March 12, 2013
Mr. Obama Goes to Israel
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In case you haven’t heard, President Obama leaves for Israel next week.
It is possible, though, that you haven’t heard because it is hard for me
to recall a less-anticipated trip to Israel by an American president.
But there is a message in that empty bottle: Little is expected from
this trip — not only because little is possible, but because, from a
narrow U.S. point of view, little is necessary. Quietly, with nobody
announcing it, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shifted from a
necessity to a hobby for American diplomats. Like any hobby — building
model airplanes or knitting sweaters — some days you work on it, some
days you don’t. It depends on your mood, but it doesn’t usually matter
when that sweater gets finished. Obama worked on this hobby early in his
first term. He got stuck as both parties rebuffed him, and, therefore,
he adopted, quite rationally in my view, an attitude of benign neglect.
It was barely noticed.
The shift in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from necessity to hobby
for the U.S. is driven by a number of structural changes, beginning with
the end of the cold war. There was a time when it was truly feared that
an Arab-Israeli war could trigger a wider superpower conflict. During
the October 1973 war, President Nixon raised America’s military
readiness to Defcon 3 to signal the Soviets to stay away. That is not
likely to happen today, given the muted superpower conflict over the
Middle East. Moreover, the discovery of massive amounts of oil and gas
in the U.S., Canada and Mexico is making North America the new Saudi
Arabia. So who needs the old one?
Of course, oil and gas are global commodities, and any disruption of
flows from the Middle East would drive up prices. But though America
still imports some oil from the Middle East, we will never again be
threatened with gas lines by another Arab oil embargo sparked by anger
over Palestine. For China and India, that is another matter. For them,
the Middle East has gone from a hobby to a necessity. They are both
hugely dependent on Middle East oil and gas. If anyone should be
advancing Arab-Israeli (and Sunni-Shiite) peace diplomacy today it is
the foreign ministers of India and China.
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine last week, Robin M. Mills, the head
of consulting at Manaar Energy, noted that “according to preliminary
figures reported this week, China has overtaken the United States as the
world’s largest net oil importer.” Mills described this as a “shift as
momentous as the U.S. eclipse of Britain’s Royal Navy or the American
economy’s surpassing of the British economy in the late 19th century.
... The United States is set to become the world’s biggest oil producer
by 2017.”
At the same time, while the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict
emotionally resonates across the Arab-Muslim world, and solving it is
necessary for regional stability, it is clearly not sufficient. The
most destabilizing conflict in the region is the civil war between
Shiites and Sunnis that is rocking Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain
and Yemen. While it would be a good thing to erect a Palestinian state
at peace with Israel, the issue today is will there be anymore a Syrian
state, a Libyan state and an Egyptian state.
Finally, while America’s need to forge Israeli-Palestinian peace has
never been lower, the obstacles have never been higher: Israel has now
implanted 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, and the Hamas rocket
attacks on Israel from Gaza have seriously eroded the appetite of the
Israeli silent majority to withdraw from the West Bank, since one puny
rocket alone from there could close Israel’s international airport in
Lod.
For all these reasons, Obama could be the first sitting American president to visit Israel as a tourist.
Good news for Israel, right? Wrong. While there may be fewer reasons for
the U.S. to take risks to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
there is still a powerful reason for Israel to do so. The status quo
today may be tolerable for Israel, but it is not healthy. And more
status quo means continued Israeli settlements in, and tacit annexation
of, the West Bank. That’s why I think the most important thing Obama
could do on his trip is to publicly and privately ask every Israeli
official he meets these questions:
================
February 9, 2013
Any Solution to Syria?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NEW DELHI
SHOULD the U.S. intervene to stop the bloodshed in Syria? I find myself torn between four different perspectives — from New Delhi, Baghdad, Tel Aviv and the U.N.
Last week, I met with a group of Indian strategists here at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses to talk about how America should withdraw from Afghanistan and navigate the interests of India, Pakistan and Iran. At one point, I tossed out an idea to which one of the Indian analysts responded: That was tried before — “in the 11th century.” It didn’t work out well. That’s why I like coming to Delhi to talk about the region. Indian officials tend to think in centuries, not months, and they look at the map of the Middle East without any of the British-drawn colonial borders. Instead, they only see old civilizations (Persia, Turkey, Egypt), old faiths (Shiites, Sunnis and Hindus), and old peoples (Pashtuns, Tajiks, Jews and Arabs) — all interacting within long-set patterns of behavior.
