Jeffrey Goldberg

Israeli officials may see a "zero hour" for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, but it could backfire.

On his Twitter feed, Oren Kessler reports that news analysts on Israel's Channel 2 are in agreement that an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities seems to be imminent. Ari Shavit, of Haaretz, is reporting that an unnamed senior Israeli security official he interviewed who is identified in a headline as "the decision-maker" (If you guess Ehud Barak, the defense minister, you would not be wrong) is arguing that the zero-hour is approaching for an Israeli decision:

"If Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes clear that it no longer has the power to act, the likelihood of an American action will decrease. So we cannot wait a year to find out who was right: the one who said that the likelihood of an American action is high or the one who said the likelihood of an American action is low."

Aluf Benn, the editor of Haaretz, writes that the world seems to have accepted the idea that Israel will soon strike Iran: "All the signs show that the 'international community,' meaning the western powers and the U.S. in the lead, seem to have reconciled themselves with Israel's talk of a military strike - and now they are pushing Netanyahu to stand by his rhetoric and send his bombers to their targets in Iran. In general terms, the market has already accounted for the Israeli strike in its assessment of the risk of the undertaking, and it is now waiting for the expectation to be realized." And then, of course, there is Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad, who warned earlier this month that Iran should fear an Israeli strike over the next twelve weeks.

I'm not going to guess whether Israel will strike Iran tomorrow, next month, next year, or never. I believe it is highly plausible that Netanyahu and Barak will do so at some point over the next twelve months, if current trends remain the same. (The Atlantic Iran War Dial, which is set by a panel of 22 experts, currently puts the chance of an Israeli or American strike over the next 12 months at 38 percent.)  Obviously, the Obama Administration believes that Netanyahu and Barak are itching to give the strike order soon. Otherwise, why would it have sent half the senior national security team to Israel over the past several weeks?

Though I have no idea what's going to happen in the coming weeks, this seems like an opportune moment to once again list the many reasons why an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities is a bad idea. Believe me, I take seriously the arguments made by Netanyahu and Barak in favor of action against Iran (read the Shavit piece, linked above, for a very good summary of all the reasons why a nuclear Iran would be a catastrophe for Israel, and pretty damn bad for the Arabs and the West as well), but the negatives still outweigh the positives in my mind: Here are some potential consequences of an Israeli strike:
 
1) Innocent people will die. It is quite possible that even a limited Israeli strike could kill innocent Iranians, and it is an almost-sure thing that Iranian retaliation will kill innocent Israels.

2) It very well might not work at all. The Israeli Air Force is very talented and brave, but it doesn't have the capacities of the USAF. It would only have one shot at these facilities, and it might not do much in the way of significant damage. It could also lose pilots, or see its pilots shot down and captured.

3) Even if a strike does work, it may only delay the Iranian program, and it might even speed it up. Any Israeli preventive strike would justify, in the minds of Iranians -- even non- or anti-regime Iranians -- that their country needs nuclear weapons as protection. Certainly much of the world would agree, and the sanctions put in place on Iran may crumble. So acceleration of the nuclear program may be a consequence of an Israeli strike.

4) An Israeli strike may cause a surge of sympathy for Iran among Sunni Arabs across the Middle East, who right now despise the regime for, among other reasons, supporting the Assad government in Damascus. Right now, Arab opinion is hardened against Iran and its Lebanese proxy, the terror group Hezbollah. An Israeli strike could reverse this trend, and would be a boon to Assad and Hezbollah in many other ways as well -- for one thing, it would take attention away from the continuing slaughter of innocent Syrians by Assad. Conversely, an Israeli strike would be very useful for those forces around the world trying to delegitimize and isolate Israel.

5) A strike could trigger an overt war without end (Iran, of course, has been waging subterranean war on Israel, and America, for a long time now, and Israel and America respond, in subterranean fashion), and an all-out missile war may escalate into something especially horrific, so in essence, Israel would be trading a theoretical war later for an actual war now.

6) A strike could be a disaster for the U.S.-Israel relationship. It might not be -- there is no sympathy for the Iranian regime among Americans (except on the left-most, and right-most margins) and there is plenty of sympathy for Israel. But an attack could trigger an armed Iranian response against American targets. (Such a response would not be rational on the part of Iran, but I don't count on regime rationality.) Americans are tired of the Middle East, and I'm not sure how they would feel if they believed that Israeli action brought harm to Americans. Remember, American soldiers have died in the defense of Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, but they've never died defending Israel. I doubt Israel wants to put Americans in harm's way now. And it certainly isn't healthy for Israel to get on the wrong side of an American president.

7) The current American president is deeply serious about preventing Iran from going nuclear. I believe he would eventually use force (more effectively, obviously, than Israel) to stop Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. His position will be severely compromised if Israel jumps the gun and attacks now. Again, what I worry about, at bottom, is that an Israeli attack would inadvertently create conditions for an acceleration of the Iranian nuclear program.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is going to the wrong parties, apparently. At the Atlantic dinner parties I attend, the first course is usually a bag of Funyuns, followed by corn dogs fried in pig fat. Dessert is usually some low-quality meth and a Ho Ho. Ta-Nehisi's parties, by contrast, sound like a drag:

Whenever this particular incarnation of the culture wars erupts, I think back to my earliest experiences with my august employer, The Atlantic. On the scale of ashy to classy, I was more the former than the latter. But my relationship with the magazine often put me in the dining company of men and women who were not unused to nice things. These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants. My new companions had other beliefs, a fact evidenced by our divergent waistlines.

They organized dinners featuring several small courses, most of which were only partially eaten. The general dining practice consisted of buttering half a dinner roll, dallying with the salad, nibbling at the fish and taking a spoonful of desert. The only seconds they requested were coffee and wine.

I left the first of these dinners in bemused dudgeon. "Crazy rich white people,"  I would scoff. "Who goes to a nice dinner and leaves hungry?" In fact, they were not hungry at all. I discovered this a few dinners later, when I found myself embroiled in this ritual of half-dining. It was as though some invisible force was slowing my fork, forcing me into pauses, until I found myself nibbling and sampling my way through the meal. And when I rose both caffeinated and buzzed, I was, to my shock, completely satiated.

Like many Americans, I was from a world where "finish your plate" was gospel. The older people there held hunger in their recent memory. For generations they had worked with their arms, backs and hands. With scarcity a constant, and manual labor the norm, "finish your plate" fit the screws of their lives. I did not worry for food. I sat at my desk staring at a computer screen for much of the day. But still I ate like a stevedore. In the old world, this culture of eating kept my forebears alive. In this new one it was slowly killing me.

In a little bit of cross-Voice experimentation, I answered a few questions about Chris Christie and Bruce Springsteen, the twin subjects of my most recent Atlantic article, from Ta-Nehisi. He has a way with questions. And with hummus. (Also, he bakes his own muffins. Do people know that?) Anyway, here's one part of our salubrious exchange (please note: if you don't immediately understand the Chuck D reference, my suggestion would be to Google the words "Elvis was a hero to most"):

Q: I'm a black dude from Baltimore. The best I can do is hum the hook to "Born In The USA"--mostly because Barry Windham and Mike Rotunda used it for their intro music. But recently I've been studying the musical culture of white people. Some good stuff there.

I am intrigued by your love of Springsteen.  You are known to be quite the hip-hop fan. I feel disadvantaged in your presence. How do we right this great historical wrong? Where in the sprawling catalogue might a thirty-something male crippled by a life of black privilege begin?

A: I'm happy you are taking up the study of the neglected musical legacy of white Americans. It's about time that African-Americans, who have profited so much from the appropriation of white music, focus on the great contributions to American culture made by this marginalized population. My own feeling is that while Chuck D was a hero to most, he never meant shit to me, he was a straight-up racist, that sucker was simple and plain, mother fuck him and Lil Wayne. But you know me, I'm just Jeff the Angry Caucasian, standing up for Leonard Chess.  

On the matter of Mr. Springsteen, you need to begin at a few places simultaneously: You need to listen to "She's the One," "Jungleland," and "Backstreets" from Born to Run, just to understand how epic the guy is; listen to "Rosalita" from The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle in order to understand that he's tremendous, propulsive fun; and then listen to the entire Nebraska, not only because it's beautiful, but because it marks the decisive moment, for me at least, when Springsteen became the voice of the voiceless. You have to trust me on this--if you do this all on the same day, your life will change.  

The Atlantic's Iran War Dial, expertly managed by Dominic Tierney, is now at 38 percent, meaning that, according to the 22 panelists, there is a 38 percent chance the U.S. or Israel will strike Iran's nuclear facilities in the next year. This is a slight bump over last month. Tierney explains the rise:

In July, the panel's average estimate of the chances of an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran in the next year was 38 percent. This is a 2-point increase on June's figure of 36 percent and snaps a 3-month streak where the chances of conflict steadily declined.

July saw the introduction of a new round of sanctions on Iran, including an EU oil embargo, which Iranian officials described as "warfare."

In a meeting with Mitt Romney, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for a tough stance. "All the sanctions and diplomacy so far have not set back the Iranian program by one iota. We need a strong and credible military threat coupled with sanctions."

One of Romney's top foreign policy aides promised that a Romney White House would "respect" Israel's decision to strike Iran. This deliberate loosening of the reins could make the threat of an Israeli attack more credible. But it could also diminish Washington's capacity to restrain Israel.

Meanwhile, negotiations with Iran appear to have stalled. Each side's diplomatic B Team, or the deputy negotiators, met in Istanbul last week. But there was little sign of progress, and the A Teams are still waiting in the wings.

The Iranian president is arguing that the only thing standing between humanity and world peace are the Joos. (And yes, when Ahmadinejad says "Zionists," he doesn't actually mean "Zionists.") Jack Shafer e-mailed Goldblog the following observation: "After all, the world was a peaceful place until Israel was formed."

There's a corollary here, to an argument you hear made from time to time. The argument goes like this: Israel's existence -- its displacement of the Palestinians, its behavior -- is a main cause of anti-Semitism today. Most Jews don't find this argument terribly convincing, for the simple reason that anti-Semitism predates the creation of Israel, and was, of course, much worse before Israel gained independence. The Germans obviously were not motivated to kill six million Jews because they were upset about Israel's settlement policy. They were motivated by, among many other things, fears of worldwide Jewish domination (fears best expressed in our age by the Iranian regime and its supporters and apologists). If Israel had existed in 1939, there would not have been a Holocaust.

I'm sure what he means here is that the Palestinians should, as a result of negotiations, be granted a state on the West Bank and in Gaza:

"It has now been some 400 years that a horrendous Zionist clan has been ruling the major world affairs, and behind the scenes of the major power circles, in political, media, monetary, and banking organizations in the world, they have been the decision makers, to an extent that a big power with a huge economy and over 300 million population, the presidential election hopefuls must go kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their victory in the elections."

(cut)

The president pointed out that in order to evolutionize the status of the world decision making is needed, the forces must get united, and their ultimate objective must be the annihilation of the Zionist regime, emphasizing, "The Zionist regime is both the symbol of the hegemony of the Zionism over the world and the means in the hand of the oppressor powers for expansion of their hegemony in the region and in the world."

This following bit is frankly Hitlerian in scope:

The Qods Day is not merely a strategic solution for the Palestinian problem, as it is to be viewed as a key for solving the world problems; any freedom lover and justice seeker in the world must do its best for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the path for the establishment of justice and freedom in the world."

I'm sure he doesn't mean it, though.

A few quick observations, since I'm on the road:
1) Tom Friedman's column today: I agree with much (or most) of what he says (except for his calling the Western Wall the "Wailing Wall," which I find inexplicable coming from Tom), but I wish Tom would express his anger at his fellow Jews with slightly more calibration and coolness. I understand the heat, but I don't think it's helpful -- it's actually harmful to the cause of convincing the mass of mainstream Jewry that certain Israeli policies are ultimately self-destructive;
2) Gore Vidal: Speaking of the Times, if you want to understand Vidal's relationship with Jews, don't bother reading the Times's obituary -- it elides all the nasty parts. This post will give you a fuller understanding of Vidal's special relationship.
3) I know the conventional wisdom casts the Romney visit to Great Britain, Israel and Poland as a disaster, but it seems as if the people who think it's a disaster aren't people who would vote for Romney in any case. On Romney and Iran, Blake Hounshell, of Foreign Policy magazine, has a smart piece up about the scant difference between the two candidates's positions on Iran. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's an excerpt that has to do with the growing feeling that confrontation is inevitable:

Washington reporters and policy wonks have been playing the "will they or won't they?" game on Iran for years. And until recently, the consensus was that Israel and the United States were, in fact, bluffing -- that to get other big powers to go along with tougher sanctions, they had to persuade them that they might indeed attack.

But now, that consensus seems to be shifting as Iran nears what Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak calls the "zone of immunity" -- when Iran has enough enrichment capability buried safely beyond the reach of Israeli bombs that its program will be impossible for the Jewish state to stop on its own
.
U.S. military leaders have hinted that the United States has a bit more time; American B-52s and massive bunker-busters can still do the job if it looks like Iran really is about to get the bomb. And given that the International Atomic Energy Agency, for all its doubts about Iran's intentions, has never conclusively determined that Iran wants the weapon, it may be years before we reach that point, if ever.
'
Still, diplomacy and sanctions have yet to show that they can change the calculus of Iran's leaders. The Islamic republic has been isolated from the world economy for three decades. It suffered through a devastating war with Iraq in which it sent unarmed children barefoot across landmines. This is not a country that buckles easily under pressure.
And at this point, given how politicized this showdown has become, it's hard to imagine a deal that both sides can accept. Here, again, the differences between Romney and Obama don't really matter -- Romney has ruled out any enrichment whatsoever, while Obama will accept some -- because neither is good enough to pass muster in Tehran.

One more thing: Jonah Goldberg makes some interesting points about the greatest threats facing the U.S., in reference to my recent exchange with Conor Friedersdorf. Jonah's basic point: There are theoretical threats, and then there are real threats. There are, of course, theoretical threats that seem more dangerous than the threat of a nuclear Iran, but they are just that: Theoretical. 

Man, what an eventful trip! I assume Mitt Romney has some hilarious Polish jokes ready for his visit to Warsaw. (To be fair, as Tomos Doran has pointed out, President Obama made something of a Polish joke as well not long ago). On the issue Romney raised this morning about the Israeli culture of success and achievement, I'd like to take a pass for the moment. Very complicated issue, though of course there is no reason, while praising Israelis for their magnificent accomplishments in science, medicine, technology and so, to slag the Palestinians (except, of course, if you think that slagging Palestinians will get you votes).

I would like very much to deal with the issue of Romney's tacky photo-op at the site of the obliterated Jewish Temple on one of the most solemn days on the Jewish calendar (the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin and I had a little bit of an argument on this matter on Twitter yesterday, and she continues to believe that the Western Wall is an appropriate campaign stop for an American presidential candidate, especially on the day Jews set aside to mourn for the destruction of the Temple. I'm sure, by the way, that Rubin would endorse an Obama campaign stop at Yad Vashem on the Holocaust Memorial Day.)  But I'm on the road and thought it more important to answer quickly an earlier post from Conor Friedersdorf about Mitt Romney's foreign policy priorities -- Romney, of course, believes that it is of paramount importance that the U.S. prevent Iran by whatever means necessary from crossing the nuclear threshold. Here's Conor:

I hope Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. But is preventing it really our highest priority? Is it more important than preventing Al Qaeda from buying or stealing a nuke? More important than preventing a bio-weapons attack? More important than disrupting another 9/11-style attack on multiple American cities? More important than avoiding an unnecessary military exchange with China or Russia? I think those should be higher priorities.

It's difficult to know if Mitt Romney actually regards Iranian nukes as his highest priority, or if he just thinks it's the subject on which he can most usefully draw a contrast with President Obama (though it's unclear what the differences in their actual positions are, especially since both men are prone to changing them).

