Waiting: An Israeli tank crew preparing before the assult on the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza.The Homefront Command has outlawed public gatherings in the towns bordering Gaza, which in effect means that people here have been told not to go to shul. Jews, however, take issue with governments telling them that they can't pray. So they pray anyway.

I have always found davening to be more meaningful when things blow up in the background. The thrust of the words hit me again, after having been a rut for months. While it is still dark outside, I find my way to the central Ashkenazi shul in Sderot for morning prayers. Occasional bursts of heavy machine-gun fire are intermingled with explosions as the small minyan silently sways back and forth. Sometimes the ground shakes so violently that I wonder if the Tzeva Adom early warning system is functional this frigid morning.

At around 1 p.m. I find myself taking cover in a shelter together with a terrified woman that asks me and a Swedish colleague to describe her reality to the Swedish people. Like a lot of Israelis, she is convinced that "European media" is biased toward the Palestinians. Well, that is just not true, at least not in Sweden. The Palestinians seem to have decidedly over-milked the cow of their own suffering. Whatever huffing and puffing going on does not translate into action, and calm voices of reason are being heard, both among politicians and among influential journalists. For example: when Nizar Rayan was assassinated on January 1, 2009, along with his four wives and nine of his children, he got a phone call from the IAF in good time. Innocent lives could have been spared in that case, as in so many other cases, but this silly little man decided to stay put, instead cracking jokes with his kids about how he was too fat for the morgue freezer. That might boost morale among suicidal terrorists, but normal people around the world with a healthy sense of right and wrong are slowly realizing that the callousness of Nizar Rayan reveals the true and sick core of the death cult calling itself "Palestinian resistance."

Gaza, day 11: Smoke rising from Gaza, as seen from a hilltop on the outskirts of Sderot.From where I am sitting right now, I can see two Apache helicopters hovering in the air. Every once in a while there is a loud flushing sound when they fire missiles at targets in Gaza. The subsequent explosions are so powerful that the windows in the coffee shop shake: it sounds like kassam rockets striking two blocks away. The IAF has bombed and shelled thousands of targets in one of the most densely populated areas on the face of the planet non-stop for 12 days now, but even if we believe in the most generous figures from Gaza, only about 150 civilians have been killed (out of the 660 total). If the secret Israeli objective were to kill as many innocent Palestinians as possible, the IDF is obviously not doing a very good job. At last we might actually have found something that the Jews are not good at: genocide.

One series of questions posed to Israeli soldiers in discussions of war ethics goes something like this: If you were ordered to blow up a house where a terrorist commander was hiding, and you had reason to believe that enemy civilians were in the house, should the order be refused? If you were ordered to blow up the house and you were told that an Israeli soldier was being held hostage in the house, should you agree to do so? If you were ordered to blow up the house and your father was being held hostage there, would you obey?

These hypotheticals are telling because they assume a moral instinct that journalists and commentators often forget, dismiss, or explicitly condemn: that all lives are not equal. But, as Sahil Mahtani points out, that’s the way the numbers work when we are talking about war and defense. And as Ross Dothat notes, rules about war will be useless—in fact, pernicious—if they does not take into account the realities of the moral choices faced not by armchair theorists but by leaders, commanders, and combatants charged with protecting their societies, soldiers, and friends.

That all lives are equal is a fundamental principle of law in Western societies, and rightly so. A government cannot be just if it values the life of some citizens over the lives of others without due cause.

But when faced with the life-and-death situations involving survival and war, this principle breaks down. Closeness makes a difference when we value lives. If I am told that an Eskimo is hanging from an Alaskan cliff and that a rescue operation would require risking the lives of a dozen alpinists, I could consider the case more or less dispassionately and might suggest that it is not reasonable to for twelve men and women to face death in order to save one man. If the person hanging from the cliff is someone I know and feel close to, I might point out that the members of the rescue team freely chose a risky profession and that they must rescue my poor friend. If the victim is my son, I would accept no moral calculus at all—no effort and no risk would be in any way equal to my son’s life.

This instinct of ours is not the vestige of primitive tribalism, a prejudice we should seek to cure ourselves of. It lies at the very core of our humanity and our ability to forge human relationships, communities, and cultures.

We should not be surprised, then, that most Israelis are not moved by the fact that hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in their country’s attack on the Gaza Strip as compared to only a handful of Israelis by Hamas rockets. Nor should we be surprised that many Palestinians are unmoved by the prospect that one of those rockets might strike a school, hospital, or supermarket and kill dozens of Israelis. If a high death toll on the other side brings peace, security, and justice to my people, most Israelis and Palestinians will tell you straight out, then it’s a price worth paying.

The mistake both sides make, the mistake that keeps the Israel-Palestine conflict going, is the assumption that death and destruction will in fact produce peace, security, and justice. In abstract terms, the Palestinians have every right to use force to defend themselves and to seek to right the wrongs they have suffered. And Israel has every right to use force to defend its population and its existence.

Both sides err in their valuation of the efficacy of force, in their belief that violence can achieve their goals. But if Palestinians blow up a bunch of buses, killing and maiming hundreds of Jews, yet do not achieve their goals, can that ever be forgiven? And if Israel kills hundreds in Gaza only to return, in the end, to a modus vivendi not all that much different from the one before the invasion, how can they claim that those Palestinian deaths were collateral damage in a justified military operation?

In fact, the reason Israelis condemn Palestinian violence so vociferously, and the reason Palestinians Israeli aggression so stridently, is that we both see the other side’s violence not just as bloody but as futile. Seeing the solidarity, determination, and fundamental justice on our own side, we cannot conceive of how a reasonable enemy could think that violence could achieve his goals. Therefore, we see violence with a justifiable purpose on our side, and gratuitous violence on the other.

Preaching to the Palestinians about the turpitude of launching missiles against Israel will get us nowhere, and neither will preaching to the Israelis about the incommensurability of the Palestinian versus the Israeli death toll. Leaders, and citizens, on both sides are quite right and justified in valuing the lives of their countrymen over the lives of their enemies. Moral condescension from writers outside the war zone whose families, friends, and fellow-citizens are not at risk will not change any minds.

If I’m to persuade my fellow-Israelis that this war is useless and wrong, the only way to do it is to show them that we are shedding blood and getting little or nothing in return. That may sound callous to the referees on the sidelines, but I’m not ashamed to say that I love my son more than my friends, my friends more than my fellow-Israelis, and my fellow-Israelis more than my enemies. What kind of father, friend, and Israeli would I be otherwise?

Read more by Haim at South Jerusalem

During wartime, the cognitive dissonance in Israel is overwhelming.

I'm typing this piece from the safety and comfort of Tel Aviv, where I went after my neighborhood was struck by rockets. There's a bloody and terrible war happening an hour's drive from here. 19 year olds who would be attending keggers in America are in gunfights with Hamas militants. Little kids are being blown to bits because their next door neighbor launched rockets at Israel a few months ago. There is madness, stupidity, heroism and a million other things besides happening here.

But right now I'm staying in a comfortable neighborhood in north Tel Aviv that reminds me of the Upper East Side back in New York. There are lots of ladies who lunch and a strip of coffee shops a few blocks down where you can get a decent cappucino and pain au chocolat.

I am bouncing between the houses of distant relatives and friends because of the war. These days, I'm normally an MA student in Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva. However, Beersheva came under rocket attack on December 30 and 31. One Grad rocket landed less than 700 meters from my house on early Wednesday morning. I ran in midsleep to a bomb shelter and heard the explosion as clear as day through the fortified concrete.

As a result, the IDF's Homefront Command has indefinitely cancelled classes at Ben-Gurion University and shut down almost all commerce in the cities surrounding Gaza.

I returned yesterday to Beersheva yesterday to pick up some personal effects. I stumbled onto a ghost town. Workplaces that don't have rocket shelters are closed. Stores that aren't fortified are closed. Schools are closed. Restaurants are closed. A few hardy kiosks, greengrocers and cafes that run day-by-day are remaining open and risking government fines. Nothing but stray cats, retirees chain-smoking outside their shelters and little kids sneaking away from their moms to throw rocks at the stray cats. Too depressing, too zombie movie.

The only hopping place in Beersheva right now is the Soroka Hospital, the Negev's largest medical facility. Though Beersheva has been lucky enough to escape rocket fire during the past few days, other cities haven't had that blessing. Ashkelon, Ashdod and the poor citizens of Sderot have been under constant rocket attack since the cease fire between Israel and Hamas broke down a few weeks ago.

Although both Ashkelon and Ashdod have hospitals, the critically injured are bought to Soroka. Helicopters land at Soroka carrying poor bastards whose arms and legs were shot full of shrapnel. There are Bedouins from the desert whose villages lack air raid sirens and cannot hear the warnings. There are manual laborers who work outdoors and don't have access to shelters. And then there are just the people who can't run quickly or who found their shelters padlocked shut by a neglectful city government.

Hell, there are even a bunch of Gaza civillians who were medivac-ed out of the war-sieged territory for treatment here.

Coming to Beersheva by train, almost all of the other passengers were reservists called up to duty. There was one kid who looked like one of my Russian friends from high school. There was a cute girl with a hipster-ish haircut reading Israeli gossip magazines while wearing a shoulder tag for an elite intelligence unit. There was a reservist with an iPhone and designer glasses who looked for all the world like a New York blogger. On the ride down to the Negev, we could see black helicopters flying over the Occupied Territories looking for any escalation of the situation there. Radio attachments from cell phones were playing the latest news from Gaza. I tried to use my limited knowledge of Hebrew to figure out what was happening while talking in broken English to the reservist in the next row.

I came back to Tel Aviv to hear of stone-throwings by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank and of more deaths in Gaza. Meanwhile, I'm sitting at a bar, drinking imported beer and eating a Cubano while talking about Barack Obama and the IDF with the bartender in bad Hebrew.

And there's a war an hour away, but everyone's ignoring it here in the "Tel Aviv bubble."

Of course they have one. (For what it's worth, so does the Multinational Force-Iraq):

The IDF Spokesperson's Unit is the Israel Defense Forces' professional body responsible for media and public relations in Israel and around the world. This is our new site that will help us bring our message to the world.

We are saddened that YouTube has taken down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF's operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. As the State of Israel again faces those who would see it destroyed, it is imperative that we in the IDF show the world the inhumanity directed against us and our efforts to stop it. It is also worth noting that one of the videos removed had the highest number of hits (over 10,000) at the time of its removal.

