Libya and Syria

T

uesday's newspapers made for some interesting reading on the subject of the Middle East. First, I take note of a New York Times op-ed called “Finish the Job" by James M. Dubik, who is described as a retired Army Lieut. Gen. who oversaw the training of Iraqi troops from the 2007 to 2008. General Dubik argues that we are in quite a mess in Libya, that we have three policy choices, none of them attractive. I agree with his basic assessment, but then of course I sort of have to since back on March 22, in my piece called "Down the Rabbit Hole", I predicted that air power alone would not be able to depose the Libyan regime and that we would in fact be faced––hold it, let me rephrase that––the Obama Administration would be faced, with a nasty dilemma: either go in to finish the job lest the wounded loon become quite dangerous, or let the situation fester in the hell of half measures.

Actually, General Dubik posits three choices: do nothing and fail, do only enough to prevent failure, or go in and finish the job. I don't see these as really three options, because doing only enough to prevent failure is merely a stopgap, albeit such “strategy” can go on for a long time, as the Johnson Administration’s approach to Vietnam proves. Eventually, barring genuine dumb luck, good or bad, the Administration still has to decide one way or the other. Still, that minor criticism aside, I think Gen. Dubik sees the situation very clearly. I want to make my own position very clear: I would rather have stayed away from this Libyan intervention altogether, but having started a war we cannot afford to lose it, and I define any outcome that leaves Muamar Qaddafi in power a loss. To listen to Administration spokesman, time is on our side. To listen to most other analysts, it is not. As with most things, time will tell whether the Administration is indulging in Macawberism—waiting futilely for something to turn up—or if its sense of patience will in the end be vindicated.

Yesterday's Washington Post, on its front page above the fold, grabbed my attention in a very different way. In a news article signed by Scott Wilson, under the headline "Syria escalates gleeful crackdown", there appears this sentence, functioning as the article's entire third paragraph: "The government's show of force, the largest in weeks of street demonstrations, is sharpening the choice facing President Obama, who has attempted to balance calls for democratic reform in the Arab world with concerns of allies that have counted on President Bashar al-Assad to preserve stability in the volatile Middle East."

When Wilson speaks of “allies that have counted on President Bashar al-Assad to preserve stability in the volatile Middle East”, it naturally raises the question of which allies he's talking about. One construction is that he means Arab countries that are friendly with the United States, with the possible addition of Israel and perhaps Turkey. We finally figure out what Wilson means when the article meanders over to page A8. This is what he says: "Many US allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, hope that Assad finds a way to remain in power."

We will come to Israel and Turkey in a moment, but first we will need to find oxygen. Because the idea that Saudi Arabia favors the maintenance of the Assad regime in Syria is truly breathtaking. I would love to know how Wilson came to this conclusion. The fact of the matter is that there are no Arab regimes, and certainly no Sunni Arab regimes, with any affection whatsoever for Assad and his thugs in Damascus. As far as the Arabs go, the Syrian regime is isolated. It has no friends, not even among its fellow military government in Algeria. By allying itself with Iran and murdering scores of Sunni politicians in Lebanon, the Syrian regime has made enemies to one degree or another out of all of them, not least Saudi Arabia, but also including every single Gulf regime except, perhaps, those high-wire diplomatic gamblers in Qatar, the kind of Arab Bedouin magicians who both grant us military basing rights and sponsor the pandaemonically anti-American TV station Al-Jazeera.

There is a remote possibility, I suppose, that the Jordanian regime would fear a refugee crisis on its border should things get a lot worse in Syria, particularly so since the town of Dera'a, near the border, has been an epicenter of revolt. But the idea that the Hashemite monarchy would prefer an Alawi-ruled Syria in perpetuity to a Sunni-dominated one just because of that is very difficult to credit.

Now what about Israel? Walter Russell Mead lays out a basic strategic analysis of the Syrian dilemma very nicely in his American Interest blog post of April 23, “War in Syria Next?” One of the comments he makes is that Israel has a stake in the Assad regime. As he put it, the Israelis don't love the Syrian regime, but it has provided a certain predictability. Actually, Walter isn’t wrong, but he understates and perhaps slightly oversimplifies the situation.

Israelis have for many years disagreed about the role that Syria has played in the region and how it has abutted on Israeli interests. At the risk of simplifying somewhat myself, the Israeli military, and those Israelis who see the world more or less like the military does, have viewed the Alawi regime as the least bad of alternatives in Syria. Why is this? Basically, three reasons.

First, the Alawis are very repressive. They repress Sunnis as their speciality (see Hama, 1982). They repress the Muslim Brotherhood. They repress Salafi fanatics who want to destroy Israel even more than some non-Sunni Syrians say they do. If the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, then the Syrian regime is a friend to Israel of a certain Middle Eastern kind.

Second, the Syrians are afraid of Israel militarily, and so they renew the United Nations mandate concerning the Golan Heights regularly without complaint or comment. This has made the Golan Heights one of the safest places in the entire region, unless you happen to be a bulgur-grazing cow who steps inadvertently on an old Syrian landmine, thus turning itself into many kilos of kibbie. This creates military stability on one of Israel's borders, not a small matter as such matters go.

Third, the Syrian regime, by insisting on a command economy for political reasons, keeps Syria an economic basketcase. The country is so poor and so lacks economic dynamism that the prospect of it replacing its rusting Soviet order of battle for cash on the barrelhead is about nil. This, of course, is related to the first comment: The Syrian regime is afraid of Israel because it cannot keep up with Israel militarily. That fact may be a main reason that led the Syrian regime to collude with North Korea in trying to create a nuclear weapons capability. Such a capability could leapfrog its conventional inferiority. Of course, that didn't work out so well for the Syrians either.

Together, these last two circumstances also explain why Israel need not feel particularly pressured to compromise territorially on the matter of the Golan Heights. Experts on this part of the world know that the Alawis, whose home turf is in Latakia province, feel no special attachment to the Golan Heights which, in Syrian terms, amounts to Jebel Druze, or the mountain of the Druze. These two minoritarian groups within Syria have never particularly liked one another or gotten along. The idea that the Alawis would risk their tenure in Damascus for an equity that belongs to the Druze doesn't make a lot of sense. This doesn't stop some Americans and others from imagining that the Assad regime, that of the father as well as that of the sun, are sincere believers in Syrian nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism, and that they want the Golan Heights back desperately for nationalist reasons. To the extent that one knows little about Syrian history and political culture, this argument makes sense. But of course it's wrong.

For Israelis who for one reason or another don't want to return the Golan Heights to Syria, or to anybody else, the Alawi regime thus functions as a kind of guarantee that negotiations will never get that serious. That negotiations may have seemed to get very serious in the fairly recent past is an illusion. The negotiating process itself was valuable to the Syrian regime, but an actual deal that required implementation would not have been. A deal would have deprived the regime of its excuse to funnel money and other resources into the military, which, in addition to the Ba'ath Party, is under the control of the Alawis. It would have ended the pretext that has justified Syria's emergency laws all these years. It would have created demands for a more normal politics, a normality that sooner or later would undermine Alawi control of the country and the economy.

Here is some evidence that supports this interpretation. Every time a deal seemed to be within reach, the Syrians would predictably haul out a demand that the new border ratified by the peace treaty to be specify the one that existed on the day before June 6, 1967. But the border before June 6, 1967 was not the international border; it was instead the result of demilitarized zones established in the armistice arrangements of 1949 and by subsequent tactical creep in the years after 1949. The de facto border of June 5, 1967 had the Syrians dipping their toes in the Sea of Galilee, while the international border, as drawn between the British and the French mandatory authorities after World War I, did and does not.

It is only a matter of couple of meters really, but it is a critical couple of meters, because it determines whether Syria is entitled to riparian rights to the Sea of Galilee, and hence to the outflow of the sea into the lower Jordan River. There was and there remains no way that any Israeli government, no matter what its politics or its coalition circumstances, would ever agree to allow Syria riparian rights on the Sea of Galilee. Since the Syrians know this, making this demand is a no-fail showstopper.

The Syrians must have been privately terrified at one point, the last time this sort of thing got going, when some clever Israelis, assisted by some clever Americans, reasoned that because the Sea of Galilee had receded in size over the years since 1967, it might be possible to let the Syrians come back to where they were literally on June 5, 1967 without being able to dip their toes into the sea. The idea was to give in to the Syrian demand, thus allowing the sealing of a deal, but without jeopardizing fundamental Israeli security over access to water. According to some accounts, that is when the Syrians pulled the plug and ended the negotiations, since they had run out of excuses not to say "yes."

This point of view, in which Israelis see some strategic benefit from the Alawi regime in Syria, also explains why at least some Israelis did not disparage particularly Syrian domination of Lebanon between the onset of the Civil War in 1975 and the Cedar Revolution. The reasoning went something as follows: The Syrians, out of their own interests, would enforce limits on how crazy Lebanon might get. Left to their own devices, the Lebanese might collapse themselves again into civil war, one in which Iran might now prove decisive in support of Hezbollah and the Shi’a in general. Better the Syrians to control or balance matters, thought many Israelis, then a Lebanon left completely free to destroy itself, and allow the creation of a new security nightmare in the south of the country even worse for Israel than was the case before the 1982 Israeli invasion.

Moreover, according to the same logic, Syria would never let Lebanese territory pose a genuine military threat to Israel, because if it did, Israel would go to war to upend that threat, and that by definition would have to include Syria. That meant, in essence, that Syrian influence in Lebanon inherently moderated Syrian policy as well as any prospective threat from Lebanon. For many Israelis, that was just fine. Besides, reasoned many, an Israeli peace treaty with Lebanon wasn't worth very much, even if one could be acquired. Lebanon by itself, as a state, poses no existential threat to Israel, so beyond the symbol of a peace agreement there would be no strategic substance to be gained from it.

This Israeli way of thinking with regard to Syria has not been immune from challenge. It has been challenged by other Israelis, of which more below, but it has also been challenged by reality. The truth of the matter is that Syrian influence in Lebanon did not decisively constrain Hezbollah's ability to harm Israel. It probably limited it, true, which may be inferred from the fact that since the Syrian military was forced to leave Lebanon in April 2005, Iran's arming of Hezbollah has accelerated both in quantity and quality. It is precisely that post-Syrian growth that helped lead to the summer 2006 mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah. But it would be a stretch to say that Syrian influence kept the Hezbollah menace controlled within a box. The Syrians wagered, in essence, that they could use Hezbollah’s growing threat to Israel as a kind of stick or asset, propitiate their Iranian ally by doing so, and at the same time not let that threat grow so large as to catalyze an Israeli preemption.

This was always risky business, and the net result today represents a real irony as far as the Syrians are concerned. Whatever role Damascus may have played as a modulator in Lebanese affairs, it now stands vulnerable to the outflow of Iranian behavior such that its alliance with Iran has actually increased the danger to itself. Iran has armed Hezbollah with so many rockets and missiles that it has become a very serious threat to Israel's civilian population. It is by no means far-fetched that at some point in the near future the Israeli government and military will determine this to be unacceptable. If Israel takes military action to eliminate the threat posed by Hezbollah, it will probably have no choice but to preemptively attack Syrian targets so that Israeli aircraft will not be vulnerable to Syrian air defenses. The Syrians are likely to get smashed but good. Ironically, too, however, Israelis who value the stability that the Alawi regime has provided are not about to do such a thing anytime soon, for fear that it would be the last straw on top of the regime’s funeral pyre.

Now, if you happen to be an Israeli who thinks that a peace deal with Syria is the key to all manner of good things, then the present Syrian regime is and has long been an obstacle to all those good things. And there are many such Israelis. They are not particularly worried that a post-Alawi Sunni regime would be friendly toward, prone to or a victim of Salafi fanaticism. They believe that if the Syrians were not there to mess things up, Israel and Lebanon could sign a peace agreement that would in truth be worth something. And they believe further that an Israeli-Syrian peace deal would make a peace deal with the Palestinians much easier to acquire, implement and enforce. So this is the rationale for those Israelis who think that a peace deal between Israel and Syria is the key to an end-of-conflict series of negotiations. Since the present Alawi regime will not make such a deal, most members of the school by now believe, it stands to reason that its fall is in Israel's ultimate long-term interests.

I hope no one is surprised to learn that Israelis have taken amongst themselves different views of this issue over the years. Israelis disagree about a great many things. And this is why I said above that Walter’s assessment here is not so much wrong, but perhaps a little on the lite side.

Now Turkey. As Walter points out, Turkey is another country that has invested a fair bit with the Syrian regime in recent years. But I don't think that the current Turkish government would shed any tears for the Alawis were they to fall to a Sunni-dominated government. After all, the AKP is itself very seriously Sunni, and is likely to see a Damascus restored to the Sunnis as a better potential ally in the long run then the Alawis could ever be.

If there are in Turkey centers of power that look kindly upon Assad and the Ba'ath for the sake of stability, these consist of the army and secularists still in thrall to the Ataturkist legacy elsewhere in the country.

From the U.S. point of view, it is almost too easy to make a list of good things that would, or at least could, happen if the Syrian regime should fall, assuming, of course, that what replaces it isn't even worse for Western interests (not an assumption that can be made glibly). First, Iran loses a key ally. Its ability to pollute Lebanese politics decreases. It's ability to arm Hezbollah decreases. Its ability to foil Saudi desiderata goes away. Second, the ability or inclination, or both, of Damascus to support terrorism far and wide presumably decreases as well, if not ends altogether. That includes its ability to continue making trouble inside Iraq.

A reduction in the mischief-making potential of Syria is of course a good thing. It might make Palestinians a bit more pliant, since reining in Hezbollah would also hurt Hamas. This might help the so-called peace process along, but it needs so very much help that this alone is unlikely to be decisive.

The fall of the Assad regime might also give the Iranian regime pause. Walter suggests that it might make the mullahs more flexible in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, but I doubt that. I think the Iranians see the nuclear program as essentially nonnegotiable, because it represents the ultimate ace in the hole against Western efforts toward regime change. Walter also suggests, more plausibly in my view, that it might curtail Iranian risk-taking, which might in turn reduce the prospect of a major fight between Iran and the United States. But then again, many factors play in such considerations, some that may be reasonably said to be controllable and some we should very reasonably assume not to be.

It is true, obviously, that the United States has divided interests in what is going on in the Arab world today in general. On the one hand, we support the right of free speech, assembly and peaceable protest against authoritarian regimes, and we wish true democrats (few as they may be) and those fighting for their rights well in such a contest. Indeed, we support them even in the knowledge that their success might well lead to a long period of general political instability. Rapid political change and rapid economic growth are not stabilizing; quite the contrary, as any reading of history will tell you. The success of the anti-authoritarian pulse in the Middle East is more likely to create space for al-Qaeda to plot and take shelter than its failure, and this is true despite the fact that the success of anti-authoritarian protest movements would undermine the appeal of al-Qaeda’s pitch, which is that only its brand of resistance can change the unacceptable status quo.

