A Four-Part Plan to Save Iran and Maybe Ourselves, Too

In my last essay, I reasoned why our present air-and-sea campaign against the Iranian Mullahs, the IRGC and the basij does not fit the Powell Doctrine. Therefore, it’s unlikely to produce the “regime change” that we, the Iranian people, and most of the Gulf need so desperately. At least it’s unlikely to do so without considerable agony for all concerned, including multiple repetitions of the current air and sea attacks. And even then it might not succeed, unless we and they get lucky.

Rational, serious people don’t depend on luck. They plan. As the punchline from an old-show business joke goes, “The harder he works, the luckier he gets.”

So here’s a plan that just might work. In the process, it might keep our own nation, once considered “the last, best hope of mankind,” from falling into the dustbin of history.

Part 1. Refining, Strengthening and Re-supplying our Conventional (Non-Nuclear) Military. As the current air and sea campaign in Iran shows, we Americans have the world’s strongest and most flexible conventional military. No other country has anything like it. China and Russia are both striving to build their conventional forces, but their bludgeons can never match our stilettos. Russia, in particular, is still using Iran’s drones.

Iran is a fine place to prove these points. The obvious—but so far unmet—goal of our campaign there is to “degrade” the regime by eliminating the bad guys with minimal “collateral damage.”

In general, that’s the best way to wage war for two reasons. First, the universal objective of war is (or should be) to change an “enemy’s” behavior, not to commit full or even partial genocide. (Genocide violates international law and is frowned on in polite society.) Second, selectively killing the bad guys leaves the rest of the “enemy’s” population and infrastructure untouched, ready to build a stronger, better, safer, and more peaceful society after the “war.”

We got close to this goal when we massacred a conclave of Iran’s Mullahs in a single strike. Unfortunately, we also apparently killed some of the Mullahs whom we favored for leadership. That’s a failure of intelligence or (our) leadership, of which more later.

I’m no historian. But I suspect that that sort of strike is extremely rare, if not non-existent, in human history, at least from our Imperial Age onward. More like it, instead of the Allies’ fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, let alone our own nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has to be the future of warfare if our species is to survive.

There are probably still fifty people inside Iran today, and easily fifty more from Iran’s vast global diaspora, who, if magically placed in safe leadership positions inside Iran, could turn the country into a modern, reliable state in less than five years. That should be the goal of our Iran operations, not turning Iran into Gaza or Southern Lebanon.

In order to effect a strategy like this we need more and better accurate weapons, as I argued a dozen years ago. We also need to replenish our supplies of such weapons—both aggressive and defensive—as we use them. Our stocks are reportedly getting low, so we must expand production. We need to make that a top national priority, damn the expense. (NATO does, too, but that’s another story.)

Part 2. Beefing up Our Intelligence. Killing the Mullahs we liked along with those we didn’t reflected a failure of intelligence, in both senses of that word. Even if (as seems probable) it derived from a fear of losing our one chance, it might have been avoided if we had had more confidence in our ability to pinpoint the bad guys another time.

I’m not now and never have been a spook. I believe spooks from our side and Russia’s tried to recruit me in connection with my Fulbright Fellowship in Moscow in 1993. In each case, I politely declined.

But two things are clear to me. First, if accurate weapons are going to save our species from repeating the tragic atrocities of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are going to have to focus on intelligence far more than on weapons of mass destruction. Second, as AI, drones and robots replace clashes of vast human armies in the field, just as they are now doing in Ukraine, many or most conflicts now resolved by armies will be fought primarily by spooks.

Our CIA’s general reputation is good. It reportedly ranks up there with Israel’s Mossad, Britain’s MI6, and Russia’s SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service, or Служба внешней разведки). But I think we’re losing the intelligence battle to Russia and maybe even China in part because their own imperial histories have helped them perfect intelligence operations for centuries before we became a nation.

So I think we need to replace the old military recruiting posters that say “Uncle Sam needs You!” with posters saying “Your CIA Needs You.”

We need to vastly expand our spooks’ number, quality and diversity (in both ethnicity and expertise). After all, spying today requires every sort of talent, from lying creatively, convincingly and spontaneously in the field to sitting at a computer screen cracking codes and penetrating (or setting up) vast networks of foreign “bots.” And though AI will undoubtedly have a big role in spying, it will be unlikely ever to replace human spooks as completely, let alone as quickly, as it will accountants, desk clerks and a lot of lawyers.

So I think our CIA should go on a full-court recruiting press, for the best and the brightest, ASAP. It goes without saying that our nation’s vast Iranian diaspora, reportedly numbering half a million people, should be both a rich field for recruiting and a signal advantage in our dealing with Iran.

Part 3: Beefing up our “Active Measures.” In general, spooks perform two tasks. They ferret out adversaries’ secrets by any and all necessary means. That kind of “spying” reflects the basic meaning of the word and is well known.

But a second kind of spying is less well understood, at least by the general public. Perhaps partly for that reason, we don’t do much of it. At least we don’t do much of it effectively. The Russians are beating us all bloody in this arena, and China is following close behind.

The Russians call this kind of intelligence “active measures.” The phrase covers things like assassination, but it also covers planting lies in adversaries’ minds, as distinguished from keeping one’s own secrets. It includes things like preparing elaborate and convincingly “official” (but false) documents and plans for your own military and government, and planting them convincingly to deceive your enemies. (A famous example of this kind of active measure came in World War II, when the Brits set out a vast array of rubber tanks and planes to convince Nazi air surveillance that our D-day invasion of the Continent would come at Calais, rather than at Normandy, where it did.)

With the growth of the Internet, active measures today include much, much more. They encompass recruiting podcasters, “influencers” and vast armies of trolls and bots to delude, deceive and divide your enemy’s people. In the last decade or so, active measures have “gone public” in the sense that an enemy’s entire people, not just its military and civilian leaders, have become targets.

It goes without saying that democracies like ours are softer targets for such widespread active measures than the general populations of authoritarian societies. I will go to my grave believing that Vladimir Putin, who cut his teeth as a spook, managed to swing both of Trump’s presidential elections narrowly in Trump’s favor by nationwide, massive and even now only partly discovered active measures.

