Check this out.

Everyone knows travel journalist, Rick Steves, but few -- I certainly didn't -- know that he is very political and very smart about the world he covers.

In this interview about his recent travels with Iran, he points out something I had almost forgot. Everything we are told about Iran in this country is propaganda. Yeah, pretty much everything.

No, I'm not saying (neither is Steves) that Iran is Vermont. What he says, what he saw, is a real country with real people with legitimate grievances about America.

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Among the many things I don't know is whether Obama's new bank plan makes sense or whether, as Paul Krugman writes, it's fully of "zombie ideas" designed to save the big banks with yet more profligate ponying up of other people's money. In a similar vein, James Galbraith argues today that the plan can only be defended if we have some independent idea of how much the so-called toxic assets about to be auctioned off are worth, and that one way to make more than a blue-sky guess about that is to use the experience we had with the resuscitation of the Indymac bank last year, as a sort of natural experiment, and examine its records to see how much their own toxic assets were actually worth. Such empiricism sounds eminently sensible, doesn't it? If we like "stress tests" for their empirical value, why not a canvass of just how disconnected the mortgage packages are from anything that might be considered underlying value?

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Yesterday when the New York Times inexplicably gave Shimon Peres' threatening and insulting message to Iran equal play with President Obama;s, I thought it might be no coincidence.

Peres, who is an uberhawk on Iran, suddenly sends "greetings" to the Iran people urging them to rise up against their government at the same moment that Obama respectfully addressed the "Islamic Republic of Iran" with the most conciliatory US message in decades. Coincidence? Maybe.

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Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble as it was growing to ever more dangerous levels. Remarkably, it seems like they still cannot see the housing bubble even as its collapse is leading to the most severe downturn since the Great Depression.

At least that is what the NYT is telling readers. According to the NYT, the new bank rescue plan works on the assumption that: "because the government can hold those mortgages as long as it wants, officials are betting the government will be repaid and that taxpayers may even earn a profit if the market value of the loans climbs in the years to come."

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No comment from me necessary, except this: enjoy your weekend neocons; this is precisely why you wanted Obama to lose.

And to think that a week ago they were celebrating their victory in the Chas Freeman fight. As I predicted, that victory will amount to nothing. The neos shot their wad over a post few of us had ever heard of before. And today this.

What to do when their entire worldview hangs on a war with Iran to top off the Iraq war. Believe me, they are sweating bricks. Obama is the guy they feared he was, the guy we hoped he was.

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Whether it is the Israeli, sorry the Israel, Lobby, the Cheney Gang or Obama's new "smart power" team, all of the above are interventionists no matter how you slice it. All too are playing a great game that is hurting a whole lot of people (including themselves) that they are sadly miscalculating.

Cole talks about engagement and many of the comments I have seen do not lose sight of the fact that engagement can definitely take the form of soft or hard power. Historically, with our love and propensity for weapons, the US, along with the prompting of others (Cheney and the lobby), likes the hard stuff.

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Thanks to Saskia Sassen for her canny comments.

Her idea of a fluid and world-spanning frontier where the US encounters the Muslim world has a great deal to recommend it. I was struck when I first read about the US colonization of the Philippines how much it was an extension of the Old West. Many of the same army units involved in the Indian wars, many of the political figures concerned with the situation at the Western frontier, ended up in Manila. The first major US military encounter with Muslim fighters in modern history was there. Psy-ops against Muslim opponents using humiliation and pork products were pioneered then and later forgotten. When George W. Bush spoke of how he envied the US troops in Afghanistan the "romance" of their endeavor, you wonder if he was also thinking of the Old West and the games of his childhood (as Tom Engelhardt suggested)..

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With the economy rapidly sinking and unemployment rising, many are asking whether we can
call this the worse recession since the Great Depression. Of course the peak unemployment rate of 10.6 percent in 1981-82 recession is still higher than anything we have seen to date, and hopefully will see going forward.

However, the gap is not quite as large as it appears. Much of the difference is explained by the aging of the workforce and some is explained by the growing tendency of the Census Bureau's survey to miss people who are more likely to be unemployed.

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Washington's neocons have been hit by a Friday morning stunner,

While they were sleeping, President Obama sent a video message to Iran, telling them that he is abandoning the confrontational approach of the previous administration.