But pace Scott Wilson, Syria does not manifest this dilemma. Of all the cases in the Middle East, the Syrian case is the one in which there is the closest parallel between American strategic interests and American principles. Aside from Israel's special interpretation of the present Syrian regime, it is clear that, from the American point of view, the upside overwhelms the risks when it comes to Bashar al-Assad. Americans should want him and his murderous Ba'ath regime gone. The risks that a post-Alawi Syria could be worse then the present regime are not zero, but they should not paralyze us. This is a case where American interests and principles are not in conflict, but it is a case in which U.S. interests and Israeli interests, at least as interpreted by many Israelis, may be in conflict.

As to more abstract issues, Walter put his finger on the obvious discomfort that the situation in Syria creates for the Obama Administration, but it's not the choice, as Wilson would have us believe, between interests and principles. Rather it's a matter of principles inconsistently applied.

We still don't know if there would have been a massacre in Benghazi. What we do know is that since March 17, when the cruise missiles started flying toward Tripoli, the death of innocent civilians in Libya, and perhaps not-so-innocent ones in rebel formations, has not ceased. The ordeal in Misurata stands as bleak testimony to that reality. Yet as the Libyan regime has increased the indiscriminate shelling of that town and others, and killed scores of civilians, the Obama Administration has reduced U.S. participation in the air campaign. As Walter points out, the potential for mass murder by the regime of its own people is greater by far in Syria than in Libya. Yet despite some tough words, there is no indication whatsoever that the United States is contemplating military intervention in Syria on behalf of the same principles, embodied in the UN resolution, that we say is the basis of the NATO intervention in Libya. Looked at from the humanitarian perspective, the issues in Libya and Syria are the same, but the gravity of the situation is much worse in Syria. Yet the U.S. government intervenes in the lighter case, however indecisively, but shows no sign of intervening in the latter, heavier case.

As Walter also suggests, but which no one can prove, it is possible that the willingness of the Syrian people go into the street has been buoyed by the sight of NATO aircraft at work in Libya. If that is true, then what United States has done in Libya has made it complicit in developments in Syria. This reminds some of us of the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, when the actions and words of the United States led the Kurds and the Shi'a to rise up against Saddam Hussein only to be left hung completely out to dry. It also reminds some of us of the American role in stimulating Hungarians to take to the streets against their Soviet occupiers in October 1956, when it was always clear--on this side of the Atlantic anyway--that the United States was not about to start World War III over Budapest. Have we gone and done the same thing again? Have we proved once again that our idealistic posturing, which makes those who do it feel so noble within, is not free of a price, at least not for others?

Walter has a couple of choice questions on this very point for Samantha Power, as if she had made the critical decisions over Libya and not the President. This is a satisfying way of writing about the problem, even if it's not completely fair. But again, Walter has alluded to the key issue even if he did not name it as such: moral hazard. If the United States acts such a way that it elicits violent anti-regime behavior hither and yon, but does not then come to the aid of those thus elicited, it is morally responsible, at least in part, for the consequences.

This is not just a theory. U.S. behavior and language combined to persuade the KLA in Kosovo that if it started a terror campaign against the Serbs, the Serbs would retaliate in an oafish and disproportional manner such as to draw the United States in on the side of the Kosovars. And that is pretty much what happened, for better or for worse––and I think probably for some of both. But the inarguable fact is that a lot of people got killed as a result of that war, and the United States cannot absolve itself from being at least partly to blame. Whether the outcome justifies the price, a price that, as usual, was paid mainly by others, is a matter on which honest people disagree. Obviously, not acting can carry a price, too. No one is trying to imply that these things are easy or simple.

What this means at the least, however, is that when American Presidents and other leaders utter idealistic statements before the media cameras that make for good applause lines, and that make them feel fuzzily noble inside, and persuade themselves and others that they are being good citizens of the world in affirming the so-called responsibility to protect, it ramifies in practical ways that can lead to very bloody consequences. All high-profile political speech must contend with the problem of multiple audiences. It is never easy to do this, but people who take moral issues seriously should be the first, not the last, to make an extra effort.

We could do worse than to end with a quote from George Orwell. Orwell once said, reportedly at least, that all saints should be presumed guilty until proven innocent. I cannot improve on that.

Triangulating

It is the Pesach of the "Arab Spring", and both coincide with the publication of Frank Fukuyama's new book The Origins of Political Order. I hear echoes among the three.

As to Frank's book, first, I read the whole thing in manuscript some months ago. I am thanked in Frank's acknowledgments, along with many others, so I do not intend here (or anywhere else) a review. I made a bunch of suggestions back them, some structural and presentational, a few substantive and bibliographical. It'll be interesting on reading the finished book to learn which suggestions, if any, Frank considered seriously. It'll also be worthwhile to read the book again anyway, because it's just that kind of book: It takes a while, a second reading at the least, to absorb the argument and the evidence in tandem. It's a big book, with a big set of ideas, based on some large premises.

I had little of core relevance to say to Frank after I first read the manuscript because I did not disagree with most of the premises, and the one I am agnostic about I knew it was pointless to raise again, because Frank and I have had this conversation several times over the past decade and more. It has to do not with what is similar between Sam Huntington and Frank, for there is a lot, but what is different, and that is temperamental, not analytical, at base. And here I intuit more like Huntington than like Frank. Frank sees a direction in history, if not an overarching teleology. I am not so sure; we may, for all I know, just be seeing some very long cycles that look like they don't curl back on themselves but actually do. I don't know if history is going anywhere in particular, or if it is that it's a destination I want to arrive at.

Anyway, let me get to the essence of the book, and then try to show how Pesach resonates with Frank's argument (which Frank does not know or care about, most likely). Then, after I have done that, I will talk briefly about the Arabs in this joint context.

First the premises (there are three, I think), one of which can be proven and two of which probably cannot.

The first premise is that humans are social animals and always have been. This matters enormously, and I think it is proven by evolutionary biology and affirmed by what we know from cultural anthropology. This reason why this matters is that Western political philosophy is based on a different premise--that of primordial individualism. Among other things, proving this premise places the subject matter right smack into the lap of sociology, not psychology, and it presupposes a kind of primordial politics based on what we know about human emotions and particularly about recognition and dignity. I think this is obviously correct, and long before I read Frank's manuscript I wrote about it myself, including in my Jewcentricity book. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I'm foreshadowing what all this has to do with Pesach...

That leads to the second premise: that politics is an autonomous domain, not an epiphenomenal one rooted in economics, for example. Ideas matter, and they may be freely formed. They are contingent--not infinitely so, to be sure, but they may vary widely. It is a plastic domain.

To me, this reminds of the late Daniel Bell, who, like Nietzsche, distrusted all monadic systems and systematizers, and saw culture, economics and politics as obviously intertwining but essentially separate realms. So does Frank, and I agree. This does not mean that the ideas have to be "right"--just that they matter and develop according to their own logical syntax. Indeed, some of the ideas that have sustained democracy in the West, and in the United States especially, are not right when laid against the teachings of evolutionary biology, and this does create a kind of problem in the book, perhaps. But we will get to that later.

Where I hesitate, however, is with the implicit teleology of this approach. Maybe I'm simplifying too much, but I think Frank really does still believe in a materialist teleology, that things are trending in a certain broad, positive direction even if slowly and unevenly and subject to temporary regression. I'm just not sure this is the case. If we step back far enough, I think we can see epochs in human history where human culture got very sophisticated, and in which exchanges among cultures were quite robust. I think, for example, that if you look at the Mediterranean world before Justinian's plague you could make the case that this was a highly developed international system, and that its wealth, stability, and order were on a par with our own today. It may not seem like that because our machines, our technology, are so much more sophisticated than anything that existed centuries ago. But I think that is a special conceit, or special kind of bias, that may blind us to what is essential about cultural sophistication. And that world back in the second and third century of the common era fell apart. One could even argue that the medieval civilization that covered much of Europe and the Middle East before the Black Death was also a highly sophisticated civilization that people at the time thought represented a permanent advance over anything that came before. But it too collapsed. Of course, we have the capacity now to learn from what went before because virtually everything can be put in writing and studied, as was not the case, say, in the second century. I'm still not persuaded that setbacks in civilizational terms are necessarily temporary. I wonder what Sam would say.

How I think about one or two of Frank's premises isn't really important. What's important is the argument itself. The argument is about the origins of political institutions, and the kinds of political cultures that result from differing patterns of origin. Frank is really interested in three institutions whose combination gives us current best-practice political reality.

The first concerns the origins of the state; in other words, how different societies made the transition from primordialism, or what Huntington called associational ties, to the impersonal authority of the state. Put more simply, it's a question of how people come to trust those to whom they are neither related nor particularly friendly.

The second, which seems to me pretty closely related but need not be, has to do with the rule of law. By rule of law, Frank means a written code of conduct in which the enforceability of law trumps the will of persons. Now in a way, it follows that the state must precede the rule of law, because it implies a means to enforce the law. But this isn't so necessarily. Law can exist in a political order characterized by primordialism in the form of religious law. Religious law can be written, it can be enforced, and it can be legitimate in the eyes of those to whom it applies even before there is a state.

The third institution Frank takes an interest in concerns accountability. How is it that the rulers can be controlled in such a way that they are accountable to those they rule? Now again, it seems that there is a very intimate connection between rule of law and accountability. Accountability, as most of us understand it, is a subcategory of the rule of law. Yet this, too, is not always so. One can have accountability, or forms of accountability, in tribal societies which are pre-lawlike in the sense we have defined it.

All that said, the fact that it makes sense to articulate these three goals in the order that Frank articulates them, namely, first the state, then the rule of law, and then accountability, seems to me to indicate that these three kinds of origins are quite entangled. Frank does a good job making the case for their being considered separately, and I think the most brilliant part of the argument consists in his demonstration that the order in which these three qualities of political development occur plays a definite role in shaping the character of the political culture that emerges. This aspect of the argument reminds me of Alexander Gershenkron's concept of path dependency. Except in Frank's hands, path dependency is not a one-dimensional concept, but a three-dimensional one set in relative flux--so really four-dimensional, I suppose. As far as theory goes, what Frank is up to is Einsteinian compared to Gershenkron's more Newtonian version.

But I am allowing myself to be carried away with detail here, and that was not my intention. So let me now just backtrack and say how Pesach resonates with Frank's premises and arguments.

First the premise that human beings are social animals. This resonates with Pesach because the story is really all about the creation of the Jewish people as a people, or as a nation. (These are not exactly the same but for present purposes let's assume they are.) This holiday is not about individual freedom, as many Jewish Americans think it is. It is about a corporate endeavor, namely the Jewish people. It is very hard to find any evidence of primordial individualism in the five books of Moses or in the rabbinical tradition. Even when we confess our sins on the High Holy Days we do it in the plural tense. As I already mentioned, in my Jewcentricity book I specifically show how Hobbes and Locke were more alike than different in the sense that both believe in a fixed human nature, but the rabbinic attitude is that there is no fixed human nature except in so far as its potential lies within broad parameters formed by free choice. It is not, as Hobbes said, that people are violent and society restrains them, or that society is corrosive, as Rousseau held, and that the individual would otherwise be pure. To the rabbinical mine these are two versions of nonsense. Human nature is malleable; we make of it what we will, but we don't do this as individuals. We do it as a society.

Frank's second premise is that politics is autonomous and primary, and that has to do with our collective emotional life and particularly our concern about recognition and dignity. Pesach is really very interesting compared to the holidays of most other major religions in that it is self-consciously rooted in a historical narrative. The story is not technically history as we think of it today, but at the time it was indeed an attempt to write history, a history in which the natural order and the divine order were co-mingled to create the context for political order. The idea here is that significant things happen in history because of ideas, whether they are good and reliable ones revealed by God or ideas hatched at lower levels of reliability by humans. They do not happen because of economic patterns submerged below any possibility of conscious awareness or control. The ideas we have about the way the world works and should work matter; indeed, they take pride of place. That is the bias within rabbinic Judaism, that the world can be improved, and that it can be improved by directing our volition to practical ends. That is why in Deuteronomy Moses tells the people that they have a choice between life and death, and so therefore choose life. This is also why Jews are so often commanded to remember (as in "Remember what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt") because it is in our capacity to remember that abstract ideas about right and wrong become embedded in our moral calculus.

Now it is true, I think it is fair to say, that the Haggadah is not a manifesto for political action. On the contrary; its bias is that the Jewish people did nothing to deserve their own redemption. God took them out of Egypt, and had he not done so, the story says, we would still be there, regardless of whatever effort we may have made on behalf of our own freedom in the more than 3000 years since. But I think this is too simple a reading, because Pesach is connected inextricably to Shavuot. The first holiday represents the freedom from; the second the freedom to. The former is incomplete without the latter, and the latter is all about accepting the yoke of heaven in the form of the Torah. This is something that requires volition and it is something that the community must do together. It is something that requires the presumed supremacy of ideas over circumstances.

So Pesach is a starting point, or launching pad, in a way not entirely different from the story of the Garden of Eden. It is a set up story that allows a more complex and mature narrative to develop after it, and that narrative is all about moral choice in a collective context. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible and nowhere in rabbinic literature is there any sense that material patterns of economic development or anything like it predetermine human moral choices. There is nothing deterministic anywhere. People choose, God either does or does not intervene, and stuff happens--rather little of it, if you examine the text hermaneutically, at all predictable. The story rather accumulates and has emergent properties both morally and phenomenologically. It does not suggest cyclical ebb and flow like most other ancient narratives; it goes somewhere. In this sense, I think that the premises of the Pesach story and what follows it parallel exactly Frank's insistence on the autonomy of politics and the progressive development of social and political institutions.

The third premise, now that we come to it--the one about political life going somewhere--is also echoed in Jewish thinking in other ways. Judaism is a messianic faith. It believes in the progressive development of history leading to an idealized endpoint. Passover, in this light, is once again a kickoff point for this development. In rabbinic tradition Passover will be the herald of the coming of the Messiah; that is what the symbolism of Elijah is all about. And let me say that, just as I have trouble with the idea that history has a definite positive, evolving direction, so I have trouble with taking the rabbinic idea of messiah literally. I wish I did not have such trouble, but I do. I actually think that all forms of end-of-history thinking and all idea of a messiah amount to really the same idea, one in traditional and one in secularized terms. I distrust both instinctively (though I am not sure why), and will be delightedly shocked if either one turns out to be true. I am not against other people believing such things and I see the broad social functionality of hope and optimism, of course. I just can't help my skepticism.

Now let's get to the arguments. The key political institution is the state. Without the state is hard to have a sustained rule of law and it is hard to have reliable political accountability. Without the state it is certainly hard to have democratic accountability in the sense that we understand it today. Pesach celebrates, as I've already said, the birth of the Jewish people, or nation. Before the Exodus, there were families and tribes, whether free ones before captivity in Egypt or during captivity in Egypt. The experience of liberation turns the Israelite tribes into a nation. That is what we are made to understand through this story, and that is what the rabbis have told us is the preeminent meaning of the story. We call this holiday the season of our freedom, "zeman herutanu" in transliterated Hebrew, and there can simply be no doubt that the root word involved here, herut, means freedom in a political sense. It means being free from the oppression or control or rule or sovereignty of others. It has nothing to do with personal, individual freedom or what some call these days self-actualization. It is not really properly translated as liberty in the Founding Fathers' sense; it means freedom.

The parallel, I think, lies in the fact that just as one cannot easily imagine progressive and sophisticated political development without the state, so one cannot imagine the world of religious law described in the Torah coming into being without the fundament of a political order beneath it. The purpose of the state is to administer justice, first and foremost. We see a vivid example of this not long after the revelation on Mount Sinai when Moses's father-in-law Jethro advises him to create judges and courts for the purpose of administering the law. The state is a means toward a nobler end, but it is an essential means.

To me, this is a most realistic way of thinking. Those who think one can achieve great moral and social ends by doing away with or trying to go around politics are wrong. This applies to lighter than air libertarians in one realm and it applies to NGO do-gooders in other realms. It even applies to clueless Californians who think that they can use gimmicks to overcome their basic political disagreements (an argument made by Bruce Cain in the next issue of The American Interest, just by the way).

It is true, of course, that after the destruction of the second Commonwealth the Jewish people did not have a sovereign base politically upon which to pursue their moral vocation. But this was no virtue, and the rabbis, at least, never pretended differently. Surviving in exile was difficult, and very risky. The Jewish people did it by creating a trans-territorial network to substitute for the function of the state. This has shaped Jewish history ever since, and though it has been a history of considerable achievement, it has certainly not been a happy history on balance. One can therefore, as I do, affirm the experience and even the necessity of the exile in history and still affirm the Zionist project, not as a harbinger of messiah (which, as I have said, is an idea I have trouble pouring myself into), but as a necessary protection for the security of the Jewish people.

There is one more note to add here. The state requires overcoming the attraction of kinship. In the book Frank shows how different civilizations––Chinese, Indian, Muslim, European––managed to achieve this. In one case, that of the Muslims, the institution of slave soldiers was required. The Jews did it a different way. They created a meritocracy of scholarship. Although the Exilarch was of course an inherited position, it became completely theoretical in exile. What mattered was the rabbinate, and one rose in that hierarchy as a function of integrity and scholarly merit. It didn't matter who your parents were. You could not pass on rabbinical status to your sons either. Primordialism among the Jews was downgraded in importance, of course, because of the convulsions of the first exile, the Babylonian exile, and then of the second. The autonomy and integrity of the tribes were destroyed at the hands of others. But that does not take away from the achievement of transcending tribalism through meritocracy. It is quite an interesting example. The only thing close to it that Frank describes in the book is the achievement of Chinese civilization in creating the first merit-based civil service to overcome the power of patrimonialism in Chinese politics, something that, as he shows, it never did completely.

Then there is the question of accountability, Frank's third focus. Again, I think Pesach echoes this consideration. In the first place, as is well known, the Haggadah radically downplays the role of Moses. His name is not even mentioned in the story except in passing and within quotations of prayers that are said later in the service. So the potential for tyranny or despotism is dealt with rather summarily in this fashion. But more than that, it is clear from the very beginning in rabbinical thinking, and even before that, that God and the law are sovereign. The King or the leader is an instrument of God and of the people, and he is not above the law. Indeed, for every Saul there is a Samuel, and for every David there is a Nathan telling them what they can't do. There is in the Jewish political design a separation of powers. There is separation between the leader and the law, represented by the prophets and the judges. And there is another kind of separation between the priesthood and the political order. This is not accountability in the Western sense, but it is arguably a precursor to it. It certainly looks like a pre-modern version of checks and balances.

And now finally, though this has taken much too long I admit, let us come to the Arab spring. On this season of Pesach we celebrate freedom, and so there is no way that a Jew, looking upon the energies being directed against authoritarianism and tyranny (they are not the same) in the Arab world, can feel anything but hope and even some pride of historical authorship. Until one thinks about it, that is. There are outcomes one can imagine from all this upheaval that would not be good for Israel, for the Jews, or even for the people of the Arab world––at least not in the short term (of which more just below).

But we can learn from what we see that the social dynamics going on clearly trump all other dimensions of these events. We are seeing sociology in motion, and ideas in motion too. We are also seeing how individuals cannot, in the end, control political reality in the absence of some sense of law and accountability. The Arab regimes have become brittle to the extent that they have become personalistic. That is certainly the case in Egypt, and no less so, really, in Syria, Libya, and in most of the other cases. Some have regressed from republics into virtual dynasties, as was nearly the case Egypt, as has been the case in Syria and that was planned to be the case in Libya. This proves, as Frank contends, that political decay is a very real force. Looking at Arab history over the centuries since about the 9th, and certainly the 13th, we see a particularly vivid example.

We can learn, too, from what Frank has to teach that there is a wide gap between overthrowing on authoritarian regime on the one hand and developing better political institutions on the other. P.J. O'Rourke once put it like this: "It's one thing to burn down the shit-house, another to install plumbing." The Fukuyama approach is a little less dramatic. Liberal democracy, he says on page 4, " is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power law and a system of checks and balances." These institutions do not just pop into existence overnight. They take a long time to mature. Political institutions are rooted deep in the mores and habits of society, of everyday face-to-face social relations. Where those roots are shallow and those habits are weak, one cannot expect the kinds of institutions that sustain democracy to exist with any surety, and one cannot fabricate them quickly.

Frank also stresses the innate conservatism of human political institutions. Even when the circumstances that gave rise to them change, institutions are resistant to change because some of the more powerful and wealthy come to have vested interests in their perpetuation. That is why change, especially in a more liberal democratic direction, is almost always a struggle and almost always bloody. That is why, one may surmise, too, God took the children of Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders and, not least, with the slaying of the Egyptian firstborn. There was plenty of blood. Presumably, God could've taken the children of Israel out of Egypt without any of that fancy and colorful stuff. But I think the Holy One was trying to prove a point, point about history, a point Frank makes very well in his book. And of course the Arab regimes are proving the point again and again and again just about every day we pick up the newspaper. Non-democratic institutions are resisting change and they are spilling blood to do so. No one should be surprised. Significant social change doesn't happen without politics, liberating change doesn't happen without struggle, and political decay ensures that such struggle will often be violent.

Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the state is a prerequisite in most cases for stable rule along and political accountability. The problem with the Arab states is that they have always been weak relative to sectarian identity and ethnic identity. Frank describes the Muslim Arab experience as one of political decay, the decay of institutions from the days of the great Muslim empires when the problem of primordialism was temporarily overcome. And I think this is accurate. This is why those who expect, or have expected, the upheavals in the Arab world directed against their authoritarian regimes to result in the quick establishment of stable liberal democracies are bound to have their expectations dashed against the realities of the region, and the differing realities of individual societies.

All this leaves observant and educated Jews in a strange position. On the one hand, we wish Arabs who seek freedom well, even though in most cases they are not revolting against foreign oppression as in the Pesach story, but one of several domestic varieties. Yet because the rule of law has fallen on such hard times, and because political accountability is so scarce on an institutional basis, we should not allow our hopes to mislead our expectations. Americans are a very forward-looking, can-do, optimistic people. That is a lesson from our experience as successful immigrant society almost desperate to leave the depredations of the Old World behind. Jews, on the other hand, at least to the extent they take their own traditions seriously, are taught to remember, and thus to take tradition and history very seriously, to revere the past and to take care never to sever the bond with the past. Americans lack a sense of tragedy in history, this despite the very great tragedy of the Civil War. Jews do not lack such a sense of tragedy; indeed, that sense of tragedy has, if anything, been magnified in the cauldron of the 20th century. That is why when Americans look upon the events in the Arab world in recent months, they see the "creative" side of creative destruction. But peoples steeped in tradition are just as likely to see the "destruction" side of that phrase. They are therefore more likely to be skeptical of the well-worn but still very dangerous phrase, "Well, things can't get any worse." Of course, they can, and they often do.

This also helps to explain why the more conservative elements in many Arab societies are leery of the upheavals that have been taking place. This is particularly true in Egypt, where the less educated rural segment of the population was definitely not with the young middle-class revolutionists of Midan al-Tahrir back in the winter.

A further note on this point: It is well-established that contemporary anti-Semitism has migrated to the Middle East, and particularly to the Arab world. A host of polls show that most Arabs have very negative attitudes toward not just Israelis, but also Jews. In many places negative attributions exceed 90%. That is certainly so in Egypt, where the government has encouraged such attitudes as a means of deflecting popular discontent away from itself. It seems to me, and I would presume also to others, that the only way this disease of the mind can be cured is to change the context of Arab politics itself. Only when Arabs are free to educate their children and to make their own choices in the fullness of knowledge are they likely to overcome the kinds of superstitions and conspiracies that afflict them today, superstitions and conspiracies that hurt them far more than they hurt the Jews. This will take a very long time, no doubt, but it has to start sometime. Maybe that time is now.

So this defines a common problem: the way back is the way of failure and stagnation, but the way forward is an uncertain path fraught with unknown dangers. The only way to a better future, however, is to take a deep breath and walk forward. This means short-term anxiety, frustration, and peril all for the sake of an elusive, and perhaps unattainable, longer-term benefit. It's hoping that what may look like a pier is really a bridge. Of course, one can never know for sure until you try the crossing. Unless, of course, you have God to make a path of dry land through the midst of the sea.

This brings us back, finally, to the question of teleology in Frank's book and in religious cosmologies. Suppose one day the world really is a qualitatively and irreversibly better place, with freedom and human rights and dignity and peace and prosperity and health and fulfillment pretty much guaranteed for all. Will we say, looking back, this was a triumphal philosophy, of politics, of luck, of material determinism––or of God's will? If it ever happens, I'm reasonably sure that there will be violent arguments over the ultimate cause, because there is no rule to tell us how to distinguish between the possibilities, which of course lie in incommensurate domains. All of us, of course, will have long since turned into compost by then. I, for one, am not about to lose any sleep worrying about it.

The gray lady has an OK day

The New York Times is not what it used to be. Joseph Epstein made a point some months ago of publicly announcing the end of his subscription. He gave good reasons. I told him at the time that I would've joined him except that I need the acrostic puzzle on alternate Sundays in the magazine.

Every once in a while, however, the Gray Lady surprises. Today was an unusually good day. On the op-ed page there is a piece by Ken Burns that is really quite wonderful. There is another piece by Edward Ball that is almost as good. Both have to do with the aftermath, now 150 years later, of the onset of the Civil War. Today, of course, is the literal anniversary, the shot in Fort Sumter having been fired on this very day 150 years ago.

Aside from the Civil War material, one of the paper's newest permanent residents on the op-ed page, Joe Nocera, has a fine piece on what he calls the Boone Pickens bill about using more of America's natural gas supply for transportation fuel. It's a well written piece, and even makes policy sense. It is certainly better than anything that the now departed (not dead, I mean, just retired) Mr. Herbert has written in decades.

But I have to say that the item I found most amusing in today's paper is David Sanger's piece entitled "Possible Libya Stalemate Puts Stress on US Policy." The piece ends with a quote said to be from an Obama adviser. This adviser acknowledged last week, says Sanger, "on a day when rebel forces seemed particularly hapless and disorganized", that: "We are not in a good place."

No kidding. I could have told them that they would be in such a place. No, wait! I did tell them they would be in such a place. I did so on March 22. See blog post of that date, called "Down the Rabbit Hole." It's never polite to say I told you so. But at the moment I'm too bemused to care about politeness. So here goes: I told you so.

While I'm at it, let me say it again. There is another piece, a front-page story, not only in the New York Times but also in the Washington Post, and it's about Pakistan. It seems that the head of the ISI has told us to remove all CIA contractors in Pakistan, to dramatically reduce the number of drone strikes in the tribal areas, and just basically to shove it. This is definitely an "I told you so" moment for me, but a relatively private one. I did once or twice before write up the very bad odds of our persuading the Pakistani government to really go after the Taliban and Al Qaeda within and near their northeastern borders. It just seemed to me, especially after Pres. Obama's December 1, 2009 speech in which he laid down a date for an exit ramp from Afghanistan, that the Pakistanis were not about to burn bridges with their Pashtun associates, since they knew they were staying where they live pretty much forever, while we would be leaving sooner or later, probably sooner. But more memorable to me, I had arguments, well, not so much arguments but discussions let's call them, with both Sec. Powell and Deputy Sec. Armitage about this very matter. They were more sanguine that the Pakistanis would do what we hoped they would do; I simply pointed out that their basic national interest over the long term did not run parallel to ours, and that, it seemed to me, we could expect only begrudged assistance, and sometimes we would not get even that. I think I am proven right, but then again, perhaps this is not really over yet.

Fragments

It has been sometime since I have written on this blog, particularly some time since I waxed a bit personal. Most recent posts have been analytical examinations of policy issues. Sometimes they have included personal asides, such as when I told a little bit about my experience on a US naval ship in my discussion on March 22 about the Libya caper. But for the most part these have been posts written for other venues and placed here on this blog just for the sake of having something to put here. Today, however, I want to write just for this venue. All I have to say, however, amounts to fragments of this and that. In a way, I intend to use my blog today as a kind of diary or list, just so that I won't completely forget some of the things that have been on my mind, and to which I hope one day to return for fuller exposition.

I have been stimulated to do this for two reasons. First, we are at a point in the cycle of the magazine where I happen to be caught up on my immediate obligations and so am not pressed as I often am to do something other than this. The second, there is a new technology that I have acquired that is stimulating me to explore its potential uses. I am speaking of a voice-recognition technology, called the Dragon, which is dramatically better in doing its job then the comparable technology was some 8 to 10 years ago, the last time that I investigated it. The thing is absolutely amazing. Of course it does make mistakes, but not so many that the technology does not represent a qualitative leap in my capacity to put words on paper, or on a screen, as the case may be. It is only slowly dawning on me the range of uses to which I might put this new facility.

The main reason I got it in the first place was because I have somewhat advancing arthritis in my hands that has caused me in recent months, I have noticed, to make more typing mistakes than I am used to making. It is very frustrating to repeatedly hit the wrong keys and have to go back repeatedly to make corrections. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I feel like pounding the keyboard and the piece of furniture on which it is sitting. This is unhealthy for the keyboard, and likewise unhealthy for the piece of furniture. Nor is it such a great idea for my hand. If I can reduce the level of frustration that I experience everyday in writing, and limit myself to mere cursing, not only will I save the machines I use but I also may reduce my general stress level, which will make me happy, and also please my doctor.

