Posts Tagged ‘Israel’

Is Iran entering a Vietnam-style Quagmire ?

Monday, April 27th, 2015

I have previously expressed concerns that Saudi Arabia was in a fight for its life.

The question is whether the Saudis will fall to their own Shiite population and whether the capture of Aden will allow Iran to block Saudi oil shipments.

“Once hailed by President Barack Obama as a model for fighting extremism, the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Yemen has all but collapsed as the country descends into chaos, according to U.S. and Yemeni officials.”

Now, the Saudis take this war very seriously.

As for Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom is waging the first war in its history. Yet with its small, weak and inexperienced army, it cannot commit ground troops to fight both the Shiite Houthis or the Sunni Jihadists, and is relying mainly on its air power that has, thus far, caused the death of many innocent civilians.

It also is blockading ports to prevent Iranian resupply of Yemeni clients.

The Saudi-led coalition that’s fighting against Shiite rebels in Yemen said it completed a blockade of the country’s ports and is ready to step up airstrikes.
Bombing missions are seeking to stop the Shiite Houthis from moving forces between Yemen’s cities, Ahmed Asseri, a Saudi military officer, told reporters in Riyadh on Monday. Coalition aircraft and warships targeted the rebels as they advanced toward Aden, the southern port that’s the last stronghold of Saudi Arabia’s ally in Yemen, President Abdurabuh Mansur Hadi. Shipping routes to and from the ports are under the coalition’s control, Asseri said.

The Egyptians are planning to help in Yemen. Even though Nasser’s campaign in Yeman was a disaster, that was in 1962 and run by Nasser, an incompetent.

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A tipping point approaches.

Saturday, March 21st, 2015

The Obama Administration is close to announcing a deal with the government of Iran on their nuclear program. The deal will include some weak language on delay in the acquisition of a nuclear weapon by Iran and the dropping of all sanctions against the regime by the US and its European allies. This will be a disaster, in my opinion. The New York Times has another editorial today which includes delighted anticipation of the deal and more invective against Prime Minister Netanyahu who opposes the deal.

“In a way, the administration has already won,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East adviser to Democratic and Republican administrations. “If you get agreement by the end of March, it will be historic in nature, it will have demonstrated that the administration is prepared to willfully stand up to Republican opposition in Congress and to deal with members of its own party who have doubts, and has withstood Israeli pressure.”

The “historic agreement” will fulfill the ambitions of the allegedly “moderate” Iranian president Rouhani. The Weekly Standard has a nice biography of Rouhani ( which means “pious” or “a cleric” in Arabic.)

Yet since 1979, throughout his entire political career, he has systematically violated what even hard-nosed Islamic jurists might consider sacred obligations that rulers owe their subjects.

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Netanyahu wins in Israel !

Wednesday, March 18th, 2015

In spite of the best efforts of the Obama GOTV team, the Likud Party in Israel improved its position in the Knesset and its leader PM Netanyahu will be the PM again. The LA Times is, of couyrse, outraged at the “cynical ” win.

Netanyahu fought to hold on to power in the worst way. In a desperate attempt to win the support of hard-line voters, he repudiated his tepid-from-the-start support for a two-state solution in which Israel would coexist peacefully with an independent Palestinian state.

His previous support for the Palestinian state was “tepid-from-the -start” in 2009 because there was a new left wing government in the US and he wanted to avoid controversy even though he did not believe that the Palestinians were serious about two states. Mitt Romney was equally skeptical but willing to make gestures toward the hoary concept. This, of course, outrages the left, which is in a weird alliance with radical Islam.

Dropping all pretenses, he played the race card early on Election Day, posting a Facebook video with an explicit ethnic message: “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls.” The intent was obvious—to scare the hell out of right-wing and anti-Arab voters who had not yet hit the polls. This brazen move followed another brazen sop to the right. On Monday night, Netanyahu declared that if he were elected, he would never permit the establishment of a Palestinian state. With this last-minute pander, Netanyahu reversed his previous public position—announced in a 2009 speech—that he supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Arabs, of course, are not another “race.” They are Semites, just like Israeli Jews. The left insists that Jews are European and are oppressing the poor local Arabs. Mitt Romney was attacked in the same left wing article.

a donor asked Romney how he would solve the “Palestinian problem.” Romney provided a detailed reply and insisted that the Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”

He noted that a Palestinian state posed “thorny questions” and became quite passionate in detailing the issues at hand:

Some might say, well, let’s let the Palestinians have the West Bank, and have security, and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians…[B]ut the border between Israel and the West Bank is obviously right there, right next to Tel Aviv, which is the financial capital, the industrial capital of Israel, the center of Israel. It’s—what the border would be?

