New York City is a place where it seems that there is a lot of variety but really often you are looking at the same stuff just all over the place. The guy I want to be in New York is the Panini Man. His sandwiches are in just about every lunch place you can find. There may be many different places to have lunch, but they all have the same panini sandwiches – and they’re not too good. 

Before I start with this month’s discussion of the Middle East, here are some reactions to last month’s article. They ran across the board, but you’d be wrong if you thought all Arabs hated it and all Jews liked it.

i'll tell u what the real problem is, its that most sunni arabs of my generation dont know how the shiites feel about sunnis, and especially how the iranians feel about arabs. and the arab governments are too scared to tell them. and all this roots from a history of problems between the persians and the arabs. i personally try not to talk politics or even think politics, but all the region is surrounded by it now.
another problem is that most people around the world and indeed the dumbasses here in the region think its about religion, and the tools (i.e. the terrorists doing the dirty work) have been brainwashed and have no idea its not about religion either. 
if any of these people took time to actually learn about their religion and think for themselves they might see what the world deems as terrorism, we also deem and terrorism. it is against Islam and Islamic teachings. anyways, i feel that as the world advances the people seem to be getting dumber... its shocking.
anyway well written article, hope ur well and taking good care of urself.
Yasir in Oman

Wow, is that you Ivan! Or maybe I should call you Ivan the terrible! Listen to yourself you are calling for Armageddon against Israel’s enemies.... So that’s what defeat and humiliation does to people... I owe you man, reading your article made me realize that there is nothing wrong with us, the Arabs & Muslims are not subhuman, rather they are just humans, and anyone subjected to the same conditions will do the same thing. I could never understand and really grasp how someone could blow himself up killing scores of innocent people in the process, but now I can see where they come from, why do we have all those crazy fanatics amongst us: its people like you; who at the first sign of things not going 100% their way call to nuke the world. I suppose it is the “superiority/inferiority” complex the jews have had throughout history, just remember that neither the Arab, Muslims nor the Persians have ever took part in your miserable existence, on the contrary the golden age for your people and culture (after the destruction of the temple) was under our rule.
I don’t even want to begin to respond to your fallacies, half truths or racial calls and invitation to commit genocide, all I hope that there are not many like you around in either side of this conflicts. You are not really different than Osam and his gang, both are fanatics who are willing to destroy the world to get at his enemy. Come on man pull yourself together I though you were a moderate educated person with sense and morality.
Go back to your senses.
Ps. your baby is really cute.
Marwan in Bahrain

what you wrote gives shivers in the back, but I believe you're right. 
Unfortunately so.
I too believe war with Iran and Syria is ineluctable.
OK, it's one (good) thing to anticipate, the important question is : 
"now, what should I do to get prepared?"
It is difficult to answer.
Marc from France in Israel

This was your best Globalthoughts yet. And I even agreed on everything you said!!!!!! 
Avi in USA

I agree with your thoughts. The world, including UN secretary Mr. Annan, does not think the same way. 
Gury in Jerusalem

OK, onto this month’s commentary.

Israel/Lebanon – So, after a month to think about things and calm down, any thoughts looking forward and any reconsideration of what was said last month? So far, the Israelis are putting in orders with the US for a few billion dollars in weapons systems to compensate for the fact they were hit bad with anti-tank missiles. They might want to look at anti-rocket defenses for the civilian population but few think it will work or that it is worth the money against the small amount of damage that the rockets cause. Assuming that advantage goes to Hizbullah sitting on its terrain during a winter fight in muddy and cold Lebanon, I expect quiet until at least the spring. The French foreign minister told the Spanish foreign minister last month that in 4-5 months it could be electric again and considering that Olmert is at 22% in the polls and Israelis across the board are extremely upset at the incompetence with which this campaign was run and the fact that they feel their deterrence has suffered a major blow, I can’t see how another round of fighting can be avoided to in effect try and set things straight. Nevertheless, I think that won’t happen, and I’ll say why below. 

I think the main reasons the Israeli public are angry at their leadership are that 1. They set the objectives too high and couldn’t meet them instead of setting the objectives low and exceeding them. Olmert and Peretz made the mistake of running off with their mouths before they had the results to show for it. This means that the failure was not in not winning the war but in not managing the public’s expectations and that people would have been satisfied with a lesser result if told that this was the intended result. The actual result wasn’t that bad and Olmert had good reasons for not going all the way. That last point was discussed in the last posting. 2. The war was just run incompetently in that orders kept changing hourly and the politicians seemed unable to make decisions. Perhaps the army brass knew what it was doing and they were hostage to the indecisive political leadership but to the soldier on the field it all seemed amateur hour. The final weekend land incursion after a cease-fire deal was reached really seemed like a waste and it was probably a mistake to start the war so quickly before things were ready. 3. People all over felt that the government did not deliver resources to those who needed it – to civilians in shelters and to the army units on the ground. People just didn’t have things they needed. 

Israelis are great improvisors but evidently not great enough (this of course is the biggest disappointment to the Americans and other Arabs who stuck their necks out banking on the Israelis to win – if you hoped that the Israelis could succeed where America failed, you were disappointed in this round), and it could also be that the corruption problem in Israel finally reached the point where people have had enough – everybody got fat and broken and nothing was lean and mean in the Israeli fighting machine and everybody realized it. So yes, heads should roll. But because the rot is so extensive, choosing whose heads to roll is the problem. In essence, since everyone is at fault, nobody is at fault and perhaps it is just best to use the people you’ve got and just buckle down and work and set things straight. That may be the way the country goes. This problem has been a decade in the making with virtually everyone in power at fault since they’ve all been running the country at one time or another. I see this as positive – maybe they’ll actually fix what’s broken now that they’ve been burned and realize that blaming or replacing one side or the other really isn’t going to solve anything. On the other hand, because everyone is at blame, then nobody is to blame and nothing will be done to fix the rot. As I will say below, some things may be fixed and others won’t. I think there may be a fresh look at diplomatic options but that corruption in the allocation of resources will probably continue.

During the past month, a few things became apparent that were not clear a month ago. First, I wasn’t yet seeing the various negative articles in the Arab press inside Lebanon about what people think of Hizbullah. Nasrallah may be having big rallies but he is not making great friends in Lebanon as he looks like a guy trying to take over the country. Second, much less Iranian money is actually reaching Lebanese than originally thought. It was great PR but not that much in reality.  These two developments negate a good number of comments I made about the dangerously rising hopeful militant mood that I felt was caused in Lebanon by this stalled campaign. The Iranians also have big problems inside Iran and money is scarce, especially with chicken prices going up 10% during Ramadan. The new president was elected on a populist platform and isn’t delivering the goods and the Iranians are not thrilled sending money to Lebanon and Hizbullah. There are real problems going on inside Iran; something that isn't obvious. This isn’t helping him, and it is interesting that the Hamas in Gaza also can’t deliver the goods because they are being boycotted. It is a fact that economic sanctions still count for something in the long run because if you can’t deliver the goods, you gotta deal with the rest of the world. Hamas realizes this and as much as they have their ideology, they know they can’t deliver anything to the Palestinians as long as they are under boycott and at some point they will be voted out. Fatah is gaining in the polls if they could just become straight. The falling price of oil may be seasonal and a product of pre-election engineering between Bush and the Saudis (I promise the price will go back up right after the November elections) but that’s the most important thing to bring the Iranians and Syrians to the table if nothing else does (and it won’t because they know it too – check out Bob Woodward’s new book quoting a meeting this summer between Bush and the Saudis agreeing to step up oil production temporarily before the elections).

There is a reason to be optimistic – putting aside what happened and looking forward – let’s say the Israelis make another war in Lebanon. What can they accomplish? Not very much – tear up the country and spend billions of dollars just to throw Hizbullah out of their bunkers to say we got even? It will trash another year of economy for the country and 6 months after they pull out (which they will, assuming they don’t want to be in Lebanon) Hizbullah will be right back where they were because there is no real Lebanese authority and the Syrians are intent on keeping a presence in Lebanon. If you deal with Syria and ONLY if you deal with Syria, you can clean up Lebanon. If you get off the Golan, you knock off Syria, isolate Iran 600 miles away and the Palestinians have to deal with you because Hizbullah and Hamas are out of business from their Syrian and Lebanese bases.

I don’t know if I’ve stated the obvious on these pages (sometimes it just escapes mention), but The main lesson of the past 5 years with Barak’s Lebanon withdrawal, the Gaza withdrawal and Hamas’s election all thrown into the mix is that the Israeli unilateral approach won’t work. That’s why Olmert and Peres have declared that track dead. It was a great idea for all the right reasons and it made sense when you had every reason to believe that you had nobody to talk to and could build a wall around the problem but it just doesn’t work in the real world. That doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. It means that it’s a waste of time to declare the end game and try to enforce it without the other side agreeing to it. All you get is a unilateral concession from Israel which is appreciated by nobody, a new border which is recognized by nobody and which is taken as a withdrawal in weakness by the Arab world which ultimately leaves the Israelis without quiet and feeling even more vulnerable and against doing anything at all except feeling that war is inevitable. So it’s stupid and doesn’t achieve anything. The Oslo problem was that there were agreements that were vague and not enforced and that there was no end game in sight but only interim agreements that did not create hope for the future.