As I say, it dawned on me only slowly the uses to which this technology might be put. I realized the other day while walking down the sidewalk that my doctoral dissertation, completed in 1978 and which I have only in a typed version (since personal computers at that time were in a primitive stage and since the University required that all dissertations submitted be typed old-fashioned like), that I can now read my dissertation into this machine and create a book in a vastly shorter time than I would've been able to do so had I had to retype the manuscript. Now, of course, I could've scanned the manuscript and done it that way, but I have all along intended to revise quite extensively the language that I used in producing this book. I know a lot more now than I did when I wrote it, not just because I'm older and more mature but also because in the course of my career I have collected more information about the subject: namely, the Jordanian Civil War of 1970. I wrote the dissertation before traveling many times to Jordan, and in those travels I was able to talk to some of the Jordanian principals and get a good idea of how they perceived American decision-making at the time that it was happening. Now I can re-create the manuscript at a higher, more sophisticated level at remarkably efficient speed, thanks to this new technology. I am going to try this very soon and see what happens.

Similarly, about a year ago I was moved to try to write a novel. Every writer should try to write a novel even if the result ends up in dismal failure. In my case I actually had an idea of a sort. I had a title that encapsulated the moral of the story. I had a setting, and I had the makings of a dramatis personae. I had a structure. All I lacked was an actual story.

I discussed my problem with Scooter Libby, an old acquaintance, who has made a success of writing a novel. I don't know that he has made a success of selling it, but you can't sell what you haven't written, can you? I have been too busy to pursue it. When I began I wrote one page. I liked what I wrote. It was a good page. It was so good, in truth, that I was hesitant to write a second page for fear that it might not be as good. This of course is quite silly, but there you have it. But now, with this voice recognition technology I think that perhaps I can be re-inspired to continue on with this project because I can now wander down many cul-de-sacs, make lots of mistakes, take several wrong turns and the pain of revision, it seems to me, will be far less onerous with this new technology then it would've been, at least psychologically, had it all come down to a matter of retyping.

So I have time around now for several writing projects that had been on my lists for years in some cases, but which I have never really summoned the energy to pursue. Whether this really turns out as I expect, or hope, remains to be seen, but on this beautiful spring day, things seem to be looking, and feeling, rather more "up" on this score than they have been across the gray skies of the dreary winter just past.

I have also realized another use for this technology. I don't have very many letter correspondence these days. Not all that many people are still inclined to put words on actual pages, fold them into an envelope, affix postage stamps and send them in the mail. As for me, I still get a thrill from the receipt of actual personal letter, much more so than I do from receiving an e-mail. Maybe it's just my generation and my age, but it seems to me that the old-fashioned personal touch evokes a different emotional pitch then electrons on a page. It will now be possible to write to my few correspondents in a far more efficient way if I don't have to type the letters and make all the mistakes that I typically make. I suspect that I might write more frequently on account of this, and while that also raises potential dangers, I think they are controllable ones.

So much for the technology. Now let me talk about a few things that have been on my mind, again in hopes that I will not lose track of whatever thoughts I have had.

One subject that has been occupying my mind off and on now for a year or two has been the question of how the human-created technological environment in which we live affects things. And by things I mean not only our social, economic, and political, but at a more interior level also our physiology. I reread this past summer a slightly crazy book by a guy named Gerry Mander, called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. It was a book that I read the first time more than 25 years ago. When I read it then it impressed me in two ways. First, I was sympathetic to the argument in general because I've always disliked television. But it also impressed me as somewhat nutty, because in several ways the author went well beyond any kind of empirical evidence to make some rather mystical, New Age remarks that did not sit well with my rational education. When I reread it, I had the same impression; I still think the guy was quite clearly out lunch in many ways. But he was also onto something.

When he was studying, or trying to study, the effects of television he noted that nearly all of the research that had been done at the time when he wrote the book, which was some 35 years ago, had been on the content of programming, mainly for children. Very little research had been done on the effects of the technology itself on those who were watching it. In other words, here were people aiming a 24,000 volt cathode ray tube at their heads and it didn't occur to most researchers to ask what effects, if any, this might have on the human body. It was later learned that many of the old black and white television sets emitted dangerous levels of radiation, and this was fixed. But other, more subtle aspects of the technology remained beyond the interest, it seems, of most researchers. Later on, evidence did accumulate that television watching causes hyperactivity in children.

The point was that Mander at least vaguely understood that all animals, as they interact with their environment from the very first day they are born (if not even before they are born), engage in a kind of literal dialectic with that environment. The human brain at birth is a dense dendrite reservoir. Each and every experience that the organism has with the environment sends an electrical impulse into the brain that creates pathways in it. The brain is in a sense "wired" in certain ways according to the experiences that it has. It therefore stands to reason, it has always seemed to me, that as one changes the environment in systematic ways, then the neural pathways formed in the brain will take on a characteristic shape in accordance with those changes in the environment.

I am not presupposing that these changes are evil, or bad in any way, but I'm not presupposing that they're not either. I would like to start simply by understanding the empirical reality of what is going on; judgments about good or bad can come perhaps later. I suspect this is mainly a matter of values and tastes, far more so, I suspect than any possible empirical or objective basis upon which to judge such things. But it does strike me as sort of odd that there isn't a great deal of curiosity about such subjects. When I asked a woman named Edythe London, who is a world-class expert on addiction, what she knew of the research that had been done on the physiological effects on the human brain of the various information technology advances of recent years, she replied that as far she could tell there weren't any that got at the questions I was asking.

I want to know, for example, how the existence of mediated images affects the hippocampus. I want to know how the technical events and astounding complexes that Mander described many years ago have changed, or not, at a time when the volume, verisimilitude and seductive capacities of mediated images are so much more advanced now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. I am especially interested in any changes in how the brain develops, especially in children.

There is a fellow in Denver named Harvey Milkman who, with a co-author, wrote a textbook about how the brain works. I first approached him to go beyond his professional interest and speculate about the broader social and political effects of the changes in brain chemistry that we have witnessed over recent years parallel to some changes in behavior. For example people now talk about addiction to the Internet, as he does in the book. It's clear that addiction is not just a matter concerning substances but can also concerned experiences. People are addicted to gambling, for example, or to roller coasters and jumping out of airplanes with parachutes and such. The question is, can we draw a link between the physiology of addiction, as we know it, whether to experiences or to drugs, and sub-threshold forms of psychological shaping that is the consequence of the cascade of mediated images delivered to us these days through all the new technologies we have adopted? I perhaps have not expressed this question very well, but I think you get the general idea.

Dr. Milkman got the idea but he did not pursue it. I later came to realize, perhaps, why. His book is very reductionist. There are passages in quotations in which he and his co-author assert that if you can find out what is going on in individual cells in the brain, that this amounts to and understanding of human experience. This is the old-fashioned reduction of mind to brain, and is, in my view, very primitive. It cannot even begin to explain how cells act together to produce anything remotely like behavior and certainly not consciousness. Reductionism in neuroscience presumes that the only processes that matter are bottom up processes when it seems clear, or should to anyone who has ever heard of DNA, that the process is as much top-down as it is bottom-up. In retrospect, I am not surprised that someone of such a reductionist inclination was not interested in trying to see how brain function could have broader social impact.

There is a new book, out from Princeton University Press, by a womanly named Louise Barrett, called Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds. Based on the title, anyway, this is exactly the general question that I have been trying to formulate, th9ug my interests are more social and political. What I really want to know is how these new technologies, by affecting the way our brains work, might have an impact on what Robert Putnam has called social trust, or social capital. So I look forward very much to see what this book has to say. I am relieved, in any case, that I'm not the only one who has been thinking about this.

Of course I know that many observers have wondered and worried about the impact of the diminution of print culture over the years, a related subject. The Gutenberg Elegies, written by Sven Birkets, was perhaps the first expression of this concern, written more than 15 years ago. A newer book by the Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, has advanced this inquiry a great deal, suggesting that, yes, there are physiological effects, not mere social ones, from this new technology. I got Sven Birkets to review this book in the magazine, and he did a great job. Carr was worried that he could no longer focus or concentrate very well, and wondered why. He wondered whether Google or, really, the technological environment as a whole, might be responsible for changes in his mental aptitudes. He adduces some pretty persuasive evidence that, yes, it is likely responsible.

As I say, my real interests in this are not physiological alone but rather to try to extrapolate from what we know about the physiology to the social, the cultural, and ultimately the political. We do know already that advertisers use very sophisticated psychological knowledge to sell stuff. It is hardly news, for example, that those who want to sell expensive cars are well advised to produce television commercials in which sexy women clad in rather little or suggestive clothing are shown making symbolic love to the vehicle. The psychologists have advised the advertisers of a very basic fact of human nature, namely, that the human mind is promiscuously associative. We do not bring to be stoppedar our rational capacities onto what we perceive except when we deliberately focus them to do so. All of the activity undertaken by our subconscious mines goes on oblivious to this rational overlay. So it is not difficult to see how an advertiser can try to sell a car by associating it with a sex object that, when men see it, begins producing dopamine by the bucket up in their heads.

It is also no revelation that American political life has in many ways adopted the techniques and the cadences of advertising culture. The consultants, the pollsters, the media experts all suffuse American electoral politics nowadays. It is no great leap of imagination to suspect that many of the same psychological insights about how humans behave are being applied to getting elected as well as how to sell soap flakes, corn chips, cars and whatever else the corporations are trying to sell. How all this affects political community, including the aforementioned social capital levels in society, I confess I don't really know. But I just have an intuition, call it, that there is something here worth exploring.

As usual, I will try, and am trying, to use the magazine as a way to sate my curiosity. That is what I do with it in the main. I have a question, I have an obsession, I have a curiosity about something, and I use the world at large to try to help me get answers. My readers, in this process, are well described, I think, as fortunate bystanders. I realize that this is a very selfish way to imagine what being an editor is all about, but it's the way it seems to suit me best.

Last for now, I had this idea the other day--well, maybe "idea" is a little too strong a term for it-- of having a contest in the magazine. The contest I am going to call something like the New American Dream contest. For a while now, I have wanted to have a cluster or an ongoing series of essays in the magazine that would try to get contributors to think out a number of years, to get them to dream about what they hope America should look like in the future. I don't want fantasies, or visions so far beyond practicality that they just hang in the air. I want the kind of dream that connects what is desirable with the public policies, at least in broad definition, that can achieve them. But I really want to put a premium on defining the vision, because, as Lewis Carroll should by now have taught everyone, most any road will take us "there" if we don't know where it is we are going. It seems to me that we have many deficits of many sorts in American society today, but one of them is that we seem to be exhausted in terms of our collective mental life. So many things seem to be going wrong that it is all we can do to fix the system we have. This focus on urgent repair sucks all of the oxygen out of the room for longer-term thinking, not to speak of planning. So I am trying in my own very small way with this idea to re-balance the matter.

I have not been able to interest many authors in taking on this kind of essay. So I thought maybe what I would do is create contest and see if, somewhere in this country or somewhere on this planet, there are people who can do the thinking that I have in mind. Our publisher, Charles Davidson, is fine with this, so I am going to proceed. The first challenge is to define the contest and communicate precise instructions to would-be participants. I think I'll get at that sometime this afternoon. A second concern, of course, is how to advertise the contest without spending a lot of money doing it. This should not be that much of a challenge, however. I have found that contests featuring cash prizes have a way of becoming known. What is particularly attractive about this idea, this contest, is that I hope it attracts younger people to the magazine, because that is what we have always wanted to do, with only moderate success thus far. I will let you know how things go.

Last for now, (and this time I mean it), I really should lay down a few words about two recent experiences, one my two weeks in Brazil in December, and the other my six days on the USS Boxer in February. I'm going to let the Brazil business go for now, because there's just too much to say and time is not infinite. But I did want to say that I learned a great deal from being together with 980 crew and eight teen hundred Marines on this helicopter landing deck ship. I left San Diego on February 22 and the ship arrived in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on March 1. During that period I and my two associates in the RSEP (regional security education program) program gave a series of lectures and talks on various aspects of Middle Eastern and South Asian politics and society. But the one-on-one conversations I had in the ward room and around the ship provided a great deal of insight for me.

You actually have to live for a while with those who are part of the military culture to understand how these folks think, and how truly wonderful most of them are. Of course we spoke mostly to the officers, although we did have a little time to talk with enlisted men and women. We also learned about the ship's routine. I got to walk on the flight deck and see the helicopters and Harrier jets. I got to walk along the cat walk and see the ocean and I even got to exercise in the gym along with the Marines. That is quite an experience. I also observed more crew cuts then I had seen since 1956.

Perhaps most educational all, I got to see the scene on the dock at San Diego when the ship left for a planned seven-month deployment. There were families everywhere; children, wives, and I suppose the spouses of both female Navy and Marine deployees, were hugging and kissing and crying all over the place. It was like a scene from a movie, except it wasn't a movie. What it was, however, was moving.

I would like to do the program again sometime and, indeed, I was already invited to do one, a new one on an aircraft carrier this time, at the end of May. Unfortunately, that's a time when the magazine's schedule is far too heavy for me to be away. And it's too bad because this deployment starts from Norfolk Virginia and ends up somewhere in either Spain or Portugal. That would have been fun.

As it happened, I had never before been to Hawaii. And as it happened, too, Hawaii was the only state I had never been in. So when I walked ashore at Pearl Harbor I racked up my 50th state. It's silly, I know, but I feel rather proud of that. I have never been to Spain or Portugal either, so I would've been just as the lighted to land there, as well. Perhaps in the future this will come to be.

Let me end by coming full circle in a way. The Commodore on the Boxer, which is to say the man in charge of the amphibious attack squadron, consisting of three ships, asked me around February 26 or 27th whether the squadron might expect any action with regard to Libya. I had already discussed possible contingencies for the Navy and Marines with respect to Bahrain and perhaps also Yemen. We spoke about Egypt and about Jordan as well. The civil war in Libya had only just begun to develop when we left San Diego, so this question took me somewhat unawares.

My response to him was that there were very few American citizens in Libya. The embassy was not large and there were not many American workers in the oil fields; they were mostly Italians and others. I could not think of any vital or even important American interest that would justify the use of military force in a Libyan contingency, outside of very marginal and minor humanitarian or search-and-rescue kinds of operations. I think I said, if I can remember my exact words, that given the stakes in Libya it would be "crazy" for the United States to use military force. What I did not say, however, is that just because it would be crazy did not mean we would not do it. I sent him an e-mail once I was back in Washington, after we had started the war, making that minor point. He appreciated it in the spirit with which it was sent....

Those who read my March 22 analysis of Libya may note that a fair number of what might generously be called predictions have come true. Some friends who read the piece have been kind enough to note as much to me directly, which of course any writer appreciates. This is a case, however, where I am sorry to have been correct. That's life, I guess.