From The London Sunday Times
One tortured lie: that’s all it took for war
Bush needed ‘evidence’ and used techniques designed to produce lies to get it
Andrew Sullivan
After the past two weeks of document-dumps – from the leaked February 2007 Red Cross report calling George W Bush’s interrogation policy unequivocally “torture”, to the Office of Legal Counsel “torture memos” released by Barack Obama 10 days ago, to the doorstopper armed services committee report, what do we know about the Bush-Dick Cheney programme for interrogating terror suspects that we did not know before?
Not much in the essentials. In fact, what’s remarkable is how solid the story has stayed from its beginnings six years ago. Nobody now disputes the following: after 9/11, President Bush secretly suspended the Geneva conventions for prisoners captured in the war on terror. The prison camp at Guantanamo Bay – under the jurisdiction of neither Havana nor Wash-ington – was picked to find a legal loophole to permit the torture of prisoners.
The techniques included multiple beatings; total sensory deprivation; keeping suspects awake for weeks on end; keeping prisoners on the edge of medical hypo-thermia and extreme heat; stress positions that make a human being buckle under muscular distress and pain; and religious, sexual, cultural and psychological abuse. Bush and Cheney also added waterboarding, long classified as torture in American and international law.
All of this was reiterated in numbing and often disturbing bureaucratic language. Yes, this is how banal evil looks in modern America. But one small detail did leap out of the footnotes. They waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times; and they waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. They then destroyed the tapes of these sessions.
What is it about the specificity of the number? Perhaps it helps people to see through the Orwellian language – “enhanced interrogation” – to the act itself. You immediately ask yourself: what was it like to strap a man to a waterboard and make him feel as if he is drowning for the 75th time? As soon as you are forced to understand that this act of torture was directly monitored by the president of the United States, you can’t look away. And the defenders of the policy, sensing the psychological impact of this fact, immediately shifted. Cheney segued effortlessly from saying “we don’t torture” to saying “it worked”. Karl Rove tweeted: “Precautions taken 2 guarantee compliance w/ federal prohibition on torture. U might characterise diligence as overcautious.”
Yes, they tortured and then ordered up transparently absurd legal memos to say they hadn’t. When Philip Zelikow, Condi Rice’s key aide, wrote a memo saying explicitly that this was torture and illegal, they did not just ignore him but, according to Zelikow last week, sought to collect and destroy all copies of his memo.
The second startling revelation was confirmation that Zubaydah, the first prisoner to be tortured, was judged by the CIA and FBI to have told everything he knew before Bush and Cheney ordered the 83 waterboardings. Why did they order the torture? An FBI interrogator of Zubaydah broke ranks to tell The New York Times “there was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics”.
What did the Bush administration gain from torturing Zubaydah? As David Rose reported in Vanity Fair magazine last year, the result of the torture was a confession by Zubaydah that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda had a working relationship, the key casus belli for the Iraq war. Rose quotes a Pentagon analyst who read the transcripts from the interrogation: “Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and Al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.”
That analyst did not then know that the evidence was procured through torture. “As soon as I learnt that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done,” the analyst says.
The president used this tortured evidence to defend the war, alongside the confession of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was cited by Colin Powell at the United Nations as a first-person source of the Saddam-Al-Qaeda connection. But al-Libi was also tortured. And we know that such an operational connection did not exist. And we also now know that what Zubaydah and al-Libi provided were false confessions, procured through torture techniques designed by the communist Chinese to produce false confessions. In other words, the first act of torture authorised by Bush gave the United States part of the false evidence that it used to go to war against Saddam.
The problem with torture is the enormous damage it does to the possibility of finding the truth. Torture forces a victim to tell his interrogator anything to stop the pain. There may be some truth in the confession but there is also untruth – and no way to tell the two apart. Every experienced interrogator knows this, which is why governments that are concerned with getting at the truth do not use it.
The British government processed and interrogated more than 500 Nazi spies during the second world war in a situation in which the very existence of Britain as a free country was at stake and when Londoners endured a 9/11 every week during the blitz. But not one of the spies was physically coerced. Not just because it would have been immoral and illegal, because giving in to torture was not morally different from surrendering to Nazism, but because it would have produced false leads, dead ends and fantasies. The reason totalitarian states use the torture techniques that Bush did is to produce false confessions to create a reality that buttresses their ideology.
The Bush and Cheney ideology was that Iraq needed to be invaded because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda that put America under an intolerable risk. When the facts could not be found to defend that idée fixe, they skewed the intelligence. When there was no intelligence to skew, they tortured people to get it.
Or, to put it more simply: on March 27, 2007, when Zubaydah went before his combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo, the judge asked him: “So I understand that, during this treatment, you said things to make them stop and then those statements were actually untrue. Is that correct?”
Zubaydah replied: “Yes.” This is partly how the entire war was justified: on a tortured lie. And this much we now know for sure.
www.andrewsullivan.com

Bea Arthur Dies at 86
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Beatrice Arthur, the tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star in the hit shows ''Maude'' and ''The Golden Girls'' and who won a Tony Award for the musical ''Mame,'' died Saturday. She was 86.
Arthur died peacefully at her Los Angeles home with her family at her side, family spokesman Dan Watt said. She had cancer, Watt said, declining to give details.
''She was a brilliant and witty woman,'' said Watt, who was Arthur's personal assistant for six years. ''Bea will always have a special place in my heart.''
Arthur first appeared in the landmark comedy series ''All in the Family'' as Edith Bunker's outspoken, liberal cousin, Maude Finley. She proved a perfect foil for blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor), and their blistering exchanges were so entertaining that producer Norman Lear fashioned Arthur's own series.
In a 2008 interview with The Associated Press, Arthur said she was lucky to be discovered by TV after a long stage career, recalling with bemusement CBS executives asking about the new ''girl.''
''I was already 50 years old. I had done so much off-Broadway, on Broadway, but they said, `Who is that girl? Let's give her her own series,''' Arthur said.
''Maude'' scored with television viewers immediately on its CBS debut in September 1972, and Arthur won an Emmy Award for the role in 1977.
The comedy flowed from Maude's efforts to cast off the traditional restraints that women faced, but the series often had a serious base. Her husband Walter (Bill Macy) became an alcoholic, and she underwent an abortion, which drew a torrent of viewer protests. Maude became a standard bearer for the growing feminist movement in America.
The ratings of ''Maude'' in the early years approached those of its parent, ''All in the Family,'' but by 1977 the audience started to dwindle. A major format change was planned, but in early 1978 Arthur announced she was quitting the show.
''It's been absolutely glorious; I've loved every minute of it,'' she said. ''But it's been six years, and I think it's time to leave.''
''Golden Girls'' (1985-1992) was another groundbreaking comedy, finding surprising success in a television market increasingly skewed toward a younger, product-buying audience.
The series concerned three retirees -- Arthur, Betty White and Rue McClanahan -- and the mother of Arthur's character, Estelle Getty, who lived together in a Miami apartment. In contrast to the violent ''Miami Vice,'' the comedy was nicknamed ''Miami Nice.''
As Dorothy Zbornak, Arthur seemed as caustic and domineering as Maude. She was unconcerned about the similarity of the two roles. ''Look -- I'm 5-feet-9, I have a deep voice and I have a way with a line,'' she told an interviewer. ''What can I do about it? I can't stay home waiting for something different. I think it's a total waste of energy worrying about typecasting.''
The interplay among the four women and their relations with men fueled the comedy, and the show amassed a big audience and 10 Emmys, including two as best comedy series and individual awards for each of the stars.
In 1992, Arthur announced she was leaving ''Golden Girls.'' The three other stars returned in ''The Golden Palace,'' but it lasted only one season.
Arthur was born Bernice Frankel in New York City in 1922. When she was 11, her family moved to Cambridge, Md., where her father opened a clothing store. At 12 she had grown to full height, and she dreamed of being a petite blond movie star like June Allyson. There was one advantage of being tall and deep-voiced: She was chosen for the male roles in school plays.
Bernice -- she hated the name and adopted her mother's nickname of Bea -- overcame shyness about her size by winning over her classmates with wisecracks. She was elected the wittiest girl in her class. After two years at a junior college in Virginia, she earned a degree as a medical lab technician, but she ''loathed'' doing lab work at a hospital.
Acting held more appeal, and she enrolled in a drama course at the New School of Social Research in New York City. To support herself, she sang in a night spot that required her to push drinks on customers.
During this time she had a brief marriage that provided her stage name of Beatrice Arthur. In 1950, she married again, to Broadway actor and future Tony-winning director Gene Saks.
After a few years in off-Broadway and stock company plays and television dramas, Arthur's career gathered momentum with her role as Lucy Brown in the 1955 production of ''The Threepenny Opera.''
In 2008, when Arthur was inducted in the TV Academy Hall of Fame, Arthur pointed to the role as the highlight of her long career.
''A lot of that had to do with the fact that I felt, `Ah, yes, I belong here,''' Arthur said.
More plays and musicals followed, and she also sang in nightclubs and played small roles in TV comedy shows.
Then, in 1964, Harold Prince cast her as Yente the Matchmaker in the original company of ''Fiddler on the Roof.''
Arthur's biggest Broadway triumph came in 1966 as Vera Charles, Angela Lansbury's acerbic friend in the musical ''Mame,'' directed by Saks. Richard Watts of the New York Post called her performance ''a portrait in acid of a savagely witty, cynical and serpent-tongued woman.''
She won the Tony as best supporting actress and repeated the role in the unsuccessful film version that also was directed by Saks, starring Lucille Ball as Mame. Arthur would play a variation of Vera Charles in ''Maude'' and ''The Golden Girls.''
''There was no one else like Bea,'' said ''Mame'' composer Jerry Herman. ''She would make us laugh during `Mame' rehearsals with a look or with a word. She didn't need dialogue. I don't know if I can say that about any other person I ever worked with.''
In 1983, Arthur attempted another series, ''Amanda's,'' an Americanized version of John Cleese's hilarious ''Fawlty Towers.'' She was cast as owner of a small seaside hotel with a staff of eccentrics. It lasted a mere nine episodes.
Between series, Arthur remained active in films and theater. Among the movies: ''That Kind of Woman'' (1959), ''Lovers and Other Strangers'' (1970), Mel Brooks' ''The History of the World: Part I'' (1981), ''For Better or Worse'' (1995).
The plays included Woody Allen's ''The Floating Light Bulb'' and ''The Bermuda Avenue Triangle,'' written by and costarring Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna. During 2001 and 2002 she toured the country in a one-woman show of songs and stories, ''... And Then There's Bea.''
Arthur and Saks divorced in 1978 after 28 years. They had two sons, Matthew and Daniel. In his long career, Saks won Tonys for ''I Love My Wife,'' ''Brighton Beach Memoirs'' and ''Biloxi Blues.'' One of his Tony nominations was for ''Mame.''
In 1999, Arthur told an interviewer of the three influences in her career: ''Sid Caesar taught me the outrageous; (method acting guru) Lee Strasberg taught me what I call reality; and ('Threepenny Opera' star) Lotte Lenya, whom I adored, taught me economy.''
In recent years, Arthur made guest appearances on shows including ''Curb Your Enthusiasm'' and ''Malcolm in the Middle.'' She was chairwoman of the Art Attack Foundation, a non-profit performing arts scholarship organization.
Arthur is survived by her sons and two granddaughters. No funeral services are planned.
Associated Press Writer Bob Thomas in Los Angeles and AP Drama Writer Michael Kuchwara in New York contributed to this report.

Star Trek chimes with the times
The fuss over the new Star Trek film reveals how what was once a tin-pot space opera chimes with our times
Andrew Collins (London Times)
The salute “live long and prosper” is the Vulcan equivalent of “shalom”, accompanied by a raised palm parted into a “V” between the second and third fingers. It neatly sums up the flourishing and seemingly never-ending story of Star Trek, whose original brief — literally, its mission statement — was to boldly go where no man had gone before, and, 726 episodes of five overlapping, live-action TV series, one animated series, 11 feature films and innumerable novels later, is still doing just that. The $150 million new movie — the very definition of what Hollywood calls a “tent pole picture” (that is, it is expected to carry the weight of commercial expectation for an entire media conglomerate) — docks in at your local multiplex next week. Its young cast, including our own Simon Pegg, are hailed as superstars. Blog and broadsheet alike have been falling over themselves to be the first with a rave review since it was first shown. Famous fans such as Jonathan Ross, Quentin Tarantino and even the leader of the free world himself line up to express their Starfleet-like allegiance.
But hang on. This is Star Trek, right? The tinpot space opera from, like, the Sixties, with the bad actors and the wobbly sets and the portentous ideas above its station? The one that was cancelled by its own network after three seasons in 1969 and relaunched as a movie franchise ten years later only by applying some sturdy corsets to its ageing cast and capitalising on the success of the much more exciting Star Wars? The Star Trek beloved only of sexless academics and sad white suburban males with few social skills and poor hygiene, tramping off to endless conventions dressed as Klingons and Romulans?
Well, yes. It’s a phenomenon, Jim, but not as we know it. By doggedly sticking to its guns over an astonishing 43 years — or rather, sticking to its peacenik “phasers”, which can be set to “stun” as well as “vaporise” — the starship USS Enterprise has become politically relevant again. Its once-radically multiracial, multispecies crew and its “prime directive” to explore rather than conquer “strange new worlds” chimed with the optimism of the space-race era and now chimes again, thanks to the election of Barack Obama, who showed his colours at an election rally in Wyoming, saying, “I grew up on Star Trek. I believe in the final frontier.”
Star Trek steadfastly refuses to reach that final frontier. But why? What makes a show about some men and women in space so enduring? Is it simple escapism, or something deeper and more profound that manages to make first contact with each successive generation?
Pitched by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, as a Wagon Train in space” — after the popular American TV western — his Utopianism may be the key to Star Trek’s durability. John Wagner and Jan Lundeen, authors of Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos (one of countless wordily academic books and papers devoted to the franchise), write: “Foremost among the tenets of Roddenberry’s vision is humanism — a compassion for our species and a faith in its ultimate wisdom and capacity for self-reliance. Bolstering the central premise are an optimistic view of the human future, an emphasis on the imperatives of freedom . . . a tolerance of diversity . . . an opposition to prejudice . . . and a visceral rejection of organised religion and divine authority.” And you thought it was all about beaming me up, Scotty.
The voyages of the microcosmic Enterprise represented the benign side of America’s pioneer spirit, offering a less paranoid flying saucer metaphor than the bodysnatching “others” of the McCarthyist Fifties. Even the franchise’s enduring alien foes find themselves understood and assimilated: Starfleet’s first Klingon, Worf, appears in The Next Generation; Voyager boasts a black Vulcan, a Native American, a half-Klingon woman and a Borg. Oh, and a hologram. Robert Hewitt Wolfe, staff writer on Deep Space Nine, says: “At its heart, Star Trek, especially the original series, is a romantic adventure that appeals to the dreamer in all of us. It says that there’s a better future waiting, one where humanity can pursue its best intentions.”
Famous fans have included the author Isaac Asimov, comedian Bill Bailey (whose son is called Dax, after a character in Deep Space Nine), Al Gore (who could be found watching Star Trek in his dorm at Harvard), Stephen Hawking (who appeared as a holographic version of himself in The Next Generation and wrote the foreword to The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss), and, perhaps less desirably, the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who, according to the book American Terrorist, became obsessed by The Next Generation after leaving the army in 1992. He considered it “an ideal world” and described himself as a Star Trek junkie” in prison letters published by Esquire in 2001.
Like many other black viewers at the time of the civil rights movement, President Obama will have seen Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, as a role model. She is famed for sharing with William Shatner the first televised interracial kiss in 1968, the climax of a curious episode from season three called Plato’s Stepchildren. The fact that the clinch between Kirk and Uhura is forced on them by a bored, telekinetic race — for humiliating entertainment — takes the historic shine off it, but it still plays a mythic part in the desegregation of America. Nichols was urged not to leave the show by no less than Martin Luther King Jr, who said: “You have opened a door that must not be allowed to close. For the first time, the world sees us as we should be seen, as equals, as intelligent people.”
Directed by that walking energy field J. J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias on TV, and director of Mission: Impossible III, the fashionable new type of movie, a prequel, has no subtitle and there is no number attached; it’s just Star Trek.
Written by the regular Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, both Trekkies, and green-lit in 2006, the film was surrounded by a shield of secrecy similar to the Romulan “cloaking device” first used on TOS (common shorthand for the original series) — at least until a surprise April 6 screening in Texas and its world premiere in Sydney a day later.
In it, the young Kirk — roughhouse Iowa farmboy of legend — essays an unconventional, impulsive rise through Starfleet to captain and sows the seeds of his long friendship with the Vulcan science officer Spock. Interestingly, Heroes, for which the Spock actor Zachary Quinto is best known, cast several elder statesmen from the original TV series, including George Takei and Nichols. Leonard Nimoy appears in Star Trek to hand over the baton with intrinsic dignity. The ship’s engineer Mr Scott (“Scotty”) is played for crowd-pleasing comic effect by Simon Pegg, an unapologetic Trek nerd himself, who, in the cult Channel 4 “slack-com” Spaced, invoked the popular fanboy theory that “odd-numbered Trek movies are s***”. Star Trek is officially number 11. Thankfully — for us old hands — it is not rubbish. It is, in fact, very good, with enough wham-bam technology to snare a new generation, and plentiful nods and in-jokes for the old fogies. Detractors may reject Trek as po-faced, but it has always had a light comic touch. Roddenberry, who first mooted the idea of a prequel in 1968, was asked in August 1991 what he thought would become of Star Trek in the future. His assistant Richard Arnold vouches that he expressed hope that “some day some bright young thing would come along and do it again, bigger and better than he had ever done it. And he wished them well”. (Roddenberry died in 1991.) Abrams admits to being more Star Wars than Trek and claims not to have even seen the tenth film, Nemesis. This potential arrogance follows through into the ground- zero title of the film. In a recent interview with Empire magazine, he set out his stall: “The problem [with TOS] was they had a space adventure but never had the resources to show the adventure. Doing this movie with the technology that exists now gave us the chance to make something fast-paced, full of action and visually stunning.”
Mark Dinning, editor of Empire, says that for his magazine’s readers Trek was “a dated and practically defunct franchise, a sort of curious time capsule that they had affection for but had had its day. What Abrams has done is both bold and brilliant.”
As per the original template, though big and noisy, Star Trek is much more concerned with relationships than its nearest competitors for the sci-fi blockbuster dollar — Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (first sequel in a movie franchise that began as a range of plastic toys) and Terminator Salvation (part four in a series that has also spawned a TV show), both released in June. “What Star Trek really has in its favour,” Dinning says, “is that it’s pure escapist entertainment, shot with a relentlessly upbeat pace, style and wit, which should, given the current global doom, be the perfect antidote for the multiplex masses.”
I ask Simon Pegg, who confesses that his first Star Trek memory is of the animated series, but remembers going to see the first Star Trek film (1979) at the ABC in Gloucester, if he thinks Star Trek will ever die.
“Never. It’s too ingrained in the collective subconscious. Its parlance has become commonplace, its speculative science has fed into reality, from advances in physics to the shape of mobile phones. Even if the films stop being made and the television shows stop being aired, historians will forever explain why the first space shuttle was called Enterprise and in doing so, recall the television series that inspired that decision.”
I don’t mind admitting to being a fan. For my generation Jon Pertwee will always be our Doctor Who, and TOS the definitive Star Trek. I still find it tricky to accept any substitute for the original cast commanded by William Shatner, which explains why I stuck with the feature films only until Star Trek: Generations in 1994, in which Kirk, Scott and Chekov meet their successors, 78 years in the future (it’s something to do with an “energy ribbon”), led by Patrick Stewart’s urbane Jean-Luc Picard. Kirk dies, and, for me, something died with him. Perhaps a new audience will bond for life in a similar way with the new Kirk, Chris Pine, and Quinto as Spock. But the emotional response of what is disparagingly called the “MySpace generation” will partly be driven by the spectacular special effects. In the Sixties, with episodes shot in six days on a tiny budget, alien worlds were created by judicious use of green lighting, some curtains and the occasional trip to Vasquez Rocks National Park in northern Los Angeles.
I vividly recall an episode from season one called Operation: Annihilate!, in which the crew beam down to the planet Deneva, where adhesive, pancake-like alien parasites threaten to wreak galactic havoc. Rubbery or not, they certainly had me behind the sofa. Another formative memory is my granddad’s claim that the registration number on the Enterprise’s saucer section — NCC-1701 — stood for “Northamptonshire County Council”. I believed him. The point is, there’s an era for every life stage. Ina Rae Hark, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Carolina, notes in her BFI TV Classics monograph that Deep Space Nine coincided in the Nineties with the coming of the internet. “My engagement with fandom,” she writes, “which had waned over the years, was re-energised by this new way of communicating with other Trekkers.”
Jonathan Ross, a fantasy geek, has similarly unshakeable memories of TOS: “I thought, this is not only the greatest television show ever made, it’s the greatest television show that will ever be made,” he enthuses. “And I think I could still possibly make a case for that. What gave it its longevity and made it permissible, particularly in the States, was Roddenberry’s optimistic view of mankind’s future.”
Like it or not, Star Trek is far more than “just a TV show”, as William Shatner insisted in a self-mocking sketch on Saturday Night Live in the Eighties. It is, to borrow the title of a Doctor Who episode, an ark in space. It is as if the rainbow of late-Sixties civil rights idealism was packed into a 289m, warp-drive-powered starship along with 430 crew, and sent out at 186,000 miles per second looking for “hailing frequencies” to communicate with the outside galaxy. It is, improbably, a good advert for us. Except for that theme song.
Ross offers a final pet theory as to why Star Trek is still boldly going: “They’re essentially a family: Kirk is a loveable, roguish father, still in his prime, Dr McCoy is his wife and Uhura his mistress. Spock is his slightly grumpy brother, who’s a bit more sensible and they find themselves in business together and they’ve got to make the most of it. And Chekov’s the foreign exchange student.”
Star Trek opens nationwide on May 8

