Global Paradigms

...and here some of my latest: Dangerous Delusions Commentary by Leon Hadar | August 15, 2007 IRC Right Web rightweb.irc-online.org A television adaptation of Nebula Award-winning author John Kessel's short story "A Clean Escape," which aired on ABC's new sci-fi anthology series titled Masters of Science Fiction, is set in a post-Apocalypse future, but it reminded me of current events. Psychiatrist Deanna Evans interrogates a distinguished but disoriented man who appears to be suffering from a memory lapse. After a climactic buildup, it is revealed—and this is a spoiler alert, if you don't want the story ruined—that he is the U.S. president, responsible for a global nuclear holocaust. They are two of a few hundred survivors of a nuclear war that resulted from the president's decision to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against a "rogue nation." Yet, not remembering what happened, he is unable to acknowledge his role or to take responsibi...

Business Times - 09 Aug 2007 Critics rap Greenspan for housing mess They blame former Fed chief's rate policies for creating a false boom in sub-prime loans AS the US housing market weakens and interest rates on adjustable mortgage rates rise and more and more borrowers are falling behind, the consensus among economists is that a sector that was once considered vulnerable is now on the verge of suffering a collapse in many regions in the country. Some analysts warn that the real estate in certain expensive bubble areas could drop by as much as 40 or 50 per cent. Daily newspapers as well as television news shows are covering the widespread defaults on sub-prime mortgages and the sad personal stories involving home foreclosures. It's still possible that the real estate bubble will not burst completely (in Manhattan you'll be lucky to get a studio apartment for US$500,000), but Americans, led by their lawmakers and pundits, are already looking for someone to blame. On one leve...

A few days ago, I was chatting with an East Asian diplomat stationed in Washington who seemed surprised that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be skipping the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Regional Forum meeting in Manila later this week. The ARF brings together 27 foreign ministers representing the 10 Southeast Asian nations, and 17 other governments with security interests in the region. Rice instead will travel to the Middle East, where she will hold discussions on stabilizing Iraq in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and visit Israel and the West Bank. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte will represent the U.S. in Manila. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack expressed regret that Rice would not be in Manila, but said that she was "prioritizing" talks on Iraq and Middle East peace. "I don't think it has to do with the importance of the business necessarily, but of the timing," he said of the ARF meeting. I reminded the East Asian diploma...

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, but most of what she writes about foreign policy is very boring and quite shallow, heaps of cliched banalities that sound like a speech of the head of Red Cross before a bunch of Valley Girls (see here ). But she sounded a bit feisty over the weekend, attacking Partisans Gone Wild in the Washington Post. The central idea: why can't we -- the good Democrats and the good Republicans, you know, the "internationalists" -- just get along when it comes to maintaining U.S. "leadership" in the world -- and isolate all the baddies on the right and the left, you know, the isolationists, realists, etc. It ends with this gem: It's time, then, for a bipartisan backlash. Politicians who think we need bargaining to fix the crises we face should appear side by side with a friend from the other party -- the consistent policy of the admirably bipartisa...

According to the New York Daily News Hillary's people are going to use Obama's willingness to meet with baddies like Iran's president as a way of making the guy who is very, very popular among Jewish voters look as insensitive to Jewish concerns: Political observers said they expected Clinton to waste no time using Obama's comment to shore up her standing among key voter blocs, such as Cuban-Americans in bellwether Florida and Jewish voters who may find the idea of a sitdown with the Holocaust-denying president of Iran disturbing. Team Clinton plans "to use these issues in outreach in the states [and nationally] with Jewish leadership and Jewish grass-roots voters," a Democratic operative familiar with the Clinton campaign told the Daily News. In a related subject, an entertaining "exchange" between Podhoretz Junior and Philip Weiss on Weiss' blog. BTW his blog which in trying to ignite debate among American-Jews over Israel and Zionism is wort...

David Remnick has an interesting "Letter from Jerusalem" in the New Yorker, The Apostate: A Zionist politician loses faith in the future about Avraham Burg, the former Speaker of Israeli Knesset and the son of a renowned Zionist and religious-Orthodox figure who seems to be kind of disillusioned about the idea of of a Jewish State: Burg writes that one of the most dispiriting aspects of Israeli political conversation is the constant reference point of the slaughter of six million Jews in the nineteen-forties. “The most optimistic years in the state of Israel were 1945 to 1948,” he said to me. “The farther we got from the camps and the gas chambers, the more pessimistic we became and the more untrusting we became toward the world. It was a shock to me. Didn’t we, the politicians, feed the public? Didn’t we cheapen the sanctity of the Holocaust by using it about everything? Some people say, ‘Occupation? You call this occupation? This is nothing compared to the absolute evil o...

The novelist and arm-chair strategist Mark Helprin who for some reason likes to brag about his service in the "Israeli air-force" (was he a pilot?) and looks like a British actor Edward Fox (the one above on the top) has a very silly op-ed the New York Times today: First there is the idiotic analogy of the Israeli-Egyptian peace process, something about "similar metaphysics." WHEN considering President Bush’s new plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, it would be wise to bear in mind that because political initiatives in the Middle East are cursed with such a high failure rate analysts sometimes use the odds as a substitute for craft. After Anwar Sadat’s spectacular trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, the press, mistaking cynicism for wisdom, was skeptical. After all, in the first 25 years of its existence, Israel had had to fight Egypt four times. But the past was no guide to the future, for in the last 30 years the peace of Menachem Begin and Anwar...

From yesterday's New York Times Bush Aides See Failure in Fight With Al Qaeda in Pakistan Surprised? Hey. guys. You only had to read some of my stuff which was published a while ago: Pakistan in America's War against Terrorism: Strategic Ally or Unreliable Client? Outsourcing the Hunt for Bin Laden Iraq, Iran, and North Korea Are the "Axis of Evil," Why Is Pakistan an Ally? Were We All Wrong About Pakistan, Too?

My article "Six Days -- and 40 Years: In 1967 Israel won Jerusalem, defeated its emenemies, and expanded its borders. It has not recovered since" in The American Conservative (July 16, 2007) is not available yet online. But if you click on the three pasted images, you'll be able to read it:

A few days ago I published The Return of the Jordanian Option in National Interest Online. Ceckout today's Growing Talk of Jordanian Role in Palestinian Affairs in the New York Times. AMMAN, Jordan, July 6 — Inside a drab cellphone shop, set deep inside the sprawling Baqaa refugee camp on the outskirts of this city, Muhammad Khalil and his friends were as gloomy as the fluorescent lights that flickered on the ceiling. “Everything has been ruined for us — we’ve been fighting for 60 years and nothing is left,” Mr. Khalil said, speaking of the Palestinian cause. Just weeks earlier, he might have been speaking enthusiastically to his friends here, in their usual hangout, about resistance, of fighting for his rights as a Palestinian and of one day returning to a Palestinian state. Last Wednesday, however, he spoke of what he saw as a less satisfying goal for the Palestinians here and one that raises concerns for many other Jordanians: Palestinian union with Jordan. “It would be bet...

In the Hobbled Hegemon the guys at The Economist concluded that while its "troubles in Iraq have much weakened it," America is "likely to remain the dominant superpower." It's a long piece, but I didn't but the main thesis. Here for example it poses the argument that American is on decline in the Middle East: Strategists wonder whether the Iraq war has damaged America so badly as to set it on a path to “imperial decline”. Is the post-Soviet “unipolar” world, established after America's first war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, coming prematurely to an end as a result of the second war to topple him? For Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading think-tank, “the American era in the Middle East is over”—and because of the importance of the Middle East, American global power has also been weakened, for years if not for decades. And here: For about two years after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration could still find ...

