I believe that the disclosures concerning the surveillance of phone records and internet communications in the Guardian and The Washington Post underscore the significance of President Obama’s recent speech on national security. His words provide the most cogent means to appraise his responsibilities for his administration’s actions. Today an analysis of the speech and the responses to it: in my next post, I will reflect on its significance in light of recent events. -Jeff

In his address to the National Defense University on May 23, 2013, President Obama set out to transform the common sense about terrorism and the proper American response to it. He continued what I take to be his major goal: the reinvention of American political culture, pushing the center left on a broad range of problems and principles, often meeting great resistance. In this particular instance, the change he sought at NDU, was apparently quite simple, moving from a war on terror to a struggle against terrorists, ending the prospect of total and endless war against an enemy whose power has been greatly and routinely exaggerated. The suggestion of the simple change understandably elicited strong and conflicting reactions. I think these reactions, along with the speech itself, illuminate the significance of Obama’s latest performance as “storyteller-in-chief.”

The editorial board of The New York Times declared:

“President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.” 

Over on the op.ed. page a few days later, Ross Douthat presented a cynical alternative:

“President Obama’s speech national security last week was a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don’t worry, liberals. I’m not George W. Bush.”

At The New York Review of Books, David Cole judged:

“President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday at the National Defense University (NDU) may turn out to be the most significant of his tenure,”

and observed:

“Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his NDU speech. Instead, he went much further, outlining a way out of this ‘perpetual war,’ saying that ‘our democracy demands it.’ Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy. If he succeeds in doing so, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will be seen not as naïve, but as remarkably prescient, in its awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama in 2009.”

I agree, but many observers, left, right and in between don’t, including, I suspect many Deliberately Considered readers. There have been strong dissenting positions, some quite cogent.

From the right

Newt Gingrich:

“I thought the president’s speech was astonishingly naïve and a sign that he hasn’t read much history…”[Obama] wants to somehow rise above the big government scandals that are gradually drowning his administration…He wants to look like he’s forward looking, engaged, etcetera … But the truth is, what he announced and explained was almost meaningless.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.):

“What do you think the Iranians are thinking? At the end of the day, this is the most tone-deaf president I ever could imagine, making such a speech at a time when our homeland is trying to be attacked literally every day.”

And Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) concluded Obama’s speech:

“will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.”

From the left

Glenn Greenwald is convinced that the speech said nothing:

“his speech had something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions.”

Benjamin Wittes was even more critical:

“If there was a unifying theme of President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University, it was an effort to align himself as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration’s operational flexibility in actual fact. To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has—but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.”

Oddly, Ron Paul seems to have judged Obama most harshly from the dovish side:

“The speech speaks of more war and more killing and more interventionism all masked in the language of withdrawal.”

His was libertarian reading:

“President Obama’s speech is not at all what it seems. It is a call for more empire and more power to the executive branch. The president promises that ‘this war, like all wars, must end.’ Unfortunately the war on the American taxpayer never seems to end. But end it will, as we are running out of money.” 

These are strong judgments, apparently determined more by the identity, interests and commitments of the judges than the judged speech. Then again, perhaps Greenwald is right, the alternative judgments could be a function of Obama’s qualities as a politician, able to fulfill the wishes of his supporters and opponents alike.

Yet, I think it is more than this. Obama’s speech is a part of his overall project. He is trying to move common sense away from the assumption of a permanent state of war. The relationship between rhetoric and action is at issue, i.e. our political culture, and the rhetoric clearly was being changed. It was not mere rhetoric.

This was not one of Obama’s beautiful speeches. Rather it was lawyerly, making a case, justifying his administrations policies to date, suggesting immediate and future changes. There are problems.

With his critics, I worry about his drone policies, about lethal attacks outside of war zones. I note that the drone attacks have decreased of late, and that in this speech, he gives a more restricted account of when and how the attacks should proceed, significantly with oversight. But I also note that this was all pretty vague.

I believe with his critics, including Medea Benjamin, the Code Pink activist who disrupted the speech, that the President could probably have done more to realize his stated goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and it is far from clear, after the speech, how hard he will push now.

And I worry about the administration’s relationship with the press and its policies on leaks. As a father of a journalist, it was good to hear the President declare: “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.” Yet, I am still concerned by the Obama administrations aggressive policies toward leaks.

Yes, there are reasons to not just applaud the speech. But applaud, I will, because of the fundamental turn Obama made in the speech. He clarified how he understands the threat we now face, and he drew the logical conclusion. The era of permanent war is now over. The post 9/11 Orwellian Winter is coming to an end. Thus spoke the President:

“[T]he current threat — lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates; threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad; homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We have to take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.

In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on a Pan Am flight — Flight 103 — over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all brutal; they were all deadly; and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.

We must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

This is prose not poetry, but crucial. For those on Obama’s left, the significance of this change in official policy may not be perceptible. Obama is trying to get done what they take for granted. But he knows, what they ignore, that a broad fearful public has been convinced by the war metaphor of “the war on terrorism” and that a significant faction of the political establishment is committed to the metaphor. They have to be moved if we are really to move beyond a dark moment in American history, epitomized by the claim that torture was effective “enhanced interrogation.” Obama is doing the moving.

Gingrich, Saxby and Graham, et al, see what Obama is up to, and as with much else, they are engaging in a counterattack. They recognize that big changes are being initiated, and they will do all they can to stop them from happening.

Although there are good reasons to wonder about the detailed connection between the promise of Obama’s speech and the practice of the Obama administration, it is important to nonetheless recognize that a big political change is going on. I think this is a way to understand and criticize recent revelations concerning government surveillance.

In an article in The New York Times last week, “Psychiatry’s Guide is Out of Touch with Science, Experts Say,” science reporters, Pam Belluck and Benedict Carey, describe an important new initiative by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the largest source of federal funding for mental health research. The new initiative criticizes the soon to be published fifth edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), offering a new framework for guiding research and focusing funding priorities in mental health research. Belluck and Carey’s article emphasizes the optimism and excitement shared by a number of prominent experts about the adoption of this new framework, known as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). In order to understand the true significance of this development, it is important for us to have a greater appreciation of the broader context in which this important change is taking place. I am ambivalent, some significant problems are being addressed, but other problems may be exacerbated in this latest development in the politics of the sciences of the mind and the brain.

Towards the end of May, the American Psychiatric Association will release its new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). This long awaited update of the DSM (colloquially referred to by some as the “Bible of Psychiatry”) has been the focus of considerable prepublication controversy among mental health professionals and has been discussed extensively in important media outlets including The New York Times. Previous editions of the DSM have also received media attention. But DSM-5 has raised the intensity of the controversy to unprecedented heights, in part because of the widely publicized criticisms of psychiatry insiders including Allan Frances (the chair of the task force that developed DSM-4) and Robert Spitzer (who chaired the DSM-3 task force). Criticisms of DSM-5 are similar in nature (if not intensity) to those leveled at both DSM-4 and DSM-3. For example, claims for the degree of reliability of diagnostic categories are exaggerated, evidence regarding the validity of the diagnostic categories is limited, and experiences that are inevitable aspects of the human condition (e.g., sadness, mourning, anxiety) are increasingly viewed as symptoms of mental illness to be treated with medication.

An important aspect of the criticism is directed at the rapidly accelerating tendency to over prescribe medications for emotional distress with dubious effectiveness and potentially serious side effects. A more fundamental criticism of DSM-5 (also leveled at the previous two editions of the DSM) is directed at the disease model of psychiatry, which views emotional problems as similar in nature to physical illnesses such as tuberculosis, heart disease or cancer. Critics are also concerned about the potential for stigmatization of everyday problems in living.

The NIMH has held a series of workshops over the past 18 months, to develop the RDoc framework described in Belluck & Carey’s article. This has been motivated by factors including the intensity of the controversy about DSM-5, the accumulating evidence that the new generation of psychiatric medications is not delivering on its initial promise, and in all probability, the Obama administration’s avowed intention of investing 100 million dollars in the field of brain science research. This shift in NIMH policy has taken place so recently that there has not yet been an opportunity for extensive conversation within professional circles (let alone the popular media) regarding its pros and cons. A few informal exchanges I have read on professional listservs have an approving tone to them. There have, for example, been expressions of glee about what can be interpreted as a development heralding the demise of the entire DSM system, with all of its associated flaws and potentially pernicious side effects.

From my perspective, however, as a psychotherapy researcher and someone who has served on NIMH grant proposal review committees over the years, the policy change is nothing to celebrate. Although I have long been a critic of the DSM system, the changed policy and the framework for the new RDoC system make it very clear that the fundamental premise guiding future NIMH funding priorities is that the bedrock level of analysis is genetic, biological and brain science research. As Thomas Insel, Director of NIMH said in an interview conducted on Monday, May 6: “The goal of RDoC is to “reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms” (quoted in Belluck & Carey’s NY Times article, May 7, 2013). This is a perpetuation and expansion of a trend that has been taking place at NIMH for many years now, privileging the biological over the psychological, emotional and social. An important consequence of this trend has been that the proportion of NIMH funding allocated to psychotherapy research and other psychosocial interventions relative to the brain sciences has been consistently diminishing over time.

The new NMIH paradigm for research means that the amount of funding available for the development and refinement of treatments such as psychotherapy that are not targeted directly at the brain circuitry (although they do influence it indirectly), is likely to continue to shrink. I want to be perfectly clear: I do not question the potential value of brain science research. What I do question, however, is the single-minded emphasis on brain science research to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of mental health investigation. It is important to recognize that funding priorities shape the programs of research pursued by scientists, and thus the type of research findings that are published in professional journals and disseminated to the public. This in turn shapes the curriculum in psychiatry and clinical psychology training programs, which shapes the way in which mental health professionals understand and treat psychological and psychiatric problems.

In concrete terms the explicit NIMH policy shift is likely to mean that despite the large and growing evidence base that a variety of forms of psychotherapy are effective treatments for a range of problems, we are likely to continue to see a decreasing availability of the already diminishing resources that can provide high quality psychotherapy for those who can potentially benefit from it. People will suffer as a consequence.

P.S. “Shortcomings of a Psychiatric Bible”: critical notes on a New York Times editorial.

A May 12^thNew York Times editorial titled: “Shortcomings of a Psychiatric Bible” is both revealing and distressing. After briefly discussing the recent National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) decision to replace DSM-5 with their new Research and Diagnostic Criteria as a guiding framework for funding future research, the editors conclude with the following assertion:

“The underlying problem is that research on mental disorders and treatment has stalled in the face of the incredible complexity of the brain. That is why major pharmaceutical companies have scaled back their programs to develop new psychiatric drugs; they cannot find new biological targets to shoot for. And that is why President Obama has started a long-term brain research initiative to develop new tools and techniques to study how billions of brain cells and neural circuits interact; the findings could lead to better ways to diagnose and treat psychiatric illnesses, though probably not for many years.”

This conclusion reflects an unquestioning acceptance of what has become the received wisdom that further advancement of our understanding of both the etiology and treatment of mental health problems is completely dependent on our ability to accurately map out the associated brain chemistry and neural circuitry. This belief is in keeping with the disease model of psychiatry, assuming that both the underlying causes and relevant targets for treatment are biological in nature. This assumption was also one of the important factors that led to the major revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-3) by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 that laid the groundwork for the forthcoming fifth edition of the DSM that the NIMH is now abandoning, because of its lack of validity. NIMH is assuming that the failure to find relevant biological targets for psychiatry to focus on is the byproduct of a diagnostic system such as the DSM that cannot be assumed to reflect the way in which “nature is carved at the joints.” They are failing to consider the possibility of a more fundamental problem: the assumption that the underlying causes and relevant targets for treatment are exclusively biological.

It is one thing to hypothesize that psychological and emotional problems are associated with changes at the biological level (e.g., specific patterns of brain activity or levels of neurotransmitters) or that symptom remission is associated with biological changes. It’s another to assume that the fundamental causes of psychological problems are always biological and that meaningful improvements in treatment will only take place when we can directly target the relevant brain chemistry. While it may be the case that biological factors play a more significant causal role in some psychological problems (e.g., schizophrenia) than others, the assumption that the major causal factor for mental health problems is always biological is a form of simplistic reductionism. Nevertheless, the disease model of mental illness has become the dominant narrative in our culture – a narrative that the Times editors quite unfortunately have accepted in an unquestioning fashion.

Jeremy D. Safran, Ph. D. is Co-Chair & Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research; an advisory editor to the journal “Psychotherapy Research” and the author of Psychoanalysis & Psychoanalytic Therapies (American Psychological Association Publications, 2012).

A dozen years back Goodman David Brooks entered the cultural pantheon through an oddly incisive book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The title charmed as Brooks asserted that a new generation of elites was upon us. Living well – not political clash – was the best revenge. What Brooks recognized and what Mitt Romney missed was that aesthetics mattered as much as economic interest in establishing political culture.

I think of Bobos when I assay the broadsheet of Brooks’ current employer, The New York Times. One can count on the editorials of the Times to embrace the most progressive respectable position: the stance of the established Statist elite. And one can count on the adverts in the Times to inspire the warm glow of Veblenian pecuniary emulation. I think of Bobos, too, when I peruse the New Yorker or even such ostensibly apolitical, but fully progressive, sources such as Time Out New York (or, from my prairie perch, Time Out Chicago).

These journals are committed to the goals of redistribution of income, environmental sustainability and ecological responsibility, and rabid, compulsive consumption capitalism. Perhaps there is no inherent contradiction between caring about people and caressing things, but the sections of the paper rarely seem as one. Recently in the Sunday Review, the Times’ editorialists promoted more regulations on health care and financial services, a more welcoming immigration policy with support for new arrivals, and one of their columnists, Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahmbo’s brother, Ezbo) is in high dudgeon about companies providing the wrong snacks for their employees (“an additional serving of potato chips every day led to a 1.69-pound weight increase over four years”). The mandarins of the Times did not comment on sea levels or climate change, but wait.

Along with these exhortations, the Times also delivered a posh 156 page Style Magazine: a testimonial to Ferragamo, the Ritz, and the Caymans. The best of living if living well is the best of life. The two sections as juxtaposed represent the Bobo paradox: a commitment to increased state involvement to achieve justice and collective betterment and a commitment to free-market consumption to achieve status recognition and personal desire.

Yet, re-reading Bobos in Paradise inspires the belief that, like any anodyne composite, social commentary should come with an expiration date. Following Calvin Trillin’s mordant observation of the shelf life of new books, this expiration date is likely to fall somewhere between milk and yogurt. Brooks recognizes the cultural changes among his elites (he embraces his inner and outer Bobo). The desire for omnivorous perfection trumps all. This will lead, he believes, to a twenty-first century political age in which the bohemian 1960s merge with the bourgeois 1980s in a triumph of triangulation. This makes David Brooks all smiley-face. He proclaims that successful politicians “seek a Third Way beyond the old categories of left and right. They march under reconciling banners such as compassionate conservatism, practical idealism, smart growth, prosperity with a purpose” (p. 256). He avers, “Thanks in large part to the influence of the Bobo establishment, we are living in an era of relative social peace. The political parties, at least at the top, have drifted toward the center. For the first time since the 1950s, it is possible to say that there aren’t huge ideological differences between the parties . . . Bobos have begun to create a set of standards and mores that work in the new century. It’s good to live in a Bobo world . . . . they have the ability to go down in history as the class that led America into another golden age .”(p. 268, 270, 273)

How Y2K; how September 10^th. Brooks trips on the prognosticator’s fallacy: what emerges today, will grow in the future. But in 2012 American politics the third way has been overtaken by ways one and two. As our politics divides and fragments, the culture of consumption proceeds apace.

The Bobos have seen their trust erode and trust funds bounce back. This ideological strain has taken root, most dramatically among progressives, who, according to research, are less given to personal charity than their compeers. (For conservatives consumption poses no moral challenge and tithing is Godly). For Bobo progressives enforced compassion and unfettered consumption are yoked virtues. Both for more established progressives (the Times and the New Yorker) or for aspiring ones (Time Out magazines), the front of the book and the back of the book operate in an uncomfortable, but economically necessary, synergy. The encomiums to buy evermore are often enough at odds with the editorial content, but the editorials depend on the slickly depicted products, both those presented in paid advertising and those aspiration goods promoted by journalists. That the contradiction is unspoken is essential to its power.

As we gaze from the bloodied political fields of 2010 and 2012, we chortle at Brooks’ belief in a moment in which those like him, whether Democrats or Republicans, will merrily rule without much concern of the consent of the governed. Elites often believe that their path – the first way, the third way, or the highway – is inevitable. But elites should not sleep well when their power ignores the unwashed. These masses pressure their representatives to stand firm and even elect their favored tribunes, both the Occupiers, not (yet?) invested in Times Style conspicuous consumption and the Tea Party whose consumption tastes are more Wal-Mart than Patek Philippe. Brooks spies an emerging golden age of elite consensus: how’s that workin’ out for you?

We have just experienced the season of gifts, a moment at which images of plummy consumption dance in our heads. And I had a gift in mind. A magazine, or perhaps, a certain website.

I am a serial reader, and, sometimes, a reader of serials. As the Deliberately Considered audience knows – because I have admitted in cyber-print – I have ogled Glenn Beck: less as harassment or flirtation, and more as an imagined discourse. I promiscuously read conservatives and progressives – and others in left, right, and libertarian venues. I live by The New Yorker, I conserve the Weekly Standard, I reason with Reason, and Mother Jones is Mom. However, I have long regretted that I cannot get a daily dosage of civic nutriment in a single journalistic bowl. I hold to a somewhat eccentric contention that there are smart liberals (neo- and old-timey, pink and pinker), conservatives (neo- and paleo-), progressives, reactionaries, socialists, libertarians, and more. Is my generosity so bizarre?

It has been argued that one of the fundamental problems in American political culture is that citizens tend to read narrowly. Those who consider themselves conservatives will not squander their lives reading liberal intellectuals, and the same is true of liberals, should they even admit to such a creature as a conservative intellectual. The divide between red and blue is as evident in the library as in the voting booth. This argument was made most compellingly by the ever diverting Cass Sunstein in his 2001 book, Republic.Com. Sunstein argued that we feel comfortable in segregated domains of knowledge in which:

“People restrict themselves to their own points of view – liberals watching and reading mostly or only liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; neo-Nazi, neo-Nazis.”

People reside in gated communities of knowledge. This is what the sociologist David Maines, referring to epistemic divisions between blacks and whites, described as racialized pools of knowledge. Our pools, suitable for private skinny dipping, are political. But if we are truly interested in the play of ideas, this chasm is a dispiriting reality. Of what are we afraid?

On the empirical side, there has been debate as to the validity of Sunstein’s claim as applicable to blog sites, at least according to a research paper by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. They discover that many political junkies are omnivores, reading widely.

But, putting aside web freebies, on the organizational side the argument seems more compelling. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s argument, if confirmed, applies to blogs like Deliberately Considered, but perhaps less to paper-and-ink magazines, where one must place one’s money where one’s politics is.

And so each week I open my copy of The New Yorker with a weary expectation. Yes, as they explain, it is the best magazine in America. Yet, it is surely predictable. Recently, Hendrik Hertzberg weighed in on Newt Gingrich (back when he was the front runner, in a piece entitled “Alt-Newt”) and, surprise!, he doesn’t think much of the former speaker. The New Yorker has not been kind to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, or Herman Cain either. Also, The New Yorker won’t embrace Ron Paul, and someone is surely generating cold thoughts about Rick Santorum. Newt, we are told, is lousy writer, a hypocrite, and more of a megalomaniac than most potential presidents. Hertzberg’s essay is beautifully crafted, and it is not false as much as it is unanswered. There are those who write with glee and panache against the current incumbent, not only from the left, but from the right. But subscribers will never hear them. Then there is The New York Times whose stable of columnists range from (mostly) deep blue to light purple. Neither David Brooks nor Ross Douthat, thoughtful men both, are movement conservatives. William Kristol was chased off the reservation by patricians with pitchforks. Would one red-meat conservative violate the Gray Lady? Perhaps The Atlantic comes closest to this model, but the distance is still real.

What I wish for is a journal that is committed to excellence with ideological generosity. Perhaps there is not an audience for such a venture, despite the suggestion of Gentzkow and Shapiro, but I fantasize that Bill Buckley and Max Lerner could share a page. Charles Krauthammer and Frank Rich, too.

If one already knows that one knows, such a project is fundamentally misguided. Why read the wrong along with the right? However, for those of us who embrace independence, uncertainty and confusion are thrilling. A magazine that is neither red nor blue but multi-hued is a gift most devoutly to be wished for. It is not only that we wish to read clever writers, but we need to imagine a rainbow of clever ideas. Under my tree, I imagine a magazine that I cannot predict before opening the cover: a periodical of intellectual astonishment. A journal that is generously considered.

Let us pretend that we might be persuaded, and then read accordingly.

Unlike recent posts that have analyzed media performances, today I want to present some direct political criticism. Rather than “perform” our distinguished art of analysis, as we have recently been doing on this blog, I want to underscore the notion that powerful media set our agenda and our performing analyses are determined by what is given to us by media as bones to chew, often with quite negative results. Nothing original, but the topic and the circumstances are.

There is a fundamental difference between the way news is produced and read in the United States and Europe. Here, we have one or two authoritative print sources. Thus, much of the reflection presented at Deliberately Considered draws on reports from The New York Times. This is in sharp contrast to European practice. I miss my daily reading of at least two or three newspapers to tap into contrasting opinions or sources of information. The near monopoly in America is troublesome. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I worry that there can develop an unquestioned prevailing commonsense, with the media reiterating the obvious, instead of challenging dominant points of view and generating new areas of debate.

This struck me in the reports and commentary concerning the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation deal, announced two weeks ago. All of what has been written in the Times columns since the surprise reconciliation announcement in Cairo has re-hashed the usual storyline: Hamas is not a peace partner. Israel has good reason to feel threatened by a national unity government, and Congress should use aid as a threat to push moderates not to accept a deal with the Islamists. This Monday, an editorial summed up the argument.

The only good thing in this editorial was its subtitle, “Continued stalemate with Israel will only strengthen extremists,” but, ironically, this disappeared in the online version. Indeed, the remainder of the piece is just a series of peremptory remarks (“we have many concerns,” “the answer, to us, is clear…”) and hollow statements. Yet, intriguingly, the top ten most recommended replies to the online version were all critical of Israel, showing how people can resist the newspaper’s views.

Nonetheless, I am deeply concerned: first, because this commentary illustrates how the media tend to have short memories when it comes to the Middle East. It is strikingly odd to say, “Fatah was committed to peace” when, at the peak of the second intifada or twenty years ago, Fatah was as much the enemy of peace (Arafat the arch-terrorist) as Hamas. As striking is the apparent obliviousness to the fact that Israel actively favored the emergence of Hamas back in the 1970s and 1980s in order to undermine the influence of the P.L.O.

Second, the usual argument about pre-conditions to return to negotiation is seriously flawed. Hamas, it is well known, should recognize the Quartet’s three principles announced in January 2006, namely renouncement of violence, accepting previous agreements and recognition of Israel. But, as other experts have underlined in a report analyzing the problematic western policies vis a vis Hamas:

“With the exception of the conditionality on violence, these political conditions are legally dubious, a fact whose seriousness is magnified by the participation of the U.N., in the Quartet. The conditionality on Israel’s recognition has no legal grounding in so far as only states (and at most the PLO as the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, of which Hamas is not yet part), and not political parties, can recognize other states. Furthermore, as Palestinians promptly note, the peace process between Israel and other Arab states has never been made conditional upon the Arab world’s recognition of Israel or its right to exist.” (Report by Nathalie Tocci What Went Wrong? The Impact of Western Policies towards Hamas and Hizbollah. CEPS Policy Brief No. 135, 16 July 2007).

Third, the western chancelleries’ idée fixe that current West Bank Prime Minister Salam Fayaad must remain in this position in a national unity government is also an insult to most of the Palestinians. Remember, his party won only 2.4% of the national votes in the last legislative election in 2006, so there are legitimate reasons for many Palestinians to ask for a change.

Fourth, the aid argument is used again in this Times editorial, as elsewhere in Yemen, or earlier in Egypt, in relation to negative conditionality (“If you don’t do this, we will cut our aid.”). It is sad to see aid, in this dominant line of reasoning, being used as a stick, rather than as a carrot promoting actors towards pluralism, effective cross-partisan collaboration or much-needed reforms in the field of education or justice.

Finally, there has been little critical reflection as to why the transition government in Egypt, busy with so many important changes at home, would focus such effort on the moribund reconciliation process that failed under Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman since 2007. Why did Egypt recently declare its willingness to keep Rafah’s crossing continuously open, and even worse (ultimate crise de lèse-majesté) to state that it would welcome the recognition of a Palestinian State in September by the General UN Assembly (the body that voted for the creation of Israel back in 1948)? Maybe one should reflect on these questions and realize that the past stalemate around Gaza was simply not viable. One way for the current government in Egypt to ease the pressure exerted by its population and the Islamists was to take effective measures to bring the Gaza situation closer to normalcy. What Egypt has been doing in the last weeks in relation to the Palestinian issue is sound politics, and the fact that Turkey has also supported these changes gives more regional credibility to this initiative.

Yes, continued stalemates will only strengthen extremists.

First, though, I must acknowledge the insight of his media criticism.  I think the Times reporter is inaccurate about politics in Argentina for the reasons Martin presents in his post, and further elaborated in his reply to the post.  The reporter may very well hang around the wrong people, listening to critics who are far from unbiased and with questionable democratic credentials.  And he may not fully appreciate that fundamental change can occur democratically, with radical changes in social policy, because this has not a common feature of American political life since the 1930s.   Such a reporter can’t tell the difference between the democratic, and the authoritarian and populist left.

And when Martin notes that factual lies can persist because they are left unopposed in our fractured media world, in response to my concern about the power of fictoids, I think he is onto something very important.

But I do disagree with Martin’s overall appraisal of Democratic politics and the Presidency of Barack Obama, thus far.  Put simply, I am not as sure as Martin is that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have not offered a significant alternative to the Republican Party and the Presidential leadership of former President George W. Bush, both in terms of platform and enacted policy.  I don’t deny that “mistakes were made” in the development of this alternative.  Perhaps more could have been accomplished.  And I realize that Obama and the Democratic leadership have not played their hand particularly well in the competition with the Republicans, but this doesn’t mean that a different hand wasn’t being played.  And, we should remember that there were significant winnings as the game proceeded.

