For the record: I don't know if there was a genuine Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. Let me repeat that: I don't know. And neither do you. All we know is that the U.S. government claims to have uncovered such a plot, involving an Iranian-American used-car salesman who allegedly was getting direction from some part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. This dangerous criminal mastermind reportedly thought he was paying a Mexican drug cartel to conduct the actual attacks, when he was in fact dealing with an undercover DEA agent.

As I said, none of us really know what was going on here, but several features ought to be kept in mind. First, the Iranian government is by all accounts a contentious and unruly body, and it is possible that some rogue element of the Revolutionary Guards came up with this cockamamie but obviously despicable scheme. Whether Supreme Leader Khamenei or President Ahmadinejad had anything to do with it, of course, is another matter entirely.

Second, the FBI doesn't have a terrific track record in identifying and documenting this sort of conspiracy, and we'd be fools to take their accusations at face value. There is sometimes a fine line between uncovering a real terrorist plot and subtly encouraging one, as in the famous case of the "Miami Seven," whose plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago appears to have been largely inspired by the undercover agent who eventually exposed them. Until we know a lot more about the actual time line and evidence behind these latest accusations, a certain skepticism is warranted. And I wouldn't be surprised if the government eventually reveals that the evidence of direct Iranian involvement is based on intercepted signals intelligence, which it will then claim it cannot make public without compromising sources and/or methods. In other words, just trust us...

Third, before we leap to the conclusion that this is more evidence of how heinous Iran's revolutionary leadership is, let's pause to remember that the United States and some of our allies have done similar things in the past. We tried to bomb Muammar al-Qaddafi's tent back in the 1980s, and the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro and a few other foreign leaders back in the 1960s. And the United States has certainly backed various groups that used assassination and other forms of terrorism to advance their political aims, such as the Nicaraguan contras. Some of you might think that these efforts were justified; my point is simply that we aren't wholly innocent in this regard. That doesn't justify what Iran is accused of doing, but it might temper our own moral outrage a bit.

Lord knows there's plenty of grounds for concern about various Iranian actions (including their reliance on murder and/or sabotage on several occasions in the past), and no shortage of conflicts of interest between Tehran and Washington. But this story is sufficiently bizarre -- would a real Iranian agent actually try to hire a drug cartel to do his dirty work? -- and the potential consequences are sufficiently grave that we really ought to wait until we know more before drawing any conclusions at all.

Today is the 21st anniversary of a key date in world history. On this date in 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting in motion a train of events that would have fateful consequences for Saddam himself, but also for the United States. Indeed, one could argue that this invasion was the first step in a train of events that did enormous damage to the United States and its position in the world.

Of course, we all know what happened in the first Gulf War. After a brief period of vacillation (and a vigorous public debate on different options), the first Bush administration assembled a large and diverse international coalition and quickly mobilized an impressive array of military power (most of it American). It got approval from the U.N. Security Council for the use of force. Although a number of prominent hawks predicted that the war would be long and bloody, the U.S.-led coalition routed the third-rate Iraqi forces and destroyed much of Saddam's military machine. We then imposed an intrusive sanctions regime that dismantled Iraqi's WMD programs and left it a hollow shell. Despite hard-line pressure to "go to Baghdad," Bush & Co. wisely chose not to occupy the country. They understood what Bush's son did not: Trying to occupy and reorder the politics of a deeply divided Arab country is a fool's errand.

Unfortunately, the smashing victory in the first Gulf War also set in train an unfortunate series of subsequent events. For starters, Saddam Hussein was now firmly identified as the World's Worst Human Being, even though the United States had been happy to back him during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. More importantly, the war left the United States committed to enforcing "no-fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq.

But even worse, the Clinton administration entered office in 1993 and proceeded to adopt a strategy of "dual containment." Until that moment, the United States had acted as an "offshore balancer" in the Persian Gulf, and we had carefully refrained from deploying large air or ground force units there on a permanent basis. We had backed the Shah of Iran since the 1940s, and then switched sides and tilted toward Iraq during the 1980s. Our goal was to prevent any single power from dominating this oil-rich region, and we cleverly played competing powers off against each other for several decades.

With dual containment, however, the United States had committed itself to containing two different countries -- Iran and Iraq -- who hated each other, which in turn forced us to keep lots of airplanes and troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. We did this, as both Kenneth Pollack and Trita Parsi have documented, because Israel wanted us to do it, and U.S. officials foolishly believed that doing so would make Israel more compliant during the Oslo peace process. But in addition to costing a lot more money, keeping U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia for the long term also fueled the rise of al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden was deeply offended by the presence of "infidel" troops on Saudi territory, and so the foolish strategy of dual containment played no small role in causing our terrorism problem. It also helped derail several attempts to improve relations between the United States and Iran. Dual containment, in short, was a colossal blunder.

