Unprecedented Justice Department searches of journalists’ phone records. IRS targeting of conservative political groups. Spiraling sexual assault rates in the military. And the downplaying of the first killing of an American ambassador in 30 years.

In a matter of days, alarming accounts have emerged regarding the actions of five key federal government bureaucracies: the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon.

For commentators on the right, the reports are final proof of the raft of conspiracy theories focused on President Barack Obama. For commentators on left, they are non-scandals that Republicans exaggerate for political gain. Our endless left-right debate – Obama the devil, Obama the angel – misses more serious problems.

For liberals, the reports are a worrying sign of Obama’s struggles to carry out his second-term agenda. For conservatives, they show that even if a Republican wins the White House, Washington is increasing unmanageable.

First, Obama’s woes. Some of his wounds are self-inflicted. For five years the Obama administration has displayed a destructive tendency to try to have it both ways. In a press conference Thursday, the president did so again.

In lawyerly responses, Obama said he supported journalists’ constitutional right to report but stood by the fact that his administration has carried out more criminal leak investigations than all previous administrations combined. He called for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad but prevaricated on how the United States would respond to apparent Syrian government chemical weapons attacks.

Obama came into office promising openness – but from counter-terrorism to domestic policy, his White House has been secretive, insular and controlling. Yes, Republicans are bent on destroying Obama’s presidency, but an aloof president has alienated his Democratic allies.

Congress is no better. Each two-year term seems to set new standards for political trench warfare. One-third of the committees in the Republican-controlled House are investigating the administration. Some on the far right call for Obama’s impeachment.

During President George W. Bush’s second term, a similar pattern emerged. Representative Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) carried out exhaustive hearings on the administration’s misdeeds in Iraq. And some talked of impeaching Bush. The current Republican effort is broader than the Democratic one. But the goal is the same: Smear one’s opponent first, legislate second.

Smear is the operative word as well in an increasingly partisan news media. Commentators on Fox and MSNBC earn millions oversimplifying complex problems, denigrating their political opponents and pandering to the far right and far left. Fox has been consistently worse.

After months of peddaling Benghazi conspiracy theories, Fox’s Sean Hannity was triumphant this week. declared this week that the IRS was targeting “those that desire to make America a better place to live.” [My apologies. The IRS did, in fact, target groups that sought to educate Americans on "how to make America a better place to live."] But Roger Ailes and company may look likely to again overplay their hand and, unintentionally, help Obama.

The IRS actions – from targeting conservative tax-exempt organization to lying to members of Congress – were outrageous. But so far, no evidence has emerged that the White House knew of the effort. And responsibility for the soaring number of sexual assaults in the military lies primarily with Pentagon, not the White House.

But both scandals show a larger problem: Legislative deadlock makes governance more difficult. Ambiguous regulations have complicated the IRS’s job of screening political groups. And there is limited agreement in Congress on how to reform the military’s antiquated system for prosecuting sexual assault.

Regarding Benghazi, there are some criticisms that can and should be made of the administration. Locked in a fiercely contested re-election campaign, Obama downplayed the role of al Qaeda in the attack in his initial public statements.

But Republicans exaggerate the impact of the careful terminology Obama used. At most, the effort succeeded for several weeks. By Election Day, the fact that al Qaeda-linked terrorists had killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was well known.

Far-right claims that Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally blocked aid to Benghazi before or during the attack are baseless and absurd. Neither would want an American ambassador killed in the middle of a presidential campaign.

Instead, blame for Benghazi lies across the government.

House Republicans’ rejection of $450 million in State Department requests for additional security funding since 2010 intensified the department’s dependence on private contractors to guard its facilities. When the Libyan government banned such firms, the department’s understaffed Diplomatic Security Service had only a handful of personnel to deploy in Libya. Charlene Lamb and three other State Department officials were relieved of their duties after rejecting repeated requests for additional security from American officials in Libya.

Privately, career diplomats have also questioned Stevens’ decision-making. They expressed surprise at his choice to spend the nights of September 10 and 11 in Benghazi, which had already experienced a series of anti-Western attacks. Brief, unpredictable day visits make it more difficult for attackers to plan assaults, they said.

And as Jake Tapper correctly pointed out in a May 15 piece for CNN, the Benghazi facility was, in fact, primarily a CIA outpost. Of the roughly 30 people evacuated from the site, 20 were CIA employees. State Department officials had an informal arrangement with the CIA to provide security if needed. When the attack unfolded, both the CIA and military were unprepared.

The 100 pages of emails released by the White House on Wednesday raise more questions for Clinton than for Obama. The State Department – not the White House – mounted an intensive effort to eliminate references to al Qaeda from much-disputed talking points. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, for example, should disclose who she was referring to when she cited the concerns of her “building leadership.”

In the weeks ahead, perceptions of Obama will likely harden. The right will see him as dastardly. The left will view him as a victim of Washington’s gutter politics. Most probably, his biggest sin is being aloof and disengaged.

But Obama’s failings are only part of the problem. An increasingly polarized Washington is devouring its own. Ceaseless, take-no-prisoners political warfare, not nefarious White House plots, ravages government.

PHOTO (Insert): House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) is holding hearings Friday to examine the IRS actions involving tax-exempt organization, Washington, February 15, 2012. REUTERS/ Gary Cameron

PHOTO (Insert B): Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pauses while testifying on the September attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites in Benghazi, Libya, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington January 23, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Picture of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad riddled with holes on the Aleppo police academy, after capture by Free Syrian Army fighters, March 4, 2013.  REUTERS/Mahmoud Hassano

MOSCOW – After marathon meetings with Secretary of State John Kerry here Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hinted that Moscow may finally pressure Syrian President Bashir al-Assad to leave office.

“We are not interested in the fate of certain individuals,” Lavrov said at a late night news conference. “We are interested in the fate of the Syrian people.”

Lavrov and Kerry announced that they would host an international conference where Syrian government officials and rebels will be given a chance to name an interim government. The odds of the two sides agreeing are low but Kerry deserves credit for securing a small diplomatic step forward here.

The problem is that Lavrov and his boss – President Vladimir Putin – may be unable to deliver on Assad. For nearly two years, Lavrov and Putin have served as the Syrian leaders’ chief diplomatic ally but Iran has provided far more military support. Russian analysts say Washington is kidding itself if it believes Putin can orchestrate a quick and easy Assad exit.

“All of this is wishful thinking,” said Sergei Strokan, a columnist for the liberal Moscow daily Kommersant. “Moscow has quite limited influence on the Syrian regime.”

Decades from now, President Barack Obama’s decision to not arm Syria’s rebels may be condemned or praised. But a visit to Moscow this week showed that it has come at an immediate price. Washington’s failure to act created a vacuum that Putin and Lavrov used to boost Russia’s global standing.

“For the last two years, Lavrov has dramatically elevated his profile on the world stage,” Susan Glasser recently wrote in Foreign Affairs. “He has done so by almost single-handedly defying Western attempts to force some united action to stop Syria’s deadly civil war.”

Lavrov and Putin have also used Syria to bolster their standing at home. Kerry’s widely publicized visit coincided with the one-year anniversary of disputed elections in Russia that Putin used to gain his third term in office. Before meeting with Kerry, Putin fired a key lieutenant who was the architect of the system that has allowed the Russian leader to control major industries, seize most media outlets and intimidate or co-opt rivals.

With the price of oil low, Putin’s oil-dependent economy is flagging. Barring a surge in prices, massive social welfare payments are unsustainable. Corruption is endemic, consuming an estimated $300 billion a year, 16 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product. Transparency International, an anti-corruption group, named Russia the worst nation on earth in its most recent Bribe Payer’s index, which ranks firms on their likelihood to bribe.

