Just Above Sunset

In the current political climate someone had to say it – we all seem convinced we’re right about politics, religion or science these days. Of course we are, we’re certain – and everyone disagrees. Perhaps it has always been so, but how can we think this way? Each of us thinks we are right. But what makes us so sure of ourselves – the sheer pigheadedness of others compared to our own brilliance? Is everyone else just stupid, or willfully ignoring the obvious truth, or just thinking badly – unable to work out the logic of most everything important?

Maybe it’s none of those things. Maybe it’s that certainty has nothing to do with thinking at all – it’s a different sort of thing, an involuntary neurological function, more akin to feeling than anything else. That’s what Robert Burton contends in The Certainty Epidemic, an item that appeared in Salon on Friday, February 29, an excerpt from his new book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (St. Martin’s Press; February 5, 2008).

Spending the week attending to events in the presidential race, watching, with bemused alarm, the two remaining Democrats have at each other in that debate in Cleveland, listening to the president at a press conference say once again that unless the telecom companies are provided legal immunity for having helped the government monitor all communications of all sorts in the past, and are granted immunity for such monitoring that they will do in the future, then certainly we’ll all die – even if such monitoring is perfectly legal – makes one wonder what’s going on here. Everyone is certain of everything. And unless you believe everything, no matter how contradictory, such bold certainty just generates massive uncertainty. All parties assert they are right. They are certain, and that certainty is held up as proof they are right. Is certainty proof of validity? Get serious – ask anyone who bet on the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

That’s why it may be important to turn to Burton, as he’s been Board-Certified in Neurology by the American Board Psychiatry and Neurology. It’s high time to turn to a neurologist, someone who understands how the brain works.

Here’s his take on the epidemic:

Certainty is everywhere. Fundamentalism is in full bloom. Legions of authorities cloaked in total conviction tell us why we should invade country X, ban “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in schools, eat stewed tomatoes, how much brain damage is necessary to justify a plea of diminished capacity, the precise moment when a sperm and an egg must be treated as a human being, and why the stock market will revert to historical returns. A public change of mind is national news.

He asks why this should be so. He dismisses the idea that it’s all a matter of stubbornness, arrogance or misguided thinking. Yes, you can leave that to the partisans, the folks who say everyone on the left has Bush Derangement Syndrome and the folks on the left who say the conservatives have been drinking deeply of the Bush Kool-Aid, or the neoconservative Kool-Aid or whatever. Each side says the other side is not thinking, just reacting emotionally and irrationally. Each side says they alone are thinking. But what if the problem is that no one is thinking and the problem is rooted in brain biology? That’s the idea here:

Since my early days in neurology training, I have been puzzled by this most basic of cognitive problems: What does it mean to be convinced? This question might sound foolish. You study the evidence, weigh the pros and cons, and make a decision. If the evidence is strong enough, you are convinced there is no other reasonable answer. Your resulting sense of certainty feels like the only logical and justifiable conclusion to a conscious and deliberate line of reasoning.

But modern biology is pointing in a different direction. It is telling us that despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of “knowing what we know” arise out of primary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of rationality or reason. Feeling correct or certain isn’t a deliberate conclusion or conscious choice. It is a mental sensation that happens to us.

So certainty has involuntary neurological roots. If so, this has major implications:

If science can shame us into questioning the nature of conviction, we might develop some degree of tolerance and an increased willingness to consider alternative ideas - from opposing religious or scientific views to contrary opinions at the dinner table.

So Burton examines the mental sensation of certainty. He calls it the “feeling of knowing.”  And that makes sense:

Everyone is familiar with the most commonly recognized feeling of knowing. When asked a question, you feel strongly that you know an answer that you cannot immediately recall. Psychologists refer to this easily recognizable feeling as a tip-of-the-tongue sensation. The frequent accompanying comment as you scan your mental Rolodex for the forgotten name or phone number is: “I know it but I just can’t think of it.” You are aware of knowing something, without knowing exactly what this sensation refers to. The most profound feeling of knowing is the “aha,” a spontaneous notification from a subterranean portion of our mind, an involuntary all-clear signal that we have grasped the heart of a problem. It isn’t just that we can solve the problem; we “know” that we understand it.

He offers a good example for that, a self-test you should read, but then he gets into what he calls the enormously complicated details of neurobiology. And here he borrows the term, “hidden layer” from the artificial intelligence community:

By mimicking the way the brain processes information, A.I. scientists have been able to build artificial neural networks (ANNs) that can play chess and poker, read faces, recognize speech and recommend books at Amazon.com. While standard computer programs work line by line, yes or no, all eventualities programmed in advance, the ANN takes an entirely different approach. The ANN is based upon mathematical programs that are initially devoid of any specific values. The programmers only provide the equations; incoming information determines how connections are formed and how strong each connection will be in relationship to all other connections. There is no predictable solution to a problem - rather, as one connection changes, so do all the others. These shifting interrelationships are the basis for “learning.”

That sounds a lot like what the administration is doing with all domestic electronic communication – it’s data-mining, something those of us in systems know quite well. It’s looking for the hidden, even if you don’t know what it is, or, more precisely, because you don’t know what it is:

With an ANN, the hidden layer is conceptually located within the interrelationships between all the incoming information and the mathematical code used to process it. In the human brain, the hidden layer doesn’t exist as a discrete interface or specific anatomic structure; rather, it resides within the connections between all neurons involved in any neural network. A network can be relatively localized or widely distributed throughout the brain. Proust’s taste of a madeleine triggered a memory that involved visual, auditory, olfactory and gustatory cortices - the multisensory cortical representations of a complex memory. With a sufficiently sensitive fMRI scan, we would see all these areas lighting up when Proust contemplated the madeleine.

So this is the way the brain processes information:

It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic predispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information. It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn’t mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident or why we don’t all put our money on the same roulette number.

So this powerful feeling of knowing – certainty – is a pretty much unconscious calculation of correctness. As Burton puts it – “The greater the likelihood of correctness, as determined by your unconscious, the stronger the sense of certainty.”

And you thought you were thinking things trough. You weren’t.

Burton comments on that bestseller, Blink, that book says your gut feelings are “perfectly rational,” that this is just “thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously” than conscious thought. Burton says Malcolm Gladwell has it a bit wrong. It’s not thinking at all – “Gut feelings and intuitions, the Eureka moment and our sense of conviction, represent the conscious experiences of unconsciously derived feelings.”

This is how we learn. It’s all a matter of those unconsciously derived feelings:

When our body needs food, we feel hunger. When we are dehydrated and require water, we feel thirsty. If we have sensory systems to connect us with the outside world, and sensory systems to notify us of our internal bodily needs, it seems reasonable that we would also have a sensory system to tell us what our minds are doing.

To be aware of thinking, we need a sensation that tells us that we are thinking. To reward learning, we need feelings of being on the right track, or of being correct. And there must be similar feelings to reward and encourage the as-yet unproven thoughts - the idle speculations and musings that will become useful new ideas.

It’s all unconscious, really, or so it would seem here. We just think we’re thinking:

To be an effective, powerful reward, the feeling of conviction must feel like a conscious and deliberate conclusion. As a result, the brain has developed a constellation of mental sensations that feel like thoughts but aren’t. These involuntary and uncontrollable feelings are the mind’s sensations; as sensations they are subject to a wide variety of perceptual illusions common to all sensory systems.

If so, then Burton suggests we pay attention to what neuroscience is telling us about the limits of knowing, how what we think isn’t entirely within our control, and use it in our lives:

Perhaps the easiest solution would be to substitute the word “believe” for “know.” A physician faced with an unsubstantiated gut feeling might say, “I believe there’s an effect despite the lack of evidence,” not, “I’m sure there’s an effect.” And yes, scientists would be better served by saying, “I believe that evolution is correct because of the overwhelming evidence.”

That’s humbling, and no politician would ever substitute “believe but not sure” for “certainly know” in any speech – that would end things fast. It would be accurate, not effective.

Burton would like to see more of it in science:

Substituting believe for know doesn’t negate scientific knowledge; it only shifts a hard-earned fact from being unequivocal to being highly likely. Saying that evolution is extremely likely rather than absolutely certain doesn’t reduce the strength of the argument, and at the same time it serves a more fundamental purpose. Hearing myself saying “I believe” where formerly I would have said “I know” serves as a constant reminder of the limits of knowledge and objectivity. At the same time as I am forced to consider the possibility that contrary opinions might have a grain of truth, I am provided with the perfect rebuttal for those who claim that they “know that they are right.” It is in the leap from 99.99999 percent likely to 100 percent guaranteed that we give up tolerance for conflicting opinions, and provide the basis for the fundamentalist’s claim to pure and certain knowledge.

Well, perhaps so – just don’t expect it in politics.

And as for the Bush theory of international relations and distinguishing between felt knowledge – hunches and gut feelings – and actual knowledge, Burton asks for the impossible – “Any idea that either hasn’t been or isn’t capable of being independently tested should be considered a personal vision.”

Right – we should have thought of that. Burton never mentions Bush, but the implications are clear.

That’s logical. But can we all accept the credo Burton offers? Try this:

Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn (and teach our children) to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. That is enough. We do not need and cannot afford the catastrophes born out of a belief in certainty.

But what will we do with all the suddenly unemployed politicians?

But then there is the other side of the coin, the world of academia, where, if you say things are complex, everyone nods sagely, and if you say things are quite simple actually, everyone rolls their eyes and considers you a bit pathetic.

Russell Jacoby, a professor in residence in the history department out here at UCLA, introduces us to that world – for those of you who haven’t experienced the rarified and often preposterous world of graduate school at a top university. See Not to Complicate Matters, but… – in the Chronicle Review from the Chronicle for Higher Education, of course. That is a strange world. He asks one question about it – “How did the act of complicating become a virtue?”

The scene:

The refashioning of “complicate” derives from many sources. One recipe calls for adding a half cup of poststructuralism to a pound of multiculturalism. Mix thoroughly. Bake. Season with Freudian, Hegelian, and post-Marxist thought. Serve at room temperature. The invitees will savor the meal and will begin to chat in a new academic tongue. They will prize efforts not only to complicate but also to “problematize,” “contextualize,” “relativize,” “particularize,” and “complexify.” They will denounce anything that appears “binary.” They will see “multiplicities” everywhere. They will add “s” to everything: trope, regime, truth. They will sprinkle their conversations with words like “pluralistic,” “heterogenous,” “elastic,” and “hybridities.” A call for “coherence” will arrest the discussion. Isn’t that “reductionist”?

This is not George Bush’s world. It’s what Burton called for, gone bad:

Cutting-edge scholars offer as the latest news these old saws: that things differ according to place and time; that our world is fractured and complex; that multiple entities constitute society. Consider the effort by the historian William H. Sewell Jr. to “clarify what we mean by culture.” After 20 pages, he triumphantly concludes that culture is “variable, contested, ever-changing, and incomplete.” In case we are deflated by that news, he adds, “I would argue forcefully for the value of the concept of culture in its nonpluralizable sense, while the utility of the term as pluralizable appears to me more open to legitimate question.” If that seems a little obvious, he adds: “Yet I think that the latter concept of culture also gets at something we need to retain: a sense of the particular shapes and consistencies of worlds of meanings in different places and times.”

What? Of course it’s nonsense. And it leads to more nonsense:

The new devotion to complexity gives carte blanche to even the most trivial scholarly enterprise. Any factoid can “complicate” our interpretation. The fashion elevates confusion from a transitional stage into an end goal. We celebrate the fact that everything can be “problematized.” We rejoice in discarding “binary” approaches. We applaud ourselves for recognizing - once again - that everything varies by circumstances. We revel in complexity. To be sure, few claim that the truth is simple or singular, but we have moved far from believing that truth can be set out at all with any caution and clarity. We seem to believe that truth and falsehood is a discredited binary opposite. It varies according to time and place. “It depends,” answer my students to virtually every question I ask.

Jacoby rebels:

To defend binary thinking is to invite opprobrium. It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic. Binary logic structures the very computers on which most attacks on binary logic are composed. Some binary distinctions are worth recognizing, if not celebrating: the distinction, let us say, between pregnant and not pregnant, or between life and death. Others are at least worth noticing - for example, that between a red and a green light. You either have $3.75 for a latte or you do not. Can that be “complicated”?

… The cult of complication has led — to alter a phrase of Hegel’s — to a fog in which all cows are gray.

Maybe they are. You never know – they could be. Less certainty, as Burton notes, would be good, and far more honest. But one can take things too far.

CNN covers the basics – the economy may be deteriorating, and most people feeling both panicked and helplessly depressed, but in the race for the White House, or whatever you want to call it, the two frontrunners, McCain and Obama, are running on what to do about Iraq. Most Republicans support the war and so far have voted for McCain. Democrats strongly oppose the war, and Hilary Clinton voted to authorize it in the first place, so Obama seems to have the better judgment, famously saying he doesn’t oppose all wars, just dumb wars, and he has the lead.

McCain, who thought the surge was a fine idea, and maybe would have committed even more troops, now says, “I think that clearly my fortunes have a lot to do with what’s happening in Iraq.” They do. He says we’re winning, and doesn’t mind if we’re there for a hundred more years. Americans don’t back down. We do what we said we’d do. Things will work out in Iraq.

Obama repeatedly says, “I intend to bring [the war in Iraq] to an end so that we can actually start going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan and in the hills of Pakistan like we should have been doing in the first place.” McCain warned that was a dumb idea – “If we left Iraq, there’s no doubt that al Qaeda would then gain control of Iraq and then pose a threat to the United States of America.”

CNN says the polling shows that McCain wins on this issue.

As Andrew Sullivan notes here, “McCain insists on not revisiting the decision to invade and occupy Iraq.” McCain suggests that’s pointless, so instead, Sullivan comments – “He wants a debate solely on the surge. I can understand why; but I doubt it will work.”

Matthew Yglesias disagrees:

I’m by no means sure it will fail. A certain notion of can-do pragmatism is deep in American political culture, and that kind of forget the problems of the past let’s roll up our sleeves and talk about what’s working now attitude has a certain appeal. But it shouldn’t work. And the reason it shouldn’t work is that a given military strategy doesn’t just “succeed” or “fail” in a vacuum, it needs to be understood in some kind of strategic context. If you understand the war as a giant mistake which created a large problem that’s now in need of a solution, that creates one set of ideas about what counts as a solution. If you understand the war as an opening salvo in a campaign to use the US military to remake the Persian Gulf, then working becomes a very different matter.

That said, the politics of the war will depend, crucially, on the actual situation.

So the surge proponents think things will get better and better, eventually, and the skeptics wonder if that’s even the point. Everything depends on defining the problem you’re trying to solve. The two sides could not be further apart – one side shouting “The surge is working!” Violence is way down, the bad guys are on the run, and we’re not taking casualties much these days. The other side is muttering, “No, we achieved a hard-won temporary calm that has led to nothing at all, strategically.” In that view Iraq is no closer to being a real country of any kind than it ever was, and now we have to stay there in full force just to maintain this shadowy, twilight waiting room, a place that’s not total chaos now, but not order yet, a sort of dangerous no particular place at all, that may never be what we wanted.

But what if things are hopeless on both counts – the surge will eventually not work, and there’s no hope for a local government, much less a nation, to ever emerge?

That’s what Fred Kaplan argues in Welcome to the Quagmire – with the subhead “The next president may be stuck with more problems in Iraq than Bush ever faced.”

The contention is that things are now so bad that Obama or Clinton, for all their vows that they would end the thing, cannot, and McCain just doesn’t understand what he’s committed himself to.

Kaplan points to three items floating about on Thursday, February 28, which indicate just how grim things are.

There was this from the New York Times, but reported everywhere – Iraq’s three-man presidential council vetoed a law that called for provincial elections in October. Mike McConnell, our director of national intelligence, called the veto “somewhat of a setback.” Kaplan says that’s “an understatement of staggering proportion.” Anyone can see why:

When the parliament passed that law two months ago, Bush and his supporters - including Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain - heralded the vote as a major sign of reconciliation among Iraq’s sectarian factions and thus a vindication of the surge. The point of the surge, as Gen. Petraeus and others have said, was to create enough security in Baghdad that Iraq’s political leaders could get their act together. The vote suggested some accommodation might be in the offing. The veto dashes those hopes.

And the New York Times reports that this veto will be hard to reverse. There still is a serious power struggle not only between Sunnis and Shiites, but also among the various Shiite parties, and Kaplan notes how discouraging that is:

Unless the veto is somehow reversed, its effects may unravel the tenuous alignments that have helped to reduce the mayhem and casualties these last few months. On one level, the veto might spur Muqtada Sadr, the powerful Shiite militia leader, to suspend his six-month moratorium on violence. It is widely believed that Sadr called this moratorium in order to pursue power through political means. Now that this route has been blocked, he may resort to his earlier methods. (The Times reports that the Sadrists “were furious at the veto.”) On another level, it is bound to infuriate Sunni groups, who had hoped that provincial elections would boost their political power in Ninevah and Diyala, which are fairly calm today but have been scenes of riotous violence in the recent past.

If so, the surge fails. McCain can hope, but this veto is something he hasn’t mentioned. He cannot.

The second item was in the Washington Post – the volunteer forces of the “Sunni Awakening” - the tribal militias in Anbar, Diyala, and other provinces that have formed alliances of convenience with us to defeat al-Qaida jihadists - are backing away from the arrangements:

As the Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit Paley report, the Sunnis are increasingly frustrated by the Iraqi government’s refusal to recognize their political clout - especially reneging on its promise to let more than a handful of their militias into the national army and police - and by what they see as the U.S. commanders’ insufficient advocacy on the Sunnis’ behalf.

In fact, the Post item notes this:

Since Feb. 8, thousands of fighters in restive Diyala province have left their posts in order to pressure the government and its American backers to replace the province’s Shiite police chief. On Wednesday, their leaders warned that they would disband completely if their demands were not met. In Babil province, south of Baghdad, fighters have refused to man their checkpoints after U.S. soldiers killed several comrades in mid-February in circumstances that remain in dispute.

These are the tribesmen fought alongside al Qaeda and then decided to fight with us, but that seems to be falling apart. One Sunni commander in Diyala is quoted as saying this – “Now there is no cooperation with the Americans. … We have stopped fighting [against] al-Qaida.”

This is not good. As Kaplan puts it:

And so the biggest success of the U.S. operation in Iraq - which was always a gamble, one very much worth taking but not very likely to endure beyond its tactical aims - may be teetering on the verge of collapse before even those tactical aims (the defeat of al-Qaida in Iraq) are achieved.

So, grand strategy aside, the specific tactics no longer work. That’s two strikes, or as Kaplan says:

First, Iraq’s sectarian factions are nowhere near reconciliation. The point of the surge was to create enough “breathing space” to allow for such a political goal. If the goal isn’t reached by July - that is, within the 15-month span that was always, inexorably, the duration of the surge - then, in strategic terms, the surge will not have succeeded.

Second, there are many reasons for the reduction in violence and casualties these last few months. The surge and, still more, Gen. Petraeus’ counterinsurgency tactics are among them. So are Sadr’s cease-fire and the Sunni Awakening - neither of which has much to do with the surge, one of which (the Awakening) was initiated by the Sunnis before the surge was even announced. And now, both Sadr’s cease-fire and the Awakening are imperiled.

Now what? That question leads to the third news item, the New York Times reporting that the commander of all forces in the Middle East, Admiral Fallon, thinks there should be a “pause” in troop withdrawals from Iraq after the last of the surge troops depart this July - but that this pause should be brief and that the withdrawals should resume soon after. That seems a tacit admission that things are falling apart, and we’d better try to keep a lid on those things, see what happens, then think about letting some of our folks go home, if possible. He says the pause in the withdrawals should be short. That may be PR.

Kaplan says this is nothing new:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called for such a pause in December after returning from a trip to Baghdad. Before the trip, Gates had been talking about continuing the drawdown of troops from today’s 20 combat brigades to the 15 that would remain after the surge brigades go back home in July and to 10 by the end of the year. He changed his tune after Gen. Petraeus told him that he might not be able to keep securing the Iraqi people with such a small force. Hence the “pause.”

But Kaplan is fascinated by Fallon saying that the pause should be brief, just long enough to allow “all the dust to settle.” That’s new:

Do Fallon’s remarks reflect the views of the Bush administration or of Secretary Gates? Certainly there is, and has long been, a tension between the institutional Army and some of the commanders in the field over this very question. The former has always been skeptical about extending the war in Iraq. Senior officers are concerned that the lengthy and repeated tours of duty, especially the toll it has taken on the retention of junior officers and the recruitment of new enlistees, might break the Army. The latter brush aside those concerns and focus on what they need to accomplish their combat missions. Gates has found himself straddling this tension - very concerned about the health of the Army but also worried about the chances of failure in Iraq.

Fallon is in the middle of this, and, if he really wants a very short pause in the draw-down – and it’s not just PR – he seems to be on the side of saving the military before it’s ruined and giving up on the grand strategy – a unified, secular, pro-western, free-market, democratic Iraq, one that welcomes our permanent bases, recognizes Israel, and sells us lots of oil, and one where everyone gets along, no matter what they think of theological matters from the seventh or eighth century. If you scale back the military mission you can forget all that – that would take even more than the one hundred years McCain proposes for our keep-the-lid-on occupation.

Back home, if Fallon gets his way and the pause in the draw-down is short, Clinton or Obama can proceed with the careful withdrawal each proposes. The big decision will have already been made. If Fallon is just blowing smoke, talking about troops coming home because that is what he has been told to do in an election year, then all bets are off. Clinton or Obama will have to decide matters. One assumes McCain would pour in even more troops, and keep tours at fifteen months, no matter what warnings he gets from the generals – but it doesn’t seem he’ll get the big strategic win, that New Iraq, in his lifetime, or ours.

Kaplan – “The way things are going, the next president, whatever his or her preferences, may be stuck with more severe problems than Bush ever was - and will almost certainly have to make decisions that are harder.”

All this is rather depressing, but the odd thing is that Kaplan never mentions George Bush. It’s as if Fallon and Gates and Petraeus are running the show, working things out on their own, with no commander-in-chief being, well, the commander-in-chief, deciding things. Perhaps, but for Cheney, it was always so. That’s the most depressing bit of slap-in-the-face reality. That Kaplan doesn’t feel he even needs to point this out, that it’s a given, speaks volumes, as they say. One day those volumes will be written. For now we need to work out a few things, on our own.

It’s okay. The concept was wrong from the beginning.

You see, once there was a CIA officer named Marc Sageman. He collected data on more than five hundred Islamic terrorists; the idea was to understand who they are, why they attack, and how to stop them. Then he retired. Then he wrote a book, Leaderless Jihad: Terrorist Networks in the Twenty-First Century. David Ignatius summarizes the book in the Washington Post on Thursday, February 28:

The heart of Sageman’s message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat - and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain’s Web site puts it, the United States is facing “a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists” spawned by al-Qaeda.

Yeah, yeah – sometimes skepticism is okay:

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a “clash of civilizations.”

It’s the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman’s account, it’s a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls “terrorist wannabes.” Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

You know where that leads:

Sageman’s harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. “Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear,” he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

McCain with his can of gasoline, and Obama and Clinton being worried, and being called cowards, traitors and quitters. What a world. Sometimes hope seems pointless.