Both Presidents Bush and Obama have argued that the number-one national security priority of the post-9/11 United States is to prevent the marriage of jihadism and nuclear weapons technology. Obama has been consistent on this point, as he has on the importance of preventing Iran from going nuclear. Unlike Conor, I don't see these two issues as unrelated. Iran is a theocratic totalitarian state run by eschatologically-minded men who are supporters of terrorism, after all. But instead of me answering Conor, let me have President Obama answer him. This is what Obama told Goldblog about the threat posed by a nuclear Iran:

"(I)f Iran gets a nuclear weapon, this would run completely contrary to my policies of nonproliferation. The risks of an Iranian nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorist organizations are profound. It is almost certain that other players in the region would feel it necessary to get their own nuclear weapons. So now you have the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world, one that is rife with unstable governments and sectarian tensions. And it would also provide Iran the additional capability to sponsor and protect its proxies in carrying out terrorist attacks, because they are less fearful of retaliation."

This is, to me, a compelling argument, one that Conor should consider.

Today is Tisha b'Av, the ninth of Av, a Jewish day of fasting and mourning. It is on this day that the First and Second Temples were destroyed. The Western Wall, in Jerusalem, is a retaining wall of the Second Temple. It is, especially on this day, a locus of prayer and reflection. It is also, on this particular Tisha b'Av, the location of a very important photo opportunity for an American presidential candidate.

How vulgar is this?

Very.

It seemed, a few weeks ago, that the Iran issue was waning; now it seems to be waxing again. If you want to read an article that is giving Centcom commanders pause (not that they aren't worried already), read Joby Warrick's excellent account of Iran's Persian Gulf military preparations. The Iranian Navy -- both Iranian navies, in fact, the regular navy and especially the Revolutionary Guard Corps navy (IRGCN)-- could do some real damage to American warships, if there is a Gulf confrontation. (I wrote about the threat of the IRGCN's speedboats here.)

Israel has been inundated this past month with visits from high-ranking U.S. officials, all coming armed with intelligence to suggest that there is still time for the West to act against Iran's nuclear program (and by time, they mean post-November 6 time). Israel is also getting a visit this weekend from Mitt Romney, who is attempting to convince Americans that he will be tougher on Iran than Barack Obama. In my Bloomberg View column this week, I lay out why this might not be the case -- why, in fact, Romney would be seriously hamstrung in his dealings with Iran, if he is elected president. Here are just a few of the reasons why he would have a potentially hard time confronting Iran militarily:

Romney would be a new president in 2013, which could plausibly be the year for a preventive attack. He will be inexperienced, and his national security team will be new and potentially inexperienced as well. The learning curve on Iran is steep, and the Iranian regime knows it. The Obama team is deeply knowledgeable, appropriately cynical about Iranian intentions, and has had the time and confidence to make course corrections.

Romney, by all accounts, is uninterested in inheriting the mantle of President George W. Bush, who invaded two Muslim countries and lost popularity and credibility as a result. Romney, despite his rhetoric, is more of a pragmatist than Bush, and far more cautious. An attack on Iran is an incautious act, one that even Bush rejected.

The unilateral use of force in the Middle East for a liberal Democrat like Obama is a credential; for a conservative Republican like Romney, it could be an albatross. I argued in a previous column that Romney is more likely than Obama to oversee a revitalized Middle East peace process. That's because conservatives are better positioned to make peace; liberals are generally better positioned to launch preventive strikes at the nuclear programs of rogue nations. We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world.) Romney will get no comparative slack.

The author discusses his new novel, about a woman who's hiding a secret from the mythical decade.

This is going to sound sacrilegious, but it is my belief that Kurt Andersen's new novel, True Believers, could plausibly be included in same class as Goldblog's sixth-most-favorite Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral, which is a brilliant evocation of the dislocations, confusions, and insanities of the 1960s. Both American Pastoral and True Believers evoke the same wistful feeling in people like me who were too young for the '60s but would have liked to have understood firsthand why everyone went nuts simultaneously. Also, I would have liked to have seen Jimi Hendrix play guitar live, rather than on YouTube.

One difference between Roth and Andersen: There's more action in Andersen's book than in Roth's—but almost as many Jews!

Before I go on, let me acknowledge that Kurt is a friend-of-Goldblog, and that I worked for him in the 1990s (an inferior decade, though not as inferior as the '80s) when he was the editor of New York magazine, and that I enjoyed working for him very much.   

True Believers is a first-person account of the life of Karen Hollander, a sexy-grandma lawyer, former Department of Justice official, and almost-Supreme Court nominee (hers is what Hillary Clinton's career path might have looked like had HRC not attached herself to Bill) who has been keeping a terrible secret about something she and a band of friends plotted to do in the 1960s.  I won't reveal more, because you should read it for yourselves. I had an e-mail exchange with Kurt about the book, and about the '60s, and about one of his book's very amusing Jewish subplots. Our conversation is reproduced below.

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As I finished reading True Believers, I couldn't decide for myself whether you thought the 1960s were ultimately beneficial to the country. Yes, young people found their voice, but it turns out in some cases that it was the voice of a crazy person. And yes, the notion of radical individualism flourished, but the consequences of this notion haven't been wholly positive. The music was great, of course, but one lesson of the '60s—do what makes you feel good, or what feels right—seems to have given license to some people to become selfish without guilt. Can you, in less than a million words, tell me where things went right as a consequence of the '60s, and where they went wrong?

