Azadeh Moaveni writes about how Iranians are increasingly disenchanted with the failed policies of their current regime and are generally well-disposed to the United States. That said, “Starting in about 2005, Iranians’ historic esteem for the United States gave way to a deep ambivalence that is only now ending.” It seems to me that the ideal way for us to take advantage of this situation is for the United States to elect a president who thinks it’s funny to joke about launching an unprovoked war on Iran, and who deems all efforts at diplomacy aimed at improving U.S.-Iranian relations as tantamount to appeasement.

People love being threatened with air strikes, there’s no more endearing way for a nation to behave on the world stage than to threaten them frequently — ideally in a light-hearted manner that involves a Beach Boys reference.

Clark Hoyt, New York Times public editor, has a devastating rebuttal to the NYT‘s Edward Luttwak op-ed on Barack Obama being a Muslim apostate:

I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong. [...] Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. [...] Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable [...] All the scholars argued that Luttwak had a rigid, simplistic view of Islam that failed to take into account its many strains and the subtleties of its religious law, which is separate from the secular laws in almost all Islamic nations.

As a blogger, I’m hardly in a position to dispute Luttwak’s right to opine on matters about which he knows nothing. But if I were the editor of an op-ed page and I were interested in publishing a provocative opinion piece grounded in an interpretation of Islamic law, I would try to get a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence to write it. But of course if I were the editor of an op-ed page, I would think that one of my goals was to publish articles that inform, rather than mislead, my audience. The actual op-ed editors at the NYT and Washington Post have, however, made it abundantly clear over the years that they see misleading their audience as fine — hence men like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer get hired as columnists.

It does, however, make you wonder what these institutions are for. As means of acquiring information, they’re useless — the editors are indifferent to whether the author’s purpose is to inform or to mislead. As entertainment, they’re not very entertaining — even a terrible movie like Crystal Skull is more fun than an op-ed column. Are they important profit centers for the failing businesses in which they’re embedded? That seems unlikely.

The defense department is recruiting thousands of new machines for a surge of robots (really). Robert Farley notes that these measures mostly seem “shift the cost of war from the blood side of the ledger to the treasure side.” In the short run, this makes questionable military ventures much more sustainable in the United States since we’re a rich country and the public’s aversion to taxes doesn’t extend to an aversion to spending, and the national elite’s aversion to deficit spending doesn’t extend to defense spending.

If Blue Dogs and Concord Coalition types started applying normal budgetary scrutiny to military stuff, it’s hard to see this working. But they don’t, so it does. It makes me sad to think how much better off we’d be today if the past five years’ worth of $100-$200 billion emergency appropriations had been spent on building a clean, economically productive 21st century transportation infrastructure rather than on Iraq. One important political question going forward is whether we’ll continue to treat war spending in Iraq as some “doesn’t count” black hole or whether the costs of an indefinite engagement there will actually get weighed against alternative uses of our resources.

John McCain can’t tell Sudan from Somalia but none dare point out that when it comes to foreign policy he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because to point this out would be to disrespect his military service.