So this is getting seriously stupid, all the campaign-season rhetoric about Iran.

First, President Obama, speaking Sunday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, says:

"I will take no options off the table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American power. A political effort aimed at isolating Iran; a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored; an economic effort to impose crippling sanctions; and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.

"Iran's leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment. I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I've made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests."

Sounds clear and tough-guy enough, right?

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

Well, apparently not to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who, The Times reported from Snellville, Ga., reacted to Obama's speech this way:

"If Barack Obama is reelected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon and the world will change," Romney told a crowd of more than a 1,000 people at a pancake breakfast that his campaign hosted in this Atlanta suburb.

When an 11-year-old boy asked the candidate how he would keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, Romney said Obama had not imposed "crippling sanctions against Iran." "He's also failed to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand, and that it's unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

"I will have those military options. I will take those crippling sanctions and put them into place," he said. "And I will speak out to the Iranian people of the peril of them becoming nuclear …. I'm not willing to allow your generation to have to worry about a threat from Iran or anyone else that nuclear material be used against Americans.”

Oh, and have some more pancakes, young fellow. I want you big and strong for when I send you off to war!

But seriously. Obama said all options were on the table -- and Romney still called him out. What is this, the second-grade playground?

C'mon, fellows, stop and think a minute. If you don't want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, does it make sense to keep bombarding it with threats of military action? I mean, I'm pretty sure they've got the picture by now. 

Do you really have to make a bunch of paranoid types more paranoid? Isn't this why Israel says it fears Iran -- because it has threatened to destroy Israel?

So how do all of these threats to attack Iran make it want the bomb less?

The bottom line: This is political gamesmanship at its worst. Romney and the GOP candidates court pro-Israel votes by taking an ultra-hard line on Iran. Which forces Obama to hew to a hard line as well.

But it's a very dangerous game. It could lead to war. It could get lots of people killed.

And yes, for me, it's personal too: I have two sons.One just turned 18, at which point you are -- yes, still -- required to sign up with the Selective Service System.

Frankly, I'm getting tired of hearing pandering politicians cast about for votes by offering up the lives of other people's kids in the name of national security.

Take Romney's sons: Did he offer them up as cannon fodder? Check out this New York Times story in 2007, the last time he ran, when he was asked about whether they had served in the military:

Mr. Romney expressed appreciation for the country's "volunteer army" and said "that's the way we're going to keep it." He explained his sons had made different career choices in life and had not chosen to serve in the military, but he mentioned a niece whose husband, he said, had just been called up by the National Guard ….

But he wound up his response with this: "It's remarkable how we can show our support for our nation, and one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping to get me elected, because they think I’d be a great president. My son, Josh, bought the family Winnebago and has visited 99 counties, most of them with his three kids and his wife. And I respect that and respect all of those in the way they serve this great country."

Yes, well, Mitt, the campaign trail is a rugged place, that's for sure, especially in a Winnebago.

But ask the fathers and mothers and husbands and wives of the thousands of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan about real war.

And then, just maybe, you -- and, frankly, Obama too -- might decide to take your finger off the trigger.

And quit playing politics with the lives of American kids.

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Photo: Mitt Romney speaks Sunday at a pancake breakfast at Brookwood High School in Snellville, Ga., outside Atlanta. Credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

What do you call a 10-year-old boy in Afghanistan? Apparently, a suicide bomber.

The Times reported Tuesday that two 10-year-olds who had been arrested for trying to carry out suicide attacks, then released last year, had been rearrested -- for trying to carry out suicide bombings.

Provincial spokesman Zalmay Ayubi said the boys each had a vest full of explosives when they were detained along with three adults suspected of being militants, and that they told intelligence officers they had been recruited for suicide missions.

A statement from provincial officials quoted one of the boys, named Azizullah, as saying the pair had undergone training at a madrasa, or religious school, in Pakistan. The mullahs there told the boys they would be unharmed when they set off their bombs, Azizullah reportedly said.

News of the boys' arrest came the same week that Muslim militant Umar Patek appeared in court in Indonesia to answer charges related to deadly bombings a decade ago in Bali that killed 202 people in a nightclub. Oddly enough -- or perhaps not -- he was captured last year in Abbottabad, the Pakistani town where Osama bin Laden was hiding.

But unlike the 202 people killed in the bombings, Patek gets a lawyer. And surprise, he downplayed his client's role: "His involvement in the Bali bombing ... [was] not as big as is being described. We will challenge that in a defense plea next week."

