The past year brought remarkable change to the Korean peninsula, and with his father Kim Jong-il’s death last December, Kim Jong-un has assumed control of North Korea. His public appearances have been geared towards shaping the political neophyte into a stately, confident ruler. In terms of actual policy, he has aimed to consolidate power by visiting elite military units and taking a hard-line stance against defectors.

Kim Jong-un’s ascension as Supreme Leader has experts like Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations reevaluating North Korea. Many wonder how the hermit state will maintain domestic stability while asserting itself on the international stage. Yet, the new leader’s role remains ambiguous, with Snyder telling the HPR, “What’s more difficult to discern is whether he is a figurehead or a decision-maker.” The youngest head of state in the world, Jong-un will face immense pressure from military brass and senior advisers to maintain North Korean strength and stability. However, if Jong-un takes brash actions to drum up support and prove his bravado, he risks alienating China and fraying the one relationship that the regime depends upon for its survival.

False Promises?

Weeks into his tenure, Jong-un surprised the world by announcing that North Korea would suspend part of its nuclear fuel enrichment program, halt long-range missile tests, and invite international nuclear inspectors back into the country. Named the Leap Year deal, the proclamation hinted at mutual cooperation between the new regime and the United States. In exchange for these concessions, the United States would provide 240,000 metric tons of food aid to the impoverished nation. As reference points, according to the Congressional Research Service, the United States provided 148,270 and 21,000 metric tons of food aid in 2008 and 2009 respectively.

But the plans quickly fell through after North Korea announced March 16 that it would launch a satellite rocket into space. The United States dismissed this as pretense for another missile test, and the Obama Administration cancelled its $250 million pledge, given that the formal written agreement had not been concluded.

This latest episode suggests that the problems and tensions emblematic of international relations under Kim Jong-Il will persist while the son employs his father’s tactics. Andrew Cobel of the RAND Corporation told the HPR that, “it’s going to be a continuity of his father’s policies.” This affair suggests strongly that Kim Jong-un will act for his government’s self-interest, despite pressure from the West.

A Leader Untested

Since World War II ended, only two other leaders have governed North Korea. While the first transfer of power occurred over many years before the death of Kim Il-Sung, the first North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un’s ascendancy took place over mere months. Consequently, the young ruler has had to operate within the multilateral framework of the Workers’ Party, the People’s Army, and the Central Military Commission. He must navigate these various factions to accumulate the widespread support and faith of the ruling elite that is requisite to maintaining power.

While the media has attempted to craft a cult of personality around the leader, Snyder notes, “concerns over a potential power struggle are unlikely to subside in the near term given the uncertainties surrounding the legitimacy of Kim Jong-un.” For example, despite having minimal experience, Jong-un was promoted to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission and four-star general. He will undoubtedly have to use his powers to project authority over the country.

China’s Strategic Interests

Despite having demonstrated a tendency toward brash actions, Jong-un is likely to consider China’s interests, given that the regional powerhouse is North Korea’s largest trading partner and closest ally. However, the bilateral relationship has weakened over the past few years, as North Korean aggression necessitated Beijing’s reassessment of the alliance. According to Snyder, China’s principal aims are to maintain regional stability and, “ensure that the leadership won’t falter.”

China has previously reined in North Korea when the rogue state threatened the existing balance of power. When North Korea first tested a nuclear weapon in fall 2006, China agreed to U.N. sanctions, then an unprecedented move for the regional titan. While the sanctions did not preclude China from trading with North Korea, given that bilateral trade between the two nations actually increased, the policy shift did send a message to Pyongyang that Beijing can pull the plug anytime. According to Scobell, “Pyongyang and Beijing don’t particularly like each other, but they need each other.” China’s willingness to publicly condemn North Korea is likely a harbinger of future economic sanctions.

China must carefully balance between pressuring North Korea and imposing harsh sanctions, which could have the unintended effect of spurring regional imbalance and political retrenchment. Accordingly, North Korea can push the envelope and test Beijing’s patience in tolerating such behavior, but Jong-un must not stray too far. “Although Chinese officials have publicly expressed support for a stable leadership…Kim Jong Il’s sudden death is likely to intensify China’s internal debates on its future North Korea policy,” said Snyder. The Chinese are fully prepared to push back should the situation warrant it.

The Fallout

According to Scobell, Kim Jong-un’s actions are largely explained because he is, “young, and still trying to exert his authority.” To shore up institutional support and retain an iron grip, Kim Jong-un will implement forceful strategies from his father’s playbook. But Beijing is monitoring the situation, and will not stand idly if the North Korean regime crosses the line.

North Korea’s actions remain difficult to predict precisely because the totalitarian state has few parallels. However, its actions over the past decade help paint a clearer picture, and despite a nominal leadership switch, little has changed in North Korea under Kim Jong-un. With its singular self-interest and recent pattern of dealings with the United States and China, North Korea is not likely to change its security policy anytime soon, despite the veneer of the new Supreme Leader.

Coming Apart focuses on the ever-increasing differences between Murray’s “new” upper and lower classes, which developed after 1960 because of the large premium placed on intellectual ability in the workplace. The new upper class is made up of college graduates who work in managerial positions or professional occupations and belong to the top 5 percent of all income earners. Murray’s new lower class comprises working-age men who are unemployed or underemployed and don’t make enough by themselves to put a household of two above the poverty line, single mother with minor-aged children, and an ill-defined group of men and women who, as Murray puts it, are “disconnected from the matrix of community life.” This lower class comprises close to 20 percent of the American population, and they are unsurprisingly located in the poorest neighborhoods.

Murray then identifies four “founding virtues” of America incorporating marriage, industriousness, religion, and honesty. He declares the “four aspects of American life were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century founder or nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them.” Charles Murray’s premise in Coming Apart is that the decline of the four founding virtues among the people of the new lower class has contributed to their socioeconomic stagnation, while the preservation of those values among the people of the new upper class produces their prosperity.

Murray’s tale about the decline of his four founding virtues digs deep into the underlying causes of socioeconomic inequality. He chose his four virtues well for the most part, although I do not think Murray should have treated them all equally. Honesty and industriousness form the weakest part of his argument because they are more abstract than marriage and religiosity. Murray does have facts and figures to support his claim that honesty and industriousness are in decline, but he cannot make many concrete observations because it is difficult to quantify them. The institutions of marriage and religion are much more important because it is easier to cede that their decline precipitated the deterioration in honesty and industriousness.

Murray’s argument concerning marriage is a revelation because he takes many different statistics that seem relatively harmless on their own and shows how disastrous their combined effect has been for the United States. Marriage rates have fallen in everywhere in our society, but while the rate seems to have stabilized among the upper class, it has continued to decline in the lower class. The number of people in the lower class who are divorced or have never been married has skyrocketed since 1960, and thus many children are born and raised in single-parent households. There are those who argue that single parents can be just as effective at raising a child as a two parents, but even they cannot deny that lower class children raised by single mothers generally have access to fewer resources and opportunities as their peers with two parents. This is an enormous problem because children do not learn vital lessons that helped preceding generations get ahead. The decline of marriage also ties in well with the decline of religiosity because they both began their deterioration at around the same time. In fact, it could be argued that declining religiousness of the American population contributed to the decline in marriage because people felt it was less necessary to get married as the taboo against having children out of wedlock disappeared.

Murray provides a refutation of the commonly held misconception that poorer working class whites are more religious than their upper class counterparts. Citing evidence gathered in the General Social Survey distributed since the 1970s, Murray shows that while the amount of people in the upper and lower classes who consider themselves to be either religious or secular is about the same, the percentage of people in the upper class who regularly attend a worship service is about 15 percent higher than in the lower class. Since organized religion provides a weekly refresher course on the importance of good behavior to followers, the particularly sharp decline in religiosity in both classes might help explain the increase in all types of crimes. The situation in the lower class is worse because there has been a correspondingly larger decrease in religiosity.

American society has changed greatly in the last several decades due to the decline of Murray’s founding virtues. The decline disproportionately affected the lower class, and the upper class is understandably drifting apart from the rest of society. The members of both classes tend to live in clusters of communities with people similar to them. Murray succinctly points out the problem with this when he says “It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisors cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.” Members of the upper class tend to make far-reaching decisions that affect members of all other classes, but how can they make decisions that benefit people they do not understand? Unless members of the new upper class make a conscious effort to address their increasing separation from the lower class, no amount of welfare or social programs will be able to resolve the issue of income inequality.

Some may say, “Who cares? The All-Star Game doesn’t even matter.” On the surface, the statement has some merit—the MLB All-Star Game merely determines which league will claim home field advantage in the World Series in October and is largely hoopla and fanfare. Delve a bit deeper, however, and it becomes clear the All-Star Game is critical at the individual player level. Simply being named to the All-Star roster is a defining characteristic of a player and a sticking point in future contract negotiations.

To put it plainly, All-Star nominations translate to higher player salaries in the long run by demarcating expertise—be it in salary arbitration hearings or free agent contract negotiations (or even marginal salary bonuses of hundreds of thousands of dollars for some). Just ask agent Scott Boras how convenient it is to tack that little tidbit onto his clients’ résumés when seeking another gargantuan contract. By extension, therefore, All-Star Game nominations have at least an indirect impact on the labor market structure of MLB and it is worthwhile to look at alternatives to make player selections more democratic in a modern sense.

Though MLB grants 25 votes per individual in an attempt to offset the innate inequities between large-market and small-market fan bases, the inequities persist. No matter how one reads it, large-market teams tend to boast more players on a league’s starting roster because of their larger fan base and wider name recognition. Just take a look at the 2011 starting lineup for the American League—Boston and New York position players alone took six of the nine spots. Sure, Boston and New York could simply have comparatively better players at given positions, but given the subpar years of Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter before the All-Star break last year, fans seem to have been ill-informed when casting their ballots.

How can MLB rectify this starting position player ballot dilemma? A two-pronged approach would help. First, list the position players on the ballot in order of sortable stats ranging from batting average to slugging percentage; the current ballot structure requires fans to actively seek out stats and assumes that all have adequate knowledge.

Secondly, and more importantly, the structure of voting should be changed so that fans are incentivized to vote for players that aren’t on their favorite team’s roster. The current structure makes a mockery of the equality of impact that is supposed to define our modern democracy by allowing some particularly avid fans to hijack the system and dilute the votes of casual fans. Instead, the voting system should use a two-step process that occurs over two weeks in late June, with each position category divided in half by lottery to create localized, intra-position voting competition. The winners of each local race the first week face their positional counterpart in a final vote to determine the starting slot, with the second-place winner starting as backup (eliminating the need for player selections).

For example, let’s take first basemen in the American League this year and run their names through a lottery. The random number generator pits the following against each other in Pool One: Adrian Gonzalez, Albert Pujols, Adam Lind, Carlos Pena, Justin Smoak, Eric Hosmer, and Daric Barton. The remaining first basemen in the AL face off against each other in Pool Two. The individuals with a plurality of votes in each pool move on to face each other in the second week. While the first week may be more based on team allegiance, the second round invites fans of all teams to cast ballots to construct the best team to put out on the field against the opposing league. Thus, the voting process eliminates many biases intrinsic to the current arrangement and does not drag on forever.

What about the pitchers? Players have as much a right as any other to vote on the pitchers worthy of a nod since they are the ones facing them daily, but giving them sole control is a bit unfair to many fans whose favorite players take the mound every five days. Here is a more reasonable alternative: have players nominate the top 50 pitchers (starters and relievers) in each league, then have fans vote for the top 10 starting pitchers and top five relief pitchers of that group using the current system during the last week of voting. That should get fans disappointed in their previously futile vote to run back to the online ballot box for a shot at redemption. For parity’s sake, the managers can fill out the remaining roster spots due to injury or non-participation or vacancy if necessary and choose the starting pitcher who will begin the game.

Under this arrangement, the All-Star Game’s impact on the labor market structure remains the same, but the players who can call themselves “All-Stars” (and earn the bigger payday) will have had to earn it through a more democratic system.

Baseball is America’s pastime, so it should try to act like it a bit more.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Vermont is still by-and-large a mountainous idyll, an unimpeachably beautiful place that in many ways serves as a positive stereotype of itself.  From the time one leaves the city limits of Burlington and heads eastward, there are practically no big-box stores; there are no billboards; the highway ambles between compact, centuries-old villages, boxed into vales by shaggy hillsides.  This cultural and topographical preservation is not an organic development.  It relies on a cavalcade of comprehensive regulations, including the state’s revolutionary Act 250, which affords regional planning boards the ability to reject projects larger than one acre for any “adverse effects” they may have on local “aesthetics, scenic beauty, historical sites, or natural areas.”  Also included in these initiatives are an outright, statewide ban on billboards and hundreds of byzantine, yet effective local zoning ordinances that have single-handedly limited the number of Wal-Marts in the state to four.  If such regulations seem grounded in government intrusion into the minutiae of construction, it’s because they are; these comprehensive measures are made possible by the semi-collectivist nature of Vermont politics and the civic fabric of its citizenry, represented by an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature and a self-described “socialist” senator in Bernie Sanders.  As a liberal, I have no philosophical quarrel with this form of politics, and I imagine that even conservatives with a strong predisposition against the process would admire the sprawl-less, civically harmonious, and aesthetically beautiful end.  Nevertheless, I realize that the libertarian argument is deontological, focused on the intrusive means of government, rather than the aesthetics of the result.

Across the border in New Hampshire, this libertarian reasoning has definitively triumphed.  Upon crossing the Connecticut River while traveling eastward on Interstate 89, those with an eye for municipal planning might as well be crossing the River Styx.  This isn’t to say that I hate New Hampshire; it is, in many places, one of the most beautiful states in the nation.  But whereas the journey in Vermont is completely devoid of bland corporatism, the traveler entering New Hampshire is immediately confronted with pallid seas of asphalt and big-box obelisks, a Kmart, a Ninety-Nine Restaurant, a TJ Maxx, a Kohl’s, a Verizon outlet, an Olympia Sports, a CVS, and a Payless Shoe Source all lining the highway within its first mile.  A local conservative poet, Robert Frost, wrote in one of his anthologies, “Mountain Interval,” of a boy who is killed by a buzz-saw while he overlooks the Connecticut, a buzz-saw that churns out identical, monotonous slices of stove-length wood in a process symbolic of modernity.  Ninety-two years after the poem was written, it is clear that it was not only the boy who was killed by the apathetic strokes of the modern machine, but the community surrounding him as well.  In the violent expansion of sprawl, local identity has been gobbled up into strip malls, parking lots, and retail chains, making once compact yankee villages indistinguishable from the highways of Dixie or the suburbs of LA.  Far too much of the journey’s remainder is scarred by this demeaning form of development, a frustration expressed by author and New Urbanist, James Howard Kunstler, in his 1996 book, The Geography of Nowhere:

Most of this [new development] is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading – the jive-plastic Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk food joints, the Orwellian office parks featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield…the whole, destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”

Kunstler is generalizing a bit in the last part of his quote.  Many non-Republican politicians (and even, admittedly, some Republicans) can distinguish between responsible and irresponsible development.  But in the rural north of New Hampshire, where distrust of government is a societal dogma, the difference between responsible and irresponsible growth has become an irrelevant, peripheral point of argument.  Regulation has become poison, and the idea that government action could preserve local identity, heretical.

Upon reaching the borderlands of Maine and New Hampshire the traveler is offered a respite against the soulless sprawl that springs from this anti-government virulence.  Partially out of local design, mostly out of neglect and isolation, the most rugged uplands of the White Mountains are free of Arby’s and Applebee’s, and a lack of business investment softens the SmartGrowth debate.  However, once the traveler arrives in my home in a tourist-laden corner of bumpy western Maine, just to the east of the Appalachian spine, local communities are once again confronted by the continuous prospect of architectural conformity.  What’s more, the zoning debate here is made particularly contentious by the composition of the local population: a broad base of Ron Paul libertarians (multiple inland counties of Maine, from Piscataquis to Aroostook,  did vote for Ron Paul), sprinkled with a healthy number of Vermont-style, cosmopolitan transplants.

In 1997, current Harvard Business Review writer Joshua Macht wrote an article about this debate, focusing on the regional village of Bethel, Maine, titled “Entrepreneurs Collide: Will Zoning Take Town Downhill?”  Within its pages, one paranoid businessman, Rick Whitney, explicitly analogized local zoning proposals with Stalinist Russia, quipping “ ‘There were plenty of comprehensive plans and 10-year plans in the USSR.  But did citizens have their freedom?”  Another local entrepreneur effectively sums up the libertarian argument, adding  “ ‘There are people in this town that wouldn’t mind regulating everything.  But they take away some of the Maine heritage I know.’”

Fifteen years after Macht’s profile, the regulations have hardly strengthened, and Rick Whitney has by-and-large thwarted the Marxist-Leninist conspiracy afoot amongst a third of the county’s population (including myself, apparently).  What’s more, the same Rick Whitney has managed to build several hideous lumber warehouses on the outskirts of town, part of the wave of concentric sprawl that has emanated outward from Bethel over the last two decades.  In my own neighboring village of eight-hundred and two residents, a recent comprehensive planning proposal was voted down easily, but not before it exploded into an armed encounter between a belligerent anti-Zonist and one of the plan’s drafters.  Thus, it seems that my town of Greenwood will, for the foreseeable future, be as susceptible as ever to the prospect of corporate obelisks gobbling up our hamlets and degrading our community, naturally and architecturally.

In recent years, the political climate for those of us fighting against this “geography of nowhere,” as James Howard Kustler put it, has only deteriorated.  On the state level, Maine’s Tea Party-backed governor Paul LePage, former executive of the big-box retailer Marden’s Surplus and Salvage, has effectively destroyed the Informed Growth Act, our state’s watered down version of Vermont’s Act 250, which had previously mandated several town meetings before a community accepted a gross retailer’s construction permit.  The Bangor Daily News deemed that LePage opposed the act because he worried that the statutes contained a “bias against big-box stores.”  But LePage seems not to understand the spirit of the law.  Of course there is an ingrained bias.  Does the governor think, after all, that we’re interested in holding twelve town meetings every time a bohemian pottery shop moves to town?

To be sure, this hatred of SmartGrowth by the Tea Party tranche of the Republican Party is not a purely local phenomenon.  Focusing on the anti-sprawl Agenda 21 passed by the United Nations in 1992, the Republican Party has denounced compact-growth policies as a form of “destructive and insidious” internationalism, and Tea Partiers have occupied countless zoning meetings throughout the country in an attempt to thwart the supposed multilateral conspiracy.  In any case, this brand of Republicanism is not a force for the ironic destruction of local autonomy just in my mountainous slice of Maine, nor in just the states of northern New England for that matter, but in all crannies of the nation where civic-minded citizens are attempting to wrest a sense of cultural uniqueness from the slings of architectural conformity.  Such realizations give me a headache, and I’ll have to go down to the new, obeliskoid RiteAid in order to medicate myself as the local apothecary has been driven out of business.  Perhaps my neighbor down the slope, the one with the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag on her lawn, will ascend the hillside to ask if she can borrow my axe-helve.  I won’t be here, but that is no matter.  She can simply travel down to the newly constructed Wal-Mart and purchase a new blade, sold by a man she has never met, manufactured in a country she can’t pronounce, destined to cut the boundary lines of a subdivision populated by flatlanders with whom she’ll never interact.  Hopefully, she’ll experience a cathartic moment beforehand, but if not, I my fear that only by surrounding herself with defeated geography and hollow interaction, will this Tea Partier realize which parts of “the Maine heritage,” as she put it in Macht’s article, are most worth defending.

Perhaps you have come to Harvard from a position as the head of your Sunnyville High School Young Democrats, Republicans, Policy Wonks, or Communists. If this is true for you, the Harvard College Democrats and the Harvard Republican Club are organizations that you might consider joining.

For those of you that sympathize with the tattered remnants of Occupy, you should SLAM yourself into place with the far-left element of campus. And for those who love play-acting The West Wing, you will forevermore call the IOP (Institute of Politics) your home.

Of course, you might also decide to write for a publication on campus in a political fashion.

However, even those interested in the political goings-on of the world might find these organizations as a hesitant home.

And so we come to the real question: What about the rest of us?

The Period of Ennui

I arrived at Harvard in August 2009, then a proud potential Neuroscience concentrator (pre-med, of course). However, even though I would eventually declare Government, I am more apathetic about political organizations now than I was then. My slackening fervor might have been caused by the increasingly besieged Obama administration, but also for the fact that liberals have it tough at Harvard. While in my home state of Texas I would be continually forced to hone my left-of-center arguments, at Harvard there is definitely a reduced need to defend things like public education or universal marriage rights. And, my political debate muscles have weakened with each passing discussion that concluded with, “Well I think we all agree on the unethical nature of corporate personhood.”

When I would “dorm-storm” for the Harvard College Democrats in 2010, six out of 10 doors I knocked on had the near-identical reply of “I don’t care about politics,” sometimes qualified with “I guess I’m liberal, but I don’t really think about it.” Now, a year later, political conversation in my extended friend group has ground to a halt. “Did you know that Santorum suspended his campaign?” was the singular statement that prompted a reaction recently: sighs from those who were frustrated he had been a legitimate candidate for this long and groans from those that wanted to prolong the Republican brawl. As shocking as this may seem, Harvard has been in the position before.

Past Views of Apathy

In a Crimson article published on Dec. 4, 2007 (one year before the Obama election), Alumni criticized Harvard students for “widespread apathy and political indifference.” But wait! Ten years earlier, in a Crimson editorial piece, the author mentioned a similar vein of criticism against Harvard’s lackluster political activist scene, making the argument that “We have a lifetime for political activism, of which many of us will take full advantage. We have only four years of liberal education (except for the few who study for a Ph.D.). With limited time, students must make a choice, and most students prudently choose their education over activism.” Three years before that, an anonymous student argued that “We are often so involved with our lives here on campus that these world-wide problems are relegated to a back burner.” At this rate, I feel that if I went back to the first editorial pages of The Crimson, I’d find a piece bemoaning the youth’s apathetic handling of Ulysses Grant’s re-election. (Then again, the drinking and voting ages were different in the good old days.)

When the argument didn’t stand in a similar fashion to “I don’t go to church because I’m too busy,” the general consensus from those bygone days, especially the snafu in 2007, lied in the supposition that Harvard students were more likely to use organizations such as the IOP and PBHA to create change. Teach for America’s hold amongst recent Harvard graduates is ever-tightening, and the disapproving reactions against Occupy Harvard (and the greater movement as a whole) give a hint as to student views on protest as an inferior form of political action to internal systemic change.

Apathy Redefined

It is true that there are fewer and fewer incentives for college students to be involved in political campaigns. The Citizens United decision has rendered dollars in pockets more important than boots on the ground, a resource that young volunteers could provide en masse. With a shifting focus onto careers in finance, the sciences, and technology, the resources to be politically active dwindle as quantifiable proficiency is valued more than qualified rhetorical ability.

However, discussion is not dead. Harvard still provides the avenues to engage in a more societal approach to political ideas. To paraphrase and bastardize Clausewitz, what is politics but an extension of war by other means. Politics at Harvard can be a war on sexism, racism, or inequalities in schooling. In that sense, they are unlike the meaningless fear-mongering of the War on Drugs, Terror, or Christmas, because the ultimate goal is to find the causes of harm, and to muster the intellectual capacity and courage to fight them wherever they may be.

So prepare yourself for a deeper brand of politics, one that requires the flexibility to reference Katniss Everdeen’s lack of self-awareness or Christopher Hitchens’ Arguably, to cite a professor in one breath and an Atlantic column in the other, and to further dialogue between each other through a combination of the desire for truth and the freedom to find it completely on your own. No pre-packaged party-approved messages. No hopeless campaigns in Russia in winter.

You can be apathetic about that, but be prepared to deal in politics, whether it seems to be clearly demarcated as such or not.

Some—if not many—of Harvard’s best moments seem to lie outside the classroom. You could create your own world-class education simply by cherry-picking from amazing speakers that pass through: Ban Ki Moon, David Petraeus, Oprah, Geoffrey Canada, Stephen Colbert. Even if their words are at times trite, their very presence, personality, and tone are master classes in public leadership.

But this surfeit jades the best of us; my freshman fall, I jumped eagerly at the chance to hear Michelle Bachelet, President of Chile, speak at the Kennedy School. I couldn’t believe it. Heads of state would come just to speak to students. I lined up for half an hour and happily sat in the worst seats in the house to see her. Her story, that of a political prisoner tortured by Pinochet turned pragmatic and successful president, was breathtaking.

Yet today, I find myself doing laundry or surfing Facebook instead of trekking to the Kennedy School. Some insidious normalcy has set in, where the routine and banal have edged out remarkable possibility. This evolution is pervasive among students at Harvard, from wide-eyed idealism to nose-to-the-grindstone cynicism. And unsurprisingly, it closely tracks the journey from freshman to senior.

But, I recently put my laundry aside—just for a few days—and rediscovered the intriguing narratives that emerge in the cross-current of speakers on campus. In the span of two weeks, I heard from three profoundly impressive people: Steven Holl, renowned American architect, Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, and General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each had a unique charisma, Holl in his self-assured and sweeping aesthetic vision, Rousseff in her down-to-earth poise, and Dempsey in his frank wit. But, what was more striking than their individual messages or even personal magnetism was the unspoken undertone that linked them.

Holl, an architect not exactly concerned with practicalities, spoke on the use of scale in his buildings. They were daring, ambitious, perhaps even crazy. His “linked hybrid” is a city in the sky, soaring towers joined by floating bridges complete with daycare, cinemas, and cultural venues. His “sliced porosity block” consumes an entire city block, with deep slices cut through the imposing building to provide sunlight to interior apartments. And his “horizontal skyscraper” is exactly as it sounds. They seem like the imaginings of unchained artist, but they exude an unmistakable optimism, that society can be challenged and inspired by audacious architecture. Amazingly enough, these fantastical buildings are being constructed—in China.

The story is much the same for Brazil. President Rousseff, while acknowledging the significant challenges her country faces—crime, poverty, currency appreciation—asserted a confident, optimistic Brazil. It is a nation that has never shied away from dreaming big: in the early 1960s, President Kubitschek ordered the building of a utopian capital in the middle of the country. Photographs of its construction are stunning, modernist monuments rising out of a barren savannah. Half a century later, Brazil has continued to live out the bold spirit of Brasilia: 40 million people have been raised from poverty to the middle class, and before the decade is out, Brazil will have hosted the the Olympics and the World Cup. Rousseff capped her speech tellingly, “Brazil needs Harvard as much as Harvard needs Brazil.”

After all this, Gen. Dempsey delivered the coda, declaring that “America is not a country in decline.” It may not be, but it seems that these days, we have settled for the small and the quotidian. We’ve stopped dreaming and doing big things, our aspiration for the future replaced by narrow cynicism. Acela is what we call high-speed rail, and One World Trade Center is our new architectural centerpiece. That might be how nations evolve, but I sure wish it weren’t.

Jonathan Yip

Today, I awoke to a punch in the gut. Somewhere in the middle of Joshua Keating’s commentary on a recent University of Chicago sociology study on atheism and religiosity around the world, a disturbing revelation written off as a footnote: “Israel saw the largest increase in belief in God (23 percent)”. To most readers, there is nothing particularly incongruous about thinking of Israel and God in the same breath: after all, Israel is the Jewish state, its capital city is a focal point of three religions, and its Iron Age name is literally suffixed with divinity (El, the Canaanite-Hebrew word whose Arabic synonym is Allah).

I have always had to explain to schoolmates: “No, not everyone in Israel walks around in black hats. In fact, it’s one of the most atheistic countries out there!” Watching the American religious right tout a fanatical, shallow love of a biblicized Israel, I have long wanted to show Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann on a tour of the robust Euro-debauchery that gives Tel Aviv its charm. Despite Israel’s immutable significance in religious imagination and its lack of separation between church and state, the revived Jewish society has always been fundamentally secular at its cultural and political core.

As the years go by, it looks increasingly as though I’ll have to revise my story. Keating mistakenly explains Israel’s religious revival as the result of an “influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews”. If he has the right definition of influx, this explanation is patently false—most recent immigrants to Israel are secular types from the former Soviet Union. Neither can it be explained in terms of the contemporary American religious narrative—unlike the individualistic ‘born-again’ movement some might imagine, it’s exceedingly rare to hear of secular Tel Aviv hipsters leaving the clubs for a life of pietistic self-denial in nearby Bnei Brak.

Rather, Israel is growing more religious as a result of the state-subsidized mass breeding of a once-tiny, now-burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community. It’s no secret that the Jewish state has been bucking global trends in reproduction: because of pro-natalist campaigns to maintain Israel’s demographic heft, the country’s fertility rate of 2.96 children per woman far outstrips all of its socioeconomic peers. And although the secular Jewish elite has ventured forth in search of a reproductive holy grail—a higher secular Jewish birthrate—the greatest gains have been accrued to the ultra-Orthodox community.

Since Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion struck a detail on the eve of Israel’s independence with what he saw as a dying religious minority—allowing them exemptions from army service, a separate state-funded school system, and trappings of theocracy in the civil state in exchange for their acceptance of Zionism—the numerical strength and political clout of the ultra-Orthodox community has taken off. But as I’ve written before, we’d be deeply mistaken to think of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel as comparable at all to religious traditionalism in the United States. Judaism, whose legal-ritualistic framework bears little similarity to the faith-based creeds of Protestantism, cannot be enjoyed primarily as an individual experience; in Israel, your level of religiosity is almost inextricable from your social identity, neighborhood of residence, and political alignment.

So when Tom Smith’s study, “Beliefs about God across Time and Countries”, shows young Israelis to be far less atheistic and more certain about God’s existence than old Israelis—at variance with the trend in Ireland, Chile, the United States, Russia, and almost every other country—the numbers do not depict some sort of evangelical revival of Orthodox Judaism among the masses. Rather, they are the product of differential birth rates, with the seculars at the heart of Israel’s art, poetry, and political thought falling behind. Although old Israelis are far less religious than old Americans, young Israelis (a staggering proportion of them from the ultra-Orthodox community) have begun to overtake young Americans in their devotion to a higher power. To what I can only imagine would be the deep dismay of Herzl, Bialik, and Ben-Gurion, Israel is now one of the few most devout countries in the OECD.

If you are expecting a rapture any time soon, this is cause to be heartened. But the Smith numbers should be sounding alarms for Israeli policymakers and secular advocates of Israeli culture. For one, they signal an age in which a growing proportion of the population elects not to teach its children about democratic values, global engagement, gainful employment, and secular science—in other words, the transformation of Israel into what Israelis accuse its neighbors of being.

More tangibly, they tell a story already well-known to political economists: while one sector of Israeli society is contributing vigorously to the global exchange of capital and ideas, another, reliant on the dole, is wallowing in some of the First World’s worst developmental conditions. As the two separate societies become set in their respective cultural ways and comfortable with their respective economic situations, the prospects for reconciliation continue on a trend to oblivion.

But I won’t refrain from value judgments: it is the rise of religious fanaticism in Israel that poses the greatest threat to the country’s future. In such a contested space as the biblically-based Land of Israel, growing certainty in the existence of a personal god who is concerned with human affairs justifies self-defeating, morally problematic ideas about West Bank settlement expansion and the peace process in general. As the religious ranks have swollen, the level of access these delusional ideas have to policymaking channels has only increased.

Luckily, brave voices of liberal Zionism like Gershom Gorenberg and Peter Beinart have set out on a polemical campaign to warn the Jewish community of Israel’s policy mistakes before the dream of a lasting Jewish democracy à la Herzl becomes untenable. However, they fail in offering too narrow a diagnosis of Israel’s problems. Yes, the inability to achieve peace with the Palestinians represents a fundamental threat to Israel’s existence. But equally damning, independent of threats to state coffers or the peace process, is the rising religious tide in Israel—something to which Gorenberg and Beinart, both self-identified Orthodox liberal Zionists, are reconciled in some form.

All else aside, somebody needs to speak up for the secular Hebrew culture that produced the Haganah and parliamentary democracy, Tchernichovsky’s sonnets and Amichai’s love poems, Tel Aviv’s symphony orchestra and gay pride parades, the Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University. A growing proportion of Israelis, sadly, would prefer to go without all these Hellenistic trappings, travel back two thousand years, and give alleged assimilationists like us a hard drubbing. But as Jonathan Haidt reminds us, we seculars are generally terrible at arguing our message: we are less sure of ourselves, less group-oriented, and less inclined to hyperbole than our religious brethren. Something has to give.

Yair Lapid’s entry into politics on the platform of an end to religious privilege is a step in the right direction. If Binyamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz can muster the support to overturn the Tal Law, there is some hope for a national conversation on the proper place of religion in Israeli public life. But above all, Israel’s waning secular majority needs the support of liberals, secularists, and Zionists around the world—lest they lose the soul of the country they struggled to build. The stakes are far greater than the difference between belief and disbelief in the existence of God.

Component 1: The Volunteers

Many campaigns advertise themselves as volunteer-driven, but few campaigns have integrated volunteers as well as the Obama campaign. Plouffe describes how their approach consisted of giving more to and expecting more from their volunteers. Their philosophy is embodied in the motto, “Respect. Empower. Include.” Since the beginning of the Democratic Primary in Iowa, Obama strove to develop a system of volunteer leaders and coordinators. He wanted to include these volunteers not only in phone banks and canvasses, but also in high-level strategy planning sessions. Especially poignant is the scene in which a victorious Obama on the night of the Iowa primary chooses to spend time alone with his young Iowa volunteer leaders and emerges from the room with tear-laden eyes. This incident epitomizes the depth of involvement and connection between the campaign and its volunteers. Today, the campaign strives to hold itself to a very high standard of volunteer leadership. Obama for America Massachusetts has only one paid staff member, state director Carl Nilsson. All other positions from regional leaders to volunteer captains are not only unpaid, but can demand up to 15 hours a week part time or 40 hours a week full time. The Obama campaign is unafraid to ask more of its volunteers and to trust its volunteers to carry the campaign. This will enable it to sends its campaign deep into communities in this cycle.

Component 2: The Metrics

The campaign’s strategy is driven by metrics. In The Audacity to Win, Plouffe’s passion for numbers and statistics shines through the pages. He repeatedly describes field data, delegate math, and methods for tracking volunteers and donations. In 2012, the love for data has evolved into a phrase that every Organizing Fellow hears from the team leader at least once a week: “If it isn’t in VAN [the Democratic database], then it didn’t happen.” “What are your numbers?” a phrase used equally often, also highlights the campaign’s commitment to monitoring number of contacts, meetings, or new volunteers added. While Ron Paul’s campaigns have succeeded in attracting a dedicated core of volunteers, they fail to reach a broader base. Obama’s system enables a focus on quantity as well as quality of outreach.  Simply increasing the number of supporters is just as important an indicator of success as building commitment and enthusiasm among these supporters.

Component 3: Discipline

The essential component of Obama’s 2008 campaign was its discipline. Plouffe credits the discipline to the President’s personality, saying, “one of the President’s greatest strengths, and therefore his organization’s strength, is his discipline: once a course is set, he is determined not to let a chorus of critics alter that game plan.” Without this discipline, the campaign would have abandoned the ultimately successful technique of expanding the electorate by registering new voters. Without this discipline, they would have stopped courting the youth vote. Without this discipline, their victory would have been unlikely as they responded to the media’s and Democratic establishment’s criticisms and waffled between methods. Even when pundits like Democratic strategist Peter Fenn warn, “It is it is very difficult for the Obama campaign to duplicate the groundswell of enthusiasm and commitment to Change You Can Believe In,” and claim that the energy and passion no longer exist, the campaign’s focus will continue to be on volunteers, on youth, and on speaking to one voter at a time. The clear and consistent strategy represents a significant advantage. It will enable the campaign to concentrate on execution and action rather than decision-making and debates over strategy.

A Player in Transition

With immense wealth, a novel brand, and a distinctive foreign policy agenda, Qatar has emerged as a rising power in the Persian Gulf. Abetted by 13 percent of the world’s total natural gas reserves and the preeminence of its national news outlet, Al-Jazeera, Qatar has demonstrated a unique capacity for promulgating its own soft power. Indeed, with traditionally dominant states such as Egypt and Syria engrossed in internal conflicts and political turmoil, Qatar is taking advantage of a shifting geopolitical landscape. Because Qatar’s agenda and strategic objectives remain ambiguous, one must wonder whether its current prominence is merely a transitory phenomenon or if it signals the arrival of a new dominant force in the Middle East.

Activism in the Arab Spring

A catalyst for the Arab League’s support for intervention in Libya, Qatar was also the first Arab country to recognize the Transitional National Council established by rebel forces. During Gaddafi’s overthrow, Qatar not only supplied financial and logistical support to insurgents, but also put several hundred special-forces personnel on the ground. These instances of intervention mark a substantial departure from a Qatari foreign policy that traditionally exhibited a neutral disposition. However, according to Dr. Ibrahim Sharqieh, Deputy Director of the Brookings Doha Center, this agenda emerged from an ideological shift among neighboring Middle Eastern states whereby most governments are increasingly less averse to interventionism.

Elsewhere, Qatar, both independently and through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has undertaken an activist role. Within the GCC, sustained rapprochement and close collaboration between Qatar and Saudi Arabia have allowed Qataris to act with unprecedented strength. Although they are traditional rivals, the two nations have been bound by mutual interests. Justin Dargin, currently a Research Associate with The Dubai Initiative and a Fulbright Scholar studying the Persian Gulf, characterized these states as, “less willing to allow intra-Gulf issues” to impede cooperation. The GCC-brokered deal that eased Ali Abdullah Saleh out of power in Yemen and pro-monarchy intervention in Bahrain exemplify this. More recently, a meeting with the Friends of Syria opposition movement in Istanbul resulted in a joint pledge by Qatar and Saudi Arabia to provide financial aid and weaponry to rebels.

Reconciling the Irreconcilable

Through its newly acquired position in international politics, Qatar has been able to develop strategic partnerships with many actors, balancing relationships between seemingly irreconcilable groups. Indeed, Qatar has long enjoyed U.S. protection and friendship, even hosting several American military bases. Simultaneously, Qatar maintains amicable relationships with groups conventionally opposed to U.S. interests. Qatar’s support of Islamist movements including the Muslim Brotherhood has been viewed with suspicion by U.S. administrations. Qatar also has close and relatively congenial relations with Iran and, partially stemming from its connections with Taliban leadership, it facilitated the proposed Taliban office in Doha, encouraging now stalled negotiations to end the Afghanistan conflict. In Egypt, Qatar has close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and is a substantial, yet opaque source of funds to affiliated political parties.

Qatar has long used economic tools to establish and maintain alliances outside of traditional political or diplomatic frameworks. Previously, due to rivalry with Saudi Arabia, Qatar sought to form independent relations with its neighbors in what Dargin described as an “alternative power bloc.” In the Dolphin Gas Project, initiated in 1999, Qatar spearheaded the construction of a natural gas pipeline to establish closer ties with the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Qatar has also improved friendships with its Gulf neighbors by selling natural gas below market price. Paralleling this, with goodwill accumulated from its economic and military aid during the Libyan Revolution, Qatar has moved toward establishing strong partnerships with Libya’s energy sector.

Strategy or Sentiment?

In general, Qatar’s objectives are framed as a combination of security concerns and symbolic considerations. Dr. Michael Herb, author of All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies, tells the HPR that Qatar’s primary security interest is defending its petroleum wealth. In addition, he notes that the vast natural gas field shared with Iran, “adds another dimension to the necessity to cooperate,” facilitating the maintenance of generally amicable relations.

However, Qatar’s policies have gone beyond what is necessary for ensuring these interests. Herb believes that, “the degree of activity in international politics has something to do with the desires of the leadership to make an impact.”  As Dr. Gregory Gause, an expert on the Persian Gulf with the Brookings Institute, asserted to the HPR, it is, “hard to characterize Qatari foreign policy” because it tends to be “very much driven by the Emir and the Prime Minister…[and] not based on anything you would argue is national interest.” From his perspective, “personality-driven” policies and ambition have driven these leaders to seek status and power for Qatar. For instance, Qatar mounted an aggressive campaign, under the leadership of the Emir himself, to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup and will be the first Arab state to do so. In preparation, massive infrastructure projects, such as an expanded metro system and a Qatar-Bahrain causeway, are being planned. Through domestic infrastructural investment, Qatar is seeking symbolic recognition along with geopolitical dominance.

Yet, simultaneously, Qatar has ample reason to seek alliances. As a small nation in an ever-perilous region, Qatar faces fundamental challenges to its security. In particular, the escalating confrontation surrounding Iran’s nuclear program puts Qatar at risk. As Gause points out, while the U.S. base in Qatar does provide protection, this could also drag Qatar, however unwilling, into a future confrontation or make it a target for retaliation. He characterizes the presence of air bases as a “double-edged sword” as it has the potential to make Qatar collateral damage in a massive geopolitical conflict.   For instance, a potential U.S. air strike on Iran could best be launched from these bases, yet recent statements by Qatar have expressed strong opposition to such an attack. Dargin describes Qatar as, “attempting to serve as a moderating voice in the conflict” by seeking, “to balance various forces in the region.”  Yet ultimately, as Sharqieh warns, “When great powers fight… small players would be likely to pay the price.” Thus, Qatar’s use of financial and soft power to build influence and goodwill are likely fundamentally motivated by concerns for its security.

The Honest Broker?

Although Qatar has only recently garnered a central role in Middle Eastern power politics, the nation has long played the part of intermediary and problem-solver. Past successes include brokering a solution to political gridlock in Lebanon and facilitating the entente between Fatah and Hamas. Through maintaining and further developing relationships with emerging power centers, Qatar could fulfill the increasingly essential role of an honest broker in the Middle East, even if these initiatives are driven by personal ambition and self-protection. Ultimately, although Qatar’s privileged geopolitical position may not be sustainable, its liminal position and critical role will make it integral to the future stability of the region.

Iraqis protesting the potential explusion of refugees from Camp Ashraf.

With the closing of Camp Ashraf, one of the most remarkable untold stories of American involvement in Iraq is concluding. With support from the United States and United Nations, the Iraqi government has begun moving long-time residents of Ashraf, the Mujahedin e-Khalq in Iraq’s Diyala province, to another location called “Camp Liberty,” potentially the first step in allowing them to leave the country. Composed mostly of Iranian dissidents, the population of Ashraf has consented to the transfer, fearing a crackdown by pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi government that emerged with the U.S. military withdrawal.

Without much evident consideration, the international community has trusted this very government as the primary overseer of the relocation process. In response, a growing movement is speaking out against perceived irresponsible trust in the Iraqi government. In American circles, many are questioning the extent to which the U.S. is responsible for the saga of Ashraf’s imperiled residents, a problem that demands a deeper exploration of the base, its history, and its future.

Camp Ashraf: A Community of Exiles

Amidst the arid desert of Iraq’s Diyala province, an area stretching northeast from Baghdad to the Iranian border, Ashraf lies on the Tigris River. Despite the surrounding area’s impoverishment, the longstanding base contains schools, parks and trees, swimming pools, mosques, a museum, and a university. Ashraf is a self-sufficient, hermetically-sealed enclave amidst Iraq’s geopolitical chaos.

Ashraf’s origins however, lie across the border in revolutionary Iran. In 1965, Iranian leftists who strongly opposed the Shah founded a group known as the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), or The People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI). They heavily partook in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but found their humanitarian and democratic goals at odds with the Shiite Islamist regime that ultimately seized power. Amir Emadi, co-founder of campashraf.org, explained to the HPR that these Iranian citizens were severely persecuted for their political and social beliefs. Out of fear and a desire to continue their democratic struggle, they sought refuge in Iraq, establishing Ashraf in 1986.

Over the last two decades, Ashraf has grown into a community of 3,500 MEK members, sympathizers, and their families, playing an integral role in Diyala’s politics and society. Despite the camp’s partial isolation, Emadi detailed Ashraf’s importance to nearby Iraqi locals: its construction services, shops, museums, and park-like beauty drew those searching for otherwise rare residential and commercial amenities. Moreover, residents of Ashraf, Shiite Iranians under the patronage of Iraqi Sunnis, helped facilitate peace talks between local Sunnis and Shiites during bouts of sectarian violence. Compelled by these experiences, over 525,000 Iraqis showed their support in April 2011 for the residents of Ashraf, declaring, “We, the people of Diyala, view the PMOI as our esteemed guests, and consider their presence in Iraq and in Ashraf as a national imperative against the Iranian regime’s meddling.”

Under U.S. Occupation

Because of its anti-Iranian platform, the MEK had been friendly with Saddam Hussein and his Sunni regime. During the Hussein years, the Iraqi government provided most of the group’s funding, weapons, and protection, directly helping construct Ashraf. However, Hussein’s removal in 2003 quickly ended the MEK’s long standing protection and privilege. Residents were viewed as enemy targets by coalition forces, whose attacks resulted in several casualties and considerable structural damage. According to Emadi, the MEK deliberately did not retaliate, declaring their neutrality to demonstrate their cooperation with the U.S. military. By April 2003, the group signed a cease-fire agreement with the United States, handing over their arsenal of weapons in exchange for guaranteed protection. By 2004, the residents of Ashraf were granted “protected persons” status under the Geneva Convention, ushering in years of continued security and stability.

Since the Withdrawal

When the United States began withdrawing from Iraq, the security of Ashraf was gradually handed over to the new Iraqi government on the stipulation that residents would continue to be protected. However, upon the narrow re-election of Iranian-backed Nouri al-Maliki to Iraq’s highest office, the Iraqi government has dramatically reversed its policy, even conducting organized attacks against Ashraf.  Emadi explains that if the Iraqi government could act without American encumbrance, it would immediately arrest and, “repatriate the residents to Iran, where they would face certain death for their political beliefs.”

Beginning in July 2009, conflict erupted when Iraqi forces entered the camp to establish police stations without the MEK’s consent, leading to a skirmish that killed nine residents. An additional 36 were detained and subjected to harsh beatings and torture. After a series of smaller attacks, April 2011 saw a full-fledged raid by Iraqi forces, leaving 34 dead and over 300 wounded. Although international observers responded negatively, scrutiny was mostly deflected when Iraqi officials claimed that security forces were responding to rocks thrown during a “riot.” Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has maintained a blockade of the camp, depriving its residents of basic services including proper medical care. Though humanitarian groups have begun analyzing the Iraqi government’s conduct for potential human rights violations, the process has been extremely slow and ineffective.

The Current Situation

According to Emadi, although the residents of Ashraf would prefer to remain, “they are not seeking a bloody confrontation with the Iraqi government.” Therefore, their only viable option is resettlement outside of Iraq. Last December, the Iraqi government and United Nations agreed to a phased plan that would transport the residents of Ashraf to a temporary location called Camp Hurriya, a deserted U.S. military base formally known as Camp Liberty. Residents did not anticipate, however, that their lives would once again be controlled by the Iraqi government. The U.S. State Department’s special advisor on Ashraf, Ambassador Daniel Fried, said that, “The Government of Iraq has committed itself to the security of the people at Camp Hurriya, and is aware that the United States expects it to fulfill its responsibilities.”

Reports from the first wave of 400 residents who were relocated on February 18^th this year have demonstrated that Camp Liberty, contrary to its name, is merely a prison that the Iraqi government controls with brutal force. Iraqi police stations surround the camp’s enclosing wall, armed troops are on constant guard, and surveillance devices dominate the landscape. These 400 residents have publicly accused the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), whose responsibility is ensuring that the camp meets “international humanitarian standards,” of lying. Nonetheless, the United States has continued its support for closing Ashraf, trusting the Iraqi government to fulfill its humanitarian responsibility.

The MEK’s “Terrorist” Problem

To complicate the issue further, the MEK was added to the U.S. government’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list by the Clinton administration in 1997. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School calls the move a “mistake.” Dershowitz tells the HPR that including the MEK on this list was a political strategy used by the Clinton Administration to “open [America’s] doors” to Iran. Published in 1995, the book titled Democracy Betrayed claims that the then-drafted State Department’s report on MEK is, “characterized by innumerable discrepancies, falsifications, and distortions of simple, unambiguous facts.” Furthermore, many American officials have acknowledged that the MEK has provided intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program and the Islamic Republic’s growing influence in Iraq, critical to shaping America’s security policy.

Promises to Keep

American advocates for Ashraf’s residents have been emphatic in calling for the U.S. government to maintain its protection. These backers charge America with two tasks to combat the situation: first, the U.S. must take MEK off the list of designated terrorist organizations. According to Dershowitz, their affiliation with this list has made European countries that would normally accept Ashraf’s residents as refugees reluctant or unwilling to do so. Perhaps Secretary of State Clinton’s recent remarks that, “MEK cooperation…will be a key factor in any decision regarding the MEK’s [Foreign Terrorist Organization] status” signal a shift in American policy. Second, they call on the United States to ensure that the evacuation from Ashraf proceeds rapidly and that the Iraqi government adheres to humanitarian standards. The livelihood and security of these residents depends on whether they can escape stifling repression.

Should the United States fail to act, it will abrogate the promise made to Camp Ashraf’s residents in 2003. Devastating consequences will result for an American-aligned group at the nexus of Iraq-Iran relations. To promote regional stability and human dignity, the international community would do well to pay greater attention.