Robert Wright : The Atlantic

Drone Strikes and the Boston Marathon Bombing

Robert Wright — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:49:01 GMT

Protesters loyal to the Shi'ite al-Houthi rebel group burn an effigy of a U.S. aircraft during a demonstration to protest against what they say is U.S. interference in Yemen, including drone strikes, in the Old Sanaa city April 12, 2013. (Reuters)

In 2011, after President Obama used a drone to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who was recruiting jihadists from his perch in Yemen, many hailed the assassination as a powerful blow against terrorism.

"The death of al-Awlaki is the last nail in the coffin of the al Qaeda brand,"wrote Lisa Merriam (a "brand consultant") in a piece for Forbes. "Yes, bombs are what we think of when we think of al Qaeda, but powerful bombs require a powerful brand. The al Qaeda brand has been the key to raising awareness, raising an army of recruits, raising money, and raising terror. Now that the brand is dead, all of those goals are out of reach."

Tell that to the people of Boston. The more we learn about the Boston Marathon bombing--and the accused bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev--the more reason there is to doubt the wisdom of Obama's drone-heavy approach to fighting terrorism. Not only did his hundreds of drone strikes fail to prevent the bombing; they've probably made this kind of terrorism--home-grown terrorism, committed by longtime residents of America--more likely.

Many have noted that a recipe for the type of bomb used in Boston was published three years ago in Inspire, the online magazine aimed at getting American Muslims to commit terrorism. Inspire is associated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and al-Awlaki is thought to have been involved in the magazine's creation.

So the Boston bombing is, for starters, a reminder that killing al-Awlaki didn't magically expunge that bomb recipe from the internet. And the fact that another issue of Inspire came out last month is a reminder that killing al-Awlaki didn't kill his magazine or his message or the al Qaeda brand.

In fact, if you look at the contents of that most recent issue, you'll find evidence that this and other targeted killings have strengthened the al Qaeda brand, or at least the jihadist brand more generically, by making it more appealing to vulnerable American Muslims (not most American Muslims, of course, or even many of them, but the very few unstable, disaffected ones who are susceptible to the lure of radical Islam).

The point of this issue of Inspire--and all issues of Inspire--is twofold: to suggest effective forms of violence and convince these vulnerable Muslims that violence is warranted. That second goal rests on a simple narrative that gained momentum via the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts: America is at war with Islam. President Obama may think he's draining that narrative of its power by extracting troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. But his strategic substitute for ground troops--a hugely expanded program of drone strikes in various Muslim countries--is also substituting for those troops in the jihadist narrative.

This latest issue of Inspire says America uses drones in a "cowardly" way:

In Yemen, they roam over Muslim houses, terrorizing children, women and the weak. Moreover they bombard 'suspected' targets in villages, towns and cities. Why? Because far from Yemen, in the Whitehouse [sic], Obama took a decision. He decided to start a new chapter, a chapter more savage and barbaric than the previous chapters of the crusade on Yemeni Muslims. A chapter which relies on the strategy of the unmanned drones, 'the strategy of signature strikes'.

This strategy allows officials in the CIA and the PTSD army to carry out attacks on any human, vehicle or building in Yemen if 'suspected' to be a threat to the security of the US without the need to identify the real identity of the target, whether Al-Qaeda or not. This includes women and children. Just because an American 'feels' this person poses danger. Whenever they have this 'feeling' they order for a 'Hell Fire missile' to be launched.

These missiles are usually carried by the unmanned drones to kill this or that target cold-bloodedly. Of course! Obama is declaring a crusade! These missiles have no eyes and their launchers are more blind. They kill civilians more than mujahideen.

Obviously, there's some exaggeration here; that's the way propaganda works. But propaganda is most powerful when it's at least within shouting distance of the truth--and, unfortunately, that's the case here. Obama's drone strikes have killed, if not more civilians than mujahideen, lots of civilians, including women and scores of children. Every time such killing happens, the jihadist narrative, the narrative that seems to have seized the minds of the Tsarnaev brothers, gains a measure of strength.

So did one or both Tsarnaev brothers actually read Inspire? Pro Publica has suggested that Tamerlan did. But whether or not he did, the drone-strike trope has become a standard theme in jihadist propaganda channels, and there's strong evidence that Tamerlan was tuned in to those channels. And he seems to have been buying the larger America-is-at-war-with-Islam meme. A man who knew Tamerlan says he "was upset with America because America was in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries."

No doubt there were lots of ingredients in Tamerlan's radicalization, possibly including Russia's brutal treatment of fellow Chechens. He may have even gotten inspiration or guidance during a 2012 trip to Russia. But his radicalization seems to have preceded that trip, and, in any event, in the end he needed a rationale for killing Americans, not Russians. That's where drone strikes can come in handy, and the latest issue of Inspire spells out the logic explicitly: Because America is "ruled by the people," its "rulers (people) should pay for their country's action till they change their system and foreign policies." So "war on America including civilians" is legitimate, says Inspire, so long as Americans are killing Muslim civilians with drone strikes. "The equation should be balanced. Like they kill, they will be killed."

We'll never know for sure whether recurring news about civilians killed in drone strikes helped push Tamerlan over the edge or helped him rationalize atrocity. But I assume jihadist recruiters know their business, and know what kinds of things can incite people like the Tsarnaev brothers. And they seem to consider Obama's drone strike policy a gift from God. If that "gift" isn't what gave us the Boston bombing, it will probably, if continued long enough, give us some other horrific bombing down the road.

When Lisa Merriam celebrated the assassination of al Awlaki in Forbes, she was under a misapprehension that seems to have motivated that assassination and has helped sustain Obama's drone strike program: that the enemy should be thought of as a kind of overseas army, and if we kill all its soldiers, we'll have won.

In truth, the enemy isn't just jihadists, but jihadist memes. And if every time you kill a jihadist you create several more by spreading the memes, you're not winning. That's especially true if some of the jihadists you create are already in America--assets more valuable to America's enemy than 100 jihadist foot soldiers in Yemen.

Another premise of Obama's drone strike policy is that "high value" targets are hard if not impossible to replace. After all, who could possibly fill the shoes of the famously charismatic al-Awlaki? Now we have our answer. Though Obama ensured that al-Awlaki isn't around to preach to people like Tamaran Tsarnaev, Tsarnaev seems to have found someone equally charismatic to follow: Feiz Mohammad, an Australian YouTube preacher who, as Noam Scheiber of the New Republic notes, has "the chiseled look of a former athlete" and "impeccable dramatic timing".

Obviously, to note how American policies contribute to terrorism isn't to diminish the moral culpability of the terrorists or to embrace jihadist rationales. And it's not to suggest that terrorists should get veto power over American policies. If Inspire inveighed against, say, freedom of religion in America, no compromise of that principle would be in order even if terrorism was the price paid for defending it. But with drone strikes, the whole point of the policy is supposed to be to prevent terrorism. If the policy is in fact contributing to terrorism, that's a pretty strong argument against it.

Signing Off

Robert Wright — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:03:12 GMT

A year ago I started writing regularly in this space. For me it was a fairly radical experiment. I hadn't had a regular writing commitment more demanding than a weekly column since I worked for a daily newspaper in the 1980s. And I'd never had the liberating but slightly frightening authority to publish whatever I wanted without an editor reading it first.

It was exhilarating from the very beginning, and often rewarding in ways that my previous forms of journalistic expression couldn't be. But by the fall it had become clear that it wasn't sustainable, and in October I let The Atlantic know that I'd have to call it quits at the end of the year.

The main reason for this decision is that I'm supposed to be writing a book. (Translation of "supposed to be": I've signed the contract and cashed the check--though my motivation to get the book written goes well beyond that.) I had naively imagined that I could make the book project dovetail with writing here on a roughly daily basis, and reconcile both of these things with my other commitments, notably running Bloggingheads.tv. Wrong.

It isn't just a matter of squeezing in the time to do some book writing. The book is about the Buddhist view of the mind, so there just isn't much synergy between writing it and writing daily about politics and policy and culture. I need to get my own mind in a different place.

In a few weeks I'll be going to that place. Through a great stroke of fortune, I have the opportunity to teach a seminar on the Buddhist view of the mind (and related matters) at Princeton. I'm looking forward to everything about this--the intellectual stimulus of curious undergraduates, the freewheeling discussion of deep subjects, the distinctively benign atmosphere of a college campus.

And, to be honest, I'm looking forward to getting up in the morning without feeling I have to develop an opinion about something and then publicize it. (Not that you asked, but: I just counted up my posts, and I've averaged one per weekday. And most were basically full-fledged columns, more like "pieces" than "posts"--which just goes to show that old habits die hard.) However, I have no doubt that any sense of relief will be outweighed by pangs of withdrawal. "Unique" is an overused word, but over the past year I've had the benefit of a unique station. I've had complete editorial freedom and I've benefited both from the aura of The Atlantic's age-old and carefully preserved prestige and from the power of The Atlantic's current editorial operation.

I somehow managed to keep the words "brand" and "platform" out of the previous sentence, but, yes, the shorter version is that this web site is a great platform with a great brand that afforded me great freedom, and the uniqueness lies in the fact that there's nowhere else--literally nowhere else--I could have gotten all three of these things in such great measure.

I want to say a little more about the brand and the platform. I know it's not a news flash to say that the digital age has been unkind to magazines and newspapers. And it's only slightly less obvious that the digital age hasn't been kind to magazine-like websites or newspaper-like websites. But those of us who have seen these truths unfold up close--that is, journalists who have seen the business of journalism transformed and in some aspects demolished--have an especially keen appreciation of the power of the technological logic behind them. So it seems nearly miraculous to see an enterprise like The Atlantic not just survive but flourish, staying in the black yet staying classy.

I was in touch with The Atlantic's editor, James Bennet, back when he and the magazine's owner, David Bradley, were adapting to an earlier, different incarnation of the internet by assembling a group of blogs to serve as the web site's core. I take some pride in (if I recall correctly) suggesting to James that he talk to Matt Yglesias, who then came to The Atlantic and became one of its early internet stars. But I deserve no credit for two subsequent inspired hires--Bob Cohn, who came from Wired to oversee The Atlantic's web site, and John Gould, Bob's deputy. Having now watched Bob and John work under James's leadership, I have some understanding of The Atlantic's remarkable adaptive record--how, with perfect timing, it has moved beyond the early, blog-o-centric model (which crucially got it a foothold on the web) just as internet journalism moved into what some call the post-blog era. I owe all four of these people--David, James, Bob, and John--thanks for building the environment I've been allowed to inhabit.

I could at this point keep naming names, thanking, in particular, fellow Atlantic writers for letting me bask in their reflected glory, but if I did I wouldn't know where to stop. So I'll just thank them generically, and also thank the readers who enjoyed, tolerated, or endured my writing, as the case may be, as well as the gratifyingly large subset of readers who reacted to what I wrote with sincere and civil comments.

I guess it's natural that, as I bring this year to a close, I look back and wish I'd written some things I didn't write, or vice versa. But my main regret is that I didn't make more explicit some of the concerns that were implicit in much of what I wrote. I feel like a preacher who, after standing at the pulpit 52 Sundays in a row, dispensing sermons on how to live right, realizes that he forgot to mention the part about salvation. So, at the risk of setting a record for longest swan song in the history of journalism, I'd like to quickly articulate three beliefs of mine that I rarely articulated this year, but that informed much of what I wrote, especially in the realm of foreign policy.

[1] The world's biggest single problem is the failure of people or groups to look at things from the point of view of other people or groups--i.e. to put themselves in the shoes of "the other." I'm not talking about empathy in the sense of literally sharing people's emotions--feeling their pain, etc. I'm just talking about the ability to comprehend and appreciate the perspective of the other. So, for Americans, that might mean grasping that if you lived in a country occupied by American troops, or visited by American drone strikes, you might not share the assumption of many Americans that these deployments of force are well-intentioned and for the greater good. You might even get bitterly resentful. You might even start hating America.

[2] Grass-roots hatred is a much greater threat to the United States--and to nations in general, and hence to world peace and stability--than it used to be. The reasons are in large part technological, and there are two main manifestations: (1) technology has made it easier for grass-roots hatred to morph into the organized deployment (by non-state actors) of massively lethal force; (2) technology has eroded authoritarian power, rendering governments more responsive to popular will, hence making their policies more reflective of grass roots sentiment in their countries. The upshot of these two factors is that public sentiment toward America abroad matters much more (to America's national security) than it did a few decades ago.

