I traveled business class to Los Angeles this month; all the airlines serve vanilla ice cream for dessert. Are we that boring a country or does everyone really love vanilla ice cream? I travel this route maybe twice a year; imagine the people that have to do this every week and eat the same food every time they fly....

Strangely, much has happened in the past 6 weeks but in a sense there is not much to say that isn’t obvious. I wrote 2 years ago before the 2004 elections in an article worth rereading that Team Bush was screwing up in Iraq and making the world less safe viz. Iran and North Korea. I wrote for most of 2006 that the Republicans would take a licking in November and that Rumsfeld ought to be fired. OK, so what else is new?

Post-Election 2006. Bill Gates, the new Secretary of Defense, is a hold-the-line kind of guy who will not make major changes but who will seek a new level of consensus and get rid of many senior level Rumsfeld advisors. James Baker is leading the review of Middle East policy that will go beyond Iraq and have the US open a more dynamic diplomacy with Syria and Iran. The problem for Iraq is that it has so deteriorated that there may not be any good options left. The question at this point may not be so much what the US does but to what extent the players in the region want to use this excuse to try and work with Team Bush hoping to salvage the best of a bad situation knowing that the US troops are going to start to be withdrawn from Iraq over the next 2 years. They have to decide whether or not the US is the real enemy or whether they can maneuver within a situation where the foreign powers still offer them the means to save face behind a third party before they are let loose on each other.

Bush has been known to be accommodating with opposition parties when he has no choice. He did so as Texas governor and, during the past 2 years, Schwartzenegger in California reinvented himself as conciliator when his offensive approach didn’t work. Right now Bush and the Democrats both have to work together to get something done right in DC; if either party tries to stand off and hope people will blame the other party for not solving problems, they run the risk of being blamed as a party unable to govern. The American mood right now is that they don’t want any bullshit about ideologies, single sex marriages and the right to life – people want problems to be solved. A third of the evangelical vote went to Democrats – the evangelicals did in fact vote and for the Republicans that was the problem this year. The biggest opportunities right now for the Congress and the Bush administration are in the domestic sphere – the foreign problems have little opportunities for progress, which is unusual for a president in his 7th year of office. Usually, the domestic problems become unsolvable and they go abroad for fame and glory.

North Korea is a problem the US is not best situated to solve. The world is too fragmented in its interests to unite around this problem. Nobody really feels at direct risk so nobody feels they have to cooperate. Russia and China won’t enforce an embargo against it. The best solution here is for China to invade and set up a friendly communist government. The South Koreans don’t want to have to deal with North Korea and the Japanese can’t stand by while North Korea goes nuclear and China doesn’t want to have to deal with a nuclear Japan. For all the talk of multilateralism, it isn’t working in Lebanon. France did the talk and then hardly did the walk. The US led a coalition of 40 countries into Iraq. So what?

Iran is a problem the US is going to be hard-pressed to solve but it has no choice but to deal with it. 6 Arab countries just announced agreements to restart nuclear programs. If the US doesn’t deal with Iran, it’s finished in this part of the world because everyone is afraid of Iran and who needs the US if it can’t stop it. It seems like everyone now knows that during the month of August Sheikh Nasrallah sat in the Iranian embassy in Beirut but the Israelis didn’t want to take on Iran by bombing its embassy. I think, as I hinted a few months ago, that the Israelis decided early on either on their own or in tandem with the US that they wanted to leave Syria and Iran out of the game for now but that they have their sights set on them at a time of their choosing, just not then.

The challenge for the US is to figure out how to become like China – be everybody’s friend and make money all over the place without having too much responsibility. Why does the Americans have to have their armies all over the place? Think about it a little bit and maybe there is some truth to the simplicity of it all. We have armies in Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and frankly they’re not accomplishing a thing and it is costing us all a huge amount of money, everyone hates our guts and the world is less safer for it all. China has none of this going on and they are making the money to fund our military adventures. Hmmmm...

