Sunday morning Friedman trolling

Shorter Thomas L. Friedman, "Arsonists and Firefighters: Who is Setting the Sectarian Fires in the Middle East?" New York Times, June 20 2014:

The problem in the Middle East isn't some kind of intrinsic ethnic or religious hostility, ancient hatreds that can never be wiped out, it's bad people starting trouble for their own apparently psychopathic purposes. No, I don't have any mirrors in my house, why do you ask?

I deposited the following in the comments:

What'd I tell you?

Image from Ask the Mighty Italian Moustache.

At +972, Ami Kaufman notes that the Knesset will be a little less fascist than it was before the elections, and with lots more women and social activist types, so that's to the good, and that the biggest losers are American political consultants:

Stan Greenberg: The polls at certain points had Labor well over 20 seats, yet they ended with a mere 15 seats (99% of the vote counted). A mere two seats more than the all-time low that Ehud Barak was responsible for. It takes American genius to only get two more seats after the social protests that should have boosted Labor sky high, if they had played their cards right.

Arthur Finkelstein: According to reports, Finkelstein (who left the country just days before the election) was the architect of unifying Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu, worth 42 seats back then. They’ve dropped to 33, maybe less (99% of the vote counted).

You read it here (for example here) that Netanyahu was a lot weaker than he looked, and knew it, so we're a winner in the prediction stakes, and I suppose his continuing weakness will help the IDF, the Mossad, and the indispensable President Obama keep him from invading Iran, so they're winners too.

Wild man Tom Friedman, Mystax Mysteriorum (Mustache of Mysteries), has an idea on that score:

Rather than negotiating with Iran’s leaders in secret — which, so far, has produced nothing and allows the Iranian leaders to control the narrative and tell their people that they’re suffering sanctions because of U.S. intransigence — why not negotiate with the Iranian people? President Obama should put a simple offer on the table, in Farsi, for all Iranians to see: The U.S. and its allies will permit Iran to maintain a civil nuclear enrichment capability — which it claims is all it wants to meet power needs — provided it agrees to U.N. observers and restrictions that would prevent Tehran from ever assembling a nuclear bomb.

He assumes, I think, that the offer has already been made and rejected in secret. He might get a big surprise! I know if I were his Supreme Leadership I'd be suspicious of such a proposal made in secret—I'd remember what happened with North Korea in 1994—but I'd jump on a public one if the U.S. put out a credible timetable. Friedman's a fool, and it's a fool's idea, but sometimes that's just what one needs, as when the mustached psychotic of Broadway and 79th stops you on the sidewalk to tell you to tie your shoe.

Another foolish idea from Mr. Mystax is this:

On Israel-Palestine, the secretary of state should publicly offer President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority the following: the U.S. would recognize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as the independent State of Palestine on the provisional basis of the June 4, 1967, lines, support its full U.N. membership and send an ambassador to Ramallah, on the condition that Palestinians accept the principle of “two states for two peoples” — an Arab state and a Jewish state in line with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 — and agree that permanent borders, security and land swaps would be negotiated directly with Israel. The status of the refugees would be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents all Palestinians inside and outside of Palestine. Gaza, now a de facto statelet, would be recognized as part of Palestine only when its government recognizes Israel, renounces violence and rejoins the West Bank. 

Or, as his alter id Really Tom Friedman puts it,

In the future we’re all going to speak languages we can’t understand and we must begin with strife in the Middle East. Or North Africa. It works if you just speak loud, simple English. Like: “NO ONE. KNOWS WHAT. JUDEA. AND SAMARIA. ARE SUPPOSED. TO BE. MAYBE THE ROMANS DID.” Or: “I’M SORRY. ABOUT YOUR. GRANDFATHER. YOU CAN’T HAVE. THESE OLIVE GROVES. ANYMORE. BECAUSE SOME HASIDS. FROM LONG ISLAND. LIVE THERE NOW.” 

This time I like the version published in the Times, with the formal recognition, better. In fact it kind of takes my breath away. If Serious People are starting to think like this, perhaps the hopey-changey has really arrived.

Image from Mouse Medicine.

West of Eden 1/20/13

So the Palestinians got themselves a promotion in the UN General Assembly, and the Israeli government responded by announcing an entirely new settlement in E-1, between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, and according to Jeffrey Goldberg President Obama has been going around saying

that this sort of behavior on Netanyahu’s part is what he has come to expect, and he suggested that he has become inured to what he sees as self-defeating policies of his Israeli counterpart.

In the weeks after the UN vote, Obama said privately and repeatedly, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.” With each new settlement announcement, in Obama’s view, Netanyahu is moving his country down a path toward near-total isolation.

So this morning on NPR, Rachel Martin is asking Aaron David Miller what's up with that "Israel doesn't know what its own best interests are"?

And Miller replies,

there are times, and on certain issues, that the Israelis are simply not being smart. When you're a small country, even if you are a nuclear power and even if you have strong allies like the United States, you have to be much more aware of how your actions influence and shape the attitudes not only of the neighborhood in which you live but of your key ally and I think there is a sense, which is right, that Israeli actions take American policies and interests for granted and that sense of disrespect is I think what the president has identified...

(Audio here.)

No! That's not it! Zero points! Goldberg had it right, it's not about influences and attitudes and respect, it's not about Obama's feelings and veiled threats and public relations as the theater of battle. Obama's not playing for position, he's giving his considered view: it's really about the settlements. Because in the long run there cannot be an Israel unless there is a Palestine. Every time they dig another foundation for a block of flats in the West Bank they are digging the grave of the Jewish state.

And that's why Netanyahu ought to be listening to the international community, and especially to Obama. Not to placate Obama or pretend he likes him, but to save Israel from his own greedy stupidity. Too bad. And meanwhile in Tuesday's parliamentary vote...

If Arabs voted at the same rate as Jews, they could win more than 20 seats and be the second-largest bloc in Parliament. “It’s in our hands,” said Ghaleb Majadleh, a Parliament member and former minister from the Labor Party whose headquarters is here in Baka al-Gharbiya. Increase turnout by half, he said, and “Netanyahu would not be in the government.”

Too bad about that too.

Image of the West Bank. Reuters/Mohamad Torokman, Jerusalem Post.

The worst message

Mustache from The Shave Den.

Thomas P. Friedman (better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mustache of Postcolonial Maturity) reminds us that it's not just about us:

The worst message we can send right now to Middle Easterners is that their future is all bound up in what we do. It is not. The Arab-Muslim world has rarely been more complicated and more in need of radical new approaches by us — and them.... [Tom's italics]

And the best way we can help them to take responsibility for their own policies and their own lives, and to start pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps instead of ours, is to give them a very clear set of instructions and then punish them if they get it wrong and reward them if they get it right:

If it were up to me, I’d put Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, in charge of American policy in the Arab-Muslim world. Because we need to phase out of the cold war business of selling arms there to keep “strongmen” on our side and in power, and we need to get into the business of sponsoring a “Race to the Top” in the Arab-Muslim world that, instead, can help empower institutions and strong people, who would voluntarily want to be on our side.

So bold it almost hurts your eyes, huh?

Instead of that old business of distinct budgets for each country from the Pentagon and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, we'd have just one big kitty for everybody (excepting Israel, which is so adult we already gave them all our credit cards and car keys).

Then every year each country gets an annual performance review on the principles of results-based accountability: how far have they gotten on privatizing government business, how far they've come with computerizing, how much progress they've made in their multiple-choice test scores. And after the review we give out the prizes: Congratulations, Yemen, that's $4 billion! Sorry, Oman, but your critical thinking scores brought you down.

Because they won't voluntarily want to be on our side if we invite just anybody. And you can't expect people to think for themselves if you won't tell them what to think.

Animatronic Disney elephant. From Woonietest.