Offers and demands (a slight return)

Well, that has to be a relief. Wednesday afternoon, the Middle East was "on brink." By Thursday morning, it was merely "rattled," though apparently by the same image:

A.J. Liebling would be pleased, in his way, to note that one side in this confrontation "threatens," while the other "condemns" -- or merely "vows" that it's "locked and loaded." Let's turn the microphone over to another great midcentury American commentator for today's example of the "realism-free zone": If you offer to poison your sister, why are you surprised when she threatens to poison you right back?

 

You keep using that word

Let's just go ahead and assume that Judge Jeanine's reference is to Sunday morning's top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Islamic State has reportedly seized al-Baghdadi, in Iraq’s Anbar Province, 5 miles from an air base staffed by U.S. Marines, as the terror group continues its push beyond its bases in Syria and Iraq in an attempt to establish militant affiliates in other countries.

Things tend to get a little less sexy when people return your emails:

On Sunday, a U.S. Central Command spokesman refuted reports that ISIS had taken al-Baghdadi. "Al-Baghdadi has not fallen to ISIL or been seized by them," said U.S. Central Command, in an email to Fox News. 

... but taken together, the two items still make the same point: We're in trouble, and we sure could use a cowboy --- rather than a feckless, dithering usurper -- to get us out of it. This presentation is part of a larger securitizing move: to borrow a concept from the Copenhagen School, the declaration of a crisis so severe that if we don't fix it now, there won't be a "we" to fix it in the future. That's the "existential threat" that Average Joe is identifying, and his prescription is clear from the photos (if not from the column itself): More Reagan, less of this dithering-in-the-name-of-prudence.

It's worth remembering, you'd like to think, that the cowboy era wasn't always healthy for US interests abroad.** The Marines might have particularly sharp memories of Reagan's bumbling in the Middle East, but the news outlets that have been having such sport lately with "Hillary's War" on Libya might also want to pause and think about the outcomes of Reagan's own Libya intervention. Passing the ammunition while the Soviet Union shot itself in the foot in Afghanistan had its moments, but it too wasn't without long-term consequences. Should things go deeply awry in the eastern Mediterranean, requiring someone Fox News detests to go in and negotiate with the evildoers for the release of a captured pilot or something, remember that it's been tried.

Because this is also the sort of time in which all sorts of charlatans take up the banner of realism, it's worth quoting old Hans Morgenthau*** at some length:

The lighthearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is the very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets have warned rulers and ruled. That equation is also politically pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgment which, in the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations -- in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.

* I've made them closer than they actually appear at The Fox Nation; there was originally a story between them vertically, and now there are more
** Conveniently, things were largely in the hands of adults by the time the Warsaw Pact actually started to fall apart.
*** "Politics among Nations," 1985 edition

Today in the realism-free zone

Behold the National Review in its infinite wisdom:

We can’t delegate our warfighting to jihadists.

Kinda slept through the entire Afghan-Soviet thing, did we? Here's the AP in December 1984, bringing Ronald Reagan into a story about the administration's apparent inability to ensure that enough high-end equipment ended up in remote parts of Afghanistan:

He added, "The Afghan freedom fighters -- the Mujahedeen -- remind us daily that the human spirit is resilient and tenacious, and that liberty is not easily stolen from a people determined to defend it."

Hey, kids: See if you can guess what triliteral root is used to form the noun "mujahed"! In sad news for the National Review, not only can we delegate our warfighting to jihadists, we're pretty good at it.

That's why we have realism, and why (in one of those rare bits of punditry that still merit reading six years later) Stephen Walt referred to the American press as a "realism-free zone." You don't have to still be sticking up for the Melians to be a realist, but you do have to begin by looking at the world as it is, not as your angry friend on the AM dial wants it to be. You don't even have to take sides for or against Reagan's Elmer Fudd approach to the parts of the world with funny alphabets and lots of brown people. (If realism had a T-shirt, it would probably say "It seemed like a good idea at the time" in Latin.) But you should have either the common sense or the common decency to agree that things happened the way they happened, because that's sort of essential if you want to shape how things might happen in the future.

To paraphrase a popular rallying cry from early in our national life: billions for defense, but not one cent for jihad.

Should we just take up a collection and buy the poor clown a copy of "Charlie Wilson's War"? 

Today in security studies: The perfect front page

 

This home page from Thursday afternoon is Fox in a grain of sand. The downpage stories are perfect: there's a little reactive devaluation (sexual harassment in the military is a fey librul plot, until our side mentions it), some primal race-baiting (just go read the comments) and a reminder that 2016 is always in season ("the claims about Clinton's cigar preferences follow a string of reports about Bill and Hillary Clintons' sky-high speaking fees and special requests while on the road"). But the real gem is the lead story:

Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday that his Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into the brutal execution by Islamic State militants of American journalist James Foley, in the latest move by the administration to use the criminal justice system to pursue terrorists.

The announcement comes as the Obama administration steps up its airstrike campaign against the same militant organization -- and mulls additional American boots on the ground in Iraq.

That might strike you as a bit of a contradiction. If you keep up with Fox, you know that pretty much the worst offense you can commit is imagining that terrorism is a law enforcement problem, rather than the sort of matter you deal with by blowing the hell out of things with naval aviation, and the Kenyan usurper is selling us out by doing the former even as he cranks up the ... does your brain hurt yet?

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At Soviet copydesk, headline writes you!

Quick, see if there's still a space on the next unheated cattle train to Siberia. Somebody seems to have forgotten who's weak and who isn't:

It is said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been playing chess while President Obama has been playing checkers, or even marbles. While it is true that Mr. Putin is playing a game of chess on the stage of history, the United States is not playing a different game. Rather, like a pawn on Russia’s chessboard, Mr. Obama is just being played. (April 15)

Instead, Mr. Obama was seen as weak in the tense standoff and his sanctions impotent. Mr. Putin, however, was seen as fully in command of the situation, pulling off the audacious land grab without so much as a scratch on him. (April 8)

With his uncontested success in Georgia and now with the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, we can be sure that the weakness of our leadership has only whetted the KGB thug’s appetite. Will eastern Ukraine next? After all, there are Russian-speaking nationals in eastern Ukraine who obviously will want protection from the regime in Kiev, which Mr. Putin declares is fascist. (March 25)

The weakness shown by President Obama on the world stage has opened the door for Russian aggression in Ukraine, Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday. (March 9)
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Whatever you do, don't mention the war

On the whole, it's probably less interesting to examine Mike Rogers's babbling prescriptions in detail than to look back -- could it be nearly eight years? -- to those halcyon days when, by golly, real Americans thought twice before declaring something a civil war:

"You have not yet had a situation also where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power, but for territory," White House press secretary Tony Snow said. "What you do have is sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences. ..."

Ah, differences. And that sort of carelessness is a sure sign of a librul media plot -- right, Bill O'Reilly?

NBC News has declared that there is indeed a civil war in Iraq. Now that's not shocking, because NBC is the most aggressive anti-Bush network these days, as they have made a calculated effort to woo left-wing viewers.

The question is: Is NBC wrong about Iraq? The answer is yes — at this point.

The Iraq War has morphed into a number of conflicts, much like the chaotic Baltic* situation under President Clinton. Because the Bush administration miscalculated the problems after Saddam, the ensuing chaos has given power to a number of bad guys.

Good thing Fox had leading policy thinkers like Cal Thomas to put it all in context:

The height of pretension in all of this was when Matt Lauer got on the "Today" show, and like a head of state, announced that they were now going to call it a "civil war." What right does he have to do this? Who elected him to anything?

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Wrong band

I'm thinking we mean "asleep at the switch," but I've been wrong before. But enough about that. What's the big story here, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The Obama administration's apparent miscalculation of the threat posed by Al Qaeda-aligned militants in Iraq drew severe criticism Thursday from top Republican lawmakers, who accused President Obama and his national security team of "taking a nap," warning "the next 9/11 is in the making."

