All posts tagged: regime change

Tell Me How This Ends

Tell Me How This Ends

Published by skeptic

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries. Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them. But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will …

All the Iran Options Have Failed

All the Iran Options Have Failed

Published by skeptic

Just three weeks before Hamas’s gruesome attack on southern Israel, the first anniversary of Iran’s “Women, life, freedom” movement quietly passed on September 16. Even in the heat of events in Israel, the women’s uprising was worth a lament: If the theocracy hadn’t subdued it, Iranians might have toppled the Islamic Republic; and among all the other salutary effects, Hamas’s onslaught against Israel could conceivably have been smaller and less ambitious, or might not have happened at all. Hamas, an offshoot of the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is an independent actor but has ties to the Islamic Republic that have grown substantially over the years. Its political head, Ismail Haniyeh, has often visited Tehran and Beirut, where other Hamas officials are in regular contact with the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful, operationally savvy proxy. As Iranians in ever larger numbers have rejected the Islamic Revolution and its theocracy, the clerical regime has sought affirmation and legitimacy abroad—an aggressive disposition that isn’t likely to abate until Iranian dissent finally triumphs. Officially, the Iranian regime characterizes internal …

A Novel Approach to Diagnosing Trump

A Novel Approach to Diagnosing Trump

Published by skeptic

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association established the so-called Goldwater Rule as a response to the many mental-health professionals who had ventured glib and florid diagnoses of Senator Barry Goldwater during his 1964 presidential campaign. “I believe Goldwater has the same pathological makeup as Hitler, Castro, Stalin, and other known schizophrenic leaders” was a representative comment; many other psychiatrists and psychologists deemed him schizophrenic, a “megalomaniac,” and “chronically psychotic.” In the four decades between its enshrining and the 2016 election, the Goldwater Rule—which prohibits psychiatrists from issuing diagnoses of public figures they haven’t seen as patients—was mostly honored. But from the earliest moments of Donald Trump’s campaign, his behavior, falling far outside the boundaries of conventional candidate comportment, raised the question of whether he could be adequately assessed in purely political terms. Where did politics end and psychology—or psychopathology—begin? Thus the Trump years have inevitably given rise to the routine flouting of the Goldwater Rule, most notably in a collection of writings assembled by the former Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald …