Count stokes tensions in Iraqi Kurdistan, with fears that reduced numbers will lessen Kurdish clout in sectarian system.

The case marks the first time victims of abuse at the hands of US soldiers in Iraq in 2004 have testified in court.

Donald Trump spent much of the 2024 presidential campaign promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies and upend the federal government. Three Cabinet picks in the past two days are starting to show what that might look like.

Since last night, Trump has announced plans to nominate Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On the face of it, the trio seem to possess little in common except having scant qualification on paper for the jobs he wants them to fill. (Gabbard and Gaetz are also widely disliked by members of the respective parties in which they served in the U.S. House.)

Consider where all three were nine years ago. Hegseth was an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran serving in the Army Reserve, backing Marco Rubio for president from his relatively new perch as a Fox News commentator. Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii and the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee; she’d resign the next year to back Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president. Gaetz was a little-known representative in the Florida state House, with plans to run for his dad’s state Senate seat in 2016. Even today, none of them share an ideology: Hegseth is a culture warrior, Gaetz a libertine with an unusual mix of political views, and Gabbard an ostensible dove with her own strange commitments.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

What brings them together is not just fidelity to Trump, but a shared sense of having been persecuted by the departments they’ve been nominated to lead. It’s what they share with Trump as well as one another, and it’s their main credential to serve under him.

After the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, Hegseth defended the rioters on Fox News. “These are not conspiracy theorists motivated just by lies—that’s a bunch of nonsense that people want to tell us,” he said. “These are people that understand first principles; they love freedom, and they love free markets.” Two weeks later, the National Guard said it had removed 12 members from duty on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration because of worries about extremist groups.

By his own account, Hegseth was one of the dozen. He said a tattoo of a Jerusalem cross had gotten him flagged. He soon left the military, then wrote a book attacking the military as a bastion of “wokeness” and decay. “The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” he wrote. He’s remained a loud critic of Pentagon brass, including suggesting that General C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in his role only because he is Black.

[Tom Nichols: The loyalists are collecting their rewards in Trump’s Cabinet]

Gabbard seems like an odd choice for DNI, a role created after 9/11 to try to solve problems of siloed information between intelligence agencies. Though a veteran and former representative, she has no clear interest in intelligence and did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee. She does, however, have a grudge against the intelligence community. She says that this summer, she was placed on a watch list for domestic terrorism, resulting in frequent extra screening at airports. Gabbard says she believes this is because of criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris. Confirming any of this is impossible, because the watch lists really are a civil-liberties nightmare: They are not public, the reasons anyone gets on them are opaque, and the process for challenging them is enigmatic.

Gaetz is somehow an even more improbable pick to be the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer than Gabbard is for DNI. He has extensive experience with law enforcement, but generally he’s been the suspect. In 2008, he was pulled over for speeding and suspected of driving drunk, but he refused a Breathalyzer test and charges were dropped. Court papers have alleged that Gaetz attended drug- and sex-fueled parties involving underage girls, which Gaetz denies. He’s currently being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for a variety of alleged offenses. (My colleague Elaine Godfrey reported that Gaetz has shown videos of naked women to colleagues; Gaetz was a leading opponent of a revenge-porn law in the Florida legislature.) 

More to the point, Gaetz was also the subject of a lengthy Justice Department probe into possible sex-trafficking. A top Trump aide told the House January 6 committee that Gaetz had sought a pardon from Trump at the close of his first presidency. After years of investigation, the DOJ informed Gaetz’s lawyers in 2023 that he would not be charged. The experience left Gaetz furious at the Justice Department.

[David A. Graham: The terminally online are in charge now]

What each of these appointments would offer, if the nominees are confirmed, is a chance to get their revenge on the people they feel have done them wrong. Whether they can get confirmed will be a good test of just how acquiescent the GOP Senate, under incoming Majority Leader John Thune, will be to Trump’s agenda.

Hegseth would be the least traditionally qualified nominee to lead the Defense Department in memory; it’s a sprawling bureaucracy, and he has no experience with it except as a low-ranking officer. But Hegseth is personally well liked and already collecting support from powerful Republicans. Gabbard’s past record of criticizing Republicans may raise some eyebrows, though she has become a loyal member of Trump’s inner circle. Gaetz will be the biggest test, in part because many Republicans personally despise him, and because the probes into him make him radioactive. (Perhaps these nominees are why Trump has so avidly demanded recess-appointment power.)

If Trump can get Hegseth, Gabbard, and Gaetz confirmed, he’ll be on the way to the retribution he promised. And if any of them falls, he’s still made his intentions crystal clear.

Defence contractor CACI, whose employees worked at Iraq's Abu Ghraib, ordered to pay damages after 15-year legal delays.

Last month, the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, for “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” Don’t let the dry language fool you: The award generated more controversy than any other in recent memory. One critic wrote that “it exposes how the economics discipline fails to ask critical questions.” Another called the trio’s work “historically inaccurate, if not ideologized.” I confess to emailing a long rant to colleagues in my department.

Why so much drama? In the work that won the Nobel, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson—three highly respected economists almost universally referred to as “AJR” by their peers—argue that nations with democratic institutions have the most economic growth. It’s an appealing thesis that reaffirms the political systems of Western democracies. The problem—not just for the theory, but for the resilience of those political systems—is that it simply isn’t true.

According to AJR, certain kinds of economic institutions—private property, freedom of contract, a strong and impartial legal system, the freedom to form new businesses—are “inclusive,” meaning they allow most people to freely participate in the economy in a way that makes the best use of their skills. These institutions create modern, wealthy economies that are driven forward by technological innovation, not merely propped up by having won the natural-resources lottery.

Economic institutions do not just drop out of the sky. The laws and systems that make an economy run, such as market regulations, must be created and maintained by governments. AJR therefore argue that political institutions dictate economic outcomes. A nation’s political institutions are what determine who can rule, how these rulers are chosen, and how power is distributed across government. The institutions are enshrined in constitutions, electoral rules, and even traditions. In a dictatorship or monarchy, political power is narrowly distributed and relatively unconstrained. In such cases, AJR argue, a small ruling class will tend to use its power to restrict competition and extract wealth for itself. By contrast, if political power is widely distributed across diverse groups in a society, then their common interest in doing business, and competition among them, will result in prosperity-generating economic institutions.

In the United States, for instance, the oil industry would prefer not to have to compete with alternative energy. Old-stock citizens don’t want to compete with recent immigrants. But if the government is given the power to exclude my rivals, that same power could potentially be used against me. So, according to AJR’s thesis, our common desire to maximize our individual liberties and protect our property prevents us from ceding such power to the government. We’d rather keep the competition than risk getting shut out of the game. And that competition forces us to be ever more efficient.

In the end, AJR claim, decentralized democratic systems such as those found in the U.S., Germany, and Switzerland foster economic prosperity by improving a nation’s ability to innovate. Democracies with more centralized power are less productive. (Think of countries such as France, Portugal, and Greece, which have less separation of powers, fewer checks and balances, and relatively weak state and local governments.) Finally, one-party states and authoritarian regimes—those with even more centralized and less competitive political systems—breed stagnation.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Why does anyone care about the Nobel Prize?]

The most common critique of the AJR thesis hinges on methodological objections to the way in which they collected and analyzed the data. But you do not need a degree in economics or statistics to be skeptical of their argument. The real world simply provides too many counterexamples.

On the one hand, there are the nondemocratic systems whose economies have done quite well. To take the most obvious, China’s economy has grown fantastically since the late 1970s even as its political system has remained autocratic and repressive. It is now a global competitor or leader in electric vehicles, solar panels, quantum computing, biotechnology, mobile payment systems, artificial intelligence, 5G cellular, and nuclear-fusion research. South Korea and Taiwan are democracies now, but each grew from an agricultural backwater into a technological powerhouse from the ’60s to the ’90s, while they were relatively authoritarian states. The same goes for Japan. After World War II, Japan’s wealth grew dramatically as the country became a world leader in technology and manufacturing. At the time, it was a one-party state, with heavy government intervention in the economy. Elections were held regularly, but only the Liberal Democratic Party won. The party therefore controlled almost every major political institution throughout the country for nearly four decades, resulting in infamous, widespread corruption. Still, the economy flourished.

On the other hand, examples abound of decentralized democracies that don’t experience the kind of knowledge- and technology-driven growth that AJR celebrate. Canada is a relatively wealthy nation, but over the past several decades, without any change to its institutions, it has fallen into a prolonged productivity slump. AJR consider Australia, another decentralized democracy, to be an example of their theory in action, but its wealth comes overwhelmingly from natural resources; it is not particularly good at cutting-edge science and technology. Nor has decentralized democracy propelled Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and India into the economic stratosphere. Great Britain was the world’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced high-tech superpower during the 18th and 19th centuries, but it lost that position even as its political institutions became more democratic and distributed.

A particularly revealing example is Spain. Spain has been institutionally transformed since 1975. It went from 40 years of military dictatorship to a market-oriented, decentralized democracy. Despite this revolution, there has been little relative change in Spain’s national innovation rate. Its economic growth per capita has averaged less than 1.5 percent per year since the dictatorship ended. That’s far worse than Ireland (a unitary democracy), Singapore (a “partly free” one-party democracy, according to Freedom House), and Vietnam (a communist dictatorship), each of which leveled up its economic competitiveness during the same time period.

AJR have responded to these critiques, often in point-by-point fashion. They have argued, for example, that China’s growth will be unsustainable in the long term if its political institutions don’t change. India, meanwhile, might be a decentralized democracy, but it is “highly patrimonial,” which “militates against the provision of public goods.” Arguments such as these are unfalsifiable: One can always explain away seemingly inconsistent results by pointing to some overlooked characteristic of a given country. And if a culture of patrimony has defeated otherwise-healthy institutions in India, then maybe institutions aren’t so fundamental after all.

If political institutions don’t explain economic outcomes, what does? My colleagues who study innovation and economic growth point to many possible answers, including culture, ideology, individual leadership, and geography. In my own research, I have found that countries with technology-driven, high-growth economies share one thing in common: a powerful sense of external threat. Some fear invasion; others worry about being cut off from a vital economic input, such as energy, food, and investment capital. Taiwan’s very existence is threatened by China, as was Israel’s after the Arab states began to unite around it. These two countries needed to build high-tech defense industries at home and earn money to purchase advanced weapons systems produced abroad.

Stagnant economies, by contrast, tend to be more focused on internal divisions. They are less concerned about military attacks or imports of essential goods and suffer more from deep conflicts over class, race, geography, or religion. If a nation’s internal threats are perceived to outweigh its external threats, then its people will fear the costs, risks, and redistribution of building a competitive economy. The pie is safe, so they fight over the relative size of their slice. (If I’m right, then Donald Trump’s focus on persecuting “the enemy from within” bodes ill for America’s economic prospects should he be reelected this week.) But if a nation’s sense of external threat is greater than its sense of internal threat, then it tends to invest in innovation. The costs and risks are worth it. The pie is in danger, so people cooperate to defend it.The question of why some countries thrive and others stagnate isn’t just an academic one. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, under pressure from the West, Russia created a parliament and privatized state assets; the West declared victory. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, set up a parliament and a stock market, and then announced “Mission accomplished.” The promised economic miracles never materialized.

[Brian Klaas: The dictator myth that refuses to die]

Western democracies too often assume that setting up the right institutions will bring about the desired outcomes. It doesn’t. A society uses institutions to accomplish its goals. But the goals come first, and they are determined by fights over wealth, power, resources, ideas, identities, culture, history, race, religion, and status.

How did such a demonstrably incorrect thesis win the Nobel Prize? In part, I suspect, because it tells the story that many educated Westerners want to hear about democracy. We want to live in a world where democracy cures all. But if democratic nations overpromise what democracy can achieve, they risk delegitimizing it. In Russia, China, and much of the Middle East, democracy is widely seen as dysfunctional, partly because it has not delivered the promised economic prosperity.