Israel – The short range issue is a major offensive in Gaza soon after Olmert finishes his visit to the US this week; the anti-tank missiles being smuggled into Gaza threaten a repeat of the Lebanon fiasco against Israeli tanks if they have to reenter Gaza; this is best dealt with sooner than later because if they have to deal with Syria and Hizbullah they don’t need to have a third front in the South. I continue to think that the long range issue here is a regional war involving Syria. That’s certainly what the generals are now saying out loud. They are saying what I said in the first place – that it was a mistake to leave Syria out of the first round and that it would have been much easier to deal with everything if they had gone right after Syria and sent a message on Day 1. Iran is very much a problem for Israel, even more so than the US at this moment, but I can’t tell you if they are in a position to attack it, despite Olmert’s veiled threats. What I am told is that the only country capable of attacking Iran is the US but that the retaliation for the strike will go against Israel. What fun. Domestically, I am told to keep an eye on this Russian billionaire named Gaydamak who made a name for himself setting up tent cities during the Lebanon campaign when the government failed to provide housing for people fleeing the northern communities.

I had an interesting talk this month with a major respected Israel policy analyst who doesn’t think the US has decided yet what to do about Iran. He doesn’t know who will be running Israel in a year. He thinks on very good knowledge that Boogie Ayalon (former chief of staff) is not interested in politics and will not go with Bibi Netanyahu to take over the Likud. You can take this last sentence to the bank. Till now, the US has been the main obstacle to dealing with Syria. He feels Olmert should embrace the Saudi plan carefully; it has good points but accepting all of them at once is political suicide. He agrees with the concept of Sulha (reconciliation on a religious level) that I have promoted in Global Thoughts and that is part of the Saudi plan as originally offered. Syria he feels will not make peace with Israel and join the West against Iran since the US is hell-bent on destroying Syria and Israel cannot guarantee Assad’s survival. This last thought may change if Baker’s review has an impact. Dan Meridor represents good potential talent in an Israeli government but Olmert’s people view him as a threat and keep him away. The Israeli government failed mostly at managing expectations during the Lebanon campaign and there was a disconnect between what the army said it could do and what the politicians set out as publicly stated objectives. One really has to wonder why in both Israel and the US the politicians insist on ignoring what the generals tell them cannot be done.

Another Israeli I spoke to says Olmert is a snake but there are no alternatives. As long as Halutz remains the corrupt head of a corrupt army, there will be no reforms. Meridor doesn’t inspire followers and neither does Braverman in the Labor party who I touted last month. He thinks Bibi might be back at the helm within a year but I must say that so many people I know can’t stand the thought of him being back in that chair.

I had an interesting talk this month with an Orthodox Jew who was an Army Ranger in Iraq for a year and who recently returned. He said the moral situation in Iraq is not clear; if we pull out, many more people will die. He feels he did his duty more so than the idea that he was proud of being there. He is glad he went but whether the war was worthwhile is for historians to decide and above his paygrade. To me these answers were mostly copouts and his facade as professionalism as an army officer and a Harvard man. 

Two articles I read recently that were of more than passing interest. A Wall Street Journal columnist answered the Iranian president’s legitimate question as to why anyone should care more about 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust 65 years ago than 60 million dying each year somewhere in Africa. Seems like a decent question to me when you first think about it and I couldn’t easily answer it. His rather good answer in my opinion: Germany, a country at peace, the technology envy of Europe and known for being educated and civilized, gets up and starts isolating, rounding up, deporting and slaughtering a bunch of their own citizens and then tries to sell off their remains from their teeth and bones to their art and even runs experiments on them. They invade other countries to implement a final solution of ridding the world of these people. In Africa as in all the other wars you can think of, many more have been killed but they were as a result of civil wars or wars between countries. The Holocaust as we know it was a unique experience and further goes against the grain precisely because Germany was a place a reasonable person would think it shouldn’t have happened.

Jeff Stein in the New York Times on 17 October wrote an oped piece that was hilarious but true. Headlined “Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?” he interviewed all sorts of top government officials who revealed they knew next to nothing about Islam, meaning they didn’t know what was the meaning behind being a sunni or a shiite, or if Iran, Al Qaida or Hizbullah were sunni or shiite. Among those interviewed were the vice chairman of the house intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence; the head of the House intelligence subcommittee overseeing the CIA’s performance recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information; the chief of the FBI’s new national security branch; and the FBI’s counterintelligence bureau chief. If you are interested in the Middle East, it is very scary how much people at the top of the US don’t know.