... The administration once again appears to have been caught off guard by an explosion of violence in a country U.S. forces helped liberate from a dictator. 

Maybe somebody should remind Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the first 9/11 didn't come from Iraq. And that if we wanted a stable, secular Iraqi autocracy that was really good at killing insurgents (and large numbers of other people who looked at it crossways) while acting as a regional counterweight to Iran, maybe we shouldn't have broken the one that was already there.

The sunshine realists were out in force during the bumbling in Ukraine. Wonder how quickly they'll scurry for cover on this one.
 

GOP Slams Kenyan Over (filename)

Now that they've gotten the message over at the New York Post and Sunday's 5 Dirtbags have become the Swap Jihadis (which is not actually a band name contest, see right, with a little Daily News bedwetting thrown in for good measure), it's worth a little look back at how some of today's salient news stories looked in the recent past.
 
For example, there's the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage on Jan. 16, shown above. And there's this AP story from April 24, noting that ... what's that, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.?

"Given the significance and necessity for centralized command and control, which I have been informed is little to nonexistent, I urge you to seriously consider the idea of directing an individual to organize, manage and coordinate activity that involves multiple elements of the federal government working toward Bergdahl's release," wrote Hunter, a Marine veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

... A month after Lumpkin's appointment, Hunter wrote President Barack Obama, asking him to make the Defense Department the lead on all efforts to get Bergdahl back "with the specific aim of achieving a faster resolution than can be provided by the Department of State." He also asked Obama to name one coordinator to oversee the entire Bergdahl effort.
 
Interesting how that's worked out, isn't it? How do you suppose Fox readers were talking about the case a year ago* over at GretaWire?
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Realism-free zone

Is this one just getting too stale?

A: What is "none," Alex?
Q: The number of Iranian protests, or protesters, mentioned in the AP story linked from the Drudge headline above!
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Off message

Looks like some would-be presidential candidates didn't get the message about Iran:

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that the agreement "makes a nuclear Iran more, not less, likely," and called the deal "a blow to our allies in the region who are already concerned about America's commitment to their security and it sends the wrong message to the Iranian people, who continue to suffer under the repressive rule of their leaders who have only their own self-preservation in mind."

Bad Marco Rubio, R-Fla.! Bad! That's not the accepted line on the Worst Regime in History! Can you help him out, Dr. Krauthammer?

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Dawn of the Stupid Question

The trouble with question heds is that they have so many answers:

1) Dunno. Since you're the one with reporters and news services and I'm the one with quarters to put in the rack, why don't you tell me?
2) In realist terms? Any of a number of people or organizations who think they can change attitudes or behaviors by randomly killing noncombatants in a highly public way. Or, you know, someone who's just nuts. In a world where punditry was an honest trade, an accurate answer might be: It's either somebody we've heard of or somebody we haven't.
3) What "this" did you have in mind -- standing around holding candles in the air? Because if you don't want the animal brain to think something, don't use a nice big colorful image to cue the animal eyes to set it in motion.

Given all those choices, maybe it would be a good idea to spend that frontpage space on talking about what you know, rather than on showing that you're just as baffled as your audience. 

Two Minutes Hate

No peeking, now: How many times in this 523-word Fox story* do you suppose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the incarnate spawn of Satan there, staring lustfully at his "Crude Behavior"  -- is mentioned?

a) 0
b) 1
c) 5
d) 10

Did I not just get done saying "no peeking"? Yes, your correct answer is "a," none. Why waste space explaining what the illustration has to do with the text when -- you know, Iran! At least it isn't the file photo of Ahmadinejad in a lab coat, wandering among tall scary tubes, that appeared on the front page Feb. 20, Feb. 15 and Jan. 12.**

As Fox turns up the heat for war, it's no surprise to see Ahmadinejad on the Two Minutes Hate list. But let's not put all the blame on Fox here -- at least, not until we check in on the discussion of rational-actor theory over at the National Review Online. Here's the kickoff:

He (the chairman of the Joint Chiefs) has described Iran as a “rational actor.” I write in my column, “Really? Hope he’s right. A lot hinges on that . . .”
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Of inventors and clues

All those nice rules that make heds tighter and shorter -- drop the auxiliaries, drop the articles, drop the linking verbs, and the like -- can also turn a once-simple phrase into a crash blossom on short notice. Such is the issue here as our friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network do their best to perform damage control on Newt Gingrich's foray into the Balfour-era politics of the Near East. Gingrich dresses up a familiar set of talking points:

"Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community," Gingrich said.

... and in the breathless syntax of the homepage, we get "Candidate draws fire for saying Palestinians 'invented' people." I mean, you could see them inventing the Internet or the compact disc or algebra, but the whole human race?
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Always at war with Eastasia (a slight return)

Did you miss the top story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network on Monday? That crazed Kenyan Muslim socialist is killing the turrists so fast we can't interrogate 'em!

White House's New Anti-Terror Strategy: Kill the Suspects?
Usama bin Laden has been killed. The U.S. is poised to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. And the Obama administration's shift in counterterrorism strategy from land wars to precision strikes and raids is raising concerns that the White House has adopted a policy of targeting killings for terror suspects.
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No use crying over split milk

We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then! But now those pesky Germans have done it:

Two years before the Berlin Wall opened, paving the way for the end of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan famously called on then-Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 to "tear down this wall," in a speech he delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, which was then part of the East-West border.

Well, we all summon spirits from the vasty deep sometimes. Would there be an actual "delayed lede" around here somewhere?

But Reagan's role in bringing down the Iron Curtain and breaking the back of communism has touched off a national debate in Germany, where conservatives want to rename a street or square after him while liberals still hold a grudge over the Gipper's deployment of nuclear missiles on West German soil.
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Si monumentum requiris ...

Is this actually the funniest news story in the history of the world in space? Or does it just achieve the best balance between earnest adolescent ardor and out-and-out, knee-slapping, single-source, pound-on-the-floor, scare-the-kitties hilarity?

Let's tune in to the second most important tale from Thursday evening at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

The revolution may have started in Tunisia where ongoing protests forced the country's foreign minister to step down Thursday. It then spread to Egypt on Tuesday, taking aim at the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

And now it has migrated to Yemen, where tens of thousands of anti-government protesters demanded Thursday that another U.S. ally step down: Yemen's president, who has held power for 32 years.
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Errors vs. cluelessness

Want to start a pool on how long it takes to see a correction in the Nation's Newspaper of Record?

Soon Mr. Obama approved military exercises in response to the North Korean shelling of a South Korean island that killed 46 people.

If the reference is to the attack on Yeonpyeong in November, no. That's a drastic overstatement, and there are a couple of plausible ways in which it could have come about. Before we get to them, though, it's worth looking at the context in which the mistake came about.
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Don't even think about ending ground here

Some thoughts about Fox News and the rewriting of history and current affairs, but first this candidate for Mondegreen of the Year, thanks to Sean Hannity:

WINSTON CHURCHILL: We shall fight down the beaches. We shall fight down those ending ground. We shall never surrender.

Surely if you're going to ridicule that sneaking Maoist Al Gore for daring to invoke Sir Winston, you must think enough of the old coot to have heard, oh, something like "fight on the landing grounds" somewhere in the dim, dark past?

The Gore-Churchill thing is a story for Hannity, of course, because it's been a big deal around the right-wing wankosphere. Here's how Fox handled it Tuesday:

Al Gore: Climate-Change Fight Like Battle Against Nazis
Al Gore on Tuesday compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

Wondering why you didn't see that in your favorite source of news? Two reasons suggest themselves:
1) The craven librul media are covering up for one of their idols again!
2) It never happened. Al Gore didn't compare climate change to Hitler -- at least, not outside the fevered little minds of the Murdoch press.

I'm going with Door No. 2. This is another case in which some elements of the (ahem) British media have taken a few light liberties with what went on, meaning that by the time it reaches Fox territory, no one's going to go back and do any verifying. There's no need to -- it's in the Times!

