar to Ken Booth's (1991) reformulation of security as emancipation, Roberts' quest for individual empowerment seeks to overcome the 'élite-legitimized disequilibrium' that results in the manifest insecurity of the majority of the world's population (Roberts, 2008, p. 185). As might be expected, the violences Roberts identifies are innumerable. In addition to the physical violences of 'infanticide, maternal mortality, intimate ("domestic", "honour" and "dowry") killings and lethal female genital mutilation; and avoidable deaths in children under five' (Roberts, 2008, p. 31), his analysis attacks the institutional structures of the dominant international financial institutions (pp. 117–35) and the andrarchal and neoliberal discourses that sustain them (pp. 136–58). In short, Roberts' answer to the question of which violences matter in global politics is quite simple: all of them. However, while studies of human security, he argues, seek to provide the human with security, his reformulated analytic takes as its starting point human insecurity; that is, he starts with the threat(s) to the sovereign subject rather than the subject's ontological condition. Roberts suggests that this circumvents the disciplinary definitional problem with human security – identified by Roland Paris (2001), Edward Newman (2001; 2004) and others – but I cannot see how this is the case, given that the answer to the question 'what is it that humans do to make the world a more dangerous and dysfunctional place?' (Roberts, 2008, p. 28) is also quite simple: we live in it. Thus Roberts' analytic seems to suffer the same lack of definitional clarity – and therefore policy relevance – that he ascribes to more conventional approaches; it is no easier to identify, quantify and ultimately reduce the threats experienced by coexisting human subjects than it is to provide those human subjects with security, if security can first be defined as freedom from fear or want. I do not espouse some construction of human nature (if such a thing were to exist) that assumes essential selfishness and a propensity for violence, nor do I assume that security is a zero-sum game, in that one person's security must always be at the expense of another's, but I recognise that even the most well-intentioned security policy can have unforeseen and sometimes disastrous effects. Sometimes, moreover, as Sjoberg and Gentry demonstrate, the decision to perform acts of political violence that are a source of insecurity for the intended victims can be understood if not condoned. Enloe's analytical remit is similarly wide-ranging to Roberts', in that she focuses on processes – globalisation and militarism – that are inherently violent. However, although Enloe also insists that all violences should count in the study of global politics, she grounds this claim in an analysis of specific sites of violence and demonstrates with startling clarity just how everyday items – for example, sneakers – are both globalised and militarised: Threaded through virtually every sneaker you own is some relationship to masculinized militaries. Locating factories in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s was a good strategic decision in the eyes of those Oregon-headquartered male Nike executives because of the close alliance between male policymakers in Washington and Seoul. It was a relationship – unequal but intimate – based on their shared anticommunism, their shared commitment to waging the Cold War, and their shared participation in an ambitious international military alliance (Enloe, 2007, p. 28). By drawing her readers' attention to the ways in which discourses of gender (ideas about how 'proper' men and women should behave) function, Enloe reminds us that adhering to ideals of masculinity and femininity is both productive of violence and is a violence in itself, a violence against the empowered human subject. 'Ideas matter', she concludes, ideas about modernity, security, violence, threat, trust. 'Each of these ideas is fraught with blatant and subtle presumptions about masculinity and femininity. Ideas about both masculinity and femininity matter. This makes a feminist curiosity a necessity' (Enloe, 2007, p. 161). While conventional studies of IR and security may be willing to concede that ideas matter (see Finnemore and Sikkink, 2001), paying close attention to the work that gender does allows for a fuller understanding of why it is that particular violences fall outside the traditional parameters of study. As to the question of when violence is worthy of study, all three texts implicitly or explicitly draw on the popular feminist phrase: 'the personal is political'. This slogan neatly encapsulates the feminist critique of a supposed foundational divide between the private and the public realms of social life. In arguing that the personal is political, feminist theory refuses to accept that there are instances of human behaviour or situations in social life that can or should be bracketed from study. At its simplest, this critique led to the recognition of 'domestic violence' as a political, rather than a personal issue (see, for example Moore, 2003; Youngs, 2003), forming the foundation for critical studies of gendered violence in times of war and in times of peace that would otherwise have been ignored. Crucially, Enloe extended the boundaries of critique to include the international, imbuing the phrase with new analytical vitality when she suggested, first, that the phrase itself is palindromic (that is, that the political is also personal, inextricably intertwined with the everyday) and, second, that the personal is international just as the international is personal. 'The international is personal' implies that governments depend upon certain kinds of allegedly private relationships in order to conduct their foreign affairs. ... To operate in the international arena, governments seek other governments' recognition of their sovereignty; but they also depend on ideas about masculinised dignity and feminised sacrifice to sustain that sense of autonomous nationhood (Enloe, 2000, pp. 196–7). These ideas about dignity and sacrifice are not neatly contained within the temporal boundaries of any given war, nor are they incidental to the practice of warfare. Further, there is of course also the question of who gets to define or declare war, or peace. While some of the violent women whose actions are analysed by Sjoberg and Gentry perform their violences in wartime (for example, Lynndie England, who received the most attention from global media of the women involved in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; see Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, pp. 67–70), others are fighting wars that are not sanctioned by the international community (such as the Chechen women pp. 97–111 and female Palestinian suicide bombers pp. 112–40). As discussed above, ideas about masculinity and femininity, dignity and sacrifice may not only be violent in themselves, but are also the product/productive of physical violences. With this in mind, the feminist argument that 'peacetime' is analytically misleading is a valid one. Of interest are the 'in-between days' and the ways in which labelling periods of war or peace as such can divert attention away from the myriad violences that inform and reinforce social behaviour. War can surely never be said to start and end at a clearly defined moment. Rather, it seems part of a continuum of conflict, expressed now in armed force, now in economic sanctions or political pressure. A time of supposed peace may come later to be called 'the pre-war period'. During the fighting of a war, unseen by the foot soldiers under fire, peace processes are often already at work. A time of postwar reconstruction, later, may be re-designated as an inter bellum– a mere pause between wars (Cockburn and Zarkov, cited in El Jack, 2003, p. 9). Feminist security studies interrogates the pauses between wars, and the political processes – and practices of power – that demarcate times as such. In doing so, not only is the remit of recognisable violence (violence worthy of study) expanded, but so too are the parameters of what counts as IR. Everyday violences and acts of everyday resistance ('a fashion show, a tour, a small display of children's books' in Enloe, 2007, pp. 117–20) are the stuff of relations international and, thus, of a comprehensive understanding of security. In the following section I outline the ways in which taking these claims seriously allows us to engage critically with the representations of international relations that inform our research, with potentially profound implications. The Violent Reproduction of the International As well as conceiving of gender as a set of discourses, and violence as a means of reproducing and reinforcing the relevant discursive limits, it is possible to see security as a set of discourses, as I have argued more fully elsewhere (Shepherd, 2007; 2008; see also Shepherd and Weldes, 2007). Rather than pursuing the study of security as if it were something that can be achieved either in absolute, partial or relative terms, engaging with security as discourse enables the analysis of how these discourses function to reproduce, through various strategies, the domain of the international with which IR is self-consciously concerned. Just as violences that are gendering reproduce gendered subjects, on this view states, acting as authoritative entities, perform violences, but violences, in the name of security, also perform states. These processes occur simultaneously, and across the whole spectrum of social life: an instance of rape in war is at once gendering of the individuals involved and of the social collectivities – states, communities, regions – they feel they represent (see Bracewell, 2000); building a fence in the name of security that separates people from their land and extended families performs particular kinds of violence (at checkpoints, during patrols) and performs particular subject identities (of the state authority, of the individuals affected), all of which are gendered. All of the texts under discussion in this essay argue that it is imperative to explore and expose gendered power relations and, further, that doing so not only enables a rigorous critique of realism in IR but also reminds us as scholars of the need for such a critique. The critiques of IR offered by feminist scholars are grounded in a rejection of neo-realism/realism as a dominant intellectual framework for academics in the discipline and policy makers alike. As Enloe reminds us, 'the government-centred, militarized version of national security derived from a realist framework remains the dominant mode of policy thinking' (Enloe, 2007, p. 43). Situating gender as a central category of analysis encourages us to 'think outside the "state security box"' (p. 47) and to remember that 'the "individuals" of global politics do not work alone, live alone or politic alone – they do so in interdependent relationships with others' (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008, p. 200) that are inherently gendered. One of the key analytical contributions of all three texts is the way in which they all challenge what it means to be 'doing' IR, by recognising various forms of violence, interrogating the public/private divide and demanding that attention is paid to the temporal and physical spaces in-between war and peace. Feminist security studies should not simply be seen as 'women doing security', or as 'adding women to IR/security studies', important as these contributions are. Through their theorising, the authors discussed here reconfigure what 'counts' as IR, challenging orthodox notions of who can 'do' IR and what 'doing' IR means. The practices of power needed to maintain dominant configurations of international relations are exposed, and critiquing the productive power of realism as a discourse is one way in which the authors do this. Sjoberg and Gentry pick up on a recent theoretical shift in Anglo-American IR, from system-level analysis to a recognition that individuals matter. However, as they rightly point out, the individuals who are seen to matter are not gendered relational beings, but rather reminiscent of Hobbes' construction of the autonomous rational actor. 'The narrowness of the group that such an approach includes limits its effectiveness as an interpretive framework and reproduces the gender, class and race biases in system-level international relationship scholarship' (Sjoberg and Gentry 2008, p. 200, emphasis added). Without paying adequate attention to the construction of individuals as gendered beings, or to the reproduction of widely held ideas about masculine and feminine behaviours, Sjoberg and Gentry remind us that we will ultimately fail 'to see and deconstruct the increasingly subtle, complex and disguised ways in which gender pervades international relations and global politics' (2008, p. 225). In a similar vein, Roberts notes that 'human security is marginalised or rejected as inauthentic because it is not a reflection of realism's (male) agendas and priorities' (2008, p. 169). The 'agendas and priorities' identified by Roberts and acknowledged by Sjoberg and Gentry as being productive of particular biases in scholarship are not simply 'academic' matters, in the pejorative sense of the term. As Roberts argues, 'Power relationships of inequality happen because they are built that way by human determinism of security and what is required to maintain security (p. 171). Realism, as academic discourse and as policy guideline, has material effects. Although his analysis employs an unconventional definition of the term 'social construction' (seemingly interchangeable with 'human agency') and rests on a novel interpretation of the three foundational assumptions of realism (Roberts, 2008, pp. 169–77), the central point that Roberts seeks to make in his conclusion is valid: 'it is a challenge to those who deny relationships between gender and security; between human agency (social construction) and lethal outcome' (p. 183). In sum, all three texts draw their readers to an inescapable, and – for the conventional study of IR – a devastating conclusion: the dominance of neo-realism/realism and the state-based study of security that derives from this is potentially pathological, in that it is in part productive of the violences it seeks to ameliorate. I suggest that critical engagement with orthodox IR theory is necessary for the intellectual growth of the discipline, and considerable insight can be gained by acknowledging the relevance of feminist understandings of gender, power and theory. The young woman buying a T-shirt from a multinational clothing corporation with her first pay cheque, the group of young men planning a stag weekend in Amsterdam, a group of students attending a demonstration against the bombing of Afghanistan – studying these significant actions currently falls outside the boundaries of doing security studies in mainstream IR and I believe these boundaries need contesting. As Marysia Zalewski argues: International politics is what we make it to be ... We need to rethink the discipline in ways that will disturb the existing boundaries of both that which we claim to be relevant in international politics and what we assume to be legitimate ways of constructing knowledge about the world (Zalewski 1996, p. 352, emphasis in original). Conclusion: 'Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend' (Mao Tse-Tung) In this essay, I have used the analysis of three contemporary publications in the field of feminist security studies to demonstrate three significant sets of analytical contributions that such scholarship makes to the discipline of IR. Beyond the war/peace dichotomy that is frequently assumed to be definitive of the discipline, we find many and various forms of violence, occurring in and between temporally distinct periods of conflict, which are the product/productive of socially acceptable modes of gendered behaviour, ways of being in the world as a woman or man. I have also argued that critical engagement with conventional, state-based approaches to (national) security must persist as the academic discourses we write are complicit in the construction of the global as we understand it. Further, 'if all experience is gendered, analysis of gendered identities is an imperative starting point in the study of political identities and practice' (Peterson, 1999, p. 37). To this end, I conclude by suggesting that we take seriously Enloe's final comment: 'Tracking militarization and fostering demilitarization will call for cooperative investigations, multiple skills and the appreciation of diverse perspectives' (2007, p. 164). While there has been intense intra-disciplinary debate within contemporary feminist security studies over the necessary 'feminist credentials' of some gendered analyses, it is important to recognise the continual renewal and analytical vigour brought to the field by such debates. Broadly speaking, there are two positions we might map. On the one side, there are those who refuse to reduce gender to a variable in their research, arguing that to do so limits the critical insight that can be gained from treating gender instead as a noun, a verb and a structural logic (see, for example, Sjoberg, 2006; Zalewski, 2007). On this view, 'gender', whether deployed as noun, verb or logic in a particular analysis, cannot be separated from the decades of feminist scholarship that worked to explore, expand on and elucidate what gender might mean. On the opposing side are scholars who, typically using phrases such as 'balanced consideration' (Jones, 1998, p. 303) and 'an inclusive perspective on gender and war' (Griffiths, 2003, pp. 327–8, emphasis in original), manipulate gender as a variable in their research to 'extend the scope of feminist IR scholarship' (Caprioli, 2004, p. 266) and to draw conclusions regarding sex-specific behaviours in conflict and post-conflict situations (see also Caprioli and Boyer, 2001; Carpenter, 2006; Melander, 2005). Crucially, however, scholarship on both sides of this 'divide' coexists, and in doing so encourages 'the appreciation of diverse perspectives'. While bracketing feminist politics from the study of gender is an overtly political move, which can be presented as either strategic (Carpenter, 2006, pp. 6–10) or as common sense, in that it 'enhances the explanatory capabilities' of feminist security studies (Caprioli, 2004, p. 266), all interrogations of security that take gender seriously draw attention to the ways in which gender is at once personal, political and international. Although it might seem that conceiving of gender as a variable adheres both to a disciplinary narrative that rewards positivist and abstract theory (without messy reference to bodies) and to a neo-/anti-/post-feminist narrative that claims 'we' have solved the gender problem (see Zalewski, 2007, p. 303), at the very least such approaches give credence to the idea that gender matters in global politics. Mary Caprioli suggests that 'IR feminists shattered the publishing boundary for feminist IR scholarship, and tackled the difficult task of deconstructing IR theory' (2004, p. 257). I would caution that it is perhaps too soon to represent the shattering and tackling as a fait accompli, but with the vital interjections of texts such as those discussed here, security studies scholars may yet envisage a politics of violence and human subjectivity that transcends the arbitrary disciplinary boundaries which constrain rather than facilitate understanding.

Our alternative is to interrogate reality – failure to do so makes their methodology suspect
Peterson and Runyan 99 professor of political science at the University of Arizona and professor of women’s studies at Wright State University, 1999  (V. Spike and Anne, Global Gender Issues, 2nd edition, p. 1-3)
Whenever we study a topic, we do so through a lens that necessarily focuses our attention in particular ways. By filtering or "ordering" what we look at, each lens enables us to see some things in greater detail or more accurately or in better relation to certain other things. But this is unavoidably at the expense of seeing other things that are rendered out of focus--filtered out--by each particular lens. According to Paul Viotti and Mark Kauppi, various theoretical perspectives, or "images," of international politics contain certain assumptions and lead us "to ask certain questions, seek certain types of answers, and use certain methodological tools."1 For example, different images act as lenses and shape our assumptions about who the significant actors are (individuals? states? multinational corporations?), what their attributes are (rationality? self-interest? power?), how social processes are categorized (politics? cooperation? dependence?), and what outcomes are desirable (peace? national security? global equity?). The images or lenses we use have important consequences because they structure what we look for and are able to "see." In Patrick Morgan's words, "Our conception of IR acts as a map for directing our attention and distributing our efforts, and using the wrong map can lead us into a swamp instead of taking us to higher ground."2 What we look for depends a great deal on how we make sense of, or "order," our experience. We learn our ordering systems in a variety of contexts. From infancy on, we are taught to make distinctions enabling us to perform appropriately within a particular culture. As college students, we are taught the distinctions appropriate to particular disciplines (psy- chology, anthropology, political science) and particular schools of thought within them (realism, behavioralism, liberalism, structuralism). No matter in which context we learned them, the categories and ordering frameworks shape the lenses through which we look at, think about, and make sense of the world around us. At the same time, the lenses we adopt shape our experience of the world itself because they shape what we do and how and why we do it. For example, a political science lens focuses our attention on particular categories and events (the meaning of power, democracy, or elections) in ways that variously influence our behavior (questioning authority, protesting abuse of power, or participating in elec- toral campaigns). By filtering our ways of thinking about and ordering experience, the categories and images we rely on shape how we behave and thus the world we live in: They have concrete consequences. We observe this readily in the case of self-fulfilling prophecies: If we expect hostility, our own behavior (acting superior, displaying power) may elicit responses (defensive posturing, aggression) that we then interpret as "confirming" our expectations. It is in this sense that we refer to lenses and "realities" as interactive, interdependent, or mutually constituted. Lenses shape who we are, what we think, and what actions we take, thus shaping the world we live in. At the same time, the world we live in ("reality") shapes which lenses are available to us, what we see through them, and the likelihood of our using them in particular contexts. In general, as long as our lenses and images seem to "work," we keep them and build on them. Lenses simplify our thinking. Like maps, they "frame" our choices and exploration, enabling us to take advantage of knowledge already gained and to move more effectively toward our objectives. The more useful they appear to be, the more we are inclined to take them for granted and to resist making major changes in them. We forget that our particular ordering or meaning system is a choice among many alternatives. Instead, we tend to believe we are seeing "reality" as it "is" rather than as our culture or discipline or image interprets or "maps" reality. It is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable to reflect critically on our assumptions, to question their accuracy or desirability, and to explore the implications of shifting our vantage point by adopting a different lens. Of course, the world we live in and therefore our experiences are constantly changing; we have to continuously modify our images, mental maps, and ordering systems as well. The required shift in lens may be minor: from liking one type of music to liking another, from being a high school student in a small town to being a college student in an urban en- vironment. Or the shift may be more pronounced: from casual dating to parenting, from the freedom of student lifestyles to the assumption of full-time job responsibilities, from Newtonian to quantum physics, from East-West rivalry to post-Cold War complexities. Societal shifts are dramatic, as we experience and respond to systemic transformations such as economic restructuring, environmental degradation, or the effects of war. To function effectively as students and scholars of world politics, we must modify our thinking in line with historical developments. That is, as "reality" changes, our ways of understanding or ordering need to change as well. This is especially the case to the extent that outdated worldviews or lenses place us in danger, distort our understanding, or lead us away from our objectives. Indeed, as both early explorers and urban drivers know, outdated maps are inadequate, and potentially disastrous, guides.
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Court affs must specify the grounds of the ruling. Evaluate this through competing interpretations.

Education—the rationale is important part—they moot literature without specification
SUTTON 1—Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Sutton, Jeffrey S. Michigan Law Review April 2010
The opinion-writing process provides another constraint. Unlike the democratically elected branches of the federal government, federal appellate judges must explain their decisions in writing. The processnot only improves the decision-making process, but it also disciplines judges to ensure that their votes amount to more than intuition and impulse. No doubt, as Posner rightly points out, this still leaves considerable room for rationalization and "fig-leafing" (p. 350)--giving decisions the veneer, if not the substance, of legal reasoning. Iagree with Posner that the courts should be more candid about the key explanations for their decisions. All too often opinions amount to a blurring array of citations, which obscure rather than highlight the critical choices made by the court. Most issues in most cases usually turn on one point, whether a pragmatic or a legalistic one. Posneris right to suggest that judges should feature and develop these points rather than bury them in a haystack of citations. One reason Posner's opinions are so influential is that they do just that. Others should follow his example.

Key to ground—all court arguments about the rulings—not abstract deicisons—not specifying structurally biases the literature for the aff.
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Obama is shifting from drones to detention --- this way he can avoid killing
Dillow 13 (Clay, “Obama Set To Reboot Drone Strike Policy And Retool The War On Terror “, 5/23/13, http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-05/obama-set-reboot-drone-strike-policy-and-retool-war-terror)
These three topics are deeply intertwined, of course. With the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and a reduced American presence in the regions regarded as power bases for the likes of al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and the Taliban, American security and intelligence forces have only two real options. Strike at suspected terrorists with drones, or somehow capture those suspects and detain them (at some place like Guantanamo). It would seem that if the war on terror is going to continue (and it is--for another 10 or 20 years according to one recently-quoted Pentagon official) then it seems that either detention or the use of lethal strikes must increase. But that’s not really the case, and in today’s speech Obama is expected to outline why the administration thinks so. In his first major counterterrorism address of his second term, the President is expected to announce new restrictions on the unmanned aerial strikes that have been the cornerstone of his national security agenda for the last five years. For all the talk about drone strikes--and they did peak under Obama--such actions have been declining since 2010. And it seems the administration finally wants to come clean (somewhat) about what it has been doing with its drone program, acknowledging for the first time that it has killed four American citizens in its shadow drone wars outside the conflict zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, something the public has known for a while now but the government has refused to publicly admit. The Obama administration will also voluntarily rein in its drone strike program in several ways. A new classified policy signed by Obama will more sharply define how drones can be used, the New York Times reports, essentially extending to foreign nationals the same standards currently applied to American citizens abroad. That is, lethal force will only be used against targets posing a “continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and who cannot be feasibly captured or thwarted in any other way. This indicates that the administration’s controversial use of “signature strikes”--the killing of unknown individuals or groups based on patterns of behavior rather than hard intelligence--will no longer be part of the game plan. That’s a positive signal, considering that signature strikes are thought to have resulted in more than a few civilian casualties. Reportedly there’s another important change in drone policy in the offing that President Obama may or may not mention in today’s speech: the shifting of the drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere (likely Yemen and Somalia as well) from the CIA to the military over the course of six months. This is good for all parties involved. The CIA’s new director, John Brennan, has publicly said he would like to transition the country’s premier intelligence gathering agency back to actual intelligence gathering and away from paramilitary operations--a role that it has played since 2001 but that isn’t exactly in its charter. Putting the drone strike program in the Pentagon also places it in a different category of public scrutiny. The DoD can still do things under the veil of secrecy of course, but not quite like the CIA can (the military is subject to more oversight and transparency than the clandestine services in several respects, and putting drones in the hands of the military also changes the governing rules of engagement). So what does this all mean for the war on terror? If Obama plans to create a roadmap for closing Guantanamo Bay and draw down its drone strike program, it suggests that the administration thinks we are winning--as much as one can win this kind of asymmetric war. It appears the war on terror is shifting toward one in which better intelligence will lead to more arrests and espionage operations to thwart terrorists rather hellfire missile strikes from unseen robots in the sky. 

The policy of detention is key --- the plan’s restriction changes the military incentive to increase the use of drones for lethal force
Chesney 11 (Robert, Charles I. Francis Professor in Law, University of Texas School of Law, “ARTICLE: WHO MAY BE HELD? MILITARY DETENTION THROUGH THE HABEAS LENS”, Boston College Law Review, 52 B.C. L. Rev 769, Lexis)
The convergence thesis describes one manner in which law might respond to the cross-cutting pressures associated with the asymmetric warfare phenomenon—i.e., the pressure to reduce false positives (targeting, capture, or detention of the wrong individual) while also ensuring an adequate capacity to neutralize the non-state actors in question. One must bear in mind, however, that detention itself is not the only system of government action that can satisfy that latter interest. Other options exist, including the use of lethal force; the use of rendition to place individuals in detention at the hands of some other state; the use of persuasion to induce some other state to take custody of an individual through its own means; and perhaps also the use of various forms of surveillance to establish a sort of constructive, loose control over a person (though for persons located outside the United States it is unlikely that surveillance could be much more than episodic, and thus any resulting element of “control” may be quite weak).210¶ From the point of view of the individual involved, all but the last of these options are likely to be far worse experiences than U.S.-administered detention. In addition, all but the last are also likely to be far less useful for purposes of intelligence-gathering from the point of view of the U.S. government.211 Nonetheless, these alternatives may grow attractive to the government in circumstances where the detention alternative becomes unduly restricted, yet the pressure for intervention remains. The situation is rather like squeezing a balloon: the result is not to shrink the balloon, but instead to displace the pressure from one side to another, causing the balloon to distend along the unconstrained side. So too here: when one of these coercive powers becomes constrained in new, more restrictive ways, the displaced pressure to incapacitate may simply find expression through one of the alternative mechanisms. On this view it is no surprise that lethal drone strikes have increased dramatically over the past two years, that the Obama administration has refused to foreswear rendition, that in Iraq we have largely (though not entirely) outsourced our detention operations to the Iraqis, and that we now are progressing along the same path in Afghanistan.212¶ Decisions regarding the calibration of a detention system—the¶ management of the convergence process, if you will—thus take place in the shadow of this balloon-squeezing phenomenon. A thorough policy review would take this into account, as should any formal lawmaking process. For the moment, however, our formal law-making process is not directed at the detention-scope question. Instead, clarification and development with respect to the substantive grounds for detention takes place through the lens of habeas corpus litigation.

Unrestrained drone use leads to multiple scenarios for global nuclear war
Boyle 13 – Professor of Political Science @ La Salle University Michael J. Boyle (Former Lecturer in International Relations and Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence @ University of St. Andrews), “The costs and consequences of drone warfare,” International Affairs 89: 1 (2013) pg. 1–29
The race for drones
An important, but overlooked, strategic consequence of the Obama administration’s embrace of drones is that it has generated a new and dangerous arms race for this technology. At present, the use of lethal drones is seen as acceptable to US policy-makers because no other state possesses the ability to make highly sophisticated drones with the range, surveillance capability and lethality of those currently manufactured by the United States. Yet the rest of the world is not far behind. At least 76 countries have acquired UAV technology, including Russia, China, Pakistan and India.120 China is reported to have at least 25 separate drone systems currently in development.121 At present, there are 680 drone programmes in the world, an increase of over 400 since 2005.122 Many states and non-state actors hostile to the United States have begun to dabble in drone technology. Iran has created its own drone, dubbed the ‘Ambassador of Death’, which has a range of up to 600 miles.123 Iran has also allegedly supplied the Assad regime in Syria with drone technology.124 Hezbollah launched an Iranian-made drone into Israeli territory, where it was shot down by the Israeli air force in October 2012.125
A global arms race for drone technology is already under way. According to one estimate, global spending on drones is likely to be more than US$94 billion by 2021.126 One factor that is facilitating the spread of drones (particularly non-lethal drones) is their cost relative to other military purchases. The top-of-the line Predator or Reaper model costs approximately US$10.5 million each, compared to the US$150 million price tag of a single F-22 fighter jet.127 At that price, drone technology is already within the reach of most developed militaries, many of which will seek to buy drones from the US or another supplier. With demand growing, a number of states, including China and Israel, have begun the aggressive selling of drones, including attack drones, and Russia may also be moving into this market.128 Because of concerns that export restrictions are harming US competitiveness in the drones market, the Pentagon has granted approval for drone exports to 66 governments and is currently being lobbied to authorize sales to even more.129 The Obama administration has already authorized the sale of drones to the UK and Italy, but Pakistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been refused drone technology by congressional restrictions.130 It is only a matter of time before another supplier steps in to offer the drone technology to countries prohibited by export controls from buying US drones. According to a study by the Teal Group, the US will account for 62 per cent of research and development spending and 55 per cent of procurement spending on drones by 2022.131 As the market expands, with new buyers and sellers, America’s ability to control the sale of drone technology will be diminished. It is likely that the US will retain a substantial qualitative advantage in drone technology for some time, but even that will fade as more suppliers offer drones that can match US capabilities.
The emergence of this arms race for drones raises at least five long-term strategic consequences, not all of which are favourable to the United States over the long term. First, it is now obvious that other states will use drones in ways that are inconsistent with US interests. One reason why the US has been so keen to use drone technology in Pakistan and Yemen is that at present it retains a substantial advantage in high-quality attack drones. Many of the other states now capable of employing drones of near-equivalent technology—for example, the UK and Israel—are considered allies. But this situation is quickly changing as other leading geopolitical players, such as Russia and China, are beginning rapidly to develop and deploy drones for their own purposes. While its own technology still lags behind that of the US, Russia has spent huge sums on purchasing drones and has recently sought to buy the Israeli-made Eitan drone capable of surveillance and firing air-to-surface missiles.132 China has begun to develop UAVs for reconnaissance and combat and has several new drones capable of long-range surveillance and attack under development.133 China is also planning to use unmanned surveillance drones to allow it to monitor the disputed East China Sea Islands, which are currently under dispute with Japan and Taiwan.134 Both Russia and China will pursue this technology and develop their own drone suppliers which will sell to the highest bidder, presumably with fewer export controls than those imposed by the US Congress. Once both governments have equivalent or near-equivalent levels of drone technology to the United States, they will be similarly tempted to use it for surveillance or attack in the way the US has done. Thus, through its own over-reliance on drones in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, the US may be hastening the arrival of a world where its qualitative advantages in drone technology are eclipsed and where this technology will be used and sold by rival Great Powers whose interests do not mirror its own.
A second consequence of the spread of drones is that many of the traditional concepts which have underwritten stability in the international system will be radically reshaped by drone technology. For example, much of the stability among the Great Powers in the international system is driven by deterrence, specifically nuclear deterrence.135 Deterrence operates with informal rules of the game and tacit bargains that govern what states, particularly those holding nuclear weapons, may and may not do to one another.136 While it is widely understood that nuclear-capable states will conduct aerial surveillance and spy on one another, overt military confrontations between nuclear powers are rare because they are assumed to be costly and prone to escalation. One open question is whether these states will exercise the same level of restraint with drone surveillance, which is unmanned, low cost, and possibly deniable. States may be more willing to engage in drone overflights which test the resolve of their rivals, or engage in ‘salami tactics’ to see what kind of drone-led incursion, if any, will motivate a response.137 This may have been Hezbollah’s logic in sending a drone into Israeli airspace in October 2012, possibly to relay information on Israel’s nuclear capabilities.138 After the incursion, both Hezbollah and Iran boasted that the drone incident demonstrated their military capabilities.139 One could imagine two rival states—for example, India and Pakistan—deploying drones to test each other’s capability and resolve, with untold consequences if such a probe were misinterpreted by the other as an attack. As drones get physically smaller and more precise, and as they develop a greater flying range, the temptation to use them to spy on a rival’s nuclear programme or military installations might prove too strong to resist. If this were to happen, drones might gradually erode the deterrent relationships that exist between nuclear powers, thus magnifying the risks of a spiral of conflict between them.
Another dimension of this problem has to do with the risk of accident. Drones are prone to accidents and crashes. By July 2010, the US Air Force had identified approximately 79 drone accidents.140 Recently released documents have revealed that there have been a number of drone accidents and crashes in the Seychelles and Djibouti, some of which happened in close proximity to civilian airports.141 The rapid proliferation of drones worldwide will involve a risk of accident to civilian aircraft, possibly producing an international incident if such an accident were to involve an aircraft affiliated to a state hostile to the owner of the drone. Most of the drone accidents may be innocuous, but some will carry strategic risks. In December 2011, a CIA drone designed for nuclear surveillance crashed in Iran, revealing the existence of the spying programme and leaving sensitive technology in the hands of the Iranian government.142 The expansion of drone technology raises the possibility that some of these surveillance drones will be interpreted as attack drones, or that an accident or crash will spiral out of control and lead to an armed confrontation.143 An accident would be even more dangerous if the US were to pursue its plans for nuclear-powered drones, which can spread radioactive material like a dirty bomb if they crash.144
1nc – 4

The United States federal government should
---substantially increase its investment and deployment of advanced air mobility capabilities as described by the Hazdra evidence below and SSGN capabilities as described by Foggo evidence below
---encourage private sector manufacturing research and development by updating tax policy including a permanent research and development tax credit, expanding programs for government procurement, and by offering training programs for manufacturing jobs
---fund the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Material, Protection, Control and Accounting program and its Global Threat Reduction Initiative
---increase funding for development of new military and intelligence capabilities as per the 1AC Myhrvold evidence and the scientific investments of the Paarlberg evidence
---reaffirm commitment to counterterrorism intelligence sharing with NATO, the EU and 5 EYES partners by no longer exploiting legal loopholes and improvements in intelligence security among other cooperative concessions as explained by the McGill evidence below and expand commitment to the operations of the NATO-Russia Council’s Cooperative Airspace Initiative and further counterterrorism intelligence sharing coordination 

CP solves the heg advantage --- air power attempts are inevitable, it’s just a question of effectiveness
Hazdra 01 (Richard J. Hazdra, Major, United States Air Force, “Air Mobility: The Key to the United States National Security Strategy,” Fairchild Paper, Air University Press, August 2001, http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/aupress/fairchild_papers/Hazdra/Hazdra.pdf)
Both Congress and the US air force itself have delayed desperately needed technological advances for AMC. Congress is forcing AMC’s pursuit of technological advance to remain at a snail’s pace due to the congressional agreements limiting the DOD budget. However, Congress will have to provide funding to obtain new air mobility designs if the armed forces are to have the rapid global mobility capability that the NSS requires. Despite the requirement to improve air transport capability, the Air Force seems narrowly focused on development and procurement of the F-22 at the expense of other critically important air mobility technological requirements. The Air Force has repeatedly emphasized the F-22 program in public and before Congress.38 In contrast, the CINCTRANSCOM seems to go it alone with little congressional or service support, when requesting technological advancements for AMC. Pursue New Air Mobility Aircraft Designs Peacetime military innovation occurs when respected senior military officers formulate a strategy for innovation.39 Albeit the concept of air mobility is not new, Gen Ronald R. Fogleman became an advocate in 1992 while assigned as the CINCTRANSCOM and then subsequently Air Force chief of staff. A change in the strategic security environment resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union may have been the catalyst for his advocacy.40 With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the security environment became more uncertain because the United States is no longer in a bipolar world. Uncertainty in the security environment arose from questions about the national interests that the United States would face in a multipolar world or in a world where the United States would face asymmetric threats from weaker enemies. The concept of rapid global mobility provides the United States with the means to project its military capabilities around the world to either punish an act of aggression, preempt an act of aggression, or deter an act of aggression. It is important to develop air mobility into a rapid global mobility force that has the flexibility to transition from the steady-state operations to a major theater war. Now is the time to pursue innovations in air transport design, rather than waiting for a major theater war. Once built and employed during peacetime, analysis on the new designs can accrue and errors can be recognized and corrected before their use in war.41 This environment encompasses a vast array of potential crisis spots on the globe, which requires a greater reliance on rapid global mobility, whose reduced force structure and worldwide infrastructure currently limit our capabilities. According to Stephen Peter Rosen, the United States can best face the issues associated with choosing new technologies by managing uncertainty.42 Looking through his lens, air mobility becomes a priority for force structure modernization because if the proper configurations of equipment cannot arrive in-theater when required, the ability of the United States to intervene in a crisis greatly diminishes. The United States needs to emphasize mobility forces now because the most opportune time for technological advancements occurs during peacetime.43 Update the Force Structure The NSS defines national interests that extend beyond the US borders; and in doing so, it establishes a requirement for military intervention to secure those interests. In citing the requirement for intervention, the secretary of defense––through the QDR––identifies several different types of interventions that the United States must prepare for. This policy of intervention, which the United States has employed numerous times since the end of the Cold War, affects several force structure issues to include an increased operations tempo and an increased personnel tempo. In addition, the concept of rapid global mobility has become the means to achieve effective military intervention and, as such, has become the backbone of both military and peacetime operations. The resulting increase in the need for air mobility operations has occurred alongside the decline of both the air mobility force structure and the worldwide air mobility infrastructure. In order to meet the challenges created in the new strategic environment, AMC must continue its pursuit of technological innovations to include new aircraft designs. New airlift designs should include intercontinental range without aerial refueling, and new tanker designs should provide for greater cargo capacity combined with greater offload capability. AMC can modernize most of its aging fleet of aircraft in order to address some issues. However, only a fleet of larger and longer-range air transports will reduce the personnel tempo while maintaining a high operations tempo. If the United States fails to meet this challenge, it limits its ability to intervene in crises and, consequently, degrades its leadership position in the world.

