Global Paradigms

The Boston Globe has a good report/analysis of the UN Security Council vote which gives yours truly the last word... Let me just add one point/prediction: The Israeli failure to crush Hizbollah will probably make it more likely that the Bush Administration will end up in a military confrontation with Iran and/or Syria. Expect growing pressure from the neocons on the Bushies to "do something" in order to demonstrate that Iran and Syria didn't win this round. And since the Hard-Line Neocons Assail Israel for Timidity in Lebanon here is my proposal, recalling the Spanish Civil War in which some of the neocons's predecessor actually did some fighting: The guys mentioned in the piece (and their many other colleagues) should form the Henry Jackson Brigade to fight in this and the other Mideast War which they love so much. I mean "war" like real war as opposed to the "war of ideas" and real tanks as opposed to "think tanks." Bill? David? Char...

The mood is shifting in Israel: both the general public and political and media elites are getting the war has been a dissaster to all concerned. According to Reuters: Rising Israeli casualties and constant Hizbollah rocket attacks have sharply eroded public support in Israel for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defence minister, an opinion poll showed on Friday. The survey in the Haaretz newspaper found only 48 percent of Israelis were satisfied with Olmert's performance compared with popularity ratings of more than 75 percent in polls taken in the early stages of fighting against the Lebanese group. read the rest. The new trend in public opinion are shaped by and reflected in the Israeli media, according to the following report in Editor and Publisher: Doubts About War Growing at Hawkish Israeli Daily By E&P Staff Published: August 11, 2006 12:10 AM ET updated Friday NEW YORK From the beginning of the Israel-Hezbollah war last month, the popular daily, Ha'aretz, like ...

Since the start of the current Middle East crisis, analysts have been trying to figure out who is responsible for this mess. Who had made the crucial decisions that triggered the fighting between the Israeli military and the Hizbollah guerrillas and that has resulted in death of many Israeli and Lebanese civilians, including children, and the destruction of villages and urban centers in both countries. And why were these decisions made in the first place? Or to put it in more stark terms: Qui Bono? Who benefits from what seems to be to anyone watching the horrifying images on television, an un-winnable war as well as a major humanitarian crisis? Some observers have speculated the Iranian and Syrians who have been the main source of financial and military assistance to the Hizbollah, have encouraged the Lebanese-Shiite militia to kidnap two Israeli soldiers, a move that led to Israeli military retaliation and ignited the round of violence that we are witnessing now. Underlying ...

In case you've missed: August 7, 2006 Baghdad, Beirut, Doha Trade-talks failure a blow to US strategy in Mideast by Leon Hadar In addition to being the capitals of three Middle Eastern countries, Baghdad (Iraq), Beirut (Lebanon), and Doha (Qatar) have something else in common, and it's President George W. Bush's global policy. While the violence taking place in Baghdad and Beirut is a direct consequence of the collapse of Bush's Middle East policy and much of its geo-strategic approach, the breakdown of the Doha round of trade talks is a reflection of the failure of the Bush administration to project U.S. leadership in the global economic arena. If Washington does not take immediate steps to reevaluate and re-energize its role in global affairs, then not only the United States but the entire international system could be threatened. (read the rest) And: American Proscenium After Zarqawi: The New Thirty Years’ War by Leon T. Hadar When the U.S. government toppled Sad­d...

yalla ya Nasrallah - song from Israel yalla ya Nasrallah - The real thing! The war of the narratives. No 2

It's yalla ya Nasrallah - song from Israel Vs. yalla ya Nasrallah - The real thing! Thanks to YouTube

Tom Segev in in an commentary in Haaretz that challenges the conventional wisdom that Israel's interests are served by "serving" the U.S. interests in the Middle East and suggests that Israel would have been better off by following the European lead in the region: If Europe had some say in the region, Israel may have started negotiations with Hezbollah on the release of the soldiers it abducted - and hopefully, it still will do so - instead of getting mixed up in war. For some years now, more Middle East-related wisdom emanates from Europe than from the United States. It wasn't Europe but the United States that invented the diplomatic fable called the road map; it wasn't Europe but the United States that encouraged unilateral disengagement and is allowing Israel to continue oppressing the population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The United States is not engaged with Syria; Europe is. Syria is relevant not only for settling the situation in Lebanon, but also...

Please don't! Iraq is flat. No peace in the Promised Land. But not all is lost. Your books are selling like Katyushas and IEDs. K. in a Unipolar Moment:Ich bin ein Israeli. But I'm fighting in the War of Ideas in Washington, DC. It's more fun and lucrative. These are depressing times. Israelis, Lebanese and Palestinians in the Levant and American and Iraqis in the Persian Gulf have become the casualties in the great Let's-Remake-the-Middle-East movie that the Bushies and their cheer-leaders have produced. But in every tragedy one can discover the silver lining. In this case, it's the idea that some of the war hawks are admitting that they were wrong. Read Tom ("countries with McDonalds don't go to war with other countries with McDonalds") Friedman who bascially admits today in Time for Plan B in the New York Times that: It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war. When our top commander in Iraq, Gen....

Yeah, that would be nice... But it's too early for predictions. It's quite possible that Israeli troops will end up stuck in southern Lebanon for a long time. Uri Avnery tries to draw the outlines of a few possible scenarios(thanks for the correspondent who provided me with the link): THE DAY after the war will be the Day of the Long Knives. Everybody will blame everybody else. The politicians will blame each other. The generals will blame each other. The politicians will blame the generals. And, most of all, the generals will blame the politicians. Always, in every country and after every war, when the generals fail, the "knife in the back" legend raises its head. If only the politicians had not stopped the army just when it was on the point of achieving a glorious, crushing, historic victory... That's what happened in Germany after World War I, when the legend gave birth to the Nazi movement. That's what happened in America after Vietnam. That's what is ...

I've never been a great fan of post-modernist philosophy associated with Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , Jean-François Lyotard and others with its emphasis on moral relativism and the "deconstruction" of "texts" and "narratives" about reality that are supposedly the invention of the powerful who dominate the "discourse," although I find myself using these and other terms that are popular with post-modernists in order to make a point. But I usually use quotation marks or do the "so-called" with my fingers during a presentation. So it was really fascinating to read this Perceptions: Israel’s Long-Term Battle in the New York Times today which basically proposes that Israel and the Hizbollah are engaging in a battle over the consturction of a "narrative" about their recent war: Gidi Grinstein, a former Israeli negotiator and director of the Reut Institute, a research group, calls it the “90-10 paradox.” Israel can elim...

Read my new The US Can't Run the Show in the Middle East It's time for the Europeans to get more active in diplomatic efforts and the read this latest piece of news from The Times(London) August 03, 2006 France moves in to fill the US vacuum Foreign Editor's Briefing by Bronwen Maddox THE US took a long step towards the position of France yesterday in drawing up a United Nations resolution on the Lebanon crisis. The text, which could be presented to the UN Security Council as early as today, represents concessions by France, the US and Britain, but its centre of gravity is closest to French views. In a week when Tony Blair delivered his sharpest ever criticism of the US's conduct of the War on Terror, this reflects a realignment of loyalties and some weakening of US influence, which may extend beyond this crisis. Talks between the US, Britain and France, all Security Council members, yesterday morning thrashed out agreement on the sequence of next moves, but left big...

National Review Online and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are mad as hell at Israel for not playing the role they assigned to it in their script, which is exactly they way they reacted to the fiasco in Iraq. According to their script, America's proxy -- Israel was supposed to defeat Iran's proxy -- Hizbollah. Hence according to BRET STEPHENS in the WSJ: It is amazing how much can be squandered in the space of three weeks. On July 12, Israel sat behind an internationally recognized frontier, where it enjoyed a preponderance of military force. It had deterrence and legitimacy. Hezbollah's cross-border raid that day was widely condemned within Lebanon and among Arab leaders as heedless and provocative. Mr. Olmert's decision to respond with massive force enjoyed left-to-right political support. He also had a green light from the Bush administration, which has reasons of its own to want Hezbollah defanged and which assumed the Israelis were up to the job. But it se...

Aluf Benn in Haaretz is a reliable source of info and analysis, so I read his latest Giving the war an image of victory, not a draw with great interest. Borrowing from the world of soccer beloved to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the Israel Defense Forces operation in Lebanon went into overtime on Monday. Olmert wants to take another stab at a decisive conclusion before the UN Security Council blows the final whistle. That's why he convened the cabinet on Monday to approve a wide-scale ground operation targeting villages used by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Olmert is fighting the battle over public opinion, both at home and abroad. He wants people to see the war as a victory, not a draw. It was this attitude that led Olmert to tell a conference of mayors on Monday that the operation is continuing despite the unfortunate deaths of dozens of Lebanese civilians in Qana Sunday. "Israel is continuing to fight," the prime minister said. One can imagine the slogan as part of a ...

Israeli commentator Uri Avnery is brilliant and demonstrates it once again jn A Nice Little War in which he warns that if the Israeli leaders sense that the perception is that the Hizbollah is "winning," they'll be tempted to target Syria which can be defeated by Israel in a conventional war: When it becomes clear that nothing is helping, that Hizbullah goes on fighting and the rockets continue to fly, the political and military leadership will face bankruptcy. They will need to pin the blame on somebody. On who? Well, on Syrian President Bashar Assad, of course. How is it possible that a small "terror organization", with a few thousand fighters altogether, goes on fighting? Where do they get the arms from? The finger will point towards Syria. Even now, the army commanders assert that new rockets are flowing all the time from Syria to Hizbullah. True, the roads have been bombed, the bridges destroyed, but the arms somehow continue to arrive. The Israeli governm...

I was talking today with a former U.S. diplomat and a Washington "insider" who made the following comment: "I'm beginning to suspect that the Israeli military has been 'Americanized.' They seem to repeating our mistakes in Iraq. Very discouraging for them and for us." This is coming from someone who is a critic of the Bush administration's policies and has been opposed to the Israeli response in Lebanon. My guess is that the Bushies and the neocons are hysterical. After all, much of what the neocons have been pushing for has been the "Israelization" of Americnan foreign policy and national security, in a sense that the Americans should adopt the tough Israeli methods in dealing with global threats, especially vis-a-vis the Arabs who supposedly "only understand force." The problem is that both in Iraq and Lebanon (now and earlier) and in the West Bank/Gaza this approach has proved to be a total failure in terms of policy (forget fo...

I've been busy working on several projects and haven't had the time to write a long item on the "situation." But Tony Karon has been reading my mind, so to speak, and has raised some of the arguments I've been discussing for quite a while. In "Is Israel Fighting a Proxy War for Washington?" he stresses that Bush and Condi have not only given a "green light" to Israel in Lebanon; that they have encouraged that (“Don’t hold back on our account, in fact, make sure you finish them off…”"). And he points out that: I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, instead demanding a confrontational approach in kee...

C-SPAN will air the Cato Institute's Book Forum on "Sandstorm" On Sunday, July 30 at 7:45 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East Leon Hadar with James Pinkerton and Geoffrey Kemp Description: Leon Hadar talks about his book, "Sandstorm," at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. In the book, Mr. Hadar argues that the U.S. should pursue "constructive disengagement" from the Middle East, where the costs of our involvement over the decades has outweighed the benefits. James Pinkerton (Newsday, Fox News) and Geoffrey Kemp (Nixon Center) provide commentary. Author Bio: Leon Hadar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former U.N. bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post and current Washington correspondent for the Singapore Business Times. Mr. Hadar is also the author of "Quagmire: America in the Middle East." Also you can listen and/or watch a audio/v...

Media Matters has a great item on Conservative pundits made wildly wrong claims about how Iraq would turn out -- what are they saying now about the Middle East? It's entertaining and depressing at the same time. And Billmon who is right most of the time has critique of Israel:A Blight Unto the Nations , a kind of Cry the Beloved Country expresses genuine sadness over the the policy direction taken by the Israeli leaders. He also has a link to commentary by Meron Benvenisti in Ha'aretz. I also recommend reading Nehemia Shtrasler's commentary in the same newspaper. The second war in Lebanon has no name yet. The army and the government are waiting to see how things work out. If the results are good, Dan Halutz and Ehud Olmert will choose a heroic name to immortalize their action. But if it ends badly - which appears more likely - they will try to belittle it and turn it into a small, unimportant, nameless operation. Expectations were high. For the first time in decades, two...

The Cato Institute held a forum today to discuss my book Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East. You'll soon be able to watch or listen to the event by clicking on the Cato Institute's Archived Events Online. C-SPAN recorded it, so they should be airing it soon, perhaps as early as this weekend. Meanwhile you should read the review of Dr. Strauss about the event: Looking for some concise, sane and informed analysis of the Middle East chaos? Who isn't. You might do well to check out our friend, Dr. Leon Hadar of CATO and author of the book Sandstorm. Leon was the guest and subject of a CATO policy book forum today. He was joined by a panel featuring Jim Pinkerton of Newsday and Fox News, as well as Geoff Kemp, nee Reagan NSC staff for Middle Eastern Affairs and currently with the Nixon Center. Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies for CATO, served as the able emcee. Leon's innovative analysis has earned strongly positive reviews from James Fallow...

Hope to see you there... Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) BOOK FORUM Thursday, July 27, 2006 12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow) Featuring the author Leon Hadar, Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute; with comments by Jim Pinkerton, Columnist, Newsday, and analyst, FOX News; and Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs, the Nixon Center, and Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs, National Security Council (1983–1985). The Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001 Watch the Event Live in RealVideo Listen to the Event in RealAudio (Audio Only) Against the backdrop of the war in Iraq, the nuclear crisis with Iran, and the deadlocked Israeli-Palestinian peace process, there is a growing sense that U.S. policy in the Middle East has failed to advance American national interests. In his book, Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East, Cato Research Fellow Leon Hadar surveys the hist...