The killing of Osama bin Laden, like the 9/11 attacks, is both deeply important and of such symbolic resonance that it invites misinterpretation.

The operation that ended the life of this century's most prominent mass murderer was an undeniable and satisfying success for the United States military and for all those who have worked through two administrations to achieve it. It appears to have been executed with precision and daring and to be managed by the Obama national security team with great professionalism.

It brings a degree of closure to a particularly dark chapter in recent history and, one hopes, a degree of justice for the many who have been caused so much pain by this vile man.

I will admit though that I am made uncomfortable by jingoistic celebrations that broke out when the news of the successful operation in Abbotabbad was announced last night by the president.  First, my thoughts went to the families of those who lost loved ones on 9/11, for whom this must trigger feelings much deeper and more complex than mere hoopla. One of those, a guy I can only think of as a the kid who lived across the street from me when I was growing up, a laughing, energetic, dependable participant in neighborhood softball and football games, lost their son, brother and husband ten years ago. Osama may be dead, but it doesn't fill the void created when Todd's offices at the World Trade Center collapsed amid fire and ashes. Another good friend has channeled her feelings of immeasurable sadness into the building of the Pentagon memorial. Osama is gone and she and her family are left with a small stark public shrine and memories that will ache long after this moment passes.

It's a moment of satisfaction, of justice, of military and intelligence success, even one that sends a message about America's relentless determination to avenge a brutal crime. But there is little to be dancing in the streets about here. Leave that to others -- to those who danced in the streets when they saw the twin towers fall -- who have been dehumanized and permanently shamed by their loss of perspective.

Dignity alone does not suggest we should be circumspect in our appreciation for this achievement. America lashed out in the wake of 9/11 in ways that were so excessive and ill considered that it will be decades before we fully recover from the dishonor we brought upon ourselves. That we did played into Osama's hands. In fact, our invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the compromising of our fundamental values were all even more important signs of the success of his plan than the acres of destruction in lower Manhattan or the blackened hole in the side of the Pentagon.

Bin Laden was as low as they come, a twisted perverter of the values of the society and culture he asserted he was championing. He was not even a master terrorist, having far more failed plans than successes to his name. But he did possess a keen understanding of the power of symbolism as the ultimate force-multiplier at any terrorist's disposal. He knew that to strike at American icons would compound the impact of the slaughter he wrought. He wanted to illustrate national vulnerability and to incite national over-reaction. And unsurprisingly, he succeeded and for a decade America redirected the might of the most powerful nation the world has ever known not to contain an existential threat but to hunt down a criminal.

The imagery and emotional power of the losses of 9/11 led us not only to overstate the power of the man who gave the order to unleash them but to spend trillions, sacrifice thousands more American lives, trigger the deaths of hundreds of thousands of others and carve a deep wound into the psyche of the planet. We called it a "war on terror" but it went beyond a measured reaction and was bloated and misdirected by a form of grief and anger-fed national dementia.  Hopefully, with this well-executed Navy Seal operation deep into the heart of the country that coddled, protected and hid bin Laden, Pakistan, some of the demons may be released and we may regain some of the perspective that we have lost.

(We can only imagine what the intelligence from this attack an hour north of Pakistan's capital in a city with a very active Pakistani military and government presence will ultimately tell us about the undoubted complicity of the Pakistani intelligence service in protecting the world's public enemy number one.)

Perspective however, requires not only that we struggle not to conflate the enormity of our sense of loss over what happened on 9/11 with our sense of the size of the enemy we faced. It also requires not overstate the impact of the death of bin Laden on the real, measurable and enduring terrorist threats we do face. While al Qaeda may have lost its leader, the organization has morphed over the years into a very real if fragmented threat that will not go away in the wake of this American victory. It is a threat that we and our allies must monitor and contain via every means at our disposal even as we come to recognize that there are far greater threats to our national security -- some economic and of our own making, some slowly building on the international scene with a rapidly shifting global power structure and clouds gathering over critical major power relationships.