And now Iran has responded, positively but cautiously.

It's going to be a busy day for the warhawks. This looks very very bad (for them).

Here is the BBC deconstruction.

The Israeli press is full of stories, now broadcast around the world, of Israeli soldiers acting ruthlessly in Gaza. In various reported cases, soldiers revealed a cavalier attitude toward the lives of civilians, including women and children; consistently, they used overwhelming force--artillery against rifles in built up neighborhoods, say--to protect the lives of fellow soldiers. We are now hearing, in addition, knowing comments about the rules of engagement and the ethics of war. According to one scholar who helped write the IDF's code of conduct, a soldier has to "do his utmost" to avoid civilian casualties and that involves taking some risk. "From the testimonies of these soldiers, it sounds like they didn't practice this norm."

Let me get this straight. We take tens of thousands of 18 and 19-year-olds, young people who are little more than children themselves, and at a time of life when showing the utmost cool is a kind of sexual ante; a time when ideas about the world are largely received wisdoms; when bodies are at their utmost strength but so is the fear of death, which only reinforces the fear of displaying cowardice; when the people from whom wisdoms are received are parents or mentors loved to the utmost; when minds are just intimidated enough about life's scrum to feel utmost gratitude for family and commonwealth--when the desire to prove one's loyalty is at its most intense.

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This is amazing.

Everything about this Obama video message to Iran is just right, starting with his reference to the "Islamic Republic." No threats. No.pointless references to its President's pff-the-wall statements. Just respect and the offer to join the US in working for peaceful relations.

If you ever wondered why we elected this guy, here you have it.

As I was reading not only the post but also some items in Cole's book it struck me that we are seeing a new frontier emerge in the encounter (not clash!!) of the US and the larger muslim world. Let me say that this is not the language Cole uses. This is me working off some of his history of the present.

I want to emphasize the formation of a frontier zone -a no man's land where the rules of engagement are not established, and where those who interact may bring very different notions about rules of engagement. Each historical frontier is specific -whether the "Far West" of the old Americas, or my argument that today's global cities are a post-colonial frontier space. And so is this emergent frontier zone between the US and the Muslim world, a frontier that spans the globe, involving yes, Iraq and Afghanistan and other critical countries in the US "War against Terror", and all kinds of other countries who have participated in one way or another in the fighting of the last several years. But this frontier space also consists of thick localizations in cities and neighborhoods in the US, and in several European countries, and beyond.

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There is something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the question of Zionist influence in American politics that, if you bring it up, dominates the discussion ever after. I stand by my theory of an unprecedented alliance of the Cheney oil interests with the Neoconservatives in getting up the Iraq War. I wonder if Lee Raymond being at the American Enterprise Institute isn't part of a similar phenomenon. But anyway, it is a couple of pages in the book. Doubters should please read the footnotes carefully.

So, mine is a book of nearly 300 pages, and while it does advert to such issues, it isn't about that but rather NATO (including US) engagement with the Muslim world. In fact, one rationale for not spending so much time on Israel/Palestine is that they are not a NATO sphere of operation.

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At the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Wednesday that, over two years, he would all but eliminate an unpopular practice that has prevented tens of thousands of active-duty soldiers and reservists from leaving military service on time if they were scheduled to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan.

At the Justice Department.

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The most interesting chart showing the connection between executive compensation and company performance--also, I suppose, the arguable importance of retention--is the one I saw proudly displayed on a bulletin board at Motorola corporate offices in Schaumberg Illinois in 1994. George M.C. Fisher, the company's widely admired Chairman and CEO, had resigned without warning a few months before to take over at Eastman-Kodak. By all accounts, Motorola had paid Fisher about $5 million and Kodak offered him $100 million in salary and stock options. He was known as a technologist who was also subtle about people and talent--a good man all round. Nevertheless, Motorola's stock price hardly budged at the announcement of his departure and had recovered completely by the time I was there. "If one leader could matter that much," I was told, "then the leader could not possibly have done his job right."

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The Israeli army now says it will investigate the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza under so-called "permissive rules of engagement."

Pretty incredible stuff.

The other big news is this. In response to the government's failure to achieve the release of the captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, Israel has decided to go the "collective punishment" route. After the jump are stories from today's Israeli press.

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A front-page story in Tuesday's (March 17) Los Angeles Times reveals the subtle and inadvertent bias that creeps into the reporting of the debate over health care.

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When I hear John Boehner intoning his daily sound bites, getting his cliches in a row, I wonder if anyone thinks he actually knows what he's talking about. The man carries out his assignments, but is it possible to believe that he can give reasons for his positions? He hasn't reasons. He has, instead, modes: two of them. Sometimes he clutches Republican totems. On today's news, for example, the screen behind him performed all the mumbo-jumbo, chanting "CREATE JOBS/CUT TAXES," as if the Obama stimulus doesn't create jobs and as if Obama doesn't propose to cut taxes on 95 percent....oh, never mind. And sometimes, in badly rehearsed indignation, Boehner and his Senate colleagues try to pretend they're not lovers of buccaneer capitalism after all, but tribunes of right-wing populism defending Main Street against those bad guys on Wall Street who they've been trying to rein in while Democratic immoralists blocked their heroic efforts...oh, never mind, again.

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First there was an opaque financial system. Many billions of side bets were bet in a global casino. These were derivatives, and derivatives of derivatives. Trillions of dollars were bet to secure banks from the consequences of buying and selling risky mortgage bundles. They amounted, in theory, to insurance without any rational basis on which to appraise the dangers. There were specialists, "the best and the brightest," many of them trained as physicists, who designed systems of "instruments" that their employers loved to swap because they understood that they could use them to raise the leverage on borrowed money. The specialists did the work their employers asked them to do. Everyone agreed to believe that they knew what they were doing. Ratings agencies believed it and promoted the illusion. For their technical prowess they and their colleagues had been schooled in universities that taught the ultimate in technological knowledge. They were the contemporary versions of angelologists, computing how many credit-default swaps could be balanced on the head of a chip. it worked as long as it worked.

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I'm going to order Juan Cole's book today. I have the typical American understanding of the Muslim world --pretty small--and admire the engagement and seriousness that Cole has brought to this issue again and again. That's why I'm addicted to his blog.

But let's talk about the Israel lobby and the Iraq War. Reading MJ's synopsis, I find Cole's view unpersuasive. I don't think the oil companies had any interest in the Iraq War. Saudi Arabia didn't want it. Just ask Chas Freeman, the former ambassador, who vehemently opposed the war. Realists hated this war. John Mearsheimer was for the Gulf War out of an American interest that included oil, Saudi Arabia was for that war. Both were against the Iraq war.

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So many things have collapsed in recent months (the auto industry, the stock market, a growing list of daily newspapers) that the announcement of an impending disaster has ceased to qualify as news. Maybe this explains why so few people paid attention when Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, predicted not long ago that at least 100,000 nonprofit organizations would disappear over the next two years. Light made his prognostication at a public forum in New York City back in November, before the Madoff Ponzi scheme wiped out institutions such as the JEHT foundation, a leading funder of criminal justice reform; before museums started canceling exhibits they cannot afford to put up; before a coalition of thousands of nonprofit organizations signed a manifesto calling on political leaders to boost support for their beleaguered sector.

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As I wrote earlier, Juan Cole's "Engaging the Muslim World" is one assumption-transforming book.

Take the Iraq war. There are two schools of thought. One says that the Cheney oil gang manipulated us into Iraq to get their hands on the oil forever. The other argues that the Feith/Perle neocon crowd did it to take out Israel's powerful enemy.

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It's common knowledge that the new Obama administration is scrambling to pull America out of two big holes that the Bush administration helped dig - the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression and a major decline in America's image abroad, which essentially has undermined U.S. power.

On my current trip to the Middle East, I'm hearing a lot about these two dynamics and the interplay between both. It's not just that America is less admired in the Middle East compared to when I first started coming to the region more than 15 years ago - America was never well-loved in these parts. The Bush administration's overall approach to the region didn't win us many new friends and alienated millions at a popular level. In addition, it didn't actually strengthen our hand and increase our power to reshape regional trends to our advantage.

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Did you see Jake Tapper of ABC getting getting all medieval on Robert Gibbs at the White House yesterday? When did the President first learn about the AIG bonuses? Would you give us a tick-tock on what he knew, how he knew, and what his reaction was?

And the newspapers are going nuts. Outrage is the #1 headline word of the day. And the pundits are wondering: is the bloom off the Obama rose?