A spate of recent laws on libel, protests, blasphemy and treason has made it more difficult to exercise basic rights, the Washington Post reported last month. Putin also recently ordered prosecutors nationwide to search for NGOS that have failed to abide by a new law requiring them to register as “foreign agents” if they receive foreign funding.

Putin is probably secure until the end of his term in 2016. But a slowing economy and public fatigue with Putin are taking a toll. In the end, the key factor may be the price of oil, the pillar of Putin’s one-dimensional economy.

“If the price of oil drops below $50 [a barrel], it is a death sentence,” said a Russian analyst who asked not to be named.

On the international stage, meanwhile, Russia is ascendant. For Putin, Kerry’s request for help marked the achievement of a decade-old goal. From the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo, to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to the 2011 U.N.-backed toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, Moscow has been largely irrelevant. Putin saw each post-Cold War American intervention as an attempt to remove opponents, not defend human rights.

“In Putin’s view, they were all victims of a cynical U.S. plot for global domination,” journalist Lucian Kim wrote last year, ”where any weapon is fair game, be it smart bomb, a pro-democracy grant or Twitter.”

Instead of being the West’s potential victim, Putin is now it’s vital interlocutor. Maria Lipman, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center and a leading political analyst, said Putin’s logic is simple.

“You may denounce us,” she explained, “but when it comes to the most important international issue today, you come to Moscow.”

So, with all this, why is the Obama administration turning to Putin for help? The answer is simple: the White House’s deep desire to not get entangled in Syria. To American officials, a deal with Russia is a cost-free solution. The geo-political equivalent, if you will, of a drone strike. No Americans lives will be lost. There will be little domestic political risk.

In truth, though, there is no easy way to stem the conflict in Syria, which increasingly threatens to destabilize the region. Blame  is widespread. Assad, of course, is the worst culprit. His refusal to relinquish power in the face of an initially peaceful protest movement has led to the killing of an estimated 70,000 people. In Washington, Obama allowed exaggerated fears of another Iraq to paralyze his administration.

Putin, though, has arguably been the most cynical. He exaggerated his control of Assad and may also be double-dealing.

Twenty-four hours after Kerry left Moscow, press reports emerged that Russia was planning to sell surface-to-air missiles to Syria that would make any American intervention in the conflict vastly more difficult. The Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli officials had warned the Obama administration of Russia’s imminent sale to Syria of sophisticated S-300 missiles with a range of 125 miles.

Asked about the sale at a press conference in Rome on Thursday, Kerry said Washington would prefer that Russia not provide arms to Syria and called  the missiles “potentially destabilizing” to Israel. If true, the missile sale would be a personal affront to Kerry, who lauded Putin and Lavrov in Moscow.

Sale or no sale, the proposed conference should be carried out. Both sides may miraculously agree on an interim government.

But it is more likely that the United States has lost control of the rebels, particularly the jihadists. And Russia has lost control of Assad, who retains Tehran’s backing and has killed so many people that he cannot compromise.

Syria’s downward spiral will continue.

This piece has been updated to include recent news about Russian plans to sell sophisticated missiles to Syria.

PHOTO (Insert): U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) gestures as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tries to fix his translation equipment during a joint news conference after their meeting in Moscow May 7, 2013.  REUTERS/Mladen Antonov/Pool

After helping coordinate the American civilian aid efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, Mark Ward arrived in Turkey last year to oversee the Obama administration’s effort to provide non-lethal assistance to Syria’s rebels. Unwilling to provide arms, Washington hoped to strengthen the Syrian Opposition Coalition. Led by moderates, the group was seen as a potential counterweight to jihadists.

Ward, a 57-year-old senior official in the U.S. Agency for International Development, had seen the successes and failures of similar post- September 11 programs. He was determined to get it right in Syria

On one level, Ward and his colleagues have succeeded. Over the last year, more than $500 million in American assistance helped feed Syrian families, provide acute medical care and get civilians through a harrowing winter. More than 600 Syrian activists, from different religious and ethnic groups, underwent training and received generators, computers and communications equipment.

Washington’s fear of any American aid inadvertently ending up in the hands of extremists, though, limited the effort. Every Syrian who received aid had to produce their Syrian national identity card, answer detailed questions about their background and have their names run through a U.S. terrorism database. And in the hope of preventing aid recipients from experiencing retaliation by the Assad regime, little of the U.S. assistance was labeled.

Inside Syria, meanwhile, the al Qaeda-affiliate al Nusra Front openly distributed vast amounts of weapons, cash and other assistance. Today, the jihadists are far more visible than the Western-backed coalition.

“Our competition in liberated areas — mainly the al Nusra front — don’t abide by the same principals,” Ward said, referring to American efforts to carefully distribute aid. “It’s hard to compete with them in the short term, but longer term our assistance will endure and the Syrian people will notice.”

The United States’ track record in similar efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, though, is grim. From Kabul in 2001 to Tunis today, Washington has struggled to identify, work with and strengthen local moderates. In some countries, these moderates simply did not exist. In others, they had no power. In many cases, the American government – particularly its civilian agencies — did a poor job of implementing its policies and promises.

Vast amounts of blame for the folly of the last decade lie with corrupt local leaders like Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. But there is need for a reckoning in Washington as well.

Ryan Crocker, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, said the United States rushed into countries, relied primarily on military force and expected immediate change.

“Let’s punch out their lights and realign their society,” is how Crocker explained it. “And then when we find out the latter is more difficult than we expect, we say ‘OK, let’s go somewhere else.’ That’s what our enemies count on — and our allies fear.”

U.S. officials should “listen a bit more than we speak,” Crocker said, focus on economics, and ask local moderates how best to marginalize extremists.

Crocker’s view echoed that of dozens of U.S. officials — Republicans and Democrats, civilians and soldiers — I interviewed while covering Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq for eight years.

Over and over, people from divergent backgrounds had reached the same conclusion:  The best way to counter militancy was working through local allies and creating economic growth. Deadly force was necessary at times, but the civilian effort was as important as the military.

Since 2001, though, Washington has mounted an overwhelmingly military effort. Of the roughly $1.3 trillion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, 95 percent went to military costs. When civilian initiatives were mounted, Republican and Democratic administrations alike threw money at the problems. Sweeping change that would take years at best to achieve was expected in months.

The United States spent more than $67 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq on civilian aid programs. By almost any measure, the results were meager. Washington squandered billions on private contractors, largely failed to strengthen local moderates and struggled to use its most potent non-lethal tools: U.S. private investment, technology and education.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, I met well-intentioned American civilians trapped in a broken system. U.S. aid programs seemed designed more to produce metrics to appease Congress — schools built, students enrolled, politicians “trained” — than have a long-term impact on the ground. Speed, visibility and American political dynamics ruled. Patience, complexity and deference to locals were shunned.

In hindsight, Washington’s tepid post-2001 civilian effort exposed the dangerously weak state of our own civilian institutions. In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the ability of the White House, State Department and USAID to devise and carry out sophisticated political and development efforts overseas has withered. And while the complexity of global challenges has increased, Washington’s partisanship and the 24-hour news cycle have fueled demands for safe, quick results that are illusory.

***

In June 2009, Steven R. Koltai, a 55-year-old former Warner Brothers executive, was elated when President Barack Obama called for a “new beginning” between the United States and the Islamic world in an historic address in Cairo. What thrilled Koltai most was the president’s call for a new economic approach.

“I will host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year,” Obama said, “to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs.”

Koltai had long believed that promoting entrepreneurship could play a role in sparking economic growth at home and abroad.

“The United States,” he said, “has not put what I consider the central strand of our DNA into the service of our foreign policy.”

Koltai accepted an unpaid State Department fellowship, designed to bring business leaders into public service. His time in Washington changed his opinion of government forever

Starting in August 2009, Koltai worked as the lead organizer of Obama’s promised summit on entrepreneurship.

His mentor, and boss, was Lorraine Hariton, the State Department’s special representative for commercial and business affairs. A successful Silicon Valley executive, Hariton was one of a handful of “special representatives” whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed to address the country’s most pressing foreign policy issues — Afghanistan-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine and dismally low American exports, among others.

Hariton and Koltai believed that promoting entrepreneurship could ignite economic development, foster political stability, create jobs and strengthen civil society in predominantly Muslim countries.

The April 2010 summit brought 220 entrepreneurs from 55 Muslim communities to Washington. In a speech, Obama unveiled a Global Entrepreneurship Program, a  public-private partnership that included Cisco and Google from the private sector; MIT and the American University in Cairo from academia, and Endeavor and TechnoServ from the nonprofit world.

The program opened offices in Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey, where “lead entrepreneurs” gave local start-ups mentoring and contact with American angel investors. Koltai and others led “entrepreneurship delegations” that brought successful investors and business school professors to the region. In a half dozen countries, they held competitions where local entrepreneurs pitched ideas for high-tech start-ups.

Yet Koltai was incensed by Washington’s lack of financial support. He managed to cobble together $1.5 million from various initiatives, but never secured permanent funding or staffers.

American members of the “entrepreneurship delegations” were surprised when they learned that the State Department was providing no prize to the local entrepreneur with the best start-up idea. Pooling resources, some delegations created prizes of their own. In Tunisia, the winning entrepreneur received a three-month internship at the TechTown incubator in Detroit, Michigan.

The lack of resources appalled Koltai.  Members of Congress, he concluded, were happy to fund the Defense Department but skeptical about increasing the size of the State Department in any way. Meanwhile, some State Department officials were far more interested in traditional diplomacy.

Koltai found government workers underpaid, cautious and cynical. They “yawned” at the announcement of new presidential initiatives, he said, dismissing them as political theatrics.

Some State Department staffers, according to Koltai, did just enough to not endanger their jobs. Others, he found, were committed to public service but had been beaten down by a system resistant to change.

With staff fearful of criticism and budget cuts, risk aversion was endemic, according to Koltai and other former government officials with private-sector experience. In business, taking risks and failing was expected. In government, members of Congress and the news media assailed the smallest mistake.

One mid-level official, a venture capitalist before joining the Obama administration, said government was paralyzed. As many as 18 out of 20 venture capital investments lose money, he said, but the goal is to learn from one’s mistakes. In Washington, one failure can doom a career.

“It’s very hard to innovate and to learn,” said the official, who asked not to be named. “If you fail once, you get screwed.”

The result was an extraordinarily cautious and territorial system that infuriated Koltai.

What angered him most, however, was the government’s reliance on contractors. Under privatization reforms enacted by President Ronald Reagan and continued by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, civilian government agencies doled out aid money to private contractors — who then hired a cascading series of subcontractors to do the work.

In theory, competition between contractors saved taxpayers money; slowed the growth of the federal workforce, and provided better services. Contractors could also be hired quickly, avoiding glacial federal hiring procedures. And they could be let go as soon as a project ended.

But after the September 11 attacks, the State Department and USAID were not given nearly enough staff to manage a torrent of spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2001 and 2010, Congress doubled USAID’s budget yet staffing remained largely unchanged.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, many local people viewed private contractors as war profiteers. They cited studies showing that 40 percent of foreign aid eventually returned to donor countries in the form of contractor profits.

Koltai estimated that State Department contractors regularly made a 30 percent profit — while performing poorly and facing little competition. He watched overworked government contracting officers choose the same companies each year because doing so allowed them to avoid congressional scrutiny.

After the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, for example, Koltai tried to convince USAID to revamp a $34-million program designed to “improve the business environment” in Egypt.  He hoped to divert money to train young Egyptian technology entrepreneurs and bring in U.S. executives and investors.

But the contractor, Chemonics International, refused to change its program, according to Koltai. When the USAID procurement officer challenged the firm, he found himself outmanned. Citing language in its contract, Chemonics’ lawyers threatened to sue. The system astounded Koltai.

“Chemonics has a whole legal department whose existence is based on memorizing the fine print,” he said. “The person overseeing the public money is outgunned. We, the American taxpayer, did not have the right to say ‘stop the presses, there’s been a revolution.’ ”

The USAID procurement officer impressed Koltai. He declined to identify him but said he was a “smart, dedicated” civil servant, with relatively low pay, scant support and tough working conditions.

“He was paid $85,000, while managing hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Koltai said. “You’d never find that in the private sector.”

In an interview last fall, a spokesperson for Chemonics defended the firm’s work and said it does adapt to changing circumstances.

After three years, Koltai left the State Department in frustration. Former colleagues said that Koltai’s grating personality hurt his efforts. Koltai, however, blamed Washington’s polarization and risk aversion.

Implementing new initiatives in the government proved extraordinarily difficult, he said. The byzantine federal procurement process minimized risk — the opposite of the venture capital system — and blocked change.

“The No. 1 problem in connecting the dots is the procurement process,” he explained. “In my view, the key to changing that is on the Hill.”

No matter which party wins the White House, he said, implementing policies will be difficult if Congress does not enact procurement reform.

“The axle of the car is broken,” Koltai said, referring to Washington. “Whether Mario Andretti or you gets behind the wheel, you’re not going to be able to drive it.”

***

A handful of firms now dominate civilian contracting. DynCorp International, a former Texas-based aviation maintenance company that morphed into a massive temp agency for the State Department, is one of them.

Government workers refer to DynCorp  as a “body shop.” Whenever the government needed personnel to do anything — from training local police to performing housekeeping on a base — DynCorp and other firms hired experts in the field and then offered them to the government for a fee.

Between 2002 and 2012, DynCorp provided translators to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; maintained helicopters the Defense Department provided to Pakistan; trained police in Afghanistan and Iraq for the State Department, and won multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts to build, supply and maintain U.S. military bases worldwide.

Between 2001 and 2011, the firm received $7.4 billion in contracts from the State Department and Pentagon in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the third-largest American contractor in the two wars, behind only the massive oil and defense conglomerate Halliburton and Agility, which provided food to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Despite questions about its performance, DynCorp won contract after contract. Congressional investigators later found that firms won vast contracts with little competition because so few companies were willing to work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

DynCorp and other contractors have defended their performance. They said, for example, the State Department was responsible for the design, administration and monitoring of police-training programs.

“We are not judged on the success or failure of the program as they established it,” Richard Cashon, a DynCorp executive, said in a 2006 interview. “We are judged on our ability to provide qualified personnel.”

The massive contracts eventually caught the eye of traditional defense contractors and Wall Street. In 2003, Computer Sciences Corporation, a longtime defense contractor known by its acronym, CSC, bought DynCorp for $914 million. Less than two years later, CSC split the company and sold its security and aviation divisions to Veritas Capital, a Wall Street venture capital firm, for $850 million.

Two years later, Veritas took DynCorp public. Then, in 2010, Veritas sold DynCorp to a Wall Street private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, for $1 billion. This $20-billion firm is headed by longtime Republican donor Stephen Feinberg.

The chairman of Veritas Capital, Robert B. McKeon, may well be the American who made the single largest profit from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: $350 million from the purchase and sale of DynCorp.

On Sept. 10, 2012, McKeon committed suicide in his home in Darien, Connecticut, according to local police. A Veritas official who asked not to be named said the cause was not work-related.

Government contracts continue to flow to DynCorp. In 2012, it was the 10th-largest government contractor in the country, with $3.8 billion in federal contracts.

***

Mark Ward, the USAID official coordinating aid to the Syrian opposition, had served as the agency’s head of procurement from 2006 to 2008. He said the agency’s major problem was a lack of staff.

“Given that the number of Foreign Service officers has fallen so precipitously since the Vietnam War — we have one-10th of the number we had,” he said, “we have no choice but to turn to contractors.”

During the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ward and a staff of 60 to 70 USAID procurement officers were responsible for monitoring all aid programs worldwide. Under pressure to approve the dispersal of billions of dollars in assistance, Ward and his staff created enormous contracts.

“The way to move the money quickly,” he said, “is to award megacontracts to megacontractors.”

He said there is a more effective way. “The better approach,” he said, “is bite-sized contracts and grants that are close to the action, that are more flexible, that can respond to changed approaches. That’s the thing we need.”

The solution is simple. “You need to hire more contracting officers,” he said.

I do not begrudge Veritas, DynCorp or Chemonics their profits. The private sector is doing what it does best: finding innovative ways to make money. The problem is that the United States now has a private sector and military brimming with capital, capacity and talent. But our civilian public-sector institutions are sclerotic, ossified and weak.

The goal should not be to hurl tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars at the Middle East. Nor should it be to simply increase the size of the State Department and USAID.

Instead, American policy makers should change their antiquated concept of national power. Military might remains vital, but in a globalized economy trade with the United States, American technology and the threat of economic isolation are now national security tools as well. Washington’s options in the Middle East go beyond mounting massive ground invasions or doing nothing.

The United States should work with viable allies where they exist and admit where they do not. In the end, it is economic growth and local moderates, not American soldiers, that will marginalize militants.

The world is changing but Washington is not.

 This article is based on an excerpt from David Rohde’s new book, “Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East,”

PHOTO (Insert A): Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker at a news conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul July 27, 2011. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail

PHOTO (Insert B): A fish hatchery funded by USAID at a village in Hilla, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, May 26, 2008.  REUTERS/Erik de Castro

PHOTO (Insert C): Afghan children watch a movie from a mobile cinema projection based on the rule of law comic series organized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Kabul September 24, 2010. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

PHOTO (Insert D): Halliburton was the largest American contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pictured here are its corporate offices in Houston, Texas April 6, 2012. REUTERS/Richard Carson

PHOTO (Insert E): Syrian refugees wait to receive aid and rations during the visit by U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah at the Za’atri refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq, near the border with Syria September 5, 2012. REUTERS/Majed Jaber

BOSTON – There is no right way to react to a terrorist attack.

Oklahoma City rebuilt after Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 truck bomb attack on the federal government. Atlanta moved on following anti-abortion activist Eric Rudolph’s 1996 bombing of the Olympics. New York displayed staggering resiliency after the September 11 attacks.

Boston, though, may have set a new standard.

Customers swarmed restaurants and businesses on Boylston Street, the site of the marathon bombings, after police reopened the area on Wednesday. There is overwhelming pride here in the public institutions – police, hospitals, government officials and news outlets (forgive my bias) – that responded so swiftly to the bombing. And there has been no major backlash against the city’s Muslim community since two Chechen-American brothers were identified as the prime suspects.

There have been missteps, of course. The FBI apparently failed to follow up aggressively enough on warnings from Russian officials about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother accused in the attack. Police fired on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, his younger brother, when he was unarmed, wounded and hiding in a boat. And a transit police officer, who was gravely wounded in a firefight with the brothers, may have been mistakenly shot by a fellow officer.

But this city’s brave, charitable and tolerant spirit so soon after the attack is an extraordinary example for all. There is mourning here, but little sense of fear. There is anger, but a realization that terrorism is a reality for communities worldwide. And there is a determination to not allow attacks on civilians to paralyze or divide this city.

“You can’t blame everybody for a few radical lunatics with hatred in their hearts,” said Neil Tanger, a 65-year-old longtime Boston Marathon volunteer, who choked back tears when visiting the bombing site Thursday night. “Most of the people who come here come for the opportunity.”

Tanger, filled with pride in the city and its people, said the examples of his immigrant grandfather and his father, a World War Two veteran, inspired his response.

“We have what we have here because of their commitment to the American dream,” he said. “We’re not going to give that up because of a few lunatics. We’re going to continue to be strong.”

On Thursday, this modest-sized but global city was back. On a glorious spring afternoon in the Boston Public Gardens, parents showed toddlers the duck statues made famous by the children’s classic Make Way for Ducklings. Nearby, blooming magnolia trees and expectant college students filled Commonwealth Avenue. And at night, the streets around Fenway Park grew electric as the Red Sox battled the Houston Astros.

Khalid Lottfi, a 47-year-old Moroccan-American taxi driver and 25-year Boston resident, is on a mission to explain his faith. Lottfi, who is Muslim, prayed in the days after the attacks that the perpetrators would not be Muslim.

After the surviving brother reportedly told investigators that they carried out the attacks to defend Islam, Lottfi started impromptu conversations about his faith with passengers in his taxi who seemed friendly.

“I tell them I’m Muslim and I can’t understand it either,” Lottfi said. “And they say, ‘Wow,’ and then they ask questions.”

Lottfi, who had lived in France but said he felt more tolerance for religious freedom in the United States, said the response from passengers has been overwhelmingly positive. He said he was doing “my little part” to ease fear in the city.

“They need to hear from a Muslim that I don’t condone this thing,” he said.

These are early days, of course. Flashes of anger do emerge. The day before images of the Tsarnaevs were released, an unidentified man assaulted a female Syrian doctor wearing a headscarf as she walked her 9-month-old daughter to day care in the Boston suburb of Malden.

“He said, ‘(Expletive) you. (Expletive) you, Muslims, You are terrorists, you are the ones who made the Boston explosion,’ ” Hebad Abolaban told the Boston Globe. “I was really, really completely shocked. I didn’t know what to do. Then I realized what happened. I was crying and crying.”

One woman visiting the bombing site called for a stricter immigration system and, like many Bostonians, expressed fury at reports that the older Tsarnaev brother received welfare. One young man who visited the site of the bombings on Thursday said he was a family friend of one victim. He called for tighter immigration laws and trying the surviving brother in a military court.

“If they were a scumbag in their own country, why should we let them in ours?” asked the young man, who did not want to be named. “Why is our government prosecuting him like he is one of us, when he obviously isn’t?”

Anger is understandable. Bostonians have suddenly joined residents of Kabul, Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Tokyo in living with terrorist attacks. In the past, no one here knew how they might react to a bomb set off in a crowd, a crazed gunman or a poison gas attack.

But this city is responding exactly as it should. The accused are being prosecuted as criminals – which they are. Public institutions are being praised – as they should be. And most people are resisting the attackers attempt to sow fear, bigotry and division.

While television images show the immediate chaos of attacks, they rarely present the long-term reaction. Bostonians are responding in the way average people have around the world when confronted with extremism: They help victims, feel contempt for the perpetrators and vow to not let them win.

“I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of the bombers,” Tanger said. “I’ll be back every year as long as I can walk.”

I expect massive crowds at next year’s Boston Marathon.

PHOTO (Top): Boston Marathon bombing survivor receives a hug next to the site of the first bomb explosion on Boylston Street in Boston, Massachusetts April 24, 2013. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

PHOTO (Insert A): Boston Mayor Thomas Menino (C), law enforcement officers and officials salute near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street during a ceremony where the FBI symbolically released jurisdiction over to the city of Boston, Massachesetts, April 22, 2013. REUTERS/Chitose Suzuki/Boston Herald/Pool

PHOTO (Insert B): Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, suspect #2 in the Boston Marathon explosion is pictured in this undated FBI handout photo. Police on April 19, 2013 REUTERS/FBI/Handout

“We were all praying this wouldn’t happen,” he told me. “No matter what you do in your community, that’s the label that is attached.”