After all, in both cases Trump’s margin of victory was small. And we discovered at least one of Putin’s nests: a whole building full of trolls called the “Internet Service Agency” in St. Petersburg.

Think about that. The stupidest, most scatterbrained, most senile, most indecisive and most divisive president in our history, who threatens the very foundations of our democracy, was foisted on us, at least in part, by our strongest and most persistent enemy. And this enemy’s triumph was accomplished without firing a single shot. If Russia’s SVR has anything like our CIA’s field of stars (one for each agent killed in the line of duty) on its own main building, it would be a single, solitary gold medal.

The “beauty” of this victory, from Russia’s point of view, is that it reinforces itself. The more Democrats—or even non-partisan officers in our vast intelligence and military bureaucracy—point to these Russian active measures as real and effective, the more Republicans demur, object and temporize. Every attempt to locate or fix the problem, or even to identify it, increases the political division in our nation, as even sensible Republicans recoil against being labeled “traitors” or “dupes,” whether directly or by implication.

From Putin’s point of view, this strategy is brilliant. Like self-metastasizing cancer, our division feeds upon itself and grows ever stronger. It’s undoubtedly the most effective and subtle set of active measures in human history, and Vlad the Deceiver’s most stunning and impressive achievement.

For reasons just stated, we are unlikely ever to address this issue seriously until Trump dies or leaves office. But can’t we just try to turn the tables a bit right now? Can’t we build a vast army of trolls and bots to use the Internet (and maybe Musk’s Starlink) to inform Russia’s army and people—especially the racial and ethnic minorities now used so often as cannon fodder—how badly Putin’s war in Ukraine is going, and how the bodies of dead and maimed Russians are piling up obscenely?

Russian history teaches that tsars who lead their people into the meat grinders of losing wars can be, and have been, deposed. So wouldn’t active measures to show the Russian people what is really happening in Ukraine—maybe even a bit exaggerated—at least keep Putin occupied with homeside defense for a change? If nothing else, our own active measures would distract him from his active measures that have been so stunningly successful against us.

Part 4: Quelling our Deadly Naïveté. Our great nation could easily fall like Rome. It could happen this century, even in its first half. And it could happen without a catastrophic war, let alone a nuclear one.

Our fall could arise from our own division, coupled with our collective corruption, stupidity and inattention. Vladimir Putin understands this well. So he has devoted all his considerable intelligence to that end. (Xi Jinping is doing something similar, but with greater sensitivity to potential unintended consequences. When Rome fell, a lot of the rest of the world got hurt.)

If that happens, insightful historians will note our naïveté as a primary cause.

Here we are, a society whose massively successful and productive global businesses rely on “excellence” in hidden persuasion: advertising, promotion and public relations. In business and everyday life, we are absolute masters of those dark arts.

Our globe-leading, profit-making businesses exploit them every day. We rely on them to sell stuff, even stuff that we know is harmful, like PFAS-containing cosmetics and other consumer products, high-sat-fat and other unhealthy foods, cigarettes and tobacco products, and obsolete vehicles that run on gasoline in an increasingly electric age on a rapidly heating planet. All these things make profits for their purveyors but threaten our survival as individuals and even as a species.

We rely on the same dark arts in our internal politics. If you don’t believe me now, watch any thirty-second political ad. See if you can pick out the lies, half truths and false implications.

All these things reflect a simple, often wilful and conscious, disregard for truth. They also reflect an unproven, unprovable and fatally naïve faith that the truth will always come out in a “free marketplace of ideas.” When a speaker’s goal is persuasion, not accuracy, and the law allows him to lie at will, persuasion wins, whether the ultimate goal is profit or winning an election.

You might think I’m about to bash our First Amendment. But I’m not. It has a key limitation embedded in its very first word: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press[.]” (emphasis added).

Judicial decisions have extended this prohibition to all branches of the federal government and to the states. But the requirement for “state action”—meaning action by any form of government—is embedded in the Amendment’s prohibition as much your skull is embedded in your head. Only government cannot stop lies or determine what is “truth.”

Our species had had enough of that during the Middle Ages, when all-powerful monarchies and (in the “West”) an all-powerful Church specified what was true and right. As most college students know, the Catholic Church even tried to suppress the Galieo’s heliocentric theory of our Solar System and his underlying observations, which signaled the arrival of modern science.

But the English common law, which we inherited, had ways of dealing with lies outside of government. It lets both private individuals and businesses sue for lies that harm them. These laws, many now codified, still apply. They exist in every state. They have since our nation was founded. Generically, they prohibit “defamation,” including libel (written) and slander (oral), in both private life and (as trade libel) in the business sphere.

Yet today these laws that discourage lies do not work on the Internet, the most powerful means of communication ever invented. There, injured parties cannot sue for lies, at least not effectively. They can sue the nerds or foreign spooks behind the bots and private networks, if they can find them, and if the nerds have enough money to make suing worthwhile. But they cannot sue the platforms that spread the lies nationwide and worldwide, because federal law gives those platforms immunity.

Vladimir Putin knows this. So does Xi Jinping. So do all the thousands (or millions!) of spooks, trolls, podcasters, “influencers” and others that they employ, in organizations far bigger and more dispersed than Russia’s old “Internet Service Agency” in St. Petersburg.

They all know that the platforms that promote lies—and that amplify them endlessly by algorithms based on individual Internet users’ personal preferences—can’t be sued for any such lies at all. Why? Because a single sentence in our so-called “Communications Decency Act of 1996” immunized the platforms entirely for spreading lies and garbage that they themselves don’t originate.

That single sentence became Section 230(c)(1) of that statute. It was added by a so-called “midnight amendment,” without hearings or debate, at the behest of the internet platforms and their “tech bros.”

Their theory was that the Internet was so new it needed immunity from legal liability to grow. Now, thirty years later, when the Internet dominates every aspect of our lives, including politics, the likes of X, Meta, Instagram and Tik-Tok get off scot free for spreading the most vicious lies and even profiting by amplifying them electronically for viewers most susceptible to believing them. We now live in Orwell’s world on steroids.

