At the Democratic convention in Charlotte on Thursday evening, Vice President Joe Biden recycled a slogan he's often repeated on the campaign trail. "Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive," he reminded a roaring crowd.

The line is more than just a crowd-pleaser. As Democratic pollster Jeremy Rosner notes, the fact that half of Biden's distilled pitch relates to foreign policy speaks to the rare advantage the Democratic Party has on national security in 2012, thanks to accomplishments such as ending the war in Iraq and killing Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. An Ipsos/Reuters poll last month found that 51 percent of registered voters believe Barack Obama is stronger on foreign policy than Mitt Romney, while 35 percent believe the Republican candidate has the edge. The president also has a 47-38 advantage on national security and a 50-35 advantage on the war on terror.

"This is not so entrenched in the DNA of the modern Democratic Party," Rosner tells Foreign Policy. He points out that when his firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, asked respondents at the end of 2003 which party would do a better job on national security, 54 percent selected the GOP, while 25 percent chose the Democrats (in the 2004 election, George W. Bush racked up double-digit leads over John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, on Iraq and terrorism). That 30-point gap narrowed at times during the 2008 election, Rosner adds, and now the balance has shifted in the other direction. 

Rosner says the last time a Democratic presidential candidate enjoyed such a foreign-policy advantage was 1964, when Lyndon Johnson argued that he was far more capable than Republican challenger Barry Goldwater of navigating the Cold War and averting a nuclear crisis. On the campaign trail, Goldwater had gotten himself into trouble for saying that America's intercontinental missiles were "not dependable" (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara claimed the comment was "damaging to the national security") and that NATO should amass a stockpile of "small conventional nuclear weapons" ("How 'conventional' was the 'small' weapon over Hiroshima?" retorted Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance).

The low point for Goldwater was the Johnson campaign's famous "Daisy" ad, in which images of a little girl picking petals gave way to a mushroom cloud, as Johnson warned of the deadly stakes of nuclear war and a sober announcer encouraged Americans to vote for the president. In his convention speech, Johnson made sure to trumpet his foreign-policy credentials:

I report tonight as President of the United States and as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces on the strength of your country, and I tell you that it is greater than any adversary. I assure you that it is greater than the combined might of all the nations, in all the wars, in all the history of this planet. And I report our superiority is growing....

There is no place in today's world for weakness. But there is also no place in today's world for recklessness. We cannot act rashly with the nuclear weapons that could destroy us all.

Just four years later, the Democratic advantage on national security had subsided as the Vietnam War soured. But the Democrats sure were brimming with confidence (and wisecracks) again on the final night of this year's convention. Just look at some of the rhetoric from Thursday's speeches. Here's Obama:

So now we have a choice. My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy.

But from all that we've seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.

After all, you don't call Russia our number one enemy -- not al-Qaeda, Russia -- unless you're still stuck in a Cold War mind warp.  

You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.

And Biden:

Bravery resides in the heart of Barack Obama, and time and time again I witnessed him summon it. This man has courage in his soul, compassion in his heart, and a spine of steel.

Kerry, meanwhile, chastised Romney for not mentioning the U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan in his convention speech, and called the GOP candidate and his running mate, Paul Ryan, "the most inexperienced foreign-policy twosome to run for president and vice president in decades." And that wasn't all:

Mr. Romney -- here's a little advice: Before you debate Barack Obama on foreign policy, you better finish the debate with yourself!

"President Mitt Romney" -- three hypothetical words that mystified and alienated our allies this summer. For Mitt Romney, an overseas trip is what you call it when you trip all over yourself overseas. It wasn't a goodwill mission -- it was a blooper reel.

Expect to hear much more of this rhetoric as we enter the final months of the campaign. But if 1964 has taught us anything, it's that a national-security advantage, once secured, can prove fleeting.

On Wednesday evening, former President Bill Clinton will issue a full-throated endorsement of Barack Obama at the Democratic convention in Charlotte. But as the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza recently pointed out, the frayed relationship between the two Democratic leaders -- tested by the bitter 2007-2008 primary contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton -- has never fully mended. 

Before Hillary Clinton dropped out of the Democratic primary, the former president did have the occasional good thing to say about Obama when it came to foreign policy. In July 2007, for example, he refused to be drawn into a dispute between Obama and his wife over whether the United States should meet with the leaders of hostile nations without preconditions. All the Democratic candidates, he noted, had "a vigorous agreement on the big question, which is, 'Should we have more diplomacy?' The answer is yes."

But Obama and Clinton clashed over  two of the defining issues of the campaign: the Iraq war and Obama's inexperience.

The spat over the war in Iraq began in November 2007, when Clinton told a crowd in Iowa that he had "opposed Iraq from the beginning," even though he was on record supporting the war in 2003. When asked about the comments, Obama quipped, "If he did [oppose it], I don't think most of us heard about it." 

Then, during a talk at Dartmouth College in January 2008, Clinton mocked the Obama campaign for celebrating the candidate's opposition to the Iraq war back in 2002 (that same year, Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq). 

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment ... and never got asked one time, not once, well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution, you said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war ... and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?" Clinton asked. "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

Obama had indeed expressed support for the ongoing war effort during the 2004 presidential election, but he had also reiterated his opposition to the original invasion. Obama criticized Clinton for repeating "this notion that somehow I didn't know where I stood in 2004 about the war. He keeps on giving half the quote. I was always against the war."

Clinton also attacked Obama's lack of experience in interviews with Al Hunt and Charlie Rose in the final months of 2007, arguing that Obama was ill-equipped to handle foreign-policy issues like terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Rose noted that experienced officials had orchestrated the war in Iraq, Clinton responded:

I remember the first time Senator Obama said that, said, you know, [former Vice President Dick] Cheney and [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld had a lot of experience. And that has great superficial appeal. But let me make the argument in another context. That's like saying that because 100 percent of the malpractices case, medical malpractice, are committed by doctors, the next time I need surgery, I'll get a chef or a plumber to do it.

Here's the full video (the discussion of Obama begins at 24:00, and the quote above comes at 35:00):

With the debate over the Iraq war, the hand-wringing over Obama's lack of experience, and the rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all things of the past, we'll hear Bill Clinton deliver a very different assessment of Barack Obama this evening. The question now turns to just how effectively he'll make the case for granting the president four more years in office.

Republican convention organizers may not have been able to accomplish much business on Monday, but they did make one dramatic statement: activating two prominently displayed clocks that will measure the national debt and how much that debt has accumulated during the four-day event. The clocks, party chairman Reince Priebus explained, will draw attention to the "unprecedented fiscal recklessness of the Obama administration."

The original National Debt Clock, which real estate developer Seymour Durst installed in Manhattan in 1989 to highlight the $2.7 trillion national debt that had piled up under Ronald Reagan, has spawned numerous imitations, including a makeshift clock the Romney campaign constructed last year out of green styrofoam, two flat-screen televisions, and two computers. (The National Debt Clock itself has grown more complex over time; whereas Durst used to collect federal data, calculate the debt level himself, and send the figure to the board by modem, the clock now relies on a computer algorithm that needs to be "trued up" with official statistics once a week.)  

The United States, it turns out, isn't the only country to engage in these brooding public displays of indebtedness. In Britain, for instance, the TaxPayers' Alliance trotted out a truck-mounted UK Debt Clock at a rally in London last year to support public-spending cuts. The DebtBombshell website, set up by a "single concerned citizen of no political affiliation," displays the United Kingdom's mounting debt atop a frightening black bomb, partially cloaked in the British flag. In Germany, the taxpayer watchdog group Bund der Steuerzähler strategically installed a whirring debt clock near government buildings in Berlin (there's also an app for that). 

The Taiwanese Ministry of Finance, meanwhile, unveiled a National Debt Clock in 2010 to deter wasteful government spending and followed up this year with a Local Government Debt Clock. While the opposition Democratic Progressive Party initially derided the idea, arguing that the clock underestimated the national debt, it has since pointed to the tally as evidence of the country's deteriorating finances. The Swedish National Debt Office has a similar debt counter on its website. 

But the mother of all debt meters is the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Debt Clock, which was released in 2009, with a color-coded map to visualize the rising tide of global public debt. Fittingly, the United States -- the country that introduced the national debt clock to the world -- appears in dark red.

I had been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Zero Dark Thirty, the upcoming film by director Kathryn Bigelow about the pursuit of Osama bin Laden that has been the target of scrutiny for some lawmakers because of the level of access given to the filmmakers by the administration.  After all, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal's last film, The Hurt Locker, was a fairly nuanced portrayal of the Iraq war, it's not unprecedented for the military and government to cooperate with filmmakers, and the movie's release date had been pushed back until after the U.S. election. The project seemed a bit more respectable than this year's glorified recruitment video Act of Valor.