Another doctor worried that years of outreach efforts by the city’s 10,000-strong Muslim community, a mix of Bosnians, Somalis and Iraqis, would be lost. Thursday, he sent a letter to the local newspaper condemning the Boston attack “no matter who committed it.” When news broke Friday that the two suspects were Chechen Muslims, his family grew nervous.

“Five minutes ago my mom called from Copenhagen to see if I was ok,” the 41-year-old geriatrician said. “It rattles all of us.”

Clearly, Bostonians have and will suffer the most from the marathon bombings. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people “sheltered in place” in and around Boston Friday. The injured now face months, if not years, of arduous recuperation. And the families of the dead will never recover.

It is by no means equivalent but the attack also impacts the United States’ roughly 2.5 million Muslims. As television screens displayed the words “the terrorist next door” Friday, a sense of dread spread among Muslim community leaders here.

“When this happens,” the cardiologist said, “it just gets tough.”

Twelve years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, some see it almost as a cliché to say all Muslims should not be blamed for the actions of a radical few. But it is vital that understandably anxious Americans adhere to that principle. Whatever their motivations, the Tsarnaev brothers are not representative of Muslims in the United States — or the world.

In the days and weeks ahead, Americans will learn chilling details about the Tsarnaev brothers. Links to groups outside the United States may be revealed. Their years in the America will be dissected. The immigration policies that allowed their families to emigrate will likely be criticized.

But it is important not to exaggerate their impact. Days of chaos have unfolded in Boston but the attacks have not paralyzed the country. Four deaths and 176 injuries are heart rending but they are a tiny fraction of the 3,000 who perished on September 11. The attack’s primary legacy is fear. The actions of two young men will focus an enormous amount of suspicion on Chechens and Muslims across the nation.

Based on initial reports, the Tsarnaevs’ story is chilling. Two brothers, one an aspiring boxer and the other a high school wrestling captain, were seemingly transformed overnight into soulless killing machines. I suspect, though, that the process took years.

In 2008, the Taliban kidnapped two Afghan colleagues and me after inviting us to an interview. Held captive in the tribal areas of Pakistan for seven months, we found that Arab, Afghan and Pakistani militants had created a sophisticated system of schools, training camps and indoctrination videos that slowly severed young men’s bonds with their families.

The only relationship that mattered, recruits were told, was their relationship to God. The only cause that mattered, clerics preached, was stopping a vast – and nonexistent – Christian-Jewish-Hindu conspiracy to obliterate Islam from the face of the earth.

For six weeks, I lived with a suicide bomber who was convinced that American forces were forcibly converting Afghan Muslims to Christianity. Neckties, he insisted, were secret symbols of Christianity. Deeming them unclean, he burned newspapers with photographs of women without veils.

No matter how long I spent talking with him, I could not alter his attitudes. Radicalism gave him a cause, a community and an identity.

Louisville’s Muslim leaders embrace an entirely different interpretation of Islam. Tolerant, worldly and passionately committed to education, they accuse Saudi Arabia of spreading an intolerant Wahhabist interpretation of Islam that distorts their faith and endangers their lives. The cardiologist, who asked not to be named, said he does not fear attacks in America. Rather, he fears for the safety of his family in Pakistan.

Last year, Sunni Wahhabist militants in Pakistan killed 400 Shias, who they consider heretics, particularly doctors. One victim was a close friend of the cardiologist and a fellow physician. Jihadists sprayed the man’s car with bullets, killing him and his 11 year-old son.

“My brother is a doctor over there,” the cardiologist said. “They target all the high-end professionals.”

Mohammad Babar, the Pakistani-American geriatrician, was happy to be quoted by name. Only his grandmother remains in Pakistan. He said the United States was a “safe haven” where he can practice and spread a moderate form of Islam without fearing assassination. In the wake of the Boston attack, he vowed to redouble his efforts.

“We are doing a bad job of reaching out to young people,” he said. “Extremists are doing a great job.”

Tensions exist in Louisville. Residents of a neighboring county recently rejected an effort to create the area’s first Muslim cemetery. And clearly not every member of the Muslim community here is as broadminded as Babar.

Since moving to Louisville in 1995, the peripatetic community activist has joined the local Rotary club, formed a close relationship with the mayor and set up meetings between Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders. Next week, he is holding an interfaith “open house” at his mosque. Next month, he is helping coordinate a visit by the Dalai Lama.

“We need to let people know,” Babar said. “We need to let our communities know what we think.”

The problem, he argued, was radicalism.

“In the whole world,” Babar said, “the far right is getting stronger.”

He is right. The enemy is not Islam. It is extremism.

PHOTO (Top): American flag hangs on a car outside the American Muslim Society mosque in Detroit, Michigan April 5, 2011. REUTERS/Eric Thayer

PHOTO (Insert): A group of interdenominational religious leaders and their supporters gather outside the Islamic Center of America mosque to rally for peace in Dearborn, Michigan April 21, 2011. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

It is the world’s most important organization, yet remains one of the most dysfunctional.

This week a former United Nations employee described a pervasive culture of impunity inside the organization – one in which whistle-blowers are punished for exposing wrongdoing. James Wasserstrom, a veteran American diplomat, said he was fired from his job and detained by U.N. police – who searched his apartment and placed his picture on wanted posters – after he reported possible corruption among senior U.N. officials in Kosovo.

“It’s supposed to be maintaining the ideals of human rights, the rule of law and anti-corruption,” Wasserstrom said in an interview. “And it doesn’t adhere to them on the inside.”

The United Nations is under attack as well for its decision last month to pay no compensation to the families of 8,000 Haitians who died and  646,000 who fell ill from a 2010 cholera outbreak that experts believe Nepalese U.N. peacekeepers set off in the country.

The organization, though, remains a vital tool. On Thursday, President Barack Obama used a White House meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to pressure North Korea. Administration officials hope that punishing new U.N. economic sanctions, supported by China for the first time, will cause North Korea to end its saber rattling.

“It’s important for North Korea, like every other country in the world,” Obama said, “to observe the basic rules and norms that are set forth, including a wide variety of U.N. resolutions.”

The United Nations has been, and will always be, an imperfect institution. Its greatest strength – and weakness – is its 193 member states. Getting a majority to agree on major issues, pass reform or refrain from political patronage can be maddening. Russia’s shameful blocking of Security Council action against Syria, for example, has shown the continued limitations of that antiquated body.

But the United Nations is likely to grow more important in the years ahead as Washington’s fiscal problems curtail U.S. overseas ambitions. Sadly, as the United Nations enters a potentially dangerous phase of peacekeeping missions, Ban’s leadership is lacking.

The 68-year-old former South Korean foreign minister has highlighted the need to combat global warming, create sustainable development and increase the number of women in leadership positions. But he has failed to provide the dynamic leadership and reforms the institution desperately needs.

“It’s a very mixed record,” said a senior United Nations official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He spends a lot of time in Davos, the Arctic Circle or Monaco, and meanwhile there are critical issues – such as the future of peacekeeping – facing a real crisis.”

To the alarm of some, the United Nations is returning to the ambitious peacekeeping operations of the 1990s – some of which ended disastrously.

The Security Council last month authorized the creation of a 3,000-soldier-strong U.N. “intervention brigade” in Congo, with an unprecedented mandate to fight with government troops against rebels, or on its own. An 11,000-troop United Nations peacekeeping mission is also expected to arrive in Mali as French forces wind down their battle against militants there. A mission in Somalia is possible as well.