[3] If the United States doesn't use its inevitably fading dominance to build a world in which the rule of law is respected, and in which global norms are strong, the United States (and the world) will suffer for it. So when, for example, we do things to other nations that we ourselves have defined as acts of war (like cybersabotage), that is not, in the long run, making us or our allies safer. The same goes for when we invade countries, or bomb them, in clear violation of international law. And at some point we have to get serious about building a truly comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation regime--one that we expect our friends, not just our enemies, to be members-in-good-standing of.

You might ask: If I'm so concerned about international affairs, why am I writing a book about Buddhism? Of course, you might not ask that. But just in case:

Part of the answer is that, though writing in this space has led me to emphasize my concerns about policy and politics, they aren't my only concerns. But another part of the answer is this:

If you look at the three challenges I've just identified in italics, you'll see that the second two wouldn't be so challenging if the first challenge was met. It's because Americans don't put themselves in the shoes of non-Americans that they (with the best of intentions) support policies that generate hatred of America and (without even realizing it) act as if rules are things that should be obeyed by everyone except America and its allies. (I don't mean to suggest that Americans are the only people who make these mistakes. It's just that I'm an American writing mainly for Americans, so I focus on American policies.) So if we could address the first challenge in a big way--if we could get much better at seeing the world from the point of view of others--that would go a long way toward saving the world from the grim fate that otherwise may await it. And, without going into a lot of detail, I'd just say that (1) the Buddhist view of the mind helps illuminate this challenge, as does modern psychology, and I'm interested in seeing how the challenge looks from these two vantage points; and (2) Buddhist meditative practice, in which I've dabbled, can be effective in addressing the challenge.

One thing I've wondered, as I've watched America's national security policies fail to address the challenges I describe above--and as I've watched the policies of nations in general fail to solve the world's biggest problems--is whether these failures will continue until we make what you might call "spiritual" progress at the grass roots level. In other words, maybe meeting that first challenge, and becoming better at seeing things from the point of view of "the other," isn't just conducive to progress at the policy level but a pre-requisite for it. In principle all religious and spiritual traditions can play a constructive role here. (That was part of the point of my most recent book, The Evolution of God--see the chapter titled "Moral Imagination.") But Buddhism is distinctively relevant, because there are now some very secular, westernized versions of it that may appeal to the growing number of westerners who reject religion per se.

My interests in the Buddhist view of the mind--the interests I'll explore in my book and my seminar--go well beyond this, but my point is just that there's a stronger thread of continuity between my 2012 and my 2013 than may at first meet the eye. So I hope readers who find that thread interesting will stay tuned. In the coming year I'll continue to do at least some writing, in various venues. (And links to things I write will appear in my twitter feed--@robertwrighter--along with other tweets.) I'm happy to report that, when the venue in question is The Atlantic, my writing will appear right here, in this space, stacked on top of all my previous posts (or pieces, or whatever). And who knows--maybe someday I'll again have the chance to write in this space with some regularity and frequency. In any event, thanks again to all the people who made doing that this past year so rewarding.

Podcasts to Try in 2013

Robert Wright — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 02:30:13 GMT

If it's true, as some sage said, that thoughts shape actions and actions shape habits and habits shape character and character shapes destiny, the obvious question is: What shapes thoughts? Well, lots of things, and one of them is... podcasts! So as you begin the new year, one way to shape your destiny is to amend your podcast lineup.

To help you, I offer the Bobbies, awards given annually (for one year in a row now) by me (Bob) to notable podcasts. I don't claim that I've scoured the planet and that these are truly the "best" podcasts in the world. But of the ones I've examined--and I've examined quite a few, because I take nightly walks and like accompaniment--they stand out.

Best Podcasts about Public Affairs

To the Point with Warren Olney. I'm not aware of any podcast that lives up to its name more fully than this one. Olney is extremely good at steering the conversation to the crux of the issue and highlighting the key points of contention. And he's good at choosing guests who help him do it. Olney doesn't win a lot of style points--he's not real zesty, and he doesn't try to impress you with his erudition, and he only occasionally indulges his (not bad, actually) sense of humor. He kind of reminds me of Jack Webb in the old Dragnet TV series saying, to anyone who started to meander, "Just the facts, please." If you listen to only one analytical podcast about public affairs, and your goal is efficient comprehension, this is the podcast for you.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook isn't as on point as To the Point. Ashbrook is a good interviewer, but he's less laserlike than Olney. That's partly because his show features listener call in, a format that isn't laser-friendly. He handles the challenge with aplomb, but if you're not a fan of listener call-in, there's only so far aplomb can go. I listen to his opening conversations with experts but sometimes bail out when the listeners start calling in, depending on whether the ratio of passion to reason gets offputtingly high.

Best High-Brow Podcasts

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. This BBC product is the closest podcast I've found to a college seminar run by an Oxford don. But instead of students being seated around the table, there are several professors--new ones each week, depending on the subject--and the don isn't a professor but rather a broadly curious radio guy who prepares well for each conversation and deftly orchestrates the exposition. Bragg does mainly history, including a fair amount of intellectual history. So episodes might focus on, say, an appraisal of Bertrand Russell or Maimonides, or an exploration of Minoan Civilization or of Martin Luther's experience at the Diet of Worms. (And the people doing the discussing are so sophisticated that it doesn't even occur to them to make a pun about the Diet of Worms!) The podcast is weekly, but because its subjects are timeless, you can make it effectively daily by plundering the archives.

Partially Examined Life. This podcast faces some self-imposed obstacles: (1) It features four, sometimes five, people, and since the regulars are all American males without distinctive regional accents, it's not immediately easy to tell them apart, so their personalities take a while to crystallize. (2) It's about philosophy! And I mean real philosophy. Most of the regulars did graduate work in philosophy and were headed for academia before they "thought better of it," as their web site puts it. So their idea of a good time is an in-depth, sometimes even technical, discussion of Wittgenstein or Quine. If that doesn't scare you off, this is your podcast.

Best Tech Podcasts

The Vergecast. I have my complaints about this weekly conversation among 3 or 4 tech writers from The Verge, but what the show has in spades is chemistry. The three mainstays--Josh Topolsky, Nilay Patel, and Paul Miller--have distinctive personas and perspectives, and there is the right amount of playful tension among them, and they're funny and smart. Do they spend too much time on jokey tangents with no relevance to the tech world? Occasionally. Do they sometimes, in their diatribes against tech companies, exhibit a youthful disregard for pragmatic constraint? Yes. But it's their unconstrained imaginations that make this podcast a good stimulus for thinking about the future of digital technology. Their conversations can be engrossing even if you have no interest in buying the products they're talking about.

Engadget. If the aforementioned eccentricities of the Vergecast rub you the wrong way, try the podcast from the people at Engadget. It spends a bit less time in zany mode, and more time offering concrete information about products, and when it does venture into business strategy, it evinces more practical understanding.

If you like narrowcasting, try Leo Laporte's TWiT Network. Though the network's first show, This Week in Tech, was (and remains) broad-gauged, the network's offerings now include more than 20 shows with names like This Week in Google, Windows Weekly, and iPad Today. Laporte, one of the pioneers of tech broadcasting, is a baby boomer, and the generational sensibility of his shows--in terms of cultural references, etc.--is accordingly different from Engadget and the Vergecast. But, like pretty much all tech podcasts, his are lighthearted and irreverent.

Speaking of narrowcasting: Best Buddhist Podcasts

Buddhist Geeks. Occasionally I wish this podcast were a little less... Buddhist. By which I mean: Buddhism counsels accepting reality as it is, and I sometimes want the host to intervene in a guest's lengthier utterances (maybe occasionally asking for an example that might illustrate some abstract assertion). Still, the interviews are smart and knowing, and certainly congenial, and the guests are diverse and interesting--at least, if you, like me, have an interest in Buddhism. And if you don't, then you haven't read this far anyway.

Buddhist Geeks is big-tent Buddhist, encompassing Zen, Tibetan, and so on. My own focus (to the extent that I have focus, which comes and goes) is within the Vipassana tradition. Dharma Seed, though not a regular podcast, is a rich archive of downloadable talks by teachers in that tradition.

Best Podcast Whose Quality I'm Not Fit to Impartially Judge

A little-known fact about my website Bloggingheads.tv (even littler known than the website itself) is that, should you ever tire of looking at the heads, you can just subscribe to the podcast. What's more, you can subscribe not just to the overall Bloggingheads feed, which will get you about one podcast per day, but, individually, to any of the dozen or so shows, ranging from weekly to sporadic, that air on BhTV.

If any readers want to share their own podcast preferences, or take issue with mine, there's plenty of space for that below. Happy New Year!

Should Buddhist Meditation Make You Happy?

Robert Wright — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:28:45 GMT

In Early December, right before I headed off for a one-week silent meditation retreat, I encouraged readers to leave comments or questions about meditation that I could respond to upon returning. A commenter named Jon Johanning obliged: "If you're talking about Buddhist meditation, I'm sorry to say that you're missing the whole point," he wrote. He was referring to my having noted that on a previous meditation retreat I felt lousy after the first few days but great later on. He continued, "Whether you feel 'good' or 'bad' or 'bored' or 'fuzzy' or 'ecstatic' or anything else in particular has nothing to do with the whole point of the thing."

Well, I wouldn't say that how you feel has nothing to do with "the whole point of the thing." According to the Buddha himself, the whole point of the thing is to find the causes of human suffering and eliminate them--and, though I have no first-hand experience with the complete elimination of suffering, I'm guessing it would feel pretty good. What's more, these Buddhist meditation retreats typically do make you feel good, which is a big reason that people keep coming back.

Still, Johanning is in a sense right. During the meditation retreats I've been on--four of them over the past 10 years--the teachers typically say you shouldn't be "seeking" a pleasurable state, or anything else. Rather, you should just observe things. Observe your breath, your sensations, your emotions, sounds, whatever. And, as you observe these things, you're not supposed to make value judgments. So, for example, though anxiety normally feels bad, if you encounter a wave of it while meditating, you're supposed to examine it with as much detachment as possible, doing your best to see it as neither good nor bad but just as a fact.

This is the irony: Buddhist meditation teachers counsel a kind of detachment that should in theory leave you neither happy nor sad. But by the end of one of these retreats, almost invariably, you're happy. And you're happy in particular ways: more appreciative of beauty, feeling more distance from ordinary anxieties, feeling more kinship with other humans and with other forms of life. You're also easier to be around--less defensive, less emotionally reactive, etc. My family always likes the post-retreat Bob, and is sorry to see him fade away as time wears on (though I find that the benign effects can be sustained in modest measure if I keep doing, say, 30 minutes of daily meditating).

In that post I wrote in early December, I said that the strikingly pleasant feelings I've had on retreats, "though warm and fuzzy, are the product of a sharp, even cold, clarity." But I didn't elaborate, and I promised to try to put a finer point on that observation when I got back from the retreat. The finer point, I guess, is more or less what I just said: a key step on this path to warm fuzziness is indeed a kind of austere detachment--a cool appraisal of your own emotions that involves dropping your instinctive labeling of them as "good" or "bad," and allows you to see them, in a sense, more clearly, and that leads them to slowly loosen their grip on you.

On this most recent retreat, I was outside doing some walking meditation around twilight, and I looked up at the horizon and saw the pink-purple legacy of a just-descended sun, set off by some barren winter trees in the foreground. I got this melancholy feeling that a winter twilight can give me. But then I examined the melancholy and suddenly it just seemed like physical waves moving slowly through my body--nothing more, nothing less, not good, not bad; its emotional content disappeared.

What happened next was interesting. With this twilight vista now uncolored by melancholy, I could focus on its sheer visual beauty. The scene had morphed magically from a source of sadness into a pleasure to behold.

Which brings us back to the irony I alluded to above: Why do certain good feelings--in this case the pleasurable appreciation of beauty--endure, indeed deepen, even as affect more generally subsides? You would think that since detachment in theory neutralizes positive and negative feelings equally, it would leave you affectively neutral, like Mr. Spock on Star Trek, who, so far as I recall, didn't spend much time reveling in life's aesthetic delights. But, as a practical matter, that's just not the way it works. Cool detachment leads to something that feels kind of warm.

And that emphatically includes warmth toward other people. I remember a day or two after my first meditation retreat, riding in a little monorail car that takes you to Newark airport from the nearby train station, striking up a friendly conversation with strangers. Believe me when I tell you I wasn't previously known for that kind of behavior. Fortunately for strangers everywhere, this phase passed.