“If you want to understand this region, just take out a map from the Ganges to the Nile and remove the British lines,” remarked M. J. Akbar, the veteran Indian Muslim journalist and author. It takes you back to the true undercurrents of history that have long ruled the Middle East “and to interests defined by people and tribes and not just governments.”
When you look at the region this way, what do you see? First, you see that there is no way the U.S. can keep Afghanistan stable after we draw down — without working with Iran. Because of the age-old ties between Iranian Shiites and the Shiite Persian-speaking Afghans of Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, Iran always was and always will be a player in Afghan politics. Shiite Iran has never liked the Sunni Taliban. “Iran is the natural counter to Sunni extremism,” said Akbar. It’s in Iran’s interest to “diminish the Taliban.” That’s why America and Iran were tacit allies in unseating the Taliban, and they will be tacit allies in preventing the reseating of the Taliban.
So from India, the struggle in Syria looks like just another chapter in the long-running Sunni-Shiite civil war. Syria is a proxy war between Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Qatar — two monarchies funding the Syrian “democrats,” who are largely Syrian Sunnis — and Shiite Iran and the Shiite-Alawite Syrian regime. It’s a war that never ends; it can only be suppressed.
Which is why in Israel some Israeli generals are starting to realize that if Syria is a fight to the death it could pose as great a strategic threat to Israel as Iran’s nuclear program. If Syria disintegrates into another Afghanistan — on Israel’s border — it would be an untamed land, with jihadists, chemical weapons and surface-to-air missiles all freely floating about.
Can that collapse be avoided? From Washington, some hoped that by quickly toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, the West and the Sunnis could “flip” Syria from the Iranian-Soviet orbit to the Sunni-Saudi-American orbit. I’m dubious. I doubt that Syria can be flipped in one piece; it will break apart in the air into Sunni and Alawite regions. And, if we did manage to flip Syria, Iran would try to “flip” predominantly Shiite Iraq and Bahrain into its camp.
Some Arab diplomats at the U.N. argue, though, that there is a middle way, but it would require the U.S. to lead: First, mobilize the Security Council to pass a resolution calling for the creation of a transitional government in Syria with “full powers” and with equal representation of Alawites and Sunni rebels. If the Russians could be persuaded to back such a resolution (not easy), it could break the stalemate inside Syria, because many regime loyalists would see the writing on the wall and abandon Assad. The stick would be to tell the Russians that if they don’t back such a resolution, the U.S. would start sending weapons to the secular/moderate rebels.
Can there really be such a policy between George W. Bush’s “all-in” approach to transforming Iraq and Barack Obama’s “you-touch-it-you-own-it-so-don’t-even-touch-it” approach to Syria? One should study Iraq. The lesson of Iraq is that deep historical currents were at play there — Sunnis versus Shiites and Kurds versus Arabs. The December 2010 Iraqi elections demonstrated, though, that multisectarian parties and democratic rule were possible in Iraq — and actually the first choice of most Iraqis. But America would have had to keep some troops there for another decade to see that shift from sectarianism to multisectarianism become even remotely self-sustaining. Syria is Iraq’s twin. The only way you’ll get a multisectarian transition there is with a U.N. resolution backed by Russia and backed by a well-armed referee on the ground to cajole, hammer and induce the parties to live together.
It’s the Middle East, Jake.
If you will the ends, you’d better will the means. You can’t change the politics “unless you say you’ll stay for a hundred years,” insists Akbar. But no one wants to play empire anymore. In which case, he argues, it’s always best not to stay long in any of these countries — five months, not five years. Five years, says Akbar, is just long enough for people to hate you, but not fear or respect you, let alone change their long-held ways.
=========================
December 4, 2012
Iron Empires, Iron Fists, Iron Domes
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Tel Aviv
I went to synagogue on Saturday not far from the Syrian border in Antakya, Turkey. It’s been on my mind ever since.
Antakya is home to a tiny Jewish community, which still gathers for
holidays at the little Sephardic synagogue. It is also famous for its
mosaic of mosques and Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Protestant
churches. How could it be that I could go to synagogue in Turkey on
Saturday while on Friday, just across the Orontes River in Syria, I had
visited with Sunni Free Syrian Army rebels embroiled in a civil war in
which Syrian Alawites and Sunnis are killing each other on the basis of
their ID cards, Kurds are creating their own enclave, Christians are
hiding and the Jews are long gone?
