Is Israel's Second Republic Like France's Third Republic

George Friedman of Stratfor, the private intelligence firm for the private sector, had a piece today looking at Israel's present strategic environment and possible future trends. Friedman, the company's founder, usually pens the company's articles on Israel.  Part of Stratfor's approach is usually to conduct analysis at the nation-state level rather than at the internal party or individual level except when dealing with civil wars/insurgencies.

An Egyptian coup?

After Mohammad al-Morsi won the election to be Egypt's first elected ruler in a real election, Egyptian military Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) carried out a coup by stripping him of power by essentially making the presidency a figurehead in a military government equivalent to the queen of England. This week al-Morsi pushed back by sacking the defense minister, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein al-Tantawi, and the Egyptian chief of staff, General Sami Annan. He replaced them with his own candidates.  Here is a link to an article from The Daily Beast on the latest power struggle. 

It may be quite some time before it is clear who holds real power in Cairo. After all, following the July 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt it took two years before Colonel Gamel Abdul Nasser emerged from behind the curtains to take real power from a general who was a hero of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence or an Nakba (the catastrophe) as the Arabs referred to it. Don't expect any Israeli government to make any peace moves on any track until it is clear how things stand in Egypt.

Eric Margolis--Wrong from the first sentence

Eric S. Margolis had an opinion piece recently that was wrong from the first sentence. It starts out speaking of the "Polish Zionist ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky." Jabotinsky was born in Odessa in what is today the Ukraine and was Russian and Jewish by culture, not Polish. He seems to be confusing Jabotinsky with Begin, who claims to have been Jabotinsky's disciple but in many ways deviated from the teachings of the founder of Revisionist Zionism.

Later on he writes of Syria being as close to Russia "as northern Mexico is to the United States." Northern Mexico borders the United States from California to Texas. Syria borders on Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey but not on Russia. Maybe he was thinking of Guatemala instead. Or maybe he thinks that Russia has a problem with illegal Syrian immigrants.  He writes, "As a veteran correspondent...who has covered Syria since 1975..." Apparently that coverage didn't include what countries it borders on or maybe he needs a refresher in the geography of the Western Hemisphere.

Grading Obama's Foreign Policy

Here is a link to a review from the New York Review of Books that reviews new books by David Sanger and James Maan (author of Rise of the Vulcans on the Bush 43 administration) on the Obama administration's foreign policy. Sanger gives Obama a B +, the reviewer thinks that he is being stingy and too strict a grader. I think B+ is about right, with the stipulation that no president since Eisenhower has merited an A. (Carter probably merited an A- for the Panama Canal treaty, Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, upgrade of ties with China, handling of the Rhodesian peace process and mishandling of the Iran rescue attempt in 1980 and leaving the embassy staff in Tehran to be kidnapped after a previous temporary takeover of the embassy.) I am also a tough grader and regularly failed to vote for reelection of presidents whom I'd voted for in the first place because of their foreign policy. Obama will be the first president that I'll vote for twice since Reagan. I hope that he has a better second term than Reagan did.

Second major Sunni figure defects from Assad's regime

Two days ago the Syrian prime minister,   Riad al-Hijab, a Sunni, defected to Jordan with a number of aides and a pilot. He had only been in office for two months and was not a key figure in the regime but was one of the few remaining figures from the Sunni majority as opposed to one of the religious minorities such as Alawites, from which the ruling Assad family comes, or Christians. Here is a link to an article on the defection from the Washington Post.  This of course led to speculation about whom would be next to leap. But how will the defection affect the Assad regime's hold on power?

Evidence for notion of Siege Democracies

This post by Ralph Seliger at Partners for a Progressive Israel (formerly MeretzUSA) is in response to a post by Ha'Aretz blogger psychiatrist Carlos Strenger in his blog Strenger Than Fiction. Both posit the notion that a combination of events and demographics have moved Israel's political system to the right since 2000 and the start of the Al-Aksa Intifada.  Here is the link to Seliger's post. It is in line with my previous claims that both Israel and Northern Ireland are siege democracies.

Were Romney's remarks in Israel a gaffe? And were they true?

Romney's trip abroad has gotten much more coverage than he and his top planners probably thought it would. But working off of the old adage that no publicity is bad publicity (which is definitely not true for presidential candidates, at least those who are nominees of major parties), possibly it was intended this way. While Romney's remarks about the Olympics in London were possibly clumsy, they are unlikely to lose him votes in America. The same can be said of his remarks in Israel that culture was responsible for the difference between the Israeli GDP and the Palestinian GDP. But is the last remark true?