The writer helpfully points out that the “West Bank” does not share a border with Syria.

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As one can see, it is almost three miles to Syria from the West Bank. Romney’s point is made well by such maps.

The leftist hysteria over Netanyahu’s victory is shared by a sulking White House, which refuses to congratulate Netanyahu.

I will though. Congratulations !

The Iran Nuclear Program

Tuesday, November 18th, 2014

The deadline for the US-Iran nuclear talks is coming soon. Next week, in fact.

The negotiations so far have been an exercise in duplicity. I thought they might have a bomb purchased from North Korea in 2013 but that may not be true.

the RAND Corporation reports that the third North Korean nuclear test appears to many experts to be fundamentally different from its previous two efforts. North Korea’s first tests used plutonium to trigger the nuclear explosion. This one, according to some atmospheric tests, likely used highly enriched uranium, exactly the form of nuclear weapon pursued by Iran.

We have heard no more about this.

What next ? Mark Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht have some thoughts about this. Gerecht is a former CIA agent who is fluent in Farsi and who has been studying Iran since the revolution in 1979. I read his book Know Thine Enemy, written under a pseudonym, a few years ago.

If the White House doesn’t end November with a cascade of concessions leading to a deal, there are four paths forward. None is appealing. Two might be effective—but the president is unlikely to choose either one.

They provide four options.

One-The White House could give up on diplomacy and pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear sites.

There is no chance that Obama would do this. Would Israel ? Maybe but only if the urgency seems critical.

Two. The administration could give up on the current talks and default back to sanctions, but again trying to undercut their seriousness, as the president attempted to do in 2011 and 2012.

Congress may have a say here, especially the new Congress.

Congress imposed the most economically painful measures—targeting Iran’s oil exports, central bank and access to the Swift interbank system—over his objections. The president has always hoped that “rationality” would take hold in Tehran, that the regime would see the economic benefits that come with good behavior. The Islamic Republic has enjoyed an economic reprieve, thanks to Mr. Obama’s decision last year to de-escalate sanctions pressure by blocking new congressional action and giving billions of dollars in direct sanctions relief as part of the interim deal.

This is the Obama we saw in 2009 when the Iranians tried to revolt.

Any hope they might have had in the Obama White House was quickly dismissed in the administration’s two statements on the matter. The first came from the president himself, anticipating a Mousavi victory (it is too soon to speculate on the source of this happy thought), and of course, in his narcissistic way, taking personal credit for it.

What else ? Three. New, even more biting sanctions could be enacted, causing Tehran considerable pain. Current energy markets, with a declining price for crude, offer ample room for Congress to threaten sanctions against any country’s central bank involved in buying Iran’s oil exports, or in giving Tehran access to oil revenues now being held overseas and available only for trade with Iran’s five main oil buyers—China, India, Japan, South Korea and Turkey.

The new Congress might be willing to do this. Will Obama ?

The wiser bet is that sanctions—though important in restoring the U.S.’s negotiating leverage—will fail without other forms of coercion. And Ayatollah Khamenei, if he isn’t otherwise deterred, may well respond to new, economy-crushing sanctions by accelerating the nuclear program, presenting Mr. Obama with the choice he most dreads: launch militarily strikes or accept Iran as a nuclear state.

It seems obvious to me that he is willing to accept their bomb and then allege that “Containment” would suffice. Would anything work ?

The White House could try to reinforce new sanctions with the credible show of military force to intimidate the Iranian regime. President Hasan Rouhani has rather pleadingly confessed in speeches and in his memoirs that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 scared the clerical regime and led him to advocate, as Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003-05, a tactical pause in the regime’s nuclear aspirations.
To achieve a more lasting impression now would require a significant military operation. Only one target would serve that purpose: Bashar Assad. Syria is Iran’s most helpful ally among Arab states. Taking Mr. Assad down would let Tehran know that America’s withdrawal from the Middle East and President Obama’s dreams of an entente with Iran are over.

I don’t see Obama doing this. Could Congress ?

Taking out Mr. Assad is unavoidable if Washington is serious about stopping the radicalization of Syria’s Sunni population and getting their help in defeating the radical Islamic State, also known as ISIS. And such an about-face by Washington would be shocking—perhaps paralyzing—in Tehran. Yet it is hard to imagine Mr. Obama taking such action.

Which means that Washington and its European allies will most likely angle for another extension of the talks. Ayatollah Khamenei may accept. The Iranian economy, despite the oil-price drop, has been noticeably improving since the interim deal was concluded in January—and the continuation of the talks poses no threat to further nuclear progress.

The Iranian bomb is probably inevitable, which will pose a severe challenge for Netanyahu, who seems the only adult in the room.

The Next World War

Sunday, December 29th, 2013

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This next summer will be 100 years since the fatal August of 1914. We live in a similar era of “history is over and everybody is happy.” See above. In August 1914, Germany was trading partners with Britain and France. There were people who believed that democracies that did business with each other never went to war. Sound familiar ? Here is a discussion of the same topic. I am concerned that the spark will be in the middle east but this is another area to think about.

The Telegraph has an excellent piece on the present world situation.

As we look forward to the First World War commemorations, three stark conclusions are hard to refute. First, that in the course of this century we will need a great deal of luck to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. Second, that the Enlightenment has failed. Third, that this can all be traced back to the Great War.

As a result of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, it seemed that mankind might make a decisive break with the scarcity and oppression that had characterised previous eras. There was, admittedly, one early warning. The French Revolution proved that a radical reconstruction of society on abstract principles was likely to end in tyranny and bloodshed. But after 1815, the 19th century developed into one of the most successful epochs in history. Living standards, life expectancy, productivity, medicine, the rule of law, constitutional government, versions of democracy – there was dramatic progress on all fronts, and in the spread of civilisation across the globe.

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Iran wins. We lose

Sunday, November 24th, 2013

The announced “six month” agreement between the European nations negotiating with Iran, with the US included, and the Mullahs of Iran is an complete surrender to the Mullahs. I say the Mullahs since it appears that the people of Iran are no more part of the government than were the people of the Soviet Union.

I am not an expert on Iran so I will quote one:

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspective. Iran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement. Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.”

There’s more:

Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges. Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers.

We are now in a position where we must trust the rationality of the Iranian Mullahs who have previously declared their willingness to die if they can eliminate the state of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu is not impressed.

“What was concluded in Geneva last night is not a historic agreement, it’s a historic mistake,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters. “It’s not made the world a safer place. Like the agreement with North Korea in 2005, this agreement has made the world a much more dangerous place.”

“For years the international community has demanded that Iran cease all uranium enrichment. Now, for the first time, the international community has formally consented that Iran continue its enrichment of uranium.”

What will happen now ?

We should be eager to see fracking decrease our reliance on middle east oil. The Democrat repudiation of the filibuster will allow anti-fracking regulations to be enacted by extreme Obama appointees who have been held up by the threat of filibuster. One example is this EPA official.

Confirming what many in the industry long suspected, a video surfaced Wednesday in which Al Armendariz, an official at the Environmental Protection Agency, promotes the idea of crucifying oil companies. Armendariz heads up the EPA’s region 6 office, which is based in Dallas and responsible for oversight of Texas and surrounding states. The former professor at Southern Methodist University was appointed by President Obama in November 2009.

He will be joined by others.

On Thursday, after five years of Republican filibusters holding back progress on environmental regulation, Senate Democrats began the process of restoring democratic accountability to their broken institution and eliminated the filibuster on presidential appointments (excluding the Supreme Court). The final straw for the Democrats, who’d been reluctant to invoke the so-called nuclear option: Republicans had refused to allow votes on three qualified, ideologically mainstream nominees to vacancies on the D.C. District Court of Appeals.

The “ideologically mainstream” nominees are closer to the above example than to mainstream as the rest of us understand it. The truth is better explained as:

“Many of us believe the D.C. Circuit is the most important court in the country for environmental health and safety protections,” says John D. Walke, director of the Climate & Clean Air Program at NRDC. “In 90 to 95 percent of Clean Air Act regulatory challenges, they are the only court to rule.”

We can only hope that an Iran-Iraeli war would find us with adequate energy sources in spite of Obama.

Iran may have the bomb

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

A report suggests that the most recent North Korea nuclear test, which used Uranium, not Plutonium as in their others, may have been the Iranian bomb.

the RAND Corporation reports that the third North Korean nuclear test appears to many experts to be fundamentally different from its previous two efforts. North Korea’s first tests used plutonium to trigger the nuclear explosion. This one, according to some atmospheric tests, likely used highly enriched uranium, exactly the form of nuclear weapon pursued by Iran.

The report is not that positive about the weapon type.

Key aspects of North Korea’s third nuclear weapon test, carried out on Tuesday, remain unknown. We do not know whether it was a test of a plutonium or highly enriched uranium weapon, though many experts suspect the latter.

The report is hardly definitive but it would not be a surprise if Iran has pushed through to a success in its program, unencumbered by any serious US opposition. Still, there is some serious concern.

The question is whether the weapon North Korea tested this month was its own, Iran’s or a joint project. A senior U.S. official told The New York Times, “It’s very possible that the North Koreans are testing for two countries.” It would be foolish for Iran to test a nuclear weapon on its own soil. Nuclear weapons cannot be detonated in secret; they leave unique seismic markers that can be traced back to their source. An in-country test would simply confirm the existence of a program that for years Iran has denied.

Ralph Peters has some serious concerns about where the Obama administration is going.

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Reflections on the debate

Saturday, October 6th, 2012

The reverberations are still going on after the Wednesday debate. The theme coming from the Obama campaign is that Romney did not tell the truth about his policies. Most of the discussion on the non-campaign left is like Bill Mahers’ who said “It looks like he took my million and spent it all on weed.”

One of the most peculiar reactions was at the U of Wisconsin the next day. Hundreds of UW students were filing into an Obama on-campus campaign rally and were asked by a Breitbart writer if it was unfair that Obama couldn’t use his Teleprompter in the debate. Amazingly, most of the students agreed. What would a Teleprompter do ? Would they stop the debate for a few minutes while Obama’s handlers thought of a good response?

The polls will take a few more days to show the response but already something is going on. A poll of Illinois’ 10th Congressional district last August was ignored but another poll now suggests that Illinois might be in play in this election.

There is a new poll out of Cook county that should make President Obama, Robert Gibbs, David Axelrod, and the rest of the Obama reelection team nervous. In Illinois’ most populous and most Democratic county things are not looking so good for team Obama. In Cook county, home of Chicago, Obama only leads Mitt Romney 49 to 37. This is bad for Obama because he needs as big of a lead as he can get from Chicago Democrats in order to hold off the fact that he will lose the rest of the state, and in some areas of Illinois by a lot. Things are so bad for President Obama in Cook county that the suburban areas are breaking for Romney 45-38(the City of Chicago still goes to Obama 60-29).

The next debate is supposed to be on foreign policy and it is interesting to speculate on what Obama will do to recoup his loss this week. First debates have been weak for previous presidents. Reagan was criticized for looking old and a bit out of touch in his first debate with Mondale.

Still, there have been a long line of incumbent presidents who bombed their first debate.

Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton and Bush all had middling to bad receptions after the first debate as an incumbent seeking re-election.

Advice for Obama will be plentiful next time.

If Obama wants to seal this election win from behind a podium, the ball is in his court alone. He’s got to recover and rebound in the next debate.

Still, Obama needs to get a Red Bull into his system for next time, because former incumbents with a bad second debate — Ford, H.W. Bush, and Carter come to mind — don’t tend to get their second term.

I expect him to try to be more aggressive. Foreign policy is not a good area for him but, no doubt, we will hear about Osama bin Laden and Romney’s inexperience. He runs a risk of further weakening the traditional Democrat support from Jewish voters (See above about Illinois) if they get into the Israel and Iran situations. Romney has to avoid looking as though he wants war with Iran and I expect Obama to bring this up. Still, Romney has good points about the failure of Obama to support the people of Iran when they were demonstrating against their own government, and the disclosures about intelligence that came from the White House.

The second debate is Romney’s chance to close the deal and how he conducts himself will be critical. So far he and his campaign have done a very good job. I was not one who complained that he was not aggressive enough. Charles Krauthammer thinks he should have given a foreign policy speech sooner, after Benghazi, and maybe that is right but he plans one Monday and the tide seems to be turning right now.

I’ll bet the audience for the VP debate this week will be larger than usual as Paul Ryan makes his national appearance for those who haven’t been following the election closely until now. I expect he will do very well. Biden is an old school politician but he lied his way through the debate with Sarah Palin and she did not point them out. Ryan is another numbers gut, like Romney, and won’t let him get away with it.

Why opposition to the XL pipeline is insane.

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

We are on the cusp of a new era in energy production in North America. Soon, assuming the Obama administration is defeated next year, we will be independent of the increasingly unstable middle east for oil. We need nuclear energy for electricity production. That is the most efficient source for base electrical generation. For transportation, we need oil or natural gas. For home heating, natural gas is the most efficient as it can be supplied by pipelines embedded in the streets and serving each house in urban neighborhoods. Rural customers can be served by CNG or propane tanks on the property. Even solar panels may contribute in tropical settings like southern California (where I live) or Arizona.

The present political climate, especially that in California, is enamored of irrational environmentalist theories that are holding up efficient solution to problems. The ban on incandescent light bulbs is an example of irrational legislation that will, hopefully, be reversed, at least outside of California which is hopelessly infected with environmentalist nonsense.

We are facing a foreign policy catastrophe in the middle east where even Israel, our single ally, may go under, albeit in the gotterdammerung of nuclear war. The Obama people have tossed aside our ally in Egypt, Mubarak, as Jimmy Carter did the Shah. The results will be similar. We have no friendly governments in the middle east except Israel and the increasingly fearful Jordan. Turkey is gone as the government, now largely Islamist, is edging toward Iran in policy.

I am not an isolationist but we need to anticipate a world where we are surrounded by hostile regimes. Self sufficiency must be our policy and the delusions of environmentalism are dangerous. Those opposed to our use of energy resources should consider suicide to make room for those of us who want to enjoy the promise of American life. Drilling for oil in the Gulf has been seriously damaged by Obama as many of these expensive drill rigs have left the Gulf for other parts of the world and will not return any time soon. In fact, there is evidence that George Soros has invested in some of these rigs that are now positioning themselves off Brazil for the same deep water drilling techniques that were criticized by Obama acolytes when they were located in the Gulf of Mexico where they were shut down by Soros-beneficiary Obama.

The technique of “fracking” has been criticized by the same environmentalists who oppose all sources of energy independence. They, of course, oppose all forms of oil production. Wind and Solar, which they do support, are capable of producing less than 10% of all energy needed by our huge economy. That way lies economic suicide and one wonders at times if that is the purpose. Tom Clancy, who has done a very good job of predicting the technological future, including the use of a jetliner as a flying bomb, has a novel, called Rainbow Six that considers an environmentalist group so radical that they plan to kill most of the earth’s population, excepting themselves, of course. I sometimes wonder if he was too extreme in what he attributed to the radicals around Obama.

Maybe I was hasty about Egypt

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

Two weeks ago, I posted a pessimistic piece about Egypt post Mubarak. Now, Austin Bay has posted a pretty optimistic piece that may be better informed than mine. I hope so.

My fear was stated here:

“One of the most publicized figures outside Egypt in this story the last few weeks is a Google executive who is Egyptian.

One of the western media’s favorite Egyptian rebels is Google executive Wael Ghonim. No surprise there: if you had to choose among radical clerics like al-Qaradawi, hooligans like those who assaulted Lara Logan, and a suave, Westernized Google exec, whom would you want to interview? Ghonim was present on Friday and intended to address the crowd, but he was barred from the platform by al-Qaradawi’s security. He left the stage in distress, “his face hidden by an Egyptian flag.” Is Ghonim Egypt’s Kerensky? Well, at least Kerensky got to rule for a while.”