9/11 was not Pearl Harbor. Al Qaeda was not and is not a historic enemy like World War II's Axis powers.  Bin Laden is not Hitler. We are not in a global war against an equal nor with one with any real capability of displacing us. But we have just buried an enemy who cannily recognized that the only power right now capable of bringing down America is America. He sought to successfully use us against us and he was for too long successful to too great a degree. That is why, for this success to be truly worthy of celebration, we must bury with him the confusion and disorienting anger that has distorted our world view for a decade. We must recast the real terrorist threat in proper size -- eliminate it wherever we can -- and remember that what's greatest about America can't be brought down by bombs or hijacked aircraft or by an amoral hate-monger furtively holed up in a walled compound in North Central Pakistan. It is within us and up to us alone to grow or diminish.

First, congratulations on having been selected by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation Michael Leiter, head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center as "the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland." Given your U.S. roots, this must be particularly gratifying. Your family must be very proud. I'm sure that the U.S. institutions of higher learning you attended-Colorado State, San Diego State and George Washington University-are all updating their websites right now. While you have achieved many such accolades in the past-from sources as diverse as soon-to-be-ex Congresswoman Jane Harman to "Investor's Daily"-this most recent acknowledgement of your achievements as the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula must be especially gratifying.

Having said that, despite having spent your formative years in the American heartland (thus confirming my worst fears about the effects of extended exposure to country music), may I take this opportunity to point out to you that you guys have picked the wrong great Satan.

Have you seen what's been going on in Europe lately. Over the weekend, David Cameron gave an address in Munich in which he decried the failures of British multiculturalism. In the audience listening to him was Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who had made similar remarks herself.  Shortly after he spoke, his remarks were embraced by Marine Le Pen, Princess of France's ultra-right wing National Front Party that her father founded.   Le Pen said "It is exactly this type of statement that has barred us from public life [in France] for 30 years. I sense an evolution at European level, even in classic governments. I can only congratulate him."

Now in my family we have a rule. If you receive a thank you note with a return address from the Le Pen family, don't even open it. It can only be bad news. And since Le Pen's warm French smooch on both of Cameron's rosy British cheeks, the Prime Minister's people have been taking pains to say that she misinterpreted him.

But Anwar, it's really pretty hard to misinterpret what he said. On the eve of a major anti-Islamic rally in the United Kingdom, that country's chosen political leader decided it was the right moment to suggest that "passive tolerance" had only served to encourage Islamic extremism. The Prime Minister was clearly attempting to have it both ways-playing the populist game of pandering to nationalist fears while also mouthing words about liberalism and implying that the alienation that produced radicalization was due to separatist policies within the Islamic community. In short, he was essentially saying "we're to blame for our policies allowing them to be themselves." 

But the bigger point isn't whether Cameron made a rhetorical and political blunder but that his remarks echoed Merkel's crowd-pleasing speech on the same topic in Potsdam days before. The Chancellor said, "(In) the beginning of the 1960s our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country. We kidded ourselves a while. We said: 'They won't stay, [after some time] they will be gone,' but this isn't reality. And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side by side and to enjoy each other ... has failed, utterly failed."

She got a standing ovation. In Germany. Attacking foreigners. What a shocker, right?

And that's my message to you. Why do you think America is your primary enemy when there is probably no non-Islamic country in the world in which the Islamic population lives with as much freedom and tolerance as in the United States? Why do you think America is your primary target when the inflammatory, insensitive and disturbing views expressed by European leaders are not a departure but are really European standards, old favorites that are played on the radio from generation to generation? Look at European attitudes toward immigrants from the Islamic world? Toward letting Turkey into the EU? Who's doing the anti-Mohammed cartoons? Who did the crusades?

It is the Europeans (and their Eurasian cousins in Russia) that have a longer, more hostile history? Do you think any major country in Europe could elect a leader today whose middle name is Hussein? Do you think any major American political leader could survive five minutes in the media after spewing the veiled and not-so-veiled anti-Islamic, intolerant messages that are so popular in Europe today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should direct your anger at Europe. The real work for Islamic leaders like yourself is fixing the Islamic world first-because the only places where there is less tolerance and where Islamic groups are more viciously targeted is in the Middle East. And the real need of the people for whom you are allegedly fighting is for real opportunity, education, economic growth and responsive, representative government at home. 

But still, if there is an East-West faultline that is growing more tense, you can look for it a lot closer to home.  Back where it has been for a couple thousand years. Back where it once made famous the Siege of Vienna and the Moorish conquest of Spain. Back in Europe where intolerance, nationalism and social polarization have given us many of the darkest stains on the pages of world history.

Scrooge. The Grinch. Critics calling out the cinematic deficiencies of "Love Actually." Christmas humbuggery is a cliché.