It's difficult to put all the pieces together, and it is tempting to fall into one of several made-to-order narratives. Which might, in fact be true - but that doesn't mean that they are complete.First, the basics. American troops attacked a farmhouse 8 kilometers inside Syria, killing 7 or 8 people, one of whom was Abu Ghadiya, a senior figure in Al Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. intelligence sources have said that there was information that Abu Ghadiya was planning an attack inside Iraq, and that while women and children were present, none were injured. Syrian sources say that women and children were among the dead, killed when U.S. Special Forces opened fire on the building form outside.

This attack in Syria follows recent attacks into Pakistan that were apparently similarly based on actionable intelligence. (In other words, the Bush administration is acting rather in the manner that Barack Obama has suggested. John McCain has called Obama "naïve" and worse for saying out loud that he would consider such cross-border raids; the Bush administration appears less reticent. But that particular irony is a tangent I do not want to pursue at the moment.) Although there has been no comment from either the White House or the State Department about the most recent raid, officials quoted in several sources say that it reflects the administrations broad interpretation of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter which provides the right of individual or collective self-defense to member states. This is the same provision that Israel has repeatedly cited to justify its own military actions including its attack on Something Mysterious in Syria last September; it has also been used by Turkish troops pursuing Kurdish militants in their sanctuaries in northern Iraq. President Bush hinted at the scope of the theory in his speech to the U.N. this past month: "As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly . . . We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime."

It is important to note that this is not the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attack, it is a theory of "self-defense" that according to administration sources justifies attacks on insurgents in other nations if they threaten "the forces, allies, or interests of the United States" according to U.S. officials. The word "interest," of course, makes the scope of this theory essentially infinite.The immediate reactions from Syria and Iran were predictable: the Syrian Foreign Minister called the raid an act of "terrorist aggression" and warned darkly "if they do it again, we will defend our territories."

The Iraqi government spokesman tried to have it both ways, condemning the attack on the grounds that the Iraqi constitution prohibits the use of its territory to attack neighboring countries - a fairly clear reference to the increasingly hostile negotiations between the Bush administration and the Maliki government over the terms of an agreement to permit U.S. troops to remain in Iraq - and also called on Syria to improve border security.

There are several easy America-centered narratives.

One is that the intelligence was specific enough and the target important enough that other consequences were simply pushed aside. Another is a conspiracy theory about attempts by the White House to influence the election. And a third has Bush either taking advantage of the opportunity to act between now and January or, alternatively, ensuring that Al Qaeda and others do not assume that the U.S. is so distracted by the election its aftermath that they can act with impunity. (If you really want to get paranoid, there is also the Somalia Theory: that Bush is deliberately creating a disaster for his successor to inherit.)All perfectly plausible. But there is still an element of weirdness in the story. As recently as last month, Secretary of State Rice was saying nice things about the progress Syria was making in securing its borders, although she said that there remained much work to be done. The EU has been working to ease Syria's isolation.

The U.S., for all our complaints about them, have been sending suspected terrorists to Syria to be tortured - er, questioned - for years, and may be continuing to do so. This month Syria opened official relations with an independent Lebanon. In other words, there were several reasons to think that relations between Damascus and Washington were beginning to thaw, which I have argued repeatedly would be a very good thing, if only to give Assad some alternative to an alliance with Teheran. So the timing is a little odd.

That can be explained, perhaps, by the unpredictable fact of actionable intelligence becoming available, but then there is the weirdness of the very moderate Syrian reaction. Bluster aside, the Syrian response has been . . . to close the American School in Damascus. Despite talks of "next time we will defend our territories" there are no reports of troop movements to the Iraqi border, unlike the movement of 10,000 Syrian troops to the Lebanese border in September. There was no talk of siccing Hezbollah on Israel; there was no mention of Israel, period. What's going on in Damascus?

Here's some possibly relevant background. In February of this year, Imad Mughniyah, a senior Hezbollah official, was mysteriously assassinated in Syria; one might plausibly assume that the Syrian government was involved. In September of this year, a car bomb in Damascus near the office of security killed 17 people. Assad may be deciding he has had just about enough of Iran's mujahadeen, and Al Qaeda, too. It's worth reminding ourselves that Syria has a secular government dominated by members of a minority Allawite sect and a predominantly Sunni population. Radical Islam is not likely to sit well with Assad's Baathist regime (any more than it sat well with Saddam Hussein).

More context. Israel is about to have elections, as is the United States. In the U.S., the neoconservatives are on their way out, but John "we are all Georgians" McCain - the only person in the U.S. or Iraq who does not accept the idea of a withdrawal of U.S. forces - is not much of an improvement. In Israel, in the person of Bibi Netanyahu, the Bush-era neocon Weltgeist could be on its way back in. (This is not an idle analogy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked for Netanyahu's government during the 1990s, producing the famous 1996 working paper describing a grand strategic vision that included a U.S. attack to get rid of Saddam Hussein; that kind of talk doesn't play well over here any more, but Netanyahu - who got 90% of his primary financing from outside Israel -- is still living the dream).

In 2006, during the Lebanon War, neocons in the Bush administration were urging Israel to attack Syria directly. The Olmert government dismissed the idea as crazy, but a Netanyahu government might be a danger to itself and others. (There was a very odd moment during that conflict in which an Israeli government spokesman explained a troop build-up as aimed at Syria, which caused the Syrian military to go on high alert, but that appears to have been a comedy of errors; the Israeli spokesman preferred to make a provocative and potentially destabilizing statement rather than admit that the high command had lost control over the situation.)

