An Israeli moderate's breathtaking sense of entitlement

As the Netanyahu cabinet unites in full-voiced opposition to the framework agreement with Iran and gears up to pull its strings in the U.S. Congress, the relative sobriety of former head of Israeli military intelligence Amos Yadlin, who would have been defense minister if Zionist Camp had won the March 17 election, offers a sharp contrast.  Yadlin, a major general who was one of the pilots who bombed the Iraqi reactor in 1981, allows that compared to realistic alternatives, the framework is "not a bad agreement,"  Acknowledging in an interview with Al-Monitor's Ben Caspit  that the Iranians have adhered to the terms of the interim agreement, he offers this conditional support:

If they implement the principles of the agreement presented yesterday in the same way, then for the next 15 years they will be frozen at a point of being one year away from a nuclear bomb, and I think this is not a negligible achievement...Let’s think: After all, even a US attack will not distance Iran for 15 years from a nuclear bomb, so why not freeze it in place for the same time — without a war?

Give his relative pragmatism and moderation, the window that Yadlin opens on Israel's assumptions about the terms of the country's relations with the U.S. is all the more striking. If Netanyahu had been savvier, he suggests, he would be in position to influence the shape of the ultimate deal -- and brought home additional bacon for Israel. My emphasis below:

The Obama Doctrine: Pushing on a String?

There wasn't much to inspire in Obama's West Point speech. Dan Drezner wished in advance -- fairly, I think -- that Obama would sketch out in some detail for the benefit of allies just how he proposes to use means other than war to enhance collective security -- in the South China Sea, in eastern Europe. He didn't do that  He just touted in rather general terms the sanctions against Iran and Russia as examples of effective collective action.* He also drew a line, with perhaps more specificity than in the past, between vital U.S. interests that would be defended unilaterally if necessary and " issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States," in which collective action, usually nonmilitary, is the appropriate course. Perhaps I've grown accustomed to that distinction through Obamosmosis -- it did not surprise me.

What did strike me was a few rather caustic notes. The speech was short on rhetorical olive branches. For example:

1. China the aggressor and competitor: 

Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors

Regional aggression that goes unchecked – in southern Ukraine, the South China Sea, or anywhere else in the world – will ultimately impact our allies, and could draw in our military.

Twice Obama rhetorically yoked China's aggression with Russia's -- and once, China's economic success with its military muscle-flexing.  No "we do not seek to contain China's rise" reassurances.

How does Roger Cohen know what Egyptians want?

With all due respect to Roger Cohen's long experience as a reporter, how does he know what the Egyptian revolution has been "about"?

He addresses the question with apparent confidence:

The uprising that ended decades of dictatorship and led to Egypt’s first free and fair presidential election last year was about the right to that vote. But at a deeper level it was about personal empowerment, a demand to join the modern world, and live in an open society under the rule of law rather than the rule of despotic whim.

In a Muslim nation, where close to 25 percent of Arabs live, it also demanded of political Islam that it reject religious authoritarianism, respect differences and uphold citizenship based on equal rights for all.

Cohen's sources? Heba Morayef, head of Human Rights Watch in Cairo, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the world famous "liberal modernizer" (Cohen's phrase) who signed onto the generals' coup. That's it -- the sum total of his cited sources for telling us what 80-plus million Egyptians want.

For Egypt, a warning from Aesop

Not to pretend to any expertise about Egypt, but as soon as I read about the military's ultimatum to Morsi, this fable of Aesop's came to mind:

There was once a Horse who used to graze in a meadow which he had all to himself. But one day a Stag came into the meadow, and said he had as good a right to feed there as the Horse, and moreover chose all the best places for himself. The Horse, wishing to be revenged upon his unwelcome visitor, went to a man and asked if he would help him to turn out the Stag. "Yes," said the man, "I will by all means; but I can only do so if you let me put a bridle in your mouth and mount on your back." The Horse agreed to this, and the two together very soon turned the Stag out of the pasture: but when that was done, the Horse found to his dismay that in the man he had got a master for good.

Until Mubarak's deposing, Egypt had been under military rule since 1952.  Do Egyptians really want to toss out their first elected leader, in power for just a year, and take the bit again?

Did Romney "panic"? Or revert to form?

Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait each offer insightful views of the thinking, such as it was, behind Romney's disgustingly opportunistic attack on the Obama administration's response to the assaults on U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya, the latter of which left four Americans dead. But the two explanations are actually somewhat at odds with each other.

Klein takes the verbal assault as evidence that the Romney campaign is panicking.  It has been determined to keep the focus relentlessly on the economy:

The key word here is "disgraceful"

In the wake of the attacks on the U.S. missions in Libya and Egypt and the Obama administration response, Mitt Romney released this statement:

"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."

Leave aside the merits of the measured administration statement or the in-the-heat  responses from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, which were not "administration" response. You do not have to be expert in anything to assess the merit of Romney's reaction -- or his fitness for the presidency. You need only be a social mammal of the human species.

Niall Ferguson goes all Götterdämmerung on us again...

Niall Ferguson issues a timely warning about the intense economic hardship following in the wake of the Egyptian revolution (recession, capital flight, inflation, unemployment). But having effectively demonstrated that hard times are at hand for Egypt, Ferguson goes into costume (melo)drama mode:

None of this should surprise us. Such is the life cycle of revolutions. What begins with euphoric crowds soon slides into a second phase of economic paralysis. The same happened in France after the initial “bliss” of 1789 and in Russia after 1917. In each case, exuberance at the overthrow of the old regime was swiftly succeeded by exasperation at the decline in living standards. And that was what gave the political extremists their opportunity to peddle their radical ideology of war against internal and external foes. Yesterday, the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Tomorrow, I fear, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.

Well, maybe. But that is what I call a loose analogy (or pair of analogies).  A lot of countries have overthrown dictators since 1789; most have probably experienced economic hardship in the aftermath.  Not all have devolved into terror and tyranny.  In fact, the Egyptians of all stripes who participated in the ovethrow of Mubarak  have displayed intense awareness of a revolution-gone-wrong much nearer at hand: Iran's in 1979.  All, including the Muslim Brotherhood, publicly rejected that model:

GVF [2/4/11] — Egypt’s main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood have rejected calls by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for an Islamic Revolution similar to the Iranian revolution of 1979 to be established in Egypt.

“The MB regards the revolution as the Egyptian People’s Revolution not an Islamic Revolution” said a statement published on the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website just hours after Khamenei's remarks on Friday, while “asserting that the Egyptian People’s Revolution includes Muslims, Christians, from all sects and political.”

Of course, Ayatollah Khomeini made noises about democracy too in 1979. Egypt's revolution could be betrayed (Elliott Abrams sees economic populism as a more likely wrong turn). But if Ferguson has any evidence that full-blown theocracy is around the corner, he doesn't cite it.

Back in February, a Bulgarian novelist, Nikolai Grozni, sketched out a very different analogy between a past revolution and Egypt's. His was offered as a hope, though not unleavened with warning:

Bernstein concentrate

Jonathan Bernstein's alertness to the tradeoffs, calculations of political advantage, and levers of influence that are elected officials' stock-in-trade often yield, shall we say, mordant clarity.  So today, waving off the NYT revelation that U.S. military aid to Egypt went largely to enrich well-placed Egyptian officers, noting that U.S. military aid to Egypt was essentially an extended bribe to keep the Israeli front quiet, Bernstein concludes:

I think I'd rather have all that money wasted on a fleet of private luxury jets than spent on fighters and bombers.

Well, me too. And ha ha!  I got a real reader's buzz from that closer. But as is often the case with Bernstein, the worldly insight begs the thornier issues of just how well realpolitik serves the country's ultimate interests. The  question here, was the "military aid" money well-spent, taps directly into the core question about our Mideast policy: has propping up dictators, and so keeping the oil flowing and Israel militarily dominant (odd that military aid to Egypt could support Israeli dominance, but it has), served the U.S.'s ultimate interests? 

Wrestling with hope for Egypt

It is interesting to watch sober minds grapple with their hopes in the wake of the Egyptian revolution. Nowhere more so than on the Comment page of the Financial Times, where columnists based on various continents address as a matter of course the current and likely future progress of democracy (and humanity), and Fukuyama haunts the space (and not infrequently, visits in the flesh, or rather ink). 

Up today is Martin Wolf, who explains the tidal pull toward democracy in basically Fukuyaman terms -- economic pressure to compete plus an Aristotelian understanding of human nature as essentially political, determined to self-govern. Unanswered in the short space of a column is the relationship between the two: as Wolf points out, usually it's only when a country has reached a certain level of economic development that its people are equipped to express "something deep within us" that demands self-governance.  If the will to self-governance is prior to the economic conditions that unleash it, that suggests that the "democracy drive" is either evolutionary or a product of intelligent design.

As an economist, Wolf places his bet on Egypt in mainly economic terms:

Scepticism is not unreasonable. As my colleague, Gideon Rachman notes, the stability of democracy goes hand in hand with economic advance. The richer the country, the more educated its people, except where wealth comes mainly from resource rents. Again, the higher the proportion of the desperately poor, the greater the likelihood of a successful electoral appeal by ultimately ruinous populists. Finally, the poorer the country, the smaller the resources at the disposal of any democratic government with which to protect itself against its foes...

True, Egypt is a relatively poor country with a sizeable proportion of the population illiterate. Yet its gross domestic product per head, at purchasing power parity, is almost double India’s and 50 per cent higher than Indonesia’s. This does not suggest that democracy is, in any sense, inconceivable. Egypt does have a well-organised Islamist movement. But does this have to be deeply anti-democratic? This must be put to the test. Remember that Catholicism, too, was once widely thought incompatible with successful democratic government.

What interests me is, with the ground thus prepared, Wolf grapples with "naivete anxiety" while giving way, mostly, to that "something deep within us" that yearns for democracy:

Times headline deploys adjective...or verb?

Is it worthwhile delving into the mind of a New York Times headline writer? Why not? Consider:

As Mubarak Digs In, U.S. Policy in Egypt Is Complicated

Momentous question of the morning: is "complicated" an adjective or a (passive) verb?  Are we simply suggesting that U.S. policy is complex right now, or that it's being "complicated" as we speak by the behavior of the besieged Egyptian president?

The core point seems to be that, being a step behind fast-moving events, policy is "complicated" at every step by new developments rendering the last pronouncement or action obsolete. For example:

Analytical humility

On Fallows blog today, a tribute to the humility of some commentators trying to make sense of the Egyptian uprising:

...arbitrarily or not, in a single day earlier this week (Jan. 31) three instances of admirable humility in attempts to fathom what's happening in Egypt caught my eye. Do they indicate some collective chastening of American consciousness by events over the last near-decade? Who knows? But here they are.

"Here" being here.

As if Marcus Garvey had his way

Via Goldblog, I'm reminded of a familiar thought prompted by Andre Aciman's reminder of an Exodus on the NYT op-ed page:

The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) "proud tradition of tolerance" of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.

I have often thought that the single best justification for the State of Israel is the fact that Jews were an oppressed minority throughout the Middle East who had a chance, mainly after the founding of the state of Israel by mainly Ashkenazi Jews, to build a home in a sliver of land carved out from the vast acres of their former oppressors. Yes, European antisemitism was more virulent than the Muslim variety, but Sephardic Jews were very much second-class citizens in Arab lands. It's somewhat as if African Americans got hold of a piece of the Arizona desert and built their own state there.