Peter Waldman has an interesting page 1 article in the Wall Street Journal, TEL AVIV BUBBLE: As Israel Prospers, Some Fear Its Defenses May Grow Soft. Among other things, Waldman points out that Israel has flourished beyond the wildest dreams of the ardent socialists who founded the Jewish state. Powered by high-tech exports, the Israeli economy grew 6.3% in the first quarter this year, with a 28% jump in personal consumption of durable goods, such as cars and refrigerators. Sales of Porsches doubled in 2006 from 2004, and last year Lexus opened shop in the Jewish state. Waldman's piece includes more info and statistics and he focuses in particular on Great Tel-Aviv as a symbol of this Israeli economic and technological progress. The problems starts when he tries to suggest that these dramatic socio-economic changes are responsible for the weakening of the Israeli resolve to deal with its security challenges. Yet prosperity has not brought security. As Israelis begin another summe...

Business Times - 27 Jun 2007 New financial system faces political backlash Most recent example is the efforts by US lawmakers to squeeze more tax money from Blackstone By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT ECONOMISTS have been celebrating the remarkable expansion in the financial system in recent years and the way it has been revolutionising the global economy. They are tying to figure out how the explosion in and globalisation of finance and the creation of new financial assets and emergence of new financial players have been transforming the global economic landscape. It has, for example, accelerated the liberalisation of the global financial sector, and in the way business is done by creating incentives for takeover and mergers. Many economists agree the forces of the new global capitalism - their most revolutionary players being the managers of equity and hedge funds - have made the process of wealth creation - the main task of the market economy - more efficient and productive. H...

Business Times - 22 Jun 2007 US just hurts itself when it plays hardball with China By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WHILE US officials were welcoming their Chinese guests in Washington on Wednesday to start talking about ways to strengthen ties between China and the United States, American lawmakers were pressing the Bush administration to increase pressure on Beijing in a way that was bound to increase tensions between these two powers. US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and China's Executive Vice-Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo are chairing the Sino-American talks in Washington, as part of a dialogue between officials from both countries aimed at managing their differences over such issues as Iran's nuclear programme, the violence in the Darfur region in Sudan and the resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis. For anyone interested in continuing engagement between the world's only remaining superpower and its rising economic and military power, the dialo...

Read my The Return of the Jordanian Option on National Interest Online.

On the mess there you can hear my words of wisdom on Newsweek on Air.

I've written a long article on the Six-Day-War and its aftermath which is going to be published in a magazine in two weeks. So I'm not going to preempt myself here (just wait patiently for my piece). But I highly recommend reading Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. I share his basic "narrative" about the war (Shouldn't have happened; too bad it happened; if only we could "rewind" history...). I also recommend three recent items on the subject: 1. Henry Luarnes, "1967: a war of miscalculation and misjudgment" in Le Monde Diplomatique. 2. David Remnick, "The Seventh Day" in the New Yorker . 3. Havrey Morris, "And on the Sixth Day the World Changed" in The Financial Times .

I feel a lot of pressure to write something about the Sopranos final scene. I actually liked it. Very creative: produce your own finale. But I really liked the way Chase developed the AJ character in the final episodes. He enters the looney bin. And then he becomes a New Age environmentalist. And finally he starts repeating all the neocon cliches about the war on terror but ends up a chicken hawk.

Please read my Time to Ignore the Middle East? Upadte : Interesting debate over my piece among Democrats here and here. (Thanks ScarletWoman!). Those who disagree should explain in what way the Middle East policy paradigm of each of the three candidates would be different than that of Bush. In fact, the rhetoric of Clinton and Edwards on Iraq is toughter than the administration's.

Business Times - 07 Jun 2007 Bush's legacy is America's albatross It will take years of effort and genuine skill to restore political credibility and legitimacy By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN my 15 years of covering Washington, I cannot recall a time when the elite and the public in the capital of this ageing global superpower have been more pessimistic about the future their country and so cynical about and distrustful of their political leaders. The sour mood of the country has been reflected in the most recent The Washington Post-ABC News poll which indicated that three-quarters of the American people believe that the country is 'pretty seriously on the wrong track'. And only a minority of Americans approve of the job that President Bush (35 per cent) and Congress (39 per cent) are doing. The poll also suggests that the gloomy outlook of most Americans have to do with the war in Iraq and US foreign policy in general. Fifty per cent of Americans do not thin...