Category Archives: Issues

America is rotting from the inside

Michael A. Cohen points out that focusing on the issue of U.S. power vis-à-vis other countries has the effect of directing attention away from this country’s domestic failings.

[B]y virtually any measure, a closer look at the state of the United States today tells a sobering tale of rapid and unchecked decay and deterioration in a host of areas. While not all of them are generally considered elements of national security, perhaps they should be.

Let’s start with education, which almost any observer would agree is a key factor in national competitiveness. The data is not good. According to the most recent OECD report on global education standards, the United States is an average country in how it educates its children — 12th in reading skills, 17th in science, and 26th in math. The World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in the quality of its mathematics and science education, even though we spend more money per student than almost any country in the world.

America’s high school graduation rate is lower today that it was in the late 1960s and “kids are now less likely to graduate from high school than their parents,” according to an analysis released last year by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. In fact, not only is the graduation rate worse than many Western countries, the United States is now the only developed country where a higher percentage of 55 to 64-year-olds have a high school diploma than 25 to 34-year-olds.

While the United States still maintains the world’s finest university system, college graduation rates are slipping. Among 25 to 34-year-olds, America trails Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom in its percentage of college graduates. This speaks, in some measure, to the disparities that are endemic in the U.S. education system. If you are poor in America, chances are you attend a school that underperforms, are taught by teachers that are not as effective, and have test scores that lag far behind your more affluent counterparts (the same is true if you are black or Hispanic — you lag behind your white counterparts). Can a country be a great global power if its education system is fundamentally unequal and is getting steadily worse?

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Racial profiling by law enforcement is poisoning Muslim Americans’ trust

Sahar Aziz writes: In the same week, a Moroccan 29-year-old man was caught attempting to bomb the Capitol in a government-led terrorism sting operation and the NYPD was caught systemically spying on Muslim students at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and other universities on the US east coast. These two seemingly distinct events epitomize the fundamental flaws in the government’s counterterrorism policies.

On the one hand, the government, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has expended significant resources to conduct “community outreach” meetings with Muslims across the nation. On the other hand, while Muslims are lured into trusting their government, they are systematically spied on, investigated, and sometimes prosecuted.

Millions of dollars are spent flying bureaucrats from various federal agencies to meet and greet Muslim leaders, most of whom are male, in an attempt to earn their trust. In those meetings, local and state law enforcement is invited to build long-term relationships with the Muslim communities in their jurisdictions. On the face of it, the meetings appear to be a good-faith effort to demystify Muslims and counter false stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists. In practice, the objectives are more duplicitous.

In a blatant violation of their trust, local and federal agencies are recording these community outreach meetings, as well as the names and personal information of the attendees. Even Muslim imams who have been engaging with the government for years have found themselves under investigation. Community outreach meetings appear nothing more than a tool within a broader fishing expedition of Muslim communities nationwide. The strategy is that if there is no evidence of terrorism, then the government must go out there and create it through community outreach meetings that set the groundwork for sting operations.

In doing so, the government is alienating its most important ally, the Muslim community, which has been the most effective counter-terrorism tool the government has.

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The creative destruction of Iran

Lara Friedman writes: Discussion of military action against Iran is again taking center stage. It takes me back to a late September 2002 meeting, when I brought a former senior Israeli official to see the late Congressman Tom Lantos, then the ranking minority member of the House International Relations Committee. Our meeting focused on Iraq, with Lantos arguing passionately for pre-emptive U.S. military action against Saddam Hussein, who he compared to Hitler. Lantos dismissed out of hand our Israeli visitor’s suggestion that a war might be destabilizing to the region and to Israel, telling us (and this is close to a direct quote):

The Middle East is like a kaleidoscope. If you pick up a kaleidoscope and look through it, you don’t see anything special. But if you shake the kaleidoscope and look through it again, you see something more beautiful than was there before.

We were taken aback. One of the most powerful members of Congress — a Holocaust survivor with unchallenged moral authority — was saying, in effect, that the U.S. should wage war not to achieve a specific goal, but to shake things up, in the hopes that out of the chaos would emerge more attractive options.

Advocates of military action against Iran today are relying on a similar “shake the kaleidoscope” approach. Their arguments are predicated on the belief that all other presently available options are unacceptable. They believe that Iran is immune to pressure; that Iran will abuse diplomacy to run out the clock and go nuclear before the world can stop it; and that containment — learning to live with a nuclear or even a “nuclear-capable” Iran — is a non-starter.

Most war advocates concede that military action will at best delay — not stop — Iran’s nuclear program. Most admit that it will probably kill many innocent Iranian civilians — the same civilians whose human rights many of them also claim to defend (AIPAC’s simultaneous campaign for human rights in Iran, and its campaign for an ever-harder line on Iran, culminating in the current effort to get the Senate to adopt a pro-war resolution, is a prominent example of this phenomenon). And most acknowledge that an attack on Iran could be profoundly destabilizing to the region and could threaten U.S. interests around the world.

Yet their conclusion is that military action is nonetheless both desirable and inevitable. [Continue reading…]

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Nuclear alarmism over Iran is backing us into a corner

Shashank Joshi warns that nuclear alarmism on both sides of the Atlantic “could drag us into an unwinnable and unnecessary war.”

A nuclear Iran is profoundly undesirable – but it’s also eminently containable.

The … argument, that Iran is too crazy to be deterred, is historically untenable. Stalin’s Soviet Union was viewed in exactly the same terms. NSC-68, one of the most famous American intelligence assessments of the cold war, judged Moscow to be “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own”, aimed at “domination of the Eurasian landmass”. That was the year after the Soviets’ first nuclear test. Mao Zedong, who was to acquire a bomb shortly thereafter, welcomed a nuclear war in which “imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist”.

Senator Joseph Lieberman last week fumed that “containment might have been viable for the Soviet Union during the cold war, but it’s not going to work with the current fanatical Islamist regime in Tehran”. Well, fanaticism has pedigree. Stalin and Mao might have been bloodthirsty fanatics, but they were not suicidal. Nor is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last week, two of America’s top intelligence officials told a senate hearing two important things. First, any Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon would be based “on a cost-benefit analysis”. Even fanatical theocracies are governed by reason. Second, “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict”. If Iran is deemed to be unlikely to start a conventional war, it’s not going to start a nuclear war.

And there’s a simple reason for this. The area around Tehran contains a fifth of Iran’s population, and half of the country’s industry. A single Israeli thermonuclear bomb would wipe this out in the blink of an eye. Iran’s abhorrent calls to wipe Israel off the map are gestures as empty as Mao’s nuclear posturing.

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Fear mounts in Israel of Iranian counterattack

The Associated Press reports: Despite its confident saber-rattling, Israel’s concern is growing that the country is vulnerable to a devastating counterstrike if it attacks Iran’s nuclear program.

An announcement this week that a mobile rocket-defense system will soon be built just outside Tel Aviv, where Israel’s sprawling military headquarters sits smack in the middle of office towers, museums, night spots and hotels, caused some jitters. Israeli officials cite intelligence reports that Tel Aviv would be a main target of any attack.

Increasingly, the debate in Israel is turning to whether a strike can do enough damage to the Iranian program to be worth the risks. Experts believe that any attack would at best set back, but not cripple, the Iranians.

Skepticism about Israel’s ability to defend itself runs deep here. Israelis still remember Iraqi Scuds landing in the center of the country 20 years ago. In 2006, the Lebanese Hezbollah militia seemed able to rain rockets at will during a monthlong conflict with the Jewish state. A scathing government report issued months ago suggested the nation is still woefully unprepared.

In a questionably timed move, the Cabinet minister in charge of civil defense in recent days resigned to become the ambassador to faraway China.