I however, am a New Year's curmudgeon. The holiday is a fraud celebrated by idiots. Our arbitrary slicing of time into comprehension-sized chunks and then celebrating the false distinctions between December 31 and the first of January is a big honking nonsense.

The fact that this ersatz holiday then motivates people to put on silly hats and drink to excess to celebrate the non-event event compounds the ridiculousness of it all and makes it dangerous to leave the safety of your couch. The only thing that adds any gravity to the activity at all is America's tradition of spending part of the evening watching Dick Clark slowly losing body functions on live national television. (I sympathize with the man and admire his courage. But he seems to be crowning a lifetime of cashing in on his bad taste with an ultimate grotesqueness: a multi-year, hard-to-watch reality show about his own demise.)

That said, you don't have to be a drunken lunatic who spends 10 hours trapped in the freezing cold in Times Square waiting for Snooki to be dropped in a glass hamster ball to add to the absurdity of this annual ritual about nothing. No, even very serious types like commentators and still grave but less credible types like bloggers regularly mark the holiday in ways that make them bigger laughingstocks than the insurance salesmen with lampshades on their heads who made the holiday famous: They make predictions.

Invariably the predictions do not come true. There is a charming irony in this: celebrating a non-event through the ritual listing of other soon-to-be non-events. (The New York Times has even run an entertaining discussion forum this week on why we seem to need predictions and how hard they are to make.) It is all a cousin to our penchant for marking the "new" year with resolutions to distinguish the year from that which came before it -- and which are all soon forgotten in ways that should remind us of the falseness of such distinctions.

But while I may condemn the holiday -- which is why on New Year's Eve I will sit here in Paris in our rented digs in the Sixth Arrondissement listening to the nearby revelry on the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail while quietly sipping Diet Coke and irritating my very patient wife just as I do each and every other night -- I am not so egotistical as to think my protests can undo the culturally embedded traditions of the season. I also don't think I can ignore the requests of the editors at FP any longer. So I too will now offer some New Year's predictions.

However, in an effort to avoid the kind of pitfalls of which I am critical, I will skip right over the dubious maybes of most pundits and cut right to what you want to know the most: I will list only those things that are absolutely certain to happen in 2011.

Read on

Update, 9/12/10: In the following post due to a mistake regarding which draft I submitted to be posted, a couple of key words were dropped that have been noted by several commenters.  They refer to the paragraph regarding the mosque project in Lower Manhattan.  What I intended to write (and had actually written in the draft that I mistakenly did not submit) was not "It is odious..." but instead "It may seem odious to some, but if our freedoms..."  I appreciate those who noted the incongruity of the remark given that I was early and strongly on the record supporting the right of those supporting the Islamic Cultural Center to build it wherever they wanted to.  As should be clear to anyone who reads this blog, I find the objections and efforts to block the cultural center to be what is really odious and that is the point that I would have made here were it not for my typo.  Apologies.

A week ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote a piece for Newsweek entitled "What America Has Lost." It was subtitled "It's clear we overreacted to 9/11." As is typical for Zakaria, it is exceptionally thoughtful and well-argued. Its timely focus is on the enormous costs associated with building up the massive U.S. security apparatus that targeted a terrorist threat that was and is clearly overstated. Zakaria makes reference to the landmark Washington Post "Top Secret America" series that outlined how, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, the United States has "created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent to $75 billion (and that's the public number, which is a gross underestimate.) That's more than the rest of the world spends put together."

Even today, nine years after 9/11, it took considerable courage for Zakaria to argue that we overreacted to the horrific events of that day. Given their scope and visceral impact on every American, it seemed in the days after the blows were struck that overreaction was impossible. But in the years that followed, the feelings seem hardly to have ebbed at all, and critiques of our national reaction are, with the exception of the near consensus that invading Iraq was wrong, considered almost unpatriotic -- nearly sacrilegious, in fact.

Yet I believe that Zakaria's column understates the problem. I attribute this to its appropriately limited focus rather than any narrowness of his perspective. It was, after all, just a single column in which he focused on making an important point about America's security priorities and the opportunity costs associated with our strategic overreaction. That said, the damage done by letting emotion and adrenaline get the best of us in the months and years after the attacks extends far beyond the distortion of foreign policy priorities or the impact on the U.S. federal budget.

Read on

Remember the scene in Annie Hall in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are talking and there are sub-titles indicating what they really were thinking? I regularly wish such a thing were available when listening to politicians speak. Not always, because frankly most of the time that politicians speak the best filter is ignoring them altogether. But Barack Obama is the president of the United States, the country is ass deep in alligators and so his State of the Union address takes on special importance. 

We know he and his team have worked for weeks on the address. They have spent the past few days pre-gaming the press hoping to get the "Obama Does It Again: America Starts Believing in Change They Can Believe In ... Again!" story they really want. And we also know that every single phrase in the speech has been viewed through multiple lenses-impact on the media, impact on the left, impact on the right, impact on the center, impact on donors, impact on November 2010 election prospects ... well, you get the idea. With the pros in the White House you often get the sense they're looking at dozens of angles associated with any phrase or idea. It's not triangulation. That's so 1990s. It reeks of Dick Morris'a mouth full of toenail polish. Today we're dealing with polygonulation of a much richer sort. With three political factions, U.S. and foreign media, 50 states, the G20, Michelle, Malia, Sasha, the White House dog and the Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol, and Oprah that would make it octacontakaihenagonulation. (There's a change you can believe in.)

Anyway, to help cut through it all, we watched carefully as the president delivered his address and have selected ten key phrases in which the president said one thing but actually meant something else. Then, we added the real or alternative meaning. So now, you can truly understand.

And as for knowing what you yourself were really thinking while you watched, perhaps it's best to return to Annie Hall in which Annie says "Well, to me, I mean it's all instinctive. You know, I mean, I just try to feel it. You know, I try to get a sense of it and not think about it so much." But while she says it, the subtitles let us know what she (and you) are really thinking: "God, I hope he doesn't turn out to be a schmuck like all the others." 

The following are not necessarily offered in the order they came in the speech:

1. "Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit."

This actually means: "Holy crap, what a mess. But let's not panic. Please do not give up on me. Please do not quit on me now. It's early yet...and look at this way, you could have elected John Edwards. Imagine where we'd all be then with the economy in the tank, the First Lady moving out and him having to turn the Situation Room into a nursery."

2. "We have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now.  We face a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years."

This actually means: "We've got a gigantic deficit of dollars right now, but let's change the subject. Let's blame it on the past. I sure hope that you don't notice that throughout this speech I blamed problems on the past like 9 or 10 times. Christ, I hope some nutjob pundit doesn't dub this the "Blame It On the Past" speech tomorrow."

3. "To close that credibility gap we must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists, to do our work openly and to give our people the government they deserve."

This actually means: "By both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, I mean in Congress.  As for the ending the outsized influence of big money I sure do hope people weren't watching Tim Geithner's mugging on the Hill earlier today for being too cozy with Wall Street.  No seriously, I hate lobbyists. The guys that fund them, the donations they give, the issues they advance, those things I'm ok with. But lobbyists, I wouldn't bend over to scrape them from my shoe."

4. "Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years. Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't."

This actually means: "Anything that pisses Rachel Maddow off this much has got to make centrists a little happier, right?  And where's she going to go?  Who's she going to vote for? Mitt Romney? Ahahahahahahhaha... I could appoint Bill O'Reilly Secretary of Banning Abortions and Distributing Assault Rifles to Schoolchildren and she would still have to vote for me.  As far as the families on a budget line goes, I hope no one does the math. We're freezing 18 percent of the budget. And the rest we're not touching. That's like a family trying to balance its budget by cutting back on what it pays the paperboy."

5. "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."

This actually means: "See my little liberal friends, there's something for you in here too. Oh sure, I know this reeks of Clinton era small ball and a kind of something-for-everyone approach. But hey, gay people, enjoy it ... because in terms of my list of priorities going forward, you're way behind big things like health care and fighting global warming and cutting the deficit and defeating terrorism and winning in Afghanistan and virtually none of those things are actually going to happen either."

6.  "Now, the price of college tuition is just one of the burdens facing the middle-class. That's why last year I asked Vice President Biden to chair a task force on Middle-Class Families."

This actually means: "So, ok, here's the one area we are going to spend.  Jobs for the middle class. Tax breaks for the middle class.  We can't afford anything.  Except for programs for the people who will determine whether we get to keep our jobs.  Ha...we're part of our own jobs program."

7. "Now let's be clear -- I did not choose to tackle this issue to get some legislative victory under my belt. And by now it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics."

This actually means: "Let's be clear, while I did take this on because I wanted a big legislative victory and because I thought it was good politics, this dog is clearly not going to hunt.  So let's just walk it back. Did I say I wanted this done by the State of the Union?  What I meant was the first bill I want on my desk this year is a jobs bill." 

8. "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections. Well I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that's why I'm urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong."

This actually means: "Geesh, this is a bit awkward. They're sitting right there. And they don't look happy. The reason I'm all for separation of powers is that if they were any closer they'd bite me on the leg. And frankly Alito looks like he has rabies."

9. "Throughout our history, no issue has united this country more than our security."

This actually means: "Ok, I have to get to national security for a few minutes. Admittedly, I am going to do about 8 minutes out of a 75 minute speech on foreign policy tonight. Pity because I really am getting us out of Iraq, that's a pretty big deal. I wish I could talk more about this stuff ... but right now, America seems to want a time out from the planet earth."

10."Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation. But I also know this: if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight."

That meant: "Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high, and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation. But I also know this: if people had made that decision fifty years ago or one hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight."

But as I said, all politicians have multiple meanings with their speeches. Overall, the speech was not bad. No grand new ideas. But overall ... not a bad domestic stump speech that was particularly effective when it turned to condemning the dysfunctional mood of Washington at the moment. Admittedly, if you're a foreign policy fan, there really wasn't much here ... but Bush was all national security all the time and that didn't turn out so well for anyone. Grade: B.

So, here we are at last, the big ones, my choices for winners and losers of the decade on the global stage.

While these selections are slightly less subjective than, say, the Golden Globe nominations (which are, I believe, selected by three drunken expat Latvian critics in a bar in West Hollywood), they do represent just the views of one man. If you agree with those views, please post your congratulations below ... or go ahead and add a few other names. If you disagree, just remember, there will be other lists -- only I decide whether to include you among the global losers of tomorrow (alongside, say, the Tiger Woods of 10 years from now when he is running Tiger's "Just Do It" Mini-Golf Course in Melanoma City, Florida) or the global winners of the future (alongside, say, President Timberlake in 2030 or so).

The Losers

The People of Iraq: George W. Bush was our Washington loser of the decade, but all he lost was his reputation such as it was. He's still rich and will probably never pay for a round of golf again. But somewhere between 100,000 and 800,000 Iraqis are dead as a consequence of the war, the country is shattered, its government held together with chewing gum and bailing wire and the random killing continues. Oh, and there was absolutely no justification for going in and breaking up the place from the get-go. This isn't a tragedy ... it's a crime, as I suspect international courts will conclude in the years to come.

The People of Afghanistan and Pakistan: These countries are no playgrounds, they are home to plenty of bad actors and, as Barack Obama has demonstrated, no U.S. president, regardless of party, could stay disengaged from the festering political sore on the planet that is AfPak. But while the pursuit of al Qaeda and the Taliban is justified, the wars that continue to percolate here will kill countless thousands, impoverish hundreds of thousands more and at the same time, support for terrorists and other enemies of civilization will grow. That there are no good choices here is a cliché ... that there are going to be no winners is a related tragic reality.

The British Government (Lifetime Achievement Award): Well, let's book at the worst problems the world has faced during the past decade -- Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine...what do these diverse countries have in common? They were all cooked up or stirred up by those fertile minds at the British Foreign Office and their colleagues elsewhere up and down Whitehall, either as they were dismantling their empire or fiddling with the region after one war or another. Thanks guys for your creativity...and for the foresight you showed by actually bequeathing your handwork to yet another remnant of your empire as you shuffled off the world stage so you could focus on counterbalancing your past contributions to global culture by producing Simon Cowell and the likes of Susan Boyle.

The U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Dollar, and American Capitalism: It was a tough decade for the pillars of U.S. society. We should have seen it coming when the decade began with the Supreme Court fiddling with an election and when a central theme of the Bush years became undercutting the Constitution. Thanks to the U.S. government's similar callous disregard for the laws of economics and fiscal responsibility the dollar began a downward spiral that many experts see as a semi-permanent feature of our future.

Democracy: Oh, yes, we know that Churchill called it the "worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried"... but as my grandma would have said, "there's democracy and then there's democracy." In other words, some forms of democracy are worse than others, and among those that that have flourished during the past decade are Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, and, yes folks, Honduras -- where leaders took advantage of the common misperception that voting equals democracy.  

