Did you know that the Gaza Freedom March -- a group of over 1300 peace activists from 43 countries -- is protesting the continued siege of Gaza, on the anniversary of the brutal Israeli assault that killed over a thousand people last year? (There is also a separate effort to bring a convoy of relief aid to the Gazans, under the auspices of the group Viva Palestina).

Did you know that the Freedom March is now stuck in Cairo, because the Egyptian government has denied them permission to travel to Gaza? The Mubarak regime has its own issues with Hamas, and it is also dependent on U.S. economic and military aid. Israel and the United States don't want the adverse publicity that the Freedom March might generate and are perfectly content to let the Gazans suffer, so needless to say Washington isn't putting any pressure on Egypt to let the convoy through.

Did you know that this event is being extensively covered in the Arab world, and may be causing problems for Mubarak & Co., as the Egyptians are once again being exposed as complicit in the collective punishment that Israel is inflicting on the population of Gaza?

Did you know that one of the participants in the convoy is an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor (Hedy Epstein), and that she recently began a hunger strike to protest the refusal to let the convoy go to Gaza?

You probably didn't know about any of this, but it's not really your fault. You probably get your news from mainstream outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post, and neither of these illustrious newspapers has bothered to cover this story. What do they consider important? Well, in the case of the Times, their idea of a big Mideast story right now is the heart-warming saga of a little shwarma shop in Amman. 

If you do want to learn a bit more about this worthy effort to help the Gazans, you can go to the group's website, here. Or you can follow it on Mondoweiss, here. Or even read about it in Ha'aretz, here.  And then you might have a better idea why the Mubarak government isn't very popular, why Israel faces growing censure for its conduct, why the United States continues to be despised in much of the Arab and Islamic world, and why the blogosphere is so important.

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is "the Narrative" -- his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren't so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that "U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny." He concedes that we made a few mistakes here and there (such as at Abu Ghraib), but the real problem is all those anti-American fairy tales that Muslims tell each other to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. "If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world," he said, "it should stop killing Muslims."

Now I don't think the issue is quite that simple, but the comment got me thinking: How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.

Here's my back-of-the-envelope analysis, based on estimates deliberately chosen to favor the United States. Specifically, I have taken the low estimates of Muslim fatalities, along with much more reliable figures for U.S. deaths.

To repeat: I have deliberately selected "low-end" estimates for Muslim fatalities, so these figures present the "best case" for the United States. Even so, the United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American lost. The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of "excess deaths" in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.

Figures like these should be used with caution, of course, and several obvious caveats apply. To begin with, the United States is not solely responsible for some of those fatalities, most notably in the case of the "excess deaths" attributable to the U.N. sanctions regime against Iraq. Saddam Hussein clearly deserves much of the blame for these "excess deaths," insofar as he could have complied with Security Council resolutions and gotten the sanctions lifted or used the "oil for food" problem properly. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the United States (and the other SC members) knew that keeping the sanctions in place would cause tens of thousands of innocent people to die and we went ahead anyway. 

Similarly, the United States is not solely to blame for the sectarian violence that engulfed Iraq after the 2003 invasion. U.S. forces killed many Iraqis, to be sure, but plenty of Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis, and foreign infiltrators were pulling triggers and planting bombs too. Yet it is still the case that the United States invaded a country that had not attacked us, dismantled its regime, and took hardly any precautions to prevent the (predictable) outbreak of violence. Having uncapped the volcano, we are hardly blameless, and that goes for pundits like Friedman who enthusiastically endorsed the original invasion.

Third, the fact that people died as a result of certain U.S. actions does not by itself mean that those policy decisions were wrong. I'm a realist, and I accept the unfortunate fact that international politics is a rough business and sometimes innocent people die as a result of actions that may in fact be justifiable. For example, I don't think it was wrong to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 or to topple the Taliban in 2001. Nor do I think it was wrong to try to catch Bin Laden -- even though people died in the attempt -- and I would support similar efforts to capture him today even if it placed more people at risk. In other words, a full assessment of U.S. policy would have to weigh these regrettable costs against the alleged benefits to the United States itself or the international community as a whole. 

Yet if you really want to know "why they hate us," the numbers presented above cannot be ignored. Even if we view these figures with skepticism and discount the numbers a lot, the fact remains that the United States has killed a very large number of Arab or Muslim individuals over the past three decades. Even though we had just cause and the right intentions in some cases (as in the first Gulf War), our actions were indefensible (maybe even criminal) in others. 

