Portside

Saying Israel is a Jewish state in the sense of observant believers would be like asserting that the United States is a Christian state even though about 22% of the population does not identify as Christian (roughly the same proportion as non-Jews in Israel). The point of the US first amendment is to forbid the state to to “establish” a religion.

It has cost the United States $8 trillion to provide military security in the Gulf since 1976. The supreme tragedy is that the US has bankrupted itself ensuring military security for the oil-producing nations of the Gulf when oil production is destroying the world.

In 2003 when Khatami made the peace proposal, Iran had just declared a small set of nuclear experiments. As of 2006, it began serious nuclear enrichment activities, though UN inspectors have never found evidence of a nuclear weapons program. As Secretary of State John Kerry pointed out Saturday night, if the Bush administration had accepted Iran’s 2003 proposal, the rancor, saber-rattling, sanctions and the rapid advances in Iran’s nuclear program could have been avoided

There is nothing wrong with doing good where you realistically can. Trying to do good by military means where you cannot can be deadly to both you and the victims. Syria resembles Iraq in many respects. The pretext for the US war on Iraq was its alleged chemical and other weapons programs and stores, which did not exist and which UN inspectors such as Scott Ritter, a former Marine, explicitly said did not exist.

Morsi and the Brotherhood leadership bear a good deal of the blame for derailing the transition, since a democratic transition is a pact among various political forces, and he broke the pact. But the Egyptian military bears the other part of the blame for the failed transition. Ambitious officers such as Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Morsi’s Minister of Defense, were secretly determined to undo Morsi’s victory at the polls.

Bradley Manning, acting on what he felt was true patriotism leaked documents revealing the killing of journalists in Iraq; corruption in Tunisia that led to the first of the Arab Spring revolts; the use of drones, and the secret drone war; US spying on UN diplomats; and John Kerry's pressing of Israel to return to pre-1967 borders. Yes, Bradley Manning has changed the world we live in.

I am genuinely puzzled as to why the Fourth Amendment is no longer taken seriously, much less literally, by any significant faction in American politics. My hypothesis is that whereas the gun manufacturers clearly make big bucks off their weird absolutist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, there is no set of corporations that would lose billions of dollars if the government snoops into your phone records or email traffic.

The confirmation hearing for John Brennan allowed the country to grapple with many issues that had been swept under the rug and seldom discussed in public. While few to none of them were resolved, it does seem positive that they were brought up in public.