I have two words for the MSM: shut the f--- up.

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Okay, that is a fallback position. The AIG bastards should be paying us not to be in jail, but if the Obama administration is not prepared to push the legal envelope to take back the bonuses, it can simply tell the private shareholders that the bonuses are coming out of their pocket.

This one is pretty simple. Private shareholders still own 20 percent of the company. The market capitalization is $2.6 billion. The 20 percent stake ($520 million) can easily cover the $165 million in bonuses.

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$165 million, of course, is less than one-tenth of one percent of the total amount of bailout money given to AIG in one form or another. Yet it may turn out to be the $165 million that broke the camel's back.

The AIG bonus saga neatly encapsulates many of the problems that we have identified with the financial system and with the bailout to date.

• The bonus contracts - which have still not been released to the public - reflect the instinct of Wall Street to favor its employees over any other stakeholders. In the companies I worked at, it was common practice that all bonus plans were contingent on overall company performance: if the company had no money, you didn't get any, either. Even our commission plans for sales people included the caveat that the plan could be changed by the CEO at any time for any reason. The fact that AIG did not similarly protect itself shows the Wall Street habit of putting itself first, or a failure to recognize the possibility of a bad year, or, most likely, both.

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Unless you have a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies -- and maybe even if you do -- you will learn from Dr. Cole's book.

Essentially, Cole visits each area of Muslim-Western conflict and explains (1) how we, as Americans, probably see it and (2) why and how we are wrong.

And, the sad truth it, that rubric works. I know considerably less about the Muslim world than I think I do. And most of what I do "know" is based on propaganda. In short, we Americans view the Muslim world entirely from our own point of view. Every nation, government, insurgency or movement within Islam is appraised based on its respective attitude toward America (and Israel).

Are they with us or against us? Even liberals (like myself) tend to view the Muslim world that way. And, surprise of surprises, that approach produces distortions.

Think of the hard-headed types who went gaga over Qadaffi because he promised to drop his (probably nonexistent or rudimentary) weapons program and desist from backing anti-American terrorists. As soon as he did that, we all loved him and to hell with all the innocent Americans he killed on Pan Am 103.

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I, for one, welcome Cole's book. It talks about engaging people and understanding them for who they are not who we believe them to be. There are plenty of people that feel Americans are not the principled people we think ourselves to be mostly because our government is implementing policy in parts of the world where they don't care to do their homework therefore the implications for the people are highly destabilizing. See Afghanistan.

At the beginning of his term, President Obama declared that he was ready to engage the world. He should be looking to people like Cole to help him understand the nuances and implications of rhetoric, postures and policies his Administration is proposing to implement. Denigrating anyone is usually counterproductive and this type of approach, which the Administration seems to be vacillating with toward Iran, will only create more apprehension on their part causing what Cole calls "American Anxiety."

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This is a great profile of Steve Rosen, who led the anti-Freeman effort. Fascinating.

The article has one thing wrong. The Nightflower memo was not disclosed by Jeff Goldberg of the New Yorker. It was disclosed by me to reporter, Chuck Babcock, of the Washington Post. Rosen wrote the Nightflower memo to me on August 3, 1982, my first day at AIPAC (I worked there for four years, and, other than Rosen, I enjoyed the job. I left to take another one; my politics on the Middle East did not change until 1993 and Oslo).

I kept the memo and, years later, after Rosen succeeded in purging three of my former colleagues, I gave a copy of the memo to the Post where it was first published. The full text.

To:MJ
From: Steve

A lobby is a nightflower
It thrives in the dark
And dies in sunlight

Remember: The Walls Have Ears.

This is the guy who robbed our government of the services of a dedicated, patriotic American who bears no resemblance to the libelous picture Rosen (and his fellow travelers) painted of him. Pathetic.

The fate of Gilad Shalit, thought resolved last night, is now again in doubt. Every problem needs a face, and Gilad's soft stare has become synonymous with the standoff between Hamas and the Israeli defense establishment. According to leaked reports, Hamas wants all of its 450 (or so) cadres released, though there has been talk of the group's agreement to have some released to Gaza, not to the West Bank, or even to have some go abroad. Israel is saying the number must be less, and is bargaining especially to release as few people as possible with "blood on their hands."

I have myself lost loved ones in a terrorist attack, and accept the claim that prison may only harden the desire to strike at Israeli civilians. I don't deny that there are serious moral questions, at least in the abstract, about democracies capitulating to terror groups. Yet I find it hard to see much value in the government's endless bargaining, which is engendering a public spectacle that often swings between soap opera and the The Price Is Right. Gilad's poor parents are camped outside the prime minister's residence, while a counter-demonstration of grief-stricken terror victims goes on across the street. Olmert's ministers are warning darkly about how Bibi Netanyahu's government will never offer as good a deal as the current government has. You can't tell bluff from spin.

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A handful of articles that I read recently have caused me to worry about how we are conducting our politics in the first decade of the 21st century. These pieces illustrate how the right and the extreme left are degrading the way we communicate with citizens in our democracy.

The first article was written by a young, allegedly rising Jewish Republican elected official, State Representative Adam Hasner of Delray Beach, FL. The first sign that this essay was not, shall we say, "enlightening," was the publication in which it appeared, The American Thinker. The Thinker is one of those hard-edged, right-wing web sites that specializes in flinging filth. It is a publication that has turned the concepts of lying and distortion into art forms.

The Hasner essay, "Obama: Pro-Israel talk, anti-Israel walk," includes so many stunning distortions, half-truths and outright falsehoods, it is hard to know which ones to highlight. Hasner's main argument is "Israel and the Jewish People now face" a "growing threat" in Barack Obama's presidency. He then proceeds to "prove" that Obama is a threat by charging the president with a series of misdeeds. Each charge is more ridiculous than the one that precedes it.

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There is something really sick about much of the commentary around the AIG Bonus payments of $170 million to retain a group of traders that managed to lose $65 Billion in the last three months of 2008. Here's Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times.

A.I.G. employees concocted complex derivatives that then wormed their way through the global financial system. If they leave -- the buzz on Wall Street is that some have, and more are ready to -- they might simply turn around and trade against A.I.G.'s book. Why not? They know how bad it is. They built it.

It is obvious that Sorkin, who writes the Dealbook column for the Times and spends his every waking hour trying to glean gossip from investment bankers and traders, has absorbed the Darwinist norms of Wall Street. Maybe like Ron Insana, now returned sheepishly to CNBC, Sorkin sees himself as a Big Swinging D**k. What's crazy is that Sorkin's explanation seems to be the one that Hank Paulson, a former BSD himself, must have believed in allowing the retention payments in the first place. After all, here is the gang that couldn't shoot straight--a historically incompetent group of traders--asking for record amounts of money to stay with the firm they brought down. WTF?

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This is interesting. Uzi Arad, Netanyahu's choice for national security adviser and one of Israel's smartest foreign policy types, cannot get a visa to visit Washington because of the Rosen case. Or so says a top reporter.

The Washington Time's Eli Lake, who has some of the best connections in Washington on all matters Middle Eastern, tends to know what he's talking about. If he says that Netanyahu's top foreign policy adviser cannot get a visa to come to Washington, it's surely true.

So what will the administration do? I expect they will give Arad the visa. Why not? He's not applying to work at the CIA? He's representing a foreign government. I doubt he'll be consulting Steve Rosen in the future.

It just goes to show that the Rosen/Franklin case keeps reverberating, and not in a good way.

Meanwhile, check this out for more evidence that the Freeman stand down does not mean that Obama is going all Likud on us. Not by a long shot.

From the first days of the Obama administration, then neocons, led by Godfather Dick Cheney, have been warning that President Obama is not only putting in place policies that will destroy the economy but also will produce another 9/11.

So does the neocon gang want disaster to strike America.? The answer is obvious. After all, what else does Rush Limbaugh mean when he says he prays for Obama's failure?

It is worth pointing out how different Democrats are. After 9/11, I knew no one who did not line up and support George Bush, even though we hated him for stealing the election. I flew (I'm almost ashamed to say this now) a half dozen flags at my house for a full year.

But that is how it always was in this country until the Bush-Cheney neocons changed the rules of the game. They hate this country (bunch of immigrants, dark skins and mongrels that we are). I remember that before 9/11, Bush did everything he could to "talk down" the still booming Clinton economy to pave the way for tax cuts for their friends. Then came 9/11, and all their dreams were answered.

