Robert Wright : The Atlantic

The Arab Spring Comes to Israel

2012-02-24T18:32:00-05:00

Today a young Palestinian I know was arrested at a West Bank demonstration, put in a prison near Ramallah, and--according to preliminary reports by Palestinian activists on Twitter--charged with pushing an Israeli soldier. The trouble is that there's pretty strong video evidence that pushing a soldier isn't what he was in fact arrested for. He seems to have been arrested for speaking--and, yes, gesticulating animatedly as he spoke, perhaps in a manner that Israeli soldiers found threatening or otherwise excessive.

But judge for yourself: The arrest is at the 3:29 mark on this Facebook video. (The orange stuff on his face is the pepper spray applied as he's first being subdued, shortly before the soldier shoves his abdomen into the rear bumper of the police vehicle.)

Fadi Quran is a remarkable guy. He grew up in the West Bank, graduated from Stanford with a double major in physics and international relations, and then returned to the West Bank. He works in the alternative energy field, and his avocation is nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation. Here's a snippet of a conversation I had with him a few months ago, in which he contends that nonviolent resistance can ultimately succeed, even if it seems to face daunting odds now. Below the video player are some thoughts on the significance of his arrest.

Fadi's arrest is a reminder of how two key ingredients of the Arab Spring--digital media and nonviolent protest--can complicate life for authorities. The reason his arrest is well documented is digital video, and the reason you're reading about his story here is Twitter.

The upshot is that more and more people outside of Israel are going to become aware that for 45 years Israel has been ruling a people who don't have basic political rights--like the right to due process (Fadi could in theory spend months in jail with no charges filed) or the right to vote for or against the government that ultimately controls their fate, even though that government is part of a democratic state.

I don't think it has been the intention of Israelis to sustain this horrible situation. In principle, most would like a two-state solution. But the traditional Israeli narrative--that the absence of a solution is the fault of the Palestinians, so they'll have to live with it--is going to run into trouble if people like Fadi Quran have their way. Demonstrators seeking basic rights have an easier time gaining international sympathy than suicide bombers seeking vengeance.

I'll close with another clip from my conversation with Fadi, in which he explains why his family so often lacks running water. This is a story Palestinians couldn't easily convey to Americans before the digital revolution. Now they can. [Update: Jake Horowitz, a friend of Fadi's from Stanford, has an update on Fadi's situation as of late Saturday morning Eastern Time. It looks like Jake may be updating that page periodically.]

Tech Blog Payola?

2012-02-23T20:07:10-05:00

Suppose you have a stake in an investment fund and would like to get favorable publicity for the companies in your portfolio. One approach is to spend your day reaching out to influential tech bloggers, trying to sell them on the glories of these companies. But that takes so much time! How about this short cut: You could just be an influential tech blogger and sing the praises of the companies yourself .

It would be kind of like the payola scandals of the 1950s, when music companies paid disk jockeys to play their music, except that you get to be both the disk jockey and the music company, thus saving yourself the trouble of moving money from one pocket to another.

According to tech blogger Dan Lyons (who gained fame via the nom de plume "Fake Steve Jobs" years ago), this business model is catching on. Last week Lyons criticized Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, two bloggers who have a stake in CrunchFund and recently wrote in defense of one of its holdings, Path. This week Lyons reports that another well-known tech blogger, Robert Scoble, has been exploring possible participation in an investment fund. Lyons predicts that other "hacks for hire" will be doing so, too.

Would that be a bad thing?

Arrington and Siegler point out that when they wrote about Path they noted their connection to it. But is that full enough disclosure? I mean, doesn't a company like Path have companies that are rivals and companies that are strategic partners or potential partners--so isn't there a conflict of interest when Arrington and Siegler write about those? And if you add up all the rivals and partners of all the companies in CrunchFund's portfolio, aren't you talking about a lot of companies? How are readers supposed to know enough about these relationships to know when they should take the writing of Arrington and Siegler with a grain of salt?

I can imagine a couple of replies:

1) Now that anyone can have a platform--Twitter, Tumblr, comments sections, whatever--there can be hordes of skeptics combing the writing of Arrington and Siegler, and the list of CrunchFund investments, and bringing conflicts of interest to light. All you need is transparency and a bunch of people with too much time on their hands. (Arrington, in particular, sees transparency as the solution.)

2) You shouldn't think of a blogger as a "journalist" who is supposed to comply with some professional code of ethics. Bloggers can be politicians, entrepreneurs, and various other kinds of people who are part of the game they're covering. In fact, one of the best known tech bloggers, Fred Wilson, is a venture capitalist whose full disclosure is in his blog's title: AVC. But because he was a VC before he was a blogger, nobody complains about him having lost his journalistic integrity!

However satisfactory you think these answers are or aren't, I suspect they're the answers of the future. If so, the future will dovetail with the recent past. For the last few decades it seems that traditional beliefs about the human obligation to truth and the human capacity for objectivity have been giving way to the assumption that everyone has an agenda and it's up to the audience to figure it out. I'm not sure to what extent, if any, this change has been driven by the fact that technologies have been making it easier to discern the agendas--or, at least, to discern the web of affiliations that might suggest an agenda. Maybe it's just a happy coincidence.

[Postscript: Shortly before posting this I came across an exchange between Lyons and Scoble over whether Lyons had overstated Scoble's role in trying to start a new investment fund. In any event, the way I've put it in my post--that Scoble had been "exploring possible participation" in an investment fund--would, so far as I can tell, meet with Scoble's approval. And here, btw, are Siegler's and Arrington's original replies to Lyons.]

AIPAC and the Push Toward War

2012-02-21T18:48:19-05:00

Late last week, amid little fanfare, Senators Joseph Lieberman, Lindsey Graham, and Robert Casey introduced a resolution that would move America further down the path toward war with Iran.

The good news is that the resolution hasn't been universally embraced in the Senate. As Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports, the resolution has "provoked jitters among Democrats anxious over the specter of war." The bad news is that, as Kampeas also reports, "AIPAC is expected to make the resolution an 'ask' in three weeks when up to 10,000 activists culminate its annual conference with a day of Capitol Hill lobbying."

In standard media accounts, the resolution is being described as an attempt to move the "red line"--the line that, if crossed by Iran, could trigger a US military strike. The Obama administration has said that what's unacceptable is for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. This resolution speaks instead of a "nuclear weapons capability." In other words, Iran shouldn't be allowed to get to a point where, should it decide to produce a nuclear weapon, it would have the wherewithal to do so.

By itself this language is meaninglessly vague. Does "capability" mean the ability to produce a bomb within two months? Two years? If two years is the standard, Iran has probably crossed the red line already. (So should we start bombing now?) Indeed, by the two-year standard, Iran might well be over the red line even after a bombing campaign--which would at most be a temporary setback, and would remove any doubt among Iran's leaders as to whether to build nuclear weapons, and whether to make its nuclear program impervious to future American and Israeli bombs. What do we do then? Invade?

In other words, if interpreted expansively, the "nuclear weapons capability" threshold is a recipe not just for war, but for ongoing war--war that wouldn't ultimately prevent the building of a nuclear weapon without putting boots on the ground. And it turns out that the authors of this resolution want "nuclear weapons capability" interpreted very expansively.

The key is in the way the resolution deals with the question of whether Iran should be allowed to enrich uranium, as it's been doing for some time now. The resolution defines as an American goal "the full and sustained suspension" of uranium enrichment by Iran. In case you're wondering what the resolution's prime movers mean by that: In a letter sent to the White House on the same day the resolution was introduced, Lieberman, Graham and ten other senators wrote, "We would strongly oppose any proposal that recognizes a 'right to enrichment' by the current regime or for [sic] a diplomatic endgame in which Iran is permitted to continue enrichment on its territory in any form."