Ambitious politicians recognize that institutions are tools, not causal forces. In different hands, the same tools will achieve different ends. Men such as Hitler and Mussolini understood this. They exploited fundamental political divides to undermine both democracy and markets. These lessons are not lost on modern leaders such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and even some here in the United States. We therefore ignore the more fundamental political forces at our peril. So do Nobel Prize winners.

In June, Ivan Raiklin, a retired Green Beret and pro–Donald Trump activist, sat down for a chat with Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattle rancher who instigated an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 over his refusal to pay grazing fees.

In the video—posted on the America Happens Network, which has aired documentaries such as Bundy vs. Deep State and the series Conspiracy Truths—Raiklin explained that tens of thousands of service members had refused to comply with a Defense Department mandate that all personnel receive a vaccine for COVID-19, because they did not want to be “experimented on with an unsafe and ineffective, what I call ‘DNA-mutilation injection.’” He told Bundy that the “illegal” mandate, since rescinded, was to blame for the “total destruction of our constitutional order.”

“There must be consequences,” Raiklin said, for the “unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal” vaccination program, which he also asserted, with no evidence, “ended up killing lots of people.” In fact, tens of thousands of service members did refuse the vaccine, and about 8,000 were discharged for failing to comply with the policy. But Raiklin speculated that as many as 1 million more still in uniform might “want to participate in retribution” against Pentagon leadership. (Depending on where in the world they serve, military personnel are required to receive about a dozen other vaccinations, including for polio, influenza, and typhoid.)

Retribution is Raiklin’s watchword these days. He calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution,” settling scores from the first term and ready to do the same in a potential second. His battles aren’t only with military leaders. After Trump lost the presidency in 2020, Raiklin suggested that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from the states that Joe Biden had won, on the grounds that they might be fraudulent. Those ideas were later taken up by John Eastman, a lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Raiklin may be one of the intellectual founders of Trump’s election denialism.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]

More recently, Raiklin, who left the Army Reserve in 2022 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, according to an Army spokesperson, has promoted the potentially illegal idea that state legislatures could withhold their electors in the event that Trump loses. He has shown up in swing states, including North Carolina, where he pushed for lawmakers to award the electors to Trump ahead of time, on the theory that Hurricane Helene had disrupted the casting of ballots in the state.

Raiklin’s ideas for ensuring a Trump victory dovetail with the plans he has hinted at for exacting retributive justice on government officials. In his conversation with Bundy, Raiklin said that he would like to “coordinate” with those members of the armed forces supposedly still aggrieved over mandatory vaccinations, “to channel those skills, training, passion, in a positive way, to kind of autocorrect the lawlessness and to create consequences for those who created that lawlessness.”

Raiklin did not explicitly call for violence, even though he praised Bundy as “quite the legend” for his aggressive opposition to federal authority. Rather, he said he wanted “appropriate lawful justice”—but archly suggested that this should come from outside the court system. Raiklin chooses his words carefully, even when they are freighted with menace. Bundy asked how the ex-soldier would treat the federal prosecutors in his own case, and Raiklin replied calmly, “I would conduct the most peaceful and patriotic legal and moral and ethical actions that they’ve ever experienced in their life.”

A New York native with a degree from the Touro Law Center, in Central Islip, Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer. He served as an intelligence officer in the National Guard in several states as well as in the regular Army, deploying to Jordan and Afghanistan. Among his numerous commendations and awards is the Bronze Star Medal, given for meritorious service or acts of valor in a combat zone.  

He has suggested that military personnel could be “deputized by sheriffs,” as he told Bundy in their conversation. This idea is rooted in the fringe theory that local sheriffs possess law-enforcement authority superseding that of any elected official or officer, at any level of government. Proponents of the so-called constitutional sheriffs’ movement urged sheriffs to investigate disproven claims of election fraud in 2020 and to get involved this year in election administration.

Bundy seemed a bit daunted by the scale of resistance that Raiklin described to him. The federal bureaucracy is “so broad,” he said, that it’s practically immovable. Raiklin reassured him: “That’s where people like me come into play, that know the system very well and in detail, to create priorities. You start with the top, and you work your way through the system.”   

To guide that work, Raiklin has created a “deep-state target list,” with the names of more than 300 current and former government officials, members of Congress, journalists, and others who he thinks deserve some of that “lawful justice.” The names of some of their family members are also included.

The list, which is helpfully color-coded, reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them. Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list.

Several former intelligence officials Raiklin has singled out told me they are well acquainted with his threats. They presume that if Trump is reelected, the Justice Department, the IRS, and other federal agencies will conduct capricious audits and frivolous investigations, all designed, if not to put them in prison, then to spend large sums of money on legal fees. A few told me they worried that Raiklin would publish their addresses or details about their families. They were less concerned about him showing up at their home than about some unhinged deep-state hunter he might inspire. In interviews with right-wing podcasters, Raiklin has said he would conduct “livestreamed swatting raids” against his targets. Swatting is the illegal practice of falsely reporting an emergency in order to summon armed law enforcement to someone’s home.

Raiklin’s future in a Trump administration is uncertain. But he is close to major figures in Trump’s orbit, particularly Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who was indicted for lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.

Raikiln is also a board member of America’s Future, a nonprofit organization that has pursued conservative causes for decades, of which Flynn is the chair. Other board members have amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory—promoted by the QAnon movement, of which Flynn is an ally—that some Democratic politicians kidnap, torture, and eat children.

Like Raiklin, Flynn has long railed against suspected deep-state actors, whom he has accused of torpedoing his career in intelligence. Flynn was regarded as a brilliant tactical intelligence officer when he served in Afghanistan and Iraq. But after he became the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, senior intelligence officials worried that his erratic management style and conspiratorial attitudes made him unfit for the job. Top intelligence officials pushed Flynn out in 2014, after an unhappy and sometimes-tumultuous two-year tenure. James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time, is on Raiklin’s list.

A few years later, Trump named Flynn to be his national security adviser, a position he held for just 24 days. Flynn resigned in February 2017, following revelations that he’d had contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States and given misleading statements to senior administration officials.

A Trump-campaign official told me that Raiklin has “no role or affiliation with the campaign.” Raiklin seems to like to suggest a relationship by promoting his physical proximity to Trump. In a post on X, he shared a photo of himself standing feet from Trump while he spoke from the lectern at an unidentified rally. Also standing nearby was Kash Patel, a fierce Trump loyalist said to be on a shortlist for a senior national-security position in a second Trump administration, possibly director of the CIA.

[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump]

Raiklin is not shy about his aspirations. I sent him an email, requesting an interview about his deep-state list. Rather than reply, he posted a screenshot of my message on X and said he would “much rather discuss” the subject, as well as the direct appointment of electors through state legislatures, “with Americans operating in good faith.” He suggested a number of conservative podcasters he thought fit the bill.

Raiklin invited me to post my questions on X, “in the interest of public transparency and exposure and [to] show the world you are operating in good faith.” So I did.  

“What is the purpose of this list?” I asked. “Why did you select these people? Do you intend to do anything to the people on this list?”

Raiklin replied with links to videos of interviews he had already done with conservative media figures, including the former television star Roseanne Barr. On her show, Raiklin explained that although the deep state went by many other names—“permanent Washington,” “the Uniparty,” “the duopoly”—“I just simply call them war-criminal scum.”

“I happen to be the guy that said, You know what? I’ve had enough,” he said. “Let me expose them by name, date, place, transgression, category. And let’s start educating the country on who they are, so that they’re not able to walk anywhere, whether it’s in the digital space or physical space, without them feeling the, let’s just say, wrath of their neighbors, friends, relatives, family.”

Barr then sang to Raiklin lyrics from “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” to his obvious delight.

It’s hard to know whether Raiklin is a true believer—and potentially dangerous—or just a profiteering troll. His unwillingness to respond to direct questions from a journalist suggests the latter.

After I pressed Raiklin to answer me, rather than post interviews he’d done with friendly hosts inclined to agree with him, he invited me to direct further questions through Minnect, an app that lets you solicit advice from self-professed experts. According to his Minnect profile, Raiklin’s current rate for answering a question via text is $50. For $100, he’ll provide a recorded video response. A video call, “for the most personalized advice,” will run you $20 a minute, with a 15-minute minimum.

“Are you asking me to book you for a fee?” I wrote in his X thread. I wanted to be sure I correctly understood Raiklin’s proposal. He replied, “And 50% of the revenue created from the article you write. Send the contract to [his email] for my team to review.”

I declined.

A few days later, he was back to campaign work, exhorting state officials to intervene in the presidential election.

“Republican State Legislatures just need to hand their States’ electors to Trump, just like the Democrat elites handed the primary ‘win’ to Kamala Harris,” he wrote Wednesday on X, adding, “276 electors on Nov 5 ... CheckMate! Then we can Castrate the Deep State and Crush the Commies immediately on January 20, 2025.”

Opportunity appears to be the word of the year in the Middle East. War has brought death and devastation to Gaza and Lebanon, but various players still see within it a big chance worth seizing: to end the fighting, capitalize on tactical successes, crush their foes, or (more grandiosely) remake the region. If history is any guide to the Middle East, the player with the greatest chance of success is called chaos.

Last month, Israel struck the southern suburbs of Beirut and killed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the militant group Hezbollah, then followed up with a military campaign against Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon and the capital. (This had been preceded by the detonation of hundreds of pagers in the hands of Hezbollah operatives.) From a tactical perspective, Israel pulled off a stunning feat: The four-decades-old Lebanese group was the most powerful nonstate military actor in the world, and Israel decimated its top three tiers of leadership, severely weakening it and throwing it into disarray.

White House officials and American journalists suggested that Israel’s military success presented an opportunity. Hezbollah has had a chokehold on Lebanese politics for two decades. For the past two years, Lebanon’s Parliament has been unable to elect a president, because Hezbollah has vetoed all candidates but its own. Maybe now Hezbollah would pull back (it had pledged not to stop firing on northern Israel until Israel ceased its war in Gaza), while Western pressure could help unlock Lebanese politics and prop up the army at Hezbollah’s expense.

[Read: A future without Hezbollah]

Regional and local players saw openings too. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had shunned Lebanon since 2021 because of Iranian interference in the country’s politics and Hezbollah’s powerful role. Now those countries sent Lebanon humanitarian aid, perhaps hoping to reclaim some influence over the country’s politics and populace. Inside Lebanon, the politicians who, together with Hezbollah, had driven the country into an economic ravine now began jockeying for power: Could Amal, the other main Shiite party, seize the advantage? Was this the right moment for opposition parties to ram through a parliamentary vote and elect a president?

“For two or three days, everything seemed possible,” one European diplomat in Beirut told me.

But the reality of war set in as Israel’s fifth military campaign in Lebanon continued apace. A quarter of Lebanon’s population has been displaced; a quarter of its territory is under Israeli evacuation orders. Lebanese institutions, barely functional to begin with, are overwhelmed. Israeli strikes may be targeting Hezbollah, but they have also flattened whole villages in southern Lebanon, as well as buildings in Beirut, killing women and children. Hundreds of civilians have died. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is regrouping, putting up a stiff fight in southern Lebanon, and even sent a drone to target Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s beach residence in Caesarea, Israel.

Hezbollah as we knew it a couple of months ago has ceased to exist. But the organization remains capable of drawing the Israeli army into a ground war of attrition and sending thousands of Israelis into shelters every day. At least 37 Israeli soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon so far, including five in a single battle. And some reports indicate that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has made up for the loss of so many Hezbollah leaders by getting more directly involved in running the group’s ground operations.

One American official, speaking with me on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the government, wondered why Israel hadn’t claimed victory within a week or two of killing Nasrallah. Then, in mid-October, Israeli forces also killed Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military commander in Gaza. “Maybe now they claim victory?” the same official asked. The Biden administration did take the opportunity to press Netanyahu for a deal that would end the war in Gaza and allow for the return of Israeli hostages. Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Israel last week to deliver that message in person: “Now is the time to turn those successes into an enduring strategic success,” he said.

But that’s not what happened. Iran launched a missile barrage at Israel at the beginning of October, and last weekend, Israel attacked military sites in Iran. Afterwards, President Joe Biden again called for an end to the escalation—in other words, for Israel to take the win and focus on wrapping up its wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Iranian officials chimed in to say that Tehran had the right to respond, but would prioritize the pursuit of a lasting cease-fire in Gaza and Lebanon instead.

The Israeli government seems to see a very different moment of opportunity—a chance to defeat its regional adversaries without actually addressing the Palestinian issue that lies at the root of the conflict. The strikes on Iran were limited, but they took aim at Iran’s air defenses, potentially clearing the way for further, deeper strikes. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir described the assault as an “opening blow.” In a statement reported in Haaretz, he said, “We have a historic duty to remove the Iranian threat to destroy Israel.” Netanyahu has taken the fight to the Iranians in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself. He called the killing of Nasrallah just the first step toward “changing the balance of power in the region for years,” and said after Sinwar’s killing, “I call on you, people of the region: We have a great opportunity to halt the axis of evil and create a different future.”

Israel has had similar notions before and been mistaken. In 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon also saw an opportunity to remake the Middle East. They invaded Lebanon with the intention of evicting the Palestinian Liberation Organization, installing an Israel-friendly president, and forcing Lebanon and perhaps even Syria into a peace agreement. Tactically, this project succeeded: The PLO and its armed militants departed for Tunisia. Strategically, it failed: A Christian president was elected, only to be assassinated, and Syria and Iran launched a bloody campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings against Israel and the United States. Iran sent its Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon, where they helped establish Hezbollah. Israel occupied south Lebanon for 18 years before withdrawing unilaterally in 2000.

That was not even the most recent effort to remake the Middle East by way of Lebanon. In 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to destroy Hezbollah, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared the resulting Israeli onslaught against Lebanon the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Instead, the war ended in a stalemate, with Hezbollah further entrenched in the Lebanese political system, where it grew into the regional paramilitary force it was until mid-September.

Of course, few efforts to remake the Middle East by force have been more disastrous than the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Netanyahu was a big proponent of that adventure. He testified as follows before the U.S. Congress in 2002: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Instead, the U.S. invasion of Iraq removed Iran’s key foe from power and emboldened the Islamic Republic to build proxy militias in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, even while further strengthening Hezbollah in Lebanon. Whoever wins the White House on November 5 should remember this history when Netanyahu tries to sell his latest vision for remaking the Middle East.

Mexico's former champion Moreno scored 49-46, 50-45, 50-45 against Iraq's Albazi, who was on a six-fight winning streak.

Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political adversaries to go before a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the Republican former representative from Wyoming, “a very dumb individual” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, Ooh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Like Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summation of what he would bring to the White House if reelected. His campaign is premised around violence, disregard for the rule of law, and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

[David A. Graham: This is Trump’s message]

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Trump’s campaign said that Trump “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.” Trump isn’t wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military interventions. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump isn’t calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney with “guns trained on her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents getting shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be written off as joking around, the excuse that Trump has typically used when he’s crossed lines. (He seems less concerned about disapprobation these days.) Trump didn’t laugh when he said it. Neither did Carlson or the audience. Besides, Trump has repeatedly called for the armed forces to be used against his political critics. He’s proposed deploying the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that includes “radical left lunatics” generally, but also former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. He’s amplified calls on Truth Social for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal (for what crimes, one can only guess). He has said that retired General Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

Yet some voters may go to the polls without a firm grasp of his rhetorical record. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that keeping track of them all is difficult, and some parts of the press persist in toning down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times on Trump’s Cheney remarks as of this writing was “Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” which is not strictly false but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump flagrantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has remade himself as a putative dove, he once backed some of the same conflicts that Cheney did, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid foreign adventurism, he spent his first term in office being talked out of attacking Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the U.S. military launch attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but to conduct a mass deportation. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Perhaps voters shouldn’t give this man command of so many people armed with rifles.

Former Sunni speaker secured 182 votes in the 329-seat legislature with significant support from Shia political blocs.