The Princess and the Brotherhood. By Mark Steyn.

The Princess and the Brotherhood. By Mark Steyn. National Review Online, July 5, 2013.

For nine decades, Egypt has fled modernity.

MOOCs: The Craigslist of College? By Walter Russell Mead.

MOOCs: The Craigslist of College? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 7, 2013.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad MOOC? (Me.) By Benjamin Ginsberg. Minding the Campus, June 26, 2013.

On the MOOC Challenge to Traditional Higher Education. By Jonathan Marks. Commentary, July 1, 2013.

Why Rome Fell. By Richard A. Gabriel.

Why Rome Fell. By Richard A. Gabriel. Military History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (September 2013). Also here.

Escape From Brooklyn. By Thomas Fleming.

Escape From Brooklyn. By Thomas Fleming. MHQ, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer 2013).

Trapped on Long Island, the American army slipped away under the cover of darkness—a defeat that taught George Washington how to win the war.

As Egypt Roils, Israel Watches. By Oren Kessler.

As Egypt Roils, Israel Watches. By Oren Kessler. Foreign Policy, July 6, 2013.

As the streets of Cairo erupt in chaos, Jerusalem wonders if the military can set things right again.

Founding Insurgents. By John Arquilla.

Washington Crossing the Delaware. By Emanuel Leutze, 1851.

Founding Insurgents. By John Arquilla. Foreign Policy, July 3, 2013.

What today’s military could learn from George Washington.

Arquilla:

This week, the 150th anniversaries of Gettysburg and Vicksburg are being observed, their military lessons reabsorbed. But for strategists today it is more appropriate to recall the Revolution than the Civil War. Yes, Gettysburg was a pivotal slugging match that saved the Union from defeat. And the Vicksburg campaign was indeed a masterpiece of maneuver warfare that split the South in two along the Mississippi River. But both were very conventional military struggles, a rare form of conflict today. Instead, our world is now rife with irregular wars, so there is much more value in remembering that American independence was won by insurgents.

 

As historian Joseph Ellis makes clear in his new account of that time, Revolutionary Summer, George Washington was initially far too tied to notions of conventional stand-up fights and nearly lost the whole army in his disastrous 1776 campaign in Manhattan. After a narrow escape, he learned his lesson and seldom thereafter ran such risks. Washington grew content, for the most part, to keep the Continental Army “in being,” posing an ever-present threat that the British always had to take into consideration in their planning. In the meantime, Washington sent off smaller forces to fight in savage actions, as at Oriskany, and in skillful operations like those that culminated in the great victory at Saratoga.

 

In the main, what took shape was an insurgent approach to the war based on “winning by not losing,” and it was nowhere better employed than in the South. It was there that the Revolution was won – not so much by the main force as by the inspired blending of conventional infantry and irregular raiders. Washington’s most effective executor of this approach was the Quaker-turned-soldier Nathanael Greene, who marched his Continentals here and there to draw his opponent, Lord George Cornwallis, after him. While the British were chasing Greene and his men, American irregulars led by Francis Marion (“the Swamp Fox”), Thomas Sumter, and others struck at outposts and supply lines, causing no end of trouble.

 

Greene never won a pitched battle, but it didn’t matter. As he famously put it, “We fight, get beaten, rise, and fight again.” He always retreated with enough of his force left to recover and resume the offensive later – when the British were more dispersed, trying to chase down Marion and his colleagues. Working in tandem like this, Continentals and guerrillas completely exhausted Cornwallis and his forces. Worn after much lashing out at the elusive rebels, the British fell back on Yorktown where George Washington was able to trap them – thanks to the preparatory efforts of Nathanael Greene. The eminent historian Russell Weigley’s assessment was that Greene “remains alone as an American master developing a strategy of unconventional war.”