I think the 1960s were definitely a net positive for America and Americans. Civil rights and women's rights were unequivocal triumphs, as was the newly heightened awareness of what we then called "ecology." The greater tolerance for different kinds of people and for weirdness were excellent changes. Pop music had its awesome big-bang moment, as you say, and movies and visual art were transformed in interesting ways, and we middle-aged people now get to wear blue jeans and sneakers and go to rock concerts and generally behave as if we're young until we die.

But we threw some baby out with the bath water. The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition. We got carried away with the idea of victimhood, so that now white people and Christians and Wall Street guys cast themselves categorically as victims of bigotry. The latent American tendency toward self-righteousness and apocalyptic thinking got ratcheted up. The idea of one's "own truth" started propagating, and that solipsism is now pandemic.

And as I recently argued in a Times op-ed which bugged a lot of of '60s-romanticizers on the left and libertarians on the right, I think the "if it feels good do it"/"do your own thing" paradigm of the 1960s also helped enable the greed-is-good hypercapitalism and general selfishness that grew and grew afterward.

As Walter Isaacson pointed out to me the other day, Steve Jobs is the great embodiment of both of these '60s strands. He's the ultimate Bobo, and his fellow bourgeois bohemians are the one cohort for whom both strands of the '60s legacy have been a win-win.

I think I'm almost at a million words.

You obviously have affection for your protagonist's granddaughter, Waverly, but there's also a bit of mockery in your portrayal of this polymorphously rebellious but stunningly naive (and commodified) high school senior. You've spoken about the Occupy movement as a kind of cover-band version of the rebellions of the 1960s. Why hasn't the Occupy movement achieved its goals, in the way the student protesters achieved many of their goals (and they achieved large things, including dumping LBJ, women's liberation, and so on.)

Two reasons. In the late '60s (and the early '70s, which were when The Sixties got scaled-up and rolled out to the mass market), there were two big, specific, demands: Stop the Draft and End the War. And in the '60s, too, the antiwar movement was part of and driven by the powerful and much larger new countercultural wave—sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc.

Whereas Occupy and kindred protesters today, while they have something of a '60s 2.0 critique of our political economy and institutions—corrupt, unfair, malign—do not have any big policy demand, and also aren't driven by a wholly distinct and exciting generational sensibility the way so many young people 40 and 45 years ago were.

Which isn't to say it couldn't happen again. Occupy in 2011 may be analogous to the left-wing protest movements in the early '60s. Maybe they just require event(s) analogous to the Vietnam War and the draft and ghetto uprisings to light the fire.

Even beyond hippies and protesters, when I was in junior high, the Generation Gap became this Major American Issue. It seemed very real. And that generation, the boomers, by staying forever youngish and maybe by being helicopter parents, has so far prevented a new generation gap from forming.

You know, it's funny, your last thought caused me to realize that my children can't rebel against my music, because their music is my music. Do you know how thrilled I was to see them embrace Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Cream? I mean, that sort of thing didn't happen in the '60s. Maybe I'm not giving them enough space to rebel. There's really something to your theory.

But, onward: There's a very interesting sub-theme in your book I wanted to ask you about, which is the way Israel kind of flashes in and out, in two different ways: In your alternating 1960s chapters, one of your main characters views a relative of his who fought with the Jewish underground in Palestine as a revolutionary role model. In the present-day chapters (well, present-day + about a year), Israel is held up by another of your main characters, an apostate leftist, now a Fox commentator, as the bulwark of Western civilization against Muslim radicals and the international left. I know, from previous conversations, that you think about the way in which Israel is understood in American cultural and political thought quite a bit, so I'm wondering if I could get you to talk about why you've deployed Israel the way you have.

As for your kids' music being your music, and that generation-gap-lessness being weird but pleasurable (and pre-modern): absolutely. It also connects to my other recent hobbyhorse about the cultural ice age that started 25 years ago. Someday I will merge it all into my personal Theory of Everything.

And as for Israel, it just...came up as I was writing, the way things do in fiction. There was no plan. But once I'd invented my apostate-lefty neocon character Buzzy, a guy who went from hard-left to hard-right during the 1970s and '80s, it seemed like an issue that would be important to him in the present day—partly because it permits him to feel the sort of righteous black-and-white New Left conviction he felt when he was young in the late 1960s. The fact that  Buzzy is a conservative Christian made his Likudite passion more interesting to me. And then, too, it seemed apt that modern Israel came into being geopolitically in 1967, around the time half my novel takes place.

In fact, 1967 was when Israel first loomed large in my consciousness. That June I was 12, and my irreligious and politically moderate parents held a Seven-Day War victory barbecue party in our front yard in Omaha, with little blue-and-white banners. Their closest Jewish friend, a bald guy, arrived wearing a Moshe Dayanesque eyepatch. I tell this story, I guess, as an illustration of how deeply, unambiguously, merrily pro-Israel regular Americans—non-evangelical-Christian gentiles in the heartland—felt back then.

A Seven-Day War party? Who would have thunk it? Also, Jews in Omaha? But that's another issue.

The obvious question is, what happened to that feeling? Why did non-evangelical culture shift, to the extent it actually has shifted? (I think it remains true that Israel is still more popular across America than its enemies, but no one is throwing parties like that anymore.) Which brings us to one of your inventions, the Paul Plan, a foreboding aside in your neocon riff: The libertarian Paul family in your book proposes a plan to extract the Jews from Israel and resettle them in America, as a means of solving the Middle East crisis. But there's a deadline for Israeli participation. After the deadline, those Israelis who remain would be left on their own. This bit struck me as the logical conclusion to Roth's "Diasporism," from Operation Shylock. Do you think you're on to something apocalyptic about the near future?