And never mind attacking Syria; if Israel launches a pre-emptive attack on Iran, what are Syria's choices for a course of action? The Israeli elections may present Assad with an opportunity, or a threat.There is also the likelihood that the Americans may not be in the neighborhood much longer. The Iraqi government has proposed amendments to the agreement with the U.S. that would call for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq - regardless of conditions on the ground - no later than 2011, and include an acceleration clause that would permit total withdrawal on 12 months' notice at Iraq's request.

The U.S. has threatened to cut off all support and all operations of any kind inside Iraq on January 1 if the original draft of the agreement is not signed. But one way or another, it looks likely that the U.S. military role in Iraq will at a minimum be very greatly curtailed in the near future: even a McCain administration cannot get away with forcing a continued presence against the will of the elected government, at least not for long. At that point we would be confronted with the preposterous situation of Iraq appealing to the U.N. to impose sanctions on the U.S.

So here's a thought. Is it possible that Assad is tired of Hezbollah and Al Qaeda both, and maybe even of being tied to Iran? Is it possible that the reason Syrian reaction to the raid is so relatively muted is that they didn't really object, and may even have known about the raid in advance? This would be interesting as all get-out, if it's true. If this is true, it needs to be pursued. From the U.S. perspective nothing is more important than turning Syria away from Iran. Particularly as the Kurds in northern Iraq appear to be becoming increasingly aggressive, Syria is going to be a key player in post-U.S. arrangements.

From Israel's perspective the case is even starker. Nothing serves Israel's interests more right now than giving Syria a good reason to stop supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. It is also possible that Assad has an eye on the elections and does not want to do anything to strengthen Netanyahu and McCain, because he is hoping for administrations he can talk to. Assad is a pure pragmatist with no ties to religious extremists and serious economic needs. He is also notoriously difficult to deal with, but that's what our diplomats get paid for (sorry, guys.) High level talks without preconditions with Syria this Winter? A consummation devoutly to be wished.

An American official confirmed on Monday that the U.S. military had conducted a raid into Syria, killing at least eight. Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem called the attack a "criminal and terrorist aggression." The U.S. raid has been denounced as a violation of international law by the Syrian, Lebanese and Qatari governments, as well as The Arab League.

The same American official who confirmed the raid claims that the soldiers' objective was to capture or kill Abu Ghadiya, a prominent organizer of anti-American fighters around the Syrian-Iraqi border who has been suspected of possible links to al-Qaeda. The same official also claims that Ghadiya was killed during the campaign, and called the invasion, "successful."

Dexter Filkins is the greatest war correspondent of my generation, and I would say this even if we weren't friends. We've reported together on occasion; Dexter knows better than anyone how to work your way into bad places, and work your way out again. He's also the author of a great new book, coming out imminently from Knopf, called "The Forever War."  I e-mailed him some questions about his Times story today, and here are his answers:

Jeffrey Goldberg: In a review in the Times today, Michiko Kakutani quotes Farnaz Fassihi writing in 2004: "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes, and it can't be put back into a bottle."  The question is, is the genie back in the bottle?

Dexter Filkins: Yes, it is, for now. The progress here is remarkable. I came back to Iraq after being away for nearly two years, and honestly, parts of it are difficult for me to recognize. The park out in front of the house where I live--on the Tigris River--was a dead, dying, spooky place. It's now filled with people--families with children, women walking alone, even at night. That was inconceivable in 2006. The Iraqis who are out there walking in the parks were making their own judgments ­that it is safe enough for them to go out for a walk. They're voting with their feet. It's a wonderful thing to see.

Having said that, it's pretty clear that the calm is very fragile. The calm is built on a series of arrangements that are not self-sustaining; indeed, some of which, like the Sunni Awakening, are showing signs of coming apart. So the genie is back in the bottle, but I'm not sure for how long.

JG: The most astonishing detail in your article today is your description of a parade through Ramadi, which included "American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets nor body armor, nor carrying guns." You wrote, "The festive scene became an occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so much better, so fast." How much of this can be credited to the surge in troops and the shift in tactics last year, and how much to the notion that Iraqis simply got tired of the killing?

DF: Astonishing indeed. I haven't seen Americans soldiers walking around Iraq without helmets since the summer of 2003, when the Americans, who were popular in southern Iraq for having taken down Saddam, used to do that.

What's happened in Anbar really doesn't have anything to do with the surge and, in fact, it is one of the main reasons why the surge has worked.

In Anbar, two things happened: Al Qaeda overreached and the Americans wised up. If you will recall, the Americans came into Iraq in 2003 in a very heavy-handed way, often sweeping up large groups of young males who had nothing to do with the insurgency. In a tribal society, ­where everyone is related to everyone else, ­the Americans dug themselves a very large hole.

Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, through sheer ruthlessness, became the dominant player in the insurgency. And while the guys from Al Qaeda were very good at killing Americans, a goal with which many Sunnis sympathized, they also wanted to kill Iraqi ­Shiites, who they consider apostates, and anyone associated with the Iraqi government. Ordinary Iraqis, it's now clear, didn't want to go along.

Sheikhing up Al QaedaAnd the sheikhs in Anbar didn't go along. So when Al Qaeda started murdering the sheikhs, the sheikhs went to the Americans. The Americans, chastened by their earlier mistakes, grabbed the opportunity. They made a deal. They crushed Al Qaeda in Anbar. The result is the calm you see today.

The Sunni Awakening, which began in Anbar, spread rapidly to other Sunni areas of Iraq, and that took enormous pressure off the Americans and the Iraqi government as the surge kicked in.

JG: One tribal leader you quote, Hamid al-Hais, puts most of the blame for the chaos of the previous years on Paul Bremer's decision to disband the army. Do you agree?

DF: I don't know. I don't think there are any one-line explanations for any of this. But it's pretty clear that decision had a lot of bad consequences.

JG: Is the average Iraqi better off today than he was under Saddam? Or, put another way, is the average Iraqi who was not directly tied to the regime better off today than he was six years ago?

DF: Today is a moment in time. The calm is just a few months old. The Iraqis have been through an extraordinarily violent and traumatic five years. Many, many people suffered horrendously under Saddam. Ask me the question again in five years.

JG: Is Iraq a democracy?

DF: I don't think so. A democracy has many things: elections, compromise between groups, an atmosphere safe enough to discuss the issues of the day, and institutions that exist outside of government that are strong enough to allow all of the above to flourish--newspapers, political groups and the like. In Iraq, most of those things are in their infancy.

JG: How do you, as an American, feel walking through Baghdad today vs. two years ago?

DF: I'll answer with two snapshots from dusk. I went running in the park in front of the New York Times house the other day as the sun was going down and I felt no threat at all. People waved, people smiled. It felt very normal.

A couple of days later I went to Sadr City, also at dusk. Sadr City is a vast slum that takes in about three million people. It's the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia, and it's been the scene of heavy fighting, as recently as a few months ago. I was with some Iraqi friends. It felt perfectly normal. Then one of my Iraqi friends said to me, "What do you think would happen if you were alone?" And I said, "What?" And he and the other Iraqis laughed and said: "You'd be dead in ten seconds."

Let me just say: I left.

[Cross-posted from The Atlantic]

Like many people who have covered John McCain, I think of him as a deeply serious man, preoccupied with America's defense and its position in the world. So I've been confused for the past few days, trying to figure out why he's allowing his campaign to make a circus of this election, leveling unserious and dishonest accusations about Barack Obama's positions on sex education and Sarah Palin.

Then it came to me: The answer can be found in my new Atlantic cover story! (How's that for Washington-based solipsism?) The story grapples with John McCain's philosophy of war, and in particular with the doctrine of preemption, which McCain still endorses. So do I, in certain cases, but that's not the point. The point is that McCain knows that preemption isn't the easiest sell these days: "It's very hard to run for president on this idea right now," he told me.

So, what do you do when one of your core ideas is out of sync with the predispositions of the American public? You spend your days talking about lipstick on pigs. This might win him the election, but I'd rather see him debate preemption.

Commonly, the laws of war in Judaism are understood through the categories of milchemet mitzvah (commanded or holy war) and milchemet r'shut (optional war). These two categories-supplemented at times by the category of milchemet hovah (obligatory war), are helpful in outlining the acceptable and/or unacceptable practices of deploying violence on a massive scale. This is usually the first place that people turn to when trying to think about Jewish notions of just and unjust war.

I want to argue that this specific body of halachah or Jewish law is irrelevant to the contemporary discussion. To find moral insight about the justice of war in the Jewish tradition, one must turn to a less well trod part of the halachic field. A more technical and, in certain ways, legally more sophisticated halachic discussions reveals that these parts of halachah are embedded in a (by definition) particularistic and, at times, chauvinistic tradition. Yet, it is possible to extract a halachic claim from its particularist context by embracing rather than ignoring the specifics of that context.[2]

Continue reading...

Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired's blog on national security, and in my mind one of the best reporters on that beat, has a great post on how Israel's military connection to Georgia is fueling increasing discord between Israel and Russia:

The Russian military blasted Israel today for supplying weapons and training to its adversaries in Georgia.

"Israel armed the Georgian army," Russian Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn told a Moscow press conference. Jerusalem provided Tblisi with "eight types of military vehicles, explosives, landmines and special explosives for the clearing minefields [sic]. "

"In 2007, Israeli experts trained Georgian commandos," he added. Georgia's Deputy Defense Minister Batu Kutelia previously said that "Georgian corporals and sergeants train with Germans, alpine units and the navy work with French instructors, and special operations and urban warfare troops are taught by Israelis."

Tensions between Georgia and Russia ratcheted up the spring, after Russia and her allies in the breakaway region of Abkhazia shot down a number of Georgian spy drones. Those unmanned Hermes 450 reconnaissance planes were made by Israel's Elbit Systems.

The two countries have been doing military hardware deals for almost seven years, "following an initiative by Georgian citizens who immigrated to Israel and became businesspeople," Ynetnews notes. "The fact that Georgia's defense minister, Davit Kezerashvili, is a former Israeli who is fluent in Hebrew contributed to this cooperation."

 Continue reading "How Israel Trained. . " 

And if you've got the Shachtman bug, check out his still very relevant Wired feature (published in November, '07), How Technology Almost Lost the War. One of the better pieces of analytical reporting on the war-planner's miscalculations, providing what amounts to a fascinating primer on the evolution of military strategy. 

For a month or so, a poster-sized advertisement emblazoned with the message “Make Games Not War” and bearing a cartoon hand forming a peace sign was pasted on walls of New York City subway stations. The ad, for the 2007 Video Game Awards, was paid for by Spike TV, who created the awards show in 2002. Samuel Jackson hosted the event on December 9.

Here are some results for any pacifists who were unable to catch the broadcast.

BEST SHOOTER
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision/ Infinity Ward)

BEST MILITARY GAME
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Activision/ Infinity Ward)

GAME OF THE YEAR
BioShock

This last one in particular offers the most felicitous irony. It turns out that BioShock is an Ayn Rand-inspired shooter game in which players battle their way out of an under-water dystopia.

That’s the same Ayn Rand who said:

Whatever rights the Palestinians may have had -- I don't know the history of the Middle East well enough to know what started the trouble -- they have lost all rights to anything: not only to land, but to human intercourse. If they lost land, and in response resorted to terrorism -- to the slaughter of innocent citizens -- they deserve whatever any commandos anywhere can do to them, and I hope the commandos succeed.

If we go to war with Russia, I hope the 'innocent' are destroyed with the guilty. ... Nobody has to put up with aggression, and surrender his right of self-defense, for fear of hurting somebody else, guilty or innocent. When someone comes at you with a gun, if you have an ounce of self-esteem, you answer with force, never mind who he is or who's standing behind him.

Had she only lived long enough to buy an Xbox and pretend to be at war I’m sure she’d have mellowed. As I heard a gray-bearded man put it to his friends while pulling out a hand-held video game on the 6 train, “This keeps me sane.”

But isn’t there something slightly insane about an adult culture that thinks it can play pretend war games in lieu of war? Isn’t there something wrong with an adult culture with a video game habit period? After all, the award show ran on Spike TV, not Nickelodeon. Although, had it aired on Nickelodeon its home audience might have been the same. As Diana West points out in her book The Death of the Grown-Up, How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, "one third of the fifty-six million Americans sitting down to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month in 2002 were between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine.” That’s a mandate for idiocy nineteen million strong.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with adults playing video games or glazing out in front of the occasional cartoon, but clearly there’s a priority problem. Rapper XZIBIT, who was a presenter at the awards, said in a backstage interview: "I have an 11-year old who's a big gamer and I like to play whatever he's playing." Father-son time is a beautiful thing, but you’re not supposed to share your 11-year old’s tastes in recreation.*

West argues that Western adults have co-opted more than their kids’ hobbies; they’ve accepted their adolescent world view—most critically, the doctrine of moral relativism. She makes a convincing case that the culture went from being grown-up-driven to adolescent-driven, not in the nineteen-sixties, but in the years immediately following World War II. This was the first time kids had their own money to spend and that established them as a targeted consumer group. An adolescent-directed marketplace blossomed up around them:

West writes:

All this new stuff not only satisfied passing teen tastes, it validated them. It worked like this: If Western Electric manufactured Princess extension phones in “dreamy” colors, then teens should want Princess extension phones in “dreamy” colors. It also entrenched such immature tastes. That is, if manufacturers made Princess phones in “dreamy” colors, then, of teens should have Princess phones in “dreamy” colors. The retail relationship between consumer teens and their consumer dreams effectively derailed the adolescent trajectory toward adulthood, stalling and even blocking the transition to more mature tastes and interests.

And the rest is history. Almost. The other necessary component was the consent of the greatest generation. And consent they did. West quotes David Reisman’s famous 1950 study The Lonely Crowd:

Children are more heavily cultivated in their own terms than ever before. But while the educator in earlier eras might use the child’s language to put across an adult message, today the child’s language may be used to put across the advertiser’s and storyteller’s idea of what children are like. No longer is it thought to be the child’s job to understand the adult world as the adult sees it. . . Instead, the mass media ask the child to see the world as [the mass media imagines] “the” child sees it.

West maintains that it was also in the post WWII era that the seeds of cultural and moral relativism were planted. Having just defeated Nazi Germany, the U.S. was understandably loath to adopt any posture or policy that could be said to have the slightest whiff of xenophobia. So, “anything goes” became the guiding principle in a youth-centered world.

It’s the noxious simultaneity of moral relativism and adolescent insecurity, fueled by educators and marketing gurus, that, West maintains, is hastening the downfall of Western civilization.

So we arrive at history’s most decadent advertising slogan: “Make Games Not War.”

Peace-loving Spike TV are also known for airing movie marathons featuring that delightfully sociopathic cold-warrior James Bond. That “delightfully” wasn’t sarcastic; Bond movies are great. But there’s something about the perpetual adolescent sensibility of outlets like Spike TV that seems to require the relegation of survival and war to the realm of pure fantasy. Everyone would be happier if war only existed on movie sets or inside an Xbox, but only a special kind of childish mindset could think it’s so: our decadent Western one.

The problem with “Make Games Not War” is that only one side espouses it. There’s another side, and they know no such choice exists. For them, that well-meaning poster is nothing but cause for celebration.

West quotes anthropologist Bryan Page, from sometime in the nineteen-fifties: “Play has become the primary purpose and value in many adult lives. It now borders on the sacred.”

And what do our enemies hold sacred?

* This piece has been edited and expanded since its original posting.

I'll admit from the outset that I'm not sure what the ideal policy towards Pakistan is. I am reasonably sure, however, that this is a terrible idea, and not simply because its authors are fountainheads of terrible ideas. Briefly, Michael O'Hanlon and Frederick Kagan are dismayed by the unrest in Pakistan and --- surprisingly --- urge us to consider pre-emptive military options. It's nice of them to concede that "[a]ll possible military initiatives...are daunting," that "unless we had precise information about the location of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and materials, we could not rely on bombing or using Special Forces to destroy them," and that "a million troops would be required [to pacify] a country of this size." Pity that they didn't leave it at that. Instead, they propose:

a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands. Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place.

I think I get it; despite the fact that we can't rely on special forces to destroy the Pakistani arsenal, we can secure and move it to a location where it's safer, presumably meaning the US will have control of it; what's more, the selfsame Pakistani nationalists who would prevent our special forces from destroying the Pakistani weapons would cooperate in a campaign to transfer them to American control; and we can do all this without intransigent elements in the Pakistani military and intelligence services noticing. How can we accomplish this? You mean you didn't see the answer in black and white in the O'Kaganlon op-ed? We can do it somehow. It's that kind of out-of-the-box strategic thinking what gets you a fellowship at AEI or Brookings. Got a policy objective that seems impossible to achieve? No problem, you can always do it somehow.

Believe it or not, the foregoing is the least hare-brained of O'Hanlon and Kagan's proposals. In fact, we're only halfway through the first, since we'd still need to figure out what to do with the nuclear weapons that the Pakistani military would have voluntarily turned over to American control. And on that score, O'Hanlon and Kagan present two options: "[T]he safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico" --- because what could go wrong with a secret plan to essentially steal a major nuclear arsenal and transport it 8,000 miles? --- or else we could "settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops." And how could we ensure that the Pakistani forces guarding the secret, remote base whither the country's nuclear weapons have vanished, will a) successfully defend the weapons and b) operate in line with American interests? Why, they'll be "elite" forces, so nothing to worry about. But just in case, "crack international troops" will guard the guardians. It's literally foolproof.

Don't get O'Hanlon and Kagan wrong. They're not monomaniacs, and they believe in presenting an array of solutions for any policy challenge. So you don't think a limited, special forces campaign will work? How about an all-out invasion, or as O'Hanlon and Kagan think of it, a "broader option" that would see us "supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together" with a "a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations." And this is just dumbfounding. I'm at a loss to think of a single country anywhere in the world that would be willing to contribute any troops, let alone a meaningful number, to an American-led invasion of Pakistan.

Do Kagan and O'Hanlon actually believe that there could be such a coalition? Do they actually believe any of what they've written? It's as if they believe the US military is capable of achieving absolutely anything, provided we describe their mission with the right adjectives. ("Elite," "crack," etc.) Talk about a Care Bear Stare --- Kagan and O'Hanlon can remake south Asia without drawing upon the magical energy of the Will of the American People, just as long as they, personally, maintain a sufficiently steely will. They'll do it somehow.

Title reference here, for those wondering.

Like a good Strausso-Trotskyist neocon, I deplore moral equivalence of any shade, particularly that tenebrous, fashionable variety that suggests the United States is now in dress rehearsals for fascism, or that George Bush and Tony Blair are the moral twins of Osama Bin Laden. To my mind, this is the diseased terminus of what, during the cold war, used to pass for the most smirking neutralism about -- if not outright sympathy for -- the Soviet "experiment." A stupid and shameful and bungled CIA coup in Central America is worth an entire gulag and then some, according to this argument. Dictatorships deserve a persistent and ever-vigiliant single standard.

However, every so often a story or news bulletin about our own government's incompetence or corruption comes down the pike that beg for not-so-free ideological associations. Case in point: In an article titled "Extended Deployments Should Lessen Army Stress, Commander Says," put out by the American Forces Press Service, we're informed that: 

Extended overseas deployments affecting soldiers serving in Afghanistan and other locales overseen by U.S. Central Command should help to alleviate the stress on the Army, a senior U.S. officer in Afghanistan told Pentagon reporters today.

"I'm absolutely confident that that's going to work and that'll manage the pressure and the stress on the force," Army Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team,said during a satellite-carried news conference.

To call this merely "Orwellian" misses the more crucial point that a worthy cause of deposing a regime that specialized in mental captivity and lying has been further tarnished by the recourse to exactly those methods by our own defense establishment. A new low has been reached when we have to add laughable condescension to the demoralization of our overburdened troops.

The War: SucksBack when the Iraq war began, I caught a lot of shit for being a poet against the war. Which shocked me at the time.  But other Jews seemed to feel that although my anti-war position was philosophically understandable, my willingness to go on the record as a member of such an organization was NOT!

I was told (by otherwise progressive intelligent people) that such groups are all (either secretly or not so secretly) anti-Israel groups.  I was told that such groups were only “using” the war in Iraq as a more acceptable way of opposing Israel.  I was told that by siding with anti-American groups I was siding with anti-Israelis.  And that in adding a Jewish name to their ranks I was lending support to the efforts of  Jewish anti-Semites, letting them use me. 

Yeah, well.  That all seemed insane to me.  I figured there are always wingnuts screaming on both sides of any fight.   And you have to follow your own instincts…

Until one day I went down to a demonstration at the anti-war tent-city in downtown Iowa City, and I discovered that there were, in fact, an awful lot of Jewish anti-Israel demonstrators mixed into the population.  And that by right of being Jewish, I was assumed to be “with them”.

I didn’t know how to feel.  The two issues had gotten conflated and confused somehow, and though I wanted to support the war-protesters, and though I do have complicated feelings about certain Israeli policies, I did NOT want to be seen as generally anti-Israel.

Well now I don’t have to be! 

Because now I can be a Jew Against the War!  I’m certainly on board with this (link via Jewschool):

Believing in the wisdom and relevance of the Jewish tradition, we, the undersigned, maintain that the invasion of Iraq was not just and that the continued occupation extends this injustice. It is now common knowledge that the “permission” to prosecute this war was gained under false pretenses by our president, and that the goals of the war were ill-considered, unrealistic, and poorly planned….

…We the undersigned implore our elected officials to act according to the will of the people of this great country and end this war! We ask that Congress set hard and fast limits on the ability of the President to expand this war or to extend it further in a military action against Iran.

This is important to me, the existence of a sane Jewish anti-war response.  Really important.  
I only wish that in 2003, there had been a more mainstream segment of the Jewish community looking critically at the war. Or that I had known about it.

One representative dead, 17 injured: 

“This is a cowardly act,” said Barhem Saleh, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, who visited the hospital where many of those injured in the explosion had been taken. “This proves terrorism is indiscriminate. Sunnis, Shias, Kurds have been injured and this should be a reminder that all Iraqis are targets.”

Fouad Ajami on Sunni grievances in Iraq:

In their grief, the Sunni Arabs have fallen back on the most unexpected of hopes; having warred against the Americans, they now see them as redeemers. "This government is an American creation," a powerful Sunni legislator, Saleh al-Mutlak, said. "It is up to the Americans to replace it, change the constitution that was imposed on us, replace this incompetent, sectarian government with a government of national unity, a cabinet of technocrats." Shrewd and alert to the ways of the world (he has a Ph.D. in soil science from a university in the U.K.) Mr. Mutlak gave voice to a wider Sunni conviction that this order in Baghdad is but an American puppet. America and Iran may be at odds in the region, but the Sunni Arabs see an American-Persian conspiracy that had robbed them of their patrimony.

They had made their own bed, the Sunni Arabs, but old habits of dominion die hard, and save but for a few, there is precious little acknowledgment of the wages of the terror that the Shia had been subjected to in the years that followed the American invasion. As matters stand, the Sunni Arabs are in desperate need of leaders who can call off the violence, cut a favorable deal for their community, and distance that community form the temptations and the ruin of the insurgency. It is late in the hour, but there is still eagerness in the Maliki government to conciliate the Sunnis, if only to give the country a chance at normalcy.

Implicit in this embittered call for American restitution is of course a Sunni demand for continued American military presence.

Part of the absurdity in referring to the mayhem in today's Iraq as a "civil war" is that civil wars are not fought in a country where the predominant military force is a foreign one tasked with peace-keeping and disposed as politically neutral. (Compare to Vietnam, if you must. Or better yet: to the Anglo-American expedition mounted by Winston Churchill in post-revolutionary Russia, where the goal was to enable the White Army and restore the tsar to power.)

Nor, if U.S. troops withdrew, would there be anything like a draw-out, clearly defined battle between fraternal enemies vying for rulership. Sunnis would be slaughtered in a Shia-led genocide that would happen in a fraction of the time the janjaweed have taken to slaughter black Muslims in Darfur. One could also fairly expect intervention from other Sunni states -- Saudi Arabia, Turkey and possibly even Jordan -- to try and halt this gruesome event, should it come to pass.

In short, we stand at the brink of a regional warfare that would engulf the entire Middle East.

After nearly a six year absence from Salon.Com, Camille Paglia has resumed her columnist duties. While I'm remiss about being dethroned in the realm of brilliantly constructed, effectively snarky pop culture criticisms, I so very much enjoyed Ms. Paglia's inaugural post (the exception being the Hillary-related stuff).

Paglia's ability to weave relevant and insightful connections through so many random tangential topics in her column this week, from Sandra Bernhard to Barack Obama to Air America, is what's going to keep me coming back.

"At the moment, given the level of violence in Iraq, every single Iraqi should be considered a refugee [because they are] victims of violence," says Stéphane Jaquemet, UNHCR's regional representative in the Middle East. So, currently, repatriation is out of the question. Neither Syria nor Jordan is offering local integration to the refugees, and the difficult economic, political, and social situation in those countries doesn't favor local absorption. This makes the option of resettlement the most compelling. But it is not happening yet. In the first nine months of 2006, a total of 404 Iraqis were resettled worldwide, 151 of them in the United States. (In other words, in six months, the American government offers a chance to start a new life to as many Iraqis as are killed each day in the civil war that has followed the U.S.-led intervention in their country.)

It makes the skin crawl to assess a raging humanitarian nightmare according to the rules of historical equivalence. But we compare Saddam to Hitler and Stalin, so World War II, like it not, obtrudes once more into the debate. The United States has a poor to mixed record on opening its borders to war-ravaged and bedraggled masses when the chaos they're fleeing from was not of the United State's own making. How will posterity judge us if turn our backs on Iraqis escaping a civil war for which we're responsible? (You can argue its inevitability with or without regime change, but you can't argue that we've become the stewards of failed state and thus accountable to its citizens.)

Neoconservatives like Bill Kristol have said they little about immigration, perhaps having shrewdly anticipated that they'd need an updated Ellis Island homily to save the day in Mesopotamia. But I'd very much like to hear Lou Dobbs' nativist take on the Iraqi exodus. Or any yellow dog Democrat's, for that matter.

Iraqi refugees in Jordan. - By Anna Husarska - Slate Magazine