Generals and their Strategies: Patton and Napoleon on the Koran

Today, on my new Tumblr (samirchopra.tumblr.com) I posted two quotes on the Koran (or the Quran, take your pick). The first, by George S. Patton:

Just finished reading the Koran—a good book and interesting. (George S. Patton Jr., War As I Knew It, Bantam Books, 1981, page 5. War Diary for North Africa landings ‘Operation Torch’, 2nd November 1942)

Patton wrote these lines on board the USS Augusta as the Western Task Force headed for landings on Morocco to enter into battle with French Vichy Forces. (Operation Torch was an attack on French North Africa, ostensibly to remove  Axis forces from North Africa, improve Allied naval control of the Mediterranean and aid in the preparation, hopefully, of an invasion of Southern Europe in 1943.) He appears to have read the Koran as part of a self-imposed ‘backgrounder’ in Morocco’s history and culture. In his diary entries that follow, Patton keeps up a stream of commentary on Morocco’s culture and institutions, but shows little evidence of applying any particular principles gleaned from the Koran. There is, however, a note of a conversation with the Sultan of Morocco–during a meeting held after the surrender of Vichy forces–in which Patton’s reading of Koran might have helped:

When the initial conversation had terminated, he informed me that, since we were in Mohammedan country, he hoped the American soldier would show proper respect for Mohammedan institutions. I told him that such an order had been issued in forceful language prior to our departure from the United States and would be enforced. I further stated that since in all armies, including the American Army, there might be some foolish persons, I hoped that he would report to me any incidents of sacrilege which some individual soldier might commit.

Patton’s reading of the Koran then, appears to be a self-edificatory strategy: to equip himself with knowledge that would aid him in an understanding of a country, whose population was almost entirely Muslim, and which he would soon administer as a military governor.

The second quote is from Napoleon Bonaparte:

I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Quran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness. (Letter to Sheikh El-Messiri, (28 August 1798); published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol.4, No. 3148, p. 420)

Napoleon being Napoleon, this drawing upon, and citing of the Koran, is more interesting. It foreshadows Napoleon’s concordat with the Catholic Church in 1801, which reinstated most of the Church’s civil status in France, his assembling the Jewish Grand Sanhedrin in 1806 and his establishing Judaism as one of the official religions of post-revolutionary France in 1807.  For Napoleon, religion was yet another arrow in his quiver, one that would aid in efficient rule. For a man who so easily moved from the military to the political and back again, this stocking of his arsenal would have been the proverbial no-brainer: a good general always calls upon all available resources in winning a battle or waging a protracted campaign.

‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together

One way to ‘read’ Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master is as an enormously ambitious, technically brilliant cinematic riff on Ron Hubbard and Scientology, on a time fertile for cults and messianic healing: post-WWII America, when broken men–post-traumatic stress disorder is as old as war–drifted back home, and were, just as many other Americans, looking for meaning and succor in a world that, for some six years or so, seemed to have gone collectively mad.

In this reading, Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffmann) and Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) are paradigmatic representatives of these two components of America: the healers and their patients. Their lives intertwine, they take from, and give to, each other, and then, they carry on, bearing the impress of each other’s presence in their lives. Dodd and his Cause serve as a showcase for many of the curious ironies of cult-based healing: that it may introduce greater dangers into the lives of those it claims to mend and repair, that the healers seem as much in need of cures as those they lay their hands on, that in healing the world, they first corrupt and disillusion those closest to them, that nowhere else is enlightenment as murky as in the words and actions of those who claim to pursue truth and eternal being beneath the superficial appearance of endlessly becoming things. (Given these ironies, it is no surprise that Dodd’s persona includes a volatile temper and a fondness for foul cocktails.)

But the story of Lancaster Dodd and the Cause is not just about irony, not just about ostensibly manipulative, dishonest, self-aggrandizing cults. It is also about story-telling and memory, about how we seek the key to the present and future in the past, how therapeutic interventions of many different stripes–sometimes art, sometimes psychoanalysis–converge on narratives and imagination. Dodd puts his patients on a couch (conjuring up visions of Viennese chambers) and invites them to travel back in time to seek clues to unlocking the mysteries of their perplexities; these performances are, unsurprisingly, subject to skepticism from stranger and family alike. But Freddie Quell’s life and his treatment show us that in fact, these past lives may not lie as far back as the skeptics imagine. For our  personas are always a sensitive and delicate balancing of the many lives that make them up. The coherent self we present–if we are lucky and skilled enough to do so–is an acutely controlled, finely tensed, dynamic equilibrium of these. Thanks to his traumatic childhood, a broken heart and an estranged sweetheart, a long, bloody war, sexual frustration, and alcoholism, Freddie has come undone; the Cause can perhaps, by making him revisit and reinterpret these sites of disruption, make him cohere again. The Cause can also, as Anderson sometimes seems to suggest, add more incoherence.

If in the end, ‘The Master’ is perplexing for some, it is because of the usual reasons: there are no straightforward resolutions, no neat endings. But in doing so, it might also pose the very sense-making challenge that confronts its central characters: of imposing structure on a series of striking, sometimes shocking, always affecting images and experiences.

Respecting the President and ‘The Ideology of Kingship’

In reporting on the second presidential debate, Charles Blow writes:

There is a fine line between feistiness and testiness. Romney has never negotiated that line well in debates and last night he fell over it again. At one point he scolded the president — the president of the United States! — “you’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.”

Regardless of how it may have felt in the hall and how his base may have received his abrasive behavior, to most others watching it was déclassé and indecorous. When you’re challenging a sitting president for his job, you have to respect the office, even if you don’t respect the man.

So Blow feels the need to remind us, in a tone of reverential, devotional awe: ‘the president of the united states!’  Is he hoping to make us fall on our knees? This is the president, the unitary executive, the person put in place to ensure a republic which would otherwise do just fine with a legislative branch also possesses an entity capable of making snap decisions. Why, then, the need for such excessive deference?

Blow is not alone in these constant provisions of reminders to respect and be suitably awed by the president and his office. The White House, the presidential galas, the gun salutes; these are archaic expressions of monarchical times gone by. But the president is a political leader; he has arisen from conflict; he presides over conflict. It’s acceptable to be in conflict with him and his office. The president can be disagreed with, he can be debated; he needs to explain himself and his actions like anyone else.  Disagreements with the president need not be confined to print, they can be verbal too. And when they are verbal, they can sound edgy (like most disagreements between adults are). ‘Déclassé and indecorous’? Dunno. Politics isn’t really the space for decorum.

This semester the readings for my Political Philosophy class–centered on the French, American and Haitian revolutions–include Michael Walzer‘s Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI. Walzer’s introductory essay includes a section on ‘The Ideology of Kingship.’ More than one student has noticed the parallels between the components of that view of kings and the powers claimed by our modern executive branch of government. They have then gone on to draw uncomfortable parallels between the ‘inviolability’ of the king that arises from such an ideology and the legal immunity claimed by modern-day presidents. (They have noticed too, that a central revolutionary claim was equality before the law, one that seems to have been forgotten in the rush to forgive and forget the war criminals of the previous administration.) The inviolability of the king spoken of in Walzer’s essay might narrowly be interpreted as a a legal one but it easily becomes one of deference too: do not disagree with the king; do not talk back; speak only when spoken to; do not interrupt the king.

Among the other revolutionary documents we have read is Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense, which includes the following line:

The nearer any government approaches to a republic, the less business there is for a king.

‘Nuff said.

It’s Fall: Time to Bash the Yankees

There are many fall-time rituals: road-trips to view colorful foliage, pumpkin sculpture and surgery, undressing for Halloween, griping endlessly about the wet and gloomy weather in the North-East, dreading the setting forward of the clocks as Daylight Savings Time runs out, going back to school and college, football watching on Sundays (and Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays). If you are a New York Yankees fan, there is another set of fall rituals to anticipate and respond to: the disappointment or elation associated with the baseball post-season, reading speculation about Yankees personnel moves, written by New York journalists before the post-season has ended, and lastly, most inevitably, death and taxes be damned, either schadenfreude or derision, emanating from non-fans of the Yankees, directed at the Yankees for an early post-season exit, perhaps in the American League Division Series, the American League Championship Series, or even better, the World Series, or alternatively, mockery at the Yankees for having ‘bought another title’ and leased out the Death Star for yet another year.

This year, the Yankees are down 0-3 in the American League Championship Series. Without exaggeration, it may be said the only reason they are alive is because, last night, baseball’s managers, in a fit of excessive caution, decided to postpone Game Four even though it had not started raining. Meanwhile, Yankees-detractors are already gleefully anticipating the fall of the Evil Witch (or Empire, take your pick), and New York journalists have started their favorite pastime of Cashman-advising and Cashman-secondguessing. (One of the favorite themes in this activity, besides bemoaning trades and acquisitions, is pointing out how well former Yankees are doing against the Yankees. Imagine that! A professional player went to work elsewhere in the same league and is now doing well against the Yankees. Mindblowing. Surely, he should obligingly do badly once he leaves the Yankees?)

Come fall, the Yankees are not so much a sports team as a rather obliging data set for hypothesis confirmation: the Yankees are always proving something, always providing positive data for one kind of sports science thesis or the other. Thus: the Yankees are proof that you can ‘buy’ titles because, er, they can hire, based on major league baseball’s market rates, the league’s ‘best’ players. Or: the Yankees are proof that money cannot buy titles. Perhaps those supposedly ‘best’ players weren’t the ‘best’ players? Who knows, sometimes market price indicators aren’t accurate. (By way of example, here is a representative sample, faithfully trotted out, on cue, with metronomic regularity, supposedly by a human, but its template-like format seems to suggest a blog-comment issuing bot.)

Anti-Yankee fervor is most similar, in its bare details, to the passion that animates those who claim their devotion to college sports is based on its steadfast commitment to a pristine amateurism. That comparison should provide us a clue to resolving the mystery of how the same team manages, every year, to prove two radically dissimilar hypotheses about professional sports. Michael Novak suggested sports were like religions in the kind of romantic fervor they elicited from their adherents. But ‘romantic fervor’ is permeated with a peculiar irrationality, as is religious discourse and disputation.

The sound you hear all around you isn’t just that of rustling leaves; it’s also the faithful dropping to their knees.

Flippin’ Channels to the Debate and Stayin’ Right There

A few days ago, I posted a note here saying I would not deign to pay attention to the debates. Last night, after a dinner date with my Brooklyn College colleague, Corey Robin, during the course of which I remarked, ‘Debates are to you what sports are to me’, I returned home, intending to watch the New York Yankees take on the Detroit Tigers in Game Three of the American League Championship Series. My intentions were honorable; some school work required my attention, so the plan was to sit on the couch with my laptop on, well, my lap’s top, and watch the boys of summer play in the fall while I did some distracted work.

Things didn’t quite go as planned. Like most afflicted by ‘Net distraction, I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and on an instinctive, nervous, automatic reflex, I checked the twin feeds issuing from those pathways to perdition. Soon enough, there was a stream of chatter and commentary, witty, caustic, and sometimes unhinged–issuing forth. I checked it out but stuck to the baseball. Unfortunately, there are innings breaks in baseball, taken up by commercials, and I’d sooner poke my eyes out with a tuning fork than sit through those. So I switched channels to the debate, intending to switch back when the game resumes.

It didn’t quite go that way. For the rest of the night, I stayed stuck on the debate. In part, this was because the Yankees were sucking royally. They seem destined to be swept by the Tigers in this series, and with their bats as silent as ever, there seemed little chance that I would see anything other than whiff and whimper. But I’d also succumbed to the temptation to throw in a whole bunch of silly two-penny contributions to the Twitter and Facebook ticker-tapes. My first missive from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious was to note the evasiveness of Obama’s reply to a question about the glass ceiling in the workplace. Thereafter, it went steadily downhill, as one snarky remark followed another.

The morning after, it still feels pretty depressing. (Yes, I feel dirty!) I might have ‘paid attention’ to the debate, but it seems all I did was use it as material for low comedy. And this use was prompted by pretty much the same considerations that had caused me to disdain them earlier; there really wasn’t any substantive ‘debate’ in them. Not that there could have been, given the format and the staging, and the incorrigible proclivity of candidates to indulge in folksy yarn-spinning and irrelevant digressions in their time-limited responses to questions. If there is any comfort in all of this, it might be that I wasn’t the only one using the debate as fodder for spinning off goofiness.

There shouldn’t be anything inherently disquieting about the spectacle of a supposed cornerstone of democracy–the discussion and debate of political difference–used for such visible ridicule. Satire and parody are important components of politics. But still, the suspicion lurks: perhaps such levity would not be on display if the debate offered more than mere vapidity.

PS: The Yankees lost.

A Nerdy Break-Up: Leaving the Academic Life

In the past few weeks I have had several conversations–electronic and face-to-face–with folks–friends and acquaintances–that have walked away from academic careers. Though I do not have numbers to back this up, it seems such departures have become increasingly common in the modern academy. The reasons have been varied: bad job markets (some things never change; in my first two years of job hunting, I sent out one hundred and fourteen applications, received precisely zero interview calls, and almost quit right then and there), a reluctance to live in particular locales or more generally, pursue an endlessly nomadic existence, income, and sometimes, frustration with work environments (i.e., the whole package: troubles with publishing, professional recognition and acceptance etc.)

In each case, my interlocutors have expressed considerable angst about their decision: sometimes they miss the teaching and their extended personal contact with their students, sometimes they wonder about their intellectual self-worth (Does this prove that I really was a poser all long, and if so, should I have gotten out earlier?), and sometimes they worry about their supposed lack of ‘backbone’ (Should have I stayed and ‘toughed it out’?). But in each case too, I sensed a contentment at a difficult decision finally made. This contentment has come about for different reasons: a better salary, a more rewarding work environment, and lowered levels of stress being among the most prominent.

Still, their cognitive dissonance about their decision is not insignificant. Change is difficult; deviation from a life path that required so much investment of energy, time and emotion even more so. Perhaps, for the budding academic, this dissonance is even more intense, because of the intense identification with the identity of the academic.  And worries about intellectual self-worth are endemic among academics; rare is the academic who is able to fully overcome insecurities in this domain (and indeed, it contributes to some of the worst aspects of posturing at fora such as conferences, seminars, meetings, job interviews etc).

But perhaps the most insidious component of the dissonance generated by the decision to leave academia is the worry that this decision shows a lack of resilience. How is one to console oneself that the decision made was the right one, that it did not mean a walking away from a long-held dream, one perhaps too hastily made, that in doing so, one did not betray oneself? Slogans like ‘obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal’ seem to militate against such a decision: the right thing to do is to hang in there, grimly determined. Because if you do ‘cop out,’ then not only do you find out that you didn’t have the bottle, you find out in fact, you didn’t really want it enough, and might as well not have wasted your time in taking so long to find out. So goes the gruesome indictment.

It isn’t a coincidence these worries are almost identical to those entertained by participants in an extended  burial of a long-standing romantic relationship. That shouldn’t be surprising; making the painful decision to leave the academic life, for some, might not just mean changing professions, it can mean a fundamental recasting of one’s self-conceptions. Nothing quite does that like the old-fashioned break-up.

Bridging Partisan Divides with Patriotism? No Thanks.

Have you, dear reader, seen the latest cinematic masterpiece making the rounds of YouTube channels, ‘Americans, Fuck Yeah‘? (I lie ever so slightly; the actual title is just ‘Americans’.) Directed by James Stafford and starring musical maestro Kid Rock and actor and director Sean Penn, it aims to bring Americans together, to bridge partisan divides, to heal rancor in these increasingly divisive times. Roughly: no matter if you think Dick Cheney is a bloviating war criminal, Rush Limbaugh is an idiotic windbag, or Paul Ryan is full of bean-induced flatulence, you are still an American, and you can do better than that. (I haven’t bothered to list insults from the other end of the political spectrum.) Namely, you can put down your political cudgels to embrace The Political Other.

Unfortunately Stafford’s Sermon loses considerable steam thanks to the manner of its execution. There are, to begin with, some rather mundane problems having to do with hokey acting and the unbearable preachiness of it all, nowhere better captured than in the two moments of supposed enlightenment that lead to political reconciliation: the lecture by the–I think–Caribbean waitress, who, in a terrible accent, reminds the two Americans of just how good they have it, and the televised reminder of a war that is claiming the lives of brave American troops.

But there is a more fundamental problem with this pulpit-pounding call to hit the political middle. Far more problematic than this video’s irredeemable sappiness, its invocation of the quiescence-preaching black female immigrant, is its basic premise: political conflict is a bad thing, one to be avoided, one that can be smoothed over. Unfortunately, politics is conflict; to be a political animal is to engage in disputation. There is an irreducible conflict at its core; banal smoothing over is nothing more than acceptance of the status quo. Which status quo? In Stafford’s Sermon, the one in which American troops go off to fight endless wars overseas. Thus: put aside your worries, swap NASCAR and ‘PETA Rocks!’ t-shirts, raise a toast to freedom, and keep sending troops overseas, those that have volunteered from the ranks of this country’s dispossessed, to die.

Political subjects, political participants of any ilk, should be wary about messages urging them to drop the fighting and come together. Those who claim they are apolitical and disdain political stances are full of it; for their stance is a political one too. Invariably, such a coming together can only take place on some other patch of political ground. There is no neutral ground in politics; whatever one must use to rest on in this turbulent ocean of conflict is a political raft. ‘Come together for the sake of the nation’ is a political appeal too, one that appeals to a very particularly framed national  allegiance and patriotism. Stafford’s message is decidedly political; it comes down on one side, and one alone, of a live debate. Stafford isn’t splitting the difference; he is an ideologue himself. His political rafts are built out of unquestioning patriotism and subscriptions to militarism. No thanks.

The Extravagant, Space-Time Distorting Business of Time Cleaning

This morning Jason Read of the University of Southern Maine posted the following photograph on his Facebook page  (due to Tom McGlynn, to whom I owe thanks for letting me reproduce it here).

Jason added:

Just looking at it makes me want to write a bad science fiction novel about the unglamorous, dangerous, and low-paying job of time cleaners.

I look forward to Jason’s novel, which I doubt will be bad. In the meantime, I thought I would put down some very brief,  necessarily loose, remarks that perhaps Jason can draw on as he gets to work on his magnum opus. (Incidentally, I should say I disagree the work of time cleaners will be ‘unglamorous, dangerous and low-paying.’ Au contraire, it will be extremely lucrative, high-end, boutique work. There will be some dangers involved, as ruptures of the space-time fabric tend to have mysterious side-effects, but that is precisely why time cleaner clients will pay top dollar rates. I suspect there will be a booming insurance industry associated with it; as usual, Lloyds will gain first mover status in this new market quite quickly.)

What would a time cleaner do? Well, if time is understood as an ordering of events, then perhaps a time cleaner would be in charge of cleaning up this ordering by removing events altogether, reordering events, and inserting new ones. The possibilities are interestingly different, each with peculiarly different consequences. The client could say something along the following lines, ‘Dear time cleaner, I wish to have  my timeline cleaned up. Would you please delete event #214, place event #345 before event #234, not after, and can you insert a new event between #434 and #435 and renumber and reorder accordingly?’. The time cleaner would make the appropriate adjustments to the space-time fabric and then, if the technology is sophisticated enough, invite the client for a trial run before submitting the final version for use. It might be that event deletion, insertion and reordering is a destructive act, thus making trial runs impossible, and consequently rendering these procedures even more expensive. (The associated premiums for catastrophic errors would accordingly skyrocket.)

There is a problem with this picture, of course. My language suggests the client is enduring through external events distinct from the client. This doesn’t seem quite right, especially when you consider the client is enmeshed and implicated in those events. If a client is an extended space-time worm, the task of the time cleaner becomes more interesting: a kind of temporal cosmetic surgeon if you will, one responsible for artfully cleaning and concealing blemishes and imperfections in particular spatiotemporal co-ordinates. The client would check in at the time cleaning clinic, sign the appropriate disclaimers and then subject itself to the time cleaner’s scalpel.

There are some fascinating interactions that remain to be explored between the work of the time cleaner and that of the memory cleaner (the kind, for instance, shown to run rampant in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Having subjected one’s space-time worm to the time-cleaner would we be left with two memories? This might require calling in the services of the memory cleaners, or perhaps we could look forward to this as an enjoyable side-effect of the time cleaning. The possibilities are intriguing.

In any case, I welcome further speculative exploration of the time cleaner’s work.

Mary McCarthy on Madame Bovary as Neurotic

Among the most famous descriptions of Emma Bovary are Mary McCarthy‘s cutting lines:

[She] is a very ordinary middle-class woman, with banal expectations of life and an urge to dominate her surroundings. Her character is remarkable only for an unusual deficiency of natural feeling.

Ouch.

But what follows these lines is a perhaps more interesting set of observations:

Emma is trite; what happens to her is trite.  Her story does not hold a single surprise for the reader, who can say at every stage, ‘I felt it coming.’ Her end is inevitable, but not as a classic doom, which is perceived as inexorable only when it is complete. It is inevitable because it is ordinary. Anyone could have prophesied what would become of Emma–her mother-in-law for instance. It did not need a Tiresias. If you compare her story with that of Anna Karenina, you are aware of the pathos of Emma’s. Anna is never pathetic; she is tragic, and what happens to her, up to the very end, is always surprising, for real passions and moral strivings are at work, which have the power of ‘making it new.’ In this her story is distinct from an ordinary society scandal of the period. Nor could any ordinary society prophet have forecast Anna’s fate. ‘He will get tired her and leave her,’ they would have said of Vronsky. He did not. But Rodolphe could have been counted on to drop Emma, and Leon to grow frightened of her and bored.