What could possibly go wrong in a nation where tech bros can become billionaires by helping spread the most vicious lies to their most gullible believers as a business, without a hint of liability for doing so? Section 230(c)(1), which is still on the books, made Putin’s most fevered wet dreams come true.

If ever a great society ever shot itself in the foot for the corrupt benefit of a few, it’s us and our US media world today. And every day—every minute—Section 230(c)(1) stays on the books, Putin wins and Xi grows stronger.

I’ve railed against this utter, self-defeating stupidity, to no avail, several times (here, here, and here). But it’s never too late to stop being stupid. If we really want to keep Putin from winning the information wars so easily, and stop letting our billionaires get even richer by helping him inadvertently, we have to repeal that single sentence. Only then will the single most important laws that penalize lies in a free society get back to work.

And as for our tech bros, recent advances in technology deprive them of excuses. Even after the Internet had grown far beyond its “nascent” status and consequent need for protection, they claimed that distinguishing lies from truth and arguable truth would be too hard and too expensive. But AI has now made that excuse untenable.

AI is a technology that most of the main Internet platforms themselves develop and/or control. If they wanted, they could, without great hardship or expense, distinguish third-party lies from truth by using AI to fact-check third-party posts, the same way I checked facts and names before publishing this post. With a bit more programming, they could even automate the process, at least far enough to let human reviewers vet the more dubious or ambiguous claims. If our tech bros can’t or won’t do that, when the technology to do so is now universally available and capable of automation, they should be held liable for all the human consequences of their failures. I have no doubt that that’s precisely what a good, old British common-law judge would hold.

* * * So there you have it. A simple four part plan: (1) continue improving our accurate weapons, for even greater accuracy, and replenish their stockpiles; (2) beef up our intelligence corps to come closer to parity with our adversaries in knowing what they are doing; (3) enter the twenty-first century at last, knowing that, in the nuclear age, “active measures” are a moral (and far less destructive) substitute for all-out war; and (4) change our laws so that lies spread by our rivals and adversaries to divide, weaken and destroy us are not further spread, without financial consequence, by billionaire tech bros for their own benefit.

While this might seem revolutionary to some, it’s a modest, common-sense plan that could help us win in Iran and redress the gross imbalance of “soft” power that now promises to make China and Russia the leading nations in a dark new century after our fall.

The Powell Doctrine and Our War on Iran

In my most recent essay, I criticized our press and the Trump Administration for citing the Powell Doctrine (inaccurately) and for failing to credit its source: our late General, Joint Chiefs Chair, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Comments pushed back on the ground that Powell had made unrelated mistakes, in matters over which he had no authority (the Big Iraq war and the ultimate resolution of the My Lai Massacre). No one, including me, mentioned the obvious: the My Lai investigation should have been run, from the outset, by a JAG officer, not a young, rising Major with combat experience but no legal or investigative training. If there was any fault in Powell’s My Lai work, it lay with his superiors, who (perhaps deliberately and cynically) assigned the wrong guy to the job.

Anyway, those comments and my responses were a distraction from the main point. The Powell Doctrine is one of those very rare instances in which a military leader comes up with a useful universal truth and states it concisely and memorably for history. In this respect it’s like Von Clausewitz’ famous observation that “War is politics by other means.” But Powell’s insight is far more granular and therefore more useful: it’s a recipe for making war successful and reducing its cost and suffering to a minimum.

After all, the Powell Doctrine let us recapture Kuwait’s oil fields from Saddam’s Iraq in just two months of combat. That compares to our losing or stalemated “forever wars” in Vietnam (10 years, 8 months, and 20 days), Afghanistan (19 years, 10 months, and 23 days), and Iraq (22 years, 11 months, and 14 days). Think maybe that difference might be practically significant?

Reduced to bullet points (pardon the pun), the Powell Doctrine had three: (1) a clear objective; (2) overwhelming force; and (3) and a clear exit strategy. In Gulf I, which Powell essentially commanded, those points became: (1) kicking Saddam’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait’s oil fields; (2) taking five months to bring to the theater 500,000 US troops—with tanks that had special, artillery resistant armor (depleted uranium shields); and (3) getting out once the oil fields were recovered. When you compare this paragraph with the previous one, it’s hard to argue that Powell wasn’t a military genius.

So how do, or can, we apply this brilliant Powell Doctrine to our current war on Iran? Satisfying point (2) is, to quote lying ex-CIA director George Tenet, a “slam dunk.” We have the strongest military in the world, not to mention the biggest GDP, and our military is specifically designed to project power worldwide. Also, we wisely took our time to position our most useful military assets, including two aircraft carrier groups, in the region. Not only that: our ally Israel is the Gulf’s strongest and most advanced military power, quite apart from its nuclear arsenal, and it’s right there. Point (2) is not an issue.

Our stated aim in point (1) is to “degrade” Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons and to (credibly) threaten, and continually make and maintain, low-level war on its neighbors. A secondary aim is to “decapitate” Iran’s utterly mindless religious regime, which makes perpetual war and declares “death to” entire nations based on wholly abstract, ivory-tower “reasoning” from millennia-old scriptures. That kind of stuff is a recipe for species self-extinction, so both aims are reasonable. (I’ve argued for decapitation in a separate essay.)

But on looking closer, a problem appears even in point (1). How do we know when we’re done? Iran can continually rebuild its missiles, its drones, its other heavy weapons and its nuclear laboratories. It can always recruit more “proxies” in neighboring countries, some of which seem to have a steady supply of strong young men to be trained in extremism and the use of automatic weapons. And as long as the religious schools in Qom keep churning out religious extremists, and Iran’s leaders keep putting them in control of hardened soldiers and heavy weaponry, there’s no guarantee of an end to any of this.

So, apart from nuking Iran utterly to radioactive rubble, or nuking Qom, there’s no simple solution to point (1). I don’t recommend committing genocide, or doing something that might convert all the surrounding Islamic nations into indignant jihadis. So there’s no clear solution, even in theory, to point (1) besides “cutting the grass” every so often, as it grows up. Doesn’t that sound like the very definition of a “forever war”?

The crux of the matter, of course, is point (3). When, if ever, do we (and the Israelis) get out? Is there any reliably foreseeable end to this conflict?

