Epstein Estate Documents - Batch 7 / TEXT / 002 from House

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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031822
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From:
Sent: 2/7/2019 3:36:37 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: From Fox News - DOJ to investigate plea bargain awarded to Clinton-linked sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but
watchdogs say probe is tainted
Importance: High
DOJ to investigate plea bargain awarded to Clinton-linked sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but watchdogs say
probe is tainted
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-op ... o-alleged-
pedophile-predator-jeffrey-epstein
It is bizarre to see who tries to get political mileage out of this.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031822

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031823
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: DAVID SCHOEN
Sent: 3/26/2019 10:56:00 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: From Fox News - Federal judge overseeing key lawsuit relating to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein dies
Importance: High
A U.S. District Court judge in New York who was presiding over a lawsuit
involving a wealthy, Clinton-connected financier and sex offender died
Sunday at the age of 96.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/federal-judg ... -relating-
to-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-dies
Explore the Fox News apps that are right for you at http://www.foxnews.com/apps-
products/index.html.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031823

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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031824
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: DAVID SCHOEN
Sent: 6/15/2019 12:20:06 AM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: From Fox News - Jeffrey Epstein, registered sex offender, settles civil lawsuit and avoids testimony from alleged
victims
Importance: High
Hope you are satisfied with the outcome all things considered.
Ridiculous article. All of sudden the NPA in 's case goes from no
jurisdiction even to prosecute to you avoiding a possible life
sentence. Moronic.
Man I sure would like to see you getting some in the W column though and
some press that at least presents the true facts that some of the girls have
admitted under oath. Still a story no one ever has heard and they are
compelling facts.
Good Shabbos.
The numerous young women who say they were sexually abused by
wealthy, Clinton-linked financier Jeffrey Epstein no longer appear set to
testify after a last-minute settlement was reached in a closely-watched civil
lawsuit against the registered sex offender.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epst ... r-settles-
civil-lawsuit-and-avoids-testimony-from-alleged-victims
Explore the Fox News apps that are right for you at http://www.foxnews.com/apps-
products/index.html.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031824

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031825
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: DAVID SCHOEN
Sent: 6/15/2019 12:21:00 AM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: From Fox News - Jeffrey Epstein, registered sex offender, settles civil lawsuit and avoids testimony from alleged
victims
Importance: High
I know it was an old piece but Fox is running it again today.
The numerous young women who say they were sexually abused by
wealthy, Clinton-linked financier Jeffrey Epstein no longer appear set to
testify after a last-minute settlement was reached in a closely-watched civil
lawsuit against the registered sex offender.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epst ... r-settles-
civil-lawsuit-and-avoids-testimony-from-alleged-victims
Explore the Fox News apps that are right for you at http://www.foxnews.com/apps-
products/index.html.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031825

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031826
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
Attachments:
I have
Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
2/6/2011 11:18:44 AM
Re: You should see this movie/documentary
image001.jpg
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 3:26 AM,
Inside Job (2010)
wrote:
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The New York Times.
Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner in the documentary "Inside Job."
Sony Pictures Classics
Who Maimed the Economy, and How
By A. 0. SCOTT
"Inside Job," a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without
punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma. The betrayal
of public trust and collective values that Mr. Ferguson chronicles was far more brazen and damaging than
the adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, which treated Hester more as scapegoat than villain.
The gist of this movie, which begins in a mood of calm reflection and grows angrier and more incredulous
as it goes on, is unmistakably punitive. The density of information and the complexity of the subject
matter make "Inside Job" feel like a classroom lecture at times, but by the end Mr. Ferguson has
summoned the scourging moral force of a pulpit-shaking sermon. That he delivers it with rigor, restraint
and good humor makes his case all the more devastating.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031826
He is hardly alone in making it. Numerous journalists have published books and articles retracing the
paths that led the world economy to the precipice two years ago. The deregulation of the financial
services industry in the 1980s and '9os; the growing popularity of complex and risky derivatives; the real
estate bubble and the explosion of subprime lending — none of these developments were exactly secret.
On the contrary, they were celebrated as vindications of the power and wisdom of markets. Accordingly,
Mr. Ferguson recycles choice moments of triumphalism, courtesy of Lawrence H. Summers, George W.
Bush, Alan Greenspan and various cable television ranters and squawkers.
Even as stock indexes soared and profits swelled, there were always at least a few investors, economists
and government officials who warned that the frenzied speculation was leading to the abyss. Some of
these prophets without honor show up in front of Mr. Ferguson's camera, less to gloat than to present,
once again, the analyses that were dismissed and ignored by their peers for so long.
Dozens of interviews — along with news clips and arresting aerial shots of New York, Iceland and other
disaster areas — are folded into a clear and absorbing history, narrated by Matt Damon. The music (an
opening song, "Big Time," by Peter Gabriel, and a score by Alex Heffes) and the clean wide-screen
cinematography provide an aesthetic polish that is welcome for its own sake and also important to the
movie's themes. The handsomely lighted and appointed interiors convey a sense of the rarefied,
privileged worlds in which the Wall Street operators and their political enablers flourished, and the
elegance of the presentation also subliminally bolsters the film's authority. This is not a piece of ragged
muckraking or breathless advocacy. It rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument.
The same was true of Mr. Ferguson's previous documentary, "No End in Sight," which focused on
catastrophic policies carried out in Iraq by President George W. Bush's administration just after the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But whereas that film concentrated on a narrow view of a complex subject
— the conduct of the war rather than the at least equally controversial rationale for fighting it — "Inside
Job" offers a sweeping synthesis, going as far back as the Reagan administration and as far afield as
Iceland in its anatomy of the financial crisis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the highest-profile players declined to be interviewed. Mr. Summers
appears only in news footage, and none of his predecessors or successors as Treasury secretary — not
Robert E. Rubin or Henry M. Paulson Jr. or Timothy F. Geithner — submit to Mr. Ferguson's questions.
Nor do any of the top executives at Goldman Sachs or the other big banks. Most of the interviewees are,
at least from the perspective of the filmmaker, friendly witnesses, adding fuel to the director's
comprehensive critique of the way business has been done in the United States and the other advanced
capitalist countries for the past two decades.
Both American political parties are indicted; "Inside Job" is not simply another belated settling of
accounts with Mr. Bush and his advisers, though they are hardly ignored. The scaling back of government
oversight and the weakening of checks on speculative activity by banks began under Reagan and
continued during the Clinton administration. And with each administration the market in derivatives
expanded, and alarms about the dangers of this type of investment were ignored. Raghuram Raj an, chief
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031827
economist at the International Monetary Fund, presented a paper in 2005 warning of a "catastrophic
meltdown" and was mocked as a "Luddite" by Mr. Summers.
Meanwhile, some investment bankers — at Goldman Sachs in particular — were betting against the
positions they were pushing on their customers. An elaborate house of cards had been constructed in
which bad consumer loans were bundled into securities, which, were certified as sound by rating agencies
paid by the banks and then insured via credit-default swaps. One risky bet was stacked on top of another,
and in retrospect the collapse of the whole edifice, along with the loss of jobs, homes, pensions and
political confidence, seems inevitable.
How did this happen? Mr. Ferguson is no conspiracy theorist; nor is he inclined toward structural or
systemic explanations. Markets are not like tectonic plates, shifting on their own. Visible hands write laws
and make deals, and in this case a combination of warped values and groupthink seems to have driven
very intelligent men (and they were mostly men) toward folly. In addition to business and government,
Mr. Ferguson aims his critique at academia, suggesting that the discipline of economics and more than a
few prominent economists were corrupted by consulting fees, seats on boards of directors and
membership in the masters of the universe club.
When he challenges some of these professors, in particular those who held positions of responsibility in
the White House or in the Federal Reserve, they are reduced to stammering obfuscation — Markets are
complicated! Who could have predicted? I don't see any conflict of interest — and occasionally provoked
to testiness. Mr. Ferguson, for his part, cannot always contain his incredulity or rein in his sarcasm.
Occasionally his voice pipes up from off camera, saying things like, "You can't be serious!"
But it is hard to imagine a movie more serious, and more urgent, than "Inside Job." There are a few
avenues that might have been explored more thoroughly, in particular the effects of the crisis on
ordinary, non-Wall-Street-connected workers and homeowners. The end of the film raises a disturbing
question, as Mr. Damon exhorts viewers to demand changes in the status quo so that the trends
associated with unchecked speculation of the kind that caused the last crisis — rising inequality, neglect
of productive capacity, endless cycles of boom and bust — might be reversed.
This call to arms makes you wonder why anger of the kind so eloquently expressed in "Inside Job" has
been so inchoate. And through no fault of its own, the film may leave you dispirited as well as enraged. Its
fate is likely to be that of other documentaries: praised in some quarters, nitpicked in others and
shrugged off by those who need its message most. Which is a shame.
"Inside Job" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some drug and sex references and pervasive
obscenity, though not the verbal kind.
--
***********************************************************
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031828
The information contained in this communication is
confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may
constitute inside information, and is intended only for
the use of the addressee. It is the property of
Jeffrey Epstein
Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this
communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited
and may be unlawful. If you have received this
communication in error, please notify us immediately by
return e-mail or by e-mail to [email protected], and
destroy this communication and all copies thereof,
including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031829

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031830
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From:
Sent:
To:
Subject:
Attachments:
Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
2/6/2011 1:27:43 PM
Re: You should see this movie/documentary
image001.jpg
it is very unfair, and misrepresents tons of inf
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 3:26 AM, <111110 wrote:
Inside Job (2010)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The New York Times.
Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner in the documentary "Inside Job."
Sony Pictures Classics
Who Maimed the Economy, and How
By A. 0. SCOTT
"Inside Job," a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without
punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma. The betrayal
of public trust and collective values that Mr. Ferguson chronicles was far more brazen and damaging than
the adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, which treated Hester more as scapegoat than villain.
The gist of this movie, which begins in a mood of calm reflection and grows angrier and more incredulous
as it goes on, is unmistakably punitive. The density of information and the complexity of the subject
matter make "Inside Job" feel like a classroom lecture at times, but by the end Mr. Ferguson has
summoned the scourging moral force of a pulpit-shaking sermon. That he delivers it with rigor, restraint
and good humor makes his case all the more devastating.
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031830
He is hardly alone in making it. Numerous journalists have published books and articles retracing the
paths that led the world economy to the precipice two years ago. The deregulation of the financial
services industry in the 1980s and '9os; the growing popularity of complex and risky derivatives; the real
estate bubble and the explosion of subprime lending — none of these developments were exactly secret.
On the contrary, they were celebrated as vindications of the power and wisdom of markets. Accordingly,
Mr. Ferguson recycles choice moments of triumphalism, courtesy of Lawrence H. Summers, George W.
Bush, Alan Greenspan and various cable television ranters and squawkers.
Even as stock indexes soared and profits swelled, there were always at least a few investors, economists
and government officials who warned that the frenzied speculation was leading to the abyss. Some of
these prophets without honor show up in front of Mr. Ferguson's camera, less to gloat than to present,
once again, the analyses that were dismissed and ignored by their peers for so long.
Dozens of interviews — along with news clips and arresting aerial shots of New York, Iceland and other
disaster areas — are folded into a clear and absorbing history, narrated by Matt Damon. The music (an
opening song, "Big Time," by Peter Gabriel, and a score by Alex Heffes) and the clean wide-screen
cinematography provide an aesthetic polish that is welcome for its own sake and also important to the
movie's themes. The handsomely lighted and appointed interiors convey a sense of the rarefied,
privileged worlds in which the Wall Street operators and their political enablers flourished, and the
elegance of the presentation also subliminally bolsters the film's authority. This is not a piece of ragged
muckraking or breathless advocacy. It rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument.
The same was true of Mr. Ferguson's previous documentary, "No End in Sight," which focused on
catastrophic policies carried out in Iraq by President George W. Bush's administration just after the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But whereas that film concentrated on a narrow view of a complex subject
— the conduct of the war rather than the at least equally controversial rationale for fighting it — "Inside
Job" offers a sweeping synthesis, going as far back as the Reagan administration and as far afield as
Iceland in its anatomy of the financial crisis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the highest-profile players declined to be interviewed. Mr. Summers
appears only in news footage, and none of his predecessors or successors as Treasury secretary — not
Robert E. Rubin or Henry M. Paulson Jr. or Timothy F. Geithner — submit to Mr. Ferguson's questions.
Nor do any of the top executives at Goldman Sachs or the other big banks. Most of the interviewees are,
at least from the perspective of the filmmaker, friendly witnesses, adding fuel to the director's
comprehensive critique of the way business has been done in the United States and the other advanced
capitalist countries for the past two decades.
Both American political parties are indicted; "Inside Job" is not simply another belated settling of
accounts with Mr. Bush and his advisers, though they are hardly ignored. The scaling back of government
oversight and the weakening of checks on speculative activity by banks began under Reagan and
continued during the Clinton administration. And with each administration the market in derivatives
expanded, and alarms about the dangers of this type of investment were ignored. Raghuram Raj an, chief
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031831
economist at the International Monetary Fund, presented a paper in 2005 warning of a "catastrophic
meltdown" and was mocked as a "Luddite" by Mr. Summers.
Meanwhile, some investment bankers — at Goldman Sachs in particular — were betting against the
positions they were pushing on their customers. An elaborate house of cards had been constructed in
which bad consumer loans were bundled into securities, which, were certified as sound by rating agencies
paid by the banks and then insured via credit-default swaps. One risky bet was stacked on top of another,
and in retrospect the collapse of the whole edifice, along with the loss of jobs, homes, pensions and
political confidence, seems inevitable.
How did this happen? Mr. Ferguson is no conspiracy theorist; nor is he inclined toward structural or
systemic explanations. Markets are not like tectonic plates, shifting on their own. Visible hands write laws
and make deals, and in this case a combination of warped values and groupthink seems to have driven
very intelligent men (and they were mostly men) toward folly. In addition to business and government,
Mr. Ferguson aims his critique at academia, suggesting that the discipline of economics and more than a
few prominent economists were corrupted by consulting fees, seats on boards of directors and
membership in the masters of the universe club.
When he challenges some of these professors, in particular those who held positions of responsibility in
the White House or in the Federal Reserve, they are reduced to stammering obfuscation — Markets are
complicated! Who could have predicted? I don't see any conflict of interest — and occasionally provoked
to testiness. Mr. Ferguson, for his part, cannot always contain his incredulity or rein in his sarcasm.
Occasionally his voice pipes up from off camera, saying things like, "You can't be serious!"
But it is hard to imagine a movie more serious, and more urgent, than "Inside Job." There are a few
avenues that might have been explored more thoroughly, in particular the effects of the crisis on
ordinary, non-Wall-Street-connected workers and homeowners. The end of the film raises a disturbing
question, as Mr. Damon exhorts viewers to demand changes in the status quo so that the trends
associated with unchecked speculation of the kind that caused the last crisis — rising inequality, neglect
of productive capacity, endless cycles of boom and bust — might be reversed.
This call to arms makes you wonder why anger of the kind so eloquently expressed in "Inside Job" has
been so inchoate. And through no fault of its own, the film may leave you dispirited as well as enraged. Its
fate is likely to be that of other documentaries: praised in some quarters, nitpicked in others and
shrugged off by those who need its message most. Which is a shame.
"Inside Job" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some drug and sex references and pervasive
obscenity, though not the verbal kind.
--
***********************************************************
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031832
The information contained in this communication is
confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may
constitute inside information, and is intended only for
the use of the addressee. It is the property of
Jeffrey Epstein
Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this
communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited
and may be unlawful. If you have received this
communication in error, please notify us immediately by
return e-mail or by e-mail to [email protected], and
destroy this communication and all copies thereof,
including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 031833

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031834
txt
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

16 May, 2011

Article 1. The Weekly Standard
The Illusion of Peace with Syria
Elliott Abrams
Article 2. The Daily Star
A democratic Arab world would welcome peace with Israel
Hamid Alkifaey
Article 3. The Daily Beast
The Awkward Exit of Mideast Envoy George Mitchell
Daniel Stone
Article 4. The Washington Post
Amid the Arab Spring, a U.S.-Saudi split
Nawaf Obaid
Article 5. Newsweek
Dr. K’s Rx for China
Niall Ferguson
Article 6. Hurriyet Daily News
Syria as Turkey’s domestic issue
Yusuf Kanli
Article 7. STRATFOR
The Geopolitics of Israel: Biblical and Modern



Article 1.

The Weekly Standard

The Illusion of Peace with Syria

Elliott Abrams



May 23, 2011 -- The news from Syria grows grimmer by the day—more peaceful protesters killed, ten thousand arrested in the past week, army units shelling residential neighborhoods.

But the Obama administration’s response has not grown grimmer or louder. As recently as May 6, Secretary of State Clinton was still talking about a “reform agenda” in Syria, as if Bashar al-Assad were a slightly misguided bureaucrat rather than the murderer of roughly 1,000 unarmed demonstrators. As for the president, though the White House has issued a couple of statements in his name, he has yet to say one word on camera about the bloodletting in Syria. This is not a small matter, for a tough statement attacking the regime’s repression and giving the demonstrators moral support would immediately circulate over the Internet. American sanctions against Syria, meanwhile, have not named Assad, and there has been no call for him to step down.

Why is the administration appearing to stick with Assad and refusing to call for his ouster? A key reason may be the hope that an Israeli-Syrian peace deal can be arranged.

From the day it came to office, the Obama administration clearly wanted to win an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. There has been no progress during its two years in office, mostly because the White House insisted on a 100 percent construction freeze in the West Bank settlements and Jerusalem as a precondition for negotiations. This was politically impossible in Israel, and also meant that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas could not come to the table lest he appear to be asking less from Israel than the Americans.

With negotiations frozen, the Palestinians turned to unilateral measures: seeking a United Nations vote admitting the State of Palestine to membership and getting dozens of countries to recognize a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, their delegitimization campaign against Israel continued apace, especially in Europe, where calls for boycotts and sanctions spread. On the pro-Israel side there was also consideration of unilateral measures—steps to head off the Palestinians diplomatically (several of which I described and supported in the April 11 Weekly Standard).

Some forlorn hope may still have existed inside the administration that a compromise on construction could bring the Palestinians back to the table with the government of Israel—until the agreement between Hamas and Fatah was signed on April 27. This agreement, unless and until it collapses, makes Israeli concessions or new flexibility in the West Bank impossible and puts paid to the entire “peace process.” It brings Hamas into the Palestinian Authority government, ending a period of several years when Palestinian Security Forces have cooperated with the Israel Defense Forces against terrorism and against Hamas in particular. It will also bring Hamas—next year and for the first time—into the PLO, the body charged with negotiating peace with Israel. Even Yasser Arafat resisted that development when he headed the PLO, and it seems obvious that Israel cannot negotiate peace with an anti-Semitic terrorist group bent on its destruction.

So where can the White House turn if it wants some kind of peace process in the Middle East? Syria. After all, in his first term as prime minister, back in 1998, Benjamin Netanyahu did authorize indirect negotiations with Syria. And the IDF—and especially Ehud Barak, a former head of the IDF, Israel’s defense minister, and a close adviser to Netanyahu—has long favored such a deal. The IDF theory was that if Syria made peace, so would Lebanon, and then Israel would be at peace with all four neighboring Arab states. And it can be argued now that Assad may see negotiations with Israel as a way to climb back from the pariah status he is earning, making him at this juncture truly open to a new peace process.

Such thinking, whether in Jerusalem or the White House, is foolish and even grotesque. There is no possibility that Assad would negotiate seriously and that an agreement could be attained. He is now clinging desperately to power, and his only true allies are Iran and Hezbollah. Yet Israel’s (and, one hopes, our own) key precondition to any agreement would necessarily be a clean break in those relationships: an end to the Syrian alliance with Hezbollah and Iran. Otherwise Israel would be giving the Golan, in effect, to Iran—a suicidal act. No Israeli government would do it, which suggests that negotiations with Assad would have no purpose.

Assad may indeed be open to commencing a negotiation as a means to escape international isolation, but that’s all the more reason not to give it to him. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s 2008 talks with Syria (via Turkey) allowed Syria to escape the partial isolation the United States had imposed on it in that decade, with zero gain for Israel. This is not an experiment worth repeating, for the Assad regime is today even more despicable than it was three years ago.

To react to the murders now taking place all over Syria by embracing the Assad regime would be morally indefensible. Whether Assad can be overthrown soon by the people of Syria is a fair question to ask. Will the army stay with him, or will Sunni units rebel? Will the Sunni business elites turn against him? How long can the regime survive? We do not yet know the answers. But surely we must avoid any step that could help Assad, rehabilitate his regime, or undermine the courageous struggle of peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Syria.

The peace agreements that Israel signed with Egypt and Jordan were real achievements, but there will be no such agreements with the Palestinians or with Syria in the foreseeable future. The Palestinians have taken themselves out of the game for now. We cannot turn from them to the Syrians while Assad’s troops are using howitzers and sniper rifles against his people. This is the time not for diplomatic engagement with Assad, but for diplomacy aimed at quarantining his regime and helping bring it down. The White House should dismiss any remaining dreams of a “peace process” with Syria to substitute for the Palestinian version and face facts: There will be no peace with the butcher who rules Syria today.



Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.




Article 2.

The Daily Star

A democratic Arab world would welcome peace with Israel
Hamid Alkifaey

One could reasonably argue that the golden opportunity for peace in the Middle East was blown away when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995.
He was the only Israeli leader capable of making peace with the Palestinians, and was about to do so had it not been for the bullets of Yigal Amir, the right-wing religious zealot who believed in the “winner takes all” principle.
One could also claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its global ramifications are responsible for agitating religious extremism in the Muslim world as a whole, and among Palestinians in particular. Prior to 1987, there was hardly any Islamic factor in Palestinian resistance. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups were established after the 1987 intifada. From this we deduce that extremism on the Israeli side led to the same on the Palestinian side, and consequently in other Muslim countries, which manifests in popular opposition to traditional and despotic regimes.
The Arab world is currently going through a social and political revolution that has so far claimed two “entrenched” regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. At least three other regimes in the region are fighting for their lives, and are not expected to survive. There will soon be different styles of government in Libya, Yemen and Syria. This much is certain.
Will there be a different policy toward Israel? Certainly. But this will take time to take shape, since there are more pressing national priorities, such as political and economic reforms. Israel has long branded the Arab world as tribal and undemocratic, in order to brand itself the only democracy in the Middle East. Well, soon enough it won’t be. Many of its neighbors will soon join the democratic world as demands for democracy grow. Democracy will mean more development, prosperity and people’s power. It means more popular participation in decision making and awareness of the possibilities of the nation and what it can and cannot do. It may not mean more hostility toward Israel if the latter knows how to deal with it. But there will be tension if Israel continues to follow extreme policies, which it will under the current leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Palestinians must achieve their right to establish their own state on their land. This right has been recognized by almost everyone except a minority of extremists in Israel, led by Netanyahu. Free and democratic Arab countries won’t shrink from supporting this Palestinian right under any circumstances. Muslims will not give up on East Jerusalem, either. Arab regimes have been weak in the past. Democracy will strengthen them, but also add reason to Arab governance. Most Arabs have accepted Israel’s right to exist, and accepted U.N. resolutions 242 and 338, but Israeli intransigence is not helping them formulate a unified position.
Democratic Egypt won’t be a threat to Israel as the Egyptian military, which will continue to be highly influential in Egypt’s politics in the foreseeable future, will not risk another war with Israel. Egyptians under a democratic regime will be seeking better living standards, better laws to govern the country and more rights as citizens. They won’t be pressing their government to fight Israel; on the contrary, they want a stable economy where things will be better for future generations. But Israel may aggravate the situation by electing extremists and following extreme policies. This will strengthen the hands of the hawks in the Arab world. Moderate Israel under reasonable and realistic leaders should have nothing to fear from Egypt, with which it has an enduring peace treaty.
The situation with Syria may not be exactly the same, however, especially when the two countries are still officially in a state of war. The regime of Bashar Assad, and his father before him, would have never started a war with Israel unilaterally. It also suited them not to have a peace treaty. Any new Syrian leader is not likely (for a considerable period of time) to initiate a move toward a peace agreement with Israel as this will weaken his position domestically. Nor will he launch a war, however, since such a war will not result in victory. A democratic regime in Syria, or any other Arab country for that matter, will need a good 10 years to build democratic institutions and stabilize a modern market economy needed in any democracy. So, war won’t be on the agenda in the near future.
Prosperity increases the public’s stake in a stable economy, and this will make people want to compromise to make their country more prosperous and stable. However, everything will depend on how prepared the free world is to help new democracies in the Middle East survive and prosper. Small Islamic groups, organized and armed with religious zeal, could hijack power from the moderates. This would lead to a disaster for the whole region. Therefore, it is imperative for the free world, Israel included, not to leave matters to chance. A proactive stance is needed to nurture democracy and help moderate forces organize themselves in order to govern the region

Hamid Alkifaey is a writer and journalist. He was the first government spokesman in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and is founder-leader of the Movement for Democratic Society. Currently he is researching democratization at the University of Exeter in the U.K.

Article 3.

The Daily Beast

The Awkward Exit of Mideast Envoy George Mitchell

Daniel Stone



May 13, 2011 -- Two days after Barack Obama's inauguration, George Mitchell was named special envoy for Middle East peace. With the new president standing beside Mitchell and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden took the podium and extolled Mitchell's reputation and experience having brokered peace in Northern Ireland, calling him an "outstanding public servant" with "incredible capacity." In the press, Mitchell was praised as the right man for the job at the right time.

On Friday, though, that capacity had reached its limit, and Mitchell told his bosses in the West Wing that he'd had enough. His reasons, he said, were personal—the kind of nebulous rationale that leaves ample room for interpretation. Unmentioned were the months of frustration that Mitchell had built up as direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians became more difficult and the peace process further off.

The timing of Mitchell's departure couldn't be more awkward. Obama will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan's King Abdullah next week, as well as deliver a major speech on Middle East policy. But the resignation didn't come as a surprise to those who worked closest with Mitchell. A State Department official described to Newsweek a man increasingly annoyed by both parties' constant moving of the goal posts and the constraints of the administration's unshakeable political instinct to support Israel.

The strain was noticeable in the Middle East. In a recent interview with Newsweek, one senior Israeli official said Mitchell often would say one thing about the direction the U.S. was taking with the two sides, only to be contradicted by Dennis Ross, Clinton's special adviser to the region. The official, who did not want to be quoted by name, said it seemed as if Mitchell had abdicated his role completely in recent months. Indeed, Mitchell's frequent visits to Israel and the West Bank slowed to a trickle; his last visit to the region was in December.

When he was there, officials on both sides of the conflict had voiced bewilderment at Mitchell's hands-off approach to the complex negotiating process. With a small staff in Israel, he would shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah to meet with senior advisers to the leaders of both sides and then leave after just a few days. In an interview with Newsweek last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas openly accused Mitchell of not doing his job. "Every visit by Mitchell, we talked to him and gave him some ideas," he said. "At the end we discovered that he didn't convey any of these ideas to the Israelis. What does it mean?"

A politically attuned man who was once Senate Majority Leader, Mitchell was aware of the complaints about him. His usual comeback was to point to his success in Northern Ireland, which earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For hundreds of days, he liked to say, he was considered a failure, until the final day, when he actually got it done.

Mitchell's resignation letter set off a small panic inside the West Wing earlier in the week. Senior advisers, as well as Obama himself, could sense the increasing difficulty of the job: Administration officials had been unable to convince Israel to halve new settlements in the West Bank, alienating Palestinians, and Israelis were irked in early May when Abbas allied with Hamas, a group that refuses to denounce violence against Israel. But the symbolism of Mitchell leaving several days before Obama's biggest week of outreach to the region projected a vacuum of confidence that anything hopeful, however remote, was on the horizon.

"He wouldn't be leaving at this important hour if he knew there was going to be a significant change in the administration's attitude toward the peace process," said Middle East analyst Gregory Orfalea, who formerly taught at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. "He's leaving because it's status quo."

Mitchell will be replaced—in the interim by his deputy, David Hale—and another official will take a crack at the quandary. But despite new momentum from Netanyahu's visit next week and Obama's speech Thursday, Mitchell's departure could signal stagnant talks for the next several years. According to Fawaz Gerges, director of the London School of Economics' Middle East Center, "the reality is that, with Mitchell leaving, Barack Obama basically lost the ideological battle [over how to confront the peace process]. By now he'll have to wait for the second term before you can get another concerted effort."



Daniel Stone is Newsweek's White House correspondent. He also covers national energy and environmental policy.




Article 4.

The Washington Post

Amid the Arab Spring, a U.S.-Saudi split

Nawaf Obaid



May 16 - RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA -- A tectonic shift has occurred in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Despite significant pressure from the Obama administration to remain on the sidelines, Saudi leaders sent troops into Manama in March to defend Bahrain’s monarchy and quell the unrest that has shaken that country since February. For more than 60 years, Saudi Arabia has been bound by an unwritten bargain: oil for security. Riyadh has often protested but ultimately acquiesced to what it saw as misguided U.S. policies. But American missteps in the region since Sept. 11, an ill-conceived response to the Arab protest movements and an unconscionable refusal to hold Israel accountable for its illegal settlement building have brought this arrangement to an end. As the Saudis recalibrate the partnership, Riyadh intends to pursue a much more assertive foreign policy, at times conflicting with American interests. The backdrop for this change are the rise of Iranian meddling in the region and the counterproductive policies that the United States has pursued here since Sept. 11. The most significant blunder may have been the invasion of Iraq, which resulted in enormous loss of life and provided Iran an opening to expand its sphere of influence. For years, Iran’s leadership has aimed to foment discord while furthering its geopolitical ambitions. Tehran has long funded Hamas and Hezbollah; recently, its scope of attempted interference has broadened to include the affairs of Arab states from Yemen to Morocco. This month the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Gen. Hasan Firouzabadi, harshly criticized Riyadh over its intervention in Bahrain, claiming this act would spark massive domestic uprisings.

Such remarks are based more on wishful thinking than fact, but Iran’s efforts to destabilize its neighbors are tireless. As Riyadh fights a cold war with Tehran, Washington has shown itself in recent months to be an unwilling and unreliable partner against this threat. The emerging political reality is a Saudi-led Arab world facing off against the aggression of Iran and its non-state proxies. Saudi Arabia will not allow the political unrest in the region to destabilize the Arab monarchies — the Gulf states, Jordan and Morocco. In Yemen, the Saudis are insisting on an orderly transition of power and a dignified exit for President Ali Abdullah Saleh (a courtesy that was not extended to Hosni Mubarak, despite the former Egyptian president’s many years as a strong U.S. ally). To facilitate this handover, Riyadh is leading a diplomatic effort under the auspices of the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council. In Iraq, the Saudi government will continue to pursue a hard-line stance against the Maliki government, which it regards as little more than an Iranian puppet. In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia will act to check the growth of Hezbollah and to ensure that this Iranian proxy does not dominate the country’s political life. Regarding the widespread upheaval in Syria, the Saudis will work to ensure that any potential transition to a post-Assad era is as peaceful and as free of Iranian meddling as possible. Regarding Israel, Riyadh is adamant that a just settlement, based on King Abdullah’s proposed peace plan, be implemented. This includes a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. The United States has lost all credibility on this issue; after casting the sole vote in the U.N. Security Council against censuring Israel for its illegal settlement building, it can no longer act as an objective mediator. This act was a watershed in U.S.-Saudi relations, guaranteeing that Saudi leaders will not push for further compromise from the Palestinians, despite American pressure.

Saudi Arabia remains strong and stable, lending muscle to its invigorated foreign policy. Spiritually, the kingdom plays a unique role for the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims — more than 1 billion of whom are Sunni — as the birthplace of Islam and home of the two holiest cities. Politically, its leaders enjoy broad domestic support, and a growing nationalism has knitted the historically tribal country more closely together. This is largely why widespread protests, much anticipated by Western media in March, never materialized. As the world’s sole energy superpower and the de facto central banker of the global energy markets, Riyadh is the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, representing 25 percent of the combined gross domestic product of the Arab world. The kingdom has amassed more than $550 billion in foreign reserves and is spending more than $150 billion to improve infrastructure, public education, social services and health care. To counter the threats posed by Iran and transnational terrorist networks, the Saudi leadership is authorizing more than $100 billion of additional military spending to modernize ground forces, upgrade naval capabilities and more. The kingdom is doubling its number of high-quality combat aircraft and adding 60,000 security personnel to the Interior Ministry forces. Plans are underway to create a “Special Forces Command,” based on the U.S. model, to unify the kingdom’s various special forces if needed for rapid deployment abroad. Saudi Arabia has the will and the means to meet its expanded global responsibilities. In some issues, such as counterterrorism and efforts to fight money laundering, the Saudis will continue to be a strong U.S. partner. In areas in which Saudi national security or strategic interests are at stake, the kingdom will pursue its own agenda. With Iran working tirelessly to dominate the region, the Muslim Brotherhood rising in Egypt and unrest on nearly every border, there is simply too much at stake for the kingdom to rely on a security policy written in Washington, which has backfired more often than not and spread instability. The special relationship may never be the same, but from this transformation a more stable and secure Middle East can be born.



The writer is a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research & Islamic Studies.









Article 5.

Newsweek

Dr. K’s Rx for China

Niall Ferguson



May 15, 2011 -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks the Chinese government is “scared” of the Arab Spring. “They’re worried,” she told Jeffrey Goldberg in the latest Atlantic, “and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it.”

These are words—intemperate, undiplomatic, and very likely counterproductive—that you cannot imagine being uttered by her predecessor Henry Kissinger. It is now 40 years since Kissinger went on his secret mission to China, to pave the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit the following year. Since then he has visited the country more than 50 times. And if there is one thing he has learned, it is this: the real fool’s errand is to lean on the Chinese. Much has changed in the world since Kissinger’s first trip to China. (In 1971, who would have dared to predict that America’s public enemy No. 1 would be a Saudi-born Islamic fundamentalist skulking in a walled compound in Pakistan?) But at least two things in American foreign policy remain consistent: the relationship with mainland China, revived by Kissinger after more than 20 years in the deep freeze, and Kissinger himself, consulted formally or informally by every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. On China, Kissinger’s new book, is a reminder of why our leaders still want to pick his brains. Eighty-eight years old this month, he remains without equal as a strategic thinker. The opening to China is a story Kissinger has told before: how he and Nixon had discerned that country could become a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union; how he secretly flew to China after feigning illness in Pakistan; how he and Premier Zhou Enlai hammered out the diplomatic basis for Nixon’s official visit (the Shanghai Communiqué). The result was, as he puts it, “a quasi alliance,” which, though initially intended to contain the Soviet Union, ended up outliving the Cold War.

In this telling, however, Kissinger is able to take advantage of recent research that illuminates the Chinese side of the story. The American opening to China was also a Chinese opening to America, actuated above all by Mao Zedong’s fear of encirclement. “Think about this,” Mao told his doctor in 1969. “We have the Soviet Union to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If all our enemies were to unite, attacking us from the north, south, east, and west, what do you think we should do?” The medic had no idea. “Think again,” said Mao. “Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn’t our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?” It was to explore the American option that Mao recalled four Army marshals from exile. Skirmishes were already underway between Soviet and Chinese forces on the Ussuri River. In October 1970 Mao ordered China’s top leadership to evacuate Beijing and put the People’s Liberation Army on “first-degree combat readiness.” The stakes for China were high indeed—higher than for the United States. As Kissinger shows, it was far from unusual for Mao to refer to “our ancestors’ counsel.” Despite his lifelong commitment to Marxism-Leninism, Mao was also steeped in the classics of Chinese civilization, as were his close advisers. “We can consult the example of Zhuge Liang’s strategic guiding principle,” Marshal Ye Jian-ying suggested, “when the three states of Wei, Shu, and Wu confronted each other: ‘Ally with Wu in the east to oppose Wei in the north.’ ” The allusion, Kissinger explains, is to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a 14th-century epic novel set in the so-called Warring States period (475–221 B.C.).

Nor was this the only occasion when China’s communist leaders looked to the distant past for inspiration. Of equal importance to them, Kissinger argues, was The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which dates from the even earlier Spring and Autumn period (770–476 B.C.). “The victorious army/Is victorious first/And seeks battle later”: axioms like this one encouraged Chinese strategists to think of international relations like the board game Weiqi (known in the West as Go), a “game of surrounding pieces.” Mao shared with China’s prerevolutionary leaders an assumption that China is not like other countries. With a population that amounts to a fifth of humanity, it is Zhongguo: the Middle Kingdom or, perhaps more accurately, the “Central Country.” At times it could even seem like tian xia: “all under heaven.” The best foreign policy for such an empire was to “let barbarians fight barbarians.” If that failed, then the strongest of the barbarians should be embraced and civilized (as happened to the Manchus). “Domineering and overwhelming … ruthless and aloof, poet and warrior, prophet and scourge”—Mao’s true hero was not Lenin but the tyrannical, book-burning “first emperor,” Qin Shi Huang, who united China in 221 B.C. In a similar way, Kissinger shows, the current generation of Chinese leaders have drawn inspiration from the teachings of Kong Fu Zi (known in the West as Confucius). Their goal, he argues, is not world domination but da tong: “great harmony.” This goes to the heart of the matter. In 1971, when Kissinger first went to China, the U.S. economy was roughly five times that of the People’s Republic. Forty years later, as a result of the industrial revolution unleashed by Mao’s successor Deng Xiao-ping, it is conceivable that China could overtake America within a decade. This is a feat the Soviet Union never came close to achieving. Moreover, China is now the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury notes, which form an important part of its vast $3 trillion of international reserves. How China will use its newfound economic power may be the most important question of our time. Few Americans are better placed to answer that question than Kissinger, who has dealt with four generations of Chinese leaders.

The most profound insights of On China are psychological. They concern the fundamental cultural differences between a Chinese elite who can look back more than two millennia for inspiration and an American elite whose historical frame of reference is little more than two centuries old. This became most obvious in the wake of June 1989, when Americans recoiled from the use of military force to end the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations. To Kissinger’s eyes, it was doubly naive to retaliate to this crackdown with sanctions: “Western concepts of human rights and individual liberties may not be directly translatable … to a civilization for millennia ordered around different concepts. Nor can the traditional Chinese fear of political chaos be dismissed as an anachronistic irrelevancy needing only ‘correction’ by Western enlightenment.”

As China’s first Anglophone leader, Jiang Zemin, explained to Kissinger in 1991: “We never submit to pressure … It is a philosophical principle.” The United States and China went to war in Korea because of another cultural gap. It came as a surprise to the Americans when Mao ordered Chinese intervention because the military odds looked so unfavorable. But, argues Kissinger, his “motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks.” Mao was a master of the ancient Empty City Stratagem, which seeks to conceal weakness with a show of confidence, even aggression. To Westerners, his insistence that he did not fear a nuclear attack seemed unhinged or, at best, callous (“We may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before”). But this was classical Chinese bravado, or “offensive deterrence.” “Chinese negotiators,” observes Kissinger in a passage that should be inwardly digested not just by American diplomats but also by American businessmen before they land in Beijing, “use diplomacy to weave together political, military, and psychological elements into an overall strategic design.” American diplomacy, by contrast, “generally prefers …c to be ‘flexible’; it feels an obligation to break deadlocks with new proposals—unintentionally inviting new deadlocks to elicit new proposals.” We could learn a thing or two from the Chinese, Kissinger implies, particularly Sun Tzu’s concept of shi, meaning the “potential energy” of the overall strategic landscape. Our tendency is to have an agenda of 10 different points, each one to be dealt with separately. They have one big game plan. We are always in a hurry for closure, anxiously watching the minutes tick away. The Chinese value patience; as Mao explained to Kissinger, they measure time in millennia.

Such fundamental cultural differences may give rise to conflict with China in the future, Kissinger warns: “When the Chinese view of preemption encounters the Western concept of deterrence, a vicious circle can result: acts conceived as defensive in China may be treated as aggressive by the outside world; deterrent moves by the West may be interpreted in China as encirclement. The United States and China wrestled with this dilemma repeatedly during the Cold War; to some extent they have not yet found a way to transcend it.”

Could the United States and the People’s Republic come to blows again? The possibility cannot be excluded. As Kissinger reminds us, war was the result when Germany rose to challenge Britain economically and geopolitically 100 years ago. Moreover, the key factor that brought America and China together in the 1970s—the common Soviet enemy the Chinese called “the polar bear”—has vanished from the scene. Old, intractable differences persist over Taiwan and North Korea. What remains is “Chimerica,” a less-than-happy marriage of economic convenience in which one partner does all the saving and the other does all the spending.

In Kissinger’s own words, China’s rise could “make international relations bipolar again,” ushering in a new cold (or possibly even hot) war. Nationalist writers like Liu Mingfu, author of China Dream, urge China to switch from “peaceful development” to “military rise” and look forward to the “duel of the century” with the United States. There are those in Washington, too—apparently including, for the moment, the Obama administration—who would relish a more confrontational relationship. Yet Kissinger remains hopeful that cooler heads will prevail in Beijing: thinkers like Zheng Bijian, who urges China to “transcend the traditional ways for great powers to emerge” and “not [to] follow the path of Germany leading up to World War I.” Rather than attempting to “organize Asia on the basis of containing China or creating a bloc of democratic states for an ideological crusade,” the United States would do better, Kissinger suggests, to work with China to build a new “Pacific Community.”

Four decades ago, Richard Nixon grasped sooner than most the huge potential of China. “Well,” he mused, “you can just stop and think of what could happen if anybody with a decent system of government got control of that mainland. Good God … There’d be no power in the world that could even—I mean, you put 800 million Chinese to work under a decent system … and they will be the leaders of the world.” That prophecy is being fulfilled in our time. The fact that until now China’s rise has been a boon to the United States rather than a bane owes much to the work of Henry Kissinger. With this book he has given his successors an indispensable guide to continuing the Sino-American “coevolution” he began.



Ferguson is writing a biography of Henry Kissinger.




Article 6.

Hurriyet Daily News

Syria as Turkey’s domestic issue

Yusuf Kanli

May 15, 2011 -- Syria is no Libya for many reasons; not just because it is a country right on the Turkish border or, like Turkey, it has a Kurdish population and an explosion there may ignite an explosion on this side of the border as well.

Like a broken watch that shows correct time twice a day, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well occasionally makes some correct analysis. Last week, while comparing the uprising in Libya against the Moammar Gadhafi regime and the growing unrest in the Syrian street against the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad, the prime minister correctly said Libya and Syria were two totally different issues for Turkey.

Erdoğan explained while Turkey was very much concerned with what’s happening in Libya and have been undertaking every possible effort to contribute to a quick end to the tumult and restoration of peace and order in Libya, Syria was very much like a domestic incident for Turkey.

As part of its neo-Ottoman drive to enhance its influence in the Middle Eastern territory of the former Ottoman Empire the ruling Justice and development Party, or AKP, government of Turkey has long waived visa requirement in travel between Turkey and Syria. The aim behind that move was to plant the seeds of a future European Union-like Middle Eastern union led by Turkey but the first tangible result was not a marked increase in commercial, business or tourist interactions, but a batch of 250 refugees running from the fire on the Syrian street.

If the problem continues and escalates further in the Syrian street it is probable that the prefabricated facility in the Hatay province constructed to provide temporary lodging to pilgrims during the Hajj season will not suffice in providing a shelter to Syrian refugees who thanks to the no-visa regime in travel between Turkey and Syria may freely escape to Turkey from the trouble in their own street and thus carry the problem to the Turkish street.

For now the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, terrorists are abiding with an unilateral truce, which is claimed to have been negotiated with the government by Abdullah Öcalan, the chieftain of the gang serving an enforced life term on the İmralı island prison, which according to claims will last until June 15, three days after the June 12 parliamentary elections. Indeed, excluding some rehearsal for a possible mass civilian disobedience campaign after the elections and some exceptional terrorist acts, it might be said that there is nothing extraordinary in Turkey’s southeast bordering Syria, Iraq and Iran, where there are sizeable Kurdish populations.

The “success” of the unrest in Syrian streets in uprooting the government might mean added trouble for Turkey, which has been battling with separatist terrorism for the past 25 years. Turkey remaining silent or supportive of the Assad regime crushing the pressure for a regime change and reform calls of the Syrian street, on the other hand, would seriously imperil the regional role aspired by the AKP governance of Turkey.

Indeed, while the AKP government in Ankara joined the calls of the U.S.-led coalition of the willing that time is up for Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and for peace and safety of his own people Gadhafi must step down, as regards to Syria Ankara, as well as the Western alliance, has been restraining their calls with a shy request from Assad to accelerate reforms.

While Ankara may answer anti-Turkish demonstrations in Libya by closing down the Turkish embassy in Tripoli, the first ever such action by the diplomatic service throughout its modern history, anti-Turkish demonstrations in Damascus can be really costly for Turkey now and in the future.

While the personal friendly relations between Assad and his counterpart in Turkey, Erdoğan, might provide Turkey a golden opportunity to help Syria sail out of the current tumultuous situation. Of course at a time when Erdoğan himself is after converting Turkey into his sultanate of fear under the aegis of advanced democracy it might be absurd to expect him to advise Assad of a democratic way out of the mess in Syria. Yet, as much as Turkey needs to see restoration of peace, security and stability in Syria for domestic security reasons as well as for its regional role, Syria and President Assad need Turkey and Erdoğan to walk the extra mile in reforms advised by them, as the real-politic of the day compels him to do so if he wants to sail out of this problem in one piece.

If, however, despite Turkey’s democracy and reform preaches, the massacres continue in the Syrian street not only the prestige of Erdoğan in the Arab street will be seriously impaired but sooner or later the fire in the Arab street will have a reflection on the Turkish streets.




Article 7.

STRATFOR

The Geopolitics of Israel: Biblical and Modern



The founding principle of geopolitics is that place — geography — plays a significant role in determining how nations will behave. If that theory is true, then there ought to be a deep continuity in a nation's foreign policy. Israel is a laboratory for this theory, since it has existed in three different manifestations in roughly the same place, twice in antiquity and once in modernity. If geopolitics is correct, then Israeli foreign policy, independent of policymakers, technology or the identity of neighbors, ought to have important common features. This is, therefore, a discussion of common principles in Israeli foreign policy over nearly 3,000 years.
For convenience, we will use the term "Israel" to connote all of the Hebrew and Jewish entities that have existed in the Levant since the invasion of the region as chronicled in the Book of Joshua. As always, geopolitics requires a consideration of three dimensions: the internal geopolitics of Israel, the interaction of Israel and the immediate neighbors who share borders with it, and Israel's interaction with what we will call great powers, beyond Israel's borderlands.

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Israel has manifested itself three times in history. The first manifestation began with the invasion led by Joshua and lasted through its division into two kingdoms, the Babylonian conquest of the Kingdom of Judah and the deportation to Babylon early in the sixth century B.C. The second manifestation began when Israel was recreated in 540 B.C. by the Persians, who had defeated the Babylonians. The nature of this second manifestation changed in the fourth century B.C., when Greece overran the Persian Empire and Israel, and again in the first century B.C., when the Romans conquered the region.
The second manifestation saw Israel as a small actor within the framework of larger imperial powers, a situation that lasted until the destruction of the Jewish vassal state by the Romans.
Israel's third manifestation began in 1948, following (as in the other cases) an ingathering of t least some of the Jews who had been dispersed after conquests. Israel's founding takes place in the context of the decline and fall of the British Empire and must, at least in part, be understood as part of British imperial history.
During its first 50 years, Israel plays a pivotal role in the confrontation of the United States and the Soviet Union and, in some senses, is hostage to the dynamics of these two countries. In other words, like the first two manifestations of Israel, the third finds Israel continually struggling among independence, internal tension and imperial ambition.
Israeli Geography and Borderlands
At its height, under King David, Israel extended from the Sinai to the Euphrates, encompassing Damascus. It occupied some, but relatively little, of the coastal region, an area beginning at what today is Haifa and running south to Jaffa, just north of today's Tel Aviv. The coastal area to the north was held by Phoenicia, the area to the south by Philistines. It is essential to understand that Israel's size and shape shifted over time. For example, Judah under the Hasmoneans did not include the Negev but did include the Golan. The general locale of Israel is fixed. Its precise borders have never been.
Thus, it is perhaps better to begin with what never was part of Israel. Israel never included the Sinai Peninsula. Along the coast, it never stretched much farther north than the Litani River in today's Lebanon. Apart from David's extreme extension (and fairly tenuous control) to the north, Israel's territory never stretched as far as Damascus, although it frequently held the Golan Heights. Israel extended many times to both sides of the Jordan but never deep into the Jordanian Desert. It never extended southeast into the Arabian Peninsula.
Israel consists generally of three parts. First, it always has had the northern hill region, stretching from the foothills of Mount Hermon south to Jerusalem. Second, it always contains some of the coastal plain from today's Tel Aviv north to Haifa. Third, it occupies area between Jerusalem and the Jordan River — today's West Bank. At times, it controls all or part of the Negev, including the coastal region between the Sinai to the Tel Aviv area. It may be larger than this at various times in history, and sometimes smaller, but it normally holds all or part of these three regions.
Israel is well-buffered in three directions. The Sinai Desert protects it against the Egyptians. In general, the Sinai has held little attraction for the Egyptians. The difficulty of deploying forces in the eastern Sinai poses severe logistical problems for them, particularly during a prolonged presence. Unless Egypt can rapidly move through the Sinai north into the coastal plain, where it can sustain its forces more readily, deploying in the Sinai is difficult and unrewarding. Therefore, so long as Israel is not so weak as to make an attack on the coastal plain a viable option, or unless Egypt is motivated by an outside imperial power, Israel does not face a threat from the southwest.
Israel is similarly protected from the southeast. The deserts southeast of Eilat-Aqaba are virtually impassable. No large force could approach from that direction, although smaller raiding parties could. The tribes of the Arabian Peninsula lack the reach or the size to pose a threat to Israel, unless massed and aligned with other forces. Even then, the approach from the southeast is not one that they are likely to take. The Negev is secure from that direction.
The eastern approaches are similarly secured by desert, which begins about 20 to 30 miles east of the Jordan River. While indigenous forces exist in the borderland east of the Jordan, they lack the numbers to be able to penetrate decisively west of the Jordan. Indeed, the normal model is that, so long as Israel controls Judea and Samaria (the modern-day West Bank), then the East Bank of the Jordan River is under the political and sometimes military domination of Israel — sometimes directly through settlement, sometimes indirectly through political influence, or economic or security leverage.
Israel's vulnerability is in the north. There is no natural buffer between Phoenicia and its successor entities (today's Lebanon) to the direct north. The best defense line for Israel in the north is the Litani River, but this is not an insurmountable boundary under any circumstance. However, the area along the coast north of Israel does not present a serious threat. The coastal area prospers through trade in the Mediterranean basin. It is oriented toward the sea and to the trade routes to the east, not to the south. If it does anything, this area protects those trade routes and has no appetite for a conflict that might disrupt trade. It stays out of Israel's way, for the most part.
Moreover, as a commercial area, this region is generally wealthy, a factor that increases predators around it and social conflict within. It is an area prone to instability. Israel frequently tries to extend its influence northward for commercial reasons, as one of the predators, and this can entangle Israel in its regional politics. But barring this self-induced problem, the threat to Israel from the north is minimal, despite the absence of natural boundaries and the large population. On occasion, there is spillover of conflicts from the north, but not to a degree that might threaten regime survival in Israel.
The neighbor that is always a threat lies to the northeast. Syria — or, more precisely, the area governed by Damascus at any time — is populous and frequently has no direct outlet to the sea. It is, therefore, generally poor. The area to its north, Asia Minor, is heavily mountainous. Syria cannot project power to the north except with great difficulty, but powers in Asia Minor can move south. Syria's eastern flank is buffered by a desert that stretches to the Euphrates. Therefore, when there is no threat from the north, Syria's interest — after securing itself internally — is to gain access to the coast. Its primary channel is directly westward, toward the rich cities of the northern Levantine coast, with which it trades heavily. An alternative interest is southwestward, toward the southern Levantine coast controlled by Israel.
As can be seen, Syria can be interested in Israel only selectively. When it is interested, it has a serious battle problem. To attack Israel, it would have to strike between Mount Hermon and the Sea of Galilee, an area about 25 miles wide. The Syrians potentially can attack south of the sea, but only if they are prepared to fight through this region and then attack on extended supply lines. If an attack is mounted along the main route, Syrian forces must descend the Golan Heights and then fight through the hilly Galilee before reaching the coastal plain — sometimes with guerrillas holding out in the Galilean hills. The Galilee is an area that is relatively easy to defend and difficult to attack. Therefore, it is only once Syria takes the Galilee, and can control its lines of supply against guerrilla attack, that its real battle begins.
To reach the coast or move toward Jerusalem, Syria must fight through a plain in front of a line of low hills. This is the decisive battleground where massed Israeli forces, close to lines of supply, can defend against dispersed Syrian forces on extended lines of supply. It is no accident that Megiddo — or Armageddon, as the plain is sometimes referred to — has apocalyptic meaning. This is the point at which any move from Syria would be decided. But a Syrian offensive would have a tough fight to reach Megiddo, and a tougher one as it deploys on the plain.
On the surface, Israel lacks strategic depth, but this is true only on the surface. It faces limited threats from southern neighbors. To its east, it faces only a narrow strip of populated area east of the Jordan. To the north, there is a maritime commercial entity. Syria operating alone, forced through the narrow gap of the Mount Hermon-Galilee line and operating on extended supply lines, can be dealt with readily.
There is a risk of simultaneous attacks from multiple directions. Depending on the forces deployed and the degree of coordination between them, this can pose a problem for Israel. However, even here the Israelis have the tremendous advantage of fighting on interior lines. Egypt and Syria, fighting on external lines (and widely separated fronts), would have enormous difficulty transferring forces from one front to another. Israel, on interior lines (fronts close to each other with good transportation), would be able to move its forces from front to front rapidly, allowing for sequential engagement and thereby the defeat of enemies. Unless enemies are carefully coordinated and initiate war simultaneously — and deploy substantially superior force on at least one front — Israel can initiate war at a time of its choosing or else move its forces rapidly between fronts, negating much of the advantage of size that the attackers might have.
There is another aspect to the problem of multifront war. Egypt usually has minimal interests along the Levant, having its own coast and an orientation to the south toward the headwaters of the Nile. On the rare occasions when Egypt does move through the Sinai and attacks to the north and northeast, it is in an expansionary mode. By the time it consolidates and exploits the coastal plain, it would be powerful enough to threaten Syria. From Syria's point of view, the only thing more dangerous than Israel is an Egypt in control of Israel. Therefore, the probability of a coordinated north-south strike at Israel is rare, is rarely coordinated and usually is not designed to be a mortal blow. It is defeated by Israel's strategic advantage of interior lines.
Israeli Geography and the Convergence Zone
Therefore, it is not surprising that Israel's first incarnation lasted as long as it did — some five centuries. What is interesting and what must be considered is why Israel (now considered as the northern kingdom) was defeated by the Assyrians and Judea, then defeated by Babylon. To understand this, we need to consider the broader geography of Israel's location.
Israel is located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, on the Levant. As we have seen, when Israel is intact, it will tend to be the dominant power in the Levant. Therefore, Israeli resources must generally be dedicated for land warfare, leaving little over for naval warfare. In general, although Israel had excellent harbors and access to wood for shipbuilding, it never was a major Mediterranean naval power. It never projected power into the sea. The area to the north of Israel has always been a maritime power, but Israel, the area south of Mount Hermon, was always forced to be a land power.
The Levant in general and Israel in particular has always been a magnet for great powers. No Mediterranean empire could be fully secure unless it controlled the Levant. Whether it was Rome or Carthage, a Mediterranean empire that wanted to control both the northern and southern littorals needed to anchor its eastern flank on the Levant. For one thing, without the Levant, a Mediterranean power would be entirely dependent on sea lanes for controlling the other shore. Moving troops solely by sea creates transport limitations and logistical problems. It also leaves imperial lines vulnerable to interdiction — sometimes merely from pirates, a problem that plagued Rome's sea transport. A land bridge, or a land bridge with minimal water crossings that can be easily defended, is a vital supplement to the sea for the movement of large numbers of troops. Once the Hellespont is crossed, the coastal route through southern Turkey, down the Levant and along the Mediterranean's southern shore, provides such an alternative.
There is an additional consideration. If a Mediterranean empire leaves the Levant unoccupied, it opens the door to the possibility of a great power originating to the east seizing the ports of the Levant and challenging the Mediterranean power for maritime domination. In short, control of the Levant binds a Mediterranean empire together while denying a challenger from the east the opportunity to enter the Mediterranean. Holding the Levant, and controlling Israel, is a necessary preventive measure for a Mediterranean empire.
Israel is also important to any empire originating to the east of Israel, either in the Tigris-Euphrates basin or in Persia. For either, security could be assured only once it had an anchor on the Levant. Macedonian expansion under Alexander demonstrated that a power controlling Levantine and Turkish ports could support aggressive operations far to the east, to the Hindu Kush and beyond. While Turkish ports might have sufficed for offensive operations, simply securing the Bosporus still left the southern flank exposed. Therefore, by holding the Levant, an eastern power protected itself against attacks from Mediterranean powers.
The Levant was also important to any empire originating to the north or south of Israel. If Egypt decided to move beyond the Nile Basin and North Africa eastward, it would move first through the Sinai and then northward along the coastal plain, securing sea lanes to Egypt. When Asia Minor powers such as the Ottoman Empire developed, there was a natural tendency to move southward to control the eastern Mediterranean. The Levant is the crossroads of continents, and Israel lies in the path of many imperial ambitions.
Israel therefore occupies what might be called the convergence zone of the Eastern Hemisphere. A European power trying to dominate the Mediterranean or expand eastward, an eastern power trying to dominate the space between the Hindu Kush and the Mediterranean, a North African power moving toward the east, or a northern power moving south — all must converge on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and therefore on Israel. Of these, the European power and the eastern power must be the most concerned with Israel. For either, there is no choice but to secure it as an anchor.
Internal Geopolitics
Israel is geographically divided into three regions, which traditionally have produced three different types of people. Its coastal plain facilitates commerce, serving as the interface between eastern trade routes and the sea. It is the home of merchants and manufacturers, cosmopolitans — not as cosmopolitan as Phoenicia or Lebanon, but cosmopolitan for Israel. The northeast is hill country, closest to the unruliness north of the Litani River and to the Syrian threat. It breeds farmers and warriors. The area south of Jerusalem is hard desert country, more conducive to herdsman and warriors than anything else. Jerusalem is where these three regions are balanced and governed.
There are obviously deep differences built into Israel's geography and inhabitants, particularly between the herdsmen of the southern deserts and the northern hill dwellers. The coastal dwellers, rich but less warlike than the others, hold the balance or are the prize to be pursued. In the division of the original kingdom between Israel and Judea, we saw the alliance of the coast with the Galilee, while Jerusalem was held by the desert dwellers. The consequence of the division was that Israel in the north ultimately was conquered by Assyrians from the northeast, while Babylon was able to swallow Judea.
Social divisions in Israel obviously do not have to follow geographical lines. However, over time, these divisions must manifest themselves. For example, the coastal plain is inherently more cosmopolitan than the rest of the country. The interests of its inhabitants lie more with trading partners in the Mediterranean and the rest of the world than with their countrymen. Their standard of living is higher, and their commitment to traditions is lower. Therefore, there is an inherent tension between their immediate interests and those of the Galileans, who live more precarious, warlike lives. Countries can be divided over lesser issues — and when Israel is divided, it is vulnerable even to regional threats.
We say "even" because geography dictates that regional threats are less menacing than might be expected. The fact that Israel would be outnumbered demographically should all its neighbors turn on it is less important than the fact that it has adequate buffers in most directions, that the ability of neighbors to coordinate an attack is minimal and that their appetite for such an attack is even less. The single threat that Israel faces from the northeast can readily be managed if the Israelis create a united front there. When Israel was overrun by a Damascus-based power, it was deeply divided internally.
It is important to add one consideration to our discussion of buffers, which is diplomacy. The main neighbors of Israel are Egyptians, Syrians and those who live on the east bank of Jordan. This last group is a negligible force demographically, and the interests of the Syrians and Egyptians are widely divergent. Egypt's interests are to the south and west of its territory; the Sinai holds no attraction. Syria is always threatened from multiple directions, and alliance with Egypt adds little to its security. Therefore, under the worst of circumstances, Egypt and Syria have difficulty supporting each other. Under the best of circumstances, from Israel's point of view, it can reach a political accommodation with Egypt, securing its southwestern frontier politically as well as by geography, thus freeing Israel to concentrate on the northern threats and opportunities.
Israel and the Great Powers
The threat to Israel rarely comes from the region, except when the Israelis are divided internally. The conquests of Israel occur when powers not adjacent to it begin forming empires. Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, Turkey and Britain all controlled Israel politically, sometimes for worse and sometimes for better. Each dominated it militarily, but none was a neighbor of Israel. This is a consistent pattern. Israel can resist its neighbors; danger arises when more distant powers begin playing imperial games. Empires can bring force to bear that Israel cannot resist.
Israel therefore has this problem: It would be secure if it could confine itself to protecting its interests from neighbors, but it cannot confine itself because its geographic location invariably draws larger, more distant powers toward Israel. Therefore, while Israel's military can focus only on immediate interests, its diplomatic interests must look much further. Israel is constantly entangled with global interests (as the globe is defined at any point), seeking to deflect and align with broader global powers. When it fails in this diplomacy, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Israel exists in three conditions. First, it can be a completely independent state. This condition occurs when there are no major imperial powers external to the region. We might call this the David model. Second, it can live as part of an imperial system — either as a subordinate ally, as a moderately autonomous entity or as a satrapy. In any case, it maintains its identity but loses room for independent maneuvering in foreign policy and potentially in domestic policy. We might call this the Persian model in its most beneficent form. Finally, Israel can be completely crushed — with mass deportations and migrations, with a complete loss of autonomy and minimal residual autonomy. We might call this the Babylonian model.
The Davidic model exists primarily when there is no external imperial power needing control of the Levant that is in a position either to send direct force or to support surrogates in the immediate region. The Persian model exists when Israel aligns itself with the foreign policy interests of such an imperial power, to its own benefit. The Babylonian model exists when Israel miscalculates on the broader balance of power and attempts to resist an emerging hegemon. When we look at Israeli behavior over time, the periods when Israel does not confront hegemonic powers outside the region are not rare, but are far less common than when it is confronting them.
Given the period of the first iteration of Israel, it would be too much to say that the Davidic model rarely comes into play, but certainly since that time, variations of the Persian and Babylonian models have dominated. The reason is geographic. Israel is normally of interest to outside powers because of its strategic position. While Israel can deal with local challenges effectively, it cannot deal with broader challenges. It lacks the economic or military weight to resist. Therefore, it is normally in the process of managing broader threats or collapsing because of them.
The Geopolitics of Contemporary Israel
Let us then turn to the contemporary manifestation of Israel. Israel was recreated because of the interaction between a regional great power, the Ottoman Empire, and a global power, Great Britain. During its expansionary phase, the Ottoman Empire sought to dominate the eastern Mediterranean as well as both its northern and southern coasts. One thrust went through the Balkans toward central Europe. The other was toward Egypt. Inevitably, this required that the Ottomans secure the Levant.
For the British, the focus on the eastern Mediterranean was as the primary sea lane to India. As such, Gibraltar and the Suez were crucial. The importance of the Suez was such that the presence of a hostile, major naval force in the eastern Mediterranean represented a direct threat to British interests. It followed that defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I and breaking its residual naval power was critical. The British, as was shown at Gallipoli, lacked the resources to break the Ottoman Empire by main force. They resorted to a series of alliances with local forces to undermine the Ottomans. One was an alliance with Bedouin tribes in the Arabian Peninsula; others involved covert agreements with anti-Turkish, Arab interests from the Levant to the Persian Gulf. A third, minor thrust was aligning with Jewish interests globally, particularly those interested in the refounding of Israel. Britain had little interest in this goal, but saw such discussions as part of the process of destabilizing the Ottomans.
The strategy worked. Under an agreement with France, the Ottoman province of Syria was divided into two parts on a line roughly running east-west between the sea and Mount Hermon. The northern part was given to France and divided into Lebanon and a rump Syria entity. The southern part was given to Britain and was called Palestine, after the Ottoman administrative district Filistina. Given the complex politics of the Arabian Peninsula, the British had to find a home for a group of Hashemites, which they located on the east bank of the Jordan River and designated, for want of a better name, the Trans-Jordan — the other side of the Jordan. Palestine looked very much like traditional Israel.
The ideological foundations of Zionism are not our concern here, nor are the pre- and post-World War II migrations of Jews, although those are certainly critical. What is important for purposes of this analysis are two things: First, the British emerged economically and militarily crippled from World War II and unable to retain their global empire, Palestine included. Second, the two global powers that emerged after World War II — the United States and the Soviet Union — were engaged in an intense struggle for the eastern Mediterranean after World War II, as can be seen in the Greek and Turkish issues at that time. Neither wanted to see the British Empire survive, each wanted the Levant, and neither was prepared to make a decisive move to take it.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union saw the re-creation of Israel as an opportunity to introduce their power to the Levant. The Soviets thought they might have some influence over Israel due to ideology. The Americans thought they might have some influence given the role of American Jews in the founding. Neither was thinking particularly clearly about the matter, because neither had truly found its balance after World War II. Both knew the Levant was important, but neither saw the Levant as a central battleground at that moment. Israel slipped through the cracks.
Once the question of Jewish unity was settled through ruthless action by David Ben Gurion's government, Israel faced a simultaneous threat from all of its immediate neighbors. However, as we have seen, the threat in 1948 was more apparent than real. The northern Levant, Lebanon, was fundamentally disunited — far more interested in regional maritime trade and concerned about control from Damascus. It posed no real threat to Israel. Jordan, settling the eastern bank of the Jordan River, was an outside power that had been transplanted into the region and was more concerned about native Arabs — the Palestinians — than about Israel. The Jordanians secretly collaborated with Israel. Egypt did pose a threat, but its ability to maintain lines of supply across the Sinai was severely limited and its genuine interest in engaging and destroying Israel was more rhetorical than real. As usual, the Egyptians could not afford the level of effort needed to move into the Levant. Syria by itself had a very real interest in Israel's defeat, but by itself was incapable of decisive action.
The exterior lines of Israel's neighbors prevented effective, concerted action. Israel's interior lines permitted efficient deployment and redeployment of force. It was not obvious at the time, but in retrospect we can see that once Israel existed, was united and had even limited military force, its survival was guaranteed. That is, so long as no great power was opposed to its existence.
From its founding until the Camp David Accords re-established the Sinai as a buffer with Egypt, Israel's strategic problem was this: So long as Egypt was in the Sinai, Israel's national security requirements outstripped its military capabilities. It could not simultaneously field an army, maintain its civilian economy and produce all the weapons and supplies needed for war. Israel had to align itself with great powers who saw an opportunity to pursue other interests by arming Israel.
Israel's first patron was the Soviet Union — through Czechoslovakia — which supplied weapons before and after 1948 in the hopes of using Israel to gain a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. Israel, aware of the risks of losing autonomy, also moved into a relationship with a declining great power that was fighting to retain its empire: France. Struggling to hold onto Algeria and in constant tension with Arabs, France saw Israel as a natural ally. And apart from the operation against Suez in 1956, Israel saw in France a patron that was not in a position to reduce Israeli autonomy. However, with the end of the Algerian war and the realignment of France in the Arab world, Israel became a liability to France and, after 1967, Israel lost French patronage.
Israel did not become a serious ally of the Americans until after 1967. Such an alliance was in the American interest. The United States had, as a strategic imperative, the goal of keeping the Soviet navy out of the Mediterranean or, at least, blocking its unfettered access. That meant that Turkey, controlling the Bosporus, had to be kept in the American bloc. Syria and Iraq shifted policies in the late 1950s and by the mid-1960s had been armed by the Soviets. This made Turkey's position precarious: If the Soviets pressed from the north while Syria and Iraq pressed from the south, the outcome would be uncertain, to say the least, and the global balance of power was at stake.
The United States used Iran to divert Iraq's attention. Israel was equally useful in diverting Syria's attention. So long as Israel threatened Syria from the south, it could not divert its forces to the north. That helped secure Turkey at a relatively low cost in aid and risk. By aligning itself with the interests of a great power, Israel lost some of its room for maneuver: For example, in 1973, it was limited by the United States in what it could do to Egypt. But those limitations aside, it remained autonomous internally and generally free to pursue its strategic interests.
The end of hostilities with Egypt, guaranteed by the Sinai buffer zone, created a new era for Israel. Egypt was restored to its traditional position, Jordan was a marginal power on the east bank, Lebanon was in its normal, unstable mode, and only Syria was a threat. However, it was a threat that Israel could easily deal with. Syria by itself could not threaten the survival of Israel.
Following Camp David (an ironic name), Israel was in its Davidic model, in a somewhat modified sense. Its survival was not at stake. Its problems — the domination of a large, hostile population and managing events in the northern Levant — were subcritical (meaning that, though these were not easy tasks, they did not represent fundamental threats to national survival, so long as Israel retained national unity). When unified, Israel has never been threatened by its neighbors. Geography dictates against it.
Israel's danger will come only if a great power seeks to dominate the Mediterranean Basin or to occupy the region between Afghanistan and the Mediterranean. In the short period since the fall of the Soviet Union, this has been impossible. There has been no great power with the appetite and the will for such an adventure. But 15 years is not even a generation, and Israel must measure its history in centuries.
It is the nature of the international system to seek balance. The primary reality of the world today is the overwhelming power of the United States. The United States makes few demands on Israel that matter. However, it is the nature of things that the United States threatens the interests of other great powers who, individually weak, will try to form coalitions against it. Inevitably, such coalitions will arise. That will be the next point of danger for Israel.
In the event of a global rivalry, the United States might place onerous requirements on Israel. Alternatively, great powers might move into the Jordan River valley or ally with Syria, move into Lebanon or ally with Israel. The historical attraction of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean would focus the attention of such a power and lead to attempts to assert control over the Mediterranean or create a secure Middle Eastern empire. In either event, or some of the others discussed, it would create a circumstance in which Israel might face a Babylonian catastrophe or be forced into some variation of a Persian or Roman subjugation.
Israel's danger is not a Palestinian rising. Palestinian agitation is an irritant that Israel can manage so long as it does not undermine Israeli unity. Whether it is managed by domination or by granting the Palestinians a vassal state matters little. Nor can Israel be threatened by its neighbors. Even a unified attack by Syria and Egypt would fail, for the reasons discussed. Israel's real threat, as can be seen in history, lies in the event of internal division and/or a great power, coveting Israel's geographical position, marshalling force that is beyond its capacity to resist. Even that can be managed if Israel has a patron whose interests involve denying the coast to another power.
Israel's reality is this. It is a small country, yet must manage threats arising far outside of its region. It can survive only if it maneuvers with great powers commanding enormously greater resources. Israel cannot match the resources and, therefore, it must be constantly clever. There are periods when it is relatively safe because of great power alignments, but its normal condition is one of global unease. No nation can be clever forever, and Israel's history shows that some form of subordination is inevitable. Indeed, it is to a very limited extent subordinate to the United States now.
For Israel, the retention of a Davidic independence is difficult. Israel's strategy must be to manage its subordination effectively by dealing with its patron cleverly, as it did with Persia. But cleverness is not a geopolitical concept. It is not permanent, and it is not assured. And that is the perpetual crisis of Jerusalem.

























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14 June, 2011

Article 1. The Washington Post
From a Saudi prince, tough talk on America’s favoritism toward Israel
Richard Cohen
Article 2. Boston Globe
Turkey’s new challenges
Stephen Kinzer
Article 3. The Financial Times
Why Syria will get away with it
Gideon Rachman
Article 4. The American Interest
The Conservative Revolutionary
Walter Russell Mead
Article 5. NYT
Iran Without Nukes
Roger Cohen
Article 6. NATIONAL REVIEW
Interview with - Francis Fukuyama
Matthew Shaffer
Article 7. Project Syndicate
Does Anything Matter?
Peter Singer



Article 1.

The Washington Post

From a Saudi prince, tough talk on America’s favoritism toward Israel

Richard Cohen



June 13 -- As best I can recall, I first met Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal at a private home in Washington years ago. I found him stern and humorless, sometimes even bitter. I have seen him since at international conferences and the like — never in the mood for small talk and exhibiting, sometimes in his glorious robes, not an ounce of Bedouin charm. Still, I was unprepared for the opinion column he published in Sunday’s Post. It read like a declaration of war.

Prince Turki is not now in the government. Yet he is a member of the Saudi royal family and was once the kingdom’s intelligence chief and its former ambassador to both London and Washington. The man is solidly credentialed.

He is also angry as hell, and he lets America have it. He starts by citing what he calls President Obama’s “controversial speech last month, admonishing Arab governments to embrace democracy and provide freedom to their populations.” Saudi Arabia, he wrote, heard what Obama said and took it “seriously,” and he noted, of course, that Obama had not demanded the same rights for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Point taken.

But the same kingdom that has taken Obama “seriously” is an absolute monarchy that, among other things, bans women from driving cars. It is also a country that offers no freedom of religion but offers, for the occasional criminal, a public beheading. Given that Turki has spent a good deal of time in the West, it’s not possible that he was unaware that commentators like me would be picky about the lack of basic freedoms. He doesn’t care.

Indeed, that was the point. Turki — and by implication all of Saudi Arabia — has had it with the United States. The kingdom will not be lectured to. It is sick and tired of American favoritism to Israel — the exuberant congressional reception for Binyamin Netanyahu, for example — and the administration’s decision to oppose any effort in the United Nations to create a Palestinian state. In this matter, America is doing what Israel wants.

“In September, the kingdom will use its considerable diplomatic might to support the Palestinians in their quest for international recognition,” Turki wrote. “American leaders have long called Israel an ‘indispensable’ ally. They will soon learn that there are other players in the region — not least the Arab street — who are as, if not more, ‘indispensable.’ The game of favoritism toward Israel has not proven wise for Washington, and soon it will be shown to be an even greater folly.”

This is not your usual diplomatic language — and even for Turki it is rough. It shows, though, a not-surprising frustration in the Arab world with American policy tethered for the moment to a quite stubborn and unimaginative Israeli policy. Both countries are suffering from a surfeit of democracy. Israel’s governing coalition is held hostage by the right; America’s governing coalition is in the same fix.

Turki does not run out of wagging fingers. He says that those who think that the United States and Israel will determine the future of Palestine are dead wrong. “There will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state. It would mark a nadir in the decades-long relationship as well as irrevocably damage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and America’s reputation among Arab nations. The ideological distance between the Muslim world and the West in general would widen — and opportunities for friendship and cooperation between the two could vanish.” This from our ally, not to mention friendly gas station.

The tone of the column is both remarkable and ominous. It comes, as I said, from a man of little charm, but he is nevertheless a skilled diplomat and intelligence chief. While his vexation over the Palestinian problem is well-known, rarely has it been carried to this extent — and in such a public venue.

A Post opinion column is designed to get the attention of the American government. I’m sure Prince Turki succeeded in that. But I hope he also got the attention of the Israeli government, which for some time now has enjoyed Saudi moderation on the Palestinian question. That seems about to change — not the least because the Arab street that Turki expressly mentioned is demanding it and the Saudis will, if they have to, appease the street. This is the gravamen of Prince Turki’s piece and is why he ends it so ominously for Israel: “I’d hate to be around when they face their comeuppance.”






Article 2.

Boston Globe

Turkey’s new challenges

Stephen Kinzer



June 14, 2011 -- SUNDAY’S ELECTION in Turkey was another reminder of the country’s astonishing rise, which has been one of the most dramatic geopolitical stories of the last decade. For the first 80 years of its existence as a nation, Turkey was dominated by generals and played almost no role in the world. Now it is a vibrant democracy and a major force in the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, the Balkans, and beyond. The election was a triumph for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has presided over his country’s remarkable transformation. His party won more votes than all other parties combined, making him the first Turkish prime minister in more than half a century to win three consecutive terms. He will naturally be tempted to take this victory as a mandate to charge ahead with his own projects. Instead he should do the opposite: curb his divisive rhetoric, adjust his authoritarian style, and seek broad support for projects that will strengthen Turkey and help calm the world’s most volatile region.

Syrians who are racing toward Turkey in search of refuge represent Erdogan’s most immediate challenge. Turkey has become not just a safe haven, but a model for what many Arabs would like to see their countries become. This model — a government with roots in Islam but also committed to democracy, free enterprise, and good relations with Europe and the United States — represents the dream of millions of Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Syrians, Jordanians, and Palestinians.

Finding a way to stabilize the ever-more-turbulent Middle East is Turkey’s most urgent task. Erdogan is obsessed with his drive to make Turkey one of the world’s 10 biggest economies (it is now 17th). This will only be possible if the Middle East is peaceful and open for business.

Besides dealing with upheaval in the Arab world, Turkey faces three other key foreign policy challenges. First is the continuing division of Cyprus between ethnic Greek and Turkish sectors. Second is the frozen conflict with Armenia, which seemed to be on the brink of resolution until Turkish and Armenian nationalists killed a promising agreement reached by both countries two years ago. Erdogan’s new mandate gives him the power to overrule militants in his ranks. If he does, and if Armenian leaders can do the same, the entire region will benefit.

Third is to rebuild relations with Israel. Erdogan has become a hero in the Middle East for his forthright denunciations of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. Like many Turks, he is still enraged over the murder of nine Turkish civilians by Israeli commandos who stormed a freighter bearing relief supplies for Gaza last year. His anger may be justified by the facts, but he should realize that a resumption of Turkey’s good ties to Israel could be a decisive step toward Middle East peace.

Foreign policy challenges are only part of Erdogan’s post-election agenda. He also needs to deepen Turkish democracy. That would require resolving the decades-old Kurdish conflict and taking concrete steps to reassure secular Turks that their country is not moving toward religious rule.

Turkey’s grand project in the next couple of years will be writing a new constitution to replace the one imposed by generals three decades ago. Erdogan wants to replace the current parliamentary system with one built around a strong president and then run for the presidency himself. His party did not win enough seats in Parliament to impose a constitution on its own, so if he wants to make such a radical change, he will have to propose a constitution that represents a national consensus. That can only be reached if the constitution includes strong guarantees of free speech, rights for women, judicial independence, and cultural freedom for all ethnic and religious groups.

Such a constitution would embody the wishes of most Turks. It might also reinvigorate Turkey’s stalled campaign to join the European Union. If Turkey becomes an EU member by the time it celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2023, that would be Erdogan’s eternal legacy.

Turkey is poised to become one of the most successful countries of the 21st century, a model of Muslim democracy and a powerful force for regional peace. Whether it will fulfill its potential depends largely on how Erdogan handles the mandate he has just won.



Stephen Kinzer teaches international relations at Boston University and is author of “Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future.’’


Article 3.

The Financial Times

Why Syria will get away with it

Gideon Rachman



June 13 2011 -- late last week, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, launched an offensive of his own. In a speech in Brussels, he dismissed most of America’s European allies as a useless bunch of timewasters. I paraphrase – but not much.

Mr Gates pointed out that while all Nato countries had voted to intervene in Libya, most had chosen not to participate in the actual fighting. Even those European countries that are taking part began to run short of munitions just 11 weeks into the fighting – forcing an exasperated America to step into the breach. More broadly, a situation in which the US accounts for 75 per cent of the military spending in Nato was “unacceptable” and unsustainable. If it is not rectified, Mr Gates predicted, Nato faces a “dismal” future.

The conjunction of the Gates speech and the Syrian civil war is very telling. It explains why a 20-year experiment with the idea that western military force can put the world to rights is coming to a close.

Just a few weeks ago, that would have seemed a surprising conclusion. Supporters of “liberal interventionism” hailed the decision to bomb Colonel Gaddafi’s forces in Libya as evidence of a longed-for new era, in which dictators can no longer feel free to massacre their own people.

However a western failure to intervene, as the Syrian army brutalises and kills its own citizens, is likely to be a more accurate guide to the future than the Libyan campaign. There is, of course, a direct link between the west’s reluctance to get involved in Syria and the frustrating and (so far) inconclusive nature of the Libyan intervention.

However, the Syrian conflict also needs to be seen in the context of a generation-long experiment with liberal interventionism. That era began in 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the world’s sole superpower and a swift victory in the first Gulf war restored confidence in the power and effectiveness of American military might. Since then, the debate about how and when to use military power has waxed and waned. Western governments chastised themselves over the failure to protect the Kurds and the Shia in Iraq in 1991, over the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and over the many years of dithering as lives were lost in the Balkans. But a series of apparently successful interventions – Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone – gradually strengthened the belief that western military power could be used to end conflicts and save civilians.

The bitter experiences of the Afghan and Iraq wars, however, shifted the debate on military intervention once more. Both Barack Obama in the US and David Cameron in Britain promised to be leaders who would adopt a much more cautious attitude to foreign military adventures. Then along came the Arab spring and western leaders once again found themselves committing to military action, this time in Libya – Mr Obama with evident reluctance, Mr Cameron and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France with apparent enthusiasm.

The Libyan war illustrates how unfolding events can force a political leader’s hand. That could still happen in Syria. But it seems much more likely that, this time, the west will stand aside.

In part, this is because of deadlock at the UN, where Russia and China – angry about the Libyan war – are blocking efforts to pass a resolution that even condemns events in Syria, let alone prepares the ground for intervention. However the broader context is the west’s diminishing ability and willingness to intervene at all.

The Gates speech effectively marks the end of the American ambition to turn Nato into the global, military arm of a unified western world. The Americans have flirted with this idea, ever since the onset of the “war on terror”. But, as the Afghan war has worn on, so the military effort has become more and more heavily dependent on the US.

The fact that Europeans called for a campaign in Libya that they are incapable of conducting alone has merely re-enforced the American view that the European arm of Nato is, to varying degrees, feckless and unreliable. Disarray and recriminations within Nato hobble the single most effective potential tool for western military intervention overseas.

Even more significant in the long run is the American anxiety that budgetary constraints, which are leading to defence cuts in Europe, are beginning to be replicated in the US itself. Admiral Michael Mullen, America’s top military officer, has called the budget deficit the single biggest threat to US national security. It is also the single biggest constraint on future bouts of “liberal interventionism”.

Money is not the only problem, however. Over the past 20 years it has become apparent that swiftly agreed-upon military actions can lead to entanglements that last for many years. There is still a Nato mission in Kosovo and an EU military mission in Bosnia, more than a decade after the fighting ended in both places.

As for Afghanistan – that conflict has now lasted almost twice as long as the second world war. Western governments are also only beginning to come to terms with what may soon be required in Libya. Against this background, there are very few takers for yet another military venture – this time in Syria.




Article 4.

The American Interest

The Conservative Revolutionary

Walter Russell Mead



June 12, 2011 -- The United States is the most revolutionary power in the history of the world, but after more than 200 years of a brilliant revolutionary career we are still not very good at understanding or responding to the revolutions our example, our ideas, our economy and our technology do so much to create.

The Arab spring is the latest example of the clash between America’s revolutionary world role and our pathetic cluelessness about the forces we do so much to promote. The Arab Spring is turning into a long, hot summer. Civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen and the sullen silence of the Shi’a in Bahrain have baptized Arab democracy in blood. More will flow — and American foreign policy is befuddled and bemused.

None of the experts look particularly smart at the moment. The ‘realists’ who counseled President Obama to forget George W. Bush’s support of Middle Eastern democracy and cultivate our relations with regional despots like Hosni Mubarak, the Iranian mullahs and the younger Assad have been sent back to the benches in disgrace. Their counsel is now seen as both morally dubious and pragmatically unwise; the ‘realists’ would have put the US on the wrong side of history in the service of unrealistic assumptions about the stability of despotic regimes.

But the idealists who seek to replace them already have egg on their faces. “Days, not weeks” is what they promised the President when he began to bomb for democracy in Libya. The democratic revolution in Egypt is looking less democratic by the day; it looks more and more as if the Army used public unrest to block the Mubarak family’s attempt to turn Egypt into a family possession. The Army has ruled Egypt since the overthrow of King Farouk, playing liberals and religious conservatives off against each other. It looks set to go on doing that for some time to come. In Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, the counsel of the idealists seems dark and confused. US policy overall seems to have found the ‘sour spot’ that is the particular curse of the Obama administration: too friendly to the revolt to earn the trust and gratitude of the despots, too cautious and compromising to win many friends on the street.

Overall I am more cautious than optimistic about where the Arab Spring is headed. There is little prospect for the kind of rapid economic growth that could improve the prospects for young unemployed and underemployed Arabs. Foreign investment and tourism have already been badly hit by the unrest of the last six months, and the Arab regimes are turning to aid donors and organizations like the IMF and the World Bank in increasing desperation.

Culturally, many of the necessary preconditions are not in place. The poor quality of most Arab universities, the limited access to serious political history and discourse among all but a handful of Arab intellectuals, the suppression of political life under past dictatorships, the weakness of Islamic political thought in recent centuries and the absence of a robust and deeply rooted tradition of Islamic democracy all work against the rapid widespread development of stable liberal democracy in the Arab world.

Putting the dark economic outlook together with the problematic cultural and political situation makes optimism a tough position to hold. Without in any way scanting or minimizing the idealism, dedication and vision of the democrats rising in the Arab world today, they still seem a long way from winning. They remind me still of the Marquis de Lafayette during the French Revolution: they believe in all the right ideas, but their countries aren’t ready for the vision they seek to promote. They can help make a revolution but others will, for a time at least, determine the flow of events.

If true, then both the realists and the idealists are wrong about the Arab Revolution. The realists are wrong that despotic regimes can provide long term stability in the region; the idealists are wrong that the fall of the old despots will lead to liberal democratic states.

Americans have been getting foreign revolutions wrong for more than 200 years. It began with the French Revolution. Enthusiasts like Thomas Jefferson initially thought they saw France following in America’s footsteps. Then came the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and a generation of brutal war.

Many Americans responded with the same generous enthusiasm to the South American revolutions against colonial rule. Once again, those revolutions failed to establish anything like liberal democratic rule.

The cycles of revolution — 1830, 1848, 1917-20, 1946-1960 (decolonization), 1989-91, 2003-5 and now 2011 — catch Americans flatfooted over and over again. We are surprised when they occur, and we are surprised when they fail to follow the course we expect.

Delusional Realists

The realists are half right: most revolutions will not bring about stable democratic societies. But realists get the other half wrong; revolution is a basic fact of modern life and the kind of ‘stability’ that old fashioned diplomats long for is just a mirage. American foreign policy cannot proceed on the assumption that despotic, frozen regimes will last. They won’t. Sooner or later they will come crashing down — and as the pace of technological and social change around the world continues to accelerate, such revolutionary upheavals are likely to become more frequent.

There is another problem with realism. Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether our government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant; American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do. Saudi conservatives know that whatever geopolitical arrangements the Saudi princes make with the American government, the American people are busily undermining the core principles of Saudi society. It’s not just our NGOs educating Saudi women and civil society activists; it’s not just the impact of American college life on the rising generation of the Saudi elite. We change the world even when we aren’t thinking anything about global revolution — when Hollywood and rap musicians are just trying to make a buck, they are stoking the fires of change around the world.

A revolutionary nation cannot make a conservative foreign policy work for long. In the 1820s and 1830s Washington tried to reassure the Mexican government that it had no hostile designs against Mexican territory. But the American people were moving into Texas and the US government couldn’t stop that movement or blunt the threat to Mexico if it tried. In the same way today, the economic and political activity of individual Americans and American companies is changing the world in ways that make life much harder for governments in countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. We can press all the reset buttons with Russia that we want, but the Russian government will still notice that both US society and sometimes the government are actively working to help foreign subversives overthrow repressive regimes.

Feckless Idealists

If the desire of our realists to conduct foreign policy with foreign despots as if unprincipled cooperation with the bad guys could build a stable world is unrealistic, the idealism of our enthusiasts that every new foreign revolution will bring a millennium of democratic peace is absurd.

American foreign policy cannot expect that revolutions in foreign countries will rescue us from the painful dilemmas our foreign policy often confronts. Revolution is not the deus ex machina that will make the world peaceful; it is a tsunami that sweeps everything before it, and often leaves the world messier and more dangerous.

Modern history teaches two great lessons about revolution: that revolutions are inevitable, and that a large majority of revolutions either fail or go bad. Americans almost instinctively look at revolutions in terms of our own past: the 1688 Glorious Revolution that made Parliament more powerful than the King in England, and the American Revolution that led in relatively short order to the establishment of a stable and constitutional government.

Most revolutions don’t work like this at all. Many of them fail, with the old despots crushing dissent or making only cosmetic changes to the old system. (This happened in Austria in 1848 and something very like it may be happening in Egypt today.) Others move into radicalism, terror and mob rule before a new despot comes along to bring order — at least until the next futile and bloody revolutionary spasm. That was France’s history for almost 100 years after the storming of the Bastille. China, Russia and Iran all saw revolutions like this in the 20th century.

The revolutions that ‘work’ are the exceptions, not the rule. The peaceful revolutions in the Central European countries as Soviet power melted in 1989-1990 are a unique exception to the rule that most revolutions either turn nasty or fail. When many American idealists think about revolution today, they have Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in mind.

Few assumptions can lead you into as much trouble this quickly. Even in 1989-90, those countries were the exception and not the rule. Think Ukraine, Belarus, Yugoslavia, Romania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and of course Russia itself. More people live in countries where the 1989-90 revolutionary wave failed to establish secure constitutional democracy than live in those where it succeeded.

More, the countries that had ‘velvet’ revolutions shared a number of important characteristics. They had or longed to have close political and cultural ties to the West. They wanted to join NATO and the EU, and had a reasonable confidence of doing so sooner rather than later. They could expect enormous amounts of aid and foreign direct investment if they continued along the path of democratic reform. They lay on the ‘western’ side of the ancient division of Europe between the Orthodox east and the Catholic/Protestant homeland of the modern liberal tradition.

No Arab country looks anything like this. Indeed, most seem closer to Yugoslavia and Belarus or, at best, Ukraine. We, and they, may get lucky, and the revolutions in the Arab world may lead to something that looks more like Central Europe than like Central Asia. That would be a nice surprise, but we should not be placing large bets that this will actually happen.

China, by the way, does not look very much like the Czech Republic. Revolution there is very unlikely to produce a US or European style democracy anytime soon.

If realists ignore the inevitability of revolution, idealists close their eyes to the problems of revolutionary upheavals in societies that have difficult histories, deep social divisions, and poor short term economic prospects. Unfortunately the countries most likely to experience revolutions are usually the countries that lack the preconditions for Anglo-American style relatively peaceful revolutions that end with the establishment of stable constitutional order. If things were going well in those countries, they would not be having revolutions.

Historically, revolutions in foreign countries are both necessary for their political development and inevitable. They often tend to make American foreign policy more difficult — and the world more dangerous. On the evidence so far, this is the pattern we are seeing in the Middle East today.

Revolutionary Realism?

The difficulty American policymakers have in coming to grips with the recurring phenomenon of foreign revolutions is rooted in America’s paradoxical world role. We are not just the world’s leading revolutionary nation; we are also the chief custodian of the international status quo. We are upholding the existing balance of power and the international system of finance and trade with one hand, but the American agenda in the world ultimately aims to transform rather than to defend.

It is harder to be an effective revolutionary power than to be a conservative one — and it is harder still to combine the two roles.

A traditional conservative power knows what it wants. Revolutionary powers have a tougher job; building the future is harder work than holding on to the past. This is particularly true in the American case; the global transformation we seek is unparalleled for depth, complexity and scale.

We are not sure how this revolutionary transformation works. We know that it involves liberal political change: governments of law rather than of men and legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed as measured in regular and free elections. We also know that involves intellectual and social change: traditional religious ideas must make room for the equality of the sexes and the rights of religious minorities. Property rights must be rooted in law and protected by an independent judicial system. While governments have a role in the economy, the mechanisms of the market must ultimately be allowed to work their way.

We do not agree among ourselves about the proper sequence of these changes. We know that in the short run, democratic voting procedures may not produce liberal governments. We know that demagogues and aspiring despots can use the language and even the mechanisms of democracy to build personal dictatorships (Napoleon III and Hugo Chavez, for example). We know that popular opinion is sometimes more nationalistic than elite opinion and that gains for democracy do not always lead to more foreign policy cooperation. In most cases, progress toward stable and peaceful democratic government comes slowly if it comes at all; even if you believe in ‘democratic peace theory, hoping that the democratization of other countries will solve American foreign policy problems is a fool’s game.

Yet we also know — or at least we believe — that in the long run a more democratic world is a better if not always a safer world, and that it would be immoral as well as impractical to stand in the way of the changes that need to come.

If we add the conservative mission of the United States to the revolutionary agenda, the problems of American foreign policy become more complex still. We are trying to carry out a vast reordering of global society even as we preserve the stability of the international political order: we are trying to walk blindfolded on a tightrope across Niagara Falls — while changing our clothes.

The uncertainties and risks that surround us should not be underestimated. There has never been a worldwide revolution of this kind before; nobody knows for sure how best to speed the plow. Nobody has ever had to balance transformational and conservative roles on a global scale before.

From an American point of view, the Arab Spring is just another complication of this global task — a sudden thunderstorm with flashes of lightening, driving rain and unpredictable gusts of wind as we hop one-legged on the tightrope changing our pants. The Islamic world is entering new territory as it struggles to integrate religious and liberal political values; as the United States tries to juggle its geopolitical interests with its values at a volatile moment in world history, we are almost certain to get the balance wrong much of the time.

Here, however, history offers some hope. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, the United States has been doing two things for more than 200 years: getting foreign revolutions wrong, but somehow still pushing its global revolution forward. America’s success as a conservative revolutionary power on a global scale depends less on the clever policies of our presidents and our secretaries of state, and more on the creativity and dynamism of American society as a whole.

It is power of a free people more than the brilliance of our intellectual and social establishment that has brought the United States this far; in that truth lies the secret of our revolution and of our success.









Article 5.

NYT

Iran Without Nukes

Roger Cohen



June 13, 2011 — Remember Iran?

I do. It’s been two years since the Iranian people rose up to protest a stolen election with a bravery that stirred the world and presented Americans with a truer image of a young and highly educated nation than the old specter of the bearded Islamic zealot. The Green Movement was suppressed through barbaric violence but its example helped kindle the Arab Spring.

As Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University wrote in July, 2009: “Tehran, I believe, is ground zero of a civil rights movement that will leave no Muslim or Arab country, or even Israel, untouched.” He added, “The moving pictures of Iranians flooding colorfully into the streets have forever altered the visual vocabulary of the global perception of ‘the Middle East.”’

Seldom were there more prescient words.

They were quoted by Nader Hashemi of the University of Denver in a recent talk on Iran, in which he noted shared Iranian and Arab aims: “Democracy and dignity, the rule of law and respect for basic human rights, political transparency and an end to corruption.”

That urge is still powerful in Iran beneath the opaque, directionless apparatus of the Islamic Republic. Iran is weak now, its ideology as tired as Osama Bin Laden’s, as marginal to peoples questing to reconcile their Muslim faith and modernity in new ways.

I would probe this weakness through new approaches. But we are stuck still with the world’s most paranoid relationship: the American-Iranian relationship. That’s largely because there’s another way to remember Iran — as the Godot of nuclear threats, the country always on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon or acquiring the “breakout capacity” to make one, but never, despite the dire warning of Israeli leaders dating back to the 1990s, doing either, preferring to dwell in the Islamic Republic’s favored zones: ambivalence and inertia. As one awaits this tortuous Godot, one might recall a forecast of a bomb by 1999 (Shimon Peres) or 2004 (Ehud Barak), or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk of “a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” or my friend Jeffrey Goldberg’s allusion in The Atlantic last year to a “consensus” that there is “a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.” That would be next month.

It might also be worth recalling that Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, declared last month that attacking Iran would be “a stupid idea.” He suggested his main worry was not Iran itself but Netanyahu’s susceptibility to “dangerous adventure.”

Dagan’s concerns have surfaced as Seymour Hersh concludes in a New Yorker article this month that, as he put it in one interview, “There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon.”

His reporting reveals that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) of 2007 — which concluded “with high confidence” that Iran had halted a nuclear-weapons program in 2003 — still pertains in the classified N.I.E. of 2011. As a retired senior intelligence official put it to Hersh, there’s nothing “substantially new” that “leads to a bomb.”

In other words, Iran, epicenter of inefficiency, unable to produce a kilowatt of electricity through its Bushehr nuclear reactor despite decades of effort, is still doing its old brinkmanship number.

Remember, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is the guardian of the revolution. That is a conservative business. Breakout, let alone a bomb, is a bridge too far if the Islamic Republic is what you’ve vowed to preserve. Much better to gain leverage by producing low-enriched uranium — far from weapons grade — under International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and allow rumors to swirl.

So Iran, long at the top of the Washington agenda, has slid down. It’s partly the Arab Spring. It’s partly that you can’t keep saying the same thing. People do begin to remember the refrain, although nobody in the large Iran-the-clear-and-present-danger school ever seems to get called to account. They should be. The nuclear bogeyman obsession has been a distraction from the need to try to tease out a relationship with Tehran, see Iran as it is. Only the most flimsy efforts have been made, insufficient to test the waters.

Those waters are troubled. The Islamic Republic has not recovered from its convulsion of 2009. It is sickly, consumed by hypocrisy as it cheers on some brave Arabs (but not those in Syria) while brutalizing its own seekers of the freedom promised in 1979. Arabs aren’t buying Iranian hypocrisy. Only Iran’s command of Revolutionary Guard force and the opposition’s lack of a shared goal salvage it.

Khamenei is at loggerheads with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who got into such a sulk recently that he took 11 days off work, infuriating everybody. The Majlis, or parliament, is investigating Ahmadinejad for various alleged frauds including, of all things, vote-buying in 2009! Ahmadinejad was booed during his June 3 speech commemorating Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. Iran is characterized by what Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii recently termed “administrative chaos.”

That’s not how you make a nuke. When remembering Iran — and it must be remembered — call the fear-mongers to account.










Article 6.

NATIONAL REVIEW

Interview with - Francis Fukuyama: The Difficulty of Political Order

Matthew Shaffer



June 13, 2011 -- It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Francis Fukuyama one of the most important thinkers in America. He’s a rare triple threat in public-intellectual life — maintaining high appointments in academe, producing popular books and magazine writing consumed by the chattering classes, and advising American presidents and foreign leaders directly. He combines expertise and influence with breadth: He’s worked on questions as imperial as American grand strategy and as delicate and abstract as bioethics. He’s most famous for The End of History and the Last Man, whose perennially misunderstood title is often jeered, but which defined a decade’s thinking about the post–Cold War world order and globalization. His latest book is Origins of Political Order, which traces a single story through several millennia and dozens of different cultures, empires, and societies — the story of how man emerged from tribal structures into a modern state. Fukuyama talks with NRO’s Matthew Shaffer, about the book and how his thinking about world order and America’s place in it has changed over the last 20 years.




MATTHEW SHAFFER: Origins is a historical work, as opposed to previous works, such as The End of History, and Our Posthuman Future, which were more theoretical. What, for you, is the prescriptive value of history?


FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: This really started with a practical concern I had after dealing with failed states and nation-building issues in the wake of September 11 and our nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seemed to me that the United States in particular didn’t appreciate the difficulty of this kind of activity, because we didn’t adequately understand how hard it was to establish institutions. When I was at Johns Hopkins at SAIS [School of Advanced International Studies] I ran an international-development program, focusing on issues of anti-corruption and improving governance. And a lot of it seemed premised on an overly optimistic faith in the ability of outsiders to effect desired outcomes. So I decided to write a book about where institutions came from in countries that had them and could take them for granted. We’ve forgotten a lot of that history and how we’ve gotten to the present. Along the way it was also a means of revisiting a lot of The End of History 20 years later.

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SHAFFER: Some theorists, like Hegel, think that history doesn’t just tell us what is stable, or what works, but actually points us toward moral progress. Do you believe that?



FUKUYAMA: Fundamentally, I believe in liberal democracy, that it’s the best form of government, and that the world has made moral progress. But that’s a separate question from whether the development of democratic institutions is inevitable and driven by an underlying historical force. I’ve become more skeptical of that latter belief over the years as I’ve become more attentive to the role of accident and contingency. And my current book is about a lot of that. For example: The reason we got to democracy in Europe is the almost accidental survival of a feudal institution — the English parliament — into the modern period. That’s something that didn’t happen in other European countries, and which we therefore can’t take for granted. So, as you see, the normative concern is separate from the empirical question of whether democracy is inevitable.




SHAFFER: Origins incorporates economics, anthropology, philosophy, and social psychology, for lessons about political order. Is that kind of study too rare today?



FUKUYAMA: This is partly the fault of the structure of academia. There’s such a premium placed on specialization and narrowness that it’s very hard to think more broadly and to cross disciplinary boundaries. I work at Stanford in an interdisciplinary institute, and I’ve been associated with these kinds of outfits for most of my years. And those are where the most interesting research gets done.




SHAFFER: What field outside of political science has the most important insights for understanding political order?



FUKUYAMA: That’s hard to say. I don’t know if there is one. Part of the problem is economics — it’s a very important discipline, but in a way it’s colonized the rest of the social sciences. A lot of political analysis in academia is driven by this model of everybody being a rational decision maker driven by more or less material interests. There’s obviously something to that, but it’s a very limited way of looking about politics, which is about dignity and values and ideas that can’t be explained in material terms. Other disciplines — sociology and anthropology — have gotten at those things better than economics has.




SHAFFER: Your chapter “How Christianity Undermines the Family” is provocatively titled and sort of microcosmic for your whole thesis. Can you tell us about it?



FUKUYAMA: You can’t have modern politics if society is based on the biological principles of supporting friends and family. That’s the natural mode of human sociability. We’re naturally inclined to take care of family and exchange favors with friends. Human beings will interact in that manner without anyone telling them to behave that way because it’s biologically grounded.



In all human societies, social order at one stage depended on extended kinship — people living in tribes where people traced ancestry to a common ancestor that may be three, four, or five generations dead. This was no less true of Europeans than it was of the Chinese, or Arabs, or Africans, or anyone else in the world. All the Germanic barbarians organized themselves tribally after overrunning the Roman Empire.

One of the broad questions I’ve addressed in the book is how did these different societies make an exit out of kinship-based social organization into a modern-based state, with impersonal, centralized administration? Europe in that respect was quite exceptional, because that happened early, and it happened through the agency of the Catholic Church, which changed the rules of inheritance for kin-groups. It forbade divorce, it forbade concubinage, and it forbade cousin marriages within three or four degrees of relatedness. All of these were practices in tribal societies that kept property within an extended kin-group. In the Arab world in many places they still encourage cross-cousin marriage, where you marry your first cousin and the two families get to keep property within this narrow circle.



When the Catholic Church [forbade cousin marriage] in the eighth century, it wasn’t thinking about the effect on kinship. It was acting in a self-interested way, because by cutting off these ways of kin-groups’ keeping property, the Church ended up being the beneficiary. So if a woman didn’t marry and didn’t have children but had a big estate, she tended to donate it to the Church. So the Church helped effect in Europe the breakdown of extended kinship very, very early. Even in the beginning of the Middle Ages, people owned property as individuals. Women could hold property — they could sell it, alienate it, in ways that they still can’t in parts of the Arab world. And this meant that individualism became very deeply rooted in European society. So some individualism was already established by the time Europe got to feudalism. And feudalism is basically a contract — it’s one that is very hierarchical, between a stronger and weaker person, but it is a contract between two people.



So the idea of exchange and private property dates way, way back, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment, Reformation, etc. So I think that the basis for European modernization traces all the way back to developments like that. In China, in India, the exit out of kinship was accomplished through political power, via a state that tried to create impersonal government layered on top of a kin-based society. And those kin-groups really never went away. Even in contemporary China and India, in certain parts there are still kin-groups that influence politics.




SHAFFER: But China had an impersonal government — a meritocratic bureaucracy — without Christianity, and long before the West did, yes?



FUKUYAMA: So you have to understand what that means. China didn’t create the first state, it created the first modern state, meaning a state which recruited people into a centralized bureaucracy based on talent and merit, essentially, and not based on family relations, or connections to the household of the emperor, or something of that sort. So it had a modern form of public administration. And this was all consolidated by the third century B.C. But what the country never got to was the rule of law. Up to the modern day, the concept of a sovereign being limited by the rule of law never existed. So what that meant is that at a very early period in their history, the Chinese perfected strong, absolutist government. And that’s been a consistent pattern — high-quality, authoritarian government. And I think that continues up to the present.




SHAFFER: Could we trace Western ascendance to that one factor, the rule of law?



FUKUYAMA: That’s what’s interesting about the present period. A lot of economic theory says you can’t have modern economic growth without Western-style rule of law. Economists who believe this are thinking about two critical things — property rights and contract enforcement. And there’s a lot of theory and a lot of empirical evidence that show that these are in fact important. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t really square with the facts in contemporary China. As everybody knows, for the past three decades, China has been growing at double-digit rates and they don’t have Western rule of law.



I think you can rescue the theory in the long run, because without rule of law they can’t keep this up. In a way the challenge that contemporary China poses it that they are doing well, and in the short run they’re doing better than the United States without having these Western institutions. The real challenge is the long-run sustainability of that system, or of the two systems. And looking at that in the long-run, I would still bet on the West, with its rule of law and systems of checks and balances on authority.



SHAFFER: You’ve probably heard a lot of phony rebuttals based on misreading of The End of History. So, I won’t attempt one — but you’ve made oblique references to your own revisions and criticisms. How does the rise of China and the current Arab unrest, for example, fit into the end of history?



FUKUYAMA: If you understand the original thesis correctly, what I was saying is that there was a theory of history among progressive intellectuals for most of the 20th century. That theory of history was Marxism. And according to the Marxists, the end of history was a communist utopia. My observation in the late 1980s is that we weren’t going to get there. Liberal democracies seemed to be the highest stage of political development, and I didn’t see any real alternatives. If you understand the thesis that way, I still believe that. Nothing that’s happened in the last 20 years has convinced me that there’s a higher form of government. Certainly not 9/11 — I don’t think anybody wants to live in a place like Iran and Afghanistan, so I don’t think that’s a serious competitor. China is a more plausible alternative. But I don’t think that anybody who’s not culturally Chinese would duplicate their system, and the Chinese are not really proselytizing their system. So I still think liberal democracy is the default form of government.



What’s changed for me are a couple of things: One is the idea of political decay. It wasn’t an important part of the End of History. But I do think that all political systems, including liberal democracies, can decay over time. They can get too rigid, they can fail to adapt, and if they do, then they’re going to get into trouble, just like authoritarian systems. The other issue, which we’ve already touched on, is contingency in history. So the route to getting into modernity is, I now think, full of a lot of accident, and so it’s not as if there’s this inevitable historical process that driving us toward the present. I think it should make us both more appreciative of the fact that we’ve gotten to the present and also more aware of the fragility of modern institutions.




SHAFFER: A lot of people have related that — your focus on the contingency of political order, and our ability to construct democracies — to your “falling-out” with neoconservatism. Was that “falling out” just local to some of the failures and disappointments of the Bush years or was it a break with the intellectual project as a whole?



FUKUYAMA: It was more a practical dispute over methods. I didn’t think U.S. hard power was an effective method [for advancing liberal democracy], and the Bush administration hadn’t really thought through the implications of invading Iraq. I still think there are ways that the United States can help promote democracy, but it’s a slow and long-term process. For example, I’m on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, which had an important role in supporting solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, and in Serbia, and the Orange Coalition in Ukraine. So there are ways in which we’ve encouraged democratic forces around the world. I still believe in that mission and project. But I don’t think the Bush administration actually invaded Iraq to promote democracy. They had security objectives in mind, and they added the democracy argument as an afterthought, and that’s what stuck in people’s minds. That was a mistake, because it kind of undermined the notion of democracy promotion, simply because it was connected to a very unpopular intervention.



SHAFFER: Taking lessons from that, what can we do to promote democracy in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring”?



FUKUYAMA: We already are doing a lot. We’ve got organizations like the National Democratic Institute, or the International Republican Institute, that are all over Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, and other places, trying to help them organize political parties, trade unions, civil-society organizations, that hopefully will allow the more Western-oriented democrats in those Arab countries to actually contest in the elections. As we move toward votes in Tunisia and Egypt we want to have some alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. So we’re giving them that kind of assistance right now. That’s difficult, because they haven’t had experience with democracy previously.



It’s a long-term struggle, and I think we’ll be disappointed in the short run. I don’t think the more pro-Western forces are the ones that will end up on top in the short-run. But we’ve got to start somewhere.



SHAFFER: Is the spread of liberal democracy dependent upon persisting American hegemony?



FUKUYAMA: It’s been helpful. The U.S. obviously plays a big role in maintaining a liberal, open world order, through its alliances and the influence it projects. And American ideas have been very dominant in the world especially in the last two decades. A lot of that is shifting now because of the rise of other powers and other ideas. But the idea of liberal democracy — the U.S. is not the only exemplar of liberal democracy — [remains]. It’s a powerful idea that would exist independently of whether the U.S. is hegemonic or not.



I’m not as scared of a world without American hegemony as some people are. We went through the whole Cold War period in which the U.S. was one of two superpowers. A return to a more multi-polar world in certain ways induces a fair amount of moderation among big players in the system, because people know they can’t get their way unilaterally. And in the more multi-polar world we’d probably think twice about doing things like Iraq. The more important question is: In the global marketplace of ideas, how dominant will American ideas about freedom and rule of law and democracy and our economic model be? Our ideas will obviously be challenged; and it’s important for the U.S. to put its own house in order, both politically and economically, because that’s the most important way we exercise influence around the world: The model we set.




SHAFFER: To revisit Our Posthuman Future, are there any developments in bio-technologies in the past nine years that you find particularly disturbing?



FUKUYAMA: Yes. The whole rise of synthetic biology, where we’ve had new forms of life, and the ability to do new forms of life is proceeding extremely rapidly. The creation of an artificial bacteria itself is not immediately threatening, but it’s part of a long-term process by which we’ll uncover the technologies for manufacturing life, in ways that could have very serious security and moral implications.




SHAFFER: Don’t bioethics pose a challenge to the idea that the best society is the most successful society? You argue in Our Posthuman Future that a society that genetically engineered its children to be more intelligent might be more productive and successful but wouldn’t be moral.



FUKUYAMA: I’ve got a simpler concern in my current book. It’s just that liberal democracy is not something you can take for granted, or that democracies will find a way to solve their problems. I think we’ve got a number of long-term problems in the United States that don’t seem to be getting addressed with the current political system.


Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute





Article 7.

Project Syndicate

Does Anything Matter?

Peter Singer



2011-06-13 – Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.

Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930’s, when logical positivists asserted that, because there seems to be no way of verifying the truth of moral judgments, they cannot be anything other than expressions of our feelings or attitudes. So, for example, when we say, “You ought not to hit that child,” all we are really doing is expressing our disapproval of your hitting the child, or encouraging you to stop hitting the child. There is no truth to the matter of whether or not it is wrong for you to hit the child.

Although this view of ethics has often been challenged, many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to religion, but could make little headway against the prevailing philosophical mood.

Last month, however, saw a major philosophical event: the publication of Derek Parfit’s long-awaited book On What Matters. Until now, Parfit, who is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had written only one book, Reasons and Persons, which appeared in 1984, to great acclaim. Parfit’s entirely secular arguments, and the comprehensive way in which he tackles alternative positions, have, for the first time in decades, put those who reject objectivism in ethics on the defensive.

On What Matters is a book of daunting length: two large volumes, totaling more than 1,400 pages, of densely argued text. But the core of the argument comes in the first 400 pages, which is not an insurmountable challenge for the intellectually curious – particularly given that Parfit, in the best tradition of English-language philosophy, always strives for lucidity, never using obscure words where simple ones will do. Each sentence is straightforward, the argument is clear, and Parfit often uses vivid examples to make his points. Thus, the book is an intellectual treat for anyone who wants to understand not so much “what matters” as whether anything really can matter, in an objective sense.

Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.

One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused. If great thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham disagree about what we ought to do, can there really be an objectively true answer to that question?

Parfit’s response to this line of argument leads him to make a claim that is perhaps even bolder than his defense of objectivism in ethics. He considers three leading theories about what we ought to do – one deriving from Kant, one from the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contemporary philosophers John Rawls and T.M. Scanlon, and one from Bentham’s utilitarianism – and argues that the Kantian and social-contract theories must be revised in order to be defensible.

Then he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”

Readers who go to On What Matters seeking an answer to the question posed by its title might be disappointed. Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.

When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.”

Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.



Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Revised editions of his books Practical Ethics and The Expanding Circle have just been published.



























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