Abadi, clean, was told to move on. But if the boy had had the wit to ply him with some questions, he might then have cried, "Take him in!" and doomed this New York-born-and-bred Yale graduate. Unbeknownst to Abadi, a colleague from a website he was writing for had just been arrested at the airport trying to leave. Abadi, lucky a second time two days ago, got a Turkish Airlines flight via Istanbul to Dusseldorf, where he caught a train to Berlin.

Even when the regime let the streets fill with peaceful citizens by day, it sowed the menace Abadi faced by night. Iranians were shocked because Tehran has so little street crime -- and so few cops -- that people walk at all hours without looking over their shoulders. It's a bit like New York City 70 years ago, when the novelist Howard Fast and his girlfriend slept in Central Park on hot summer nights to escape moral strictures as stifling as their airless apartments. They feared not muggers but an occasional police officer.

In Tehran now, too, the only public menace is the state. But the Iranian state teaches oppressed, angry boys to cling to guns and God -- both dispensed by the state itself, including by that senior boy and ex-traffic engineer, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad. Yet some U.S. neocons and lefties seem to like having him around.

Silly though some of those liberals indeed are (Don't get me started), neocons have become the other side of the coin, recognizing in Amadenijad a perfect foil for their own embrace of an American political party that engages in chillingly similar preachments and practices.

Sound fantastical? We've had Blackwater mercenaries patrolling the streets of New Orleans on contract to the federal government. We've had torture protocols that turn honorable conservatives' stomachs. We've had surveillance, renditions, and inexplicable detentions. We've had predatory capitalists unleashed to crush the hopes, health care, and home-ownership prospects of millions of heartbroken poor and lower-middle class Americans.

As those Americans become desperate and angry, we have Fox News showing them day and night whom to hate and make war on. We even have pastors telling parishioners to bring guns to church, and Texas legislators working to let University of Texas students do likewise in classrooms.

And we have neo-cons like Bill Kristol, who discovered the "pistol-packing hockey mom" Sarah Palin while taking a Weekly Standard cruise and commended her to John "Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran" McCain. At the 2008 Republican convention, Kristol and most other neo-con war-mongers found themselves staring into a horror-house mirror at the Basij populism they'd worked so hard, if only semi-wittingly, to foment.

They saw nothing wrong because, like their preternaturally insecure forebears in Europe, they'd made themselves creatures of the national-security and corporate state -- becoming its apologists, strategists, myth-spinners, and flag wavers and thinking that, at last, they had arrived.

Alas, as in the France of the 19th century and the Kaiserreich and Austria-Hungary in the 20th, neocon creatures of the state always wake up only when their "national greatness" myth-making and yahoo populism have left them high and dry, hated by the very people they thought they were rousing. That will happen to them here, too -- all the more quickly if, as seems increasingly likely to Paul Krugman, the Obama administration fails to undo the lasting, scarring, damage that neocons and their patrons have already done to people's hopes, health, and homes.

This month, Iranians -- encouraged, undoubtedly, by our 2008 election and by Obama's address to them and his speech in Cairo -- tried to have their own Obama moment. "It's hard right now to remember," Abadi writes poignantly, "that before dread settled over the country, before violence and fraud tore the threads that bound Iranian society together, the Islamic Republic enjoyed several weeks of unprecedented vibrancy. There was, of course, the joyous green-clad tidal wave that swept over Tehran in the days prior to the vote. But, the streets of the capital were also home to many earnest, if mundane, displays of democracy..... in a spirit of generosity and optimism.

"[These Iranian democrats] were college-age volunteers who canvassed undecided voters. They were strangers who staged impromptu public debates on street corners. They were tens of millions who waited long hours in the summer heat to cast their ballots. And they were all Iranians who wanted their voices heard.

"It was the feeling that their devotion had been betrayed, that their claim to fairness had been violated, that sent Iranians onto the streets."

There, they were met by something like what Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative cheerleaders have tried to foster right here. Isn't it time we sensed what's at stake and what kind of American civic-republican (and even religious) energy it will take to make Obama deal wisely with the thugatollahs and with those in our midst who count on them as backstops or as foils?