SSGN’s shore up US hegemony – they’re a crucial force multiplier and solves escalation of conflict
Foggo 12 (Rear Admiral James Foggo, US Navy, “A Promise Kept,” US Naval Institute, Proceedings Magazine, June 2012, http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012-06)
note – SSGN = Submersible, Ship, Guided, Nuclear – nuclear powered cruise missile submarine
What the SSGN Can Do After reviewing the lessons learned from Operation Odyssey Dawn, the capabilities and performance of the SSGN stand out as major contributors to the operation’s successful outcome. The Florida immediately provided the force multiplication required to achieve the JTF commander’s stated objectives. Combatant commanders faced with similar challenges in the future are sure to demand the resources provided by the SSGNs. Fortunately, the submarine force had the foresight to develop and employ this highly capable platform. Unfortunately, the lifespan of the SSGN platform is limited. Each of the four will retire in the mid- to late-2020s. Built on the conversion of an existing platform, the cost required to regenerate the identical capability in a new platform is prohibitively high; the capability must be provided through another path. One potential solution being considered is modifying Virginia-class SSNs. By installation of the proposed Virginia payload module (VPM), later submarines of the class could have flexible compartments that can be configured for strike systems. While they would not have the weapon density afforded by the SSGN, the number of platforms proposed could make up for the lost capability. The Navy’s recently released Program Objective Memorandum-13 budget includes continued research-and-development investment for the VPM project. In the near term, however, submarines such as the Florida and her sister ships, the Ohio (SSGN-726), Michigan (SSGN-727), and Georgia (SSGN-729), remain on station, providing combatant commanders with the comprehensive tools necessary to prepare for and respond to any crisis likely to emerge in this unstable world. As I look into the future, I see the demand for the capabilities provided by these awesome warships as not only continuing, but also steadily increasing.

Investment in the industrial base solves hegemony
O’Hanlon 12 (Michael, Director of Research and Senior Fellow – Brookings Institution, “The Arsenal of Democracy and How to Preserve It: Key Issues in Defense Industrial Policy January 2012”, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/1/2620defense20industrial20base/0126_defense_industrial_base_ohanlon)
The current wave of defense cuts is also different than past defense budget reductions in their likely industrial impact, as the U.S. defense industrial base is in a much different place than it was in the past. Defense industrial issues are too often viewed through the lens of jobs and pet projects to protect in congressional districts. But the overall health of the firms that supply the technologies our armed forces utilize does have national security resonance. Qualitative superiority in weaponry and other key military technology has become an essential element of American military power in the modern era—not only for winning wars but for deterring them. That requires world-class scientific and manufacturing capabilities—which in turn can also generate civilian and military export opportunities for the United States in a globalized marketplace.

NNSA imitative solves the terrorism advantage
Newmann and Bunn, 2009 Andrew, Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom, Kennedy School, and Matthew, Associate Professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “Funding for U.S. Efforts to Improve Controls Over Nuclear Weapons, Materials, and Expertise Overseas: A 2009 Update,” http://www.nti.org/e_research/cnwm/2009_Nuclear_Budget_Final.pdf, June
SECURING NUCLEAR WARHEADS AND MATERIALS As noted earlier, if President Obama’s objective of securing all nuclear weapons and weapons- usable materials worldwide within four years is to be achieved, NNSA’s MPCandA and GTRI programs will play a central role, along with the smaller warhead site security and warhead transportation security programs in DOD’s Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) effort. In May, the administration requested $700 million in FY 2010 funding for these and other programs to improve security and accounting for nuclear weapons and materials, $45 million below the FY 2009 appropriation.5 Some highlights: MPCandA: Remarkably, the FY 2009 omnibus appropriation, the first in many years with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, was also the first in many years in which the Congress cut the request for the International Nuclear Material Protection and Cooperation. (The administration, however, chose to take these cuts in the Second Line of Defense component of the effort, discussed below under interdicting nuclear smuggling, rather than in the MPCandA program itself.) The Obama administration’s FY 2010 request of $280 million for the MPCandA program is $55 million more than the FY 2009 appropriation, but $87 million less than the FY 2008 appropriation and a substantial decline from the FY 2007 peak of $406 million.6 (The Obama administration’s FY 2009 supplemental request, approved by the House on May 12 and the Senate on May 14, adds $55 million to the MPCandA and brings total FY 2009 funding to $280 million, the same as the FY 2010 request.7) For the out-years, the budget documents envision steadily declining funding, as currently planned work in Russia and elsewhere is completed; even in the out-year projections, no funds have been included for expanded efforts to implement the President’s four-year goal. In essence, to avoid being criticized for carrying large unspent balances from one year to the next, the budget includes funding only for those areas where NNSA already has foreign countries’ agreement to do work, or was confident (when the budget was being prepared) that such agreement would be forthcoming, rather than including not-yet-agreed activities likely to be needed to implement a four-year plan to achieve effective nuclear security worldwide.  GTRI: While the FY 2010 request of $354 million is $41 million less than the FY 2009 appropriation, Congress had boosted the FY 2009 appropriation to an unusually high level, far beyond either the FY 2008 appropriation or the request for FY 2009. (The Congressional appropriation was $53 million above the $140 million request for FY 2008 and $55 million above the $340 million request for FY 2009.8) It appears that the GTRI budget includes some accelerated activities meant to meet the four-year target for parts of GTRI’s agenda. But as with the MPCandA program, the funds that would be needed to expand GTRI’s coverage to ensure that the full range of facilities and materials were addressed, or to provide incentives to countries and facili- ties to allow their weapons-usable material to be shipped away, are not included in the FY 2010 GTRI request. Indeed, under current plans, GTRI would be spending dramatically more after the four-year plan is over ($1.1 billion in 2014) than it would be in FY 2010 or FY 2011. (This is in part because high-density fuels required to convert some 27 of the reactors GTRI hopes to convert will not be available until the latter part of this period, requiring substantial spending on converting reactors and shipping away irradiated HEU once this high-density fuel becomes available.) It seems certain that if the four-year goal is to be achieved, GTRI’s budgets for FY 2010 and FY 2011 will have to be substantially higher than those in the current request. In particular, more money would be needed to accelerate conversion of the 38 HEU-fueled research reactors that could convert to proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium (LEU) with LEU fuels already available. GTRI is planning to provide funds to accelerate private sector efforts to establish fabrication capability for the new high-density LEU fuels, and that is likely to be costly. Additional funds could also accelerate the pace of removing nuclear material from vulnerable sites around the world (in part because here, too, prices are escalating). More money is also needed to secure radiological sources and research reactors around the world—including in the United States, where upgrades are needed for some 1,800 locations with sources of 1,000 curies or more, and for the nation’s 32 domestic research reactors, both of which have now been included in GTRI’s scope.9 Moreover, GTRI is so far planning to return only a small fraction of the U.S.-origin HEU abroad; while most of the remainder is in developed countries, in many cases there is good reason to bring this material back as well, and more funds would be required to give these facilities incentives to give up their HEU. Finally, NNSA does not yet have a program focused on giving underutilized HEU-fueled reactors incentives to shut down—in many cases likely to be a quicker and easier approach than conversion. All told, an increase of $200 million or more would be needed for GTRI to move forward as rapidly as possible in reducing these risks—though managing such a large single-year increase would pose a challenge.10  

CP solves terrorism through expanding allied cooperation and making intel sharing resilient
McGill 12 (Anna-Katherine Staser McGill, School of Graduate and Continuing Studies in Diplomacy, Norwich University, “Challenges to International Counterterrorism Intelligence Sharing,” Global Security Studies, Summer 2012, Volume 3, Issue 3, http://globalsecuritystudies.com/McGill20Intel20Share.pdf)
Conclusion It is clear that diplomacy will continue to be a key component in US counterterrorism coalition building. Intelligence sharing, as a by-product of these efforts, will likely improve for as long as trust is maintained or improved and compromises are made in the greater interest of combating the shared threat of terrorism. However, the US is also likely to face continuing foreseeable challenges from the ever expanding breadth of its international allies, its increasing dependence on its counterterrorism coalitions, and unpredictable setbacks to international trust like WikiLeaks. There are ways, however, to allay the impact of these challenges if not overcome them all together. With regards to traditional allies the United States must continue to negotiate a close working relationship with its NATO, EU, and 5 EYES partners. Great strides have been made but future disagreements on policy, tactics, and strategy for the war on terrorism are inevitable. The best way to prepare for such future issues is to continue to foster a positive collaborative relationship with these nations so that mutual trust will prevent arguments from threatening the survival of the alliance. This means that the US must carefully manage its international position. It cannot exploit legal loopholes like exporting suspects to other nations for questionable interrogations; it cannot bully its friends nor act unilaterally against their wishes; and it must hold itself to high moral standards befitting a liberal democracy. For new and non-traditional allies, Reveron states that “the long-term challenge for policymakers will be to convert these short-term tactical relationships into meaningful alliances while protecting against counterintelligence threats” (467). Traditional alliances have to start somewhere and over time these new relationships can turn in to tried and tested cooperation. In order to further develop these relationships the US should attempt to iron out policy differences in other arenas rather than turn a blind eye to them and continue providing technical and material support to their development of effective intelligence programs. The US should not however hold CT cooperation supreme over other critical issues such as nuclear and conventional arms proliferation and human rights violations. Nations like Iran and Syria may be helpful in the short term and for limited purposes but this does not negate their less desirable practices. Finally, the US will also need to look inward to prevent more classified information leaks. The US needs to be more critical in the issuance of security clearances, employ digital monitoring of who is downloading information and in what amount to prevent mass dumps, and give greater importance to curtailing the “insider threat” of US citizens leaking information overall. Improving intelligence security will help to mitigate the blowback from WikiLeaks and will go a long way to advancing US credibility and trust building.

NRC operational expansion solves as well --- enhances counterterror coop
NATO 12 Last updated: 23-May-2012 16:10 http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-ED060502-C82F582E/natolive/topics_77646.htm?
Deepening relations with partners to combat terrorism
Combating terrorism was among the main drivers behind the creation of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) in May 2002. The common fight against terrorism remains a key aspect of NATO’s dialogue with Russia, as well as a focus of the NRC’s practical cooperation activities. For example, Russia has contributed to the fight against terrorism by participating in Operation Active Endeavour, in 2006 and 2007.
In December 2004, the NRC agreed an Action Plan on Terrorism that laid out areas of cooperation and was subject to regular review. In April 2011, NRC Foreign Ministers approved an updated NRC Action Plan on Terrorism that aims to enhance capabilities to act, individually and jointly, in three critical areas: preventing terrorism, combating terrorist activities and managing the consequences of terrorist acts (for more information, see NATO-Russia Action Plan on Terrorism).
In 2003 the NRC also launched the Cooperative Airspace Initiative (CAI) to foster cooperation on airspace surveillance and air traffic coordination, with the underlying goal to enhance confidence-building and to strengthen capabilities required for the handling of situations in which aircraft are suspected of being used as weapons to perpetrate terrorist attacks. The CAI system became operational in 2011.
1nc – 5

Precedent for war powers deliberation now.  It will check US militarism
Hunter 8/31/13 - Chair of the Council for a Community of Democracies Robert E. Hunter (US ambassador to NATO (93-98) and Served on Carter’s National Security Council as the Director of West European Affairs and then as Director of Middle East Affairs, “Restoring Congress’ Role In Making War,” Lobe Log, August 31, 2013, pg. http://www.lobelog.com/restoring-congress-role-in-making-war/
But the most remarkable element of the President’s statement is the likely precedent he is setting in terms of engaging Congress in decisions about the use of force, not just through “consultations,” but in formal authorization. This gets into complex constitutional and legal territory, and will lead many in Congress (and elsewhere) to expect Obama — and his successors — to show such deference to Congress in the future, as, indeed, many members of Congress regularly demand.
But seeking authorization for the use of force from Congress as opposed to conducting consultations has long since become the exception rather than the rule. The last formal congressional declarations of war, called for by Article One of the Constitution, were against Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary on June 4, 1942. Since then, even when Congress has been engaged, it has either been through non-binding resolutions or under the provisions of the War Powers Resolution of November 1973. That congressional effort to regain some lost ground in decisions to send US forces into harm’s way was largely a response to administration actions in the Vietnam War, especially the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 1964, which was actually prepared in draft before the triggering incident. The War Powers Resolution does not prevent a president from using force on his own authority, but only imposes post facto requirements for gaining congressional approval or ending US military action. In the current circumstances, military strikes of a few days’ duration, those provisions would almost certainly not come into play.
There were two basic reasons for abandoning the constitutional provision of a formal declaration of war. One was that such a declaration, once turned on, would be hard to turn off, and could lead to a demand for unconditional surrender (as with Germany and Japan in World War II), even when that would not be in the nation’s interests — notably in the Korean War. The more compelling reason for ignoring this requirement was the felt need, during the Cold War, for the president to be able to respond almost instantly to a nuclear attack on the United States or on very short order to a conventional military attack on US and allied forces in Europe.
With the Cold War now on “the ash heap of history,” this second argument should long since have fallen by the wayside, but it has not.  Presidents are generally considered to have the power to commit US military forces, subject to the provisions of the War Powers Resolution WPR, which have never been properly tested. But why? Even with the 9/11 attacks on the US homeland, the US did not respond immediately, but took time to build the necessary force and plans to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (and, anyway, if President George W. Bush had asked on 9/12 for a declaration of war, he no doubt would have received it from Congress, very likely unanimously).
As times goes by, therefore, what President Obama said on August 29, 2013 could well be remembered less for what it will mean regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria and more for what it implies for the reestablishment of a process of full deliberation and fully-shared responsibilities with the Congress for decisions of war-peace, as was the historic practice until 1950. This proposition will be much debated, as it should be; but if the president’s declaration does become precedent (as, in this author’s judgment, it should be, except in exceptional circumstances where a prompt military response is indeed in the national interest), he will have done an important and lasting service to the nation, including a potentially significant step in reducing the excessive militarization of US foreign policy.
There would be one added benefit: members of Congress, most of whom know little about the outside world and have not for decades had to take seriously their constitutional responsibilities for declaring war, would be required to become better-informed participants in some of the most consequential decisions the nation has to take, which, not incidentally, also involve risks to the lives of America’s fighting men and women.

Dismantling war powers justiciability undermines deliberation.  Our link is unique
Broughton 01 – Asst Attorney General of Texas Broughton, J. Richard (LL.M., with distinction, Georgetown University Law Center), “What Is It Good For--War Power, Judicial Review, and Constitutional Deliberation,” Oklahoma Law Review, Vol. 54, Issue 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 685-726
Judicial abstention from war powers disputes can mitigate the effects of the judicial overhang by encouraging Congress and the President to think more seriously about constitutional structure."' In the Vietnam era, for example, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution to assert its own constitutional prerogatives only after the courts had consistently refused to intervene. Perhaps this was no accident. Without resort to the judiciary, Congress was forced to take responsibility for using its Article I powers in its own defense. Whatever the other flaws of the War Powers Resolution, it at least represents Congress's assertiveness in attempting to define the boundaries of constitutional war power, as the Constitution provides. (Wther Congress got it right is a separate matter, beyond the scope of this article.) Similarly, rather than resort to the courts to challenge the constitutionality of the Resolution, presidents since Nixon have simply deployed troops at their discretion, forcing Congress to either authorize the action, reject such authorization, withdraw funding, or, perhaps as a last resort, impeach the President. Thus, the modem trend of cases leaving war powers controversies to the political branches has produced somewhat more responsible political institutions, though much work must still be done to truly effectuate the Constitution's vision of prudent and reasoned constitutional discourse among the Congress and the White House.' In keeping therefore with constitutional history and design, political actors best serve republican government when they give careful attention to constitutional boundaries and constitutional weapons in the course of adopting military and foreign policy. Political actors will be more likely to do so if they have only themselves, and not the courts, to do the work.
IV. Conclusion
There is much we can learn from Madison and Marshall, statesmen who understood the value of prudent constitutional reasoning to the practical governance of a large republic. Importantly, not all such reasoning occurs in the courts, nor should it. Those matters not "of a judiciary nature," in Madison's words, must find resolution in other fora. Controversies between Congress and the President regarding the Constitution's allocation of war powers are among this class of disputes. This is not to say that courts must leave all cases involving foreign affairs to the vicissitudes of political institutions; the Constitution explicitly vests the judiciary with authority over admiralty and maritime cases, as well as cases affecting ambassadors, public ministers, and consuls, all of which may invariably touch upon foreign relations. War powers disputes are constitutionally unique, however, because the Constitution itself commits the resolution of those disputes to legislators and the chief executive. The courts have, for the most part, appropriately left these disputes where they belong, in the hands of the political branches. Through the doctrine of justiciability, courts have helped to preserve the separation of powers by recognizing both the limits on their Article In authority and the broa prerogatives that the Constitution grants to political actors who are charged with making and effecting American military and foreign policy. By continuing this trend, as the District of Columbia Circuit did in Campbell, the judiciary can encourage deliberation about constitutional structure in the political branches, as Madison and Marshall envisioned. Pg. 724-725

Militarism risks World War III.  We must check the expansionist desires
Boyle 12 - Professor of International Law @ University of Illinois College of Law Francis A. Boyle (PhD. degrees in Political Science from Harvard University), “Unlimited Imperialism and the Threat of World War III. U.S. Militarism at the Start of the 21st Century,” Global Research, December 25, 2012, pg. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unlimited-imperialism-and-the-threat-of-world-war-iii-u-s-militarism-at-the-start-of-the-21st-century/5316852
Historically, this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898.  Then the Republican administration of President  William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidal conditions.  Additionally, McKinley’s military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America’s economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the “open door” policy.   But over the next four decades America’s aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the “Pacific” would ineluctably pave the way for Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America’s precipitation into the ongoing Second World War.
Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the Republican Bush Jr. administration and now the Democratic Obama administration are threatening to set off World War III.
By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001 9/11, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect.  Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago:  control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas.  The Bush Jr./ Obama  administrations  have  already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation.  In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration  announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species.  Libya and the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the last.
This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated “unlimited imperialism” in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53):
“The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror’s lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind… “
 It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
*CASE* 

Hegemony 

No impact to heg decline --- their epistemology is flawed
Friedman 10 – research fellow in defense and homeland security, Cato. PhD candidate in pol sci, MIT (Ben, Military Restraint and Defense Savings, 20 July 2010, http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-bf-07202010.html)
Another argument for high military spending is that U.S. military hegemony underlies global stability. Our forces and alliance commitments dampen conflict between potential rivals like China and Japan, we are told, preventing them from fighting wars that would disrupt trade and cost us more than the military spending that would have prevented war. The theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim is weak. It overestimates both the American military's contribution to international stability and the danger that instability abroad poses to Americans. In Western Europe, U.S. forces now contribute little to peace, at best making the tiny odds of war among states there slightly more so.7 Even in Asia, where there is more tension, the history of international relations suggests that without U.S. military deployments potential rivals, especially those separated by sea like Japan and China, will generally achieve a stable balance of power rather than fight. In other cases, as with our bases in Saudi Arabia between the Iraq wars, U.S. forces probably create more unrestthan they prevent. Our force deployments can also generate instability by prompting states to develop nuclear weapons. Even when wars occur, their economic impact is likely to be limited here.8 By linking markets, globalization provides supply alternatives for the goods we consume, including oil. If political upheaval disrupts supply in one location, suppliers elsewhere will take our orders. Prices may increase, but markets adjust. That makes American consumers less dependent on any particular supply source, undermining the claim that we need to use force to prevent unrest in supplier nations or secure trade routes.9 Part of the confusion about the value of hegemony comes from misunderstanding the Cold War. People tend to assume, falsely, that our activist foreign policy, with troops forward supporting allies, not only caused the Soviet Union's collapse but is obviously a good thing even without such a rival. Forgotten is the sensible notion that alliances are a necessary evil occasionally tolerated to balance a particularly threatening enemy. The main justification for creating our Cold War alliances was the fear that Communist nations could conquer or capture by insurrection the industrial centers in Western Europe and Japan and then harness enough of that wealth to threaten us — either directly or by forcing us to become a garrison state at ruinous cost. We kept troops in South Korea after 1953 for fear that the North would otherwise overrun it. But these alliances outlasted the conditions that caused them. During the Cold War, Japan, Western Europe and South Korea grew wealthy enough to defend themselves. We should let them. These alliances heighten our force requirements and threaten to drag us into wars, while providing no obvious benefit. 

Judicial legitimacy and court processes are not the lynchpin of hegemony --- it’s resilient and decline is impossible
Norrlof 10 – an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto (Carla, “ America’s Global Advantage US Hegemony and International Cooperation” p. 1-2)
We have seen erroneous predictions of American decline before. In the 1970s, the combination of high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, the Vietnam War, political and military challenges from China and the Soviet Union, and the economic rise of Japan led to eerily similar forecasts. Pessimists then, as today, underestimated the longevity of American power. The main reason the United States has continued to occupy a unique place in the international system is because a sufficient number of major and lesser powers have a strong interest in maintaining America at the top of the hierarchy. To bring America down would take a deliberate, coordinated strategy on the part of others and this is simply not plausible. As much as the United States benefits from the space it has carved out for itself in the current world order, its ability to reap unequal gains will remain unless and until allies start to incur heavy losses under American dominance. Even that, by itself, will not be sufficient to sink American hegemony. A strong alternative to American rule will have to come into view for things to fundamentally change. At present, no credible alternative is in sight. The United States is not invincible but its dominance is currently steady. Those who are inclined to think that American hegemony will persist – at least for a while – tend to dwell on the claim that the United States is providing a range of public goods to the benefit of all at its own expense. This is a chimera. The United States is self-interested, not altruistic. The illusion of benevolence has meant that very little attention has been given to uncovering the mechanism through which the United States gains disproportionately from supplying a large open market, the world’s reserve currency, and a military machine capable of stoking or foiling deadly disputes. This book exposes the mechanism through which the United States reaps unequal gains and shows that the current world system, and the distribution of power that supports it, has built-in stabilizers that strengthen American power following bouts of decline. Although all dominant powers must eventually decline, I will show that the downward progression need not be linear when mutually reinforcing tendencies across various power dimensions are at play. Specifically, I will demonstrate how the United States’ reserve currency status produces disproportionate commercial gains; how commercial power gives added flexibility in monetary affairs; and, finally, how military preponderance creates advantages in both monetary and trade affairs.

Multipolarity now --- plus there will be no transition war
Ikenberry 11 (May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, G. John, PhD, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, “The Future of the Liberal World Order,” http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67730/g-john-ikenberry/the-future-of-the-liberal-world-order)
For all these reasons, many observers have concluded that world politics is experiencing not just a changing of the guard but also a transition in the ideas and principles that underlie the global order. The journalist Gideon Rachman, for example, says that a cluster of liberal internationalist ideas -- such as faith in democratization, confidence in free markets, and the acceptability of U.S. military power -- are all being called into question. According to this worldview, the future of international order will be shaped above all by China, which will use its growing power and wealth to push world politics in an illiberal direction. Pointing out that China and other non-Western states have weathered the recent financial crisis better than their Western counterparts, pessimists argue that an authoritarian capitalist alternative to Western neoliberal ideas has already emerged. According to the scholar Stefan Halper, emerging-market states "are learning to combine market economics with traditional autocratic or semiautocratic politics in a process that signals an intellectual rejection of the Western economic model." Today's international order is not really American or Western--even if it initially appeared that way. But this panicked narrative misses a deeper reality: although the United States' position in the global system is changing, the liberal international order is alive and well. The struggle over international order today is not about fundamental principles. China and other emerging great powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership within it. Indeed, today's power transition represents not the defeat of the liberal order but its ultimate ascendance. Brazil, China, and India have all become more prosperous and capable by operating inside the existing international order -- benefiting from its rules, practices, and institutions, including the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the newly organized G-20. Their economic success and growing influence are tied to the liberal internationalist organization of world politics, and they have deep interests in preserving that system. In the meantime, alternatives to an open and rule-based order have yet to crystallize. Even though the last decade has brought remarkable upheavals in the global system -- the emergence of new powers, bitter disputes among Western allies over the United States' unipolar ambitions, and a global financial crisis and recession -- the liberal international order has no competitors. On the contrary, the rise of non-Western powers and the growth of economic and security interdependence are creating new constituencies for it. To be sure, as wealth and power become less concentrated in the United States' hands, the country will be less able to shape world politics. But the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive. Indeed, now may be the best time for the United States and its democratic partners to update the liberal order for a new era, ensuring that it continues to provide the benefits of security and prosperity that it has provided since the middle of the twentieth century. 

States don’t have feelings – soft power doesn’t work
Fan 7 (Ying, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Brunel Business School, Brunel University in London, “Soft power: Power of attraction or confusion?”, November 14)
The whole concept of soft power — power of attraction — is based on the assumption that there is a link between attractiveness and the ability to influence others in international relations, that is, such a power of attraction does have the ability to shape the preferences of others. This may be the case at the personal or individual level. It is questionable whether attraction power works at the nation level. Wang (2006) identifies two problems. First, a country has many different actors. Some of them like the attraction and others do not. Whether the attraction will lead to the ability to influence the policy of the target country depends on which groups in that country find it attractive (eg the political elite, the general public or a marginal group), and how much control they have on policymaking. For example, soft power by Country A may have positive influence on the political elite but negative influence on the general public in Country B, or vice versa.
Secondly, policy making at the state level is far more complicated than at the personal level; and has different dynamics that emphasise the rational considerations. This leaves little room for emotional elements, thus significantly reducing the effect of soft power. Even Nye (2004a) has to admit, what soft power can influence is not the policy making itself but only the ‘environment for policy’. Soft power may be counterproductive because societies react differently to American culture, the working of which is extremely complex, not least because of the diversity, as Fehrenbach and Poiger point out, in the ‘ processes by which  societies adopt, adapt, and reject American culture’ ( Opelz, 2004 ). 

Heg fails – we cant assert our influence effectively
Maher 11-12-2010 (Richard is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at Brown University. “The Paradox of American Unipolarity: Why the United States May Be Better Off in a Post-Unipolar World” Science Direct) BW
And yet, despite this material preeminence, the United States sees its political and strategic influence diminishing around the world. It is involved in two costly and destructive wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where success has been elusive and the end remains out of sight. China has adopted a new assertiveness recently, on everything from U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, currency convertibility, and America's growing debt (which China largely finances). Pakistan, one of America's closest strategic allies, is facing the threat of social and political collapse. Russia is using its vast energy resources to reassert its dominance in what it views as its historical sphere of influence. Negotiations with North Korea and Iran have gone nowhere in dismantling their nuclear programs. Brazil's growing economic and political influence offer another option for partnership and investment for countries in the Western Hemisphere. And relations with Japan, following the election that brought the opposition Democratic Party into power, are at their frostiest in decades. To many observers, it seems that America's vast power is not translating into America's preferred outcomes.¶ As the United States has come to learn, raw power does not automatically translate into the realization of one's preferences, nor is it necessarily easy to maintain one's predominant position in world politics. There are many costs that come with predominance – material, political, and reputational. Vast imbalances of power create apprehension and anxiety in others, in one's friends just as much as in one's rivals. In this view, it is not necessarily American predominance that produces unease but rather American predominance. Predominance also makes one a tempting target, and a scapegoat for other countries’ own problems and unrealized ambitions. Many a Third World autocrat has blamed his country's economic and social woes on an ostensible U.S. conspiracy to keep the country fractured, underdeveloped, and subservient to America's own interests. Predominant power likewise breeds envy, resentment, and alienation. How is it possible for one country to be so rich and powerful when so many others are weak, divided, and poor? Legitimacy—the perception that one's role and purpose is acceptable and one's power is used justly—is indispensable for maintaining power and influence in world politics.¶ As we witness the emergence (or re-emergence) of great powers in other parts of the world, we realize that American predominance cannot last forever. It is inevitable that the distribution of power and influence will become more balanced in the future, and that the United States will necessarily see its relative power decline. While the United States naturally should avoid hastening the end of this current period of American predominance, it should not look upon the next period of global politics and international history with dread or foreboding. It certainly should not seek to maintain its predominance at any cost, devoting unlimited ambition, resources, and prestige to the cause. In fact, contrary to what many have argued about the importance of maintaining its predominance, America's position in the world—both at home and internationally—could very well be strengthened once its era of preeminence is over. It is, therefore, necessary for the United States to start thinking about how best to position itself in the “post-unipolar” world.

Plan increases US leadership – that leadership will be used to counterbalance China.  That undermines regional cooperation over the South China Seas and risks US-China Cold War.  
Steinbock 13 - Senior ASLA-Fulbright Scholar @ New York University Dr. Dan Steinbock (Expert on the economic, political and strategic aspects of the nascent multipolar world), “Two Visions: U.S. and Chinese Rebalancing in Asia,” EconoMonitor, October 14th, 2013, pg. http://www.economonitor.com/blog/2013/10/two-visions-u-s-and-chinese-rebalancing-in-asia/#sthash.m4yEgivO.dpuf

Today, the United States is no longer the dominant economic contributor in the region. Nonetheless, Washington hopes to restore its primacy in Asia to counterbalance China’s role.
In turn, from China’s standpoint, U.S. rebalancing translates to de facto containment policies vis-à-vis America’s old allies (Japan, Australia), new partners (India) and new military partnerships with emerging ASEAN nations (e.g., the Manila Declaration, cooperation with Vietnam).
Indeed, the two pivots toward Asia have a very different approach to regional cooperation and the South China Seas disputes.
U.S. rebalancing in Asia
Indeed, the buildup of U.S. forces in Asia has intensified since 2011. In June 2012, at Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, an annual meeting of regional defense ministers and security experts, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that America’s combat ships in Asia would be doubled to 60 percent by 2020. Further, some military scenarios (e.g., the so-called AirSea Battle plan) have identified China as a kind of a hostile hegemon in the region – in a way that has divided even Pentagon’s leadership.
The most recent strategic moves toward U.S. rebalancing in the region include the new U.S.-Japanese agreement to broaden the bilateral military alliance. It was signed only a few days ago during a joint visit by Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in a meeting with their Japanese counterparts. It reflects the US’ increased military, economic and diplomatic focus on Asia.
Most importantly, the deal comes at a time when the Japanese government is seeking to greatly enhance its own military capabilities and to revise its pacifist Constitution, drafted after World War II. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plans to increase Tokyo’s military budget by 3 percent this year. As a result, Japan’s this year’s defense budget will be highest since the end of the Cold War, despite Japan’s huge and soaring debt burden.
Since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was elected at the end of last year, he has revived Japan’s efforts to enhance its military capabilities. Under its Constitution, Japan has been constrained since World War II from using military force for purposes beyond basic self-defense, which Abe hopes to change. These efforts have become complicated by Japan’s increasingly tense relations with nearby South Korea and China.
A year ago, Tokyo also decided to “nationalize” a group of disputed, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea. Meanwhile, China is Japan’s number one trading partner by a large margin, whereas Japan is China’s second-largest source of foreign trade, after the U.S.
In brief, while the U.S. rebalancing in Asia is motivated by efforts to accelerate trade and investment, its primary focus, at least currently, is military.
China’s rebalancing in Asia
China, too, is rebalancing its foreign policy in the region. But its approach is different.
In the past, Chinese foreign ministers have been U.S. or Russia experts. Now, the emphasis is no shifting (back) to Asia and Asia-Pacific. New foreign policy is reflected by a slate of new appointments, including those of senior diplomats Yang Jiechi, Wang Yi, and Cui Tiankai.
In the past, Washington and Brussels have sought to nurture relations with Asia vis-à-vis special relations with the ASEAN’s more advanced but small members, such as Singapore. In contrast, President Xi made his opening in Indonesia whose huge population accounts for 40 percent of the ASEAN total. While the West prefers advanced-economy partners to focus on trade and defense, Chinese approach favors emerging-economy cooperation stressing trade with economic development.
During his maiden Southeast Asian visit, President Xi Jinping addressed the Indonesian parliament proposing joint efforts with countries in the region to develop a new ”maritime silk road.” What the speech underscored were the economic opportunities for cooperation between China and the 10 member nations of the ASEAN. This initiative holds potential for great opportunities for regional development. In particular, setting up an Asian investment bank to support regional connectivity construction is vital to Indonesia, which has drawn up a $400 billion plan for its domestic infrastructure development.
Further, President Xi told the Indonesian lawmakers China would strive to ensure the trade volume with ASEAN countries reaches US$1 trillion by 2020. He also restated the proposal to establish a regional infrastructure investment bank, an initiative he raised during a visit to the region in March.
Following President Xi’s opening, Premier Li Keqiang outlined the blueprint for a “diamond decade” of relations between China and ASEAN, at the China-ASEAN leaders meeting in Brunei, Premier Li proposed a treaty on good-neighborliness, friendship and cooperation between China and the ASEAN.
In addition to a treaty on good-neighborliness, friendship and cooperation, Premier Li advocated the need to boost security exchanges and cooperation, speaking for bilateral trade to 1 trillion U.S. dollars by 2020, an Asian infrastructure investment bank as a platform for financing intra-ASEAN and regional inter-connectivity projects, cooperation to enhance regional financial cooperation and immunity to risks, promotion of maritime cooperation, and exchanges in culture, technology, environmental protection.
The strategic partnership between China and ASEAN was initiated a decade ago. However, the proposals by President Xi and Premier Li could broaden and deepen the relationship by a magnitude – in order to support, secure and boost regional cooperation between China and the ASEAN.
Cooperation versus rearmament
A week ago, President Barack Obama canceled his appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation APEC conference in Bali and long-planned visits to Malaysia and the Philippines, because of the fiscal standoff in Washington. That, in turn, raised questions about the White House’s stated goal of pivoting its foreign policy toward Asia. Replacing President Obama at the APEC, Secretary of State John Kerry assured his Asian audience that the U.S. fiscal standoff was actually “an example of the robustness of our democracy.”
Clearly, President Obama had no other option but to focus on the domestic priorities. But America’s pivot toward Asia is not just about the presence or absence of the U.S. president in certain vital summits in Asia. What’s far more important is the way the U.S. and China are pivoting to Asia is very different.
What emerging Asia needs is broader and deeper economic cooperation through security, trade and investment, and shared prosperity. What Asia does not need is a 21st century Cold War.
It goes nuclear. Their takeouts do not assume the Air-Sea Battle strategy
Etzioni 13 – professor of international relations @ The George Washington University Amitai Etzioni, “Air-Sea Battle: A Dangerous Way to Deal with China,” The Diplomat, September 03, 2013, pg. http://thediplomat.com/2013/09/03/air-sea-battle-a-dangerous-way-to-deal-with-china/

On the face of it, the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle plan makes eminently good sense; it is a clear response to a clear challenge. China has been developing a whole slew of weapons (especially anti-ship missiles) over the past two decades that are of great concern to the U.S. military. These weapons, known in Pentagon-speak as anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, could undermine the international right to free passage in China’s surrounding waters or, in the case of a conflict over Taiwan or contested islands in the South and East China Seas, prevent the U.S. from making good on defense commitments to its friends in the region.
In response, the Pentagon developed Air-Sea Battle (ASB), the employment of which entails, according to position papers developed to promote it, a blistering assault on China’s mainland. A report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) gives a detailed account of how an ASB-style war with China would unfold. In the opening “blinding campaign,” the U.S. attacks China’s reconnaissance and command-and-control networks to degrade the PLA’s ability to target U.S. and allied forces. Next, the military takes the fight to the Chinese mainland, striking long-range anti-ship missile launchers. Given that this is where the anti-ship missiles are located, it is only logical that the U.S. would target land- based platforms. And to go after them, one of course needs to take out China's air defense systems, command control centers, and other anti-access weapons. In short, ASB requires a total war with China.
As word of this plan spread, it generated a great deal of buzz in defense circles—and considerable push back. Some in the Army saw ASB as an attempt by the Air Force and Navy to grab future missions and a larger share of a shrinking defense budget. They were somewhat mollified when planners later carved out more room in the plan for land forces. Others fear that it would lead to an arms race between the U.S. and China just when both powers must focus on nation building at home. Still others claim that the same goal could be achieved by a much less aggressive strategy, such as imposing a blockade on China. Above all, critics hold that ASB is highly escalatory and may lead to nuclear war. Defense analyst Raoul Heinrichs warns that the deep mainland strikes “could easily be misconstrued in Beijing as an attempt at preemptively destroying China’s retaliatory nuclear options. Under intense pressure, it would be hard to limit a dramatic escalation of such a conflict, including, in the worst case, up to and beyond the nuclear threshold.”

1nc – terrorism adv.

Zero risk of nuclear terrorism
Chapman 12 5/22, *Stephen Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune, “CHAPMAN: Nuclear terrorism unlikely,” http://www.oaoa.com/articles/chapman-87719-nuclear-terrorism.html, AJ
Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have had to live with the knowledge that the next time the terrorists strike, it could be not with airplanes capable of killing thousands but atomic bombs capable of killing hundreds of thousands.  The prospect has created a sense of profound vulnerability. It has shaped our view of government policies aimed at combating terrorism (filtered through Jack Bauer). It helped mobilize support for the Iraq war.  Why are we worried? Bomb designs can be found on the Internet. Fissile material may be smuggled out of Russia. Iran, a longtime sponsor of terrorist groups, is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. A layperson may figure it’s only a matter of time before the unimaginable comes to pass. Harvard’s Graham Allison, in his book “Nuclear Terrorism,” concludes, “On the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable.”  But remember: After Sept. 11, 2001, we all thought more attacks were a certainty. Yet al-Qaida and its ideological kin have proved unable to mount a second strike.  Given their inability to do something simple — say, shoot up a shopping mall or set off a truck bomb — it’s reasonable to ask whether they have a chance at something much more ambitious. Far from being plausible, argued Ohio State University professor John Mueller in a presentation at the University of Chicago, “the likelihood that a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small.”  The events required to make that happen comprise a multitude of Herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia’s inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing. Besides, those devices are probably no longer a danger, since weapons that are not maintained quickly become what one expert calls “radioactive scrap metal.” If terrorists were able to steal a Pakistani bomb, they would still have to defeat the arming codes and other safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized use.  As for Iran, no nuclear state has ever given a bomb to an ally — for reasons even the Iranians can grasp.  Stealing some 100 pounds of bomb fuel would require help from rogue individuals inside some government who are prepared to jeopardize their own lives. Then comes the task of building a bomb. It’s not something you can gin up with spare parts and power tools in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a safe haven and advanced equipment — plus people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die for the cause.  Assuming the jihadists vault over those Himalayas, they would have to deliver the weapon onto American soil. Sure, drug smugglers bring in contraband all the time — but seeking their help would confront the plotters with possible exposure or extortion. This, like every other step in the entire process, means expanding the circle of people who know what’s going on, multiplying the chance someone will blab, back out or screw up.  That has heartening implications. If al-Qaida embarks on the project, it has only a minuscule chance of seeing it bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, it probably won’t bother.  None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen. 

Detention doesn’t fuel terrorism or recruitment and even if it is they’ll attack us anyways after the plan --- this card alone beats the whole advantage
Joscelyn 10 (Thomas Joscelyn, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Gitmo Is Not Al Qaeda's 'Number One Recruitment Tool'” 12/27/10, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gitmo-not-al-qaedas-number-one-recruitment-tool_524997.html?page=1)
President Obama and his surrogates have made this argument before, but they have provided no real evidence that it is true. In fact, al Qaeda’s top leaders rarely mention Guantanamo in their messages to the West, Muslims and the world at large. No journalist in attendance had the opportunity to challenge President Obama’s assertion. The president should have been asked: If Guantanamo is such a valuable recruiting tool, then why do al Qaeda’s leaders rarely mention it? THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reviewed translations of 34 messages and interviews delivered by top al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan (“Al Qaeda Central”), including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, since January 2009. The translations were published online by the NEFA Foundation. Guantanamo is mentioned in only 3 of the 34 messages. The other 31 messages contain no reference to Guantanamo. And even in the three messages in which al Qaeda mentions the detention facility it is not a prominent theme. Instead, al Qaeda’s leaders repeatedly focus on a narrative that has dominated their propaganda for the better part of two decades. According to bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other al Qaeda chieftains, there is a Zionist-Crusader conspiracy against Muslims. Relying on this deeply paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, al Qaeda routinely calls upon Muslims to take up arms against Jews and Christians, as well as any Muslims rulers who refuse to fight this imaginary coalition. This theme forms the backbone of al Qaeda’s messaging – not Guantanamo. To illustrate this point, consider the results of some basic keyword searches. Guantanamo is mentioned a mere 7 times in the 34 messages we reviewed. (Again, all 7 of those references appear in just 3 of the 34 messages.) By way of comparison, all of the following keywords are mentioned far more frequently: Israel/Israeli/Israelis (98 mentions), Jew/Jews (129), Zionist(s) (94), Palestine/Palestinian (200), Gaza (131), and Crusader(s) (322). (Note: Zionist is often paired with Crusader in al Qaeda’s rhetoric.) Naturally, al Qaeda’s leaders also focus on the wars in Afghanistan (333 mentions) and Iraq (157). Pakistan (331), which is home to the jihadist hydra, is featured prominently, too. Al Qaeda has designs on each of these three nations and implores willing recruits to fight America and her allies there. Keywords related to other jihadist hotspots also feature more prominently than Gitmo, including Somalia (67 mentions), Yemen (18) and Chechnya (15). Simply put, there is no evidence in the 34 messages we reviewed that al Qaeda’s leaders are using Guantanamo as a recruiting tool. Undoubtedly, “Al Qaeda Central” has released other messages during the past two years that are not included in our sample. Some of those messages may refer to Guantanamo. And some of the al Qaeda messages provided by NEFA, which does a remarkable job collecting and translating al Qaeda’s statements and interviews, may be only partial translations of longer texts. However, the messages we reviewed also surely include most of what al Qaeda’s honchos have said publicly since January 2009. These messages do not support the president’s claim. A closer look at the 3 out of 34 messages in which “Al Qaeda Central” actually referred to Guantanamo reveals just how weak the president’s argument is. Even in these messages al Qaeda is far more interested in other themes. In a February 17, 2010 message entitled, “The Way to Save the Earth,” Osama bin Laden made an offhand reference to Guantanamo. But it is hardly a prominent feature of the terror master’s message. As bin Laden makes clear in the opening lines, his main concern is climate change. “This is a message to the whole world about those who cause climate change and its dangers – intentionally or unintentionally – and what we must do,” bin Laden said. Bin Laden blames the “greedy heads of major corporations” and “senior capitalists” who are “characterized by wickedness and hardheartedness” for the supposed deleterious effects of global warming. Bin Laden does refer to Guantanamo, but it is brief and in the context of a rambling passage. In the surrounding sentences, bin Laden criticizes America for waging war in Iraq for oil, incorrectly claims that America and her allies have “killed, wounded, orphaned, widowed and displaced more than 10 million Iraqis,” and calls President Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize “an extreme example of the deception and humiliation of humanity.” If bin Laden’s February 17th message is evidence that al Qaeda is using Guantanamo as a recruiting tool, then it is also evidence that al Qaeda is using climate change and President Obama’s Nobel to earn new recruits. The other two messages in our sample that refer to Guantanamo do not fare much better when any amount of scrutiny is applied. In a message dated September 15, 2010, Ayman al Zawahiri focuses most of his critique on Muslim governments and especially the Pakistani government. There is a single reference to Guantanamo and it is a throwaway line in which Ayman al Zawahiri repeats the myth that America has desecrated the Koran at Gitmo. Referring to NATO, Zawahiri asks rhetorically, “And aren’t they the forces which humiliated the noble Qur’an in Guantanamo, Iraq and elsewhere?” There is no other mention of Guantanamo in the 12-page translation provided by NEFA. In an August 5, 2009 tape entitled, “The Facts of Jihad and the Lies of the Hypocrites,” Ayman al Zawahiri mentioned Guantanamo five times. The August 5th tape comes closest to validating the president’s theory of jihadist recruitment and yet it still falls way short. Words related to “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” appear more than 70 times each. The words “Israel” and “Israelis” appear 39 times. And the word “Zionist” appears another four times—in the context of the aforementioned imagined American-Zionist conspiracy against the Muslim world. (According to Ayman al-Zawahiri, by the way, Obama is himself a participant in this conspiracy.) And the words “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Jewishness” appear another 12 times. Last week, President Obama cited jihadist propaganda as his chief reason for closing Guantanamo. But as the analysis above makes clear, it is not true that Guantanamo is the terror network’s “number one recruitment tool.” Even if it were, al Qaeda would just move on to another pretext for its terror once Gitmo is closed. There is no good reason for an American president to cite jihadist propaganda in defense of his policy decision. By that standard, if President Obama must close Guantanamo, then he must also withdraw all American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as move to end the “Zionist-Crusader” conspiracy against Muslims elsewhere around the world.

Squo solves---defense capabilities
Daniel 12 2/16, *Lisa Daniel: American Forces Press Service, Defense News, “U.S. Faces Broad Spectrum of Threats, Intel Leaders Say,” http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=67231, AJ
Intelligence shows the next three years will be a critical transition time in counterterrorism, as groups like al-Qaida diminish in importance and terrorist groups become more decentralized, Clapper said. U.S. counterterrorism has caused al-Qaida to lose so many top lieutenants since 2008 “that a new group of leaders, even if they could be found, would have difficulty integrating into the organization and compensating for mounting losses,” the director said. Al-Qaida’s regional affiliates in Iraq, the Arabian peninsula and North Africa are expected to “surpass the remnants of core al-Qaida in Pakistan,” he said. With continued, robust counterterrorism efforts and cooperation from international partners, Clapper said, “there is a better-than-even chance that decentralization will lead to fragmentation of the movement within a few years,” although he added that terrorist groups will continue to be a dangerous transnational force. Intense counterterrorism pressure has made it unlikely that a terrorist group would launch a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear mass attack against the United States in the next year, Clapper said, but groups such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula continue to show interest in such an attack. Most terrorist groups, however, remain locally focused, Clapper said, noting that al-Qaida in Iraq remains focused on overthrowing the Shiia-led government in Baghdad in favor of a Sunni-led government. In Africa, the al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and al-Shabaab organizations struggle with internal divisions and outside support, and have been diminished by government and military pressure in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, he said. Still, intelligence shows no nation states have provided weapons of mass destruction assistance to terrorist groups, and no nonstate actors are targeting WMD sites in countries with unrest, the director said. But that could change as governments become more unstable, he added.  

The rest of the government agrees --- nuclear retaliation is excessive.
Spring ‘1 (Baker, Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation, Heritage Backgrounder 1477, Sept 20, http://www.heritage.org/Research/MissileDefense/BG1477.cfm)

Nuclear retaliation is not appropriate for every kind of attack against America. Some opponents of missile defense believe that the United States has an effective nuclear deterrent that, if necessary, could be used to respond to attacks on the homeland. But no responsible U.S. official is suggesting that the United States consider the use of nuclear weapons in response to the horrific September 11 attacks. In most cases of attack on the United States, the nuclear option would not be appropriate, but a defense response will almost always be appropriate. The United States needs to be able to resort to defensive options.

The risk of nuclear terrorism is vanishingly small --- terrorists must succeed at each of twenty plus stages --- failing at one means zero risk.
Mueller ‘10 (John, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and a Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, A.B. from the University of Chicago, M.A. and Ph.D. @ UCLA, Atomic Obsession – Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford University Press, Accessed @ Emory)
LIKELIHOOD In his thoughtful, influential, and well-argued 2004 book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe—a work Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times finds "terrifying"—Graham Allison relayed his "considered judgment" that "on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not." He repeated that judgment in an article published two years later—albeit without reducing the terminal interval to compensate—and he had presumably relied on the same inspira-tional mechanism in 1995 to predict: "In the absence of a determined program of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade is out."1 He has quite a bit of company in his perpetually alarming conclusions. In 2003, UN Ambassador John Negroponte judged there to be a "a high probability" that wandJjjn two years al-Qaeda would attempt an attack using a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction. When some 85 foreign policy experts were polled by -Senator Richard Lugar in 2004 and 2005, they concluded on aver-age that there was a 29 percent likelihood a nuclear explosion would occur somewhere in the world within the next ten years, and they overwhelmingly anticipated that this would likely be carried out by terrorists, not by a government. And in 2007, physicist Richard Garwin put the likelihood of a nuclear explosion on an American or European city by terrorist or other means at 20 percent per year, which would work out to 87 percent over a ten-year period.2 In late 2008, after working for six months and interviewing more than 250 people, a congressionally mandated task force, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (possibly known as COPWOMDPAT to its friends) issued its report, portentously entitled World at Risk. It led by expressing the belief that "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013." Although the report is careful to reassure its readers that it does not intend to frighten them about the current state of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, it failed miserably in that admirable goal almost immediately. Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, proclaimed shortly after the report was issued, that it "scared the pants off of most of us."3 In its dire forecast, the report's phraseology echoes, of course, Allison's formulation of 2004, and this may owe something to the fact that he was one of the commission's nine members. There are a couple of differences, however. In Allison's earlier rendering, bad things happen only if we stay on "the current path." Thus, should bad things fail to occur, this happy result could be taken as proof that we somehow managed somewhere along the line to alter our path, and who, pray, will be able exactly to designate what a "current path" actually is (or was)? The commission, in stark contrast, claims bad things are likely to happen "unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency" something, experience suggests, that is next to impossible. On the other hand, the commission artfully broadens its definition of bad things from Allison's "acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets" to the use of a "weapon of mass destruction" by terrorists "some-where in the world." As one critic points out, there is certainly a good chance that someone somewhere will release some germs, killing few, if any, or, as insurgents have done in Iraq, ineffectually lace the occasional bomb with chlorine. Although no normal person would consider either act to constitute "mass destruction," the report can, strictly speaking, claim vindication. Actually, the report is on even safer ground. A man in Rockford, Illinois, who purchased some bogus hand grenades from an FBI informant with the intent to detonate them at a local shopping mall, has been convicted of attempting to use weapons of mass destruction under laws that creatively define hand grenades to be weapons of mass destruction.4 Even those who decidedly disagree with such scary-sounding, if somewhat elusive, prognostications about nuclear terrorism often come out seeming like they more or less agree. In his Atomic Bazaar, William Langewiesche spends a great deal of time and effort assessing the process by means of which a terrorist group could come up with a bomb. Unlike Allison—and, for that matter, the considerable bulk of accepted opinion—he concludes that it "remains very, very unlikely. It's a possibility, but unlikely." Also: The best information is that no one has gotten anywhere near this. I mean, if you look carefully and practically at this process, you see that it is an enormous undertaking full of risks for the would-be terrorists. And so far there is no public case, at least known, of any appreciable amount of weapons-grade HEU highly enriched uranium disappearing. And that's the first step. If you don't have that, you don't have anything. The first of these bold and unconventional declarations comes from a book discussion telecast in June 2007 on C-SPAN and the second from an inter-view on National Public Radio. Judgments in the book itself, however, while consistent with such conclusions, are expressed more ambiguously, even coyly: "at the extreme is the possibility, entirely real, that one or two nuclear weapons will pass into the hands of the new stateless guerrillas, the jihad-ists, who offer none of the retaliatory targets that have so far underlain the nuclear peace" or "if a would-be nuclear terrorist calculated the odds, he would have to admit that they are stacked against^ffen," but they are "not impossible."5 The previous chapter arrayed a lengthy set of obstacles confront-: v ,„ ing the would-be atomic terrorist—often making use in the process of Langewlesche's excellent reporting. Those who warn about the likelihood of a terrorist bomb contend that a terrorist group could, if often with great difficulty, surmount each obstacle—that doing so in each case is, in Langewiesche's phrase, "not impossible."6 But it is vital to point out that, while it may be "not impossible" to surmount each individual step, the likelihood that a group could surmount a series of them could quickly approach impossibility. If the odds are "stacked against" the terrorists, what are they? Lange-wiesche's discussion, as well as other material, helps us evaluate the many ways such a quest—in his words, "an enormous undertaking full of risks"— could fail. The odds, indeed, are stacked against the terrorists, perhaps massively so. In fact, the likelihood a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small. ARRAYING THE BARRIERS Assuming terrorists have some desire for the bomb (an assumption ques-tioned in the next chapter), fulfillment of that desire is obviously another matter. Even the very alarmed Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier contend that the atomic terrorists' task "would clearly be among the most difficult types of attack to carry out" or "one of the most difficult missions a terrorist group could hope to try" But, stresses the CIA's George Tenet, a terrorist atomic bomb is "possible" or "not beyond the realm of possibility." In his excellent discussion of the issue, Michael Levi ably catalogues a wide array of difficulties confronting the would-be atomic terrorist, adroitly points out that "terrorists must succeed at every stage, but the defense needs to succeed only once," sensibly warns against preoccupation with worst-case scenarios, and pointedly formulates "Murphy's Law of Nuclear Terrorism: What can go wrong might go wrong." Nevertheless, he holds nuclear terrorism to be a "genuine possibility," and concludes that a good defensive strategy can merely "tilt the odds in our favor."7 Accordingly, it might be useful to take a stab at estimating just how "difficult" or "not impossible" the atomic terrorists' task, in aggregate, is— that is, how far from the fringe of the "realm of possibility" it might be, how "genuine" the possibilities are, how tilted the odds actually are. After all, lots of things are "not impossible." It is "not impossible" that those legendary monkeys with typewriters could eventually output Shakespeare.8 Or it is "not impossible"—that is, there is a "genuine possibility"—that a colliding meteor or comet could destroy the earth, that Vladimir Putin or the British could decide one morning to launch a few nuclear weapons at Ohio, that an underwater volcano could erupt to cause a civilization-ending tidal wave, or that Osama bin Laden could convert to Judaism, declare himself to be the Messiah, and fly in a gaggle of mafioso hit men from Rome to have himself publicly crucified.9 As suggested, most discussions of atomic terrorism deal in a rather piecemeal fashion with the subject—focusing separately on individual tasks such as procuring HEU or assembling a device or transporting it. However, as the Gilmore Commission, a special advisory panel to the president and Congress, stresses, setting off a nuclear device capable of producing mass destruction presents "Herculean challenges," requiring that a whole series of steps be accomplished: obtaining enough fissile material, designing a weapon "that will bring that mass together in a tiny fraction of a second" and figuring out some way to deliver the thing. And it emphasizes that these merely constitute "the minimum requirements." If each is not fully met, the result is not simply a less powerful weapon, but one that can't produce any significant nuclear yield at all or can't be delivered.10 Following this perspective, an approach that seems appropriate is to catalogue the barriers that must be overcome by a terrorist group in order to carry out the task of producing, transporting, and then successfully detonating an improvised nuclear device, an explosive that, as Allison acknowledges, would be "large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient." Table 13.1 attempts to do this, and it arrays some 20 of these— all of which must be surmounted by the atomic aspirant. Actually, it would be quite possible to come up with a longer list: in the interests of keeping the catalogue of hurdles down to a reasonable number, some of the entries are actually collections of tasks and could be divided into two or three or more. For example, number 5 on the list requires that heisted highly enriched uranium be neither a scam nor part of a sting nor of inadequate quality due to insider incompetence, but this hurdle could as readily be rendered as three separate ones. In contemplating the task before them, woixftlsbe atomic terrorists effectively must go through an exercise that looks much like this. If and when they do so, they are likely to find the prospects daunting and accordingly uninspiring or even terminally dispiriting. "

Public anxiety prevents retaliation
Huddy et al. 5 – Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY), Charles Taber (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY) and Gallya Lahav (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY), “Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3, July 2005, Pp. 593–608

The findings from this study lend further insight into the future trajectory of support for antiterrorism measures in the United States when we consider the potential effects of anxiety. Security threats in this and other studies increase support for military action (Jentleson 1992; Jentleson and Britton 1998;Herrmann,Tetlock, and Visser 1999). But anxious respondents were less supportive of belligerent military action against terrorists, suggesting an important source of opposition to military intervention. In the aftermath of 9/11, several factors were consistently related to heightened levels of anxiety and related psychological reactions, including living close to the attack sites (Galea et al. 2002; Piotrkowski and Brannen 2002; Silver et al. 2002), and knowing someone who was hurt or killed in the attacks (in this study). It is difficult to say what might happen if the United States were attacked again in the near future. Based on our results, it is plausible that a future threat or actual attack directed at a different geographic region would broaden the number of individuals directly affected by terrorism and concomitantly raise levels of anxiety. This could, in turn, lower support for overseas military action. In contrast, in the absence of any additional attacks levels of anxiety are likely to decline slowly over time (we observed a slow decline in this study), weakening opposition to future overseas military action. Since our conclusions are based on analysis of reactions to a single event in a country that has rarely felt the effects of foreign terrorism, we should consider whether they can be generalized to reactions to other terrorist incidents or to reactions under conditions of sustained terrorist action. Our answer is a tentative yes, although there is no conclusive evidence on this point as yet. Some of our findings corroborate evidence from Israel, a country that has prolonged experience with terrorism. For example, Israeli researchers find that perceived risk leads to increased vilification of a threatening group and support for belligerent action (Arian 1989; Bar-Tal and Labin 2001). There is also evidence that Israelis experienced fear during the Gulf War, especially in Tel Aviv where scud missiles were aimed (Arian and Gordon 1993). What is missing, however, is any evidence that anxiety tends to undercut support for belligerent antiterrorism measures under conditions of sustained threat. For the most part, Israeli research has not examined the distinct political effects of anxiety. In conclusion, the findings from this study provide significant new evidence on the political effects of terrorism and psychological reactions to external threat more generally. Many terrorism researchers have speculated that acts of terrorist violence can arouse fear and anxiety in a targeted population, which lead to alienation and social and political dislocation.8 We have clear evidence that the September 11 attacks did induce anxiety in a sizeable minority of Americans. And these emotions were strongly associated with symptoms of depression, appeared to inhibit learning about world events, and weakened support foroverseas military action. This contrasted, however, with Americans’ dominant reaction, which was a heightened concern about future terrorist attacks in the United States that galvanized support for government antiterrorist policy. In this sense, the 9/11 terrorists failed to arouse sufficient levels of anxiety to counteract Americans’ basic desire to strike back in order to increase future national security, even if such action increased the shortterm risk of terrorism at home. Possible future acts of terrorism, or a different enemy, however, could change the fine balance between a public attuned to future risks and one dominated by anxiety. 

Wouldn’t use bioweapons and no impact
Leitenberg ‘5 (Milton, Senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, Trained as a Scientist and Moved into the Field of Arms Control in 1966, First American Recruited to Work at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Affiliated with the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and the Center for International Studies Peace Program at Cornell University, Senior Fellow at CISSM, ASSESSING THE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS AND BIOTERRORISM THREAT, http://www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/assessing_bw_threat.pdf)

The conclusions from these independent studies were uniform and mutually reinforcing. There is an extremely low incidence of real biological (or chemical) events, in contrast to the number of hoaxes, the latter spawned by administration and media hype since 1996 concerning the prospective likelihood and dangers of such events. A massive second wave of hoaxes followed the anthrax incidents in the United States in October-November 2001, running into global totals of tens of thousands. It is also extremely important that analysts producing tables of “biological” events not count hoaxes. A hoax is not a “biological” event, nor is the word “anthrax” written on a slip of paper the same thing as anthrax, or a pathogen, or a “demonstration of threat”—all of which various analysts and even government advisory groups have counted hoaxes as being on one occasion or another.79 Those events that were real, and were actual examples of use, were overwhelmingly chemical, and even in that category, involved the use of easily available, off-the-shelf, nonsynthesized industrial products. Many of these were instances of personal murder, and not attempts at mass casualty use. The Sands/Monterey compilation indicated that exactly one person was killed in the United States in the 100 years between 1900 and 2000 as a result of an act of biological or chemical terrorism. Excluding the preparation of ricin, a plant toxin that is relatively easier to prepare, there are only a few recorded instances in the years 1900 to 2000 of the preparation or attempted preparation of pathogens in a private laboratory by a nonstate actor. The significant events to date are: • 1984, the Rajneesh, The Dalles, Oregon, use of salmonella on food; • 1990-94, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group’s unsuccessful attempts to procure, produce and disperse anthrax and botulinum toxin;80 • 1999, November 2001, al-Qaida,81 the unsuccessful early efforts to obtain anthrax and to prepare a facility in which to do microbiological work; October-November 2001, the successful “Amerithrax” distribution of a high-quality dry-powder preparation of anthrax spores, which had been prepared within the preceding 24 months.

Tournament: Vanderbilt | Round: 4 | Opponent: West Georgia Mauro-Zapata | Judge: Zagorin
1nc – counterplan

Text: United States Supreme Court should invalidate Title 8 Code of Federal Regulations §241.14 as a violation of the right to trial by a jury of peers.

A. Thesis – The due process clause is indeterminate – it is used to help the powerful and is a fantasy for those who want its protection
Jane Rutherford, Assistant Professor, DePaul College of Law, 72 B.U.L. Rev. 1 1992
One of my favorite childhood stories was The Adventures of Robin Hood. 1 The story, set in medieval England, describes the adventures of Robin Hood and his band of merry men who occasionally emerged from Sherwood Forest to taunt the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. The Sheriff was authorized to act in the King's name to collect outrageous taxes and selectively to enforce arbitrary edicts, but he abused his seizure powers to further his own personal interests as well as those of the Crown. Robin Hood heroically protected the people from the Sheriff's abusive power by redistributing property more equitably. In other words, he robbed from the rich to provide for the poor. 2 The meaning of the story, however, is not inherent in the text. The rich might not view Robin Hood as a hero; to them, he may seem a common criminal. 3 Readers must bring their own values to the story to evaluate it in the context of their own experiences. 4 Legal texts, such as the Due Process *3 Clause, are like other stories that must be interpreted in the context of certain value choices. 5 As the values of the readers change, the meanings they find in the text change. 6 Thus, if a text can be said to have any meaning at all, it is a multiple meaning 7 which changes over time with the changing values readers bring to it. Such changing stories are called myths. Although we tend to think of myths as stories that hold out false promises, myths need not be misleading. Myths are also the stories that are told to pass on cultural values. As myths are retold, they are often embellished. 8 As a result, myths frequently combine fact and fantasy, 9 and gradually change over time. 10 Myths are living *4 creations of a culture, and viewed from within the culture, they represent core values that some also may view as central truths. In this sense myths are eternal; they explain the past, present, and future. 11 Indeed, they create the very fabric of the culture, that which distinguishes one culture from another. Viewed from other cultures, myths are mere fables. Accordingly, the very word "myth" embodies a paradox. Depending on the vantage point, myths are simultaneously true and fictional. The story of Robin Hood is a myth. It has been told for over 700 years, and various historic characters have been identified as the "real" Robin Hood. Although we no longer know whether any given episode of any particular version is true, the core remains the same. Robin and his merry band foiled the evil Sheriff and redistributed property. That myth may be read in at least three different ways. It may be read to condone "robbing" from the rich to provide sustenance to the "poor," thus justifying everything from a progressive income tax to home invasion. Alternatively, Robin Hood may be read as a warning to the rich and politically powerful that if they fail to behave justly toward those less fortunate, bands of merry men and women may take the law into their own hands. 12 Finally, Robin Hood may suggest that Robin was a hero because he enabled the merry men to confront their government and demand more equitable treatment. In this sense, Robin steals nothing, but merely reclaims the rightful property of the poor. He corrects the state's wrongs and restores the system to the proper order. Due process, like Robin Hood, is a myth. It is a set of stories, texts, and values which have been handed down over 700 years to regulate the relationships between people and government. she continues Unfortunately, the myth of due process repeatedly has been corrupted to enhance the position of the powerful. Consequently, due process is a myth not only because it is a set of stories that transmit values, but also because it is a fantasy for many who claim its protection. 

B. Link – Historically, Due process has been used to help the already powerful – even if the court becomes more flexible in it’s application of due process it will only serve to help the government – the impact is a world in which there are no constitutional protections
Jane Rutherford, Assistant Professor, DePaul College of Law, 72 B.U.L. Rev. 1 1992
The most pernicious aspect of freezing due process at a given historical moment is the Court's resulting ability to exclude all notions of fairness from the analysis. Due process reduced to a system of rules becomes the tool of powerful groups because the powerful have more influence in framing the  *32  rules for their own benefit. 156 Rigid application of such rules magnifies the imbalance of power. As the changes in habeas corpus indicate, history is just as subject to interpretation as the content of due process itself. 157 In Teague v. Lane, 158 history provided the excuse to define due process in narrow, rigid terms to advance powerful government interests. The Court there held that a due process violation occurred only if the state violated a previously articulated constitutional rule. 159 This rigid view of due process could not expand to encompass novel constitutional violations. Some scholars have suggested that flexibility would solve the problem. For example, Lynne Henderson has argued that the real problem with the recent Court is not that it is conservative, but that it is inflexible and therefore authoritarian. 160 She suggests that if the Court were more willing to stretch the definition of due process all would be well. Mere flexibility, however, is not sufficient. Flexibility used to increase government power can be just as authoritarian as inflexibility. 161 For example, in Hurtado v. California, 162 the Supreme Court was quite willing to stretch the definition of due process. It ruled, in a capital case, that California could substitute an "information" 163 filed by a prosecutor for an indictment by a grand jury, even though an indictment previously had been considered an essential element of  *33  procedural due process. 164 Similarly, in Apodaca v. Oregon, the Court ruled that criminal decisions did not require a unanimous verdict, even though unanimity previously had been thought to be an essential element of due process. 165 More recently, in Williams v. Florida, the Court read due process flexibly to permit a six person jury. 166 In each of these instances the Court held that the government need not follow previously announced due process rules. In situations where a stretching of due process rules would benefit less powerful parties, however, the Court has remained rigid. As Justice Scalia has explained, "If the government chooses to follow a historically approved procedure, it necessarily provides due process, but if it chooses to depart from historical practice, it does not necessarily deny due process." 167 The Court's current approach to due process is thus avowedly pro-government. Indeed, Erwin Chemerinsky has argued that the Constitution has been interpreted to favor the government so consistently that the Constitution is virtually vanishing. 

C. Impact – Due process law is inherently indeterminate – the Court’s doctrine of due process lets justices “stop the historical clock” to manipulate the law – this reinforces the worst hierarchies of domination where the government reins over individuals – this turns and outweighs the case
Jane Rutherford, Assistant Professor, DePaul College of Law, 72 B.U.L. Rev. 1 1992
The quest for the "historical" due process takes a narrow view of history and assumes that history consists of isolated facts frozen in time, instead of seeing history as an evolving, interconnected process. Certain important events such as Magna Carta, the Fifth Amendment, or the Fourteenth Amendment stop the clock; yet stopping the clock in 1215, 1797, or 1868 is like stopping the music in musical chairs. Those who have seats are privileged, but those left standing are excluded. An historically frozen definition of due process reinforces the power dynamic of the status quo, preventing any new claimants from asserting due process rights, even when the asserted rights are analogous to those claimed by more powerful elements of society. For example, although the Supreme Court has recognized substantive due process privacy rights for heterosexual couples, n139 it has relied on "history" to deny analogous rights to homosexuals. n140 Similarly, the due process right to counsel has been limited to the historical context of imprisonment. n141 This ability to freeze history at convenient moments has enabled the myth makers to turn due process on its head: to increase the arbitrary power of government over individuals. Consider the recent rules restricting access to habeas corpus, a writ which has roots traceable to Magna Carta. Translated literally, the phrase habeas corpus means that the government must produce the body of anyone unlawfully imprisoned. n142 Consequently, habeas is a major mechanism to raise constitutional issues in criminal cases, providing state prisoners with access to federal courts to enforce constitutional rights. Nevertheless, relying on the historically frozen view of due process, the Supreme Court has severely restricted the scope of the remedy by limiting it to cases in which the state violated pre-existing constitutional rules. n143 In Teague v. Lane, for example, the defendant complained that the prosecutor purposely had excluded blacks  *30  from the jury. n144 The Court refused, however, to give the requested relief, reasoning that the defendant was seeking to apply a "new rule" and that habeas relief only applied to existing constitutional interpretations. n145 Theoretically, the Court carved out a small due process exception for new rules of fundamental fairness. The plurality suggested, however, that the due process clock probably had stopped, stating that, "We believe it unlikely that many such components of basic due process have yet to emerge." n146 To assume that government already has discovered every possible way to act arbitrarily, and that no new forms of due process violations can occur seems amazingly optimistic. n147 As new situations arise, so will due process violations. As Justice McKenna said: Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is peculiarly true of constitutions . . . . In the application of a constitution, therefore, our contemplation cannot be only of what has been but of what may be. n148 Anthony Kronman has argued that precedent is important not merely to preserve the past, but to serve as a foundation for constructing the future. n149 When judges construct the future, they may do so from their own personal  *31  and political perspectives. Although the Court has not always frozen due process at the same time, the current Court often uses "history" to stop the due process clock, n150 thereby preserving the definitions in force when the clock stops. By selecting the particular moment in history which will stop the clock, the Court furthers its own personal or political agenda. Selecting the moment to stop the due process clock allows the Court to determine the outcome of the case. For example, consider the cases dealing with a criminal defendant's due process right to counsel. In 1932, the decisions of Powell v. Alabama cited to colonial history when it ruled that indigent criminal defendants had a due process right to appointed counsel in capital cases. n151 Ten years later, however, in Betts v. Brady, the Court held that no similar due process right to appointed counsel existed in non-capital cases. n152 Had the Court wished to require appointed counsel, it could have stopped the clock in colonial America. Instead, the Court reached the opposite result by reinterpreting the colonial law in light of English common law dating back to the 17th century. n153 Later, in Gideon v. Wainwright, n154 the Court overruled Betts and claimed that the Betts Court had stopped the due process clock at the wrong time: "The Court in Betts v. Brady made an abrupt break with its own well-considered precedents. In returning to these old precedents, sounder we believe than the new, we but restore constitutional principles." n155 Thus, the outcome of many of these cases is determined by the Court's arguably arbitrary decision on when to stop the due process clock.
1nc – topicality 

The aff is not “war powers authority” it is immigration authority –combatant detention is war powers
Klein and Wittes 11 (Adam Klein, third year J.D. candidate at Columbia Law School and Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review, Benjamin Wittes, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, “Preventive Detention in American Theory and Practice,” http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Vol.-2_Klein-Wittes_Final-Published-Version.pdf)
As noted above, the President’s power to detain alien enemies during wartime rests on explicit statutory authority — not, in contrast to combatant detention, as an incident to the political branches’ constitutional war powers. 70 This section first describes the history of that statute, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It then considers the historical roots of the power to detain enemy aliens during wartime and the permissibility of this practice under modern international law. 

Authority to detain immigrations is from the Alien Enemies Act
Klein and Wittes 11 (Adam Klein, third year J.D. candidate at Columbia Law School and Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review, Benjamin Wittes, senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, “Preventive Detention in American Theory and Practice,” http://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Vol.-2_Klein-Wittes_Final-Published-Version.pdf)
The President’s wartime authority for dealing with alien citizens of enemy powers is set out in Chapter 3 of Title 50 of the U.S. Code, colloquially known as the Alien Enemies Act (or the Enemy Aliens Act). Specifically, 50 U.S.C. § 21 authorizes the President to detain an alien under the following circumstances: First, a state of war or threatened hostilities must exist, and not just any such state will do. The powers are triggered only in case of “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or an invasion or predatory incursion . . . attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government . . . .”62 By the statute’s terms, they could not be invoked in a conflict with a non-state actor. Nor could the Act’s powers be activated in a conflict with a state that has not attacked or threatened attack on the United States, absent a formal declaration of war.63 In practice, the law has been invoked in circumstances of declared war only. Second, the subjects must be “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward . . . .” 64

Vote neg
Limits – They can talk about anything related to the 4 topic areas not about war powers, makes research impossible – key to topic education
Extra topicality is an independent voting issue – artificially inflates aff ground and forces us to read counterplans to get back to square one 

1nc – kritik

The aff has the right idea but provides the wrong solution --- the 1AC’s assumption that the starting point of legal ruling is in any way a true embrace of the immigration Other only rearranges the legal card deck by reaffirming the sovereignty of the law and the state --- this sanitizes violence, marginalization of the Other, and turns the case
Krasmann 12 (Susanne Krasmann, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg, “Law's knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters,” Theoretical Criminology 2012 16: 379 originally published online 4 June 2012, pg. 380)
In the face of these developments, a new debate on how to contain governmental interference in the name of security has emerged. What is remarkable about this debate is that, on the one hand, it aims at establishing more civil and human rights and attendant procedural safeguards that allow for systematically calling into question the derogation of laws and the implementation of new laws in the name of security. On the other hand, it recognizes the existence of a new dimension of threats, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. As John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino (2004: 228), for instance, contend: We are faced, nowadays, with serious threats to the public safety that can occur anywhere and that cannot terminate definitively. ... If we think that the capacity to deal effectively with emergencies is a precondition for republican government, then it is necessary to ask how emergency powers can be controlled in modern circumstances. Adequate legal frameworks and institutional designs are required that would enable us to ‘reconcile’ security with (human) rights, as Goold and Lazarus (2007b: 15) propose, and enduring emergency situations with the rule of law. Traditional problems in the relationship between law and security government within this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations:2 emergency government today, rather than facing the problem of gross abuses of power, has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional becoming normal (see Poole, 2008: 8). Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as ‘necessary’.3 Hence, law not only constrains, but at the same time also authorizes governmental interference. Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try to balance security and liberty are rarely able, or willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative presuppositions: ‘The metaphor of balance is used as often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them’ (Zedner, 2005: 510). Finally, political responses to threats never overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events. To ignore this uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They establish political spaces of dispute and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a ‘culture of justification’, as David Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be ‘justified by law’, in a fundamental sense of a commitment to ‘the principles of legality and respect for human rights’ (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most of these accounts, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and institutional arrangements that are well known to us. To frame security as a public good and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example demand, is a promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be ‘civilized’, though, once again echoes the truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality and a political ‘culture of justification’ (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the following section. Those normative endeavours will be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice. Contrary to the idea that law can be addressed as an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to normative aspirations, the present account renders law’s reliance on forms of knowledge more discernable. Law is susceptible, in particular to security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms itself and, notably, articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of knowledge brought into play. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this perspective enables us, on the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law in a way that goes largely unnoticed. This point will be discussed on the example of automated surveillance technologies, which facilitate a particular rationality of pre-emptive action. The conception of law as a practice, on the other hand, may also be understood as a tool of critique and dissent. The recent torture debate is an extreme example of this, whereby torture can be regarded as a touchstone of law’s resistance to its own abrogation.

To attempt to invert the law on itself is to misunderstand the connections between securitization and law --- the aff subscribes to a form of lawfare in the name of immigration rights which promotes violence and pacifies broader resistance  
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
Kennedy begins by coldly contradicting those opponents of the Bush administration ‘that have routinely claimed that the United States has disregarded these rules’ (p. 40) by pointing out that both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war as well as both opponents and supporters of the great panoply of US legal measures related to the war on terror ‘were playing with the same deck’ (p. 40) in presenting ‘professional arguments about how recognised rules and standards, as well as recognised exceptions and jurisdictional limitations, should be interpreted’ (p. 40). The author’s only concession with reference to the Bush administration’s legal advisers is to point out that ‘as professionals, these lawyers failed to advise their client adequately about the consequences of the interpretations they proposed, and about the way others would read the same texts – and their memoranda’ (p. 39).Thus Kennedy does not adopt any legal position to the detriment of any other, as his assessment does not seemingly pretend to persuade his reader at the level of the world of legal validity presented in the vocabulary of the UN Charter. The extent to which that excludes the author from the category of being a ‘true jus-internationalist’, according to A. Canc¸ado Trindade’s understanding of those who actually ‘comply with the ineluctable duty to stand against the apology of the use of force which is manifested in our days through distinct “doctrinal” elaborations’,42 is not for us to judge. Suffice it to note that the starting point of Kennedy’s convoluted perspective on the matter is that ‘the law of force’ is a form of ‘vocabulary for assessing the legitimacy’ (p. 41) of a form of conduct (e.g. amilitary campaign) or ‘for defending as well as attacking the “legality”’ (p. 41) of an act (e.g. distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate targets) in which the same law of force becomes a two-edged sword, everybody’s and no one’s strategic partner in a contemporary world where ‘legitimacy has become the currency of power’ (p. 45). For the author, in today’s age of ‘lawfare’ (p. 12), ‘to resist war in the name of law . . . is to misunderstand the delicate partnership of war and law’ (p. 167). In Kennedy’s view, therefore, ‘there is little comfort in knowing that law has become the vernacular for evaluating the legitimacy of war and politics where it has done so by itself becoming a strategic instrument of war and the continuation of politics by similar means’ (p. 132). 3. LAW AS A MODERN LEGAL INSTITUTION Of War and Law seems, indeed, to be animated by a certain philosophical perplexity regarding the ambiguous relation between the apparently antithetical nature of the terms appearing in its title. Since antiquity both jurists and philosophers have taught that the law’s raison d’eˆ tre is that of making social peace possible, of overcoming what would later be commonly known as the Hobbesian state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes. Kant noted that law should be perceived first and foremost as a pacifying tool – in other words, ‘the establishment of peace constitutes, not a part of, but the whole purpose of the doctrine of law’43 – and Lauterpacht projected that same principle onto the international sphere: ‘the primordial duty’ of international law is to ensure that ‘there shall be no violence among states’.44 The paradox lies, of course, in that law performs its pacifying function not by means of edifying advice, but by the threat of the use of force. In this sense, as Kennedy points out, ‘to use law is also to invoke violence, at least the violence that stands behind legal authority’ (p. 22). Hobbes himself never concealed the fact that the state, ‘that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defence’,would succeed in eradicating inter-individual violence precisely due to its ability to ‘inspire terror’;45 but Weber – ‘the State is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’46 – Godwin,47 and Kelsen48 have also provided support for the same proposition. This ambivalent and paradoxical relationship between law and violence,which is obvious in the domestic or intra-state realm, becomes even more obvious in the interstate domain with its classical twin antinomy of ubi jus, ibi pax and inter arma leges silent until the law in war emerges as a bold normative sector which dares to defy this conceptual incompatibility; even war can be regulated, be submitted to conditions and limitations. The hesitations of Kant in addressing jus in bello49 or the very fact that the Latin terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello were coined, as R. Kolb has pointed out,50 at relatively recent dates, seem to confirm that this has never been per se an evident aspiration.51 Kennedy explains his own calling as international lawyer as being partly inspired by his will to participate in the law’s civilizing mission (p. 29)52 as something utterly distinct from war: We think of these rules law in war as coming from ‘outside’ war, limiting and restricting the military. We think of international law as a broadly humanist and civilizing force, standing back from war, judging it as just or unjust, while offering itself as a code of conduct to limit violence on the battlefield. (p. 167) The author notes how this virginal confidence in the pacifying efficiency of international law – its presumed ability to forbid, limit, humanize war ‘from outside’ – becomes progressively nuanced, eroded, almost discredited by a series of considerations. The disquieting image of the ‘delicate partnership of war and law’ becomes more and more evidenced; the lawyer who attempts to regulate warfare inevitably also becomes its accomplice. As Kennedy puts it, The laws of force provide the vocabulary not only for restraining the violence and incidence of war – but also for waging war and deciding to go to war. . . . Law no longer stands outside violence, silent or prohibitive. Law also permits injury, as it privileges, channels, structures, legitimates, and facilitates acts of war. (p. 167) Unable to suppress all violence, law typifies certain forms of violence as legally admissible, thus ‘privileging’ them with regard to others and investing some agents with a ‘privilege to kill’ (p. 115). Law thereby becomes, in Kennedy’s view, a tool not so much for the restriction of war as for the legal construction of war.53 Elsewhere we have labeled Kennedy ‘a relative outsider’54 who, peering from the edge of the vocabulary of international law, tries to ‘highlight its inherent structural limits, gaps, dogmas, blind spots and biases’, as someone ‘specialised in speaking the unspeakable, disclosing ambivalences and asking awkward questions’.55 The ‘unspeakable’, in the case of the ‘law of force’, is precisely, in Kennedy’s view, this process of involuntary complicity with the very phenomenon one supposedly wants to prohibit. Prepared to ‘stain his hands’ a` la Sartre, in his attempt to humanize the military machine from within, to walk one step behind the soldier reminding him constantly, as an imaginary CNN camera, of the legal limits of the legitimate use of force, the lawyer starts to realize, in the author’s view, that he is becoming but an accessory to the war machine. Kennedy maintains that law, in its attempt to subject war to its rule, has been absorbed by it and has now become but another war instrument (p. 32);56 law has been weaponized (p. 37).57 Contemporary war is by definition a legally organized war: ‘no ship moves, no weapon is fired, no target selected without some review for compliance with regulation – not because the military has gone soft, but because there is simply no other way to make modern warfare work. Warfare has become rule and regulation’ (p. 33).War ‘has become a modern legal institution’ (p. 5), with the result that the international lawyer finds himself before an evident instance of Marxian reification, in other words ‘the consolidation of our own products as a material power erected above us beyond our control that raises a wall in front of our expectations and destroys our calculations’.58 Ideas and institutions develop ‘a life of their own’, an autonomous, perverted dynamism.

Their method for change in mired in bureaucratic vernacular which displaces more effective solutions and cedes agency over violence which guarantees failure
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
War’s ubiquity, its discontinuity, and the blurring of its outline are not without psychological and moral consequences in the military: ‘Experts have long observed that when warfare itself seems to have no clear beginning or end, no clear battlefield, no clear enemy, military discipline, as well as morale, breaks down’ (p. 119). This dispiriting confusion that affects soldiers also concerns the international lawyer, who sees the old rules of jus belli evaporate and be replaced by much vaguer ‘standards’. The last pages of Of War and Law convey, in fact, a clear feeling of defeat or loss, showing the demoralization of the international lawyer who still tries to take the law of war seriously: ‘How can ethical absolutes and instrumental calculations be made to lie down peacefully together? How can one know what to do, how to judge, whom to denounce?’ (p. 117). The former categorical imperatives (‘thou shalt not bomb cities’, ‘thou shalt not execute prisoners’, etc.) give way to an elastic and blurred logic of more and less, within which instrumental might triumphs definitively over the ethical (p. 132).89 As the new flexible ‘standards’ seem more susceptible to strategic exploitation and modulation than do the old strict rules, the various actors will play with the labels of jus belli – now definitively versatile – according to their strategic needs: Ending conflict, calling it occupation, calling it sovereignty – then opening hostilities, calling it a police action, suspending the judicial requirements of policing, declaring a state of emergency, a zone of insurgency – all these are also tactics in the conflict. . . . All these assertions take the form of factual or legal assessments, but we should also understand them as arguments, at once messages and weapons. (p. 122)90 Kennedy reiterates a new aspect of the ‘weaponization of the law’: the legal qualification of facts appears as a means of conveying messages to the enemy and to public opinion alike, because in the age of immediate media coverage, wars are fought as much in the press and opinion polls as they are on the battlefield. The skilled handling of jus belli categories will benefit one side and prejudice the other (p. 127);91 as the coinage of the very term ‘lawfare’ seems to reflect, the legal battle has already become an extension of the military one (p. 126).92 In cataloguing some of the dark sides of the law of war, Kennedy also stresses how the legal debate tends to smother and displace discussions which would probably be more appropriate and necessary. Thus the controversy about the impending intervention in Iraq, which developed basically within the discursive domain of the law of war, largely deprived lawyers of participating in an in-depth discussion on the neo-conservative project of a ‘great Middle East’ – more democratic and Western-friendly and less prone to tyranny and terrorism – the feasibility of ‘regime change’, an adequate means of fostering democracy in the region, and so on: We never needed to ask, how should regimes in the Middle East . . . be changed? Is Iraq the place to start? Is military intervention the way to do it? . . .Had our debates not been framed by the laws of war, we might well have found other solutions, escaped the limited choices of UN sanctions, humanitarian aid, and war, thought outside the box. (p. 163) 6. CONCLUSIONS Those familiar with the author’s previous works93 will certainly have already identified the Derridean streak in Kennedy’s thought in the underlying claim that every discourse generates dark zones and silences or represses certain aspects, renders the formulation of certain questions impossible (a Foucauldian streak in the author could be suspected as well: every discourse – be it administrative, legal, medical, or psychiatric – implies simultaneously ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’; each discourse amounts somehow to a system of domination, insofar as it defines ‘conditions of admission’ into the realm of the legally valid, the ‘sane society’, etc.).94 In the picture resulting from the application of this analytical framework to the domain of the use of force, international lawyers and humanitarian professionals appear gagged, restricted by the language they try to utter effectively to themselves and others. As if the legal language had imposed on them its own logic, it now speaks through their voices and what is, evidently, once again, the Marxian-structuralist idea of cultural products gaining a life of their own and turning against their own creators. Kennedy, however, does not stop at noting that jurists have become ‘spoken’ by their language amidst a dramatically changing war scenario. More disquietingly, he stresses the evident corollary of the previous proposition: the evaporation of a sense of individual moral responsibility: All these formulations, encouraged by the language of law, displace human responsibility for the death and suffering of war onto others . . . . In all these ways, we step back from the terrible responsibility and freedom that comes with the discretion to kill. . . .Violence and injury have lost their author and their judge as soldiers, humanitarians, and statesmen have come to assess the legitimacy of violence in a common legal and bureaucratic vernacular. (pp. 168–9) While depersonalization and a lack of sense of personal responsibility are evidently also favoured by external structural factors, among which is the bureaucratic political complexity of modern states themselves (p. 17),96 Kennedy stresses that the language of international law would thus trivialize and conceal the gravity of decisions: In all these ways, we step back from the terrible responsibility and freedom that comes with the discretion to kill. . . . The problem is loss of the human experience of responsible freedom and free decision – of discretion to kill and let live. (p. 170).

Their method for change necessarily calls on ‘normal’ rights to be universally applied. This ignores how the normal law treats all prisoners, immigrants, and upholds suffering. Vote negative to challenge the normalization of law. Our alternative ends indefinite detentions of the Other by fighting against the law, not within the law.
Johns 05 Fleur Johns is a lecturer, University of Sydney Faculty of Law, Sydney, Australia. Email: fleurj@law.usyd.edu.au. The author would like to thank the organizers of, and audience members and co-panelists at, each of the following events for insightful comments on, and interrogations of, oral presentations of earlier versions of this article: the Second Joint Workshop of Birkbeck Law School and the Foundation for New Research in International Law (9–11 May 2004, London, UK), the Inaugural Conference of the European Society of International Law (13–15 May 2004, Florence, Italy), the 12th Annual Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law Conference (18–20 June 2004, Canberra, Australia), and the 22nd Annual Australian Law and Society Conference (13–15 Dec. 2004, Brisbane, Australia). The author is also indebted to Professor Peter Fitzpatrick for generous and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article and to two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/16/4/311.pdf
Is Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as one scholar has described it, an ‘anomalous zone’?1 In international legal terms, does Guantánamo Bay embody law’s absence, suspension or withdrawal – a ‘black hole’, as the English Court of Appeal has stated?2 Is it a space that international law ‘proper’ is yet to fill and should be implored to fill – a jurisdiction maintained before the law, against the law or in spite of the law? These are some of the questions with which I began the research from which this article emanates. I commenced, too, with a sense of unease with the responses to these questions that may be elicited from the surrounding international legal literature. Implicit or explicit in most international legal writing on Guantánamo Bay is a sense that it represents an exceptional phenomenon that might be overcome by having international law scale the heights of the Bush administration’s stonewalling. Guantánamo Bay’s presence and persistence on the international legal scene, such accounts imply, may be understood as a singular, grotesque instance of law’s breakdown – an insurgence of ‘utter lawlessness’ in the words of Lord Steyn of the House of Lords.3 Of this, I am not so sure. By my reading, the plight of the Guantánamo Bay detainees is less an outcome of law’s suspension or evisceration than of elaborate regulatory efforts by a range of legal authorities. The detention camps of Guantánamo Bay are above all works of legal representation and classification. They are spaces where law and liberal proceduralism speak and operate in excess. 4 This article will probe this intuition by examining law’s efforts in constituting the jurisdictional order of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (and, more specifically, Camps Delta and America at that Base). It will consider, in particular, the claim that the jurisdictional order of Guantánamo Bay renders permanent a state of the exception, in the sense (derived from the work of Carl Schmitt) of a space that ‘defies codification’ and subjects its occupants to the unfettered exercise of sovereign discretion.5 Such a claim has been put forward (usually without an express invocation of Schmitt) by a range of international legal commentators.6 It has also been famously put forward, with distinct and in many ways divergent implications, in the writings of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This article argues against that characterization, in both its legal scholarly and its Agamben-esque forms. It will be contended here that understanding Guantánamo Bay as a domain of sovereign exception (and, as such, of political decision-making) in a Schmittian sense is a misnomer. Rather, Guantánamo Bay may be more cogently read as the jurisdictional outcome of exhaustive attempts to domesticate the political possibilities occasioned by the experience of exceptionalism – that is, of operating under circumstances not pre-codified by pre-existing norms. Far from emboldening sovereign and non-sovereign forms of political agency under conditions of radical doubt, the legal regime of Guantánamo Bay is dedicated to producing experiences of having no option, no doubt and no responsibility. Accordingly, in Schmittian terms, the contemporary legal phenomenon that is Guantánamo Bay may be read as a profoundly anti-exceptional legal artefact. The normative regime of Guantánamo Bay is one intensely antithetical to the forms of decisional experience contemplated by Schmitt in Political Theology and to modes of decisional responsibility articulated by other writers before and since.7 It is by reason of its norm-producing effects in this respect, I would argue, that the legal regime of the Guantánamo Bay detention camps and its replication beyond Cuba merit interrogation and resistance. Section 1 of this article will present a brief sketch of the jurisdictional order of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, as constructed primarily in the final decade of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st. Section 2 will examine the claims to exceptionalism made in respect of this order, first as those claims are circulating in international legal scholarship, and second as they have been advanced in Giorgio Agamben’s writings. Section 3 will put forward a critique of these diagnoses (both international legal scholars’ and Agamben’s), advancing an argument that the legal order of Guantánamo Bay is noteworthy for its insistence upon constraining or avoiding experiences of the exceptional, rather than for its rendering permanent and all-encompassing a sense of the exceptional. Finally, in Section 4, a further argument will be made for resistance to the necessitarian normative architecture of Guantánamo Bay through a re-invigoration of that sense of the exception that may be derived from the work of Carl Schmitt. This final argument will be predicated on a reading of the exception as a political experience that may be de-linked from notions of centralized, sovereign authority, reading Schmitt’s decisionism away from Schmitt’s fetishism of the state. 1 The Legal Order of ‘Anomaly’ Guantánamo Bay is a 45 square mile area of Cuba occupied by the United States pursuant to a perpetual lease agreement entered into in 1903.8 Under that lease, the US obtained the right to use the area for coaling and naval operations.9 The text of the lease agreement provides inter alia that ‘the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within such areas’ while reserving to Cuba ‘ultimate sovereignty’.10 Accordingly, since December 1903, Guantánamo Bay has been operated as a US naval base, its area closed to private use, access and navigation without US authorization.11 The base maintains its own schools, power system, water supply and internal transportation system.12 According to recent accounts, ‘the base population has grown to 6,000, and . . . “in addition to McDonald’s, there are now Pizza Hut, Subway and KFC franchises. Another gym is being built, and town houses, and a four-year college opens next month”. . . The base commander describes it as “small-town America” ’.13 Having previously been dedicated wholly to military and related purposes, in the early 1990s this ‘small town’ was refashioned as a detention camp for those seeking asylum in the United States.14 Between 1991 and 1996, more than 36,000 Haitian and more than 20,000 Cuban asylum-seekers were interned for varying periods in Guantánamo Bay, pursuant to US immigration policies of interdiction, administrative detention, off-shore processing and, wherever possible, repatriation.15 Thereafter, other than short-term operations in 1996 and 1997, the migrant processing operation at Guantánamo Bay was wound down. In January 2002, however, shortly after initiating a military campaign in Afghanistan, the United States began transferring hundreds of persons captured during military operations in Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, where they have since been held without charge as ‘unlawful combatants’.16 According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay held approximately 550 detainees as of 5 November 2004.17 In a 2001 Military Order and a series of subsequent orders issued by the Department of Defense, the US Executive has constructed an elaborate legal regime surrounding these persons.18 The particular, tailored features of this regime have been justified, above all, by the detainees’ unorthodox and peculiarly threatening status: hence the language of compound illegality. As ‘unlawful combatants’, Guantánamo Bay detainees are cast both beyond the pale of non-violent political discourse and beyond the legal bounds of warfare. Yet although the terminology applied to the Guantánamo Bay detainees implies an extra-legal status, these detainees have, since the outset, been the focus of painstaking work of legal classification. In a press briefing on 13 February 2004, given by Paul Butler, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Mr. Butler detailed an elaborate, multi-stage screening and evaluation process through which each detainee is passed. In Mr. Butler’s description, an ‘integrated team of interrogators, analysts, behavioural scientists and regional experts’ works alongside military lawyers and federal law enforcement officials to decipher and consider ‘all relevant information’. ‘We have a process’, Mr Butler announced confidently, ‘and . . . that process will take its own course’.19 Thus, even before the 28 June 2004 rulings of the US Supreme Court in Hamdi v Rumsfeld20 and Rasul v Bush21 affirmed the entitlement of Guantánamo Bay detainees to a ‘meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for their detention before a neutral decisionmaker’ and their capacity to invoke the jurisdiction of US federal courts,22 the Department of Defense had produced a panoply of regulations concerning the handling of detainees. These include mechanisms for annual administrative review of the necessity of each enemy combatant’s detention and procedures for detainees’ trial before specially convened Military Commissions.23 Since the US Supreme Court’s 28 June 2004 rulings, the normative and institutional network at Guantánamo Bay has become even denser. On 7 July 2004, the Deputy Secretary of Defense promulgated an order establishing a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. This Tribunal was charged with determining whether persons detained at Camps Delta and America (the detention camps now maintained at Guantánamo Bay, the former comprising six separate camps) have been properly classified as enemy combatants.24 This, alongside the Military Commissions and the Administrative Review Board, added a third body to the line-up of specialist legal institutions convened at Guantánamo Bay. Later in the same month, the Secretary of the Navy produced a lengthy memorandum outlining procedures to govern this Tribunal’s hearings, including (rather bizarrely) a standard form script for the conduct of a hearing.25 Furthermore, by order of the Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on 16 July 2004, a new Office of Detainee Affairs was created within the Pentagon to coordinate ‘around 100 inquiries, investigations, or assessments’ that were then said to be ongoing in respect of detainees’ handling by US military police.26 Far from a space of ‘utter lawlessness’ then, one finds in Guantánamo Bay a space filled to the brim with expertise, procedure, scrutiny and analysis. Amid the work of the Military Commissions, the Administrative Review Board, the Combatant Status Review Tribunal and the other inquiries mentioned above, it is not upholding the rule of law that seems tricky. Rather it is the possibility of encountering the yet-to-begoverned exception that seems difficult to contemplate. 2 The Claim to Exceptionalism As framed by Carl Schmitt (primarily in his 1922 work, Political Theology), the exception is that domain within jurisprudence in which decision-making ‘cannot be subsumed’ by existing norms.27 It is that space in which such norms are held open to suspension or transformation, and where programs of norm-implementation and norm-compliance cease to govern action and decision-making. Accordingly, the exception is synonymous with the attempt to exercise momentarily decisive agency or, as Schmitt put it, ‘principally unlimited authority’.28 I will argue in Section 3 of this article that it is precisely this sort of agency that the legal regime of Guantánamo Bay is designed to negate.29 To many commentators, however, the extraordinary procedural characteristics of the three primary legal institutions installed at Guantánamo Bay render the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base effectively ‘a prison outside the law’ (to quote the petitioners in Rasul v Bush) 30 or at least outside the pre-existing order of legality.31 Two eminent US constitutional lawyers, Professors Katyal and Tribe have, for instance, observed that ‘the November 2001 Military Order’s procedural protections fall conspicuously short of those most Americans take for granted’. They concluded, further, that ‘its vagueness invites arbitrary and potentially discriminatory determinations’, it ‘installs the executive branch as lawgiver as well as law-enforcer, law-interpreter, and law-applier’ and, accordingly, it ‘authorizes a decisive departure from the legal status quo’. Faced with what they construe as executive acts that ‘do not comport with the US Constitution’s structure’ being justified by ‘unilaterally defined emergency’, these commentators propose recourse to the US Congress to ensure legislative extension to Guantánamo Bay detainees of constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process of law, thereby ‘reestablishing the rule of law’.32 Public international lawyers have, to a significant degree, echoed and compounded these concerns, lamenting that the Military Commissions ‘fail  to deliver to justice that the world at large will find credible’ by ‘authorizing the US Department of Defense to dispense with the basic procedural guarantees required by the Bill of Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Third Geneva Convention of 1949’.33 Following is an overview and brief analysis of such claims to exceptionalism made in respect of Guantánamo Bay, first in prevailing international legal scholarship, and second in the work of Giorgio Agamben. A Appeals to the Exception in International Legal Scholarship As indicated by the foregoing remarks, the exceptional status of Guantánamo Bay Naval Base has been a recurring theme of legal critiques of the internment, trial and interrogation practices that have been put into effect there.34 In international legal literature, development of this theme typically entails a two-part discursive move. First, the regime of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is isolated and distanced from the ambit of routine legality. By expressly disavowing the entitlement of detainees to certain due process guarantees enshrined in international law and US constitutional law, the US executive has, it is said, sought to create an abomination: a ‘legal no man’s land’;35 a place ‘beyond the rule of law’.36 The current US administration, such accounts report, ‘wants its own exceptional “rights-free zone” on Guantánamo’.37 At Guantánamo Bay, judgments are said to be ‘based on politics, not legal norms’.38 Guantánamo Bay is cast as a ‘black hole’ and ‘the nature of that black hole’, it is said, ‘is that there is no way out, except through the good grace of the military’.39 Next, this severance of Guantánamo Bay from the prevailing legal order – or the normative emptying out of this jurisdiction, ostensibly to make way for the political – is identified per se as a critical source of concern. As one scholar has observed, ‘human rights law abhors a vacuum’.40 Horror is directed as much towards the apparent refutation of law’s claim to completeness as it is towards the perceived effects of this, namely, the inability to subject detainees’ indefinite detention, torture and degradation to third party question or constraint. Thus, Professor Jordan Paust has insisted ‘under international law, no locale is immune from the reach of relevant international law’. ‘Despite claims that certain persons, including “enemy combatants” or so-called “unlawful combatants,” have no rights’, he continued, ‘no human being is without protection under international law . . . in every circumstance, every human being has some forms of protection under human rights law’.41 The notion of a domain from which law has withdrawn (or where it has been forced into exile) is thus first generated as a definitive diagnosis of the Guantánamo Bay ‘problem’, then cast as intolerable. The encounter with this prospect has, in turn, occasioned two main types of response, each dedicated to affirming the comprehensiveness of the systemic order of national-international legality. One response among legal critics has been to appeal to a variety of legal institutions to subject the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base to their purview, under the rubric of existing law and institutional procedures. Thus, while Professors Katyal and Tribe advocate congressional action within the US, international lawyers and others have instigated litigation and complaint procedures in a wide range of settings, from the US and UK courts to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.42 Others, like Paust above, have turned to the law review as a forum in which to avow the breadth of international law’s reach and the pertinence and inviolability of its precepts.43 A second approach has been to insist upon the necessity of reshaping the law to fit the ostensibly novel phenomena thrown up by the events of 11 September 2001, including the demand for indefinite detention of those suspected of terrorist allegiances. This too is based upon the invocation of emergency or exceptional circumstances, albeit to a very different end. ‘Terrorist attacks’, US constitutional law scholar Bruce Ackerman has written, ‘will be a recurring part of our future. The balance of technology has shifted . . . and we urgently require new constitutional concepts to deal with the protection of civil liberties. Otherwise, a downward cycle threatens’. Ackerman goes on to propose ‘a newly fashioned emergency regime’ so as to permit ‘short-term emergency measures, but drawing the line against permanent restrictions’, thereby ‘rescuing the concept of emergency power from fascist thinkers like Carl Schmitt, who used it as a battering ram against liberal democracy’.44 Oren Gross has likewise announced, quoting Fred Schauer, that ‘the exception is no longer invisible’. Recent confrontations with ‘acute exigency’ have, according to Gross, demanded that law be reformulated in profound ways. ‘Taken together, the panoply of counterterrorism measures put in place since September 11th has created’, he writes, ‘ “an alternate system of justice” aimed at dealing with suspected terrorists’.45 Gross, however, diverges from Ackerman in the following significant respect. Although, according to Gross, ‘separation between normalcy and emergency along geographic lines has once again been resorted to’ and ‘the anomalous nature of Guantánamo . . . has been invoked once again’, those juridical mechanisms designed to keep emergency and normalcy separate have, in Gross’ view, repeatedly broken down.46 ‘The exception has merged with the rule’, in Gross’ account, such that ‘belief in our ability to separate emergency from normalcy . . . is misguided and dangerous’.47 Gross nevertheless reaffirms the necessity and tenability of just such a distinction when he argues for the imperative of ‘going outside the legal order’ in order to tackle ‘extremely grave national dangers and threats’.48 While purporting to reject a normalcy-emergency distinction, Gross reinstates it in the form of a division between, on the one hand, ‘extremely grave . . . dangers’ such as require ‘extra-legal’ adventures and, on the other, conditions under which such adventures are not justifiable. Coming full circle, Gross argues that accommodating such extra-legal adventures will serve the ultimate goal of ‘preserving enduring fidelity to the law’ by fostering a combination of frank political self-explanation on the part of government officials, open and informed public deliberation, and robust individual rights protection on the part of courts in all but the overt extra-legal case.49 Among international lawyers, as opposed to US constitutional lawyers, reform discussions tracing their impetus to exigency have tended to focus on the question of international humanitarian law’s possible obsolescence.50 On the whole, however, international lawyers seem reluctant to engage in the sort of thought experiments in which Ackerman and Gross trade, that is, to entertain the prospect of international law’s wholesale reconfiguration to accommodate the apparent exigencies of recent times. Regardless of the divergence in proposals that have emerged (or not) from the foregoing writings, these legal scholarly characterizations of Guantánamo Bay overwhelmingly rely on the archetype of the exception, taking a separation from normalcy and an apparent play-off between legal and political power as their starting points.51 In almost all of the preceding accounts, both the configuration of Guantánamo Bay as a detention camp, and the violence that has accompanied this, are imagined as nonlegal or quasi-legal phenomena. The encounter with such phenomena, moreover, is understood to necessitate some effort of conquest or accommodation on the part of law and lawyers, so as to close the circle of legal systematicity once more. But for efforts in this respect, they – law and lawyers – are imagined to stand well apart from the events under way at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and (with a few significant exceptions, namely those who have advised the Bush administration) to remain exempt from responsibility for conditions there. It is this set of assumptions with which I will take issue in Section 3 of this article, after first discussing the further theorization of the exception, and its relationship to the detention camp, in the work of Giorgio Agamben. B Giorgio Agamben and the State of the Exception Giorgio Agamben has argued that the Military Order of November 2001 (by which the indefinite detention and trial of alleged enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay was authorized) ‘produced a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being’ in the person of the detainee.52 This rendered each detainee ‘the object of a pure de facto rule’, subject to ‘a detention . . . entirely removed from the law’.53 According to Agamben, this embodies a juridical phenomenon – the ‘state of exception – that arose historically from the merging of two precepts: the extension of military power into the civil sphere (under the rubric of a state of siege) and the suspension of constitutional norms protecting individual liberties by governmental decree.54 This merger, Agamben characterizes as bringing into being a ‘kenomatic space, an emptiness of law’55 in which the sovereign affirms its authoritative locus within the legal order by acting to suspend the law altogether.56 As such, it is expressive of a ‘dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’.57 ‘US President George W. Bush’, Agamben claims, ‘is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war . . . becomes impossible’.58 Unlike the commentators cited in the preceding section, Agamben is at pains to point out that this ‘state of exception’ is neither removed from the legal order, nor creates ‘a special kind of law’. Rather, it ‘defines law’s threshold or limit concept’.59 Agamben maintains that the ‘state of exception’ is juridical in form and effect – a vital scene for the development and deployment of governmental techniques of rule. Within the juridical order, the state of exception is said to embody an emptiness of law, ‘a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations . . . are deactivated’.60 More precisely, the state of exception is ‘neither external nor internal to the juridical order’; it is rather a ‘zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other’.61 In Agamben’s account, law ‘employs the exception . . . as its original means of referring to and encompassing life’ so as to ‘bind  and, at the same time, abandon  the living being to law’.62 Law binds itself to ‘bare life’ – zo3 or biological life as such – in the space of the exception, whereby every outside, every limit of life and every possibility of transgression comes to be included within the purview of ‘a new juridico-political paradigm’.63 Of the November 2001 Military Order, Agamben observes that ‘it radically erases any legal status of the individual’ by reason of the detainees held thereunder enjoying neither ‘the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Conventions’ nor ‘the status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws’.64 Accordingly, Agamben declares the operations at Guantánamo Bay ‘de facto proceedings, which are in themselves extra- or antijuridical’ but which have nonetheless ‘passed over into law’ such that ‘juridical norms blur with mere fact’.65 Agamben thus endorses, albeit in his own distinct terms, the claim that much of the legal scholarship surrounding Guantánamo Bay makes: that this jurisdiction represents a special, original case within the juridical order: ‘a zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide’.66 In so doing, Agamben implies the existence, or preexistence, of a juridical zone – a space of non-exceptional character – in which fact and law do not coalesce; a secondary sphere in which maintaining ‘the very distinction between peace and war’ is or was possible. Agamben’s discussion of the ‘nourishment’67 that the exception affords law suggests some other domain where, but for the exception, law might hold back (or be held back) from its voracious colonization of the preconditions of life and of politics (‘the normal situation’).68 Following the work of Duncan Kennedy and other legal scholars, however, one may read the juridical deployment of fact/law, peace/war, detainee/prisoner of war, law/politics, law/life ‘argument-bites’ as one of those operations by which ‘legal arguers generate the experience of necessity’.69 Read according to Kennedy’s semiotic schema, Agamben’s suggestion that, but for the state of exception, these sort of oppositions might hold and remain separable (however ‘fictitiously’70) seems, itself, a necessitarian ‘argument-bite’ (state of exception/normal situation) open to cataloguing and interrogation within this very grid. This, as Kennedy points out, does not entail any overarching assertion of indeterminacy,71 nor does it indicate that Agamben’s analysis does not work or must be corrected.72 Agamben’s characterization of the state of the exception might work so well precisely because it more or less replicates, rather than upsets, familiar, necessitarian operations of legal argumentation.73 Reading Agamben in this way suggests that he might be ‘at least somewhat naïve about legal argument’s simultaneously structured and indeterminate (floating) character’, that is, about the characteristic operations of law and legal argument.74 From this vantage point, the ‘Eureka!’ tone of Agamben’s recent writings, his claim to be remedying the woeful shortcomings of public law theory, and his heralding the ‘deactivation’ of law’s hold on life and the ‘decontamination’ of politics from law might be approached with some scepticism.75 One might question too Agamben’s assertion that the Guantánamo Bay detainees have been stripped of legal status, and thereby of all but bare life.76 Law frequently declares (indeed celebrates) a dearth of the normative where critical scrutiny discloses a hyper-regulatory abundance. Consider the rhetoric of the ‘free market’. The legal emptiness of the market is declared repeatedly and used to justify the erosion or suppression of regulatory initiatives pertaining to consumer protection, workers’ rights and environmental standards.77 At the same time, laws and rules of many sorts – securities laws, antitrust laws, contract laws, accounting standards, etc. – proliferate unabated in the very same space.78 In a comparable way, the records surrounding Guantánamo Bay suggest that the interactions of detainee and detainer in that jurisdiction are experienced as almost entirely pre-codified by the dictates of legal status.79 It is by this means, rather than, as Agamben has suggested, through ‘obliteration and contradiction’ of the normative aspect of law, that governmental violence is being effected, or so it will be argued in Section 3 of this article.80 By focusing, at the outset, on the ‘abandoned’ being of the detainee in isolation (a humanitarian rather than a political impulse),81 Agamben neglects the particular, precarious experience of deciding that remains central to Schmitt’s theory of the exception. For Schmitt, on whose work Agamben purports to draw,82 the exception ‘cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law’.83 The decision on and in the exception cannot, accordingly, be derived from the content of any code or norm, nor can responsibility for its taking be deflected; it is ‘a decision in the true sense of the word’.84 Agamben likewise maintains that the sovereign decision that occurs in the space of the exception – President Bush’s decision in relation to Guantánamo Bay, as he casts it at one instance85 – ‘is the position of an undecidable’.86 The ‘necessity’ triggering a state of the exception, Agamben writes, ‘ultimately comes down to a decision, but that on which it decides is, in truth, something undecidable in fact or law’.87 The law remains in force in the state of exception, Agamben maintains, but ‘the normative aspect of law’ is ‘obliterated’.88 Yet Agamben’s characterization of the state of exception amounts, in effect, to an insistence upon the historical and theoretical pre-codification of the decision thereon – pre-codification that negates its exceptionalism in Schmittian terms. Tracing a number of historical and etymological lineages, Agamben declares these to have culminated in an ‘extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen’,89 such that ‘the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment’.90 On one hand, Agamben declares the Military Order of November 2001 to have created a compulsion to decide upon the undecidable. On the other, he characterizes the space of that decision (and of detainee-detainer interaction) so as to suggest that its dynamics have been pre-codified and rendered ‘permanent’ by the onward march of history and language.91 Agamben imagines the camp (and the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay, specifically)92 as ‘the structure in which the state of the exception – the possibility of deciding on which founds sovereign power – is realized normally’.93 From this ‘extreme phase’, Agamben would lead his readers in ‘clearing the way for a longoverdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics in which bare life is no longer separated and excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights’.94 What is this if not a (partially) pre-codified program, or at least a call for compliance and implementation? What is this if not an affirmation of the norm in the sense of an ‘attempt to spell out in detail the case in which law suspends itself’?95 Agamben would nevertheless have us believe that the telos of his account runs in a contrary direction: Of course, the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it . . . To live in the state of exception means . . . ceaselessly to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war.96 3 The Order of Exceptionalism and the Annihilation of the Exception In arguing against Agamben and others that the experience of the exception anticipated by Schmitt is in retreat at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the legal order of Guantánamo Bay often looks and sounds like a domain operating as one of ‘pure’ sovereign discretion and thus exceptionalism. Lawyers for the US Justice Department have asserted that the US President has unlimited discretion to determine the appropriate means for interrogating enemy combatants detained at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.97 Likewise, counsel for the US Government contended, before the US Supreme Court, that ‘a commander’s wartime determination that an individual is an enemy combatant is a quintessentially military judgment, representing a core exercise of the Commander-in-Chief authority’.98 By assuming the affect of exceptionalism, the normative order of Guantánamo Bay has soaked up critical energies with considerable effectiveness, for it is the exception that rings liberal alarm bells. Accordingly, the focus falls on less than 600 persons being abused in Cuba, rather than upon the millions subjected to endemic sexual, physical and substance abuse in prisons across the democratic world. In a similar way, attention is captured by the violation of rights of asylum-seekers, rather than by the over-representation of immigrants in the most informal and vulnerable sectors of the contemporary economy.99 For detention decisions taken at Guantánamo Bay to correspond to Schmitt’s understanding of the exception, however, ‘the precondition as well as the content of jurisdictional competence in such a case must necessarily be unlimited’. ‘From the liberal constitutional point if view’, Schmitt wrote, ‘there would be no jurisdictional competence at all. The most guidance the constitution can provide is to indicate who can act in such a case.’100 Yet in respect of Guantánamo Bay, both the content and competence of the US executive is repeatedly cast as pre-codified in presidential and governmental statements. At times, the ‘code’ is said to be that of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ or ‘justice’.101 At other times, it is that of God.102 On still further occasions, constitutional norms are invoked to frame a decision.103 The acts of the would-be sovereign, in each case, are characterized by repeated references to some higher source of competence and direction, overt deference to a pre-determined programme in the course of implementation, and insistence upon the conduit or vessel-like status of executive authority. A little lower down the hierarchy, Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, speaking about the annual administrative review process at a press briefing on 23 June 2004, conceded: ‘There’s no question there’s judgment involved. I doubt if many of these are black and white cases. I would expect most are going to be gray’. When pressed to define his role in the process, he confirmed that he was the one to make the final decision regarding release, transfer or continued detention in respect of each detainee, in the wake of an Administrative Review Board assessment. ‘I operate and oversee, organise the process, and I also make the ultimate decision’, he stated.104 Secretary England went on, however, to convey an impression of this judgment as one cabined by broad policy directives, notions of reasonableness, and the institutional demand for standardization: ‘We do have some guidelines; . . . the boards do have some guidelines’, he assured the audience, ‘every board doesn’t have a different standard’. He continued: ‘It will be a judgment based on facts, data available . . . the best decision a reasonable person can make in this situation’. ‘It’s what is the situation today and going forward in terms of a threat to America. And that is what we will decide, and that’s what the decision will be based on’.105 From expressing the decision he would be taking in personal, case-specific terms, Secretary England thus moved rapidly into the mode of generalization, depersonalization and necessity. ‘His’ decision became ‘the’ decision of the reasonable person, made not to assess the individual detainee’s responsibility, but rather to assess his or her proximity to a generalized ‘threat to America’. Such an approach is also discernible in the Military Order issued by President Bush in 2001, pursuant to which the Military Commissions were convened before which Guantánamo Bay detainees were, until their suspension in November 2004, in the process of being tried. The ‘findings’ upon which the jurisdiction created by that order is predicated cast the steps taken thereby as inexorable reactions to a state of affairs of immeasurable proportions and persistent duration. Attacks by international terrorists are said to have ‘created a state of armed conflict that requires the use of the United States Armed Forces’.106 Likewise, it is said to be ‘necessary for individuals subject to the order . . . to be detained’, just as the issuance of the order itself is stated to be ‘necessary to meet the emergency’.107 Although expressed in terms of ‘an extraordinary emergency’, this order frames the Presidential decisions embodied in its text as matters of exigency – in other words, as non-decisions – dictated by a ‘state of armed conflict’. The only acknowledgement of discretion is buried in the final paragraph of the order’s ‘findings’, where the President is said to have ‘determined that an extraordinary emergency exists for national defense purposes’. The exercise of sovereign discretion is, accordingly, cast as a derivative matter: a question of classification after the fact. One could, of course, read these claims as exercises in public relations, designed to cloak the deployment of unfettered sovereign power in the guise of liberal proceduralism. Yet regardless of how one might characterize the ‘real’ intent behind the military mandates governing Guantánamo Bay, the experience of decision-making reported by figures such as Secretary England seems, to a significant degree, to be one of deferral and disavowal – as though his job were more a matter of implementation than decision. Speaking of the determination, by the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, that one of the first 30 detainees to be heard by the Tribunal was not, in fact, an ‘enemy combatant’, Secretary England explained: ‘In this case we – we set up a process, we’re following that process, we’re looking at all the data . . . Determinations were made he was an enemy combatant. We now have set up another process; more data is available. Time has gone by . . . I believe the process is doing what we asked the process to do, which is to look at the data as unbiased as you can, from a reasonable person point of view . . . and I believe the process is working . . . ’108 This is not the language of Schmittian exceptionalism. Rather, it is suggestive of efforts to construct a series of normatively airtight spaces in which the prospect of agonizing over an impossible decision may be delimited and, wherever possible, avoided. As such, the jurisdiction created at Guantánamo Bay is constituted, in Schmittian terms, in the liberal register of the norm (indeed, an overdetermined version thereof).109 This brings me to my final point, which is to sketch a reading of Schmitt whereby the experience of exceptional decisionism that his work evokes may be de-linked from the notion of self-founding, all-encompassing sovereignty and, as such, deployed against the centralization of political authority. I wish to suggest, moreover, that the political possibilities attendant upon such a de-frocked, wayward sense of the exceptional are ripe for reinvigoration in resistance to the initiatives being undertaken at Guantánamo Bay. The legally sanctioned, indefinite detention of persons at Guantánamo Bay might be countered not through a return to the normative, but through an insistence upon the prevalence of the exception in these terms. 4 Of the Exception, the Decision and Resistance When Schmitt wrote of the ‘independent meaning of the decision’, he rejected the assumption (attributed to Robert von Mohl) ‘that a decision in the legal sense must be derived entirely from the content of a norm’. Likewise, as noted above, Schmitt observed that the exception occasioning a decision ‘cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law’.110 He went on, nevertheless, to attempt to do precisely this. Envisaging the jurisdictional competence exercised in the decisional space of the exception as ‘necessarily unlimited’ and insisting on its correspondence with an absolute, indivisible sovereignty, Schmitt himself sought to anchor the exception to a preformed law of political order.111 Accordingly, the prospect of sovereignty operating as ‘a play between two or more parties’ was, in Schmitt’s assessment ‘contrary to all reason and all law’.112 ‘The law’ in this context seemingly referred to some predetermined mandate higher than the law of liberal constitutionalism that would, according to Schmitt’s account, always be susceptible to suspension by the sovereign. Schmitt’s resistance to the diffusion of decisional power on the exception was undoubtedly bound up with his critique of the pluralism of the Weimar Republic and his hopes for a state order beyond it.113 Yet one need not follow the suggestive perplexities of Schmitt’s exception down his particular centralizing route. Instead one could identify the absence of precodification characteristic of the exception with immersion in the contingencies of the social and the ubiquity of power. Far from circumscribing the exception, acknowledgement of the immersion of decision-making in the social, and thus the impossibility of a sovereign state retaining a monopoly on decision, allows the exception to retain its exceptional character. Schmitt himself acknowledged this when he wrote: ‘There is no irresistible highest or greatest power that operates according to the certainty of natural law’. 114 Only when the question ‘who decides?’ forms part of the ‘concrete case that the law cannot factually determine in any definitive manner’ is the potential of the exception to ‘confound the unity and order of the rationalist scheme’ held open, as Schmitt contemplated.115 Schmitt himself wrote: ‘a distinctive determination of which individual person or which concrete body can assume the authority to decide cannot be derived from the mere legal quality of a maxim’.116 Were authority to decide on the exception already known to be monopolized, then the exception would no longer embody ‘the power of real life to break  through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition’: that is, the crust of acceptance of the norm or, what Kierkegaard termed ‘comfortable superficiality’.117 Schmitt’s exception, accordingly, evokes a political experience that is amenable to delinking from Schmitt’s fetishism of the state. The exception, in this sense, arises from the vertiginous combination of, on one hand, responsibility assumed and, on the other, faith in one’s determinative authority and autonomy relinquished. In this mode, I believe, it offers scope for interruption of the normative order of Guantánamo Bay. To delink the experience of deciding on/in the exception from the sovereign state is not to deny Schmitt’s claim that such a decision entails (indeed, derives its political character from) an effect of ‘grouping . . . according to friend and enemy’; that is, that every decision involves a would-be exclusion.118 Nor is it to configure the state as ‘an association that competes with other associations’, the sort of pluralism targeted by Schmitt in The Concept of the Political. 119 Rather, it is to argue that Schmitt’s decisionism is not necessarily contingent upon an insistence upon the state’s (or any selfsustaining sovereign’s) monopolization of all political decisions (that is, decisions in/ on the exception).120 Nor, for that matter, is it contingent upon any theorization of the structure of the political order per se (whatever Schmitt might say).121 Rather, it is possible to conceive – indeed, proceeding from Schmitt’s open characterization of the exception,122 it is almost impossible not to conceive – as both political and exceptional a much broader range of decisions, approached by or among a much broader range of agents, aggregations or arrogations, than those which Schmitt entertained as such. That is, in the sense of their ‘defying general codification’, involving, potentially, a ‘thinking of the general with intense passion’ and thereby ‘becoming instantly independent of argumentative substantiation’.123 5 Conclusion International lawyers’ and activists’ appeals to the Geneva Conventions124 and the appeals by legal theorists, activists and commentators to the work of Giorgio Agamben125 both lay claim to the juridical phenomenon of Guantánamo Bay by way of invoking a code and seeking to follow that code to an exit point and/or a point of origination. The foregoing critique has been directed against this particular invocation of Agamben’s work, and its relationship to prevailing invocations of international law, rather than to that work or that law as such (amenable, as it is, to many readings that would defy the accounts presented above). In so far as it pursues this end, the effect of such commentary is to compound efforts to curtail the experience of deciding on/in the exception – efforts that are already well under way at Guantánamo Bay. For notwithstanding all the liberal heartache that they provoke, the law and legal institutions of Guantánamo Bay are working to negate the exception in tandem with, rather than in opposition to, what Schmitt identified as ‘the tendency of liberal constitutionalism to regulate the exception as precisely as possible’.126 To corrode the experience of the exception in this way is to eviscerate the experience of politics as Schmitt characterized it. That is, it is to lose or avoid the experience of deciding in circumstances where no person or rule offers assurance that the decision that one takes will be the right one or, indeed, whether one does in fact exert the decisive authority that one envisages oneself to hold. The exception poses, as Schmitt observed, ‘a case of extreme peril’ because it permits both righteousness and self-knowledge to be placed at risk; because the decision taken remains ‘independent of the correctness of its content’.127 Notwithstanding all the talk of threats that surrounds Guantánamo Bay, it is this sense of peril that is lacking within its legal order. Moreover, it may be, in part, the absence of such a risk that contributes to the strange assurance with which Secretary England announces, as he did at a press briefing on 8 September, ‘we have a lot of very bad people’ in detention at Guantánamo Bay.128 It is, therefore, to a renewed sense of the exception and the decision that ‘emanates from nothingness’129 within law, rather than to a vehement insistence upon the norm, that I suggest turning in order to raise doubts about the work of Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary England and the other ‘good’ people of Guantánamo Bay. By understanding Guantánamo Bay as a legal order dedicated to the annihilation or codification of the exception, we may come to appreciate the scope for political action within such a juristic zone. Recognizing in herself or himself Schmitt’s exceptional decision-maker, the functionary implementing a programme might come to experience that programme as a field of decisional possibility and impossibility, with all the danger and difference that that implies. It is precisely this experience that critics of the Guantánamo Bay programme might strive to evoke in Secretary England and in the other officials upon whose concrete decisions that programme depends, as well as in the audiences with which they – critics and officials alike – perpetually dance.
Case

The ruling changes nothing.  President will win the ground game
Scheppele 12—Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs @ Princeton University Kim Lane Scheppele (Dir. of the Program in Law and Public Affairs @ Princeton University),  “The New Judicial Deference,” Boston University Law Review, 92 B.U.L. Rev. 89, January 2012
In this Article, I will show that American courts have often approached the extreme policies of the anti-terrorism campaign by splitting the difference between the two sides—the government and suspected terrorists. One side typically got the ringing rhetoric (the suspected terrorists), and the other side got the facts on the ground (the government). In major decisions both designed to attract public attention and filled with inspiring language about the reach of the Constitution even in times of peril, the Supreme Court, along with some lower courts, has stood up to the government and laid down limits on anti-terror policy in a sequence of decisions about the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. But, at the same time, these decisions have provided few immediate remedies for those who have sought the courts' protection. As a result, suspected terrorists have repeatedly prevailed in their legal arguments, and yet even with these court victories, little changed in the situation that they went to court to challenge. The government continued to treat suspected terrorists almost as badly as it did before the suspected terrorists "won" their cases. And any change in terrorism suspects' conditions that did result from these victorious decisions was slow and often not directly attributable to the judicial victories they won.
Does this gap between suspected terrorists' legal gains and their unchanged fates exist because administration officials were flouting the decisions of the courts? The Bush Administration often responded with sound and fury and attempted to override the Supreme Court's decisions or to comply minimally with them when they had to. n6 But, as this Article will show, these decisions did not actually require the government to change its practices very quickly. The decisions usually required the government to change only its general practices in the medium term. Judges had a different framework for analyzing the petitioners' situation than the petitioners themselves did; judges generally couched their decisions in favor of the suspected terrorists as critiques of systems instead of as solutions for individuals. In doing so, however, courts allowed a disjuncture between rights and remedies for those who stood before them seeking a vindication of their claims. Suspected terrorists may have won  *92  in these cases—and they prevailed overwhelmingly in their claims, especially at the Supreme Court—but courts looked metaphorically over the suspects' heads to address the policies that got these suspects into the situation where the Court found them. Whether those who brought the cases actually got to benefit from the judgments, either immediately or eventually, was another question.
Bad though the legal plight of suspected terrorists has been, one might well have expected it to be worse. Before 9/11, the dominant response of courts around the world during wars and other public emergencies was to engage in judicial deference. n7 Deference counseled courts to stay out of matters when governments argued that national security concerns were central. As a result, judges would generally indicate that they had no role to play once the bullets started flying or an emergency was declared. If individuals became collateral damage in wartime, there was generally no judicial recourse to address their harms while the war was going on. As the saying goes, inter arma silent leges: in war, the law is mute. After 9/11, however, and while the conflict occasioned by those attacks was still "hot," courts jumped right in, dealing governments one loss after another. n8 After 9/11, it appears that deference is dead.
 *93  But, I will argue, deference is still alive and well. We are simply seeing a new sort of deference born out of the ashes of the familiar variety. While governments used to win national security cases by convincing the courts to decline any serious review of official conduct in wartime, now governments win first by losing these cases on principle and then by getting implicit permission to carry on the losing policy in concrete cases for a while longer, giving governments a victory in practice. n9 Suspected terrorists have received  *94  from courts a vindication of the abstract principle that they have rights without also getting an order that the abusive practices that have directly affected them must be stopped immediately. Instead, governments are given time to change their policies while still holding suspected terrorists in legal limbo. As a result, despite winning their legal arguments, suspected terrorists lose the practical battle to change their daily lives.
Courts may appear to be bold in these cases because they tell governments to craft new policies to deal with terrorism. But because the new policies then have to be tested to see whether they meet the new criteria courts have laid down, the final approval may take years, during which time suspected terrorists may still be generally subjected to the treatment that courts have said was impermissible. Because judicial review of anti-terrorism policies itself drags out the time during which suspected terrorists may be detained, suspected terrorists win legal victories that take a very long time to result in change that they can discern. As a result, governments win the policy on the ground until court challenges have run their course and the courts make decisions that contribute to the time that the litigation takes. This is the new face of judicial deference.
This Article will explore why and how American courts have produced so many decisions in which suspected terrorists appear to win victories in national security cases. As we will see, many judges have handled the challenges that terrorism poses for law after 9/11 by giving firm support, at least in theory, to both separation of powers and constitutional rights. Judges have been very active in limiting what the government can do, requiring substantial adjustments of anti-terrorism policy and vindicating the claims of those who have been the targets. But the solutions that judges have crafted—often bold, ambitious, and brave solutions—nonetheless fail to address the plights of the specific individuals who brought the cases.
This new form of judicial deference has created a slow-motion brake on the race into a constitutional abyss. But these decisions give the government leeway to tackle urgent threats without having to change course right away with respect to the treatment of particular individuals. New deference, then, is a mixed bag. It creates the appearance of doing something—an appearance not entirely false in the long run—while doing far less in the present to bring counter-terrorism policy back under the constraint of constitutionalism.

1NC No Solvency—Congress Backlash
Congress will backlash.  It will functionally bar the Court from exercising its authority
Vladeck 11—Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Scholarship @ American University Stephen I. Vladeck, “Why Klein (Still) Matters: Congressional Deception and the War on Terrorism,” Journal of National Security Law, Volume 5, 6/16/2011,  9:38 AM 

Six weeks later, Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT Act, which included a series of controversial revisions to immigration, surveillance, and other law enforcement authorities.34 But it would be over four years before Congress would again pass a key counterterrorism initiative, enacting the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA)35 after—and largely in response to—the Supreme Court’s grant of certiorari in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.36 In the five years since, Congress had enacted a handful of additional antiterrorism measures, including the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006,37 as amended in 2009,38 the Protect America Act of 2007,39 and the 2008 amendments40 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, known in shorthand as the FAA.41 And yet, although Congress has spoken in these statutes both to the substantive authority for military commissions and to the scope of the government’s wiretapping and other surveillance powers, it has otherwise left some of the central debates in the war on terrorism completely unaddressed.42 Thus, Congress has not revisited the scope of the AUMF since September 18, 2001, even as substantial questions have been raised about whether the conflict has extended beyond that which Congress could reasonably be said to have authorized a decade ago.43 Nor has Congress intervened, despite repeated requests that it do so, to provide substantive, procedural, or evidentiary rules in the habeas litigation arising out of the military detention of noncitizen terrorism suspects at Guantánamo.44
As significantly, at the same time as Congress has left some of these key questions unanswered, it has also attempted to keep courts from answering them. Thus, the DTA and the MCA purported to divest the federal courts of jurisdiction over habeas petitions brought by individuals detained at Guantánamo and elsewhere.45 Moreover, the 2006 MCA precluded any lawsuit seeking collaterally to attack the proceedings of military commissions,46 along with “any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement of an alien who is or was detained by the United States and has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.”47 And although the Supreme Court in Boumediene invalidated the habeas-stripping provision as applied to the Guantánamo detainees,48 the same language has been upheld as applied elsewhere,49 and the more general non-habeas jurisdiction-stripping section has been repeatedly enforced by the federal courts in other cases.50
Such legislative efforts to forestall judicial resolution of the merits can also be found in the telecom immunity provisions of the FAA,51 which provided that telecom companies could not be held liable for violations of the Telecommunications Act committed in conjunction with certain governmental surveillance programs.52 Thus, in addition to changing the underlying substantive law going forward, the FAA pretermitted a series of then-pending lawsuits against the telecom companies.53
Analogously, Congress has attempted to assert itself in the debate over civilian trials versus military commissions by barring the use of appropriated funds to try individuals held at Guantánamo in civilian courts,54 and by also barring the President from using such funds to transfer detainees into the United States for continuing detention or to other countries, as well.55 Rather than enact specific policies governing criteria for detention, treatment, and trial, Congress’s modus operandi throughout the past decade has been to effectuate policy indirectly by barring (or attempting to bar) other governmental actors from exercising their core authority, be it judicial review or executive discretion.
Wasserman views these developments as a period of what Professor Blasi described as “constitutional pathology,” typified by “an unusually serious challenge to one or more of the central norms of the constitutional regime.” Nevertheless, part of how Wasserman defends the “Klein vulnerable” provisions of the MCA and FAA is by concluding that the specific substantive results they effectuate can be achieved by Congress, and so Klein does not stand in the way. But if Redish and Pudelski’s reading of Klein is correct, then the fact that Congress could reach the same substantive results through other means is not dispositive of the validity of these measures. To the contrary, the question is whether any of these initiatives were impermissibly “deceptive,” such that Congress sought to “vest the federal courts with jurisdiction to adjudicate but simultaneously restrict the power of those courts to perform the adjudicatory function in the manner they deem appropriate.”56 pg. 257-259 

Office of Legal Counsel will declare the plan as nonbinding and there is nothing that can be done about it
McGinnis 93—Professor of law @ Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law John O. McGinnis (Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel @ Department of Justice.), “Constitutional Review by the Executive in Foreign Affairs and War Powers: A Consequence of Rational Choice in the Separation of Powers,” 56 Law and Contemporary Problems 293-325 (Fall 1993).

In war powers and certain other areas of foreign affairs, the executive rather than the judiciary appears to exercise the constitutional authority to declare "what the law is."1 For instance, when presidents have committed troops to foreign hostilities in the past decade, they have claimed the constitutional authority to do so without congressional authorization, essentially refusing to acknowledge that they were bound by the War Powers Resolution.2 Recently, President Bush declared that certain provisions in two bills were not legally binding because they derogated from his authority in foreign affairs despite the fact that he himself had signed them into law.3 In each of these instances, the Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC"), the central voice of executive branch legal interpretation, wrote an opinion as elaborate as a judicial opinion supporting the President's view that the provision at issue was unconstitutional. The President's apparent exercise of constitutional review in such cases is also highlighted by the judiciary's complementary tendency to avoid exercising substantive review over foreign policy or war powers disputes between the executive and legislative branches. Pg. 293 

Decision on authority triggers Congressional override.  The Court knows it is coming and ties rules to avoid the backlash
Puro 2k—Professor Political Science and Public Policy @ Saint Louis University Puro, Steven, "Congress-Supreme Court Relations: Strategies of Power,” Saint Louis University Public Law Review, Vol. 19, Issue 1 (2000), pp. 117-128

Cross argues that "Court decisions do not automatically actualize the Court's policies and the impact of Court opinions may depend upon the compliance of Congress or other external actors." 67 The Supreme Court can encourage other institutions to comply with its decisions, and Justices often assume that noncompliance is more likely for decisions with broader scope.  Additional legislation, regulation, or appropriations by Congress play an important role in achieving compliance by society with the Court's decisions. Congress may achieve additional authority through reinterpreting Court decisions. The judiciary is often faced with deciding between the authority of Congress and the President. In the last decade, on many important domestic and international matters the judiciary's constitutional and statutory interpretations appear to shift power from Congress to the President. By expanding presidential authority and limiting Congress's authority are federal courts involved in forming a more compact constitutional structure?
IV. CONCLUSION
The American system of government shares the power and responsibility of constitutional interpretation among the executive, legislative and judicial branches. The constitutional and statutory relationships among these three branches are guided by both short- and long-term considerations. In a given year or over the course of several years, Congress's authority is concerned in a wide range of constitutional and statutory issues before Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress-Supreme Court relationships involve multiple strategies which encourage consensus and coalition building among them rather than conflict. Conflicts occur due to different ideological positions, varying interpretations of specific constitutional and statutory provisions, and central questions about the scope of constitutional authority.
Congress's institutional competence in dealing with the courts and the executive will affect its attempts to maximize institutional capacity in relations with the Supreme Court. Congress may convey its institutional authority through statutory language, setting institutional boundaries for Supreme Court interpretation of statutes and regulations, and threatening increased jurisdictional or budgetary controls over federal courts. No determinative set of criteria for Congressional limitation on Court decisions was found. Such criteria should not be expected since Congress has given the Supreme Court power to set its own agenda and decide major constitutional and statutory matters. It would be difficult for Congress to use long-term institutional strategies in specific cases to fully exercise its institutional powers and abilities. Congress has increasingly received its expected payoffs from short- term reactions to Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s and 1990s, with divided governments as the national norm. Pg. 126-127 

Override destroys their precedent based advantages
Eskridge 91—Professor of Law @ Georgetown University Eskridge, William N. Jr., "Overriding Supreme Court Statutory Interpretation Decisions" Yale Law Review, 101 Yale Law Journal 331 (1991)

1. This Article will use the term "override" to mean any time Congress reacts consciously to, and modifies a statutory interpretation decision. A congressional "override" includes a statute that: (I) completely overrules the holding of a statutory interpretation decision, just as a subsequent Court would overrule an unsatisfactory precedent; (2) modifies the result of a decision in some material way, such that the same case would have been decided differently; or (3) modifies the consequences of the decision, such that the same case would have been decided in the same way but subsequent cases would be decided differently. With only a few exceptions, this Article will not use the term "override" to include statutes for which the legislative history-mainly committee reports and hearings-does not reveal a legislative focus on judicial decisions. Pg. 332

Courts DA
Wartime means Obama will ignore the decision.  Noncompliance undermines the Court’s legitimacy and makes the plan worthless
Pushaw 4—Professor of law @ Pepperdine University Robert J. Pushaw, Jr., “Defending Deference: A Response to Professors Epstein and Wells,” Missouri Law Review, Vol. 69, 2004
Civil libertarians have urged the Court to exercise the same sort of judicial review over war powers as it does in purely domestic cases—i.e., independently interpreting and applying the law of the Constitution, despite the contrary view of the political branches and regardless of the political repercussions.54 This proposed solution ignores the institutional differences, embedded in the Constitution, that have always led federal judges to review warmaking under special standards. Most obviously, the President can act with a speed, decisiveness, and access to information (often highly confidential) that cannot be matched by Congress, which must garner a majority of hundreds of legislators representing multiple interests.55 Moreover, the judiciary by design acts far more slowly than either political branch. A court must wait for parties to initiate a suit, oversee the litigation process, and render a deliberative judgment that applies the law to the pertinent facts.56 Hence, by the time federal judges (particularly those on the Supreme Court) decide a case, the action taken by the executive is several years old. Sometimes, this delay is long enough that the crisis has passed and the Court’s detached perspective has been restored.57 At other times, however, the war rages, the President’s action is set in stone, and he will ignore any judicial orders that he conform his conduct to constitutional norms.58 In such critical situations, issuing a judgment simply weakens the Court as an institution, as Chief Justice Taney learned the hard way.59
Professor Wells understands the foregoing institutional differences and thus does not naively demand that the Court exercise regular judicial review to safeguard individual constitutional rights, come hell or high water. Nonetheless, she remains troubled by cases in which the Court’s examination of executive action is so cursory as to amount to an abdication of its responsibilities—and a stamp of constitutional approval for the President’s actions.60 Therefore, she proposes a compromise: requiring the President to establish a reasonable basis for the measures he has taken in response to a genuine risk to national security.61 In this way, federal judges would ensure accountability not by substituting their judgments for those of executive officials (as hap-pens with normal judicial review), but rather by forcing them to adequately justify their decisions.62
This proposal intelligently blends a concern for individual rights with pragmatism. Civil libertarians often overlook the basic point that constitutional rights are not absolute, but rather may be infringed if the government has a compelling reason for doing so and employs the least restrictive means to achieve that interest.63 Obviously, national security is a compelling governmental interest.64 Professor Wells’s crucial insight is that courts should not allow the President simply to assert that “national security” necessitated his actions; rather, he must concretely demonstrate that his policies were a reasonable and narrowly tailored response to a particular risk that had been assessed accurately.65
Although this approach is plausible in theory, I am not sure it would work well in practice. Presumably, the President almost always will be able to set forth plausible justifications for his actions, often based on a wide array of factors—including highly sensitive intelligence that he does not wish to dis-close.66 Moreover, if the President’s response seems unduly harsh, he will likely cite the wisdom of erring on the side of caution. If the Court disagrees, it will have to find that those proffered reasons are pretextual and that the President overreacted emotionally instead of rationally evaluating and responding to the true risks involved. But are judges competent to make such determinations? And even if they are, would they be willing to impugn the President’s integrity and judgment? If so, what effect might such a judicial decision have on America’s foreign relations? These questions are worth pondering before concluding that “hard look” review would be an improvement over the Court’s established approach.
Moreover, such searching scrutiny will be useless in situations where the President has made a wartime decision that he will not change, even if judicially ordered to do so. For instance, assume that the Court in Korematsu had applied “hard look” review and found that President Roosevelt had wildly exaggerated the sabotage and espionage risks posed by Japanese-Americans and had imprisoned them based on unfounded fears and prejudice (as appears to have been the case). If the Court accordingly had struck down FDR’s order to relocate them, he would likely have disobeyed it.
Professor Wells could reply that this result would have been better than what happened, which was that the Court engaged in “pretend” review and stained its reputation by upholding the constitutionality of the President’s odious and unwarranted racial discrimination. I would agree. But I submit that the solution in such unique situations (i.e., where a politically strong President has made a final decision and will defy any contrary court judgment) is not judicial review in any form—ordinary, deferential, or hard look. Rather, the Court should simply declare the matter to be a political question and dismiss the case. Although such Bickelian manipulation of the political question doctrine might be legally unprincipled and morally craven, 67 at least it would avoid giving the President political cover by blessing his unconstitutional conduct and instead would force him to shoulder full responsibility. Pg. 968-970 

Fight with President devastates court legitimacy. Two centuries of judicial decisions prove they can’t solve without his support    
Devins and Fisher 98—Professor of Law and Government @ College of William and Mary and Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers @ Congressional Research Service  Neal Devins and Louis Fisher, “Judicial Exclusivity and Political Instability,” Virginia Law Review Vol. 84, No. 1 (Feb. 1998), pp. 83-106
Lacking the power to appropriate funds or command the military, 73 the Court understands that it must act in a way that garners public acceptance." In other words, as psychologists Tom Tyler and Gregory Mitchell observed, the Court seems to believe "that public acceptance of the Court's role as interpreter of the Constitution that is, the public belief in the Court's institutional legitimacy enhances public acceptance of controversial Court decisions."75 This emphasis on public acceptance of the judiciary seems to be conclusive proof that Court decisionmaking cannot be divorced from a case's (sometimes explosive) social and political setting.
A more telling manifestation of how public opinion affects Court decisionmaking is evident when the Court reverses itself to conform its decisionmaking to social and political forces beating against it.76 Witness, for example, the collapse of the Lochner era under the weight of changing social conditions. Following Roosevelt's 1936 election victory in all but two states, the Court, embarrassed by populist attacks against the Justices, announced several decisions upholding New Deal programs.' In explaining this transformation, Justice Owen Roberts recognized the extraordinary importance of public opinion in undoing the Lochner era: "Looking back, it is difficult to see how the Court could have resisted the popular urge for uniform standards throughout the country-for what in effect was a unified economy.""8
Social and political forces also played a defining role in the Court's reconsideration of decisions on sterilization and the eugenics movement," state-mandated flag salutes,' the Roe v. Wade trimester standard, 8 the death penalty,' states' rights, 3 and much more.' It did not matter that some of these earlier decisions commanded an impressive majority of eight to one." Without popular support, these decisions settled nothing. Justice Robert Jackson instructed us that "the practical play of the forces of politics is such that judicial power has often delayed but never permanently defeated the persistent will of a substantial majority.""6 As such, for a Court that wants to maximize its power and legitimacy, taking social and political forces into account is an act of necessity, not cowardice. Correspondingly, when the Court gives short shrift to populist values or concerns, its decisionmaking is unworkable and destabilizing.87
The Supreme Court may be the ultimate interpreter in a particular case, but not in the larger social issues of which that case is a reflection. Indeed, it is difficult to locate in the more than two centuries of rulings from the Supreme Court a single decision that ever finally settled a transcendent question of constitutional law. When a decision fails to persuade or otherwise proves unworkable.' elected officials, interest groups, academic commentators, and the press will speak their minds and the Court, ultimately, will listen."
Even in decisions that are generally praised, such as Brown, the Court must calibrate its decisionmaking against the sentiments of the implementing community and the nation. In an effort to temper Southern hostility to its decision, the Court did not issue a remedy in the first Brown decision.' A similar tale is told by the Court's invocation of the so-called "passive virtues," that is, procedural and jurisdictional mechanisms that allow the Court to steer clear of politically explosive issues.91 For example, the Court will not "anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it," not "formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required," nor "pass upon a constitutional question... if there is... some other ground," such as statutory construction, upon which to dispose of the case.' This deliberate withholding of judicial power reflects the fact that courts lack ballot-box legitimacy and need to avoid costly collisions with the general public and other branches of government.'
It is sometimes argued that courts operate on principle while the rest of government is satisfied with compromises." This argument is sheer folly. A multimember Court, like government, gropes incrementally towards consensus and decision through compromise, expediency, and ad hoc actions. "No good society," as Alexander Bickel observed, "can be unprincipled; and no viable society can be principle-ridden."'95
Courts, like elected officials, cannot escape "the great tides and currents which engulf" the rest of us.96 Rather than definitively settling transcendent questions, courts must take account of social movements and public opinion.' When the judiciary strays outside and opposes the policy of elected leaders, it does so at substantial risk. The Court maintains its strength by steering a course that fits within the permissible limits of public opinion. Correspondingly, "the Court's legitimacy-indeed, the Constitution's-must ultimately spring from public acceptance," for ours is a "political system ostensibly based on consent."98 pg. 93-98

Weakening the court prevents sustainable development
Stein 5—Former Judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal and the New South Wales Land and Environment Court Justice Paul Stein (International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Specialist Group on the Judiciary), “Why judges are essential to the rule of law and environmental protection,” Judges and the Rule of Law: Creating the Links: Environment, Human Rights and Poverty, IUCN Environmental Policy and Law Paper No. 60, Edited by Thomas Greiber, 2006
The Johannesburg Principles state:
“We emphasize that the fragile state of the global environment requires the judiciary, as the guardian of the Rule of Law, to boldly and fearlessly implement and enforce applicable international and national laws, which in the field of environment and sustainable development will assist in alleviating poverty and sustaining an enduring civilization, and ensuring that the present generation will enjoy and improve the quality of life of all peoples, while also ensuring that the inherent rights and interests of succeeding generations are not compromised.”
There can be no argument that environmental law, and sustainable development law in particular, are vibrant and dynamic areas, both internationally and domestically. Judge Weeramantry (of the ICJ) has reminded us that we judges, as custodians of the law, have a major obligation to contribute to its development. Much of sustainable development law is presently making the journey from soft law into hard law. This is happening internationally but also it is occurring in many national legislatures and courts.
Fundamental environmental laws relating to water, air, our soils and energy are critical to narrowing the widening gap between the rich and poor of the world. Development may be seen as the bridge to narrow that gap but it is one that is riddled with dangers and contradictions. We cannot bridge the gap with materials stolen from future generations. Truly sustainable development can only take place in harmony with the environment. Importantly we must not allow sustainable development to be duchessed and bastardized.
A role for judges?
It is in striking the balance between development and the environment that the courts have a role. Of course, this role imposes on judges a significant trust. The balancing of the rights and needs of citizens, present and future, with development, is a delicate one. It is a balance often between powerful interests (private and public) and the voiceless poor. In a way judges are the meat in the sandwich but, difficult as it is, we must not shirk our duty.  Pg. 53-54

Extinction of all complex life
Barry 13—Political ecologist with expert proficiencies in old forest protection, climate change, and environmental sustainability policy  Dr. Glen Barry (Ph.D. in "Land Resources" and Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development” from the University of Wisconsin-Madison), “ECOLOGY SCIENCE: Terrestrial Ecosystem Loss and Biosphere Collapse,” Forests.org, February 4, 2013, pg. http://forests.org/blog/2013/02/ecology-science-terrestrial-ec.asp

Blunt, Biocentric Discussion on Avoiding Global Ecosystem Collapse and Achieving Global Ecological Sustainability
Science needs to do a better job of considering worst-case scenarios regarding continental- and global-scale ecological collapse. The loss of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscape connectivity reviewed here shows clearly that ecological collapse is occurring at spatially extensive scales. The collapse of the biosphere and complex life, or eventually even all life, is a possibility that needs to be better understood and mitigated against. A tentative case has been presented here that terrestrial ecosystem loss is at or near a planetary boundary. It is suggested that a 66 of Earth's land mass must be maintained in terrestrial ecosystems, to maintain critical connectivity necessary for ecosystem services across scales to continue, including the biosphere. Yet various indicators show that around 50 of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems have been lost and their services usurped by humans. Humanity may have already destroyed more terrestrial ecosystems than the biosphere can bear. There exists a major need for further research into how much land must be maintained in a natural and agroecological state to meet landscape and bioregional sustainable development goals while maintaining an operable biosphere.
It is proposed that a critical element in determining the threshold where terrestrial ecosystem loss becomes problematic is where landscape connectivity of intact terrestrial ecosystems erodes to the point where habitat patches exist only in a human context. Based upon an understanding of how landscapes percolate across scale, it is recommended that 66 of Earth's surface be maintained as ecosystems; 44 as natural intact ecosystems (2/3 of 2/3) and 22 as agroecological buffer zones. Thus nearly half of Earth must remain as large, connected, intact, and naturally evolving ecosystems, including old-growth forests, to provide the context and top-down ecological regulation of both human agroecological, and reduced impact and appropriately scaled industrial activities.
Given the stakes, it is proper for political ecologists and other Earth scientists to willingly speak bluntly if we are to have any chance of averting global ecosystem collapse. A case has been presented that Earth is already well beyond carrying capacity in terms of amount of natural ecosystem habitat that can be lost before the continued existence of healthy regional ecosystems and the global biosphere itself may not be possible. Cautious and justifiably conservative science must still be able to rise to the occasion of global ecological emergencies that may threaten our very survival as a species and planet.
Those knowledgeable about planetary boundaries—and abrupt climate change and terrestrial ecosystem loss in particular—must be more bold and insistent in conveying the range and possible severity of threats of global ecosystem collapse, while proposing sufficient solutions. It is not possible to do controlled experiments on the Earth system; all we have is observation based upon science and trained intuition to diagnose the state of Earth's biosphere and suggest sufficient ecological science–based remedies.
If Gaia is alive, she can die. Given the strength of life-reducing trends across biological systems and scales, there is a need for a rigorous research agenda to understand at what point the biosphere may perish and Earth die, and to learn what configuration of ecosystems and other boundary conditions may prevent her from doing so. We see death of cells, organisms, plant communities, wildlife populations, and whole ecosystems all the time in nature—extreme cases being desertification and ocean dead zones. There is no reason to dismiss out of hand that the Earth System could die if critical thresholds are crossed. We need as Earth scientists to better understand how this may occur and bring knowledge to bear to avoid global ecosystem and biosphere collapse or more extreme outcomes such as biological homogenization and the loss of most or even all life. To what extent can a homogenized Earth of dandelions, rats, and extremophiles be said to be alive, can it ever recover, and how long can it last?
The risks of global ecosystem collapse and the need for strong response to achieve global ecological sustainability have been understated for decades. If indeed there is some possibility that our shared biosphere could be collapsing, there needs to be further investigation of what sorts of sociopolitical responses are valid in such a situation. Dry, unemotional scientific inquiry into such matters is necessary—yet more proactive and evocative political ecological language may be justified as well. We must remember we are speaking of the potential for a period of great dying in species, ecosystems, humans, and perhaps all being. It is not clear whether this global ecological emergency is avoidable or recoverable. It may not be. But we must follow and seek truth wherever it leads us.
Planetary boundaries have been quite anthropocentric, focusing upon human safety and giving relatively little attention to other species and the biosphere's needs other than serving humans. Planetary boundaries need to be set that, while including human needs, go beyond them to meet the needs of ecosystems and all their constituent species and their aggregation into a living biosphere. Planetary boundary thinking needs to be more biocentric.
I concur with Williams (2000) that what is needed is an Earth System–based conservation ethic—based upon an "Earth narrative" of natural and human history—which seeks as its objective the "complete preservation of the Earth's biotic inheritance." Humans are in no position to be indicating which species and ecosystems can be lost without harm to their own intrinsic right to exist, as well as the needs of the biosphere. For us to survive as a species, logic and reason must prevail (Williams 2000).
Those who deny limits to growth are unaware of biological realities (Vitousek 1986). There are strong indications humanity may undergo societal collapse and pull down the biosphere with it. The longer dramatic reductions in fossil fuel emissions and a halt to old-growth logging are put off, the worse the risk of abrupt and irreversible climate change becomes, and the less likely we are to survive and thrive as a species. Human survival—entirely dependent upon the natural world—depends critically upon both keeping carbon emissions below 350 ppm and maintaining at least 66 of the landscape as natural ecological core areas and agroecological transitions and buffers. Much of the world has already fallen below this proportion, and in sum the biosphere's terrestrial ecosystem loss almost certainly has been surpassed, yet it must be the goal for habitat transition in remaining relatively wild lands undergoing development such as the Amazon, and for habitat restoration and protection in severely fragmented natural habitat areas such as the Western Ghats.
The human family faces an unprecedented global ecological emergency as reckless growth destroys the ecosystems and the biosphere on which all life depends. Where is the sense of urgency, and what are proper scientific responses if in fact Earth is dying? Not speaking of worst-case scenarios—the collapse of the biosphere and loss of a living Earth, and mass ecosystem collapse and death in places like Kerala—is intellectually dishonest. We must consider the real possibility that we are pulling the biosphere down with us, setting back or eliminating complex life.
The 66 / 44 / 22 threshold of terrestrial ecosystems in total, natural core areas, and agroecological buffers gets at the critical need to maintain large and expansive ecosystems across at least 50 of the land so as to keep nature connected and fully functional. We need an approach to planetary boundaries that is more sensitive to deep ecology to ensure that habitable conditions for all life and natural evolutionary change continue. A terrestrial ecosystem boundary which protects primary forests and seeks to recover old-growth forests elsewhere is critical in this regard. In old forests and all their life lie both the history of Earth's life, and the hope for its future. The end of their industrial destruction is a global ecological imperative.
Much-needed dialogue is beginning to focus on how humanity may face systematic social and ecological collapse and what sort of community resilience is possible. There have been ecologically mediated periods of societal collapse from human damage to ecosystems in the past (Kuecker and Hall 2011). What makes it different this time is that the human species may have the scale and prowess to pull down the biosphere with them. It is fitting at this juncture for political ecologists to concern themselves with both legal regulatory measures, as well as revolutionary processes of social change, which may bring about the social norms necessary to maintain the biosphere. Rockström and colleagues (2009b) refer to the need for "novel and adaptive governance" without using the word revolution. Scientists need to take greater latitude in proposing solutions that lie outside the current political paradigms and sovereign powers.
Even the Blue Planet Laureates' remarkable analysis (Brundtland et al. 2012), which notes the potential for climate change, ecosystem loss, and inequitable development patterns neither directly states nor investigates in depth the potential for global ecosystem collapse, or discusses revolutionary responses. UNEP (2012) notes abrupt and irreversible ecological change, which they say may impact life-support systems, but are not more explicit regarding the profound human and ecological implications of biosphere collapse, or the full range of sociopolitical responses to such predictions. More scientific investigations are needed regarding alternative governing structures optimal for pursuit and achievement of bioregional, continental, and global sustainability if we are maintain a fully operable biosphere forever. An economic system based upon endless growth that views ecosystems necessary for planetary habitability primarily as resources to be consumed cannot exist for long.
Planetary boundaries offer a profoundly difficult challenge for global governance, particularly as increased scientific salience does not appear to be sufficient to trigger international action to sustain ecosystems (Galaz et al. 2012). If indeed the safe operating space for humanity is closing, or the biosphere even collapsing and dying, might not discussion of revolutionary social change be acceptable? Particularly, if there is a lack of consensus by atomized actors, who are unable to legislate the required social change within the current socioeconomic system. By not even speaking of revolutionary action, we dismiss any means outside the dominant growth-based oligarchies.
In the author's opinion, it is shockingly irresponsible for Earth System scientists to speak of geoengineering a climate without being willing to academically investigate revolutionary social and economic change as well. It is desirable that the current political and economic systems should reform themselves to be ecologically sustainable, establishing laws and institutions for doing so. Yet there is nothing sacrosanct about current political economy arrangements, particularly if they are collapsing the biosphere. Earth requires all enlightened and knowledgeable voices to consider the full range of possible responses now more than ever.
One possible solution to the critical issues of terrestrial ecosystem loss and abrupt climate change is a massive and global, natural ecosystem protection and restoration program—funded by a carbon tax—to further establish protected large and connected core ecological sustainability areas, buffers, and agro-ecological transition zones throughout all of Earth's bioregions. Fossil fuel emission reductions must also be a priority. It is critical that humanity both stop burning fossil fuels and destroying natural ecosystems, as fast as possible, to avoid surpassing nearly all the planetary boundaries.
In summation, we are witnessing the collective dismantling of the biosphere and its constituent ecosystems which can be described as ecocidal. The loss of a species is tragic, of an ecosystem widely impactful, yet with the loss of the biosphere all life may be gone. Global ecosystems when connected for life's material flows provide the all-encompassing context within which life is possible. The miracle of life is that life begets life, and the tragedy is that across scales when enough life is lost beyond thresholds, living systems die.

AT: Prez must obey
President will nullify the decision. Court legitimacy is at risk  
Fallon 9—Professor of Law @ Harvard Law School Richard H. Fallon, Jr., “Article: Constitutional Constraints,” California Law Review, 97 Calif. L. Rev. 975, August 2009

1. Inefficacy or Nullity Under Applicable Rules of Recognition
   Judges and justices are constrained by the prospect that some decisions they might imaginably render would be treated as nullities or otherwise prove inefficacious. n189 While some rules of recognition tell justices how to identify valid law, others, applicable to other officials, characteristically direct those other officials to accept judicial interpretations as binding—even when those other officials think the judges made mistakes. n190 But there are limits. For example, as I have said before, a judicial directive purporting to raise or lower interest rates solely for policy reasons would not be recognized as legally authoritative. n191
   This conclusion may appear trivial, but I do not believe that it is. As Fred Schauer has documented, the Supreme Court's docket typically includes few of the issues that most American regard as most pressing. n192 Matters of war and peace, economic boom and bust, and priorities in the provision of public services seldom come within the province of judicial decision-making. In light of familiar assumptions that unchecked power tends to expand, n193 we might ask why this is so. Part of the answer lies in the justices' awareness of external constraints.
    *1016  As a historical matter, the prospect of judicial pronouncements being treated as nullities or otherwise proving inefficacious is hardly hypothetical. n194 President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State James Madison credibly threatened to defy the Supreme Court if it awarded mandamus relief to William Marbury in Marbury v. Madison. n195 Abraham Lincoln directed his subordinates to ignore the ruling of Chief Justice Taney in Ex parte Merryman. n196
   Another example may come from the World War II case of Ex parte Quirin, n197 in which the Court upheld executive authority to try alleged Nazi saboteurs before military tribunals rather than civilian courts. n198 While the case was pending, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it known to the justices that if they ruled for the petitioners, he would order military trials and summary executions to proceed anyway. n199 In the wartime circumstances, military personnel would almost certainly have obeyed presidential orders to ignore a judicial ruling—a consideration that may well have affected the Court's decision to uphold the constitutionality of military trials. n200 The Court may also have framed its famous order that local schools boards should enforce the rights recognized in Brown v. Board of Education n201 "with all deliberate speed," n202 rather than posthaste, partly because it knew that a mandate of immediate desegregation might have proved inefficacious. n203
    *1017  Without attempting to account systematically for all possible external constraints that arise from the prospect that judicial rulings might be null under the rules of recognition practiced by nonjudicial officials, or might otherwise provoke defiance, I offer three observations.
   First, in cases in which the justices worry that executive officials or lower courts might defy their rulings, they may feel a tension between the direct normative constraints and the external constraints to which they are subject. In other words, they may believe that they have a legal duty to do what they may feel externally constrained from doing. In Quirin, for example, the justices might easily have believed that at least one of the alleged saboteurs—a U.S. citizen who had been apprehended within the United States—had a constitutional right to civilian trial. n204
   As I noted above, however, it also seems plausible that in a case such as Quirin, external constraints might affect the justices' perceptions of their legal duties. For example, in reflecting upon precedents such as Marbury v. Madison n205 and Stuart v. Laird, n206 in which the Court bowed to political threats, the justices may have concluded that the "rule of recognition" authorizes them to avoid rulings that would likely provoke broadly supported defiance and thereby threaten the long-or short-term authority of the judicial branch. As I have written elsewhere:
   Looking at the Supreme Court's long-term pattern of decisions, I would surmise that the Justices have internalized the constraint that the Court must conduct itself in ways that the public will accept as lawful and practically tolerable ... : the Court's interpretations of the Constitution must be likely to be accepted and enforced by at least a critical mass of the officials normally counted on to implement judicial decisions, and they should not trigger a strong and enduring sense of mass outrage by political majorities that the Court has overstepped its constitutional powers. n207
    *1018  Second, while assent to judicial mandates is today the norm, and official defiance of court rulings the exception, some observers believe that nonjudicial officials should feel freer than they presently do to treat judicial rulings as not binding on them. In a much discussed book, Larry Kramer has argued that nonjudicial officials once regarded themselves as being entitled as judges to interpret the Constitution, even after the courts had spoken, and to treat judicial rulings as limited to the particular cases in which they were issued or even to ignore them. n208 Whatever historical practice may have been, the recognition practices of nonjudicial officials could change in the future, with official defiance of judicial rulings becoming more common. n209 The external constraints on judges and justices are thus potential variables.
   Third, if we ask why elected officials, in particular, currently accede so readily to claims of judicial authority that are not clearly ultra vires, part of the answer can be traced to the external constraint that public expectations impose. The public expects governmental officials to obey the law, and the public has been socialized to believe that judicial interpretations are legally binding. n210 But reference to current norms only postpones the question of how a state of affairs developed in which judicial authority to resolve disputable constitutional questions is so widely accepted.
   In addressing this question, it is just as important to recognize that the domain of recognized judicial authority is bounded—that there are some issues committed almost wholly to resolution by politically accountable officials—as it is to note that judicial authority is seldom seriously questioned within its sphere. In accounting for these phenomena, political scientists increasingly argue that the domain within which the Court possesses recognized authority is politically "constructed." n211 With respect to the kinds of issues concerning which the courts speak authoritatively, elected officials prefer that the courts do speak authoritatively. n212 Maintenance of a relatively independent judiciary within a limited sphere may be the preferred strategy of risk-averse political leaders who willingly forego some opportunities to exercise power while they  *1019  hold office in order to prevent unbounded power by their political adversaries when the adversaries triumph at the polls. n213 Perhaps of even greater significance, politicians may find it to their electoral advantage to leave a range of contentious issues for judicial resolution. n214 Congress and the president may also be happy to see dominant national visions enforced against the states n215 and to delegate to the courts a number of issues possessing low political salience. n216
   If political scientists are correct that the domain of judicial authority is politically constructed, however, there is no guarantee that the political forces that define that domain will remain in long-term equilibrium. From the perspective of some political scientists, every election is a potential external shock to the system. n217 Keith Whittington advances the more architectonic thesis that, from time to time, "reconstructive" presidents have confronted the Supreme Court, sometimes successfully, and have forced a redefinition of the substantive bounds within which acceptable judicial decision-making can occur. n218 According to Professor Whittington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt all achieved this effect to greater or lesser degrees. n219 They did so partly by persuading the public to accept their visions of constitutional meaning and partly, having prevailed in the court of public opinion, by appointing justices who shared their constitutional visions. Thus, to take the starkest example, the prevailing constitutional understandings that emerged from the Roosevelt Revolution of the 1930s—in the country as well as on the Court—differed vastly from those of the 1920s, and the principal engine driving the change was Franklin Roosevelt. n220
    *1020  In order for external constraints to be effective, judges and justices need not respond to them self-consciously, "for the constitutional understandings shared by those affiliated" with the dominant political coalition or "regime"—including jurists who have been nominated and confirmed with their constitutional visions in mind—"will be entrenched and assumed." n221 Nevertheless, the external constraints that define the domain of politically acceptable judicial action can exert important influence as parts of the process through which current and future judges identify and internalize legal norms. As Thomas Keck puts it, "The justices' ostensibly political preferences have themselves been constituted in part by legal ideas, and those legal ideas, in turn, have been derived in large part from ongoing debates in the broader political system." n222
   2. Concurrent Agreement or Acquiescence Requirements
    The Supreme Court "is a they, not an it." n223 In considering constraints on the Court as an institution, it is easy to forget that the Court is comprised of nine justices, each of whom is constrained individually by the need to secure the agreement of at least four colleagues in order to render legally efficacious constitutional rulings. n224 Judges of courts of appeals are similarly constrained by the need to muster majority support for their conclusions. Unlike Supreme Court justices, lower court judges are of course further constrained by the Supreme Court's power to reverse their decisions. n225
    *1021  As I have noted, nonjudicial officials can defy or refuse to implement judicial decisions. Indeed, they have sometimes done so. n226 The courts, however, are virtually never constrained by the need to earn the formal approval or acquiescence of officials in another branch in order to act with the authority of law. The reason, I would speculate, is that the Constitution is written, and surrounding norms and expectations have developed, on the hypothesis that the judiciary is the least dangerous branch. n227 If the judiciary is assumed to be relatively impotent to inflict affirmative damage, and if the other branches are more threatening, it may be more desirable to preserve an efficacious checking power for the judiciary than to establish concurrent agreement or acquiescence requirements as formal checks against judicial action.
   Having said this, I hasten to add that there may be circumstances under which the exercise of a judicial negative does indeed do affirmative harm—for example, if the Court unwisely invalidates legislation that would further important public interests or protect moral rights. n228 Perceptions that the Court has done so partly explain some of the instances in which "reconstructive" presidents—including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt—have mounted successful attacks on previously prevailing visions of appropriate judicial authority under the Constitution. n229
   3. Sanctions
   The Constitution insulates the Supreme Court, as it does all federal judges, against certain kinds of sanctions. The justices cannot be removed from office during good behavior, nor can Congress reduce their salaries. n230 All judges, justices included, also enjoy immunity from suits for civil damages based on their official acts. n231
   Despite these safeguards of judicial independence, the Constitution provides for some sanctions against Supreme Court justices. Most formally and conspicuously, justices can be impeached and removed from office. n232 They are  *1022  also subject to the criminal law, including its prohibitions against bribery and extortion.
   Less formally, justices confront the possibility of sanctioning by their colleagues. If the justices thought one of their number to be reckless or cavalier in her constitutional judgments, they could deprive the wayward colleague of the privilege of speaking authoritatively for the Court simply by refusing to join her opinions. Or they could vote to rehear any case in which that colleague cast the decisive vote—as apparently happened with the aged William O. Douglas. n233 The justices' capacity to write opinions exposing their colleagues' constitutionally faithless reasoning (if such were ever to occur), and thus to hold up offenders to contempt or ridicule, may also qualify as a constitutionally authorized, albeit informal, sanction. n234
   Beyond the sanctions available against Supreme Court justices, the Constitution provides mechanisms for the imposition of institutional sanctions, directed not against individual justices but the Court as a whole. The Constitution permits Congress to withdraw at least some cases from the Court's jurisdiction. n235 If so minded, Congress and the president could also "pack" the Court and thereby not only reduce the power of incumbent justices, but also diminish the Court's prestige. n236
   Lower federal court judges are vulnerable to virtually the same sanctions as Supreme Court justices, but with one conspicuous addition. Unlike the justices, lower court judges are subject to being reversed, and potentially to being upbraided, on appeal. n237
    *1023  Insofar as threats of sanctions function as a constraint on judicial action, their directive force could sometimes create a tension with applicable normative constraints. n238 This prospect appears most visibly in the case of state judges, who may incur electoral or other political sanctions if their decisions displease a majority of voters. n239 But it is at least imaginable that an irate or partisan Congress might sanction federal judges by impeaching them and removing them from office for rendering unpopular but legally correct decisions. n240
   This possibility—which exemplifies the age-old dilemma of who should guard the guardians—is almost surely an unhappy one. But the threat has seldom if ever come to fruition. There are at least three lessons to be drawn.
   First, nonjudicial actors within the American political system, including the public, have largely internalized a norm against attempts to interfere with the exercise of independent judgment by the federal judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court. Early in American constitutional history, the Jeffersonian Republicans threatened to impeach judges as an instrument of ideological discipline, but the effort foundered before it gained momentum. n241 More than a century later, when Franklin Roosevelt sought authority to "pack" a Supreme Court that had appeared poised to scuttle hugely popular New Deal policies, Congress and public opinion rallied against the president. n242 Similarly, although members of Congress have recurrently introduced legislation that would curb the authority of the federal courts to rule on controversial issues, n243 such proposals have generally collapsed in the face of protests that they would violate the Constitution's spirit if not its letter. n244
    *1024  Second, as I have noted already, other powerful political actors have good reasons to wish to maintain a relatively powerful, relatively independent judiciary. n245 Granted, "reconstructive" presidents have sometimes sought to challenge the prevailing ideologically inflected assumptions through which the Constitution has predominantly come to be viewed. But even reconstructive presidents and their normal allies have either had normative compunctions about subjecting the Supreme Court to significant sanctions or have encountered external resistance when they attempted to do so.
   Third, saying that the sanctioning of federal judges and especially the Supreme Court has occurred infrequently is different from saying that the prospect of sanctions has had no effect. As I have noted, judicial decision-making in the United States has long exhibited a streak of prudentialism, through which the Court has avoided not only particular decisions that might provoke defiance, but also broader patterns of rulings that could arouse political majorities to impose sanctions. n246 Although I would stop considerably short of Judge Richard Posner's conclusion that "constitutional law is a function ... of ideology" checked principally if not exclusively by the justices' "awareness, conscious or unconscious, that they cannot go "too far' without inviting reprisals by the other branches of government spurred on by an indignant public," n247 it seems only commonsensical to assume that sanctions or other external constraints have some effect.

The executive can refuse to be bound
Paulsen 9—Chair and Professor of Law @ University of St. Thomas Michael Stokes Paulsen, “The War Power,” University of St. Thomas School of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09-23, 2009

Sometimes, the Court will erroneously hold legislative authorization required for presidential action and Congress will not grant that authorization to the full extent the President feels necessary. And sometimes the Court keeps invalidating presidential action, notwithstanding congressional authorization, or finds aspects of the authorization unconstitutional. (This is an apt description of what happened in Boumediene.)52 What then?
I submit that the scheme of separation of powers—the logic of the Framers’ design and the clear implication of the words they used to explain and defend that design—must permit the President, as Commander in Chief, to refuse to be bound by erroneous decisions of the Supreme Court that pose a serious harm to the nation.53 I expect that President Bush would have so refused, had he thought it necessary. Now this of course is a controversial proposition in today’s legal culture. But it should not be. The idea of “executive review” of unlawful Supreme Court decisions follows, I submit, as night the day, from the same premises that justify judicial review of congressional decisions: No one branch is bound by the constitutional interpretations of any of the others.54 Indeed, I submit that it would be a violation of the President’s oath if he or she were, in a case endangering the nation’s security, deliberately and consciously to adhere to what he or she concludes is an erroneous judicial determination that poses a grave threat to national security. President Lincoln clearly understood this and saw in the Presidential Oath Clause a duty to defend the nation and to resist erroneous judicial decisions threatening the Constitution and the constitutional order.55 The President swears an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution, a personal, non-delegable, non-defeasible moral and legal obligation that logically includes the preservation, protection, and defense of the nation whose Constitution it is and upon whose existence everything else in the Constitution depends. To put it as plainly as I can: It would be a violation of the President’s oath to accede to a judicial violation of the Constitution that endangers the nation’s security. If, in consequence of Hamdi, Hamdan, Boumediene, or any other erroneous judicial decision, the President of the United States would be required to take action endangering the nation’s security, he should announce that he will, to that extent, refuse to honor such judicial decision.
Conclusion The war power, like any other power too important to vest in a single set of hands, is a divided, separated, shared power. In crude overview: In general, the power to initiate war is Congress’s, and not the Presidents. Similarly, the power to execute war, but not to initiate it, is the President’s. Each branch possesses exclusive powers that the other may not properly infringe or usurp. But each branch may leverage its war powers, and its other constitutional powers, to check the others’ exercise of theirs—or to attempt precisely such an improper usurpation. That is how the separation of powers game works, as a general proposition, and the interaction of war powers is no exception. The courts, as the third branch in this game, have the important and proper role—and duty—of deciding genuine Article III cases involving war powers, in accordance with the Constitution’s true allocation of war powers. They have no substantive war powers, but an important, co-equal interpretive province. They should not shirk the exercise of their true constitutional powers, but neither should they abuse them. Where they do, a further aspect of the separation-of-powers game is that the other branches may, and should, resist those encroachments on their exclusive provinces—encroachments in violation of the Constitution—by the exercise of their co-equal interpretive powers.

President has nonenforcement powers
Steilen 13—Professor of law @ SUNY Buffalo Law School MATTHEW STEILEN, “Collaborative Departmentalism,” Buffalo Law Review, Volume 61, 2013

Consider first the familiar issue of “non-enforcement.” Non-enforcement is the president’s power to refuse to carry out the law because he believes it unconstitutional. A well-known example is President Reagan’s refusal to enforce provisions of the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984.61 The Act permitted losing bidders on federal contracts to lodge a “protest” with the Comptroller General’s Office.62 The Comptroller General was tasked with investigating the protest, during the pendency of which the contract could not be awarded to the winning bidder.63 Reagan’s administration instructed the agencies to disregard this stay provision; according to its view, the provision delegated to an officer of Congress (the Comptroller General) duties that belonged to executive officials, thus violating the separation of powers.64 Federal courts were highly critical of the administration’s conduct at the time.65 Yet since that time, judgment on the matter has shifted, at least among scholars of presidential power;66 today, most conclude that the Constitution supports some form of presidential non-enforcement power.67
President is not obliged to adhere to Court decisions.  They have the authority to depart from judicial precedent
Steilen 13—Professor of law @ SUNY Buffalo Law School MATTHEW STEILEN, “Collaborative Departmentalism,” Buffalo Law Review, Volume 61, 2013

A variant of the same argument can be made using a comparison to the courts. A lower federal court is bound by the constitutional interpretations of the Supreme Court. This is because lower federal courts are “inferior,” in the language of Article III, to the Supreme Court.55 But the president is not inferior to the Supreme Court; the president is equal in rank to the Supreme Court, as head of a coordinate branch of the federal government. Therefore, the president is not similarly obliged to follow the constitutional interpretations of the Supreme Court—unless there is an independent argument to that end that is otherwise consistent with coordinacy.56 With respect to Supreme Court precedent, the president should be in the same position as the Court itself is: namely, as always possessing the authority to depart from precedent where doing so is appropriate.57
It may help to run the argument in the other direction. Suppose that the president does not have the authority to independently interpret the Constitution. What, then, do we make of the pardon power? It is accepted that the president may invoke constitutional grounds to pardon an individual duly convicted of a crime in a federal court.58 Indeed, given that the pardon power limits the actions of the federal judiciary, it would constitute a radical rethinking of that power to insist that it could be exercised only in conformance with judicial constructions of the Constitution.59 Much the same can be said for the veto power; no one expects that the president should be confined to judicial precedent in deciding whether to veto a presented bill on constitutional grounds.60  pg. 359-360

Tournament: Vanderbilt | Round: 6 | Opponent: Michigan Batra-Jacome | Judge: Galloway
1nc – disad
Immigration will pass – Boehner will allow a vote – Obama’s leadership is key
HUFFINGTON POST 10 – 26 – 13 GOP Rep Emerges As First House Republican To Join Democrats' Immigration Efforts, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/26/jeff-denham-immigration_n_4166654.html
With less than three weeks to go in Congress' 2013 legislative calendar, one Republican serving in a heavily Hispanic district has moved to join House Democrats on immigration reform.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) is ready to sign on with 185 of his House colleagues as a co-sponsor for a pathway to citizenship. The Senate passed an immigration reform bill in June with a strong 68-32 majority, but House Republican leaders have said it will not be considered without majority Republican support.
Denham would be the lone GOP rep at this point, but he does not see that circumstance lasting for very long.
“I’m the first Republican,” he told the Post. “I expect more to come on board.”
Denham's decision comes amid hope from leaders on both sides of the political aisle that a deal can come to fruition. On Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters just that, vowing that it was an issue that needs to be addressed. One day later, President Barack Obama had his focus on the same issue, arguing that there was still time for immigration reform to make it through.
"If House Republicans have new and different additional ideas for how we should move forward, then we want to hear them," Obama said. "I'll be listening. ... But what we can't do is just sweep the problem under the rug one more time."
Denham also spoke about his decision during a Spanish-language interview with Univision's Jorge Ramos, set to air on "Al Punto" Sunday. Asked whether Obama was right that Boehner was the only thing preventing immigration reform from moving forward, Denham replied, "No."
"That's just not true," he said, adding that issues such as Syria and government spending have impeded progress on immigration reform. "You know, we need the president to show real leadership on this issue, as well as other issues that have really held up our schedule."
He said he expects Boehner to keep his word and bring immigration reform for a vote.
"I’m confident he’s going to bring it to the floor, but we’re going to continue to make sure that the entire country focuses on this, and that we actually get more Republicans that are willing to take a stand and get out there," Denham told Ramos. "Yes, it’s risky. We will get hit from the left and the right, and there will be a lot of different media that portrays us in different ways in our districts. But what is right for the American people and our economy should be the focus on the entire Congress."
Immigration reform activists are also hopeful. HuffPost's Elise Foley reported Friday that nearly 600 supporters will be in Washington next week, partaking in a series of vigils, marches and visits to congressional offices. Advocacy group PICO National Network is planning to knock on doors in nine districts, including Denham's 10th district in California, which sits to the south of Sacramento and east of the San Francisco bay area.

Obviously a restriction saying all factory farms would be shut down would cause a fight – saps Obama's PC 

Immigration restrictions are blocking the clean tech industry—reform causes greater US-China energy coop.
Herman and Smith 10 Richard T. Herman is the founder of Richard T. Herman and Associates, an immigration and business law firm and Robert L. Smith is a veteran journalist who covers international cultures and immigration issues for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Immigration Policy Center, “Why Immigrants Can Drive the Green Economy” http://immigrationpolicy.org/perspectives/why-immigrants-can-drive-green-economy
Raymond Spencer, an Australian-born entrepreneur based in Chicago, has a window on the future—and a gusto for investing after founding a high-technology consulting company that sold for more than $1 billion in 2006. “I have investments in maybe 10 start-ups, all of which fall within a broad umbrella of a ‘green’ theme,” he said. “And it’s interesting, the vast majority are either led by immigrants or have key technical people who are immigrants.” It should come as no surprise that immigrants will help drive the green revolution. America’s young scientists and engineers, especially the ones drawn to emerging industries like alternative energy, tend to speak with an accent. The 2000 Census found that immigrants, while accounting for 12 percent of the population, made up nearly half of the all scientists and engineers with doctorate degrees. Their importance will only grow. Nearly 70 percent of the men and women who entered the fields of science and engineering from 1995 to 2006 were immigrants. Yet, the connection between immigration and the development and commercialization of alternative energy technology is rarely discussed. Policymakers envision millions of new jobs as the nation pursues renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power, and builds a smart grid to tap it. But Dan Arvizu, the leading expert on solar power and the director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy in Golden, Colorado, warns that much of the clean-technology talent lies overseas, in nations that began pursuing alternative energy sources decades ago. Expanding our own clean-tech industry will require working closely with foreign nations and foreign-born scientists, he said. Immigration restrictions are making collaboration difficult. His lab’s efforts to work with a Chinese energy lab, for example, were stalled due to U.S. immigration barriers. “We can’t get researchers over here,” Arvizu, the son of a once-undocumented immigrant from Mexico, said in an interview in March 2009, his voice tinged with dismay. “It makes no sense to me. We need a much more enlightened approach.” Dr. Zhao Gang, the Vice Director of the Renewable Energy and New Energy International Cooperation Planning Office of the Ministry of Science and Technology in China, says that America needs that enlightenment fast. “The Chinese government continues to impress upon the Obama administration that immigration restrictions are creating major impediments to U.S.-China collaboration on clean energy development,” he said during a recent speech in Cleveland. So what’s the problem? Some of it can be attributed to national security restrictions that impede international collaboration on clean energy. But Arvizu places greater weight on immigration barriers, suggesting that national secrecy is less important in the fast-paced world of green-tech development. “We are innovating so fast here, what we do today is often outdated tomorrow. Finding solutions to alternative energy is a complex, global problem that requires global teamwork,” he said.

Bilat coop generates momentum, spills over to global climate solutions
Holbrooke et al 09 Richard, chairman of the Asia Society, includes a bunch of other people who are pretty qualified like Steven Chu Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Berkeley and John Thornton Chairman, The Brookings Institution; Professor, Tsinghua University; Board Member, Asia Society but really there are a lot more “Roadmap for US-China Cooperation on Energy and Climate Change” http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/US-China-Roadmap-Feb09.pdf
The challenge of global climate change is unprecedented in world history. The fact that a molecule of carbon dioxide emitted in the United States is just as harmful to Chinese as one emitted in China is to Americans—or, indeed, to anyone on our planet—means that no human being is exempt from our inescapable commons. This new reality begs a completely new set of global responses. One of the most critical responses must come from the United States and China. For without the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world forging a new and extensive collaborative relationship, this global problem will remain intractable and unsolvable. Whatever our other disagreements may be, failure of the United States and China to cooperate successfully on this unique issue will jeopardize any hope the world community as a whole may have of heading off ever more dire impacts from a changing global climate. While a Sino-U.S. bilateral effort is a critical element in any overall global climate strategy, it is not an alternative to the multilateral UN climate change process. Collaboration between the United States and China will be crucial both to achieving significant greenhouse gas reductions in both countries, and to creating the joint momentum that will inevitably be required for a larger multilateral solution to this collective challenge.

Warming causes extinction.
Dyer 12. (Gwynne, London-based independent journalist, PhD from King's College London, citing UC Berkeley scientists, "Tick, tock to mass extinction date," The Press, 6-19-12, l/n, accessed 8-15-12, mss)
 Meanwhile, a team of respected scientists warn that life on Earth may be on the way to an irreversible "tipping point". Sure. Heard that one before, too. Last month one of the world's two leading scientific journals, Nature, published a paper, "Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere," pointing out that more than 40 per cent of the Earth's land is already used for human needs. With the human population set to grow by a further two billion by 2050, that figure could soon exceed 50 per cent. "It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," said the paper's lead author, Professor Anthony Barnofsky of the University of California, Berkeley. But Barnofsky doesn't go into the details of what kind of new world it might be. Scientists hardly ever do in public, for fear of being seen as panic-mongers. Besides, it's a relatively new hypothesis, but it's a pretty convincing one, and it should be more widely understood. Here's how bad it could get. The scientific consensus is that we are still on track for 3 degrees C of warming by 2100, but that's just warming caused by human greenhouse- gas emissions. The problem is that +3 degrees is well past the point where the major feedbacks kick in: natural phenomena triggered by our warming, like melting permafrost and the loss of Arctic sea-ice cover, that will add to the heating and that we cannot turn off. The trigger is actually around 2C (3.5 degrees F) higher average global temperature. After that we lose control of the process: ending our own carbon- dioxide emissions would no longer be enough to stop the warming. We may end up trapped on an escalator heading up to +6C (+10.5F), with no way of getting off. And +6C gives you the mass extinction. There have been five mass extinctions in the past 500 million years, when 50 per cent or more of the species then existing on the Earth vanished, but until recently the only people taking any interest in this were paleontologists, not climate scientists. They did wonder what had caused the extinctions, but the best answer they could come up was "climate change". It wasn't a very good answer. Why would a warmer or colder planet kill off all those species? The warming was caused by massive volcanic eruptions dumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. But it was very gradual and the animals and plants had plenty of time to migrate to climatic zones that still suited them. (That's exactly what happened more recently in the Ice Age, as the glaciers repeatedly covered whole continents and then retreated again.) There had to be a more convincing kill mechanism than that. The paleontologists found one when they discovered that a giant asteroid struck the planet 65 million years ago, just at the time when the dinosaurs died out in the most recent of the great extinctions. So they went looking for evidence of huge asteroid strikes at the time of the other extinction events. They found none. What they discovered was that there was indeed major warming at the time of all the other extinctions - and that the warming had radically changed the oceans. The currents that carry oxygen- rich cold water down to the depths shifted so that they were bringing down oxygen- poor warm water instead, and gradually the depths of the oceans became anoxic: the deep waters no longer had any oxygen. When that happens, the sulfur bacteria that normally live in the silt (because oxygen is poison to them) come out of hiding and begin to multiply. Eventually they rise all the way to the surface over the whole ocean, killing all the oxygen-breathing life. The ocean also starts emitting enormous amounts of lethal hydrogen sulfide gas that destroy the ozone layer and directly poison land- dwelling species. This has happened many times in the Earth's history.

1nc – topicality
The aff is not topical – “species war powers authority” is non-existent. War Powers authority must be derived from Congressional or Constitutional authorization
Bradley and Goldsmith, 2005  (Curtis and Jack, professor of law at the University of Virginia and professor of law at Harvard, 118 Harvard Law Review 2047, May, lexis)
Second, under Justice Jackson's widely accepted categorization of presidential power, n5 "the strongest of presumptions and the widest latitude of judicial interpretation" attach "when the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress." n6 This  *2051  proposition applies fully to presidential acts in wartime that are authorized by Congress. n7 By contrast, presidential wartime acts not authorized by Congress lack the same presumption of validity, and the Supreme Court has invalidated a number of these acts precisely because they lacked congressional authorization. n8 The constitutional importance of congressional approval is one reason why so many commentators call for increased congressional involvement in filling in the legal details of the war on terrorism. Before assessing what additional actions Congress should take, however, it is important to assess what Congress has already done. Third, basic principles of constitutional avoidance counsel in favor of focusing on congressional authorization when considering war powers issues. n9 While the President's constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief is enormously important, determining the scope of that authority beyond what Congress has authorized implicates some of the most difficult, unresolved, and contested issues in constitutional law. n10 Courts have been understandably reluctant to address the scope of that constitutional authority, especially during wartime, when the consequences of a constitutional error are potentially enormous. n11 Instead,  *2052  courts have attempted, whenever possible, to decide difficult questions of wartime authority on the basis of what Congress has in fact authorized. n12 This strategy makes particular sense with respect to the novel issues posed by the war on terrorism.

Limits – justifies putting any adjective in front of “war powers authority” – makes the research burden impossible for the neg 

Ground – we lose war powers authority disads – no topic education about the mechanism of restriction 

Extra T – even if species warfare in one of the topic areas is topical, the 1ac implies that species warfare includes factory farms - not topical
1nc – kritik

The aff has the right idea but provides the wrong solution --- the 1AC’s assumption that the starting point of legal ruling is in any way a true embrace of the animal Other only rearranges the legal card deck by reaffirming the sovereignty of the law and the state --- this sanitizes violence, marginalization of the non-human Other, and turns the case
Krasmann 12 (Susanne Krasmann, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Criminological Research, University of Hamburg, “Law's knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters,” Theoretical Criminology 2012 16: 379 originally published online 4 June 2012, pg. 380)
In the face of these developments, a new debate on how to contain governmental interference in the name of security has emerged. What is remarkable about this debate is that, on the one hand, it aims at establishing more civil and human rights and attendant procedural safeguards that allow for systematically calling into question the derogation of laws and the implementation of new laws in the name of security. On the other hand, it recognizes the existence of a new dimension of threats, particularly in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. As John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino (2004: 228), for instance, contend: We are faced, nowadays, with serious threats to the public safety that can occur anywhere and that cannot terminate definitively. ... If we think that the capacity to deal effectively with emergencies is a precondition for republican government, then it is necessary to ask how emergency powers can be controlled in modern circumstances. Adequate legal frameworks and institutional designs are required that would enable us to ‘reconcile’ security with (human) rights, as Goold and Lazarus (2007b: 15) propose, and enduring emergency situations with the rule of law. Traditional problems in the relationship between law and security government within this debate form a point of departure of critical considerations:2 emergency government today, rather than facing the problem of gross abuses of power, has to deal with the persistent danger of the exceptional becoming normal (see Poole, 2008: 8). Law gradually adjusts to what is regarded as ‘necessary’.3 Hence, law not only constrains, but at the same time also authorizes governmental interference. Furthermore, mainstream approaches that try to balance security and liberty are rarely able, or willing, to expose fully the trade-offs of their normative presuppositions: ‘The metaphor of balance is used as often to justify and defend changes as to challenge them’ (Zedner, 2005: 510). Finally, political responses to threats never overcome the uncertainty that necessarily accompanies any decision addressing future events. To ignore this uncertainty, in other words, is to ignore the political moment any such decision entails, thus exempting it from the possibility of dissent. Institutional arrangements that enforce legislative control and enable citizens to claim their rights are certainly the appropriate responses to the concern in question, namely that security gradually seizes political space and transforms the rule of law in an inconspicuous manner. They establish political spaces of dispute and provide sticking points against all too rapidly launched security legislation, and thus may foster a ‘culture of justification’, as David Dyzenhaus (2007) has it: political decisions and the exercise of state power are to be ‘justified by law’, in a fundamental sense of a commitment to ‘the principles of legality and respect for human rights’ (2007: 137). Nonetheless, most of these accounts, in a way, simply add more of the same legal principles and institutional arrangements that are well known to us. To frame security as a public good and ensure that it is a subject of democratic debate, as Ian Loader and Neil Walker (2007) for example demand, is a promising alternative to denying its social relevance. The call for security to be ‘civilized’, though, once again echoes the truly modern project of dealing with its inherent discontents. The limits of such a commitment to legality and a political ‘culture of justification’ (so termed for brevity) will be illustrated in the following section. Those normative endeavours will be challenged subsequently by a Foucauldian account of law as practice. Contrary to the idea that law can be addressed as an isolated, ideal body and thus treated like an instrument according to normative aspirations, the present account renders law’s reliance on forms of knowledge more discernable. Law is susceptible, in particular to security matters. As a practice, it constantly transforms itself and, notably, articulates its normative claims depending upon the forms of knowledge brought into play. Contrary to the prevailing debate on emergency government, this perspective enables us, on the one hand, to capture how certain forms of knowledge become inscribed into the law in a way that goes largely unnoticed. This point will be discussed on the example of automated surveillance technologies, which facilitate a particular rationality of pre-emptive action. The conception of law as a practice, on the other hand, may also be understood as a tool of critique and dissent. The recent torture debate is an extreme example of this, whereby torture can be regarded as a touchstone of law’s resistance to its own abrogation.

To attempt to invert the law on itself is to misunderstand the connections between securitization and law --- the aff subscribes to a form of lawfare in the name of animal rights under the law which promotes violence and pacifies broader resistance  
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
Kennedy begins by coldly contradicting those opponents of the Bush administration ‘that have routinely claimed that the United States has disregarded these rules’ (p. 40) by pointing out that both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war as well as both opponents and supporters of the great panoply of US legal measures related to the war on terror ‘were playing with the same deck’ (p. 40) in presenting ‘professional arguments about how recognised rules and standards, as well as recognised exceptions and jurisdictional limitations, should be interpreted’ (p. 40). The author’s only concession with reference to the Bush administration’s legal advisers is to point out that ‘as professionals, these lawyers failed to advise their client adequately about the consequences of the interpretations they proposed, and about the way others would read the same texts – and their memoranda’ (p. 39).Thus Kennedy does not adopt any legal position to the detriment of any other, as his assessment does not seemingly pretend to persuade his reader at the level of the world of legal validity presented in the vocabulary of the UN Charter. The extent to which that excludes the author from the category of being a ‘true jus-internationalist’, according to A. Canc¸ado Trindade’s understanding of those who actually ‘comply with the ineluctable duty to stand against the apology of the use of force which is manifested in our days through distinct “doctrinal” elaborations’,42 is not for us to judge. Suffice it to note that the starting point of Kennedy’s convoluted perspective on the matter is that ‘the law of force’ is a form of ‘vocabulary for assessing the legitimacy’ (p. 41) of a form of conduct (e.g. amilitary campaign) or ‘for defending as well as attacking the “legality”’ (p. 41) of an act (e.g. distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate targets) in which the same law of force becomes a two-edged sword, everybody’s and no one’s strategic partner in a contemporary world where ‘legitimacy has become the currency of power’ (p. 45). For the author, in today’s age of ‘lawfare’ (p. 12), ‘to resist war in the name of law . . . is to misunderstand the delicate partnership of war and law’ (p. 167). In Kennedy’s view, therefore, ‘there is little comfort in knowing that law has become the vernacular for evaluating the legitimacy of war and politics where it has done so by itself becoming a strategic instrument of war and the continuation of politics by similar means’ (p. 132). 3. LAW AS A MODERN LEGAL INSTITUTION Of War and Law seems, indeed, to be animated by a certain philosophical perplexity regarding the ambiguous relation between the apparently antithetical nature of the terms appearing in its title. Since antiquity both jurists and philosophers have taught that the law’s raison d’eˆ tre is that of making social peace possible, of overcoming what would later be commonly known as the Hobbesian state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes. Kant noted that law should be perceived first and foremost as a pacifying tool – in other words, ‘the establishment of peace constitutes, not a part of, but the whole purpose of the doctrine of law’43 – and Lauterpacht projected that same principle onto the international sphere: ‘the primordial duty’ of international law is to ensure that ‘there shall be no violence among states’.44 The paradox lies, of course, in that law performs its pacifying function not by means of edifying advice, but by the threat of the use of force. In this sense, as Kennedy points out, ‘to use law is also to invoke violence, at least the violence that stands behind legal authority’ (p. 22). Hobbes himself never concealed the fact that the state, ‘that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God our peace and defence’,would succeed in eradicating inter-individual violence precisely due to its ability to ‘inspire terror’;45 but Weber – ‘the State is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’46 – Godwin,47 and Kelsen48 have also provided support for the same proposition. This ambivalent and paradoxical relationship between law and violence,which is obvious in the domestic or intra-state realm, becomes even more obvious in the interstate domain with its classical twin antinomy of ubi jus, ibi pax and inter arma leges silent until the law in war emerges as a bold normative sector which dares to defy this conceptual incompatibility; even war can be regulated, be submitted to conditions and limitations. The hesitations of Kant in addressing jus in bello49 or the very fact that the Latin terms jus ad bellum and jus in bello were coined, as R. Kolb has pointed out,50 at relatively recent dates, seem to confirm that this has never been per se an evident aspiration.51 Kennedy explains his own calling as international lawyer as being partly inspired by his will to participate in the law’s civilizing mission (p. 29)52 as something utterly distinct from war: We think of these rules law in war as coming from ‘outside’ war, limiting and restricting the military. We think of international law as a broadly humanist and civilizing force, standing back from war, judging it as just or unjust, while offering itself as a code of conduct to limit violence on the battlefield. (p. 167) The author notes how this virginal confidence in the pacifying efficiency of international law – its presumed ability to forbid, limit, humanize war ‘from outside’ – becomes progressively nuanced, eroded, almost discredited by a series of considerations. The disquieting image of the ‘delicate partnership of war and law’ becomes more and more evidenced; the lawyer who attempts to regulate warfare inevitably also becomes its accomplice. As Kennedy puts it, The laws of force provide the vocabulary not only for restraining the violence and incidence of war – but also for waging war and deciding to go to war. . . . Law no longer stands outside violence, silent or prohibitive. Law also permits injury, as it privileges, channels, structures, legitimates, and facilitates acts of war. (p. 167) Unable to suppress all violence, law typifies certain forms of violence as legally admissible, thus ‘privileging’ them with regard to others and investing some agents with a ‘privilege to kill’ (p. 115). Law thereby becomes, in Kennedy’s view, a tool not so much for the restriction of war as for the legal construction of war.53 Elsewhere we have labeled Kennedy ‘a relative outsider’54 who, peering from the edge of the vocabulary of international law, tries to ‘highlight its inherent structural limits, gaps, dogmas, blind spots and biases’, as someone ‘specialised in speaking the unspeakable, disclosing ambivalences and asking awkward questions’.55 The ‘unspeakable’, in the case of the ‘law of force’, is precisely, in Kennedy’s view, this process of involuntary complicity with the very phenomenon one supposedly wants to prohibit. Prepared to ‘stain his hands’ a` la Sartre, in his attempt to humanize the military machine from within, to walk one step behind the soldier reminding him constantly, as an imaginary CNN camera, of the legal limits of the legitimate use of force, the lawyer starts to realize, in the author’s view, that he is becoming but an accessory to the war machine. Kennedy maintains that law, in its attempt to subject war to its rule, has been absorbed by it and has now become but another war instrument (p. 32);56 law has been weaponized (p. 37).57 Contemporary war is by definition a legally organized war: ‘no ship moves, no weapon is fired, no target selected without some review for compliance with regulation – not because the military has gone soft, but because there is simply no other way to make modern warfare work. Warfare has become rule and regulation’ (p. 33).War ‘has become a modern legal institution’ (p. 5), with the result that the international lawyer finds himself before an evident instance of Marxian reification, in other words ‘the consolidation of our own products as a material power erected above us beyond our control that raises a wall in front of our expectations and destroys our calculations’.58 Ideas and institutions develop ‘a life of their own’, an autonomous, perverted dynamism.

Their method for change in mired in bureaucratic vernacular which displaces more effective solutions and cedes agency over violence which guarantees failure
Contreras 08 (Francisco J. CONTRERAS Prf. Philosophy of Law @ Seville AND Ignacio de la RASILLA Ph.D. candidate in international law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva ‘8 “On War as Law and Law as War” Leiden Journal of International Law Vol. 21 Issue 3 p. 770-773)
War’s ubiquity, its discontinuity, and the blurring of its outline are not without psychological and moral consequences in the military: ‘Experts have long observed that when warfare itself seems to have no clear beginning or end, no clear battlefield, no clear enemy, military discipline, as well as morale, breaks down’ (p. 119). This dispiriting confusion that affects soldiers also concerns the international lawyer, who sees the old rules of jus belli evaporate and be replaced by much vaguer ‘standards’. The last pages of Of War and Law convey, in fact, a clear feeling of defeat or loss, showing the demoralization of the international lawyer who still tries to take the law of war seriously: ‘How can ethical absolutes and instrumental calculations be made to lie down peacefully together? How can one know what to do, how to judge, whom to denounce?’ (p. 117). The former categorical imperatives (‘thou shalt not bomb cities’, ‘thou shalt not execute prisoners’, etc.) give way to an elastic and blurred logic of more and less, within which instrumental might triumphs definitively over the ethical (p. 132).89 As the new flexible ‘standards’ seem more susceptible to strategic exploitation and modulation than do the old strict rules, the various actors will play with the labels of jus belli – now definitively versatile – according to their strategic needs: Ending conflict, calling it occupation, calling it sovereignty – then opening hostilities, calling it a police action, suspending the judicial requirements of policing, declaring a state of emergency, a zone of insurgency – all these are also tactics in the conflict. . . . All these assertions take the form of factual or legal assessments, but we should also understand them as arguments, at once messages and weapons. (p. 122)90 Kennedy reiterates a new aspect of the ‘weaponization of the law’: the legal qualification of facts appears as a means of conveying messages to the enemy and to public opinion alike, because in the age of immediate media coverage, wars are fought as much in the press and opinion polls as they are on the battlefield. The skilled handling of jus belli categories will benefit one side and prejudice the other (p. 127);91 as the coinage of the very term ‘lawfare’ seems to reflect, the legal battle has already become an extension of the military one (p. 126).92 In cataloguing some of the dark sides of the law of war, Kennedy also stresses how the legal debate tends to smother and displace discussions which would probably be more appropriate and necessary. Thus the controversy about the impending intervention in Iraq, which developed basically within the discursive domain of the law of war, largely deprived lawyers of participating in an in-depth discussion on the neo-conservative project of a ‘great Middle East’ – more democratic and Western-friendly and less prone to tyranny and terrorism – the feasibility of ‘regime change’, an adequate means of fostering democracy in the region, and so on: We never needed to ask, how should regimes in the Middle East . . . be changed? Is Iraq the place to start? Is military intervention the way to do it? . . .Had our debates not been framed by the laws of war, we might well have found other solutions, escaped the limited choices of UN sanctions, humanitarian aid, and war, thought outside the box. (p. 163) 6. CONCLUSIONS Those familiar with the author’s previous works93 will certainly have already identified the Derridean streak in Kennedy’s thought in the underlying claim that every discourse generates dark zones and silences or represses certain aspects, renders the formulation of certain questions impossible (a Foucauldian streak in the author could be suspected as well: every discourse – be it administrative, legal, medical, or psychiatric – implies simultaneously ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’; each discourse amounts somehow to a system of domination, insofar as it defines ‘conditions of admission’ into the realm of the legally valid, the ‘sane society’, etc.).94 In the picture resulting from the application of this analytical framework to the domain of the use of force, international lawyers and humanitarian professionals appear gagged, restricted by the language they try to utter effectively to themselves and others. As if the legal language had imposed on them its own logic, it now speaks through their voices and what is, evidently, once again, the Marxian-structuralist idea of cultural products gaining a life of their own and turning against their own creators. Kennedy, however, does not stop at noting that jurists have become ‘spoken’ by their language amidst a dramatically changing war scenario. More disquietingly, he stresses the evident corollary of the previous proposition: the evaporation of a sense of individual moral responsibility: All these formulations, encouraged by the language of law, displace human responsibility for the death and suffering of war onto others . . . . In all these ways, we step back from the terrible responsibility and freedom that comes with the discretion to kill. . . .Violence and injury have lost their author and their judge as soldiers, humanitarians, and statesmen have come to assess the legitimacy of violence in a common legal and bureaucratic vernacular. (pp. 168–9) While depersonalization and a lack of sense of personal responsibility are evidently also favoured by external structural factors, among which is the bureaucratic political complexity of modern states themselves (p. 17),96 Kennedy stresses that the language of international law would thus trivialize and conceal the gravity of decisions: In all these ways, we step back from the terrible responsibility and freedom that comes with the discretion to kill. . . . The problem is loss of the human experience of responsible freedom and free decision – of discretion to kill and let live. (p. 170).

The alternative is to reject the 1AC’s starting point of the law --- instead, we should endorse cultural and epistemic shifts in our relationships to the non-human Other and endorse as a thought expriment the global suicide of humanity – our total rejection of human agency and the continuation of human life functions as a valuable thought experiment that allows us to end the oppression of the status quo.
Kochi, their author, 08 – (Dec. 2008, Tarik Kochi, PhD, Lecturer in Law and International Security, University of Sussex, Noam Ordan, linguist and translator, conducts research in Translation Studies at Bar Ilan University, research focus on human cultural history, “An argument for the global suicide of humanity,” Borderlands, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no3_2008/kochiordan_argument.pdf DH)
For some, guided by the pressure of moral conscience or by a practice of harm minimisation, the appropriate response to historical and contemporary environmental destruction is that of action guided by abstention. For example, one way of reacting to mundane, everyday complicity is the attempt to abstain or opt-out of certain aspects of modern, industrial society: to not eat non-human animals, to invest ethically, to buy organic produce, to not use cars and buses, to live in an environmentally conscious commune. Ranging from small personal decisions to the establishment of parallel economies (think of organic and fair trade products as an attempt to set up a quasi-parallel economy), a typical modern form of action is that of a refusal to be complicit in human practices that are violent and destructive. Again, however, at a practical level, to what extent are such acts of nonparticipation rendered banal by their complicity in other actions? In a grand register of violence and harm the individual who abstains from eating non-human animals but still uses the bus or an airplane or electricity has only opted out of some harm causing practices and remains fully complicit with others. One response, however, which bypasses the problem of complicity and the banality of action is to take the non-participation solution to its most extreme level. In this instance, the only way to truly be non-complicit in the violence of the human heritage would be to opt-out altogether. Here, then, the modern discourse of reflection, responsibility and action runs to its logical conclusion – the global suicide of humanity – as a free-willed and ‘final solution’. While we are not interested in the discussion of the ‘method’ of the global suicide of humanity per se, one method that would be the least violent is that of humans choosing to no longer reproduce. 10 The case at point here is that the global suicide of humanity would be a moral act; it would take humanity out of the equation of life on this earth and remake the calculation for the benefit of everything nonhuman. While suicide in certain forms of religious thinking is normally condemned as something which is selfish and inflicts harm upon loved ones, the global suicide of humanity would be the highest act of altruism. That is, global suicide would involve the taking of responsibility for the destructive actions of the human species. By eradicating ourselves we end the long process of inflicting harm upon other species and offer a human-free world. If there is a form of divine intelligence then surely the human act of global suicide will be seen for what it is: a profound moral gesture aimed at redeeming humanity. Such an act is an offer of sacrifice to pay for past wrongs that would usher in a new future. Through the death of our species we will give the gift of life to others. It should be noted nonetheless that our proposal for the global suicide of humanity is based upon the notion that such a radical action needs to be voluntary and not forced. In this sense, and given the likelihood of such an action not being agreed upon, it operates as a thought experiment which may help humans to radically rethink what it means to participate in modern, moral life within the natural world. In other words, whether or not the act of global suicide takes place might well be irrelevant. What is more important is the form of critical reflection that an individual needs to go through before coming to the conclusion that the global suicide of humanity is an action that would be worthwhile. The point then of a thought experiment that considers the argument for the global suicide of humanity is the attempt to outline an anti-humanist, or non-human-centric ethics. Such an ethics attempts to take into account both sides of the human heritage: the capacity to carry out violence and inflict harm and the capacity to use moral reflection and creative social organisation to minimise violence and harm. Through the idea of global suicide such an ethics reintroduces a central question to the heart of moral reflection: To what extent is the value of the continuation of human life worth the total harm inflicted upon the life of all others? Regardless of whether an individual finds the idea of global suicide abhorrent or ridiculous, this question remains valid and relevant and will not go away, no matter how hard we try to forget, suppress or repress it.
1nc – case

our impacts outweighs - Human survival impacts ought to be weighed.  animal advocates should pick battles—and disturb as little of existing political and moral arguments as necessary—key to avoid backlash.  
Tzachi ZAMIR Comparative Lit. @ Hebrew (Jerusalem) ‘7 Ehtics and the Beast p. 14-15
Moral philosophers (rightly) regard intuitions gingerly. But since this is not the place to plunge into the debate over intuitions, their value (or lack thereof), and whether or not moral reasoning can be purged of them, 1 will appeal to a conservative theoretical principle: choose your battles when advocating reform-avoid replacing existing beliefs/intuitions/considered judgments that can be harmlessly maintained. Rescuing the woman by pitching the dog overboard does not appear to me to conflict with or con- tradict my own liberationist sensitivities. It does cohere with my speciesist bias to promote the welfare of humans before that of animals, even if the humans happen to be profoundly retarded and inferior in mental capaci- ties in relation to the animals. And it constitutes precisely the kind of case in which I am prompted to actively discount the interests of an animal. The same holds for eating animals: if personal or collective survival re- quires eating animal flesh, I would give up my moral vegetarianism. The justification 1 can give to this does not amount to anything more sophisticated than an engrained favoritism. Similar deep-seated intuitions underlie my liberationism: primarily, the immediate, nonderived conviction that needless tremendous suffering and death take place, and that these can and should be eradicated. Lifeboat situations thus do elicit a speciesist intuition in me, which I see no reason to shun. Yet a second moral intuition that surfaces in me when considering lifeboat cases and that i should record is the inclina- tion to look for ways by which survival conflict can he dissolved and through which lifeboat "either/or" decisions can he finessed. The only lifeboat-like situation with regard to interspecies ethics relates (perhaps) to a very small portion of applied research. Allocating substantial re- sources to alternative research models might make this conflict go away. Here, then, is the version of speciesism that, unlike (5), coheres with lib- eratiorusm and can also digest the most compelling speciesist intuitions:
Speciesism (6): Human interests are more important than animal in- terests, in the sense that promoting even trivial human interests ought to take precedence over advancing animal interests. Only survival interests justify actively thwarting an animal's survival interests.
While (6) is intuitive, (5) is not. Strategically, the advantage of endorsing (6) from a liberationist stance is that the most counterintuitive implications of liberationism, on which antiliberationists focus, become conceptually dissociated from liberationism. One can obviously choose to hold on to them too, maintaining that survival conflicts do not justify sacrificing animals. But liberationism as such does not require this fraught extension.
My goal is not to urge liberationists to begin defining themselves as speciesists. My aim is to show that the category of "speciesism" is itself not important: accepting or denying that one is or is not a speciesist, at least in most of its senses, does not have much of a hearing on the issues that are actually debated and on the practices that need to be abolished. Moreover, the more popular speciesist intuitions can be readily digested by liberationists without jeopardizing the call for reform. Later chapters in this book show how this modified liberationist argument mobilizes criticism of specific animal-related practices. 

Their restriction is a smokescreen and will not be enforced
Nzelibe 7—Professor of Law @ Northwestern University Jide Nzelibe, “Are Congressionally Authorized Wars Perverse?” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 59, 2007
These assumptions are all questionable. As a preliminary matter, there is not much causal evidence that supports the institutional constraints logic. As various commentators have noted, Congress's bark with respect to war powers is often much greater than its bite. Significantly, skeptics like Barbara Hinckley suggest that any notion of an activist Congress in war powers is a myth and members of Congress will often use the smokescreen of "symbolic resolutions, increase in roll calls and lengthy hearings, and addition of reporting requirements" to create the illusion of congressional participation in foreign policy.' 0 Indeed, even those commentators who support a more aggressive role for Congress in initiating conflicts acknowledge this problem," but suggest that it could be fixed by having Congress enact more specific legislation about conflict objectives and implement new tools for monitoring executive behavior during wartime. 12
Yet, even if Congress were equipped with better institutional tools to constrain and monitor the President's military initiatives, it is not clear that it would significantly alter the current war powers landscape. As Horn and Shepsle have argued elsewhere: "Neither specificity in enabling legislation ... nor participation by interested parties is necessarily optimal or self-fulfilling; therefore, they do not ensure agent compliance. Ultimately, there must be some enforcement feature-a credible commitment to punish ....Thus, no matter how much well-intentioned and specific legislation Congress passes to increase congressional oversight of the President's military initiatives, it will come to naught if members of Congress lack institutional incentives to monitor and constrain the President's behavior in an international crisis.
Various congressional observers have highlighted electoral disincentives that members of Congress might face in constraining the President's military initiatives. 14 Others have pointed to more institutional obstacles to congressional assertiveness in foreign relations, such as collective action problems. 15 Generally, lawmaking is a demanding and grueling exercise. If one assumes that members of Congress are often obsessed with the prospect of reelection, 16 then such members will tend to focus their scarce resources on district-level concerns and hesitate to second-guess the President's response in an international crisis. 17 Even if members of Congress could marshal the resources to challenge the President's agenda on national issues, the payoff in electoral terms might be trivial or non-existent. Indeed, in the case of the President's military initiatives where the median voter is likely to defer to the executive branch's judgment, the electoral payoff for members of Congress of constraining such initiatives might actually be negative. In other words, regardless of how explicit the grant of a constitutional role to Congress in foreign affairs might be, few members of Congress are willing to make the personal sacrifice for the greater institutional goal. Thus, unless a grand reformer is able to tweak the system and make congressional assertiveness an electorally palatable option in war powers, calls for greater congressional participation in war powers are likely to fall on deaf ears. Pg. 912-913

Office of Legal Counsel will declare the plan as nonbinding and there is nothing that can be done about it
McGinnis 93—Professor of law @ Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law John O. McGinnis (Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel @ Department of Justice.), “Constitutional Review by the Executive in Foreign Affairs and War Powers: A Consequence of Rational Choice in the Separation of Powers,” 56 Law and Contemporary Problems 293-325 (Fall 1993).
In war powers and certain other areas of foreign affairs, the executive rather than the judiciary appears to exercise the constitutional authority to declare "what the law is."1 For instance, when presidents have committed troops to foreign hostilities in the past decade, they have claimed the constitutional authority to do so without congressional authorization, essentially refusing to acknowledge that they were bound by the War Powers Resolution.2 Recently, President Bush declared that certain provisions in two bills were not legally binding because they derogated from his authority in foreign affairs despite the fact that he himself had signed them into law.3 In each of these instances, the Office of Legal Counsel ("OLC"), the central voice of executive branch legal interpretation, wrote an opinion as elaborate as a judicial opinion supporting the President's view that the provision at issue was unconstitutional. The President's apparent exercise of constitutional review in such cases is also highlighted by the judiciary's complementary tendency to avoid exercising substantive review over foreign policy or war powers disputes between the executive and legislative branches. Pg. 293 

They don’t solve --- their pictures are of factory farms which the executive doesn’t have the authority over

The plan fails --- humans can’t overcome anthropocentrism
Werth, 98 (Lee F., department of philosophy at Cleveland State University, “The Anthropocentric Predicament and the Search for Extra- terrestrial Intelligence,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Volume 15, Issue 1, pg. 83-84)
Those who study comparative psychology are aware of the perils of anthropomorphism, particularly with respect to primates closely related to us. Do chimpanzees truly understand and use language? If an orangutan looks into a mirror and sees a reflection of herself with a spot of red paint on her forehead, and then attempts to remove the paint by wiping her brow, does this entail a concept of self or at least the knowledge that the reflected image is her reflection?1 Monkeys seem unable to recognise `their' reflections, unlike orangutans. Clearly, we are unable to understand the consciousness of another species except by generalising from human experience. Empathic understanding, even when grounded in empirical data as in the mirror experiment, has limited utility. We are permanently stuck in an anthropocentric predicament.

Anthro is good and different --- only humans can make moral choices
Cohen, 86 (Carl Cohen, Prof. Phil. @ U. Michigan, New England Journal of Medicine, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research”, 314:865-869, http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/phil1200,Spr07/cohen.pdf)
A right, properly understood, is a claim, or potential claim, that one party may exercise against another. The target against whom such a claim may be registered can be a single person, a group, a community, or (perhaps) all humankind. The content of rights claims also varies greatly: repayment of loans, nondiscrimination by employers, noninterference by the state, and so on. To comprehend any genuine right fully, therefore, we must know who holds the right, against whom it is held, and to what it is a right. Alternative sources of rights add complexity Some rights are grounded in constitution and law (e.g., the right of an accused to trial by jury); some rights are moral but give no legal claims (e.g., my right to your keeping the promise you gave me); and some rights (e.g., against theft or assault) are rooted both in morals and in law. The differing targets, contents, and sources of rights, and their inevitable conflict, together weave a tangled web. Notwithstanding all such complications, this much is clear about rights in general: they are in every case claims, or potential claims, within a community of moral agents.Rights arise, and can be intelligibly defended, only among beings who actually do, or can, make moral claims against one another. Whatever else rights may be, therefore, they are necessarily human; their possessors are persons, human beings. The attributes of human beings from which this moral capability arises have been described variously by philosophers, both ancient and modem: the inner consciousness of a free will (Saint Augustine); the grasp, by human reason, of the binding character of moral law (Saint Thomas); the self-conscious participation of human beings in an objective ethical order (Hegel); human membership in an organic moral community (Bradley); the development of the human self through the consciousness of other moral selves (Mead); and the underivative, intuitive cognition of the rightness of an action (Prichard). Most influential has been Immanuel Kant's emphasis on the universal human possession of a uniquely moral will and the autonomy its use entails. Humans confront choices that are purely moral; humans--but certainly not dogs or mice-- lay down moral laws, for others and for themselves. Human beings are self-legislative, morally autonomous. Animals (that is, nonhuman animals, the ordinary sense of that word) lack this capacity for free moral judgment. They are not beings of a kind capable of exercising or responding to moral claims. Animals therefore have no rights, and they can have none. This is the core of the argument about the alleged rights of animals. The holders of rights must have the capacity to comprehend rules of duty, governing all including themselves. In applying such rules, the holders of rights must recognize possible conflicts between what is in their own interest and what is just. Only in a community of beings capable of self-restricting moral judgments can the concept of a right be correctly invoked. Humans have such moral capacities. They are in this sense self-legislative, are members of communities governed by moral rules, and do possess rights. Animals do not have such moral capacities. They are not morally self-legislative, cannot possibly be members of a truly moral community, and therefore cannot possess rights. In conducting research on animal subjects, therefore, we do not violate their rights, because they have none to violate. To animate life, even in its simplest forms, we give a certain natural reverence. But the possession of rights presupposes a moral status not attained by the vast majority of living things. We must not infer, therefore, that a live being has, simply in being alive, a "right" to its life. The assertion that all animals, only because they are alive and have interests, also possess the "right to life" is an abuse of that phrase, and wholly without warrant. It does not follow from this, however, that we are morally free to do anything we please to animals. Certainly not. In our dealings with animals, as in our dealings with other human beings, we have obligations that do not arise from claims against us based on rights. Rights entail obligations, but many of the things one ought to do are in no way tied to another's entitlement. Rights and obligations are not reciprocals of one another, and it is a serious mistake to suppose that they are.

Only anthropocentrism can solve asteroids
Grey 93 — William Grey, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, 1993 (“Anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology,” Australiasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 71, Number 4, Available Online at http://www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, Accessed 07-27-2011)
Suppose that astronomers detect a modest asteroid or comet, say five or ten kilometres diameter, on collision course with planet Earth 8. The impending collision would be perfectly natural all right, and cataclysmic enough to do to us what another one rather like it probably did to the dinosaurs. Such periodic disruptive events are natural all right, though they probably destroy most of the then extant large life forms. These times of renewal provide opportunities for smaller, flexible organisms to radiate opportunistically into vacated niches, and life goes on. From a biocentric or ecocentric perspective there is little doubt that our demise would provide comparable opportunities for development which we currently prevent. Should we, in 470 such circumstances, step aside so that evolution can continue on its majestic course? I think not, and I think further that interference with the natural course of events, if it could be effected, would be no bad thing—at least from our point of view and in terms of our interests, which it is quite legitimate to promote and favour. 

Extinction of everything --- turns the case
McGUIRE 2002 (Bill, Professor of Geohazards at University College London and is one of Britain's leading volcanologists, A Guide to the End of the World, p. 159-168)
The Tunguska events pale into insignificance when compared to what happened off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years earlier. Here a 10-kilometre asteroid or comet—its exact nature is uncertain—crashed into the sea and changed our world forever. Within microseconds, an unimaginable explosion released as much energy as billions of Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously, creating a titanic fireball hotter than the Sun that vaporized the ocean and excavated a crater 180 kilometres across in the crust beneath. Shock waves blasted upwards, tearing the atmosphere apart and expelling over a hundred trillion tonnes of molten rock into space, later to fall across the globe. Almost immediately an area bigger than Europe would have been flattened and scoured of virtually all life, while massive earthquakes rocked the planet. The atmosphere would have howled and screamed as hypercanes five times more powerful than the strongest hurricane ripped the landscape apart, joining forces with huge tsunamis to batter coastlines many thousandsof kilometres distant. Even worse was to follow. As the rock blasted into space began to rain down across the entire planet so the heat generated by its re-entry into the atmosphere irradiated the surface, roasting animals alive as effectively as an oven grill, and starting great conflagrations that laid waste the world's forests and grasslands and turned fully a quarter of all living material to ashes. Even once the atmosphere and oceans had settled down, the crust had stopped shuddering, and the bombardment of debris from space had ceased, more was to come. In the following weeks, smoke and dust in the atmosphere blotted out the Sun and brought temperatures plunging by as much as 15 degrees Celsius. In the growing gloom and bitter cold the surviving plant life wilted and died while those herbivorous dinosaurs that remained slowly starved. global wildfires and acid rain from the huge quantities of sulphur injected into the atmosphere from rocks at the site of the impact poured into the oceans, wiping out three-quarters of all marine life. After years of freezing conditions the gloom following the so-called Chicxulub impact would eventually have lifted, only to reveal a terrible Sun blazing through the tatters of an ozone layer torn apart by the chemical action of nitrous oxides concocted in the impact fireball: an ultraviolet spring hard on the heels of the cosmic winter that fried many of the remaining species struggling precariously to hang on to life. So enormously was the natural balance of the Earth upset that according to some it might have taken hundreds of thousands of years for the post-Chicxulub Earth to return to what passes for normal. When it did the age of the great reptiles was finally over, leaving the field to the primitive mammals—our distant ancestors—and opening an evolutionary trail that culminated in the rise and rise of the human race. But could we go the same way1?To assess the chances, let me look a little more closely at the destructive power of an impact event. At Tunguska, destruction of the forests resulted partly from the great heat generated by the explosion, but mainly from the blast wave that literally pushed the trees over and flattened them against the ground. The strength of this blast wave depends upon what is called the peak overpressure, that is the difference between ambient pressure and the pressure of the blastwave. In order to cause severe destruction thisnccds to exceed 4. pounds per square inch, an overpressure that results in wind speeds that arc over twice the force of those found in a typical hurricane. Even though tiny compared with, say, the land area of London, the enormous overpressures generated by a 50-metre object exploding low overhead would cause damage comparable with the detonation of a very large nuclear device, obliterating almost everything within the city's orbital motorway. Increase the size of the impactor and things get very much worse. An asteroid just 250 metres across would be sufficiently massive to penetrate the atmosphere; blasting a crater 5 kilometres across and devastating an area of around 10,000 square kilometres— that is about the size of the English county of Kent. Raise the size of the asteroid again, to 650 metres, and the area of devastation increases to ioo;ooo square kilometres—about the size of the US state of South Carolina. Terrible as this all sounds, however, even this would be insufficient to affect the entire planet. In order to do this, an impactor has to be at least 1 kilometre across, if it is one of the speedier comets, or 1.5 kilometres in diameter if it is one of the slower asteroids. A collision with one of these objects would generate a blast equivalent to 100.000 million tonnes of TNT, which would obliterate an area 500 kilometres across say the size of England—and kill perhaps tens of millions of people, depending upon the location of the impact. The real problems for the rest of the world would start soon after as dust in the atmosphere began to darken the skies and reduce the level of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. By comparison with the huge Chicxulub impact it is certain that this would result in a dramatic lowering of global temperatures but there is no consensus on just how bad this would be. The chances are, however, that an impact of this size would result in appalling weather conditions and crop failures at least as severe as those of the 'Year Without a Summer'; 'which followed the 1815 eruption of Indonesia's Tambora volcano. As mentioned in the last chapter, with even developed countries holding sufficient food to feed their populations for only a month or so, large-scale crop failures across the planet would undoubtedly have serious implications. Rationing, at the very least, is likely to be die result, with a worst case scenario seeing widespread disruption of the social and economic fabric of developed nations. In the developing world, where subsistence farming remains very much the norm, wide-spread failure of the harvests could be expected to translate rapidly into famine on a biblical scale Some researchers forecast that as many as a quarter of the world's population could succumb to a deteriorating climate following an impact in the 1—1.5 kilometre size range. Anything bigger and photosynthesis stops completely. Once this happens the issue is not how many people will die but whether the human race will survive. One estimate proposes that the impact of an object just 4- kilometres across will inject sufficient quantities of dust and debris into the atmosphere to reduce light levels below those required for photosynthesis. Because we still don't know how many threatening objects there are out there nor whether they come in bursts, it is almost impossible to say when the Earth will be struck by an asteroid or comet that will bring to an end the world as we know it. Impact events on the scale of the Chicxulub dinosaur-killer only occur every several tens of millions of years, so in any single year the chances of such an impact arc tiny. Any optimism is, however, tempered by the fact that— should the Shiva hypothesis be true—the next swarm of Oort Cloud comets could even now be speeding towards the inner solar system. Failing this, we may have only another thousand years to wait until the return of the dense part of the Taurid Complex and another asteroidal assault. Even if it turns out that there is no coherence in the timing of impact events, there is statistically no reason why we cannot be hit next year by an undiscovered Earth-Crossing Asteroid or by a long-period comet that has never before visited the inner solar system. Small impactors on the Tunguska scale struck Brazil in 1931 and Greenland in 1097, and will continue to pound the Earth every few decades. Because their destructive footprint is tiny compared to the surface area of the Earth, however, it would be very bad luck if one of these hit an urban area, and most will fall in the sea. Although this might seem a good thing, a larger object striking the ocean would be very bad news indeed. A 500-metre rock landing in the Pacific Basin, for example, would generate gigantic tsunamis that would obliterate just about every coastal city in the hemisphere within 20 hours or so. The chances of this happening arc actually quite high—about 1 per cent in the next 100 years—and the death toll could well top half a billion. Estimates of the frequencies of impacts in the 1 kilometre size bracket range from 100,000 to 333,000 years, but the youngest impact crater produced by an object of this size is almost a million years old. Of course, there could have been several large impacts since, which cither occurred in the sea or have not yet been located on land. Fair enough you might say, the threat is clearly out there, but is there anything on the horizon? Actually, there is. Some 13 asteroids—mostly quite small—could feasibly collide with the Earth before 2100. Realistically, however, this is not very likely as the probabilities involved arc not much greater than 1 in io;ooo— although bear in mind that these arc pretty good odds. If this was the probability of winning the lottery then my local agent would be getting considerably more of my business. There is another enigmatic object out there, however. Of the 40 or so Near Earth Asteroids spotted last year, one — designated 2000SG344—looked at first as if it might actually hit us. The object is small, in the 100 metre size range, and its orbit is so similar to the earth that some have suggested it may be a booster rocket that sped one of the Apollo spacecraft on its way to the Moon. Whether hunk of rock or lump of man-made metal, it was originally estimated that 2000SG344 had a 1 in 500 chance of striking the Earth on 21 September 2030. Again, these may sound very long odds, but they are actually only five times greater than those recently offered during summer 2001 for England beating Germany 5-1 at football. We can all relax now anyway, as recent calculations have indicated that the object will not approach closer to the Earth than around five million kilometres. A few years ago, scientists came up with an index to measure the impact threat, known as the Torino Scale, and so far 2000SG2144 is the first object to register a value greater than zero. The potential impactor originally scraped into category 1, events meriting careful monitoring. Let's hope that many years elapse before we encounter the first category 10 event—defined as 'a certain collision with global consequences'. Given sufficient warning we might be able to nudge an asteroid out of the Earth's way but due to its size, high velocity, and sudden appearance, wc could do little about a new comet heading in our direction. 

Their advocacy leads to more animal deaths --- retrenches violent speciesm
Pollan, 2 (Michael, John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, “An Animal’s Place,” New York Times, 11/10/02, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500efd7153ef933a25752c1a9649c8b63andpagewanted=6)
The farmer would point out that even vegans have a ''serious clash of interests'' with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat.  When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it -- especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.  The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls -- then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.  There is, too, the fact that we humans have been eating animals as long as we have lived on this earth. Humans may not need to eat meat in order to survive, yet doing so is part of our evolutionary heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our digestion. Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our identity -- our own animality.  Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

The alt causes destruction of indigenous cultures --- turns their violence impacts
Satudenmaier, 4 (Peter, Ambiguities of Animal Rights, Institute for Social Ecology, http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20040611140817458)
The unexamined cultural prejudices embedded deep within animal rights thinking carry political implications that are unavoidably elitist. A consistent animal rights stance, after all, would require many aboriginal peoples to abandon their sustainable livelihoods and lifeways completely. Animal rights has no reasonable alternative to offer to communities like the Inuit, whose very existence in their ecological niche is predicated on hunting animals. An animal rights viewpoint can only look down disdainfully on those peasant societies in Latin America and elsewhere that depend on small-scale animal husbandry as an integral part of their diet, as well as pastoralists in Africa and Asia who rely centrally upon animals to maintain traditional subsistence economies that long predate the colonial imposition of capitalism. These are not matters of “taste” but of sustainability and survival. Forsaking such practices makes no ecological or social sense, and would be tantamount to eliminating these distinctive societies themselves, all for the sake of assimilation to standards of morality and nutrition propounded by middle-class westerners convinced of their own rectitude. Too many animal rights proponents forget that their belief system is essentially a European-derived construct, and neglect the practical repercussions of universalizing it into an unqualified principle of human moral conduct as such.13 Nowhere is this combination of parochialism and condescension more apparent than in the animus against hunting. Many animal rights enthusiasts cannot conceive of hunting as anything other than a brutal and senseless activity undertaken for contemptible reasons. Heedless of their own prejudices, they take hunting for an expression of speciesist prejudice. What animal rights theorists malign as ‘sport hunting’ often provides a significant seasonal supplement to the diets of rural populations who lack the luxuries of tempeh and seitan. Even indigenous communities engaged in conspicuously low-impact traditional hunting have been harassed and vilified by animal rights activists. The campaign against seal hunting in the 1980’s, for example, prominently targeted Inuit practices.14 In the late 1990’s, the Makah people of Neah Bay in the northwestern United States tried to re-establish their communal whale hunt, harvesting exactly one gray whale in 1999. The Makah hunt was non-commercial, for subsistence purposes, and fastidiously humane; they chose a whale species that is not endangered and went to considerable lengths to accommodate anti-whaling sentiment. Nevertheless, when the Makah attempted to embark on their first expedition in 1998, they were physically confronted by the Sea Shepherd Society and other animal protection organizations, who occupied Neah Bay for several months. For these groups, animal rights took precedence over human rights. Many of these animal advocates embellished their pro-whale rhetoric with hoary racist stereotypes about native people and allied themselves with unreconstructed apologists for colonial domination and dispossession.15 Such examples are far from rare. In fact, animal rights sentiment has frequently served as an entry point for rightwing positions into left movements. Because much of the left has generally been reluctant to think clearly and critically about nature, about biological politics, and about ethical complexity, this unsettling affinity between animal rights and rightwing politics — an affinity which has a lengthy historical pedigree — remains a serious concern.

Turn—The alt terminates the biomedical research on animals
Cohen, 86 (Carl, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine, http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/phil1200,Spr07/cohen.pdf)
Humans owe to other humans a degree of moral regard that cannot be owed to animals. Some humans take on the obligation to support and heal others, both humans and animals, as a principal duty in their lives; the fulfillment of that duty may require the sacrifice of many animals. If biomedical investigators abandon the effective pursuit of their professional objectives because they are convinced that they may not do to animals what the service of humans requires, they will fail, objectively, to do their duty. Refusing to recognize the moral differences among species is a sure path to calamity. (The largest animal rights group in the country is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; its co- director, Ingrid Newkirk, calls research using animal subjects "fascism" and "supremacism." "Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal," she says, "so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They're all mammals.") Those who claim to base their objection to the use of animals in biomedical research on their reckoning of the net pleasures and pains produced make a second error, equally grave. Even if it were true--as it is surely not--that the pains of all animate beings must be counted equally, a cogent utilitarian calculation requires that we weigh all the consequences of the use, and of the nonuse, of animals in laboratory research. Critics relying (however mistakenly) on animal rights may claim to ignore the beneficial results of such research, rights being trump cards to which interest and advantage must give way. But an argument that is explicitly framed in terms of interest and benefit for all over the long run must attend also to the disadvantageous consequences of not using animals in research, and to all the achievements attained and attainable only through their use.

Extinction
Cohen, 86 (Carl, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine, pg. 865-869, http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/phil1200,Spr07/cohen.pdf)
The sum of the benefits of their use is utterly beyond quantification. The elimination of horrible disease, the increase of longevity, the avoidance of great pain, the saving of lives, and the improvement of the quality of lives (for humans and for animals) achieved through research using animals is so incalculably great that the argument of these critics, systematically pursued, establishes not their conclusion but its reverse: to refrain from using animals in biomedical research is, on utilitarian grounds, morally wrong.

Ideas of animal equality cause human extinction – inability to use animals for food or labor means annihilation of the species
Epstein and Brook, 1 (Senior writer at Ayn Rand Institute _{ex director of Ayn Rand Institute, Alex and Yaron, “The Evil of Animal Rights”, http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/evilofanimalrights.shtml)
It is common to write off terrorist activity and the vicious statements of animal rights leaders as "extremist," while maintaining that the majority of people in the animal rights movement have benevolent intentions. But man-hatred sic is not limited to a few leaders, it is inherent in the very notion of animal "rights." According to PETA, the basic principle of animal rights is: "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." To abide by this principle, we must leave animals free—to overrun and destroy our property, to eat our food, even to kill our children. As Michael Fox, vice president of The Humane Society explains, "The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration." This is a formula for human extinction since human survival and progress depend on our ability to kill animals when they endanger us, eat them when we need food, run tests on them when we fight disease. Without horses for transportation and oxen for plowing, without furs to keep us warm and meat to sustain us, mankind's sic ascent from the cave to civilization would have been impossible. Today, animal rights advocates want to make the progress of medical science impossible—so that rats may live. The only goal of a doctrine that demands such a sacrifice of man sic to animals can be the annihilation of man.}

Alt doesn’t solve and is worse for animals
Tibor Machan, ‘4 (Tibor, Distinguished Fellow and Prof. @ Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics @ Chapman U., “Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite”, p. 11-13)
Now, one can dispute Hospers, but only by averting one's gaze from the facts. If animals in fact did have rights as you and I understand the concept of rights—rights that entail and mandate a hands-off policy toward other rights possessors—most of the creatures now lurking in lawns and jungles, at the very least all the carnivores, would have to be brought up on murder charges. This is what all the animal rights champions fail to heed, including Ingrid Newkirk, radical leader of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who holds that it is unacceptable for us to use animals in any way at all.13 This is why they allow themselves such vile thoughts as that "the world would be an infinitely better place without humans in it at all."'4 If the scenario is absurd, it's so not because the concept of animal rights has been unfairly reduced to absurdity but because there is nowhere else to go. The idea of animal rights is impracticable to begin with; any attempt to visualize the denizens of the animal world benefiting from and respecting rights must collapse into fantasy willy-nilly. The concept of rights emerged with the rise of human civilization precisely because it is needed by and applicable to human beings, given the specifically moral nature of human beings and their ambition to live with each other in mutual harmony and to mutual benefit. Rights have nothing to do with the lives of wolves and turtles because of what animal rights champions themselves admit, namely, the amoral nature of at least the bulk of the animal world.15 Advocates of animal rights in at least one way do admit the vast gulf between animals and humans and that humans alone are equipped to deal with moral issues. When they address us alone about these matters—when they accept all the carnage that is perpetrated by other living things, including what would be infanticide and worse if human beings were to engage in it—they clearly imply that human beings are indeed special. They imply, first and foremost, that people are indeed the only living beings capable of understanding a moral appeal. Only human beings can be implored to do right rather than wrong. Other animals just don't have the capacity for this. And so the environmentalists don't confront them with any moral arguments no matter how politically incorrect the animals may be toward one another.