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In 2009, Iran's squirrely behavior helped shift the terms of the debate, and signs in Washington point to a fresh push for sanctions. After taking a close look at the technical specs on Iran’s newly revealed plant, many arms-control wonks concluded it was part of a network of secret sites, designed to keep Iran’s nuclear weapons program going in case of an attack on Iran’s main enrichment plant at Natanz. President Barack Obama may have won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for promoting nuclear disarmament, but the revelation that Iran has a clandestine atomic facility has everyone wondering whether Washington and Tehran aren't headed for a showdown over nukes.

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Still, that hasn't deterred the pirates: Last month, they took another crack at seizing the Maersk Alabama, the vessel once skippered by Phillips.

Private security firms stepped forward to sell their pirate-fighting skills to a wary shipping industry, and the case for armed security got a boost after Israeli guards repelled an attack on the cruise ship MSC Melody. ship captain Richard Phillips hostage, Navy snipers shot and killed three of the pirates who were holding him prisoner in a lifeboat. An international counter-piracy task force was established in January, and after pirates took U.S. It was a boom year for the anti-piracy market as well. Back in April, we posted this oddly intimate home video, taken aboard a captured vessel (the ship and crew were released unharmed after a ransom was paid). It was a busy year for Somali pirates, with 174 attacks (and counting) on merchant ships.

(They turned out to be specialized missiles, wrapped with fragmentation sleeves of tungsten cubes.) ' The Arab view is now that Israel is a crazed animal, locked in a cage, fuming to get out all the time,' an Israeli Foreign Ministry official told me. Killer drones fired off mysterious weapons that caused brutal injuries – especially to children. When that wasn't enough, the IDF used incendiary white phosphorous to torch the hideouts. Troops pummeled militants, even when they holed up in mosques or hospitals or schools. Tanks blasted continuously, forming lethal circles of fire. Yet the IDF also fought with an unrestrained ferocity in Gaza with tactics more akin to textbook military campaigns than those used in recent counterinsurgencies. When the Israelis did decide to attack from the sky, they often dropped small, smart munitions with tiniest of blast patterns.

They kept spy drones constantly flying, and empowered their remote pilots to call off strikes at any time. On the one hand, the Israelis tried all kinds of things to minimize innocent casualties in Gaza's crowded slums. From the start, the campaign – a retaliation for Hamas' ongoing rocket attacks against civilians – seemed tangled in contradictions. 3, 2009, the Israeli Defense Forces poured into Gaza, using a collection of new tactics and technologies. But counterinsurgency experts continue to worry that the robotic attacks could destabilize the region as they continue into 2010 and expand to a new front: Yemen.

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By May, the unmanned attacks had become such an open secret that CIA director Leon Panetta confessed that the robotic campaign was ' the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership.” (This, despite the militants' apparent understanding of how the drones were targeted, and how to see through the robotic planes' eyes.) That view was shared by some in the White House, who wanted to recast the Afghanistan fight along the lines of the drone-heavy effort in Pakistan. Predators parked on a Pakistani runway before the Air Force let slip that their drones were running missions east of the Durand Line and before the CIA publicly announced that it was cutting Blackwater's contract for rearming the drones. But that was before Google Earth spotted U.S. And the idea that Blackwater was somehow mixed up in the whole thing was a plot twist worthy of Hollywood. A year ago, the Pakistani government was denying any connection with the attacks. The character of the drone war changed, too. Compare that to 2008, when there were just 36 drone attacks.

The Obama administration launched more than 50 reported robotic strikes, killing several hundred people. This time last year, it was most definitely underway.

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