 

Indeed, it is curious that in the Civil War the Confederates completely failed to seize upon the founders’ key strategy from the Revolution. Improvements in firepower – particularly the rifle – made advances by massed conventional forces problematic. To win, though, and restore the Union, the North had to go on the offensive, ensuring that its armies’ losses would be high. And they were, from the costly defeat at Fredericksburg to the even more costly victory that U.S. Grant won during his year-long duel (1864-65) with Robert E. Lee. But the Confederates never took advantage of the opportunity to create a Greene-like campaign that blended a conventional defensive with an offensive led by irregular raiders. To be sure, the South had great guerrillas like John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. But Lee’s was the guiding spirit, and he preferred the conventional – right up to and even after the culminating disaster of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

 

The true strategic heir of Washington and Greene seems to have been Vo Nguyen Giap – now over 100 years old – who guided the skillful blending of conventional and irregular field operations that ultimately prevailed against American might in Vietnam. To counter Giap’s strategy, U.S. forces were deployed in a “big unit” war – not too unlike the British effort against the American rebels during the Revolution. And even in the wake of failure against Giap, U.S. military leaders reaffirmed a preference for the conventional, culminating in the development of the Powell Doctrine of “overwhelming force.” Needless to say, this doctrine has not served particularly well in either Iraq or Afghanistan, where successes, when achieved, have more often than not resulted from the close integration of conventional and special operations forces.

 

So the battle for the American military’s strategic soul goes on unabated. No doubt the predilection to pursue conventional approaches is a natural outgrowth of an industrial age in which sheer mass came to mean so much, particularly in the world wars. But in an information age, when the fundamental dynamic in armed conflict has shifted from mass-on-mass collisions to the simple need to find the hidden – the key to fighting insurgents and terrorists – the persistence of the “overwhelming force” mindset imposes huge costs and makes victory ever harder to achieve.

 

Now, at this inflection point in history, this time at the end of the industrial era and the beginning of the information age, when networks of all sorts are rising up to challenge nations, this is the moment to look back before looking ahead. To look back all the way to the founders of the Republic, who won their and our freedom by using irregular means to defeat the world’s leading power of that day. Now is the time to rekindle our strategic roots if we are to continue to be an effective force for good in the world. This is worth deep contemplation on our 237th Independence Day.

Liberal Apartheid. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Liberal Apartheid. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, July 2, 2013.

The elite mostly lead a reactionary existence of talking one way and living another.

Hanson:

One of the strangest things about the modern progression in liberal thought is its increasing comfort with elitism and high style. Over the last 30 years, the enjoyment of refined tastes, both material and psychological, has become a hallmark of liberalism — hand in glove with the art of professional altruism, so necessary to the guilt-free enjoyment of the good life. Take most any contemporary issue, and the theme of elite progressivism predominates.

 

Higher education? A visitor from Mars would note that the current system of universities and colleges is designed to promote the interests of an elite at the expense of the middle and lower-middle classes. UCLA, Yale, and even CSU Stanislaus run on premises far more reactionary and class-based than does Wal-Mart. The teaching loads and course responsibilities of tenured full professors have declined over the last half-century, while the percentage of units taught by graduate students and part-time faculty, with few benefits and low pay, has soared.

 

The number of administrators has likewise climbed — even as student indebtedness has skyrocketed, along with the unemployment rate among recent college graduates. A typical scenario embodying these bizarre trends would run something like the following: The UC assistant provost for diversity affairs, or the full professor of Italian literature, focusing on gender and the self, depend on lots of graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences and humanities piling up debt without any guarantee of jobs, while part-time faculty subsidize the formers’ lifestyles by teaching, without grading assistants, the large introductory undergraduate courses, getting paid a third to half what those with tenure receive.

 

The conference and the academic book, with little if any readership, promote the career interest and income of the trendy administrator and the full professor, and are subsidized by either the taxpayers or the students or both. All of the above assumes that a nine-month teaching schedule, with tenure, grants, sabbaticals, and release time, are above reproach and justify yearly tuition hikes exceeding the rate of inflation. The beneficiaries of the system win exemption from criticism through loud support of the current progressive agenda, as if they were officers with swagger sticks in the culture wars who must have their own perks if they are to properly lead the less-well-informed troops out of the trenches.