In civil-disobedience, you break a law non-violently and accept the legal punshiment to show that it's the unjust law that has betrayed the constitution, not your breaking that bad law publicly in order to defend the very rule of law. That strategy is risky enough here, but in Iran, it's inconceivable. Even just demonstrating peacefully will now demand more moral and physical courage than it did yesterday, or than civil disobedience usually does here. It will be cast as disobedience to the constitution itself - to the "Supreme Leader."

Watch the first 20 seconds of his speech and see his listeners' quintessentially fascist salutes, and you know what's coming. But consider that the U.S. hasn't always been better, and that some Americans still aren't.

Many Republicans still don't get this. At their 2008 convention, the "Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!" chanters responded to their leaders almost as the Ayatollah's listeners have. Such people are everywhere, even next to you at work. You have to work on them, bit by bit, as has been happening in Iran.

Republicans and neocons who saw nothing wrong in their party's 2008 speeches and crowds are now piously praising the Tehran demonstrators, as Josh Marshall and Jon Stewart have been showing. But, in their hearts, pious neocon supporters of the street marchers want the regime to crush them, because that would justify another war. They've forgotten that the last one, in Iraq, boosted the Iranian mullahs' power. Even the neocon rhetoric is doing that again right now; the regime in Iran is capitalizing on it.

The regime is odious and should be overthrown. Even many Ahmadenijad voters now see this, as a former student of mine reported from Tehran and as Roger Cohen more recently confirmed. But an American or Israeli military reaction would reverse those changing perceptions and boost the regime.

Liberation must come somehow from the incredibly brave, disciplined, civilized people we've been watching, as it came in India, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. They need both more and less than bellicose American rhetoric and war-mongering, as I argued two days ago and as John Kerry insisted a day later.

So why do the war mongers keep falling into the trap of thinking that the time for intervention is at hand?

A hint comes from the semi-recovering neocon David Brooks, who is skirting that trap this time: "The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Revolutionary Guard is seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. The Iranians on the streets know it. The world knows it.....

"The nations of the West will have to come up with multi-track policies that not only confront Iran on specific issues, but also try to undermine the regime itself. This approach is like Ronald Reagan's policy toward the Soviet Union, and it is no simple thing. It doesn't mean you don't talk to the regime; Reagan talked to the Soviets. But it does mean you pursue many roads at once.

"There is no formula for undermining a decrepit regime. And there are no circumstances in which the United States has been able to peacefully play a leading role in another nation's revolution. But there are many tools this nation has used to support indigenous democrats: independent media, technical advice, economic and cultural sanctions, presidential visits for key dissidents, the unapologetic embrace of democratic values, the unapologetic condemnation of the regime's barbarities."

Brooks also knows, but stops short of saying, what most Americans and the world know, too: Republicans and neocons just don't get this. They hated Reagan's negotiations with Gorbachev, and George W. Bush, for whom Brooks campaigned ardently, refused to talk to Iran. As early as 2006 Brooks could have rewritten one of his paragraphs above to read:

"The core lesson of these events is that the Republican majority is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Alberto Gonzales are seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. Americans on the streets know it. The world knows it....."

The world now is rightly, breathlessly focused not on Republicans but on Iran, as it was on Eastern Europe twenty years ago. Now, as then, our war-mongers are trying to insinuate themselves into the action.

The better strategies are the ones that Brooks mentions but that the party of his youth and early middle-age hasn't learned any better than has the audience cheering the Ayatollah. The next 24 hours may tell whether the rest of Iran can stand up to them and the terrifying division in the country which their saluting represents. Meanwhile, let's face down their American counterparts and find other ways to support the brave democrats of Iran.

I won't light up his name by linking him right now, but here's his find: Many Iranians who voted for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voluntarily and with a clear conscience are deciding that he used them to consolidate power in ways they don't like. Yes, Ahmadinejad had legitimate electoral support. But where is it now?

