Letter From New York
I guess we’re getting back to normal. We can get back to hating each other now. So said a cartoon last week in the New Yorker. The radical Black Moslems are back on my corner making trouble and taking the temperature, seeing if apathy and tolerance are again at “acceptable” levels. I called up the police beat patrol officer who was aware of this reconnaissance mission by these front guys but said that he’s constrained by our constitution. So there it is, rule of law at 34th and 7th Avenue. My roommate feels their return shows some sense of normalcy – what it means to me is that people are starting to get less edgy (and less alert) which means that the good terrorist should start getting ready for Round 2. Unfortunately, things are going exactly according to my schedule and I figure the next 3-4 weeks are the most important ones to hope will be quiet. Ramadan starts this coming weekend – with momentum appearing to be going the West’s way, Osama needs some sort of “victory” to rally his side and the optimum time to terrorize the US home-front is just before the holiday traffic starts up.
Nobody knows if Mike Bloomberg will be a good mayor but he is rich and successful and we all want it to rub off on the rest of us, especially going into a recession. Nobody thinks Mark Green would accomplish that and that’s why he lost. A quarter of the blacks and half the Jews and Hispanics voted against him. So that’s how Bloomberg, a Republican in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 6:1, won.
I had a great time Thursday night. Went to a Broadway show “Mama Mia.” The songs are almost all by the band Abba. I haven’t seen so many people aged 40-65 having so much fun in a long time. They dance in the aisles, wave their hands in the air and clap with the songs. It is the first modern musical not written by Andrew Lloyd Webber that has caught on in awhile. People here want badly to enjoy a fun night out. There is no recession for things worth having – the show was sold out and I paid $108 for my orchestra ticket. Ouch!
Last Sunday was the New York City marathon. I got a great view from the Roosevelt Island tram which crosses over First Avenue and goes parallel to the 59th Street bridge which are on the course. My friend Elizabeth Greenstein ran the marathon and her e-mail was particularly insightful and inspiring; she has permitted me to post it to the site as a guest article. I hope you will check out her Marathoner’s Diary entry for that day and enjoy a look at the Big Picture most of us don’t get to experience as most of us don’t run marathons.
Where was God 9-11? Rabbi Steinsaltz spoke last week in New York about this subject. He is one of the leading Jewish thinkers alive. He criticizes those who look for God when things go wrong but not when things go well. To do so is an abuse of religion; it is not a conditional relationship we have with God where we make promises and expect blessings from heaven in return (ie: I’ll pray today and my stock will go up tomorrow). God is our father and king. It is OK to be disappointed and angry with your father when he doesn’t seem to look after you but it only goes so far; your King is the subject of unconditional awe and worship; you have no right to question his edicts. Abraham sacrificed his sanity when he sacrificed Isaac; we must be able to accept the irrational because our awe for God transcends such rational issues of life and even the extreme issue of fear of death. These are not comforting words but then religion is not sweet potatoes and brown sugar. Anyway, that’s his opinion.
Fellow just told me he had his nail scissors confiscated at the airport security. Just after the checkpoint, there was a kiosk selling the same scissors. Hmm…
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OK, let’s get down to business. I’ve had a chance to start thinking through the present and begin looking toward the future. So time for me to get back to doing what GlobalThoughts does best which is to analyze the current situation and forecast the future. All in all, things seem to be moving in positive directions with some fundamental shifts taking place that are good long term.
Prize for most underrated analyst of the year goes to Hosni Mubarak. One of my first thoughts on 9-11 was that he was right; the world was ignoring his warnings about terrorism and an imminent explosion. The West was letting radicals operate within their countries; they took his extradition requests as signs of repression by his regime. They ignored his pleas to make progress on issues such as the Palestinians because it would create a climate of anti-Americanism that would provide moral cover in the Arab world for radicalism. Mubarak is himself part of the problem, but he is quite sensitive to terrorism and his opinion has value.
The War Effort
We still don’t know anything useful about the anthrax – in a way, I wouldn’t mind giving amnesty to the freak who is doing it if he would just come out and admit it and go away. The amount of damage he or she is causing is way in excess of any retribution we will get out of this.
The one good thing overall is that Osama prefers occasional splashy attacks instead of a regular drumbeat of events. At least we are not London under the daily blitz.
Can you say Pushtun? If you still don’t know what this means, it means you are not reading the stories about Afghanistan carefully. (They are a tribe which represents a sector of the Afghan population.) We are busy learning the intricacies of the various sects that make up Afghanistan and the wishes of all its neighbors, because they are all at odds with what will be of Afghanistan post-Taliban and we have learned that we have to care about the afterward. The most important development so far is that Musharraf (I like this guy) is not holding back the war effort or an invasion of Kabul pending a resolution of this issue; he is content to let the Taliban fall and let chips fall where they may as long as the post-Taliban regime is not hostile to Pakistan. The Iranians are in the same boat as are the Russians, and even the Indians are willing to give us the benefit of the doubt for the time being (ie: the new regime may include some acceptable Taliban personnel if it achieves the necessary equilibrium). This is a major development in global thought by leading policymakers; in Iraq, we were afraid of the hereafter. It is now the same viz. Arafat, Hussein and, to an increasing extent, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – we are becoming less dependent on the head honchos we know and more flexible about creating facts on the ground and letting chips fall where they may.
If the story in today’s Daily Telegraph is correct, the newspaper possesses a video tape wherein Osama admits he ran the 9-11 operation. So now we no longer have to joke that the evidence Musharaf needed were the zeros at the end of the American check. The Americans have started shaking their booties on the PR front and we now have Arab-speaking diplomats at the ready to go onto Al-Jazeera when anything happens. That and a quarter gets you a cup of coffee in Cairo.
More bombs go off in training exercises than are presently going off in Afghanistan but the appearance is larger than life. Israeli pilots say the Americans are afraid to get their hands dirty and keep bombing from afar without really being concerned about hitting their targets. The B-52’s bomb all day and then 15 minutes later the Taliban come out from underneath and take up their positions. I’ve seen the video footage from the BBC that confirms this. So far, we don’t appear to be accomplishing much although we are being told that we have for now captured a key point in the North. We might accomplish more with bribes but the problem is that the Afghans are not loyal and sell for money partially because they have seen momentum shift so many times in the past they have become quite cynical; the problem with the Taliban is that their best troops are Arab mercenaries who are being well paid but are very loyal and will not sell out to the highest bidder.
Not a pretty picture – we appear to be making all the poor people of Afghanistan suffer while bin Laden and his elites sit somewhat comfortably and give interviews. The Arab world looks at this and wonders if we are truly that impotent and incompetent, or if this is really a conspiracy to take over the area’s oil fields and extend American influence in the region. The truth is neither; we are just moving slowly and carefully on our own timetable and the generals have the benefit that nobody in the US has any idea of what they are up to or what is going on in Afghanistan. The irony here is that oil prices are heading southward because the world economy is down and therefore demand is down; non-OPEC oil production is way up and it is possible that oil prices might go down to $10 a barrel within 6 months. The Saudi princes are clearly in for more than they ever bargained for when they started playing with fire. The long term future for oil markets is that the Arabs will never again hold the world hostage through OPEC; worse comes to worse, the Saudis will fall and we will take over the oil fields and OPEC will cease to exist but it no longer matters. This is a fundamental change in the world that should be noted. It means for now that the Emirates is in for a bad year and Mr. Chavez in Venezuela can no longer float his incompetence on oil revenues; he may not last another year in office. The Russians need the oil revenue but are getting enough new oil production out of the war objectives to make up for it and they are much stronger now economically than a year ago.
The future: We hold the north of Afghanistan through the winter and take Kabul in the spring. (Maybe faster but I wouldn’t advise it unless the war effort is going better than I realize.) The north is fractious but manageable and we have had some experience with them via the Uzbeks and British for some time; the south is a whole loose confederation of people we are not yet familiar with. If we have to sit in Kabul over the winter, it will take a lot of ground troops who will be sitting ducks as they were when Americans were in Lebanon. That means lots of extra casualties that could be avoided if we act under more optimal circumstances. Better to do this war on the US timetable and there are a few good reasons not to rush things.
Keep Osama busy for now. If we kill him and Mullah Omar, there will be great pressure to declare victory and stop the war. Meanwhile, we are getting everybody in line not so much in Afghanistan but all over the world to clamp down on the worldwide Al-Qaida network. We would lose that sense of urgency if the war were stopped. Also, we can just sit there for the next 6 months and bomb the hell out of the Taliban with relatively low cost; civilians will get killed but the actual amounts have been relatively low considering everything. As long as this stays on a low flame and there are few pictures and no other countries involved, public opinion will get bored of the story. The military still needs a lot of intelligence in order to make any ground campaign produce results and the intelligence is coming a lot slower than expected. The Al-Q network is out there – in a bizarre incident just a few weeks ago, some Egyptian was pulled out of a crate of air freight in Italy at a shipping dock – he was traveling in a portable living space with 3 cellphones and satellite equipment. The story is being covered up by the Egyptians but I’m sure the Americans are on it.
Next summer we will go after Iraq and get rid of Saddam. He provides too much state cover for terrorism and is a menace to his neighbors; until we get rid of him, we are a paper tiger even to our allies. We have some good intelligence now; the Yugoslavs will leak it to the US via the Israelis; they are now our allies and they helped build his bunkers and installations a decade ago. The Yugos expect as part of the deal that Saddam is dead when we are finished. Remember you read it here first.
I read about criticism of the US war effort; I welcome alternative ideas but I haven’t heard any. Put in hundreds of thousands of ground troops and we will have a bloodbath. Pull out and the Taliban is still in business and they along with everyone else that wishes evil will be encouraged. If we continue bombing, we kill people and perhaps destabilize Pakistan and its neighbors. Lift sanctions against Iraq and leave Saddam in place? Abandon Israel and figure that Osama will just go away or that he would never have existed?
If you don’t like the program don’t just criticize it and say what NOT to do – suggest an alternative that solves a problem. I was at a foundation meeting this week and some fellow on the board wanted an extra $2,000 for his charity but the amount of money we had to give away was fixed. So we said, where do we take away $2,000 from? He said, you’re the board – that’s your problem. We said, hey, you’re the one on the board who made the motion – so tell us what to do. He shut up and 15 minutes later we passed the budget as proposed. Right now we have tons of people taking shots without accepting the responsibility of coming up with constructive criticism. Here’s a cartoon that sheds some light on this. Article continues below.
For now, we keep to the fiction that all the Arabs are with us against the terrorists – Osama wanted to create a division between the West and the Arabs and it is vital he doesn’t get it. Iran’s Khatami did a good job of putting Osama in his place with his appearances this past weekend.
American Foreign Relations: Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran
That doesn’t mean the above fiction is true and fundamental shifts are taking place here. The Saudis can hire all the PR firms they want; they are taking a beating in otherwise friendly territory such as with Ted Koppel on Nightline. Americans want to know why they have sheikhs on Saudi TV this week telling people when not to accept cake from infidel neighbors. Why Saudi state school textbooks teach kids that it is bad to be friends with non-Moslems. Why they won’t deal with the fact that 15 of 19 of the hijackers were Saudis. Why the editor of Al-Ahram, a hand-picked official by Mubarak, writes an editorial that says the Americans are putting poison in the food packages being dropped in Afghanistan. Americans are being told that people in this part of the world are not our friends; we can be each other’s prostitutes but the love is lost. This is too bad really because these state-sponsored organs are giving ordinary Arabs a bad name making it look like everybody is a common savage who hates America. But let’s face it, America is not popular in Saudi Arabia today and the government of Saudi Arabia is so afraid of its own people that it prefers to bash America hoping it will save their butts. The result is bad will that feeds on itself and, in the end, will bring down the royal family with it because no matter how much they let their media bash America, the Saudis will never disassociate the royal family with America.
The Arabs are complaining that we do not understand their feelings which stem from different political agendas and I have dealt with this issue during the past month. At this moment, I would like to point out some indignation on our part – we have feelings too that transcend politics, we expect people to see each other as human beings to be respected and at least for governments to be telling their people to do so instead of leading such campaigns against us “infidels.” Especially while we are falling all over ourselves to put out the word that this is not a war against Islam and for Americans who are not Moslems to be nice to Moslems. This is not an easy argument to make to Americans when every suicide bomber in the arena today is a Moslem even though not every Moslem is a suicide bomber.
I think Americans would be thrilled to pull their soldiers out of Saudi Arabia. Bahrain would be a more sensible place to put them. If I am correct, they are the ones who asked us to be there in the first place. I remember that Bush wasn’t very interested after Iraq invaded Kuwait – he was hanging out at a ranch in Wyoming; it took Thatcher to fly out to Wyoming and read him the riot act and the Saudis who sent for our defense secretary to beg the US to get involved. It is, I believe, the most unpopular place in the world to do military service. They are humiliated by being restricted from practicing their religions and women are treated as lepers. The attrition rate for pilots stationed in Saudi Arabia was 1:3 in the years after the Gulf War, meaning that one third of all pilots refused to reenlist when their terms were up. This was a disaster for the US since it costs so much to train a pilot.
Look, I’m not a fan of Saudi Arabia; I didn’t get a great feeling about the country or its people when I visited and those Saudis who I have met have not made any effort to keep the lines open. It is in a sense a cursed country – all the oil money but the water is barely drinkable, their telephones don’t work and their people are among the most alienated, uncommitted, unmotivated and irrelevantly educated in the world. A society that treats half of its citizens (women) as chattel and doesn’t reward any kind of initiative among its people will never be anything. They hide behind custom and honor when they shouldn’t – the only honor being protected by keeping women unemployed in Saudi Arabis is that of its men who would be out of work if the women worked. It is a testament to the black hole that is the Saudi education system that over a hundred Saudis are majoring in Hebrew because they think they can get a job with that skill rather than traditional degrees which are worthless in that country. Anyway, as I said above, a fundamental shift is taking place and the oil party is over for Saudi Arabia. They will have the appearance of business going on there, but their checks are bouncing and the veil is off – we are going to reduce them to secondary oil supplier.
Thirty years ago Richard Nixon said to Gold Meir that the Americans and Israelis were not just allies but essentially friends. If she didn’t get it, he said, then the Israelis would be the losers for it. Nixon is remembered as the consummate ally who personally was an anti-semite but he was fundamentally right about the relationship between the two countries – the Americans and the Israelis are friends with shared values (and that’s why Sharon’s speech last month comparing Bush to Chamberlain was ill-advised as a matter of tact). The Americans are not sure that Arabs in the Islamic world share their values and therefore they are not considered friends. Let’s face it; the feeling is mutual. The Arabs are not sure that the Americans consider them friends and have many reasons to be suspicious about American intentions. We have not been good friends to ordinary Arabs.
The Americans have to work at not only changing their image in the Arab world but at changing their policies to be more morally consistent and being more honest about how they view their relationship with Arabs. PR alone won’t do the job by a longshot. The Arabs have to do the same viz. Americans. Both sides have to look inside themselves and be honest about this. Maybe we won’t be friends, maybe we will. If we are honest, we will probably wind up better friends. I think my friends are my friends because our relations are honest and difficult issues are dealt with instead of pretending they don’t exist. We all need to inspect our bibles, deal with our intolerant verses and stop pretending they don’t exist.
You know, Iran today is considered a better country to deal with than Saudi Arabia. I watched President Khatami in an hourlong interview this week with Charlie Rose. He is a wise man and it is too bad that he doesn’t have real power in Iran but we know that he represents the feelings of a majority of Iranians. The Iranians are simply too intelligent and sensible to be sidelined. We have to deal with them and despite the fact that they are a theocracy, they are a hekuva lot more dynamic than the Saudis. I hope that an outcome of this 9-11 is that the US makes up with Iran. Both countries are the losers for the past 20 years of lost exchanges.
The Israeli/Palestinian Situation
There are some fundamental changes taking place and this is for the long term benefit of all.
Certain things don’t make sense. All of a sudden, the Arabs are holding meetings with Israeli officials, ostensibly for economic projects. At the same time, the US refuses to meet with Arafat and the Israelis have been occupying cities in Area A. C’mon…. What’s really going on is that everybody is reading GlobalThoughts and has come to the conclusion that it is time to start planning the post-Arafat era. Even the French public supports the Israeli position more so than the Palestinian, say the latest polls. Peres said this week he can’t trust anything Arafat says. A European diplomat quoted Arafat as saying he wanted a ceasefire during a meeting with him and then right afterward went out and made one of his “Fight On” speeches.
Sharon has made no secret that he is finished with Arafat. He is not going to get rid of him directly and cause chaos but hopes that forces within the PA will finish him off. The latest invasion was meant to humiliate the PA – the first thing the Israelis did in Bethlehem was to remove the streetlights which was the first development project they did in the city. Significantly, the ceasefire deals in Area A have not been cut with the PA per se but rather with chieftains of local villages and so far these deals have stuck. The top people around Arafat are either resigning, going on vacation or simply becoming quiet. Street demonstrations don’t show Arafat’s pictures. The Americans and Peres agree that meetings with Arafat only encourage him to kickstart more terror attacks in the background (which then bring on an Israeli response) so they are not giving him any more meetings that give him any kind of legitimacy and wiggle room. Meanwhile, they will all say nice things about a Palestinian state albeit with different levels of intent. The message in public is: The Israelis are no longer contesting the issue of the territories and statehood; stop the terror, let’s work out an arrangement for the refugees and Jerusalem and we can move forward. The intent from Sharon is: I hope they never get around to it because I don’t want to pull out of the territories. Meanwhile, let the Arabs get rid of Arafat. If Hamas takes over, they are a bigger target. The odds are that people such as Rajoub will take over. The intent from Bush is: Anything to keep them all quiet; I don’t want to get my hands dirty in this. The intent from Peres is: We want peace and security. The question is no longer what Arafat’s intent is: Nobody knows and nobody cares any more which is why he is finished. Sharon will have to fall into line when a reasonable alternative exists; Arafat will never fit the bill because he himself is not with the program and his own people around him realize this and have tired of criticizing him.
I read an interview with Marwan Barghouti in Haaretz this past weekend. Maybe he will soon be killed but there is a certain justice to his words, he has quite a history of productive work and he has earned over time the right to say his piece. You can kill the man, but he stands for something called Liberation and he is not an unreasonable person. It would ultimately be more compelling to work with him in the future in nation-building than to knock him off as a bogeyman; as a terrorist he is easily replaced. As a national liberator who can accomplish things, he is not easily replaced. He is what you call an honorable foe despite the fact that he is dangerous.
On the ground, the Israelis are not really accomplishing much and they know it but they try to save face. The assassinations policy cuts both ways and is probably not worth the backfire it causes. I said a year ago that ultimately Peres and Sharon are teammates, not enemies and the Arabs more so than the Jews realize this. Sharon cannot be brought down by Peres but rather by his own party, many of whom favor Netanyahu. The Shas party will lose many seats in the next election to Likud and so they aren’t going anywhere either. Three things to note: (1) Everybody realizes they have to deal with the Palestinian issue because the world wants this to happen. However, everybody realizes that if it appears the Palestinian issue was resolved due to terror by Osama and the other organizations, it will encourage other terrorist networks (ie: Kashmir). So the appearance has to be without linkage. That partly explains why Arafat doesn’t get a meeting with Bush this weekend. The Saudis are pissed off, but Bush is letting it be known that double-dealing on the terrorism issue won’t get you lunch with the President these days. It is a message aimed at Syria as well. (2) The Arabs want the Palestinian issue resolved; so do the Arab governments. But once it is resolved, the shield behind which to bash the US goes away and the removal of this major distraction exposes Arab governments to harsh realities and responsibilities viz. their own people. Be careful what you pray for as you might get it….For Arabs this is good because it means real issues will have to be dealt with and it will be time to fully enter the 21st century. Same thing for the Israelis, by the way. (3) There is a consensus developing post 9-11 among the radical factions in Palestine as well as in Syria and Iran that if the Palestinian issue is resolved with 2 states sharing the 1967 borders, the Iranians and the rest will not oppose the deal. This is a significant change.
Let’s flush out that second point a bit more. I was thinking today what the Arab world would be like if Israel didn’t exist for the past 30 years and if the Americans stayed out of the region. This is my opinion: Jordan and Lebanon would be part of Syria; after all, it was Israel and not the UK that helped Jordan keep Syria out in 1970. We all know Lebanon doesn’t stand under its own power and the only thing keeping Syria honest there is Israel. I know personally that Lebanon is a world apart from Syria and wants to remain a world apart. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would have been taken over by Iraq which, had Israel not knocked out its nuclear program in 1981, would have been nuclear by then. Iraq would also control 40% of the world’s oil supply. The GCC was utterly impotent after Iraq invaded Kuwait so all their conferences don’t infuse me with any real feeling of security if I had to rely on them. Saudi Arabia wouldn’t exist as we know it; it would either be run by Iraq, Iran or the US Army as a territory because the royal family milks rather than represents Saudi Arabia. Iran would definitely have taken over several of the Gulf countries such as Bahrain and used them as a base to agitate the rest of Arabia. Egypt wouldn’t have turned pragmatic under Sadat and would be even more of a loser country without $2 billion a year from Uncle Sam (I love it when Mubarak takes aim at the Jewish lobby which keeps aid to Egypt and Jordan alive).
So, if you ask me, I’m not so sure Israel has been a bad deal for Arabs as a whole even though no doubt it has been an awful deal for the Palestinians (though I’m not sure they would have an independent state even now if the UN hadn’t given Israel a state in 1947). I know that Sharon is the big bad wolf who stood by and didn’t interfere while Arabs took revenge on other Arabs in Lebanon (he wouldn’t have been in there in the first place if the northern border hadn’t turned into a farce), but the fact is that Saddam Hussein has directly ordered the killing of more Muslims than anyone else in the 20th century, used chemical weapons against his own people, and has invaded and attempted to wipe out the existence of brother Arab states without provocation. Go ask any Kuwaiti who remembers not only that he tried to take over Kuwait but also acted to wipe out its culture and history. The only thing that kept Saddam from crossing red lines in 1990 and even now is the certainty that the Israelis will nuke him if he does. I don’t think he really fears the US; after all, he keeps outlasting all our presidents but I think the party’s over for him within a year. I think Saddam and expansionist regimes are more a threat to Arabs in the region than Sharon or Israel.
Anyway, what is important right now is that Abdullah of Jordan talks about Arab guarantees of Israeli security and regional integration, Bush now says the word Palestine in his speeches, and the Palestinian press now carries articles of various opinions promoting serious compromises. Iran’s Khatami talks of recognizing Israel. You have to be an ostrich to ignore these shifts.
What’s To Buy?
I don’t recommend buying any equities; there will be at least a second wave of attacks and the relapse will be worse than the original sickness which resulted from 9-11. If you ask me which countries are on the way up, I’d say the Czech Republic and China.
Late Report: Yossi Beillin & Yasser Abad Rabbo Speech
I just returned from the premier of the Yossi and Yasser Show. Both of them are on a joint speaking tour of the US. It was Rabbo’s first appearance either in a synagogue or in front of an American Jewish audience. Rabbo is a high official in the PA and was lead of their negotiating team at various points. Beilin didn’t contradict anything Rabbo said, so I assume just about everything Rabbo said was true. I didn’t find anything to disagree with as to either of them. The only question is whether Arafat stands behind Rabbo or whether Rabbo will be one of those people we will be dealing with post-Arafat. Highlights from Rabbo: The Palestinians support a two-state solution and realize the issue of the refugees cannot result in an undoing of Israel. From Beillin: Camp David was a mistake that shouldn’t have happened because the summit was premature without adequate preparation. Rabin didn’t put a clause into the Oslo Agreement banning settlement construction because he thought it was obvious and didn’t want to energize Right-Wing opposition but Netanyahu was able to build legally because the clause didn’t exist. Thus, the building of settlements was against the declared spirit of Oslo. Both agreed that the US must get involved in knocking heads together if there will be a settlement. Both agreed that there was a lot of misinformation about what happened at Camp David but that the cup was more half full than empty and that people shouldn’t conclude from Camp David that no settlement is possible.