It is also striking to observe that virtually all of the Muslim deaths were the direct or indirect consequence of official U.S. government policy. By contrast, most of the Americans killed by Muslims were the victims of non-state terrorist groups such as al Qaeda or the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans should also bear in mind that the figures reported above omit the Arabs and Muslims killed by Israel in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Given our generous and unconditional support for Israel's policy towards the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular, Muslims rightly hold us partly responsible for those victims too.

Contrary to what Friedman thinks, our real problem isn't a fictitious Muslim "narrative" about America's role in the region; it is mostly the actual things we have been doing in recent years. To say that in no way justifies anti-American terrorism or absolves other societies of responsibility for their own mistakes or misdeeds. But the self-righteousness on display in Friedman's op-ed isn't just simplistic; it is actively harmful. Why? Because whitewashing our own misconduct makes it harder for Americans to figure out why their country is so unpopular and makes us less likely to consider different (and more effective) approaches.

Some degree of anti-Americanism may reflect ideology, distorted history, or a foreign government's attempt to shift blame onto others (a practice that all governments indulge in), but a lot of it is the inevitable result of policies that the American people have supported in the past. When you kill tens of thousands of people in other countries -- and sometimes for no good reason -- you shouldn't be surprised when people in those countries are enraged by this behavior and interested in revenge. After all, how did we react after September 11? 

MOHAMMED SAWAF/AFP/Getty Images

I haven't read Sarah Palin's new autobiography, and frankly, I don't plan to. But I did Michiko Kakutani's review in yesterday's New York Times, and I was struck by this passage:

In Going Rogue Ms. Palin talks perfunctorily about fiscal responsibility and a muscular foreign policy, and more passionately about the importance of energy independence, but she is quite up front about the fact that much of her appeal lies in her just-folks "hockey mom" ordinariness. She pretends no particular familiarity with the Middle East, the Iraq war or Islamic politics -- "I knew the history of the conflict," she writes, "to the extent that most Americans did." And she argues that "there's no better training ground for politics than motherhood."

Yet Mr. McCain's astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (less than two years as the governor of Alaska, and before that, two terms as mayor of Wasilla, an Alaskan town with fewer than 7,000 residents) as his running mate underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted -- or equated with elitism -- in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.

I think Kakutani is right, but I wonder why so many people -- including Senator McCain, Ms. Palin herself, and the other folks who supported her -- seem to think you don't need to know anything to be good at running foreign policy. I doubt if Ms. Palin would let someone perform surgery on one of her children (or even repair her car) simply because they had parenting experience or an entertaining life story. No, she'd want to make sure that the person in question actually knew what they were doing. Virtually all of us normally insist on genuine expertise when we hire anyone to do an important job -- whether it's carpentry or a cardiac bypass -- yet millions of people in this country seem to think that the most momentous decisions about our collective future can be entrusted to people who are sublimely comfortable in their own ignorance.

George Frey/Getty Images

Two eminent mainstream journalists -- Tom Friedman and Joe Klein -- recently called for United States to disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, on the grounds that Palestinians were too divided to make a deal and the Israelis were not interested in one. Friedman couldn't bring himself to draw the logical conclusion -- if the United States truly going to "disengage," that also means cutting off its economic and military assistance -- but Klein did.   

I have a certain sympathy for this position (and even wrote similar things myself before I wised up), but there are two problems with this specific idea. The first is that it is a meaningless prescription: There's no way to cut the aid package (or even put a hold on it, which is what Klein recommends) so long as Congress is in hock to AIPAC and the other groups in the status quo lobby. And unless I've missed something, I doubt groups like J Street would support it either.

Friedman and Klein's statements do convey how discourse in the United States is changing, but the specific recommendation they offer here is a non-starter. Remember: we are dealing with a Congress that just voted to condemn the Goldstone Report by a vote of 344-24. The aid package may be indirectly subsidizing the settlements and threatening Israel’s future as a Jewish majority state, but a supine House and Senate will still sign the annual check.

The second problem, I fear, is that it is too little, too late. Having dithered, delayed and dissembled ever since the Oslo Accords -- while the number of settlers more than doubled -- we are about to face an entirely different problem. The sun is now setting on the "two-state solution" -- if it is not already well below the horizon -- and pretty soon everyone will have to admit that they are sitting around in the dark and pretending they see daylight.

Be careful what you wish for. Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton's mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state -- which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent "Road Map" -- to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine. And on what basis could the United States oppose such a campaign, without explicitly betraying its own core values?

In this regard, it was telling that Martin Indyk -- a key figure in the lobby and far from a harsh critic of Israeli policy -- is quoted in the Times saying "more than likely, we are entering a new era." I think he's right, and he sounds worried. He should be, because the Obama administration isn't remotely ready for it.  

MUSA AL-SHAER/AFP/Getty Images

I watched the Frontline documentary on Afghanistan ("Obama's War") Tuesday night, and most of my concerns got reinforced. One should watch most documentaries with a skeptical eye, because skilled filmmakers can easily slant the story by omitting any footage that doesn't fit the impression they are trying to leave and by shaping the story in ways that reinforce a particular conclusion.

Nonetheless, the presentation didn't offer much grounds for hope, and even the on-screen advocates of a continued U.S. effort (Gen. Stanley McChrystal, AfPak envoy Richard Holbrooke, CNAS President John Nagl, etc.) didn't sound very encouraging. I think McChrystal and maybe even Holbrooke know they've got a loser on their hands, and were operating in damage-limitation mode. As others have noted, the on-screen interviews with Pakistani officials made it clear that they are playing a double-game here; they've been in bed with the Afghan Taliban for years and are even less reliable partners than the Karzai government, no matter how much aid we dump on them. To believe we can eke out something resembling "victory" in these circumstances is like believing one could drain the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon. And watching the footage of U.S. Marines attempting to do the impossible made me admire their dedication and raw courage and resent like hell the strategic myopia that sent them on this fool's errand.

Remember that the main justification for our counterinsurgency campaign is the "safe haven" argument: We must defeat the Taliban to prevent Al Qaeda from regaining a sanctuary there. A recent presentation by Richard Barrett, coordinator of the United Nations' Al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee, suggests that this may not be much of a problem (h/t: John Mueller).

Money quotes (from pp. 17 and 23 of the PDF file):

p. 17: "If I could just talk a little bit about Afghanistan and al-Qaida, the link between al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban is a historic one but not a very strong one, in my view. The Afghan Taliban have their own objectives. And their objectives are to take power in Afghanistan. Essentially, it's a local issue for them. Al-Qaida can join the party; fine, they can help them, but to a certain extent, al-Qaida doesn't help them because if – and I think Mullah Omar's made this very clear – if they take over in Afghanistan, they want to consolidate their power. They don't want to be kicked out again like they were in 2001. And to consolidate their power, they don't want al-Qaida hanging around. They want to be able to say we are a responsible government; we're not going to support anybody who meddles in the business of our neighbors or in other international countries or partners.

Well, you might say well, they'd say that anyway; why wouldn't they – why shouldn't they say that? But I don't think they lose a lot if they don't say that. They don't gain a lot by saying it and they don't lose a lot by not saying it. So I think that we could possibly think that we might take them at the face value – that they would not automatically allow Afghanistan to become a base for al-Qaida…"

p. 23: "I'm not sure that if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that they would necessarily welcome al-Qaida back in great forces, particularly if al-Qaida was going back there to set up camps to train people to mount attacks against other countries. I think the Taliban must calculate that had it not been for 9/11 they'd still be empowering Kabul now today, that no one would have come to kick them out. It was only 9/11 that caused them to lose power. So you know, they lost all that time, and if they get back they perhaps don't want to make that same mistake again."

If the Frontline report was mostly accurate and Barrett is mostly correct, there are no good strategic reasons to wage a costly counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. It's no more the "good war" than Iraq was, and Obama is deluding himself if he thinks he can achieve a meaningful victory there.

Postscript: If Obama wants a more promising strategy -- and Lord knows he should -- he should take a look at Robert Pape's op-ed in today's New York Times. Readers here know that I'm in favor of the "offshore balancing" strategy that Pape outlines, and not just in Afghanistan. I believe we will eventually head in that directon, but as Winston Churchill once noted about America, only after "trying all the alternatives."

Yesterday, the New York Times online service hosted a "debate" about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, in response to the leaking of commanding general Stanley McChrystal's memo stating that more troops were necessary to avoid defeat. Unfortunately, the six people they asked to debate the issue (Gretchen Peters, James Morin, Vanda Feldab-Brown, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, and Kori Schake) all seemed to be open supporters of the U.S. military commitment there. So when asked "how should additional troops be deployed? What types of specialized personnel are needed now?" none of the Times's chosen panel responded by saying "more troops are not the answer." In short, the six panelists managed to avoid the real question that President Obama (and the nation) faces: should the United States increase its presence in the hopes of reversing the situation, or should it cut its losses and get out? Would it really have been so bad to have at least one genuine skeptic of the war included among the respondents?

DAVID FURST/AFP/Getty Images

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has reportedly penned a "searing critique" of efforts to improve U.S. relations with the Muslim world via "strategic communication." According to the New York Times, Mullen argues that "we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate."

Sounds right to me. Like most great powers, and especially dominant ones, the United States tends to believe that its motives are pure, that its noble aims are apparent to all, and that other peoples ought to be grateful for its self-less assistance. (Never mind that U.S. foreign policy is mostly driven by perceived self-interest, even if we don't like to admit it to ourselves). If people overseas are mad  at us, this must be due to a some sort of misunderstanding. If we just explained it to them a little better, they would support whatever it is we are doing, even if it involves reorganizing their way of life, helping select who runs their country, supporting various allies even when they are mis-behaving, or sending Predators or cruise missiles from afar to blow up suspected terrorist sites on their soil.  And if anti-Americanism isn't just a misunderstanding, it is because some misguided people "hate our values." Whatever it is, it's never our fault.

To his credit, Mullen appears to be acknowledging that U.S. actions really do have consequences--including negative consequences--and maybe we ought to think about them differently. This isn't the first time that the Pentagon has said smart things about the sources of anti-Americanism, by the way. A 1997 study by the Defense Science Board found "a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and increased terrorist attacks on the United States," and a 2004 DSB study on strategic communication concluded that "Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom," but rather they hate our policies."  It also observed that in the eyes of the Muslim world, the "American occupation of Aghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering." The Pew Global Attitudes Survey reached a similar conclusion in 2002, observing that "antipathy toward the United States is shaped more by what it does in the international arena than by what it stands for politically and economically."

Of course, one can still debate whether a given policy is the right one or not; sometimes policies that are in the U.S. interest will annoy or anger other people. That's just life in the international system: conflicts of interest inevitably arise and foreign policy isn't a popularity contest. Given America's privileged position, however, one of our main foreign policy goals should be to try to minimize the amount of global irritation we face, and to go to some lengths to make sure we don't generate antipathy unnecessarily.

The key point to bear in mind is that there are real limits to America's ability to improve its global image simply by improved "messaging," "spin," or even by electing a black President. And there's an important lesson there for Obama, whose rise to power was elevated in good part by his remarkable communications skills. The lesson is that an eloquent, learned, and well-delivered speech-like the one he gave in Cairo--is just a first step, and the effects wear off quickly. To bring about genuine change, lofty rhetoric needs to be accompanied by policies that will actually address the legitimate concerns and grievances of his listeners.  You know the old line: talk is cheap. And here's another old saw: actions speak louder than words.

In the end, what will matter to people around the world is what the United States actually does with its vast power at its disposal. If it is seen as both competent and committed to morally defensible aims and broadly benevolent purposes, it is likely to be viewed as a positive force by most people (though the sheer magnitude of U.S. power will still make many nervous, and there will always be some who cannot be won over). If it is seen as bumbling, venal, cruel, or deeply hypocritical, however, then no amount of clever packaging is going to fool the world for long.

P.S.  Mullen's article is due to be released today in Joint Forces Quarterly.  It wasn't on-line when I was writing this, so my discussion is based solely on the Times story. I'll read the article as soon as it's available, and will let you know if my thinking changes after I read the whole thing.  

(Editor's note: Mullen's article is now available on ForeignPolicy.com)

Via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, we learned yesterday that Stars and Stripes has reported that journalists seeking to "embed" with U.S. forces in Afghanistan are being vetted by the Rendon Group, the controversial consulting group that helped the Iraqi National Congress spread disinformation about Iraqi WMD in the run-up to the Iraq War. Rendon reportedly "examines individual reporters' recent work and determines whether the coverage was "positive," "negative" or "neutral.'" The article also quotes an Air Force public affairs officer saying that no reporters have been denied access, but says that the policy "is so we know with whom we're working."

It's hard not to see this as a not-too-subtle attempt to bolster public support for the war by spinning coverage (the more you know about a reporter's proclivities, the more you can try to mold what they write). And that makes me wonder if the situation there is even worse than the mainstream media coverage suggests (which is worrisome enough).

As attention remains riveted on Iran, readers should not miss two important pieces on the Israel-Palestine front. The first is Tony Judt's blockbuster op-ed from today's New York Times, which demolishes most of the myths about Israel's "settlements" and calls them -- all of them -- what they are: illegal.

My only difference with Judt's analysis -- and it is a minor one -- is his suggestion that Israeli leaders have repeatedly "hoodwinked" American officials about the nature of the settlement enterprise. That may be true of George W. Bush, who seemed to accept Ariel Sharon's world-view rather uncritically, but it's not true of most of Bush's predecessors. Every U.S. president since Lyndon Johnson formally opposed the creation of settlements, and some administrations (e.g., Richard Nixon's) also referred to them as contrary to international law. And even George W. Bush repeatedly called on Israel to stop expanding the settlements, to little avail, of course.

The real problem has been that no president has been able to put sustained pressure on Israel to stop building settlements, because to do so would trigger reflexive opposition from AIPAC and the other hard-line elements in the Israel lobby. Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush both took on the lobby and were able to make some modest progress, but both paid a significant price for doing so. Subsequent U.S. presidents have effectively sub-contracted their Middle East policy to individuals (e.g., Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk under Clinton and Elliott Abrams under Bush) who were connected to key groups in the lobby and personally opposed to putting any pressure on Israel, so it's hardly surprising that settlement expansion continued even though it was contrary to official U.S. policy. Moreover, as the Washington Post recently reported, the State Department issued an opinion in 1979 that the settlements were "inconsistent with international law." That opinion, the Post reports, "has never been revoked or revised." But it has been ignored.

The result of all this, as Judt makes clear, has been to "create facts" that make a two-state solution increasingly difficult -- and maybe impossible -- to achieve. But don't forget former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's warning: "If the two-state solution collapses, Israel will face a South African style struggle for political rights." If Israel continues on its present trajectory, in other words, it will become an apartheid state. And once that happens, Olmert said, "The state of Israel is finished." By turning a blind eye towards the settlement project for decades, in short, Israel's so-called "friends" helped pave the road to a very bleak future.

Judt will undoubtedly receive the usual denunciations from hardliners committed to defending the status quo; we can expect the usual retorts in the letters' section from Abe Foxman of the ADL or David Harris of the AJC. But anyone with a genuine commitment to Israel's future should welcome his honest and eloquent piece. And the Times deserves credit for running it.

The second piece is a terrific commentary by Helena Cobban on the internal paralysis within the Palestinian national movement, and especially the current weakness of Fatah. Most people already know that Fatah and Hamas are bitter enemies, and that this rift is an obstacle to peace. But Cobban shows that the problems are in fact deeper than that, and will require sustained attention to repair.

The dysfunctional nature of current Palestinian leadership has many origins, and lots of different groups bear responsibility for it. As Rashid Khalid documents in The Iron Cage, the British did their best to decapitate the Palestinian Arab community during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, and the expulsion of the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionists/Israelis in 1948 further decimated and divided the community. The Arab states subsequently reinforced these divisions by backing competing Palestinian factions in order to advance their own selfish interests. Key PLO leaders -- including Yasser Arafat -- made serious blunders themselves. Israel also did its best to reinforce Palestinian disunity by aiding Hamas in the late 1980s and by arresting or assassinating Palestinian leaders, and especially anyone who looked like they might be legitimate leader and capable foe. Given the various forces that have worked to keep the Palestinians weak and divided, it would be shocking if their leadership were not problematic.

But if our goal is peace, then we need strong and legitimate leaders on both sides. It follows that if Israel wants a durable peace, it has an interest in doing everything it can to strengthen Palestinian leaders. As Barack Obama clearly understands, halting settlement expansion and removing the hundreds of checkpoints that are strangling Palestinian daily life would be an important step in both symbolic and practical terms. Agreement on the basic principles of a two-state solution -- starting with an agreement on borders -- would strengthen moderate leaders and force Hamas to choose between being part of the peace process or being increasingly irrelevant to the Palestinian future. Today, Israel's long-term interests are advanced not by encouraging division and rancor on the other side but by helping foster a greater sense of national unity and the creation of strong and effective Palestinian institutions. The multinational effort to train Palestinian security forces (under the leadership of U.S. general Keith Dayton) is a step in the right direction, but it will only succeed if viable statehood in the near future is a realistic possibility.

When making war, it is good to face an adversary who is weak and divided. But when it comes time to make peace, it is best if one's former foe is competent, legitimate, efficient, and able to live up to its commitments. Convincing Israelis of that radical but rather obvious idea will be one of Barack Obama's most important tasks.

How should we respond to North Korea's unconscionable decision to sentence two American journalists to twelve years at hard labor? North Korea has a history of using prisoners as bargaining chips or for propaganda purposes (as it did with the crew of the USS Pueblo, which it seized back in 1968), or as a way to get far more powerful countries to make symbolic apologies or concessions. This tactic shouldn't surprise us: when you are as weak as the Hermit Kingdom, facing the possibility of more intrusive sanctions, and apparently in the midst of a succession struggle of some kind, trying to find some way to get Uncle Sam to do your bidding is probably hard to resist.

But the louder we protest, the more domestic benefits the regime gets and the greater their incentive to extract the maximum prestige by prolonging the journalists' incarceration. North Korea wants this story on page one and wants Obama to pay lots of attention to them, but we don’t have to play that game. In fact, we want to remind them that we've got lots of more important countries to deal with and we just don't have much to say to them anymore. Once they are ready to release the captives, they know how to reach us. Pyongyang might demand some sort of apology or statement of regret from Washington (as it received when it finally repatriated the Pueblo's crew), and if that's all it would take to get the journalists released, then we ought to go ahead and give it to them. The good news is that we could say almost anything they asked and nobody outside of North Korea would believe we actually meant it. In fact, the more abject and absurd the apology, the less credible it would be and the less actual harm it would do to our image.   

JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images

In general, I think the Obama/Netanyahu meetings went pretty much as I expected. I've also been struck by the Rashomon-like quality of the commentary on the event, which reminds me of the way that politicians react after campaign debates (their candidate always won). People who want the United States to be more evenhanded saw signs of discord and emphasize the clear differences between the two men on the Palestinian issue; those who favor the status quo on Israel-Palestine highlight the partial agreement on Iran (both men regard its nuclear program as a bad thing, albeit with different degrees of alarm). 

The fact that different people can so easily read different meanings into this event is not surprising; both men had little incentive for an overt clash despite their obvious differences. That that's what diplomatic ambiguity is all about. As I suggested yesterday, we won't really know where U.S.-Israeli relations are headed unless and until Obama spells out own vision of a peace settlement in some detail, and until we learn whether Obama is willing to use U.S. leverage to bring it about. Stay tuned.

Amos Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images

Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to a website for a film festival featuring over thirty movies about wine. That got me thinking: if Foreign Policy had a film festival, what movies should we show? There are some obvious candidates (see below), but rather fewer than you might think. After all, many aspects of foreign policy don't lend themselves to cinematic treatment, which is why I don't expect to see a gripping drama about the Doha Round or a lighthearted farce about the Six Party Talks on North Korea (though Kim Jong Il clearly has untapped comic potential).

There are lots of terrific war movies, of course, but most of them tell you relatively little about why the war happened or what the conflict was actually about. And spy movies have long been a popular genre, ranging from Hitchcock’s Thirty-Nine Steps to the gadgetry and glitz of most Bond flicks to the film noir seediness of The Third Man to the paranoid high-tech travelogue that is the Jason Bourne franchise.

But let's raise the bar high, and exclude pure war movies, spy capers, documentaries, and overt propaganda films like Triumph of the Will or Frank Capra's Why We Fight, and focus on movies that tells us something about international relations more broadly. Here's my personal top ten list, with apologies for my ethnocentrism (I don’t see enough foreign-language films).

10. Meeting Venus

Ostensibly a film about opera and an unlikely romance between a diva and an obscure conductor -- set in a fictitious "all-European" orchestra -- this droll sleeper actually tells you a lot about environmentalism, European labor unions, the historical legacy of the Trotsky-Stalin split, and the tangled politics of the European Union. Plus it’s got Glenn Close.

9. Independence Day

Basically a sci-fi flick the depends on you suspending disbelief throughout (e.g., how did Bill Pullman stay cockpit ready for an F-15 while serving as President, and where did Wlll Smith learn to fly a flying saucer?) It's Hollywood, so of course the United States gets to save the world. But it makes my list because it is balance-of-power theory in action: an external threat (giant alien spaceships), gets the world to join forces against the common foe.

8. Syriana

Yes, there are a lot of spies roaming around this movie, but its much broader than that; an exciting if somewhat incoherent portrait of the interplay of oil companies, great power politics, local militias, and the tension between modernity and tradition in the Middle East.  Not to be taken too seriously, but not without insights either.

7. Judgment at Nuremberg

Not just a gripping movie, but also a film about a watershed historical event. One could argue that this is where the modern human rights movement begins.

6. Wag the Dog

Instead of invading Grenada or firing cruise missiles at Sudan, here the White House hires a Hollywood producer to invent a wholly fictitious war. Sounds absurd, but those WMD in Iraq turned out to be fictitious too. There's a whole IR literature on "scapegoat wars" (i.e., wars fought to distract the public from other issues), and this film just takes that impulse a step further. It's a cautionary tale in this era of digital special effects, a compliant news media, and the citizens who are all too inclined to believe whatever they are told. Could this be Roger Ailes's favorite movie?

5. Fail Safe

Almost-but-not-quite a war movie, and one of the best Cold War-era "will we blow up the world or not?" thrillers, with a surprising, sobering ending.

4. Gandhi, and A Passage to India (tie)

Everything you ever wanted to know about colonialism and the unavoidable clash of cultures that it produces.

3. The Great Dictator

Chaplin's lethal lampooning of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, released in 1940 and addressing anti-Semitism at a moment when plenty of other institutions were still ignoring it. Reminds us that making fun of despots is often an effective weapon.
 
2. Dr. Strangelove

Granted, it is a war movie (though the war depicted here won’t last long), but so much more. Kubrick punctured the absurdity of the conventional military thinking in a nuclear age as well as any scholar could, and managed to satirize the whole Cold War mentality to hilarious effect.  

1. Casablanca

No, it’s not really a war movie (there are no battle scenes, and the emphasis is on politics, resistance, and of course romance). But it’s on my list, because, well, it's Casablanca. And where would modern discourse be without phrases like "Round up the usual suspects," "Here's looking at you, kid," "I was misinformed," "I'm shocked, shocked!…" and "this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”?

HONORABLE MENTIONS: The Interpreter (not that good a movie, but how many films take place at the UN?); Rollover (an old B movie about a global financial meltdown triggered by crooked corporations, venal foreign investors, and corrupt financiers. Right, as if something like that could ever happen); Local Hero (hot shot rep from a multinational oil corporation is no match for the charms of a quirky Scottish fishing village); Duck Soup (the Marx Brothers show you what could happen if Glenn Beck ran foreign policy); Missing (about the CIA's involvement in Chile); Grand Illusion (a classic antiwar movie, but didn't make my list because it is set in the middle of World War I); Hotel Rwanda (humanity in midst of the world's most recent genocide); Charlie Wilson's War (partly about the Afghan War, but mostly about how things get done -- or not -- in Washington. My CIA friends tell me a lot of it is a crock, but Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant and Tom Hanks ain't bad); and last but not least, Reds (the Bolshevik Revolution was a major world event, and it's an excellent movie, too).  

And YOUR nominees are?

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I’m spending some time this month rehearsing for an annual charity show (playing keyboards in the pit band), so my thoughts have turned back to music. Here’s my question: where have all the political songs gone, and especially songs about war and peace? I’m not saying there aren’t any (see below), but this genre doesn’t seem to cast the same shadow it once did.

Back in the folk era (for younger readers, that means the late 50s/early-to-mid 60s), songs about war and injustice were staples of popular culture here in the United States. Think of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” or Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” At about the same time, the all-time genius of political musical satire, Tom Lehrer, was writing scathingly funny songs about a range of foreign policy topics, including nuclear proliferation (“Who’s Next?”), NATO’s multilateral force (“The MLF Lullaby”), liberal interventionism (“Send the Marines!”) and even nuclear Armageddon (“So Long, Mom!”). And don’t forget Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” (written by P.F. Sloan), an apocalyptic jeremiad that hit #1 on the Billboard charts in 1965 and contains references to nuclear war, Red China, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and congressional fecklessness.

By the late 1960s, fueled by Vietnam, songs about war were legion. Off the top of my head, there’s Donovan’s “Universal Soldier,” the Animals' “Sky Pilot,” CSNY’s “Ohio,” and “Wooden Ships,” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” and “Imagine,” Edwin Starr’s “War,” and Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” Even Glenn Campbell’s pop hit “Galveston” (written by Jimmy Webb) has a Vietnam theme. There were a few songs on the other side too, most famously Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.”

My main point is that some of these songs were big hits, selling lots of copies and getting lots of airplay. And satire wasn’t entirely gone either, with Country Joe and the Fish’s “Feelin’ Like I’m Fixin to Die Rag,” and Randy Newman’s brilliant “Political Science,” which dates from the early 1970s but could have been written for George W. Bush. Excerpt:

No one likes us, I don’t know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around the world, even our old friends put us down,
Let’s drop the big one, and see what happens…

We give them money, but are they grateful?
No, they’re spiteful, and they’re hateful,
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them,
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.

I’d be remiss not to mention one of my all-time favorites, Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?” (first recorded in the early 1970s but made famous by Elvis Costello and the Attractions in 1979 and later voted 284th best rock song by Rolling Stone). Then in 1985, right on cue, came the pop anthem to globalization (and foreign aid): “We are the World” (written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie and recorded by an all-star group to raise money for famine relief in Africa).

Given the foreign policy problems we have faced in recent years, including 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s somewhat surprising that we haven’t seen a resurgence of popular music exploring these themes. There are some obvious exceptions, to be sure, such as Springsteen’s “Devils and Dust,” Pink’s “Dear Mr. President,” or Neil Young’s album “Living with War,” and alt-country singer/guitarist/songwriter Buddy Miller has a terrific anti-landmines tune on his album Poison Love entitled “100 Million Little Bombs.” (Salon.com has a list of other anti-war songs here, and I found this list of top 10 political rock songs here.) On the pro-war side, you’ve got Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” and “American Soldier,” among others. But unless I’ve missed something (and that’s perfectly possible, because I’m not nearly as plugged in as I once was), none of these songs is commanding the sort of mass audience that earlier songs about war (or foreign policy, broadly defined) did. Some of them are powerful and evocative and musically sophisticated, but I haven’t heard one that seems likely to become a standard anthem.

Why? My hypothesis: there’s no draft. So long as military service is voluntary, and thus something that young people can opt out of, the costs of war will seem far away to many of them and their attention will tend to focus elsewhere. And when that happens, there won’t be big money in political songs and they’ll stay on the fringes of popular culture. Seems to be true of antiwar movies too.

But as I said, I’m not as plugged in as I used to be, and maybe I've just missed the good stuff. So the floor is open for comments: are there terrific songs about war or foreign policy being recorded these days? If so, are any of them attracting mass interest? If not, why not? The floor is open.

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Like every fan of good writing, I was delighted to see the New York Times end its experiment with Bill Kristol. Now the question is who the Times will pick to fill the second right-wing slot in its op-ed lineup. Here's a radical idea: instead of merely duplicating David Brooks, why not hire a realist? As I wrote in Salon back when Kristol was hired, there are plenty of neoconservatives and liberal internationalists writing for today's op-ed pages, but realists are surpisingly scarce. And I can think of several who would be pretty good at it (no, I don’t mean me).

If the Times doesn't like that idea, why not look for a conservative voice from overseas? It's a globalized world, after all, and I'll bet its readers might appreciate reading a view of the world from outside the parochial confines of the United States. For example, the Times could hire one of the people who write lead editorials for the Economist, or even "Lexington," the anonymous columnist who covers America for the British-based magazine. Economist columns and editorials are almost always well-informed, sometimes witty, and the prose is a model of laser-like clarity. Could this be one reason why The Economist is making money and the Times isn't?

Whatever the reason, here's hoping that the Times' management does better this time around.

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