I'm not sure how to explain this irony of detachment-induced warmth. Maybe, though in theory you're distancing yourself equally from positive and negative emotions as you meditate, you're actually cheating, and doing selective distancing. Or maybe a feeling of affinity--with our environment, with other creatures--is a kind of default state, and we revert to it when more transient and superficial feelings, both negative and positive, are stripped away. But that doesn't make immediate sense to me in terms of evolutionary psychology, my basic paradigm for viewing the mind, and I'm not sure it even accords with mainstream Buddhist doctrine.

Anyway, one thing I feel pretty sure of: If more people did silent meditation retreats--at least, retreats of the kind I'm familiar with--there would be more happiness, and more peace of mind. And I don't think the people who felt this (and who, as a consequence, made people around them feel better) would be missing the point.

[Note: There are lots of different kinds of silent meditation retreats. Mine were in the Vipassana tradition and were at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. The teachers of this particular retreat were Narayan Liebenson Grady of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Society and Rodney Smith of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society.]

Can Obama Avert the Fiscal Cliff Without Mitch McConnell?

Robert Wright — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 02:41:00 GMT

Lots of people say that President Obama, if given some help by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, could keep the federal government from going over the "fiscal cliff." But in the exchange below, after Noam Scheiber of The New Republic lays out that scenario, Conn Carroll of the Washington Examiner argues that if Obama really wants to avert the cliff, he can do so without McConnell's help:

Chuck Hagel Gets His Second Wind

Robert Wright — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:30:00 GMT

Tom Friedman, in this morning's New York Times, endorses Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense. Friedman finds it "disgusting" that Hagel has been "smeared as an Israel hater at best" by his detractors (some neoconservatives). But Friedman's stinging rejoinder to the anti-Hagel campaign isn't motived just by revulsion; he believes calling Hagel anti-Israel is, in addition to being sleazy, 180 degrees away from the truth:

The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.

Friedman's support isn't the only boost Hagel's candidacy has gotten in the last 24 hours. Last night the Washington Post published a letter in support of Hagel signed by four former national security advisers -- James L. Jones, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Frank Carlucci. They write:

Mr. Hagel is a man of unshakable integrity and wisdom who has served his country in the most distinguished manner in peace and war. He is a rare example of a public servant willing to rise above partisan politics to advance the interests of the United States and its friends and allies.

Note the bipartisan cast. These people held the top White House national security post in, respectively, the Obama, George H.W. Bush, Carter, and Reagan administrations. And they're not alone. Hagel has also been endorsed by a slew of former U.S. ambassadors, from both Democratic and Republican administrations, including no fewer than five who have served as ambassador to Israel.

The Friedman column and the Washington Post letter come at an important time for Hagel. Some observers were starting to think his candidacy was on life support.

To be sure, the main reason for this judgment didn't make any sense: A couple of Sunday talk shows decided to invite as their guests legislators who were guaranteed not to be supportive of Hagel, and then when they said non-supportive things, this was billed as news. (Lindsey Graham sides with neocons! Joe Lieberman sides with neocons! Chuck Schumer is non-commital! Dog bites man!) But never mind -- once the conventional wisdom hardens it hardens, and this piece of conventional wisdom was starting to gel. So the interventions by Friedman and those Democratic and Republican heavyweights were timely.

Hagel has now drawn support from liberals all across the foreign policy spectrum, from well left to center if not right of center: John Judis of The New Republic, Josh Marshall of TPM, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Joe Klein of Time, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, Jim Fallows of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic (who, like Friedman, makes a pro-Israel argument for Hagel), etc. Hagel has also been embraced by many on the non-neocon right, as evinced not only by the politicos mentioned above, but by pundits ranging from paleocons to a bunch of libertarians. A few progressives are skeptical of Hagel because of his past conservative positions on issues with little bearing on foreign policy, but by and large this fight is between some neocons (plus a few reliable supporters) and everybody else.

So it's in Obama's hands. There's a lot at stake here -- not just whether McCarthyite smears will be allowed to succeed, but whether Obama, in the wake of the Susan Rice episode, will now get a reputation as someone who caves whenever he faces resistance. Some people say Obama will abandon Hagel because he's too busy dealing with the fiscal-cliff negotiations. The truth is that if he doesn't stand by Hagel he'll have a weaker hand in the fiscal cliff negotiations, because no one will take his threats seriously. "Defining moment" is an overused term, but this is a defining moment for President Obama. I'll let Andrew Sullivan have the last word.

Is There a Right to Bear Machine Guns?

Robert Wright — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:24:44 GMT

Among the post-Newtown gun law reforms being discussed is a limit on the number of bullets that magazines can hold. Sometimes opponents of such reforms invoke the Second Amendment's guarantee of a right to bear arms. That strikes me as a stretch, given that the Second Amendment was conceived in a time when there was no such thing as a gun that could shoot more than one bullet without reloading. I mean, if the Amendment applies to weapons that didn't exist when it was written, why shouldn't it apply to machine guns, or grenade launchers, or even shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles? I recently raised that question with someone who opposes limits on magazine size -- Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine, who has thought and written a lot about this stuff. And it turns out he does think machine guns are constitutionally protected. As for grenade launchers and shoulder-fired missiles -- he's less certain about those. Here's the exchange:

You can see the continuation of this conversation here, and you can watch the whole conversation from the beginning here.

Chuck Hagel and the Neocon Smear Machine

Robert Wright — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:53:00 GMT

Reports that President Obama may nominate former Senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense haven't been well received at The Weekly Standard. In pre-emptively opposing the nomination, the neoconservative magazine is employing what you might call a two-tiered strategy: the low road and the lower road.

The low road is taken by the Standard's editor, Bill Kristol. He writes that Hagel is "anti-Israel," and then follows this assertion with a series of facts that don't corroborate it. Of course, as Kristol surely knows, "anti-Israel" is taken by some people as code for "anti-Semitic." As for those Weekly Standard readers who don't interpret the term that way -- well, that's what the lower road is for. A separate story written by a Standard staffer quotes a top Republican Senate aide saying flat out that Hagel is anti-Semitic.

If you're wondering who that aide is, I have bad news for you: The Standard doesn't tell us, so we have no way of being sure that this person even exists. To students of American history, this tactic -- conveying vicious accusations while cloaking their source -- may sound familiar, because it's the way Joseph McCarthy used to operate. What it's not is the way a magazine with integrity operates. But I guess it shouldn't surprise us, given some of the Weekly Standard's previous behavior.

Meanwhile, Kristol's ideological kin are getting into the spirit of things. The Washington Post's neocon blogger, Jennifer Rubin, quotes Abe Foxman saying Hagel's views "border on anti-Semitism."

In case you don't know who Abe Foxman is, he's the guy who believes that, though Jews can build synagogues wherever they want, and Christians can build churches wherever they want, Muslims shouldn't build mosques wherever they want. (This may sound like a bigoted position, but it's grounded in respect for relatives of 9/11 victims, whose anguish, says Foxman, "entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.")

The other thing you should know about Foxman is that he's head of the Anti-Defamation League. So far as I can tell, that means he's opposed to defamation unless the target is (1) a Muslim who aspires to build a mosque in the wrong place; or (2) someone whose views on Israel don't meet with his approval -- in which case he'll personally do the defaming.

What is the evidence that Chuck Hagel is anti-Semitic, or at least borderline anti-Semitic? Apparently he once said, "The political reality is that ... the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here [on Capitol Hill]." The Weekly Standard's anonymous "top Republican Senate aide" is quoted as calling this "the worst kind of anti-Semitism" because it means Hagel "believes in the existence of a nefarious Jewish lobby that secretly controls U.S. foreign policy."

Actually, it doesn't mean that. It means what it says: Hagel believes that AIPAC, like the NRA, is powerful enough to sometimes intimidate legislators. Now, it does follow that AIPAC and the NRA influence policy in their domains, but not that they "control" it. If this "top Republican Senate aide" doubts that AIPAC or the NRA influence policy via intimidation, that's just more reason to wonder whether such a person actually exists. I don't see how you could work in the Senate and be sentient and be oblivious to such facts.

The other complaint about Hagel's quote, expressed by neoconservative Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, is that Hagel used the term "Jewish lobby" instead of "Israel lobby". This is actually a valid criticism, because the Israel lobby does in fact include lots of Christian Zionists, and for that matter doesn't include lots of Jews. On the other hand, "Jewish lobby" was once the standard term for what is now called the Israel lobby (especially back when the term was closer to being accurate, before Christian Zionism became a big political force). And it doesn't seem to me that it's an indictable offense for a guy Hagel's age to have on one occasion used this once-accepted term -- especially in light of the fact that he subsequently acknowledged it was the wrong term to use.

At any rate, this isolated Hagel quote certainly doesn't justify Stephens' clear insinuation that Hagel is anti-Semitic. ("Prejudice ... has an olfactory element," writes Stephens, and in Hagel's case "the odor is especially ripe.") Neither does any other "evidence" Stephens adduces -- such as the fact that not many Jews live in Nebraska, the state Hagel represented as a senator.

I'll leave further debunking of the anti-Semitism charge against Hagel to (Jewish Zionist) Peter Beinart at Open Zion. Meanwhile I'll underscore his fellow Open Zion blogger Ali Gharib's point that it's ironic for Hagel to be pilloried for saying that politicians are intimidated by a pro-Israel lobby -- when those doing the pillorying bear a striking resemblance to a pro-Israel lobby trying to intimidate a politician. (Note the headline on that Weekly Standard piece: "Senate Aide: 'Send Us Hagel and We Will Make Sure Every American Knows He Is an Anti-Semite'" I don't suppose that's an attempt to intimidate anyone?)

I should have put "pro-Israel" in quotes, because, as I've said again and again, people who are "pro-Israel" in a right-wing sense of the term favor policies that are, in my view, bad for Israel. And that's especially true of the group I'm talking about now: not neocons in general (many of whom are honorable people who fight clean and don't make ad hominem attacks), but the subset of neocons (Kristol, Rubin, Stephens, et. al.) who try not just to counter arguments they disagree with but to stigmatize the people who make them. This subset of neocons -- the neocon smear machine -- has long prevented an open and honest American discussion of Israel, and as a result America, the country with the most influence over Israel, has indulged Israel's worst, most self-destructive tendencies.

The most obviously self-destructive tendency -- the endless building of illegal settlements in the West Bank -- reached a kind of culmination this year, as the greenlighting of the infamous E1 settlement project made it clear to all but the most deluded observers that a two-state solution will never happen. Which means sooner or later we'll almost certainly wind up with a one-state solution -- either a one-state solution that preserves Zionism but makes Israel literally an apartheid state or a one-state solution that marks the end of Zionism.

The latter scenario wouldn't necessarily be a disaster. It's possible for Arabs and Jews to live side by side in peace as citizens of a single state that encompasses the occupied territories. But it will take some work, and in any event it won't be welcomed by the people whose defaming of Israel's critics has done so much to make this the only likely alternative to apartheid.

Over the past year, as I've written about Israel critically and gotten a milder version of the kind of blowback Hagel is getting, my view of the people generating it has changed. I used to think that all the "anti-Israel" and "anti-Semitism" charges were just cynical smears, and I still think some of them are. But I also think some of them come from people who genuinely believe that any severe critic of Israel speaks out of malice. These people are blinded by their passions, and the fact that their smears are wild and unfounded doesn't mean they're insincere.

Still, these smears have been hugely counterproductive from a truly pro-Zionist standpoint. What you're seeing now is one of the final desperate spasms of a group that has already helped destroy the thing it loves, and will probably destroy a few other things before finally, like Joseph McCarthy, destroying itself and receding mercifully into the pages of history.

Postscript: Already, Hagel has been defended by a strikingly diverse array of voices, including (in addition to people I mentioned in the piece) Dana Milbank of the Washington Post; John Judis of The New Republic; Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast; Scott McConnell and Daniel Larison of The American Conservative; the progressive pro-Israel group J Street; the Center for American Progress blog ThinkProgress; Stephen Walt of Foreign Policy and Harvard; Steve Clemons of The Atlantic and the New America Foundation; Jim Fallows of The Atlantic; Emily Hauser of Open Zion; Marsha B. Cohen and Jim Lobe at Lobeblog; Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times; Clyde Prestowitz, formerly US Trade Representative in a Republican administration, in Foreign Policy; Robert Merry at The National Interest; former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer; and former U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller (author of the book in which Hagel's "Jewish Lobby" quote appears). Update: Also, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Update, 12/20: A bunch of former US ambassadors--including five former ambassadors to Israel--have now written a letter saying Hagel has "impeccable" credentials to be secretary of defense: Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Ambassador to NATO and Greece; Ryan Crocker, former Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan; Edward Djerejian, former Ambassador to Israel and Syria; William Harrop, former Ambassador to Israel; Daniel Kurtzer, former Ambassador to Israel and Egypt; Sam Lewis, former Ambassador to Israel; William H. Luers, former Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia; Thomas R. Pickering, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Ambassador to Israel and Russia; Frank G. Wisner, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Ambassador to Egypt and India.

A Gun Control Law That Would Actually Work

Robert Wright — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:03:36 GMT

The AR-15 is getting its fifteen minutes of fame. Whole articles in major newspapers are devoted to the rifle that Adam Lanza used in the Newtown shooting, as the nation begins to debate restoring the ban on "assault weapons."

But the assault weapons issue is a red herring.

First of all, there's no clear and simple definition of an assault weapon, and this fact has in the past led to incoherent regulation. The defunct 1994 assault weapons ban, according to the Wall Street Journal, outlawed "semiautomatic rifles that accepted detachable magazines and possessed at least two other characteristics, including a protruding pistol grip, flash suppressor or threaded barrel or a folding or telescoping stock." Um, how important was it whether the gun Lanza used had a "flash suppressor"? And, by sacrificing that and a few other such features ("protruding pistol grip," etc.), a mass killer gets to keep his detachable magazine, for rapid reloading?

Second, focusing on assault weapons--or even rifles in general--distracts from the important issue of magazine capacity in pistols. It's true that if you had taken away Lanza's AR-15, he wouldn't have had a rifle that could fire 30 rounds without reloading. However, he was also carrying two pistols--a Glock 20 and a Sig Sauer P226--each of which can fire 15 rounds without reloading. And, actually, since two pistols are less conspicuous than a rifle, they're a more effective way to get 30 rounds of continuous fire into lots of public settings.

Imagine the following world, which it's within our power to create: It's illegal to sell or possess a firearm--rifle or pistol--that can hold more than six bullets. And it's illegal to sell or possess a firearm with a detachable magazine. In other words, once a shooter exhausted the six rounds, he couldn't just snap in another six-round magazine; he'd have to put six more bullets in the gun one by one.

In this world, a significant number of those 20 Newtown first graders would almost certainly be alive. Lanza reportedly fired six bullets from his AR-15 just to get inside the locked school. So, in the alternative universe I just described, he would then have to more or less exhaust one of his two pistols to kill the principal and school psychologist he encountered after entering. At that point, as he headed for the classrooms, he'd have six more rapid-fire bullets left, after which he'd have to reload his guns bullet by bullet.

Is there a single legitimate use of firearms that requires more than six rounds of continuous fire? Certainly not hunting. And not any sort of self-defense that's realistically imaginable, unless you've recently antagonized a Mexican drug cartel.

As the gun lobby gears up to battle proposals such as this one, you'll hear a lot about the fact that mass killings are actually a drop in the bucket of total homicides. True. But mass killings take a disproportionate toll on the nation psychologically and spiritually. Thirty individual people dying in isolated assaults in various cities is a horrible thing, but it doesn't terrify our children, and it doesn't turn our schools into bunkers.

The sort of law I'm describing would make lots of current guns illegal. (I actually own one.) So you'd have to phase the law in over a couple of years, and, to overcome political resistance, you might have to compensate gun owners for surrendering newly illegal guns--or for having them altered to comply with the law. And, even then, the resistance would be very, very strong. It might even turn out to be insurmountable. But if the question is "What could we do that would greatly reduce the scale of mass killings while preserving the right of Americans to use firearms for legitimate purposes," this, it seems to me, is a real answer.

[Update, 12/17 4:25 p.m.: More than one commenter has noted that most handguns currently manufactured would be illegal under my proposal. True. (As I noted in the final paragraph, I own such a gun.) And on Twitter, @drgitlin has noted something I didn't realize: A revolver, which would be clearly legal under my proposal, can be loaded fairly quickly with a "speedloader." Well, if speedloaders are indeed so speedy that they're the functional equivalent of detachable magazines, they could be banned. And as for the fact that most or all non-revolver pistols would be illegal under my proposal: You'd be surprised how fast gun manufacturers would fill this void by designing semi-automatics that could hold a maximum of six bullets and could only be loaded one bullet at a time. I'm not saying this makes my proposal politically feasible; the number of existing owners of conventional semi-automatic pistols (i.e. semi-automatics with detachable magazines) might create insurmountable resistance to it, as I noted in the final paragraph. Still, governments do have the power to ban things that exist, and in this case creating substitutes that complied with the new law would be very doable. And, even if banning detachable magazines in pistols does prove politically infeasible, that doesn't mean we can't make real progress by doing the politically easier thing of banning all magazines, for both rifles and handguns, that hold more than six bullets. And it's a trivial matter for manufacturers to create magazines that would fit existing guns and comply with that law. In any event, we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that another ban on "assault weapons" is by itself significant progress.]

Retreating Into Meditation

Robert Wright — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:57:36 GMT

At the moment this post is published--Monday evening--I'm probably miserable. But I can't say for sure.

Monday is the third full day of a week-long silent meditation retreat I'm attending. Since being on a silent meditation retreat means cutting off all contact with the world, I had to write this post before the retreat started. But since this isn't my first week-long meditation retreat, I can with some confidence predict how I'll be feeling three days into it. And it's not a great feeling.

As I put it a couple of years ago in a piece I wrote about my first meditation retreat:

We spent 5.5 hours per day in sitting meditation, 5.5 hours per day in walking meditation. By day three I was feeling achy, far from nirvana and really, really sick of the place.

I was sick of my 5 a.m. "yogi job" (vacuuming), I was sick of the bland vegetarian food, and I wasn't especially fond of all those Buddhists with those self-satisfied looks on their faces, walking around serenely like they knew something I didn't know (which, it turns out, they did).

Since that first retreat, in 2003, I've been on two more, not counting this latest one. And the pattern is fairly general: Tough first few days, followed by something much better--and, at its best, much, much, much better.

If you're curious about what I mean by "better," you can read the account that the passage above is taken from. But, as I re-read that account now, it strikes me as not doing a great job of capturing why a meditation retreat can be worth the early days of frustration.

I mean, the warm, fuzzy feelings I describe in that account are genuine--they were definitely part of the payoff. What I failed to convey is the sense in which these feelings, though warm and fuzzy, are the product of a sharp, even cold, clarity; I failed to really explain why there's such good reason to believe that the state of consciousness a meditation retreat can induce, though off-kilter by comparison with what we think of as normal consciousness, may actually bring a more trenchant, truthful apprehension of the world than normal consciousness affords. After I return from this retreat, I'll try to do a better job of explaining what I mean. Meanwhile, any readers who want to plant the seeds for my post-retreat ruminations with questions or comments should feel free to leave them below.

[Postscript: I've found that when I write about the uncomfortable parts of a meditation retreat, I sometimes get blowback from commenters who say that I should quit whining and be grateful that I have the opportunity to sit around meditating while other people are working for a living. So I want to emphasize that I agree that a meditation retreat is ultimately a kind of luxury, and I feel lucky to be able to attend one every now and then. Still, you'd be surprised how unpleasant sitting around doing nothing can be.]

Why Not Push the Pentagon off the Fiscal Cliff?

Robert Wright — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:11:51 GMT

The Pentagon is bracing for the fiscal cliff. This week the White House Budget Office directed it to plan for $500 billion in cuts it may have to make over the next ten years if cliff-averting negotiations fail. The negotiations may of course not fail, but it's still worth asking: in the event that our military resources really did shrink significantly, how much damage would that do to our national security?

Here's my initial estimate: zero.

I mean, what actual threat to America's security is the military currently fending off? Are there any countries that would invade the United States if the Pentagon's budget were 10 percent smaller than it is--which is roughly what $500 billion in cuts over 10 years would amount to?

The main threat to national security you hear about is terrorism. And, so far as I can tell, a big chunk of the money spent by the military to address that problem has made the problem worse. The invasion and occupation of Iraq provided massive propaganda for terrorist recruiters (and the consequent regime change created a new ally for Iran, which is said to be our nemesis and a backer of terrorists). The war in Afghanistan has also been a Godsend for Jihadist propagandists--while, in the bargain, destabilizing Pakistan and making its nuclear weapons more likely to fall into the hands of extremists.

And even if you believe that drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, etc., are making us safer from terrorists (I personally think the opposite), they don't account for that much of the military budget--and in fact many of them are conducted by the CIA, not the Pentagon.

As for the navy: What threat to America are American ships half a world away from our shores fending off? If the navy were 90 percent--or even 80 or 70 percent--of its size, who exactly would attack us? What vital interest would be threatened?

Some people say Middle Eastern oil is a vital national interest, so we must be poised to intervene if it is somehow threatened. But what form would that threat take? Even if oil-rich Arab nations were taken over by regimes so hostile to the US that they wouldn't sell it oil, that wouldn't much matter. The market for oil is global, and so long as oil producers sell their oil to someone--which is something oil producers tend to do--that will keep the price America pays for oil more or less unchanged.

There is, to be sure, one way our naval presence in the Middle East could affect our national security--but not in a good way. The fact that the Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain leads the American government to look the other way when the Bahrainian government suppresses dissent. And, as you may recall, siding with authoritarian Arab regimes is one thing that fomented enough hatred of America to turn terrorism into a national security threat in the first place.

And what exactly is our Pacific Fleet for? Don't get me wrong. It would bother me if China used its muscle to take possession of a few islands that rightfully belong to some other nation (assuming they do). And if our ships are discouraging that (which they may or may not be doing--I honestly don't know), I guess that's a good thing. But it's not a thing with direct bearing on our national security. And right now I'm just asking how much of what our military does actually makes the United States of America safer.

I want to emphasize that I'm literally just asking this question. I haven't conducted a big study on the subject or systematically thought the matter through. Maybe people will reply to this post in ways that convince me that, actually, something close to the current level of Pentagon funding is critical to our national security. Or maybe they'll fail to. Either way, it's a debate worth having, and if the fiscal cliff causes us to have it, then there's something to be said for fiscal cliffs.

What If the Fiscal Cliff Is the Wrong Cliff?

Robert Wright — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 01:35:35 GMT

One premise of the people who built the "fiscal cliff"--who committed Congress to either make big inroads on the deficit or have big inroads made automatically, meat-cleaver style--is that government debt is central to our economic problems. What if they're wrong?

I don't mean "What if public debt isn't a problem?"--because it is, and I don't doubt that addressing it in some measure is a good idea. I mean: What if public debt is such a small part of the problem that we're setting ourselves up for pain followed by disappointment? What if we'll make lots of budget cuts, dampening economic activity in the short term, only to find that the long-term benefits, while real, are dinky in the scheme of things, and there's a much bigger problem that's been left unaddressed?

That's the view of some analysts whose voices aren't getting much airtime amid all the freaking out about the fiscal cliff. They say that private debt--mortgages, credit card bills, business loans, etc.--is a much bigger problem than public debt, and we're going to have to confront it before we truly recover from the great recession.

This summer my Atlantic colleague Steve Clemons published a report on this subject--co-authored with entrepreneur Richard Vague, and based on data Vague had collected. It makes for bracing, and sometimes scary, reading. Especially when you realize that, as Financial Times columnist Edward Luce notes in discussing the Clemons-Vague paper, private debt is "higher as a share of America's GDP than anywhere in Europe."

Now Clemons and Vague have put together a video on the subject, and the segment below, in which Vague explains the data with the help of some illuminating visual aids, is very much worth watching. Below the video I offer a thought or two on what can be done about the problem.

So what do you do when your economy is burdened by a huge debt overhang?

How about we just forgive the debt?

That may sound simplistic, but, actually, there tends to be an element of out-and-out debt forgiveness in what is described more technically as "debt restructuring" or "debt relief." And people are starting to talk about doing this sort of thing on a large scale. For example, Martin Wolf, chief economist at the Financial Times, agrees with Vague and Clemons that the private debt problem dwarfs the public debt problem, and he lays out some ambitious approaches to debt relief here.

Obviously, debt forgiveness is more popular among debtors than among creditors. But you can't please everybody! And, needless to say, creditors often have more money than debtors, so when you shift money from the former to the latter, you may be putting money in the hands of people who are more likely to spend it. Which in turn could mean there will be a short-term stimulative effect on the economy--which wouldn't be a bad thing right about now.

That last paragraph was just me talking--not somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. But Martin Wolf and Richard Vague (who has started successful companies in both the financial and energy sectors) are actually worth listening to, and they both say that, one way or another, we've got to help people get out from under the mountain of debt that looms, barely seen, beyond the fiscal cliff.

[Update, 1/9/2013: I should have noted, by way of full disclosure, that Richard Vague is chairman of the Governors Woods Foundation, which last year gave a donation to the Nonzero Foundation, of which I'm president. (As for why it took me a month to note this: This afterthought occurred to me, inconveniently, on a one-week silent meditation retreat I went to shortly after posting this piece, and I failed to attend to it immediately upon returning.)]

How Obama Could Stop Those Israeli Settlements

Robert Wright — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 04:06:52 GMT

According to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bibi Netanyahu has delivered "the worst possible slap in the face" to President Obama. Olmert was referring, of course, to Netanyahu's announcement that Israel will proceed with a settlement project that, the New York Times reported, "has long been condemned by Washington as effectively dooming any prospect of a two-state solution." (An article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz seconds Washington's assessment--see headline above.)

Olmert may be overstating things, but not by much. Certainly Netanyahu's settlement surprise isn't the show of gratitude Obama had reason to expect after the US voted with Israel against Palestine's bid for nonmember observer status at the UN--a bid so reasonable and innocuous that Israel and the US, in opposing it, were in a minority of 9 out of 147 voting nations. And some of those 9 were on our side only because of American arm twisting. (Olmert himself thought it was a mistake for Israel to oppose the resolution.)

In a way this was more than a slap at Obama. It was a slap at the United States. Terrorism is one of America's main national security threats, and the hatred of America by some Arabs and Muslims is the most valuable asset terrorist recruiters have. So stoking that hatred by voting to thwart the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians makes America less secure. To put a finer point on it: Stoking that hatred makes our children more likely to die a violent death 5, 10, 15 years from now.

I'm not saying this UN vote alone increased the chances of terrorism by much. In fact, it increased them by only a very tiny bit. But that's more than zero, and every increment matters. And, however tiny the increment, it was only increased when Netanyahu then turned around and announced an epically indefensible settlement project; America, especially after its display of loyalty to Israel at the UN, is naturally seen as complicit in things like that. (And, no, toothless diplomatic protests by the US don't do much to change that perception.)

So Obama needs to stop this settlement project--not just to save face, but to protect Americans. He needs to show Arabs and Muslims--and everybody else--that no nation, including Israel, can take America's support completely for granted; that America won't stand by impotently as Israel embarks on a project that shows contempt for the Palestinian people and for world opinion.

Obama's leverage with Netanyahu is limited, because Congress has so much influence over purse strings. But the president has enough leverage to do what needs to be done. Here's how he should proceed:

[1] Write out a statement that he's willing to deliver on TV. It should criticize Netanyahu sharply and say something that will shock the Israeli people: If the prime minister is going to behave this outrageously, America can no longer guarantee that it will stand by Israel's side at the United Nations. It can no longer guarantee that it will veto Security Council resolutions that declare West Bank settlements in violation of international law. Indeed, America may now introduce such a resolution--that's how outrageous this latest settlement project is.

[2] Call Netanyahu, read him the statement, and tell him that if the settlement plans haven't been reversed within 48 hours, Obama will deliver the statement on TV.

And Obama has to mean it. He has to be ready to deliver the statement--because then Netanyahu will sense that he means it, in which case Obama won't have to deliver the statement.

The Israeli people care very much about their relationship with the United States--especially when so much of the world is rejecting their policies toward the Palestinians. So Netanyahu doesn't want to head into the coming election as the prime minister who has done more to jeopardize that special relationship than any Israeli leader in memory. He'll cave.

He'll hate caving, because he'll look foolish, and the whole episode will have hurt him politically. But it won't hurt him as much as something approaching an actual breach with the United States.

And if for some reason he doesn't cave, and Obama has to deliver his statement, I predict that Obama will find--to the surprise of many--that he pays no significant political price (or, at most, a price that a second-term president can easily tolerate). The reason is that pretty much everyone who's paying attention to this issue realizes how indefensible Netanyahu's behavior has been. Most people will realize, too, that Obama is acting in Israel's best interests by trying to strongarm it into limiting its alienation of the world.

Even if Netanyahu doesn't cave, Obama will have strengthened America's national security, because he will have shown the world that America will actively and forcefully oppose at least some unjust and illegal encroachments on Palestinian territory. Terrorist recruiters will be very disappointed to hear this.

I'm not suggesting that we should always do whatever minimizes hatred of America. There are principles worth fighting for, and there are principles whose defense will require increasing our exposure to terrorism. But Israel's freedom to build more settlements on occupied territory--in violation of international law and of the world's sense of decency--isn't one of those principles. Obama would be helping both Israel and America by making that clear.

[Postscript: I hope it's clear that I'm not saying Obama will take this approach; obviously, it would be out of character for him to be so bold. I'm just saying that if he did take this approach it would work. I'm also saying that if he doesn't do something to rein Netanyahu in, he's not doing his duty as president.]

A Republican Secretary of State?

Robert Wright — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:17:42 GMT

A few days ago I floated the name of William Burns as a possible secretary of state. (Strictly speaking, Burns, not his name, would be secretary of state -- but I'm following standard Washington journalistic usage here.) And such is my esteemed position within the Washington establishment that the very next day President Obama ... um, went about his business as usual.

But I haven't given up on the Burns meme! (Maybe it's, as they say, a slow burns.) Meanwhile, in the interest of fairness, I'll air some of the other names that are being mentioned for the job.

Interestingly, a few of them are Republicans. Josh Rogin reports at Foreign Policy that the administration is vetting Chuck Hagel for a national-security post, possibly secretary of defense or secretary of state. And Jim Lobe of Lobelog mentions several Republican prospects -- Richard Lugar, Bob Zoellick, and Jon Huntsman.

I like the idea of a Republican secretary of state, and it's the kind of thing Obama would probably like. But let's face it: Lugar is 80, Hagel isn't very articulate, and a Zoellick pick would violate the unspoken never-choose-a-secretary-of-state-with-an extremely-thin-moustache rule. And as for Huntsman: he used his last Obama administration diplomatic post -- ambassador to China -- to launch a presidential campaign. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it took the form of amping up provocative rhetoric toward China as he was leaving his post. Sometimes provocative rhetoric is in order, even from an ambassador, but to trot it out for personal political reasons strikes me as cheap and deeply irresponsible. Besides, Huntsman reminds a little of the character Leland Palmer on the old TV show Twin Peaks. And [spoiler alert!] Leland, it turned out, killed Laura -- his own daughter.

The one candidate that no one seems to be advocating is Susan Rice. And I don't think that's just because of the political obstacles she faces. My sense is that pretty much nobody thinks she'd do a good job as secretary of state.

One of the more full-throated endorsements of Rice I could find was on this website, where Jeffrey Goldberg went so far as to say she'd make a "plausible" secretary of state. Granted, he said, "She's brittle, she's inexperienced, she lacks the stature to challenge President Obama, and she is no great foreign policy genius." And, granted, during the Benghazi turmoil "she should have been more careful about what she said when she said it." (But, hey, so what if your secretary of state goes around the world saying ill-advised things?) Still, he said, Rice does have some redeeming features. For example, "She has had some very public failures. A secretary of state nominee -- anyone in high office, really -- should have some experience with failure, and she has it." So there's that.

William Burns for Secretary of State?

Robert Wright — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 02:02:04 GMT

With Susan Rice's prospects of becoming secretary of state now uncertain at best, thoughts naturally turn to John Kerry as the alternative candidate. But should they?

Kerry would by most accounts make a fine secretary of state. Certainly, as James Traub recently noted, he's got the visuals down -- solemn, suave, tall, etc. Plus, he's well-traveled and knows a lot about the world beyond America's borders.

Associated Press

But there's that nagging downside to moving Kerry out of the Senate: Now that Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has lost his reelection bid, he lurks as the likely Republican candidate in the special election that would be held to fill Kerry's seat -- and, unlike other Republican politicians in Massachusetts, he could actually win. Indeed, conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Republican opposition to Rice is motivated partly by a desire to turn Kerry's seat in the Senate from blue to red.

And Kerry wouldn't be vacating just any old seat, but the seat that holds the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, which he occupies very ably. Robert Menendez of New Jersey would be in line to fill that spot -- a prospect that, according to reporter Laura Rozen, is viewed dimly in the White House because "the White House has a lot of problems with Menendez on foreign policy issues."

With Rice's nomination in doubt and a Kerry nomination having so much practical downside, maybe it's time to consider a third candidate? And who should that be? I'm not qualified to say -- I don't keep close track of all the D.C. foreign-policy players. But a couple of weeks ago, I did an informal email poll of people I know who keep closer track. And the favorite candidate, by a large margin, was William Burns, currently deputy secretary of state.

Regular readers may suspect that any poll I conduct carries a left-wing bias, since I don't spend a lot of time socializing at, say, the American Enterprise Institute. But, actually, the people I consulted weren't all that homogenous. Besides: Regular readers will also know that my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg and I often disagree on foreign policy, and that he's not exactly a flaming left winger -- yet he recently opined that, if this job were assigned solely on the basis of merit, William Burns would be at the front of the pack.

That's the point: Burns isn't an ideological candidate. He's just a dedicated and very accomplished career diplomat -- good credentials for the job of running American diplomacy. And he is said to be the overwhelming favorite within the State Department, which means he'd have a highly motivated team to lead. Plus, the things that keep him awake at night are reasonable things to be kept awake by. And, finally: his becoming secretary of state wouldn't mean a lost Senate seat for Democrats or a new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who drives people in the White House crazy.

What's not to like?

Postscript: Passing Kerry over as secretary of state (or secretary of defense, the other position he's mentioned for) needn't mean he never makes it into President Obama's cabinet. In 2014, if Democratic prospects for winning a Kerry-less Senate election in Massachusetts have improved, he could always move to the State or Defense department.

Is Hamas Really a 'Surrogate' of Iran?

Robert Wright — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 23:16:00 GMT

Is Hamas a puppet of the Iranian regime? An affirmative answer to this question is, from the point of view of Bibi Netanyahu, a dual-use rhetorical technology: (1) It helps justify the recent bombardment of Gaza (since one goal of the operation was to deplete an Iranian-supplied missile stock that Iran could in theory activate against Israel in the event of war). (2) It helps justify Netanyahu's uncompromising stance toward Iran (since, the more pervasively threatening Iran seems to Israelis, the easier it is to convince them that the Iranian regime is beyond the reach of negotiation).

The Hamas-as-Iranian-puppet narrative gets help from American media. Consider, for example, this week's New York Times piece by David Sanger and Thom Shanker asking what the recent Israel-Gaza conflict tells us about how a possible war with Iran might play out. Referring to Netanyahu and President Obama, Sanger and Shanker write:

And one key to their war-gaming has been cutting off Iran's ability to slip next-generation missiles into the Gaza Strip or Lebanon, where they could be launched by Iran's surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, during any crisis over sanctions or an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

The confident assertion that Hamas is an Iranian "surrogate"--a claim Sanger and Shanker never get around to substantiating--is oddly out of touch with recent developments in the region.

It's certainly true that Hamas had, and still has, lots of Iranian-supplied missiles, the product of a close relationship that goes back years. But this past year has seen developments that changed the relationship.

First, Hamas ended its relationship with the Syrian regime and moved its leadership out of Syria--a move that not only strained relations with Syrian ally Iran but may have deeply altered them. In March, a Hamas official said Hamas would not serve as Iran's retaliatory surrogate in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran and would not get involved in an Israel-Iran war.

Second, the sudden slack in Hamas's relationship with Iran seems to have been taken up by Qatar, which is now bankrolling Hamas, and, in a different way, by Egypt, which is closer to Hamas under President Morsi than it was under Hosni Mubarek. This shift in Hamas's source of support--from Iran and Syria toward Qatar and Egypt--could prove constructive in the long run, since both Qatar and Egypt are members of the global establishment and seem to want to stay that way.

None of this means Hamas's relationship with Iran is over. Indeed, with Hamas now basking in the glow of what it's calling a victory over Israel, gratitude for the missiles Iran sent to Gaza is on conspicuous display. Still, Hamas's behavior during the conflict with Israel may say more about its relationship with Iran than any niceties emanating from Gaza afterwards. On this point it's worth reading Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli academic of Iranian descent who teaches a course on Iranian politics. His take:

Apart from supplying weapons, Iran did not have any other influence. If it did, and Hamas was acting as its proxy, the latter would not have agreed to a cease-fire and instead done everything to force Israel to launch a land invasion in Gaza. Such an outcome would have many benefits for Iran and, in fact, this is what Iran's military and political leaders wanted. They wanted to see Israel stuck in a quagmire in Gaza, with its economy and diplomatic standing suffering heavily while its relations with Egypt reached breaking point. Unfortunately for the Iranian regime, it did not get its wish precisely because Hamas is not its proxy, nor does it have any political influence over Hamas. Otherwise, the story would have been different.

The Hamas-as-Iran's-surrogate motif has dramatic appeal, and journalists, like the rest of us, like drama. But dramatization often means simplification. And when the prospect of war is real--as it was with Iraq in 2002, as it is with Iran now--journalists have a particular responsibility to resist incendiary oversimplification.

The Mainstream Media's Biased Coverage of the Gaza Blockade

Robert Wright — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 03:34:52 GMT

There's reason to hope that the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel will lead to an easing of Israel's suffocating economic blockade of Gaza. The ceasefire text said that "opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods... shall be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the ceasefire." But, more than 100 hours later, we're still waiting for word of actual progress.

Meanwhile, if you're wondering where to turn for background information about the blockade, I have this guidance: stay as far away from mainstream media as possible.

Sadly typical of the way the MSM covers the issue is a recent New York Times piece about the ceasefire by David Kirkpatrick and Jodi Rudoren (both of whom have done excellent work on other issues in the region). The piece described the blockade as "Israel's tight restrictions on the border crossings into Gaza under a seven-year-old embargo imposed to thwart Hamas from arming itself."

Putting it this way is a real time saver, not just because it fits into a single short sentence, but because, if you're too busy to actually write that sentence, the Israeli government's press office would be happy to do it for you. But this description of the blockade raises a question:

If the essential purpose of the blockade were indeed to "thwart Hamas from arming itself," wouldn't restrictions on imports into Gaza suffice? (And even then the import restrictions wouldn't have to be as draconian as they were when imposed, or even as tight as they are now, after some loosening.) What I'd like to see an enterprising MSM reporter ask is: How do Israel's severe restrictions on Gazan exports keep arms from getting to Hamas?

Kirkpatrick and Rudoren, later in their piece, do elaborate a bit on Israel's motivation for imposing the blockade. But not enough. After raising the prospect that Egypt may open the Rafah crossing into Gaza, they write that "Israel enforces its embargo on the other sides of Gaza, fearing that it would face an influx of refugees or end up with responsibility for the impoverished enclave."

Fearing "an influx of refugees" doesn't explain why Israel won't let Gazans put whatever goods they want to export on a ship and send them across the Mediterranean to Europe or Africa. Nor, really, does this fear explain the other side of the export restrictions--not letting Gaza export much of anything to Israel or the West Bank. Making sure that exports were confined to goods, and didn't include people, would be readily doable. Israelis know a thing or two about how to set up an effective checkpoint.

The closest Kirkpatrick and Rudoren get to a plausible reason for the export restrictions is in positing an Israeli fear of winding up "with responsibility for the impoverished enclave." But even here they're not putting nearly a fine enough point on it. Here's the fine-point version:

Recall that a very plausible motivation for Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was to address "the demographic problem"--the fact that the number of Palestinians in the occupied territory, plus the number in Israel proper, was beginning to approach the number of Israeli Jews. That meant that if Israel's aggressive settlement program eventually led to Israel's absorption of the occupied territories, Israel wouldn't remain a Jewish state unless it were an apartheid state--i.e., unless it continued to deny Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories the right to vote. But once you remove Gaza from the equation, and define it as outside of the occupied territory, the math changes (though Gazans contend their territory is still, for practical purposes, occupied, since Israel controls the ports and airspace and the Israeli border and enters Gaza at will to kill Gazans). In this scenario--the divide and conquer scenario--the last thing Israel wants to do now is permit the sort of organic economic ties between Gaza and the West Bank that would make it easier to think of their Palestinian inhabitants as a single people.

There's one other possible motivation for Israel's severe restrictions on commerce involving Gaza: collective punishment. Maybe Israeli leaders want to keep all of Gaza impoverished as payback for the sins of Hamas. Maybe they even think that this impoverishment will lead Gazans to reject Hamas. If so, I have bad news: If Gazans reject Hamas, it will be in favor of Islamic Jihad or even more radical elements, in keeping with the general principle that imposing unjust suffering on people empowers extremists.

Sandy's Psychological Impact, in Living Color

Robert Wright — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 21:26:39 GMT

Warning: Before you click 'play' on this video, I recommend that you turn the volume down, because the music is jaw-droppingly hokey. Aside from that, though, I think this is pretty cool--a kind of time-lapse emotional thermometer of the United States as it endured Hurricane Sandy. The video is based on a computer analysis of the "location, intensity, and tone" of Sandy-related tweets, according to the Facebook page for the Global Twitter Heartbeat project (a collaboration between the University of Illinois and Silicon Graphics International). Second warning: They freeze the action right before Sandy makes landfall, milking the drama. But it's worth the wait, IMHO.

When Will the Economic Blockade of Gaza End?

Robert Wright — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:42:00 GMT

[Update, 11/21, 3:55 p.m.: The ceasefire announced today envisions "opening the crossings and facilitating the movement of people and transfer of goods..." Too soon to say what this will mean in practice.]

President Obama and Bibi Netanyahu are on the same page when it comes to the justification for Israel's bombardment of Gaza. Netanyahu : "No country in the world would agree to a situation in which its population lives under a constant missile threat." Obama: "There's no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."

It's true that if, say, Canada were lobbing missiles into the US, the US wouldn't tolerate it. But here's another thing the US wouldn't tolerate: If Canada imposed a crippling economic blockade, denying America the import of essential goods and hugely restricting American exports. That would be taken as an act of war, and America would if necessary respond with force--by, perhaps, lobbing missiles into Canada.

This is the situation Gaza has faced for years: a crippling economic blockade imposed by Israel. Under international pressure, Israel has relaxed the import restrictions, but even so such basic things as cement, gravel, and steel are prohibited from entering Gaza. The rationale is that these items are "dual use" and could be put to military ends. But this logic doesn't explain the most devastating part of the blockade--the severe restrictions on Gaza's exports.

Gazans can't export anything to anyone by sea or air, and there are extensive constraints on what they can export by land. They can't even sell things to their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank. According to the Israeli NGO Gisha, the number of truckloads of goods that leave Gaza each month is two percent of what it was before the blockade was imposed. (A black market trade via tunnels to Egypt has taken up some, but by no means all, of the slack.)

No wonder Gaza's unemployment rate has risen to 28 percent. No wonder 70 percent of Gazans receive humanitarian aid. No wonder there's a shortage of schools--it's hard to build them without construction materials.

If you mention the blockade to the average reasonably well-informed American or Israeli, you'll likely get a reply such as: Well, if the Gazans don't like economic strangulation, Hamas should quit firing missiles at Israel; or Hamas should recognize the state of Israel; or Hamas should do something else Israel wants it to do.

So, over the past couple of days, I tried to find out exactly what actions on the part of Hamas would suffice to end the blockade. And, after contacting various experts by email, I discovered that the answer is: nothing would suffice. At least, nothing we know of. Apparently Israel hasn't articulated clear conditions under which the blockade would end.

As law professor Noura Erakat has written in a journal article:

Despite claims of self-defense, Israel has not defined a definitive purpose for the blockade, the achievement of which would indicate its end. Official Israeli goals have ranged from limiting Hamas's access to weapons, to seeking retribution for the pain caused to Israeli civilians, and to compelling the Palestinian population to overthrow the Hamas government...

This seems kind of strange. I thought sanctions and blockades and the like were supposed to have specific purposes. The sanctions against South Africa, for example, would end when apartheid ended. So when will the blockade of Gaza end? If there's no answer, why should anyone expect the situation in Gaza to improve? If the Gazan people are being treated this harshly, and there's no end in sight, why does President Obama sound so surprised and outraged that violence against Israel would emanate from Gaza?

I'm not saying the blockade justifies the firing of missiles. And I'm not saying it doesn't--I'm just not getting into that messy issue right now, and I'd have to study up on international law before I did. But I'm saying that, when you subject people to treatment like this, without even specifying the conditions under which the treatment would change, human nature pretty much ensures that bad things, including violent ones, will happen.

Who Started the Israel-Gaza Conflict?

Robert Wright — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 23:02:00 GMT

On Monday my Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg began a post with this sentence: "Rockets are flying from Gaza into Israel at a fast clip, and Israelis, it is said, are divided on the question of how to respond."

That same day I came across this report from Ma'an, a Palestinian news agency:

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Palestinian factions met on Monday in Gaza City to discuss Israeli attacks and threats of a wider operation in the enclave.

Hamas called the meeting to try and avoid further casualties after Israeli forces killed six Palestinians in Gaza since Saturday, said Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader Talal Abu Tharefa.

Abu Tharefa told Ma'an any truce with Israel must include an end to Israeli airstrikes and attacks, adding that the Palestinian resistance would retain the right to respond to Israeli aggression.

So in Israel the question was how to respond to aggression from Gaza, and in Gaza the question was how to respond to aggression from Israel. And each side considered its own use of force--what the other side called provocation--a response to provocation.

On Thursday, after Israel had killed a senior Hamas military commander and his son, and a rocket from Gaza had killed three Israelis, I aired this question on twitter: "Does anybody know of a truly symmetrical timeline of Israel-Gaza escalation--including missiles from Gaza and Israeli strikes?"

A number of people sent links, but none of the timelines seemed wholly objective; all seemed to have at least a wisp of Israeli or Palestinian perspective. Happily, Emily Hauser, an American-Israeli writer who lived in Tel Aviv for 14 years, offered to do her best to assemble a symmetrical timeline from available sources. You'll find it below, with fatalities in boldface.

Since Emily didn't want to devote the rest of her life to this project, she had to choose a starting date, and she chose Nov. 8. But her preamble acknowledges that picking any date is in a sense arbitrary.

So examine this timeline and draw your own conclusions. I'll save my conclusion for the bottom of this post.

A summary of events in the renewal of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, Nov 8 - Nov 15

By Emily L. Hauser

Recent events in Israel and the Gaza Strip have been unusual only in scope. Violence and fear of violence is a near-daily reality for the residents of Gaza and Israel's southern communities. There's a constant back and forth, and on both sides, there's always something or someone to avenge.

For instance, some Palestinian sources date the start of this latest round of violence back to November 4, when Reuters reported the death of "an unarmed, mentally unfit man" who strayed too near the border fence, did not respond to reported Israeli warnings, and was then shot. Palestinian medics report that Israeli security personnel prevented them from attending to the man for a couple of hours, and say that he likely died as a result.

But it's genuinely impossible to date today's hostilities conclusively to one incident or another; even the "two-week lull" that some outlets have said preceded Nov. 8 (when the timeline below begins) was, according to Reuters "a period of increased tensions at the Israel-Gaza frontier, with militants often firing rockets at Israel and Israel launching aerial raids targeting Palestinian gunmen."

According to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of November 13, Palestinian militants had fired 797 rockets into Israel in the course of 2012 , and according to the Israeli human rights organization Btselem, between January 2009 (the conclusion of the last all-out Gaza war) and September of this year, 25 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 314 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces, with six more being killed by Israeli civilians.

Thursday, November 8

In an exchange of fire on the border of Gaza with militants from the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), Israeli forces killed a 12 year old (or 13 year old ) Palestinian boy. "The PRC said it had confronted an Israeli force of four tanks and a bulldozer involved in a short-range incursion beyond Israel's border fence with the Gaza Strip." Later, Palestinian fighters blew up a tunnel along the Gaza-Israel border, injuring one Israeli soldier. Reuters

Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported the incident as follows: "An IDF [Israeli military] engineering force located a number of powerful explosive devices to the west of the fence. After the IDF disarmed charges found on the Gaza side of the border, and were repairing the border fence, explosives in an underground tunnel were detonated, causing a large explosion...damaging a jeep and lightly injuring a soldier."Israeli MFA

Saturday, November 10

An IDF force patrolling near the border, inside Israel, was hit by an anti-tank missile fired from inside the Gaza Strip. Two soldiers were seriously injured. MFA

In retaliation, Israeli tanks fired into Gaza, killing four Palestinians; Palestinian fighters retaliated in turn with rockets into Israel; an Israeli air strike targeted a rocket crew, & killed a militant. "Popular Resistance Committees, said it had fired rockets at communities close to the border and the towns of Sderot and Netivot in southern Israel, in what it called 'the revenge invoice' for the deaths in Gaza." The IDF reports that "over the past few hours, 25 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip hit southern Israel." Reuters

In addition to the four Palestinians killed immediately by Israeli fire, 38 were injured, one of them dying on November 13. As a result of additional Israeli artillery fire that day, 11 Palestinians, including a 10 year old child, were also injured. An Israeli drone fired a missile at members of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad in north Gaza, killing one militant. Palestinian Center for Human Rights

Sunday, November 11

Israeli government reports four civilians injured in rocket fire from Gaza; Israeli attacks result in one Palestinian civilian killed and dozens injured. Institute for Middle East Understanding

Sixty-four rockets and several mortars were fired into Israel; two Israeli homes hit directly. "A number of Israeli civilians were wounded by the rocket fire, although not seriously; several were treated for shock and there was extensive property damage." MFA

Ynet reported that over 100 Qassam rockets, mortar shells and Grads fired from Gaza into Israel in the course of 24 hours; the Israeli air force "struck several terror hubs in the Strip." Ynet

A Palestinian civilian was injured by Israeli artillery fire, and a militant killed in drone strike. PCHR

Monday November 12

Israeli warplanes opened fire on three different Gaza targets between the hours of 2:20 and 3:20 am; no casualties reported. PCHR

In the morning, damage was done to a private home inside Israel when a rocket hit its yard. A ceramics factory was later hit, and that evening, two rockets were intercepted by Israel's "Iron Dome" defense system. MFA

At 9:07 PM, HaAretz reported that "The representatives of Palestinian militant groups in the Gaza Strip announced an agreement to hold their fire on Monday, following days of persistent rocket attacks.... However a matter of minutes later, two rockets [exploded] in open fields near [the southern town of] Sderot. No casualties or damage reported." HaAretz

Tuesday November 13

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh praised Gaza's main militant groups in Gaza for agreeing to the truce: "They showed a high sense of responsibility by saying they would respect calm should the Israeli occupation also abide by it," he said." Reuters

A rocket exploded in an open area in Ashdod. MFA

Wednesday November 14

Reports emerged that Israel has targeted Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing; Israel confirmed the assassination, citing his "decade-long terrorist activity," and said that killing was the part of an operation in which the military struck 20 different targets across Gaza. HaAretz [Note: Later reports indicate that Jabari was considering a permanent truce agreement at the time of his assassination]

Over the course of the day, Israeli strikes killed 8 Palestinians, leaving 90 injured. The dead include a 65 year old man, a pregnant 19 year old, a 7 year old girl, and an 11 month old boy. Ma'an News Agency

At 10:17 PM, HaAretz summarized the day's rocket attacks: 60 rockets fired, of which the Iron Dome defense system intercepted 17; later entries for that night show another 12 rockets, some of them intercepted. HaAretz

One rocket hit an Israeli shopping center, damaging stores and a vehicle. MFA

Thursday November 15

At 6:45 AM, HaAretz summarized the early morning in Israel: "Throughout the night some 25 rockets fired from Gaza toward Israel; since the beginning of Operation Pillar of Defense 104 rockets have been fired toward Israel; 28 people suffer anxiety; two lightly wounded."

At 6:50 AM HaAretz reported: "Three Hamas operatives killed in two separate Israel Air Forces airstrikes.... Israel Defense Forces strikes in the Gaza Strip throughout the night leave 15 wounded."

At 7:32 AM, HaAretz reported that "According to a military source, overnight strikes in Gaza damage a substantial portion of Hamas' long-range missile infrastructure."

HaAretz reported that three Israelis were killed in Kiryat Malachi, about 20 miles north of Gaza, after more than a dozen more rockets were fired over the course of the morning and one hit the apartment building in which the Israelis had lived. HaAretz

Three Israeli civilians killed [as reported by HaAretz above]; two others seriously injured, one boy moderately injured, and two babies lightly injured. Elsewhere, rockets also struck a residence and a school. MFA

At 7:23 PM, HaAretz reported that the Israeli military reports striking 250 sites in Gaza since the start of the current operation, during which time 274 rockets had been fired at Israel, 105 of them intercepted .

At 9:50 PM, Israel reported having hit an additional 70 targets in Gaza.

At 11:00 PM, HaAretz reported that "according to Hamas figures, 16 Palestinians have been killed and 151 wounded in Gaza since the start of Operation Pillar of Defense (on Nov. 14). Hamas says it has fired 527 rockets at Israel, while Islamic Jihad has fired 138." HaAretz

At midnight, Ma'an reported that "on Thursday, Israel killed 11 Palestinians in Gaza [presumably including the 3 Hamas operatives noted above], including two toddlers, and militants returned fire killing three Israelis [as reported above by HaAretz et. al.] in a rocket attack on southern Israel. Islamic Jihad fired a Fajr missile at Tel Aviv [Israel's cultural center, and the farthest any rocket had ever been fired] and Hamas said it downed an Israeli reconnaissance drone over eastern Gaza." Ma'an

Note: I depended on a variety of sources to prepare this timeline because none, other than Reuters, can be considered strictly "objective" in the conflict - each comes from within the societies that have been at war with each other for decades, and as Americans learned during the Gulf War, that can lead venerable NGOs or news organizations to err on the side of national loyalty, even if unintentionally (and of course, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a direct party to the conflict).

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli writer. She lived in Tel Aviv for 14 years and has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East for 25; she writes for Open Zion on The Daily Beast, and also at her own blog. She can be followed on Twitter at @emilylhauser.

OK, my own takeaway from this timetable (drum roll) is that it's very hard to say which side started the conflict.

The Incoherence of a Drone-Strike Advocate

Robert Wright — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 02:36:00 GMT

In my previous post I complained about the militarization of the CIA over the past decade, as exemplified by its role in overseeing drone strikes and as symbolized by the appointment last year of Gen. David Petraeus to head the agency. I also took a shot at the American foreign policy establishment for not focusing on the big questions--such as: Is this whole war-by-drone-strike thing, whatever its short-term payoffs, a disastrously bad idea in the long run?

Now I bring you exhibit A, someone with the ultimate in foreign-policy-establishment credentials who enthusiastically defends drone strikes while apparently giving no coherent thought to their long-term implications. I refer to Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

You'd think Boot would be an able defender of drone strikes--not just because he likes them, but because he's one of the staunchest defenders and allies of Petraeus, who has overseen countless drone strikes in the past year and relied heavily on them when commanding the Afghanistan war effort. Yet here's what transpired when Boot appeared three weeks ago on the (excellent) public radio show To The Point:

Naureen Shah of Columbia Law School, a guest on the show, had raised the possibility that America is setting a dangerous precedent with drone strikes. If other people start doing what America does--fire drones into nations that house somebody they want dead--couldn't this come back to haunt us? And haunt the whole world? Shouldn't the U.S. be helping to establish a global norm against this sort of thing? Host Warren Olney asked Boot to respond.

Boot started out with this observation:

I think the precedent setting argument is overblown, because I don't think other countries act based necessarily on what we do and in fact we've seen lots of Americans be killed by acts of terrorism over the last several decades, none of them by drones but they've certainly been killed with car bombs and other means.

That's true--no deaths by terrorist drone strike so far. But I think a fairly undeniable premise of the question was that the arsenal of terrorists and other nations may change as time passes. So answering it by reference to their current arsenal isn't very illuminating. In 1945, if I had raised the possibility that the Soviet Union might one day have nuclear weapons, it wouldn't have made sense for you to dismiss that possibility by noting that none of the Soviet bombs dropped during World War II were nuclear, right?

As if he was reading my mind, Boot immediately went on to address the prospect of drone technology spreading. Here's what he said:

You know, drones are a pretty high tech instrument to employ and they're going to be outside the reach of most terrorist groups and even most countries. But whether we use them or not, the technology is propagating out there. We're seeing Hezbollah operate Iranian supplied drones over Israel, for example, and our giving up our use of drones is not going to prevent Iran or others from using drones on their own. So I wouldn't worry too much about the so called precedent it sets..."

Got that? Drones are so high tech that "they're going to be outside the reach of most terrorist groups and even most countries." However, even as we speak, "We're seeing Hezbollah operate Iranian-supplied drones over Israel," which is evidence that "the technology is propagating out there."

Hard to say what was going on in Boot's brain. Maybe, halfway through his reassurance that we don't have to worry about technologies spreading, he realized that human history is among other things the story of technologies irrepressibly spreading. But, whatever was going in his head, it wasn't the formulation of a response to the question raised by Naureen Shah.

In defense of Boot's employer, the Council on Foreign Relations: The only think-tank-based national security expert I'm aware of who devotes lots of time to airing doubts about the wisdom of our drone strike policy--Micah Zenko--is at CFR, and maybe Zenko roughly balances Boot on the national security karma scales. But Zenko certainly isn't counterbalancing the hordes of national security think tankers who approach the issue of drone strikes within a narrowly tactical framework and never ponder the question Shah asked. Nor do many of them spend a lot of time on the question of whether drone strikes, in stoking the hatred that creates anti-American terrorism, are intensifying the thing they're invoked to combat, thus drawing us into a vicious circle that makes war-by-drone-strike self-perpetuating. America has embarked on a path that could lead to a very bad place, and not many people in Washington are looking far enough ahead to imagine such a thing.

The Real David Petraeus Scandal

Robert Wright — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:56:00 GMT

Petraeus, his wife, and Paula Broadwell at his CIA confirmation hearings. (AP)

When, in the fall of 2011, David Petraeus moved from commanding the Afghanistan war effort to commanding the CIA, it was a disturbingly natural transition. I say "natural" because the CIA conducts drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is involved in other military operations there, so Petraeus, in his new role, was continuing to fight the Afghanistan war. I say "disturbingly" because this overlap of Pentagon and CIA missions is the result of a creeping militarization of the CIA that may be undermining America's national security.

This trend was clear during the Bush administration, but it accelerated under President Obama, who greatly expanded drone strikes, and it reached a kind of symbolic culmination when Obama nominated this four-star general to run things at Langley. That would have been the perfect time to reflect on the wisdom of the convergence of the CIA's and Pentagon's jobs. But, instead, the network of journalists, think tankers, public officials and others who constitute the foreign policy establishment preserved their nearly unblemished record of not focusing on the biggest questions.

There were exceptions, notably in the Washington Post. Its reporters raised the militarization issue shortly after Petraeus was nominated for the CIA post and then, the week before he took office, raised it again. Discussing the ongoing "expansion of the paramilitary mission of the CIA," Greg Miller and Judie Tate wrote:

The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed... The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001, a staggering figure for an agency that has a long history of supporting proxy forces in bloody conflicts but rarely pulled the trigger on its own.

The militarization of the CIA raises various questions. For example, if the CIA is psychologically invested in a particular form of warfare--and derives part of its budget from that kind of warfare--can it be trusted to impartially assess the consequences, both positive and negative, direct and indirect?

And then there's the transparency question. That Post piece noted concerns among some activists that "the CIA now functions as a military force beyond the accountability that the United States has historically demanded of its armed services. The CIA doesn't officially acknowledge the drone program, let alone provide public explanation about who shoots and who dies, and by what rules." Indeed, only a few months ago, in compliance with the War Powers Resolution, the Obama administration reported (vaguely) on targeted killings in Somalia and Yemen that had been conducted by the military, but not on those conducted by the CIA.

What's wrong with this opaqueness? For starters, you'd think that in a democracy the people would be entitled to know how exactly their tax dollars are being used to kill people--especially people in countries we're not at war with. But there's also a more pragmatic reason to want more transparency.

These drone strikes are a radical departure from America's traditional use of violence in pursuit of national security. In contrast to things like invading or bombing a country as part of some well-defined and plausibly finite campaign, our drone strike program is diffuse and, by all appearances, endless. Every month, God knows how many people are killed in the name of the US in any of several countries, and God knows how many of these people were actually militants, or how many of the actual militants were actual threats to the US, or how much hatred the strikes are generating or how much of that hatred will eventually morph into anti-American terrorism. It might behoove us, before we accept this nauseating spectacle as a permanent feature of life, to fill in as many of these blanks as possible. You can't do that in the dark.

That Post piece reported that the chief of the CIA's (burgeoning) Counterterrorism Center had told a colleague, "We are killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them now." This kind of claim seems to neglect the possibility that the drone strikes, especially given their intermittent killing of innocents, could in the long run generate so much hatred of America that they increase the rate at which terrorists are created. Coming from the guy who heads the part of the CIA that operates the drones, this simplistic language is not reassuring. If an opaque drone program means trusting people like this to do the smart thing, the case for transparency is strong.

At the risk of raising a question that is by custom excluded from discussion of American foreign policy: What if other nations behaved as we do? What if they started firing drones into countries that house people they'd rather were dead? Couldn't this get kind of out of control? Shouldn't the U.S. be at least thinking about trying to establish a global norm against this sort of thing (except, conceivably, under well-defined circumstances that have a clear basis in international law)?

I think history is going to judge American foreign policy in the Bush-Obama years harshly. And I think a big reason is that we're missing a fleeting opportunity to help build a world civilization based on widely respected laws and norms. Shortly after 9/11, with the US holding the attention and sympathy of the world, it had the opportunity to start doing this. President Bush failed--by, to pick just one of many examples, attacking Iraq without having international law on his side.

I wish I could say that President Obama has done a whole lot better than Bush. And, in Obama's defense, he did get UN Security Council authorization before intervening in Libya (leaving aside the question of whether the intervention ultimately exceeded the UN mandate). But in many ways this president is no improvement over the last one, and Exhibit A is the acceleration of a far-flung drone-strike program that is shrouded in the secrecy of the CIA. The vision implicit in this program is of an America whose great calling is to lead the world into a future of chaos and lawlessness.

This prospect was vividly highlighted when, a bit more than a year ago, Obama had David Petraeus turn in his stars so he could move to the CIA and keep fighting wars. There have been other military men who headed the CIA, but never has there been one whose move to Langley brought so much continuity with what he was doing before he went there.

The circumstances of Petraeus's departure from the CIA are a little alarming; you'd rather your chief spy not be reckless. But the circumstances of his arrival at the CIA a year ago were more troubling. Yet no alarm was sounded that was anywhere near as loud as the hubbub surrounding Petraeus now. That's scandalous.

Food for Republican Thought From Nate Silver

Robert Wright — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 19:10:00 GMT

I just stumbled on a chart put together by Nate Silver back in August of 2011, before he was as celebrated/notorious as he is today, and before Republicans had decided who their presidential candidate would be. This chart has a more subjective basis than most of Silver's graphics, but I think it's useful. In particular, as I'll explain below, I think it's a good Rorschach test for Republicans as they continue to ponder the meaning of their electoral defeat. (Color refers to the region the candidates are from, and the size of each circle represents their popular support as measured by polls.)

Here are some Republican reactions to this I can imagine:

[1] See, we chose a candidate who was far, far from our party's center of gravity, and look what happened! We need to be truer to our creed!

[2] Look at how much space there is between Romney and the bulk of the field. Maybe we just need to find someone to fill that space--someone who is moderate but not that moderate.

[3] The problem isn't where Romney was on Silver's mid-2011 graph. The problem is that, to secure the nomination, he had to migrate toward those other circles and lock himself into positions too conservative for the general election. (As David Frum put it in a tweet today, "The people who tied the cement overshoes to Mitt's feet will now blame him for sinking.") Our party needs a nomination process that doesn't suck candidates so far to the right.

And so on... Feel free to add your own interpretation in the comments section below. And check out Silver's original post to see versions of this graphic that show where people like Chris Christie would have belonged had they thrown their hats into the ring.

The Bright Side of the Ryder Cup Defeat

Robert Wright — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 01:59:42 GMT

Like other American golf fans, I am currently rending my garments over the collapse of the American team at this weekend's Ryder Cup tournament. But when, tomorrow or the next day, after the anguish and despair have faded, I start to discern the silver lining around this cloud, I think it will look something like this:

There was an overarching, across-the-decades symmetry here that's kind of beautiful. Until this weekend the most famous comeback in Ryder Cup history was in 1999, when the American team entered Sunday's final round facing a nearly insurmountable four-point deficit--exactly as the Europeans did this Sunday. And in both cases there was a kind of mystical dimension to the comeback. In 1999 there was American captain Ben Crenshaw's now-famous oracular pronouncement, at Saturday night's press conference: "I'm a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about tomorrow. That's all I'm gonna say." And this time around there was the fact that the European team was playing for the late and beloved Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros--whose protégé, fellow Spaniard Jose Maria Olazabal, was team captain. Seve's silhouette was stitched on the Europeans' shirts, and his memory became vital spiritual fuel once a nearly miraculous comeback was needed; "whatwouldsevedo" was the rallying tweet from Irish golfer Graeme McDowell before today's match. Seve's name even appeared in the sky! (Although, at the risk of dimming the supernatural aura of that apparition, I would add that it seems to have been the work of a skywriting stunt plane hired by an Irish bookie who was trying to unsettle the American team.) After the Europeans won--aided by a victory from another Spaniard, Sergio Garcia--Olazabal cried us a river.

In case all of this isn't enough symmetry for you: Back in 1999, Olazabal had been on the losing end of the day's climactic match with Justin Leonard, whose stunning 50-foot-putt on the 17^th hole is part of golf lore. Speaking of which: Maybe that's what we American golf fans need to cheer us up--a stroll down memory lane that will remind us how it felt when the shoe was on the other foot:

OK, now this is my final effort--even more strained than the previous one--to find something positive here:

The world needs European solidarity! Granted, this comeback victory won't by itself solve the Euro crisis. But one thing standing in the way of a solution is tension between Europe's haves and have nots--notably German reluctance to bail out those (alleged) slacker Mediterranean nations, such as Spain and Greece, and attendant resentment of the Germans in places like Spain and Greece. So it can't hurt that, on this team captained by one Spaniard and motivated by the memory of another, it was a German golfer--Martin Kaymer--who holed the winning putt.

All right, that's all the inspiration I can muster. One uninspiring observation:

The Rory McIlroy-Tiger Woods inversion now seems complete. Tiger wasn't on the winning side of any of the four matches he was involved in. And on Sunday, on the 18^th hole, he blew a three-and-a-half-foot putt that would have left the team score tied at 14-14 (though the Ryder Cup would still have stayed with Europe, because Europe was in possession of the cup after winning in 2010.) Rory, meanwhile, handled his Sunday match in spectacularly casual style. He had gotten confused about his tee time and arrived at the course with no time to warm up on the driving range--and only 15 minutes away from forfeiture--and still he prevailed. (However, I must say that Rory's theatrical and apparently sarcastic post-victory bow on the 18^th hole, though no doubt deserved by the American fans who had taunted him, came off as uncharacteristically ungracious.)

[Photo: Getty Images]

Why I Refuse to Refuse to Vote for Obama

Robert Wright — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 01:59:42 GMT

My friend and Atlantic colleague Conor Friedersdorf has struck a chord with his piece "Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama," in which he explains why he won't support the candidate he supported in 2008 even though he doesn't want his Republican opponent to win. (If he votes, he says, it will be for Gary Johnson.) At last check Conor's piece had more than 160,000 Facebook recommends -- a number that's up there in Romney 47 percent video territory.

I can see the appeal of Conor's argument. The Obama policies he finds unacceptable -- such as drone strikes that kill innocents, the assassination of American citizens abroad without due process of law, and other assaults on civil liberties -- are policies I've been criticizing for a long time. And Conor's principled stand on these "dealbreakers," as he calls them, is inspiring. To say that you'd rather vote for someone who can't win than for a candidate with odious values is one of those stirring, consequences-be-damned pronouncements that usually win me over when I hear them in movies. But this isn't a movie, so I have a hard time ignoring the consequences of (implicitly) encouraging would-be Obama supporters to nullify their votes and thereby increase the chances that Mitt Romney will be our next president.

"Consequences" is ultimately the word that divides me and Friedersdorf. I'm what philosophers call a "consequentialist," someone who judges the rightness and wrongness of behaviors by their consequences. Roughly speaking, you could say I'm in that subset of consequentialists known as utilitarians -- i.e., people who think that what's good is what maximizes overall human welfare. So if not voting for Obama only increases the chances of victory for the candidate I consider worse for America and the world than Obama, I'm not going to do it. (Unless you can show me that there are counterbalancing long-term consequences of a protest vote -- e.g., that this will strike the fear of God into the 2016 Democratic candidate.)

Friedersdorf says he respects the argument of utilitarians who take the position I've just outlined -- supporting Obama because he's the "lesser of two evils." But, in a follow-up piece, he says he wishes more of these utilitarians would at least confront a thought experiment that might get them to question whether they're really thoroughgoing utilitarians -- whether they don't in fact believe that some values are so important that they should be honored regardless of consequence; or, as Friedersdorf puts it, whether these professed utilitarians don't in fact have "deal breakers." Here's Friedersdorf's thought experiment:

Suppose that President Obama was surreptitiously videotaped in private, and found to be "repeatedly using anti-Hispanic slurs to refer to Mexican Americans, musing that his personal dislike of Mexicans motivated the record number that he deported, and noting that while he'd never transgress against the law by unlawfully targeting Mexican Americans, he sure does hate them." Wouldn't that be a dealbreaker for you, asked Friedersdorf? In other words, wouldn't some of us professed consequentialists, if pressed far enough, admit that we're not really consequentialists but actually hold some values so dear that their violation would trump consequentialist considerations?

I promise to answer Friedersdorf's thought-experiment question in a few paragraphs, but first I'll ask him to answer mine. Here it is:

Suppose that President Obama was what he in fact is: a drone-striking, civil-liberties disregarding president. Suppose you could be pretty sure (as I think you can, though Friedersdorf disagrees) that Mitt Romney's policies on drones and civil liberties wouldn't be any better. And suppose that -- through the magical powers that are permitted in thought experiments -- you knew that if Romney were elected he would start a needless war that would kill 100,000 people, and would also inflame the international arena in ways that led America (through the irrationality that has become its hallmark) to deploy more drone strikes, and disregard civil liberties on an even larger scale.

Of course, for purposes of the thought experiment, I could crank the stakes up even higher: Suppose Romney would start a war that killed a million people. Or 10 million. Or suppose he would go nuts and nuke half the world or the whole world. Is there any point at which you'd concede that casting a vote that increases the chances of a Romney victory is the wrong thing to do? If you'd rather see half the human species extinguished than vote for someone with a low regard for civil liberties and a high regard for drone strikes, just say so. But if you wouldn't, then it seems to me you're admitting that, actually, you've got a bit of consequentialist in you -- that your "dealbreakers" aren't really absolute, unconditional dealbreakers.

By the way, the reason I started out with relatively small stakes -- only 100,000 dead -- before moving up to a million and beyond is that when the number is 100,000, this isn't a mere thought experiment. In 2000, a bunch of voters on the left decided that Al Gore's likely policies included some "dealbreakers," so they voted for Ralph Nader. That's why George Bush became president. Bush then started a war that Gore probably wouldn't have started, and as a result at least 100,000 people died, and the international arena was inflamed in a way that gave his successor a rationale to (unwisely, but fairly predictably) conduct lots of drone strikes and disregard civil liberties. So my "thought experiment" is very much a real-world scenario -- way more plausible than the average philosophical thought experiment.

Obviously, there is no way of knowing for sure what the consequences of a Romney or Obama presidency will be. But I'm convinced (for reasons I will spell out in a later piece) that Romney is more likely to get us involved in a war with Iran than Obama is. And I don't think the fact that I'm just talking about a likelihood, not a certainty, invalidates my argument. (Obviously, we're never sure what any president will do, so if probabilistic assessment isn't a valid basis for voting behavior, I guess I shouldn't vote at all.)

So here's what I'd ask of Friedersdorf: Either (1) say that you'd rather see half the human population die than cast an unprincipled vote for a drone striking civil liberties disregarder; or (2) say that, actually, yes, the consequences of our choices are part of the moral calculus that should inform them. If my thought experiment is the inescapable trap that I hope it is, you have to do one or the other.

Now back to Friedersdorf's thought experiment: Would I vote for a closet racist if the alternative was to vote for someone who, in practical terms, would be even worse? Well, I don't live in a swing state, and, anyway, when was the last time a swing state's electoral votes were decided by a single vote? So if I were faced with that choice I'd probably stay home on election day and use the guaranteed insignificance of my vote as an excuse.

But if we assume -- as I think we should for purposes of these thought experiments -- that my vote would actually make a difference, then, yes, I'd vote for a closet racist rather than vote for someone who, in practical terms, was even worse (certainly including someone who wasn't racist but who out of political expediency would support policies more racist than the closet racist's policies).

Now over to Friedersdorf.