 

Take illegal immigration. On the facts, it is elitist to the core. Big business, flush with cash, nevertheless wants continued access to cheap labor, and so favors amnesties for millions who arrived without English, education, or legality. On the other end of the scale, Jorge Hernandez, making $9 an hour mowing lawns, is not enthusiastic about an open border, which undercuts his meager bargaining power with his employer.

 

The state, not the employer, picks up the cost of subsidies to ensure that impoverished illegal-immigrant workers from Oaxaca have some semblance of parity with American citizens in health care, education, legal representation, and housing. The employers’ own privilege exempts them from worrying whether they would ever need to enroll their kids in the Arvin school system, or whether an illegal-alien driver will hit their daughter’s car on a rural road and leave the scene of the accident. In other words, no one in Atherton is in a trailer house cooking meth; the plastic harnesses of missing copper wire from streetlights are not strewn over the sidewalks in Palo Alto; and the Menlo schools do not have a Bulldog-gang problem.

 

Meanwhile, ethnic elites privately understand that the melting pot ensures eventual parity with the majority and thereby destroys the benefits of hyphenation. So it becomes essential that there remain always hundreds of thousands of poor, uneducated, and less-privileged immigrants entering the U.S. from Latin America. Only that way is the third-generation Latino professor, journalist, or politician seen as a leader of group rather than as an individual. Take away illegal immigration, and the Latino caucus and Chicano graduation ceremony disappear, and the beneficiaries become just ordinary politicians and academics, distinguished or ignored on the basis of their own individual performance.

 

Mexico? Beneath the thin veneer of Mexican elites suing Americans in U.S. courts is one of the most repressive political systems in the world. Mexican elites make the following cynical assumptions: Indigenous peoples are better off leaving Mexico and then scrimping to send billions of dollars home in remittances; that way, they do not agitate for missing social services back home; and once across the border, they act as an expatriate community to leverage concessions from the United States.

 

Nannies, gardeners, cooks, and personal attendants are increasingly recent arrivals from Latin America — even as the unemployment rates of Latino, African-American, and working-class white citizens remain high, with compensation relatively low. No wonder that loud protestations about “xenophobes, racists, and nativists” oil the entire machinery of elite privilege. Does the liberal congressman or the Washington public advocate mow his own lawn, clean his toilet, or help feed his 90-year-old mother? At what cost would he cease to pay others to do these things — $20, $25 an hour? And whom would he hire if there were no illegal immigrants? The unemployed African-American teenager in D.C.? The unemployed Appalachian in nearby West Virginia? I think not.

 

Or take the green industry. At about the same time that statisticians readjusted the first-quarter GDP growth markedly downward — to a 1.8 percent annual rate, from the previously reported 2.4 percent — President Obama announced sweeping new regulations to curtail carbon emissions that will hamper the coal industry, further slow the economy — and delight his elite green base. Al Gore thought the speech historic. And why would he not? Gore has made hundreds of millions of dollars in the Marcus Licinius Crassus style of hyping a disaster and then profiting from its remedy. Gore hates carbon emissions. So much so that he dismisses those who live by them, such as coal-company executives, coal miners, and the rubes who mindlessly use coal-based electricity. But Gore also likes money and what money can do for him — SUVs, private jet travel, multiple residences. That’s why he just sold his interest in a failed cable-television network to a broadcasting network backed by a Middle Eastern authoritarian sheikhdom, known for both its anti-Semitism and its huge cash profits from the sale of fossil fuels. Take away the talk of polar bears and melting ice caps, and Gore becomes just another huckster, cashing in on oil profits from the Middle East, a region that is ensured continuance of its riches in part because of environmental restrictions that hamper fracking, horizontal drilling, and coal production on public lands in the United States.

