It's always tempting to read too little into the recent contretemps between VP Joe Biden and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel timed its announcement of additional settlement building in East Jerusalem to coincide with Biden's arrival to try to force engagement in some sort of back-channel talks with rump PA president Mahmoud Abbas. The least Abbas could insist on was a settlement freeze, so Netanyahu's government's action was a deliberate attempt to undermine whatever scant chance the talks might have had. The Obama administration had also insisted on freezing settlements over a year ago, but had yet to push back when Netanyahu failed to restrain the settler movement. Still, this timing was shock enough to force Biden to "condemn" the plans -- a position that was reiterated by usually compliant state secretary Hillary Clinton. In widely reported "private" talks, Biden lectured Netanyahu on how failure to make progress on Palestine was endangering US troops in "Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan." To my knowledge, that is the first time any official US source, at least since 2001, has identified Israel-Palestine as a liability, hence as a strategic interest, to US interests in the region. All of this suggests that Obama is finally trying to get back in charge of the diplomatic initiative he started over a year ago with appointment of George Mitchell. Obama has become widely viewed as an ineffective leader, mostly due to his inability to lead Congress, but he has more effective power to direct foreign affairs, so this would be one way to burnish his credentials as a world leader -- a long shot, given Israel's past performance, but also a huge win if he can only pull it off.

For his part, Netanyahu has more experience than any other Israeli leader at thwarting American wishes for a peace agreement with the Palestinians, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he is very good at it. It mostly means that the Americans have never been serious enough persistently enough to overcome Israeli resistance -- even though there have been clear instances where Israel has bent to US will: the Madrid talks forced by Bush I (which, by the way, resulted not in agreement but in Shamir's loss to Rabin, which in turn led to the Oslo agreement), and Bush II's embargo of military aid which held Sharon to go through with his Gaza disengagement plan. If he wanted to, there are lots of ways Obama can apply pressure on Israel -- both behind the scenes and out front. He could even give Israeli voters reason to change their government, which would not be hard to do given Netanyahu's rickety coalition.

As always, the question is American willpower. Before Biden left, he conceded that, "the United States has no better friend in the community of nations than Israel." As Paul Woodward pointed out, this is on its face ridiculous. Israel may have no better friend than the US, but the US has plenty of friends who cause us no trouble and don't require the constant stroking that Israel does:

Is it because Israel is the most ill-mannered among America's friends that it has to be flattered with this "best friend" status? Is it because Israel remains perpetually on the verge of throwing a tantrum that its wet nurse feels compelled to constantly sing sweet words to this troublesome infant?

Early on, you should recall, Netanyahu's game plan was to pump up the Iranian threat and insist that the US solve that before getting engaged with the Palestinian issue. Unfortunately, Obama obliged, instead of pointing out the obvious: that the two are separate and independent fronts, connected only in the sense that a Palestinian settlement would make Iran much less threatening even without Iranian agreement.

Woodward has another update here. Also see Stephen M. Walt: Welcome to Israel, Mr. Vice-President. The most interesting paragraph here came as an aside:

Lastly, my FP colleague Dan Drezner asked a good question the other day: Why has Israeli diplomacy committed so many obvious gaffes recently? Part of the blame undoubtedly lies with particular individuals, but I think there are also structural (or even structural realist) factors at work. Realist theory argues that the pressures of international competition impose a certain discipline on a country's diplomatic conduct: when actions have real consequences, you need to think things through carefully and act with prudence and restraint. But when any country is insulated from the short-term consequences of its own blunders, you can expect it to act in a less careful or disciplined way. Domestic politics will exert greater weight, ideological fantasies get pursued, and personal whims are more easily indulged.

Just as America's dominant position allowed it to pursue a lot of ill-advised excesses over the past fifteen years (see under: Iraq), America's "special relationship" with Israel has insulated the latter from the consequences of its own follies. We see the results in the entire settlement enterprise -- which threatens to turn Israel into an apartheid state and jeopardizes its long-term future -- and in ham-fisted diplomatic kerfluffles like the Biden visit or the deliberate humiliation of the Turkish Ambassador by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. The original Zionists faced a more challenging environment and usually acted with great adroitness, consistency of purpose and imagination, while their successors in recent decades have been able to misbehave in part because Uncle Sam was always there to provide support and diplomatic cover.

One way to look at this is to imagine Israel as being caught in quicksand: the more they struggle, the quicker they sink, but they have to struggle, because they're sinking anyway. The quicksand is the fundamental contradictions at the root of their power: the idea that they can fight the entire world forever to establish a Jewish State that can lord it over everyone else who happens to be in the way. In this they are struggling against history: against the main thrust of the last century toward equal and individual rights, and against the declining power and influence of their imperial sponsors, who are themselves ever more conscious of how Israel stands apart.

Israel exists to a large extent because of David Ben-Gurion: in particular because of his cunning in playing off the various angles of world opinion. Regardless of which angle he was playing, he was always consistent in his endgame: that Israel should emerge as a respected member of the world community. Israel has lost that aim, and with it any hope for living peacefully in a world which really, deep down, is ever more disenchanted by war. The turning point was the 1967 war, which the retired Ben-Gurion opposed, at least until he got a glimpse of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and blinked. (Of course, there were other turning points, as he built up Israel's military juggernaut, as he played up the trauma of the Holocaust in the Eichmann trial, as he compromised his secular-socialist ideals in deals with the religious right and any white colonial power that would work with him.) But in his quest for respect, it's hard to imagine him turning down the Arab League proposal of recognition in exchange for return to the pre-1967 borders: that very deal would have been the vindication of everything he stood for.

On the other hand, Netanyahu can't make that deal, because Israel has swallowed the poison pill of the settler movement. To do so would tear the right apart in Israel, and there is no left anymore (cf. the Gideon Levy quote in There has never been an Israeli peace camp). As such, there is no Israeli political force that can extract the country from the quicksand of its delusions. That leaves the US, which isn't much hope given that we're stuck in our own quicksand, but at least it's easier to recognize someone else's problems. And it's certainly positive that Obama, Biden, and Clinton even, have begun to see that this quicksand is something we share -- that may even justify all this talk about there being "no space" between Israel and the US.

PS: Some more info on why the above took place is in Paul Woodward: Isreal is putting American lives at risk and the article quoted/linked to: Mark Perry: The Petraeus briefing: Biden's embarrassment is not the whole story:

[T]he briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus's instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders. "Everywhere they went, the message was pretty humbling," a Pentagon officer familiar with the briefing says. "America was not only viewed as weak, but its military posture in the region was eroding." But Petraeus wasn't finished: two days after the Mullen briefing, Petraeus sent a paper to the White House requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which, with Israel, is a part of the European Command -- or EUCOM), be made a part of his area of operations. Petraeus's reason was straightforward: with U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military had to be perceived by Arab leaders as engaged in the region's most troublesome conflict.

The Mullen briefing and Petraeus's request hit the White House like a bombshell. While Petraeus's request that CENTCOM be expanded to include the Palestinians was denied ("it was dead on arrival," a Pentagon officer confirms), the Obama Administration decided it would redouble its efforts -- pressing Israel once again on the settlements issue, sending Mitchell on a visit to a number of Arab capitals and dispatching Mullen for a carefully arranged meeting with Chief of the Israeli General Staff, Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi. While the American press speculated that Mullen's trip focused on Iran, the JCS Chairman actually carried a blunt, and tough, message on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: that Israel had to see its conflict with the Palestinians "in a larger, regional, context" -- as having a direct impact on America's status in the region.

Israel's reaction to Biden's visit was to announce that it was building more settlements, explicitly contrary to US policy (not to mention a couple of UN Security Council resolutions). Then:

But no one was more outraged than Biden who, according to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, engaged in a private, and angry, exchange with the Israeli Prime Minister. Not surprisingly, what Biden told Netanyahu reflected the importance the administration attached to Petraeus's Mullen briefing: "This is starting to get dangerous for us," Biden reportedly told Netanyahu. "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace." Yedioth Ahronoth went on to report: "The vice president told his Israeli hosts that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel's actions and US policy, any decision about construction that undermines Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem could have an impact on the personal safety of American troops fighting against Islamic terrorism." The message couldn't be plainer: Israel's intransigence could cost American lives.

Also: Dmitry Reider: Israel Punks Itself: A little something on Israel's latest PR campaign. The author sums up:

Thus, while ostensibly making every effort to reach out, Israel is instead curling deeper and deeper into itself, engaging not so much in public diplomacy as in navel-gazing. Rather than changing the policies that are rapidly turning it into an international pariah, or even honestly arguing its viewpoints, the state is inoculating its citizens against realistic and very real outside criticism. In the long run, this means it will become even more difficult to persuade Israel to change its course -- and to save it from the damage it inflicts upon itself.

Kate Zernike: Democrats Need a Rally Monkey. Since I wrote my Latte? piece Friday, it's come to my attention that there is a burgeoning Coffee Party movement out to rally the Democratic Party faithful. Not exactly what I had in mind. I was looking for something to push the left's ideas and proposals onto a Democratic administration that is more inclined to look right toward the corporate establishment than left toward its own rank and file. That's different than rallying the base to support the party leadership against the much worse Republicans. Nothing really wrong with that, but after Bush and Cheney and DeLay and Gingrich and Dole and Bush and Reagan, not to mention Nixon, it's not like we have to be reminded to hold our noses and vote for whatever numbskull Democrat stands between sanity and Republican rule. It's just that until you start putting some real alternative ideas into discussion we won't actually be able to solve much of anything.

I'm not much worried about the 2010 elections; even less so about Obama's reelection prospects in 2012. For all the Tea Party hysteria, it's a marginal and mostly incoherent movement, and can easily be painted as such: Nixon's Silent Majority spin seems especially ripe for the taking here, even though the bigot subtext then is on the other foot now. Moreover, there's no reason to think that voters primarily concerned with the sad state of the economy, and their own slack job prospects, should start trusting the Republicans now when the Democrats have always scored better on those issues. And as much as I regret Obama's failure to end Bush's wide-ranging wars of terror, he hasn't opened himself up to stab-in-the-back charges of defeatism, nor has he exhibited Bush's recklessness. Plus the economy is on at least a modest upturn. The only big risk I see is the chance of a nasty ethics blow-up, which could occur if anyone looked real close at the administration's inside dealing -- e.g., on banking and health care, but also on defense and nuclear power and who knows what else. Obama should have done more to clean up the possibility of such corruption -- starting with exposing the extent of it under Bush, and going on to attacking the corrosive role of money in elections -- but by playing it so close to the vest he may be minimizing the chance of something exploding.

Of course, the Republicans will continue to harp on the debt, which would be less damaging if Obama fought them head on rather than throwing out concessions like his mini spending cuts and commission. The short-term problem would go away quickly with higher taxes on the superrich, and the long-term problem requires significant health care reform. Both of these things are valuable in themselves, and no discussion of public debt should take place without bringing them up. Still, Obama's wiggling on debt shows his political calculation, as does nearly every other retreat and compromise. He's angling for control of sane middle ground: incremental solutions which help a little while leaving the whole established order looking pretty much as before -- a world where there are many small winners and few big losers. No reason to think this won't work, at least for him, at least for the next few election cycles. The problem is that necessary change gets swept under the rug or barred from the door. That's what you need a grassroots movement, apart from the Democratic Party establishment, to advance.

Paul Krugman: Senator Bunning's Universe: Bunning managed to fillibuster an extension of unemployment benefits long enough to disrupt the flow of funds to chronically unemployed workers. John Kyl defends Bunning, arguing that unemployment benefits disincentivizes workers from seeking employment opportunities (as if this matters when such opportunities don't even exist). As Krugman points out, Bunning and Kyl inhabit a different universe from that of the Democrats who pushed the bill through: a universe different both intellectually and morally. Kyl, for instance, is frantically concerned about the 0.25 percent of estates not sheltered from the estate tax. Doesn't he understand that the purpose of the estate tax is to disincentivize the superrich from dying? (Or being killed off by their heirs?)

One thing about this vast chasm between political universes is that the boundaries are relatively fixed. There's virtually nothing that Obama can do to get Republican votes short of escalating the war in Afghanistan, pumping up the defense budget, or surrendering a key post like Chairman of the Fed to someone like Ben Bernanke. Why bother? We should be broadening the discussion in the real universe to include proposals that might make a real difference. That other universe is so far removed from reality it's unlikely to matter anyway, especially if we stop flattering it by paying it so much attention.

I was reading a front-page Wichita Eagle article today about a local Tea Party organizer, and it got me to thinking. A small fraction of the Tea Party gripes are well-founded: especially how the political influence of large companies -- especially investment banks -- corrupts government into granting them outrageous favors. On the other hand, the notion that the answer here is disabling the government -- shrinking it and drowning it in the bathtub, in Grover Norquist's phrase -- is self-defeating. I don't doubt that government bureaucracies, like all bureaucracies, are self-perpetuating, but the government, in principle at least, belongs to the people, and provides a means for acting in the public interest in straightforward ways that private interests are incapable of. If you really do care about problems like bank racketeering you need to pry the government away from being subservient to the banks and return it to the rightful role as the people's agent. To do that involves shaking up several mindsets, but one step that would help a lot would be to publicly fund election campaigns, and to ban (or at least castigate) private and group "contributions" (bribes, really).

I don't much understand the Tea Party platform, which seems to be full of contradictions, and I've never credited their claims of nonpartisanship, which strike me as nothing more than a cynical effort to dispose of the memory of Bush and his Republican claque while doubling down on his most disastrous policies. What makes them so incredible is how their opposition to Obama is so unhinged from Obama's uninspired and unthreatening policies. The people who really do have bones to pick with Obama are the people who elected him: the wars and America's megalomaniacal imperial posture, the insider deals on the banks, the insider deals on health care, the inadequate stimulus, disinterest in a fairer tax system (even the modest step of undoing the Bush tax favors), the whitewashing of the Bush administration's contempt for democracy, the lack of any effort whatsoever to secure democracy from the influence of money. There's more space separating Obama from the left than there is between Obama and the bipartisan elites he works so hard to suck up to.

The main thing that prevents such a movement from forming is the fear that splitting the Democrats will tilt the country back into the hands of the right-wing nutters. I've never been one to split up the united front, but we desperately need some way to get issues back into discussion. It's not like there's any bunch of enlightened elites working in the background to solve these problems, nor that there are a bunch of rich guys anxious to make sure that public interest concerns get a fair hearing.

Not sure what to call such a movement, but one way to discredit a stereotype is to embrace it: maybe we need Latte Parties?

Wichita Eagle: Tanker contract looks promising: I haven't been counting, so I'm not sure whether this is the 30th or the 300th editorial or op-ed column the Eagle has run in favor of wasting $35 billion taxpayer dollars to give the Air Force something they don't need and that will only be used to get the US involved in foreign conflicts faster than ever. This is a monumentally bad program which can and should be attacked on numerous grounds: it is a colossal waste; the whole program has been fraught with corruption (with one Boeing official, Darleen Druyun, winding up in jail, and several other resignations); and it makes a long-term strategic commitment to extending our worst desires to act as the world's police force. It isn't even much of a jobs program: this editorial, like every other, leads off with promises of jobs: the usual share promised to Wichita has been 1000, although lately Boeing has been backing down on that as they find they need to spread more jobs around to lock up more congressional support. That political clout came in handy in 2008 when the Air Force awarded the contract to Northrop and their proposal to modify Airbus airliners -- a deal which has its own cadre of congressional flacks, starting with Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). All that political pressure resulted in rebidding the deal on terms more favorable to Boeing.

You have to wonder why Boeing's lobbyists even bother to plant so much propaganda in the Wichita Eagle, given that the whole state's congressional delegation has long been bought and paid for. Leading the fight is ex-Boeing employee Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), who has been obsessing about tankers so long that Bush wound up nicknaming him Tanker Todd. One thing that's curious about all of this is that the current tanker fleet, based on venerable Boeing 707 aircraft that have been periodically upgraded with new wings and engines, are based and maintained here in Wichita, a steady source of jobs that would be phased out with new tankers. Even if Boeing wins the contract, they're always happy to auction the jobs to the highest (or more often the lowest) bidder. They've already wiped out 90% of their Wichita plant, and they moved their headquarters from Seattle to Chicago so the executives would be less likely to run into unemployed plant workers. Meanwhile, they've spread out facilities all over the country, wherever they could find political favor, plus they've pawned much of their work off on China and Japan -- including the wings on their new 787 Dreamliner, something hitherto regarded as the crown jewels of the airframe industry. (They've even sublet their real crown jewels -- their lobbying organization -- to China back in the 1990s to press for "most favorable nation" trade status.)

Boeing cooked up the tanker scam about 10 years ago as a way to extend their soon-to-be-obsolete 767 production line. The Air Force didn't have any interest in new tankers, and certainly didn't have any budget for it, so Boeing proposed to finance the tankers privately and lease them to the Air Force, where they'd be buried in the operating budget, away from the more competitive procurement budget. Needless to say, the lease scheme opened up hitherto unimagined avenues for ripping off the government. John McCain played a small role in shooting the lease scam down, but eventually Boeing got the Air Force to put the deal on its procurement wish list, but that wound up inviting EADS into the bidding -- after all, Airbus has their own obsolescent airliners, the US desperately needs European support for its NATO disaster in Afghanistan, and Northrup, with their own roster of paid politicians, was eager to partner with them on a cushy deal.

So now we have lobby money flying thicker than ever, but all you ever read is how many jobs would be created -- numbers that seem really paltry compared to the $35 billion outlay -- and maybe a bit about how old the KC-135s are. The antiwar movement has missed a golden opportunity to shoot this turkey down, because it raises so many issues, especially about how we view the future role of the US in world affairs, but also about how business and politics colludes in the US, and how the Defense Department juggernaut keeps feeding conflicts by investing in them.

Peter Bergen: The Ultimate AfPak Reading List: Bergen's reading list covers Afghanistan (Soviet Invasion from 1979-89, rise and rule of the Talian 1994-2001, and post-2001), Pakistan (general, post-2001 Jihadism), and Al Qaeda (general, 1988-2001, since 2001, media strategy) with some background (underlyilng causes of 9/11 attacks, Islamist terrorism and its intellectual influences). A big chunk of those books have been on my reading list, so I thought I'd consolidate the list from 11 pages to 1, merge the categories, drop the essays (which no doubt are of equal interest), and add links to my book pages (where I have them; [*] denotes an entry in by Book Notes file):

• 9/11 Commission Report (2004, Norton): An authoritative account and actually a good read, surprisingly so for a government report.
• Hassan Abbas: Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror (2005, M.E. Sharpe, 2005): 89-177.
• Mariam Abou Zahab/Olivier Roy: Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection (2004, Hurst). [*]
• Abdel-Bari Atwan: The Secret History of al-Qa'ida (2006, University of California Press). A concise primer. [*]
• Daniel Benjamin/Steven Simon: The Age of Sacred Terror (2002, Random House): 38-94.
• Owen Bennett Jones: Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (2002, Yale University Press). [*; 3rd ed, 2009, Yale University Press]
• Peter Bergen: Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2002, Touchstone): Reporting on the ground about al Qaeda around the world. Easy read (I think.)
• Peter Bergen: The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader (2006, Free Press): A collection of interviews with those who have known bin Laden and key documents such as the founding minutes of al Qaeda.
• Paul Berman: Terror and Liberalism (2003, Norton): Argues that the jihadist threat is similar to the fascist or communist threat in terms of both its ideology and goals.
• Gary Bernsten: Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (2005, Crown): CIA officer recounts the fall of Taliban and the battle of Tora Bora.
• Henry Bradsher: Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention (1999, Oxford University Press).
• Jason Burke: Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror (2003, IB Tauris): A really sharp combination of on the ground reporting and analysis.
• Sarah Chayes: The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2006, Penguin): A journalist-turned-aid worker based in Kandahar for four years after the fall of the Taliban provides an interesting and important account of mistakes made by all the players in the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
• Richard Clarke, ed: Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face (2008, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science).
• Stephen Cohen: The Idea of Pakistan (2005, Brookings): Well written general history. 61-200.
• Steve Coll: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (paperback, 2004, Penguin Press): Deeply reported. Won the Pulitzer for best non-fiction book of 2004. [*]
• Steve Coll: The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008, Penguin Press): An absorbing read about a family caught between the 7th and 21st centuries. Finalist for a Pulitzer in 2008. [*]
• David Cook: Understanding Jihad (2005, University of California Press): An erudite explanation of the history of jihadist thought.
• Gordon Corera: Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network (2006, Oxford University Press).
• George Crile: Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (2003, Atlantic Monthly Press). [*]
• James Dobbins: After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan (2008, Potomac Press).
• Gilles Dorronsoro: Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to Present (2005, Columbia University Press, 2005): Dense, authoritative study. [*]
• Mamoun Fandy: Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (1999, St Martin's Press): 177-194.
• Douglas Farah: Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror (2004, Broadway).
• Gregory Feifer: The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (2009, Harper Collins).
• Reuven Firestone: Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam (1999, Oxford University Press): 13-18 and 47-65.
• Yosri Fouda/Nick Fielding: Masterminds of Terror (2003, Mainstream Publishing): 73-87, 105-122, 123-147, 196-202.
• Douglas Frantz/Catherine Collins: The Man From Pakistan: The True Story of the World's Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler (2007, Grand Central Publishing). [note: originally published as The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets . . . and How We Could Have Stopped Him (2007, Twelve)] [*]
• Dalton Fury: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man (2008, St Martin's Press). [*]
• Fawaz Gerges: The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (2005, Cambridge): Well researched account of how the global jihadist movement is riven by internecine ideological disputes and petty feuds. 1-80, 119-151, 185-250. [*]
• Antonio Giustozzi: Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: the Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (2006, Columbia University Press). [*]
• Karen Greenberg, ed: Al Qaeda Now: Understanding Today's Terrorists (2005, Cambridge): A stimulating collection of essays.
• Roy Gutman: How We Missed the Story: Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan (2008, USIP Press). [*]
• Husain Haqqani: Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005, Carnegie).
• Bruce Hoffman: Inside Terrorism (1998, Columbia University Press): 87-129.
• Rex Hudson: The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why (1999, Lyons Press).
• Zahid Hussain: Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle Within Militant Islam (2007, Columbia). [*]
• Jamestown Foundation: Pakistan's Troubled Frontier: The Future of the FATA and the NWFP (2009).
• Chris Johnson/Jolyon Leslie: Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace (2004, Zed Books): Two long time aid workers paint a bleak picture of Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban.
• Seth Jones: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan (2009, Norton). [*]
• Gilles Kepel: Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (1986, University of California Press): 36-67.
• Gilles Kepel: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2002, Belknap Press): 1-20. [*]
• David Kilcullen: The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (2009, Oxford University Press). [*]
• Alan Krueger: What Makes a Terrorist (2007, Princeton University Press): 1-52.
• Bernard Lewis: The Political Language of Islam (1988, University of Chicago Press): 71-90.
• Brynjar Lia: Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab al-Suri (2008, Columbia University Press)
• William Maley, ed: Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (1998, New York University Press)
• William Maley: Rescuing Afghanistan (2007, UNSW Press): A concise book that examines the problems and possible solutions in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban government.
• Terry McDermott: Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers -- Who They Were, Why They Did It (2005, Harper Collins): An excellent narrative.
• Hugh Miles: Al-Jazeera (2005, Abacus).
• Pervez Musharraf: In the Line of Fire (2008, Free Press): 197-281.
• Shuja Nawaz: Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (2008, Oxford University Press). [*]
• Sean Naylor: Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda (2005, Berkeley Publishing Group): Army Times reporter gives a deeply reported account of Operation Anaconda. [*]
• Robert Pape: Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005, Random House): Argues that campaigns of suicide terrorism are more motivated by nationalism than religion.
• Marianne Pearl: A Mighty Heart (2003, Scribner): 113-189.
• Sayyid Qutb: Milestones (1991, American Trust Publications).
• Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (paperback, 2001, Yale University Press). [*]
• Ahmed Rashid: Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (2008, Penguin). [*]
• Louise Richardson: What Terrorists Want (2007, Random House): 38-103. [*]
• Bruce Riedel: The Search for al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (2008, Brookings Press). [*]
• Malise Ruthven: A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America (2002, Granta Books): 72-98.
• Marc Sageman: Understanding Terror Networks (2004, University of Pennsylvania Press): Sageman's groundbreaking sociological analysis of who joins al Qaeda and affiliated groups. [*]
• Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (2009, Henry Holt). [*]
• Gary Schroen: First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (2005, Ballantine). [*]
• Michael Scheuer [aka: Anonymous]: Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America (paperback, 2002, Brasseys): Written by the former head of the bin Laden unit at CIA. Well researched, analytically sharp.
• Michael Semple: Reconciliation in Afghanistan (2009, USIP Press).
• Mark Urban: War in Afghanistan (1998, Macmillan Press).
• Gabriel Weimann: Terror on the Internet (2006, United States Institute of Peace): The most authoritative account of terrorists' use of the Internet.
• Laurence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006, Knopf): A gripping narrative of the jihadist movement from its birth in Egypt in the mid-20th century up until 9/11. Won the Pulitzer Prize for best non-fiction book of 2006. [*]
• Mohammad Yousaf/Mark Adkin: Afghanistan -- The Bear: The Defeat of a Superpower. (1992, Leo Cooper) [possibly reissued as The Battle for Afghanistan: The Soviets Versus the Mujahideen in the 1980s (2009, Pen & Sword)].
• Rahimullah Yusufzai: Most Wanted: Profiles of Terror (2002, Lotus/Roli): 132-144, Interrogations of Omar Sheikh and Maulana Azhar.
• Ayman al Zawahiri: Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet (2001): This document is Zawahiri's autobiography, and it also outlines his political philosophy. It runs about 75 pages and is essential reading to understand him.

The section on Pakistan is very short, not that there's a lot more to choose from, aside from narrow and rather dated monographs. The omission of Tariq Ali's The Duel is notable both as a substantial book on Pakistan and for what it says about American power as a root cause for the troubles. The section on root causes is also short, and focuses exclusively on terrorist psychology, whereas it should be obvious that at least part of the problem is the US has sent its corporations, military, and spies far from the homeland. No small amount has been written about that, both on the general problems of empire and on specific conflicts -- Iraq and Israel would each swamp the list, Iran and Saudi Arabia would add significantly to it, and there are other hot spots. For the most part I haven't singled out books like that unless they specifically tripped my keyword searches below. Any broad spectrum survey of US politics in the region would include works by Gabriel Kolko, Noam Chomsky, James Carroll, Jonathan Schell, Chalmers Johnson, Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Kinzer, Tim Weiner, Dilip Hiro, Tariq Ali, and Michael Klare.

Scrounging through the Book Notes file, looking for keywords (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Islam, jihad, al Qaeda, terror), but skipping books focusing on other Arab areas, suggests some additional books. The main thing that's missing above is a better critique on how the US got so tangled up in the Muslim world that it became a target of al Qaeda, and what sort of ideology plays out in the compulsion to revenge 9/11 by waging an indiscriminate war against civilians who had nothing to do with al Qaeda.

• Akbar S Ahmed: Resistance and Control in Pakistan (1983; revised ed, paperback, 2004, Taylor & Francis)
• Tariq Ali: The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2002, Verso): The first significant effort to recognize the common obsessions of both sides.
• Tariq Ali: Rough Music: Blair Bombs Baghdad London Terror (paperback, 2006, Verso)
• Tariq Ali: The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008; paperback, 2009, Scribner): An important introduction to Pakistan, uncovering much that is uncommented on elsewhere, such as the pervasive corruption.
• Ali A Allawi: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (2009, Yale University Press)
• Tamin Ansary: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (2009, Public Affairs)
• Reza Aslan: How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (2009, Random House): A deep look at the split within Islam.
• Walden Bello: Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire (paperback, 2006, Holt)
• Mats Berdal: Building Peace After War: A Critical Assessment of International Peacebuilding (paperback, 2009, Taylor & Francis)
• Barbara Bick: Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (paperback, 2008, Feminist Press at CUNY)
• Artyom Borovik: The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (paperback, 2001, Grove Press)
• Michael Burleigh: Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (2009, Harper Collins)
• Caleb Carr: The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed and Why It Will Fail Again (2002, Random House)
• Matthew Carr: The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism From the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda (paperback, 2008, New Press)
• Melody Ermachild Chavis: Meena, Heroine of Afghanistan: The Martyr Who Founded RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (paperback, 2004, St Martin's Press)
• Ira Chernus: Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin (paperback, 2006, Paradigm)
• John Cooley: Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (3rd ed, paperback, 2002, Pluto Press)
• Brian Coughley: War, Coups and Terror: Pakistan's Army in Years of Turmoil (2009, Skyhorse)
• Christopher Coyne: After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (paperback, 2007, Stanford Economics and Finance)
• Robert D Crews/Amin Tarzi, eds: The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (2008; paperback, 2009, Harvard University Press) [*]
• Mark Danner: Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War (2009, Nation Books)
• Meghnad Desai: Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror (paperback, 2006, IB Tauris)
• Robert Dreyfuss: Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (2005; paperback, 2006, Holt): How the US promoted Jihadism for Cold War purposes.
• David B Edwards: Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (paperback, 2002, University of California Press)
• Susan Faludi: The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (2007, Metropolitan Books): Paints the US response to 9/11 as a nervous breakdown, couched in eons of frontier myth.
• Paul Fitzgerald/Elizabeth Gould: Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (paperback, 2009, City Lights)
• Fawaz A Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (paperback, 1999, Cambridge University Press)
• Fawaz A Gerges: Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (2006; paperback, 2007, Harcourt)
• Antonio Giustozzi: Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords of Afghanistan (2009, Columbia University Press)
• Aaron Glantz: Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations (paperback, 2008, Haymarket Books)
• Larry P Goodson: Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (paperback, 2001, University of Washington Press)
• Lester W Grau/Michael A Gress, eds: The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost (paperback, 2002, University Press of Kansas): From the Russian General Staff papers.
• John Gray: Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (paperback, 2005, New Press)
• Ramachandra Guha: India After Gandhi: The History of the Largest Democracy (2007, Ecco): Long history of India, which inevitably impinges on Pakistan.
• Stephen Holmes: The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (2007, Cambridge University Press)
• Raymond Ibrahim, ed: The Al Qaeda Reader (paperback, 2007, Broadway)
• Ayesha Jalal: Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia (2008, Harvard University Press)
• Arif Jamal: Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (2009, Melville House)
• Chris Johnson/Joylon Leslie: Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace (2nd ed, paperback, 2008, Zed Books)
• Ann Jones: Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan (paperback, 2007, Picador)
• Robert D Kaplan: Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1990; paperback, 2001, Vintage): Cheerleader-propagandist for the mujahideen.
• Robert D Kaplan: Imperial Grunts: On the Ground With the American Military, From Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq (2005, Random House)
• Robert D Kaplan: Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground (2007, Random House)
• Gilles Kepel: The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (2004, Belknap Press): A postscript to the author's critically important Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, which left off viewing 9/11 as a desperate measure reflecting bin Laden's terminal weakness.
• Gilles Kepel/Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds: Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (2008; paperback, 2009, Belknap Press)
• Rashid Khalidi: Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Hegemony in the Middle East (2009, Beacon Press)
• M Ashgar Khan: We've Learnt Nothing from History: Pakistan: Politics and Military Power (2006, Oxford University Press)
• Yasmin Khan: The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (paperback, 2008, Yale University Press)
• Sonali Kolhatkar/James Ingalls: Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (paperback, 2006, Seven Stories Press)
• Jon Krakauer: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009, Doubleday)
• Christina Lamb: The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan (2003; paperback, 2004, Harper Perennial)
• Mark LeVine: Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (2005, Oneworld)
• Mark LeVine: Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (paperback, 2008, Three Rivers Press)
• Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (paperback, 2002, Harper Perennial)
• Adam B Lowther: Americans and Asymmetric Conflict: Lebanon, Somalia, and Afghanistan (2007, ABC-CLIO)
• David Loyn: In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation (2009, Palgrave Macmillan)
• William Maley: The Afghanistan Wars (2002; second ed, paperback, Palgrave Macmillan 2009)
• Mahmood Mamdani: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004, Pantheon): On how our views of Muslims are affected by US tactical interests, no matter how inconsistent.
• Eric S Margolis: War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet (revised ed, paperback, 2002, Routledge)
• Eric S Margolis: American Raj: America and the Muslim World (2008; paperback, 2009, Key Porter)
• Stephen L Melton: The Clausewitz Delusion: How the American Army Screwed Up the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (A Way Forward) (2009, MBI)
• Nick B Mills: Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (2007, John Wiley & Sons)
• Pankaj Mishra: Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (paperback, 2007, Picador)
• Greg Mortensen: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time (paperback, 2007, Penguin Books): An alternate, more practicable path to nation-building.
• Greg Mortensen: Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009, Viking)
• Azhar Hassan Nadeem: Pakistan: The Political Economy of Lawlessness (2002, Oxford University Press)
• Omar Nasiri: Inside the Global Jihad: My Life With Al Qaeda: A Spy's Story (2006; paperback, 2008, Perseus)
• Ronald E Neumann: The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan (2009, Potomac Books)
• Gretchen Peters: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (2009, Thomas Dunne)
• Gregory Alonso Pirio: The African Jihad: Bin Laden's Quest for the Horn of Africa (paperback, 2007, Red Sea Press)
• Norman Podhoretz: World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007, Doubleday)
• William R Polk: Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq (2007, Harper): A comparative history as the US moves from revolutionary insurgents to imperial counterinsurgents.
• Jerrold M Post: The Mind of the Terrorist: The Psychology of Terrorism from the IRA to al-Qaeda (paperback, 2008, Palgrave Macmillan)
• Deborah Rodriguez: Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil (paperback, 2007, Random House)
• Andrew M Roe: Waging War in Waziristan: The British Struggle in the Land of bin Laden, 1849-1947 (2010, University Press of Kansas)
• Olivier Roy: The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (2008, Columbia University Press)
• Barnett R Rubin: The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (2nd ed, paperback, 2002, Yale University Press)
• Marc Sageman: Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (2007, University of Pennsylvania Press
• Marc Sageman, ed: Unmasking Terror: A Global Review of Terrorist Activities (paperback, 2007, Jamestown Foundation)
• Michael Scheuer [Anonymous]: Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004, Potomac Books)
• Michael Scheuer: Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (2008, Free Press)
• Asne Seierstad: The Bookseller of Kabul (paperback, 2004, Little Brown)
• Ayesha Siddiqa: Military Inc: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy (paperback, 2007, Pluto Press)
• Mick Simonelli: Riding a Donkey Backwards Through Afghanistan: How I Successfully Spent $400 Million of Your Taxpayer Dollars to Build the Afghanistan National Army (paperback, 2009, Mill City)
• Rory Stewart: The Places in Between (2004; paperback, 2006, Harvest Books): A winter 2001-02 trek across the mountains, in Babur's footsteps, in Bush's wake, in the brief moment of Taliban retreat.
• Stephen Tanner: Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban (2002; revised ed, paperback, 2009, Da Capo)
• John B Taylor: Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World (paperback, 2008, WW Norton)
• Alex von Tunzelman: Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007, Henry Holt): A top-down view of partition, easy on Nehru, hard on Jinnah.
• Mary Anne Weaver: Pakistan: Deep Inside the World's Most Frightening State (paperback, 2010, Farrar Straus and Giroux)
• David Wildman/Phyllis Bennis: Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer (paperback, 2010, Olive Branch Press)
• Lawrence Ziring: Pakistan: At the Crosscurrent of History (paperback, 2005, Oneworld)

Also found mentions of a bunch of Afghanistan war memoirs: Jon Lee Anderson: The Lion's Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan; Colin Berry: The Deniable Agent: Undercover in Afghanistan; Christie Blatchford: Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army; Eric Blehm: The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan; Mark W Bromwich: Captains Blog: The Chronicles of My Afghan Vacation; Matthew Currier Burden: The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; John T Carney: No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units From Iran to Afghanistan; Jeff Courter: Afghan Journal: A Soldier's Year in Afghanistan; Dayna Curry/Heather Mercer: Prisoners of Hope: The Story of Our Captivity and Freedom in Afghanistan; Ed Darack: Victory Point: Operations Red Wings and Whalers - The Marine Corps' Battle for Freedom in Afghanistan; Lt Gen Michael DeLong: A General Speaks Out: The Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Brandon Friedman: The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War; Mike Friscolanti: Friendly Fire: The Untold Story of the US Bombing That Killed Four Canadian Soldiers in Afghanistan; Chuck Larson: Heroes Among Us: Firsthand Accounts of Combat from America's Most Decorated Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan; Joe LeBleu: Long Rifle: A Sniper's Story in Iraq and Afghanistan; Marcus Luttrell/Patrick Robinson: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10; Malcolm MacPherson: Roberts Ridge : A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan; Sean Maloney: Enduring the Freedom: A Rogue Historian in Afghanistan; Platte B Moring III: Honor First: A Citizen-Soldier in Afghanistan; Craig M Mullaney: The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education; Johnny Rico: Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America; Mike Ryan: Battlefield Afghanistan; Doug Stanton: Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan; Peter Telep: Direct Action: Special Forces in Afghanistan; Benjamin Tupper: Welcome To Afghanistan: Send More Ammo: The Tragicomic Art of Making War as an Embedded Trainer in the Afghan National Army; Chris Wattie: Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle That Saved Afghanistan; Stephen D Wrage, ed: Immaculate Warfare: Participants Reflect on the Air Campaigns Over Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq; Thomas W Young: The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan; Regulo Zapata Jr: Desperate Lands: The War on Terror Through the Eyes of a Special Forces Soldier; also: Masood Farivar: Confessions of a Mullah Warrior; Emmanuel Guibert/Frederic Lemercier/Didier Lefevre: The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders; Ali Ahmad Jalali: Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the Words of the Mujahideen Fighters Patrick Macrory: Retreat from Kabul: The Catastrophic British Defeat in Afghanistan 1842; Matthew J Morgan: A Democracy Is Born: An Insider's Account of the Battle Against Terrorism in Afghanistan; Jules Stewart: Crimson Snow: Britain's First Disaster in Afghanistan (i.e., 1841); Christine Sullivan: Saving Cinnamon: The Amazing True Story of a Missing Military Puppy and the Desperate Mission to Bring Her Home; Vladislav Tamarov: Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story; Mary Tillman: Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman; This list continues to grow at a rapid pace.

The stuff I've added is no doubt less selective than the original list, although it also helps fill in critical holes. Overall, this seems like an awful lot of material, but there are a lot of things poorly covered if covered at all: starting with day-by-day political relationships between the US and various Afghani and Pakistani agents; there is little systematic military analysis, especially of damage to civilians; there is little accounting of money spent; there is a massive propaganda snow job to unshovel; there are secret prisons with a legacy of torture; there is the matter of Karzai's miraculous purchase on his office. So the ultimate list is still to come. But this is a start.

Matthew Yglesias: A Sensible Response to Terrorism:

As you probably know, a white guy entranced by an extremely version of Tea Party-style right-populist paranoia deliberately crashed an airplane into an IRS building in Texas yesterday. I'm not especially interested in debating semantics, but I think it's very clear that if this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes that the right wing would be pissing its pants and demanding that anyone who refused the label the attack "terrorism" be put up on treason charges. But the new rules seem to be that politically motivated violence when undertaken by white people isn't terrorism.

But instead of complaining about the hypocrisy involved in not trying to whip people into a fit of terror and madness about this incident, I think it makes more sense to congratulate everyone on handling this in a calm and sensible manner. [ . . . ]

Stack's stated purpose for undertaking the attack was to try to prompt a counterproductive overreaction: "I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are." It's smart, then, that as a country we're responding to his terrorism by trying to avoid counterproductive overreactions. But of course this is also Osama bin Laden's goal and it's also appropriate to respond to Islamist political violence in a similar spirit. [emphasis original]

The lesson I draw from this is that it is possible to respond to provocations in different ways according to the political interests of those in power. Bin Laden got his war because that's the way Bush wanted to play it. He craved the opportunity to become a War President, and played up his Commander-in-Chief role to the day he left office. What Stack did, however, is far less useful either to Obama or to the Republicans who seem more inclined to spin it into jokes. Even if someone wanted to escalate the event into a war, what could you do? Send drones out over West Texas looking for wedding parties to bomb? Round up random taxi drivers and beat them to death? Those are things we did in Afghanistan, but it's highly unlikely that we'd treat American citizens with that same level of contempt and indifference.

Steve Fraser: A Tale of Two Presidents: The notion that Obama might be a "transformational president" like Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed brief favor back when we could actually imagine "change we can believe in" as meaning something concrete. A year into their respective first terms, Roosevelt moved much further than he could have imagined, while Obama has rarely done anything but backpeddle. Fraser contrasts the two, seeing Obama's New Deal trajectory as reversed from Roosevelt's, approaching populism only as his attempts at accommodating the powers keep failing. Consider Obama's prospects:

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, off-year elections do not always favor the minority party. Indeed, 1934 may be the best example of the opposite effect. Exactly because the New Deal showed itself ever readier to junk the ancien régime, break with economic orthodoxy, and above all say goodbye to its erstwhile corporate friends, it was rewarded handsomely at the polls. None of that apparently will be repeated in 2010, given an administration that seems to be running a New Deal in reverse.

There is plenty of reason to think that the financial collapse that triggered this recession was every bit as severe as that of 1929, but the resulting worldwide depression was arrested in much shorter order. This had less to do with the underlying dynamics than the fact that people in power -- even in the ultrareactionary Bush administration -- felt the need to act aggressively. And even though their solution was to re-stuff the pockets of the rich, the political support they needed came not from the Republican rank and file but from Democrats who bought the argument that a collapse on Wall Street would be a disaster for Main Street. That seemed like a good deal at the time, but less so now: not only was the crisis resolved on terms extremely favorable to the same bankers who caused the problems in the first place, but the apparent ease with which the crisis was averted has evidently dispelled any chance of changing things to prevent similar crises in the future, let alone any effort to make up for the damages done.

You can chalk this up to our reluctance to learn anything except in the hardest ways possible. At least in 1933 when Roosevelt came to the White House there was no doubt that the nation faced a grave situation. The main thing Roosevelt brought into play was a strong predilection for taking action, even if he didn't have a firm idea of what to do, and even if he wound up pursuing different approaches following no fixed ideology. That he was ultimately seen as a liberal had less to do with how he wanted to act than with the fact that his various liberal initiatives helped the economy and helped people cope with the economy whereas his conservative initiatives -- like slashing spending and balancing the budget -- failed. Obama has no such luxury today, partly because we don't think we're so desperate, and partly because the ideological blinders have been clamped down so tight.