Read on

Today Hillary Clinton made a statement in Thailand that the United States would work to create a defensive shield to help protect Gulf allies from a potential Iranian nuclear threat. Her point is that Iran should not think creating nukes will give them a strategic advantage because we will work relentlessly to blunt any edge nukes might provide.

Seems reasonable enough. Not surprisingly though, Clinton's comments landed in Jerusalem like a dud scud. According to Agence France Presse, Israel's Intelligence Services Minister Dan Meridor responded:

I heard without enthusiasm the American declarations according to which the United States will defend their allies in the event that Iran uses nuclear weapons, as if they were already resigned to such a possibility. This is a mistake. We cannot act now by assuming that Iran will be able to arm itself with a nuclear weapon, but to prevent such a possibility."

I also agree with this view. That's what I like about the Middle East. It's rife with complexities and no issue has fewer than three sides. What I don't like much about the Middle East is when it becomes, as it often does, that magical fantasy land where passions can be applied to fantasies to produce facts ... or where the insupportable is often the unshakable foundation of absolute certitude. (Which explains a number of religious developments in the region ... but I will gingerly sidestep that discussion for now.)

My recent post on shifting attitudes in Israel and the United States regarding the relationship between the two countries produced among those commenting on it a host of really interesting comments from all over the spectrum ... and some of the nasty/loony stuff we could all do without. 

Of course, item number one in this latter category is racism or prejudice of any sort against any group. Examples of this were visible in a number of the comments, sometimes boldly, sometimes insidiously. The big winner in the makes-ya-wanna-barf contest came from a guy named "briand" who, in reference to a rather overheated pro-Israeli post by AllanGreen, wrote, "If this is parody, kudos! I think the thing I'll miss the most about you Jews is your sense of humor. Not so much the apartheid/lebensraum mentality though." Scroll on through the comments ... there's lots of hatred there, in and among some fairly thoughtful arguments for one side or another.  

Another commenting technique that drives me up a wall is imputing views to me (for whatever reason) that I don't actually hold. For example: I'm no fan of the settlements, think they ought to be dismantled, am not a Zionist, don't support the views of the Likud, and based on his track record to date am no Bibi fan. I also don't think that taking a tough stand against the Iranian nuclear program implies the need to attack and lay waste to Iran. Rather, we need an international program of inspections and enforcement that explicitly asserts the right to use force to compel compliance and offers a multilateral guarantee of providing that force. (Not just in the case of Iran, by the way, but in the case of all future signatories of the new NPT we will start negotiating next year ... an NPT that should offer the framework within which the deal with Iran ought to be included.) 

Another aggravating approach which often undercuts otherwise reasonable arguments is making insupportable assertions. For example, one reader argued that Israel had Iran and Ahmadinejad all wrong, that the Iranian president's comments about destroying Israel were really a deliberate, unfair misquoting of him and that by extension; Israel had nothing to fear from Tehran. Really? Aren't we forgetting 30 years of official pronouncements or the guy who chants "death to Israel" at afternoon prayers? I think it was the same reader who argued another reason to chill out about any potential Iranian threat was that Iran has not attacked anyone in 250 years. This overlooked, as another reader pointed out, the fact that the country has for decades been the world's leading state sponsor of terror...which ought to count for something.    

In this vein, one of the most popular insupportable assertions is that somehow solving the settlements problem or even the larger Israel-Palestinian problem will in turn solve or contribute greatly to solutions for all our other problems in the Middle East -- this despite the fact that many of the biggest problems in the region antedate the founding of Israel by a number of centuries.

In the interest of dispelling this misconception, here, off the top of my head, are 15 major problems in the Middle East that would not be solved by solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute:

1. The Iranian nuclear program
2. The regional arms race that may be triggered by the advancement of the Iranian nuclear program
3. The Saudi succession problem
4. The problems associated with getting Shias, Sunnis and Kurds to get along in Iraq
5. The problems associated with possible Kurdish succession from Iraq and Turkey
6. The Egyptian succession problem
7. The battle between moderates and hard-liners in Iran
8. Our dependency on Middle Eastern oil and its economic, political and environmental consequences
9. The efforts of Taliban, al Qaeda and other extremists to assert their influence in Afghanistan
10. The efforts of Taliban, al Qaeda and other extremists to assert their influence in Pakistan
11.  Anti-U.S. and anti-Western terrorism not associated with Israel but with the promotion and expansion of Western cultural values and perceived global inequalities
12. The ability of the Palestinians to form a stable, working state with functioning political processes
13. The historic competition for resources in the region including, increasingly, water
14. The conflict between Hezbollah and pro-Western political groups to gain a foothold in Lebanon
15. Israel's historical tensions with Syria, Iran, and virtually every other major Arab state

This doesn't include related issues like the tensions between extremist or tribal Islamic groups with roots in the region and Russia, China, and other bordering countries. Perhaps you have others, feel free to add. (Just try to restrain yourself if you feel the impulse to make a comment that uses as its primary source The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

Dismantle the settlements. Create two states. Create an internationally monitored buffer between those states. Let billions in aid flow in to help relieve the plight of the Palestinians. Please, do all these things. They are all long overdue. But know this: They may remove an irritant, they may remove an argument from extremists, they may put U.S. relations on a more even footing with other countries in the region. But they won't make the Middle East appreciably less dangerous or difficult and I guarantee you, they won't stop efforts by the countries of the region to continue to scapegoat, confront and battle Israel on countless other pretexts.

David Silverman/Getty Images

After all this hoopla about a transformational election, it turns out all this country needed was a good pair of glasses. The Bush administration as it turns out had a focus issue. It wasn't that they had so much trouble focusing on things, although I always thought the president had a bit of that ADHD feel to him. It was that they tended to focus on the wrong things. It was a kind of foreign policy dyslexia that caused us to misread maps and regularly miss the things that should have been our targets by quite bit, say, a country or two.

So, we went to war to stop a WMD program in Iraq and as it turned out, the program we should have been worrying about was a country away in Iran. Also, as it turns out, there was another one a country away, in Syria. We went to war in Afghanistan and it turns out the war was actually in Pakistan. In the waning months of the Bush administration, we started to worry about the situation in Mexico but as it turned out...and as in each of the cases as we should have recognized all along...the real serious problem was right here in the United States.

Say what you may about the muddled economic policies of the Obama administration, the national security team has its glasses on and the result is a president who is offering a much improved vision of what America's foreign policy priorities ought to be. Nothing illustrated this quite so well as today's presidential announcement of our new policy in "Afghanistan"-- although Hillary Clinton's acknowledgement of the drug demand factor in fueling Mexico's violence and the overall effort to wind down operations in Iraq and to initiate new diplomacy with Iran also suggest we are finally doing the obvious and attempting to deal with the real roots of the challenges we face.

What set the new Afghanistan strategy apart was that it clearly acknowledged that our real problems lie with in Pakistan and that we were dealing not so much with countries but with a wild, borderless region. The Afghan side of the strategy was focused on stabilization -- helping to substantially build Afghan army and police forces and thus their  ability to manage Afghanistan's internal issues, and on deploying legions of teachers, lawyers and engineers to help them build the country. While the Pakistan side of the equation did include elements of assistance to support that country, the rational for the aid was clearly different (though this is not something the administration would ever acknowledge.) The Afghanistan money is to promote a more stable society and to make that problem go away (or at least make our exit a little easier when we ultimately pull out.) The Pakistan money -- $1.5 billion a  year for 5 years -- is a bribe...or maybe a multi-stage bribe. On the one hand, it is a public display of friendship to a country whose people don't much like us and on the other it is cash for our friends in Pakistan to use (assuming they actually get their hands on it) to bid for the loyalties of other Pakistanis currently leaning toward our enemies. 

Importantly, Obama was very clear that our target is still al Qaeda and he made one of his most forceful statements to date of the perceived on-going threat from that group. Beyond reiterating that we are there for the same reason we went in originally...to get the guys who did 9/11...this did two important things. First, it separated out the Taliban, consistent with the current strategy of seeking to find an in to them and peeling them off. Second, it said, the real meat of this problem is in Pakistan because the Taliban are in Pakistan. 

As I have said before, I am skeptical that we can achieve much of lasting value in this part of the world as problems there are so amorphous, ingrained and have such strong regenerative features that I feel we will spend much of our effort just pushing our food around on our plates. That said, the only chance for real progress is the kind of narrowing focus, realism and intensification of pressure on the truly bad guys implied by this plan.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images