 

Here in central California there are predictable themes to the new environmentalism: Land that could produce food and provide jobs will be idled to protect a bait fish in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. Rivers that are critical to irrigation and are anchors of the economy will be diverted to their 19th-century course in order to fulfill the dream of salmon runs through a desert-like San Joaquin Valley, and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gas and oil that could be fracked and provide jobs for communities suffering 10-plus percent unemployment will be ignored. On one side, there are academics, lawyers, high government officials, those with inherited wealth, and those with enough capital to easily afford the higher taxes and higher costs of fuel, power, and food that are the inevitable wages of their own boutique ideology. On the other side, there are the apparent losers and clingers who are out of work, who pay over $4 a gallon for gas for their silly used Dodge Ram trucks, and who stupidly splurge by turning their air conditioners on for an hour or two a day in 108-degree Fresno.

 

In the real world, the tiny delta smelt is a good psychological totem for a well-paid Google exec in Mountain View, who doesn’t mind paying a little more for his arugula or paying higher sales taxes. But the worship of a bait fish is not shared by Manuel Lopez, a tractor driver in Bakersfield who has no more fields to disc this summer. Those in breezy, cool Malibu hate coal, and apparently believe those who mine it would be better off on food stamps and unemployment insurance, which the generous seaside denizens would so selflessly be willing to pay for.

 

Take gun control. What caused the latest round of furor over the Second Amendment was not gun-related deaths per se. In fact, they have been declining overall in the United States for some time. Nor is it the death toll in Chicago, where last year over 500 mostly African-American and Latino youths gunned each other down, almost exclusively with illegally obtained handguns in a city that has enacted among the tightest gun laws in the nation. Instead, the horrible tragedies of Columbine and Sandy Hook and Aurora suggest that the atypical shooter with a semi-automatic long gun will on rare occasions slaughter anywhere, from an upscale school to a cinema in a good neighborhood. Worse still, the most effective remedies for stopping these typically young, white, unhinged suburbanite shooters — detain the mentally ill far more frequently, curb the promiscuous use of psychotropic drugs, treat violent video games for our youth as we do pornography, jawbone Hollywood to show some restraint in its graphic and titillating portrays of gun carnage — rub up against liberal elite views on mental health, civil liberties, free expression, and the arts.

 

The result is that the elite find resonance in demonizing the largely white lower-middle-class gun crowd, who are not responsible for the vast majority of yearly gun deaths, but whose culture as the proverbial clingers is ripe for caricature and the fuel of elite outrage. No gun law that Barack Obama has supported would have stopped any of the recent suburban violence — given the millions of weapons that exist throughout the United States. To stop Sandy Hook — where the deranged Adam Lanza stole from his own mother firearms that she had legally purchased — the president would have had to confiscate privately owned semi-automatic rifles and larger clips, or made the possession of existing rifle ammunition illegal. No matter: Obama knew well that the liberal elites were outraged that savage violence had hit the suburbs; he knew too that there was nothing he could do to stop it that was acceptable to those elites, while there were lots of cultural targets that would at least allow the elites to vent. Thus followed the hysterical calls to ban all sorts of evil-looking black “assault weapons” and the demonization of the redneck beer-bellies who for some reason like to shoot them at their inane target ranges.

 

Modern liberalism, among other things, is a psychological state, in which very-well-off Americans find ways through their income and privilege to be exempt from the ramifications of their own ideologies, while adopting causes and pets that exempt them from guilt over their own status and limitless opportunities. Judging by their concrete actions, they are indifferent to the poor whom they romanticize at a safe distance. In short, voting for larger government and subsidies is seen as a necessary cost of being a reactionary, liberal elite.

Creating Chaos: Lawrence of Arabia and the 1916 Arab Revolt. By O’Brien Browne.

Creating Chaos: Lawrence of Arabia and the 1916 Arab Revolt. By O’Brien Browne. MHQ Vol. 23, No 1 (Autumn 2010). Also here.

Was the American Revolution a Holy War? By James P. Byrd.

Was the American Revolution a Holy War? By James P. Byrd. Washington Post, July 5, 2013. Also here.

Byrd:

Holy war can seem like something that happened long ago or that happens far away — the Crusades of medieval Europe, for example, or jihadists fighting secular forces today. But since their country’s founding, Americans have often thought of their wars as sacred, even when the primary objectives have been political.

 

This began with the American Revolution. When colonists declared their independence on July 4, 1776, religious conviction inspired them. Because they believed that their cause had divine support, many patriots’ ardor was both political and religious. They saw the conflict as a just, secular war, but they fought it with religious resolve, believing that God endorsed the cause. As Connecticut minister Samuel Sherwood preached in 1776: “God Almighty, with all the powers of heaven, are on our side. Great numbers of angels, no doubt, are encamping round our coast, for our defense and protection.”

 

Several founding fathers were more theologically liberal than the typical evangelical Protestant of their day. Still, few were anti-religious, and the nation’s architects often stated that religion supported virtue, which was essential to patriotism. “A true patriot must be a religious man,” wrote Abigail Adams, wife of America’s second president.

 

George Washington believed so strongly in the religious case for patriotism that he demanded chaplains for the Continental Army. He appealed to the Continental Congress for higher pay for chaplains, and when one chaplain impressed the general, Washington went to great lengths to retain him.

 

That chaplain was Abiel Leonard of Woodstock, Conn. Washington wrote letters to the governor of Connecticut and to Leonard’s church, hoping they would support the pastor’s extended service in the Army. In his letter to the governor, Washington wrote that Leonard had proved to be “a warm and steady friend to his country and taken great pains to animate the soldiers, and impress them with a knowledge of the important rights we are contending for.”

 

For Washington, chaplains not only supplied moral guidance but appealed for God’s support in battle, which was vital. He believed that the war’s outcome rested in God’s hands, and he ordered his soldiers to attend “divine service, to implore the blessings of heaven upon the means used for our safety and defense.”

 

We cannot fully understand the revolution without recognizing such appeals for God’s favor on the battlefield. Both the founders and ministers understood these ideas because they knew scripture, one of the major sources of American patriotism. Colonists fought the Revolutionary War in a society in which the Bible was the most read, most owned and most respected book. John Adams once told Thomas Jefferson, “The Bible is the best book in the world.” Perhaps more important, Adams also called the Bible the world’s “most Republican book” — scripture inspired morality, but it also fueled patriotism.

 

Even those colonists who normally had no use for the Bible found it helpful during the revolution. Thomas Paine would attack Christianity and call the Old Testament “a history of wickedness,” more appropriately judged “the word of a demon than the word of God.” But he did not publish these radical statements until after the revolution. In 1776, Paine quoted scripture like a revival preacher. His “Common Sense,” the most influential patriotic pamphlet of the revolution, had the feel of a sermon, deploying the King James Bible against King George’s tyranny. Scripture, Paine argued, clearly revealed God’s “protest against monarchial government.”

 

Paine knew that “Common Sense” had to make biblical sense. He relied especially on 1 Samuel 8, which tells of the Israelites asking for a king. In that passage, God relents and gives them King Saul, but the prophet Samuel warns that their demand signals their rejection of God. Accordingly, Paine asserted that “monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins” of the Israelites that would later bring curses from God; if Americans would obey God, therefore, they must reject British monarchy. The war for independence was a sacred duty.

 

The views of the founders notwithstanding, ministers translated the revolution’s meaning to colonists who knew much more about the Bible than political theory. Revolutionary War sermons were convincing because they spoke in ubiquitous stories and images from scripture.

 

Patriotic ministers did not shy away from biblical violence. They embraced it, almost celebrated it, even in its most graphic forms. For example, they cited the story of Deborah in Judges 5, about God’s condemnation of those who refused to fight his enemies. This text also includes the heroic story of Jael, a tent-dwelling woman who assassinated a Canaanite general by driving a tent peg through his skull. Ministers often quoted this story with an equally gruesome curse from the prophet Jeremiah: “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.”

 

There were hundreds such sermons — tools for combating the chronic problems of soldier recruitment and morale. In one example, Israel Evans, a favorite chaplain of Washington, praised fallen patriots as “martyrs for the cause of freedom” and called on the remaining troops to “finish the glorious work of liberty! Arise, and lead on your brother soldiers to dreadful deeds of death and slaughter, until the ruthless hand of Britain shall no more disturb the peace of men.”

 

Likewise, preachers often called patriotic service in war a sacred virtue. As Massachusetts Congregationalist Eli Forbes proclaimed, not every “good Christian is of consequence a good soldier,” but one could not be a good soldier without “the principle and practice of Christianity.” Peter Thacher of Malden, Mass., insisted that “we are fighting . . . for our religion, that religion which the word of God hath instituted and appointed.” So Thacher charged patriots to “fight to the last drop of your blood in this glorious cause.”

 

Talk of glorious causes has persisted from the revolution through the war on terror. Some Americans think of the United States as “God’s New Israel,” a nation on a divine mission, its wars blessed by God. Sometimes rhetoric makes this view obvious: Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, for example, the White House apologized after President George W. Bush used the word “crusade” to describe the battle against terrorism.

 

But references to religion can be subtler, or even obligatory, in political speeches. Consider President Obama’s July 4 speech from last year, in which he praised military sacrifices and ended with: “God bless you. God bless your families. And God bless these United States of America.”

 

We pass over such niceties as commonplace, almost dutiful, in political speech, but they are religious statements. Their roots go back to the revolution, when colonists — from evangelical preachers to founders such as Washington — asked for God’s blessing. Whatever century it is, our leaders often include some suggestion of the same biblical themes that filled revolutionary-era sermons, including sacrifice, courage for the fight and appeals for God’s providential blessings on America.

 

We are, it seems, one nation under God after all.

The Racism of New York Times’ “Muslims Are Not Ready for Democracy.” By Omid Safi.

The Racism of New York Times’ “Muslims are not ready for Democracy.” By Omid Safi. What Would Muhammad Do? Religion News Service, July 5, 2013.

Egypt’s Revolution Part II. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Egypt’s Revolution Part II. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, July 4, 2013.

The Arab world and Egypt’s divide. By Zvi Mazel. Jerusalem Post, July 6, 2013.

Egypt’s revolution strikes back. By Avi Issacharoff. The Times of Israel, July 4, 2013.

Defending the Coup. By David Brooks.

Defending the Coup. By David Brooks. New York Times, July 4, 2013.

David Brooks’s Unconvincing Coup Defense. By Isaac Chotiner. The New Republic, July 5, 2013.

David Brooks is Mentally Unprepared for Egyptian Democracy. By Max Read. Gawker, July 5, 2013.

The Humanities in Crisis? Not at Most Schools. By Scott Saul.

The Humanities in Crisis? Not at Most Schools. By Scott Saul. New York Times, July 3, 2013.

America the Coupless. By Rosa Brooks.

America the Coupless. By Rosa Brooks. Foreign Policy, July 4, 2013.

Good Riddance to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Fake Democrats. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good Riddance to Brotherhood’s Fake Democrats. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 4, 2013.

Don’t Blame Islam for the Failure of Egypt’s Democracy. By Noah Feldman. Bloomberg, July 5, 2013.

A Coup By Any Other Name. By Fouad Ajami. Bloomberg, July 4, 2013.

Confrontation, Coups, and Bloodshed. By David Pryce-Jones. National Review Online, July 4, 2013.

It’s Time to Work With Egypt’s Generals. By Martin Indyk. Foreign Policy, July 4, 2013.

From 1776 to 2013: How America Has Changed. By Paul Krugman.

E Pluribus Unum. By Paul Krugman. New York Times, July 4, 2013.

Hatetriot’s Day: July 4th Is America’s Crappiest Holiday. By Ken Layne.

Hatetriot’s Day: July 4th Is America’s Crappiest Holiday. By Ken Layne. Gawker, July 3, 2013.