“We’re talking about a new era of big demands on peacekeeping,” said Kieran Dwyer, spokesman for the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations. “We are on the cusp.”

Current and former U.N. officials worry about a repeat of the 1990s debacles. Undermanned, poorly equipped peacekeepers with vague instructions about when to use force were deployed to Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Civilians who expected to be protected were abandoned.

In by far the most shameful case, 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The 1995 U.N. promise to protect the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia also proved fallacious, and 8,000 Muslim men and boys were executed.

Current and former U.N. officials fear that the “intervention brigade” in Congo sets a dangerous precedent. And poorly equipped U.N. peacekeepers in Mali will be no match for committed jihadists.

“Well-established principles of peacekeeping are being set aside,” said the U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I don’t think the long-term implications are being thought through.”

Meanwhile, American officials are calling for sweeping management reform at the United Nations, which spent $769 million on travel alone over the last two years, eight times the amount budgeted. The United Nations has cut some spending, but proposals to modernize its operations have stalled in the fractious General Assembly.

Employee unions and their allies have blocked a measure that would force U.N. staff, like most other diplomats, to rotate between hardship posts in war zones and posh postings in New York, Geneva and Rome. Firing employees – even those caught stealing from the organization – takes an enormous amount of effort in the U.N.’s ponderous internal justice system.

Wasserstrom, the whistle-blower, says the problem lies with top U.N. managers, including Ban, who call for reform but do little. In a six-year legal battle, Ban’s office challenged every aspect of Wasserstrom’s claim, he said.

In a landmark victory last year, a judge in the U.N.’s internal judicial system ruled that Wasserstrom was the victim of retaliation. Yet a U.N. review panel in March awarded Wasserstrom only $65,000 of the $3.2 million he sought in damages, a move he said was designed to discourage whistle-blowers.

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry this week, Wasserstrom called for the State Department to enforce an American law that requires the withholding of 15 percent of American aid to the UN if the organization does not have adequate whistle-blower protections in place.

A new system put in place in 2006 to defend whistle-blowers is failing, according to a study by the Government Accountability Project, an American organization that defends whistle-blowers. The group found that the U.N.’s ethics office received at least 343 inquiries from whistle-blowers about protection against retaliation as of last June, but only 1 percent of the claims were ultimately validated as retaliation. In the letter, Wasserstrom said that track record “defies logic, probability and common sense.”

Wasserstrom’s case, the Haiti outbreak and the new peacekeeping missions are examples of the U.N.’s worst dynamics. Unwilling to take major risks themselves, member states ask the organization to solve the world’s most complex problems. U.N. staffers, meanwhile, blame all of their difficulties on members not giving them enough resources. Both sides can be more committed, intrepid and innovative.

As Washington steps back in the world, a dynamic United Nations must step forward. So far, the U.N. of Ban Ki-moon has not been up to the task.

PHOTO (Top): French peacekeepers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon take part in a military parade in Tiri village, southern Lebanon, July 14, 2010. REUTERS/Ali Hashisho

PHOTO (Insert): President Barack Obama meets with United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon (L) in the Oval Office of the White House, April 11, 2013. REUTERS/Larry Downing

For Americans, it was Jon Stewart as national treasure. In a virtuoso performance Monday, the American satirist ridiculed the Egyptian government’s crackdown on Cairo comedian – and Stewart protégé – Bassem Youssef. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch Stewart’s mock conversation with Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi here.

“What are you worried about, Mr. President – the power of satire to overthrow the status quo?” Stewart deadpanned. “Just so you know, there’s been a grand total of, uh, zero toppled governments we’ve brought about.”

In Egypt, members of the ruling Muslim Brotherhood saw Stewart’s bit differently. The comedian’s skewering of Mursi was the latest insult from a nation that backed Egypt’s pro-American dictators for decades. Told that cracking down on comedians was playing poorly in Washington, a usually moderate senior Brotherhood member argued that Western notions of free speech were being used, yet again, to denigrate Islam.

“Yes, the same West that supported the burning of the Koran!” the member told American journalist Lauren Bohn this week. “We need to draw red lines.”

Egypt’s political polarization is intensifying. Crucial parliamentary elections have been delayed until October. Both sides are increasingly engaging in street violence and vitriol. Opposition leader Mohammad ElBaradei compared the government to “fascist regimes” on Twitter this week. Mursi vowed to “break the neck” of anyone who throws a petrol bomb on the street.

“I’m worried,” Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor and leading Egypt expert, said in an interview. “This is a broken political system. It’s a system that can’t reach a consensus.”

While it’s tempting to avert one’s eyes from Egypt’s post-revolutionary political train wreck, no Arab country is more important to the United States. The Arab world’s most populous nation, Egypt is the Middle East’s cultural capital and the site of an epic power struggle between conservatives and liberals that will influence the region’s politics, culture and faith for decades.

Opposition members have seized on the Youssef case as the latest example of overreach and intolerance by the Brotherhood. But the group’s political Achilles’ heel is its handling of the Egyptian economy and growing lawlessness, including a spate of sexual assaults that have polarized the country. Showing extraordinary bravery, Egyptian women have publicly described horrific gang rapes in a series of stories broadcast by Egypt’s newly independent news media, the New York Times reported. Religious ultraconservatives have cravenly blamed the victims.

Inflation has nearly doubled since November, the country has lost $4 billion a year in tourism revenue since the revolution and unemployment is officially 13 percent ‑ but actually far higher. To receive a $4.8 billion International Monetary Fund loan, Mursi must cut government food and fuel subsidies for average Egyptians. As Stewart dryly put it, post-revolutionary Egypt is “a work in progress.”

It’s a stretch, but there are silver linings. The Youssef case, for example, is a testament to the indomitable spread of globalization and technology. A Cairo surgeon-turned-comic has created a wildly popular Egyptian version of The Daily Show that skewers the country’s political elite on one of Egypt’s 30 new satellite television stations.

Since the 2011 fall of President Hosni Mubarak, criticism of authority has exploded across Egyptian society, a trend that the Brotherhood is now clumsily trying to stem. Youssef’s case is one of up to 33 filed against comedians, activists, politicians and bloggers in just the past two weeks. Last month, protesters attacked television stations and at least three prominent journalists after Mursi criticized the press.

The response from the Obama administration – like its initial response to Egypt’s revolution ‑ has been confused. The U.S. embassy in Cairo initially tweeted a link to Stewart’s monologue.

When Mursi’s office tweeted in reply that it was “inappropriate for a diplomatic mission to engage in such negative political propaganda,” the embassy shut down its Twitter account without conferring with Washington, according to Foreign Policy. The embassy Twitter account later reappeared, without the offending Stewart tweet.

In Washington, meanwhile, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland stated the tweet was “inappropriate.” Yet she also bluntly criticized “growing restrictions on the freedom of expression “in Egypt.

The mixed American response confused Egyptians, according to Bohn, the American journalist. In interviews this week, several Egyptians said they don’t know what Washington wants.  

Emboldened Muslim Brotherhood members, meanwhile, vow to press ahead. In the Youssef case, Brotherhood members filed formal legal complaints with prosecutors accusing the comedian of breaking antiquated laws that criminalize insulting Islam or the head of state. They are demanding that prosecutors, who are nominally independent of the government, fully prosecute Youssef.

In a blunt statement on its website, the group dismissed State Department calls for free expression.

“They will have only one interpretation in the Egyptian street,” the group predicted, “the U.S. welcomes and defends contempt of religion by the media.”

Peter Hessler, in a telling posting for the New Yorker on Thursday, suggested the Brotherhood may be right. Hessler described how his Arabic language teacher viewed the dispute. Angered by a wildly inaccurate description of Stewart’s monologue in an Egyptian newspaper, the teacher saw Stewart as part of a Jewish conspiracy.