I went on to say:

Ghonim is one more proof, as if we needed any more, that brilliance in another field is no guarantee of common sense in politics, especially revolutionary politics. We are now about to move to the next stage, which in the French Revolution ended with the Terror. In Iran, it still goes on.

Austin Bay has the advantage of two more weeks of observation of the rapidly evolving situation. He quotes Haaretz, a rather left wing Israeli newspaper that is more hopeful. Hope is not a policy but Israelis are far more interested in the situation in Egypt than we are. They have to be as they share a border.

The revolution in Egypt is far from over. The popular uprising may have succeeded in ousting president Hosni Mubarak and most of his top associates, but the young people who led the protests at Tahrir Square are certainly not resting on their laurels.

Tens of thousands returned to the square on Friday, this time demanding to shut down the internal security authority, Amn al-Dawla. By yesterday, dozens of young people had already taken over the headquarters of the organization, notorious for terrorizing Egyptian citizens under Mubarak’s rule. The takeover was prompted by fears that organization officials were destroying evidence of their involvement in torture and other human rights violations.

This may be good news but I keep going back to the French Revolution, which set the standards for all revolutions to come.

Until the election, both Israeli and international observers agree Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, remains the key authority in Cairo. The mission facing Tantawi and his generals is to take Egypt safely through a transition period that will culminate with the establishment of civilian and democratic rule. The army is maneuvering between the establishment it knows well and the street, a new and not yet entirely familiar player.

The Army is the best hope for Egypt, as it has been for Turkey. A key factor in our failure to do better in Afghanistan is the fact that a crude and stupid Congressional reaction to the news that Pakistan had a nuclear bomb was to cut off all contact between Pakistan’s army and ours. That was nearly fatal as there are few ties between Pakistani officers and the US army, which are usually established as junior officers. These contacts were abolished by a Congress that knows little about foreign relations, especially those not published in the New York Times.

If we finally have to leave Afghanistan under unsatisfactory conditions, much of the failure should be attributed to Congress and its crude attempts to manage US policy it knows little about.

The following is good news, if true.

The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, is seen as the opposition body most prepared for a general election, but the chances it will seize power are seen by Egyptians as slim. Most observers believe that the Brotherhood will assume a similar position to the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel, influencing the government but not leading it.

Just keep remembering that the Kerensky government thought it had the Bolsheviks under control in 1917. Bay is still optimistic for another unusual reason.

The article argues that “the real power belongs to the young people [in Egypt] who managed to change political reality.” Media in Israel are missing “the generational shift taking place in Egypt and perhaps the entire Arab world.”

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll– now that’s a universal language. Al Qaeda doesn’t rock and roll. A burka is not sexy. On the twitter-connected Arab street, these may be Al Qaeda’s fatal social flaws. I don’t know what Al Qaeda’s drug policy is (probably pro-hashish), but I know its alcohol policy. Hence one of the most important socio-cultural quips of the first decade of the 21st century: “Democracy, whiskey, sexy.”

But once again back to Haaretz, this time on the Muslim Brotherhood. Yes, it will be a factor but “the chances it will seize power are seen by Egyptians as slim. Most observers believe that the Brotherhood will assume a similar position to the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel, influencing the government but not leading it.” Interesting analogy. Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is factionalized — but so are ultra-Orthodox Israeli parties.

We will see. I hope he is right. Unfortunately, Turkey is slipping into Islamist hands as the AKP party continues to arrest army officers on phony charges.

Here are Annie and her mother in an Istanbul restaurant. Everybody spoke English and were more than courteous.

I have tried to explain to my daughter Annie how the friendly Turks, who did so much to make her visit to Istanbul pleasant, want to arrest large numbers of Army officers, like the one who gave her a tour of the Scutari Barracks, a major Army headquarters.

This officer is a major, spoke English perfectly and gave her a tour.

I guess I will have to do a post on the history of Turkey for her. She certainly wouldn’t learn anything about it in college. She was 14 when those photos were taken. I wonder if the Turks would be as friendly now. I suspect they are because we were in Istanbul, the westernized and secular part of Turkey.

I hope Egypt will learn a lesson from Ataturk, who is still revered in Turkey, at least modern Turkey.