The key here is the word “reliably.” Any idiot can conceive of an end in which the young people of Iran take their futures into their own hands, throw out (or kill) the nutcase Mullahs, and put the Mullahs’ students back in their ivory religious towers in Qom without any secular or military authority, so Iran becomes a modern, free, secular democracy that never threatens its neighbors, including the Sunni Gulf states. Wouldn’t that be nice?

But it’s hard even to conceive of a way to get from here to there. If someone can figure out how to do that, let alone with minimal violence and turmoil, he or she should get a Nobel Peace Prize, relabeled as a prize in Peace through War. I doubt anyone can, for precisely the reason that Von Clausewitz articulated. “Politics” is complicated. Maybe his aphorism is the most granular our feeble minds can get on the subject.

So if we are honest with ourselves, we have to recognize that today’s Iran is not a candidate for application of the Powell Doctrine. If we want to “degrade” Iran’s ability to harm its neighbors with missiles, drones and armed extremist proxies, we are going to have to do the “degrading” over and over again. We are going to have to become a better global policeman, not by making yet more endless wars with no clear strategy, but by learning to make a “decapitation” strategy more focused (at least not killing the leaders we think we prefer, as we did just recently), and by training a whole new generation of young Iranians to work hard and fight for their own rights.

At very least, we are going to have to learn to do “active measures” as well as the Russians, who so far have managed to divide our own nation against itself and elect the stupidest and most divisive chief executive in our history. Maybe we should make the CIA’s and our military intelligence units’ budgets open line items in our national accounting, just to show the Russians and Chinese that we mean business. Continuing with our present “policy” of making perpetual war, when we need to upgrade our clandestine measures and organize, train and arm Iran’s own best people, as much as off the worst, is not a fruitful option.

The broad outlines of an effective strategy in Iran are clear. As far as we know, the majority of Iran’s people, especially young people in cities, want a democratic, modern Iran not ruled by Mullahs and not in a perpetual, senseless war with its neighbors. Our task is to help them, organize them (or teach them to organize themselves), train them and (as necessary) arm them, even while eliminating the worst obstacles to their success.

This is a worthy but long-term project. Our problem is that the likes of Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem (who’s still in government!), among many others, simply don’t have anywhere near the patience, let alone the brainpower, to get the job done. So it’s going to have to be a semi-secret project within our military and intelligence communities (preferably blessed by Congress). You can calculate the chances of that happening under our current regime as well as I.

Keeping His Memory Alive

Colin Powell was a great American. He served as a Four-Star General, Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State. In the last two positions, he was the first Black man to do so.

But Powell was special in other respects, too. Most military men get known for their deeds, not their words. Powell did notable things, but he was also good with words and strategy.

It was he who took the so-called “Pottery Barn” rule and applied it to international military affairs. “You Break it, You Own it,” he said. He did that in the context of Gulf I, our very brief war to kick Saddam’s Iraq out of Kuwait’s oil fields, which Saddam had taken and occupied without provocation.

Powell meant to warn against getting our troops too deeply involved in re-arranging the borders of the Middle East, or in “regime change” there. Otherwise, they might be there for a long, long time, perhaps in perpetual combat. So he identified, decades earlier, the very same problems that still face us in Iraq today and might soon face us in Iran.

But Powell didn’t stop there. He pronounced what became known as the “Powell Doctrine” for military intervention abroad. It has three parts:

(1) Have a clear objective;
(2) Bring and apply overwhelming force; and
(3) Have (and follow) a clear exit strategy.

Powell applied that doctrine brilliantly in Gulf I. The clear objective was to recover the oil fields that Saddam’s forces had stolen and return them to Kuwait (and non-Iraqi control). Powell spent five months transporting half a million troops, plus their tanks (with special artillery-resistant armor), to the theater. They were his overwhelming force. His clear exit strategy was to return the stolen oil fields to Kuwait and get out.

The war itself may have been the shortest in US history. The actual fighting lasted two months. It was our nation’s single, solitary, clear victory in major combat since the Korean war. And if you consider the Korean War only a partial success (because we left the Korean Peninsula divided), it was our only unambiguous, clear and complete victory since World War II, whose end involved the first and only wartime use of nuclear weapons.

Think about that. The Powell Doctrine gave us the only major war after World War II that was not a debacle (as in Vietnam and Afghanistan), a stalemate (as in Iraq, where ISIS still controls large parts of the nation) or a worthwhile but costly partial victory (in Korea).

As for his “Pottery Barn” rule, Powell created it to convince our then president (George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush’s father) not to invade and occupy Baghdad, or even to try. The son, in what may have been a misjudgment of Oedipal proportions, later did invade Baghdad. That debacle, which spawned the Islamic State and is still ongoing, proved the Powell Doctrine’s value.

Powell was not perfect. In declining to invade Baghdad, he allowed Saddam to slaughter the so-called “Marsh Arabs,” a disaster that might have been avoided with a little air support. And before the son did invade Baghdad, Powell, as Secretary of State, gave a speech at the UN supporting intelligence (which later proved false) that Saddam had been developing nuclear weapons. But Powell had been trained as a soldier, and intelligence was not his remit. So his following orders at the UN was excusable, if unfortunate.

As his Powell Doctrine suggested, Powell was an honest, straightforward thinker. Early in his tenure as Secretary of State, a Chinese fighter plane, trying to scare off one of our spy planes, came too close and made contact. The fighter crashed, killing the pilot, but our spy plane, though damaged, managed to land safely at a Chinese air base. China refused to release the plane or its crew until Powell, in a simple but effective exercise of diplomacy, made a formal apology to defuse the crisis. Powell was never one to let pride get in the way of avoiding unnecessary conflict.

So why am I writing this essay? Because we’re beginning to forget who did these things.

In the last week or so, I have seen several mentions in the press of the “Pottery Barn” rule without Powell’s name attached. I have also seen at least one summary of the Powell Doctrine without mentioning his name or using his precise or even similar words.

Having grown up in a society whose biggest domestic problem, by far, is deeply entrenched racism, born of slavery, I’m suspicious and irritated. To me, it’s all of a piece with taking down plaques from public parks that accurately report the atrocities of slavery or depict key parts of Black history in the US.

Racism is not just our country’s worst plague, far more damaging than Covid-19. I think it has already changed our twenty-first century history, far for the worse.

As the turn of the century approached, Bill Clinton’s two terms as president were coming to an end. The Monica Lewinski scandal and the unsuccessful attempt to impeach him, plus his constant erosion or neglect of traditional Democratic Party values (to win elections), were tarnishing the Party’s brand.

So the Republican star was rising. Nevertheless, the GOP was rational and cautious then, so it wanted to seal the deal. What better candidate to put forward than Colin Powell, a hero and the architect of our only winning major war since the Big One?

Powell was reluctant at first. Then, just he as appeared inclined to yield, his wife objected. Reportedly at her request, Powell demurred, in an act of pure spousal chivalry.

Although I’ve never voted for a Republican for president in my life, I was disappointed. I thought Powell was a wise, careful leader, and I thought he would have made a good president. Later, when Obama became our first Black President, I railed at how the Republicans, having little reason to complain about his policy, made thinly concealed racism their chief plan of attack.

I’m 80 years old. I will go to my grave devoutly believing that, if Powell had been our first Black president, the Republicans would have suppressed racism in their ranks, just because Powell would have been their guy. There would have been no push, in the Supreme Court or otherwise, to replay Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and we would all be living in a much better, more peaceful and less racist country.

So let’s at least give credit where credit is due, shall we? It’s not the “Pottery Barn” rule: Pottery Barn, which still exists (a subsidiary of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.), is a housewares retail store, not a military contractor or a think tank. The military/foreign relations principle is “Colin Powell’s so-called ’Pottery Barn’ Rule.” And the three-part doctrine that, if followed as intended, just might keep us from making the same disastrous mistakes in Iran as in Iraq, is not the output of some anonymous think tank or war college. It’s the “Powell Doctrine,” named after the distinguished general and statesman who first enunciated it and applied it well.

If our “mainstream” press has any love of history and self-respect left, it will use these terms religiously. Then maybe some of us will recall how the GOP once had a chance to win big by embracing diversity and claiming the first Black president but, having lost that chance, went full-on-bonkers racist when that chance shifted to the Dems.

Picking our Next President

It’s not too early to start thinking about our next president. That kind of thinking will have three salubrious effects. First, it will get us looking at something positive, for a change. Second, it will force us to figure out what’s right about our country and how to build on that. Finally, it might make us consider what makes a good leader, as distinguished from one who can win elections by any and all means necessary, including lying, deceiving voters, and bending or breaking our Constitution.

A recent article in The Atlantic, in my view, sprinted off in the wrong direction. It delved minutely into a potential candidate’s family and family history. It spent a lot of ink analyzing his upbringing, education and political career under the microscope of “eliteness.” After reading it carefully, I couldn’t tell whether the article was a weak kudo, a subtle hatchet job, or a cruel joke.

I’m not linking it because I think it epitomizes how not to pick a president. But the article got me thinking. Do we really want a president “just like us”? What does that even mean, in the most self-consciously diverse nation on the planet? Don’t we want a president who’s better than most of us? who’s smarter, more knowledgeable, calmer, kinder, shrewder and (above all) a better and more thoughtful leader?

I sure do. I want someone who’s “elite,” not in the sense of being born with a silver spoon, but in the sense of having qualities and yes, maybe even connections, that make for smarter and more effective social problem solving. Do we really want to exalt Gavin Newsom’s 960 (total) SAT scores?

I feel sorry, deeply sorry, for young people who came of age around the time Trump rode that famous escalator with Milania down to his first candidacy. A better visual metaphor for our collective descent into Dantean Hell would be hard to find.

How can our youth even know what a good leader is when all they know of Obama, MLK, JFK, Eisenhower, and LBJ they see through the twisted lens of social media? when FDR appears as far back in the fog as Jesus? when everything they see is distorted through lenses of lies and hate? when even our legacy media have made “if it bleeds, it leads” not just a business tip, but a religion?

So I thought I’d spend a little digital ink considering what makes a good president. What’s the essence of good leadership? What qualities in our next president could help us turn our social, political and economic decline around?

First and foremost is intelligence. You can’t even see problems, let alone solve them, unless you’re smart. “Smarts” is the single most underrated quality in a leader. Our failure to recognize it—perhaps even to test it in candidates for high office, even before the primaries—is one of the greatest failings of our democracy.

As we’ve known for about a generation and a half, there are two types of intelligence. The first or “standard” kind is “smarts,” i.e., quick uptake and accurate analysis. We all know it when we see it, as every honest person knows and recognizes someone else as smarter. I call this “analytical intelligence.”

The second kind is emotional intelligence. In 1995, a psychologist and science journalist named Daniel Goleman popularized its concept in his best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. The book sold 5 million copies worldwide.

With subsequent advances in science, we now know how the two types of intelligence work. Analytical intelligence uses our cerebral cortex and our “slow” thinking, in ways that produced the great thoughts of Jeremy Bentham, Albert Einstein, John Steward Mill, Sir Isaac Newton and Adam Smith. Emotional intelligence uses our amygdala and “fast thinking,” triggering strong emotions like fear and hate that helped our fittest to survive and thus our species to evolve.

Leaders can use emotional intelligence in two ways. They can evoke and exploit strong emotions in voters. They can rile them up, get them to ignore or suppress their analytical intelligence, and have them march like lemmings to unnecessary battles, or right over a cliff. Or they can quell strong emotions: they can calm people down and appeal to their analytical intelligence to enlist them in rational problem solving.

It takes no analytical genius to see what kind of intelligence our current leader has. He has gone to great lengths, including legal blackmail, to make sure that his grades and standardized test scores from his college days never see the light of day. Those things measure analytical intelligence. His appalling but very real success in getting a big part of our population to share his fear and loathing of immigrants, minorities and hapless foreign nations like Venezuela attests to his high emotional intelligence.

It doesn’t matter that his evidence is thin, that he often contradicts himself, or that he changes his mind radically from day to day. Emotions don’t follow reason. He knows how to get voters where they live, in their amygdalas, not their cerebral cortices. That’s how emotional intelligence works.