Except, of course, that it isn't -- in the Times, that is. Odd, the link says "likens climate change to battle against Nazis," but the Times article online has the tamer -- and actually true -- "Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change." Nor does Gore seem to invoke the H-word in the text:

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.

How much of that he "admitted" is open to debate. The hosts don't seem to have posted a transcript, but Gore doesn't say any such thing in the video at the Times site, and there's no further indication (I'm looking at reports from the Scotsman and Press Association as well) that Gore brought Hitler into things. And when some public whackjob invokes Hitler, it's standard journalistic practice to provide a supporting quote or two (as the Guardian does here). Absent some such evidence, I'm inclined to categorize the admission as primarily rhetorical stretch on the writer's part -- but it's the sort that allows Fox to produce an out-and-out lie without actually having to, you know, lie or anything.

It's hardly unusual to catch Fox making stuff up about people it doesn't like, but there's a bit of delightful irony in this one. For one, Hannity is a spear carrier for a political faction that excelled in hijacking Churchill for its own purposes. Here's the New York Post in February 2003:

Tony Blair's not the first British leader to risk political disaster by saying things his people weren't ready to hear. Winston Churchill, in the mid-1930s, repeatedly warned that Germany was re-arming, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and would eventually march across Europe once more. For that he was hooted down in Parliament and ridiculed, even by his own party, as a demagogic alarmist.

Well, sorta. But Churchill, a realist, was talking about a large continental power that had reached air parity with Britain by 1935 and was soon to surpass it -- not a onetime regional power in the Middle East whose airspace was effectively owned by its antagonists. It's hard to imagine Churchill demanding an invasion of Iraq in 2003, because Churchill was not an idiot.

Which brings us to the second point. Churchill wasn't just ridiculed by "his own party" (to the extent that was true in the first place; for a notional exile, he retained a very high level of access); he was an object of scorn for the American right. The cartoon above,* from Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune, is a typical depiction: Churchill is ready to let anyone else's boys die -- that'll be yours, Mr. and Mrs. America -- in the interest of some obscure European tribal war that we're well advised to stay out of. Nor was Col. McCormick alone. His Patterson cousins, who owned the largest papers in New York and Washington, were as virulently anti-Roosevelt and anti-intervention as he was. If the Big American Media look "liberal" today, that's partly because they were so monolithically right-wing for much of their history.

Sean Hannity isn't the kind of guy who would have been comforting Churchill in the Tory wilderness; his ilk were in the isolationist camp until the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Supporting the troops? When the Reuben James was sunk, they were writing the "We asked for it" heds in the Tribune. It's a pity Churchill -- no mean hand with the ad hominem attack -- isn't around to tee Hannity up for the lying gasbag that he is.

* Nov. 4, 1941. The cartoonist, Carey Orr, later won a Pulitzer; one of his post-Pearl Harbor cartoons provided the main title for John Dower's outstanding "War Without Mercy: Race and power in the Pacific war."

In charge of the asylum

So you figured the foil-helmet nature of news from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network was going to die down a little after the election? Well ... sorry. It looks like we could be in for a long couple of years.

Our topic of interest* is the second item here, "GOP Rep. claims Obama wants 'Nazi'-like security force." It's from the AP, which unfortunately has sort of a professional obligation to report on the doings of our elected officials with more or less a straight face. The embellishments are Fox's, though:

Republican Congressman Warns of Obama Dictatorship
A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

WASHINGTON -- A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Here's where the AP needs to step in and contextualize a bit. Alas, it fails:

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

Partly true: There is a July speech (July 2), and it has "circulated on the Internet" -- at least, a 16-second clip has. People like Joseph Farah, the bull goose loony over at the generally hilarious WorldNetDaily, have been sounding the tocsin for months now about this "rather shocking (and chilling) pledge." The usual suspects have taken up the call, and it got another push right before the election. AP doesn't help matters by taking Rep. Broun's summary at face value, rather than bothering to figure out what the Obama speech might actually have meant. (Memo to Ron Fournier and the gang at AP Washn: If you still want to "reward the truth-tellers" and "expose the liars," this would have been a really, really good place to start.)