But no strategy is so bad that somebody else can't make it worse. And that is precisely what George W. Bush did after 9/11. Under the influence of neoconservatives who had opposed dual containment because they thought it didn't go far enough, Bush adopted a new strategy of "regional transformation." Instead of preserving a regional balance of power, or containing Iraq and Iran simultaneously, the United States was now going to use its military power to topple regimes across the Middle East and turn those countries into pro-American democracies. This was social engineering on a scale never seen before. The American public and the Congress were unenthusiastic, if not suspicious, about this grand enterprise, which forced the Bush administration to wage a massive deception campaign to get them on board for what was supposed to be the first step in this wildly ambitious scheme. The chicanery worked, and the United States launched its unnecessary war on Iraq in March 2003.

Not only did "Mission Accomplished" soon become a costly quagmire, but wrecking Iraq -- which is what we did -- destroyed the balance of power in the Gulf and improved Iran's geopolitical position. The invasion of Iraq also diverted resources away from the war in Afghanistan, which allowed the Taliban to re-emerge as a formidable fighting force. Thus, Bush's decision to topple Saddam in 2003 led directly to two losing wars, not just one. And these wars were enormously expensive to boot. Combined with Bush's tax cuts and other fiscal irresponsibilities, this strategic incompetence caused the federal deficit to balloon to dangerous levels and helped bring about the fiscal impasse that we will be dealing with for years to come.

Obviously, none of these outcomes were inevitable back in 1990. Had cooler heads and smarter strategists been in charge after the first Gulf War, we might have taken advantage of that victory to foster a more secure and stable order throughout the Middle East. In particular, we would have pulled our military forces out of the region and gone back to offshore balancing. After all, Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait in 1990 did not force the United States to choose "dual containment." Nor did it make it inevitable that we would bungle the Oslo peace process, pay insufficient attention to al Qaeda's intentions, or drink the neocons' Kool-Aid and gallop off on their foolish misadventure in Iraq. But when future historians search for the moment when the "American Empire" reached its pinnacle and began its descent, the war that began 21 years ago would be a good place to start.

A quick footnote to the tragic events in Norway.  Although as Greenwald points out, various unreliable sources were quick to assume that the attacks was the work of al Qaeda or some other Islamist group, there was in fact good reason to suspect from the start that right-wing extremists were really to blame. As I noted back in February, a 2010 study to Europol had shown that the vast majority of "terrorist" incidents in Europe were the work of European anarchist groups, and only a tiny fraction had anything to do with Islam. Here's what I said back then:

In 2009, there were fewer than 300 terrorist incidents in Europe, a 33 percent decline from the previous year. The vast majority of these incidents (237 out of 294) were conducted by indigenous European separatist groups, with another forty or so attributed to leftists and/or anarchists. According to the report, a grand total of one (1) attack was conducted by Islamists. Put differently, Islamist groups were responsible for a whopping 0.34 percent of all terrorist incidents in Europe in 2009. In addition, the report notes, ‘the number of arrests relating to Islamist terrorism (110) decreased by 41 percent compared to 2008, which continues the trend of a steady decrease since 2006.'''

So if journalists and right-wing bloggers had been paying attention, they might have guessed that it was far more likely that a European was responsible. But they didn't, which tell you a lot about their mind-set and motivations.

Moreover, as Matt Yglesias observes over on his blog, the attacks in Norway also cast doubt on the whole "safe haven" argument that has been used to justify our protracted, costly, and counter-productive effort to reorder political and social relations throughout Central Asia.  Norway was far better governed than Afghanistan or Pakistan is likely to be in our lifetimes, yet that didn't prevent a local extremist from perpetrating a horrific crime, inspired at least in part by the hyperventilating hatred disseminated by prominent rightwing Islamophobes here in the United States. Put differently, the United States could stay in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the next century, and it would still be unable to guarantee that this territory didn't contain some hostile cells of extremists bent on attacking the United States or its allies. And even if we could, we obviously couldn't be sure that bad guys weren't in Yemen or Oslo or Bakersfield or Des Moines or Portland or Key West, or anywhere else.

I did say that I was "going off the grid" for ten days or so, but reading the New York Times remains a morning ritual for the household and I still have access to my email. And yesterday they combined to make a brief post imperative.

The first item was an email announcement from the Hudson Institute, inviting me (and probably hundreds of other people) to attend a luncheon briefing on "The Political Situation in Kyrgyzstan: Implications for the United States." The first sentence of the announcement informed me that "the situation in Kyrgyzstan has a critical bearing on American national security." As my teen-aged daughter would say: "OMG!" Did you know that your safety and security depends on the political situation in.... Kyrgyztan?" Yes, I know that the air base at Manas is a critical transit point for logistics flowing into Afghanistan, but otherwise Kyrgyzstan is an impoverished country of about 5 million people without significant strategic resources, and I daresay few Americans could find it on a map (or have any reason to want to). It is only important if you think Afghanistan's fate is important, and readers here know that I think we've greatly exaggerated the real stakes there. (And if we're heading for the exits there, as President Obama has said, then Kyrgyzstan's strategic value is a stock you ought to short.)

