Avi Shlaim's biography of King Hussein, which I review at length in the current issue of The Nation, is about to be published in the United States. The book should stimulate, not only a reevaluation of what advocates of "peace process" have (and have not) accomplished during the past 40 years, but the generally underappreciated role of Jordan in Israel's and Palestine's future.

The king was an advocate of peace and dignified compromise for more than a generation. Jordan, meanwhile, has itself become a kind of miracle in the desert, a commercial hub of regional business, an early example of the kind of economic development that the globalization of intellectual capital makes possible. Dubai, now, is the poster-child of this kind of development, but Hussein is among its pioneers. This economic development is far more consequential to the slow process of democratizing the Arab Middle East than neocon-inspired military adventures.

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Charming. Plain spoken. Good looking. Earnest. Angry.  Sort of a wild youth, but settled-down, family.  University, but no intellectual, thank God.  Early career in sports. Knows how to cheer.  TV dinners, when necessary.

What the Bible prohibits (well, what the New Testament prohibits) are sins. "Choice" is a liberal's way of dressing up what's immoral. Thinks government should prohibit what's immoral.  Yet sees government as too big, intrusive, and tending toward corruption.  Thinks only an intellectual could notice a contradiction.

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My friend Sam Bahour, one of Ramallah's grittiest entrepreneurs and consultants, a Palestinian-American man-of-the-world (who got his Kellogg School MBA at Tel-Aviv University), knows more than most how important economic reciprocity and development will be to building peace. But he also knows their limitations. Israelis or Americans who think economic advance will be a substitute for a political process that changes borders and governance and makes room for refugees--that Palestinians will be silenced by the hope of material gain--do not understand their future.

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In my last post I asked, only half-rhetorically, if any decent candidate could be elected in a campaign dominated by what we call, out of habit, "coverage," especially the chatter of cable and network news.  I'm not the first to ask this question, or dread the answer, or be accused of elitism regarding political life, or defeatism regarding Obama's campaign. But my fears are not, as he would say, about him. They are about us. So I'll pursue the point one step more.

Spiro Agnew once said that the press was infected by liberalism. The problem, I think, is that it is infected by behaviorism. Day-in, day-out, we are talked about as bundles of "socialized" appetites, our freedom a matter of "preferences."  So what we think is either the product of "ideology" (i.e., of our "demographic") or a kind of impulse buy.  Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, seen as an expression of our material "interests" or, if we are deeply socialized, "values."  You get the idea.

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