Also this week, a radical Islamic preacher, Abu Qatada, who had been under detention in Britain for most of the last 6 1/2 years, was released from jail Monday.

British officials consider him extremely dangerous, saying he encourages suicide attacks and terrorism, and they want him sent back to Jordan to face terrorism charges.

But Abu Qatada also is being given the benefit of the doubt in some legal circles. Last month the European Court of Human Rights blocked his deportation, saying he could face conviction on the basis of evidence obtained by torture.

And what do these cases have in common?  

They show the difficulty -- perhaps even the futility -- of trying to fight terrorism within the judicial system.

When religious leaders find it acceptable to use children as bombs, it says something terrible about the values of our enemies.

And although it's a tribute to modern society that we remain committed to legal rules, those same legal rules can be -- are being -- manipulated by those committed to our destruction.

It would be nice if there were an easy answer.  Perhaps the madrasas that are training children to be terrorists should be shut down?

Not likely.  As the recent controversy in the U.S. over health insurance coverage for contraceptives shows, government interference in religious freedom is a tough sell everywhere.

No, we're stuck. We must stick to our legal system. We must allow freedom of religion.

And we must fight our enemies and safeguard our soldiers and our nation.

But it would be nice if we could keep 10-year-olds out of the fight.

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Photo: Taliban fighters walk with their weapons after joining the Afghan government forces during a ceremony in Herat province. Credit: Aref Karimi /AFP/Getty Images

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been a vocal critic of the Transportation Safety Administration's screening procedures at airports, particularly its insistence on "invasive" (Paul's term) pat-downs of travelers regardless of how young or old they might be. So it was just a matter of time before Paul had a run-in with the TSA outside the halls of Congress.

That time came Monday morning. The TSA stopped Paul from entering the gate area of the Nashville airport after he set off an alarm in a body scanner, then refused to be patted down by security personnel. Paul's office issued a tweet saying he'd been "detained," but TSA officials said local police merely walked him out of the screening area. Paul caught a flight to Washington later without further incident.

Paul's father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), took time off from the presidential campaign to fire off an outraged statement:

The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors, and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe.

That is why my "Plan to Restore America," in additional to cutting $1 trillion in federal spending in one year, eliminates the TSA.

But what, exactly, went wrong in Nashville? Paul went into a body scanner, which detected something anomalous on one of Paul's knees. In that circumstance, TSA procedures call for security personnel to investigate further, by hand. That's the infamous pat-down. The younger Paul's office indicated that the TSA refused the senator's request to be rescanned in lieu of being patted down, which is why he wasn't allowed into the secure gate area.

Rand Paul has argued that the TSA should exercise more judgment in deciding whom to pat down, and it should offer a way for frequent fliers to avoid close scrutiny. As the senator put it at a congressional hearing, "A big bulk of those traveling are traveling two, three times a week, and yet we treat everybody equally as a terror suspect."

That's a good argument. Nevertheless, one of the lessons we've learned in the wake of the 9/11 attacks is that Al Qaeda designs its plots to take advantage of weaknesses it finds in security procedures. The more exceptions you carve out to screening rules, the more opportunities you create for the bad guys. And if you give more power to individual screeners to decide whom to admit and whom to block, you raise the likelihood that terrorists will apply social engineering to the problem -- in other words, finding ways to corrupt an individual screener instead of exploiting holes in the procedures.

That's a long way of saying that airport security involves trade-offs. Do you want TSA agents to use their judgment and give heightened scrutiny only to passengers who fit a terrorist profile, as Israeli airport security personnel do? Then invest a whale of a lot more in training (and get ready for a true "police state" approach to airline travel). That may be a better approach, but it won't happen by eliminating funding for the TSA.

I don't fly as much as either of the Pauls, so maybe I'm too glib about the hassles they encounter. But I'm glad the TSA didn't bend its procedures to accommodate the younger Paul. They don't rescreen adults when anomalies are detected, they do pat-downs. (In response to Rand Paul's previous complaints, they will rescreen young children.) As long as that's the rule, it should be the rule for everyone.

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Credit: Charles Dharapak / Associated Press

Rick Perry is not the first to defend the four Marines who were catapulted to infamy last week when an Internet video emerged capturing them urinating on what appeared to be the corpses of three dead Taliban fighters. Conservative luminary Britt Hume said on Fox News  that he didn't see anything despicable about it, and author Sebastian Junger penned a thoughtful essay in the Washington Post that defends if not excuses the Marines based on his own experiences studying the emotional state of combat soldiers. But that's not the way Perry put it. And that's why he doesn't just infuriate liberals, he inspires little confidence among educated conservatives.

In an appearance Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Perry blasted the Obama administration for what he considered its overreaction to the video. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the actions of the Marines might be considered a war crime, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the incident "utterly deplorable" and numerous generals condemned the individuals involved while promising a full investigation. To Perry, this reaction shows nothing but "disdain for the military."

"These kids made a mistake, there's no doubt about it," Perry said. "But to call it a criminal act, I think, is over the top."

What would you call it, Gov. Perry? Desecration of enemy corpses is clearly forbidden by the Geneva Convention. If Perry's looking for legal advice, he might want to consult a memo sent to the troops Friday by Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who wrote, "Defiling, desecrating, mocking, photographing or filming for personal use insurgent dead constitutes a grave breach of the (law of armed conflict)." The four Marines are very likely to be court-martialed, and while it's not clear what charges they'll face, there is nothing remotely "over the top" about suggesting they may be guilty of a war crime; that's merely stating the facts.

What's more to the point, Perry --who is trying to drum up pro-military votes -- seems to think it would be a good idea for the president and his administration to shrug off breaches of the rules of military conduct, international law or common decency when they're committed by active-duty soldiers. Perry's approach, popular as it may be among his dwindling base, would invite international condemnation, promote retaliation on the battlefield, gift Islamic insurgents with a sterling recruitment tool and undermine relations with key allies such as the Afghan and Pakistani governments. Which makes me wonder, and not for the first time: How long are we going to have to listen to this hillbilly nonsense before Perry bows to the inevitable and drops out of the GOP presidential race?

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I guess now we can call it the "Iran rule."

You know: It's the rule that says the United States must go to war with a country or risk loosing another Hitler on the world.

In 2003, of course, it was the "Iraq rule." Remember how George W. Bush and other administration officials and conservatives justified the invasion of Iraq by comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler?

Although, to be fair, Bush was just following in the tracks of his father, who also invoked the Hitler comparison in deciding to oust Hussein from Kuwait in the 1990 Persian Gulf War.

If I didn't know better, I'd say too many U.S. policymakers have seen "The Boys From Brazil" and assumed it was a documentary.

Today's Hitler, though, is -- take your pick -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the mullahs who rule Iran. And they want Iran to be a nuclear power. And they must be stopped. And the U.S., of course, must do the stopping. And all options must be on the table, including military action.

Who says so?

Well, except for Ron Paul, every Republican running for president, for starters. Here's Mitt Romney:

"If we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon," Romney stated unequivocally. "And if you elect Mitt Romney, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."

But this is a bipartisan stance, it appears. As The Times quoted Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta on Sunday:

"Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon?  No," Panetta said. "But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is, 'Do not develop a nuclear weapon.' That's a red line for us."

"I think they need to know that ... if they take that step, that they're going to get stopped," Panetta said, adding that he was not taking any options off the table.

Gosh, fellows, maybe you could all take a break from the Xbox and Call of Duty for a bit?  You know, get out for some fresh air?

Because honestly, I think the American people are just a bit tired of playing Hitler whack-a-mole.

And this is starting to give me 2003 deja vu: Everyone knows the Iranians are building a bomb, just like everyone knew Saddam Hussein was pursuing a bomb.

Except he wasn't. 

And even if the Iranians are, what makes everyone so sure they'd use it?

Ah, you say, just check what Ahmadinejad has said.

OK. Check what Romney just said. Check what Panetta just said. Does that mean we're automatically going to war?

If we went to war every time someone said something bellicose, we'd be going to war a lot -- uh, I mean a lot more.

We didn't want the Soviet Union to get the bomb, but it did. We didn't want China to get the bomb, but it did. Ditto North Korea. And Pakistan.

Each time, some argued -- as some, especially Israel, argue now about Iran -- that it would be Armageddon if the bad guys got the bomb.

Well, the United States has lived for more than 60 years with thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at it.

It's no picnic, but we're still here.

Plus, sanctions against Iran are starting to take their toll. They might work. At any rate, they don't cost nearly as much as a military action.

So why don't we give the war talk a rest. Hitler, after all, is dead.

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-- Paul Whitefield

Photo: A U.S. sailor in a safety boat observes a boarding team from the U.S. guided-missile destroyer Kidd after Iranian fishermen were rescued from pirates in the Arabian Sea. Credit: U.S. Navy

Remember "the mother of all bombs"?

Well, there's a whole new mama in town.

The Air Force's Massive Ordnance Penetrator, developed by Boeing, is more than 20 feet long, weighs in at 30,000 pounds (by comparison, the "mother" GBU-43 MOAB is a trim 22,600 pounds) and is packed with 5,300 pounds of explosives.

The  Air Force ordered 20, at a total cost of $314 million, and started taking delivery in September.

The Massive Ordnance Penetrator (wonder if anyone calls it the MOP?) has one job: pulverize underground enemy hide-outs.

Hmmm, wonder which country we don't like that has stuff hidden in underground bunkers?

From Times staff writer W.J. Hennigan's story:

"The Massive Ordnance Penetrator is a weapon system designed to accomplish a difficult, complicated mission of reaching and destroying our adversaries' weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities," Lt. Col. Melinda F. Morgan, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Experts took note of the fact that the military disclosed delivery of the new bunker-busting bomb less than a week after a United Nations agency warned that Iran was secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon. That country is known to have hidden nuclear complexes that are fortified with steel and concrete, and buried under mountains.

This week, Times columnist Doyle McManus wrote that both President Obama and his Republican rivals  have made similar statements on Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon:

Obama and all the likely Republican nominees for president have long said they consider a nuclear-capable Iran unacceptable. There's no wiggle room in that word; no president could back down from that warning without major damage to U.S. influence.

Obama has favored sanctions. The GOP's Mitt Romney has offered saber-rattling, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he said that "I won't let Iran get nukes."

Romney's prescription? Increase military aid to Israel and send more ships to the Persian Gulf to convince Iran that when the United States threatens to use force, it means it.

But as McManus points out:

If the Iranians called his bluff, a President Romney would all too quickly face that same stark choice: go to war, or back down.

Which is when, yes, the MOP might come in really handy.

But would we use it? Should we use it?

No one can say now, of course.  But certainly the option of a non-nuclear weapon with such destructive power seems a sensible precaution. 

Iran's leaders now know that their nuclear facilities are at risk. That, coupled with sanctions, might persuade them to abandon their efforts to build the bomb.

If not? Well, then the United States has one big saber it can rattle.

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Image: An artist's rendering of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bomb. Credit: Boeing Co.

It's always gratifying to hear the voice of experience dress down a callow youth. Except for the fact that the callow ones were adults, that's a good description of Sen. John McCain's rebuke of several GOP presidential candidates who said waterboarding wasn't torture.

In a Republican presidential debate focusing on foreign policy on Saturday, Herman Cain recycled a Bush administration euphemism in saying that waterboarding was "an enhanced interrogation technique." Michele Bachmann said waterboarding "gained information for our country." Rick Santorum and Rick Perry said they supported any and all necessary enhanced interrogation techniques. 

McCain, a former prisoner of war, tweeted a rebuttal: "Very disappointed by statements at SC GOP debate supporting waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture."

It's sometimes forgotten that McCain provided cover for the enactment of anti-torture legislation that remains on the books. He couldn't be dismissed as a soft-headed ACLU type. The soft-headed ones were -- and are -- those who won't call torture by its name.

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Photo: Arizona Sen. John McCain in Washington last week. Credit: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Andrew Cockburn's Op-Ed about "taxpayer-funded assassinations" this year asked whether targeted killings were the most effective way to fight terrorism. Reader "DaveMarsh" responded on our discussion board with the following:

This author doesn't consider that during WW2 the US forces planned, and successfully carried out, the assassination of Admiral Yamamoto -- the mastermind of the Imperial Japanese Navy's tactics.  I'm sure that if the opportunity presented itself, there would have been many Japanese and German commanding officers and key political leaders killed.  These actions have a disrupting effect on the enemy's war effort.

I think that the author is a "selective" student of history.

Cockburn, an investigative journalist and author, offers this reply:

The study conducted by Rex Rivolo as part of his duties at the Counter IED Intelligence Center at U.S. headquarters in Baghdad in 2007-08  that I cited was unique because it dealt with hard data, as opposed to the conjecture and inference deployed by those who look to justify a high-value target policy.  There is no evidence to support the notion that the killing of Adm. Isoroku  Yamamoto shortened the war, but it did very nearly lengthen it.  The Japanese commander was ambushed thanks to our successful penetration of the enemy codes.  It is a miracle that the Japanese did not surmise this fairly obvious fact and change their codes accordingly, thereby depriving us of a weapon worth far more than the elimination of an admiral, however supposedly talented.

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--Alexandra Le Tellier

Photo: Among those killed this year by the U.S. were Osama bin Laden, left, and Anwar Awlaki. NATO forces helped bring down Libya's Moammar Kadafi, right. Credit: Associated Press

Why is Barack Obama’s presidency a tale of two situations?

On the foreign-policy front, the administration has had a string of successes: Osama bin Laden killed; major Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen killed; and this week, of course, Moammar Kadafi killed.

And on Friday, the president announced that all U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by year’s end.

An unpopular war will be officially over for us soon.  Terrorists and terrorist groups that threaten us are dead or on the run. Libya’s longtime strongman has been overthrown, thanks in part to Obama’s policy that had the U.S. and NATO working together.

But here’s a question:  If Obama has been so successful in foreign policy, why has he been so unsuccessful on domestic issues? 

Sure, unemployment fell in California last month, but it's nothing to write home about. Joblessness, foreclosures, poverty -– you know the numbers, and they're not pretty.

Even his signature domestic achievement, healthcare reform, remains under attack by Republicans.  They vow to undo it as soon as they control the White House again.

So what’s the deal?

It isn't that he's escaped criticism on foreign policy. Republicans -- heck, even some Democrats -- have been critical of Obama's moves.   But what he's done has, in the main, worked.

No, domestically the problem is that Obama's opponents have turned criticism into obstructionism.  Unlike his foreign policies, Obama's efforts to fix the economy have been thwarted at every turn by Republicans.

Take the president's jobs bill. As The Times reported:

Republican-led opposition in the Senate blocked a key element of President Obama’s jobs plan Thursday night -- a proposal to send $35 billion to cash-strapped states to keep public school teachers, police and firefighters on the job.

That's right.  Republicans won't even agree to spend $35 billion on teachers, police and firefighters.

And why not?

Republicans are fighting the measures because they do not believe such government efforts will help businesses to create jobs in the struggling economy. They also oppose asking those earning beyond $1 million a year to pay more.

Yes, protecting people making more than $1 million a year is far more important that saving a $35,000-a-year teaching job, wouldn’t you say?

The bottom line?  It's wrong to say the president's domestic policies haven't worked when those policies haven't even been given the chance to work.

Abroad, Obama has been allowed to set policy, and those policies have been given time to work.  And, for the most part, they have.

Perhaps if Republicans gave the president that same leeway on domestic policy, we might be winning some battles at home, too.

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Photo: President Obama on Tuesday told a crowd at Greensville County High School in Emporia, Va., that Republicans were blocking his efforts to boost the economy to deal him a political setback. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Tuesday that federal authorities had foiled a plot backed by the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States on American soil. Two men, one of whom is apparently a member of a special operations unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, were charged in federal court in New York on Tuesday. Holder called the bomb plot a flagrant violation of U.S. and international law. And Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, "We will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground."

But wait a minute. Two weeks ago, the United States assassinated one of its enemies in Yemen, on Yemeni soil. If the U.S. believes it has the right to assassinate enemies like Anwar Awlaki anywhere in the world in the name of a "war on terror" that has no geographical limitation, how can it then argue that other nations don't have a similar right to track down their enemies and kill them wherever they're found?

It's true that the assassination of Awlaki was carried out with the cooperation of the government of Yemen. That makes a difference. But would the U.S. have hesitated to kill him if Yemen had not approved? Remember: There was no cooperation from the Pakistani government when Osama bin Laden was killed in May.

It's also true that there's a big difference between an Al Qaeda operative who, according to U.S. officials, had been deeply involved in planning terrorist activities, and a duly credited ambassador of a sovereign country. Still, the fact remains that all nations ought to think long and hard before gunning down their enemies in other countries.

As the United States continues down the path of state-sponsored assassination far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, all sorts of tricky moral questions are likely to arise. But this much is clear: The world is unlikely to accept that the United States has a right to behave as it wishes without accountability all around the globe and that other nations do not.

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Photo: Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department, joined by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Credit: Haraz N. Ghanbari / Associated Press