For the record, and as explained in posts collected here, I am not a fan of:

(a) the idea of a foreign leader being invited to criticize existing U.S. foreign policy before a joint meeting of Congress, something that has never happened before; or

(b) the specific critique Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to advance in this setting, which, based on his statements over the past decade, is likely to involve such impossible conditions and strictures for an "acceptable" deal with Iran as to torpedo the negotiations. Not to mention ...

(c) the idea that a military strike on Iran's nuclear installations merits serious consideration for either the U.S. or Israel.

So, factor that in as you will. A recent crop of developments:

1) A Congressional statement you really should read. Vice President Biden showed one way of distancing himself from this spectacle, through the super-important though not-yet-specified "foreign trip" he'll need to make just when Netanyahu is here.

Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, a Democrat from Louisville (and one of 19 Jewish members of the House) demonstrated the other approach. Yesterday he put out a remarkable statement with the heading "Why I Will Not Be Attending PM Netanyahu's Speech to Congress."

Seriously, this is worth reading, for what it says both about the specifics of U.S.-Israeli relations and about larger institutional dangers in the conduct of foreign policy as a whole. Here are a few samples.

On the conversion of a "policy" speech into a political and lobbying stunt, with emphasis added:

It is both sad and ridiculous that attending this speech will be used as a litmus test for support of Israel.  In short, roll will be taken, and some outside organizations have even threatened potential absentees with electoral repercussions....

It will become a matter of score-keeping as to who stands up and applauds and who doesn't. Having visited Israel only months after Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2011, I know how much political impact these scenes have in that country. There is pressure to join the applause even if a member does not agree with statements made.

On the "informational" value of the appearance:

We know what he is going to say. Netanyahu’s position on the ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program is not a secret. Like many other members, I have been visited by the Israeli ambassador and understand what they want and how that differs from what U.S. negotiators are attempting to accomplish.

The Prime Minister has plenty of other places to express his opinions. In fact he has done so many times.

On interference in U.S. policy-making by a foreign leader:

Speaker Boehner invited the Prime Minister to address Congress specifically to refute President Obama’s position. I will not contribute to the impression that this body does not support the President of the United States in foreign affairs.

Congress has a broader responsibility than the security interests of Israel. While it certainly is important that we understand the Israeli perspective, the American people will hear only Netanyahu’s perspective, creating a public perception that could undermine a broadly supported resolution to the Iranian nuclear situation.

This is as gutsy and non-boilerplate a statement as you're going to see from any congressional office. The way to encourage more such behavior by elected officials is to recognize it when it occurs.

2) Why the obligatory applause lines can be the most damaging parts of the speech. From a reader who makes a point parallel to Yarmuth's:

I just had a flash of what that address to a joint Congress will look like.  All members must attend, lest they be branded anti-Israel.  And, in the fashion of a State of the Union address, Netanyahu will deliver his speech with the intention to evoke applause. And, like the State of the Union address, the cameras will pan, and if a member is seen not applauding to a key policy point, he/she will be branded anti-Israel. Netanyahu will have been given an extreme American political power, given only to one other person on earth: the President of the United States....  

This, for me, brings into clear focus the patent harm caused by Citizens United:  The ability of money to highjack American political processes is a dangerous thing. And the, shall I say, chutzpah of Israel, a foreign power, to inject itself (with disrespectful swagger) into the heart of the American political process should be seen as a real harbinger of those dangers.  How much of the dark money being invested into 501(c)(4)'s has its origins in foreign treasuries?  Israel is a potent example of how a savvy foreign power can, with careful political management and financial investment, hijack American politics.  The analogy to a virus or a cancer springs to mind. And the vector is money. And its ability to neutralize our own self-protective evaluative and deliberative mechanisms very directly resembles an auto-immune disorder....

And I must make what seems to have become the obligatory disclaimer:   I must clarify that I am not anti-Israel, anti-Jew, anti-semite;  I'm actually part Jewish by culture, though not by faith.  And I do think that the interests of the Jewish state are very important.  But that should never displace a clear-headed perspective on what American interests are, and an independent evaluation of Israel's policies and actions, on our terms.

As the doubly partisan nature of this spectacle becomes more obvious—partisan in U.S. terms, as part of the struggle between Obama and the Republicans, partisan in Israel as its own election nears—the case for Democrats simply absenting themselves becomes more powerful.

As an intellectual matter, there is nothing they will learn by attending the speech that they haven't already heard. As a matter of short-term politics, they put themselves and their president in a no-win situation just by showing up. (If they don't applaud, they "lose." If they do applaud, they "don't win.") And as a question of long-term governance, everything about the situation is bad. As Josh Marshall argued two days ago, emphasis in original:

The idea of a foreign head of state appearing before Congress as an advocate in a debate that is a matter of great controversy within the United States is basically without precedent. This is quite apart from the equally unprecedented idea of a foreign head of state addressing Congress to advocate against a sitting President. Mainly this is because foreign heads of state or government are by definition not American.

Why enable any of this? Why agree to serve as props for what has become a GOP-Likud stunt? If Vice President Biden and Representative Yarmuth can stay away, so can the rest of you.

***

3) I've also received a lot of mail on the merits of the Iran negotiations. More about that shortly. For now, one more reader note on an under-covered aspect of the situation:

I'm not as bothered by Netanyahu's speech as you are, but I am disgusted more generally by the ongoing efforts to sabotage negotiations and I don't see it covered much elsewhere in my media universe. Anyway, my point is below:

It seems to me that Israel's chest thumping about war has moved the center of the Iran debate into such extreme territory that crippling economic sanctions are treated as merely symbolic. Many of the same politicians who take sanctions so lightly talk a lot about the suffering in America caused by the Great Recession (and rightly so). Well, we've done much worse things to Iran's economy than the recession did to ours. We've caused immense human misery in the Iranian population. Is economic suffering only real when it happens in America?

Maybe after weighing the risks and benefits, sanctions were indeed the right thing to do (particularly if these negotiations succeed). I'm skeptical but uncertain. But I am fairly certain that the sanctions aren't weighing on the consciences of those who are inflicting them to the degree that they should.

In the realpolitik of this moment, sanctions seem the only plausible alternative to talk of outright military confrontation. Thus for me they are clearly the lesser evil. But the reader rightly points out how taken-for-granted they have become.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/the-case-for-democrats-skipping/385415/

I intend to give the Netanyahu-speech situation a rest after this, though there will be more to say on the risks and merits of the underlying negotiations with Iran. (For past items on the speech controversy, follow the links in this post.) But here is one last reader message on the speech itself. It's from someone whose real identity I know but am not using here. He lives in the Western U.S.

Let's get the disclaimers out of the way right from the start: I'm Jewish, or at least I was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, and continue to consider myself culturally Jewish.

A substantial portion of my parents' families died in the Holocaust. One branch survived because they emigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century. That branch still lives in Israel and they have all served in the Army and many have fought during the numerous wars, starting with independence. My father's family spent a year as refugees in France until a miracle yielded entry visas to the US. My mother's family evacuated at Dunkirk. I've visited family in Israel twice as an adult. So, if you wonder if I appreciate the importance of Israel to Jews around the world, my credentials are solid.

That said, I remain utterly baffled by the obeisance American politicians pay to a country that, due to the disproportionate influence of fanatic religious parties in the coalition, sometimes borders on the theocratic. Israel's policies towards the occupied territories are in conflict with international law and US policy, yet we turn a blind eye. Israel is America's ally when it serves Israel's interest (which of course is how any rational country behaves, putting its own interests first.)

Perhaps all the more ironic, a frequent anti-Semitic (or at least anti-American Jew) canard is that American Jews place loyalty to Israel ahead of the US (a claim one doesn't hear applied to western European immigrants, like the Irish, in spite of decades of support for IRA terrorists).

So here we have Jewish senators and congressmen, who supposedly place loyalty to Israel ahead of the US because of their religion, threatened with being viewed as anti-Israel for not attending Netanyahu's circus, yet the Republicans behind this spectacle are not being questioned about their loyalty to the US for apparently placing Israel's interests ahead of the US. And of course, Netanyahu's interests and Israel's interests are not even the same thing.

So, when the cameras show who attends and who doesn't, who applauds and who doesn't, let's not think about who is pro-Israel or anti-Israel, let's ask who is pro-American or anti-American.

I know from other correspondence with this reader that his aim is not to launch some different sort of re-directed loyalty witch-hunt. Rather it is to ridicule or challenge the general idea of "loyalty tests" and instead to concentrate on the sanest long-run pursuit of U.S. national interests.

To my mind those interests lie with seeing if an acceptable deal with Iran can be found—a prospect that cannot possibly be helped by the spectacle a foreign leader addressing Congress to criticize the administration's approach to negotiations, while those talks are still underway. Again, imagine Congress inviting Chaing Kai-shek to address a joint meeting on the problems with the Nixon opening to China, while the negotiations that would lead to the Shanghai Communique were still underway. No American strategist would have thought that was a good idea at the time, and similar logic applies now.  But I've made this point already and will move on.  

***

Time for the periodic housekeeping note about reader mail. Unless specified otherwise, I consider any incoming message to be available for quotation here. I don't have an open-comments section, because I don't want to commit the time to moderate and tend it (as Ta-Nehisi Coates has so impressively done). But I try to give an idea of the range of response by quoting samples of what's come in.

I generally want/need to know a reader's real name before quoting a message. That's to avoid trolling, phony claims about background or identity, false-flag-style arguments, etc. But I don't ever use a reader's real name on our site unless agreed in advance.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/anti-israel-or-anti-american/385524/

Through the past 13+ years the United States has fought a war of choice in Iraq, and has extended its original fully justified punitive mission in Afghanistan into a war of choice (including "surge") there. It has the world's most powerful and most expensive military and has won nearly every tactical engagement in each country. Yet in a strategic sense it has lost both wars.

Now it faces the challenge of the indisputably evil and brutal ISIS. Of the desirability of crushing ISIS there is no doubt. But after the previous commitments led to grief, people have looked back and asked, How could we ever have thought that [Tactic X] would have worked?

It's worth trying to ask that question ahead of time with ISIS, as it was worth doing with Iraq. The cover story of our brand-new issue [Subscribe!] is a tremendous, thoroughly reported, vividly told analysis by Graeme Wood of the history, ambitions, strengths, and vulnerabilities of the Islamic State movement. I urge you to read it and think about its implications.

Along with Graeme Wood's story, please consider this shorter assessment by Kenneth S. Brower, a longtime defense analyst. He doesn't agree with Wood on everything, but in the areas both of overlap and of differences I think you'll find these essays clarifying and valuable.

Some thoughts about our so called "war" on ISIS.

By Kenneth S. Brower

As I see it the Sunni minority in Iraq and the Sunni majority in Syria are under siege by Shia. ISIS is the one successful Sunni group opposing the Shia. A very large portion of Arab Sunnis at least passively support ISIS, not because they support its extreme ideology but because they want the Sunnis to emerge victorious. A subset of the pro ISIS Sunnis actually support their extreme ideology. What we call the Iraqi military is seen by almost all Arab Sunnis as a Shia army under the influence, if not the control, of Iran. This explains why Turkey maintains open borders, as well as the policy of Jordan, Saudi and the Emirates.

I simply do not understand our strategy, assuming we really have one. If our goal is defeating ISIS's ideology and its support of international terrorism this cannot be done by indirect fire, PERIOD! If [conclusive defeat] is our objective we have only have limited choices: either military control of 25 million Syrian/Iraqi Sunnis, which will require a sustained force of 500,000 for decades; or creating conditions whereby the majority of Sunni Arabs will see it in their self interest to subjugate the ideological minority.