The answer, almost literally, is blowin' in the wind: The next 24 hours should tell whether the regime can suppress the rising anger. The clerks and teachers my former student describes aren't all taking to the streets; they're asking neighbors with friends in the thuggish militia,"Don't the Basij have parents, don't they have children?" Such appeals to decency from Ahmadenijad voters matter in nationalistic, "revolutionary" Iran.

Never mind that the usual infestation of neocon revolver journalists and provocateurs, such as Elliott Abrams, Daniele Pletka, and Robert "Boom Boom" Kagan, are touting the opposition because they want it to lose. Partly that's because it's in their nature: Every cause they attach themselves to loses, in ways and for reasons the writer Walter Benjamin described in the 1930s, but I'll save that for another time. The main reason the neocons are jumping up and down in unison this time is that they want the opposition to have a glorious defeat (which their support helps to ensure) that will darken the current Iranian regime as a foil for their latest, most stupid war-mongering. Ignore them.

The current regime is odious, but who was defending it? Anyone in America with power, and not just a big mouth, should back the opposition without the scorching rhetoric of "Boom Boom" and John McCain as a prelude to war -- and without searching for an Iranian Ahmed Chalabi to present to what we laughingly call "the intelligence community." Anyone with power has to behave moderately, as Obama is doing. At this stage, change really will have to come from within the Iranian people, in ways my source is describing and in ways neocons, creatures that they are of the national-security state, viscerally can't understand.

The regime behind the Iranian elections was anticipated by Edward Gibbon, who wrote that when Augustus, the Roman emperor who posed as a savior of the republic, "framed the artful system of Imperial authority, his moderation was inspired by his fears. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government... In the election of the magistrates, the people, during the reign of Augustus, were permitted to expose all the inconveniences of a wild democracy. That artful prince, instead of [showing] the least symptom of impatience, humbly solicited their [votes] for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate..."

Beneath the smiles, of course, was the iron fist. I don't know whether the Iranian Augustus who tried to play the "wild democracy" card in Tehran is the smiling Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or the smiling Ahmadinejad, or both, as the latter moves to try to "share" power with the former. But while the crackdown may silence opposition's voices, millions of Iranians have made irreversibly clear they aren't settling for a grinning Augustus.

The courage, pride and discipline of these crowds - and, I must add, their sheer civility -- is palpable partly because most Iranians are "conservative" and wise in the sense that, far from challenging religion, they are drawing on it and claiming to purify it, as the American civil-rights movement did.

The operative principle here, as in the American South, Gandhi's India, and even in Poland in 1989, is that although religion is dangerous and odious whenever it tries to rule in states, it is indispensable as an inspiration to the body politic, especially in an insurgency against great odds. Without it, republics often falter, but when it oversteps its bounds, they are lost.

In economics, most demonstrators in Tehran aren't Marxists any more than they're atheists. Nor, really, are they ardent capitalists. Right now, the economic crisis has been overshadowed by something more basic. While before the election Iranians spent a lot of time and energy debating the country's rate of inflation and alternative names for the Persian Gulf, my student notes, "That's forgotten now. The fight for more elemental aspects of political life has superseded the issues of the election; in the streets there is a desire to name simple facts and to call them such and treat them such: facts like election ballots, facts like gun shots fired at innocent bystanders. The demonstrators are bound together by their desire for truth."

Call it God's truth, or natural law, or human rights: This movement of its ordinary bearers may be asphyxiated tonight or tomorrow by the crackdown that keeps me from mentioning my former student's name. Or it could be perverted and derailed, as it was in Iraq, by its would-be neocon champions. But something irreversible and, I think, more constructive, has happened, and it will be vindicated, even if not tonight or tomorrow.

From the national-security-state right to the "armed struggle" left, people scoff that coercive non-violence is pious pacifism and passivity and that those touting it are either credulous dupes or Machiavellian oppressors. But coercive non-violence requires as much concerted, collective energy as warfare, and more courage than that of the scoffers on both sides, whom history often turns into pious apologists for mass murder.

Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World explains that practitioners of coercive non-violence are committed and disciplined to expel not just the oppressor but the oppressive methods they themselves have internalized. They stop obeying established power and generate new power by doing new things together peacefully that the oppressor disapproves. That needn't mean that they attack or, if attacked, turn violent, although at times, they may: Scoffers seem unaware that Gandhi and King weren't pacifists, and they don't understand what that means. It's urgent that we find out.

Morally as well as physically, violence in people's wars as well as by military machines is usually a dead end. As Albert Camus understood but Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon did not, those who lack the courage to think their way through this become, by default, apostles of murder.

The blogger Phil Weiss, for example, has barricaded himself into an intellectual Masada that leaves no option I can find short of massive dispossession of Israelis for the sake of his own tortured ethno-moral equilibrium. Why does Weiss scoff at Gershom Gorenberg's excruciatingly conscientious "The Missing Mahatma"? Gorenberg's and Schell's insights make Weiss uneasy. In an intellectual Masada one gets a sweeping view and some interesting dispatches but not enough truth of the kind George Orwell got in Spain.

History since 1789 shows that the "people's war" left has often been as much implicated in murderous folly -- even in victory, in post-revolutionary Paris, Moscow, or Phnom Penh -- as has the "blood and soil" nationalism of the right, in Madrid or Santiago. Yet some editors at some leftist publications or websites are pious clerics of other people's violent "purity" who turn smoothly away from its ugly consequences, as if they're trapped in a cold, fine-spun, unquenchable rage at their own bourgeois upbringings.

Weiss accuses advocates of coercive non-violence of drawing facile analogies between what it took to drive the British from India and what it will take to remove Israelis from..... where? I'm not sure if he means all of the Palestine of, say, 1936, but he seems to want all Israelis kicked out of the Middle East, pretty much the way the British were kicked out (by the Israelis, often violently, even terroristically), and not the way the Brits were kicked out of India by Gandhi. Weiss hasn't factored in Kant's portentous if stupid assessment of Europe's Jews as "these Palestinians who are living among us," a people too Levantine for Christendom.

Weiss also seems unaware that Gandhi was no pacifist and that he's the one making facile analogies between Palestine and India. He writes as if he'd gloat if the War in Iraq came home to America. There is something sadly missing here - and something else that is sadly far too present.

Schell's rendering of coercive non-violence draws not just from Gandhi but also from the even less-pacifist Hannah Arendt's understanding of the inverse relationship between violence and power: The more of the former, the less of the latter, and much sooner than many zealous young fighters of the left or the right ever seem to realize, until it's too late.

Real power grows from voluntary consent, or it is doomed by its violent imposition, even by people's liberation movements. This is what people who get swept up in moralism aren't strong enough to understand, or brave enough to deliver on. They're not equal to practitioners of coercive non-violence who have brought down vast-national security states in India, South Africa, American Dixie, and Eastern Europe.

I know that I must repeat here that coercive non-violence can't work in all conditions. Jews couldn't have tried it against Hitler, although, even there, it worked against him at certain moments, if for circumstantial reasons.

Gorenberg reports a range of Palestinian and Islamic assessments of all this. He doesn't push an ideological answer or a pie-in-the-sky solution. Israelis' own religious and national warrants for coercive non-violence are murky, and Gorenberg starts on this by contrasting Israelis' fraught readings of Jewish non-violence in the diaspora as cowardly and shameful - an understandable but ultimately uncomprehending and incapacitating assessment -- with Jews' own best examples across the generations. More needs to be said about this.

Finally, it always amazes me when supposedly progressive people say things about a supposedly rightfully Muslim and Arab Middle East that recapitulate right-wing Israelis' and right-wing Arabs' racialist "blut und boden" (blood and soil) notions that peoples belong to lands and lands to peoples in some nearly sacred way.

Why should anyone on the left carry this notion as far as these people do? The problem with it -- aside from the fact that Americans who embrace it should leave America and give back its blood-soaked lands to the original inhabitants -- is that it's a dead end for both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict and flies in the face of certain realities one may not see from a Masada.

Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq have been home to Christians and Jews as well as Muslims for centuries. The 1917 Ottoman census of Iraq counted 80,000 Jews among Baghdad's 200,000 residents, and 10,000 more Jews in Basra and more in Mosul. They had been there since 586 BCE. My brother-in-law, an Iraqi Jew whose family had been there for nearly 2500 years, grew up in Baghdad and attended a Jesuit-run high school there. He and his family escaped "back" to Israel after Saddam took power.

Purists of people's liberationist violence turn smoothly away from the fact that these Jews were kicked out. By their own logic, shouldn't they be equally accepting of the fact that as the Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, Tunis, and Damascus returned to Palestine along with Kant's European "Palestinians," many Arabs were kicked out, too? Wasn't Hebrew the language of the area for a thousand years before any Arab was spoken and 700 years before Islam grew out of the Hebrew religion? Wasn't Palestine mostly Jewish when the Romans named it... Palestine?

That's what "full Israel" Zionists will tell you, and while they're right on those facts, they're so violently wrong in so many other ways that I wonder if people's liberationists at the London Review of Books can see how their own and the Zionists' sacred nationalist logic converge, and how tragically and wastefully they are fueling that convergence.

Well, after all, this is something one expects and can almost understand among the Brits, into whom a few too many historical embarrassments and necessities have implanted a hypocrisy of such unprecedented purity and depth about these matters that one might think it genetic. But what about the rest of us?

If you've followed me on "How (and How Not) to Assess Israel's Moral Self-Destruction," you know how coercive non-violence is becoming the most effective way to win power justly. Some Israelis and Palestinians have noticed this, even if most of their leaders and self-proclaimed spokesmen haven't.

Reading Gorenberg, I was suspicious at first of the fact that this Israeli author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and contributor to The American Prospect and the dovish Israeli Ha'aretz, had just published his "The Missing Mahatma" in, of all places, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard. Was this some West Bank pacification gambit? But an hour ago Gorenberg told me how the piece wound up where it did.

"I could have spent time shopping it around, but... I preferred to update it and to get it published and into circulation on the Net, rather than let it gather dust..... After the effort I put into this essay, I wanted to give someone besides my family the chance to read it."

You'll be glad that he did. This is one of those rare reports that could just as well have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Sunday Times Magazine, or The Nation.

The gradual awakening Gorenberg describes in Palestine has little chance of reaching very soon the kind of fruition it did under charismatic, brave leaders like Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Eastern European dissidents of 1989-92. That's a tragedy, because, as I said on New York City's NPR station WNYC, it has a good chance of working on Israelis, whose profound if unacknowledged ambivalence about their own violence Gorenberg describes in explaining some of its recent extremity and its failure.

Make time this afternoon or evening to settle down with this quiet "must" read in a very dark time. Gorenberg tells me he read Jonathan Schell's indispensible The Unconquerable World, which I described in the post linked above and in my other Israel-Gaza posts, now collected here. Anything I've written on this subject was but a prelude to Gorenberg's stunning and canny effort to show all the parties what may be their only way to end the dance of death.

The smart and telling part is that Douthat will outclass not only William Kristol but also a faithless, conniving, faux-populist neo-conservative strain of punditry, whose collapse has been evident recently in loud second thoughts from the historian Robert Kagan at the Washington Post and in the maunderings of David Brooks.

Ironically, Douthat's co-author of Grand New Party, Reihan Salam, worked for Brooks at the Times in 2003-4. But Douthat comes from somewhere else and is going somewhere else, and he is not alone. He may give serious left-liberals an adversary they deserve, because, unlike Kristol and Brooks, he has more beliefs than insecurities.

The Church does take a long view of things, usefully keeping the tragedy of the political before us. Sometimes it props up what looks like the serenity of its faith with unseemly, Grand Inquisitorial musings about (and exploitations of) the weaknesses of the flesh in a fallen world. Some of us Hebrews take an even longer and somewhat different view of how to balance the evil inclinations in the human heart with efforts to repair a world that isn't quite so fallen.

That has its own risks, but all of it's lost on those among us who've been running the nervous, neo-liberal/neo-conservative Times for the past few decades. Its publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., finding his empire a fragile craft in history's tides (and God's), has grasped for a pundit who respects the Catholic Bishops' well-known injunctions on behalf of the poor and against unjust wars, but not from any knee-jerk-liberal vantage point.

In Privilege, Douthat stood almost equidistant enough from the free-marketeering right and liberationist left to notice a perverse codependency between them, as I mention in my review. Conservative though he is, he confessed to a sneaking sympathy for his fellow students' Living Wage Campaign on behalf of Harvard's underpaid workers. That's the Dorothy Day part of him. Or maybe it's the Baltimore Cathechism, which is more Tory and corporatist in the conservative "we incorporate and care for everyone" sense of that term.

Conservative Catholics tend also to be statists of theocratic inclination and to be prissily or haughtily silent about their side's own sins -- a silence of the sort to which the usually congenial Douthat is not always immune, owing partly also to his inexperience in the business and political worlds. His hauteur flashed during a long and increasingly testy defense of the late conservative Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus in a series of exchanges with Damon Linker in the New Republic. That his casuistry has a longer arc than Brooks' sophistry makes Douthat a bit too ecclesiastical for my taste, but also, when he's at his best, more grounded and even profound.

It doesn't worry me that Douthat considers human life a sacred, inter-generational thread that is not to be broken by individual decisions or (as I hope he also thinks) by the state in capital punishment or in unjust wars. I do wonder what Douthat would think about capital punishment and lesser but noxious repressions if the state tended toward theocracy or just took sides on certain issues, in ways he considered beneficent.

But he's only 29. As he travels his Via Dolorosa from the Times op ed page toward the Kingdom of God on earth, Douthat may be an interlocutor who makes liberals think through their own long-unexamined assumptions and find the missing groundwork for some of their beliefs in government action and individual rights -- beliefs which neo-conservatives have derided liberals for holding at all or have shared with them only opportunistically. It may be more rewarding to watch Ross Douthat transcend his conservative prematurity than it has been to watch David Brooks grow up politically so much later in life.

Gewen isn't only being provocative, although, Lord knows, he tries. He actually likes the idea: "The Iraq war was never a partisan affair," he explains, adding that "Many prominent Democrats and liberals like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and George Packer supported it." Gewen neglects to mention that he supported it, too, along with his boss Sam Tanenhaus and most of the political reviews they published, as I showed here and in The Nation.

And how are Times Book Review readers responding? Click here and enjoy what Gewen wound up provoking.

Gewen seems awfully sanguine about Heilbrunn's discovery that neo-cons may yet worm their way in from the cold thanks to Hillary Clinton, who's now their favorite woman in Washington. Or they may insinuate themselves back into power thanks to a recent report on possible American responses to genocide -- co-authored by Clinton's friend and predecessor Madeline Albright -- that, as Heilbrunn puts it, "is essentially a stalking horse for liberal intervention. It would create a permanent bureaucracy with a vested interest in insisting upon armed interventionism whenever and wherever the U.S. pleases...."

The American Conservative published Heilbrunn's warning because it wants to save its movement from neo-cons, for reasons like those I sketched recently here and in openDemocracy. American Conservative editor Scott McConnell actually endorsed John Kerry in 2004, warning that four more years of George W. Bush would leave the conservative movement exactly where those four years have left it. In 2008, McConnell, horrified by neo-cons' battening onto John McCain's campaign, actually canvassed for the Obama in Virginia.

The New York Times Book Review was and is far less horrified than The American Conservative, as Gewen unwittingly reminds us by spinning Heilbrunn's warning as far as possible from its author's intent and from McConnell's brave and honorable responses as an editor and citizen. But now Gewen's own commenters are reminding us what neo-cons are worth to many of his and the Book Review's long-suffering readers.

I certainly can't afford not to complete it. As I read the many richly-informed posts here at TPM, I am reminded that our desperate world can't afford my procrastination, either.

"Though to a writer whose design is so comprehensive and miscellaneous that he may accommodate himself with a topic from every scene of life, or view of nature, it is no great aggravation of his task to be obliged to a sudden composition, yet I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment's idleness increased the difficulty."

So writes Johnson. At least, I think that it's writing. I've been told on good authority that it is. But maybe Johnson is only trying and failing to say that while his wide-ranging interests should make it easy to pick a topic for his next column, he likes dithering too much to decide.

There, you see? I can complete great work if I have to. Then again, isn't each of my own columns itself a kind of dithering, or a simulation of bold action on some distant and therefore seemingly manageable problem, rather than a determined advance on a real one? Instead of slaying dragons, I seem to be slaying earthworms (David Brooks, for example).

You might ask me which of the world's great villains or looming disasters is the dragon I intend to slay. I forbear to answer the question. Before I strike at the monster, I'd better have done the careful, painful preparation required to land a fatal blow. I'm working on it, as you can see.

Do be patient. Think of all the things you pretend to have done but haven't. For example, you pretend you've read certain books when actually you've read only the reviews (such as mine, coming in Monday's Commonweal magazine, of Ross Douthat's and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party) or the discussions in TPM's Book Club.

Now, there are also certain things you've read but pretend that you haven't -- my columns, for instance! But that's not procrastination on your part; it's perversity, surely a separate and important subject in its own right. Silence such as yours is the reason the late Texas iconoclast Molly Ivins entitled a collection of her columns Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? She knew that most journalists are afraid even to name the dragons she took on.

I suppose that that's partly because journalists believe that curiosity and judgment run in one direction only -- from them to others, not the other way 'round. Their inability to reciprocate is part of the reason they became journalists in the first place: Behind all the excitement, they're hiding, even from themselves.So they're procrastinating, too, even in all their busyness.

George Orwell encountered precisely this journalistic hypocrisy when he tried to tell the whole truth about the Spanish Civil War, as I noted here recently, only to find his writing suppressed or studiously ignored and his motives as a writer questioned by editors and journalists who never questioned their own motives. I myself get questions from such people from time to time - just last Thursday, in fact.

But don't mind me. In the dark London spring of 1944, Orwell was having an eerily difficult time finding an established publisher for Animal Farm, whose Swiftian send-up of Stalin, Britain's ally against Hitler, frightened British book publishers out of their wits. Although he was himself a man of the left, Orwell even had to suspend his column in the Tribune because, as he told a friend, its Labourite editor "was terrified there might be a row over Animal Farm which might have been embarrassing [to the Labour Party]." The Manchester Evening News rejected a review by Orwell faulting Harold Laski's Faith, Reason and Civilization for its blindness to Stalin's "purges, liquidations, the dictatorship of the minority [and] suppression of criticism."

The gatekeepers weren't exactly in thrall to Stalinism, but they were certainly paralyzed by a kind of cowardice toward it that puzzled Orwell. He probed it in "The Freedom of the Press," a preface he wrote for Animal Farm as he contemplated publishing the book privately, with subventions from friends.

In his preface, as I've recounted more thoroughly elsewhere, Orwell sketched the weakness he sensed in editors and reporters all around him and traced the balance he was trying to maintain. Yet he withheld his preface from publication when the manuscript of Animal Farm was accepted at last by a publisher well-enough established to allay his fears that the book would sink into oblivion, as had his Homage to Catalonia, on the Spanish civil war.

Orwell's preface didn't see daylight until 1972, when his biographer, Bernard Crick, found it among the papers of Orwell's publisher. Its best-known sentence is a declaration any dissenter might utter: "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Why would publishers and editors, who claim to prize liberty, so often deny a hearing even to reasonable, well-presented views like Orwell's? He wrote that they "exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print it... not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.

"The sinister fact about literary censorship... is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact.... It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is 'not done' to say it .... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing....."

That's even more true of opinions about editors and reporters themselves! Seven times in this preface he never published, Orwell accused them of "sheer cowardice," of harboring "a cowardly desire to keep in with the bulk of the intelligentsia," of "timidity," and of "servility" to conventional wisdom. To which I'll add that that's true even when they're trying to appear brave in reinforcing the conventional wisdom itself, as Brooks, Fox News, and a few too many contributors to the New Republic have done in feignedly unconventional attacks on real truth-tellers and dissenters.

Orwell likened such journalists to "circus dogs" who jump when no whip is cracked, and he told the "leftwing journalists and intellectuals" of his time what he 'd surely tell neo-conservative and liberal war hawks in our own: "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.... Once a whore, always a whore."

But that's not really what worries me now. Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator; that's my problem. I'd better get back to work. Surely someone will be brave enough to publish it once I've completed it. _______________________________________________________________
I thank Prof. Allan Silver of Columbia for sending me Samuel Johnson's essay.

Perhaps the first thing to remember is that history cuts both ways. Soon we may learn that Hamas has tortured, maimed, or killed hundreds of Palestinians since Israelis left on Jan. 20. Slowly, American bleeding hearts will stop bleeding. The tragedy is that Israel's parliamentary democracy -- in which even the briefly-banned Arab parties will participate on Feb. 10 thanks to a Supreme Court unlike any other in the Middle East -- doesn't seem able to short-circuit the country's own part in this destructive spiral.

But not they alone. A lot must be blamed on Israel's excessive courting of big-power gamesmanship, against which Hannah Arendt warned so presciently; its rapacious market priorities (including arms markets); and its bone-headed citizenship, religious, and settlement policies, which have ratcheted up racism even (sometimes especially) among the 40% of Israeli Jews whose parents or grandparents grew up speaking Arabic in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

The cold bottom line is that for 40 years Israelis have tried to reduce Palestinians in the territories to the condition of American Indians, a defeated people surviving on smaller and smaller reservations or, at best, Bantustans. Where was the Marshall Plan or the confederative economic, EU-style effort backed by Israel (and the US)? I see only gestures and bromides along those lines from the three leading candidates in the Feb. 10 elections.

As the Gaza War raged this month, Michael Walzer, a political philosopher who edits a small journal called Dissent, lectured its readers on the proper use of the term "proportionality" in assessing the calculated relation of means to ends in Israel's venture. Walzer might now turn his talents to elucidate the proportionality of means to ends in Israel's policies toward Palestinians since 1967.

If Walzer would have us sideline the conflict's emotional and moral dimensions in order to think strategically, can he do it to help us see, factually and strategically, what Israel's intentions and conduct toward the Palestinians have been since 1967? Can he show us the tough choices and hopeful efforts that Israel made and that he supported, only to see them thwarted by unbending Arab rage?

Can Walzer recount how leaders of Labor, if not Likud, tried to nudge Israelis toward an understanding that Israel could survive only if Palestinians were enabled to build something better than Bantustans and Indian reservations? If he can't do that, could he please stop urging we understand proportionality as a calculated relation of means to ends?

The ineradicable difference between American Indians and Palestinians, of course, is that demographically and politically the tide is on the side of the latter. True, Hebrew was spoken in Palestine 1500 years before Arabic; and when the Romans conquered the Jews there and named it Palestine, not only wasn't there any Arabic in the area; Islam didn't exist, and wouldn't for another 800 years. But there were other native peoples; it was the Hebrews who were always on the move; and, today, their valid historical claims notwithstanding, Israel can survive as a Jewish fortress state only if it becomes like Singapore-- an increasingly authoritarian, racist society garrisoned against surrounding threats and desperation. Otherwise it will have to consider possibilities like those suggested by Seyla Benhabib in a recent essay, "What is Israel's End Game?", that is getting the attention it deserves.

Every step Israel takes in the direction of Singapore is killing off its beautiful, even unprecedented, social-democratic experiment with a rich confluence of cultures, including those of its Palestinian citizens and the Arabic strains in much of Israel's Jewish life. I have little patience with American critics of Israel who know nothing about this and want to know less -- and show it by proposing academic boycotts of a country whose universities are among its strongest centers of self-criticism and even resistance. If the would-be boycotters knew anything, their hearts would be bleeding out of both sides. And, by their logic, they'd have spent the past eight years boycotting themselves.

But I do hope that the shift in American public opinion which M.J. describes will strengthen President Obama's ability to send strong signals in the next few days that re-open Israeli political debate, and leadership, between now and the Feb. 10 elections. Otherwise, Israel will become a society that is harder to defend, and even to love.