It probably helps to know that, among grownups who study security issues, there's been a debate for quite some time about how to extend "security" beyond the traditional state-border-military domain without -- to borrow Stephen Walt's pointed image -- turning day care into a national security matter. Thus, when a candidate suggests that public education, energy policy, and an active foreign service ought to be considered along with armed force as components of security, you can be forgiven for guessing that the candidate actually knows what he's talking about -- quite a pleasant change from the hacks and neocons who have had the run of "national security" of late.

If you watch the whole speech (it's almost half an hour, but start around the 16:00 mark and you'll have enough context to make sense of the scare quote when it shows up a minute later), that's sort of the idea you get: a broad conception of what constitutes service and "security" and how those ends can be served without necessarily blowing people up. You could say the guy's trying to start a personal Gestapo,** and you might be able to slip it past a couple of especially stupid fifth-graders, but don't push your luck. Sometime they're smarter than they let on.

I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that word of the armistice hasn't reached the Fox trenches, and WorldNetDaily readers will probably be turning up in caves on desert islands 40 years from now no matter what the rest of the world does. But it'd be nice if AP stopped enabling this sort of openly mendacious nonsense -- and if newspapers running wire stories just as they appear would turn off the autopilot and add a line indicating that Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., probably shouldn't be allowed to dress himself alone, let alone vote or play with scissors or drive in Washington traffic.

Working journalists who field calls from the bottom-feeders demanding the head of whatever Kremlin*** plant suppressed that story are justified in responding:
1) Nope. Not a story. Go watch the video.
2) Please don't be seen in public reading our newspaper, all right?

* Gov. Palin's speculations about the almighty are only of interest when He speculates back.
** The rhetor might mean something more like Sturmabteilung, but -- hey, whatever.
*** Or OkH. Apparently commies and Nazis are interchangeable again.

Hyperforeign spelling alert

If you see this McClatchyism headed for print, go remonstrate gently with your wire editors:

It's no irony that Palestinians refer to the establishment of Israel as "al naqba" — the catastrophe.

Aside from the complete lack of any relationship between "irony" and the subsequent concept, our writer has the wrong word here. "Q" and "K" are commonly used to represent two different consonants in Arabic, and -- surprise -- the words that result aren't interchangeable when it comes to meaning. The word for "catastrophe" is "nakba." If the 1976 edition of the Wehr-Cowan dictionary is a good guide,* "naqba" is something like excavation or perforation.

Why does this sort of thing happen? You have to admit, "q" looks a lot more bizarre than "k" -- especially in the middle, without a friendly "u" to help it out. It's sort of an orthographic version of hyperforeignization: spelling a word wrong to make sure that it looks strange enough. And this one's actually going in the wrong direction. Two decades ago, "nakba" was far and away the dominant spelling in AP texts. By the early 200s, things were reversed: "naqba" was about 10-1 over the more accurate "nakba."

In the great grand scheme of things, the q-for-k swap here isn't one to start the revolution over (not that originating editors are prone to appreciating, oh, technical arguments about consonants and meaning and stuff). It's far from the worst mistake of its kind -- not in spelling, certainly not in translation. But if we have to speak other people's languages, it'd be nice if we could sort of start trying to tone down the ambient fear level, one consonant at a time.

One more thing:
Even if Israel and the Palestinians do agree on their borders, few realists think that a deal would assuage extremists who refuse to accept the idea of a Jewish nation in the Middle East.

Let's not get our concepts confused. That's not a primary concern of realists. Realists care about whether extremists know who's on which side of a proposition like "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Don't get realists confused with "pessimists."

* Long story short, this W&C doesn't list either "naqba" or "nakba," but "naqb" (excavation) and "nakb" (catastrophe) are the transliterations of the first nouns after the roundup of the respective verb forms.