On the other hand, you have to wonder why it should be so difficult. When the stock bubble burst in 2000-01, uncovering mountains of fraud that sank Bush's buddies at Enron, even a Republican president and congress felt obliged to make some token reforms, yet the banking industry, following a much larger and much more damaging meltdown, is good to go back to business as usual with little if any reform. Part of this is that Republicans have cynically chosen to block any reform that in any way crimps a potentially lucrative contributor, but it's also because the media seems determined to stifle anything that smacks of populist revolt -- even to the point of anointing the Republicans as the real populists, leaving the word hopelessly neutered. It's almost as if the media is doing the work of its corporate paymasters.

Roosevelt had no trouble striking a populist pose because it was in the air, driven by the agitated poor and confirmed by the readily identifiable "economic royalists" who opposed him. Obama will have a tougher time, if indeed he ever decides to try. He is certainly even less inclined to try than Roosevelt, whose own upper class pedigree gave his rabblerousing a cloak of irony. But what Obama is bound to discover is that the elites he tries to appeal to with reason have their heads stuck in a view of their interests that is ultimately bad for most Americans and eventually even for themselves. So Obama could find he needs to move to the left to save himself, or to save the country, or even to save its ruling class. The question is whether he does so soon enough and strongly enough to save the Democrats' grip on congress in 2010.

Paul Woodward: British officials say Mossad murdered Hamas commander: Starts with passport photos of suspicious persons traveling on anything but Israeli passports. (In particular, there is a report that the real Melvyn Mildiner never left Jerusalem and is actively seeking to clear himself.) The juicy part is here:

If the investigation into the murder of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 20, establishes that it was carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, Dubai police have said they will issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While this would not be the first time an Israeli leader faced the risk of arrest, unlike previous instances which have involved alleged war crimes, in this instance Netanyahu would presumably be treated as a co-conspirator to pre-meditated murder in a case that already involves Interpol.

This reminds one of the CIA abduction case in Italy, which as far as I know is still waiting for the agents to be captured, but wasn't pursued so quickly to the desk where the buck stops. But then that seems to be a shorter path in Israel, where prime ministers routinely sign off on Mossad operations (or order them up directly). This may seem like politics, but once one starts looking at such actions as criminal conspiracies -- and assassination is nothing if not criminal -- they take on a life of their own.

By the way, Woodward forgot about another class of indicted Israeli prime ministers: those who got nabbed for corruption. Ehud Olmert tops that list. Not sure who else, but Ariel Sharon seemed to be headed that way before he checked into the witless protection program.

PS: Added an update to "Bayh" below.

Matthew Yglseias: Evan Bayh: I'm not sure just how this works, but Indiana's so-called Democratic Senator timed his retirement announcement to minimize the chances of the Democratic Party to retain his seat. It won't be much of a loss, and it's tempting to say "good riddance" -- even at the risk of being called a "fucking retard" by Rahm Emmanuel. Bayh has never seen a war he didn't like, did his share to wreck health care reform, and has periodically grabbed the spotlight to spout sheer nonsense on budget matters. Of late the only thing he's been campaigning hard for is the dubious title of dumbest person in Congress. As for whether any of this is principled, let's quote Yglesias:

Obviously, Evan Bayh's never been my favorite Senator. And the more one learns about both the manner of his departure, and the thinking behind it, the clearer it is why. Simply put: He's an immoral person who conducts his affairs in public life with a callous disregard for the impact of his decisions on human welfare. He's sad he's not going to be president? He doesn't like liberal activists? He finds senate life annoying? Well, boo-hoo. We all shed a tear.

Evidently, Bayh leaves with a $13 million campaign warchest. Not sure what happens to that -- maybe he'll roll it over into a flier at challenging Obama in 2012 -- but it looks lost for the Democrats in the Indiana senate race: a huge opportunity cost. He was well ahead in the polls, with no reason to think he shouldn't have been able to triangulate his way to a third term, despite some Republican lust for the seat. Despite all the noise, I don't see the GOP as a lock for big gains in November. They are know-nothing, do-nothing obstructionists in thrall to a rigid ideology that seeks to capture government for nothing more than a joy ride after which they leave it and us battered and bruised. And they don't see the slightest reason to think otherwise, especially as long as their obstruction seems to be wearing Obama down. The only thing that's going to wake them up is to get wiped out in the next round of elections. Had he run, Bayh would have been part of that rout, even though he's actually been about as much of a problem as the Republicans. Without him it's a bit harder. It does, however, keep his track record intact: count on him always to do the wrong thing.

Update: Some more kind words on Evan Bayh:

• Ezra Klein: "Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left."
• Saturn Smith: "Whatever his official statement lists as the reason, I believe that Bayh -- like his 'centrist' contemporary in Hair Awesomeness, John Edwards -- suffers from a chronic need to be the center of attention. After eight full years of being a real star in Washington, it's become apparent that he's no longer anyone's darling. Ergo, quit."
• Ross Douthat: "His big issue was supposed to be deficit reduction, but you wouldn't catch him dead proposing anything remotely like Paul Ryan's fiscal roadmap, with its detailed list of programs to be reshaped and reduced. [ . . . ] Wherever the Beltway conventional wisdom settled, there was Evan Bayh -- and he was rewarded for it with endless presidential and vice-presidential chatter, which has followed him, absurdly, even now that he's announced his retirement."
• Jonathan Chait: "The Washington Post's Jonathan Capeheart calls Evan Bayh's retirement a 'brain drain.' [ . . . ] This was just a completely unremarkable man who, had he not been the hansome son of a famous politician, would never in a million years have been a Senator." [*]
• Marcy Wheeler [emptywheel]: "Poor Evan Bayh won't suffer through another term as Senator if he's not going to be allowed to be a budget hypocrite while calling for cuts in entitlements while pushing to give the super-rich big tax breaks?"
• Barbara O'Brien [mahablog]: "Good riddance. Although the seat may now go to a Republican, I think in the long run the Democratic party is better off without dead weights like Bayh."

[*] Also, note this from a comment to Jonathan Chait's post:

"But running for the sake of winning an election, just to remain in public office, is not good enough," Bayh said. "And it has never been what motivates me."

Obviously not. From '07:

"Since leaving Indiana as a first lady, Susan Bayh has become a professional board member, earning more than $1 million a year in director fees for advice she gives to companies that make pharmaceuticals, operate radio stations, sell health insurance policies, offer online banking and distribute ingredients to fast-food restaurants.

"In the past four years, Bayh collected more than $1.7 million in pre-tax income when she exercised stock options from two of the corporations. Her actual income from exercising stock options is higher, but the details of one transaction were not publicly reported." [source; subtitle: "Bayh says wife's corporate roles hold no sway over his votes"]

It also looks like Bayh is pretty much home clear with the $13 million he raised for the Senate race he isn't running in. It looks like no other candidate qualified for the Democratic primary, so the party will pick a replacement candidate -- although I've also seen a report that conservatives are flocking to restaurant owner Tamyra d'Ippolito, who had announced against Bayh but hadn't been able to get enough signatures to make the primary ballot.

James Surowiecki: The Populism Problem: I have no idea why Republican ranting is called Populism these days, and neither does Surowiecki. It used to be a code word for a Democrat talking about class, but now it seems to apply to any demagoguery, no matter how incoherent. Surowiecki writes:

In recent weeks, Democrats have been bombarded with advice about how they should reinvent their economic agenda. The electorate, we hear, wants Barack Obama to be more of an economic populist but less of an ambitious reformer. He has to aggressively create jobs but also be less spendthrift. This advice may be contradictory, but then so are the economic opinions of the many angry voters who are animating what's being called the new populism. [ . . . ]

The failure of free markets during the financial crisis might have led people to think that the government should be more involved in the economy. Instead, the percentage of Americans who think government is trying to do too much is higher than it's been since the late nineties. Health-care reform offers a case study in this. The bills passed by Congress, whatever their flaws, would do things that voters overwhelmingly say they support: extend coverage to the uninsured, ban the worst practices of insurers, and guarantee insurance for people who lose their jobs. Yet more voters now oppose the bills than support them, with many saying that the government is overreaching. And, while voters routinely say that the rising cost of health care is a problem, it is the bills' cost-control provisions -- including a tax on expensive insurance plans and rules to restrain Medicare spending -- that have proved especially unpopular. On top of this, many people are just annoyed with the whole process: a survey of voters who supported Obama in 2008 but voted for Scott Brown in the recent Massachusetts Senate race found that forty-one per cent of those who opposed health-care reform weren't sure whether reform went too far or not far enough. [ . . . ]

One thing voters do want is jobs. But even here populist sentiment is at odds with itself. People want the government to help provide jobs, but they also want it to cut the deficit. Of course, one can worry about rising long-term debt and still think that, right now, more deficit spending is crucial to the nascent recovery. But angry voters aren't that nuanced in their thinking: they want the government to tighten its belt and fight unemployment at the same time. Not that they believe that the government's efforts will do any good: three-quarters of Americans think that much of the money in the first stimulus program was wasted, perhaps because they can't see all the jobs that the stimulus saved, only the nearly eight million jobs that the economy has lost.

Surowiecki misses many more examples. Krugman's latest column is on Republicans and Medicare. I tried reading Jane Mayer's The Trial, on Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in court in New York and just couldn't plow through the incoherency of the critics, not to mention the calls for lynching Holder. They act like being interrogated by the FBI and prosecuted by the DOJ is some form of coddling -- a perception that no one who's been through it seems to share. This isn't just confused. It constitutes some sort of nationwide nervous breakdown.

Mayer offers the Massachusetts Senate race as an example:

As Eric Fehrnstrom, [Republican Scott] Brown's political consultant, put it to me recently, the "most potent political issue" in the race was voter opposition to the Justice Department's decision to extend customary legal protections to suspected terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect who on Christmas Day attempted to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines passenger plane bound for Detroit. In a debate with his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, Brown declared, "We're at war in our airports, we're at war in our shopping malls. I have to be honest with you, folks. . . . I'm scared at some of the policies I've heard."

In a television ad, Brown, who is in the Army National Guard, flashed a photograph of himself in fatigues and declared, "Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree." Brown also announced his support for waterboarding suspected terrorists -- a tactic that Holder, among others, has denounced as torture. As Brown's attacks grew more pointed, Fehrnstrom said, Coakley got "bollixed up" defending Obama's policies. He added, "The obvious follow-up is: Are you going to read Osama bin Laden the Miranda warning if you catch him?"

Actually, if I was going to make a Hollywood fantasy movie of some special posse breaking into Bin Laden's cave, wrestling him to the ground, and cuffing him, I'd end it with a G-Man towering over him and reciting the Miranda warning. That's exactly how you established that the law has triumphed. I doubt that anyone seeing such a movie would fail to get the point, which isn't to say that Lynne Cheney wouldn't rush out to write an op-ed condemning me.

I haven't written anything about "underpants bomber" Abdulmutallab because from the moment the story broke it seemed like a confirmation that the system had basically worked -- maybe not as frictionless as one would like, but when do systems ever work like that? That the FBI was able to convince the would-be bomber to provide useful info was consistent with the FBI's track record -- unlike the CIA's, where he would have been tortured into spouting useless nonsense. As many people have pointed out, the case was exactly analogous to that of Richard "shoe bomber" Reid, who was prosecuted in exactly the same way by the Bush administration -- in one of the few cases where they realized that everything they needed was legal. The only difference today is that the hysteria that folks have worked themselves into based on the totally bogus idea that Obama is pro-terrorist. He may have given up the silly "war on terror" rhetoric, but he's on track to kill more terrorists (and bystanders) than his predecessor, and he hasn't shown any evidence of pulling back or toning down a war that quite frankly never was a good idea.

Brown's statements underscore not just how paranoid and excitable folks are, but how ready they are to trample the constitution. To my ears this sounds exactly like they're calling for fascist dictatorship, although if you listen to much right-wing radio you'll hear that Obama has this or that secret plan to establish his own fascist dictatorship. This is all the more incredible given how deferential Obama has been to both parties in Congress and to the lobbyists of industries he's made very modest proposals to regulate, and how he's backtracked on virtually every principled promise he made to end the illegal actions and policies of the Bush administration. You have to wonder where folks get this stuff.

Radio, of course -- the Republican Noise Machine is in full gear. But also papers like the once-liberal Washington Post have gone whole hog into attack mode. Glenn Greenwald writes:

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey has become the leading spokesman for a Cheneyite national security attack, which relies on scaring Americans into believing that Obama is endangering their lives in those rare instances when he deviates from Bush's Terrorism approach. Toward that end, Mukasey has yet another fear-mongering Op-Ed, this time on today's oh-so-liberal Washington Post Op-Ed Page (along side Michael Gerson's stirring tribute to the virtues of GITMO, Bill Kristol's call for regime change in Iran, a warning from Blackstone Chairman Steven Schwarzman to stop being so mean to banks, and a Charles Krauthammer column blaming Obama for something or other).

The point of that Greenwald column was to write about Mukasey, but it comes only one day after another column which also summarized the Washington Post's Op-Ed page:

Today, Broder pens a gushing love letter to Sarah Palin -- decreeing that we must "Take Sarah Palin seriously," admiring her "pitch-perfect recital of the populist message," and warning that she will be difficult to stop as a major political force [ . . . ]

But look at what else is on the Post Op-Ed Page today. The Post's CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, writes a column arguing that Europe is in desperate need of a "tea party movement," which would do all the great things for Europeans that it is doing for the U.S. The pro-war Post Editorial Page excitedly announces a "Showdown in Tehran," calling -- yet again -- on the Obama administration to do more to confront and subvert Iran's government. George Will touts a GOP resurgence in California. And earlier this week, it was revealed that Post editors actively solicited someone to write an Op-Ed complaining that liberals -- unlike conservatives -- are arrogant, condescending, and smug.

It's an old truism that the easiest way to get folks to believe something is to keep repeating it ad nauseum, and that's what this sounds like. And if the so-called liberal media is this far gone, why not just throw caution to the wind and go with the flow? (Other than that it's totally fucking nuts, that is.)

PS: This is another case where the title might sound better with a little German, like "The Völkisch Revolt" -- although there must be an even better word/phrase that's beyond my limited vocabulary. I left out a digression into how much this sounded like fascism once I got to the leader-principle (you know, Führerprinzip) and started trying to plug in names. I'm not sure whether Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck came out more farcical -- you could make a good case either way. Which may mean a real fascist movement is further off than it seems. But what is clear is that the masses -- the people Goldhagen called the "willing executioners" -- are primed and ready. The Republicans may want nothing more than to count their votes, but they're so desperate to do so they're promising to become far worse than Bush and Cheney could dare get away with.

I got a letter from someone in the UK asking for my opinions on a couple of things. Don't know why he cares, but I have lots of opinions. He asks:

How would you respond to those who advocate missile defense?

I don't think the concern of such people is about a surprise attack, as wouldn't need missiles but could be done by terrorist-style means, and could in any case be deterred by the US nuclear arsenal. The concern is that the US would no longer be able to invade a rogue state if it acquired nuclear missiles and the US did not have a ballistic missile defense, then the US would no longer dare impose a regime change on said rogue state. This means that the rogue state could sponsor terrorism with impunity, or worse conquer neighboring (non-nuclear-weapon) states, growing into a great power or even a superpower strong enough to directly threaten the Western world.

I suppose there could be an economic case against missile defense -- namely that it would be far more expensive for to build than it would be for the enemy to build enough missiles to overwhelm it (meaning that it's only useful if you have an enormous economic advantage over the enemy). A similar case could be made against highly sophisticated penetrating bombers like the B-2 (as opposed to bomb trucks like the B-52).

My first thought about missile defense is that it doesn't work. It's not only that it is a very difficult technical task given the speeds, sizes, and distances which leads to a very complex and finicky system, but also that it's virtually impossible to test to any real degree of confidence. Maybe if you had a lot of incoming rockets you could get some real world practice. Testing against MIRVed ICBMs, even with mock warheads, is prohibitively expensive, not to mention dangerous. Israel has some sort of system for combatting toy rockets from Gaza, but it's a long ways from being reliable.

That leads to my second thought, which is what good is a defensive shield system if it can't be trusted as reliable? It isn't exactly useless, but it is certainly dangerous. In particular, it's likely to confuse the chain of command, and it's likely to confuse whoever the enemy is supposed to be. We know, for instance, that both the US and the USSR regarded the other's ABM efforts as destabilizing advances meant to secure a first strike capability -- even if one was certain that the system would fail you couldn't trust the side that was building it to recognize its faults. (Ronald Reagan was the only guy on earth who regarded such systems as benign.)

There are other problems, like response time. In order to have a chance of working, response has to be pretty automatic, which runs the risk of taking the decision of starting a war away from the chain of command -- a problem that is all that much worse given that the likelihood of a glitch is greater than the odds of an actual attack.

Your economic points are valid enough. It's certainly cheaper to defeat an ABM system than it is to build one, which is yet another reason it's impossible to build a working system against a determined, resourceful foe. On the other hand, rocket science is rocket science, and few nations are actually any good at it (or for that matter B-2-like bombers). More likely a relatively poor nation would try to circumvent rather than overwhelm the system, in which case the economic differential is a moot point, and the system is even more unworkable.

It's also worth noting that in the US missile defense has evolved (i.e., has been molded by selection pressures) mostly as a form of graft. The companies who build it are rewarded for their political clout and are not punished for failures. The US has deep pockets, but nothing that can't be wasted by companies like Boeing. And how deep for how long is a serious question.

As for your rogue state scenario, I think you'll find that the critical issue isn't how perfectly defended we are -- no real way to do that, and certainly not with a hacked missile defense shield -- but how aggressive (or reckless) we choose to be. The US was not deterred from attacking Iraq by chemical and biological weapons -- real in 1991, mythical in 2003; on the contrary, Saddam Hussein was deterred from using them. The US has very daunting conventional military force, and if the other side wants to play nuclear, the US can bring that on too, faster and harder than any other nation. Such a strategy may be riskier once the opponent has nuclear weapons, but no recent US president (except maybe Reagan) seems to have been squeamish about sacrificing American lives.

On the other hand, there are no rogue states like you mention. No nation can conquer its neighbors and become "a great power." Every such occupation costs more than it's worth. (Iraq taking Kuwait might have been an exception, but Kuwait is contiguous with Iraq, really the same people and culture, and small enough to be manageable -- India taking Goa was a similar example but nobody cared about that.) Nobody has figured out how to practice nuclear blackmail. I suppose you could say that Israel is free to bomb Syria and Lebanon, but Israel's conventional forces have ample deterrence, and Israel doesn't flaunt its bomb. Similarly, the US has fought many wars without bringing nuclear weapons to the battlefield, and has caused incredible amounts of damage. Nuclear weapons are at best difficult and awkward to use. As for terrorism, there are plenty of options besides regime change, and often regime change is a bad strategy. North Korea, for instance, is an awful mess, but you'd have to be a really crackpot pseudo-humanitarian to think invasion is the answer.

To sum up, I think missile defense is an insane investment intended to produce a set of undesirable policy options that are unwise and fraught with danger. I see it as a very stupid and unnerving thing to pursue.

Another question (only semi-related) -- how likely do you think it is in the future that Israel will expel or exterminate the Palestinians and become a North-Korea-like pariah state, relying on nuclear MAD to keep its neighbors from wiping it out?

I think it's extremely unlikely, almost unthinkable. This has much to do with how Israel's security elites view themselves, and it's not that they're too "moral" to do such a deed so much as that they're too professional. The endstate they want is for the Palestinians to be ground down and invisible -- "an utterly defeated people" -- but more important they really don't want an endstate. The conflict is what holds Israel together, what gives Israelis their identity, and what gives the security elites their unique societal status. It's not surprising they don't want to give that up.

On the other hand, if the elites did decide to implement a final solution, I don't doubt that it would be substantially popular among Israelis -- probably only a big minority right now, but it wouldn't be hard to uncork enough terror to sway a majority. One thing to understand is that most Israelis have been systematically terrorized all of their lives -- not by Palestinians, although they've done their part, but by the Holocaust culture, military indoctrination, religious study, all-pervasive hasbara. A good picture of the gap between what the elites know and what the masses fear can be gleaned from Tom Segev's 1967, although since then both sides have gotten much nastier. There are no shortage of political demagogues and "willing executioners" in Israel, but it would take an extreme fluke to flip the elites.

For what it's worth, Israel is a pariah state already -- maybe not a North Korea, but the comparisons to South Africa are, if anything, too generous. The more the Palestinians try to court world opinion -- as opposed to trying to fight their way out of their cage -- the more bizarre Israel looks and the more isolated it becomes. That may matter little to the masses who can't see themselves, but the elites will eventually face a self-identity crisis as traditional allies like Europe and the US turn on them. If this really were an existential conflict, they might decide to go down an isolationist path, like Myanmar, but the conflict isn't like that. There's a straightforward deal on the table which would leave the elites secure in a slightly smaller Israel, and if the choice was that or Myanmar they'd be unprofessional not to take it. It will, of course, be Israel's choice: no one's going to impose regime change on them. But South Africa was in a similar situation, and chose to be part of the world rather than apart from the world.

I actually think most rogue states would lean that way if given a self-respecting chance. Building anti-missile shields to ensure a nation can't take any recourse against you while you pound them back to the stone age is a crude, expensive, and ultimately ineffective way to solve such problems.

Let me add a little more on missile defense. First, recall that in the days and weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's top priority (having passed his tax cuts) was getting Congress to approve funding for major expansion of anti-missile defense. One of the first conversations we overheard when we went out to lunch in Brooklyn that day was someone saying, "boy, too bad we don't have that anti-missile defense system." I don't recall anyone rejoining with, "oh, come on, the anti-missile defense system is only for real, serious attacks."

Fred Kaplan has a good chapter on anti-missile defense in Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. In particular, he says (p. 79):

The debate over missile defenses dated not to Reagan's Star Wars or even to the 1972 ABM Treaty but much further back, to the mid-to-late 1950s, when weapons scientists inside the government, carrying high-level security clearances, first discovered the technical obstacles. Roughly every ten years since, the debate has repeated itself, with the same arguments, often among the same people. And each repetition has followed the same pattern, with the president and his aides at first enthusiastic about some technological advance that makes shooting down missiles seem suddenly feasible -- then realizing that the same old technical obstacles remain.

If Bush and his aides had known this history -- if they had known that the main critique of missile defenses was not political or philosophical but rather technical -- they might have stepped more gingerly before tripling the missile-defense budget yet again, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, and rushing a brand-new missile-defense system into production and deployment without having any idea whether it could really defend against an attack. But they didn't know the history; they thought that history was irrelevant anyway; and so they plunged ahead.

And (p. 85):

It has been a recurring pattern throughout the history of arms procurement: when one rationale for buying a weapon proves untenable, its most impassioned advocates shift to a different rationale. The advocates know that the weapon is vital to the national defense; they figure that opposition stems from some ulterior motive (political hostility or pacifism or a rivalry with the branch of the armed services that's funding the weapon). For many, it would be too drastic a cognitive shift to reassess the wisdom of a project; better to devise a new argument that justifies it. [ . . . ]

This pattern of shifting rationales has been particularly acute in the history of the ABM, because the desire for a nuclear defense is understandably strong -- and because the case for specific ABM systems has fallen apart so repeatedly.

And he follows this with various examples from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the setback that shook Nixon into negotiating the ABM Treaty (pp. 89-90):

But a bigger shock came in the spring. On April 9, 1970, Kissinger's assistant on strategic issues, Laurence Lynn, met in DuBridge's White House office with two senior executives from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Safeguard's prime contractor. The executives had called the meeting to announce that they wanted out of the ABM business. They recited all the ways that Safeguard could be overwhelmed by the offense, and concluded -- as Lynn put it afterwards in a secret/eyes-only memo to Kissinger -- that Bell no longer wanted "to be associated with a program which cannot technically perform the missions the government claims it will perform."

Nixon and Kissinger were shocked. Nixon wrote in the margins of the memo, "My guess is that the real reasons are their scientists" -- who might have been influenced by all the Nobel laureates opposing the system -- "and P.R. fears." Whatever the motive, they knew this was a disaster. Once Congress found out that the prime contractor was giving up lucrative business on the grounds that Safeguard wouldn't work, the program was doomed.

I considered working the latter story into my response. In particular, I thought about comparing Bell's scruples to the companies that have been working on Star Wars since Reagan came in. Another interesting sidelight is a story from James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. In the early 1960s McNamara set up the in-house Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to sort through all the crap the CIA and the military brass were passing off as intelligence. The first head of the DIA was Carroll's father, Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll, who remained in charge until Nixon's Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, fired him in 1969. The reason? Carroll refused to remove a statement from an intelligence estimate that said that the Soviet Union wasn't pursuing a first strike capability. Why? Because the statement was needed to justify Laird's ABM system (i.e., the same one Bell decided wouldn't work).

Also worth reading is Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which focuses especially on space-based weapons schemes (e.g., p. 216):

Similarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American -- even planetary -- way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force's "counterspace doctrine" never so much as mentions.

In fact, he gives an example of a doomsday weapon: a rocket that could launch "a dumptruck full of gravel" into orbit, where it would suffice to destroy every satellite, including the NSA's and the military's eyes and ears, as well as most of our global telecommunications bandwidth, plus handy things like GPS. Missile defense would also produce space debris, starting with the test phase.

Glenn Greenwald: Wall Street Owners Angry with their Purchase: Starts with a New York Times article where anonymous Wall Streeters are grousing about how Obama has turned on them, saying unkind things, "rousing the dirty rabble with their anti-banker rhetoric." They're so upset they're threatening to pull the plug on their contributions and flock to the Republicans -- after all, who among the Republicans would talk trash about them? Given how much influence the megabanks have had over Obama and his team, how mild his actual statements have been, they're showing awful thin skin. The arrogant sense of entitlement is shocking. It's as if they thought the backroom deals with cooked up with the Fed and Treasury were brought on by popular acclaim, or (more likely) that public opinion is totally irrelevant anymore. The Republicans have done the banks a lot of favors thus far, not least by raising such a stink over any attempt to use the same sort of restructuring the Republicans used to clean up the S&L mess -- what they called "nationalizing" the banks. The result of that was that Obama wound up rescuing the bank shareholders while leaving the banks under the same management that broke them -- and a big chunk of the real economy -- in the first place.

Simon Johnson: President Obama on CEO Compensation at Too Big to Fail Banks: Start here, but also read Paul Krugman's Clueless and Wall Street Damage Control (which includes the clueless quotes in broader context). Thanks to the federal government's "too big to fail" bank bailouts, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs will get bonuses of $17 and $9 million respectively. Obama's reaction: "I know both of those guys; they are very savvy businessmen," and "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system." Most of the flak thus far has been technical: how can you consider a bank where the federal government steps in to whitewash its bad debts and dumb investments part of the free-market system? Johnson makes more sense when he calls it "the antithesis of a free-market system."

In some ways my reaction is less visceral than Krugman's -- "Oh. My. God." But I think there are many layers of error here, and we should start unpeeling them. For starters, Obama likens these bank titans to baseball stars who make as much or more, leading Krugman to point out that at least the ballplayers didn't start a recession. Still, it's not that simple. For one thing, ballplayer salaries aren't all that generously accepted: go into any sports bar in the country and strike up a conversation on the subject. I'd be surprised if you can find anyone who doesn't think athletes are overpaid. As for CEOs, this isn't a brand new topic. The explosion of CEO pay has been a scandal for several decades now. The beggar banks are a particularly egregious example, and not just for the numbers: it smells funny that any business could totter between the edge of the abyss and enough profit to make such bonuses possible.

In fact, the whole bonus structure of the banking business smells funny. Banking used to be a simple game of percentages: people trust you with their savings, you take those savings and loan them out to businesses and people who repay those loans with interest, some of which in turn gets credited back to the depositors, with expenses and some margin of profit for the banker covered in the difference. Usually bankers did relatively well for themselves, but they mostly did well if the community did well, and they were a part of that. These days it's not so clear. In 2007 the banking-financial services industry was responsible for about 20% of the nation's GDP, but took 41% of all corporate profits. There are two obvious problems in that sentence: one is that it's impossible to imagine why one out of every five dollars we spend should be for credit or insurance; you'd think we could do something that important a little more efficiently, especially with all the advances in computers and telecommunications. The other is that if finance is more than twice as profitable as the rest of the economy, it seems likely that a lot of the money that passes through bankers' hands is getting stuck (or sucked up) along the way.

For instance, consider this example. We have an old friend: a longtime community organizer, good politics, decent in every way. He moved to New York and got a job with one of those "socially responsible" investment firms, eventually parlaying that into his own financial services business (although he's still attached to some megabank). We put $50k into an account with him nearly a decade ago. That account is now worth $48k, which isn't the worst total imaginable but hasn't impressed us enough to up our ante. On the other hand, our friend got written up in the New York Times a while back: an article on a fancy rehab to his $1 million apartment, so evidently he's pulling in pretty good income regardless of what his clients are getting back. Now, I don't begrudge him his success -- certainly no more than Obama, who's a pretty savvy businessman in his own right, begrudges Dimon for pulling down 50+ times Obama's salary. But this still smells funny, like the entire financial services industry has turned into a giant scam for sucking up as much loose change as possible.

This suggests several things to me. For one thing, even before the bailouts the banking system wasn't functioning as a real free market. Had it been, there would have been competitive pressure to drive prices down and reward efficiency. Instead, what we see is basically an orgy of escalating fees. Competition would also drive wages down, and that would have put a lid on bonuses. It's one thing for a CEO to rape the stockholders -- that happens in practically every industry these days -- but it's extraordinary when you start handing out million-dollar bonuses just for sales commissions. You can't do that and still deliver cost-competitive product if there's any competitive pressure. The only reason for payouts like that is that you're robbing someone and feel obliged to split the take -- if for no other reason than to keep the buyer in the dark.

The net effect of doing business like that is a culture of rapaciousness -- a culture so pervasive in the industry now that the movers and shakers expect "retention bonuses" even when they fail. Joseph Stiglitz writes in his new book, Freefall (p. 80):

But even the collapse of the system did not curb their avarice. As the government provided the banks with money to recapitalize and ensure a flow of credit, they instead used the money to pay themselves record bonuses -- for the record losses! Nine lenders that combined had nearly $100 billion in losses received $175 billion in bailout money through TARP and paid out nearly $33 billion in bonuses, including more than $1 million apiece to nearly five thousand employees. Other money was used to pay dividends, which are supposed to be a sharing of profits with shareholders. In this case, though, there were no profits, just government handouts.

This doesn't follow the expected rules of capitalism, so what is really going on here? If you have no profits but pay dividends and bonuses, what exactly are you paying people for? I'll hazard a guess and say influence: the banking racket is held together by its profiteering, and threatens to fly apart if people don't get their expected cut. Lucky thing for the banks that the government stepped in to pick up the tab, or is it so lucky? Although oil, arms, and (lately) health care buy a lot of influence in Washington, do any of them have remotely as much clout as the banks? We know, for sure, that the auto industry, which back when America built things was the largest sector of the economy, doesn't come close: not only isn't GM paying out bonuses and dividends, their management has been canned and their shareholders liquidated in bankruptcy, all for chump change -- $30 billion, compared to the trillion-plus the banks have racked up. This didn't just happen: the banks have been clawing away at the regulations Roosevelt put in place in 1933 after the last time unregulated banking wrecked the economy. They finally got rid of the Carter-Glass Act in 1999, and less than 10 years later they brought back memories of 1929.

If ever a lesson was obvious, this is it. Even Obama understands that new regulations are in order. The problem is that he severely underestimates the enemy. One proof of this is that he regards bank CEOs like Dimon and Blankfein as "savvy businessmen" -- as opposed to reckless buccaneers (to put it kindly) or greedy crooks (which is more like it). There's also the problem of his team, all of whom are deeply bred in the banking culture. More generally, he has a real serious problem with deferring to rich people. That is the world he aspired to and catered to, in fact sucked up to so much that he raised more money in his presidential run than McCain or Clinton. He knows people like Dimon and Blankfein because he's cultivated them for years. In doing so he's overlooked what they really do, and bought into the myth that what's good for America's rich is good for America.

It shouldn't take more than a minute of reflection to see that that's nonsense. The banking industry is a predatory racket, backed by legal favors from Washington and, in a pinch, trillions of tax dollars. One way to prove this is to look at the fine print on your credit card bill: the interest rates are beyond usurious, and you're likely to be smacked with fees coming and going for the slightest slip-up on your part. Given the costs and risks, why would anyone do business with that credit card company? Well, try to find one that will give you a better deal. Or take mortgages: Stiglitz has a whole chapter on mortgage scams, most predatory, many flat-out fraudulent. In the lead-up to the crisis, mortgage brokers went out of their way to write bad mortgages, which could then be passed on through banks who securitized them to investors who were deliberately misled on what they were buying and what the real risks were. The only reason Bernie Madoff is in jail and Dimon and Blankfein are rolling in fresh cash is that the latter covered their tracks with more confusing paperwork and a lot of political graft.

Krugman is right that Obama is clueless here. He doesn't have the instinct to trash a rich athlete, let alone a big contributor, and he doesn't have the touch to connect with the rage so many Americans feel about his insider deals. (That is, by the way, why Michelle Malkin scored so successfully with her utterly hypocritical Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies, and that's precisely the same sense of rage that drove the Democrats out of Congress in 1994.) But he's got an even bigger problem than being clueless, and that's being dumb. He fails to recognize that what makes the banking industry so troublesome is how they use their political and financial leverage to strip the economy, and that in the process they're making everyone else's lives poorer and riskier. Moreover, it's not just the bankers who are devouring the nation. Same thing is going on with the health care industry, which got some press last week for topping 17% of GDP. Lots of people in America are smart and work hard and never get rich. The people who get rich have angles they can leverage, which could be a distinctive brand or a patent or some market niche they've cornered and rendered noncompetitive; increasingly, it's a lobbyist on K Street who perverts the government from serving the public into favoring a special interest. But what lets all of these special interests get away with it is that we're brought up to esteem the rich and successful -- indeed, is there any definition of conservative that matters other than to serve the rich?

Obama's proving himself to be a complete conservative. Guess I'm going to have to go back to describing the Republicans as something else, like neo-fascists.

Mahablog: What Small Government Looks Like: Alternatively, what happens when the Tea Baggers win. I suppose it had to happen somewhere, if for nothing else because so many folks can only learn things the hard way, and Colorado Springs -- home of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and the U.S. Air Force Academy -- is at least, blessedly, not here. Colorado, you may recall, was the state that got suckered into passing a so-called Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TaBOR) law, which pretty much guaranteed that taxpayers would be subjected to nothing but bad government until it keeled over and expired from starvation. (We've fought similar laws off here in Kansas for years, although the ringleader managed to get himself elected to the Sedgwick County Board where he's become Public Menace No. 1.) Still, it's rare to read a report starting off with how many police and firefighters will be sacked.

I read a similar piece a while back about how Arizona is closing half of its state parks due to lack of funds. As someone who as a kid grew up drooling over Arizona Highways that hit pretty close to home. Here in Kansas our ex-Republican, ex-Democrat, soon-to-be-ex-Governor is pushing for a sales tax increase to salvage even the cutback budget, while many of the state's local school boards are suing the state for abandonment. These stories show one of the ironies in the Republicans' starve-the-beast strategy: it isn't hard to get folks riled up about the federal government and all its waste and corruption, but the immediate victims of their success will be state and local governments that those same folks actually depend on. I expect this will backfire, although I have to admit that in their strongholds Republicans manage to keep getting re-elected while providing the worst government possible. Still, especially in the belt from South Carolina to Texas and Oklahoma expectations have been awful low for a very long time. Still, what's happening in Colorado and Arizona are even below long-time norms, so you have to wonder.

Matthew Yglesias: More Condescension Needed: Starts with a quote from Gerard Alexander:

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.

I may not be qualified to speak for liberals, but aside from the word "fact" I don't see any evidence that conservatives are any less convinced that their positions are self-evidently right and that opposing views are "illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration." (Facts do seem to be a distinct refuge for liberals, and something conservatives casually disregard.) And I can recall any number of conservatives deriding liberals as idiots (Mona Charen's Useful Idiots is one example; the collected works of Ann Coulter is another), and this has been going on a long time. You might argue that liberals have finally caught up with conservatives in mustering disdain for their opponents, and you might bemoan that uncivility, but it didn't come from nowhere. And one might even argue that liberal invective is the direct result of the degradation of conservative thought. Ten-twenty-thirty years ago there were liberals who readily acknowledged that some conservatives had some good ideas -- there was indeed a period when conservatives touted themselves as "the party of ideas." That doesn't happen anymore because a lot of those ideas have been tried and found wanting, and because conservative mindsets have increasingly shrunk back into their reptilian shell, lashing out incoherently about taxes and big government and the need to destroy anyone who doesn't like us enough.

Alexander digs up an old Lionel Trilling quote:

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

It's worth remembering that in 1950 the Republican Party was dominated by its northeastern wing, having nominated Wendell Wilkie and Thomas Dewey as its last standard bearers, with Ike Eisenhower in the wings. Conservatives were marginal within the GOP, and even those who passed as mainstream conservatives then would be hard pressed to pass muster now. By 1950 the New Deal had outgrown its personal association with Roosevelt, and had moved on to conquer the Axis powers in WWII, to build the US economy up to a point where it was not only world-dominant but also more equitably distributed than at any time before or since. (Actually, the decline and decay began around 1970, as conservatives started to make their comeback.) So Trilling's quip had a whiff of triumphalism to it.

Still, it seems more apt now than ever. Conservatives have often been able to talk a good game, but after the last 8 or 14 or 28 years it should be clear that no matter how attractive their ideas seem, in practice they are disastrous. Especially while Bush was in the White House liberals have had plenty of opportunity to sharpen their critique. On the other hand, since Bush left office, the conservatives (or Republicans, since the two have become one) have raged and ranted but it's hard to see a single coherent idea they've brought to fore. They rant about banking industry bailouts, but they oppose any attempt to regulate the banking industry (such as the regulations that kept banks from needing bailouts from the 1930s until they were repealed less than a decade before the meltdown). They rant about budget deficits, which they practically invented with the Bush tax cuts, but recoil in horror at either raising taxes (which Reagan and the first Bush did to limit deficits) or address rampant growth in health care costs. They oppose Obama's conservative health care reform program (negotiated with industry and the AMA to keep private insurance companies in business despite overwhelming proof of dysfunctionality), but can't give a single coherent reason why. The way things are going, we can shorten Trilling's quote: the "irritable mental gestures" remain, but they scarcely even "seek to resemble ideas."

I suppose it's possible that there are thoughtful conservatives somewhere. One thing that makes it hard to tell is that since Obama took office the public face of conservatives has been the media celebrities (Alexander excuses "relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck") and Republican politicos, with all the Tea Party nonsense noise in the background, plus the occasional terrorist like Scott Roeder or Randall Terry. And the fact that congressional Republicans have maintained party unity only underscores their commitment to their most vocal fringe. On the other hand, it's not hard to find self-styled conservatives who have broken ranks, especially under Bush -- some names that come to mind include John Dean, Bruce Bartlett, Andrew Sullivan, Andrew Bacevich. I saw a bit with David Stockman tonight where he argued that the age of tax-cutting that he inaugurated as Reagan's budget director is over and that we need to be raising taxes. I looked him up, and ran across this bit of advice he has for Obama:

He should immediately stop the unconscionable bailout of Wall Street, housing, autos and other sectors. These bailouts are an enormous waste of resources that add huge amounts to the public debt while accomplishing nothing in terms of real economic recovery. Instead, he needs to focus government spending exclusively on the safety net; that is, helping the poor and unemployed to cope with the economic disaster created by the Fed and Washington, while leaving the markets and economy to liquidate excessive debts and failed investments. The second thing he needs to do is fire his economic team: Bernanke, Geithner and Summers.

That's a combination of ideas that can't be simply caricatured as either conservative or liberal, but it's consistent and has a workable sense of balance. From the left, I have a different set of ideas, but this at least is something I can see as plausible. Sure, ideological conservatives and ideological liberals would probably reject either Stockman's or my ideas out of hand, but pragmatic reformers wouldn't be so close-minded. Interestingly, a lot of people who conservatives viscerally reject as liberals, socialists, fringe leftists, and/or fascists, are really people who just recognize problems and are willing to try things that may work even if they aren't first choices. For instance, cap and trade is a flexible market mechanism for dealing with a problem that people from the left would traditionally try to deal with through regulation. Yet most so-called liberals, including Obama, are pushing for cap and trade to mitigate global warming: partly they do so because it should be an approach that would attract market-oriented conservatives (if they can extricate their heads from wherever they've stuck them), but also because it might be a more effective way of dealing with the problem. Private health insurance exchanges is another Obama sop to market-oriented conservatives (and to some powerful business interests). In this case, no one on the left has any fondness for the idea, but most would support it if that's what it took to get health care reform going. (And in this case it is definitely not a better idea, even if it is marginally workable.)

Through two wars and several rounds of tax cuts, Republicans plunged us into massive deficits while allowing private interests to steal us blind, and doing whatever they could to cripple the welfare state safety net. Among the results was a major financial meltdown: the simplest way to understand it is that the rich wound up with so much money the only way they could pretend to invest it was to construct a huge ponzi scheme that eventually collapsed on itself, taking a big chunk of the real economy with it. The combination cost the Republicans power, and that loss is the only thing they can think about remedying -- putting an end to their wars or their financial misadventure is way beyond their conception -- so they've orchestrated a massive slander campaign against Obama and the Democrats. They can't do this honestly -- honesty would involve admitting some culpability, and that in turn would ease Obama off the hook -- so they spew out nonsense and cover it up with rage, and it sort of seems to be working. You don't have to be liberal, let alone a leftist, to see this as a hollow scam, but it helps because if you are one you've seen this sort of scam from these same people before. And for those who see into this scam, how do you expect them to regard those who can't see it? I don't know about you, but stupid is the first word that pops into my mind. And as I look for other possibilities, stupid seems the kindest, because pretty much everything else suggests sinister ulterior motives.

Alexander whines and pouts that liberals think conservatives are stupid. OK, so what? From what we've seen of late, the shoe sure fits. But Alexander is wrong in saying that liberals have always thought conservatives stupid. Throughout most of history, liberals figured conservatives to be privileged, greedy, uncaring, and often flat-out spiteful. It's only when they start claiming that their programs will benefit everyone (not just themselves) that it becomes clear that they are stupid (or worse). Moreover, it's not just liberals (and leftists) who have come to conclude this. Consider this little item from Bruce Bartlett's blog (titled "Why I Am Not a Republican"):

I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid.

In racking my brain above, even I didn't come up with "insane": something more to be said for approaching a problem from multiple perspectives.

Since I started with Yglesias, let's finish by letting him continue:

I have a condescending attitude toward this op-ed. Of course I think my views are correct and based on fact and reason. If I thought my views weren't correct and based on fact and reason, I would adopt different views -- correct fact-and-reason based ones. Does Alexander really think that conservatives don't think their views are correct? Does Alexander not think his own views are correct? Not based on fact? Not based on reason? I'm not sure it's possible to be condescending enough to this op-ed.