Charleston South Carolina, Economy, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, Afghanistan, Anthrax, Pakistan/India/Kashmir, Bill Clinton One Year Later, Gulf Region / Iraq (Notes from Conversation with Richard Perle), Israel-Palestinian Affairs. The Day School Tuition Problem.

Charleston, South Carolina
On the way down, I flew over Ground Zero at night. Very eery. Last time I flew over this area the twin towers were still there and they looked beautiful that September 6 as I flew off to Switzerland. Now the whole area looks like a grey crater smack in the bottom of Manhattan as if hit by a meteor and it is all bathed in bright white electrical light. Anyway, Charleston is a nice little 2-3 day getaway place 1.5 hours by plane from New York and, with balmy temperatures, you can lose your sweater, just walk around in this pretty coastal town and veggie out – your anxiety level is guaranteed to decrease dramatically. Magnolia House plantation has pretty gardens. Take walking tours of historic Charleston; a horse and buggy tour is also fun. January is a good time to visit – no bugs and summers can be brutal – it is a swamp area, after all. Charleston Grill restaurant at the Charleston Place hotel was excellent. My hotel was the Wentworth Mansion – a 5 minute walk from the main shopping street and a true small luxury inn built over 100 years ago in a mansion that feels more like a residence than a hotel. With my travel agent’s card, I got the $450 room for $265 a night and stayed two nights.  (www.wentworthmansion.com) The Citadel is a military school and their students walk around either in their uniforms or in jackets and ties. Even when they jog around they are in a different uniform. There is something very genteel about this town but the locals can get rowdy on a Saturday night downtown especially when the sailors come in off the naval base. I am a bit nervous being around Americans when they get rowdy. I am not totally comfortable here.

Economy

Good News: The most important indicators that I want to see for economic recovery (see March 22, 2001 posting “The Bear Market Explained”) are coming in. Unemployment is down, the fed stopped lowering interest rates, computer RAM prices are going up again and business purchases of computers went up in December for the first time since the end of 2000. Russia’s now-private oil producers are flooding the markets and oil will probably be at $15 for the next year. What more could you want? I am not rushing to buy equities and personally have shifted to other types of investing for now; the markets will still gyrate nervously for the next few months trying to gauge the extent of corporate profits that might result until more solid signs make it clear that recovery is under way and to what extent. Investors: Start to pay attention to Russia. Putin is getting the country's economy and industry under some sort of control and there may be good values in their equities, even though people are super-cautious of this country.

Saudi Arabia

This is bad news for Saudi Arabia with its $12 billion deficit and for Egypt as well. Saudi princes were in America this week purchasing assets to have in case they get kicked out of Saudi. This month you heard the first rumblings that American troops would leave the Kingdom, and the Pentagon policy that women stationed in Saudi need not wear the veil I am sure will not make us more welcome. The important point is that the Americans have decided they don’t care, Siberian oil production is now 10% of world production and rising, and it is only a matter of time (probably 5-10 years) before there is a change of rule in Saudi Arabia and at this point we have decided not to care too much and to be ready to deal with it. Notice that Bush has cancelled a $1.8 billion R&D program for fuel-efficient cars based on petrol and instead is backing hydrogen-powered cars, the first of which are going on market this year. It doesn’t help that opinion polls in Saudi Arabia taken by Saudi intelligence confirm that 95% of their elites are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden and my reporting has shown for a while that sympathy for his point of view there is not to be underestimated. Saudi intelligence is good and the royal family has been cooperative in certain ways, but there is just a chasm of values between us and talking past each other when each side has something valid to say, and it is not totally the fault of one side or the other. Consider that Christian / Western ideas of tolerance and equality (ie: women's rights) are relatively new; Catholic theology until 35 years ago was very close to what Islamic fundamentalism is today and Jews also had periods in their Biblical history where non-Jews were to be killed because they were not Jews. So the Saudis and their like may not be where we want them to be right now in history, but they are in no way historically unique.

Terrorism Front

Disturbing article in the Jerusalem Report this month: Terry Nicholas (Oklahoma bombing) and Ramzi Youssef (World Trade Center 1993 bombing) were both in the Philippines at the same time and both have overlapping telephone records during that visit which was under suspicious circumstances. Youssef was an Iraqi agent at the time. Nicholas also made frequent trips to the Philippines and received training from Abu Sayyef, a Filipino Muslim group with ties to Al-Qa’eda and Iraq. This points to Iraqi involvement in the 1993 bombing and who knows what else.

Many of the discussions of terrorism overlook the fact that the definition of terrorism is often a matter of dispute which I think is tossed around without much thought. Here is a suggested definition of the term: Terrorism is violence against non-combatants (ie: soldiers, uniformed security personnel) designed to create fear within a society and get its government to change its policies. Violence against combatants is an act of war. Therefore, the classification depends on the intended victim, not the intensity of the act itself. 

Afghanistan

Karzai is an American puppet with chic-looking capes but rules nothing. I feel we are being played for suckers – yo, Taliban is over there. Give us $50,000 and we look for him. Yo, now he’s over there. I think that we lost Bin Laden and Mullah Omar to this kind of chicanery and that’s the price you pay for not sending in our own guys to get him. It doesn’t matter – bin Laden cannot live without dialysis treatment and cannot last long anonymously. Mullah Omar is useless if he’s in hiding and we will find them both in due time. Global Thoughts early on stated that this war would be determined not by 50,000 troops but by 250 special forces dudes and so it has and the US military and NATO are rewriting their manuals as we speak. (Actually, NATO and Europe are looking more and more irrelevant.) Nicholas Kristof wrote a NY Times column noting that while the US campaign killed say 10,000 Taliban and 1,000 Afghan civilians, the order we are helping to establish and the foreign aid will save many more lives than this. Vaccinations alone will save 35,000 children’s lives this year. The mortality rate should drop by 50% over the next 5 years (at a savings of about 120,00 lives per year) and the number of children in elementary school next year will be double that of this year (an extra 750,000). A blessing in disguise for Afghanis.

Tom Friedman writes this month that Arabs refuse to believe American claims about Osama. Consider that most Blacks in America still believe OJ is innocent. We all have some stubborn opinions. Fact is, everybody believes what they want to believe and it is sometimes impossible to have truth interfere with prejudice. The American campaign to change public opinion in the Arab world is failing so far and to some extent will never succeed.

Anthrax

American investigators have solid leads and will figure this out during the next couple of months. They may not decide to prosecute if they find out it was a government scientist who did it in the hopes of stirring public concern about this issue.

Pakistan / Kashmir / India

Musharraf’s 1/12 speech was significant and I watched it with translation. He is trying to build a modern Islamic state in Pakistan that will be a model for others to follow and understands the need to clean up its act. The Indians appreciate he is for real and will cut him some slack; the heavy response to the attempted bombing of their parliament was in part for domestic consumption as well as out of real outrage and concern as to the prospect that would have resulted had the attack been successful. Problem for Musharraf is that the PIA (their intelligence service) which is pro-Taliban and militantly anti-India is not completely under his control and can in fact get rid of him. The PIA probably is behind the kidnaping of the Wall Street Journal journalist. What he does have going for him is the Silent Majority in Pakistan which supports his reforms, and which gives heart to argument that the Silent Majority in the Islamic World is anti-terrorist and not anti-West.

My recommendation as to Kashmir is as follows: Kashmir basically breaks down into 3 geographic parts: pro-Indian, pro-Paksistani, and areas in the center along a confrontation line that could go either way. They should set up districts along these lines and have referendums in each district supervised by UN observers; the districts that go with India should join India and the districts that go with Pakistan should join Pakistan. The end result will be a fairly orderly and equal division of territory that reflects the will of the people who live there. Past attempts to have an election did not succeed mainly because the Indians didn’t allow it under such conditions.

Bill Clinton One Year Out of Office

I wanted to wait a year before commenting about him. I like this guy and I can’t help it. He was a president who got out of bed each day wondering what he could do as president (as opposed to Bush Sr. & Jr. who wondered what he had to do as president). Clinton had faults and we knew of them because he openly grappled with them, and we voted for him twice. He had a bitch of a wife, had no money and all his friends were in jail. Just like a normal Joe. He was a self-made man with no advantages from childhood. He was insistently optimistic, even at the worst of times, and his composure at the State of the Union address smack in the middle of his darkest hour of scandal will forever be remembered as a command performance. He felt people’s pain and gave people hope. He was a Seinfeld President – intellectual but ambiguous and devoid of substance in the sense that he reflected whatever you wanted him to be at that moment. That was America in the nineties – instant gratification, remote control in hand, looking for easy cash and answers and to stay clear of anything messy. Now we don’t want ambivalent intellectualism but rather simpletons who make everything clear and choose sides; we don’t crack up at the word “evil” anymore and the Gary Condits of the world have become insignificant but less tolerated.

We wouldn’t vote for Clinton today but our shift in taste doesn’t negate what we were or his worth at the time. He was what we were. For Jews and Blacks he was great – he put Jews in top spots in government and curtailed some of the more chilling operations that secretly took place in the US against Jews by government intelligence agencies.  He was hands-on with regard to government policy – nobody thinks that Bush runs the show today. We just expect him not to screw up.

Clinton still inspires me because his words ring true and you know he speaks from experience. Here is a quote from Clinton receiving an honorary degree at Tel Aviv university this month:

 “There is nothing more I can do (about the Middle East peace process). But I have lived long enough and had enough success as well as enough failure to tell you that you can never get discouraged, and you can never quit. Because you can never know when a chance for a miracle will pass you by.”

The Gulf Region and Iraq: The Coming War

I attended a briefing lunch and had some private moments last week with Richard Perle, a top defense analyst who has the ear of everybody who counts today, and the most important stuff he had to say was what he told me in private, especially when I challenged his military strategies. He is convinced that the US will go after Iraq and I have no reason to doubt this. His strategy is to get Saddam to mobilize his troops into a concentrated effort and then to crush the forces. Meanwhile, Israel will take a few chemical and biological hits as Saddam pushes buttons in survival mode (he won’t say this publicly but I pressed him on this in private). The Israelis will have the freedom to hit back because the US is not going to try and mobilize a huge coalition or armed forces mobilization this time around. Instead, it will use vastly improved aerial warfare capabilities and special forces teams, a la Afghanistan. The US doesn’t have accurate information as to the daily whereabouts of Saddam and therefore hasn’t been able to send in a team to just knock him out. (Given our performance in Afghanistan, I actually believe him on this.) One objective will be to convince his commanders not to follow crazy orders (ie: to bomb other countries) for fear of the consequences once he is gone. The US believes that there is great potential disloyalty to Saddam within his armed forces by virtue of the fact that he keeps replacing and killing his generals every few months.

According to Perle, the most important reason to get rid of Saddam is that the US is convinced that he will either leak unconventional weapons to sidekicks who will then use such weapons against the US and that he will blackmail all his neighbors to do what he wants. We are prepared to completely ignore everyone in the region and to tolerate warfare between the Israelis and the Iraqis (and the damage caused to Israel) if that’s what it takes to replace him because the future only promises even worse scenarios. King Abdullah of Jordan sees the writing on the wall and is not sitting on the fence this time around.

With regard to Iran, we will not act against it but will have nothing to do with its government in the hope that the people of Iran will eventually replace its government. There is concern over Iranian intentions to build intercontinental missiles that could strike Europe and North America.

As for me, I may have to stay clear of the region this year and limit foreign travel to quieter spots such as secondary cities in Europe. I have several itineraries pending developments over the next few months. My next trip will be in May and things could be rather nasty by then.

Israel / Palestinian Affairs
Sharon’s Strategy; How to Change the Status Quo;
Personal Thoughts about our Reality.

For the past year, I’ve been trying to figure out if Sharon has a strategy and what it is. I think I now know. I’m calling it “Creeping Incrementalism and Normalization of Permanent War Footing.” He’s managed to get everybody to take what a year ago was an Escalation and ignore it as Normal. F-16's bombing, tanks surrounding Arafat’s quarters – maybe nobody will notice when one day it just so happens that Arafat is gone. Never mind that when he escalates, the Palestinians also escalate. We assassinate leaders, they assassinate leaders and run suicide bombers.

Now Israeli military doctrine thinks about missiles from the territories and Iranian involvement. Who can think of peace anymore? A perpetual state of war is not only inevitable but tolerable under such a strategy. Remember when the Israelis were scared to death of people with knives? Now we have suicide bombers at Bat Mitzvahs and women martyrs in downtown Jerusalem. And then the Israelis evacuate and bomb the PA’s television studios? Declares Arafat irrelevant and then twice this month meets with his top advisors and sends his son to meet him? Sheikh Yassin sits undisturbed at his home with people lined up around the block to kiss his hand and appear with him on television? It doesn’t make sense – if you want to stop such things you send a commando team to the local sheikh’s daughter’s wedding and blow up their wedding hall. 

But it does make sense. Sharon doesn’t want to kill Arafat or reoccupy the territories. He has “bigger” plans than that. He is enjoying the orgasmic effects of watching Arafat undergo daily humiliation by Sharon’s military. One day he will cut off the hot water; next week he won’t collect his garbage. Perhaps some commandos will send a box of cockroaches into his office or back up some sewage. Arafat’s death would end the ecstasy of this personal vendetta and reshuffle the deck which could be to Sharon’s detriment. Maybe not, but at least he might turn off his telephone and cut off visitors. Not that his phone is ringing very much these days – people are writing him off and that is Sharon’s most important accomplishment. Maybe they have been reading Global Thoughts or Arafat’s newly discovered involvement with arms smuggling and Iran did him in (Omigod, aren’t you just shocked and mortified? I thought liberationists collected marbles instead of weapons.).... Arafat’s continued existence only prolongs Palestinian agony – it allows Israelis and the rest of the world the luxury of not taking them seriously, ensures instability within Palestine just short of civil war and keeps the Israelis on a war footing carefully calibrating tit-for-tat but never going over the edge. Sharon and Arafat can live with this because compromise ensures their termination. 

Here are my suggestions for the Palestinians if they want to change the status quo because it is they (not the Israelis) who will change the status quo: 

1. Put Arafat on a plane on the way to some meeting and blow it up somewhere over the sea. Declare 40 days of mourning and move on. There will be no civil war, no Islamic takeover, no huge demonstrations all over the Arab world that last more than a day, and all the doomsday scenarios will be for naught. Rajoub and Dahlan will take over for at least the short term.

2. Start a series of weekly peaceful demonstrations in which 100,000 civilians march on an Israeli settlement in the territories and overrun a military checkpoint. For instance, a Friday march across Bethlehem into Efrat. People gather and sit in the center of Efrat to call for an end to the occupation, and the daytime demonstration continues with a nighttime candle-lit vigil with fasting. They will probably be joined by 50,000 Israelis. It makes for great international television and it is impossible for the Israelis to resist without the use of force – something which will drive Israel and international public opinion to the brink. They won’t use force, especially when a bunch of Israelis are with them in the town square. This, not suicide bombers, will change the world. And it also tells the Palestinians an important point – Israeli public opinion today is very indignant in reaction to events but it is not monolithic and will change quickly if conditions change. 150 officer reservists have signed a letter opposing the current conditions of occupation and I predict they will get the critical mass of 500 signatures within the next 2 weeks.

If the Palestinians wanted to terrorize Sharon, they would given him 7 days of Quiet and called his bluff. They would have done so even though Sharon undermined every ceasefire by assassinating Hamas militants ensuring revenge retaliation. The dance of death has worked very well for those at the top – Sharon, Arafat, Khameini and Nasrallah in Lebanon. If Hamas didn’t exist, Sharon would have to create it. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s probably true. Put another way, the only cause Hamas is serving with its tactics is Sharon’s.

Questioning Today’s Reality viz. Israel and the Current State of Morality

Recently, the chief rabbi of Efrat was on tour in the US and spoke of what he termed the miracle from heaven that Arafat was exposed before it was too late and how happy everybody is that everybody is united in Israel. C’mon, everybody is united and happy? I’d say united and depressed. When these bombs go off in Jerusalem, everyone’s first reaction is “I hope my kid wasn’t stupid enough to be hanging out in the center of town.” This is the Jewish Riviera we are talking about here. Where else should a Jew want to be on a Saturday night? I’ll never forget going from the depressingly silent and grey streets of Warsaw in 1988 to the joyful loud and colorful Ben Yehudah pedestrian street in Jerusalem a few days later. That transition is one of the most emotionally uplifting things a person can feel after walking through the concentration camps that attempted to exterminate the existence of such a people 50 years before. Today and for the past 18 years, there is never a good time to visit Israel. Every time my brother or I go there, my parents are on the phone trying to convince us not to go because of some terrorist attack that occurred that day. Itineraries for solidarity missions today are filled with visits to hospitals and victims of terror, demonstrations of civil defense procedures, details regarding security checks, security briefings, and visits to settlements in bullet-proof buses seeing all the latest bypass roads and tunnels. Where is the fun, man? This is not an Israel I care to go to but I won’t abdicate the country either (and I do other things during my visits there). 

Maybe we should create decoy pedestrian zones in Israel with actors simulating people (and encourage  Arabs to bomb that) and have our Saturday nights out at a secret location. We are too smug today and drenched in self-righteousness. We want fairness when life isn’t fair (as do the Palestinians) and you can see where it’s gotten the two sides. We are too “happy and united” to be ashamed or alarmed at what we have tolerated and what we will settle for. We are convinced that there is no other side to deal with that is human and that we are giving up tangible items for intangibles such as forbearance (though we have no idea what kind of tangible things we want in return). And so we do things we can’t believe we would do and say we are forced to do so because the other side values life less than we do. We say we won’t give up places we refuse to even visit. We refuse to believe that our past offers were anything but magnanimous (and if they weren’t so generous, well tough luck because we’re the ones who won all these wars that they started, we say). So we are sure that the other side only wants to destroy everything and any deal will be only an Islamic truce to be broken at will (the most damning charge based on years of Arafat’s and mullah’s speeches). And now Israeli officers who don’t follow orders to do things they consider “brutal and cruel” on the basis of moral conviction are viewed as traitors and violators of national security and morale. Makes you wonder about things we condemned earlier this century and the concept of victor’s justice. To say “I was just following orders” was not acceptable at Nurembourg to those who occupied us.

But hey, we’re supremely civilized, right? I first heard about this 5 years ago when Israeli tourists visited Jordan but today in Haaretz I read that the Grand Hotel in Rhodes has a policy that with regard to Israeli guests, the hotel empties its mini-bars, removes extra pillows and blankets from its rooms, disconnects international telephone lines and makes it impossible to order room service (too many stiffs on the bill). Did anyone tell the Grand Hotel that we are a Nation of Priests? Has anyone out there read such a thing with regard to other nationalities? Maybe we are not so holy or I just am not being fair because I don’t know about all the Arabs who do the same thing, right? I assume the Jordanian hotels never had any Arabs in their hotels to know that they would lose towels to guests so it was a big surprise when Israeli tourists arrived.

Meanwhile, anti-semitism is increasing around the world to the point where it is becoming a concern again. Jews feel obliged to defend Israeli occupation of an indigenous people (something they increasingly are ambivalent about, both for and against) and the world is convinced that Israel is wrong. Jews are paying the price for this. And we get upset when we hear Arabs and Moslems around the world defending Palestinians. As if. Like, duh?

Look, in the end this is not about who is right. Both sides have their bastards and still we sense some sense of obligation toward them because they are OUR bastards and cannot ignore the suffering we see on the TV every day. This is about making do. Either keep up the dance of death or compromise in a way that both sides can live with and move on. The terms for compromise are well known to Global Thoughts readers and it is my opinion that Silent Majorities on both sides will back such terms and that the result will be a much better situation for all concerned. 

Yesterday I read the headlines that the mother of the female suicide bomber said that she was proud of her daughter’s martyrdom. But the New York Times reporter ended the long news article with the most profound point – after the rest of the reporters left the room, the mother cried and said, “I lost my daughter.” You have to look beyond the propaganda and bravado, read between the lines and remember the real story is truer to the universal heart than it appears.

To some extent, I am just simply astounded at the level of ignorance and smugness all around. There is no shortage of this among Jews and Israelis either and I think there is something wrong with people stating that they cannot relate to people who sympathize with suicide bombers because such means offends their sense of morality – who am I to dismiss someone because I cannot relate to the depth of their despair that led them to after all take their own lives and make the ultimate sacrifice to better the lot of their people? Did I see soldiers come into my house in the middle of the night and kill my father in his bed? Was I with my mother at a security checkpoint when she died because the soldier wouldn’t let her go to the hospital? Who in Israel knows of such things that he should relate or not relate to them? These suicide bombers are not just poor religious fanatics – the statistics show that revenge for specific acts drove the majority of them to their acts and quite a few come from rich aristocratic families. I can mentally excuse (though not legally justify) all the desperate things that are going on because I can see the other side’s point of view and understand what drives people to madness. No doubt that if I were on the other side I wouldn’t be some Uncle Tom pleased as hell to have the Israelis dominate my life for the next 50 years constantly reminding me they are there and in control of everything I do and wherever I go. My main objection to suicide bombings from the Global Thoughts geo-strategic point of view is that they are a tactic that in practice is proving to be counter-productive. I certainly don’t condone it, but is it a logical act that could be explained and could an Israeli or American driven to same extreme do such a thing? Yes.

But this editorializing does not solve the issue. The status quo is what will be if there is no security. Now Palestinian women will suffer because of that one female martyr. Now they will be suspect. The brutality of occupation doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from fear based on previous action. So both sides have to get real. Tactics have to shift to those that will produce positive change and encourage people to see the value of getting along and not just finding more reasons to dehumanize the other. Global Thoughts provides a blueprint today and in past editions. Even the refugee problem has a solution suggested on this site.

Everything above can be somehow explained. The one thing I can’t justify is the stupidity of stubbornness that has prevented people from thinking creatively and knocking heads against the wall to solve this problem. If we’re all so clever, why are we all living like this with no prospect of a better future?

Tuition Futures

My friend Danny tells me that he has 4 kids all under 12 attending Jewish day school in Manhattan. Tuition is about $60,000 with scholarship aid and, because after-tax money pays for private school education, Danny must earn about $100,000 just to pay tuition. This is the most important expense people pay in their lives if they have children and want to give them such education. It is a problem that nobody deals with in a practical manner. Global Thoughts presents a study of this problem and offers radical solutions and critically rethinks fundamental assumptions about high school education. Check it out -- dayschool.html