Krauthammer said that President Obama should have ramped up rhetoric against Iran during the brutal crackdown on the Green Movement — the distinctly non-violent protest movement born out of Mir Hossien Moussavi’s failed 2009 presidential campaign. And when O’Reilly asked what else Obama could have done, Krauthammer said he should have armed the protesters and order a covert war against Iran:

O’REILLY: But what else could he have done except rhetoric?

KRAUTHAMMER: Weaponry — he could have done a lot of things. Rhetoric is one thing and not to support the legitimacy of the regime. Clandestine operations. Why do we have $50 billion in secret operations in the CIA if not for an opportunity like this? He was hands off. He did nothing and we lost one of the great opportunities in history.

Watch the video:

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his ideological comrades have made President Obama’s reaction to the 2009 post-election Iranian government crackdown on Green Movement demonstrators a centerpiece of their criticisms. Romney’s campaign issue page for Iran says Obama “refrained from supporting the nascent Green Movement.” In a Washington Post op-ed, Romney wrote that he would “speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents who are fighting for their freedom.”

In reality, Obama didn’t, as Krauthammer put it, “support the legitimacy of the [Iranian] regime.” Daniel Larison has pointed out that, when failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the same charge, that unlike many world governments, Obama never recognized the elections. Furthermore, Obama condemned the abuses against demonstrators that June.

But more to the point, one hopes that Romney does not conflate symbolic “fighting” for freedom with literal fighting. Unlike in Syria and Libya, the Green Movement in Iran never took up arms. As Ardeshir Amirarjmand, a top adviser to Moussavi now in exile in France, told an audience at MIT last year, “We do not have any other choice than a nonviolent path toward democracy.” Or, as University of Toronto professor Ramin Jahanbegloo put it, “The Green Movement faces a troubling situation, but it is banking on its strategy of nonviolence as moral capital.” Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi — who, like Iranian civil society as a whole, opposes attacking Iran — told ThinkProgress in 2010 that she disagreed with critics who said that Obama should have spoken more forcefully in support of the Green movement in June 2009.

Krauthammer worries that Obama is not doing enough to support Iran’s democracy movement. But it’s perfectly clear that the Green Movement doesn’t want the kind of support — weapons and covert war — that Krauthammer is offering.

Last week, the New York Times published a provocative  letter in its weekly “Invitation to a Dialogue,” and, as usual, invited comments to be published in its Sunday Review.

The letter, by Robert J. Lifton, critiqued popular Harvard Professor Steven Pinker’s recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.  Lifton, a renowned psychologist who has written about the human responses to the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Vietnam, questioned Pinker’s optimism that the world is getting less violent. His opinions were compelling, concluding:

There is a terrible paradox here. Dr. Pinker and others may be quite right in claiming that for most people alive today, life is less violent than it has been in previous centuries. But never have human beings been in as much danger of destroying ourselves collectively, of endangering the future of our species.

We are not helpless about our fate. There could not be a more crucial moment to draw upon our gradual taming of individual violence, along with our growing awareness of the grotesque consequences of numbed technological violence, to achieve lasting forms of what can be called peace.

I was worried that no one would take discussion to an even broader level, in the context of the violent world we are steadily creating, and the warning signs the world is ignoring. His letter sent me to the book, which, although erudite and compelling, includes within its 696 pages only four dismissive paragraphs (pp. 375-377) on whether climate change could threaten international security.

Pinker looks only at the potential for armed conflict among poor countries for resources, and concludes, “maybe so, maybe not.” That compelled me to send in a response to the piece:

Robert Jay Lifton is right to redefine violence and peace. Corporations and governments collaborating in plunder will make our planet increasingly unlivable, unleashing violence on an unimaginable scale. Business-as-usual treats our atmosphere as a garbage dump, altering our climate and  disrupting nature. Within our lifetimes, warming will spread epidemics and diseases to insects, birds, and animals, and through them slaughtering countless people. Extreme weather, from dust storms to floods, will spark desperate responses…. Instead of reassurances about human progress, we need wake up calls to avert species suicide.

I perfectly understand that my submission — surely one of hundreds or thousands the Times received — was not accepted. But I was shocked that in the responses that were published, the subject of global climate change’s impact never came up!

Lifton’s response to these letters never mentioned the environment, but he at least pointed to the power relationships that impede change:

I’m also in full agreement with Dr. Pinker and the other letter writers about our capacity to take constructive steps to diminish the dangers we face. Indeed, much protest over the years has sought to do that, whether as 1960s and 1980s opposition to war and weaponry or today’s Occupy movement. We would do well to channel more of this protest into combating all violence, but especially the numbed technological variety.

Pinker’s point of view was welcomed by a few deniers. The only other critique I’ve seen was in the Times Book Review last October by bioethicist Peter Singer, “Is Violence History?” which concluded fittingly:

If he had been able to see, before his book went to press, a study published in Nature as recently as August of this year, he might have been less sanguine about maintaining peace despite widespread climate change. Solomon Hsiang and colleagues at Columbia University used data from the past half-century to show that in tropical regions, the risk of a new civil conflict doubles during El Nino years (when temperatures are hotter than usual and there is less rainfall). If that finding is correct, then a warming world could mean the end of the relatively peaceful era in which we are now living.

I guess this is one more time when the editors at The Times made their selections with blinders on.

Felix Kramer is a fierce climate hawk and founder of the California Cars Initiative.

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• Veterans Day, 2030

So, caveat! I am almost but not entirely caught up on the first season of Downton Abbey, so I am relying a little bit on Wikipedia for backstory here. I will be caught up by next week, but for now, please be merciful.

I really am struck by the atmosphere of creative destruction in this episode, the way the war clarifies and distills the characters priorities. I agree with critics who say that Downton Abbey is predictable, more a product of its genre than a subversion of it. But it’s the rare thing that both can be qualified that way and that is executed so strongly that it’s a bracing reminder of why these cliches exist and are powerful. Even when I can see something coming from a mile away, whether it’s a hand injured in the war, a maid’s disappointment or a nobleman’s wrongfooting, it still lands like a blow to the chest. And there are enough surprises that are true to character that there’s fresh air in it.

The walls between the upstairs and the downstairs were already crumbling in the first season, whether in Lord Grantham’s tie to Bates or Carson’s confession to Lady Mary that “even a butler has his favorites” after he reassures her that her life isn’t over yet. But the war’s brought them down in force, with Isobel as something of an intermediary. First, there’s Sybil, who, after realizing bitterly that “Sometimes it feels as if all the men I ever danced with are dead,” decides she wants to try nursing, and by extension, learn how to be a functional woman rather than an ornament of the aristocracy. “Have you ever made your own bed, for example? Or scrubbed a floor?” Isobel asks her gently. The scenes of Mrs. Patmore and Daisy trying to teach her how to do the simplest tasks, including filling a kettle without drenching herself, are kind, revealing Sybil’s foibles but helping her work beyond them. It’s fascinating to see Violet and Lady Grantham’s response to her desire. Violet, surprisingly, sides with Isobel, insisting that “You can’t pretend it’s not respectable when every day we’re treated to pictures of queens and princesses in a Red Cross uniform.” And Lady Grantham’s concern for Sybil ultimately undoes her objections: her daughter’s emotional well-being trumps her concerns with propriety. “I was worried about Lady Sibyl. But I’m not worried anymore,” she tells the butler. “Carson, the cake will be a surprise whether you approve of it or not, so please don’t give it away.”

Sybil’s road is easier than Lord Grantham’s in this episode. Upon finding out that Bates is leaving abruptly (after being blackmailed by his wife, who is threatening to expose Lady Mary), he’s injured, saying “I thought we were friends. I thought we’d crossed the great divide successfully.” But that sense isn’t informed by real work on his part to understand who Bates is. Sybil’s commitment to learning, to becoming a different kind of person, is vastly different than her father’s fall into misunderstanding. It’ll be fascinating to see if the war forces Lord Grantham to become a different kind of man, or even if he can, after learning he isn’t exactly being welcomed back into the ranks. “Today has shown me that I am not only a worthless man but a bad-tempered and ungrateful one,” he confesses to his wife. But will he live with that knowledge or use it as the foundation for a very different self?