“Do you know who this Jon Stewart is?” the teacher asked Hessler. “He’s a Jew, isn’t he?”

The teacher also argued, however, that the Brotherhood was using the case against Youssef to distract Egyptians from the country’s dismal economy.

For now, it’s unclear whether the Brotherhood is losing the broad support that allowed it to sweep post-revolutionary elections. Public opinion polls show Mursi losing popularity in urban areas and among youth — but retaining strong approval in poor, rural areas.

Brown, the George Washington University professor, argued that the Brotherhood is politically vulnerable. He said Egypt’s transition would be best served if the opposition ended its current boycott of the parliamentary vote and ran hard.

“The opposition has an opportunity here,” he said. “They’re not going to win the next elections but they could win the ones after that.”

A free and fair parliamentary election must be held as soon as possible. Opposition groups should follow Brown’s advice and begin the long, slow process of building political organizations. Washington should make $1 billion in promised American aid contingent on democratic norms. And Jon Stewart like satire should not be a crime.

Egypt is awash in conspiracy, distrust and despair. Mursi has miscalculated over and over. So have his opponents. Egypt’s best hope is that they resolve their differences at the ballot box – not in court and on the street.

PHOTO (Top): Riot policemen stand in front of Brotherhood members during clashes near the Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo, March 22, 2013. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

PHOTO (Insert A):Bassem Youssef (C) arriving at the high court to appear at the prosecutor’s office in Cairo March 31, 2013. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

 PHOTO (Insert B):Jon Stewart in New York City March 26, 2011. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi

The Bosnia reference was personal. Along with writing searing columns that pressured the Clinton administration to intervene in the conflict, Lewis put my family in touch with senior White House officials when I was arrested by Serb forces for ten days while covering the war.

My uncle, Sig Roos, a Boston-based lawyer and one of legions of Lewis admirers, emailed me to mourn his passing and again praise his help. After I was released, I returned to the United States and thanked Lewis in person. He was an extraordinarily kind, gracious and unassuming man, who mentored countless young journalist as tribute after tribute has described this week.

To be honest, as soon as I sent my Tweet about Lewis I regretted it. A man whose work had inspired a generation of reporters, lawyers and judges – and helped save my life ‑ was reduced to 48 characters.

Tweeting about Lewis seemed somehow an indictment of contemporary journalism. Shouldn’t I have taken a few minutes to reflect on Lewis and the extraordinary life he had lived? Why, in the greater scheme of things, did my opinion of him even matter? Worst of all, it was slapdash. In a rushed effort to pay respect to one of the most precise writers of our time, I used the wrong word. Lewis “championed” Gideon and Bosnia. He did not “save” them.

In a moving piece in The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen explained how Lewis’ Supreme Court coverage and seminal book, Gideon’s Trumpet, transformed legal journalism. Lewis’ simple sentences and lucid prose, Cohen wrote, turned arcane legal jargon and court procedures into concepts readers could easily understand. As shown in the passage below, Lewis made justice simple.

The case of Gideon v. Wainwright is in part a testament to a single human being. Against all the odds of inertia and ignorance and fear of state power, Clarence Earl Gideon insisted that he had a right to a lawyer and kept on insisting all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

His triumph there shows that the poorest and least powerful of men ‑ a convict with not even a friend to visit him in prison ‑ can take his cause to the highest court in the land and bring about a fundamental change in the law.

But of course Gideon was not really alone; there were working for him forces in law and society larger than he could understand. His case was part of a current of history, and it will be read in that light by thousands of persons who will know no more about Clarence Earl Gideon than that he stood up in a Florida court and said: “The United States Supreme Court says I am entitled to be represented by counsel.”

In short, Lewis’ journalism inspired people. (Gideon’s Trumpet is the reason my step-father, George Ruffo, is a lawyer today. ) His columns distilled the welter of half-truths that has always been political debate into clearer choices. His legal coverage told readers why one court decision – as compared to others – mattered to society. His journalism clarified.

Today, inspiring journalism exists, but it is increasingly threatened by the high speed and volume that the economics of online journalism demand. A recently released Pew Charitable Trust report on the state of the news media in 2013 contained an alarming finding. The long-awaited surge in digital revenues for news organizations appears unlikely to materialize, particularly for newspapers. Since 2003, total newspaper print ad revenues have fallen from $45 billion to $19 billion. At the same time, online ads grew from $1.2 to $3.3 billion.

“Stop and think about that,” Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. “The total ten-year increase in digital advertising isn’t even enough to overcome the average single-year decline in print ads since 2003. Ugh.”

Given the comparatively small amount of revenue being produced by news websites, there is a danger of them becoming digital sweatshops. Young journalists will be expected to simultaneously write their own pieces, edit others’ work, make complex news judgments and update web pages. A handful of slots will exist for well-paid older journalists, but media executives struggling to make ends meet will cherish youth for a simple reason: low cost per post.

Andrew Beaujon, a media reporter for Poynter, wrote last week about a Washington Post job posting for a Style section blogger who would be required to post at least twelve times a day. Last year, Patrick Pexton, then the paper’s ombudsman, warned against “high volume, low oversight” blogging after Elizabeth Flock resigned from her blogging position after failing to credit another news source in an aggregated piece. When Pexton interviewed the paper’s young bloggers, he found deep discontent.

“They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing,” Pexton wrote. “Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.”

Twelve posts a day is unfair to young journalists and a business model that is unlikely to produce the next Lewis. Even a young Lewis, I suspect, would have struggled to produce a dozen meaningful posts a day.

Many disagree with me. In a column last week, Matthew Yglesias of Slate questioned the sky is falling tone of the Pew report and declared that the “American news media has never been in better shape.”

“Pew’s overview makes no mention of the Web’s speed, range and depth,” he wrote, “or indeed any mention at all of audience access to information as an important indicator of the health of journalism.”

In some ways, Yglesias is right. More information than ever is at the fingertips of news consumers. But the problem is that many Americans simply don’t have the time to search the Web for story after story, as Yglesias did, about the banking crisis in Cyprus. They have time for one clear piece that quickly and accurately tells them why Cyprus matters.

The digital age has enormous advantages, as Yglesias argues. Journalism is more democratic than ever. Anyone anywhere can report anytime. Twitter can be a fantastic news source ‑ a running wire of stories and tips from people who share interests. Skilled bloggers possess an extraordinary ability to review vast amounts of news coverage, instantly discern its importance and immediately offer an original take.

But the tyranny of speed and volume can limit a journalist’s ability to do such basic tasks as conducting phone interviews with those they are writing about, or traveling to the community affected by an event, or slowly gaining the trust of a source or whistleblower in face-to-face meetings. Those steps are not always necessary for quality journalism, but they certainly help. Maybe editors should formally declare blogging and traditional reporting equally valuable but different jobs. Or news organizations should become non-profits.

Lewis’ masterful legal writing was the product of time. Over many years, he developed a sophisticated understanding of the law, an encyclopedic knowledge of the Supreme Court and close personal relationships with justices. Felix Frankfurter famously said that Lewis knew the cases before the Supreme Court better than most of its judges.

In the end, I’ll take Lewis-like context and depth over high volume and speed. I thank Lewis for championing journalism.

PHOTO: An illustration picture shows the log-on icon for the Website Twitter on an Ipad in Bordeaux, Southwestern France, January 30, 2013.  REUTERS/Regis Duvignau

The glaring lesson of the war is that American ground invasions destabilize the Middle East, instead of stabilizing it. The 100,000 Iraqis who perished, the 4,500 American soldiers killed and the $1 trillion spent should have halted what Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner has called the “creeping militarization of American foreign policy.” Instead, the civilian American institutions that failed us before Iraq have grown even weaker.

The State Department is the first example. Drezner correctly argues that as the Pentagon’s budget has ballooned in the post-9/11 decade, so has its influence over American foreign policy. Too many former generals, he contends, have occupied foreign policy important positions.

That trend has slowed in the second Obama administration, but the budget, planning capabilities and training programs of the State Department are still laughably small compared with those of the U.S. military. Money equals power, influence and a seat at the table in Washington. As one former national security reporter put it to me, weak civilian institutions leads to fewer potential civilian responses to crises.

In his first major speech as secretary of state, John Kerry tried to put the size of the American civilian effort in perspective. He cited a recent poll that found most Americans believe the State Department and U.S. foreign aid programs consume 25 percent of federal spending. In fact, they receive 1 percent. (The military gets roughly 20 percent.)

Kerry’s speech got virtually no press coverage. Just as it did a decade ago, the news media – a second vital American civilian institution – is failing us. This week the media is being correctly excoriated for its failure to be more skeptical of the Bush administration’s central justification for the Iraq war: weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.

In the months before the invasion, the New York Times published a series of exaggerated WMD stories by reporter Judith Miller on its front page. At the same time, editors at the Times and other mainstream outlets largely ignored intrepid reports by Knight-Ridder newspapers that questioned the administration’s WMD claims.

Ten years later, Miller is a Fox News contributor, and the Knight-Ridder chain no longer exists. A harrowing report released by the Pew Research Center on Monday found that the full-time professional editorial staff at newspapers has declined by 24 percent since 1989. A separate analysis found that the ratio of public-relations workers to reporters grew from 1.2 to 1 in 1980 to 3.6 to 1 in 2008.

The rise of social media and citizen journalism arguably fill the void created by dwindling newspaper resources. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters argued this week that Twitter could have forced mainstream reporters to do a better job before the Iraq invasion. He cited recent cases of mainstream newspapers columnists being forced to respond to a torrent of criticism on Twitter about pieces they wrote.

Jonathan Landay, one of the Knight-Ridder reporters whose pre-invasion work questioning the WMD evidence received little attention, said social media might have made a difference. But he hesitated to say Twitter would have silenced the White House.

“Had the New York Times, Washington Post and the networks done the kind of reporting that we had, could the administration have been able to take the country to war? I don’t know,” Landay said in an email message. “But social media would have brought far more attention to our work, and perhaps more journalists would have followed our lead.”

Looking back, Landay, a former colleague and longtime friend who now reports for McClatchy, blamed the news media and American intelligence agencies. “The mainstream news media was as egregious in its failure to do its job,” he said, “as the U.S. intelligence community was in its failure to produce accurate intelligence on Iraq’s non-existent WMD.”

Today, fears of “another Iraq” dominate America’s foreign policy debate. The choice is binary. The United States can respond to a foreign policy threat by carrying out a risky ground invasion. Or it can do nothing at all. Diplomatic, economic and other non-military attempts to influence events overseas are given short shrift. Any American involvement will make the situation worse, the argument goes, and create another quagmire.

The United States, of course, should not launch another ground invasion in the Middle East. But that does not mean it should not interact in the region at all. The Arab Spring showed that people in the Middle East, in fact, desire democracy. Young Arabs, in particular, want self-determination, jobs and modernity. Washington has an interest in helping them but no inclination – and few non-military tools — to do so.

A decade after Iraq, the State Department remains the Pentagon’s Mini Me. The news media is one-third the size of the public-relations industry. And we continue to view military force as our principal means of addressing foreign policy challenges. In post-Iraq America, our foreign policy debate has devolved into an “invade or not invade” dichotomy. Far more options are available. Every country is not Iraq.

PHOTO: An explosion rocks Baghdad during air strikes March 21, 2003. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

The story said that at least half of the organization’s budget will come from a small number of well-connected donors who each raise or contribute more than $500,000. In return, those donors get a spot on a national advisory board, the right to attend quarterly meetings with the president and access to other White House meetings.

“Unlike a presidential campaign, Organizing for Action has been set up as a tax-exempt ‘social welfare group,’ ” Confessore wrote. “That means it is not bound by federal contribution limits, laws that bar White House officials from soliciting contributions or the stringent reporting requirements for campaigns. In their place, the new group will self-regulate.”

In other words, the organization will function as a de facto super PAC with little transparency. As Chris Cillizza pointed out in the Washington Post this week, the creation of Organizing for Action is no surprise. Whatever his public statements have been, Obama has exacerbated the insidious role of money in politics.

In 2008 he became the first major-party nominee to forgo public presidential campaign financing, effectively ending the system created after the Watergate scandal. Obama declared that Republicans were “masters of gaming this broken system,” but his massive advantage in fund-raising during the general election helped cement his victory over John McCain.

In 2010, Obama again decried the role of money in politics. In his State of the Union address, he criticized the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which legalized the creating of super PACs.

“Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections,” the president said.

Yet no major White House campaign finance initiative emerged. And in 2012, Obama created his own super PAC during his battle with Mitt Romney. Cillizza — and Obama’s supporters — correctly point out that the president had to respond to hundreds of millions in spending by conservative super PACs such as American Crossroads.

This week, advocates of campaign finance reform angrily criticized the president for creating a group like Organizing for Action. Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, called for Obama to shut down the group and work for campaign finance reforms that disempower, not empower, deep-pocketed donors.

“His record for the past five years has been dismal on the issue of reform,” Edgar said in an interview. “It’s another example where the president doesn’t look that different from Karl Rove.”

The White House referred all questions to Organizing for Action. A spokeswoman for the group did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Aides to the president argued to Confessore that they had no choice. They say conservative Republicans rebuffed the president’s first term efforts to strike compromises. They see Organizing for Action as a liberal counterweight to groups like the National Rifle Association, which has used its deep coffers to vanquish political opponents for decades.

Edgar, the head of Common Cause, argued that Obama should make reducing the influence of large donors a priority in his second term. Instead, Organizing for Action elevates their importance and cements the rise of a new type of American politics: fundraising and campaigning on an ever-increasing scale.

Confessore said Organizing for Action will pay for ads, rent, salaries, and the maintenance of vast databases listing the president’s 22 million Twitter followers, 17 million email subscribers and 2 million volunteers. On Friday, thousands of Obama supporters held rallies outside 80 lawmakers’ offices across the country and bombarded them with phone calls and email.

They called for the lawmakers to support Obama’s call for stricter background checks for gun buyers. In the future, they will pressure members of Congress to back the president’s climate change and immigration reform proposals.

Even if Obama’s goals are laudable, his means set a precedent that may hurt his side in the long term. The floodgates  have been opened, and Republicans will not stand idly by.

Some Obama campaign workers questioned the approach at a January Organizing for Action meeting in Washington. In a piece in The Atlantic, Nancy Scola said hoots of disapproval emerged from the audience after Jon Carson, the group’s executive director,  said chapters would have to raise a certain amount of money to get access to the campaign’s voter database.

“We’ll give you each a little grassroots fund-raising page, and if you raise X amount, you can have access to VoteBuilder,” Carson said, referring to the  database. “If you raise a little more, you can have an office.”

In a question-and-answer session, a member of the audience asked Carson if he was joking. Carson said he was serious.

Money and politics, of course, have always been intertwined. And for as long as presidents have held office, they have used every tool at their disposal to pressure lawmakers. But Organizing for Action sets a new standard. The age of the perpetual campaign – where ad buys potentially decide key congressional votes – appears to have begun.

It is naïve to think that honest debate ever decided the fate of legislation. But now it seems clearer than ever that money will buy not only access, but laws as well.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the Business Council in Washington February 27, 2013. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas