Nation-Building

American foreign policy in the Middle East claims to seek the spread of democracy among the Arab and/or Islamic nations found there. They are currently ruled by autocratic, unresponsive governments, who restrict the freedom of the citizens, giving rise to resentment, frustration, and eventually political violence and intolerant "Islamo-fascism".

I think we all agree that many of the governments in question are autocratic, unaccountable and unresponsive, and that this creates enormous problems for the people they govern.

Is Western democracy the solution?
What do the people of the region actually want, and do they get a voice in choosing?

 
What we in the West call "democracy" is the product of almost 1,000 years of effort to make the state accountable to the people governed. That history has gone hand in hand with other political, social, and economic changes. Our understanding of what "the state" itself is has changed from a more or less tribally based polity, ruled by an elite land-holding warrior class, to the modern nation-state, governed by elected representatives of the population according to the rule of law. Western democracy relies on a literate, informed, and responsible population, which historically goes hand in hand with a robust middle class. Western democracies are also associated with a more or less market economy, in which economic affairs largely consist of the interactions of private persons, each seeking their own best interest.

Overall, it works pretty well for us. It's a good solution to a number of problems which have, historically, plagued us.

Western democracy assumes the division of everyday human life into a number of more or less separate spheres -- political, economic, religious, family, personal. In each of these spheres, citizens are accountable to different authorities -- nation and state; employers, business partners, customers, and the market; religious leaders and traditions; members of our family; ourselves. These spheres interact, for sure, but they are really separate. We do not want the government telling us what or how to worship; we don't want our boss telling us how to vote; we don't want religious leaders telling us how to organize our finances.

What the west does not have, or really want, is a concept akin to the Ummah. As I understand it, the Ummah is a concept of community that encompasses all of the various aspects of life -- religious, political, economic, family, personal -- in an integrated whole. Within the Ummah, life is not divided into separate spheres, each accountable to different authorities. Within the Ummah, in all spheres of life, each person is responsible to God. Muslim readers will, I hope, forgive and correct me if my understanding of what is meant by the Ummah is incorrect.

I'm not sure that political institutions that enforce crisp boundaries between different spheres of life fit well in a culture informed by something like the Ummah. And, I'm not sure people who live in those cultures will want to give up such a concept in return for whatever they might get from secular, Western style governance.

What does a responsive, accountable, transparent government look like in a culture and society informed by a concept like the Ummah?
Is something like a Western democracy what is wanted?
What institutions and traditions *already exist* within the Islamic world that embody, encourage, and support responsible government?
Who are the people advocating for those institutions and traditions?

What are we doing to understand and encourage those institutions and traditions?
What are we doing to identify, understand, and encourage the people who champion those institutions and traditions in the Islamic world *now*?

Do the people who live in Islamic nations get a voice in how they want to order their lives, or must they choose between autocracy and Jeffersonian democracy?

It should go without saying, but it may not, so allow me to be clear about a couple of things. I *do not* believe that Muslims, Arabs, or any combination thereof, are incapable of governing themselves well. I *do not* believe they are uninterested in freedom. I *no not* believe, as some claim, that they "only understand force".

My questions are simply these:

What does good government look like in the context of Islamic culture?
How can we encourage it to emerge and take root?

The reason I ask is because what we are doing now does not appear to be working all the well.

No hat fits every head. We have found, and jealously guard, the hat that fits ours. The Islamic nations deserve the opportunity to do the same.

Thanks -

Continue reading/discuss democracy and the ummah ...

Essential op-ed in the Washington Post by Egyptian democray activist, Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Absolutely essential.

teaser:

The pattern here is clear, and it is Islamic. And among the few secular public figures who made it into the top 10 are Palestinian Marwan Barghouti (31 percent) and Egypt's Ayman Nour (29 percent), both of whom are prisoners of conscience in Israeli and Egyptian jails, respectively.

Don't miss this related story in NPR: Israel Seizes Hamas Ministers and Lawmakers (June 29th)

Also, Abu Aardvark has been blogging for years about "liberal" Islamists. The key here is that not all islamists are our enemy. The best case of this is Yusuf Al-Qaradawi.

 

Continue reading/discuss the cold war on muslim democrats and liberal Islamists ...

Charles Bird posts a litany of demands of the Administration, naming himself a mamber of the "Dissatisfieds", conservatives who supported George Bush but feel that the war is on track to failure rather than victory if there is not change. I feel his pain here, because though he and I disagreed on which candidate in 2004 was going to get the Job Done, we did agree on what a Done Job should look like.

That said, I doubt his critique is going to gain much traction. Here's why:

Donald Rumsfeld fired, to be replaced with someone who can put together a workable and executable plan for helping deliver a free, peaceful, democratic non-theocracy in Iraq.

Who? Names, please. The only person I can think of is John Abizaid, but is that even remotely going to happen? Morelikely is a cosmetic change of leadership at Dod if anything, which will simply reinformce existing policy. The thing to change is not Rumsfeld, but the President and Vice President's attitude towards the threat. See below.

Enough troops (both Iraq and coalition) to mount successful clear-and-hold counterinsurgency operations.

how many? numbers, please. Where do the troops come from? how soon can they be mobilized? Can present recruiting sustain them? What level of incentives are we prepared to offer? Are we going to lower or raise physical and mental standards for new recruits?

A more concerted effort to get Iraq trained to Level 2 status or better

I think Charles is being unfair here. It seems clear that the best possible effort has already been made to do this. The problem is not lack of effort, its lack of resources.

Better border security, keeping out Iranian infiltrators in the east and Sunni paramilitants in the west.

utterly impossible, as pertains to the Iranian border. As far as Iran goes, the Administration is trying its best to paint Iran as an actionable threat. A diplomatic approach, with security guarantees, would be the better route with Iran. Most of Iran's interference in Iraq, and its nuclear ambition, is driven by its need to have a security posture with respect to us and Israel. The Administration is pursuing a direct confrontational approach, which is the opposite of what is required. Diplomacy with Iran would actually help stabilize Iraq, and the threat to Israel from Iran's nuclear ambitions is a deterrable one through conventional MAD (last I checked, blood enemies India and Pakistan have cooled down their animosity once they both joined the nuclear club, despite analogous hateful rhetoric. After all, autocrats are not bred for suicidal impulses).

A better information war.

Better? in what way? how is our information war underperforming? Specifically? Keep in mind that Hizbollah and the insurgency in Iraq have dramatically different organization and goals.

I believe that I have a single counter-proposal that would, if enacted, immediately improve the prospects for our victory in our long term project in Iraq. And that quite simply is, to be willing to treat each threat as a separable one rather than lump them all together. A refinement of terminology is the first step - especially given the damage that the present lexicon in use does for our prospects.

As Kevin Drum states, we don't have good options. I presently believe that despite popular opinion, keeping a significant troop presence in Iraq will lead to the less-horrible outcome. All outcomes are civil war at this point, though some forms of civil war are more uncivil than others.

I believe that the best we can do is to believe that democracy - even when it results in Islamist gains - is genuinely transformative in the long run. Our troops are, for better or for worse now, the only thing that can buy us that time. Maybe.

Continue reading/discuss democracy: our only hope ...

Chuck Todd at the National Journal talks about Edwards 2008. He points out that the new primary schedule actually favors Edwards over Clinton:

In many ways, this Democratic calendar reminds me of the NCAA basketball tournament which, while exciting, rarely crowns the country's best team as its champ, just the hottest.

Think of this primary calendar schedule as a "draw" and then match up the candidates best positioned to run the table in those states.

Suddenly, you come up with another front-runner with Clinton: and his name isn't Mark Warner or Evan Bayh or John Kerry. It's John Edwards.

Organizationally, Edwards is in the best shape of anyone in Iowa. His close ties to the hotel labor workers give him an interesting leg up in Nevada. South Carolina is a primary he's already won once. About the only state where Edwards is weak is New Hampshire. And, frankly, if he wins Iowa and Nevada, New Hampshire support will gravitate to him. He's planted plenty of support seeds in the state, but he's just never been anyone's 1st or 2nd choice.

But let's forget geography for a minute and look at who is best positioned on the two biggest issues Democrats will debate between now and 2008 -- Iraq and electability. Edwards has become an unabashed opponent of the war and liberal activists in Iowa will remember that. That should play well in New Hampshire as well. He's also heavily courting labor and someday labor is going to matter again in a Democratic primary; at least that's what labor keeps telling itself. But the combination of labor and Iraq positions Edwards very neatly to Clinton's left, where she'll leave a vacuum since she's trying so hard right now to make herself electable in a general.

As for electability, Edwards should be considered too liberal to win a general. Then again, there's something about a southern accent which sends voters a moderate message. And that's always served Edwards well. Democratic primary voters are very much like Republican primary voters; they don't nominate the most electable, they nominate the most electable liberal (Republicans usually find the most electable conservative).

There's some irony in the DNC's calendar compromise which ended up favoring one candidate over every other (in this case Edwards) -- it's that he doesn't have a lot of defenders/diehards looking out for him in the Democratic Party inner-circle. This calendar order came together because of individual power centers each early state had (or didn't have). South Carolina had Don and Carol Khare Fowler and Nevada had Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D). Clinton's folks tried (and failed) to shift the Southern primary away from South Carolina to Alabama.

Of course, the real test of the law of unintended consequences will be in about 18 months when we look back and realize that "so-and-so" won or lost because of something in this calendar configuration that we hadn't realized. But from what we know now, this new calendar is a clear advantage for Edwards and a taller hurdle for Clinton.

There's a lot to like about Edwards. He's got the charisma and the empathy down, of course. But he also has a lot more depth than most realize. During the 2004 campaign he was the only candidate who had devoted any effort to poverty. He was the sole primary candidate who didn't try to tear Dean down. During the campaign as veep nominee, he worked his rear end off in the heartland, doing the small town stops and interacting directly with the people, and this is probably the main reason that the margin was so close.

Unless Gore enters the race, Edwards is more likely to be the anti-Hillary than Warner. And I wouldn't be surprised to see Edwards in the veep slot regardless.

Continue reading/discuss the case for Edwards ...

The concensus is that the Lebanon-Israeli conflict was a complete debacle. At the outset of the conflict, I mourned that Hizbollah was winning, again. It's worth reading Greg Djerjian for the definitive post-"cease fire" analysis in terms of what strategic advantage Israel has lost. Abu Aardvark has some observations about what the Arab press is saying. And Charles Malik has a morose look at the political scene in Lebanon.

Still, despite all the ways in which Israel came out the worse for its efforts, I can point to a few positives.

1. Some argue that the "myth of Israeli invincibility" with respect to conventional arms is now shaken. I argue otherwise: Israel showed that it could destroy Lebanon. Don't imagine for a moment that the message was not received in Damascus. As Razib pointed out, political rulers in Arab countries are not bred for suicidal impulses. And of course the elephant in the room is Israel's nuclear weapons, which everyone knows exist and which were not used. If anything, the take-home message is: Israel's not going anywhere, least of all the sea. Even Hizbollah's vaunted victory over Israel was in a strictly defensive context.

2. Even greater contempt for Arab regimes by the Arab people. Abu Aardvark touches on this in more detail, but in a nutshell the Arab regimes basically own-goaled themselves from a PR perspective. The general view is that Arab rulers are totally irrelevant when it comes to the defense of the Arab polity. From Israel's perspective this is a tremendously important development.

3. Iran is actually under increased scrutiny. The rise of Hizbollah and Nasrallah to folk hero status means that the Arab regimes see Iran as an even bigger threat to what they care about - not Islam, but rather their hold on power (see Point 2 above). Iranian money is flooding Lebanon right now which guarantees that they will have tremendous influence over Lebanon's future (another wasted opportunity by the US, but don't get me started). But more broadly speaking, for the region as a whole, Iran is now firmly on the threat radar. And the overblown promises of doomsday on Aug 22nd haven't exactly come to pass either.

Overall, the point is that the Israel-Lebanon conflict served to throw pressure on the old fault lines of division in teh region - and in some cases, those fault lines are useful in fracturing the threat facing Israel. When everyone who hates Israel hates each other just as much, then part of that hate energy is diffused.

Continue reading/discuss Hizbollah won, but Israel didn't lose ...

A friend of mine from church recently sent me an article by Bill McKibben entitled "The Christian Paradox" that was published in Harpers last summer. After reading the article, I realized that I have read many similar articles over the past couple of years. The gist of the article is that while most Americans claim to be Christians, they don't appear to be following Christ's commands, particularly as it relates to caring for the poor.

This premise is central to the Religious Left's critique of our culture, as often expressed by people such as Jim Wallis or Ron Sider.

Of course many on the Religious Right counter that laissez-faire capitalism is the only way to provide for the poor.

Both groups are wrong and I am going to take this opportunity to show why.


The Religious Left's Case on Poverty
Bill McKibben gets to the heart of the issue by asking this question:

"What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?"

Bill then provides the answer:

"In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it’s that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention."

Jim Wallis echoed many of these thoughts in a press conference last year calling for a "moral budget":

“As this moral battle for the budget unfolds, I am calling on members of Congress, some of whom make much out of their faith, to start some bible studies before they cast votes to cut food stamps, Medicaid, child care and more that hurt the weakest in our nation. The faith community is drawing a moral line in the sand against these priorities. I call on political leaders to show political will in standing up for ‘the least of these,’ as Jesus reminds us to do.”

A common refrain from the Religious Left is that the federal government is the primary dispenser of charity and that the amount of or lack of federal funding directed at poverty is a prime indication of our morality as a people and nation.

I believe that there are a number of problems with this approach ranging from the practical to the spiritual.


Middleman Politics
Almost all industries have realized over the past couple of decades that the idea of removing the middleman is an attractive idea. Most people have come to realize that middlemen in business processes often serve little interest other than their own in creating friction in order to make money. This isn't to say that all middlemen are bad or are not valuable, but I believe that there is a cost involved in using middlemen.

As it relates to poverty reduction, government fills the role of the middleman. And no middleman in all of history has created more friction and additional cost than the federal government. Non-profit charities are often rated by their ability to direct the highest percentage possible of donated funds to those in need. The higher the administrative costs are, the less money goes to those the charity intends to help.

If the federal government was rated in the same manner, it would fail tremendously. A tremendous portion of money raised (i.e. taxes) for those in need (i.e. welfare recipients) actually goes to pay the salaries of government employees, retirement accounts, an unreal amount of office space, etc. If the US federal government actually were a non-profit charity, it would be on the cover of Time magazine for defrauding its donors.

Coercion is not charity
I think that most Christians would agree that more should be done to help the poor and oppressed. I believe that it is disingenuous for the Religious Left to suggest that true Christian charity involves the government.

The Religious Left is completely correct when they say that Christians are commanded to help the poor. I could document all of the references in the Bible that talk about helping the poor but I would run out of room. It is absolutely clear that Christians are commanded to give charity to those in need.

However....government aid is not charity. Let me repeat: government aid is not charity. It doesn't even have the ability to be charity.

By its very nature, government is coercive. That it, it has the power of the sword to command people to action. Almost everything the government does comes with the implication that if one goes against the government, they will be forcibly made to do as the government requires. It doesn't make sense for the Religious Left to speak of helping the poor by the country giving more. It is too easy to be generous with other people's money.

I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like charity to me. Forcibly taking money from some to give to others? If you boil down government aid to its root, this is what you have. While Christians are certainly commanded to "render unto Caesar", I can see no justification whatsoever that helping the poor involves taking from others by force.

Missing the point
I was thinking about this issue a few months ago and realized that there is a paradox going on here. On one hand, Jesus Christ commands Christians to help the poor. Yet Jesus also says that "the poor will always be with you."

I suppose that there are some who would use this latter reference as an excuse to do nothing to help the poor. But I think most would agree that this isn't the case. But isn't it fruitless to try to end poverty since Jesus said that we would always have poor among us?

This made me think that there is more to this than is on the surface. Why would Jesus ask people to do something that he knew they would fail at?

I believe that Jesus intended great good to occur in more than one way when he commanded Christians to help the poor. Not only did he want to see actual physical suffering alleviated, but I believe that he knew that great spiritual good would come to both those helping the poor and the poor themselves through the actions of charity.

Ask anyone who has spent time working in a soup kitchen or building a house for the homeless and they will tell you how good it made them feel. I don't think that we should be motivated by the promise of feeling good about ourselves, but I don't think there is any denying that great good does come from helping those in need. There also tends to be a relationship between how close we get to those in need and how we feel about our works of charity. Spending time with an inner-city fatherless child can have a tremendous impact upon our lives in addition to the positive impact on the child's life. However, in those cases where we simply give money to a charity (still a laudable action), the impact upon us and those in need is lessoned.

So how much are we missing when we delegate charity to the government? How easy does it then become to avoid the poor and avoid getting messy with other people's lives? How easy do it become for the poor to resent those better off in society that they have little interaction with? How easy does it become for some to foment class warfare?

The Religious Right's Case on Poverty
To this point, I have focused on how the Religious Left approaches the issue of poverty. But the Religious Right certainly hasn't gotten this issue correct either.

Those on the Right generally argue that free-market capitalism is the only way to address poverty. Many say that we should simply end all government aid and that private organizations such as churches will take over. I earlier accused the Religious Left of being disingenuous, but at this point the Religious Right outdoes them. Does anyone actually believe this? If this were the case, wouldn't we have already seen a tremendous reduction in those living in poverty?

Two things have occurred to free-market capitalism that is hampering its ability to care for the poor.

Corporatism
Much that passes for capitalism these days isn't. In fact, capitalism has often become corporatism. That is, instead of an economic system based upon freedom, we have moved towards an economic system set up for the benefit of large corporations.

I could write a book on all the ways we as a society give money to large corporations. While I have nothing against big business per se, I am baffled at how we as a society have gone to great lengths to subsidize large businesses through tax breaks, various business incentives, and the like. While I don't think that direct government aid to the poor is a good solution, it is far better than plowing money into big business.

Morality
One thing that many proponents of capitalism often forget is the origins of capitalism. It is often forgotten that the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, was a moral philosopher who wrote almost as much regarding ethics as he did on economics. Smith conceived of free-market economics taking place in an environment filled with exhortations and expectations of morality.

While "The Wealth of Nations" is a much better known work today, Adam Smith's "The Theory of the Moral Sentiments" is what made his career. In this book, Smith argued that ethics didn't derive from law or rational thought, but that people were born naturally with a moral sense. It was this moral sense that acted as a restraint upon the baser impulses of man to exploit others in an economic system.

Unfortunately, many proponents of capitalism, especially libertarians, have forgotten these origins of the system. Too often capitalism is presented as simply the working out of people's self-interest. This ultra-individualistic approach is doomed to fail.

Summary
So what is the answer? How should the Religious Left and Religious Right approach the issue of poverty?

One would hope that those on the Left and Right could put down their "culture war" weapons and spend time, money, and resources giving sacrificially to those in need to the point that there was little left for the government to do. I would love to see broad coalitions put aside their differences to tackle the issue of poverty.

Continue reading/discuss The Politics of Poverty ...

The Houston Chron has a short piece about Gore's Current.TV project, noting that it is making a profit, and more importantly:

But the media landscape has shifted in the past year as video-sharing sites like YouTube.com revealed an audience for viewer-created entertainment. Current has since led the industry in the commercialization of that concept, with its viewers creating ads for its leading advertisers. Half of Toyota and Sony's commercials on Current are made by the people watching them, giving advertisers a window into the mind-set of the coveted younger demographic.

Why is this newsworthy, you ask?

 

Remember that Current.TV initially only went to 17 million homes; It's now in 30 million homes. Further growth is inevitable, and significant considering that YouTube's entire registered user base is only 6 million. And all the hype about the media center aside, people still watch more TV than they do videos on the internet.

The article addresses this point directly, but then goes on to make a mistake in my opinion:

But while Current may have been ahead of the curve on this trend, the next challenge it confronts is tougher: Many in the channel's targeted 18- to 34-year-old demographic may not be able to afford the premium-tier service of some digital cable systems, where Current is carried. Critics continue to ask:

Is Current focused on the wrong medium?

Current "caught the (viewer-created content) trend early, but it is kind of surfing by them," said John Higgins, business editor at Broadcasting & Cable magazine, a trade publication for the television industry. "These guys (at Current) had all the right ideas and all the same machinery in place that YouTube did, but they didn't quite do it. Lightning struck 10 feet to the left of them."

Hyatt said Current is trying to position itself as the thinking person's YouTube — a "premium offering" where the best of user-generated content will gravitate to TV.

Part of Current's strategy is rooted in the belief that while YouTube may be serving up 100 million videos a day to 6 million visitors, the 18-to-34 set still watches and appreciates a lot of television.

But while that age group watches an average of three hours and 55 minutes a day, that's far less than older folks watch.

The over-50 crowd sees nearly six hours daily, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Yet, in another sign that media consumption habits are unpredictable, the audience for short videos may not be as young as perceived. The highest percentage of YouTube's audience is between 35 and 49 years old, according to June measurements by Nielsen/NetRatings.

However, those 18-35 year olds are in households that overlap with the older demographic. And, the false competition with YouTube that the article tries to insist on is not neccessarily required; YouTibe's revenue stream is totally separate from Current, one could easily see Current do a regular Best of the Web segment from YouTube. YT would get free advertising to a much larger audience and Current would get content. Theres nothing inherently adversarial about the two markets.

Why Current matters is because if the idea takes off, it becomes a true video-blog arena where anyone can have their say. TV does have better penetration than the web. The key to an informed public debate is people, debating in public, and there's simply no better medium than television.

Continue reading/discuss Current.tv doing better than expected ...

I found this very interesting new item about a suspected gay wedding in Saudi Arabia. While there are some who think that the United States is obsessed with sex and is stridently homophobic, nothing can compare with Muslim attitudes towards homosexuals.

Publicly claiming to be homosexual in a Muslim country usually equals death. So why is it that rarely does one hear the homosexual community here in America speaking out against Muslim countries? Am I missing something here?

Continue reading/discuss Gay Saudi Arabia ...

Kevin Drum and his readers at The Washington Monthly have added a new term to the blogger lexicon: "nutpicking"

Last night I held a contest to create a name for the moronic practice of trawling through open comment threads in order to find a few wackjobs who can be held up as evidence that liberals are nuts. It's both lazy and self-refuting, since if the best evidence of wackjobism you can find is a few anonymous nutballs commenting on a blog, then the particular brand of wackjobism you're complaining about must not be very widespread after all.

I find this actually to be a fairly cogent observation on human behavior. I am often on the defensive against nutpickers who for example interpret Islam through the narrow lens of the violent fringe, and Jews, Catholics, Italians, and pretty every other identity group has had to deal with much the same phenomenon. Drum's Law as stated above is focused more on politics becuse it's a naturally binarized arena in which demonization of the Other is the currency of the realm - one needn't look far to see examples. It seems like it should be easier to see what the decent majority has in common rather than focus on the differences at the extremes, but in truth the short-term advantage to be gained by nutpicking is just too irrestible. Purple politics is about making the effort.

Continue reading/discuss nutpicking ...

This is an expansion of my comments under Razib's "wrong reason" thread. Nothing I will say here is particularly new or original. It's all been noted by others, here and elsewhere.

I'm happy to repeat these simple points, once again, because they are true, and because by repeating them enough it might be, perhaps, possible to counter the flood of inflammatory rhetoric that we hear, day after day, from folks who are in whole-hearted agreement with the current direction of US policy.

Lots of folks like to compare our present situation with WWII. They like the feeling of moral purpose associated with WWII. They like the clear and unambiguous distinction between good guys and bad guys. They like the memory of the US as a the champion of liberty and the savior of the free world.

Let's compare what we, as a nation, faced at the outset of WWII, and what we face now.

More below...
Our enemy in WWII were the major fascist states: Japan, Germany, and Italy. Japan and Germany, our primary enemies, were extraordinarily powerful nations. They commanded enormous military power and economic might.

Japan and Germany were committed, as a matter of both ideological principle and fact, to an aggressive campaign of military conquest of their neighbors. They were also engaged, explicitly, in the enslavement or extermination of the peoples they conquered. They were aggressive, enormously powerful nations, motivated by a cruel and authoritarian ideology.

Who is our enemy now?

Our direct enemy is Al Qaeda. They like to kill Americans. They will kill as many as they can. They have a very good operational praxis, they've provided tens of thousands of guys with good military training, and they have a lot of money to spend.

What they don't have, remotely, is the means to defeat the US. They cannot conquer us militarily, they cannot occupy or rule us, they cannot defeat us in any meaningful way. They can kill Americans. That's it.

Let's be crass for a moment. Humor me.

9/11 -- just under 3,000 dead.

WWII -- a little over 400,000 military deaths. 11,200 civilian deaths. 3.2 of every thousand people in the total US population were killed.

Do you know 300 people? If we were as far into WWII as we are into the "global war on terror", one of them would be dead.

As an aside -- if you think I am taking the threat of terror lightly, I can assure you I am not. From my little town of 20,000, four were killed on 9/11. My cousin, who works on Wall St, went missing for much of the day. He turned up when he walked across the bridge to Brooklyn and phoned home. I don't take it lightly.

However, this is not WWII.

Allow me to put a point on this.

There are a lot of folks who like to invoke what they see as the moral purpose of WWII to support our current foreign policy.

During WWII, the total population of the US was about 130 million. During WWII, over 16 million -- well over 10% -- of the population was in uniform. There were over 400,000 military deaths, and over 11,000 civilian deaths.

Relative to today's US population, that would be about 35 million people in uniform, over 900,000 -- almost a million -- military deaths, and over 25,000 civilian deaths.

Who among those claiming a "moral equivalence" to WWII is putting on a uniform?
Who is sending their son or daughter into harms way?
Who has a gold star in their window?
Who has willingly submitted to, or even suggested, rationing of any luxury good, gasoline, metals, or any other material necessary to prosecuting a war?
Who has given up butter for margarine?
Who is collecting tin foil wrappers from gum and candy bars?
Who is buying war bonds?
Who is putting off the purchase of a vehicle, a washing machine, a couch, a television?

In short, who is making any sacrifice, of any kind, to support what they claim is an existential fight for the survival of this nation?

Of those who wish to claim the moral purpose of WWII for our current adventures, I see few or none who are actually willing to step up and call for anything remotely -- remotely -- like the level of commitment or sacrifice that our parents and grandparents willingly shouldered during WWII.

Comparisons to WWII are a rhetorical device intended to build popular support for an agenda that has nothing whatsoever in common with that of WWII. At best, those who make the comparison indulge in cheap nostalgia. At worst, they exploit the memory of real sacrifice and commitment for, let us say, less worthy ends.

This is not WWII. If it were, every able bodied American below the age of 40 would be in uniform. If it were, we would gladly walk, take public transportation, or ride our bikes to work. If it were, the industrial infrastructure of this country would be dedicated to producing material essential to the war effort, rather than creating consumer goods.

None of the above is true. So I say folks that want to talk WWII are just blowing hot air.

I, personally, would like them to shut up and deal with what is, actually, before us, here and now.

My father, stepfather, and father-in-law spent their youth overseas fighting, often in conditions of extreme deprivation. My uncle's bones are still somewhere in Germany, noone knows where. My mother in law spent the war years building Corsairs in Akron OH. My mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles spent the war years buying war bonds, raising their own vegetables in victory gardens, and living with rationing, bad food, and other minor but real forms of deprivation, to support the war effort.

Want to claim the moral mantle of WWII? Do as they did. Otherwise, I will thank you to show some humility and dummy up.

Thanks -

Continue reading/discuss talking WWII ...

This is becoming so routine, that barely anyone even thinks it's news anymore. 35 dead in Najaf:

A suicide bomb attack at a market in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf has killed at least 35 people and injured more than 90 others.

Reports say the bomber detonated a belt of explosives at a police checkpoint.

The attack occurred near the Imam Ali shrine, one of the most sacred Shia Muslim sites. A Sunni insurgent group claimed it had carried out the bombing.

Michael Yon - who is one of the few voices, another being Michael Totten, who can say that things aren't just peachy-keen in Iraq and not be immeddiately castigated as a dhimmicrat-appeaser by the conservative pro-war blogsphere, has been sounding this alarm for a year. And he sounds it again:

For the past year I have steadily been warning that if we do not act now Iraq’s smoldering civil war could burn out of control. Recently, even the Army Public Affairs Office seems to recognize this. Although many commanders have asked that I return to Iraq and report on their efforts and progress, PAO Officers such as LTC Barry Johnson in Baghdad have turned down my embed requests.

It bears repeating, despite the incredible progress that has been made in Iraq; we are in great peril of losing the war entirely. Having seen and reported on how it doesn’t have to end this way, because there are units and leaders in our military who know how to succeed in Iraq, who have won the peace for communities once considered as dangerous as Baghdad, I have always maintained a hope of the eventual success of the mission citing conditions on the ground as justification. Unfortunately, given what we have for information sources, now may have passed. Now could be yesterday, or last month, or even last year. Now it may be too late.

General John Abizaid, whom I hold in high regard, has testified to Congress that Iraq is closer to civil war than ever before:

"I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war," he said. "Al-Qaida terrorists, insurgents and Shia' militia militants compete to plunge the country into civil war. It is a decisive time in Baghdad and it requires decisive Iraqi action with our clear support."

That's the straight talk from in the field. But the Administration - via Rumsfeld - remains in denial:

Q: Is the country closer to a civil war?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is -- there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I'm not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.

As for the President, he isn't even spinning like Rummy - his rhetoric seems completely detached from the facts on the ground.

And some people wonder why Djerjian has been "a daily one-note on how there are no grownups in charge" ? The grownups are in the field, not in charge. That's the opposite of how it should be.

And yes, everything IS connected. Our failure of diplomacy in Lebanon could have serious consequences in Iraq.

I was against the Iraq war. But I have been steadfast in my belief that having occupied Iraq, our troops in Iraq have been a force for more stability than their absence would be. But we are fast approaching a point - and may have even passed it - where that presence is more harmful than good. And I am drawn inexorably towards the withdrawal camp.

It has long been true that invading Iraq was an "own-goal" in the war on Terror. The question is, as Iraq slides towards civil war and the Administration remains oblivious, has our occupation become an "own goal" as well?

Continue reading/discuss civil war in Iraq ...

A friend with whom I discuss politics from time to time on email asked me yesterday:

instead of standing with the president on some issues (i think you said "uncritically"), you feel that joe should have "uncritically" followed every single aspect of the democratic "team" platform?

no, not at all - and in fact there are plenty of Dem politicos who take stands opposite to the mainstream and who are in fact celebrated for it. Harry Reid is pro-life, and he is Minority leader. Governor Brian Schweitzer is pro-gun. Tim Roemer (who recently lost his congressional seat to a GOP candidate) is really, really strong on defense. Many other Dem politicos voted just like Lieberman - including Clinton and Kerry! but also many many others too, all of whom never came under fire the way Joe did.

And here's the single reason why. When any of the rank and file Dems disagree with the party on an issue, they say, "I believe in XYZ. I know that there is debate on XYZ within the party, and this is my position. I think that my belief in XYZ is good for my district because ABC..."

When Joe talks about the issue (and here XYZ is understood to primarily be his uncritical acceptance of every single aspect of how the President pursues the war on terror - not just the vote for war, but also every decision made afterwards, and especially the president's nonexistent stance to diplomacy towards our national interests in the Middle East. For more on this, read Djerjian), Joe's disagreement runs more like this:

"I, Joe Lieberman, believe in XYZ, and i think it is shameful that my fellow Democrats disagree with me, and indicates a deeper problem within my party that I am courageously seeking to change. I think that the debate on XYZ within the party is harmful to our national interest and that the debate needs to stop. I think that my belief in XYZ is good for the nation because I am right and the Democrats in general are wrong - I am the "right" kind of Democrat and they are the wrong kind."

Now, you may certainly agree that the Democrats are wrong on issue XYZ. And you may even agree that the debate on XYZ is harmful to the national interest. But what is unconscionable is how Joe uses the rest of what is ostensibly his own party as his foil to advance his political career. He campaigns as a Democrat at the expense of other Democrats. And that's not honorable behavior.

And neither is it smart behavior. By repeatedly casting his own party as in the wrong, every attempt he makes to be "bipartisan" - not just Iraq, but also for example on Social Security privatization, where he repeated the President's false claim that every year we don't "fix" Social Security adds $600 billion to the deficit - gives the President political cover for his own agenda, which is in marked contrast to all the progressive principles that Joe reliably votes for. I am not saying Joe doesn't believe in his votes; I am saying he isn't acting to preserve their meaning. He is a tool, and he doesn't realize it, and in fact believes himself to be righteous for it.

What I expect of both parties' politicos is honor. I want both parties to be diverse in their views but consistent and united in their politics. That is because - when both are correctly in opposition - they represent an important check and balance upon the system. I have argued before that I am against methods like Instant Runoff Voting (which would empower third paries) and abolishing the electoral college on these grounds. I am also for repeal of the 17th Amendment, as many of you well know.

So should a Dem politico be an uncritical follower of the mainstream platform? No. But should they be 1. honorable and 2. smart? Yes. If you want to understand why Democrats voted Lieberman out of office, and voted Lamont in, the above is really the key.

The CT primary wasn't some Rovian plot directed by Daily Kos. This wasn't even a revolution. It was a regression to the way things are supposed to be - a party should choose its elected reps based on their commitment to the party. Only then can those representatives be trusted to vote their ideals.

Continue reading/discuss a big tent needs strong poles ...

Most you know about the plot that was caught in time. The suspects are brown British born Muslims. This is speaks to my general concerns that the "War on Terror" looks abroad when I suspect that the real monster is lurking within the beast. Before we transform foreign cultures we need to absorb some of our own subcultures.

Continue reading/discuss The "Nation Building" angle ...

Below Aziz exhorts Joe Lieberman not to run as an independent. Why? There seem to be two general points. First, Lieberman is clearly out to "get his." This isn't a man of pragmatic principle, as his refusal to stop running for the Senate in 2000 when he was on the ticket as VP with Al Gore showed. But there is a stronger point, so I'll quote Aziz:

There is no dishonor in submission to the will of the people. That is the essence of democracy. I hope that Joe realizes that public service is about the public, not the servant. I hope that he realizes that he should follow the example of Al Gore.

Democrats have reason to be angry with Joe, but "the people"? I'm not a Democrat, so I look at this with relative disinterest. The key, for me, is that political parties do not have automatic legitimacy, what I render to the republic I will never render to a party. In fact, this republic was not founded with political parties in mind, the rise of the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans took many such as George Washington by surprise. I believe political parties have a large role to play in our democratic system, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for the republic in and of themselves. They emerge out of the dirty aspects of social coalitions and organized mobs. Joe Lieberman is an opportunist, but he is a product of the party system. This is the nature of the beast. When the scorpion stings the frog which carries it upon its back across the river one shouldn't be surprised.

Continue reading/discuss Joe blow... *shrug* ...

On the anniversary of 9-11, I wrote of the 2000 election that in the end, Bush was uniquely positioned to win, and Gore uniquely positioned to concede (in possibility the greatest concession speech in history).

I remember thinking in 2000 that while Gore was out there, trying to win, that Joe was nowhere to be seen - especially in the critical post-election Florida limbo. Joe wasn't invested in winnning, just being the winner, and so he left Al to do the dirty work. Many on the right castigated Gore for endorsing Dean over Joe in 2004 and now refusing to support Joe against Lamont, but the simple truth is that Joe abandoned Al, not the other way around.

Now, the Democratic party voters of Connecticut have spoken; they want Lamont, not Joe, to represent them. And Joe will run as an independent. I can't help but make the connection between the lack of commitment to his Party today and the lack of commitment in 2000.

Lieberman lost this race by less than 5 points. The sole reason he lost, in other words, was his public decision to run as an indy should he lose this primary. It was hubris, plain and simple, and it cost him.

There is no dishonor in submission to the will of the people. That is the essence of democracy. I hope that Joe realizes that public service is about the public, not the servant. I hope that he realizes that he should follow the example of Al Gore. Lamont won this primary with honor, and now it is finished.

Concede, Joe. Or bear the title of Sore Loserman as your political legacy.

Continue reading/discuss concede, Joe ...

Just to clear up confusions....


1) Lebanon - don't really care too much. Israel probably overreacted, but so what? Thousands die in an African country in a week and there is a back page story, while if you are a Jew or killed by a Jew it has far greater significance? Well, of course it does matter more, but not that much more (at least to me). Lebanese Christians are economically productive, they'd be a good refugee group for most countries to absorb.

2) Iran - Don't take the rants literally. No need to invade right now, but keep all options open. Rattle enough to make the bluff seem quasi-credible.

3) Syria - Try and keep the Alawites in power. We've got a sectarian melee in Iraq, no need for one in Syria.

4) Iraq - Work behind the scenes toward partition and withdrawl within the next 5 years.

5) Afghanistan - ratchet up the hunt. Substantively it might not matter if Osama and Ayman are killed, but style is substance in terms of symbolism. The next stage of the terror will probably be due to a local cell operating independently, but at least kill their heroes and sap some of their will.

6) Keep supporting Arab autocracies for at least the next generation. Work toward economic liberalization so that a normal civil society can develop.

7) Big picture in regards to terror, use Marc Sagemen's model in Understanding Terror Networks, knock out the nodes and keep killing key individuals. Stop mass immigration from Muslim countries into the West, work to halt arranged marriages between citizens and non-citizens which perpetuate ghettos, and aggressively reassert the universality and primacy of Enlightenment values within the spatial bounds of the West. Do favor immigration of well a number of educated Muslims into Western countries so as to cultivate a nucleus of Western influenced thinkers who might eventually influence the shape of culture in their lands of origin. The key to mitigating the Islamist threat is to the change the distribution of mentalities within Muslim countries so that Islamists are so marginal that they "can't live off the land."

Yes, the West is somewhat flaccid in terms of its cultural assertion right now, but I think that a reemergence of the vision of JS Mill is more likely than the success of the conquest and forced transformation of the Muslim world.

Continue reading/discuss Where I stand ...

Over the past few days I've really lashed into what I perceive to be the un-reality-based foreign policy espoused by the Right in these United States. But, I do want to give notice: the tyranny of the heart is not absent on the Left either! But while the Right dreams fantasies abroad the Left believes in a domestic policy blinkered by eternal optimism about human nature and cultural robusticity. I am not going to hit this hard, but I point you to Nick Thompson's senior thesis at Stanford, Tension Over Immigration and the Future of the Environmental Movement. I felt Nick pussy-footed around the genuine conflict and pretended at the end as if no hard choices were going to have to be made, so I emailed him back in the late 1990s about this conflict, and he plainly dodged. Well, I won't try to dodge in the future.

Continue reading/discuss Fire from the center ...

This blog can now be accessed at the mirror: http://www.nationbuilding.org.

Continue reading/discuss Technical note ...

Over the past few weeks I have been expressing what I believe is the irrational and emotive discourse which seems to pervade the political blogosphere. From this you might conclude that I believe one should guide one's life by the light of reason, and that a cold-blooded calculus must be our ground of being. Well, of course I don't believe this, rather, I hold that reason and emotion complement each othr, have different roles to play in the way we make decisions. In evolutionary biology there is often a distinction between between the ultimate and the proximate. The former is the tendency for fitness to increase within a population by the tautological nature of natural selection, that which begets in this generation perpetuates the generations to come. The latter is the means, the mechanism, the shorter term strategies through which one attains ultimate aims. I believe that in our personal political and moral landscape emotion should be skewed toward the ultimate, and reason toward the proximate. In the short term day to day reason must hold emotion by the leash, but over the long term reason is simply emotion's dog of war, obeying the injunctions of the heart.


To illustrate why I believe that there is an unfortunate conflation of the role of reason and emotion in modern politics, and in foreign policy, consider the circumstance where several young thugs confront you on your way to school. They hurl insults at you, and push you to the ground. How do you feel? You are enraged, furious, and perhaps fearful. How do you react? You could charge them, unleash your fury, but despite the short term satisfaction it would get you nothing but a bloody nose beause of the nature of the battle. On the other hand, you could hold your tongue and practice short term stoicism. That day you could discuss the situation with your friends, explain your dilemna, and proceed upon a cold blooded course of action. The next day when the thugs confronted you your friends could swing around the block and beat the living crap out of them, you could stand upon the lead thug's chest and kick him the face. Ah, what a sweet prize delaying unleashing your emotion for one day yields! I will be candid and admit that this scenario is taken from my own lfe, and it was delicious to be victorious and impose my brutal judgement upon those who taunted me. I will leave the details to your imagination. Never again did my antagonist say a word to me!

So please note, even if I express caution in the short term, never doubt that I am unaware of the passions and furies which drive a man to violence, I am no pacifist in my worldview nor in my own personal life. But violence must be wielded with care, caution and forethought.

Continue reading/discuss Leashing and unleashing ...

The Jerusalem Post looks at the war by the numbers, which paint an asymmetric picture indeed. Using their data, we see that it takes 10 sorties by the IAF to kill one Lebanese, and 24 rockets to kill one Israeli. Despite the vast disparity of tecchnologic force and weapon precision, the collateral damage/military kill ratio on both sides is 1:1 - the disparity only affects the magnitude of the kill rate (a factor of 10), not the accuracy. The IAF chiefs admit openly that air power alone won't suppress rocket fire, which is quite a rhetorical about-face from when the war began.

Hezbollah's roots in Lebanon run deep, as this fascinating article on its social service network demonstrates. Meanwhile, Syria's ambassador to the US argues in a lonely op-ed that in refusing to engage in any diplomacy with Syria, the US "continues to lose ability to influence a major player in the Middle East". His question - does isolating Syria really advance our stategic interests? - is moot I guess.

And this lengthy essay by Wesley Clark on the failure of the Administration to engage the root case of violence in the middle east, from back in May, strikes me as rather prescient given what has transpired since.

Continue reading/discuss essential reading ...

I'm feeling kind of strange, blogging about political and foreign policy issues. I'll be honest, I don't follow this stuff anymore, I have a hard time getting my head wrapped around a lot of topics and I don't expend much CPU cycles to the bread & butter of the political blogosphere. But a few points:

1) I've been motivated to make some negative comments about what I perceive to be unhinged fantasists because even if I don't focus on this area much I can spot incorrect assumptions since those assumptions are derived broadly from other disciplines.

2) Several individuals in a thread below referred to the potentiality of Islamists. As I said to Dean, England made its craven peace with Germany 1 year before war. Fascist brownshirts had been terrorizing Jews, Austria had been annexed and the Rhine remilitarized. Germany had already been involved in a World War. The comparison of the potentiality of threat seems a very stretched analogy to what had been a real threat since the fall of Bismarck. In fact, some of the potentialists seem to be making Anselm's Ontological argument for foreign policy: vulgarly, if one can conceive of a threat in the future, that threat must exist in the present.

3) Dean referred to Okham's Razor below in regards to parsimony. My rejoinder is that Okham's Razor holds insofar as one must not add unnecessary parameters! In behavior genetics it is more parsimonious to assume that genes, or environment, are responsible for all behavioral differences. But the reality is that genes and environment, as well as their interactions, play important necessary roles. We do not multiply unnecessary causes, but we do continue to add parameters so long as it yields more explanatory power.

4) Where does this leave us with the topic at hand? First, on the theoretical level we must examine this issue from more than realpolitik modelling of nations as rational actors, or the historical longview, or pop psychology, rather, we must synthesize as many disciplinary lenses as possible to form the best model possible. Why is this relevant? Because the leaders of Iran (for example) are humans, with human motivations, biases, blindnesses and outlooks. My reading of the cognitive psychology of religion for example leads me to the conclusion that some are overreading the millenarian rhetoric that is coming out of Iran, just as some Europeans become overwrought at the influence of radical Protestantism, that is, evangelical Christianity, in US politics.

5) Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. Sometimes it isn't. The past 3 years have shifted my priors in terms of who to believe, or not believe. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Continue reading/discuss Wow, I'm a political blogger! ...

No matter the reality that reason is imperfect because our own reasoning process is fraught with "noise" introduced by our biases in the form of slanted premises and unexposed assumptions I believe it is a good place to start, sometimes. John Emerson in the comments says this:

The idea that militant Islam is a threat equal to Nazi Germany or the USSR, or might become that big a threat, is assumed by many and perhaps most hawks, and it really underlies the whole Iraq War. That idea is almost impossible to argue in detail and I've seldom or never seen it argued. It's just pure fantasy.

I don't know if it is pure fantasy, but yes, I do think that to a great extent it is fantasy. I've believed this from the fall of 2004 when I extended my reading to non-science blogs. Many of the individuals expressing a hawkish perspective claim a historical perspective, but as someone who loves history for its own sake I tend to find their analyses grounded in biased and minimal data points. Additionally, they do not avail themselves of the full range of insight from the human sciences, in particular psychology.


In Aziz's post below he outlines a sober and realistic plan for peace. Over at Dean Esmay's blog Aziz called out for peace proposals, and the responses were often quite unhinged. They are not necessarily unhinged because they lack reasoning powers, but, their assumptions are simply detached from reality. This is not Hitler's Germany, the corruption of one of the premier nation-states of the modern world. This is not the USSR, the #2 world power of the 20th century. This is not World War III. But like religious beliefs it does not seem that these assumptions are open to reasonable or rational decomposition. What to do? Make alliances with those grounded in reality. Speak to the public and others who might be unsure. Sometimes it is time to write off the True Believer.

Continue reading/discuss Wrong reason ...

Below, the outlines of a workable plan for peace in the middle east:

A Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with minor rectifications agreed upon between Palestine and Israel.

· Palestinians giving up the right of return and Israel reciprocating by removing its settlements in the West Bank, again with rectifications as mutually agreed. Those displaced on both sides would receive compensation from the international community.

· King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia unambiguously reconfirming his 2002 pledge that the Arab world is prepared to enter into full normal relations with Israel upon its withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967.

· Egypt and Saudi Arabia working with the Palestinian Authority to put together a government along the lines of the 18-point agreement reached between Hamas and Fatah prisoners in Israeli jails in June. This government would negotiate for the Authority.

· Deployment, as part of a cease-fire, of a robust international force in southern Lebanon.

· Deployment of another international force to facilitate and supervise traffic to and from Gaza and the West Bank.

· Designation of Jerusalem as the shared capital of Israel and Palestine, with appropriate international guarantees of freedom of movement and civic life in the city.

Outline courtesy of Brent Scowcroft. Agreeable? Possible? Practical? Just? Discuss.

Continue reading/discuss peace in the middle east ...

One of the reasons that I don't blog about politics is that it seems that the discourse seems to be out of this world, literally. Consider this from Roger L. Simon:

If that's what you're looking for, play chess. In order to win WWII, we ended up destroying Tokyo and Dresden. What is going on in Lebanon is nothing at all by comparison, yet the enemy, Hezbollah-Iran, etc., is equally dangerous, perhaps more so.

Meanwhile, you have have Michael Totten, who though his heart is in the right place, seems to be rather obsessed with Israel trading in a local conflagoration for a regional war against both Syria and Iran. Over at The American Scence, one commenter who finds Michael Ledeen "reasonable" and "prudent" asks why we've let the Alawite dominated Assad dictatorship last so long?

Noah Millman has the answers to this, and much more. Noah manages to present the situation in an analytic fashion peppered with copious data points and make clear his own bias while not coming off as unhinged. That's important. When it comes to chemistry or mathematics we can keep our cool, but when it comes to foreign policy, where lives and tax dollars are at stake, we let our emotions get the better of us. Of course this happens in many public policy discussions. The important point is to keep our emotions in check when we are in analytic mode, but let the analysis serve the fire of feeling which we rightly hold close to our hearts, whatever that maybe.

Continue reading/discuss Astrology & astronomy ...

It depends on how you define "win". And all my recent pessimism on the short-term events aside, I do believe that in the long term, Israel will not only survive but even prosper. The simple reason is that Israel is free. And, there has been an inexorable trend towards increased freedom in the middle east - facilitated in no small part by Al Jazeera, possibly the single media forum most dedicated to genuine "air all views and let the audience decide" journalism in the world.

Israel will pay a price for its short-sightedness in this campaign. That price will likely be in needless deaths of innocents due to ongoing violence - a price that every nation must pay, it seems, in the simultaneously sacred and cursed center of the world. But is Israel under an existential threat?

 

Hizbollah poses zero threat to Israel's existence. It is a militia, tied to geography and to demography. A sophisticated one, to be sure, and one that can inflict terror upon Israeli civilians from afar due to its own state sponsorships. But remember the political cartoons in the US after 9-11: Uncle Sam, sporting a black eye, rolling up his sleeve. Not Uncle Sam, stabbed in the heart. Even a nuke in Miami would represent a wound, not a fatal stroke - we simply are too strong, their methods (being quintessentially asymmetric) are by their very nature too weak.

Remember the Blitz. During the first phase, London alone was targeted by over 200 bomber sorties per night, with over 13,000 tons of explosives and over 1 million incendiary bombs dropped in a period of three months. Sure, there were great losses of life, and priceless heritage. And yet, like the most beautiful building in London, the British remained strong. Bruised and bloodied, but all the more determined.

Does Hizbollah possess even a fraction of the Nazi machine's arms? Can Iran, by proxy, supply even the tinest portion of the munitions needed to rival the Blitz? And even if it were so, would the Israelis succumb where the British did not?

Mind you, the will to survive is not unique to Israelis or to the British. Lebanon too will rebuild. After all, they have inspiration next door:

a country noted for intellectuals, musicians, classical music concerts, raves, major publishing houses, incredible nightlife, beach parties, excellent local beer and wine, a diverse population of incredibly secular and incredibly religious people, leftists and libertarians, budding film directors. This is a country that has tremendous problems with all its neighbors. A country that feels oppressed by its neighbors. A country that has been greatly harmed by its neighbors.

There are two nations on the Mediterranean, north of Egypt, bordering Syria, that fit this description. Someday, the sacrifices of the innocents will bear sweet fruit rather than the bitter lemons that are today's crop.