I'm not trying to make fun of the Hudson Institute here, but the idea that we have "critical" interests in Kyrgystan just illustrates the poverty of American strategic thinking these days. Even now, in the wake of the various setbacks and mis-steps of the past decade, the central pathology of American strategic discourse is the notion that the entire friggin' world is a "vital" U.S. interest, and that we are therefore both required and entitled to interfere anywhere and anytime we want to. And Beltway briefings like this one just reinforce this mind-set, by constantly hammering home the idea that we are terribly vulnerable to events in a far-flung countries a world away. I'm not saying that events in Kyrgyzstan might not affect the safety and prosperity of American a tiny little bit, but the essence of strategy is setting priorities and distinguishing trivial stakes from the truly important. And somehow I just don't think Kyrgyzstan's fate merits words like "vital" or "critical."

And then I read David Greenberg's op-ed in yesterday's Times, on the "isolationist" roots within the Republican Party. Greenberg is a historian, and his brief account of isolationist strands within the GOP is perfectly sensible. But he uses this narrative to cast doubt on the growing number of people who believe that the United States is over-committed (a group, one might add, that includes the out-going Secretary of Defense), but who are hardly "isolationists."

In particular, Greenberg ends his piece by warning that "following the path of isolationism today won't serve America well." He may or may not be correct in that judgment, though his op-ed offers no arguments or evidence to support this particular conclusion. More importantly, Greenberg falls into the familiar trap of assuming that those who are now calling for a more restrained, selective, and above all realistic foreign policy are "isolationists." There may be a few people in contemporary foreign policy discourse who deserve that label, but it simply doesn't apply to most serious critics of today's over-extension.

In particular, critics of our over-committed and overly-militarized foreign policy recognize that the world is interconnected, that the United States cannot wall itself off from that world, and that defending long-term U.S. interests occasionally requires the application of the many diverse elements of American power.  People like Andrew Bacevich, Barry Posen, Paul Pillar, Lawrence Wilkerson, Chas Freeman, the late Chalmers Johnson, and many others are not reflexive doves, naïve pacifists, or fatuous one-worlders. On the contrary, they are hard-headed experts who support American engagement in the world, just not in the mindlessly hubristic fashion that has become the self-defeating norm of the past several decades and the default condition of foreign policy thinking in D.C.

What realists (and other advocates of greater "restraint") also recognize is that 5 percent of the world's population cannot dictate how the other 95 percent should live their lives. They also know that trying to impose our preferences on others by various coercive means (e.g., military force, economic sanctions, etc.) is helping sap our economic vitality and turning more and more people against us. Advocates of a more restrained foreign policy understand that other major powers will just free-ride if we insist on doing everything ourselves, and that other client states will engage in what Posen has called "reckless driving" if they know that the United States will back them now matter what they do.

In short, the isolationsists of a by-gone era have little to do with today's advocates of restraint, and it is serious error to conflate the two. In particular, applying the discredited label of "isolationist" to those who now question our present "strategy" will make it harder to formulate a grand strategy that is consistent with our present resources, less likely to provoke unnecessary resentment or resistance, cognizant of our many political advantages, and focused (as foreign policy should be) on our long-term vitality and security as a nation.

 UPDATE: In my original post, I mistakenly equated libertarians with isolationists.  This was careless, insofar as some important analysts who favor more limited government (such as Chris Preble of the CATO Institute), are clearly not "isolationist" in the proper sense of that term.  I regret the error, and have corrected the text above to eliminate the conflation.

I've been buried with end-of-term obligations and some other administrivia, so I haven't posted anything since last week. Fortunately, you've all got the whole web to feast upon, so I doubt that anyone's been suffering from withdrawal.

Given all the other things that have been happening lately -- hey, did you hear we got bin Laden? -- I also haven't written anything about the unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas that was announced more than a week ago. Several correspondents weighed in by email and asked me what I thought of it, so here goes.

The first and most obvious point to remember is that the agreement is very fragile. There's a lot of bad blood between the two main Palestinian factions, stemming both from doctrinal and strategic differences but also from a lot of prior violence between the two. Fatah conducted a harsh crackdown on Hamas during the 1990s-in an attempt to prove to the U.S. and Israel that it was serious about controlling terror -- and the two groups fought a short civil war in Gaza in 2007. Incompetent U.S. "leadership" helped cause that war: not only did the US refuse to accept the results of the 2006 Palestinian elections because we were miffed that Hamas had won, but then we tried to arm Fatah and encouraged it to attack Hamas, which led the latter to preempt and drive the less effective Fatah cadres out. In other words, the United States helped foment a little civil war, and then the side we were backing lost. Well done!

Of course, those who oppose the creation of Palestinian state promptly denounced the recent unity agreement, declaring that of course one could never negotiate with a "terrorist organization." I've never understood this position, given that many current governments had their origins in groups that used terrorist methods as part of struggle to gain national independence, and several terrorist leaders (including some former IRA members, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin) have all been welcomed at the White House. The U.S. government has backed its own "terrorist" groups on occasions, and some U.S. leaders are now openly hoping that bin Laden's death will encourage the Taliban -- which also relies on terrorism -- to come to the table and get serious about talks to end the war in Afghanistan. The obvious point is that sometimes states negotiate with groups using terrorist methods, if they are seriously interested in ending a conflict and they have sufficient reason to believe that the "terrorist" group is too.  It didn't make sense to negotiate with bin Laden or al Qaeda, obviously, but it might with Hamas.

Israel and the United States now say that they won't negotiate with Hamas because it refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist and because its charter contains some hateful and frankly bizarre clauses, including an endorsement of that old Tsarist fraud, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here I find it hard to understand Hamas's reluctance to jettison rhetorical positions that serve no positive purpose and merely make it easy for their opponents to portray them as unreasonable. I can see why they might hold back on formal recognition-it's one of the last cards they have to play, and Fatah's decision to recognize Israel back in the late 1980s hasn't stopped the continued expansion of Israeli settlements or led to a Palestinian state. But Hamas could advance its own cause mightily if they made it clearer that they would be willing to recognize Israel provided that it withdrew to the 1967 borders and allowed for the creation of a Palestinian state. Some Hamas leaders have hinted about movement along these lines, but being less coy about it would place the Netanyahu government in a very difficult political position, especially now.  

Despite these reservations, however, I think the unity agreement is in fact in everyone's interest. It is certainly in the Palestinians' interest, as they are already weak and vulnerable and internal divisions just make that situation worse. And given the current balance of power and the broader international situation, violence is not the Palestinians' best tactic: civil resistance, international publicity, and diplomatic engagement is. And I've always believed that the best way to either marginalize Hamas or force it to moderate its own positions was to make genuine progress toward ending the occupation and creating an independent state, which will make calls for continued resistance fall on deaf ears.

Palestinian reconciliation and unity is ultimately good for Israel too, assuming that Israel wants peace more than land.  Divisions among the Palestinians were very useful for Israel during Zionism's expansionist phase, because it made establishment and consolidation of the state possible. But if Israel wants peace, then it needs a Palestinian neighbor that is not wracked by internal divisions: who wants to live next door to a failed state? At this point in Israel's history, in fact, its security would be enhanced by a stable, secure, and legitimate Palestinian government that could keep order in its territory, foster economic development, and when necessary, deal with any die-hard rejectionists that might still exist.  (The same goes for Israel too: If a peace deal is ever reached, it will need to be able to control its own right-wing extremists, and that won't be a picnic either.) Ironically, Israel needs an effective Palestinian government as much as the Palestinians do, and that was always going to be hard to achieve so long as the Fatah-Hamas split endures. 

Finally, the unity agreement is a potential opportunity for the United States as well, if it helps break the current deadlock and gets movement towards a final status agreement rolling again.  As everyone knows (but some don't want to admit), the persistence of the I-P conflict is a major distraction for the United States and a major contributor to anti-Americanism, at a moment when the United States needs to be shifting its sights toward Asia and improving its relations with the Arab and Islamic world. So the idealist in me would love to believe that this agreement will hold, and that it can be used to jump-start a new diplomatic process (which will probably also involve moving beyond the current U.S. monopoly on this issue). 

Alas, the realist in me suspects it won't.  So far, nobody ever lost money assuming that things could go badly in that part of the world, or that new opportunities will be squandered.

There's some second-guessing going on in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, mostly having to do with whether he actually "resisted" or whether the SEAL team that took him out did so deliberately. Although it would be better if the Obama administration's original story had been more complete from the start, I'm inclined to cut them a bit of slack on this one. To me, it's not that surprising that some details were wrong in the initial accounts, and to their credit the administration has been forthcoming about amending the basic account.

Did the Obama administration deliberately send the team in to take him out? I don't know. But I'm sure the SEALs were given very loose "rules of engagement," such that even a minimal degree of "resistance" could be met (as it was) with deadly force. At the same time, I suspect that one reason Obama decided to send a team in rather than simply bomb the compound was a desire to use discriminate force, and to minimize the danger to bystanders. Killing bin Laden during the raid is one thing; killing his wives or the children present there would have played far worse in the eyes of much of the world. Sending a team in was also a way to ensure that we could prove we had got him; leveling the compound would have given even more fodder to conspiracy theorists to argue that he had actually escaped (presumably to join Elvis and Hitler somewhere in South America).

There are two reasons to suspect that we were more interested in killing him than capturing him. The first is the obvious point that having him in custody would have been a major policy challenge. How many terror threats or hostage takings might have accompanied his trial and incarceration? In the abstract, I'd prefer to have put him on trial for his crimes, to draw the sharpest possible contrast between his lawless behavior and the principles of the rule of law that we like to proclaim. But the practical obstacles to that course would have been daunting, and I can understand why the U.S. government might have preferred just taking him out.

The second reason, of course, is that targeted assassinations have become an increasingly favorite tool of U.S. security policy. And it's not just drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan or Yemen, targeted killings by special forces are one of the key ways that we are prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. And there's certainly some reason to believe that this is how NATO is trying to resolve the civil war in Libya, though of course we will never say so openly. Given our current practice in these contexts, it would hardly be a stretch to imagine Obama sending in the SEALs not with deliberate orders to kill bin Laden, but with instructions that made his death very, very likely. 

Lastly, what about the decision to dispose of his body at sea? Somebody clearly thought about this issue in advance, and this step was supposedly done because 1) there was no country that would want to accept his remains, 2) the United States had no interest in keeping them ourselves, and 3) U.S. officials were worried that a gravesite might become some sort of inspirational shrine for like-minded extremists.

I get all that, but I'm not totally convinced. For one thing, some Muslims are likely to see the burial at sea as disrespectful or callous, and Muslim religious experts seem to be divided on this issue. Second, while it's possible that his body/grave might have emerged as some sort of shrine, that's hardly a certainty. Mussolini's place in the family crypt isn't a big pilgrimage site for proto-fascists, and the site of the bunker where Hitler died hasn't become a big rallying place for neo-Nazis. Revolutionary states like the Soviet Union, Iran, and Vietnam have built enormous shrines to their founding leaders, but do these pretentious attempts at immortality really inspire many followers? And needless to say, no government or charitable foundation was going to pour any money into a shrine for bin Laden. If his body had ended up buried in some remote corner of Saudi Arabia, I rather doubt it would attract a lot of visitors. And even if it did, as Yglesias points out, it would be a nice way to get their pictures on file.

When my clock radio went off this AM, the first story I heard was about a NATO air attack on Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's compound near Tripoli. Although NATO officials have denied that this was an attempt to kill Qaddafi, it is hard to believe that the officials responsible weren't hoping for a lucky shot. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham told CNN that it was time to "to cut the head of the snake off, go to Tripoli, start bombing Qaddafi's inner circle, their compounds, their military headquarters." Similarly, Senator Joe Lieberman called for "going directly after Qaddafi," saying that "I can't think of anything that would protect the civilian population of Libya more than [his] removal."

In a situation like this, it is obviously tempting to think you can solve the problem by removing the bad guy at the top. Instead of a prolonged civil war that kills lots of combatants and civilians and inflicts vast property damage, why not just get rid of the individual you think is causing all the trouble, and maybe a few of his closest associates? To take the most obvious case: with the benefit of hindsight, wouldn't it have been far better to take out Adolf Hitler sometime in the 1930s? By a similar logic, wouldn't a surgical strike on Qaddafi and his inner circle be preferable to a protracted civil war?

But before you conclude that targeted assassination is the way to go, I suggest you read Ward Thomas' 2000 International Security article "Norms and Security: The Case of International Assassionation." Thomas traces the evolution of attitudes, norms, and practices regarding international assassination, and shows how they have changed significantly over time. He argues that assassination was a fairly common foreign policy tool a few centuries ago, but a combination of shifting material interests and evolving normative principles led to the emergence of a fairly strong norm against the killing of foreign leaders, even during wartime. This shift occurred in part because great powers preferred to confine conflict to the clash of armies on the battlefield (where they had the advantage over weaker states), and partly because it helped enshrine the idea that war was conducted by states and not by individuals. Thus, the norm helped reinforce the political legitimacy of the state itself, and it eventually grew so powerful that even deeply hostile states did not make serious efforts to kill each other's leaders.

Thomas also argues that the norm appears to be breaking down, for three separate reasons. First, as warfare became increasingly destructive, states began to look for cheaper alternatives. Second, terrorist groups routinely employ assassination against the states they oppose, and states have responded with targeted killings against suspected terrorist leaders. Third, and perhaps most interestingly, in the post-Nuremberg environment, national leaders are increasingly seen as individually responsible and morally accountable for acts undertaken at their behest. The creation of an International Criminal Court is another sign of a shifting moral and legal context in which raison d'etat no longer protects national leaders from accountability (if they lose, of course). And if individual leaders are seen as morally responsible, then it is easier to slip into viewing them as legitimate targets in war.

Of course, the United States (and some other countries) have been on this slippery slope for awhile, given our reliance on targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. The practice is troubling on at least three grounds. First, due to the imperfect nature of intelligence and the inevitable "fog of war," targeted killings inevitably murder innocents along with the supposedly guilty. Second, and following from the first point, killing innocent bystanders may create more adversaries than it eliminate, thereby undermining the strategic purpose of the program itself.

Third, and perhaps most important of all, going after foreign leaders-no matter how despicable-helps legitimate a tactic that will eventually be visited back upon us. If the world's most powerful countries see fit to kill any foreign leader that they don't like, what's to stop those same (presumably evil) leaders from threatening to pay us back in kind? Targeted assassinations of foreign despots may seem like a cheap and efficient way of solving today's problem, but we won't enjoy living in a world where foreign adversaries think attacking U.S. leaders (including the president and his inner circle) is a perfectly legitimate way of doing business.  And notice that making targeted killings more legitimate tends to level the international playing field: you don't have to be a powerful or wealthy state to organize a few hit squads and cause lots of trouble for your enemies.

So even if this attempt at "decapitation" were to succeed in the short-term, the longer-term consequences may not be quite so salutary.  

Ever since 9/11, Islamophobia has been a recurrent problem in a number of Western societies, including the United States. It's been fueled by opportunistic politicians, hate-mongering bloggers, and any number of the other usual suspects. The lingering fear of Islam undergirds the present concerns that the turmoil in Egypt might give groups like the Muslim Brotherhood greater political influence there.

Trying to inject reason and evidence into this sort of debate is usually futile, but I do wish to report some good news. Remember the avalanche of Muslim-based terrorism that was about to descend upon the West? Well, according to the EU's 2010 Terrorism Situation and Trend Report, the total number of terrorist incidents in Europe declined in 2009. Even more important, the overwhelming majority of these incidents had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.

The report is produced by Europol, which is the criminal intelligence agency of the European Union. In 2009, there were fewer than 300 terrorist incidents in Europe, a 33 percent decline from the previous year. The vast majority of these incidents (237 out of 294) were conducted by indigenous European separatist groups, with another forty or so attributed to leftists and/or anarchists. According to the report, a grand total of one (1) attack was conducted by Islamists. Put differently, Islamist groups were responsible for a whopping 0.34 percent of all terrorist incidents in Europe in 2009. In addition, the report notes, "the number of arrests relating to Islamist terrorism (110) decreased by 41 percent compared to 2008, which continues the trend of a steady decrease since 2006."

I know there are lot of people getting rich fueling Islamophobia, but we'd really all be better off if they would focus their attention to anarchists, or maybe separatist groups like ETA. The report isn't naive or Panglossian about Islamic radicalism, and it emphasizes that there are still extremist groups with worrisome ambitions. But their sifting of the data does put the actual danger in perspective and serves as a valuable corrective to the careless threat inflation that has become all too common over the past decade.

The news that various Afghan and Pakistani insurgent groups are coordinating their activities more extensively is neither surprising nor encouraging. This outcome is exactly what balance of power theory (or if you prefer, balance of threat theory) would predict: as the United States increases its military presence and escalates the level of violence, its various opponents put aside their differences for the moment in order to deal with the more imminent danger.

This pattern of behavior has a long-tradition in Afghan internal politics, as my former student Fotini Christia showed in a terrific Ph.D. thesis a few years back. It's also a phenomenon we've seen in earlier foreign interventions. The various mujaheddin warlords put aside their various quarrels in order to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, just as China, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam set aside their mutual fears and rivalries when the United States was fighting in Indochina.

Once the Soviets withdrew, of course, divisions within Afghan society re-emerged and made the place nearly ungovernable before the emergence of the Taliban. Something similar happened in Indochina: as soon as the United States withdrew from Vietnam, rivalries between the various communist nations and the Khmer Rouge eventually led to a Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea and a short border war between China and Vietnam. It was our presence that held them together and our departure that allowed long-standing resentments to burst forth anew.

The obvious lesson is that there is little danger of some sort of powerful jihadi monolith emerging in Central Asia. It is our war effort there that is leading these groups to make common cause with each other, and the longer the war goes on, the more we can expect them to cooperate. Because our strategic interests in Central Asia are very limited (i.e., we just don't want people organizing attacks on American soil from there) our real objective should be to reduce the U.S. presence, play "divide-and-conquer," and let the natural centrifugal tendencies in this region reassert themselves. That's not necessarily the "heroic" play (which is why our commanders aren't embracing it), but wouldn't it make more sense than giving a set of un-natural allies more reason to work together?

McClatchy news service reports that the Obama administration is starting to back away from the president's July 2011 timeline for a de-escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, "the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014."

Assuming the report is accurate, it shouldn't be a surprise. I don't know anyone who thought the U.S. could turn things around in eighteen months, and that particular deadline was little more than a piece of political sleight-of-hand designed to make escalation look like a temporary step. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Obama's decision to escalate in Afghanistan was the right one (I think it wasn't), but Obama's straddle on this issue is one reason why some of his most enthusiastic supporters have become disenchanted.

