In César Hidalgo’s 2015 book, Why Information Grows, there’s a passage on how information is packaged into a product.  To make the point, Hidalgo asks us to imagine a Bugatti Veyron.  If you put the car on a scale, you’d find that it’s worth its weight in silver.  Now imagine the NTSB (if it were to safety test $2 million cars) runs the Veyron into a wall at 70 miles per hour.  What’s the value by weight now?  Something far less.  But the weight is the same, so where did the value go?  It was in the arrangement of the atoms – as the value of all information is.

This occurred to me during a recent experiment with perplexity.ai, a “conversational search engine” powered in part by GPT4.  Ask it: how fast is human knowledge growing?  It replies that “the volume of human knowledge is doubling every 12 months.” A follow-up query tells us that this “volume of human knowledge” includes the 4.4 billion minutes people spent on TikTok each day in 2023 and the 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute.  One assumes this volume also includes, say, the Associated Press’ 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning reporting on Mariupol, but the distinction seems lost.  Either way, the point is that TikTok, et al., is what information looks like when you ram it into a wall at 70 mph.  Or another way: there’s something on the order of 1.1 million Terabyte/tons of mangled information being created every day and that’s not good. 

Part of the solution is increasing the volume of good information.  And in the next phase of Civil, we are working with emerging video editing/generative AI tools; partnering with AI companies that are developing LLMs to understand and track mis- and disinformation; and identifying creators with whom we can share the internal processes and tools we’re building.  The goal is to empower long form creators (journalists, scientists, etc.) with the tools to easily create short form videos as teasers for long form work – to drive curiosity about our world and each other. 

Recall Mark Twain’s quip that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.  Our goal is to use AI to help give truth a shot.

The above video on misinformation and the Texas border is an example.  This is based on a long Wired magazine piece that explored the role of Russian influence in the online discussion (if one can call it that) about the tension between Governor Abbot and President Biden over border security.  By creating a short form summary designed for social media, we can encourage curiosity about the subject and help drive consumers back to the long form article for more information.  Doing this at scale of hundreds and eventually thousands per day (all from hundreds of high-information creators) can capture a meaningful audience.

We have not emailed these short form videos (but you can find them under our ‘Shorts’ tab) because we don’t want to overload your inboxes - and because they are designed to drive traffic from social to Substack.  But for those who may have missed them, we wanted to share an example.  In the coming weeks, look for more updates on our editorial board and longer-from content library we’re building.  And, as always, our deepest thanks.

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And what is the moment?  Walter Russel Mead, the Global View columnist at the Wall Street Journal, recently argued that the world is transitioning from a postwar era (where the work of international relations is to manage problems from the last great conflict) to a pre-war era (where the existing international systems are breaking down, threatening to usher in the next great conflict).1 Amidst this transition period, 2024 will see billions of people across 70 countries vote in national elections; wars in the Middle East and NATO’s eastern flank; and the likely Trump v. Biden rematch in November that almost no one wants and will be decided by 100,000 people across a few swing states.  The stale – and generally hyperbolic – refrain that democracy is on the ballot may actually understate the case.  It may rather be the American-built liberal world order that’s on the ballot.

The abuse of hyperbole had some role in getting us here.  As far back as the election of 1948, Harry Truman likened his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, to Hitler; calling him a frontman for fascists, and warning that Republicans were a threat to liberty in America. This seems a hard charge to substantiate given Dewey’s performance as the governor of New York, Manhattan District Attorney, and his refusal to countenance efforts to outlaw the communist party, but perhaps Truman’s improbable victory suggested a formula.  By 1990 – a year before the World Wide Web was opened to the world – the frequency of Hitler comparisons on Usenet discussion boards led Mike Godwin to coin his eponymous law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.  Gurwinder, who writes the Substack, The Prism, suggests this is because it’s the only history most people know.  That’s plausible.  If you’re looking for a simile that will resonate with the widest group of people – whether across an electorate or internet – Hitler is an obvious choice (some might suggest Stalin – and Stalin does make appearances, though more commonly from Right to Left, whereas Hitler goes both ways).  Calling someone the vile issue of Iago and Goneril just doesn’t scale.

But there are also structural reasons.  Related to Godwin’s Law, there is a relationship between the speed with which Hitler enters a debate and the density of the information environment.  In 1948, evening TV news broadcasts were only a few years old and newspapers were still on the front end of the fair and balanced heyday driven by advertiser’s demands for wide popular appeal.  In this low-density information environment of 1948, Hitler didn’t make an entry until three months before the election and only after a year of bad polling for Truman.  Today, the information density is exponentially higher, creating an arms race of hyperbole.2  From social media to streaming to cable news to gaming, the competition for attention is brutally intense and the opportunity for distraction is endless.  Politicians, pundits, and journalists must be ever more urgent and concise, binding every premise to an existential why. The effect can vary by platform; the path to Hitler is more direct when limited to 280-characters (partly why X-Twitter is such a cesspool) than, say, on Reddit.  But the effect is everywhere.  Whether legacy media, cable news, social media, it’s a war for time and money in the attention economy where everything is literally the most (adverb, adjective, noun) ever.  And along the way, simile becomes metaphor and hyperbole becomes corporal and runs for high office, feeding on itself. 

The question is: what to do now?  Civil’s answer is to stand athwart it all, yelling stop.3

Consider this more of an informal company memo than an essay.  All of you reading this have joined more on the promise of what we will do than on what we have done.  So, as you are more partners than consumers, I wanted to share some thoughts on our strategy going into 2024.

First, one might reasonably ask how we propose to scale nuance and subtlety in an emotionally charged, hyperbolic media landscape that – as I just wrote – demands extremism in exchange for attention.  I’ll come back to this. 

Our mission is to restore trust.  It’s not to build agreement or prove the righteousness of one side.  We’re rather skeptical of righteousness, in general; and healthy disagreement is the engine of progress.  It’s the people and process of this country, and our role in the world, that interests us. Democracy is conversation and conversation is process. 

In service of this mission, we pursue objectivity and truth.  We’re structurally nonpartisan.  This is accomplished through the balanced experiences and backgrounds of the staff, founders, and advisors (more on this coming later).  Our point of view is that the American Dream – the ability to maximize one’s potential; the duty of the government to make opportunity ever more equal – is real but under threat.

If we want to truly contribute to the health of the American experiment, we must understand the realities of the market.  We must scale to the millions.  Our sales channels must reach across multiple platforms and positions. 

People are increasingly isolating themselves in partisan legacy media brands or passively consuming whatever the social media algorithms serve.  And there are real reasons for this.  Those in partisan outlets feel attacked and are retreating to their tribe.  Those across social media – almost everyone under 30 – have lost all faith in legacy news and don’t know where to turn.  News and culture stories that want to penetrate these thousand truth verticals must reach the person before the partisan.

Civil is a wholesale business, not a retail business.  Our interest is not (only) in the insider debates in Washington DC, New York, and LA.  This is not a populist approach, it is a democratic one. 

For too long, it’s been hate and fear that drove clicks on news stories in social media.  We want to drive curiosity.  We think of our content library like a ladder, with short-form video content as the entry point, leading to increasingly nuanced and lengthy content up the rungs. 

We begin with short-form video because that’s where more than 70 million Americans get their news. By leveraging emerging generative AI, we will be able to make extremely fast-turn, short-form videos on major events and trending stories; publish these to social media; and drive curiosity to encourage people to click back to our landing page to learn more.

Video also allows us to communicate on multiple levels at once; the words, the images, the music. It’s a medium that can reach past the political barriers and communicate intellectual and emotional complexity in a tight space. 

We see the reductionism of the left as a threat; we see the populism of the right as a threat.  We see the abandonment of objective principles of both parties and their supporting media as an existential problem.  We see social media algorithms creating and curating bland, singular culture and taste that no longer respects their users or values actual diversity.  

Which brings us to why this will work.  There is now a market and civic opportunity imperative for a new way to restore our national conversation. Generative AI will make it possible to produce and scale video in a way never before possible - which presents both extreme threats and extreme opportunities. It is not hyperbole to say that technological, cultural, and political pivot points will combine in 2024 in a way that has not happened in a very long time, putting us at a crossroads. This will be a year of consequential choices. And it begins - as all great movements do - by standing athwart the tides that seemed inexorable, saying, No.

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Seely went to the Great War in 1914 – opening the war at the head of one of the last great calvary charges in history – and remained until the end, publishing his memoir in 1931.  Nearly 100 years later, we’re all familiar with the safety first mantra on college campuses.  In their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote about how safetyism has become a sacred value that prioritizes emotional safety over intellectual rigor.  This kind of safety is, of course, meant in a different sense than what Seely had in mind – the concept of emotional or intellectual safety would never have occurred to him, and physical safety on college campuses should very well be taken for granted – but mindset is the same.  His title – Fear, and be Slain (an unusually breathless title for the British-soldier-memoir genre) – is meant to say that boldness and courage are essential to physical (and, really, mental) survival in war (and, come to think of it, the office, as Terry Tate reminds us with his take on tippy-toeing).  In the war of ideas (that should exist) on university campuses, it is intellectual courage that is essential.  As Van Jones perfectly said, colleges must keep students intellectually and emotionally unsafe. “I’m not going to pave the jungle for you.  Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity.” In short, you must have the strength and courage to confront ideas you passionately disagree with.  Which is all to say: safety first in academia is also a soul destroying, pestilent heresy.

We have a sense of this from the December 5^th congressional testimony of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.  If yours isn’t one of the 105 million views of Bill Ackman’s X post of the exchange, the summary is this: Representative Elise Stefanick asked each if calling for the genocide of Jews violates (your university’s) code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment.  Each responded rather poorly, saying, in brief, that it depended on the context.  Though Representative Stefanick’s exchange with President Magill stood out.

President Magill:  If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment.

Rep. Stefanick (stunned): Conduct being committing the act of genocide?

President Magill: It can be harassment.

Throughout the exchange, President Magill smirked and smiled, giving the impression that the entire hearing was beneath her.  As Jonah Goldberg wrote, It’s the smirking, damnit; the suspected condescension of the elites for the rest of the country made manifest in the breezy sighs and smiles of these academic leaders on the question of genocide. 

But what has really touched a national nerve is the apparent hypocrisy.  Fareed Zakaria noted that elite universities have gone from centers of academic excellence to institutions pushing political agendas.  With ideology replacing academic rigor, we’ve seen the growth of “safe spaces, trigger warnings, micro aggressions.” This has led to “speech codes that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive.” Zakaria says that having gone so far down this ideological road, these university presidents could not credibly make the claim that free inquiry is a priority on their campuses and that it applies to all students equally.  And without free inquiry, one wonders what purpose these universities serve.

Days later, President Gay apologized, and said that she had been “caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.” (One might hope that the President of Harvard could manage an extended exchange with a member of congress without getting “caught up” in it.) She clarified her position by saying, “Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group… have no place at Harvard.” President Magill also changed her position in a two-minute-long video statement that halfway through included, “In my view it (calling for the genocide of Jews) would be harassment.” (President Magill has since resigned.)

It begs the question: What changed in the three days from the hearing to the apologies?  It would seem to have something to do with that soul destroying, pestilent heresy of intellectual safety.

There are those who are objectively consistent and those who are ideologically consistent.  The mark of the latter is that they are, well, inconsistent.  The mark of the former is that they gain or lose friends depending on the controversy of the day.

Take Albert Camus, one of the objectively consistent.  His falling out with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre was in part over his insufficient passion for the Algerian War for independence, but the root cause was their opposing views on ends and means. 

Sartre and de Beauvoir (and most of the post-World War II French philosophers) had big ideas about the future.  It’s understandable.  After witnessing the world’s greatest calamity from the front lines, the desire to take hold of mankind’s destiny with both hands and jam it through the eye of a needle toward a better world must have been overwhelming.  How else to answer the destruction of Europe and the loss of more than 20 million lives (or counting the direct and indirect results in all theaters of the war, 100 million)?  For de Beauvoir and Sartre, nearly any means justified the construction of a world that would end war and its root causes.

But Camus had his doubts.  For him, ends are illusive at best and dangerous at worst.  A messianic faith in our ability to mold the perfect future tends to a deadly consequentialism that can be as cruel as war.  This is what Camus had in mind when he described Marx as “the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbeliever’s plot at Highgate Cemetery.” For Camus, the pursuit of paradise either in heaven or on earth requires all the same religiosity.

Rather, Camus said the best we can do is to attempt the right ethical decisions moment to moment; which is quite hard enough.  As he wrote in The Rebel:

When the end is absolute, historically speaking, and when it is believed certain of realization, it is possible to go so far as to sacrifice others.  When it is not, only oneself can be sacrificed, in the hazards of a struggle for the common dignity of man.  Does the end justify the means?  That is possible.  But what will justify the end?  To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

Camus wrote the book in 1951 as an answer to the many influential western Leftists who sought to excuse Stalin’s crimes as the price of progress.  It was this that ended the friendship with Sartre.  He hated The Rebel, damned Camus as a counterrevolutionary, and responded with a series of personal attacks that ignored the book’s arguments entirely.  To Sartre – who would have condemned the West with all his might had it committed a fraction of Stalin’s crimes – Camus was a naïve contrarian who would trade the world’s great future for his own present conscience and bourgeois status. 

Camus did not respond to the criticism.

After all, it was the Marxists, not him, who believed that class determines what one may say.  But it was a petty and laughable accusation even so: Sartre grew up in privilege, and he let other people manage his domestic matters all his life.  Camus grew up in Algeria in poverty, where as a child he lived in a two-room apartment with his brother, uncle, grandmother, and deaf widowed mother who worked as a cleaning woman to support all of them.1

The point, here, is that those who favor means prefer an objective ethical standard for behavior that holds, regardless.  These are the objectively consistent.  In contrast, those who favor ends will adopt or discard any value as it suits their perceived goals at any given time.  These are the ideologically consistent.  In American universities today, it would seem apparent which group holds sway.  

Actually, it’s worse than that.  It took five years from the publication of The Rebel and the Soviet invasion of Hungary before Sartre renounced Stalin.  In contrast, it took three days and some bad press for Presidents Gay and Magill to renounce their (already lukewarm) positions on free speech.    

In retrospect, it seems there were three options for Gay and Magill in the wake of the hearing.  One, defend their testimony as consistent with their ideological view of power.  Meaning: Israel has more power than the Palestinians, therefore speech critical of Israel (the oppressor in this dynamic) is permissible while speech critical of the Palestinians (the victim) should remain restricted.  Two, defend their testimony as consistent with need for free inquiry on campus, but acknowledge the double standard that exists among different groups, and pledge reform.  Three, capitulate to criticism, apologize for “hurtful words,” and call for further speech restrictions on campus. 

The first two would’ve had at least the benefit of demonstrating the courage of their convictions (much as option one arguably remains antithetical to an open society).  The third option was, of course, the one chosen; and also the worst of the three.  It demonstrated that there appears to be no guiding principle, whatever.

This lack of fundamental guiding principles today – or, in Seely’s take, so much as a helpful maxim such as duty first – is the problem today.  Shadi Hamid (one of the objectively consistent) wrote about this in the essay, America without God, for the April 2021 issue of The Atlantic.  Hamid noted that as religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen, asking: will the quest for secular redemption through politics doom the American idea? Hamid went on:

On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends. Adherents of wokeism see themselves as challenging the long-dominant narrative that emphasized the exceptionalism of the nation’s founding. Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just society here on Earth.2  

It's Camus v. Sartre – the clash of ends and means – all over again.  Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.  But the difference today in the US is that it’s the middle versus both the far left and the right (so much of the latter having committed to empowering one man with unchecked power to crush their enemies, however perceived); thus leaving the majority of the country flanked by those illiberal forces on both sides who believe that the ends justify the means. 

Which, then, is the good news.  And it’s the reason Civil is here; to serve the vast majority who still believe in America’s founding ideals.  After all, it’s the pursuit (the means) of a more perfect union that matters.  We’ll never get to perfection (ends are an illusion), but the point is to keep trying and to be true to our values. If Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania can’t do so (and their opponents on the right won’t so so), no matter. We, the middle, outnumber them many to one, and easily have enough courage of conviction to spare.

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Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil

At first glance, what’s most striking about the event is the combatants involved.  Would anyone have predicted that this first ballistic missile would’ve been fired by Yemeni tribal militia?  In a war being fought in the Levant? 

But after a moment’s reflection, this makes as much sense as any other possibility. There is perhaps no other place in the world where you can trace the current conflicts so far back with such a straight line.  Well, not straight.  It’s rather winding, convoluted, and knotted.  But a continuous line, it is.

Outside Sana’a, Yemen, there are ruins of a once vibrant Jewish community.  All that remains now are faded mud walls and outlines of old foundations, but against the surrounding green and rocky plain, it stands out.  According to legend, Sana’a was founded by Shem, Noah’s son.  It was later ruled by the Queen of Sheeba, and is possibly the longest continually occupied municipality on the planet, sitting at the crossroads of east and west since civilization began.  

After the third failed rebellion against the Romans in the 1^st Century CE, Jews fled to Sana’a in large numbers.  By the 4^th and 5^th centuries, even the kings were converting to Judaism.  Today, the locals in Sana’a refer to the ruins as ‘The Jewish Cemetery.’ The place is rather revered, though not so much with solemnity than with the good-natured respect and graciousness often given by the descendants of conquerors toward the long dead and gone conquered. 

The story is similar in Afghanistan.  To this day, the largest ethnic group in the country – the Pashtuns, also called Pathans – claim descent from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. When Robert Byron (who, like his namesake, died young on the periphery of a great war) rode and walked through Afghanistan in the 1930s, he noted that Afghans sometimes considered themselves Semitic and sometimes Aryan, depending on the subject at hand. (Byron suggests - and my experience agrees - the subjects depend as such: politics, then Aryan - if war, history, art, then Semitic.)

According to legend, Saul had a grandson named Afghana who, after his father died, was raised by David and later became the chief commander of David’s army. Following the Babylonian captivity, the sons of Afghana withdrew to the mountains in the east and there remained until the time of the Prophet Mohammed when Khalid bin al-Walid called in their banners.1 

Khalid bin al-Walid was one of Mohammed’s closest companions, the first great Arab conqueror, and also a descendant of Afghana. So, when asked by Mohammed to raise an Army, he went first to his distant cousins in the eastern mountains in Afghanistan. They answered, and under the command of “one (named) Qais… waged war most gallantly on the Prophet’s behalf.” The Prophet was so grateful that he “lavished praise on them,” and said that God would surely make the descendants of Qais so numerous, and their attachment to the faith would be so strong, “that it would be like the wood upon which they lay the keel when constructing a ship, which seaman call Pahtan.” Thus, the descendants of Saul in the eastern mountains past Persia became Pathans.

That almost none of this legend of Afghana is true proves the point yet further: the importance of origin stories and deep Jewish roots as far afield as Yemen and Afghanistan.  Consider the fact that the Afghan chroniclers who drafted this narrative felt compelled to tie the story of their people directly to Saul - the first monarch of the Kingdom of Israel. Consider also the years covered. Saul lived sometime in the 11th century BCE. The Babylonian Captivity was in the 6th century BCE. Mohammed lived in the 7th century CE, and these stories were not written down in Afghanistan until sometime after 1,200 CE. Eighteen centuries passed from Saul to Mohammed, and another half millennia from that point to when this was all put to parchment. A story must be deeply rooted to pass through so many generations, so many families.

The book that came out of Robert Byron’s trek to Afghanistan, The Road to Oxiana, began in what was then Mandatory Palestine, the western hub of the Silk Road.  Oxiana was - along with Ariana, Bactria - an ancient name for the region stretching across northern Afghanistan; variously conquered through history by the Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Timurids, Mongols, Russians, others.  The book is a travelogue, but it’s as much a journey through time as it is space; the ghosts of the past are ever-present and the entire journey has the feel of an end, or beginning, of something.

At one point, Byron notes the “infection of uncontrolled detail” seeping into the book, which he blames on reading Proust whilst in Turkestan. Pages later, he writes that he wished he could endow a prize for the “sensible traveler” who could cover the Marco Polo trail (from Palestine to Afghanistan, in this case) while consuming three books a week and a bottle a wine a day. “That man might tell one something about the journey.” This was in contrast, he wrote, to the well-funded academic and scientific expeditions which carry to the region all the instruments and equipment known to man, yet learn nothing.  All of which I note just to give a sense of Byron’s eye on the road to Oxiana.

The book opens with a description of his departure from Trieste, Italy, in August 1933:

(It) was attended by scenes first performed in the Old Testament. Jewish refugees from Germany were leaving for Palestine… the boys and girls struck up a solemn hymn, in which the word Jerusalem was repeated on a note of triumph… The crowd on shore joined in… At that moment Ralph Stockley, (a deputy) to the High Commissioner on Palestine, also arrived to find that he missed the boat. His agitation, and subsequent pursuit of the launch, relieved much of the tension.

Tension, indeed. Recall that Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the same year that Hannah Arendt - who would later write The Origins of Totalitarianism - began work with the German Zionist Organization to publicize the brutality of the Nazis.  It’s ever present in the background of the opening pages where Byron writes one moment about the decoration of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (“harmonious and restrained, almost severe”), then in the next we see the SS Martha Washington where the conditions of the Jews already desperate to escape Europe were such that “had (they) been animals, a good Englishman would have informed the RSPCA.” This is like Byron, very British, at once both descriptive and removed.

Later, walking on King David Street on his way to the Dome of the Rock, Byron finds “the desert Arab, furiously mustached…” the Arab woman, face tattooed with henna and dress embroidered, the Orthodox Jew, the Greek priest, the Latin father, the monks from Egypt, Abyssinia, and Armenia; and ever in the background a camera-strapped tourist. He then writes, “I don’t know how long they think the Arabs will suffer a single Jew to exist once the English went.”

We look back now and know the question would’ve been better put to the Europeans.  Or the Soviets, from whom 30,000 Jewish refugees fled to Afghanistan in the early 1930s.  Or Afghanistan, which that year would begin confiscating Jewish property and developing close ties to the Germans; the latter having determined – in an effort to project power between Russia and south Asia – that the Afghans were in fact Aryan (as Byron found of the Afghans themselves on the subject of Germany) and natural allies of the Nazis. 

That same year on the other end of the Silk Road from Afghanistan, Yemen was at war with Saudi Arabia, as it would be again in 2014; a war in which the Houthis captured Sana’a, and, according to the UN in 2022, drove out all remaining Jews save one.  In Afghanistan, the last Jew left in 2021, with the withdrawal of US forces.  Anyway, the point is, by 1933, the Jews had long since internalized questions about their existence.

Osama bin Laden had a deep fondness for Yemen.  Both his father and youngest wife were born there, and much of his inner circle was Yemeni at one time or another.  He often referenced a passage in the Qu’ran that predicted the rise of a great army in Yemen’s Hadhramaut valley that would defeat the enemies of Islam and pave the way for the return of the Mahdi (the final leader in Islam who will appear after the return of Jesus, who is known to Muslims as Isa ibn Maryam) to rule the world in peace and justice.2

The Hadhramaut valley is in southern Yemen, running along the Gulf of Aden.  Like so many names in that part of the world, there are debates about the etymology.  Jews relate the name to Genesis and Hazarmaveth, another descendent of Shem.  I vaguely recall Yemenis telling me that the name developed from the Arabic for “death has come” (a suspicion reinforced by Wikipedia – also, death to something feels like a common trend for ancient names from the Arabian Peninsula to the Oxiana).

The Houthis are a Zaydi Shia Muslim tribe from the northern Yemeni highlands, near the Saudi border and the Red Sea.  Often called The Houthi Movement, or Ansar Allah, the group was founded by the followers of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a tribal and political leader who was assassinated by the Yemeni government in 2004 for allegedly plotting a rebellion.

It was not the first time a Zaydi group was accused of rebellion. The Zaydis are a sub-sect of Shia Islam who have been a minority on the Arabian Peninsula since Zayd ibn Ali‘s unsuccessful rebellion against the Umayyad Caliphate in the 8^th century CE and their expulsion to the southern (in reference to the Umayyads – northern when in reference to Sana’a) highlands. Centuries later, the Zaydis fighting Ottoman rule would roll boulders down the tight passes at soldiers and horse drawn artillery, crushing and pinning animals and man alike for a slow, screaming death unless put from their misery.  An Ottoman folk-song captured the sense of things:

Yemen, your desert is made of sand

What did you want from my son?

I don’t know your way or your sign

I am just missing my son

O Yemen, damned Yemen

(It reminds me of Afghanistan where during the Soviet Jihad the Mujahideen claimed to throw rocks from the peaks onto the Soviet helicopters struggling in the thin air.  A large rock striking a rotor blade can be fatal at that altitude, killing half a dozen men and a multi-million-dollar machine with a slingshot.  Long before the Soviets, Kipling wrote: When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, An' go to your Gawd like a soldier).

A government minister in Sana’a remarked wryly to me in 2010 that the Zaydi ride down every hundred years or so to capture and plunder Sana’a, then return to the mountains when they grow weary of administration.  The time previous was 1905 when Imam Yahya led a Zaydi force in a siege of the city that led to the death by starvation of two-thirds of the population.  According to Yemen by Victoria Clark, “the city’s 8,000- strong community of Jews were hit especially hard.  On a visit to Sana’a after the siege… (a British) diplomat reported that the city’s ghetto ‘was like the dream of some haunted painter.  Many of the men were still skin and bone, and the crowd of dark faces with cavernous cheeks, half-hidden by twisted, black elf-locks that hung on either side, begging eyes and clutching hands, were horrible.’” Just five years before, foreign diplomats had called Sana’a the finest city in the Ottoman empire save Bagdad.3

That siege was eventually broken by the Ottomans.  But the next time the Zaydis marched on Sana’a was in 2015 (my Yemeni inoculator was off by ten years, it seems), under the banner of the Houthis.  This time they took the city, triggering another Yemeni civil war and another war with the Saudis.

The question is: how did the Zaydi militias go from boulders to ballistic missiles in the span of a century?  For the answer, go back to 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution.

In the US, we tend to remember the event as a jarring humiliation, ranging from the hostages in the US Embassy to the failure of Desert One (which, incidentally, is another key date as this marks the beginning of the Joint Special Operations command that would change special operations forever).  But for the Sunni Arabs, the establishment of a Shia Islamic Republic in Iran was a strategic earthquake. 

Under the rule of Pahlavi Dynasty from 1925 - 1979, Iran was generally secular, with an identity that was more Persian than Shia.  But the creation a Shia Islamic Republic in 1979 stirred fears in the Sunni Arab world that Iran would reignite tensions between Sunni and Shia that dated to the schism following the Prophet Mohammed’s succession in 632 (the Shia believed that Mohammed’s successor should be from his family, and supported Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law; whereas the Sunnis, who are 80-90% of Muslims, wanted a successor chosen by the elite of the early community).

This was especially true in neighboring Iraq, which had a substantial Shia population.  Fearing that the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, would foment rebellion among Iraq’s Shia, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980.  The entire Arab and western world backed Iraq.  Iran was left with two allies: Syria and Libya.

After the Iran-Iraq war ended (with 1-2 million dead, including untold numbers of Iranian child soldiers who were used to trigger mines so advancing platoons behind them could safely cover the ground) Iran resolved never again be so isolated, and began building proxy forces among Shia populations across the region; including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Badr Brigades in Iraq, and others. 

For sake of clarity, a pause here to focus on a few broad factors at work in the last two decades in the Middle East.  First, the destabilizing effects of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent withdrawal ultimately gave Iran vastly more influence in the region and expanded support to proxies across the Shia crescent. 

Second, increasing frustration among Arab (and American) leaders at the corruption and intransigence of the Palestinian leadership led to decreased Arab (and American) attention on the Palestinian issue. 

Third, Benjamin Netanyu’s governing coalition includes settlers who do not support a two state solution and have rapidly expanded settlements in the West Bank (in part to make a two-state solution impossible, in part because they believe Jews have a divine right to the land). Further, Netanyahu’s coalition has pushed for increasing Israeli control over al-Aqsa compound, which is the third holiest site in Islam. This is in violation of an agreement dating to the Ottoman Empire and endorsed by the UN in 1947 that says Muslims shall have exclusive control over the site; an agreement that was designed to reduce religious tensions as the area includes the Dome of the Rock and was built on the ruins of the Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans.

Fourth, Israel’s growing economic power, a desire by the Gulf States to diversify their economies, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to modernize Saudi Arabia; these all led to closer economic and diplomatic ties in the region.  In 2020, Israel normalized relations with multiple Gulf States, and the US had been working to facilitate a similar deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. (If the latter had been successful and included a path to a Palestinian state as the Saudis claimed it must, then it would have been the most important diplomatic development in the region since 1947 - President Biden has said he believes negotiations will resume at some point, though Saudi Arabia did announce a pause in talks after the attack on 10/7). 

The combination of these factors has both increased a sense of desperation among the Palestinians and increased Iranian influence. Hamas leaders – who are opposed to a two-state solution4 – called warming relations between Israel and the Arab states a “stab in the back.” For its part, Iran in recent years further consolidated power among Shia groups and strengthened relations with Sunni Palestinians, especially Hamas.  In the last few years, Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah have become as well armed, equipped, and trained as many nation states.  Further, many analysts observed that a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel would have been extremely damaging to Iran’s ambitions in the region. This led many to assume that Iran directly encouraged the attack on 10/7 in an effort to force an end to Saudi-Israeli negotiations. 

However, Tehran immediately and strongly denied any foreknowledge of the attack, both publicly and privately.  As a friend of mine recently back from Israel, said, Tehran was terrified that Israeli missiles were already on the way and couldn’t get a denial out fast enough.

Consider also that Iran’s economy is struggling after years of sanctions, and internal discontent is straining political stability. In March of this year, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia in a deal that Tehran viewed as an important step in reversing its diplomatic and economic isolation. In the view of one person with whom I spoke who has deep knowledge of the region, Iran is not eager to risk war with Israel, the reversal of newly reestablished ties with Saudi Arabia, nor further sanctions from the US. This does not mean that Iran is not complicit in the Hamas attack on Israel; they certainly are that given the history of support. But assuming they did not have a direct role, where does that leave us?

Possibly worse off than it seems at first glance.  If Iran has full control over their proxies, then these proxies can be deterred through threat of force against Iran.  Indeed, this is the current state of affairs, and it is why Hezbollah and the Houthis have engaged in the fight just enough to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinians, but not so much to merit a stronger reaction from Israel or the US. The danger is that Iran will have its hand forced by events on the ground, and/or that Hezbollah and the Houthis will be tempted to escalate without Iran’s consent.  If they (whether Hezbollah and Houthi leadership, or their rank and file) really see a chance to damage Israel in a way that all the Arab armies have failed to do since 1948, the momentum may gather such that its impossible to stop. In short: If the only thing preventing escalation is the degree to which Tehran can and will retain control, then the situation is tenuous indeed.

Consider also that for decades Israel was a nation of less than ten million that had been invaded or threatened multiple times by nations whose populations total 200 million.  Now add to that Islamist militias who, as the Houthis do, have slogans that say: Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews.  And who also have more than 100,000 rockets and missiles in their stores. Even Arab diplomats are quietly saying that Hamas must be destroyed or it will embolden the other militias in the region in a way that no one will be able to control. 

Jake Sullivan, the President’s National Security Advisor, took much criticism for his recent essay published before 10/7 in which he said the Middle East was quieter than it had been in decade.  But he wasn’t entirely wrong.  The Abraham Accords in 2020 were historic agreements, and talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed promising.  But how often in history has the moment before historic peace been the cause of historic war by those for whom peace would cost too much.  Hamas, for whom death is preferred to two-state peace, has brought us close.  Should Hamas survive, it may embolden the Houthis and Hezbollah in a way that will put the entire region over the brink.  Indeed, not only Riyadh but also Tehran may be quietly hoping that Israel succeeds.  If Israel fails, then historic war it may be.

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Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil

In some ways, the cycle of war and peace is the cycle of reality and unreality.  The farther you get from war – the richer and more stable a country is – the greater freedom to experiment and build and create your own world.  Progress happens this way.  Take for example the United States.  With oceans to the east and west and friendly neighbors north and south, this freedom exists in abundance.  In his book, History has Begun, Bruno Maçães suggests that America’s wide ability to create its own reality will define the future for the planet.  Even the (still imperfectly realized) founding story of this country – that we are all created equal – is a victory over the reality of the human experience since the dawn of civilization. 

But there is a risk. When we get far from reality, we risk losing a sense of perspective. To begin, we may forget that war is an ever-present threat to far too many across the world.  For a country that spent the last 22 years at war, you’d think this wouldn’t be so.  But those wars have been – and are – fought by less than one tenth of one percent of the population and very far from home.  More pressing, we seem in danger of forgetting that the process itself – the civic and cultural institutions large and small – that allows this country to work is a miracle; a process that in part emerged naturally from our deep diversity.  As John Adams wrote, any nation will have either balance or despotism.  A great range of diverse interests tend to conversation, compromise, and balance.  Two great opposing interests – say, the right and left today – tend to despotism. 

This is not to discount the profound flaws of our nation’s birth and growth.  The pursuit of a more perfect union has been slow and hard.  When I see commentators on the right and left lamenting some halcyon time in the past, I wonder what era it is to which they are referring.  Besides, ends are an illusion, it’s the means that matter.  This is something the United States embodies as a country; it is nearly alone in the world and history as a living state; a place, like a person, ever in a state of becoming.  It’s the process that makes this possible. 

The Context

I strongly agree with Maimonides that we should accept the truth from whoever speaks it.  Today, however, we are conditioned (correctly, if unfortunately) to filter any truth through the experience of the speaker.  There are both well intentioned reasons (highlighting historically marginalized voices) and cynical reasons (exploiting tribal emotion in the fiscal imperative for clicks) for this, but the result is a media environment that is as predictable as it is chaotic. 

Which isn’t to say that partisan, breathless media is new.  The concept of detached objectivity was a recent invention.  And the current doubts about objectivity – that we all have our biases and these are impossible to fully suppress – are not unreasonable.  But many have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.  Civil’s raison d'être is the pursuit of objectivity.  Yes, pure objectivity is impossible and inadequate.  But, like the pursuit of a more perfect union, the process is everything.

Begin with our point of view at Civil: liberal democracy is good and isolationism is generally bad.  All things flow from that.^[i]  But still, the pursuit of objectivity lies not just in how you cover a story.  It’s more about what you cover; what you put on your platform for people to consume in their limited time.  This moment, for example, in Israel.  In all the immensely complicated history of the region and the enormity of what’s happening now, what story do you tell? I’ll come back to this, but first, some context on my experience.

The first time I was shot was in Afghanistan.  He was an al-qa’ida suicide bomber, and I shot him back in a near simultaneous exchange.  Though given the C4 strapped to his chest, it’s hard to say if the bullets killed him or the explosion.^[ii]  In the years before and after, I deployed to many other places as part of the War on Terror.  I recognized the places destroyed by American munitions in Sana, Yemen by the people I knew there.  I’ve seen dead families and have friends who’ve had to pull dead children from the rubble of US airstrikes.  I’ve known more than a dozen friends and colleagues killed from Africa to the Middle East to South Asia.  I know their widows and kids.  For my close friends who served longer than I did, the number is two or three times that.  I did not personally know anyone that died on 9/11, but being on active duty in the Marines at the time, I well recall the intense emotion watching the TV that day, seeing people jump from the towers rather than burn to death.  I remember hardly sleeping for weeks during the fall of Kabul, trying to get people out; I remember discovering for the first time what betrayal felt like.

Now, consider the context in Israel right now.  It’s generally irresponsible and callous to equate tragedies, but there are objective comparisons we can make to 9/11.  In the United States that day, nearly 3,000 people were killed and more than 6,000 were wounded.  The population of the United States is almost 340 million.  As of this writing, 1,300 Israelis have killed by Hamas, more than 3,000 wounded, 100 taken prisoner, and the Israeli population is less than a tenth the size of the United States.  Terrorists came into people’s homes and shot children in front of parents, raped women next to their dead friends, murdered babies in their cribs.  They filmed executions with the victims’ own phones and posted the videos to their Facebook pages for their friends and family to see. For these and other reasons (the strong confidence in their security services as one sense of national identity, for example), this is something worse than ‘Israel’s 9/11.’

Recall also what followed 9/11. Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS, and now the Taliban again in power in Kabul.  Consider that Hamas - and perhaps Iran - had the American experience in mind when planning the attack. Consider what Israel faces in the weeks ahead. Hezbollah, the Iranian backed political party and militia in Lebanon, will not likely remain on the sidelines.  Syrian forces, which have invaded Israel three times, are positioned on the border of the Golan Heights. Consider the fact that the two million people in the Gaza Strip live in the most densely populated place in the world; consider the three million in the West Bank.  Consider that 43% of the people who live in Gaza are children under the age of 15, that their electricity and water have been cut off, and much worse is ahead.

Back to Objectivity

The power of video lies in the levels on which you can communicate. If done well, it can tell stories of emotional complexity and intellectual depth in a short space.  Doing this with nuance and balance, and building the technology that will provide the tools to sift through the avalanche of misinformation coming in the next few years is our goal (more on this when we send the update that this was originally planned to be).  This is what you have invested in and this is what we owe you.

But the emotional power of video can also be a danger.  Is objectivity just sending raw images of tragedy?  What about context?  Which images do you use?  Every decision is rooted in your point of view.  Where to begin in Israel?  Is it an analysis of fault; the intelligence failure or Netanyahu’s administration? Is it a look at the plight of the Palestinians, both in history and the coming weeks?  Where do you begin with the cause? Is it the rebellion against the Romans almost 2,000 years ago and the subsequent massacre and expulsion of the Jews from their ancestral homeland?  The pogroms or the Holocaust? Perhaps the missing piece is role of the world in all this.  Zionism was born of the belief that neither God nor the world would protect the Jewish people, and they needed a state to protect themselves.  After World War II, the UN General Assembly endorsed the idea, and Israel was reborn.  But what of the Arabs who lived in the region?  Was it unreasonable that they resisted the Western-led UN plan to take their land, asking why it should be they – and not the Europeans or Americans; who both had a history of resisting Jewish immigration – who should provide a Jewish homeland?  What of the fact that Israel’s expansion past the 1948 borders was the result of three wars begun and lost by Israel’s Arab neighbors?  Further, what of the Persian and Arab roles in stoking the Palestinian cause and resisting a two-state solution for their own domestic reasons?  Yes, it is immensely complicated.  Europe, the UN, the United States, Iran, and the Arab states all played a role in getting to this point.  It’s going to take more than Israel to stop it.    

As a fledgling media company that is still months away from a full launch, these questions are largely theoretical for us.  Further, the focus for Civil is, and will be, on domestic stories.  This doesn’t mean that we won’t cover the war, but our strength will be in covering how it affects all Americans and how we may facilitate understanding, if not always agreement.  Admittedly, this is a far easier task than covering the war itself. But we did not think we could say nothing about what is happening. This essay is only an acknowledgment of the tragedy, an exploration into how we think, and an explanation of where we are trying to go. Remembering all that came after 9/11, I worry it will be a long road.

Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil

^[i] Liberal in the classical sense: individual rights, a society where we are all tolerant of each other’s beliefs and delusions, and politics with limited ambitions.  Also, I wrote ‘isolationism is generally bad.’  Our foreign policy should be engaged and humble.  This doesn’t always lead to big, satisfying triumphs.  But it does limit the potential for catastrophe like the kind with which we’ve had so much recent experience.

^[ii] Lest I make this sound more heroic than it was: there were several al-Qa’ida fighters on one side, and several Americans and Afghans on the other.  It wasn’t a lone old west style standoff, but rather a confused firefight at night among a group of us.  Very likely the fighter that shot me was also hit by several shots apart from mine.

Also, the suicide vest went low order which is the reason why I’m still here to write this.