Planet hunters find an Earth-mass planet and a potential water world
By Pete Spotts Christian Science Monitor
One star, its fourth planet, and a lot of buzz.
That’s what’s happening as planet-hunters digest the news that European astronomers have detected planet No. 4 orbiting a star with the imaginative moniker: Gliese 581. The new planet has 1.9 times Earth’s mass, making it the tiniest exoplanet astronomers have bagged to date.
The golden Easter egg in this hunt, of course, is the elusive Earthlike planet orbiting a star in its habitable zone. There, it’s not too hot and not too cold, but just right for liquid water to gather and persist on the planet’s surface.
To spot a planet this small, and use an Earth-based telescope to do it, is a big deal.
“This is really the most exciting new discovery in the field of exoplanets,” enthused Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University and an active planet hunter, in an e-mail exchange. It’s an impressive achievement, she continues, in no small part because the planet’s tell-tale signature is tiny compared with larger planets astronomers have found using the same detection technique.
Looking for stars that wobble
The approach detects the presence of a planet through the tiny tug its gravity imparts on its host star. This appears as a periodic wobble in the star’s spectrum. The tool in this case was a sensitive planet-hunting spectrograph called HARPS bolted to the back end of the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile.
In the process of nabbing this new planet, the European team also refined estimates of the orbits of three other planets in the system – a revision that pulled a planet with seven times Earth’s mass more securely into Gliese 581’s narrow habitable zone. That planet, Gliese 581d, was discovered in 2007, and orbits the star once every 66.8 days.
Gliese 581d “is probably too massive to be made only of rocky material, but we can speculate that it is an icy planet that has migrated closer to the star,” according to Stephane Udry, an astronomer with the University of Geneva’s Geneva Observatory and a member of the research team. This would make it “the first serious water-world candidate,” she noted in a prepared statement.
The results were unveiled on Monday at a conference at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain. The work has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astophysics for formal publication. You can download a pdf “preprint” of the paper here.
Gliese 581 is 20.5 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Libra. As stars go, it’s a munchkin. It has roughly one-third of the sun’s mass and is only about one-third as large as the sun. It’s an M-dwarf star.
But by some estimates, M-dwarfs account for 70 percent of the stars in our galaxy.
Happy hunting grounds
This small size – and ubiquity – makes these stars tempting hunting grounds for astronomers searching for other worlds. The stars’ smaller mass, and hence weaker gravity, means that any Earth-sized planets will be orbiting an M-dwarf more closely than they might a larger star.
In essence, an Earthlike planet’s gravitational tug on an M-dwarf would be more noticeable than it would if a more massive star was involved. That doesn’t mean detection is a cakewalk. It’s just relatively easier than spotting an Earth-size planet around a larger star with a more-distant habitable zone.
In the case of the new planet, dubbed Gliese 581e, it’s circling the star once every 3 to 15 days. And it’s doing so at a distance of just under 3 million miles. The researchers say it’s very likely to be a rocky orb.
And so close to its star that it would be inhospitable to the max. Or would it?
A habitat on the dark side?
M-dwarf planets are notorious for launching enormous flares into space, Dr. Fischer explains. Gliese 581e is so close that it’s likely to be locked to the star in such a way that it has a permanent day and permanent night side – no rotation. Especially during flares, the day side would become the fried side. Even without flares, the day side would be bathed in ultraviolet radiation and assaulted by the “wind” of charged particles streaming from Gliese 581.
The back side, however, would be shielded from such events.
If the planet has a magnetic field, possible given its mass, that field could protect the surface from the star’s charged-particle wind, which would otherwise strip away an atmosphere.
So one key question, she says, is whether the planet has a substantial atmosphere – which it may not, given its mass. If it does, however, and it has sufficient protection from the star’s wind, atmospheric circulation potentially could redistribute heat to the dark side. There, “one could imagine that liquid water could accumulate,” she adds. “While this planet doesn’t fall into the classical habitable zone, I wouldn’t discount it as an interesting environment for life

Israel stands ready to bomb Iran's nuclear sites
Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem (London Times)
The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran's nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.
Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.
Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face.
“Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours. They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words,” one senior defence official told The Times.
Officials believe that Israel could be required to hit more than a dozen targets, including moving convoys. The sites include Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges produce enriched uranium; Esfahan, where 250 tonnes of gas is stored in tunnels; and Arak, where a heavy water reactor produces plutonium.
The distance from Israel to at least one of the sites is more than 870 miles, a distance that the Israeli force practised covering in a training exercise last year that involved F15 and F16 jets, helicopters and refuelling tankers.
The possible Israeli strike on Iran has drawn comparisons to its attack on the Osirak nuclear facility near Baghdad in 1981. That strike, which destroyed the facility in under 100 seconds, was completed without Israeli losses and checked Iraqi ambitions for a nuclear weapons programme.
“We would not make the threat [against Iran] without the force to back it. There has been a recent move, a number of on-the-ground preparations, that indicate Israel's willingness to act,” said another official from Israel's intelligence community.
He added that it was unlikely that Israel would carry out the attack without receiving at least tacit approval from America, which has struck a more reconciliatory tone in dealing with Iran under its new administration.
An Israeli attack on Iran would entail flying over Jordanian and Iraqi airspace, where US forces have a strong presence.
Ephraim Kam, the deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies, said it was unlikely that the Americans would approve an attack.
“The American defence establishment is unsure that the operation will be successful. And the results of the operation would only delay Iran's programme by two to four years,” he said.
A visit by President Obama to Israel in June is expected to coincide with the national elections in Iran — timing that would allow the US Administration to re-evaluate diplomatic resolutions with Iran before hearing the Israeli position.
“Many of the leaks or statements made by Israeli leaders and military commanders are meant for deterrence. The message is that if [the international community] is unable to solve the problem they need to take into account that we will solve it our way,” Mr Kam said.
Among recent preparations by the airforce was the Israeli attack of a weapons convoy in Sudan bound for militants in the Gaza Strip.
“Sudan was practice for the Israeli forces on a long-range attack,” Ronen Bergman, the author of The Secret War with Iran, said. “They wanted to see how they handled the transfer of information, hitting a moving target ... In that sense it was a rehearsal.”
Israel has made public its intention to hold the largest-ever nationwide drill next month.
Colonel Hilik Sofer told Haaretz, a daily Israeli newspaper, that the drill would “train for a reality in which during war missiles can fall on any part of the country without warning ... We want the citizens to understand that war can happen tomorrow morning”.
Israel will conduct an exercise with US forces to test the ability of Arrow, its US-funded missile defence system. The exercise would test whether the system could intercept missiles launched at Israel.
“Israel has made it clear that it will not tolerate the threat of a nuclear Iran. According to Israeli Intelligence they will have the bomb within two years ... Once they have a bomb it will be too late, and Israel will have no choice to strike — with or without America,” an official from the Israeli Defence Ministry said.

Counting My Blessings

Andrew Sullivan Responds
Alex Massie and James Joyner say some very kind things about me and this blog.

Johann's profile which prompted them is also a very generous one, largely because he did me the great favor of reading my stuff from the very beginning and trying to see it from the inside out. That's rare:
Sullivan is often accused of flip-flopping according to political expediency, but it’s revealing that almost all the later tensions in his thought are prefigured in his writings about Oakeshott from his early 20s, recently published as “Intimations Pursued”. In 1984, he wrote that Oakeshott offers “a conservatism which ends by affirming a radical liberalism”—precisely the charge against Sullivan since 2004.
The reason I am such a bore on Oakeshott is because reading him and thinking deeply about him at the end of the 1980s was a breakthrough for me. Until then I had struggled badly in trying to reconcile a deep philosophical conservatism with the modernity I had come to enjoy and that had been so kind to me. (Any Tory in love with America would feel the same cross-currents, I suspect. And any gay man unaware of the blessings of the contemporary West needs a lesson in history and geography.)
I can't say my reconciliation has been without complication or some rough edges, but whose hasn't? And one feels a little less self-contradictory in this regard because most of the really interesting conservative icons I revere - Hobbes, Hume, Burke, Oakeshott and Hayek come to mind - show that liberal strains are intrinsic to sophisticated conservatism. (One recalls also, of course, that the founder of English Toryism was an Irish Whig. And the greatest statesman of the last century, Churchill was both a Liberal and a Conservative - can you imagine the ridicule he'd face today on Fox News for his flip-floppery? And the greatest conservative statesmen of the nineteenth century, Disraeli and Lincoln, advanced modernity more than their more liberal peers.) But their lack of political monochrome is not, I think, a function of weakness or expediency, but of being instinctive conservatives in a civilization constructed on liberalism. And the epistemologically conservative defense of classical liberalism - the Oakeshottian riddle - is the place I ended up by a process of elimination and a few years of care-free study. Such a conservative liberalism pushes at times against an emotional impulse to correct injustice and punish cruelty, but this tension is an adult one and I see no reason to abandon it now.
And what I love about the free-form unfinishedness of blogging is its capacity to embrace these various strains, sometimes one, sometimes another, in response to a fluid world and an evolving soul. To do it alongside others, however, is the real joy of this medium - with fellow bloggers and writers and above all readers. For Oakeshott, the ideal human interaction is conversation; and I know no form better designed for it than this one. And so I am, in a way, lucky to have stumbled upon this idiom in this time and place because it suits me, and teaches me, and reproves me in ways no other can, and allows contradictions to become internal and external conversations.
Where it ends I cannot know. Which is one reason to carry on.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: THINKING. OUT. LOUD.
By Johann Hari
One of America’s most-read bloggers is Catholic, conservative, gay, pro-Obama—and from East Grinstead.

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

Sullivan’s story is inherently implausible. How did an HIV-positive gay Catholic conservative from the poky English town of East Grinstead end up as one of the most powerful writers in America?
Today his blog, the Daily Dish [1], is regularly named as one of the most influential in America, and in November it reached 23m hits in the month. Politicians from Condoleezza Rice to Barack Obama himself have courted Sullivan in the hope of friendly posts. After he moved his blog to the website of the venerable Atlantic Monthly magazine [2], the traffic there rose by 30%.This is all the stranger since—unlike other big-name bloggers such as the liberal-Democratic Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos [3] or the libertarian Republican Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit [4]—he has no obvious political constituency. Sullivan is regarded by his critics as an attention-deficit bundle of contradictions. He is a conservative Christian who rages against the self-proclaimed forces of conservative Christianity. He is a pioneering crusader for gay marriage savaged by the gay left as “chief faggot”, herding homosexuals on behalf of The Patriarchy. He admits: “I’m very uncomfortable with audiences who agree with me… I’ve never really had a place where someone didn’t dispute my right to be there.” So what is the glue that holds together the blogger-king?In a series of long interviews, Sullivan—a friend of mine—talks me through his story. He is sitting in the office at the Atlantic Monthly in Washington, DC, where he blogs frenetically [5]: it’s not unusual for him to produce 20 posts a day. Once a pretty, slight young man who modelled for Gap, he is now bald, bearded and solidly built, with his chest bulking out in front of him. He speaks in a baritone voice that seems to be always in italics and often ends his sentences incongruously with a slightly nervous laugh.Sullivan’s travels began in 1963, when he was born in Surrey, the middle of three children. His grandparents had been Irish immigrants to Britain, barely literate and passionately Catholic. Sullivan’s father had worked his way up to a middling job in an insurance company, a career his son tells me “he hated really… My father was basically a jock. His natural home was the rugby club. It’s his passion.” He says quietly: “I don’t know how to summarise my relationship with my father. I still don’t.” In his 1998 book, “Love Undetectable [6]”, he described how as a teenager, terrified of his emerging homosexuality, he grew further and further apart from his father, “consumed with an anger and hatred that terrified me, and [drew] closer and closer to my mother”.But Sullivan’s mother wasn’t able to provide stable support. Starting when he was four, she had a string of mental breakdowns caused by bipolar depression, and had to be hospitalised. “I don’t remember very much about it. I’ve really blocked it out,” he says. “But I think it made me turn inward on myself.” He became a self-confessed swot, obsessively throwing himself into his schoolwork. He says his life uncannily paralleled that of Posner, the repressed gay swot in Alan Bennett’s play “The History Boys”. He spent his Saturday nights learning about Tudor and Stewart history.He was politically aware early in life. During his childhood, the lights would often blink out. One of his first political memories is of the three-day week. “But what really made me a right-winger was seeing the left use the state to impose egalitarianism—on my school.” At 11, he was sent to a grammar school for bright children, but the Labour government tried to merge it with a local comprehensive. The school chose to go private. “I was really disgusted…I saw that the 1944 left—which was meritocratic—had been replaced with this nasty levelling-down left committed to equality of outcome.”For this rather lonely and alienated teenager, Margaret Thatcher appeared as a secular Messiah. “I really became a freak,” he says, laughing. “To be a Thatcherite at that time and place was much more rebellious than being a punk. My teachers thought I was insane. I’m sure I was pretty obnoxious.” He was so happy when Thatcher was elected that he stopped his calendar on that day—May 3rd 1979. He obsessively read George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, and had Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech [7] seared onto his memory.Sullivan was also slowly realising he was gay—yet he had no vocabulary to understand it. He says he didn’t hear the word “gay” while at school. “It’s hard for people to understand now, but there was a total silence about homosexuality. It was unmentioned and unmentionable.” Aged eight, he asked his mother if it was true that God really knew everything about you. She said yes. “Then there’s no hope for me, Mum,” he replied, and returned, despondent, to his bedroom.At the dawn of Thatcherism, he became the first person in his family to go to university—Magdalen College, Oxford. Was he daunted by it? “Never. If you had spent 18 years of your life in East Grinstead, to suddenly be in Oxford was paradise.” He describes it as “a very Bridesheady time”—the famous TV adaptation had just been broadcast—and he was determined to try everything. He made his name by founding the Pooh-Sticks Society, a group dedicated to A.A. Milne’s game where you toss sticks in a river to see which floats past fastest. It became a monster: he says the group swelled to a thousand members, and crowds of hundreds would stop the traffic on Magdalen Bridge to play Pooh sticks. His Oxford brand established—he was known as Piglet—Sullivan appeared in a ream of plays and swiftly conquered the Oxford Union. He was thrilled to meet William Hague, the ultra-Tory-boy famous for making a speech to Conservative Party conference when he was just 16.“I was such a sad bastard, I was thrilled by that speech,” Sullivan says. He was absorbed into Hague’s political machine, and became the president of the Union at the start of his second year. It was an unusual event—you were supposed to wait your turn, and Sullivan was seen as a vulgar grammar-school boy. He became “inseparable” from fellow student Niall Ferguson—soon to become a famous right-wing historian—in part because they both disdained what they called the “rah-rahs”. But he equally loathed the left: he organised a champagne party the night Reagan’s Pershing missiles arrived in Britain.At the time he was sure he would be either a Conservative politician or an actor. He specialised in roles about conflicted, internally fractured men, taking the leads in “Another Country”, “Equus” and “Hamlet”. But then his sexuality suddenly became an issue for the first time. He had barely acted on his gay impulses, but the student newspaper Cherwell outed him nonetheless. “I’m proud of the fact I never hid it,” he says. “Even then, I wasn’t prepared to lie.”It was at this time that Sullivan discovered the philosopher who was to provide the timber of his conservatism—and the road map to many of his apparent contradictions. Michael Oakeshott was then a relatively obscure English philosopher in his 80s. Sullivan characterises his thought as “an anti-ideology, a nonprogramme, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism”.At the core of Oakeshott’s thought is the belief that human beings are extremely limited in what we can know. As Sullivan puts it: “While not denying that the truth exists, the [Oakeshottian] conservative is content to say merely that his grasp on it is always provisional. He begins with the assumption that the human mind is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, or see only so far ahead.” In light of this extreme fallibility, human beings should err on the side of inaction. Claims to certainty—in religion, or political ideology—are invariably hubristic. We have to build our politics on “the radical acceptance of what we cannot know for sure”.
Sullivan is often accused of flip-flopping according to political expediency, but it’s revealing that almost all the later tensions in his thought are prefigured in his writings about Oakeshott from his early 20s, recently published as “Intimations Pursued [8]”. In 1984, he wrote that Oakeshott offers “a conservatism which ends by affirming a radical liberalism”—precisely the charge against Sullivan since 2004.He argues that Oakeshott requires us to systematically discard programmes and ideologies and view each new situation sui generis. Change should only ever be incremental and evolutionary. Oakeshott viewed society as resembling language: it is learned gradually and without us really realising it, and it evolves unconsciously, and for ever.After taking a first in history and modern languages, Sullivan headed to Harvard, where he began a stunningly rapid ascent into American life—only to crash, reviled and apparently dying, five years later. Two months after he got to America, he wrote to his parents saying he felt he was home for the first time in his life. “It was like meeting a person in their prime. It was 1984, Reagan had been re-elected, the Olympics had just happened.” Within a year, his accent had morphed into a Middle American drawl. His life at Harvard was a dizzying whirl. He remembers one 24-hour period when he played Hamlet on stage, had sex with a man in the Senior Common Room, and flew home for his grandmother’s funeral. “I remember standing at my grandmother’s grave and thinking—how do I unite these different parts of my life?” After years of trying to suppress his sexuality—an “emotional blockage” that “really warped my personality”—he allowed himself to fall in love and have sex. It was on a trip home that he finally told his parents he was gay. His mother paused and said: “Oh my god. I’d better make a cup of tea.” His father wept. Sullivan had never seen his father cry before. After a while, he said: “What’s wrong? I’m fine.” His father replied: “No, you don’t understand. I’m crying because of everything you must have been through, and I did nothing to support you.” Sullivan says now: “It was the most honest expression of love I have ever heard.”He began interning in his summers for the New Republic [9], the leading liberal magazine in America, which was slowly shifting rightwards under a new owner, Marty Peretz. Sullivan was talent-spotted and mentored by Leon Wieseltier, the stern, vigorously heterosexual scholar of medieval Judaism who edited the books pages with an increasingly neoconservative eye. Sullivan became his deputy—and within a year Peretz made the startling decision to fire the left-leaning editor, Hendrik Hertzberg, and replace him with Sullivan.“It was crazy,” he says now. “Daunted isn’t the word, I was terrified. I was 26 years old and overnight I was weekending in Hyannisport with Bobby Kennedy’s son and meeting Barbra Streisand and being photographed by Annie Leibovitz for a Gap advert.”But he didn’t choose a cautious path. He instantly fired one of the liberal stalwarts of the magazine, Morton Kondracke, and made the magazine spikier. He drew in writers like Camille Paglia and Douglas Coupland. Advertising revenues soared by 76% during his editorship, but Sullivan’s innovations were itching powder to its traditional liberal readership. He championed welfare reform and helped destroy Hillary Clinton’s plans for universal health care.At some point, the elders of the magazine turned on Sullivan, and Wieseltier’s support turned to hate. He claimed later Sullivan was “responsible for an extraordinary amount of professional and personal unhappiness”—although neither man will say exactly what happened. “I was a lousy manager of people,” Sullivan says. “I was this kid dealing with these large egos, and I was terrible at it. But…I loved putting out a magazine, and I was good at the ideas and the editing.”He concedes that the turning point—in his relationship with Wieseltier, and the magazine—came in 1994, when he decided to serialise the sociologist Charles Murray’s incendiary book “The Bell Curve [10]”. It argued that IQ was significantly affected by genetics—and that black people had a lower average IQ. Although he didn’t endorse everything the book said, Sullivan thought it was a serious, scientific work that should be discussed. The editorial team wasn’t persuaded: almost all of them threatened to resign. He just managed to keep them on board by running 19 critical responses in the same issue as the extracts.The political fallout was furious—but Sullivan faced a personal crisis that made it seem irrelevant. After a routine check-up, he was diagnosed as HIV positive, and given five years to live. At that time, it was a death sentence. “We talk about the 4,000 people who have died in Iraq as a calamity, but 300,000 Americans died of AIDS… My best friend died just after his 31st birthday.” He describes the diagnosis as like being in a movie theatre when something goes wrong in the projector room and suddenly the images are out of focus. “You wait for it to go right, but then it hits you—the movie will never be fixed. From now on, this is the movie.” For days after, his body went into periodic involuntary spasms.What shocked him most of all was his own psychological response to the diagnosis: he instinctively interpreted it as something he deserved for being gay. “All that carefully constructed confidence in my own self-worth was just wiped away overnight.” He volunteered to help a 32-year-old gay man with AIDS. “He was the stereotype in many ways—the 1970s moustache, the Alcoholics Anonymous theology, the Miss American Beauty Pageant fan, the college swim coach. But he was also dying.” Sullivan realised he had to re-explore his attitudes towards homosexuality, which led him to an even sharper confrontation.Of all the debates Sullivan has been embroiled in, his collision with the gay left is the hardest to reconstruct, because the gay-rights debate has been transformed in the two decades since, not least by his own writing. Yet Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry—and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers [11], who waved signs with Sullivan’s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a “collaborator” and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why? The Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein spoke for this tendency when he claimed that Sullivan was “promoting the bargain of assimilation. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights… [But] we were interested in messing with the codes of sexuality.” By advocating marriage, Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people should destroy. He was just “Rush Limbaugh with monster pecs,” a self-hater who “would solve the faggot problem by urging gay men not to act like fags”.
Today, marriage is the Number One demand of the gay-rights movement. So why was Sullivan demonised for being the first to articulate it? He says now, haltingly: “It was the middle of a plague, we were all dying, and here’s this brash British guy who’s a Catholic and right-winger talking about something unfamiliar, that challenges their assumptions… [But] I was too narcissistic to realise that it wasn’t about me.”Sullivan was trying to alter the underlying argument of the gay-rights movement, from a radical assertion of difference to a radical assertion of sameness. The gay theme tune had to change from “I Am What I Am” to “I Am What You Are”—and for a dying generation, it was a message they could not bear to hear.In the middle of this conflagration, Sullivan wrote his masterpiece, a philosophical treatise called “Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality [12]”. The book rebutted both the homophobic right and the radical gay left to make the case for absorbing gay people into existing social institutions [13], especially marriage. He saw this as fundamentally conservative and Oakeshottian. His gay opponents were so enraged that they went—almost literally—below the belt.They discovered that Sullivan was advertising for unprotected sex on a website called barebackcity.com. He made it absolutely clear he was HIV positive and only sought other HIV-positive lovers, but they turned the advert into a scandal. “It was vile. It was published everywhere, and they sent it to my mother and my bosses. They wanted to destroy me,” he says. His critics claimed that this proved Sullivan’s argument for gay monogamy was a fraud. Sullivan replies: “I was never a hypocrite. Never… No gay man writing at that time was more open about their sex life than I was.”It’s true. In “Love Undetectable”, Sullivan had taken a nuanced position that was disarmingly honest. He wrote about the gay debate: “One side has excoriated promiscuity; the other side has glorified it. And both have, in the process, erased the human being in the middle.” He explained that while he strived for monogamy, “I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.” He even admitted to having unprotected sex with another HIV-positive man.Nonetheless, the scandal, he says, “really devastated me for a while.” Was he angry with them? “Not really.” Angry with himself? “Yeah.” Was there part of him that subconsciously wanted to get caught? “No. I wanted to get laid!”He left the New Republic, in a scenario he summarises as “I said ‘I quit’ and they said ‘No, you’re fired.’” Humiliated, reviled, and still carrying a deadly virus, Sullivan’s story could easily have ended here. But he was intrigued by the internet, and was one of the first dozen people to stumble across the fact that you could publish his own articles online and update whenever you wanted to. He was the first well-known writer to become a blogger—and played a key role in smelting the form. Just as Michel de Montaigne played a crucial role in developing the modern essay, Andrew Sullivan will be remembered as pioneering the form of the blog [14]. The now-ubiquitous blog style—short, pithy, personality-inflected posts, offered often—was begun by him. “How many writers in their lifetime stumble across a new medium like this?” he asks excitedly. “Here you are, present at the creation.”He pioneered blogging as a form where a writer can “think out loud”. He believes it suits an Oakeshottian temperament: like his favourite philosopher, it is radically provisional, always aware of its own limits in time and space, and always poised to have to correct itself in light of new evidence.His readership figures surged after the 2001 massacres in New York and his home-town, Washington, DC. “I experienced 9/11 very personally,” he says. “The jihadists attacked my dream, my place—I felt like I had been beaten or raped. I succumbed to the fear a lot of us felt—panic really—about this country being in mortal danger. And neoconservatism seemed like the only ideology on the shelf with a plan for how to react immediately, and I turned to it.”Having voted for George Bush in 2000, he now became one of his most militant supporters, urging him to invade not just Afghanistan but Iraq, in charged and extreme language. His blog posts from that time are quite startling to read now—more expressions of rage and grief than political analysis. After the anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill, he immediately attributed them to jihadis and even mooted the need for America to launch a nuclear or biological response. He then savaged the “decadent left enclaves on the coast”, saying they “may well mount a fifth column” within the United States. This was applauded by Republicans, but the liberal columnist Eric Alterman spoke for many when he called him “a one-man House Un-American Activities Committee [15]”.Sullivan now believes this was the only period in his life when he departed from his Oakeshottian stance: “I was terribly wrong. In the shock and trauma of 9/11, I forgot the principles of scepticism and doubt towards utopian schemes that I had learned.” He was jolted back to “sanity”, he says, by the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. He had always seen torture as the negation of American values—and was stunned that this man he had cheered on was authorising it. He began to pore over the emerging evidence. It led him to a radical reappraisal of Bush—and into a confrontation with the Republican right that mirrored his earlier fight with the gay left.As Iraq burned, spending swelled and the deficit bloated yet further, he came to see Bush as the polar opposite of Oakeshott: a big-government proponent of absolute certainty, who was beginning to “combine the worst foreign-policy utopianism of the left with the worst social draconianism of the right”.The Republican right—who had, finally, begun to accept him, despite his homosexuality—turned on him with rhetorical machineguns blazing. Hugh Hewitt, the hyper-partisan talk-show host, denounces him as “the biggest wasted talent in all of the English-speaking world… [He] wants very badly to be described as a conservative, but he is no more a conservative than I am a Russian... That Andrew Sullivan is read at all is a symptom of a fundamentally unserious country in a deadly serious age.” They found his argument for doubt incomprehensible. The right-wing commentator Jonah Goldberg says: “For many conservatives, Sullivan has become the intellectual equivalent of a write-off… [It’s] a Monty Python-esque absurdity to imagine a serious political movement founded on such bumper-sticker slogans as ‘We’re not sure!’ and ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, certainty has got to go!’”Sullivan admits that this hurts. “Of course sometimes I feel like throwing in the towel and saying, ok, I’m not conservative any more, if Bush and Palin are what conservatism means. But I believe in [conservatism] enough to try to reclaim it from these people.”He sees Sarah Palin as the “reductio ad absurdum” of the American conservatism he opposes—an “idiot” whose success is purely based “on identity politics and Christian fundamentalism”. This disgust was so intense that during the election campaign, he circulated rumours on his blog that Palin’s youngest child had in fact been born to Palin’s daughter, Bristol. Right-wing bloggers said he was a “shrieking fag”, and even whispered that he had aids dementia. If they didn’t ignore his thoughtful book “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It and How To Get It Back [16]”, they scorned it.But as he was embarked on a new and vicious battle with the right, he was slowly winning his old argument with the gay left. Many of the people who denounced him as “evil” for proposing marriage were now—without any apology—getting married themselves in the two American states that allowed it. (Iowa has just become the third state to legalise gay marriage [17], after a recent state Supreme Court verdict.) Yet Sullivan believed he was too late to benefit from his own great crusade. He believed his generation was too scarred, but the next generation could still be saved. Then, three years ago, at a gay club-night in New York City, he met Aaron Tone, a younger actor and artist, and “fell head-over-heels in love, in a way I never had before”. In 2007 they got married in Provincetown, at a small ceremony for family and friends. It was the place where, 15 years before, when gay marriage seemed an impossible dream, he had written “Virtually Normal”.They live together now with their beagles in an apartment in central DC. To be their guest is to wander into a scene of pure gay domesticity, of the kind Sullivan was picturing to widespread bemusement not so long ago. It is a clear, uncluttered apartment, filled up only with vast quantities of coffee and dog toys. But in one corner—Sullivan’s “blog den”—piles of papers and books erupt chaotically, and a Mac is perma-charged and ready to blog.Protease inhibitors mean that Sullivan can now expect to have a much longer life—albeit swallowing fistfuls of pills a day, and with regular testosterone injections—than he could ever have imagined when he was first diagnosed HIV-positive. But he says the experience of facing death—imminent, painful death—underpins his writing. “The ashes of all the people I love who died keep me going. They’re my fuel. I promised one of my best friends that I would not give up. And that’s still very much part of my identity. I am a child of the plague and I will never, never forget that.”With the scenery of conservatism collapsing all around, Sullivan was one of the first major champions of Barack Obama as a future president. He found his temperament—empirical, doubtful, discursive—immediately congenial. This brought yet more howls of betrayal from the right. But now Obama has won, will Sullivan’s Obamaphilia clash with his small-state conservatism, as Obama embarks on a programme of big-government Keynesian reflation?This question cuts to an unacknowledged tension in Sullivan’s thought that has lain dormant since his Oxford days. Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom [18]”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.
This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”When I ask Sullivan about this, he says: “It’s very hard to be a consistent Oakeshottian, to not let dogmas creep in. Perhaps my belief in markets has become like that. Over the next few years, in my blog and writing, I’m going to be thinking this through.” It seems he can imagine reasoning himself to a more Obama-friendly pro-intervention viewpoint—surely provoking yet more cries of betrayal from conservatives.He believes his greatest future conflicts will centre on religion—the topic of his next book. He learned his Catholicism as an altar boy in East Grinstead. For him it is a sacramental religion, all about smell and sight and touch. Ritual is at its core, because “ritual has no point beyond itself. Only ritual can approximate the ineffability of the divine, enact its truth while not purporting to explain or capture it.”Sullivan feels that this model of religion—filled with a sense of the mysterious, and the unknowability of God—has been replaced in both America and the Vatican by outright fundamentalism. He says he can understand the appeal of this fundamentalism because he went through a phase of it himself. When he first went to grammar school, he was severed from his childhood friends. He became obsessed with doctrinal differences. He would draw little crosses in his exercise book to ward off evil, and in art classes he refused to draw or paint anything that was not somehow related to the Bible. For confirmation, he took the name of Sir Thomas More—the scourge of heretics and Catholic martyr.“I remember feeling that without the structure of my faith, without my knowledge of its infallible truth, I might have been completely overwhelmed,” he says. Fundamentalism “was a way of sealing myself off from the world”. He sees American Christians turning to fundamentalism as a panicked response to change and doubt too. They have ended up pining for a theocracy that is contrary to his beloved US constitution and basic liberties for gay people.He says his next battle is to “turn Christianity against the fundamentalists”. For him, “their certainty is the real blasphemy; their desire to control the lives of others the real heresy; their simple depiction of the Godhead proof positive they do not really understand him.” In the Gospels, the men who set themselves up as arbiters of moral correctness are often the furthest from God, he says, while Jesus urges people to see beyond fetishising rules and commandments to their own conscience. This is the flag Sullivan will carry into battle as a paladin against the Palins.And so he is left where he is happiest: at war with his own side. I try to picture him as a boy, wearing his Reagan ’80 badge in a bemused liberal school, a proud minority of one. This Andrew Sullivan feels familiar to me. In the decades since, he has recreated this lonely dynamic—as Thomas More, standing for the truth against the heretic-majority—with the three constituents of his character in turn: his homosexuality, his conservatism and his Catholicism. Even when he is wrong, it is invigorating to watch, and proof that heat does generate light. I suspect Andrew Sullivan will be wearing his defiant badge of difference to the end.

(Johann Hari is a columnist on the Independent. In 2008 he won the Orwell prize for political journalism and was called "fat" by the Dalai Lama.)

From The Sunday Times
Obama’s best friend: a seething, sniping right
A poll indicating a sharply divided US proves Obama has won the fight for the centre
Andrew Sullivan
It was a slim reed but former Bush officials understandably grasped it. A lone poll last week showed a large gap in Barack Obama’s approval ratings between Democratic and Republican voters. The Pew poll found, as Karl Rove boasted in The Wall Street Journal, that Obama “has the most polarised early job approval of any president since surveys began tracking this 40 years ago. The gap between Mr Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points”. This is 10 points larger than George W Bush’s partisan gap after the brutal polarising period of the 2000 election recount.
Does this mean that Obama has failed to deliver on his new politics? Is the red-blue split just as deep and just as debilitating as it was for the Bush administration? And is this Obama’s fault? Rove would like to think so. So would the former Bush speech-writer and adviser Michael Gerson, who echoed Rove’s line. He wrote in The Washington Post – or more accurately dreamt – that “Obama’s polarising approach challenges and changes the core of his political identity”. For the partisan right, turning Obama into another left-lib-eral is key to finding a way back to some kind of political relevance. The politics it has always used – and that Rove specialised in – is dividing the country into red and blue, and working wedge issues such as abortion, gay rights, torture and national security to expand the red.
The trouble for the Bush Republicans is that the poll – and most other surveys now coming in as Obama nears his 100-day mark – do not yet bear out this analysis. First, the partisan polarisation has grown with every presidency in the past few decades, as the parties have settled into more cohesive ideological groupings. Second, Obama has made some rather blunt out-reaches to the right, including large tax cuts in his stimulus package, postponement of withdrawal from Iraq, a ramped-up effort in Afghanistan, a conservative evangelical at his inauguration, and more meetings with congressional Republicans than even Bush held.
Americans noticed this, which is why they find it hard to suddenly believe that Obama is the second coming of Michael Moore or Fidel Castro. But the third point is far more important. The poll measures a gap between Democrats and Republicans, but it doesn’t tell you how many there are of each. Self-identifying Republicans now form only 24% of the American electorate, their lowest showing in recent memory, and far lower than at the start of Bush’s term. And those who are left in the rump tend to be more conservative and more ideological than a larger, more heterogeneous group.
You can see this by a simple measure: some 68% of Republicans identify as ideological conservatives while only 37% of Democrats identify as ideological liberals. When the Republican party is much smaller, more ideological, and more radical than the Democrats, of course a Democratic president will prompt more angry and motivated opposition than a Republican. And so Bush won support from a generous 36% of Democrats in April 2001; while Obama gets only 27% support from Republicans.
The upswing in virulent Republican hostility has been the most marked feature of the first three months of Obama’s presidency. Obama has been called a socialist and a fascist by Fox News’s newest ratings star, Glenn Beck. Another star of the right, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, has warned that Obama intends to force the young into mandatory reeducation camps. Another leading light, the former senator Rick Santorum, has written that Obama “has a deep-seated antipathy towards American values and traditions”.
Michael Savage, the popular right-wing talk show host, warned last week of “a rising tide of pink fascism in this country, and it comes as a result of the election of Barack Hussein Obama”. CNN’s Lou Dobbs has warned that Obama has an open borders policy designed to increase illegal immigration. This week, rallies are planned in main cities, promoted aggressively by Fox News, to protest against looming socialism and debt. And the more you penetrate the sub-culture of the post2008 right, the angrier and more frightened it appears. Under this onslaught from conservative media and political outlets, it is not that surprising that Obama’s negatives among Republicans and even independents has jumped.
But this, when you come to think about it, is far more worrying for the Republicans than for Obama, if Obama maintains a centre-left course. The right’s strategy is clear: define Obama as a far-left radical, and wait. Offer nothing substantive as policy alternatives, but keep the drumbeat up. It’s a classic strategy – and it was what John McCain and Hillary Clinton tried last year.
Now look at the independent vote. So far, independent disapproval of Obama has indeed gone up since January – but from such low levels to begin with (a mere 14% disapproved three months ago) – it would be premature to make that much of it. But when you look at broader numbers, you find that a whopping 70% of independents in the poll cited by Rove have confidence in Obama to address the deep problems the US faces. On the basic approval question, the Pew numbers give you 61% approval overall – with independents approving of Obama by 56% and Republicans by 29%. With independent support more than double the Republican support and closer to stratospheric Democratic backing, Obama has won the battle for the centre.
Now look at other impressive data. Large majorities believe that the economic crisis will take a long time to fix and are not impatient for results. Hispanic voters – the fast-est-growing demographic – give Obama a 73% approval rating; the under30s give him 75% approval.
In the poll of polls, Obama’s disapproval rate has actually dropped from the high thirties to the low thirties in just the past month. What’s striking is that as Republican hostility has soared, the rest of the country has actually warmed to the new president. When Obama took office, only 26% of Americans believed their country was on the right track. That number is now 40% and rising steadily. In January 23% approved of Congress; now 35% do. Obama’s personal favourable ratings are now higher than when he won the election.
There are dangers. The long-term debt is indeed worrying, and if Obama has done nothing to address it by 2010, he will suffer. But my own sense is that the country is taking the measure of the man, likes him personally and is not uncomfortable with most of his policies. The Republican base, meanwhile, is seething. Put those two trends together, and polarisation is Obama’s secret weapon – as long as the Republicans remain at one isolated pole, and he moves persistently and pragmatically forward.
www.andrewsullivan.com

Why Israel Will Bomb Iran

The rational argument for an attack.

By David Samuels (Slate)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuThe more Israeli leaders huff and puff about their determination to stop Iran's nuclear program, the more sophisticated analysts are inclined to believe that Israel is bluffing. After all, if George W. Bush refused to provide Israel with the bunker busters and refueling capacity to take out Iran's nukes in 2008, the chance that Barack Obama will give Israel the green light anytime soon seems quite remote—this being the same President Obama who greeted North Korea's recent missile launch with a speech outlining his plan to dismantle America's nuclear arsenal on the way to realizing his dream of a nuclear-free world. Israel's performance in the 2006 war in Lebanon was widely depicted as catastrophic, and with Israel's diplomatic standing hitting new lows after the stomach-turning images of destruction from Gaza, the diplomatic consequences of a successful attack on Iranian nuclear facilities might be worse than the prospect of military failure. There is also the fact that no one knows exactly where Iran's nuclear assets are.
Many perfectly reasonable people chalk up the rhetorical excesses of both parties to the hot desert sun and assume that nothing particularly awful will happen whether Iran becomes a nuclear power or not. From a U.S. point of view, at least, there is little reason to doubt the analysis that a nuclear Iran with a few dozen bombs can be contained at relatively limited cost using the same strategies that successfully constrained an aggressive Soviet Empire armed with nearly 45,000 nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War.
What the nuclear optimists miss is that it is not the United States that is directly threatened by the Iranian nuclear program but Israel—and the calculations that drive our Middle Eastern client state are very different from those that guide the behavior of its superpower patron.

Less sanguine types—who think that Israel isn't bluffing—generally fall into two camps: those who think that the Israelis are crazy and require the firm hand of America to restrain them and those who think that the Iranian leadership lives on a different planet and will use nuclear weapons against Israel. Yet it is not necessary to stipulate that either party is crazy in order to see why an Israeli attack on Iran makes sense.
From the standpoint of international relations theory, the scariest thing about recent Israeli rhetoric is that an attack on Iran lines up quite well with Israel's rational interests as a superpower client.
While Israeli bluster is clearly calculated to push America to take a more aggressive stance toward Iran, that doesn't mean the Israelis won't actually attack if President Obama decides on a policy of engagement that leaves the Iranians with a viable nuclear option. In fact, the more you consider the rationality of an Israeli attack on Iran in the context of Israel's relationship with its superpower patron, the more likely an attack appears. Given Iran's recent technological triumphs, like the launch of the Omid communications satellite earlier this year and the lack of ambiguity about the aims of the Iranian nuclear program, it is hardly apocalyptic to expect an attack within the next year—assuming that the Russians continue to dither about delivering S-300 surface-to-air missiles to protect Iranian nuclear sites. A stepped-up delivery date for large numbers of S-300 missiles could lead to an earlier attack.
The fact that U.S. and Israeli interests with regard to Iran may diverge in radical ways comes as a surprise to many mainstream analysts because of the tendency among both supporters and opponents of America's "special relationship" with Israel to invoke various forms of mind-bending mumbo-jumbo—from dimwitted theories about an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy to childlike evocations of the community of democratic values that unites the two countries. While America's embrace of Israel is partially motivated both by shared values and by the lobbying power of an influential minority group, neither Israel's creaky democratic polity nor the hidden persuasive powers of AIPAC can claim much credit for the billions of dollars in American military credits that Israel enjoys—a vast corporate welfare program that benefits Pentagon defense contractors as much as it benefits Israel's military.
The key fact of the American-Israeli alliance that most commentators seem eager to elide is that Israel is America's leading ally in the Middle East because it is the most powerful country in the Middle East. Critics of the American-Israeli relationship love to conflate American support for Israel before 1967 with America's support since then by citing statistics for tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military credits and aid given to Israel "since 1948," when the Jewish State was founded. In fact, Israel's rise to becoming a regional superpower was accomplished without any significant help from United States. Israel's surreptitious program to build nuclear weapons was accomplished with the aid of the British and the French, who joined with Israel to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt's rabble-rousing President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and who were then forced to give it back by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Israeli air force pilots who destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces on the ground flew French-made Mystère jets—not American-made F-4 Phantoms. The U.S. Congress did not appropriate a single penny to help Israel accommodate an overwhelming influx of Holocaust survivors and poor Jewish refugees from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until 1973—25 years after the founding of the state.
By shattering the old balance of power in the Middle East with its spectacular military victory in the Six Day War, Israel announced itself to America as the reigning military power in the region and as a profoundly destabilizing influence that needed to be contained. The parallels between Israel's rise to superpower-client status in the 1950s and 1960s and the Iranian march toward regional hegemony over the past decade are quite striking. Both Israel circa 1967 and modern-day Iran are non-Arab states that utilized innovative military tactics to panic the Arabs. Yet where Iran is a non-Arab country with a population of more than 70 million, Israel was and is a tiny non-Arab, non-Muslim country whose small population and seat-of-the-pants style of leadership made even the country's modest colonial ambitions seem like a stretch. In the absence of any fixed plan of expansion, or any long-term plan for dealing with its neighbors, Israel decided to use its excess military power and captured lands as a chit that it could exchange for resources provided from outside the region by its wealthy American patron.
Israel earned its role as an American client with a series of daring military victories won by a tiny embattled country with a shoestring budget and its back against the sea: the capture of the Suez Canal from Nasser in 1956, the audacious victory in 1967, and the development of a nuclear bomb. Yet the terms of the bargain that Israel struck would necessarily relegate such accomplishments to the history books. Israel traded its freedom to engage in high-risk, high-payoff exploits like the Suez Canal adventure or the Six Day War for the comfort of a military and diplomatic guarantee from the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. As a regional American client, Israel would draw on the military and diplomatic power of its distant patron in exchange for allowing America to use its control over Israel as leverage with neighboring Arab states.
With each American-brokered peace move—from Camp David to the Madrid Conference to Oslo and Annapolis—the United States has been able to hold up its leverage over Israel as both a carrot and a stick to the Arab world. Do what we want, and we will force the Israelis to behave. The client-patron relationship between the United States and Israel that allows Washington to control the politics of the Middle East is founded on two pillars: America's ability to deliver concrete accomplishments, like the return of the Sinai to Egypt and the pledge to create a Palestinian state, along with the suggestion that Washington is manfully restraining wilder, more aggressive Israeli ambitions.
The success of the American-Israeli alliance demands that both parties be active partners in a complex dance that involves a lot of play-acting—America pretends to rebuke Israel, just as Israel pretends to be restrained by American intervention from bombing Damascus or seizing the banks of the Euphrates. The instability of the U.S.-Israel relationship is therefore inherent in the terms of a patron-client relationship that requires managing a careful balance of Israeli strength and Israeli weakness. An Israel that runs roughshod over its neighbors is a liability to the United States—just as an Israel that lost the capacity to project destabilizing power throughout the region would quickly become worthless as a client.
A corollary of this basic point is that the weaker and more dependent Israel becomes, the more Israeli interests and American interests are likely to diverge. Stripped of its ability to take independent military action, Israel's value to the United States can be seen to reside in its ability to give the Golan Heights back to Syria and to carve out a Palestinian state from the remaining territories it captured in 1967—after which it would be left with only the territories of the pre-1967 state to barter for a declining store of U.S. military credits, which Washington might prefer to spend on wooing Iran.
The untenable nature of this strategic calculus gives a cold-eyed academic analyst all the explanation she needs to explain Israel's recent wars against Hezbollah and Hamas, its assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and engineers, and its 2007 attack on the Syrian nuclear reactor. Israel's attempts to restore its perceived capacity for game-changing independent military action are directed as much to its American patron as to its neighbors. Israel's current strategic posture was established by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who alternated strong, unpredictable military actions like Operation Defensive Shield and the final isolation of Yasser Arafat with invocations of the importance of peace and surprising concessions, such as the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Sharon also took care to balance his close relationship with President Bush with a program of diplomatic outreach to second-tier powers like Russia and India.
An attack on Iran might be risky in dozens of ways, but it would certainly do wonders for restoring Israel's capacity for game-changing military action. The idea that Iran can meaningfully retaliate against Israel through conventional means is more myth than fact. Even without using nuclear weapons, Israel has the capacity to flatten the Iranian economy by bombing a few strategic oil refineries, making a meaningful Iranian counterstroke much less likely than it first appears.
If the 2006 Lebanon war showed the holes in Israel's ability to fight a conventional ground war, it also showed the ability of the Israeli air force to destroy long-range missiles on the ground. Israel's response to fresh barrages of missiles from Hezbollah and Hamas while engaged in a shooting war with Iran would presumably be even less restrained than it has been in the past.
Short of an Iranian-hostage-rescue-mission-type debacle in which a small Israeli tactical force crashes in the Iranian desert, or a presidential order from Obama to shoot down Israeli planes on their way to Natanz, any Israeli air raid on Iran is likely to succeed in destroying masses of delicate equipment that the Iranians have spent a decade building at enormous cost in time and treasure. It is hard to believe that Iran could quickly or easily replace what it lost. Whether it resulted in delaying Iran's march toward a nuclear bomb by two years, five years, or somewhere in between, the most important result of an Israeli bombing raid would be to puncture the myth of inevitability that has come to surround the Iranian nuclear project and that has fueled Iran's rise as a regional hegemon.
The idea of a mass public outcry against Israel in the Muslim world is probably also a fiction—given the public backing of the Gulf states and Egypt for Israel's wars against Hezbollah and Hamas. As the only army in the region able to take on Iran and its clients, Israel has effectively become the hired army of the Sunni Arab states tasked by Washington with the job of protecting America's favorite Middle Eastern tipple—oil.
The parallels between Israel's rise to superpower client status after 1967 and Iran's recent rise offer another strong reason for Israel to act—and act fast. The current bidding for Iran's favor is alarming to Israel not only because of the unfriendly proclamations of Iranian leaders but because of what an American rapprochement with Iran signals for the future of Israel's status as an American client. While America would probably benefit by playing Israel and Iran against each other for a while to extract the maximum benefit from both relationships, it is hard to see how America would manage to please both clients simultaneously and quite easy to imagine a world in which Iran—with its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, its control over Hezbollah and Hamas, and easy access to leading members of al-Qaida—would be the partner worth pleasing.
Bombing Iran's nuclear facilities is the surest way for Israel to restore the image of strength and unpredictability that made it valuable to the United States after 1967 while also eliminating Iran as a viable partner for America's favor. The fact that this approach may be the international-relations equivalent of keeping your boyfriend by shooting the other cute girl he likes in the head is an indicator of the difference between high-school romance and alliances between states—and hardly an argument for why it won't work. Shorn of its nuclear program and unable to retaliate against Israel through conventional military means, Iran would be shown to be a paper tiger—to the not-so-secret delight of America's Sunni Arab allies in the Gulf. Iran's local clients like Syria and Hamas would be likely to distance themselves from an over-leveraged Persian would-be hegemon whose ruined nuclear facilities would be visible on Google Earth.
The only real downside for Israel of an attack on Iran is Washington's likely response to the anger of the Arab street and the European street, both of which are likely to express their fierce outrage against Israel and the United States. The price of an Israeli attack on Iran is therefore clear to anyone who reads Al Ahram or the Guardian: a Palestinian state. It seems fair to say that both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak see the establishment of some kind of Palestinian state as inevitable and also as posing real security risks to Israel.
Yet, in a perverse way, the idea that the price of an attack on Iran will be the establishment of a Palestinian state makes the logic of such an attack even clearer. Israel's leaders know that the security threats inherent in giving up most of the West Bank will be greatly augmented or diminished depending on how a Palestinian state is born. A Palestinian state born as the result of Israeli weakness is a much greater danger to Israel than a state born out of Israeli strength. Ariel Sharon was able to withdraw from Gaza because he defeated Arafat and crushed the second intifada. Desperate to rid themselves of the bad PR and the demographic threat posed by maintaining Israel's hold over the West Bank, Sharon's successors have been unable to find a victory big enough to allow them to retreat. Nor are they able to reconcile themselves to the threat posed by images of a defeated Israel being forced to withdraw from Hebron and Nablus by triumphant Palestinian militias backed by Iran.
The inevitability of a future Palestinian state is the most powerful argument for the inevitability of an Israeli attack on Iran—unless the Iranian nuclear program is stopped by other means. Taking out the Iranian nuclear program is the one obvious avenue by which Israel can turn the debilitating drip-drip-drip of territorial giveaways and international condemnation into a convincing appearance of strength. Destroying a respectable number of Iranian centrifuges will end Iran's march to regional hegemony and eliminate Israel's chief rival for America's affections while also allowing Israel to gain the legal and demographic benefits of a Palestinian state with a minimum of long-term risk.
Israel's version of a nuclear grand bargain that brings peace to the Middle East may be messier and more violent than what the Obama administration imagines can be accomplished through sanctions, blandishments, and the invocation of Barack Obama's magic middle name. But who can really argue with the idea of trading the Iranian nuclear bomb for a Palestinian state? Saudi Arabia would be happy. Egypt would be happy. Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates would be happy. Jordan would be happy. Iraq would be happy. Two-thirds of the Lebanese would be happy. The Palestinians would go about building their state, and Israel would buy itself another 40 years as the only nuclear-armed country in the Middle East. Iran would not be happy.
But who said peace won't have a price