If our objective is simply to maintain the borders set by colonial powers in 1919, then air power alone will suffice. But the inevitable result will be Shia control of Syria and Iraq and a strengthening of ISIS ideology and terrorism.

The use of air power is our only feasible military option, but using air power to liberate urban areas, like Mosul, means destroying them! That will only create more enemies.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no military solution to this issue that can be generated by the US. But I believe there is a political solution.

We have to give the Sunnis reason to reject ISIS. That would entail having the US come out against the Sykes-Picot borders, supporting a break up of Iraq into Kurdish, Shia and Sunni countries, incorporating most of Syria, while simultaneously and carefully decimating ISIS leadership. I simply cannot understand why it is in the strategic interest of the US to maintain current Middle Eastern borders, which are unsustainable. I see our current approach as guaranteed to fail.

Terrorism is murder, whether it is in Paris, Copenhagen or any US town. Every day about 70 Americans are murdered, most by guns. Unless the victims are famous or cute most are ignored by the media. But a minor terrorist attack gets headlines. A YouTube video of a beheading forces the US President to go to " war" in order to avoid being called weak by his domestic political opposition. That's not leadership! Worse, the so called Hawks push for deeper evolvement irrespective of military reality. They live in a fantasy world of US military exceptionalism.

To me the issue is not whether we would be better served if the A-10 were being properly employed. Obviously we would be! Ditto [other military-reform concepts], which have always made sense to me. To me the issue is strategy.....and as I see it our use of force is currently counter productive.

In Gaza the IDF has been able to assassinate Hamas leaders sometimes layers deep. So what! The occupants of Gaza have seen their society all but ripped apart, and they continue to support Hamas. If 125,000 were still employed in Israel instead of Asians I wonder how much support Hamas would have?

If I were a Sunni Arab I would know that when the Syrian Alawite ( Shia ) used poison gas the US did nothing although thousands were massacred. Yet when two Americans were murdered we bombed Sunnis......and then we expect Sunnis to love US.

We have got caught up in tactics and strategy has been caught up in domestic politics. Military reality is nowhere to be found.

I am profoundly worried.

A central argument of my "Tragedy of the American Military" article was that because Americans "honor" their military but don't really take it seriously, we repeatedly send our forces on missions at which they're destined to fail.

The "easy" part of dealing with ISIS is agreeing on its horror. The difficult part is thinking ahead five steps, about what the use of military power can and cannot do. Wood's reporting and Brower's military analysis are valuable steps in that direction.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/on-the-impossibility-of-fighting-isis/385530/

The video below is all over the China-related community but may not have made attracted the general awareness it deserves.

I'm tempted to make a joke about the video, because it is preposterous in 16 obvious ways. But as I watched it again, the humor started to drain away. It really is depressing to have the officials in China trying to shut off the country this way, and defending it with this kind of 1960s-worthy agitprop.

Thanks to ProPublica for retrieving the video, translating and subtitling it, and providing an informative background item. Sisi Wei and Yue Qiu of ProPublica, who did the translation, know a million times more about Chinese language than I ever will, but I thought I'd underscore one point about the translation for the fellow native English speakers in the crowd:

Time and again the song's refrain mentions 网络强国, wangluo qiangguo, which it translates as "Internet power."  Eg:

English speakers might think of "Internet power" as comparable to "soft power" or "girl power." But to my amateur eye there is a more explicit connotation of China's becoming a national power in cyberspace. I'm sure Chinese readers will tell me if I'm wrong to read 强国 as meaning a powerful country, but the impression I got from this was of a strongly nationalistic message.

Overall the video is funny. And not.

***

Many people have sent links to an item in The Guardian about the surprisingly light hand of Chinese net censors. Unfortunately this analysis seems to me significantly out of date, eg, similar to what prevailed back in the palmy pre-Xi Jinping era. I would prefer to be proven wrong. Meanwhile check out the video.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/fun-with-chinese-agitprop-presidents-day-edition/385532/

A word of background: Over the past week, I've argued that Prime Minister Netanyahu's upcoming speech to a joint meeting of Congress is destructive as a matter of procedure and misguided as a matter of policy. For previous installments please see: why the speech itself is unprecedented; why I think Netanyahu's case about Iran is wrong on the merits; more about why he is wrong on Iran; and why it would make sense for Congressional Democrats to follow VP Joe Biden's (and Rep. John Yarmuth's) example and skip the speech.

A full roster of Iran-related posts is here. And the distillation of why I care about the episode at all is in this post, ending with:

Here's why I care. I am deadset against my country drifting into further needless unwinnable wars. I view Netanyahu's arguments on Iran, however sincerely held on his side, as being wrong and unhelpfully warmongering from a U.S. perspective...

1. In my view, and as I've argued in my book Blind Into Baghdad and in many articles including "Bush's Lost Year," the decision to invade Iraq was the worst American foreign-policy mistake of my lifetime....
2. The arguments made to promote the Iraq war—we must strike before it's too late; diplomacy is a ruse and has run its course; the regime is irrational and can only be crushed rather than reasoned with; military "solutions" will in fact solve the problem—very closely parallel those now being made about Iran. And they are being made by many of the same people, notably including Benjamin Netanyahu...
3. Before the Iraq war, I admired State Senator Barack Obama's judgment in opposing it. I admire President Obama's judgment now in pushing hard for a diplomatic solution with Iran, despite huffing about "weakness" from the same people who rushed us into war with Iraq. Many people are doing the huffing, but only one of them has been asked to address a joint meeting of Congress. That's why I'm talking about him.

I understand that people disagree about this. Today as promised, a sample of opposing views.

What you see below, mainly from readers who identify themselves as Jews living in North America or Israel, comes in response to the reader I quoted here, on the question of "dual loyalty," a hoary slur against Jewish Americans. That reader, a Jewish American with family members who had died in the Holocaust, said that he didn't like "loyalty" labels. But he said that if anyone could be suspected of "dual loyalty" in this episode, it would be the (overwhelmingly non-Jewish) Republican politicians who had invited Netanyahu as a way to embarrass the Obama administration and make policy toward Israel a partisan issue.

You can agree with that or not. Unfortunately, many readers saw the words "dual loyalty" and immediately imagined, incorrectly, that the reader must have been advocating rather than rejecting the standard slur. This is life on the Internet I suppose; yet each time I encounter it I'm taken aback. With all that throat-clearing, here goes:

***

1) "So utterly offensive." From an American rabbi:

America's closest ally in the Middle East is Israel. Israel is the region's only true democracy. It is a nation with which we Americans share many western values. Like our democracy, Israel's is imperfect. But like our democracy, it aspires to fulfill the values enshrined in its Declaration of Independence. Israel and the United States share a strong strategic/defense/security relationship. It is because of these and many more core reasons that Prime Minister Netanyahu received sustained applause and standing ovations during his last speech before a joint session of Congress. The thesis presented by your previous commentator does nothing but promote the disgusting canard of Jewish dual loyalty. [JF note: although of course he was writing about non-Jewish "dual loyalty." But I'll stop with the comments now.]

As an American, a Jew and a religious leader I found the comments related to the charge of dual loyalty and your willingness to publish them so utterly offensive that I've decided to discontinue receiving blog posts.

2) "Clean hands." From another reader in the United States:

So you finish up your Bibi-bashing series by posting the the opinion of a Liberal American Jew telling you how right you are about everything. Just the person to help you trot out the old dual loyalty canard with clean hands.

You used to be better than this.

3) "Support Israel against Iran or risk nuclear contamination of the planet." From a reader in New York, who didn't get into "dual loyalty":

Netanyahu is not coming to speak to Congress for the sake of the United States, but for the sake of Israel.  Let us understand clearly that Israel is being surrounded by Iran and the US is meddling by assisting those who could thwart those developments: Hizb'Allah in Lebanon, Iranian and Hizb'Allah troops on the Syrian-Israel border in the Golan; Shi'a Iranian support of Sunni Hamas; and most recently Iranian support of Yemeni Shi'ites.  If the Houthi in Yemen reach Bab el-Mandeb they could blockade Israeli shipping from the Israeli port of Eilat...

The consequences, if you are wrong about the intentions of Iran to wipe Israel off the map, will be a nuclear confrontation.  One generally weighs costs versus benefits in serious matters.  The survival of Israel for Israelis is a benefit.  The cost of going nuclear, when that scenario could have been prevented, not only by past actions but by present actions as well, is far higher than political and military support for Israel before that terrible mushroom cloud materializes.

The bottom line: Support Israel against Iran politically and militarily or risk nuclear contamination of the planet.  The very idea of pushing Israel into a weakened position in an attempt to control it is a fools errand given the duplicitous nature of Iranian chess playing on an international scale.

I wrote back to the reader acknowledging his note and saying that I disagreed with some of the factual claims made in parts I'm not quoting here. He replied:

Mr modest recommendation to you is to visit a classic Eastern European Yeshivah for one hour.  Without the process in which the students engage each other nothing real ever happens - not in their world or in ours.

I replied saying: Yes, I think I've seen the same process at work in Jesuit high schools and some nondenominational debate courses, small-group tutorials, and Socratic-method classes. He wrote back saying, No, it's special to Yeshivahs.

4) "If you are anti-Zionism then you are anti-Semitic." From another reader I believe to be in Israel. I have somewhat condensed what was a very long and detailed note:

There is not a single column you write that I agree with. But with this piece I had to email you and completely tear apart your shallow anti-Israel screed.

As for your reader, I have the same creds as your so-called Jewish reader. But what he established as creds does not provide him automatic entitlement as a Jew. In fact this person is the typical secular American who happened to be born Jewish.

Based on his comments he long ago traded in his belief in his religion and heritage for the belief in a false idol called left wing socialism which is the new liberalism. That is irrefutable. Every Jewish service prays for the homeland of Jews of Jerusalem and Israel. There is no air between being Jewish and supporting Israel. If you are anti-Zionism then you are anti-Semitic. Martin Luther King Jr. said that once.

But the anti-Semitic left have created a false narrative to give cover to these fake Jews to separate themselves from Israel.

Your friend says:

“I remain utterly baffled by the obeisance American politicians pay to a country that, due to the disproportionate influence of fanatic religious parties in the coalition, sometimes borders on the theocratic.”

Maybe he missed this, but Israel IS a Jewish state and the U.N. mandate stated as such. A reason for such a state is to prevent another holocaust and that came to use with Jews leaving the USSR and now from Europe. Also his characterization of the political parties shows he has no clue what Israel is or what actually happens there but is simply picking up the narrative of the anti-Semitic left

“Israel's policies towards the occupied territories are in conflict with international law and US policy, yet we turn a blind eye.”

What policies are those? He does not say but once again gratuitously parrots the anti-Semitic left. [Much detail on occupation and settlements.]... .

There is nothing illegal about what Israel is doing in the West Bank and your so-called Jewish friend simply uses radical Islamic and left wing anti-Semitic propaganda – and not facts.

“Israel is America's ally when it serves Israel's interest”

Another shallow anti-Semitic claim and he provides no support for. The fact is that Israel has done a lot for the U.S. even when it was not in their interest.

“Jewish senators and congressmen, who supposedly place loyalty to Israel ahead of the US because of their religion, threatened with being viewed as anti-Israel for not attending Netanyahu's circus”

Again your so-called Jewish friend provides zero evidence which is what people on the left do. They demagogue without support. And to call Netanyahu’s (the leader of Israel) speech to a joint session of Congress a “circus” pretty much disqualifies this abhorrent person as a Jew. That is the view being perpetrated by Obama.

“Netanyahu's interests and Israel's interests are not even the same thing.”

Really? Why because Obama and his left wing anti-Semitic thugs say so? Try the rest of the country who disagree with you and most are not Jews.

Here is the real issues for someone who claims to be an American Jew.

Why was every one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers while he was a candidate in 2008 all with anti-Israel credentials which made him different than the other Democratic candidates?

Why was Obama’s first call in the oval office to the head of the PLO?

Why did Obama’s first trip to the Middle East include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey and intentionally skipped over Israel?

Why did Obama feel it necessary to embarrass and personally denigrate Netanyahu publicly and treat him like a junk yard dog?

Why did Obama call the Paris deli attack “an act of random violence” and intentionally ignore that it was an anti-Semitic attack?

Why has anti-Semitism risen dramatically here and around the world coincidentally while Obama has been President?

Why is Obama the first American President to be overwhelmingly disliked and not trusted by Israelis?

Your so-called Jewish friend likely voted for Obama twice and ignored that he spent 20 years in the most anti-Semitic church in the country and considered its pastor his spiritual mentor. He ignored the fact that among Obama’s other mentors were Rashif Khalidi and Khalid Al Mansour. Your friend is typical of far too many American Jews who have capitulated to the socialist left and traded in their religion and heritage for loyalty to enemies of their religion and heritage.

Because you happened to be born Jewish does not mean you are.

5) "You are wrong." From a reader in Israel:

1. Your analogy of China/Nixon and Iran/Obama is wrong. China was not planning to destroy Taiwan and murder all is citizens. As Obama begged/demanded that Israel not take military action when it was possible, there is an obligation to make Israel part of the decision process today. The current perception in Israel is that Obama will throw us under the bus for the sake of his "legacy".

2. Why do American journalists insist on quoting Haaretz; it is read by less than 5% of the population, the extreme left wing anti-zionists. It is not representative of mainstream thinking and never had anything good to say about the country, it's leaders, it's people or its religion. Quoting it reduces your credibility outside of that small elitist community.

6) Maybe you are right. Just to mix things up, and as a reminder of the heated debate within Israel, a note on this same point from a reader in Jerusalem:

I wholly agree with both your analysis and comparisons. The Nixon-Taiwan reference is truly illuminating for me.

My reservation, though, is that your accounts advocating to let Bibi come and speak in Congress neglects to take into account the ways in which American politics play a direct role in our national politics, particularly the coming general elections.

Bibi has contributed more than any other leader on both sides of the ocean to transforming Israel from a bi-partisan issue to one of great contention. He actively interfered in the 2012 presidential campaign in favor of Mitt Romney. He also managed to hold a joint event with John Hagee on the eve of VP Biden's visit to Jerusalem (a tactic he already used back in 98, when participating in a Jerry Falwell event before coming to Clinton's White House). All of this is happens while Netanyahu remains extremely reluctant to respond positively to most foreign policy initiatives coming from the Administration.

You write: "let's think carefully about American national interests". I urge you to do exactly that, and remember that unlike Nixon and Taiwan, the US has other interests down here in our neighborhood - the issue of Palestine and its contribution to instability; Jordan's refugee problem and the counter-IS coalition more generally; Egypt's delicate post-Mubarak politics. These interests are compromised by letting Bibi use the Congress podium as the ideal setting for his campaign ads.

All call, in other words, for a less tolerant approach to Israel's contemporary Chang Kai Shek.   

After the jump is another long note from a reader in the United States who professes herself (understandably) sick of all sides in this discussion.

7) "Sheese already!" An American reader writes:

Dual loyalty? Really?  Why go there at all?  

Bibi can be annoying BUT he has a point does he not?  Note I think he’s wrong to have bypassed President Obama.  And he may be grandstanding for his own electorate.  BUT.  This is cause to question anybody’s “loyalty?”  Since when is speaking, listening, or applauding a sign of “loyalty?” [JF note: Rep. Yarmuth had the answer to this one. He pointed out that if Senators and Representatives went to the speech, then every time they clapped, or not — or stood to cheer, or not — would be tallied up as a sign of "support" and loyalty. Thus he declined to attend. Please read his rationale here.]

Today in eastern France dozens of Jewish graves were desecrated with swastikas.  The latest terrorist meme in Europe seems to be, kill a free speech advocate, then kill a Jew.  Against this backdrop the craziness and brutality of the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa (and other parts of Africa) simply defies description.

BUT we make a big deal about allegiance to Israel/allegiance to America why? [JF: There is horror around the world. Only one foreign leader is being invited to address the Congress about it.]

I feel sick, and sad, having to even write this.  My grandparents fled Europe, fled the pogroms, fled to America for their lives.  My uncles fought in WWII and one died.  Yet even my supposedly intelligent, liberal step-father never considered us Jews “real Americans,” and made me attend church so I’d “be able to communicate with real Americans” when he married my mom.

Regardless - Israel is an ally, is quite similar to America, and exists for some very good reasons – some historical and others a simple matter of fairness, of rightness, not only because of the Shoah but because of history, of thousands of years of history....

Jews have been considered “other” since the diaspora of Jews from Israel, before that actually to Greeks, and so forth; and victimized as such, and it’s enough already, with or without the presence/existence of Israel; modern Israel is now a proxy for the shadow Israel, that pre-existed Eretz Israel in the imagination of the sort of people who wrote and who believe in “The Protocols,” in the minds of people who perpetrated the Inquisition, who have tormented Jews for ages and ages.  We don’t have to be “good little Jews” or “bad Jews” or Israelis, or religious Jews, or “banksters,” or “conversos” to be “other,” to be feared, and scorned, and have our loyalty questioned, and you should know this and not go there, period, except to stomp on it, on any suggestion of this kind of bigotry, hard....

Meanwhile – for Jews around the world, for democrats and progressives around the world – and others who seek and respect the truth - let’s not forget that to elements of Iran, “freedom of speech” means, “let’s have a Holocaust denial cartoon contest.”

So?

Perhaps you could write about that, and about why Elie Weisel is supporting Bibi’s speech to Congress, which otherwise does upset me since it puts Jews in the crosshairs of this kind of bigotry, as evinced by your column, and also because as President Obama says, our relationship with Israel isn’t a matter of partisan politics.  And I’m truly concerned that in America, “pro-Israel” is becoming “right wing.”  That worries me!

More importantly, American Jews shouldn’t be questioned as to our loyalty to America [JF: let me note once more and Israel shouldn’t be regarded as THE global pariah, second only to North Korea on the BBC’s most hated/feared list from what I’ve read recently.  Britain – don’t get me started....

I’ve seen swastikas in my neighborhood, on synagogues, on the office walls of a Jewish politician.

I think you should write about THAT.  About all of it; about Iran’s explicit and repeated threats; and maybe while you’re at it, you could read the article in today’s NYT about the crusader’s first “war,” which was against European Jews.  Things don’t change much.

An embattled American Jew, left wing and sick and tired of anti-Semitism which includes anti-Israel propaganda, including “cultural boycotts.”  Sheese already.

***

My main purpose here is to give a sample of critical response and an idea of what the mailbox looks like, so I'll engage only two points.

The first, as mentioned frequently, is that the original correspondent was saying one thing, and many readers somehow understood him to be saying just the reverse. The second is to register my for-the-record dissent to reader #4's assertion that "there is no air between being Jewish and supporting Israel," and by extension that differing with Israeli government policy must always anti-Semitism. This presumably would be news to opposition parties in Israel.

OK, I'll add a third point: I am not a fan of "You should write more about XXX" instructions, like those from reader #7. People should write about things where they have some knowledge or standing to speak.

The world is full of problems I don't write about because I have no special insight on them. I have, by contrast, spent decades learning about American military and strategic engagement with the world, which is how I got into this topic in the first place. It involves whether the U.S. should choose another military standoff, this one with Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu has been elected to set his own country's policy in this matter. Barack Obama was elected here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/reader-push-back-on-netanyahu-iran-and-the-speech/385538/

I was on the road during the SNL 40th Anniversary celebration and will have to dig it up online some time.

Meanwhile, here is the Lorne Michaels-backed show I wish had lasted for 40 years, or at least more years than it did: the Toronto-based Kids in the Hall. For these reasons.

First, a way better opening-credits sequence than SNL ever had. The videos for the opening changed a little bit during each of their (sigh!) 5 seasons, and you can see a compilation of intros from all the seasons here. But the music was always the great "Having an Average Weekend" by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and you can see and hear an example below:

The comedy was much meaner than SNL's, and also campy in a literal sense, much like Monty Python's. Also as with Monty Python, many skits featured one or more of the five cast members in drag. To the best of my knowledge, only Scott Thompson, later familiar on The Colbert Report as the flamboyant Buddy Cole, was openly gay.

If you've seen the show, you know what I'm talking about—but because it sadly ended its brief run 20 years ago, many people might not. A few samples:

"Chicken Lady." This is genuinely disturbing.

"Girl Drink Drunk." This is a sustained sketch of a kind SNL has a harder time pulling off.

"The Daves I Know." Idiotic yet somehow brilliant. I think the appeal involves Bruce McCulloch's attire and stride, starting about one minute in.

"The Ham of Truth." Rebellious youth.

"The Beard." Also fairly disturbing.

"My Horrible Secret." This is just surreal.

"Buddy Cole and his Softball Sluggers." A prequel to the Colbert appearances.

There are a lot more. SNL had been going for nearly 15 years when Kids in the Hall made its U.S. debut. But because Kids ended its regular run 20 years ago, it seems more a glimpse into a lost world. Spare a thought for KITH as SNL rolls on.  

And here's another, mainly B-and-W version of the opening.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/lorne-michaelss-other-show/385598/

The National Journal, which is part of our same Atlantic Media empire, has a new cover story by Bob Moser on Jim Webb's possible campaign for the presidency.

I've known Webb for a long time, and I am quoted several times about his personality and possible effect on the race. The direct quotes are all accurate, but unfortunately (and inadvertently) they're presented in a context I did not intend.

The story says that I do not think Webb should run. Thus the specific observations on which I'm quoted — about his temperamental difference from run-of-the-mill politicians, about the long-shot prospects he or anyone else would seem to have versus Hillary Clinton — seem to be reasons for opposing his candidacy. Eg:

Actually, I hope Jim Webb does run. Two of the issues on which he has based his political career—income inequality, and the risks of chickenhawk militarism—are absolutely crucial issues for the Democratic party and the country. Realistically the 2016 Democratic race seems more sewed up than any other nomination race I can recall. Anyone running against Hillary Clinton is facing very steep odds. But there's still a long time to go, anything can happen, and the country and the party can only benefit from having a candidate like Webb make the case he would make. For similar reasons, I said nine years ago that I was glad Webb was beginning his (long-shot) run for the Senate in Virginia.

Want to hear how Jim Webb sounds when he talks about economic justice? I wrote about this during the 2012 presidential campaign, and I give you the video below. It came during the controversy over whether 47% of Americans were "takers," and in it Webb talks both about moral issues and about things he accomplished in the Senate.  

This was an unintentional mis-presentation on NJ's part, which I believe it will correct in the online version of the story. But it is important enough (to me) that I want to make this point myself.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/for-the-record-i-hope-jim-webb-runs/385599/

Various 30-something readers are grumpy that I mentioned The Kids in the Hall as if some people might not already know about them.

Welcome to the march of time, 30-something kiddos! About one third of the current U.S. population, something like 100+ million people, is not old enough to have seen KitH when it was on TV through 1995. (If you'd like an extra little jolt, consider that today's first- and second-year college students can't really remember the 9/11 attacks.) Trust me, more of these little surprises lie ahead.

On the other hand, other 30-something readers were glad to have one of their era's gems be remembered. They passed along a few other routines I hadn't seen:

"Gavin in the Butcher Shop." This is remarkable, and I'm not sure it would be allowed on television in the US. Those wild Canadians.

"Grizzly Bear Attack." Deliverance goes north.

"Head Crusher." A recurring bit popular with many readers.

"I Sell Shoes." Satan waits on you.

A few other points before we turn the page. First, about the great opening-credit music:

Thanks for the post about Kids in the Hall. Just for fun, listen to the music intro for The Daily Show, then the one for KitH. Second cousins (maybe even first), wouldn't you think?

Agree. And about the other other show by Lorne Michaels, this note from a reader in Canada:

Lorne Michaels also had a Laugh In-style show called the Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour that ran for one season [1970-1971] on CBC in Canada. As I recall it was cancelled for being "too urban". The Hart half of the duo was Hart Pomerantz who went on to become on of Ontario's top criminal defense lawyers.

Here are some clips from the show:

Ah, the lost territory of the past, circa 1970 and also 1995. Thanks to readers north and south of the US-Canadian border, and now we move on.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/kids-in-the-hall-the-sequel/385637/

“There were mistakes made in Iraq for sure.” Jeb Bush, yesterday, in his foreign policy speech. Nearly all of which, by the way, could have been delivered by his elder brother—which is as it should be, given how many members of his brains-trust have Bush #43 or Bush #41 experience.

Previously in this ignoble series:

1973: "Mistakes were made in terms of comments." Richard Nixon's press secretary Ron Ziegler, on the lies he had told the Washington Post's  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their Watergate stories.

1986: "Mistakes were made." Then-VP George H.W. Bush on the Iran-Contra scandal and the administration's lying about it.

1987: "Serious mistakes were made." Ronald Reagan, on the same topic in his State of the Union address.

1991: "Some mistakes were made." White House chief of staff John Sununu on his abuse of travel policies.

1997: "Mistakes were made." Bill Clinton not on the topic you might guess but on administration officials discussing banking policy in front of fund-raisers.

2002: "it is quite possible that mistakes were made." Henry Kissinger, on human-rights complaints about U.S. intelligence activities in South America.

2006: "The biggest mistake that's happened so far," George W. Bush on the Abu Ghraib torture scandals. "That's happened" is a nice variation on "was made."

2007: "Mistakes were made." Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, on the politicized firing of some U.S. Attorneys.

1946: "Mistakes were made," Albert Speer at the Nuremberg trials.

No, sorry, this last one is not real. Nor are AD 33: "Mistakes were made," Pontius Pilate; nor 1912: "Mistakes were made," Capt. Smith of the Titanic.

For wrapups on this pernicious, passive-voice, accountability-avoiding approach to public life, see On the Media; the Maddow show blog; The Washington Monthly; the NYT; CBS; Wikipedia; the NPR blog; MetaFilter; etc. The late William Safire wrote about the circumlocution in 2003, also arguing at the time (mistakenly) that the invasion of Iraq would not prove to be a mistake.

Please, God, let us bring a halt to this three-word affront to logic and language. Other 2016 candidates, please learn from the mistake that was made in Jeb Bush's speech.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/mistakes-were-made/385663/

I have received a foreseeable flood of mail in response to the collection of Israel-and-Iran letters posted three days ago. I am not going to quote any more of it. As has been evident for many years, there is an unbridgeable chasm in outlooks on this topic. Having offered a sample of the current state of that divide, I'll say Enough for now.

This makes me all the more admiring of diplomats who try to find ways across the chasm, starting with what I saw from Menachim Begin, Anwar Sadat, and Jimmy Carter at Camp David long ago (as dramatized in Lawrence Wright's play Camp David).

***

But I will weigh in on one more aspect of the Netanyahu-Obama-Iran controversy, namely the language with which we describe it. If you’d like background on how Obama and Netanyahu came to this impasse, please read two reports by David Ignatius, here and here. If you’d like to consider some of the long-term ramifications of Israel’s leader saying that he is the “true” voice of Jews worldwide, including American Jews, please read M.J. Rosenberg in The Nation, or former Congressman Mel Levine and former Israeli ambassador Oded Eran in Politico.

From Rosenberg: “[The US-Israel relationship] is especially threatened when an Israeli Prime Minister is seen as openly challenging the U.S president, asking the country and the Congress to side with a foreign Prime Minister over America’s President on an issue which potentially involves war and peace, a question about which the American public is anguished and divided.”

From Levine and Eran: “Netanyahu’s action, in challenging the American president and claiming to speak for all Jews when he does so, suggests that it is Israel and not the country in which Jews live and vote that is their homeland. This idea is anathema to the overwhelming majority of American Jews,… He is coming to the US Capitol to tell Congress that it should not support a president who is working to secure an agreement that president believes serves national interests, among which he has repeatedly said is the security of Israel.”

***

On language: we've reached the stage where a particular word obscures more than it clarifies about Iran and its nuclear prospects. That word is "existential," as in this now-standard formulation from Prime Minister Netanyahu: "A nuclear Iran is an existential threat on Israel and also on the rest of the world."

I have learned in seeing mail that if the first paragraph of a message includes the word “existential,” I know 90% of what will come next. In this context an existential threat, literally a challenge to continued existence, means implicitly likening Iran to Nazi Germany — or explicitly equating it, as Netanyahu has done for many years.

By definition an existential threat justifies any action that might forestall it, from preemptive military strikes to efforts at torpedoing an “unacceptable” diplomatic deal. It makes all compromises suspect. And it means that opinions from other countries lack moral standing, because after all their existence is not on the line.

In most of Netanyahu’s speeches, as in most of the angry mail I receive, you can find each of those elements. Look for them in the next editorial you read in the WSJ or Commentary. Whenever you see an argument that could be paraphrased as “it’s 1938 again,” you’ve found the real thing. But let’s stop and think about this concept of existential threats.

- Is there an existential threat from nuclear weapons? Of course there is. Throughout my Cold War childhood, families in the United States and the Soviet Union were constantly reminded of the danger that we could all be incinerated in a second. My parents sanely refused to build a fallout shelter, but many neighbors gave in to the fears. On the Beach and Fail-Safe were hugely popular novels because of exactly this danger. Soon after the first use of atomic weapons, Albert Einstein wrote in the Atlantic about the danger to all of humanity. Enough nuclear warheads remain to kill everyone on Earth many times over. I support the Global Zero drive to eliminate them.

- Is nuclear proliferation a problem, wherever it occurs? Of course, yes as well. Each new nuclear power makes the emergence of further powers more likely. This domino effect on other Middle Eastern countries is a very strong reason to oppose Iran's getting a bomb.

- Is there a state that faces a specific existential threat right now? Yes again. That state is South Korea.

South Korea has no nuclear weapons of its own, though the U.S. has extended its "nuclear umbrella." Its immediate neighbor, North Korea, does have nukes, which it tested and developed while the U.S. was distracted in Iraq. North Korea’s leaders are peculiar, to put it mildly, and have repeatedly promised / threatened to destroy South Korea in a "sea of fire" in rhetoric as blood-curdling as any anti-Israel rant from Iran. South Korea's population center is practically on the border with the North, rather than several time zones away as with Iran relative to Israel.

It would be better for everyone except North Korea if it had no nukes, but the South Korean president was not invited to address Congress during the GW Bush years to demand tougher action against North Korea.

- Is Israel's situation comparable to that on the Korean peninsula — or, to use the more familiar parallel, to that of European Jews menaced by Hitler in 1938? It most emphatically is not, if you pay any attention to the underlying facts.

The most obvious difference is that Israel is the incumbent (if unacknowledged) nuclear power in the region, with the universally understood ability to annihilate any attacker in a retaliatory raid. The only similarity between this power balance and the predicament of European Jewry in 1938 is the anti-Semitism. In 1938 the Jews of Germany, Poland, France, and Russia were a stateless minority with no military force of their own to protect them and no foreign power (including the U.S.) willing to step in. In 2015 Israel is a powerful independent state, more heavily armed than any adversary.

Think of this parallel: The full-tilt U.S. slave economy of the 1850s and the police-shooting abuses of 2015 have in common racist anti-black prejudice, but they are not the same situations. One was resolved only by cataclysmic war. The other is very serious but not the prelude to north-versus-south combat. The Iranian rhetoric of 2015 and the Nazi death machine of the Reich have in common the anti-Semitic hate mongering. But the differences between them are far more obvious than that similarity.

- And is the Iran of 2015 like the Germany of 1938? Oh, please. In 1938, Germany had the strongest military in the world, and the second-largest economy (behind only the United States). Its economy was bigger than France's and England's combined. Today's Iran, by contrast, doesn't even have the strongest military in its region, and its economy is not in the world's top 25. Hitler's Germany was an expansionist force that would grow until it was crushed. Iran makes enormous trouble for the U.S. and others, but no one serious can be proposing that it must be crushed.

I lay this out not imagining that it might change a single word in Netanyahu’s upcoming speech, nor the fervor of those who support him (and will soon tell me so). And of course Israel will decide for itself whether it feels "existentially" threatened. I am writing to an American audience that must assess our next steps and long-term goals toward Iran. When we call this situation "existential," we’re either saying something that is true for everyone — in the age of nuclear weapons all of humanity is at risk — or we’re making a specific observation that is far less applicable in Israel than in many other places, starting with South Korea. It's a slogan that has replaced thought.

***

After the jump I have a reader's note marveling at the way we've agreed to discuss Iran as a bottomless evil, rather than as a state with whom we should look for diplomatic ways to manage conflicts, as we have with China and the old Soviet Union—and as Begin did with Sadat.

A reader writes:

This whole thing has become so utterly surreal it's hard to talk about anymore. The entire kerfuffle is premised on an Iranian nuclear weapons program - a program we KNOW with certainty they do not have in operation. NO fissile materials have been diverted, IAEA inspectors routinely tell us that. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his Likudnik colleagues have been telling us since the 1980s that Iran is SIX MONTHS away from having a nuclear weapon.

I understand that Netanyahu is using fear of a nuclear-armed Iran for domestic political purposes - primarily to frighten his citizens into keeping him in office. The use of a ginned-up external existential threat is a time-honored method for cowing and manipulating a domestic constituency, and clearly at some point the fear of the Palestinians had lost its punch.

But why do the US, UK, France, China and other nations go along with this charade? Why do the media always write the stories in such a manner as to indicate that Iran has an active weapons R&D program? Why did we pile sanctions on and make daily threats of offensive war against a signatory of the NPT is good standing, particularly in support of an illegal proliferator? How can we continue this ridiculous sham?

Over the last couple years, you wrote repeatedly about how the press covered Republican filibusters - and you were right. This is the same thing - we're going through all these massive machinations to address a problem WE KNOW DOES NOT EXIST. If I wrote this in a novel it would be rejected as "utterly implausible"...

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/on-existential-threats/385638/

Yesterday I argued that it was time for Americans to drop or ignore the words "existential threat" when thinking about Iran and its nuclear potential. The words have become a slogan or incantation taking the place of thought. Now, response:

(1) A slew of readers have written in with variants of this sentiment:

The populated stretch of Israel from Haifa to Tel Aviv is about 55 miles as the crow flies. One or two nuclear weapons delivered in minutes by Iranian ballistic missiles and Israel would cease to exist, even if the Israelis were able to make a retaliatory strike.

Sure seem like an existential threat to me.

OK. That is "existential" if (a) by the same logic you acknowledge that South Korea is living with an "existential" threat now, yet has not seemed terrified or terrorized by it, or motivated to preemptive attack; and (b) you assume that the leadership of Iran is literally suicidal, since any attack on Israel would bring a devastating, nuclear-armed counterattack. The current Iranian government does many destructive things. I have asked "existential" readers for evidence of suicidal moves on Iran's part, and am still waiting.

(2) From a veteran of the news business:

In dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, U.S. policymakers knew that the impact would be felt, almost solely, by Japanese citizens. Aside from all else, today’s geographic and demographic realities rule out the possibility of a nuclear attack on, say, Tel Aviv, impacting solely, or even mostly, Israeli Jews.

That is, in addition to incurring a devastating retaliation on Iran itself, Iranian leaders would know that in attacking Israel they would kill millions of mainly-Muslim others at the same time.

(3) From reader Robert Levine:

What I've never understood about about Netanyahu's position is what he thinks the alternative might be. Pretty clearly he's been told that Israel does not have the ability to knock back Iran's ability to make nuclear weapons more than a few months, or he probably would have tried that a long time ago.

Any military action by the US would be without allies other than Israel, and would permanently shatter any diplomatic track. And surely he's aware that such action would be of a "rinse and repeat" in order to keep Iran from moving forward - which, after an attack on their soil, they would inevitably do. The only permanent solutions would be invasion and occupation - or bombing them back to the Stone Age. Neither seems likely, much less wise. I'll bet Netanyahu sees at least the "likely" part.

The bottom line is that there is no practical way to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons if it wants to, and that military action would make it more far more likely that they would want to. The most frustrating part of watching this debate unfold is how many people don't seem to get the elementary fact that stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons is impossible. What is possible is discouraging them from wanting to get them or wanting to use them. The second is solved by deterrence, which already exists, as you point out.

(4) From a reader with extensive experience outside the US:

One of my pet peeves has always been this reflex in the US media, politicians, and Beltway Wise Men types to constantly see history as a series of repeating events...there is always a Munich 1938 happening somewhere or a new Hitler on the rise somewhere, etc. etc..  

Is this something that is specific to the US only or have you observed it in other countries and regions over the course of your career?  I have family in Canada, UK, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, Dubai, India, and Pakistan, and trust me when we discuss politics or when I peruse the dailies or new sources over there, I rarely come across somebody arguing on the basis of these shoddy analogies.

Was just curious if in your experience, this "malady" is specific to the US or if you've seen it in other places too?

My main answer is to direct readers to the elegant book by (my one-time professors) Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time, about the use and mis-use of historic analogies.

(5) "Why America’s Obsession With Iran’s Centrifuges Could Give Tehran the Bomb." Joseph Cirincione writes in Defense One about the practicalities of Iranian motivations, and capabilities, that matter much more than generalities on the "existential" risk. (Note: Defense One is part of the Atlantic Media empire.)

(6) From another reader with extensive professional experience in the Middle East:

If Israel were governed by referenda, the following three propositions would pass (with decreasing majorities):

1. Israel should be a Jewish State.

2. Israel should be a liberal democracy

3. Israel should retain control of the West Bank in perpetuity.

The problem is that Israel can have any two of the above, but not all three. Of Jewish Israelis, 20% would pick 1 and 2. 50% don't bother themselves about these things, so long as life in Tel Aviv goes on as usual. 30% would pick 1 and 3. The latter group's problem is they cannot say so in polite American society as it implies either apartheid or ethnic cleansing. In so far as Bibi has any principles at all, he (like his ally Naftali Bennet) is in the third group.

So what does he really think about Iran? An existential threat? Hardly, the man is an opportunist, not a fool. Good domestic politics? Certainly. But above all, it is an opportunity to kick the can down the road. If we Americans focus on Iran, we will not focus on the fact that all too many Israelis, and especially the present government very much want to pick options 1 and 3. And, who knows? Maybe in the context of another disastrous war, the American establishment might just be persuaded to look the other way as that choice's implications play themselves out?

Pretty cynical, I agree. But then cynicism is a valuable corrective in assessing the actions of cynical people.

***

Coming soon in this space: Starting Saturday, February 21, the return of the Chickenhawk chronicles. Coming Sunday, March 1, the return of American Futures.  

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/the-existential-chronicles-go-on/385722/

Sebastian Junger, who has produced moving accounts of the human face of combat in Afghanistan and elsewhere (to say nothing of  the narrative mastery of The Perfect Storm), and whose war movie Restrepo I recommended a few years ago, has written what is presented as a counter or critique to my "Tragedy of the American Military" article.

I hope you will read it. When you're done, I invite you to head back here.

* * *

The overwhelming majority of the (overwhelming) response I've gotten to this article has impressed me by engaging with the case I actually made. I mention this because so frequently that does not happen on controversial topics. You can see an example in the reader letters I quote here on a different subject: Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming speech to Congress. In that case the angriest messages came from people reacting to exactly the opposite of what a previous correspondent was trying to say. Readers of a certain age, who have heard of Gilda Radner's performances in the early days of SNL, will recognize this as the "Miss Emily Litella" syndrome, a heated denunciation of views you misheard or misunderstood.

Unfortunately I feel that Junger's heartfelt arguments are the exception to most of the response to this piece, in their misalignment with the thrust of my article. Here are some examples.

Democratic feedback system. Early on Junger makes this point:

Fallows takes this idea [of civic disengagment] and puts a particularly sharp edge on it: “Because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action,” he writes, “the normal democratic feedbacks do not work.”

It’s an appealing theory that persists despite the fact that it’s demonstrably untrue. By the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of Americans were on active military duty. That should have resulted in massive public resistance to the war, but it was exactly the opposite.

It appears that Junger understood me to be saying something as over-simple as "the bigger the military, the more unpopular the war." Thus World War II would seem to be a powerful counterexample: big army, but broad public support. He could have gone on to mention the Civil War in the same vein: very broad participation, very broad support. Therefore my point, as he understood it, must be demonstrably untrue.

But of course the argument in the article was not that at all. In simplest form it was: the broader the civic engagement and exposure to the consequences of military action, the greater the chance that the public will take its military seriously. And the less the engagement, the more likely a nation will be careless and sloppy in how it applies military force. As the article put it, "A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness." That is not quite the same as "big army = unpopular wars."

What would be the signs that the country was taking its military seriously? They would include thinking carefully about the causes to which we commit troops, holding military leaders accountable for tactical and strategic competence, holding political leaders accountable for their judgment in military matters, being close enough to the realities of military operations to understand that some spending is crucial and other is sheer porkbarreling waste.

All of those traits describe the fully committed America of the World War II era and its aftermath, when it was first fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japanese and then digging in against Stalin's Soviet Union. None of them (I contend) apply to the America of the chickenhawk era. Thus for the point the article was actually making, World War II is strong evidence that the argument is "demonstrably true" rather than the reverse. Why do you think I wrote about World War II and its aftermath so much?

As Andrew Bacevich wrote, in a quote I used in the piece, “A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it.” During and after World War II most Americans were touched by war, and cared about it. During today’s long wars most Americans aren’t, and don’t.

The 1 percent problem. Several times in the piece, I emphasize how small a share of the American public is involved in the military or has served in our recent wars. For instance, Americans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan at any point since 2001 make up three-fourths of 1 percent of the population.

Junger imagines that I am presenting the small size of today’s military as a problem to be solved in itself, rather than as both symptom and cause of the real disorder I am discussing: the estrangement of the military from most of society. Therefore he wonders how much bigger I would like the military to be and whether I would like a draft:

But what’s the solution? Saying that 1 percent is too low implies that the figure should be higher. But how high? Five percent? Ten? Does the United States really need an army of 5 million people? Do Americans really want to pay for that?

Maybe when people get upset about the 1-percent figure, what they’re really getting upset about is the lack of a military draft.

These would be strong points if I had said that the military needs to be bigger, which I didn't, or if I thought the draft would return, which it won't.

Thirty-five years ago, when the volunteer army had been running for only a few years and the (then) Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan, Jim Webb and I co-wrote a feature for The Atlantic arguing that the United States would be better off in the long run if it brought the draft back. That was a different world. Barring changed circumstances no one can foresee, there is zero likelihood that the U.S. will bring conscription back. Similarly, I don't think, and didn't say, that the United States needs more people in uniform. In fact I quoted retired Admiral Mike Mullen, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on why we should have a smaller military, to make it harder to drift into "casual" wars.

To spell it out again: A smaller army is not itself the problem. It's a symptom of America's inattention to its military, which is the real challenge to address.

Sebastian Junger says that if you're not willing to expand the army or reinstitute the draft, there's no point in talking about this 1-percent problem. Obviously I disagree and feel that we are in terrain similar to what William James explored long ago with that most American of all meaning-of-America essays, "The Moral Equivalent of War." Its premise was that the Civil War, for all its horrors, had evoked a kind of nobility in individual and collective purpose. The question was how a nation could evoke some of that nobility without all the carnage. In my own more limited sphere I was asking how we could repair the civic-military connection without having a huge military or restoring the draft.

Winning and losing. Sebastian Junger says that it can be difficult to know whether you have "won" in today's open-ended combat. I agree.

He says that therefore you can't know if you have "lost." I disagree completely.

Here is how he frames his point:

"One of the most powerful arguments against the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan has been that it lacked any clear definition of “winning.” But if we accept the premise that there’s no definition of winning, then there’s no definition of losing, either, and we forfeit the right to use either word. You can’t “lose” a race that has no finish line."

I don't think Junger himself would agree with this if he thought about it for a minute. Here is what it means to “lose” a modern war:

You spend several trillion dollars—at least 10 times more than a figure the Bush administration dismissed as impossibly high before the Iraq War began. (Paul Wolfowitz, of course, predicted that the Iraq War would be self-financing, from local oil.)

You sacrifice thousands of American lives, to speak only of the losses on our nation's side, and shatter tens of thousands of families through disability and long-term trauma. What everyone considers a left-wing film, The Hurt Locker, and what everyone considers a right-wing film, American Sniper, are to my mind essentially the same film, showing brave young Americans placed in impossible circumstances in unwinnable wars and suffering long-term consequences. Reduced to a message, Restrepo can be seen the same way.

As I said in my piece, the U.S. scored one big success in killing Osama bin Laden, and another in the initial campaign to drive the Taliban from Afghanistan—before troops and attention were diverted to Iraq. Yet nothing in the circumstances of either Iraq or Afghanistan after 13 years of war resembles what any U.S. leader would have called “successful” before the wars began. For a truly sobering look at the situation in Iraq, please see this new analysis from Chuck Spinney.

You know you have lost when you have done those things—and when you have left the United States in worse shape with nearly all allies, done profound damage to its moral standing, and exposed the limits rather than the extent of its military reach.

That is defeat. That is what we have suffered. And the real point of my article was that the fault lies with our nation as a whole, for thinking that calling our troops "heroes" makes up for thoughtlessness in this gravest of national decisions.

I am glad that Sebastian Junger took the time to read and write about my article. I do hope you'll read his essay for the good points he makes. But I am sorry that he seems not to have registered what my article said.

***

I am resuming the Chickenhawk responses with this installment. Here is the running index of previous installments:

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/sebastian-junger-on-chickenhawk-nation/385825/

There has been a lot of heavy weather in this space recently. Herewith a spot of wonderful cheer.

Please welcome Eleanor Rose Fallows, who made her debut on February 11 in Newport Beach, California.

This is young Eleanor as she looked this past weekend, when we had the joy of visiting her parents Tad and Annie Fallows, and her big brother Jack, at their home in Corona del Mar. Her parents, like all parents of young children, are exhausted but happy. Or happy but exhausted. We, like most grandparents, are just happy.

Previously in this series: Welcome Jack Fallows, and Welcome Tide Fallows. The center of gravity in the family has changed in noticeable ways. Now seven members — our sons, their wives, a total of three children — are living in the original homeland of California. And after presiding over the tumult of an all-boy household, we are looking forward to seeing little girls grow up.

Congratulations to mother, father, big brother, aunts and uncle, cousin, other grandparents, great-grandparents, and lovely little Eleanor.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2015/02/welcome-eleanor-fallows/385886/

Last week I mentioned the latest chapter in the Chinese government's efforts to seal the country off from the rest of the Internet — and what I considered an out-of-date report in the Guardian about the situation. The Guardian report was based on the palmy-in-retrospect era a few years ago when the government censored attempts to organize protests, but otherwise let people have their say.

No more. From a foreign reader in Shanghai:  

The Guardian article you linked to cited some interesting research, but they're pretty out of date, and they missed the point/reality of the firewall pretty badly for an article claiming to tell us the "fascinating truth" about the situation here....

I've been living in Shanghai for almost two years, so the censorship started tightening not long after I got here. It was ironic because right after I arrived I read a newsletter from the American consulate here saying that the local government was considering lightening the firewall in Shanghai as a "special zone" style experiment, including unblocking Facebook. Obviously, that report was either false or else the plan got shot down by hardliners higher up the food chain.

But things have definitely gotten worse lately. The Guardian didn't mention the self-censorship that most media companies have to go through, but I recently sent a WeChat message to a friend (in English) that was mildly critical of the government. The message didn't go through, and for the first and only time in more than a year of constant use I was booted from the system on all my devices. This is just an anecdote, and it could be a coincidence, but it definitely goes against the "criticism is ok as long as you don't try to mobilize" philosophy.

The other thing they're missing, and that doesn't get discussed enough, is the social engineering part of the Party's censorship project. Just because a website isn't "blocked" doesn't mean they want you to use it. Part of this is their war on Google: many (maybe most) websites these days use Google Fonts. In practice, this means that millions of websites include a call to Google's servers when you try to load their page. I've noticed that this call hangs a lot of the time, causing the page to load excruciatingly slowly. Again, I can't prove this, but I've noticed it with many sites that are completely non-political and technically unblocked.

Even without Google, they throttle their international connections here. I play around a lot with Ping, and as a totally non-scientific example, pinging Baidu without a VPN takes 17ms on average with 0% loss; pinging the Atlantic without a VPN takes 350ms and about 40% loss. With a VPN, both are about 250ms with 0% loss. This is why I often need to use a VPN even for sites like xkcd, which has nothing to do with anything that the Party cares about but which is so slow it doesn't render properly.

The goal of this is obviously to nudge (maybe too gentle a word) people towards the Chinese internet/intranet. I'm sure you had this experience here as well: Youku loads like a dream here, and it's the best streaming video site in the world as far as I'm concerned (and mostly free!). Baidu, QQ Music, WeChat, Taobao...everything the government wants you to use is fast, free, and for the most part beautifully designed.

One of your earlier posts quoted a businessman in China pointing out that the internet in China just "doesn't work." This isn't quite true. The Chinese part works very, very well...it's only when you try to access overseas content, no matter how innocuous, that you start tearing your hair out.

Further in this vein: A report from WantChinaTimes.com, which is based in Taiwan so bear that in mind, about foreign-owned businesses finding it harder to do business in China. And a valuable discussion in ChinaFile on "Is Mao Still Dead?" Spoiler: maybe not.

As I've written a million times, I'm overall a big fan of China and hope for its continued emergence. But as I've written almost as often, these past two years of crackdown under hoped-for "reformer" Xi Jinping have been discouraging to put it mildly, and we'll hope that at some point we can look back on them as a nasty phase.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/sobering-news-out-of-china-part-four-million/385889/

For the past 10 days my wife Deb and I have been mainly on the road in California, visiting cities for the new season of American Futures that launches in this space a week from today.

But last Wednesday, in Sacramento, I had a chance to interview Dan Richard, chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, about what I keep calling the most significant infrastructure project underway anyplace in America. This was part of a "Bold Bets" conference on transportation challenges, which was run by AtlanticLIVE and underwritten by Siemens.

You can see an index to the past year's High-Speed Rail series here, and again in this post after the jump. It included two installments, No. 3 and No. 9, in which Dan Richard responded to financial, technical, and environmental criticisms of the project. My approach for the interview below was to say: Obviously you (Dan Richard) are in favor of this project. And over the months, as I've written, I've become a supporter too. So instead of talking about the pluses I'm going to take you through the major criticisms and complaints about the project, to hear how you address them. Then if I have left out any complaints, I'll give members of the audience their turn.

You can see the results in the video above. (Video from the conference as a whole is here.) You'll see Richard talking about specific complaints—cost overruns, potentially outdated technology, inefficient routing, "last mile" challenges of connecting with local transport networks—and also larger political and philosophical questions of how to assess investment in costly civilian infrastructure. I thought this was an interesting and instructive half hour and hope you find it worthwhile as well.

* * *

Here is a compendium of past installments, in order.

1) "The California High-Speed Rail Debate: Kicking Things Off." An introduction to the role of big infrastructure projects in American history, from the Louisiana Purchase and the Erie Canal onward. Also this contained the first link to a powerful interactive map created by UC Davis and Esri, which allows you to see the staged development plans for the railroad and overlay them on economic and environmental indicators. Plus links to various economic and environmental impact assessments.

2) "The Critics' Case." Cost-overruns, impracticality, and other drawbacks.

3) "Let's Hear from the Chairman." Dan Richard, chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority, gives a detailed reply to some of the critics' contentions.

4) "7 Ways in Which High-Speed Rail Would Help California, According to its Chairman." Richard goes on to make the positive case.

5) "10 Readers With 10 Views." Voice of the public.

6) "Some Views From the Valley." Readers from the state's low-income, high-unemployment Central Valley comment on the project.

7) "The Courts Speak Up, and So Do Some Readers." A major court ruling last summer that removed an impediment to proceeding with the plan.

8) "More Questions and Concerns." Reader concerns mainly about ridership estimates, earthquake safety, cost overruns, etc.

9) "The Chairman's Turn Again." Dan Richard responds to the issues raised in #8.

10) "Palate Cleanser." A (relatively) brief entry on the question of how and whether 21st-century America can decide on infrastructure projects whose full value might not be felt for many decades.

11) "Thinking in Time." An extension of the point in #10. This also has been an increasing theme in Jerry Brown's speeches, based on his references to medieval masons work on cathedrals whose completion their grandchildren might see.

12) "All Aboard!" Mainly reader mail on the effects of rail networks.

13) "Let's Look at Maglev and Other Alternatives." On whether the "futuristic" high-speed rail network is already out of date.

14) "Why You Shouldn't Get Your Hopes Up for the Self-Driving Car." On one popular futuristic alternative to rail systems.

14 1/2) "California High-Speed Rail: It's Happening." Shortly after the 2014 elections, Jerry Brown announced that on the first full day of his fourth and final term, he would go to Fresno to break ground for the rail system. This is No. 14 1/2 because I had promised that No. 15 would be the grand finale.

14 3/4) "Is the Winning Bid Suspiciously Low?" The first bids for system construction came in far under estimates. Is that a problem?

15) "A Minor End, an Important Beginning." Last week, on the day of the ground-breaking, I explained why I thought that the centuries-long record of American infrastructure investments argued for going ahead with this one.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/dan-richard-on-high-speed-rail/386621/

Why is Benjamin Netanyahu going ahead with his speech to Congress in a few hours' time, despite complaints from all quarters about the damage it is causing? It's a trickier question than it seems.

Was it simple tin ear on his side, and Ambassador Ron Dermer's? Based on the idea, as Netanyahu has preposterously claimed, that he "didn't intend" any affront to the sitting U.S. president and was surprised by all the ruckus? Were they that ill-informed, naive, trapped in a bubble, or plain dumb?

I find that hard to believe, from a leader who prides himself on his U.S. connections and an ambassador born and raised in the U.S. and schooled by Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz. If Barack Obama addressed the Knesset and said he had a "moral obligation" to criticize Netanyahu's policies, would he then say he "didn't intend" any offense? Please.

Was it crass election-year politicking on Netanyahu's part, based on the need to get through this month's election in Israel and the faith that eventually things would sort themselves back out with the United States? All politicians know that if they don't hold office their platforms don't matter, and most convince themselves that what is good for them is good for their country. So maybe he rationalized that getting through this election was worth whatever bruised feelings it might cause.

On this I defer to the reporting of The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, here, here, and here about the tensions between Netanyahu's electoral incentives and long-term U.S.-Israeli relations. From my point of view, this would be the most benign explanation. Countries act in their own self-interest, and so do politicians.

Was it because Netanyahu has been such a prescient, confirmed-by-reality judge of real-world threats that he feels moral passion about making sure his views are heard?

Hardly. I can't believe that he's fooled even himself into thinking that his egging-on of war with Iraq looks good in retrospect. And for nearly two decades Netanyahu has been arguing that Iran was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. When you're proven right, you trumpet that fact—and when you're proven wrong, you usually have the sense to change the topic. Usually.   

Was it because Netanyahu has a better plan that he wants Congress or the United States to adopt in dealing with Iran? No. His alternative plan for Iran is like the Republican critics' alternative to the Obama healthcare or immigration policies. That is: It's not a plan, it's dislike of what Obama is doing. And if the current negotiations break down, Iran could move more quickly toward nuclear capacity than it is doing now—barring the fantasy of a preemptive military strike by Israel or the U.S. As Michael Tomasky put it in the Daily Beast:

Netanyahu is creating a much bigger problem here. Ultimately, he wants war with Iran. And American neoconservatives want it, too. ... Think about it. What is the alternative to negotiating with Iran? Well, there is only one: not negotiating with Iran. And what are the possible courses of action under that option? At the end of the day, there are two. Number one, let Iran do what it wants. Number two, ultimately, be willing to start a war to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Was it because Netanyahu actually believes what he is about to tell Congress: that his country faces an "existential threat" if Iran develops a nuclear weapon? These are fighting words on my part, but: I don't really believe this can be so.

Let me explain. No person, nation, or community can define what some other person (etc) "should" consider threatening. And after I argued last month that a nuclear-armed Iran would be undesirable for the world but not an "existential" threat to an Israel with its own large nuclear-weapons arsenal, I received a flood of mail summed up by one message from a man in Connecticut: "If you were a Jew, you would understand."

There is no answer to an identity-based argument; no one can completely stand in someone else's shoes; and the Holocaust is obviously the memory that trumps all others in discussing Israel's security. So if the voters of Israel want to define Iran's ambitions not as a problem but as an "existential threat," that's up to them.

But from the U.S. perspective I can say that the "existential" concept rests on two utterly unsupportable premises. One is that Iran is fundamentally like Nazi Germany, and the world situation of 2015 is fundamentally like that of 1938. Emotionally you can say "never forget!" Rationally these situations have nothing in common—apart from the anti-Semitic rhetoric. (To begin with: Nazi Germany had a world-beating military and unarmed Jewish minorities within its immediate control. Iran is far away and militarily no match for Israel.) The other premise is that Iran's leaders are literally suicidal. That is, they care more about destroying Israel than they care about their country's survival. Remember, Israel has bombs of its own with which to retaliate, so that any attack on Israel would ensure countless more Iranian deaths. As another reader, who also identified himself as Jewish, wrote:

Questions for Prime Minister Netanyahu (and his supporters)

Question 1: How does Iran survive the consequences of a nuclear attack of any scale on Israel?
Question 2: There is no question 2.

That Iran's current leaders are zealots is easy to demonstrate. That they are suicidal? For that premise there is literally zero evidence, as Peter Beinart recently wrote and as Israel's own security-services report.

* * *

Maybe I am giving Netanyahu too much credit. Maybe he genuinely believes everything listed above—that he's been right all along, that we need to hear his message, that Obama and his administration will take no offense, and that this is a life-or-death existential issue because of a suicidal Iranian leadership.

Maybe. But I think he is smarter than any of that. And thus the explanation that rings truest to me is one offered in The National Interest by Paul Pillar, a veteran of the CIA. It's relevant to note that Pillar was as presciently right about Iraq, concerning both the hyped nature of the threat and the disastrous consequences of the invasion, as Netanyahu was spectacularly wrong.

Pillar's assessment is that the ramped-up "existential" rhetoric is a screen for the real issue, which is a flat contradiction between long-term U.S. and Israeli national interests as regards Iran. It is in American interests (as I have argued) to find some way to end Iran's excluded status and re-integrate it with the world, as happened with China in the 1970s. And it is in Israel's interests, at least as defined by Netanyahu for regional-power reasons, that this not occur. As Pillar writes:

The prime objective that Netanyahu is pursuing, and that is quite consistent with his lobbying and other behavior, is not the prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon but instead the prevention of any agreement with Iran. It is not the specific terms of an agreement that are most important to him, but instead whether there is to be any agreement at all. Netanyahu's defense minister recently made the nature of the objective explicit when he denounced in advance “every deal” that could be made between the West and Tehran. As accompaniments to an absence of any agreements between the West and Iran, the Israeli government's objective includes permanent pariah status for Iran and in particular an absence of any business being done, on any subject, between Washington and Tehran.

That is, as long as Netanyahu keeps the attention on nukes and "existential" threats, he's talking about an area where the U.S. and Israel might differ on tactics but agree on ultimate goals. Inflammatory as that topic is, it's safer than talking about re-integrating Iran as a legitimate power, where U.S. and Israeli interests may ultimately differ. As George Friedman wrote in a Stratfor analysis just now:

This is the heart of Israel's problem. ... Israel does not want to be considered by the United States as one power among many. It is focused on the issue of a nuclear Iran, but it knows that there is no certainty that Iran's nuclear facilities can be destroyed or that sanctions will cause the Iranians to abandon the nuclear program. What Israel fears is an entente between the United States and Iran and a system of relations in which U.S. support will not be automatic.

From this perspective, Netanyahu's bull-headedness makes sense, even beyond its short-term electoral value back home. He can be willing to endure complaints about breach of protocol and partisan alignment, if in so doing he can prevent the deeper divergence in national interests from becoming apparent. And if this episode has any value on the American side, it may be to promote freer discussion of the many areas where U.S. interests align with Israel's, and those where they diverge. We'll see if that starts with the planned response by a number of Democratic representatives just after the speech.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/the-mystery-of-the-netanyahu-disaster-and-a-possible-explanation/386644/

After Benjamin Netanyahu's speech let me point you toward Jeffrey Goldberg's analysis. Let me also suggest, again, that differences on Iran policy correspond to answers to this one question: Whether the world of 2015 is fundamentally similar to, or different from, the world of 1938.

I've gone into the 1938 question before, here and here, but in light of the theme's centrality to this speech I'll do so one more time. No parallel from history is ever perfect, as Ernest May and Richard Neustadt so memorably argued in Thinking in Time. But as that book also demonstrated, the idea of recurring historic episodes has a powerful effect on decision-making in the here and now. Disagreements over policy often come down to the search for the right historic pattern to apply.

Over the years Benjamin Netanyahu has very explicitly said, "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany." For instance, see the the first minute of the clip below. Netanyahu said he was asked to give a young man a one-sentence summary of the world situation. Netanyahu answered with those six words.

In less explicit form, the idea that Europe on the eve of the Holocaust is the most useful guide to the world in 2015 runs through arguments about Iran policy. (Ted Cruz made the explicit comparison after the speech.) And if that is the correct model to apply, the right "picture in our heads" as Walter Lippmann put it in Public Opinion, then these conclusions naturally follow:

• The threatening power of the time—Nazi Germany then, the Islamists' Iran now—is a force of unalloyed evil whose very existence threatens decent life everywhere.

• That emerging power cannot be reasoned or bargained with but must ultimately be stopped and broken.

• "Compromisers" are in fact appeasers who are deluding themselves about these realities—Neville Chamberlain then, Barack Obama now—and increase danger for the world by wasting time before the inevitable showdown. The tellers of harsh truths—Winston Churchill then, Benjamin Netanyahu now—are trying to spare the world far greater dangers by encouraging action before it's too late.

• The appeasers' blindness endangers people all around the world but poses an especially intolerable threat to Jews. Six million of them were slaughtered because Britain, France, and especially the United States took too long to confront Hitler or even open their doors to refugees. Today's 8 million residents of Israel could be at existential risk if a mad regime, committed to their destruction, gains nuclear weapons. If a national leader says he intends to kill you, you take that seriously.

• As a result of all these factors, no deal with such an implacable enemy is preferable to an inevitably flawed and Munich-like false-hope deal.

That's what follows if the most relevant history is pre-Holocaust, pre-World War II Europe, and nearly everything in Netanyahu's speech can be read in this light. Also, and crucially, it means that the most obvious criticism of the speech—what's Netanyahu's plan for getting Iran to agree?—is irrelevant. What was the Allies' "plan" for getting Hitler to agree? The plan was to destroy his regime.

* * *

If, on the other hand, you think that the contrasts with 1938 are more striking than the similarities, you see things differently. As a brief reminder of the contrasts: The Germany of 1938 was much richer and more powerful than the Iran of today. Germany was rapidly expansionist; Iran, despite its terrorist work through proxies, has not been. The Nazi leaders had engulfed the world in war less than a decade after taking power. Iran's leaders, oppressive and destructive, have not shown similar suicidal recklessness. European Jews of 1938 were stateless, unarmed, and vulnerable. Modern Israel is a powerful, nuclear-armed force. Moreover, the world after the first wartime use of nuclear weapons, of course by the United States, is different from the world before that point. That is, all of humanity has faced an existential threat from nuclear warfare through the past 60 years. Eliminating the weapons is the only lasting protection; while they exist, deterrence has been the only way to keep them from being used.

So if it's not 1938, then other models of negotiation can apply, like those the United States used with the Soviet Union through the decades of the Cold War, or with China from the 1970s onward. Iran is then another problematic state, rather than a uniquely Nazi-style menace. (Recall that before the Iraq War Netanyahu made similarly absolutist claims about the undeterrable threat of Saddam Hussein.) Negotiations will therefore include, as they have with other states, a combination of carrots and sticks; a recognition of interests on all sides; and an understanding that negotiated progress is long, halting, and imperfect, but better than the alternative of no progress at all.

And if it's not 1938, analyses like this one, from the Arms Control Association after today's speech, have weight:

[Netanyahu] argues that the agreement-in-the-making would make it a near "certainty" that Iran pursues nuclear weapons because it would retain a nuclear program. This is just plain wrong.

The reality is that the agreement the P5+1 are pursuing would increase Iran's theoretical "breakout" time to amass enough enriched uranium gas enriched to bomb grade from today's 2-3 months to more than 12 months, and it would do so for over a decade. It would block the plutonium path to weapons.

* * *

Here's what I understand the more clearly after these past few weeks' drama over Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech. These differences in historic model are deep and powerful, and people with one model in mind are not going to convince people with the other mental picture. (Indeed after I rashly used the "is it 1938?" theme in a tweet, there was a little storm of responses in this vein: "@trueholygoat Serious question: Why do you hate Jews so much? @JamesFallows")

Unless Iran's behavior worsens in ways we have not yet seen, to me and others in the not-1938 crowd it will seem more comparable to other difficult states, for instance the old Soviet Union, than to Hitler's Germany. And unless its behavior improves in ways we have not yet seen, to Netanyahu and many others it will seem like the old threat in a new form, all the worse because of the nuclear element.

That is one more reality for negotiators to deal with. As Jeffrey Goldberg notes at the end of his post-speech report, Obama's task in trying to broker a deal is hard in the best of circumstances, and there's a reasonable chance that after this speech it has become harder.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/the-central-question-is-it-1938/386716/

These responses follow these recent pieces about Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech: "Is it 1938?", "The Mystery of the Netanyahu Disaster," "The 'Existential' Chronicles Go On," and "On Existential Threats."

1) "What kind of existential threat is this, if it won't change policy on the West Bank?" From a reader at a U.S. defense-related organization:

Let me add a couple more thoughts on Iran as an existential threat to Israel, or to be more precise, whether Netanyahu thinks Iran is an existential threat to Israel.  I say, no he does not.  Obviously, no one can read his mind, but we can see how he acts, and he does not act like a national leader possessed by such a belief.

A leader who truly believes there is an existential threat to his nation organizes his actions to counter that threat.  In particular, he prioritizes his goals.  Things which would otherwise be valuable to him have to take a backseat, and maybe even be dispatched with, if it harms or insufficiently aids him in countering the existential threat.

In Netanyahu’s case, what would that include?

It would mean forming stronger alliances against Iran that would buttress Israel’s position against their nuclear program, even at the cost of harming other interests close to Netanyahu’s heart.  Principally, that would mean being more accommodating towards the Palestinian Authority (even if not Hamas).  This would serve to remove an unnecessary irritant with the Obama administration, conceivably even with the European states imposing sanction on Iran.  It would help open doors to the Sunni Arab states that Israel desperately needs to be publicly on its side on the Iran issue, and not just expressing their agreement in private.  (Indeed, reports are that Israel wooed these states’ ambassadors to attend Netanyahu’s speech, but was turned down.

Does Netanyahu want to thwart development of an Iranian bomb?  Surely.  Is it worth any concessions on the West Bank?  Apparently not.  What kind of existential threat is it when maintaining Israel’s position on the West Bank supersedes rational actions to counter Iran?

So indeed let’s compare Netanyahu to Churchill.  We can just mention briefly that Churchill’s main goal from at least May 1940 on was to stay on the best possible terms with the American president, which obviously could serve as a lesson to Netanyahu.  But that was an easy one for him.  Other things were a lot harder.  Selling off parts of the British Empire to the Americans.  Making deals with the devil named Stalin, allying himself with any and all partners to defeat Hitler and Germany.  *That’s* what you do when you face a true existential threat.

I didn’t know Churchill and he wasn’t a friend of mine, but Netanyahu sure as hell isn’t a Churchill.

2) "This is where we disagree." A reader responds to this line from me, contrasting 1938 and 2015: "Nazi Germany had a world-beating military, and unarmed Jewish minorities within its immediate control. Iran is far away and militarily no match for Israel." The reader replies:

This is where we disagree. Iran is close and militarily strong, much stronger than any military Israel has faced before. Iran is as far away as Syria and Lebanon. In other words, on the Israeli border. Iran is much larger than Israel and has much larger manpower. While Israel spends more and has more military equipment, it is not that much more and, as stated before, Iran is likely stronger than any military Israel has ever faced before. Hezbollah did very well in its recent wars with Israel.

A war against Iran would be devastating for Israel, or at least that is what many Israelis believe. There is no handwaving "we'll crush them" belief, as you try to portray it.

3) "If it's really 1938 ..." That is the subject line on this reader's note:

The expanding empire that blames a minority  (gays) for its problems is Russia, not Iran.

Iran is just a buffer state to Putin.  See also Syria.

The best hope for world peace and nuclear proliferation would be joint US and Iranian military operations against ISIS.  Second best is a good nuclear deal.

Instead of attacking Iran, we should be quietly moving tens of thousands of troops, tanks and aircraft to all three Baltic countries and Poland.

Even if Iran gets nukes it lacks the air force or navy to invade and hold a country.  The same can't be said about Russia.

Several other readers wrote to say that they would have liked the speech better if it were about Putin and Russia.

4) A political shift. From a lawyer on the East Coast:

Netanyahu’s choice to embrace the Republican Party offers what may be a historic opportunity.  Henceforth we will have one party, the Republican, asserting as it has for some time that the United States must follow the lead of Israel in all things -- the “no daylight” cliché that has become Republican orthodoxy.

This creates an opportunity for the Democratic Party to tell voters something different.  How about this: “We wish the people of Israel well.  On many issues the interests of Israel and the United States are the same, and we will work together to advance those interests.  But there may be times when we conclude, even after honest dialogue with Israel, that the interests of our two countries diverge.  When that happens we will work to advance the interests of the United States rather than the differing interests of Israel.”

In the context of U.S.-Israel relations this sounds like a radical idea, but it expresses our view of every other country in the world, and there is no reason Israel should be different.  This would perhaps put Democrats out of the running for Sheldon Adelson’s money, but they’re not likely to get any of that anyway.

5) "You are wrong." From a reader I have known in the tech industry:

Unfortunately, you're wrong about Bib's fighting words.

You may or may not be right that Iran is fundamentally unlike Nazi Germany or that Iran's leaders are not suicidal. In the spectrum of risks, it's a big chance to take. Israel's population is 8.3M vs Iran's 77.2M vs USA 320.2M, so your statement "any attack on Israel would ensure countless more Iranian deaths" isn't all that reassuring. Is it possible that you do not appreciate the thinking of suicide bombers or Jihadis.

More importantly, Iran neither has to actually use the bomb nor use it directly to intimidate the free world. There are plenty of anonymous popular fronts who unfortunately would happily deliver an atomic suitcase to downtown DC. Oops. What are you going to do? Start a war?

I personally did not support Netanyahu's speaking to Congress, but the scariest quote in the 3rd Jeffrey Goldberg piece you linked to: "The deal that seems to be taking shape right now does not fill me—or many others who support a diplomatic solution to this crisis—with confidence." David Horovitz, the thoughtful editor of the TimesOfIsrael, put it this way: "Netanyahu so wrong in confronting Obama, so right on Iran".

It's not about preventing any deal. Deep down, doubt it though you may, Netanyahu actually does go to sleep and wake up "genuinely believing that this is a life-or-death existential issue because of a suicidal Iranian leadership." And many many Israelis share what you must consider his "paranoia".

My Dad's [a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald] quote still stands, "When someone threatens to kill you, just believe him".Americans may find this hard to appreciate because of (1) superpower strength, (2) strategic size and depth, and (3) the doctrine of M.A.D. [Mutually Assured Destruction, a.k.a. nuclear deterrence] with relatively rational adversaries for the last 70 years.

I envy your inability to consider the E-word. [Existential]

6) What about the speech, as a speech? From another lawyer on the East Coast:

We can agree to disagree about 1938, protocols, etc., but given your role as former speechwriter, I was really more interested to read what you thought of the speech in terms of delivery, language, rhetoric, structure, etc.

I wasn't listening to it so much in those terms, or taking notes on phrasing and stage-craft. But overall as a speech, I thought it was very good. (Transcript from WaPo here.)

It was crystal-clear: "My friends, for over a year, we've been told that no deal is better than a bad deal. Well, this is a bad deal. It's a very bad deal. We're better off without it."

It was well and powerfully delivered, by someone who knows how to wait for and ride crowd approval, of which there was a lot.

It had a number of noticeable phrases that stayed just on the effective side of the effective-verging-toward-cutesy continuum. (Ie, I thought these were good, not too cute.)  For instance,  "It doesn't block Iran's path to the bomb; it paves Iran's path to the bomb." And "Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam.... In this deadly game of thrones, there's no place for America or for Israel.."  And "when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy."

When listening to Ronald Reagan, I often disagreed with the policies he was presenting but respected his skill in presenting them. Same with Benjamin Netanyahu today.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/readers-on-netanyahu-iran-and-existential-threats/386764/

Previously in this series on Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech: "Is It 1938?", "The Mystery of the Netanyahu Disaster," "The 'Existential' Chronicles Go On," "On Existential Threats," and yesterday's roundup of reader mail.

1) "The historical equivalent of hollering." From a history professor at a university in the Southwest:

I am no fan of Bibi's, but I'd also like to note that this ahistorical use of the past makes historians' teeth itch. (I'll just blithely speak for the whole profession.) More centrally, both our political leadership and Israel's desperately need to develop a wider grasp of that past.

History offers up a depressingly vast number of small states perceiving danger from larger, well-armed, unpredictable neighbors. It provides at least that many examples of threats to continued Jewish existence in a given region. The constant reiteration of this particular event [the Nazi-era Holocaust] achieves little more than dumbing down the discourse: it's the historical equivalent of hollering.

To paraphrase Levi-Strauss, the Holocaust is not particularly good to think with. Its extremity serves as a bludgeon. Its use is nearly always intended to cut off debate or critique, to seize the moral high ground, and ideally to incite panic. I don't know the best response to the Iranian threat, which I take seriously. But I suspect hysteria is unhelpful -- and if that's true, so is raising the specter of the Holocaust, as Netanyahu does every time he discusses this topic.



Ask your average historian whether the past repeats itself. She'll tell you it doesn't -- only that it sometimes rhymes. The past can be a rich source of insight, surely. But much of what we ask our students to do centers around analyzing the complex causes of immensely complicated events. There are almost always at least three solid ways to interpret any given historical question. In short, the past is not a simplistic instruction manual for the present. It almost never provides any kind of predictive template. 



There are other good reasons to argue with Binyamin Netanyahu beyond his misuse of the past. But since his perception of Iran is based at least in part on that misuse, I stand by my reason. 


Read all of Gary Sick's piece; compare it with Netanyahu's end-days warnings about the emerging "bad deal"; and while you're at it think back to people who were telling you in 2002 and early 2003 to be skeptical of the end-days warnings about Saddam Hussein's imminent and existential threat to the world.

3) "It will always be 1938." From a reader in Massachusetts who identifies himself as Jewish:

Here is a simpler answer to your "Central Question" [of whether it's 1938 again] Bibi is basically stating that it will always be 1938 for Israel and the Jews of the world.

Here's the thing:  I cannot but see that Rabin understood this when it came to the relationship of Israel with its neighbors, while Sharon came to appreciate it in terms of internal demographics, so each took tremendous risks to rebalance these unsustainable circumstances in a meaningful and durable way. Just to be clear, I don't think that Sharon was as constructive as Rabin, but he was probably sincere in his calculus.

When has Netanyahu ever done anything that comes close to this?

In Bibi's mind, does Israel - and do the Jewish people - lose a significant aspect of their ("our") place in the world if the threat of annihilation is not present?  He can say that "they" would like to live in peace with all the other peoples of the world, but what would it take from Iran - or Egypt (or Russia, for that matter) - in order to permanently eliminate the sense that Israel is potentially facing an Existential Threat?  In my humble opinion, nothing could.

4) This note comes from a reader in Germany, and I am presenting it with original spelling. In context it's relevant to point out that Germany has wrestled with its own cataclysmic Nazi-era history much more earnestly than Japan has dealt with its Imperial-era record, China with its Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, or the United States with its treatment of Native American populations and its ongoing racial injustices.  He writes:

I want to add the following thought:

(I am German)

What does the Netanyahu statement(s) about the possible prospect of Iran developing a nuclear military capability  tell us ? I understand, that the ruling political elite of Israel can’t imagine to live peacefully with it’s neighbours, including Iran, Iraque, if Israel does not have the military dominance including the option to annihilate a perceived opponent. If there might develop a situation in which a country, f.e. Iran, has the same nuclear option against Israel, this would be seen as inacceptable and an existential threat.

Even if the picture of Nazi-Germany in 1938 obviously does not apply, one might be inclined to look for some parallel in history. With my limited knowledge, I can only find the late 1940s and the political and military opposition of USA and the Sowjet Union. There was a time where the USA had a –proven- nuclear capability and the SU did not. Yet it did not immediately blow the world to pieces, when the Sowjets also developed the nuclear option. The military capabilities were just leveled.  Cold war started and more than once came very close to become a hot one – but both learned and knew to avoid it, finally.

A leveled military stand-off is unacceptable for Israel ? Well, then what ? To my knowledge, there is not a single serious analyst, who would state, that a nuclear Iran immediately will start a lot of missiles to destroy Israel completely. Israel (and Iran) would “only” have to adopt a similar political process at eye-level – that would be the “unacceptable” new experience.

This view of Israel’s relationship to it’s neighbouring countries by the present political leadership is deeply troubling. South Korea is accepting the situation of a nuclear threat certainly for the sole reason of the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States – otherwise I would guess it would take long for South Korea to establish some nuclear option as well.

Why should the nations around Israel permanently accept the nuclear threat of Israel with no option on their side – since there certainly is no nuclear umbrella whatsoever for them, neither by USA, Russia, China, India nor Pakistan ?

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/on-the-use-and-misuse-of-history-the-netanyahu-case/386839/

It's obviously good news that no one appears to have been hurt when a Delta Airlines flight skidded off a runway this morning at LaGuardia airport. Here's an aspect of the whole process I find enlightening:

Reader and aviation buff Ari Ofsevit sent a link to the LiveAtc.net recording of transmissions from the LaGuardia control tower while the episode was underway. It's not embeddable, but you can listen to an MP3 of the recording if you click here. A listener's guide to what you'll hear:

• At about time 2:15, the tower controller clears a different Delta flight, number 1999, to land on Runway 13. The controller also reports that there is a noticeable but by no means hazardous 12-knot crosswind on landing, and that after a recent landing another airliner had reported "braking action good." Getting the wind report is a routine part of the landing process; the "braking action" report would be added only in slippery conditions like these.

Here's the FAA plate showing LaGuardia's layout. The red arrow, added by me, shows the landing path to Runway 13. The blue arrow shows the approximate direction of the wind.

• At around time 2:40, the controller starts calling for the airliner that ran into trouble, Delta 1086, which presumably had just landed. He doesn't get any answer.

• About 30 seconds after that, the shift into emergency mode begins. A ground vehicle, "Car 100," checks in with the tower to say that there's a problem. By time 4:00, or barely one minute after the controller was calmly sequencing planes in for landing, one of the busiest airports in North America is immediately ordered closed, as the ground crews try to assess how bad the problems were.

• Over the next few minutes, the tower controller first tells planes in the landing process to "go around," that is abort their approach and climb away from the airport, and then sequences them to ... wherever else they will end up. The bad weather and flight cancellations today meant that the New York-area airspace would have been less jammed than normal. Even so, fitting extra traffic, at one minute's notice, into the flow for JFK and Newark (or airports farther away) is no simple feat.

This action continues with some intensity for the next few minutes. You can get a sample starting at 4:45, when another Delta crew checks in with everything-is-normal calmness only to hear that they are not allowed to land.

• At about 5:40, another air crew reports that the disabled Delta 1086 is leaking fuel. The tower controller passes on that info. After that there are long periods of radio silence, when the controllers are on the telephones or talking with people other than air crews, and then bursts of instructions to airplanes that were about to take off but can't (for instance, around time 15:00 and 20:45), sending inbound airplanes somewhere else (and out of one another's way), and managing the turn-on-a-dime closure of this normally very busy site.

***

Why do I mention this? One reason is that real-time responses to crisis are just plain interesting—and you can enjoy the drama with clear conscience in a case like this, when (apparently) no one was hurt. But the major reason is to emphasize a point that my wife Deb wrote about here, and that most air travelers never get a chance to witness. That is the remarkable unflappability of air traffic controllers in circumstances that would leave most people flapped.

When this LaGuardia controller first hears that the active runway is closed, and then that the entire airport has been closed, his voice rises in pitch. But at that moment he had no way of knowing whether there was a minor mishap or whether hundreds of people had just died on impact. He goes on to juggle a complete re-ordering of plans very quickly and in relative calm. Compared with the way most people in most roles handle the unexpected, air traffic controllers are amazingly steady—as are the flight crews too. Since most things about modern airline travel are unpleasant for most of the traveling public in most circumstances, it's worth being reminded of how these professionals do their work.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/03/how-air-traffic-controllers-sound-when-they-have-to-close-the-airport/386971/