Downstairs, things are more complicated. Carson is doing his best to hold on to old ways, not only expressing concern for Sybil’s future as a nurse, but keeping to the spit and polish because “Keeping up standards is the only way to show the Germans that they cannot win.” And everyone’s on edge over Ethel Parks, the new maid who’s replaced Gwen, who is not particularly shy about speaking aloud the dangerous desires of the heart. “I want the best and I’m not afraid to admit it,” she tells her colleagues. “At the end, I want to be more than just a servant.” It’s a dangerous thing to admit, and some of the other servants punish her for it. It’s not so much that the servants don’t have dreams, but to articulate them is to risk terrible disappointment.

Then, there are the trenches, where everyone’s uniforms are the same color. Courting injury to get sent home isn’t surprising, given the themes of cowardice and bravery that stream through the episode. But that flame in the darkness, the wait, the worry that it might be worse not to be shot than to be maimed were lovely and terrifying.

But I think the counterfactual question that stood out at me most when reading the book is what it would have meant if Schulz or Peanuts had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Michaelis writes in particular about Snoopy. In one strip, “Snoopy, invited to make a distinguished-grad speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, finds himself caught up in a riot protesting the drafting of dogs to serve in Vietnam…Snoopy, at the podium, his hit with a dog dish, then teargassed.” He writes “One of the few ‘enemies’ that Americans could agree on in those years was the Red Baron…From 1966 to 1969, Snoopy could be found pursuing—or being pursued by—the Red Baron wherever American explained itself to itself.”

The answer as to why Schulz didn’t come out against the war lies in this observation: “His opinions on subjects ranging from the miniskirt to the sexualizations of Peanuts were surprisingly tolerant, indeed hospitable.” You don’t get to be a national sage without being largely agreeable. But that quality also denies you your ability to speak forcefully and decisively on divisive issues without alienating somebody. It’s the same thing as perpetual reelection to Congress: if staying the nation’s tolerant Grandpa, or staying a member of the House becomes more important than anything you actually do with the position, you’ve got to start wondering what the point is.

So I’m pretty excited to hear that he’s going to direct one of the most important sequences in the next season of Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s novel A Clash of Kings, a battle in which one side manages to trap the other. Marshall did a very nice job of communicating the panic of both a plan gone wrong and reacting to a plan gone horribly wrong in a (relatively) confined space, and so I’m excited to see what he’ll do with the larger dynamics of that scene.

And more importantly, it strikes me that Marshall’s a good fit for Martin’s material, which makes war out to be incredibly ugly. Marshall’s one of the few directors who, like Zack Snyder, has an extremely distinct visual style. But unlike Snyder, who tends to make things look burnished and as a result, creates some emotional distance between viewers and events, Marshall’s good at a kind of hyperclarity that brings events closer. This battle in Martin’s novel is literally hell. If Marshall can do on a small screen what he did on the big one, he’ll make that fear and cognitive shutdown even more direct.

It’s odd to see Colin Meloy and company old enough to credibly be the middle-aged parents on the sidelines at a school event, when just five years ago the members of the band were young enough to play high school kids at the bleeding edge of that range where people in their 20s are allowed to play high school students in exchange for our willingness to pretend it’s not ridiculous. I think I might like the video for “Sixteen Military Wives” a bit more, if only because I’m susceptible to Rushmore allusions, and because there’s something useful in the pointedness of the blame the song assigns, even if it is a little heavy-handed:

Certainly, its humor is more direct that the Vogue-photoshoot mock-battle the band staged earlier in the year with the video for “This Is Why We Fight,” which, unusually for the Decemberists, cut away from the bloodshed:

But then, the band’s always been more direct about intimate violence than geopolitical conflict: