Ba'athing in the Euphrates

Perhaps the most simultaneously heartening and distressing piece of news in the interim has been the announcement of cessation of combat operations by US forces in Iraq. The drawdown leaves behind some fifty thousand troops for training Iraqi security forces ("advise and assist"),   deterring the various internal security threats plaguing that country, and securing key US interests across Iraq. American media and the US administration have routinely used the word “withdrawal” to describe the change in force levels, signifying the start of an irrevocable process by which to arrive at an agreeable conclusion to that deplorable misadventure. Iraq is one of the two Wars inherited from the previous administration, and bringing it to a swift and – insomuch as it is possible – painless conclusion has been one of Obama's key priorities and campaign promises (WP); Obama has to ensure that the withdrawal is carried out – irrespective of the security situation in Iraq and the implied strategic failure of the Surge – to limit the political fallout from Vietraq come 2012.

Iraq herself is likely to be destabilized further as the deterrent represented by US forces is diminished and fragmentation of the population along ethnic and sectarian lines continues: a process frozen in place by the Surge in 2007. President Obama's recent speech marking the end of designated combat operations sidestepped the important issue of a longterm American footprint in Iraq. How will the administration respond if requested by the Iraqi government to extend the tenure of US forces in Iraq or expand the scope of their mission? Such a request would be entirely rational given the security challenges facing that country.

The other, perhaps more dreaded specter of an Iranian Iraq is also a lot closer to reality than in 2003. The Iranians have, through sponsorship political parties and support of Shiite militias and resistance groups, gained a strong political foothold in Iraq. As this Foreign Policy article points out: the political gains made by Moqtada Al-Sadr in the recent elections and subsequent horse-trading have placed Iran in a powerful position to influence Iraqi politics. In the absence of a strong US military presence in Iraq – under a clear mandate to deter and rollback the various militias, from which potential antagonists derive much of their hard-power – the role of Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, and hence and his Iranian backers, will continue to increase.

The fact, however, is that none of the minority groups opposed to Iranian influence in Iraq – the Kurds for example – is capable, even when acting in concert, which they are unlikely to do, to acquire a decisive proportion of political power in the Iraqi government. The US-made new constitution of Iraq seems to have made effective governance only possible when a broad consensus is shared. In the absence of this consensus, Iraqi political factions reserve the right – and preserve the ability – to revert to armed warfare, a nightmare scenario the lawmakers perhaps did not foresee in 2003. Indeed, the various political parties and factions in Iraq find common ground mainly in their antagonism toward one another: a common occurrence wherever democratic systems are paired with politics of fear-mongering and ethnic sensationalism.

Iraq's increasing tilt towards Tehran will have repercussions for more than Iraq herself. The strategy for limiting and countering Iranian influence in the Middle East has thus far revolved around containment. It was to this end that various Arab governments sided with Iraq in her eight-year war with Iran; this same policy guided the Saudi government in 1991 to lobbying to limit the outcome of the First Gulf War to expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait and not threatening Saddam Hussein's regime itself. Saudi Support for the 2003 invasion was limited and given only reluctantly, when it became clear that the Bush administration would not be swayed from the warpath. Iranian gains in Iraq and Lebanon (via Hezbollah) are cause for as much concern in Riyadh and Tel Aviv as in Washington, and may catalyze attempts by regional players to influence events in Iraq. Indeed, absent US assurances - backed up by a hundred thousand pairs of boots on the ground in Iraq - to contain and curtail Iranian influence in Iraq, other players may be left with no choice but to get their hands dirty. Whichever way such a contest may turn, it does not bode well for Iraq.

It is perhaps too early, and ultimately irrelevant, to talk of winning and losing in the Iraq War. Posterity will be judge how the War changes the balance of power in the region and how it affects the development of US policy, and revise whatever inferences we may draw today. The one thing  that is certain, however, is that abandoning Iraq to her fate will close the lid on what appears at present to be a decisive strategic victory for Iran; made all the more impressive because no-one realized they were even in the running to begin with.

Repetition vs. Persistence in MMORPG Design: Why Arthas Won't Stay Dead

I was slow to jump on the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) bandwagon. I was content to play my single-player CRPG's and – occasionally – Action RPG's, devoting myself to faithfully enacting and reenacting the adventures of the Lone Wanderer, or Scion of Lionheart, or Bhaalspawn, or Darth Revan, or simply Hero. Going back to play the original Baldur's Gate in 2006 for no better reason than I'd run out of games to play was a pain, surely; but being able to immerse myself in the Forgotten Realms was worth the clunky animations and other limitations of the Infinity engine..

After eventually giving World of Warcraft a try and instantly getting hooked, I found that the game experience was lacking in something – not electronic ego boosts (epeen), nor the visually attractive wide-open worlds that the Elder Scrolls and Gothic series had lavished me with. There was an addictive crafting system, a popular PvP element, the PvE was rewarding and, and, and, the game was horribly repetitive and one was forced into doing the same things over and over.

Coming from a somewhat extensive and exclusive CRPG background, which extended to pen-and-paper fantasies, being out of the limelight and not being at the center of attention of the game world came as a pretty rude – even if perfectly reasonable – shock. My character in the world of Warcraft had no agency in the game world. I indulged in most of the things the game had to offer. The NPC's called my character “Hero,” I managed to get some text next to my character's name that proclaimed me a Champion of some sort, my character rode atop an enormous armored black bear, and was covered head-to-toe in fancy gear that bore testament to my character's numerous victories over heinous villains – hellish demons, corrupt wizards, megalomaniac warlords – and “enemy” players. But for all the alleged heroism of my character and the band of similarly acclaimed and accoutered adventurers that my character hung out with in Orgrimmar, we did not really have as much of an impact on the game's world and storyline. The *bling* gear, our majestic steeds and vainglorious titles were status symbols lacking in any inherent value, only appreciated within a narrow community of the game's players. Without much preamble regarding the indulgent escapism of players of video games and the dependency of video game media on the audience – the players – to immerse themselves in the content therein provided, I shall attempt to reconcile the idea of Agency, as that heroic footprint that allows players in single-player games to thoroughly affect the game world, with the “massively multiplayer” part of these games in the context of Bioware's upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: the Old Republic.

Three broad elements of gameplay are present in MMO games across the broad and are known as the Three Pillars: exploration, combat and character progression. It should be noted that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between these three pillars: the player engages in exploration and combat and is rewarded with progression; a broad term that means an increase in the strength and significance of the player character; this is accomplished by gaining a new ability, increasing the power of an ability, gaining score or – given the social nature of MMO games – prestige!

Somewhere along the road to having fun with the game, which is and should be the overriding reason people play games, the player community realized that it is possible, even encouraged by design, for all players to gain the same abilities, rack up the same scores and project the same in-game personality; bragging rights, then, become one of the key points of competition between players – how else does one define “winning” in what is an endless game experience? The objective is not just to complete a certain adventure, slay a particular monster or acquire a special treasure, but instead to be the first to complete the adventure, to slay the monster in the hardest way possible, to hoard a mountain of treasures from different sources and be able to show them off to people as trophies of one's unmatched success in the game. This is not an incidental development, either. The game is designed – by economic necessity – to reward the investment of time with character progression; in terms of items, abilities and prestige. The inclusion of achievement badges, trophies and honorific titles has absolutely no impact on the gameplay, but it does appease the burgeoning number of players who want to stand out from their colleagues, fueled by the remainder of the player-base playing catch-up to these competitive types.

Repetition is something we have come to associate with the very notion of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. After all, users expect to be provided hours of daily entertainment from these games, and because there is only so much content that developers can realistically create, they are forced to recycle. This repetitive nature of gameplay is indispensable and reasonable in its entirety from the perspective of the developers. There are three broad themes of repetition in MMO games:

Content Structure

Content structure and format are repeated frequently throughout the game, with cosmetic differences with varying player levels, game world areas, factions and allegiances and the like. Consequently, there are the ubiquitous “Kill X of Y” quests, the “Rescue/Escort the Prisoner to Safety” quests, the FedEx quests and several other recurring quest templates and formats.

Content

Another kind of repetition is that of content itself: enter repeatable quests, instances and material/currency farming. An artificial delay is introduced into the repetitive cycle by means of traveling time, respawn times on monsters, preventing you from doing a certain quest, instance or other activity more than once per day or week etc.

Rewarding Repetitive Gameplay

The game is structured by developers to reward repetition: gear, which is the main standard of progression in most end-games, is gained by repeatedly defeating an instanced encounter – perhaps on a resetting timer – until the desired items are randomly generated and received by everyone in the group who desires them, or raising a certain reputation score to the highest levels by means of repeatable quests and monster-killing, or entering a few instanced Player versus Player (PvP) areas again and again – win or lose – until the requisite tokens/currency/rank has been gained. This reward system leverages the repetition of content and content structures mentioned above to coherently bind the player to the game world and provide a broad set of “goals” for the players to work towards.

Whatever passes for epic adventures in such games are built by stringing together combinations of these content templates with a flimsy dressing of narrative, usually delivered by bland text boxes that most players skip reading. Some few adventures are actually well written, nicely choreographed narratives that have broad implications for developments in the story of the game world itself, but more often, story-telling takes a backseat in MMO games. Even when some major development takes place, such as the death of a major enemy from the game's overarching plot line at the hands of the player character, the killed character does not die in the game world itself, instead reappearing after a certain time and making no mention of his previous death. Indeed, even after the narrative of the game world acknowledges the death of such a character in the world's lore, the character is still very much alive and present in some dungeon. More than any death at the hands of the players, these all-powerful villains die of irrelevance; lurking ignominiously in their sprawling caverns that players no longer care to explore, sitting atop treasures that players no longer desire, lording over minions and underlings that can no longer earn their keep by attempting to keep Raiders at bay.

Of course it is not possible to remove content altogether once it is completed. As discussed already, repetition of content is an indispensable gameplay requirement. It is not possible for everyone to get everything the first time an encounter is defeated and it is not possible to remove content from everyone's game-world after one player or group of players has defeated it. To use an analogy from the Lord of the Rings:, it is not enough for one Frodo Baggins to defeat Sauron, it is not fair for the Nazgul to be destroyed by only one group of heroes; the Content is meant to be experienced by as many erstwhile adventurers as possible. Hence it is the “first” or “hardest” instance of an in-game achievement that confers bragging rights, and not the “only” instance of that achievement. These gameplay abstractions relating developments in the story to the game-world are left to the players to figure out and/or ignore altogether; story-telling is at once irrelevant to and unaffected by the gameplay. In these MMO games the player character's own story is (generally) shallow, and the broader world story arcs are not affected by any player actions, instead being tightly controlled by the Developer by means of playable content patches, revisions in canon, comic books, novelizations, game expansion packs etc.

Role-playing games have traditionally been about telling a story from the perspective of a key heroic role played by the player character. This detail has been lost and buried by successive generations of MMORPGs as something that could not be reasonably implemented within the constructs of contemporary MMO games. The traditional view has been challenged, however, by Bioware with their first foray into the MMO market with Star Wars: the Old Republic, it aims to leverage the studio's expertise in interactive narrative by making a bold attempt to innovate in a genre that has stagnated since its first iteration over a decade ago. This innovation comes in the form of adding a Fourth Pillar to the MMO design philosophy: Story.

Of course, considering the ease with which I give in to over-thinking and speculation, it did not come as a surprise when my enthusiasm for storytelling in a MMO context faded and I was left wondering if delivering to players millions of “Han/Fett/Vader/Luke/Emperor” fantasies was actually possible without instancing major portions of the game and hence killing off the “massively multiplayer” element. After all, having a million Luke Skywalkers slay a million Emperor Palpatines would – in my nit-picky eyes – detract from the idea of player agency. I am not convinced if Bioware will actually be able to pull off storytelling while allowing player characters to have an impact on the wider game world, I suspect it is not a priority and I will probably not know anything for certain until after I have played the game next year.

That said, it occurs to me that perhaps my expectations of player agency are over the top and unrealistic. It would certainly be that way insomuch as Galaxy-changing events such as the destruction of Alderaan are concerned (*hint* I would play the Grand Moff Tarkin class). By way of analogy, the problem appears to be one of having too many children playing in the same sandbox, one would only just start to build a sandcastle before another stomps on it, and no meaningful experience can be drawn from such chaos. One way, then, for players to have a heroic footprint without said footprints competing for severely limited “world space” is to reduce the radius of each to the point that they no longer overlap. The idea itself, like everything else in this post, is nothing unknown or surprising. Other MMORPG's, by reducing and limiting player agency to zero by means of widespread instancing and paying only lip service to story/narrative have accomplished exactly this. But is it impossible to allow the heroic footprint to retain some non-zero radius without destroying the structure on which the game's fun factor is based?

Our Galaxy is a big, fascinating place. The Star Wars galaxy is perhaps as big and certainly not as fascinating to a scientist – hokey religions and all that – but it is filled with tens of thousands of inhabited planets, populated by visually distinct but anthropomorphic alien species and improbable conspiracies, romance and drama. The Star Wars galaxy is not a zero-sum, closed-loop system. The Galactic Civil War that Luke helped to end in the movies did not have much of a bearing on events in the Unknown Regions or the Hapes Cluster. Life goes on, there are pirates, warlords, criminal syndicates and unpopular governments aplenty in this fantastic place, and you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting some plot point that could bring everything crashing down for everyone.

Luke, Leia, and Han – joined by an endless stream of poorly named characters from the Expanded Universe – are not only omnipotent and immortal as they need to be to resolve disparate crises one after another and escape unscathed; they are also omnipresent. To quote a certain irate Yuuzhan Vong Warmaster from another galaxy ever farther away: “Is every third person in this Galaxy named Solo?” One may excuse the Warmaster for thinking so, given how almost every major event in the YV invasion across the entire Galaxy was affected pervasively by the Wesley Crushers of the NJO. What does this mean for storytelling in SWtOR? Simply that heroic adventures are only a stone's throw away, your average Joe is neck-deep in some exhilarating quest, and the bad guys find redemption only too often in a self-sacrificing blaze of glory.

What this ubiquity of excitement and adventure confers on the designers of the Old Republic is the ability, the license, to craft – or allow a human-assisted computer system to cobble together – an enormous number of adventures using the templates provided by the novels and comic books of the Expanded Universe. If we are afraid of everyone being Luke Skywalker, the simple alternative is to tone it down a notch and allow everyone to be Kyp Durron or Nomi Sunrider instead: flying away to far flung parts of the galaxy, infiltrating criminal elements, raising squadrons of starfighters, waging anti-piracy campaigns, discovering some subtle hints of an overarching conspiracy – a resurgent Ssi Ruuvi, for instance – and following mostly solitary but convergent paths until they coalesce into an epic (shared: cooperative or competitive) climax for everyone involved, but it needs to be a climax that does not or cannot have rippling implications for the broader galaxy in the context of story. To illustrate: the final encounter in such an adventure can be with the leader of a band of Weequay pirates, not someone as irreplaceable as Admiral Ackbar.

I find it expedient to imagine this kind of encounter/content design as something akin to oversight by a 'Dungeon Master': throwing hordes of monsters and traps and riddles in the path of intrepid explorers on their way to rescuing the Princess. Not the same monsters nor the same obstacles, nor indeed the same treasures at the end of the adventure. The content structure, the content itself, must repeat, that much is a given, but the degree of variation, however superficial, must be heightened in order to offer a higher degree of immersion and a sense of Agency in the game world.

There is no reason this cannot be extended to other fictional universes. To cross over into Warhammer 40,000, consider that since “in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war,” allow players to fight said wars on obscure planets and actually conquer them. Offer a clear path starting with a “deep strike” to secure the Spaceport and leading up to the final defeat of a Demon Prince of Khorne.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are attractive and addictive; not least because persistence and social interaction bring them a lot closer to the “real world” than other games. Repetition detracts from the experience offered by the sense of finality that persistence can lend to these worlds. Developers have sidestepped this design conflict by widespread instancing of game content and trivialization of the player character narrative. However, I feel that the trade-off between accessibility and agency need not be dealt with in binary terms. It is possible, by limiting the player's expectations of agency and toning down the scope of the content and the player's role in it, to enhance the sense of player agency. This will create an experience containing a coherent, player-centric narrative and allow for the repetition of content to feel less like a meaningless grind.

In sum: some degree of repetition is required to appease the player-base within a reasonable amount of unique content; what this “degree” is and what constitutes a “reasonable amount,” of course, is open to debate. Agency demands, however, that things once done cannot be undone or done a different way, that the player character is a heroic influence on the game world, or a very small part of the game world, and as such holds sway over the pace and direction of the narrative of that part of the game. Their achievements are theirs alone and are visible for the rest of the server's population to see, even if most never happen across those hyperspace lanes anyway.

Spring Thaw: Turkey & Israel

Since Turkey's PM Erdogan stormed out of the World Economic Forum in Davos after a heated diatribe against Israel's military operation in Gaza (Jan 2009), there have been exuberant displays of solidarity and admiration for his confrontational antics: the Muslim world, desperate for a hero, has hailed him as its Knight in Shining Armor (Aljazeera). It is natural for Erdogan's Turkey to have such popularity in Muslim countries; deprived as they are of any sense of common purpose, and lacking in modern hero-figures who transcend national borders and ethnic divides. This recent chain of spats between Turkey and Israel, however, is not indicative of a shift in the geopolitical dispositions of the Near Eastern countries. The idea of Turkey's participation – perhaps in a leadership role – in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot find purchase with the other Countries and factions involved in this tortuous process. Indeed, it is unlikely that this is the Turkish government's primary motivation to begin with. On the contrary, this could be seen as no more than posturing on the part of the Turkish government to appease certain domestic lobbies, and curry favor with Arab and Muslim countries; possibly as a counterweight to perceived over-reliance on European and American markets and alliances.

The location of Anatolia as a crossroads between East and West, in possession of the sole access to the Black Sea, has long placed her in the crossfire of opposing forces. The same strategic importance that led the Crusaders to spend much time crusading against their Orthodox Christian allies in the Byzantine Empire – by means of coups d'etat, palace intrigue and assassinations, direct military intervention – caused all sides in the Second World War to woo Turkey with promises of regaining pride of place in the Near East in the post-War period. Turkey deftly played all sides – German, British and Soviet – and maintained its neutrality through the War, not aligning itself with any power until several years later.

The end of the Second World War was followed by the Greek Civil War, and a shift in US policy towards the Soviets – marked by the adoption of the Truman Doctrine. Turkey was provided with hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the anti-Communist stance of the Turkish administration, the military and economic aid rendered by the United States continued well into the Cold War, with Turkey becoming a member of NATO in 1952.

It should come as no surprise then that Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to lend diplomatic recognition to Israel. 1948 was a turbulent year in the Middle East. The British had been forced out of Palestine, Israel proclaimed independence and was promptly set-upon by every country on its borders. The Israelis fought them to a standstill and even managed to expand into Palestinian territory. The Soviet Union stepped in to rearm the beleaguered Arab states. Having opted-in to the Western Bloc, Turkey pursued her strategic interests in containing and curtailing Soviet influence in her backyard. Recognizing that Israel was there to stay, supported by the same countries that supported Turkey's government and opposed by countries aligned with the Soviet juggernaut poised along Turkey's Northern and Eastern borders, embassies were exchanged between Turkey and Israel in 1949 and ushered in an age – by necessity – of economic, military and diplomatic cooperation between the two countries.

Turkey, of course, gained more from her alignment with the United States than just a regional ally and a military alliance. The Nixon administration granted its tacit endorsement to the Turkish invasion and subsequent division and occupation of Cyprus in 1974. The Kurdish separatist insurgency was suppressed first for the cause of anti-Marxism-Leninism and then as a target for the ongoing War on Terror, with frequent cross-border operations undertaken by the Turkish military in Iraq, as late as 1999. Turkey was allowed to get away with certain flagrant abuses of human rights and other nations' sovereignty in pursuit of these goals, and at least one of the factors in making Turkey such an indispensable ally of the United States and Europe is her cozy relationship with Israel, unique among Muslim countries.

Recently, however, due to anti-expansion and anti-Muslim sentiments in European Union countries, Turkey's application to join the Union, of several institutions of which Turkey is already a signatory and participant, has been stalled on demographic, socio-religious, geographic and political grounds.

Almost 51% of Turkey's population self-identified as Muslims in 2006, up from 43% in 2005 (Pew Global Report) and previous years. The Islam-branding of the ruling AK Party has placed expectations on the administration to stand up for perceived “Muslim interests.” In retrospect, the likelihood of the Aid Flotilla incident should have been evident considering the Turkish Prime Minister's rhetoric at Davos almost two years ago. The severe Israeli reaction to the Flotilla, and the grim Turkish response are well within keeping of the requirements of their respective electorates. The Israeli public would have accepted no other outcome from the Likud government, and the AKP was expected to put into action the words spoken at Davos and since: stalling the Aid Flotilla or not protesting the Israeli raid on the ships would not sit well with the electoral power-base of the AKP.

Will this diplomatic spat signal the end of Turkey's alliance with Israel and NATO? Do the Premiership of Erdogan and primacy of the AKP in Turkish politics represent a paradigm-shift in her foreign policy imperatives and national interests? Does Turkey seek to take upon herself a leadership role in the Muslim community at large, at odds with its European interests? The answer to all of these questions ranges between “absolutely not” and “probably not.” The Turkish government has deftly handled the various problems in Gaza and used these to embellish its image in Muslim countries while fulfilling some of its campaign slogans. This PR windfall in Muslim countries should yield sizable dividends for the Turkish economy, as well as send a clear message that Turkey retains its ability to play all sides for maximum advantage (incidentally, a new gas pipeline is to run from Russia through Turkey to Europe). Indeed Turkey has a well-established legacy of tactfully preserving, propagating and perpetuating her national interests, come what may.

The United States has a clear understanding of the implications of estrangement or even divergence from Turkey. So much so that President Obama chose Ankara as the destination of his first visit to another State. Turkey's is the successful Muslim secular democratic experiment the West looks to as a solution to the present alienation of the Muslims.

“The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey ['toward a secure and lasting peace' in the Israel-Palestinian conflict]. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security.”

Barrack Obama, to the Turkish Parliament, April 6, 2009

In the same speech, he reaffirmed US support for Turkey's EU application, the fight against the PKK, Turkey's role in salvaging Iraq. The message is clear: Turkey is important to the West and knows it. The recent posturing raises the stakes for appeasing and retaining Turkey's full support for the many thorny issues in the Middle East, while opening up new opportunities for regional relationships (with Iran for example). It was this perceived imperative that has prompted Turkey to embarrass Israel. The defunct Uranium trading deal reached recently with Iran is another extension of the same policy: Turkey is reaching out to her estranged neighbors, re-building bridges to the East while retaining and buttressing those to the West. Caught in the tug-of-war as she is, Turkey seems to have settled, as often before in the past, for making the most of it.

Operation Opera Opportunity Cost: Why Israel will not attack Iran's nuclear facilities

The recent tragedy in the Eastern Mediterranean in which a flotilla of aid ships headed for Gaza were violently stopped and diverted by the Israeli blockade has heightened tensions between Israel and most of the rest of the world. Such drama always raises temperatures and kicks up a lot of dust and, as always, our species is only too eager to lose all perspective. This series of blog posts attempts to weave a single disjointed thread through similar episodes in the violent recent history of the Middle East with the objective being to establish the historical, albeit anecdotal, framework in which to correctly view and appreciate this crisis. It is my belief that only by building a nuanced understanding of the issue by fostering an open and objective discussion (especially within the community) may one ever hope to arrive at an adequate treatment of this festering problem.

June 7, 1981. The morning in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad is eerie and quiet, unfaithful to the raging conflict with Iran that shows no signs of abating. Worshipers in the Iraqi capital make their way back home after the morning prayer. Along the banks of the Euphrates far to the east, the dull thump of artillery has just begun to shake weary Iraqi and Iranian soldiers out of dreamless, zombified stupor. It is just another day in the Middle East. The calm is shattered by the sound of jets diving from the sky; a hail of bombs streaks from the warbirds. Lazily, almost as an afterthought, the sound of air raid sirens and anti-aircraft fire fills the air with a ceaseless, maddening din. The jets are already long-gone: the wreck of Saddam's nuclear reactor lies buried beneath tons of rubble. It is no longer just another day in the Middle East.

The preemptive Israeli airstrike on Osirak was hotly debated and analyzed to no end during the latter half of the decade and several times thereafter. The eventual consensus that did develop amongst all except Israel and her staunchest allies, was that Osirak's value as a weapons facility was dubious at best, and that the airstrike had exacerbated the non-proliferation issue in the Middle East by emphasizing the deterrent value of nuclear weapons and the need to keep such strategic assets secure against surprise attacks. Most analyses did not, however, factor the local political gains made by the Israeli government at the time as a causative agent. Begin's Likud government, which had previously lagged behind its political rivals in the polls, managed to win the largest share of seats in the neck-and-neck elections for the tenth Knesset three weeks later.

Operation Opera did, however, come with a significant opportunity cost. It served as a catalyst for the hitherto-nascent Iraqi nuclear program, established the strategic strike capabilities of the IDF for their potential adversaries to learn from, and expounded the need for adequate hardening of strategic facilities against similar attack. In a nutshell, the success of this feat, the first of its kind, was so great as to instantly make a repeat performance extremely likely to meet with failure. Israel expended diplomatic capital and military capability, and actually exacerbated its security situation for the decades to follow. This puzzling, self-destructive behavior, at odds with the remarkable ability for self-preservation that Israel has demonstrated amply throughout its turbulent history can only be explained by the unexpected victory in the electorate that Begin gained by capitalizing on the success and exaggerating the threat that had been neutralized. Public support in Israel for the incumbent administration ran high following the miraculous deliverance of the Tribe of Israel from a phantom threat of nuclear apocalypse posed by the Osirak reactor. Miraculous because an airstrike on a nuclear facility was too audacious an idea to have been taken seriously before it happened; phantom because Iraqi nuclear weapon ambitions were neither substantial nor directed against Israel.

All politics is local, and nowhere is this more true than in the reunited diaspora of cross-cultural immigrants who are defined and identified not so much by introspective adhesion and ideological common ground as by the forces – imaginary and otherwise – that are alleged to threaten its existence from within and without. Israel exists in a parallel universe where every mundane choice is between black-and-white, every shadow is either with us-or-them, every banality of life is make-or-break, and even inconsequential actions are defined in do-or-die terms; a paranoia in which the Holocaust was not a freak accident in which a bunch of middle-aged men in trench-coats perpetrated a grievous crime in thrall to a madman, but an apocalypse that has almost-happened too many times too easily and must never be allowed to happen again.

Denizens of the Civilized World cannot be blamed for scratching their heads and wondering why Israel behaves so unilaterally with brazen displays of disproportionate force. Muslims in particular, antagonized in equal measure by the inability of the Arab world to intimidate Israel, and the ignominious existence of Palestinian refugees, feel justified in shaking their fists at Israel and ascribing all of their woes: from the mayhem in Somalia to the drone attacks in Pakistan to the Australian intervention in East Timor, to some grand Zionist conspiracy against Islam. That may very well be true, and one may neither refute nor validate such emphatic assertions while holding oneself to standards of rationality and logic. There may, however, be a somewhat simpler and less glamorous explanation: In the most recent episode involving the flotilla of ships bearing aid for impoverished Gazans, imagine that the aid flotilla had been allowed unimpeded access to Gaza and allowed to unload its supplies freely and without hindrance from officious Israeli politicians and soldiers. In this set of ideal circumstances, whenever the next rocket attack on Israeli settlements from Hamas-controlled Gaza takes place, irrespective of whatever damage it may cause, if any, and despite the fact that the rockets were not supplied by the aid flotilla, the political opposition in the Knesset would charge the government with neglecting its sworn duty to protect the lives and property of Israeli citizens. The allegation would run something like this:

1. Aid ships were allowed to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza
2. This symbolic victory and the actual aid delivered by the flotilla bolstered support for Hamas in Gaza
3. The Israelis maintain that the people of Gaza should not support Hamas because of the latter's perceived rejection of co-existence with Israel (on Israel's own terms, no less, it should be noted). Israel should drive home the point that Hamas is a lose-lose for the people of Gaza by making the people of Gaza suffer for having voted for Hamas, hence the blockade
4. The recent rocket attacks were carried out by Hamas only because (this is where the politics get scary for the incumbent administration) the aid ships were allowed to dock, carrying weapons and aid that Hamas was able to use to shore up its support base, undoing perceived gains in Israeli efforts to isolate and topple Hamas

• Hypocritical? Perhaps.
• Plausible course of action for self-serving politicians? Most certainly.

As noted: all politics is local. The Israelis' botched handling of the interception of the flotilla may come under fire on the international stage and in the media, but given Washington's unequivocal support for Israel's actions, however heavy-handed, it is not a PR crisis that threatens the domestic standing of the Israeli government, the actions of which are driven by political self-preservation. An ineffective hailstorm of rockets landing near the blast walls of fortified Israeli settlements built on occupied territory, on the other hand, could create a domestic political maelstrom the hardliner Likud administration cannot afford. One may cry foul and allege double standards, and one may well be right, but one's opinions – right or wrong – carry no weight in Tel Aviv for the simple reason that the Israeli electorate is the sole consideration.