The Obama and Bush administrations have proven to be fundamentally different in many ways, and it is important that we don’t lose sight of this.  Instead of a failed attempt to privatize social security, there was a successful accomplishment of healthcare reform.  The reform is initially modest and not all that Martin and I would wish, but the precedent has been set.  Decent healthcare is emerging as a citizen’s right.  America’s relation with the rest of the world is on a much different footing.  The repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” is now supported by the Secretary of Defense and the military leadership. It will soon be a policy of the past, no matter how much kicking and screaming comes from John McCain.   And most significantly, for the future prospects for a democratic society, there are very different Supreme Court Justices now being nominated and confirmed.

Given these very big differences in program and enacted policy, I think the notion that there is no empty space for politics in America, which Martin suggests drawing on Lefort, is a sophisticated way of saying that the parties don’t offer different programs, and don’t represent very different visions of the American common good and American identity.  I think this is simply not true.

Starting today, on Friday afternoons, I will present reflections on the deliberate considerations of the past week.

The discussion about WikiLeaks at DC suggested the importance of looking at other dimensions of the problem, not only the issue of whether the release of official secrets serves or undermines immediate political interests, but also what it suggests about fundamental social problems, about the relationship between public and private in diplomacy, and in everyday life, and about what it means for “the big picture,” concerning the prospects for war and peace, and the success or failure of democratic transition from dictatorship and democracy.

I understand and anticipated the critical responses to the conclusion of my post.   “I believe WikiLeaks’ disclosures present a clear and present danger to world peace.”

Esther expressed concern that the boldness of my judgment suggested a need to constrain the media.  She, Scott and Alias agreed that the danger of the WikiLeaks “dump” was not great.  Scott judged that “it’s rather unfair to assume that the US is the only country whose diplomacy can be duplicitous and shady.”  And he criticized Alias’s summary judgment, based on the predictability of the revelations, “Oh well.”  Scott noted that there are detailed reasons for not being so blasé and cites the possible complications in Afghanistan.

Perhaps I exaggerated, but only a little.  Making public what is meant to be private undermines social interaction, whether it be in a family or in diplomacy or anywhere else.  I understand why for specific reasons one would want to do that in a targeted way, if the family is dysfunctional and abusive, if the diplomacy is sustaining an injustice.  But to reveal secrets just because they are secret makes little sense, since there are necessarily secrets everywhere.  That is whistle blowing gone wild. It generally undermines the practice of diplomacy.  Not a good thing, because the alternative to diplomacy in solving international conflict is war.  And in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, as Elzbieta Matynia considered earlier today, transparency would have insured failure, i.e. the continuation of dictatorship, a violent revolutionary change, or civil war, each a path to human misery and injustice.

But I should be clear, once the information is public, I understand why news organizations need to report it and try to do so as responsibly as possible.  I think The New York Times did just that, although I find their explanations for their decisions to be strained.

As far as strains go, Esther Kreider-Verhalle underscored this week the dangers Fictiods present to American democracy in her post.  Hers is an ironic but critical observation: what first appears as farce, later appears as tragedy (to turn Marx on his head).  It seems amusing that a Chinese journalist mistook a satirical article in the Onion for real reporting, but it is deeply disturbing that Fox news did the same thing.  Disturbingly funny for those of us who don’t take Fox seriously, although we, (I, along with Esther, and probably DC readers), are deeply concerned that many of our compatriots do.   To struggle against this, we will organize a continuing fictoid watch at DC, starting next week, reporting on fictoids and critically analyzing the dangers they pose.  I hope this is not just an intra pillar activity, to use Esther’s imagery .  Our challenge, keeping in mind Martin Plot’s earlier post on opposition and truth, is to make this activity visible to those who take Fox nation seriously.  Is there anything that can be done?

Reading Martin Plot’s posts this week, I think, leads to pessimism, or at least a very critical appraisal of the prospects for democracy in America.  I am not so pessimistic, not quite as critical.  In my next post, I am going to consider his analysis of American politics, media and the leadership of President Obama.  My basic argument – Obama never was a leftist but an imaginative centrist, and the limits of that imagination may not be as exhausted and the general prospects for creative democratic action may not be as constricted as Plot thinks.