So to solve this problem, whatever the solution is going to be, you’re going to need the Israelis and their opponents to sit down and agree to whatever they’re going to agree to. It’s the only way forward. The optimism is that Lebanon now (a country which itself has no real issues with Israel) is really the key to all this, and that's something that wouldn't be true if it weren't for the events of this past summer. Think about it – Saudi Arabia spent billions of dollars over the past 15 years building up Lebanon. That’s all been lost. The Saudis are not idiots and they know that they will be fools to invest a dime into Lebanon because if there is no peace between Lebanon and Israel that investment will be completely at risk. You were burned if you thought with all due logic that Hizbullah would keep the peace because they didn’t give a shit about Lebanon. Neither do the Syrians if it suits their Syrian interest and if it isn’t good for them, they’ll let Lebanon burn too in the hope that chaos will force them into the void. You can’t solve Lebanon without dealing with Syria, and the Palestinians also have something to do with this because they’re a big part of Lebanon and the Iranians are using Lebanon as a base against Israel with the Palestinian issue as the hook. The Jordanians would very much prefer to have a stable Lebanon on their border; they don’t need trouble going on around them even though every time Lebanon crashes, it means more Arab tourists prefer Amman to Beirut. But still, every time something sneezes in the region, tourists bypass Jordan and investment falters. They need stability around them and, as I said last month, in the event of nuclear war, they and all the Palestinians around them will be toast more than anyone else. As I said earlier, the Israelis must be realizing that even if the last campaign in Lebanon seems like unfinished business, is going back to war over this a promising alternative? The best alternative for the Israelis is to go for peace, if it’s possible, and that is what Olmert and Co. really want and will go for if they can – if it’s real, they will survive politically because that’s what the country really wants too and why they elected them in the first place. Especially when everyone there thinks that peace can’t work – it requires a strong push by leadership to deliver the goods and to do it in a real way that convinces people that it’s for real, which means that the next round of peacemaking might be more successful than the past because everyone is so cynical about its prospects which will force leaders to get real. If all that Olmert can offer is the prospect of another war, he must be replaced because nobody trusts him to run it. Put another way, Olmert was elected to make peace, not to make war.

So all in all, this provides an excellent incentive for the Saudis and Israelis to be talking to each other. (It’s also interesting because Silvan Shalom, the previous foreign minister, said he met with every Arab country except for Saudi Arabia.) The two regional mafiosi need to make a deal about Lebanon in order for the Saudis to rebuild that country. Nobody else will rebuild that country so in effect Lebanon has no future at all until the Saudis and Israelis decide its future. Since Lebanon requires dealing with Syria and Palestinian issues and I’ve also said on these pages that a Sulha on a religious level between the Saudis and the Israelis could create a whole new atmosphere on a global level between Jews and Moslems, it really makes sense to go this route and try to engineer a holistic solution to these problems via the Saudis. The new Saudi leadership is quite responsible and, above all, has the most to lose against the Iranians and it is just a fact that the Saudis need a strong and reliable regional ally against Iran and the Israelis are just the best situated to do this. They may be despicable Jews to the Wahabis but to these Sunnis that beats their fanatical Shiite neighbor to the east. I have long felt that if the Israelis and Saudis can move forward, everything else will ultimately fall into line. I think Silvan Shalom had it backward – the Saudis have the gold and Mecca – they’re the first ones to talk to. Another aspect to the Saudis – they are courting American Jews and even Israelis. They have differences with Bush but realize that they prefer Republicans to Democrats. Bush Jr. is not Bush Sr. (Sr. wouldn’t have invaded Iraq), but he has a world view and runs a pretty stable administration. He lets his people run their departments and doesn’t change his mind much. Unlike Clinton who issued new statements each month. So Bush represents a certain stability and he offers a real possibility of dealing with Iran in his last 2 years in office. They have to deal with Bush and they don’t want Qatar stealing their thunder. So they’ve made the decision to deal with Bush and America, and Israel.

As to Syria, I don’t know what Olmert really has in mind about Syria. He talks tough about them but in the end the Israelis were scrupulous about avoiding any entanglement with Syria in the past campaign. I don’t think they want to replace this regime with what might be a fanatical religious regime and a good part of the Israeli strategic establishment is not thrilled with the American experiment in Iraq. Therefore, I think they don’t want to mess around with Syria and wind up with something that might be off the wall there. Assad is weak and an idiot but at least he has a stable regime and he seems to be very receptive to dealing with Israel. If you stand back and look at the whole picture, it doesn’t matter what you think of Syria – the important point is that Syria is not an existential threat to anyone but Iran is and the immediate need is to get Syria away from being Iran’s toehold in the region. Syria is also holding back Lebanon and so therefore it is the godfather of that country. I have mentioned before that a substantial portion of the Israeli strategic establishment wants to deal with Syria.

My friend Mohammed in Israel has this to say and I value his opinion highly. People in Israel are forgetting the war very fast and returning to the North for holidays and to do business. Arabs in the area are cash poor and selling real estate below what it’s worth. Olmert is weak and needs to show some kind of solution to divert attention from the failure of the war. (I personally don’t think it was a war, which is why I call it a campaign. Maybe 2% of the country’s military was actually used; to me that’s a campaign, not a war.) So therefore he’s interested in trying to deal with Saudi Arabia. (He certainly is saying nice things about them, which I have been doing as well in the last few months.) In order to deal with Iran, you have to get the Palestinians out of the way because you need the Arab world with you on this one and once you take away the Palestinian issue, the Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran have nothing to say about it. It seems the Americans are applying a lot of pressure on Israel to deal with the Palestinians to try and clear the decks so that they can build a coalition to go against Iran, which everyone in the region agrees is the Real Problem. Syria may be at odds with Saudi right now on Iran and Lebanon, but if the Syria issue is resolved in the Israeli framework, this also leaves Iran alone and much easier to deal with. Interestingly, there is talk in Israel about compromising on the Golan which is why the Likud has been raising a storm about the issue this week. Bibi could be back in the prime minister’s chair within a year; perhaps even Barak could make a comeback. But there is really nobody on the horizon that looks appealing as a leader. Hamas and Abbas are also cornered; they can’t deliver under this boycott. Neither the Jews nor the Arabs want another war in Lebanon. The Israelis can’t win it and the Hizbullah doesn’t want to start another war because they know the outcome will be worse the second time around – they will be sure not to give the Israelis a pretext and as long as this is the fact the Israelis ought not dare start a war because nobody will think they are justified if they start it. [An interesting problem for Lebanon is that one of the major criticisms of this war inside Israel even among the rabbis is that too many soldiers died trying to minimize civilian casualties and the ethics of war are being rewritten so that in the next round the collateral damage will be greater. IC]  The Arabs are confused right now in Israel what to think about all this especially since things in the Middle East these days are changing at a constant rate and they are divided over whether or not the Arab world should have given Israel the green light to do this to Lebanon. They took the brunt of the civilian casualties in this last war even though they didn’t get either headlines or resources. Their elected representatives don’t speak for them – 40% of Arabs don’t vote for Arab members of Parliament; many don’t even vote and they are increasingly cynical of those that try to be extremist when they see them going to Arab countries and getting paid off by the word – Bisharra is believed to have received over $10 million from Arab countries and gets paid off when he goes to visit the Syrians and the others. 

You have to keep in mind the Arab citizens of Israel – they’re the ones in the middle who have the most to lose if things get messy. They took the majority of civilian casualties in the last round and know that they will continue to take the hit even though they have zero influence in the process. I’ve always felt it was a mistake for Olmert and Barak not to put any ministers in the government; it really is an injustice and it would change things greatly if they did so. The other Arabs have to be reminded that if you want to throw bombs at Israel, you’re really hitting the Palestinians both inside and outside Israel even more so. For all the business of the events of August, the Israelis really weren’t all that threatened by it. Terrorized yes, but not really put at major risk. If it were so, they wouldn’t be forgetting it so quickly and I’m still not convinced that even with all the scandal and rot that anyone truly will be fixed, for one thing because everyone is at fault and because the damage wasn’t all that great. So in a sense, since you can’t blame anyone and nothing really happened, nobody has to do anything. 

Here's a new name in Israeli politics to keep in mind. Avishay Braverman is a guy in Labor who was promised an important job in the new government. He didn't get it and now wants to take over the Labor party from Peretz. He was the head of Ben Gurion university in Beersheva and is considered a world-class economist. He has a good record of making things work. He currently leads in Labor party polling 36-21 over Peretz. He has competition in the party, but he is a non-general with a track record of success and is the kind of guy who has a real chance at leadership if peace is on the agenda and Bibi turns out to be the Likud's top man.

Back to the broader Middle East and this month’s developments. Qatar is an interesting situation. They are setting themselves up as mediators between Israel and the Arabs and there is a steady stream of people coming through the country to meet with others. The Americans seem not too thrilled; Bush recently refused a meeting to the country’s emir and prime minister and there are talks of moving US military facilities out of that country. Remember what I said also about the tensions between the Qataris and the Saudis and the use of Qatar as a wedge by the US and the increasing desire of the Saudis to get back in the US corner. The issue is that the US wants to use that facility to attack Iran and the Quataris are pretty cozy with the Iranians...On the Iranian front, here’s why it’s going to be up to the US, Israel and very few others to deal with this and the rest is all chatter: I was in Portugal and a guy said to me, “What do we care about Iran? Maybe they’ll hit Spain but not us. We can sell them anything and not worry about them.” As long as people feel they can do business with them and suffer no pain, nothing will constrain them and all the talk about peace, love and happiness is just chatter from someone who has nothing to lose. The Russians are an interesting case as well – they have what to lose from Iran in terms of a bunch of fundamentalist muslims around them waiting to be leaked nuclear technology from Iran, but the people running the show are not worried about the future; they are a mafia only interested in what they can get from Iran right now in their pockets, says my amigo in Moscow. If Iran nukes Moscow, they will be sitting in their villas in London. So don’t expect any responsible help from that end of the world.... Just remember, there’s a reason why a bunch of secret service heads of Arab states and Israel all met this week in secret and why they all want Hamas out of the PA – it’s called Iran.

As for Iraq, I just think the Americans are in a lousy situation. I don’t believe anything coming out of official Washington on this war and I am very upset that the Pentagon is breaking its word to the various soldiers and extending their tours. Nobody will want to volunteer for an army that treats people this way. No matter what happens in Iraq, if this is the way we win a war (which we won’t), we will hurt when we have to fight a real war and nobody trusts the Pentagon. It’s terrible long-term policy for the US. We ought to turn all these troops around and deal with Iran and just arrange to finish up Iraq which is really not producing anything for anyone at this point and just costing us billions of dollars. I can’t see any benefit to this and do not believe that by fighting over there we are making our world safer here in the US. I just don’t get it and according to the Congressional accounting office this war is costing us $2 billion a week – we should get a lot more for this money by ploughing into regional development and education and negate the idea that suicide and self-destruction are suitable options, but nobody is smart enough to figure this out. By the way, the fact that the Israelis are training the Kurds is no surprise to me – the Israelis have been involved with the Kurds for about 40 years already. For whatever it’s worth, the Kurd area is the only area that is peaceful. Even the Arabs from the rest of Iraq are dying to move in there to escape the fratricide between Sunni and Shiite.

As for Iran, let me conclude by stating that I don’t know if the problem of Iran can be solved militarily or not. Charles Krauthammer has an article this month about the Calculus of War and it says the stakes would be really high if the US went to war. It may be necessary but it really should be a last resort because it will be painful, expensive and very messy. As I said last month, many will die but the question is whether many more will die if we don’t deal with Iran. It may be that the better way to solve Iran is to solve other regional problems and deny the Iranians the grist for their fire. There may be good opportunities here to test that route and I think the current desire among the parties in the region is to test that route first. 

One more point on this war against terror. Of course, I am against terror but I am very uncomfortable with what the US administration is doing. It is too easy for them to call someone a terrorist for any reason and lock them up for years. It won’t be long (and has already happened if you read a good number of the op-ed columnists in the New York Times) that people will threaten to do this to people who don’t do what they want. There is no way that such power will not be abused. There is no reason to me that courts should be bypassed in the name of national security. You can’t just throw people in jail, send them to third countries and torture them without any oversight. It will lead to innocents having their lives ruin and probably catch very few real terrorists. We know from experience that coercion rarely leads to truth and that Guantanimo alone was responsible for squandering whatever benefit of the doubt the world might have given American post-9/11. One of the best reasons to throw out the Republicans in the next election is that they are getting too many powers and are going to cause real harm to the country’s image abroad as well as to those who get caught up in this century’s version of the communist witch-hunt. You’d think we’d have learned something in the last 5 years and we haven’t. Creating a nation driven by fear is not going to make America strong or respected in the world. I think that the country will soon figure this out and vote them out. Especially as it becomes clear that the administration is manipulating the petroleum price with the Saudis in advance of the elections. I don’t have any love for the Democrats – their party has become captive of left-wing extremist elements and they’re not terribly friendly to Israel these days, but you need to clean house every decade or so in order to maintain the checks and balances of our government, and it’s time to clean house again and regain some balance that’s been lost. Bush may be very sure of himself and his vision, but the people around him mostly don't seem to believe in it, based on the information they have, and it seems that the few that do believe it refuse to look at anything that doesn't mesh with their conceptions. They don't seem to have any facts at their disposal to prove otherwise.

Economy – It’s a needed break for the world economy that oil went down but I think it’s a blip and that the long term price will stay up. Real estate prices are going down in places such as Miami, but New York has not changed much yet. Give it another year and I think you will see more blood on the streets of New York. Residential inventory is 80% higher than last year and rents are actually going up quite a bit this year. But it still doesn’t make sense that a 2 bedroom apartment in Manhattan is $1.1 million. So hold onto your hats. 

Pope – People want a comment here. I don’t have an opinion yet of this new pope, but I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he meant to let the Moslem world know that he will deal with issues related to their religion instead of sweeping it under the rug but I don’t think he meant to insult the Moslem religion. My friend Mohammed says the pope needs to tread more carefully when he talks about anything Islam because the relations between the religions are just so tense that even saying the word Moslem is likely to create a storm of protest. I of course like the idea that the Pope discusses real issues and recognize that troublemakers will take any opportunity to seize on anything he says to make a controversy out of it. I hope he will say whatever he intends to say and say it clearly instead of hiding behind obscure quotes from 500 years ago and doing so in a way that creates plausible deniability for himself when someone notices that he might have said something controversial. If Islamic extremism is a problem in the world today, I want the Pope to take it on.

2008 Presidential Race – Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic frontrunner until she gets knocked out of the race if it remains true that 40% of Americans say that they would never vote for her. Till now, you could never become president with such numbers. Her saving grace is that people still like Bill Clinton and would vote for her if they thought they were getting him. Americans read the Constitution to forbid someone from serving more than 2 terms as president. Guiliani is a contender from the Republican side but he is not popular among the conservative Republicans, whose vote he needs to get past the primaries. Senator McCain could be a contender but he has a tendency to self-destruct and it is a long season to run for president. The problem for the Democrats is that the party has been taken over by extremist leftists and they have a horrible history of putting up losers as candidates because their primary voters don’t represent the likely mainstream voters in general elections.

Pakistan Prediction -- I am predicting that the wild card in the next year will be Pakistan. I think Musharraf will not last another year. His new biography which spills too many beans on his international colleagues while he is still in office is going to make some of these colleagues decide that they could live without him. They may not get rid of him, but they will be much less likely to cover his ass from now on.

Business Hotels and Travel Experiences – Away from politics. I find that all these airlines and hotels who tell you they offer business class services are all the same and don’t really offer things that I want as a business person when I travel. I just read a comparison of 50 airlines and their business class cabins in the Business Traveler Magazine and it’s amazing how commoditized it’s all become – basically the only difference is in the degree of the pitch and recline and the width of the seat. On airlines for example, they all give you the same stupid amenity kits with things you don’t really need. Why not give you something useful such as a smartly designed lightweight bag to carry your carry-ons or toiletries? I’ve never gotten anything useful from all these flights and you’d think someone would spend 5 minutes thinking of some way to distinguish themselves from the others in this business. In hotels, I’d like to find in my room a laptop and printer with easy access to tourist information, TV programs that offer me something intelligent to watch such as something about business or travel instead of HBO movies or even an exercise or relaxation program that I can do in the room, snacks to eat when I come in at 10 at night and have nowhere to go such as crackers, fruit, ready to eat vegetables and hummus instead of just cookies and chocolate bars. How often do you use the body gel and the hair conditioner? How about something to clean your eyeglasses, dental floss and mouthwash, things you tend not to fly with but that you really want. All the spas have the same menu of treatments – facials, massages and various water treatments. It’s the same all over the world. Wouldn’t you rather see a coach for an hour to work on improving your memory or visualization techniques, have an adult playroom with various games that test or build skills such as models or drawing or even computer graphics instead of the regular gym or library that has one TV tuned to one channel and a couch facing it. I really think that if someone rethinks the concept of a business hotel or even a resort and tailors it to business executives either to network with others in a city environment or a resort to meet others in a relaxed retreat that it would be a great contribution to the world of business and human relations. There is nothing along this line that I see remotely yet.