Let us, then, look elsewhere for a propitious handle on the issue.

The Trident of Erebus

The recent furore in Pakistan over the “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” has spawned dozens of anti-groups and a vociferous SMS/e-mail campaign: using flawed assumptions and flimsy mathematics to overemphasize the financial worth of Pakistan's Facebook users and optimistically believing that a 'boycott' by Pakistani users would teach them a lesson. 'Them' being a group of fascist-Zionist (but somehow devil-worshiping) anti-Christs. Of course the whole point of the spirited boycott campaign and Internet-borne heckling (their commitment is admirable, even if one does not agree with their views) has been rendered moot by the Lahore High Court's heavy handed, blanket ban on the social networking giant, extended by the PTA – eager to showcase its own evangelical zeal – to cover Youtube and en.Wikipedia as well. I am generally a very unhurried blogger: content to leave things unfinished, unsaid and unpublished in the security that “it'll be done when it's done,” but the recent spate of bans has me worried they'll shut down Blogspot itself shortly – and I cannot let that happen without weighing in on the issue for myself.

A lot of unqualified, emphatic assertions (to the accompaniment of even more spittle!) have been made in the (mockery of) debate surrounding the subject: Facebook's double standards vis à vis Holocaust denial pages have been particularly lambasted. As someone who followed this older debate closely last summer, the nonobjective bias rampant in these allegations is easily apparent to me. Yes, two pages advocating holocaust denial were removed – but many more were not, notwithstanding considerable pressure by a number of influential forces such as CNN. Ezra Callahan from Facebook's PR team, who also happens to be Jewish, had this to say on the subject: “You do not combat ignorance by trying to cover up that ignorance exists.” When eventually they did take down two of several pages, it was for reasons other than the promotion of hate speech or antisemitism, as evidenced by several other antisemitic pages that continue to exist.

The First Amendment of the American Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and even the freedom of hate speech is held sacred. A United States court tossed out a case last year against a small group of Midwestern hicks who protested the Iraq war in a very unique fashion: by picketing funerals of servicemen killed-in-action and ascribing their deaths to God's punishment for America's tolerance of homosexuality. Very few people, within the United States and without, would consent to that rather unique view; even fewer would consider dishonoring fallen servicemen – regardless of what one thinks of the cause they died for – to be anything but shameful. What prompted a bench dominated by conservative Justices to throw out the petition brought by bereaved and rightly offended families was not an agreement with said Midwestern hicks, but a responsibility to uphold the First Amendment right to Freedom of Speech. Will a fortnight of boycott by Pakistanis, of dubious value to the social networking giant really convince Facebook to clamp down on Islamphobes? Does Facebook's removal of these web pages, even if it were ever to happen, remove the hatred that pervades the thoughts of a small but vocal minority of Westerners? Perhaps most importantly, how does blocking access to Facebook help combat blasphemers or blasphemy? If anything, it plays into the favor of those people who stir up controversy by denying the spirited opposition the means to combat them. Walking away from an argument equals forfeiture; it is not a winning tactic but the opposite - a spoiled infant smashing her sand castle because someone showed her a picture of the real thing.

Of course the larger, perhaps more sensitive, question is why Pakistani sensitivities are offended more easily than those of the larger, vaunted Umma (a worldwide Muslim national identity); or perhaps we are just more prone to expressing ourselves violently than our brethren in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and wherever else Muslims happen to reside. The Jyllands Posten controversy saw millions of dollars of damage to our markets and infrastructure as riotous mobs inflicted righteous justice on themselves; I wonder if these same frothy-mouthed zealots are sitting down across the country with monstrous smug smiles, proclaiming the local and temporary ban on Facebook, Youtube and en.Wikipedia as a great victory for God. I wonder also if these are the same ignorant beasts who believe television is a demonic contraption and the necktie is a symbol of Christianity. I have no illusion that such views are held by only a minority of our people, or that all we're missing for a lasting, forward-looking solution to our rampant ignorance and regressive tendencies is a bit more time for the media/government etc. to work their magic. The people of this country take great pride in their ignorance, and brandish it like a weapon to those that would challenge it – a means and an end in and of itself.