Of course, there's a long tradition of presidents telling the American people that some new military mission won't take long and won't cost that much. Nixon told us he has a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War (he didn't) and Bill Clinton said U.S. troops would only be in Bosnia for 12 months (it was more like nine years). President George W. Bush and his advisors said that the occupation of Iraq would be brief and pay for itself yet we are still there today. And now Obama has done essentially same thing: selling an increased committed by suggesting that it is only temporary, and then backing away from his own self-imposed deadline.

This report also suggests that the war is not going as well as we're being told. We may be achieving some successes on the battlefield, but as with Iraq, the real challenge is political. Success requires building some sort of effective and legitimate governing authority in Afghanistan, and achieving some sort of political reconciliation among various contending groups. If this goal means building a strong, centralized Afghan state (something that has never existed before) then we are talking about an effort that will take years, costs tens of billions of additional dollars, and could still fail. It also requires rooting out corruption in the Karzai government, but the news on that front is hardly encouraging. Al Qaeda's leaders are no longer in Afghanistan and they don't need safe havens there in order to threaten the U.S., so it is no longer even clear why we are engaged in a massive effort at social engineering in this country. Or as I've said before: if the situation in Afghanistan were exactly what it is today, but no U.S. forces were present, would Obama have ordered 100,000-plus troops to go there?

I don't think so, but he'll keep them there for the rest of his presidency (whether he gets one or two terms), and he or his successor could end up facing essentially the same choice in 2014 that he is facing today. Barring a new approach from the United States, does anyone think it will be any easier to change course then?

Today's Washington Post has a lengthy article reporting on high-level talks between the Karzai government in Afghanistan and the Taliban over a negotiated end to the war. It is impossible to know how serious the effort is or what the prospects for success are, in part because all of the parties appear to be insisting that the talks are preliminary and saying very little about what's on the table (to give themselves an easy way out if the talks don't go well).

The thrust of the Post piece is that most (if not all) of the contending parties are beginning to realize that a decisive victory is not going to be won by force of arms. It is perhaps significant the talks do not include representative of the Haqqani network, which may be why the Obama administration has been going after it with particular energy in recent weeks. 

In any case, I think this is an encouraging sign. The first recommendation of the Afghanistan Study Group in which I participated was "Emphasize Power-Sharing and Political Reconciliation," and I'm glad to see several key actors behaving in ways that are consistent with that recommendation. If the Karzai government, the Taliban leadership, and various members of ISAF are moving in that direction, there's a chance that the United States and its allies will get out of there sometime before 2020, and maybe some chance that Afghanistan can revert to its previous status as largely neutral and not very important strategic backwater.  

The United States and others would still have to keep an eye on the area for counter-terrorism purposes, but we'd be out of the costly and counterproductive business of nation-building. Given the other items that we really ought to be addressing, that would be a good thing. So I will keep my fingers crossed that these talks are serious and that they eventually succeed.

Political leaders often draw negative inferences from an adversary's conduct, without realizing that their own behavior is not really that different. In particular, an opponent's past actions is frequently invoked to demonstrate how aggressive/dangerous/hostile/unstable they are, but when one's own country (or a close ally) acts in the very same way, we are quick to find ways to rationalize or justify it and we would never conclude that we might be equally aggressive or irrational.

Case in point: in an interview with Charlie Rose on Sept. 7, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair came close to endorsing the use of force against Iran, on the grounds that it would be too dangerous if Iran were some day to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. He explicitly rejected the idea that deterrence could work against a nuclear Iran in the same way that it worked against the Soviet Union, saying that "this regime is qualitatively different in their makeup. I see them now exporting terrorism, instability around the Middle East." (Blair also threw in an incorrect reference to one of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's offensive statements about Israel, based on the usual mistranslation, though what Ahmadinejad actually did say is still pretty objectionable).

But the main point is that Blair's reasoning here is faulty. For one thing, the Soviet Union exported a lot of terrorism and instability in its day (while murdering its own citizens in large numbers), yet containment and deterrence worked well for some forty years. Iran's past conduct, while far from perfect, isn't remotely in the same league with Stalin's or Brezhnev's.

Second, the United States has been a far greater source of "instability" in the Middle East in recent years than Iran (aided in no small part by tame puppets like Blair). Yet surely the former PM doesn't think that the U.S. and British "regimes" are "qualitatively different" (i.e., irrational or aggressive) and therefore cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons either.  

Third, countries like Iran rely on low-level strategies like covert support for terrorist organizations precisely because they don't want to take serious risks and don't have any other ways to try to protect their own interests. Far from indicating some sort of dangerous irrationality, therefore, this behavior might be evidence of fairly rational (if from our perspective, undesirable) behavior. 

In short, Blair's tacit support for military force in this case is without foundation.

Political psychologists sometimes attribute this sort of faulty reasoning to the "fundamental attribution theorem." The term refers to the tendency of people to attribute another actor's behavior almost entirely to that actor's dispositions or attributes, while ignoring the circumstances that might be forcing the actor in question to behave in a particular way. At the same time, we tend to see our own behavior as forced upon us by the situation we are in. In other words, my actions are forced upon me by my situation, but others are freer to do what they want and so their actions tell me a lot about their character and motives.

Something of the sort may be at work here, but I think it mostly tells you that Blair is not a very careful thinker. And like most politicians, he tends to see his conduct as virtuous and principled and the behavior of potential adversaries as a reflection of bad character. Even when the behavior is essentially identical, or arguably worse on our side.

And please: I'm not defending Iran's support for terrorist groups, justifying Ahmadinejad's hateful rhetoric, or playing down the oppressive nature of the clerical regime. Nor do I think it would be a good thing if Tehran got nuclear weapons. My only point is that if we are going to justify preventive war against Iran by using its past behavior to draw inferences about the nature of their future decision-making, we ought to pause for a second and consider what inferences others might reasonably draw from ours.

The shooting of four Israeli settlers on the West Bank was a brutal crime, and I condemn it as strongly as I condemned Israel's attacks on the civilian population of Gaza or its assault on the Mavi Marmara. Whatever one thinks about the Israeli occupation, shooting civilians in this fashion is never justified.  

I can't say I'm surprised by the event, however, having written earlier this week that we ought to expect spoilers to try to disrupt this latest round of talks. There is no shortage of spoilers on the Israel side either-such as Rabbi Ovedia Yosef, spiritual advisor to the Shas party, who offered his pious hope that "Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world ... God should strike them with a plague." But to be fair, at least the rabbi didn't actually shoot anybody.  

When I heard the news, my first thought was that the shooting was both a crime and a blunder, because it would only reaffirm Hamas's pariah status and keep them outside the peace process even longer. But then I reconsidered. I think the more important lesson here is that Hamas has already assumed that this latest round of talks will fail, and that this failure will pound the final nail in the coffin of the two-state solution.

As I've said before, that outcome will be a tragedy for all concerned, as well as a serious problem for the United States.  But it also makes me wonder if Hamas is being a lot more far-sighted than the various parties who are sitting down to talks in Washington this week.

Why?  Because if the parties fail to reach a genuine and reasonable two-state solution, we are going to end up with one-state apartheid on the West Bank. That's hardly headline news, of course, insofar as people like Jimmy Carter, Ehud Olmert, and Ehud Barak have warned about this possibility for years. At that point, the conflict will evolve into a Palestinian campaign for political rights within that single state, based on well-established norms of justice and democracy, and it will put Israel and its American patron in a very awkward situation.  

If that happens, Hamas will be in a strong position. Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad will have failed, and Hamas' rejectionism will have been vindicated. Its reputation for probity and superior grass-roots organizing ability will be a powerful asset in the struggle for Palestinian hearts and minds, and those same capacities will also help them resist the inevitable Israeli attempts to suppress them. Their star will be ascending, and the secular and more moderate Fatah will be even less legitimate than it is today.

The best (only?) hope of averting that outcome lies in making the current negotiations a success and ending the occupation once and for all. If Abbas, Obama, and especially Netanyahu realize this, maybe they'll surprise us all and get the job done. No matter how many brutal crimes are committed or hateful speeches are uttered by those who oppose "two states for two peoples."

I have only two thoughts on the deal that has sent ten Russian spies back to their homeland, in exchange for four people who were, as the Times puts it, "deemed to be spies" in Russia.

First, some people wonder why the United States didn't get more upset about this, and why the Obama administration didn't allow the incident to derail its long-term effort to "reset" relations with Moscow. The simple answer is: because we are undoubtedly doing the same thing, albeit probably in different ways. I doubt we've sent U.S. citizens to Russia as long-term moles (though anything's possible), but I have no doubt whatsoever that we are engaged in all sort of espionage efforts there (and in plenty of other countries too). To pitch the diplomatic equivalent of a hissy fit over something that we are doing ourselves would be asinine.  And as Reagan administration official Richard Burt pointed out, the United States and the Soviet Union ratified numerous agreement at the height of the Cold War, even though we were spying on each other like crazy and trying to bring about the other side's collapse (we succeeded, they failed).

Second, it is remarkable how quickly the whole business was resolved. The two governments did the deal, the Russian spies plead guilty, and the handoff was made. Turns out its much better to be spying for Russia than to be detained as a suspected terrorist. If that happens, you could end up being held without trial for eight years, with the U.S. government bending over backwards to find some way to keep you in custody, even when there was mounting evidence that you were innocent. Keep that latter point in mind the next time you decide to visit Yemen, or when somebody brags about our deep commitment to the "rule of law" and the importance of habeas corpus.