For sure Israel remains vastly more popular among Americans than any country in its part of the world. But that's a very low bar. A few years ago at a swank Manhattan dinner party I got in a serious shouting argument with a Brit who'd said that Israel was a worse country than its neighbors. Americans have not yet become reflexive Euro-style anti-Israelites in significant numbers. But the country has gone in my lifetime from being our bestest non-European buddy, our spunky amazing inspiring heroic pal, to being...a friend, a friend who's in a tragic and terrible tight spot, a friend most Americans these days would prefer not to think too much about.

Of course the Paul Plan, embodied in legislation sponsored by Ron and Rand Paul in the House and Senate, is fantastical. (And thanks making for the Roth connection. I only thought of Operation Shylock and Diasporism after I'd finished True Believers; American Pastoral I thought about from the get-go.) But: If the Pauls or people of equal stature seriously proposed such a plan? I think it would get traction, right, left and middle. Because Americans don't like open-ended foreign entanglements or insoluble-seeming large problems, and because the West Bank Palestinians are looking like pretty reasonable un-Arafats, and Netanyahu and his settler-centric government is not easy to embrace enthusiastically. A Paul Plan would feel to a lot of Americans like the ultimate Gordian-knot-cutting act of magnanimous national tough love—and who would object to getting a well-regulated influx of a few million smart, ambitious, prosperous, English-speaking immigrants, and developing an undeveloped chunk of the American West in the bargain? But it is fiction.

You will be tempted—deeply, seriously tempted—to answer the following question with a one-liner, but don't, unless you can't truly help yourself: If Mitt Romney were a character in this novel about the '60s, and about the legacy of the '60s, what role would he play? Not so much in the plot, which I don't want to give away, but what would he symbolize? And how much of a product of the '60s is he? (I'm obviously thinking of the greed-is-good flipside of the if-it-makes-you-happy-it-can't-be-that-bad ethos you talk about to such good effect, but maybe I'm wrong.)

Great question! Mitt graduated college the same year my characters do, 1971. But he was, of course, living in an alternate Mormon universe, willfully insulated from The Sixties. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Except that's why he seems so strange and anodyne and Conehead-y and Ward Cleaverish to people—the era made no apparent marks on him. (I mean, for instance, look at his Spotify playlist: It's like he plugged his ears after "Good Vibrations" was released when he was 19, the year after he cut the bohemian kid's hair.) Which is to say, he's a generational outlier, and it's hard to imagine him as anything but a minor and somewhat implausible comic character in True Believers. Even his success in business, although it may have been enabled by do-your-own-thing anything-goes hypercapitalism, is that of a 1950s McNamara-esque efficiency expert, not a post-'60s buccaneer.

Karen Hollander, your heroine, has juvenile diabetes, as do you. You explore the emotional and interior-life consequences of diabetes quite carefully and lovingly, and I'm almost tempted to ask—ok, I'm tempted—if you think that your experience with diabetes has made you a better, or at least different, writer. The second Hollander question is, are you a little bit jealous of her? She had the full-'60s experience; you were just a bit too young to get the full blast. By the time you came up, it was moving more from a Woodstock sort of experience to a bitterish Altamont kind of thing.

For the record, they call it "Type 1" as opposed to "juvenile" these days. (Juvenile diabetes, juvenile delinquent—why did the j-word get retired across the board after the 1960s?) Anyway: a better writer? If only. But it did have the effect, getting diagnosed at age 32, of concentrating my mind in a wonderful-ish Samuel Johnsonian sense, of knocking out of me a certain youthful lah-di-dah sense of endless time. So it definitely made me a different person. Maybe a bit tougher and wiser. And as a writer, as it's turned out with this book, it gave me material. Which is like blood for a vampire.

I'm actually not jealous of Karen. At the time I would have been—when I got to college in 1972, it felt like I'd just missed all the fun. But now I'm actually kind of glad I didn't get the full blast—or at least, I tend to feel more generational kinship with people born during the second half of the Baby Boom... what the writer Josh Glenn calls The Original Generation X. It's why I like Barack Obama, and Comedy Central "news" shows, and you.

This book ultimately is about the virtues of pure belief, and the price of pure belief. You come down squarely on the side of moderation, but you also have deep sympathy for the passions that animate the Occupy movement, and its predecessor movement, the big one of the 1960s. The question is, is it over now? Are we going to let another whole generation pass before there's a kind of disgust-driven rising at the Way Things Are?

Yes, the book is a story about passionate belief (and secrets and lies), especially at crazy historical inflection points when the center doesn't hold and empirical reality gets all mucked up by rampant magical thinking. Such as now. Were Q3 and Q4 of 2011 the full extent of ADHD America's protest season for this half century? Could be. But I sort of doubt it. As Norman Mailer said in 1964, when almost no one else had any inkling of the thrills and chills and madness that were just months away, "There's a shitstorm coming." The Sixties were a function of the baby boomers coming of age and feeling entitled, and the impending shitstorm, if it comes, will be partly a function of baby boomers getting old and feeling entitled—and of 21st century young people, as in the 1960s, having an overwhelming and annoying clarity that The Way Things Are is deeply, systemically, untenably wrong. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain apparently did not say.

Reports, all deeply speculative, are coming in that the Bulgarian suicide bomber is a Swedish citizen of Algerian extraction who is affiliated with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, and like-minded Sunni organizations, have obviously targeted Israel in the past, so this is highly plausible. Which raises a question about Bibi Netanyahu's rush to blame Hezbollah and Iran for the attack. Of course, al Qaeda-like groups do have a presence in Iran, though the relationship between the regime and al Qaeda has been fractious and uncomfortable and most of all mysterious, as Bruce Riedel wrote not long ago. These reports can all wind-up being erroneous, and unfortunately, I'm about to be traveling for the next day so I won't have access to the Interwebs to try and understand what is happening. In the meantime, I'm going to post my interview with Kurt Andersen about his new book, "True Believers," which you should read, because Kurt says interesting things about everything.

Matthew Levitt analyzes the recent history of Hezbollah's external operations, which were revived after the Israeli assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the terror leader who was behind multiple anti-American and anti-Israeli attacks:

Mughniyeh's assassination led to the resurrection of Hezbollah's international operations arm, which Hezbollah leaders actively paired down in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in an effort to keep the group out of the crosshairs of the "global war on terror." The drawdown helps explain why Hezbollah's Islamic Jihad Organization experienced so many failures when it first set out to avenge Mughniyeh's death. Not only was the terrorist mastermind Mughniyeh no longer there to quarterback operations, but the group lacked the resources and capability to carry out a successful operation abroad. In light of the far tighter security environment now in place in the Western world since 9/11,

Hezbollah has also generally shied away from trying to carry out attacks in the West, opting instead to operate in places where security is still relatively lax and where the group has cells and supporters (of its own or belonging to its Iranian patron). Thus, attacks in places like Baku, Bangkok, and now Burgas. In Bulgaria, Hezbollah may have relied on Lebanese drug and other criminal organizations that have long provided funds to the group. A 2008 Bulgarian government commission concluded that profits from drug trafficking through the country supports Hezbollah and other militant groups. This was likely on the agenda when then Mossad chief Meir Dagan paid an official visit to Sofia in 2010 to meet with the Bulgarian Prime Minister.

These sorts of videos are truly creepy. Look at the size of this guy's backpack, by the way:

America's preeminent sportscaster, Bob Costas, who will once again be anchoring Olympic coverage for NBC, will protest the International Olympic Committee's insensitive decision to not mark the 40th anniversary of the slaughter of Israel's Olympic athletes with a moment of silence by having his own moment of silence:

At the July 27 Opening Ceremony from London, Costas plans to call out the IOC for denying Israel's request for a moment of silence acknowledging the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Games. On the 40th anniversary of Munich, it's a decision he finds "baffling." When the Israeli delegation enters the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium, Costas will stage his own protest: "I intend to note that the IOC denied the request," he says, modulating his voice as if he were on the air. "Many people find that denial more than puzzling but insensitive. Here's a minute of silence right now."

Well, Tablet, a Jewish magazine with which I was formerly involved (discerning Goldblog readers know that I didn't end-up moving the blog there, as was my plan a while back), has achieved greatness: It has brought together Commentary's John Podhoretz and the Nation's Katha Pollitt. How did it achieve this rare feat? By publishing a vicious attack on Holocaust survivors for surviving. No, I'm not kidding.

 It was Podhoretz who first brought to my attention to the article, which is ostensibly a review of "Breaking Bad" by a writer named Anna Breslaw. This is what John wrote: "(A)fter spending years calling out anti-Semitism committed primarily by paleoconservative publications and anti-Zionism on the part of liberal Jewish publications of a kind all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism, I decided it would be improper for me to be silent on something published by Tablet. It is, without question, the most disgusting piece of anti-Semitism I think I've ever read outside of the arrant lunacy of schizophrenic letter writers, and the fact that it was written by a Jew trumpeting her connection to the Holocaust only makes it all the more repugnant."

Pollitt, when she read the Tablet piece, tweeted: "Oh dear. I actually agree with @jpodhoretz about something: that ghastly Anna Breslaw piece in @tabletmag."

Just how ghastly is this ghastly piece? Podhoretz, being a refined sort, wouldn't post the relevant passages on his Commentary blog, but I have no problem doing so. Here are the thoughts of Anna Breslaw, brought to you by a Jewish magazine:

Since I was 12 I've had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father's parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror--visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you're not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like "triumph of the human spirit."

I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn't pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race--conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.

As one of the commenters on the piece wrote, "I can't imagine the pain of having a child or grandchild like this."

Breslaw clearly needs help. Tablet needs to ask itself why it would publish such a horror. It also needs to provide evidence to back-up Breslaw's insinuation that Elie Wiesel has manufactured incidents of betrayal. If Tablet can't do this, then it needs to apologize to Wiesel. While Tablet is at it, it should apologize to those victims of the Nazis who remain alive today -- those "race-conniving, indestructible, taking and taking" Jews of Breslaw's demented imagination. And no, this doesn't count.

Uh-oh. Run for the hills. Someone has discovered the pernicious role Camp Kinderland is playing in bringing about Communist rule in America:

A forthcoming report from the conservative organization Americans for Limited Government (ALG) details how President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) sent her children to a politically left-wing Jewish summer camp with Communist roots.