The Iron Dome missile defense shield has frequently been touted as a vital element in Israel’s multilayered missile defense program, yet surprisingly a week ago it was reported that new batteries will not be deployed even though so far only three have been deployed while 14 are estimated to be needed to cover te whole country.

Hebrew daily “Yediot Ahronot” reports that the Ministry of Defense will stop procurements of the Iron Dome anti-missile system, due to cuts in the defense budget.

Ministry of Defense director general Udi Shani notified Iron Dome’s manufacturer, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. that it will not procure another Iron Dome battery. The IDF currently operates three batteries, and the Ministry of Defense had planned to procure two more.

Shani notified his US counterparts of the decision, saying that it was due to budget constraints. A defense official said that US aid did not meet all the requirements, and that the Ministry of Defense will have to make up one third of the expenditure from its shekel budget.

An IDF source said, “The current budget sends the Army back to 2003, when the IDF trained less than in any year.” Last week, “Yediot Ahronot” reported that the IDF cancelled a division-level exercise and five brigade-level exercises.

Ministry of Defense said in response, “In the economic reality, the budget is insufficient to complete procurement of the batteries. This issue will be submitted to the cabinet shortly.”

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Future will be shaped by the rise of the angry young man

Afshin Molavi writes: Last October, amid the din of the Arab uprisings, the euro-zone crisis, the lingering effects of the Japan earthquake, and the US gearing up for a election season, a quiet milestone was passed: the world population hit the seven billion mark.

This is, on one level, very good news. It means that advances in medicine, nutrition, and education over the past six decades have dramatically raised life expectancies, reduced infant mortality rates, and eradicated previously fatal diseases. Over the past 60 years, we have become healthier and wealthier than at any time in human history – and yet, still, we stand on a precipice.

Of those seven billion humans on our planet, nearly half are under the age of 24.

In many of the poorest and developing countries, those numbers are even more stark, with 60 to 70 per cent of the population falling into that age group, particularly in poor and developing countries unable to cope with the demands of young populations. For example, three out of four Nigerians are under 35. In Yemen, the numbers are even more stark. Three out of four are 25 or under. Across the Middle East and North Africa region, two out of three people are 29 or younger.

We are currently living amid the largest cohort of youth in human history. Young populations can be a demographic gift or a demographic bomb. A gift when governments effectively employ them, deriving sustainable productive value from their labour while the young people derive meaningful work experience, raise their incomes, marry, have children, invest, and continue the cycle of life.

The next decade, however, will likely see some demographic bombs blowing up across the world as youth bulges push against weak or underperforming economies and unemployment and underemployment plague societies from Nigeria to Pakistan, from Egypt to large parts of India and sub-Saharan Africa, and in many European countries.

While this environment will inflict damage on men and women alike, the effect on young men will prove to be more destabilising.

The world over the next decade will be defined by the Angry Young Man, born amid this historic baby boom, and now entering the netherworld between youth and adulthood, unable to find a job, angry at his government, hyper-aware of the inequalities around him, frustrated by corruption, and connected to the outside world through social networking sites and satellite television. From Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis to Tahrir Square in Cairo, from Athens and Tehran to Delhi and Karachi, the angry young man, fist pumping the air, has become a feature of our world. [Continue reading…]

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Khader Adnan and now-normalized Western justice

Glenn Greenwald writes: Each year, the U.S. State Department, as required by law, issues a “Human Rights Report” which details abuses by other countries. To call it an exercise in hypocrisy is to understate the case: it is almost impossible to find any tyrannical power denounced by the State Department which the U.S. Government (and its closest allies) do not regularly exercise itself. Indeed, it’s often impossible to imagine how the authors of these reports can refrain from cackling mischievously over the glaring ironies of what they are denouncing (my all-time favorite example is discussed in the update here).

In 2010, the State Department included a long section on the oppressive detention practices of China. The “principal human rights problems” of the tyrannical Chinese government include “a lack of due process in judicial proceedings” and “the use of administrative detention.” Indeed, “arbitrary arrest and detention remained serious problems. The law grants police broad administrative detention powers and the ability to detain individuals for extended periods without formal arrest or criminal charges.” Can one even find the words to condemn these Chinese monsters?

Time‘s Tony Karon today writes about the case of Khader Adnan, a 33-year-old Palestinian baker currently imprisoned without charges by the Israeli government on accusations that he is a spokesman for Islamic Jihad. To protest his due-process-free imprisonment and that of thousands of other Palestinians, Adnan has been on a sustained hunger strike and is now close to death. Karon writes:

Israel has not charged Adnan with any crime . . . Israel deals with such cases using a legal framework based on emergency laws left over from British colonial rule to detain any suspect for six months at a time without needing to provide evidence or lay charges against them. When a detainee’s six-month spell has expired, the detention can simply be renewed.

Writing today about the Adnan case in The National, Joseph Dana explains that Israel imprisons Adnan and so many like him pursuant to “a framework of laws and statutes to govern all aspects of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” and “many, if not most, of the laws governing movement of Palestinians, freedom of speech and association are draconian in nature; none is more alarming than the administrative detention order. The order enables Israel to hold prisoners indefinitely without charging them or allowing them to stand trial.” [Continue reading…]

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Does AIPAC want war?

Robert Naiman writes: For all it has done to promote confrontation between the United States and Iran, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has worked to avoid the public perception that AIPAC is openly promoting war. In AIPAC’s public documents, the emphasis has always been on tougher sanctions. (If you make sanctions “tough” enough – an effective embargo – that is an act of war, but it is still at one remove from saying that the US should start bombing.)

But a new Senate effort to move the goalposts of US policy to declare it “unacceptable” for Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capability – not a nuclear weapon, but the technical capacity to create one – gives AIPAC the opportunity to make a choice which all can observe. If the Lieberman resolution becomes an ask for AIPAC lobbyists at the March AIPAC policy conference, then the world will know: AIPAC is lobbying Congress for war with Iran.

Sponsors of the Lieberman resolution deny that it is an “authorisation for military force”, and in a legal, technical sense, they are absolutely correct: it is not a legal authorisation for military force. But it is an attempt to enact a political authorisation for military force. It is an attempt to pressure the administration politically to move forward the tripwire for war, to a place indistinguishable from the status quo that exists today. If successful, this political move would make it impossible for the administration to pursue meaningful diplomatic engagement with Iran, shutting down the most plausible alternative to war.

The first “resolved” paragraph of the Lieberman resolution affirms that it is a “vital national interest” of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a “nuclear weapons capability“.

The phrase “vital national interest” is a “term of art”. It means something that the US should be willing to go to war for. Recall the debate over whether the US military intervention in Libya was a “vital national interest” of the United States (which Defence Secretary Robert Gates said it wasn’t.) It was a debate over whether the bar was met to justify the United States going to war.

The resolution seeks to establish it as US policy that a nuclear weapons capability – not acquisition of a nuclear weapon, but the technical capacity to create one – is a “red line” for the United States. If the US were to announce to Iran that achieving “nuclear weapons capability” is a red line for the US, the US would be saying that it is ready to attack Iran with military force in order to try to prevent Iran from crossing this “line” to achieve “nuclear weapons capability”.

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Khader Adnan: The West Bank’s Bobby Sands

The Independent reports: It was only after talking with lucidity and animation for an hour about her husband’s 61-day hunger strike that Randa Jihad Adnan’s eyes, visible though the opening of her nekab, filled with tears. Until then, this articulate 31-year-old graduate in sharia law from Al Najar University in Nablus, the pregnant mother of two young daughters aged four and one and half, had described with almost disconcerting poise the two months following the arrest of her husband, Khader Adnan, on 17 December.

He was seized at 3.30am by some of the scores of Israeli military and security personnel who surrounded the family home in a West Bank village south of Jenin, and is now being held in the Israeli Rebecca Ziv hospital in Safed. On Wednesday she was allowed to visit him with the children and her father-in-law.

There they found him, weak and extremely thin, his beard unkempt and his fingernails long. He was shackled by two legs and one arm to his bed, and was connected to a heart monitor. Though mentally alert, he could speak only with difficulty. “I was shocked,” she said yesterday. “I couldn’t speak for about three minutes, and it was the same for my daughters.”

Mrs Adnan is convinced that the Israeli authorities only allowed the visit because they wanted the family to put pressure on her husband to end his hunger strike. He had started this on 18 December in protest at his arrest, his treatment and the subsequent detention order served on him.

“My father-in-law said to him: ‘We want you to stay alive. You cannot defeat this state on your own.’ He told him he wanted him to end the strike. I told him I wished he would drink a cup of milk. But he said: ‘I did not expect this from you. I know you are with me all the time. Please stop it.” Mrs Adnan said yesterday: “I know my husband. He will not change his mind. I expect him to die.”

The day before the visit, a Red Cross delegation had gone to her home to warn her that her husband’s heart could fail “at any minute”. They told her that he was suffering from muscular atrophy, which was affecting his heart and stomach, that his pulse was weak, and that his life was now in extreme danger.

Richard Falk writes: The world watches as tragedy unfolds beneath its gaze. Khader Adnan is entering his 61st day as a hunger striker in an Israeli prison, being held under an administrative detention order without trial, charges, or any indication of the evidence against him.

From the outset of his brutal arrest in the middle of the night – in the presence of his wife and young daughters – he has been subject to the sort of inhumane and degrading treatment that is totally unlawful and morally inexcusable. Its only justification is to intimidate, if not terrify, Palestinians who have lived for 45 years under the yoke of an oppressive occupation. This occupation continuously whittles away at Palestinians’ rights under international humanitarian law – especially their right to self-determination, which is encroached upon every time a new housing unit is added to the colonising settlements that dot the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The case of Khader Adnan is a revealing microcosm of the unbearable cruelty of prolonged occupation. It draws a contrast in the West between the dignity of an Israeli prisoner and the steadfast refusal to heed the abuse of thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails through court sentence or administrative order.

Mr Adnan’s father poignantly highlighted this contrast a few days ago by referring to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas in captivity for several years and recently released in good health: “Where are the mother and father of Gilad Shalit? Do they not feel for me in this humanitarian case? Where are they?” He went further in drawing this comparison: “My son was arrested from his house, from among his wife and children, was taken prisoner. He was not carrying any weapon. Whereas Shalit was fighting against the people of Gaza, and destroying their homes, and firing upon, and Shalit was released.”

It is true that foreign authority figures, from the UN Secretary General on down, showed their empathy for the agony experienced by Israelis concerned for the wellbeing of Shalit, but these same personalities are notably silent in the much more compelling ordeal being experienced before our eyes in the form of Mr Adnan’s captivity, seemingly unto death. It should not be surprising that surviving family members of IRA hunger strikers should step forward expressing solidarity with Mr Adnan and compare the Irish experience of resistance to that of the Palesinians.

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How companies learn your secrets

Charles Duhigg writes: Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”

As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.

“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.” [Continue reading…]

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Nanosecond trading could make markets go haywire

Wired reports: The afternoon of May 6, 2010 was among the strangest in economic history. Starting at 2:42 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones stock index fell 600 points in just 6 minutes. Its nadir represented the deepest single-day decline in that market’s 114-year history. By 3:07 p.m., the index had rebounded. The “flash crash,” as it came to be known, was big, unexpected and scary — and a new study says flash events actually happen routinely, at speeds so fast they don’t register on regular market records, with potentially troubling consequences for market stability.

The analysis involved five years of stock market trading data gathered between 2006 and 2011 and sorted in fine-grained, millisecond-by-millisecond detail. Below the 950-millisecond level, where computerized trading occurs so quickly that human traders can’t even react, no fewer than 18,520 crashes and spikes occurred. The study’s authors call those events “financial black swans,” though they’re so common that the black swan label probably doesn’t fit anymore.

Moreover, those events fell into patterns that didn’t fit market patterns seen at other time scales. It’s as if computerized trading has created a new world, one where the usual rules don’t apply, populated by algorithms and only dimly understood by the people who made them. The extent to which that world influences our own — perhaps making events like the 2010 flash crash more likely, or causing markets to be generally more volatile — is an open question.

“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet,” said Neil Johnson, a complex systems specialist at the University of Miami and co-author of the study, released Feb. 7 on arXiv [PDF]. “It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”

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The things that Anthony Shadid taught me

Thanassis Cambanis writes: Anthony Shadid never seemed to be in a hurry. If you needed him, or simply wanted his company, he would linger to chat and fix you with a gaze that defined undivided attention. He gave the impression that nothing was more important to him than whomever he happened to be speaking to, even if he had a dozen deadlines. His hospitable nature blended seamlessly with Levantine mores, but I think it originated in equal measure from his origins in Lebanon, in Oklahoma, and in his entirely exceptional soul.

Often, I was scared when I was with Anthony. He reassured in the most primal manner, by example. The day after Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad, hundreds of journalists, Iraqi fortune seekers, and U.S. Marines thronged the front lot of the Palestine Hotel. In a panic, I found Anthony in his room upstairs, surrounded by stacks of bottled water. “You have time for a coffee?” he inquired, as if I were the busy one, as if time were limitless. Around him, in a way, it was. The more he slowed things down in the minute, the more minutes he seemed to pack into a day. He connected with so many of us — artists, political activists, militiamen, families, working people, fellow journalists, heads of state — and each of us felt that we had shared something alone with Anthony. And we had. That bounty was one of his many gifts.

On Christmas eve in 2003, we drove into Baghdad together. His first marriage was failing, and he spent that long night in Iraq’s western desert speaking of his daughter, Laila, and of the Iraq story, both of which he loved in different ways. He felt ineluctably that he could not leave that story at a crucial time. It was a commitment shouldered without arrogance but with a clear — and in my opinion, correct — assessment that if he didn’t tell the stories he was telling, no one would.

That commitment awed and inspired us all. Readers saw it in his dispatches from Iraq over more than a decade. Colleagues saw it in Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank, Libya, and countless other places. He was devoted to better coverage of the Arab world. He lived that devotion in his own writing, about which nothing need be said because it so authoritatively speaks for itself, but also in the countless invisible acts he did to make the work of others better. He shared contacts with novice reporters he just had met. He took hours to mentor strangers and friends alike, about brief dispatches or sprawling book projects. He was the least selfish reporter I ever met, and he was the one who had the most to share, which he did compulsively.

I am not alone when I say I wanted to be more like Anthony Shadid, in my approach to people, to stories, to the region that was his destiny and which became my own focus. The people he wrote about were never subjects. They each were a world, in which he became engrossed for the entirety of the length of his relationship to them, whether it lasted an hour or a year. In Iraq, he taught me history. In Lebanon, as we criss-crossed the front lines in the 2006 war, he showed me what courage looks like. I drove him around the border, where he translated the conversations we had with people. At one point, alone on an exposed ridge, we heard a steady patter of mortar shells, each one closer to us than the next. We realized we weren’t approaching somebody else’s front line; we alone were the targets. “What do you think?” he said, unhurriedly. “Should we go?” I answered by running back to the car. Anthony, as always, was full of grace.

We all know how he brought that grace to the stories of people at war and in revolt across the Arab world. Soon, when the book he had labored over for half a decade is released next month, we might learn how he applied that delicacy to the tale of his ancestral home in Marjayoun. He lovingly rebuilt the manse on a hill overlooking the Hula Valley, and in the process fell in love anew with his wife Nada. With Marjayoun and Nada, Anthony opened a new chapter in happiness, which blossomed on his face when he was with them or with his daughter Laila. [Continue reading…]

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