These are the most unpatriotic people ever to serve in any administration ever. Why is the administration not allowing Sen. Leahy to begin those hearings on Bush 43's responsibility for virtually all our nation's problems? They act like a fifth column. And attention needs paying.

Or is accountability nonexistent in this country?

Stabilization programs in emerging markets often come down to this: the government needs to do something unpopular, e.g., reduce some subsidies, privatize an industry, or eliminate the crazy credit that goes to oligarchs - no one likes oligarchs, but their factories employ a lot of people. There is naturally resistance - pushback from legislators, riots in the streets, or oligarchs calling their friends in the US foreign policy establishment. The question becomes: does the government have the "political will" to get the job done?

In fall 1997, a key issue for Indonesia's IMF program was whether the government could close the banking operations belonging to one of President Suharto's sons. There was an epic and fascinating struggle and, in the end, the government did not have sufficient political will or power. The subsequent loss of US support, and further currency and economic collapse is (messy and painful for many) history.

It is striking that Ben Bernanke now asks whether the United States today has sufficient political will.

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I am really intrigued by Roger Cohen of the New York Times. Suddenly, the anti-neocons have a powerful voice on the New York Times editorial page.

On Gaza, Iran, Chas Freeman and a host of other Middle East issues, Roger Cohen is challenging the tired old CW of the late Abe Rosenthal, William Safire and Bill Kristol. In fact, he has brought the first creative thinking on Middle East issues since Anthony Lewis retired from the op-ed page a dozen years ago.

Why now? First, I think Cohen has changed his views. Until relatively recently, I found him predictable and safe. But then something clearly opened his eyes. My guess is that it was the Iraq war. He seems to have concluded that the people who lied us into that debacle can't be trusted on anything else either. So he's looking at other issues fresh and he is coming up with some startling conclusions.

And he's not alone either. Has anyone noticed how Andrew Sullivan has evolved recently? Until Gaza, he was still pretty much the son Martin Peretz might have had. But now he's furious and it shows. (Read his writing on Chas Freeman).

In fact, pretty much the entire blogosphere (other than crazy right sites like"Little Green Footballs," and COMMENTARY) seem to be waking up to the realization that the Middle East status quo is disastrous.

And now the New York Times. Maybe in a century or two, the Washington Post will come around. (Note: The Los Angeles Times is also doing some great stuff on its editorial pages).

Neocons may have just won a battle but, with Iraq as their ever-lasting legacy, they are losing the war.

I'm currently on a short visit to the Arab Gulf, organized by the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It's the sort of study tour that DC think tank analysts, national newspaper columnists, and media pundits of all sorts engage in on a regular basis - they are invaluable for making contacts, facilitating dialogue between countries, and learning about a new aspect of some policy challenges our country is facing. I've already outlined some of my initial perspectives on the first few days here in the United Arab Emirates in this post earlier today.

The UAE - which I'll refer to as the Emirates in shorthand here - is known for many things these days: an indoor ski slope in the desert, man-made islands like the Palm Island shown here (where our delegation just had dinner at the home of a senior government official), and a rapidly expanding skyline of luxurious hotels and office buildings shown in this video here.

But just a few short years ago, the Emirates was best known for being at the center of a mini-firestorm in DC policy circles linked to a proposed policy that would have given a firm in Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, operational control over a handful of U.S. ports. The Emirates got hammered in the public furor that erupted - with Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle engaging in a bit of demagoguery that ended up killing the idea. At one point, fully seven in ten Americans opposed the ports deal.

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There are few economists who would defend the decision to allow Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt last September. Its collapse induced a worldwide panic that sent stock markets plummeting and caused credit to freeze up. In the subsequent months, the downturn went into over-drive, with the United States losing almost three million jobs from October through February.

This set of events has led almost everyone to conclude that the trio who let Lehman go under - Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and the then-head of the New York Fed, Timothy Geithner - erred badly in this decision. That seems a reasonable judgment.

However, the conventional wisdom includes a corollary that is much less obvious: because the Lehman bankruptcy was a disaster, US taxpayers must honour in full all the debts of all the banks.

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My new book is a series of case studies in US and NATO relations with a Muslim country or movement, and I feel vindicated that I chose well. I talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of which are in the headlines as the book appears in bookstores. These areas in particular pose dilemmas for the Obama administration, and I have a lot to say about how we got where we are and how we might get out of the serial morasses bequeathed us by eight years of Bush-Cheney.

I believe that the United States and its NATO allies are destined to have more and more to do with the Muslim world over the coming decades. Some estimates of world population growth suggest that it will level off about 2050 at 9 billion or so. Nearly a third of humankind at that point may well be Muslim (the proportion is more like one-sixth to one-fifth today). Muslims will be the labor pool of the 21st century. And while we all wish that we could wean ourselves from fossil fuels in only ten years, likely a majority of our energy will still be being generated by them in 2050. The deepest known reserves of petroleum and natural gas are in Muslim-majority regions such as the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. As the shallower reserves elsewhere run dry, or as the populations of those countries with limited reserves begin using these resources themselves, industrialized nations will become even more intimately intertwined with the Muslim producers. Ironically, these hydrocarbon producers may also be the ones who have the capital to partner in trying to move to solar energy, the only real solution to the crisis (and one that should be attractive to the Muslim world, which has a disproportionate amount of sunlight and deserts).

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Escalation in Afghanistan, drawdown in Iraq, instability in Pakistan, dialogue with Iran; relations between the United States and the Muslim World are at a height of complexity and intensity. This week at Book Club, we will be joined by Juan Cole who will be discussing his new book Engaging the Muslim World. Cole hashes out where we are, where we've been, and what the future could like in relations between the the United States and the Muslim World. Juan Cole is a professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of the blog Informed Comment.

He will be joined by Patricia DeGennaro, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute; Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University; Saskia Sassen, professor of Sociology at Columbia University; and MJ Rosenberg, regular Cafe contributor.

The neocons should not let their victory in the Chas Freeman matter go to their heads.

On their number one issue -- the issue over which they struggled successfully to defeat Freeman -- they are batting zero.

Last week, just prior to Freeman's stand down, Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, told the Senate that he did not believe Iran was on the brink of going nuclear. And now, Admiral Michael Mullen, head of the Joint Chiefs, says that the US opposes Israeli military action against Iran.

Mullen could not be more emphatic. The United States is against Israeli military action. Period.

I wrote last week that the neocons' apparent victory over Freeman was an empty one. This proves it. Why? Because the main issue the neocons care about is not settlements, not Gaza, not Israel, itself, in fact. It is Iran. They want the Iran nuclear question resolved militarily not diplomatically. And they want the regime brought down.

I guess they will have to wait for the Palin/Wurzelbacher administration. Obama will focus on diplomacy.

****
By popular request, here is my letter on Chas Freeman that led off the New York Times' letters column.

Last November, Ken Griffin told investors in his Citadel Hedge Funds that they couldn't withdraw their money, but he was still going to charge a 2% management fee on their trapped funds. Oren Kramer a rival hedge fund manager said, "It's like telling someone at a hotel that they can't check out and then charging them for the privilege of staying."

Things were bad for Citadel, but this evening we learned that Ken Griffin isn't really the hyper-capitalist he's always portrayed as--he's just another corporate socialist, passing his losses off on the public. It turns out that $200 million of taxpayer dollars have been turned over to Ken Griffin by AIG for his speculation in Credit Default Swaps. As I said last week, there is no good reason for this to happen.

This is a guy who has been fighting tooth and nail to keep his income from being taxed like the rest of us. So while Griffin finances shills like Grover Norquist to fight for his right to a special tax break, we pay the bills at Citadel.

Uncle Sucker.

The term of the hour is "the best and the brightest," David Halberstam's brilliant coinage of 1972 meant to cast much deserved aspersions on the dazzlingly credentialed, smugly presumptuous crowd who peered through ivied tunnels to run foreign policy under JFK and LBJ, again and again counseling them to thrust the United States into the devastating Vietnam war. By 1992 Halberstam was noting, as Frank Rich wrote a few months ago, that the term "is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended.'' Ya think?

"The phrase, in its original coinage," as it shouldn't have been necessary for Rich to point out, "was meant to strike a sardonic, not a flattering, note." Yet it continues to crop up as a compliment, as in today's NYT, where Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., is quoted as having written SecTreas Timothy Geithner as follows:

We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses -- which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers -- if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury.

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