Obama nominated Erica Groshen to be the BLS commissioner in February, but this new report -- obtained by The Daily Caller and set to be released on Thursday -- reveals for the first time publicly that she sent her children to Camp Kinderland. The ALG report reveals how "Groshen and her husband are listed in the Kinderland Directory 2011-2012, which indicates that they sent children to the camp during the 1990s and 2000s."

"Camp Kinderland was founded in the 1923 as a place for the children of radical Jewish activists," the report continues. According to New York University, some of the camp's founders were "activists in the Communist Party," and all "were associated with the left wing of the Workermen's Circle."

"From 1930 the camp operated under the auspices of a branch of the International Workers Order [IWO]," NYU researchers add.

The Workmen's Circle! The most harmless organization in America! This is what they're worried about? You should have seen my Jewish summer camp, Camp Shomria, a Socialist Zionist outpost in the Catskills. Kinderland was for bourgeois pantywaists. We, on the other hand, almost succeeded in forcibly collectivising Grossinger's.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, you'll recall, was the organization Richard Nixon believed was overpopulated with Commie Jew-types. He became so obsessed with this, in fact, that he tasked an aide, Fred Malek, to count all the Jews in the bureau, some of whom were subsequently demoted. But it's hard to keep those Commie Jews down, apparently.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iranian-sponsored terror group Hezbollah, seems to be betting on the wrong horse, eulogizing the Syrian defense minister and his deputy, Bashar al-Assad's brother-in-law:

When Gaza had nothing to eat Syria sent missiles and food. Rajha and Shawkat (symbolize) the Syria which helped the resistance in Palestine. While other Arab regimes blocked (the transfer) of food and donations to Gaza, it was Syria that sent food and weapons to Gaza and took a chance. This is the Syria of Bashar Assad, this is the Syria of the shahid leaders. We denounce this blow which only serves the interests of the enemy."

That's what the Times of Israel is saying: That the Bulgarian attack was actually carried out by a suicide bomber, and not a bomb planted in the trunk of a bus, and that the bomber is understood to have been carrying a fake American passport:

Israeli rescue teams flown to Bulgaria began evacuating wounded from the resort town of Bourgas Thursday morning, as reports emerged that the deadly attack on a bus of tourists was carried out by a man with a fake American passport.

The death toll in the bombing on a bus of Israelis at the airport in Bourgas rose to eight in the early hours of Thursday as one of the seriously injured victims succumbed to their wounds. Six of the dead are Israeli.

Two victims remain in serious condition at a hospital in the capital of Sofia. The rest of the 34 wounded are in a local hospital or still at the airport in Bourgas waiting to be flown home by Israeli rescue teams.

On Thursday morning, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said the attack was likely carried out by a suicide bomber who likely detonated as he boarded the bus. It was previously thought the bomb had been in a suitcase placed on the bus.

The suicide bomber is one of the eight dead, officials said.

The suicide bomber was reportedly carrying an American passport and a driver's license from Michigan, both thought to be fake, the Sofia News Agency reported.

In security video, the Caucasian man is seen walking around the premises for at least an hour, dressed in sports attire, the agency reported.

If indeed it is the case, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleges, that Iran is behind the heinous murder of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria (and Iran, and its proxy Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, are the likeliest suspects, given their recent attempts to kill Israelis in half-a-dozen countries across the globe), then we've entered a new phase in the confrontation over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Already this month we've seen signs that this matter is moving toward confrontation; these signs include a parade of American officials coming to Israel to assure its leaders that they have the situation in hand, and demanding requesting in a firm manner that Israel take no rash steps against Iranian nuclear sites; and the movement into the Persian Gulf of an enormous fleet of American naval vessels, meant to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil flows, stays open in the event of an Israeli attack, or an Iranian provocation, or some unforeseen crisis.

Iran has been waging war, rhetorical and actual, against Israel, and Jews, for at least 20 years, and is the prime sponsor of anti-Israel terror attacks, including the most notorious Iran-sponsored attack of all, the one that took place 18 years ago today, in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were murdered at a Jewish community center. Of course, Israel has responded to the eliminationist anti-Israel program of the Iranian regime by battling Hezbollah, assassinating several of its leaders, assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, and otherwise sabotaging the nuclear program whenever possible. But in this most recent phase of the confrontation -- the last two years or so, when Israel ramped up its campaign to get Tehran to stop its nuclear program -- Iran has been fairly inactive in the successfully-murdering-Jews department.

This is what may have changed earlier today. Prime Minister Netanyahu will be under extraordinary political pressure to retaliate in some serious way, and he will be under more pressure from himself than ever to deal with a regime he believes seeks the annihilation of six million Jews.  As Amos Harel put it in Haaretz yesterday, the nuclear clock seems to be ticking more quickly than ever, and the "the key question will be whether...Netanyahu can fulfill his ideological and historical commitment to prevent what he describes as a potential second Holocaust."

I doubt Netanyahu will retaliate for the Bulgaria bombing by launching an immediate attack on Iran's nuclear sites. But there is a good chance he will launch attacks on Hezbollah targets and individuals, and possibly certain Iranian targets as well, and this sort of back-and-forth can only escalate tensions further, which could only bring us closer to an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran.

Which, of course, is an enormous challenge for President Obama, who can't seem to convince the Israeli leadership that he will deal with the Iranian nuclear program militarily, if need be. Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, is traveling to Israel later this month, to meet with Netanyahu and the defense minister, Ehud Barak. He certainly won't be the last American official to visit before November.