Where destiny is no more than average probability, it appears inescapable in a particularly depressing way. This is because any element in it can be replaced by a substitute without changing the outcome; e.g., if Rodolphe had not materialized, Emma would have found someone else. But if Anna had not met Vronsky on the train, she would still be married to Karenin. Vronsky is necessary, whereas Rodolphe and Leon are interchangeable parts in a machine that is engaged in mass production of human fates.

This is certainly an acute way to capture the contrast between a tragic fate and a merely pathetic one. It also, quite perspicuously, makes us cast Anna Karenina as the heroine of an existential drama, one not driven to her destiny, but one who remains in command till her tragic end. Societal compulsions may seem to have exerted inexorable pressure on her life, and made it hew to a precise trajectory, but as McCarthy notes, there remains a great deal of surprise to be found in each fork of the path she traveled. This sense of surprise ensures Anna Karenina works as a suspenseful novel; we are aware of tragedy looming, but still unclear about its exact contours. Of course, even in Emma’s case, her ‘end’ is not precisely determined, but that she would be forever condemned to her relentless, misery-making dissatisfaction seems preordained. In so doing, Emma resembles nothing as much as Freud‘s neurotics, destined to endlessly, helplessly, repeat a recurring pattern, and indeed, finding their only comfort in its reenactments.

Note: Excerpts from the 1964 Signet Classic edition of Madame Bovary featuring a translation by Mildred Marmur, a foreword by Mary McCarthy and excerpts from Gustave Flaubert‘s trial on obscenity charges in 1857.

Mr. Panetta Warns of Danger And Would Like to Spy on You

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta comes a-calling, warning us of the dangers of cyberwarfare, of a new ‘Pearl Harbor’ that lies ahead. He conjures up devastating visions of the nation’s ‘cyber-infrastructure’ by a band of code warriors, sneaky rogues that could:

[D]erail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.

Terrifying stuff. Before I  stock up on tinned food, bottled water, spare batteries, toilet paper, ammunition, load up my shotguns, and head for the shelters, let me just, in passing, make a couple of minor observations.

1. The US been the most aggressive proponent of cyberwarfare in recent times, thus, as usual, serving as inspiration and inviting emulation and retaliation. As Steve Coll noted a while ago:

[David Sanger’s new book, “Confront and Conceal]describes a joint American-Israeli offensive cyber-attack operation in 2010 against Iran’s nuclear industry. The existence of the weapon used against Iran—a piece of malware called Stuxnet—was previously known, and there was rough knowledge of the authorship. Sanger, though, describes both—and President Obama’s hands-on role—more fully than any previous account. The attack was designed to disable Iranian centrifuges that enrich uranium. (The enriched uranium could ultimately be used to make nuclear bombs.) Cyber Command and the 24th Air Force presumably played at least a supporting role, along with the National Security Agency, although it remains unclear exactly who did what in the operation, which may be continuing.

The operation’s code name—“Olympic Games”—suggests some of the complacency and self-satisfaction among the President’s advisers…..“Olympic Games” seems to be, so far as is known, the first formal offensive act of pure cyber sabotage by the United States against another country, if you do not count electronic penetrations that have preceded conventional military attacks, such as that of Iraq’s military computers before the invasion of 2003.

2. The proper reaction to any pronouncement from post-911 administrations, when their officials come calling to warn us of dangers that lurk ‘out there’, should be–given their track record and sustained erosion of civil liberties–unbridled skepticism. With that in mind, note the following:

Mr. Panetta said President Obama was weighing the option of issuing an executive order that would promote information sharing on cybersecurity between government and private industry. But Mr. Panetta made clear that he saw it as a stopgap measure and that private companies, which are typically reluctant to share internal information with the government, would cooperate fully only if required to by law.

“We’re not interested in looking at e-mail, we’re not interested in looking at information in computers, I’m not interested in violating rights or liberties of people,” Mr. Panetta told editors and reporters at The New York Times earlier on Thursday. “But if there is a code, if there’s a worm that’s being inserted, we need to know when that’s happening.”

This roughly translates to: We are not interested in spying on the citizenry, but under the right circumstances, which we alone will determine, possibly on the basis of vague, unspecified, broadly stated, indeterminate intelligent reports that we will not let you, the affected citizenry, be privy to, we will be very interested in spying. At that moment, we expect our favorite poodles to roll over and beg to be tickled.

Here is a vague warning of danger, one that we might have brought upon our heads by our own reckless actions. May we have your civil liberties, please?