This notwithstanding the fact that 1) enrichment is allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; (2) a sufficiently intrusive monitoring system can verify that enrichment is for peaceful purposes; (3) Iran's right to enrich its own uranium is an issue of strong national pride. In a poll published in 2010, after sanctions had already started to bite, 86 percent of Iranians said Iran should not "give up its nuclear activities regardless of the circumstances." And this wasn't about building a bomb; most Iranians said Iran's nuclear activities shouldn't include producing weapons.

Even Dennis Ross--who has rarely, in his long career as a Mideast diplomat, left much daylight between his positions and AIPAC's, and who once categorically opposed Iranian enrichment--now realizes that a diplomatic solution may have to include enrichment. Last week in a New York Times op-ed, he said that, contrary to pessimistic assessments, it may still be possible to get a deal that "uses intrusive inspections and denies or limits uranium enrichment [emphasis added]..."

The resolution plays down its departure from current policy by claiming that there have been "multiple" UN resolutions since 2006 demanding the "sustained" suspension of uranium. But the UN resolutions don't actually use that term. The UN has demanded suspension as a confidence-building measure that could then lead to, as one resolution puts it, a "negotiated solution that guarantees Iran's nuclear program is for exclusively peaceful purposes." And various Security Council members who voted on these resolutions have made it clear that Iranian enrichment of uranium can be part of this scenario if Iran agrees to sufficiently tight monitoring.

Indeed, that Iran's right to enrich uranium could be recognized under those circumstances is, Hillary Clinton has said, "the position of the international community, along with the United States." If the Lieberman-Graham-Casey resolution guides US policy, says George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that would "preclude" fulfillment of the UN resolutions and isolate the US from the international coalition that backed them.

The Congressional resolution goes beyond the UN resolutions in another sense. It demands an end to Iran's ballistic missile program. Greg Thielmann of the Arms Control Association notes that, "Even after crushing Iraq in the first Gulf War, the international coalition only imposed a 150-kilometer range ceiling on Saddam's ballistic missiles. A demand to eliminate all ballistic missiles would be unprecedented in the modern era--removing any doubt among Iranians that the United States was interested in nothing less than the total subjugation of the country."

On the brighter side: Maybe it's a good sign that getting significant Democratic buy-in for this resolution took some strong-arming. According to Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now, the resolution got 15 Democratic supporters only "after days of intense AIPAC lobbying, particularly of what some consider 'vulnerable' Democrats (vulnerable in terms of being in races where their pro-Israel credentials are being challenged by the candidate running against them)." What's more, even as AIPAC was playing this hardball, the bill's sponsors still had to tone down some particularly threatening language in the resolution.

But, even so, the resolution defines keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapons "capability" as being in America's "vital national interest," which is generally taken as synonymous with "worth war." And, though this "sense of Congress" resolution is nonbinding, AIPAC will probably seek unanimous Senate consent, which puts pressure on a president. Friedman says this "risks sending a message that Congress supports war and opposes a realistic negotiated solution or any de facto solution short of stripping Iran of even a peaceful nuclear capacity."

What's more, says Friedman, the non-binding status may be temporary. "Often AIPAC-backed Congressional initiatives start as non-binding language (in a resolution or a letter) and then show up in binding legislation. Once members of Congress have already signed on to a policy in non-binding form, it is much harder for them to oppose it when it shows up later in a bill that, if passed, will have the full force of law."

No wonder Democrats who worry about war have the "jitters."

Non-Scary Scare Stories About Pentagon Budget Cuts (Cont'd)

2012-02-19T23:57:33-05:00

I flew into the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport today, and that provides the perfect occasion for a sermon about cutting the Pentagon's budget. I realize that doesn't seem to make sense, but bear with me.

Some weeks ago I questioned the logic of a New York Times story that warned of the woes that could befall our economy if the Pentagon's research budget is slashed. But I didn't manage to address all of the arguments made in the story, and I promised to return to the subject in the future. The future has finally arrived.

The Times piece, after asserting that Pentagon research spending "played a key role in the blossoming of high technology as a driver of the nation's economic growth," cites as evidence the sea of technology companies that are in the Pentagon's vicinity. Tech companies "built large campuses employing thousands of workers, mostly around the growing Tysons Corner crossroads." And "other clusters of technology companies grew up around universities that have been large recipients of military research money, creating Silicon Valley in California, the Route 128 corridor around Boston and the Research Triangle in North Carolina, where the Army opened its Research Office in 1958."

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that without early Pentagon spending that reached the West Coast, the area known as Silicon Valley would today be known mainly for garlic farming. To convey why this fact wouldn't be testament to the virtues of Pentagon spending, let's take a look at an earlier era in America's technological history. And what better prism through which to look at that era than... Minneapolis?

There was a time when grain mills, powered by river water, were at the forefront of technology. In Minneapolis there are vestiges of that time--great old mills with big old signs protruding from their tops on stilts: Gold Medal Flour, Pillsbury. Both of these are now owned by General Mills, which itself got its start in Minneapolis as the Minneapolis Milling Company. In short: Minneapolis was to milling what Silicon Valley is to electronics.

Why Minneapolis? Well, it had the basic prerequisites: a river to drive the mills, access to grain growers and to markets (access afforded partly by the same river that drove the mills). But Minneapolis wasn't alone in possessing those things; it just got a jump on alternative locations. And once an emerging industry takes root in a given place, the logic of that locale becomes self-reinforcing: Because the talent is there, and the transportation infrastructure is there, and the mill-building know-how is there, that's where the talent and know-how and capital continue to flow.

So what serendipitous thing happened that led to early milling success here and thus is responsible for Minneapolis becoming the milling center it became? I have no idea. But let's suppose it all started when some local woman lent her nephew enough money to start a small mill. By the logic of the New York Times story, this would be an argument for encouraging aunts everywhere to lend their nephews money.

My point is that (1) the microelectronics revolution, like the milling revolution, was inevitable; (2) once it happened, it was probably going to have an epicenter, a place that attracts the lion's share of the talent and capital; (3) where that place turned out to be might well be where crucial seed money happened to first become available; (4) none of this means that, absent this particular bit of seed money, the microelectronics revolution would have been any less momentous or contributed less to the nation's economic welfare as a whole; it just means that the revolution might have had a different epicenter.

Is it possible that this epicenter would have been in some other country had the Pentagon not planted the seeds for it in Silicon Valley? It's conceivable, but given how economically dominant America was in the wake of World War II, I'd call it unlikely.

Anyway, that's the kind of counterfactual question you'd need to address to mount a strong argument that Silicon Valley is a testament to the value of a big Pentagon budget. I'm not saying that such an argument can't be made. I'm just saying that that argument wasn't made in that Times piece. I'm also saying that, if Silicon Valley weren't in Silicon Valley, it would still be somewhere. Maybe in Minneapolis.

An Amazing Newt Gingrich Anecdote

2012-02-18T20:57:00-05:00

At least I think this is an amazing anecdote, given Gingrich's current position on Israel. The anecdote is from 1998, but apparently it's never been told publicly before. Sarah Wildman picked it up on a recent trip to Israel from Danny Seidemann, head of a Jerusalem NGO called ir Amin. Here she shares the story with Sarah Posner in the first episode of the Posner Show. Then they discuss how and why Newt's relationship to Israel has evolved since 1998.

Sarah and Sarah also have an interesting exchange about the paradoxical relationship between American conservatism and American Muslims.

You can watch the whole conversation here.

The Media's 'Iran Is a Wild and Crazy State' Frame

2012-02-17T10:45:00-05:00

As evidence mounted this week that Iran was behind attacks on Israelis in India and Georgia, the Israeli government had its messaging ready to go. According to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, talking points crafted in the prime minister's office read, "If this is what Iran is doing now, imagine what it will do if its nuclear arms project reaches the goal."

That's one interpretation--that a spree of terrorist attacks signifies a reckless, unpredictable, maybe even crazy Iranian regime. Here's another interpretation: The Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks, far from being unpredictable, were exactly what you would expect from a rational actor.

Put yourself in the Iranian leadership's position. You are a regime that is insecure about the allegiance of your people. A foreign government (Israel) has been systematically assassinating people in your country. Can you afford to just sit there and take it--to be seen by your people as submitting to your enemy? For that matter, is this image of impotent submission one you'd want to send to the outside world at a time when it is tightening economic sanctions and there is talk of bombing your country? (Pre-emptive note to incensed commenters: No I'm not saying the Iranian counter-attacks were 'morally justified' or that Israel deserved them, etc.)

The Israeli government isn't alone in using the "Iran is wildly unpredictable" frame as the basic prism for mediating reality. The American media likes that frame. The lead paragraph of a piece published in Thursday's edition of The New York Times cited the terrorist attacks, along with, "renewed posturing over its nuclear program and fresh threats of economic retaliation" as evidence that "Iranian leaders are responding frantically, and with increasing unpredictability, to the tightening of sanctions by the West."

To its credit, the story did go on to quote an expert noting that all of these Iranian actions could be viewed as a coherent package: "These are all facets of the same message," said Muhammad Sahimi, an analyst and professor at the University of Southern California. "Iran is saying, 'If you hit us, we will hit back, and we are not going to sacrifice our nuclear program.' " Or, to paraphrase Mr. Sahimi: "The lead paragraph of the New York Times story you are reading right now is misleading."

But the New York Times piece wasn't done yet. On the same day that Iran had engaged in "renewed posturing over its nuclear program"--that is, it had unveiled (and hyped) some advances in its nuclear program--an Iranian official said Iran was ready to engage in a new round of talks on the nuclear standoff. Now, you might argue that this was the most important news of the day, and belonged in the lead paragraph. Or, at the very least, you might ask that this news be depicted as counteracting the Iran-is-wildly-unpredictable meme. But no--from the standpoint of The New York Times, this was just more evidence that Iran is a bundle of contradictions. "The intentions of Iran's divided leadership are notoriously difficult to divine, and even as Mr. Ahmadinejad declared defiantly that 'the era of bullying nations has passed,' another Iranian official said Tehran was ready for new talks on the nuclear issue."

Are these statements by two Iranian leaders really at odds, making Iran a nation whose intentions are "difficult to divine"? Here's an alternative view: When Iran announces, under the pressure of intense economic sanctions, that it is willing to return to the negotiating table, that overture is likely to be seen--by both its domestic audience and its foreign audience--as a sign of weakness. Iran doesn't want to be seen as weak by either audience. So it might make sense, from Iran's point of view, to couple this announcement with demonstrations that it won't be intimidated--whether Ahmadinejad's declaration that Iran wouldn't be "bullied" or the announcement (complete with pictures of Ahmadinejad in a lab coat) of advances in Iran's nuclear program.

The New York Times may have found this perplexing, but not everyone did. Wednesday around noon--roughly the time the Times piece was being written--Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project for the Federation of American Scientists, wrote in an email, "Iran is projecting strength by organizing a nuclear show on the same day that it responded to Ashton's letter [i.e. the same day it agreed to return to the bargaining table]. Iran is signaling to the West that they will not come to the negotiating table under unprecedented pressure and give up their rights. If Washington does not understand this, the new round of negotiations is doomed to fail."

By "rights," Vaez meant what Iran sees as its right to enrich uranium--even if under strict international monitoring that ensures that the enrichment is for peaceful purposes. By "doomed to fail" he meant what tends to happen when you negotiate with people whose perspective, and whose predicament, you don't understand.

Here is the Iranian leadership's predicament: If it goes into negotiations under the pressure of sanctions and threats, and agrees to abandon any aspirations to make a nuclear weapon, it needs to have something positive to show its people, some reason to plausibly declare victory. And one good candidate for this role is the international community's acknowledgment of Iran's right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Let's hope America's officials understand this. In other words: Let's hope they're not relying on the mainstream American media as they try to divine Iranian intentions.

[Postscript: I want to emphasize that the authors of The New York Times stories have done great work in the past. (This morning Steve Coll cites Robert Worth as deserving mention in the same breath as the late, great Anthony Shadid.) I'm not saying this is like the famous Judith Miller problem at the Times during the runup to the Iraq War. And I understand the difficulties of reporting on deadline and hope I don't sound too preachy here. But as the prospect of war with Iran gets more tangible, I think every American journalist who writes about Iran has a duty--you might even say a patriotic duty--to work extra hard to fathom and convey the perspective of and constraints on the Iranian leadership. That reduces the chances that bad things will happen. And, anyway, that's what good reporting is.]

Kotlikoff for President!

2012-02-16T17:33:03-05:00

Good news! This November you don't have to choose between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, or between Barack Obama and Rick Santorum. There's also Larry Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University who served on the staff of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Kotlikoff seeks the nomination of the Americans Elect Party, which will have its candidate on the ballot in all fifty states.

Glenn Loury, host of the Glenn Show, has given Kotlikoff his chance to shine. In the three final clips cascading down this page, Kotlikoff discusses his plans for health policy, financial policy, and dealing with Iran. But let's start out with a juicier clip, in which Kotlikoff discusses why presidents are often ill-served by economic advisers, and we hear some memorable characterizations of Larry Summers:

Health policy:

Financial Policy:

Iran:

Fighting Breaks Out Between Atlantic Voices!

2012-02-16T08:23:22-05:00

Finally! I've been an Atlantic "Voice" for six weeks, and until now I hadn't gotten into any fisticuffs with other Atlantic Voices. I knew fighting would break out sooner or later--but I had no idea that my opponent would be the kindly James Fallows.

Jim, a friend and a wonderful person, takes issue with a post I wrote about Jeremy Lin a couple of days ago. I'm afraid I have no choice but to launch a brutal counter-assault.

First, let's get clear on what I said.

Jim says I'm drawing on the work of social scientists who argue that Asians "perceive reality in a more 'group'-like than individually centered fashion." Not true. I emphasized that I wasn't drawing on "stereotypes about collectivist Asian values." Rather, the finding of these social scientists--and their research is now very well established--is about perceiving dominant foreground images as opposed to background scenes. In the example I cited, the background scene wasn't "a group" but rather a mountain stream.

Anyway the social science finding is that, compared to westerners, East Asians (most experimental subjects have been either Chinese or Japanese) pay more attention to the background scene and less to the central foreground image. I suggested that maybe this more "holistic" perceptual tendency (as the researchers call it) would be an asset to a basketball player as he surveys the basketball court and so might help explain why Lin is such a good passer.

And I emphasize the word "suggested". I called my theory about Lin an "armchair pop-psychology theory." I probably should have used the word "conjecture" just to emphasize that I have no great confidence that the theory is correct. If I had to put a number on it, I'd give it chances between 20 percent and 40 percent. But whatever the likelihood that this conjecture is correct, I certainly don't agree with Jim that it's "crazy" or "horseshit".

Before I address the points Jim makes, I'd like to ask why Jim--and no few of the commenters who read my piece--get so exercised about this particular conjecture. Columnists are always throwing out theories about what will happen in politics and very often the chances that the theories are right is way less than 50 percent. I've done a lot of that myself, and my theories rarely get called "crazy" or "horseshit"--certainly not by genteel people like Jim Fallows.

I suspect that in this case the reason for the inordinate energy devoted to criticism is that I'm discussing ethnicity. And, by itself, that's fine; I actually agree that certain kinds of theories about ethnicity shouldn't be tossed out casually. Specifically:

1) If the posited group trait (or statistical tendency) is one that could get a group persecuted, discriminated against, or even denigrated, then I think you should tread carefully. But I'm having trouble imagining any of these fates befalling an ethnic group because it gets a reputation for remembering the background details in a picture better than members of another group, and paying relatively less attention to dominant foreground images.

2) If the theory is that a difference between two ethnic groups is genetically based, I think that here, too, great care is warranted. But the leading researcher in the area I was discussing--the highly respected psychologist Richard Nisbett--has explicitly made it his premise that these differences are cultural, not genetic, and in my piece I explicitly subscribed to that premise.

OK, so on to Jim's argument. Actually, I should have put "argument" in quotes. With all due respect, I honestly don't detect an actual argument.

Jim writes:

But being Asian has nothing to do with how he plays ball. (Nor does going to Harvard.)

My evidence? Earlier this week, the Atlantic's sport columnist Jake Simpson analyzed Lin's game in terms of its real components -- shooting accuracy, willingness to take on double-team coverage, etc. I could leave it at that, with the reminder that considering his passing skills "Asian" is about as legit as saying that he has "a high basketball IQ" because he went to Harvard. Or a confident on-court manner because he's from Silicon Valley.

That's "evidence"? So far as I can tell that's just the repeated assertion that I'm wrong. (The Jake Simpson piece is interesting but it doesn't bear on my conjecture one way or the other.) Maybe I'm missing something, but I would expect evidence to come in the form of some actual empirical reason to think that my conjecture isn't plausible.

Jim says he has additional evidence. He shows us a video of basketball being played in China. He writes that the video features "crowd agitation, yelling at refs, general tumult, and some basketball. Virtually none of it fits with treatises on Asian 'philosophical heritage'."

I cannot overemphasize how utterly irrelevant this observation is to the argument I was making. Again, I explicitly said I wasn't talking about stereotypes about Asian "collectivist values." And I said nothing at all about "philosophical heritage."

So where did Jim get the idea that my theory has anything to do with these "treatises on Asian 'philosophical heritage'"? Well, in his (partial) defense, I now see that, right below my piece's headline (which I wrote) there is a subhead (which I didn't write) that was added sometime after I posted the piece. It says, How the New York Knick's philosophical heritage may be helping him win. I don't blame the person who wrote that as one of many chores on a no-doubt busy day. Maybe he or she was conceiving of the word "philosophical" in such a broad way that it seemed to encompass the "holistic" perceptual/cognitive tendencies I described. Still, Jim says he is critiquing the piece I wrote, not a subhead, and the piece doesn't mention "philosophical" heritage at all; nor does it mention any tendencies toward harmony, cooperation, or whatever stereotypes he thinks are being debunked by a video featuring agitation and tumult.

Then Jim shows us another video of a basketball game in which a fight breaks out. He notes, "The gratuitous aggression all came from the Chinese side." Um, OK. But did I say anything about aggression?

And that, so far as I can tell, is the sum total of Jim's "evidence."

Jim knows a lot more about Asia than I do, and has spent many years there. And when you spend a lot of time anywhere you start noticing distinctions that aren't apparent to outsiders. He once told me that the two most different cultures he's ever seen are Japan and China, and I don't doubt him.

Still, the fact is that the body of research I'm talking about has featured both Japanese and Chinese subjects, and certain tendencies do seem to hold up as statistical generalizations about them. It's another question, of course, whether my conjectural theory applying these findings to basketball is valid, but Jim never gets around to addressing that question.

My sense is that Jim has long been frustrated with various generalizations that are made about Asians and has long had, within him, a blog post about these generalizations waiting to get out. And I think he's now written that post--a post that was in some sense formulated before I wrote my piece, and that, not surprisingly, isn't relevant to my piece.

But let me emphasize--as I should have emphasized more with respect to my Jeremy Lin theory--that my theory about Jim is just conjecture.

Anyway, I'm glad to finally have some internecine Atlantic fighting under my belt, and I thank Jim for giving me my initiation. Now on to the next Voice!

Linsanity as a Diplomatic Asset

2012-02-15T09:24:08-05:00

Among the one-million-plus microblog posts about Jeremy Lin that have appeared in China in recent days is this one: "Your physical agility has shown me the glory and omnipotence of God."

My own religious orientation doesn't incline me to think of Lin in those terms, but I must say that last night's New York Knicks game didn't exactly dispel the belief that he's heaven sent. His clutch last-minute three-point-play tied the game, and his clutch last-second shot won it.

But I digress. Let's get back to those Chinese microblog posts. We learn from a story by Keith Bradsher in this morning's New York Times that the Linsanity tsunami has now swept across China. ("His jerseys have sold out, even including the counterfeit ones," says a store clerk in Zhejiang.)

With China's next prime minister, Vice President Xi Jinping, visiting America, my thoughts naturally turned to the diplomatic possibilities: Could Lin play a positive role in US-Chinese relations? I mean, presumably it would be a good thing for American sports fans and Chinese sports fans to adore the same person, especially if that person's life story spans East and West?

Turns out there are some complications:

(1) Lin's parents are from Taiwan, not mainland China, so there could be rival claims for homeland status. Bradsher writes, "Cai Qi, the organization chief for the Communist Party in Zhejiang, posted a message on his Twitter-like microblog over the weekend claiming that Lin's ancestral home is Jiaxing, a city on the northeastern outskirts of Hangzhou where Lin's maternal grandmother grew up."

(2) There's also the God issue. China's government of course views Christianity warily, and Lin is a pretty devout Christian. So it could be that, as the enthusiasm of Chinese Christians for Lin grows, the enthusiasm of Cai Qi and others in the Communist Party will wane. (But I don't understand Chinese politics well enough to say, or to plot out the implications of that.)

In any event, having heard a few interviews with Lin, my guess is that he'll handle delicate questions gracefully, and that he won't let international celebrity distract him from his on-court mission. And that's all that's really necessary; it's not like he has to become a roving ambassador of good will in order to play a constructive role in international relations.

Of course, this whole conjecture about Lin's diplomatic value presupposes that he's the real deal--that he'll be star for some time to come. My own guess (not that you asked) after watching last night's game is that he will indeed hang on to star status so long as he gets better at hanging on to the ball in heavy traffic. So I'm cautiously optimistic that Jeremy Lin could wind up, so to speak, doing God's work.

Meanwhile, let's savor last night's game-winning shot:

The Secret of Jeremy Lin's Success?

2012-02-14T08:47:17-05:00

How the New York Knick's philosophical heritage may be helping him win

Jeremy Lin is on the verge of becoming the Tim Tebow of basketball. I don't mean that he's a devout Christian who is suddenly showing a remarkable ability to guide his team to victory--though he is that. I mean that the story of this New York Knicks point guard is moving beyond the world of sports fans into the culture at large.

What gives this story legs is that (1) Lin graduated from Harvard, whose basketball program has never been dubbed "gateway to the NBA," and (2) he is Asian-American.

I gather that this second fact is considered by some not just statistically noteworthy (no Asian-American has played in the NBA in decades, though several Asians have) but inherently ironic. Certainly the fact that Lin was almost completely ignored by both college recruiters and pro scouts could be explained by a belief that people of Asian descent aren't built for hoops.

MORE ON THE NBA

The Fearlessness of Jeremy Lin

How the Internet Made Jeremy Lin a Star in Less Than a Week

This NBA Season's 10 Biggest Stories

NBA Stars in China

'I Hope LeBron Plays 15 Years and Never Wins an NBA Championship'

But there's a sense in which Asian heritage could equip a person for success in basketball, and it wouldn't surprise me if we start seeing more Asian-Americans in the NBA. What follows, at any rate, is my armchair pop-psychology theory to that effect.

Lin is known not just for scoring but for "assists"--that is, he's good at passing the ball to teammates who are in a position to score. Since helping teammates score is a form of selflessness, it's tempting to invoke stereotypes about collectivist Asian values, but that's not where I'm heading.

Being a good passer in basketball isn't the same as being a good passer in football. Quarterbacks tend to go sequentially through their targets--they look at the primary receiver, and if he's not open they look at the next prospect, and so on. In basketball, the great passers are simultaneously aware of several targets at once; their focus expands toward the edge of their peripheral vision. Indeed, sometimes the success of the pass depends on never looking directly at the person you're passing to, as that would tip off your opponents.

One of the most intriguing cultural contrasts between eastern and western ways of viewing the world was documented in experiments by the psychologist Richard Nisbett, some of them in collaboration with Takahiko Masuda. The upshot was that East Asians tend to view scenes more holistically than westerners.

In one experiment, East Asians and Westerners were shown pictures and then asked to remember what they'd seen. Westerners tended to recall the dominant foreground image. If the picture was of a beaming tourist with a mountain stream in the background, they'd remember the tourist clearly. The stream? Not so much. East Asians were on balance better than westerners at remembering the background.

Related tendencies showed up when people were asked to take pictures of other people. East Asians, compared to westerners, framed the pictures so that the individual was smaller relative to the entire scene.

An assessment of eastern and western art found something similar. East Asian landscape paintings, wrote Nisbett and Masuda, "tend to put the horizon high as it would be seen by a bird flying over the landscape or an artist perched on a high outcropping. Western landscapes put the horizon low, as it would be seen from the ground. Consequently, less of the landscape is seen."

I played basketball in high school. Actually, "played" is misleading. I mostly sat on the bench--though during my freshman year I did, to my credit, have the prescience to play at the high school where the great Shaquille O'Neal later played. Anyway, I remember a kind of perceptual "frame shift" you needed to undergo when, on a fast break, or while driving the lane, you had targets to your left and right and needed to be aware of them simultaneously. It was a kind of broadening of your focus, toward a more wide angle view. You stared straight ahead but your focus wasn't straight ahead; in a sense, there was no focus.

Is it crazy to think that the perceptual tendencies that Nisbett and Masuda documented in East Asians could equip them for this sort of thing?

There's at least one problem with my conjecture. These experiments were done with Asians, not Asian-Americans, and presumably immersing people of Asian heritage in western culture makes them more and more like westerners. Indeed, other researchers showed Rorschach cards to China-born Chinese and American-born Chinese and found that the China-born subjects were more likely to view the patterns as a whole, whereas the American-born focused more on details.

But even if immersion in western culture would erase all vestiges of this Asian heritage, that doesn't mean it would do so immediately. One posited explanation for the differences Nisbett documented has to do with the way Asian parents direct the attention of their infants and young children. Lin's parents were born in Asia (Taiwan), and maybe their child rearing reflected that.

In any event, they seem to have raised a nice young man. Here's a video of Lin being interviewed earlier this year, back when he was with the Golden State Warriors. My favorite part is near the end, starting at 3:20, when he is lured into briefly dancing. It's kind of endearing.

[Update, 9:40 a.m., 2/14: Alert commenters Kawlighty and Joe Smith caught two factual errors that I've fixed. I had originally said that this was Lin's rookie year, when in fact he played some games for the Warriors last year. I had also said there had been one Asian NBA player in recent decades (I was of course thinking of Yao Ming) when in fact there have been several.

Image credit: Reuters

Israel and Proxy Terrorism

2012-02-13T08:43:45-05:00

Should Israel be classified as a state sponsor of terrorism? That question is being debated in the wake of a story that NBC News broke late last week.

Citing unnamed US officials, NBC reported that Israel has used an Iranian opposition group to carry out those much-publicized assassinations of Iranian scientists. The group in question is the M.E.K. (Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People's Mujahedin of Iran), which since 1997 has been designated a terrorist group by the United States because of its alleged assassinations of US citizens.

The argument for considering Israel a supporter of terrorism comes in two varieties:

1) According to NBC, Israel gives the M.E.K. the funding, training, and weapons to carry out the assassinations--and that would seem to constitute support for a terrorist group.

2) Leaving aside the M.E.K. involvement, there's the argument that the assassinations inherently constitute terrorism. Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum had previously suggested that whoever is behind the assassinations is committing terrorism, but this NBC story is the first mainstream media corroboration of the widespread suspicion that Israel is behind them.

After the NBC story broke, Paul Pillar, a former CIA official who teaches at Georgetown, dusted off the definition of terrorism used by the US government for purposes of keeping statistics: "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." That, says Pillar, is what these assassinations are.

The counter-arguments have tended not to be big on legalisms. There is the "Look who's talking" argument. "Isn't Iran itself the leading exporter of terrorism in the world?" asks The New York Post. And there's the argument that Iran is an existential threat to Israel and therefore all is fair. "Israel is entirely justified in using whatever means it has to prevent Khameini's government from achieving its genocidal ends," writes Jonathan Tobin in Commentary.

Daniel Larison, writing in The American Conservative, was aghast at Tobin's argument: "In other words, Israeli state sponsorship of a terrorist group is acceptable because it's in a good cause."

This whole issue is in one sense moot. Adding a country to the list of states that sponsor terrorism requires executive branch initiative. And unless I'm misreading the political winds, placing Israel alongside Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism isn't high on President Obama's list of election-year priorities.What's more, strict and consistent enforcement of America's anti-terrorism laws could raise uncomfortable questions about some of America's drone strikes.

Still, there may be some consequential fallout.

There has been a movement afoot to "de-list" the M.E.K.--to remove it from America's list of terrorist groups on the grounds that it has renounced violence and, anyway, hasn't killed an American in a long time. This argument gets made mainly by Americans who support bombing Iran or even engineering regime change--a project the M.E.K. would love to abet. (A few other high-profile Americans have signed on to the de-list-the-M.E.K. cause, but as The Christian Science Monitor reported, they have shown a tendency to get paid tens of thousands of dollars for the speeches in which they express their newfound yet heartfelt sympathy for the M.E.K.)

As Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon, the NBC report should, if nothing else, "completely gut the effort to remove the M.E.K. from the list of designated terrorist groups; after all, murdering Iran's scientists through the use of bombs and guns is a defining act of a terror group, at least as U.S. law attempts to define the term."

The Nuttiest Bomb-Iran Idea of Them All?

2012-02-10T19:36:43-05:00

Last month Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt got a lot of attention by arguing that the garden variety bomb-Iran plans aren't ambitious enough. Rather than just use surgical strikes to set back Iran's nuclear program, they said, we should expand the target list and keep bombing until the government falls. Then you would get regime change without the hassle of boots on the ground.

Matthew Duss has suggested that proposals like this serve as framing devices. They're so radical that they expand the "Overton window" to the right, making standard bomb-Iran proposals sound moderate, Duss wrote in Salon.

But Duss, co-host of the Bloggingheads show Foreign Entanglements, apparently believes that everyone deserves their day in court. He gave Fly his. Here is the heart of their exchange:

You can watch the whole conversation here.

Mindful Eating and Fast-Food Buddhism

2012-02-10T09:54:12-05:00

"Mindful eating" has officially entered the memosphere. An article about it reached the very top of The New York Times most-emailed list this week, and two days later it's still hanging in there at number three.

What is mindful eating? The Times piece gives step-by-step instructions. "Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam."

And what is the point of the exercise? For one thing, it's a kind of fast-food form of Buddhism. If you don't have time to go off to a monastery and sit in silence for a week, you can still get little tastes, here and there, of what such a retreat might be like.

And when I say little tastes, I mean little tastes. The Times story says of Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher:

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, "and then, O.K., I've got to go do my work," she said. "Anybody can do that. Anywhere."

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. "Mindful eating includes mindless eating," she said. " 'I am aware that I am eating and driving.' "

It may sound like I'm about to make fun of the mindful eating movement--and that last quote is certainly a tempting springboard--but instead I'm going to spring to its defense. First, though, I have to disclose something about myself.

Three times over the last nine years I've gone on one-week silent meditation retreats at a Buddhist retreat center. Seven days of no talking, no reading, no phone calls, no email, no news whatsoever from the outside world. Five and a half hours of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking walking meditation each day. And, more to the point, three meals a day.

But the term "meals" doesn't do justice to these experiences. When I got to my first meditation retreat, I didn't understand why so many people in the dining hall were eating with their eyes closed. Three days later I was just like them--eyes closed, eating in slow motion, totally absorbed in the taste and texture of foods that, a few days earlier, I would have dismissed as offputtingly wholesome and lacking in sex appeal. (None of the food was even made of dead animals!)

Now that I've established my credentials, I just want to make two points:

(1) If you dabble in mindful eating as prescribed in the Times piece, do not be under the mistaken impression that this is anything like the real thing. The level of sensual emergence in food that I reached would not have been possible without getting totally off the grid and using intense meditation to fundamentally alter my frame of mind.

(2) Do not be under the impression that this sensual indulgence is the ultimate point of the exercise. Because meditation can involve a lot of inward focus, it is sometimes belittled as egotistical or solipsistic. But the overall effect is supposed to be roughly the opposite, and that held true for me. The retreats made me way more open to other people and less judgmental of them. I felt a true kinship even with non-human animals (even non-canine non-human animals!). That this was intertwined with a much deeper sense of aesthetic appreciation--of both food and non-food items--certainly made the whole experience gratifying, but it was a paradoxically selfless kind of gratification.

The transforming effect that a silent meditation retreat can have doesn't magically last forever, though you can hang on to an appreciable part of it if you practice daily meditation and mindfulness in a disciplined fashion after the retreat is over (which is way easier said than done). So I'm not the wonderful human being I so briefly was at the end of my first meditation retreat. But I think I'm better than I was before I went on it (leaving aside the question of how high that's setting the bar).

Anyway: Yes, by all means, read the Times piece and experiment with mindful eating. But don't think that, amid the hubbub of your daily life, you're going to get more than a taste of what mindful eating can be like. And don't think that even full-fledged, mind-blowing mindful eating is more than a taste of what Buddhism can be about.

[Postscript: Judging by early commenter reaction, I've written this in a way that makes it seem like I'm denigrating everyday mindful eating, or looking down on people who haven't been on meditation retreats. I plead innocent! Here's my alibi.]

Can Russia Save Syria? Can Anything?

2012-02-09T10:42:00-05:00

Earlier this week I criticized Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice for their high-volume indignation over Russian and Chinese vetoes of a UN resolution that would have called on Syria's president to step down. And I still think Clinton and Rice were hypocritical, given America's long tradition of overlooking the atrocities of dictators who are as close to America as Bashar al-Assad is to Russia.

Still, it looks like the public shaming of Russia may have done some good. Russian leaders are sounding pretty defensive, and Russia's foreign minister says he'll work to start negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition. His prospects can't be great, but I've got to think Russia has a better chance of influencing Assad than that UN resolution did.

I wonder if national leaders are more sensitive to international shaming now than they were back before electronics made the world seem small. Or maybe it's just that the things they're ashamed of are harder to cover up; the images coming out of Homs must make it harder for Russia to walk away. (In 1938 Chamberlain famously described turmoil in Czechoslovakia as "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing." Today you couldn't say that about Papua New Guinea.)

Meanwhile, I haven't found anyone with a compelling idea about what to do. Everyone seems to agree that this would be a much messier intervention than Libya (where, the New York Times reminded us yesterday, things remain a bit messy even now.) And everyone seems to agree that things will be very messy in the absence of an intervention.

Part of the problem is that, as usual, America's standard dictator narrative doesn't apply. That narrative envisions a single "autocrat," with a small coterie of thugs and lots of military hardware, oppressing the rest of the population. But it looks like Assad may be able to hold the allegiance of ethnic groups constituting a third of the country (Allawites, Christians, Kurds)--plus the military hardware.

There is at least some cause for hope in two New Republic pieces--one pro-intervention and one not--that go beyond indignant denunciations of Assad and of Russia and actually look at things from their point of view.

The pro-intervention piece notes that if Russia is to join in authorizing an intervention it will have to be guaranteed post-war use of its cherished warm-water naval base in Syria. (I would add that the same pre-requisite holds if Russia is to truly support more peaceful regime change.) The anti-intervention piece notes that if diplomacy is to work, key members of the Assad regime will have to be guaranteed safe exile after this is over.

Looking at things from the point of view of bad guys is always unpopular--certainly in America, home of the good guys--but it's just about always valuable.

Coda: I had actually raised the last point--about guaranteeing Assad safe haven--in a recent Bloggingheads dialogue with Matthew Lee of Inner City Press, who is the world's most dogged United Nations correspondent. When I asked him if it was possible to grant immunity from prosecution to a dictator who has committed atrocities, he pointed out that, actually, we just did that with another dictator who is probably at the Ritz Carlton in New York at this very moment:

Another Reason Not to Bomb Iran

2012-02-08T08:18:17-05:00

The threat of homegrown terrorism is dropping, according to a report released today by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. The report, says the New York Times, "found that 20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011, down from 26 in 2010 and a spike of 47 in 2009."

I take this with a small grain of salt. A number of terrorism prosecutions have been borderline entrapment cases -- terrorist "plots" that took shape with the active involvement of undercover agents. So changes in these numbers could conceivably reflect changes in the zealousness of law enforcement. And in any event we're not out of the woods; a sufficiently big attack could spook Americans into the sort of hypervigilance (prolific mosque surveillance, ethnic profiling) that alienates young Muslims and so makes them more susceptible to the call of radicalism.

Still, these numbers seem encouraging, and there is reason to hope for continued progress. Some of the most high-profile cases -- the Fort Hood shooting, the botched Times Square bombing -- were, by the perpetrators' own accounts, inspired in part by either the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, or drone strikes in Pakistan. With the withdrawal from Iraq complete, and withdrawal from Afghanistan now accelerated, maybe this kind of fuel for homegrown terrorism will decline for some time to come.

And surely, having made this progress, we wouldn't threaten it by doing something as stupid as supporting or even participating in the bombing of a Muslim country, would we?

It's kind of amazing, when you think about it: This whole "debate" over bombing Iran has included essentially no discussion of whether America's involvement in another war might revive the threat of homegrown terrorism, which was demonstrably exacerbated by past wars with Muslim countries. I'm getting that Twilight-Zoney feeling I got before the invasion of Iraq, when it slowly became apparent that the drive to war was impervious to reason.

Against the Smartphone Thinness Fetish

2012-02-07T09:13:00-05:00

Have you heard the good news? It is rumored -- not confirmed, sadly, but rumored -- that the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone will be only seven millimeters thick! That's a big relief, because the Samsung Galaxy S II (pictured above) was a whopping 8.5 millimeters thick--and who wants to be seen walking around talking to a brick?

Of course, there's a downside to a 7-millimeter-thick phone: It will have less battery life than a thicker phone could have had. And it will be harder to hold onto than a thicker phone, so you'll be more likely to drop it and watch in horror as it plunges to its death. But in between the time it leaves your hand and the time it hits the concrete, it will look really attractive. Same goes for when you're on the road and the battery is dead: It's an awesome kind of dead.

I've waited until now to unload this rant about the gadget thinness fettish because I wanted to let a decent interval pass after the death of the man I blame for it: Steve Jobs.

Remember when Jobs first unveiled the Macbook Air? I do, because I had long been a fan of the small, lightweight computers that had until then been available only on the Windows platform. Jobs brought the machine onstage in a manila envelope, because the thing he wanted to wow the audience with was its thinness.

I thought: Who cares how thin it is? Thickness isn't the dimension that really matters when you have to fit a computer into a tiny backpack or use it in a coach seat on an airplane. And, anyway, more important than any spatial dimension is weight. Sure, to the extent that thinner means lighter, thinness is good, but if you make thinness an end in itself, you start compromising functionality.

Witness the new generation of Windows "ultrabooks"--machines designed to compete with the Macbook Air. Read the parts of the ultrabook reviews that focus on the keyboards. Chances are the reviewer will say either that the keyboard is bad or that, happily, the keyboard isn't quite as bad as the average ultrabook keyboard. The main reason is that the keys don't have far enough to travel--even though adding a millimeter of travel space would have added almost nothing to the machine's weight.

Jobs hewed true to his thinness fetish with the iPhone. (That's one reason iPhone batteries aren't replaceable.) And the iPhone set the aesthetic standard for a whole generation of smartphones. It's a testament to the charisma and marketing genius of Jobs that he could start a global fashion wave that millions of people have cheerfully succumbed to even as it makes their lives more problematic.

The good news is that the tide may be turning. Motorola just unveiled the Droid Razr Maxx--a new iteration of the Droid Razr that is thicker than the original. The reason is that the original, while claiming the title "thinnest 4G phone on the market," also claimed the title "phone with bad battery life."

Last week Brad Molen of Engadget reviewed the Razr Maxx. One of his main complaints was that the Maxx would make people who had just bought the original Droid Razr feel cheated. "How many owners," Molen asked, "would much rather have a device that's still very reasonably svelte and offers astronomically superb battery life?" That's the kind of question that could start a fashion revolution.

America's Self-Righteous Indignation Over Syria at the UN

2012-02-06T10:20:04-05:00

American officials spared no rhetorical expense in reacting to Saturday's collapse of a UN resolution on Syria. Hillary Clinton was "appalled," and UN Ambassador Susan Rice was "disgusted." Referring to Russia and China, who vetoed the resolution, Rice said, "any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands."

This seems like a bit much. It's not as if this resolution would have stopped the bloodshed. It would have called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down--something he would have promptly not done. And it's not as if the Russians and Chinese weren't willing to play ball at all. Russia offered amendments that would have turned an ineffectual resolution into a more conspicuously ineffectual resolution, and they were rejected.

And Russia's resistance, anyway, isn't shocking. The Assad regime is an ally of Russia that buys arms from it, and Russia has a naval base in Syria.

Imagine if the U.S. had a naval base in some Arab country and popular unrest threatened the regime, which then set out to suppress the unrest. Oh, wait--you don't have to imagine that; it actually happened last year, in Bahrain. And the US wasted no time in deserting the people in favor of the regime, even as some of those people were being killed or tortured.

Granted, the Syrian regime's brutality far exceeds that of the Bahranian regime, which managed to nip its revolution in the bud. But America has more than once averted its eyes as friendly dictators killed thousands of innocents. For a nation whose support of popular revolts comes and goes depending on which authoritarian regimes we find useful, we're pretty intolerant of this sort of fickleness in other nations.

I would have liked to see this resolution pass. (And I'd love to see Assad actually step down.) And I can see why the administration would like to be seen as making some progress on Syria. That might slow the advance of people who are arguing for military intervention (which would be way, way messier and less predictable than it was in Libya, and would take place in a much more explosive part of the world).

And indeed, as if on cue, the usual suspects responded to the failure of this resolution by arguing that America should arm the Syrian rebels--a development that would no doubt be followed by calls for America to provide air support and, if necessary, boots on the ground.

Then again, those suspects were saying the same thing before the resolution failed, and they would not, in any event, be long appeased by essentially symbolic actions at the UN. As we saw in Iraq, even when the UN does something much more than symbolic--like get a country to admit weapons inspectors who are in the process of discovering that it has no nuclear weapons program--American hawks have a way of persisting and prevailing.

If the failure of this resolution has made it even easier for the hawks, that's bad. But for Clinton and Rice to carry their moral indignation to such high levels is to evince exactly the sort of forgetful American self-righteousness that is one of the hawks' most valuable and enduring resources.

Debating Military Intervention in Syria

2012-02-05T19:51:16-05:00

Should we start thinking seriously about military intervention in Syria? Shadi Hamid answered affirmatively in a recent Atlantic piece that has sparked a lot of debate. The debate will likely intensify in the wake of Saturday's drama at the United Nations Security Council, where a resolution that would have called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down was vetoed by Russia and China. Here Hamid, of the Brookings Institution, defends his thesis against Gregory Gause of the University of Vermont.

You can watch the whole conversation here.

How to Decide Who to Root For in the Super Bowl

2012-02-04T19:47:00-05:00

If you don't pay much attention to football during the regular season, you may now be trying to figure out who to root for in the Super Bowl.

I can help! I'm not a regular-season fan either, so I've devised a simple four-point formula to help me choose my allegiance.

1) All other things being equal, root for the underdog.

2) All other things being equal, root against a team that has a known cheater as its coach.

3) All other things being equal, root against a team whose quarterback has political aspirations and lent valuable symbolic support to a president who a year earlier had launched a disastrous war that would damage America's national security for years to come.

4) All other things being equal, root against a team whose quarterback has so little imagination that he marries a supermodel and builds a supermansion.

Some years there is tension among these four criteria. But not this year! Go Giants.

Could There Be a Viable Post-Ron-Paul Peace Candidate?

2012-02-04T09:19:07-05:00

In his brand new book The End of War, John Horgan argues that war isn't inherent in human nature and can disappear if enough people want it to disappear. I just did a Bloggingheads dialogue with Horgan, and we wound up discussing whether there could ever be a plausible 'peace candidate' for president (which leads us, in the last couple of minutes of this clip, to a discussion of the role of religion in war and peace):

On post-dialogue reflection, I fear that a viable third-party peace candidate is unlikely. The natural constituency would consist mainly of (a) Republicans who are very fiscally conservative, including libertarians; and (b) Democrats who are in the left wing of their party not just on foreign policy but, typically, on domestic policy. It's hard to imagine a domestic policy platform that both groups could stand on. Anyway, back to Horgan's book: It's a brisk, uplifting read. Here's an excerpt that just appeared on The Atlantic.

Iran's Destructive Fear of America

2012-02-03T11:40:00-05:00

Today's New York Times op-ed page brings a major proposal for resolving the Iran crisis, authored by two eminent American diplomats, Thomas Pickering and William Luers.

When I say "major," I mean major. It isn't a plan just to defuse the crisis, but to craft a grand bargain that would begin to draw Iran into the community of nations. Along with intrusive inspections that would prevent Iran from enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels, there would be full recognition of Iran by America, systematic cooperation between the two nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on.

I hope anyone tempted to dismiss an approach this ambitious will first pause to appreciate the basic reality that motivates Pickering and Luers to think in such big terms. Here is their key paragraph:

For Iran's leadership, the notion that the United States is bent on overthrowing its rulers is rooted in historical experience: the United States did overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, supported the Shah afterward, supported Saddam Hussein's war against Iran in the 1980s, and now backs increasing efforts to weaken and isolate Iran.

It's true: There is a genuine fear in some Iranian circles that America has hostile intentions that are independent of any threat Iran may pose to America or Israel. And if you were a Middle Eastern regime that believed the U.S. was bent on deposing you, wouldn't you want nuclear weapons? Especially if you'd seen what happened to the last two Middle Eastern leaders who abandoned a nuclear weapons program--Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi?

No expert I know of believes that bombing Iran would permanently halt an Iranian drive for nuclear weapons. Most experts believe bombing would remove any doubt in the minds of Iranian leaders that they should pursue nuclear weapons headlong. Certainly bombing would intensify what Pickering and Luers identify as one of the motivators of any Iranian ambition to build nuclear weapons.

The Virtue of the Mormon Afterlife

2012-02-02T19:42:15-05:00

Mormonism just rose in my estimation. I was talking to Joanna Brooks--a Mormon who writes the Ask Mormon Girl advice column and is the author of The Book of Mormon Girl-- when conversation turned to the afterlife. The news she brought was good even for us non-Mormons:

I'm not just being facetious here. I do think there's something deeply laudable about a doctrine of universal salvation. The word "virtue" in the headline of this post is meant literally.

Is Obama Deceiving Us About Drone Strikes?

2012-02-01T21:40:43-05:00

It may be to President Obama's credit that this week, posed with a question about American drone strikes, he answered it rather than ducking it--even though the strikes are technically covert operations. It is not to his credit that his answer seems to have been misleading.

As part of a foray into social media, the president was chatting with some regular Americans on a Google Plus "hangout" when he encountered a question about drones from a guy named Evan in Brooklyn. "For the most part," Obama assured Evan, "they have been very precise, precision strikes against al Qaeda and their affiliates." He added later that the drone strikes are "part and parcel of our overall authority when it comes to battling al Qaeda. It is not something that's being used beyond that." And he reminded us that "there are still active plots against the United States."

Coverage in the mainstream media tended not to question any of this, but Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations questioned it. Noting that Obama had focused his discussion on drone strikes in Pakistan, Zenko wrote: "We know from reporting by Pakistani journalists that the vast majority of suspected militants targeted are not members of al-Qaeda, nor are they involved in plots against the U.S. homeland. Many of the targets are actually anonymous, low-level militants who provide operational support to the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan."

You can understand why Obama would want to play up the al Qaeda angle and stress that there are still "plots against the United States." Terrorist threats to the homeland tend to shut down critical thinking--and if, as Zenko says, the drone strikes aren't mainly about al Qaeda, much less about al Qaeda's threats to America, then critical thinking could raise doubts about them.

After all, the inevitable drone-induced civilian casualties tend to make life easier for recruiters for al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups. It's one thing if, in thus expanding the ranks of terrorists in the long run, we're at least doing major damage to al Qaeda in the short run; it still may be, on balance, bad anti-terrorism strategy, but at least you'd have to do the math, comparing short-term benefits to long-term costs, before being sure of that. But if--as seems to be the case--most of the drone strikes are protecting American soldiers in Afghanistan from attacks by the Taliban, then there may be no big upside in terms of homeland security.

True, the security of American soldiers may be served, and that's of course a good thing in itself. But many of those soldiers are there because Obama ill-advisedly upped the ante in Afghanistan, rather than start withdrawing as soon as he took office. And, worse still, he seems to have committed to this escalation as part of a political calculation during the presidential campaign.

At one point in his Google Plus conversation, Obama did a masterful job of describing the function of the drone strikes in a way that did allude to their battlefield function, but still appealed to "war on terror" psychology. The people targeted by the drones, he said, "are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases, and so on." When you're at war, is it really "terrorism" for the enemy to kill your soldiers? If so, why isn't it terrorism for your soldiers to kill the enemy (especially when you sometimes, as with drone strikes, kill civilians)? But of course, the virtue of the word "terrorism" is that it makes us think of al Qaeda, whether or not al Qaeda is in fact involved.

If drone strikes are indeed increasing America's vulnerability to terrorism in the long run--and if in the short term they're a price paid for Obama's 2008 political calculation--then it's no wonder the president is using these sorts of verbal smokescreens.

[Postscript: It was a big week in drone news. Here's Glenn Greenwald's coverage of a story about the state department's use of surveillance drones in Iraq and, possibly, elsewhere. And here's Obama's Google Plus chat. The drone questions start at 26:25.]

[Update, 2/2/12 8 a.m.: Relevantly, the New York Times reports that a new NATO report finds that "the Taliban have gradually distanced themselves from Al Qaeda."]

Newt Exit Countdown: 10 Days?

2012-02-01T09:04:21-05:00

Last night CNN commentator David Gergen said of Newt Gingrich, "It's like he's in a different reality."

Some might say this insight dawned on Gergen more than a quarter of a century after the evidence for it became insurmountable. But, in Gergen's defense, he wasn't making an overall appraisal of Newt's mental health; he was talking about the concession speech Gingrich had just delivered.

And, indeed, the speech made few clear references to the universe you and I live in. Gingrich, having just seen his chances of winning the Republican nomination drop to less than one percent, set about describing the things he would do the day he took the oath of office.

Worse still, as he ticked these things off, he showed signs of more fine-grained disorientation. He said he would "instruct the State Department that day to open the embassy in Jerusalem and recognize Israel." I get the part about moving the embassy to Jerusalem. But: Recognize Israel? I was under the impression that we'd already recognized Israel. Maybe he meant Palestine? No, I guess we can rule out that hypothesis.

This could get fun, folks. We're on a magical mystery tour, and Newt is our tourguide.

But, pessimist that I am, I fear that the journey is close to its end. I'm betting Newt will pull the plug before Super Tuesday, and maybe even within ten days. My logic:

1) Casino-magnate sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson will presumably cut off Newt's $5-million-per-week allowance. Surely Adelson's friends will explain to him that at this point each dollar for Newt just increases the chances that Obama will defeat Romney. Conceivably Gingrich could counter that by promising to run a 100-percent positive campaign. But I'm guessing the Adelson spigot is now off.

2) Once the money runs out, campaigning can become un-fun. Last night Newt, in yet another megalomaniacal reference to historical figures that are nearly as momentous as himself, closed his speech by pledging "my life, my fortune, my sacred honor." (It's the pledge made by the signatories of the Declaration of Independence to each other.) But is he serious about the "fortune" part? I can't see him persisting beyond the point where campaign expenses start cutting into Callista's hairspray budget.

3) Newt is addicted to public adoration. The flip side is that, when the crowds start dwindling, he'll feel withdrawal. And there's a reason they call it "withdrawal."

I'm not a political sage, but I assume the experts are right when they say that February voting is unlikely to bring any good news for Gingrich. So as of a week from now, he'll have lost several caucuses and a non-binding primary. And the view ahead will look like this: He has to wait three more weeks for two more primaries that he's going to lose (Arizona and Michigan)--after which, with a week still left until Super Tuesday, he'll have zero momentum.

Newt's crazy, but he's not that crazy. Is he?

Why I Secretly Root for Newt

2012-01-30T09:12:01-05:00

Are members of the "elite liberal media," as Newt Gingrich would put it, secretly rooting for him? That's the claim of New York Magazine's John Heilemann. And, says Heilemann, this covert sympathy for Newt "may turn out to be a crucial asset--especially if, as seems likely, he falls short in the Florida primary and is forced into survival mode."

It isn't that many journalists actually want Newt to be president, says Heilemann. Some just want the horse race to continue, since they are, after all, in the horse race covering business. For others, there's something fascinating about the spectacle of Newt, and their lives would be poorer without it.

I have to admit that I fall into the latter camp. The horror I feel when I imagine Newt assuming a position of responsibility can give way to melancholia if I contemplate the prospect of life without the feisty, aging smurf. Here are some things I'll miss should anyone ever succeed in driving a stake through Gingrich's heart:

1) The bizarre hyperbole. In his famous dressing down of John King, Newt said that the media's focus on his previous wife's testimony about his character was "as close to despicable as anything I can imagine." Anything you can imagine? Come on, Newt, think harder. Jeffrey Dahmer? The Jonestown Massacre? Stop me when I get to something closer to despicable than John King.

2) The vision thing. The first President Bush was derided for lacking "the vision thing." With Newt that's not a problem. My favorite part of his visionary mode is the part where he... just... keeps... going. Take the space colony thing. It's not crazy, if you're trying to win the Florida primary, to say that you'll increase spending for NASA. I don't even think it's necessarily ill-advised to set as your eventual goal a continuously inhabited base on the moon. And I suppose, if you want, you could call this base a "colony". But at that point you're at the outer limits of the vision an aspiring president should evince. Newt boldly goes where no aspiring president has gone before. He has pledged that as president he would support something that he (who else?) dreamed up as a congressman: "the northwest ordinance for space," which says that, once you have 13,000 Americans on the moon, the moon can apply for statehood.

The problem isn't the conundrums this would raise. (With one senator per 6,500 moon residents, would lunar interests be overrepresented in Congress? Or might this effect be partly offset by the difficulty senators would have flying home to take the pulse of their constituents on three-day weekends?) The problem, rather, is that this sounds like a crazy person talking!

What's not to like?

3) The instinct for the jugular. Newt's ruthlessness might bother me if he were running against a Democratic presidential candidate. But that doesn't seem to be in the cards. So I can just watch with bemusement as he besmirches Mitt Romney's good name. Some people have criticized Sheldon Adelson, the sugardaddy Casino magnate who bankrolled Newt's South Carolina and Florida media campaigns. (Oops! I mean, "who donated to a SuperPac not affiliated with Newt Gingrich.") But my hat's off to any Republican who will spend several million dollars trying to drive up the unfavorables of the inevitable Republican nominee--and in a swing state, no less!

Godspeed, Newt Gingrich.