But the FOIAed documents on the CIA and Department of Defense's cooperation with Bigelow and Boal released by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch today don't really make anyone look good. 

The documents follow an earlier release in May, which showed that the filmmakers had been granted access to the commander of SEAL Team Six -- though asked not to reveal his name -- and shown the facility where the planning for the bin Laden raid took place, as well as being granted interviews numerous other officials who rarely speak with journalists.  

Today's documents show officials being more than accomodating to the visitors from Hollywood, with then CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf urging colleagues to support Bigelow's film over other competing projects as "It’s got the most money behind it, and two Oscar winners on board." When Boal thanked then CIA director of Public Affairs George Little for "pulling for us at the agency," Little responded,  "I can’t tell you how excited we all are (at DOD and CIA) about the project…PS – I want you to know how good I’ve been not mentioning the premiere tickets. :)”.

There's also the matter of whether New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti violated protocol by sharing an unpublished Maureen Dowd column with Harf.

There's no evidence that classified information was shared with Bigelow and Boal, though as Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy told the Daily Beast in May, the unusual access they were given certainly adds to the perception that "The whole interaction with the filmmakers appears to be self-serving and self-aggrandizing [attempts] in an election year to glorify the administration.”

Here on Passport we've had some fun with movies like Georgia's 5 Days at War and China's Flowers of War -- ostensibly independent projects with some Hollywood names attached that were made with the "cooperation" of local authorities and, in the end, very much felt like it. Obviously, we'll find out when the movie is ultimately released, but it's starting to look like Zero Dark Thirty might be in the same genre. 

Back in May, when the latest round of controversy over the Law of the Sea treaty was raging in Congress, I took a look at seven other seemingly harmless international agreements on which the U.S. was conspicuous by its absence, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The "Sovereign American Leadership in International Organizations" section of the draft GOP platform released by Politico today, not only explicitly rejects these treaties, but veers pretty close to black helicopter territory:

Under our Constitution, treaties become the law of the land. So it is all the more important that the Congress -- the senate through its ratifying power and the House through its appropriating power -- shall reject agreements whose long-range impact on the American family is ominous or unclear. These include the U.N. Convention on Women's Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty as well as the various declarations from the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development. Because of our concern for American sovereignty, domestic management of our fisheries, and our country's long-term energy needs, we have deep reservations about the regulatory, legal, and tax regimes inherent in the Law of the Sea Treaty and congratulate Senate Republicans for blocking its ratification. We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty, and we oppose any form of U.N. Global Tax.

Assuming Romney follows through on opposition to Law of the Sea if elected, that would be a shift from the Bush administration, which supported it,  and also put him at odds with U.S. military commanders. The reference to the ominous "long-range impact on the American family" could be a dog-whistle to homseschooling groups, some of whom fear that these treaties would empower international bureaucrats to interfere with the raising of their children. And despite some debate at the U.N. over the possibility of a global carbon tax, the body does not have the authority to impose such a tax on its members. 

Then there's Agenda 21. For those not familiar with this sinister plot, it's a non-binding U.N. agreement passed in 1992, and signed by President George H.W. Bush, that commits signatories to the goal of sustainable development through responsible land use and energy conservation. It doesn't actually legally compel its signatories to do anything, though the fact that various local green initiatives have been promoted as being in accordance with the agenda is evidence enough of a conspiracy for some.

The Times reported in February that Tea Party activists were increasingly referring to Agenda 21 in local debates on issues ranging from bike lanes to smart meters on home appliances:

Tom DeWeese, the founder of the American Policy Center, a Warrenton, Va.-based foundation that advocates limited government, says he has been a leader in the opposition to Agenda 21 since 1992. Until a few years ago, he had few followers beyond a handful of farmers and ranchers in rural areas. Now, he is a regular speaker at Tea Party events.

Membership is rising, Mr. DeWeese said, because what he sees as tangible Agenda 21-inspired controls on water and energy use are intruding into everyday life. “People may be acting out at some of these meetings, and I do not condone that. But their elected representatives are not listening and they are frustrated.”

Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to “enhance federal engagement with rural communities,” Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded “eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order.”

The movement has been particularly effective in Tea Party strongholds like Virginia, Florida and Texas, but the police have been called in to contain protests in states including Maryland and California, where opponents are fighting laws passed in recent years to encourage development around public transportation hubs and dense areas in an effort to save money and preserve rural communities.

Agenda 21 has been a favorite hobbyhorse of Glenn Beck, who argues that it is a covert means of achieving "centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth" as well as Alex Jones' all-purpose conspiracy theory clearinghouse Infowars, which calls it a "globalist death plan for humanity." 

The once fringe movement has been going mainstream this year. The RNC adopted a resolution condemning Agenda 21 in January and Newt Gingrich made frequent reference to it in his presidential campaign, calling it "part of a general problem of the United Nations and other international bureaucracies that are seeking to create an extra-constitutional control over us." He promised to block the initiative as one of his first executive orders if elected. Given how vague that actual text of Agenda 21 is when you read it, it's hard to imagine that anyone would notice if he did.

Of course, those of us downplaying the nefarious globalist agenda behind bike lanes and high-speed rail projects could just be naive. Good thing brave public servants like Judge Tom Head are getting ready. 

A judge has sentenced three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot to two years in prison for their "punk prayer":

"The girls' actions were sacrilegious, blasphemous and broke the church's rules," Judge Marina Syrova told the court as she spent three hours reading the verdict while the women stood watching in handcuffs inside a glass courtroom cage.

She declared all three guilty of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, saying they had deliberately offended Russian Orthodox believers by storming the altar of Moscow's main cathedral in February to belt out a song deriding Putin.

The U.S. State Department has issued a statement expressing concern over "both the verdict and the disproportionate sentences." Protests have been staged in several cities -- some less productive than others -- and a number of prominent activists including chessmaster Garry Kasparov were reportedly arrested in Moscow.

While the reaction from Pussy Riot is driving the news today, President Vladimir Putin is likely a bit more concerned by another headline. The president's popularity has hit a record low according to the Levada Center, an independent pollster: 

Less than half of Russians (48 percent) approve Vladimir Putin's performance as president, down 12 percent since the last survey in May, whilst 25 percent said they were unhappy with his work (up from 21 percent in May).

The results show a major fall in Putin’s approval rating since his first two terms as president, when it was on average was 65 percent, with just 15 percent reacting negatively to him. His popularity peaked at the end of 2008 when it reached 80 percent, with just 10 percent against.

His popularity hit an all-time low of 55 percent in winter 2005, when the government introduced a program to monetize social benefits.

This is likely driven more by economic factors than democracy -- the ruble tanked against the dollar last week, though it's recovered a bit over the last few days thanks to rising oil prices. Putin probably won't face too much of a public backlash over the Pussy Riot verdict. According to another Levada poll, "6 percent had sympathy with the women, 51 percent said they found nothing good about them or felt irritation or hostility."  

Writing about the ongoing Julian Assange standoff at the Ecuadorean embassy in London yesterday, I wondered if it would be possible to smuggle the Wikileaks founder out of the country via diplomatic mail, if the British government refuses to grant him permission to leave. Dan Trombly alerted me on Twitter that there is precedent  for embassies doing this sort of thing, particularly Egypt. This led me to the strange case of  Israeli-Moroccan double agent Joseph Dahan.

On Nov. 19, 1964, the New York Times reported on Dahan's discovery at the Rome airport:

Italy expelled today two Egyptian diplomats accused of an attempt to "air express" to Cairo a trunk marked "diplomatic mail" but containing a man who had been drugged bound and gagged. The two officials are Abdel Moneim el-Naklawy and Selim Osman el-Sayed, both first secretaries of the United Arab Republic's Embassy here. The man in the trunk has been identified as Joseph Dahan, 30 years old, a Moroccan. [The man was identified Wednesday by an army officer in Israel as Mordecai Luk, an Israeli renegade] The man told Italian policemen that he was kidnapped in a café in Rome and taken to an apartment and that the following day he was drugged and put into the trunk. He was freed after an airport guard heard him moaning as he was being put aboard an Egyptian airliner. [...]

There was speculation that the trunk, especially fitted with a small seat and adjustable foot and head supports, had been used for other such "shipments," because the exterior appeared worn.

The trunk was addressed to the United Arab Republic's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo. One tag identified the trunk as "Diplomatic Mail No. 33."

In a fairly overwrought editorial on the case, the Times wrote: 

When life enlarges upon the wild fancies of the spy thrillers, we are astonished. In the case of the macabre story of Joseph Dahan (or whatever he name may be), whom the Egyptian Embassy encased in a fiendishly constructed trunk and labeled "diplomatic mail" en route from Rome to Cairo, we can also be horrified.

The bland disclaimer of the Egyptian Ambassador could be given some credence but for a sinister fact announced by the Rome police: The trunk "shows almost definitely that it had been used this way before." Is it, perhaps, an old Egyptian custom? Certainly it is one of the oldest of Egyptian stories, which Plutarch made forever famous: About the god Osiris, whose wicket brother Set lured him into a coffin, nailed him up and cast the box into the sea. Osiris, it will be recalled, but then he was a god. Dahan was no god; he was just lucky.

So it seems it is possible, but helps if the person being shipped is willing. 

Not sure if it's quite fair to say Romney "took a shot" at Japan here, but he's not exactly complimentary toward the staunch U.S. ally. Buzzfeed's Jake Miller writes: 

One country Romney seems pretty determined not to offend is Poland. In this new ad seemingly aimed at Catholic voters, he praises John Paul II and touts his "endorsement" from former President Lech Walesa.

No one can accuse Romney of forgetting Poland.

Only 47 percent of Irish polled said they were religious people, a 22-point drop from the 69 percent recorded in the last similar poll in 2005, according to the WIN-Gallup International network of opinion pollsters.

Average religiosity in the 57 countries included in the poll was 59 percent, a decline of 9 points since 2005, it said.

One counterrorism strategy that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama agree on -- not to mention Desmond Tutu, Colin Powell, Kofi Annan and many more -- is that there's a link between extreme poverty and support for violent extremism. But some new data from Pakistan complicates this picture somewhat. 

Analyzing a 6,000 person survey, researchers Graeme Blair, Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, and Jacob N. Shapiro found little connection between wealth and support for terrorism:

Using this approach, we find first that poor individuals hold militants in lower regard than middle-class Pakistanis, even after controlling for a wide range of potentially confounding factors. We further find no evidence that those living in poorer areas are more supportive of militants than others, and the relationship between support and individual-level poverty does not change when we control for community-level income measures. Rather, the contextual factor that matters appears to be exposure to the externalities of militant violence. Leveraging a new dataset of violent incidents, we find first that violence is heavily concentrated in urban areas and second that dislike of militant groups is nearly three times stronger among the urban poor living in districts that have experienced violence than among the poor living in nonviolent districts. It is not that people are vulnerable to militants' appeals because they are poor and dissatisfied. Instead, it appears that the urban poor suffer most from militants' violent activities and so most intensely dislike them.

Depressingly, the data seems to show that the main factor reducing support for terrorism is more terrorism. 

Christine Fair also discussed the "poverty breeds terrorism" assertion in a "Think Again" article for FP -- co-authored with former ambassador Husain Haqqani -- back in 2006.

Hat tip: Chris Blattman

Mitt Romney has followed up his controversial comments on the link between Israel's economic success and its culture (See Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson for a rebuttal to the argument.) with a short piece in the National Review arguing that the Jewish state "has a culture that is based upon individual freedom and the rule of law," which has "created conditions that have enabled innovators and entrepreneurs to make the desert bloom."

That's a little bit vague (and arguably it was a tradition of mandatory conscription and collectivism that made the desert bloom in the early days)  but for a more nuanced understanding of the case for Israel's cultural advantage, it's useful to turn to Romney's advisor Dan Senor. As Michael Shear of the New York Times writes today, "It was Mr. Senor’s book about entrepreneurs in Israel that informed his comments, Mr. Romney explained to the group of Jewish-American donors he had assembled at the King David hotel."

So what cultural factors does the 2009 book Start-Up Nation, co-authored by Senor and Saul Singer, credit for Israel's success? For starters, Senor and Singer reject that the answer is simply Judaism. (In recent days, some have interpreted Romney's comments as a repitition of the old stereotype that Jews are simply good with money.) They write:

[P]inning Israel's success on a stereotype obscures more than it reveals. For starters, the idea of a unitary Jewishness--whether genetic or cultural--would seem to have little applicability to a nation that, though small, is among the most heterogenous in the world. Israel's tiny population is made up of some seventy different nationalities. A Jewish refugee from Iraq and one from Poland or Ethiopia did not share a language, education, culture, or history--at least not for the two previous millenia.

The main factors the authors identify in Israeli culture are bluntness, informality, a love of argument, and a high tolerance for failure:

In The Geography of Bliss, author Eric Weiner describes another country with a high tolerance for failure as "a nation of born-agains, though not in a religious sense." This is certainly true for Israeli laws regarding bankruptcy and new company formation, which make it the easiest place in the Middle East -- and one of the easiest in the world -- to brith a new company, even if your last one went bankrupt. But this also contributes to a sense that Israelis are always hustling, pushing, and looking for thenext opportunity. 

Newcomers to Israel often find its people rude. Israelis will unabashedly ask people they barely know how old they are or how much their apartment or car cost; they'll even tell new parents--often complete strangers on the sidewalk or in a grocery store--that they are not dressing their cildren appropriately for the weather. What is said about Jews--two Jews, three opinions--is certainly true of Israelis. People who don't like this sort of frankness can be turned off by Israel, but others find it refreshing, and honest. 

This frankness can create a unique workplace atmosphere:

[H]eated debate is anathema in other business cultures, but for Israelis it's often seen as the best way to sort through a problem. "If you can get past the initial bruise to the ego," one American investor in Israeli start-ups told us, "it's immensely liberating. You rarely see people talk behind anybody's back in Israeli companies. You always know where you stand with everyone. It does cut back on the time wasted on bullshit."[...]

The cultural differences between Israel and the United States are actually so great that Intel started running "cross-cultural seminars" to bridge them. "After living in the U.S. for five years, I can say that the interesting thing about Israelis is the culture. Israelis do not have a very disciplined culture. From the age of zero we are educated to challenge the obvious, ask questions, debate everything, innovate," says Mooly Eden, who ran these seminars. 

Despite its military tradition, the authors argue, the culture of the Israeli army encourages challenging authority:

[Military theorist Edward] Luttwak says that "in the reserve formations, the atmosphere remains resolutely civilian in the midst of all the trappings of miltiary life."

This is not to say that soldiers aren't expected to obey orders. But as [venture capitalist Amos] Goren explained to us, "Israeli soldiers are not defined by rank; they are defined by what they are good at." Or, as Luttwak said, "orders are given and obeyed in the spirit of men who have a job to do and mean to do it, but the hierarchy of rank is of small importance, especially since it often cut across sharp differences in age and social status."

Senor and Singer argue that the maturity and sense of responsibility Israelis gain from miltiary service, as well as a tradition of international travel, for fostering a culture of entrepreneurship in the country's youth. They also emphasize the informality, the common use of nicknames and lack of strict social heirarchy as important factors: 

A bit of mayhem is not only healthy but critical. The leading thinkers in this area... argue that the ideal environment is best described by a concept in "complexity science" called the "edge of chaos." They define that edge as "the estuary region where rigid order and random chaos meet and generate high levels of adaptation, complexity, and creativity."

This is precisely the environment where Israeli entrepreneuers thrive. They benefit from the stable institutions and rule of law that exist in an advanced democracy. Yet they also benefit from Israel's nonhierarchical culture, where everyone in business belongs to overlapping networks produce by small communities, common army service, geographic proximity, and informality. 

It is no coincidence  that the military -- particularly the elite units...-- have served as incubators for thousands of Israeli high-tech start-ups. Other countries may generate them in small numbers, but the Israeli economy benefits from the phenomena or rosh gadol thinking and critical reassessment, undergirded by a doctrine of experimentation, rather than standardization, wide enough to have a national and even a global impact. 

It's worth pointing out that the emphasis in the book is less on demonstrating Israel's superiority to the Palestinians or other neighbors than on the economic lessons the United States could borrow from its culture of entrepreneurship. Whether or not you buy Senor and Singer's argument, it's a lot more nuanced than "Israeli culture superior. Arab culture inferior" -- the takeaway that a lot of observers got from Romney's remarks. Senor's boss might have used his arguments about Israel as the starting point for an interesting conversation on U.S. economic, military, and education policies, if he had done a somewhat better job explaining them. 

David Yang writes today that Chinese viewers have been surprisingly impressed by China's less audacious, somewhat quirkier Olympic games (Exhibit A). But while China is currently tied for the U.S. team in the medal count, the media coverage the Chinese team has received has not been so kind.

Although she's never failed a drug test, suspicion continues to follow Chinese swimming phenom Ye Shiwen, who comfortably took gold in the 200-meter individual medley after shattering the world record in the 400-meter on Saturday -- a race in which she swam the final leg faster than men's winner Ryan Lochte.

"History in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I put quotation marks around this, 'unbelievable,' history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved," said John Leonard,  head of the American Swimming Coaches Association, who compared Ye to the famously doped up East German swimmers of the 1970s. BALCO founder Victor Conte, who helped American runners Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery cheat in previous Olympics, suggested that difficult-to-detect blood doping could be involved. 

The Chinese media, not surprisingly, has reacted angrily to the accusations. The Global Times editorializes: 

Negative comments about her and Chinese athletes come from deep bias and reluctance from the Western press to see Chinese people making breakthroughs.

If Ye were an American, the tone would be different in Western media. Michael Phelps won eight gold medals in the 2008 Games. Nobody seems to question the authenticity of his results, most probably because he is American.

It's an understandable reaction. China may have some recent history of illegal sports behavior,  but so does the United States, including Jones and cyclist Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory after he was caught doping. Nonetheless, China's meteoric -- and government-orchestrated -- rise in the sports world makes it a target for scrutiny.

While the Ye situation played out, last night was described as a "evening of shame" for the sport of badminton after several teams, including China's defending gold medalists Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang, seemed to be intentionally tanking preliminary matches in order to get a more favorable draw in later rounds. The Chinese team, along with pairs from Indonesia and South Korea, was disqualified from competition today.

Hard to blame Western media bias for that one. 

Tim Johnson reports on a community of American gamblers who have found safe-haven in Central America:

Forrester, who grew up in Dillon, Mont., is one of probably 150 American professional online-poker players who flooded Costa Rica after Black Friday: April 15, 2011, when U.S. federal prosecutors went after the founders of the three largest online-poker companies, slamming a lid on the surging business.

Many of the Americans – who are generally male and in their 20s – aren’t happy about leaving their U.S. homes. Unlike Forrester, they voice anger at being denied the chance to earn a living in their home country even while paying taxes there.[...]

The American online poker players in Costa Rica are called “poker refugees,” partly because that’s the name of a relocation service in the capital, San Jose, that helps U.S. players travel to the Central American nation, open bank accounts, find housing and start playing online quickly.

“These guys play anywhere from four to 24 games at one time,” said Kristin Wilson, a former professional surfer from Florida who started the Poker Refugees relocation service.

Wilson’s company ensures that players who move to Costa Rica have nearly foolproof accommodations, to avoid the usual travails of less-developed countries.

“If the Internet or power goes out for 30 seconds, they can lose thousands of dollars. So they have to have two sources backed up to a battery. And they have a USB data card. So if the Internet goes out, they just switch over to the data card,” she said.

Interestingly, Costa Rica is also a major destination for medical tourism, particularly as it provides controversial procedures such as stem-cell treatments which are still illegal in the United States.  It seems as if the country has found a niche as a workaround for culturally conservative U.S. laws.  

For gambling, at least, this may be changing soon as more states legalize online gambling -- a devlelopment that also has some American Indian tribes worried.

With general elections potentially on the horizon, a new party has burst onto the Israeli political scene. On Wednesday, the Pirates party, which according to Haaretz "champions ‘the freedom to copy' and ‘the pirating sector,'" applied for recognition as an official political party. Despite its name, the group, led by former Green Leaf party member Ohad Shem-Tov, does not belong to the Pirate Parties International (PPI) movement, which already has an established Israeli chapter. Though the party refuses to speak to non-pirate media, its goals apparently "range from the radical to the delirious," including "the freedom to divide and copy" and social justice.

Shem-Tov is best known for forming the Green Leaf Graduates party before the 2009 following his expulsion from the original Green Leaf party, which campaigns to decriminalize marijuana. During the general elections that year, the Green Leaf Graduates forged an unlikely alliance with the Holocaust Survivors Party, running advertisements espousing a hybrid pro-cannabis, pro-survivors benefits platform.

The Pirate creed is not new to the region. In 2011, PPI member Slim Amamou joined the new Tunisian cabinet as State Secretary of Youth and Sports. PPI also made significant inroads in May, when it won 8 percent of votes in Schleswig-Holstein during German general elections, in addition to 8.9 percent in Berlin and 7.4 percent in Saarland. Israel's Pirate party stands somewhat of a chance, since the election threshold for the Knesset is just 2 percent, but whether it asks the Jewish state to recognize the Church of Kopimism is more of a gamble.