I have a theory, which I modestly call “Dratler’s Law.” The very worst leaders are those with high emotional intelligence and low analytical intelligence. They can get voters (and soldiers!) to do what they want, such as gassing helpless innocents at Auschwitz, or cheering the violent deportation of honest laborers doing work that no citizen will do at the same price. But they can’t conceive of effective solutions to real problems, let alone solutions that make most people happy most of the time. Their “solutions” range from ineffective to cruel, brutal and catastrophic. Hitler, Stalin and Mao (in his dotage) were all like that, and our current president is the closest we’ve ever come to that model.

Oddly enough, the patron Saint of modern Republicans was a bit like that, although of course not nearly as bad. With his Irish charm, Ronald Reagan could beguile voters and adversaries alike. On waking from surgery after an attempt on his life, he smiled weakly and told his wife “Honey, I forgot to duck!” Referring to the Berlin Wall that then divided West Germany from its Soviet-occupried eastern half, he told then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “Tear down this wall!” And it happened, because Gorbachev had both high analytical and high emotional intelligence.

Yet Reagan famously derided necessary taxes with the cry “It’s your money!” With that simple mantra, he began our nation’s apotheosis of greed, contrary to the analysis of every great leader from Jesus on, and contrary to the teachings of every organized religion, including Islam.

But I digress. The bare dichotomy between analytical and emotional intelligence misses some nuance. We have to “turn off” our fast thinking in order even to access our cortices and slow thinking. That’s the way our brains are wired: our amygdalas are the gateways to our cortices, as is required for our physical survival. (The saber-toothed tiger’s shadow had to wake us from our ruminations about God, lest we not survive to pass on our genes.)

So there’s another aspect of emotional intelligence that I think gets far too little press. Because it’s so important, I made up a new word for it: “calmth.”

Of all the public figures of my 80 years, MLK had it most and best. His slow-paced, resonant voice I can still hear in my head, on command. It lowered my blood pressure on hearing, better than any BP med.

His iconic “I have a dream!” speech apparently had that same effect on Americans generally. Their heart rates dropped and their empathy came into play. Then they were able to ask themselves, quite analytically, “whom does this gross and mindless discrimination really benefit? Does it make sense to suppress the work and immiserate the lives of one out of every twelve Americans?”

The analytical answers, of course, are “no one” and “no.” With that emotional/analytical one-two punch, MLK set the national tone for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even with LBJ famously having the “peckers [of arch-segregationists] in mah pocket”, LBJ never could have gotten those bills passed without MLK preparing the national emotional groundwork.

MLK had high analytical intelligence, too. In a speech in 1967, breaking with LBJ on the Vietnam War, he predicted precisely what continuing that senseless war would do to our national politics, our economic success. and our general welfare. MLK never entered electoral politics, but IMHO he would have made a great president.

But I digress again. As we’ve seen, great leaders need both analytical intelligence and emotional intelligence. And a big part of emotional intelligence is “calmth”: the ability to get voters and subordinates to think with their cortices, not their amygdalas, and to encourage just enough empathy so neighbors can think about what might be best for everybody.

Empathy is, after all, the father and the mother of peace and cooperation, which are precisely the evolutionary advantages that let our species dominate our small blue planet. Can the lessons of our own evolution be wrong?

So what pols in our nation today have these key traits? I see only two, so far, that best display them: Pete Buttigieg and Wes Moore, Maryland’s governor. Both are members of minority groups, openly gay and Black people, respectively. So, if I’m right that they are the best, we’re going to have to abandon our prejudices to have the best chance of surviving (let alone thriving) as a nation.

Though they look and sound quite different, Buttigieg and Moore have three things in common. The first is self-evidently superior analytical intelligence. For Buttigieg, it appears in his debates and press interviews. He speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs. His ideas are always thoughtful, and often novel and creative, if not unique to him. He has the air of a college professor meeting with his best students to discuss smart ways to solve problems. I think these qualities—not his sexual orientation—are what have attracted far more press attention to him than a former small-town mayor and Secretary of Transportation otherwise deserves.

Since Moore has gotten far less national press attention, his high analytical intelligence is less well publicized. For me, it appeared during his victory-night speech as governor-elect. A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he summarized the key principles of the Western Enlightenment in five minutes, in simple, common language. Also in that speech, and in his follow-up as governor, he’s worked to provide free pre-K education for all of Maryland’s children. His rationale: science says that’s the best way to develop our kids’ brains.

When was the last time you heard a politician recommend doing something at the local and family level because science says it’s the right thing to do? Think we’ll ever get anything like that from RFK, Jr.?

The second thing that Buttigieg and Moore have in common is emotional intelligence in general, and that “calmth” thing in particular. I must have watched a dozen debates and/or press conferences involving Buttigieg, and I have never once seen him lose his cool. Even in responding to harsh, unjustified criticism, he always answered calmly, rationally, as if analyzing a problem in a graduate seminar.

Moore displayed this quality superbly in his press conference after the disastrous collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor. He politely let the federal rep speak first. Then he gently stepped forward and, with a calm, measured, almost apologetic mien, he told us accurately and factually what had happened and how it was going to get fixed. Not a word of blame or recrimination. Just the facts, a bit of hope, and some welcome realism about how long the bridge would be closed.

The third thing Buttigieg and Moore have in common is combat experience in our military. I saved this for last because I think it’s the most important.

I’m no militarist myself. I dodged the draft (entirely legally) during the late sixties and early seventies. I avoided service in Vietnam by staying in graduate school in physics, even though I wasn’t entirely sure it was the best career choice for me. After a few years employment as a scientist, I switched to law school, practiced business law, and became a law professor.

But now, with what I hope is the wisdom of age, I recognize three facts of life. First, the conversion to an “all-volunteer” military by abolishing the draft has cost us as a nation. No longer do rich or “elite” kids have to serve. That in itself deprives our military of talent, as well as influence among our oligarchs and aristocrats. It also puts the burden of service on the poor, the marginalized and those who have no other ladder of opportunity.

Second, I have no doubt that former SecDef Lloyd J. Austin III and Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Q. Brown, Jr.—both Black men—were dismissed for reasons of politics and failure to show personal loyalty, not incompetence. I believe they were (and are) the best of the best, if only because they rose to the very top in a still-racist society. So in their important cases, our degraded politics deprived us of our best military leaders at a critical time when we may need them most. (I won’t tarnish their reputations or dignify the undignifiable by comparing either with Hegseth.)

Finally—and most important—consider the damage that abolishing the draft has done to the fairness of our society and the competence of our Executive Branch. The last US president to have served in combat in our armed forces was George Herbert Walker Bush, who presided from 1989-1993, over a generation and a half ago.

Three consequences are self-evident: (1) We go to war too easily, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. (2) Our top civilian leaders have neither experience in combat nor experiential empathy for those who fight. (3) Our political leaders often look at war through the lenses of ideology and wishful thinking; they do not weigh, let alone accurately, the blood, guts, disorder and suffering that war produces. (I don’t see either Venezuela or Iran as a real war, at least not yet, because of their limited scopes and impacts so far.)

My last point is the most important. Military service in combat is perhaps the best way to test and nurture leadership skills. There’s no better test for quick and practical decision-making, especially where (as is so often the case in combat) there may be no good option, only less bad ones. And nothing tests one’s ability to form and grow bonds of trust and confidence with one’s peers and subordinates the way combat does.

People who reason a priori from ideology and airy abstractions, the way Aristotle did and George Will routinely does, do not make good leaders in combat. Those whose goals are too impractical, or who cannot temper their ambition, their anger or their impatience, end up “fragged” or shot in the back by their underlings, as so many low-level leaders in our pointless war in Vietnam reportedly did.

In contrast to the vast majority of our pols today, Pete Buttigieg and Wes Moore both served in our armed forces, and both served in combat zones. Buttigieg never took fire, but he served “outside the wire” as an intelligence officer and driver for his commander in Kabul. Moore got a Combat Action Badge for direct enemy engagement. Although a draft dodger myself, I see a crying need for more civilian leaders like them.

My belief that both these men got their “calmth” and empathy from military service is part speculation. Maybe these qualities were just innate. But whatever their source, these men deserve far more attention from our press and our media than they are getting at the moment. Moore, in particular, deserves far greater publicity, although perhaps he’s the kind of guy who shuns it and just wants to do his job. If so, the more’s the pity (pardon the pun).

Today the norm for ambitious pols is to posture and preen ad nauseum. The “press” devotes far too much attention to their preening, and (in my view) far too little to those who have the qualities that make good leaders. For example, I’d like to hear much more about Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, and James Talarico, a soft-spoken white Texan and devout Christian who professes to practice his religion as Jesus would and just won the Democratic primary in the race for the job of Republican Senator John Cornyn.

Our “press,” IMHO, is doing an execrable job helping us evaluate potential national leaders. Like negligent parents, the press devotes all its attention to the child crying “Look at me!” most loudly. That mistake gave us such paragons of national leadership as Marjorie Taylor Greene. It has also enabled the worst president in our history, a long line of congressional lackeys, and a succession of self-promoting presidential contenders who inspire confidence in no one but themselves and perhaps a few extremists.

Isn’t it time to start looking at leaders of real quality, who spend their time doing their jobs well and not just clamoring for attention? We’ve got close to three years. But if the press and we voters don’t do our homework, 2028 may see the last election we’ll ever have.

Decapitation

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (circa 400 BC).

For nearly all of human history, Thucydides has been right. The Nazis made his apothegm shorter and more punchy, as was appropriate to our then-emerging electronic-media age. “Macht macht Recht,” they said: “Might makes right.”

As if to emphasize the point, the Nazis put a similarly catchy but diabolically ironic slogan over the main gate to their concentration-death camp at Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work makes you free”), it said. The camp’s purpose was exterminating members of mostly innocent and wholly defenseless minority groups (Jews, “Gypsies” and Communists) by working or gassing them to death.

Then the Nazis lost the war. And then came the Nuremberg Trials.

Long before our presidency was a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye, I argued that those Trials were a seminal and grossly underappreciated event in human history. Yes, tyrants who had made unprovoked and brutal war on their neighbors had been “offed” before. But the “offing” had always been in battle, in its immediate aftermath, or in the endless chain of intrigue, retribution and treachery that Machiavelli described in his seminal work “The Prince.” (He recounts two instances in which parties of high officials from rival city-states had been lured to so-called “peace” conferences only to be assassinated in surprise attacks, to the last man.)

Before Nuremberg, the goals of action against leaders were always retribution, revenge and domination, not exposure, trial and punishment for “crimes against humanity.”

The Nuremberg Trials changed all that. They were something new under the Sun.

Nuremberg gave us a novel legal process intended to adjudicate crimes against our entire species (and its nascent sense of general justice and order). They publicized the adjudication worldwide, using the then-nascent technologies of radio, film and rudimentary television. Then came the punishments: executions and imprisonments (many for life).

This new cycle of solemn legal prosecution and punishment continued with action by the Israelis. They tracked down and captured, in Argentina, one of the surviving principal authors of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. They put him on televised trial in Jerusalem and executed him by hanging in 1960.

The Nuremberg Trials themselves spanned the dates of late 1945 to spring 1949. They started less than 81 years ago. That’s about 1.35 percent of our species’ roughly six-thousand-year recorded history. Not surprisingly, that’s similar to the historical, population-weighted incidence of democracy, which I recently estimated as 3.2%. We are discussing very rare and recent social innovations.

The conclusion is simple. Our human species is just now in the earliest, incipient stages of trying to accelerate our social evolution to ameliorate the most dangerous aspects of our biological evolution: “survival of the fittest” in increasingly devastating and catastrophic wars. If we cannot succeed, our accelerating weapons technology and relatively primitive social organization, if not our heedless planetary heating, will make self-extinction likely, if not inevitable.

Right now, we seem to be playing out, on our own planet and in real time, credible explanations of the Fermi Paradox: the presence of so many billions of habitable planets out there, but no contact yet with other intelligent species. Maybe the “Paradox” derives from most species of intelligent and competitive individuals committing generalized seppuku in catastrophic wars after developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Viewed against this background, the unusual events of the last few weeks are a big, big deal. Nuclear weapons are rapidly proliferating. They are already in the hands of unpredictable and evil tyrants reminiscent of the “worst of the worst” of old: Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. Our safety, as a species, from nuclear self-annihilation is as precarious today as it has been since we came within minutes of self-extinction during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. With such dangerous weapons in the hands of leaders who increasingly resemble Ivan the Terrible, what can we do?

Enter “decapitation.” In its Latin origins, it means “beheading,” like cutting the head off a snake. Today, it has also come to include changing the likely course of human history by removing, disabling or eliminating the deviant human leaders who threaten our collective survival, species wide.

The seminal recent events are, of course, the capture and imminent trial of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro (and his wife), and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s late “Supreme Leader,” along with several high-ranking members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”) and other groups, who sustained his absolute (and absolutely theological!) rule by force and mass murder.

Ironies abound, as often they do in human affairs. The criminals against humanity most in need of a complete, procedurally impeccable and globally publicized trial are now mostly dead.

Though justice has been served on their persons, the Ayatollah and his top military enforcers will never be brought to justice publicly for all the crimes they have committed against humanity, their own people, and their neighbors, including Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, not to mention us Americans. They will never have the details and methods of their crimes fully exposed in extended legal proceedings, as were those of the Holocaust’s perpetrators.

In comparison, Maduro was but a petty criminal against humanity. His brutal, kleptocratic regime, under the guise of “socialism,” stole the wealth of a minor Caribbean banana republic, destroyed its rising energy economy, and brutalized its people. It lasted for less than thirteen years, since the death of Hugo Chavez. In contrast, the late Ayatollah Khamenei had been Iran’s Supreme Leader for 37 years, and his over-the-top religious “vision” has devastated an entire region, if not a sub-continent.

No doubt he had been partly, if not fully, responsible for the recent murders of an estimated 3,117 to over 30,000 protesters by Iranian government troops in less than a week. Without a complete and open trial of his (and his henchmen’s) crimes, we may never know the details of his atrocities, let alone have an accurate account of all those killed. (The low number represents Iran’s own estimate now, while the higher one represents the minimum estimate of independent international organizations like Amnesty International. In comparison, estimates of the number of Gazans who died violently, over the course of the entire recent Gaza War of three years, five months and counting, range from 72,097 from the Gaza Ministry of Health to 83,740 from an independent study reported in The Lancet, a British medical journal.)

The final and crowning irony is, of course, the decapitation’s perpetrator. He is hardly a paragon of justice, reason or international law. He’s Donald J. Trump, the least morally appealing and law-abiding, and undoubtedly the stupidest and most senile, chief executive of the United States (and perhaps of any democratic nation) since the Enlightenment began.

But evolution—including social evolution—never proceeds in a straight line. It proceeds in fits and starts. Whatever the fate of the unfortunate Iranian people, their future looks brighter now than at any time in the last half-century, and their wishes (including those of the vast Iranian diaspora) are more likely now to be taken into account. And Maduro’s kleptocratic depredation of the Venezuela people has come to an end, with a full accounting to be had by legal process in a court in (of all places!) Brooklyn, NY. Any successor regime is likely to be better for Venezuelans, if only because its leaders will be looking over their shoulders.

So the task for our entire species now is to “take the win” and mold it to our better angels.

These two decapitations could be a turning point in human history. For most of our social evolution, bad leaders survived, wreaking havoc on their neighbors and their own people, until they died or were killed in battle, or until their vast (and often only partly willing) armies were defeated in increasingly catastrophic wars.

The last, greatest such war killed some 50 million people and devastated much of Europe and East Asia. The next great war is likely to extinguish our species, leaving only the faint promise of re-evolution after the passage of ten half-lives of Plutonium-239. That’s 240,000 years, or 40 times our species’ entire recorded history. Quite a setback that would be!

During the Imperial Age, the “elite” got exchanged as prisoners, after being incarcerated in relative luxury. Kings and nobles were rarely brought to account, except on the battlefield. “The people,” as common soldiers, were treated as cannon fodder or languished and died in concentration camps. And if you think the Nazis invented those camps, think again. Read a bit about Andersonville, our own Civil War concentration camp, where the unrepentant South kept captured Union soldiers and recaptured slaves under horrendous “concentrated” conditions that foreshadowed the Nazis’ own camps.

When all else fails—and it had, in both Venezuela and the entire Middle East—decapitation can be a backstop to political failures, for the benefit of all humanity. It’s not a perfect instrument, of course. Like anything else that people do, it’s subject to misuse and abuse. But it’s infinitely better than World War III, or even a smaller more regional repetition of World War II. Its mere threat can constrain the depredations of the worst human leaders and their enablers, and its practice can bring those depredations to a close, as in Venezuela and Iran today.

So our species’ task now is clear. Individual responsibility, as the Nuremberg Trials showed, is the best and the only certain way to promote right conduct among leaders. Realistic fear of personal consequences is the best and most effective way to insure that the twisted, selfish, and the ideologically or religiously rabid do not, by their clever manipulation of “the masses,” bring us again to the slaughter of millions, the razing of whole cities, or the brink of self-extinction.

We must learn to perfect the technical arts of decapitation so its mere possibility serves as a personal restraint on the demagogues, beguilers, and deceivers among us. Eventually, we must put the sword in the hands of a neutral, international, well-educated and highly restrained body—something like today’s UN or the International Criminal Court, but more universally accepted, more professional and more effective.

I know, I know. It’s a long, long way from here to there. But properly refined and placed in responsible hands, the technologies and systems that at last brought justice to many of the grand criminals of Iran and the petty criminal Maduro could be the salvation of our species. If history is a guide, we don’t have a lot of time to waste in perfecting those technologies and systems and putting them under rational and effective international control.

Neither the psychopathy of a single individual, nor the collective delusions and ambitions of a small group, should be allowed to fix our species’ fate, or even the fate of a nation. Decapitation is the anticipatory enforcement mechanism of Nuremberg, and it deserves careful elaboration. The general undesirability of our own current leader should not disabuse us of these larger, more durable truths.