Hamas May Be a Big Loser of Morsi’s Fall.

Morsi has fallen, but Hamas may be as big a loser. By Mitch Ginsburg. The Times of Israel, July 4, 2013.

Gaza: Hamas “biggest loser” of Morsi’s overthrow. By Elior Levy. Ynet News, July 4, 2013.

John Kerry’s Bid for Mideast Peace Is Doomed.

John Kerry’s Bid for Mideast Peace Is Doomed. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 1, 2013.

Dead on Arrival. By Oren Kessler. Foreign Policy, July 2, 2013.

Why is John Kerry shuttling around trying to kick-start a Middle East peace process that no one wants?

Kerry Keeps Leaving the Mideast Empty-Handed. By Raphael Ahren. NJBR, July 1, 2013.


Goldberg:

It’s a testament to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s grit, determination and self-assurance that he refuses to give up in his quest to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But I wish that he would, during the long slog toward renewed talks, ask himself one question: Why didn’t his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, apply herself to the problem in the same manner?

 

Certainly, Clinton possesses the same qualities of fortitude and indefatigability. No one is more tenacious than Clinton when she identifies a goal worth pursuing. So why did she resolutely avoid this issue? The answer is simple: She saw no reasonable chance for success, even success modestly defined.

 

The goal Kerry has in mind – getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas together for direct talks about the most divisive issues – won’t be achieved. Both the Palestinians and Israelis know that Kerry’s proposed negotiations won’t work, but neither party wants to upset Kerry by saying so, and neither wants to be perceived as uninterested in compromise. So they may meet, and then maybe they will meet again and maybe they will even meet after that. But peace, and a Palestinian state that would be the byproduct of peace, won’t happen, not now and not in the foreseeable future.

 

Kerry’s Delusions

 

I wish this all weren’t true. Peace for Israel and a state for the Palestinians are goals worth achieving. Reaching these goals won’t change the Middle East as much as Kerry thinks it will, but I’ll address this particular delusion of the American foreign-policy elite another time. (I already have, come to think of it, in this column.)

 

The delusion at hand is that Kerry will succeed where numerous secretaries of state have failed, and succeed in what might be the most inauspicious moment in years to start new negotiations: The Middle East is erupting all around Israel, which makes even centrist and some left-leaning Israelis fear the idea of tangible territorial concessions; the Palestinian Authority is weaker than ever; the two territories that would make up the future state of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) are divided between the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas and the more moderate Fatah; and the Israeli Cabinet is under the de facto control of the settlement movement, which continues to expand its holdings on the West Bank.

 

But maybe I’m just a cynic. I called Ari Shavit, Israel’s leading columnist and a man who very much wants to see a Palestinian state created on the West Bank, to ask him if my bleakness was unjustified. “I’m just this moment putting the Champagne bottles in the fridge,” he said. “I expect to open them shortly. We’re all going to have special permission from the Muslim Brotherhood to drink Champagne.”

 

Shavit’s withering sarcasm wasn’t matched by contempt for Kerry, though. Like many Israelis, Shavit has a strange kind of respect for Kerry’s quixotic efforts. “Kerry is a decent, noble American trying to bring peace to a tormented land and a troubled region, and I salute him for his benign intentions and commitment and energy,” Shavit said. “But that said, I think this good will and energy and political capital is being invested in a course of action that resembles too much the previous attempts that have failed. I think the right approach is to learn from the failures of the past and to do something practical that relates to the realities on the ground rather than reach for something that is totally unrealistic. There is no serious Israeli or Palestinian who thinks that the Kerry approach would work.”

 

Modest Ideas

 

So if the idea of bringing Netanyahu and Abbas together to talk about the largest issues is a bad idea, what constitutes a good idea? “Modest ideas,” Shavit said, modest ideas that may lead to less modest ideas.

 

That means a different approach, undertaking one set of negotiations between the U.S. and Israel, and another between the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority. Each side could take a few steps separately that would lay the groundwork for eventually having direct talks about the actual issues separating them: the future of Jerusalem, the future of the Jewish settlements, a solution for Palestinian refugees and borders for the future state of Palestine. Shavit argues that this strategy would shift the discussion away from the dangerous binary of all or nothing at all.

 

To the Israelis, Kerry should be asking for a freeze in the expansion of settlements beyond Israel’s security barrier. These far-flung communities are home to a small minority of settlers, but their growth signals to Palestinians like nothing else that Israel means to continue occupying the whole of the West Bank. A majority of Israelis would agree to a freeze, and Palestinians would interpret it as a sign that Israel might be considering territorial compromise. And Kerry would have a powerful argument behind him, one most Israelis understand: Continued expansion outside the main settlement blocs, and on the far side of the security barrier, threatens Israel’s democracy and its Jewish character. The settlements entangle Israel to a dangerous degree in the lives of Palestinians.

 

To the Palestinians, Kerry should be arguing for a return to “Fayyadism,” the technocratic approach to state-building championed by former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Israelis would interpret a return to Fayyadism as a sign the Palestinians were serious about building a state with legitimate and organized institutions, rather than the sort of Palestinian state Israelis fear: corrupt, dysfunctional and a launching pad for attacks.

 

If Israel were to make a limited gesture on settlements to the Palestinians, and if the Palestinian Authority would make a sincere effort to return to technocracy, then it might be worth trying to bring Netanyahu and Abbas together.

 

Right now, though, there’s no point. One day soon, Kerry will understand why.

Egypt’s Lost Opportunity. By Fareed Zakaria.

Egypt’s Lost Opportunity. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, July 3, 2013.

Mobs make fickle friends. Egypt is not Les Misérables. By Simon Jenkins. The Guardian, July 4, 2013.

Israel Cautiously Optimistic on Egypt. By Ben Caspit.

Israel Cautiously Optimistic on Egypt. By Ben Caspit. Al-Monitor, July 2, 2013.

Israel Warily Watches Egypt Turmoil. By Joshua Mitnick. Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2013.

Price of Freedom. By Ralph Peters.

Price of Freedom: July Fourth and Our Veterans. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, July 4, 2008. Also here.

Intellectuals Lie, the Powerless Die. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, July 9, 2008. Also here.

The Dissent Deceit: Not Patriotism’s Highest Form. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, July 12, 2008. Also here.

The War Over Patriotism. By Peter Beinart. NJBR, January 28, 2013. Originally in Time, June 26, 2008.

Political Islam Fails Egypt’s Test. By Roger Cohen.

Political Islam Fails Egypt’s Test. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, July 4, 2013.

Egypt Risks the Fire of Radicalism. By Ed Husain. New York Times, July 3, 2013.

Morsi’s Fall a Blow to Islamists. By Hamza Hendawi and Lee Keath. AP. Real Clear World, July 4, 2013.

How Morsi came undone. By Eric Trager. New York Daily News, July 5, 2013.

What Is July 4 to African-Americans? By Carl M. Cannon.

What Is July 4 to African Americans? By Carl M. Cannon. Real Clear Politics, July 4, 2013.

Hama Rules. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Hama Rules. By Thomas L. Friedman. From Beirut to Jerusalem, Chapter 4. New York: Anchor Books, 1989, 1995.

Hama Rules. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, September 21, 2001.

The New Hama Rules. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, August 2, 2011.

Assad’s Hama Rules, Again. By Wendell Steavenson. The New Yorker, February 4, 2012.

Tribes With Flags. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, March 22, 2011.

Tom Friedman lifts someone else’s aphorism (“Tribes with flags”). By Dan Sisken. Mondoweiss, March 27, 2011.

Tribes With Flags. By Aaron David Miller. NJBR, February 27, 2013.

Tribes With Flags – Is the Arab State Really Dead? Karl reMarks, February 28, 2013.

Why Aaron David Miller is lame, cliché, and offensive. By Issandr El Amrani. The Arabist, March 1, 2013.