What is this telling us? For me, it raises the question of whether there
are just three governing options in the Middle East today: Iron
Empires, Iron Fists or Iron Domes?
The reason that majorities and minorities co-existed relatively
harmoniously for some 400 years when the Arab world was ruled by the
Turkish Ottomans from Istanbul was because the Sunni Ottomans, with
their Iron Empire, monopolized politics. While there were exceptions,
generally speaking the Ottomans and their local representatives were in
charge in cities like Damascus, Antakya and Baghdad. Minorities, like
Alawites, Shiites, Christians and Jews, though second-class citizens,
did not have to worry that they’d be harmed if they did not rule. The
Ottomans had a live-and-let-live mentality toward their subjects.
When Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire in the Arab East,
they forged the various Ottoman provinces into states — with names like
Iraq, Jordan and Syria — that did not correspond to the ethnographic
map. So Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Turkmen, Kurds and
Jews found themselves trapped together inside national boundaries that
were drawn to suit the interests of the British and French. Those
colonial powers kept everyone in check. But once they withdrew, and
these countries became independent, the contests for power began, and
minorities were exposed. Finally, in the late 1960s and 1970s, we saw
the emergence of a class of Arab dictators and monarchs who perfected
Iron Fists (and multiple intelligence agencies) to decisively seize
power for their sect or tribe — and they ruled over all the other
communities by force.
In Syria, under the Assad family’s iron fist, the Alawite minority came
to rule over a Sunni majority, and in Iraq, under Saddam’s iron fist, a
Sunni minority came to rule over a Shiite majority. But these countries
never tried to build real “citizens” who could share and peacefully
rotate in power. So what you are seeing today in the Arab awakening
countries — Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen — is what
happens when there is no Iron Empire and the people rise up against the
iron-fisted dictators. You are seeing ongoing contests for power — until
and unless someone can forge a social contract for how communities can
share power.
Israelis have responded to the collapse of Arab iron fists around them —
including the rise of militias with missiles in Lebanon and Gaza — with
a third model. It is the wall Israel built around itself to seal off
the West Bank coupled with its Iron Dome antimissile system. The two
have been phenomenally successful — but at a price. The wall plus the
dome are enabling Israel’s leaders to abdicate their responsibility for
thinking creatively about a resolution of its own majority-minority
problem with the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
I am stunned at what I see here politically. On the right, in the Likud
Party, the old leadership that was at least connected with the world,
spoke English and respected Israel’s Supreme Court, is being swept aside
in the latest primary by a rising group of far-right settler-activists
who are convinced — thanks, in part, to the wall and dome — that
Palestinians are no threat anymore and that no one can roll back the
350,000 Jews living in the West Bank. The far-right group running Israel
today is so arrogant, and so indifferent to U.S. concerns, that it
announced plans to build a huge block of settlements in the heart of the
West Bank — in retaliation for the U.N. vote giving Palestinians
observer status — even though the U.S. did everything possible to block
that vote and the settlements would sever any possibility of a
contiguous Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, with a few exceptions, the dome and wall have so insulated
the Israeli left and center from the effects of the Israeli occupation
that their main candidates for the Jan. 22 elections — including those
from Yitzhak Rabin’s old Labor Party — are not even offering peace ideas
but simply conceding the right’s dominance on that issue and focusing
on bringing down housing prices and school class sizes. One settler
leader told me the biggest problem in the West Bank today is “traffic
jams.”
I am glad that the wall and the Iron Dome are sheltering Israelis from
enemies who wish to do them ill, but I fear the wall and the Iron Dome
are also blinding them from truths they still badly need to face.
===================================================
December 1, 2012
Darkush, Syria
THE scene is almost biblical. You step down through tall reeds, cross the
Orontes River from Turkey in a small rowboat and are received by a local
contingent of the Free Syrian Army, outside the Syrian town of Darkush. One of
them shows you the picture on his cellphone of a Syrian girl who was just taken
across the river to Turkey with what turned out to be fatal wounds from a Syrian
Army helicopter attack on her village. The helicopters, the rebel soldiers say,
dropped barrels with nails and explosives on her house. Meanwhile, over here in
the mud are three fresh graves with bodies that just floated down the river.
Some days it's just an arm or leg that washes up. Although this is "liberated"
territory, in the background you can hear the low drumbeat of shells slamming
into some town over the hills. I ask the rebel local commander, Muatasim Bila
Abul Fida, how he thinks all of this will play out. His answer strikes me as
very honest. "Without the help of Iran and Hezbollah, he would be gone by now,"
he says of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But even after he goes, there
will be a great sorting out. "It will take five or six years," he adds, because
the Islamist parties "want Shariah, and we want democracy."
In my visit along the Turkey-Syria border, I am struck at how so many different
people want so many different things for Syria. It is unnerving. A Christian
businessman from Aleppo tells me that if a real election were held in Syria
today, the besieged President Assad would still win "with 75 percent of the
vote," because most Syrians crave the order that he provided and are exhausted
by war. But a few hours earlier at an impressively run Syrian refugee camp set
up by Turkey outside the Turkish border town of Antakya, I interviewed young
Syrian Sunni Muslim men who had fled from the Assad family's largely Alawite
stronghold of Latakiya, just down the coast. They spoke about the deep
unfairness of the Syrian system and how Alawites were getting an unfair share of
the pie. "When we first protested to demand reforms, the regime did not do
anything," said Yahya Afacesa, "and then we started to shout and demand freedom,
and the regime attacked us. So there was no way to fight the regime peacefully."
He and his colleagues insisted, though, that the problem in Syria was the Assad
family, not the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot from which the Assads hail and
which dominates the regime. These are secular young men, and they still took
pride in Syria's multisectarian identity and harmony, which, it should be
remembered, has deep historical roots in this region. Indeed, before visiting
them, I met with the Chamber of Commerce of Antakya. The chamber's president
proudly displays outside his office a poster of more than 20 different churches,
mosques and even a synagogue still operating in his town, which is just a few
miles from the Syrian border. I repeat: There are cultural roots for pluralism
in this region that a new Syrian government could still fall back on — but
there's also the opposite.
A case in point: In Antakya I met two Turkish logistics experts. They spoke
about the "Arab foreign legion" of Islamist fighters from as far away as
Chechnya and Libya who have come through their town and crossed the Orontes to
join the battle in Syria. They scoffed at the idea that Syria will emerge as a
democracy from a war in which its main arms suppliers are the Islamic-oriented
monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The main Saudi and Qatari desire is that
Syria shift from being an Iranian-Shiite-dominated country to a Sunni-dominated
one. Democracy per se is not their priority.
One of the two Turkish experts has another business in Qatar. To get permission
to work and operate in Qatar, he explained, he needs a local Qatari to sponsor
his work permit. "If you have a work permit and you want to leave the country,
you need your sponsor to give you written permission," he noted. "If your
sponsor dies, his son inherits that right." His Qatari sponsor's son is very
young. Yet, "if he says I cannot leave, I cannot leave. I do business [in Qatar]
but I have no rights at all. ... We joke that we are `modern slaves' there. And
this country is trying to bring democracy to Syria?"
These stories illuminate for me the enormous number of crosscurrents and mixed
motives driving this revolution. Without a strong, galvanizing Syrian leader
with a compelling unifying vision, backed by the international community,
getting rid of Assad will not bring order to Syria. And disorder in Syria will
not have the same consequences as disorder in other countries in the region.
Syria is the keystone of the Middle East. If and how it cracks apart could
recast this entire region. The borders of Syria have been fixed ever since the
British and French colonial powers carved up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I. If Assad is toppled and you have state collapse here,
Syria's civil war could go regional and challenge all the old borders — as the
Shiites of Lebanon seek to link up more with the Alawite/Shiites of Syria, the
Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey try to link up with each other and create
an independent Kurdistan, and the Sunnis of Iraq, Jordan and Syria draw closer
to oppose the Shiites of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
We could be entering a new age of Middle East border-drawing — the
do-it-yourself version — where the borders of the Middle East get redrawn, not
by colonial outsiders from the top down but by the Middle Easterners themselves,
from the bottom up.
September 22, 2012
Hard Lines, Red Lines and Green Lines
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Washington
ON Wednesday, Myanmar’s democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, came here and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in the Capitol. I was not there, but I read the transcript and was deeply impressed by the emotional tribute delivered by Senator John McCain, who thanked “ ‘The Lady,’ for teaching me at my age a thing or two about courage.” In closing, McCain quoted Aung San Suu Kyi’s famous dictum that “it is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
I love that line: it’s not power but the fear of losing power that corrupts. It is deeply true and relevant today, when so few leaders now dare to throw caution and polls to the wind and tell people the truth about anything hard or controversial. Aung San Suu Kyi gave up 20 years of her life for her country. Many leaders today won’t even give up a news cycle.
You see it everywhere: Muslims go on a rampage against the U.S. Embassy in Cairo because of a despicable and juvenile anti-Muslim video on YouTube — and the new Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, at first refuses to condemn them or even properly protect America’s diplomatic mission. Only a blistering phone call from President Obama, who no doubt hinted that Egypt wouldn’t get another penny of foreign aid if Morsi didn’t act, prompted the Egyptian leader to condemn the attack. Muslim Brotherhood officials “explained” that Morsi was torn between the demands of diplomacy and not wanting to alienate his base or be outflanked by even more hard-line Salafist Muslims. Sorry, to lead is to choose. Not a good sign.
But you know what they say about people in glass houses. ... In July, Representative Michele Bachmann started a bogus campaign against Muslims in the U.S. government, including a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Bachmann wrote to the leaders of America’s national security agencies questioning whether the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the federal government. Both Senator McCain and the House speaker, John Boehner, chastised Bachmann for her politically inspired witch hunt — but not Eric Cantor, the House majority leader. The ambitious Cantor saw a chance to get a little political edge with the Republican base, against his rival Boehner, and told Charlie Rose of CBS News that we should understand Bachmann: “I think that her concern was about the security of the country.” Yes, right, Mr. Cantor, and I suppose that was all Senator Joe McCarthy was concerned about, too.
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel has been loudly demanding that America publicly draw a “red line” in respect to Iran’s nuclear program that would delineate exactly when the U.S. would launch a strike against Tehran. Bibi is Winston Churchill when it comes to demanding that the U.S. draw red lines, but he is a local party boss when America asks him to draw a “green line” delineating where Jewish settlements in the West Bank will stop and a Palestinian state might start. Oh, no! Can’t do that, Bibi tells American officials. “I would lose my coalition.” So America is supposed to risk a war with Iran, but Bibi won’t risk anything to advance a deal with the Palestinians that might create a little more global legitimacy and sympathy for Israel, and America, in the event of a war with Iran. Thanks a lot.
Obama made every mistake in the book in trying to negotiate a “grand bargain” on taxes and spending last year with Mr. Boehner. But I’ve always had one question: Boehner said that he walked away after Obama, at the 11th hour, asked for $400 billion more in taxes to bring along more Democrats. Why did Boehner just walk away and not call Obama back and say, “Here is my deal — no $400 billion more — take the original bargain or leave it.” He didn’t do that because he was afraid Obama might take it — and Boehner knew he could not deliver his Tea Party base or would lose his speakership trying. So he didn’t try.
As for Obama, he’s been at his best when he has dared to lead without fearing the politics: taking out Osama bin Laden, securing health care without a public option, racing to the top in education and saving the banks rather than throwing all the bankers in jail, which they deserved. And he has been at his worst when he’s put politics first: spurning Simpson-Bowles, doubling down on Afghanistan for fear of being called a wimp and dropping “climate change” from his speeches.
My gut tells me that this deficit of global leadership can’t last. For one thing, the world is getting so interdependent that weak leadership in one country now deeply impacts so many others. Think euro crisis, Israel-Iran or Chinese pollution. And, for another, I don’t believe the two most powerful disciplining forces on the planet — the market and Mother Nature — will sit idle for another decade and let us keep building these huge financial deficits and carbon surpluses without one day delivering some punishing blows that will require herculean leadership to deal with.
So let’s honor The Lady from Myanmar, not just with a medal, but in a way that really matters — with emulation.
=====================================================================
June 16, 2012
First Tahrir Square, Then the Classroom
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
nytimes Istanbul
A FEW weeks ago, I was in Amman, Jordan, talking with educators, when I met a young American woman with the most remarkable job description. Her name was Shaylyn Romney Garrett. She introduced herself by saying that she and her husband, James, were former Peace Corps volunteers in Jordan who had stayed on to start a nonprofit, Think Unlimited. It helps Jordanian schoolteachers learn how to “teach creative thinking and problem solving” in their classrooms. “Now that,” I said, “would be the real Arab Spring.”
Rote learning is still the dominant education method in most Arab public schools. The Garretts, with some backing from Queen Rania of Jordan’s school-reform initiative, designed a program to enable and inspire Jordanian teachers to adopt a much more creative approach to education. They also conduct summer “Brain Camps” for young students to hone their problem-solving skills by creating solutions for water shortage. Garrett told me one story, though, that really stuck in my mind.
“There was a 16-year-old girl in our Peace Corps village in Jordan,” she said. “She came from a very conservative family, always wearing Islamic dress. When you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said ‘doctor,’ which is what they all say, because it is the most prestigious job. After completing our six-day summer camp, she realized, though, that she could do something else with her talent, that she could be a change-agent. So she started a girls’ club in the village. [At the camp,] we teach kids the concept of ‘brainstorming,’ and one day we were walking together and she was running ideas past me, and she said, ‘Miss Shaylyn, I stormed my brain last night to think of different ideas for what the theme of my club should be.’ She eventually made it a leadership club.” It was an example, said Garrett, of taking a specific creative-thinking skill — brainstorming — and applying it to her community.
The Arab awakenings may or may not succeed in ousting the dictators, but they will have no chance of really empowering the new generation without this kind of revolution in education. The Arab awakening — at its core — was a nonreligious event, led by young people frustrated that they lacked the space, job opportunities and educational tools to realize their full potential. That was the volcanic energy source that blew the lid off Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen and Libya. While Islamist parties have seized this opening to initially take power, if they don’t satisfy the aspirations of those youths who stormed their brains and then stormed the barricades, they will — sooner or later — get blown away just like the Mubaraks and Qaddafis.
Dalia Mogahed runs polling in the Arab world for Gallup. She would not predict if the Muslim Brotherhood candidate would win this weekend’s Egyptian presidential election, but she did note that, since January, support for the Brotherhood and Salafists in Egypt has fallen by 20 percent. Why? Because they misinterpreted their parliamentary victory as a religious/ideological mandate, she said, “and it wasn’t.” When a female parliamentarian from the Brotherhood’s party made statements suggesting that female genital mutilation no longer be criminalized, it triggered a backlash from Egyptians worried that this is what the Brotherhood’s priorities were.
In tracking polls, Gallup asked Egyptians which parties they supported and, at the same time, what their priorities were for the new government. No matter which party they voted for, said Mogahed, “there is no difference across the board — not the slightest — between liberals and conservatives on priorities for the next government. They are jobs — No. 1 — then economic development, security and stability and education, in that order. Take out security and stability, and they look just like American voters. If the Muslim Brotherhood misreads their win as a popular ideological mandate, rather than a practical vote for good governance, they will work on the wrong things and, therefore, lose power.”
According to the Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2012, “Earning a fair wage and owning a home are now the two highest priorities for young people in the Middle East — displacing living in a democracy as the greatest aspiration of regional youth.” Democracy is now third. And no wonder. If you are not properly educated, you can’t get a decent job and buy an apartment — and, without that, you can’t get married. Record numbers of Arab youth today are still living with their parents after college. Indeed, 25 percent of all young Arabs ages 15 to 24 are unemployed. What makes this cohort so dangerous, though, is that they are the educated unemployed — who are not really educated. Most Arab state public schools score very low on the international math/reading comparisons, thanks to a system that asks students to take notes, spew back what they learned and pay for private tutoring from the same teachers after school if they want anything remotely better.
The dominant trend in the Arab world today remains “education for unemployment” rather than “education for employment,” said Mona Mourshed, an Egyptian-American who leads McKinsey’s global education practice. “You have a teaching method that is centuries old and a curriculum that does not support students with the competencies they need.” It takes the average employer in the Arab world nine months to train a new worker to be proficient. The single most popular thing the U.S. could do right now to support the Arab Spring is to identify six or seven specific fields of work — in light manufacturing, textiles, services, word processing, etc. — and establish education programs that can impart real skills for those jobs.
I read the other day that a U.S. drone had killed “the No. 2 man” in Al Qaeda. I am sure the world is a better place. But I don’t think President Obama realizes how much U.S. drone strikes have become his signature policy in the Middle East today. President Obama needs to remember, said Mogahed, what a radical act his election was. Every Arab knew that could never happen in their societies, and it had a huge impact on their sense of the possible. “It was such a symbolic win for American values, for the idea that it doesn’t matter who your grandfather is, you can succeed on merit,” she added. But we’re drifting away from that story line. If we don’t storm our own brains and redirect our Arab foreign aid to education for employment, we’ll forever be killing the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda.
===============================================
February 28, 2012
December 1, 2012
Letter From Syria
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMANDarkush, Syria
THE scene is almost biblical. You step down through tall reeds, cross the
Orontes River from Turkey in a small rowboat and are received by a local
contingent of the Free Syrian Army, outside the Syrian town of Darkush. One of
them shows you the picture on his cellphone of a Syrian girl who was just taken
across the river to Turkey with what turned out to be fatal wounds from a Syrian
Army helicopter attack on her village. The helicopters, the rebel soldiers say,
dropped barrels with nails and explosives on her house. Meanwhile, over here in
the mud are three fresh graves with bodies that just floated down the river.
Some days it's just an arm or leg that washes up. Although this is "liberated"
territory, in the background you can hear the low drumbeat of shells slamming
into some town over the hills. I ask the rebel local commander, Muatasim Bila
Abul Fida, how he thinks all of this will play out. His answer strikes me as
very honest. "Without the help of Iran and Hezbollah, he would be gone by now,"
he says of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But even after he goes, there
will be a great sorting out. "It will take five or six years," he adds, because
the Islamist parties "want Shariah, and we want democracy."
In my visit along the Turkey-Syria border, I am struck at how so many different
people want so many different things for Syria. It is unnerving. A Christian
businessman from Aleppo tells me that if a real election were held in Syria
today, the besieged President Assad would still win "with 75 percent of the
vote," because most Syrians crave the order that he provided and are exhausted
by war. But a few hours earlier at an impressively run Syrian refugee camp set
up by Turkey outside the Turkish border town of Antakya, I interviewed young
Syrian Sunni Muslim men who had fled from the Assad family's largely Alawite
stronghold of Latakiya, just down the coast. They spoke about the deep
unfairness of the Syrian system and how Alawites were getting an unfair share of
the pie. "When we first protested to demand reforms, the regime did not do
anything," said Yahya Afacesa, "and then we started to shout and demand freedom,
and the regime attacked us. So there was no way to fight the regime peacefully."
He and his colleagues insisted, though, that the problem in Syria was the Assad
family, not the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot from which the Assads hail and
which dominates the regime. These are secular young men, and they still took
pride in Syria's multisectarian identity and harmony, which, it should be
remembered, has deep historical roots in this region. Indeed, before visiting
them, I met with the Chamber of Commerce of Antakya. The chamber's president
proudly displays outside his office a poster of more than 20 different churches,
mosques and even a synagogue still operating in his town, which is just a few
miles from the Syrian border. I repeat: There are cultural roots for pluralism
in this region that a new Syrian government could still fall back on — but
there's also the opposite.
A case in point: In Antakya I met two Turkish logistics experts. They spoke
about the "Arab foreign legion" of Islamist fighters from as far away as
Chechnya and Libya who have come through their town and crossed the Orontes to
join the battle in Syria. They scoffed at the idea that Syria will emerge as a
democracy from a war in which its main arms suppliers are the Islamic-oriented
monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The main Saudi and Qatari desire is that
Syria shift from being an Iranian-Shiite-dominated country to a Sunni-dominated
one. Democracy per se is not their priority.
One of the two Turkish experts has another business in Qatar. To get permission
to work and operate in Qatar, he explained, he needs a local Qatari to sponsor
his work permit. "If you have a work permit and you want to leave the country,
you need your sponsor to give you written permission," he noted. "If your
sponsor dies, his son inherits that right." His Qatari sponsor's son is very
young. Yet, "if he says I cannot leave, I cannot leave. I do business [in Qatar]
but I have no rights at all. ... We joke that we are `modern slaves' there. And
this country is trying to bring democracy to Syria?"
These stories illuminate for me the enormous number of crosscurrents and mixed
motives driving this revolution. Without a strong, galvanizing Syrian leader
with a compelling unifying vision, backed by the international community,
getting rid of Assad will not bring order to Syria. And disorder in Syria will
not have the same consequences as disorder in other countries in the region.
Syria is the keystone of the Middle East. If and how it cracks apart could
recast this entire region. The borders of Syria have been fixed ever since the
British and French colonial powers carved up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I. If Assad is toppled and you have state collapse here,
Syria's civil war could go regional and challenge all the old borders — as the
Shiites of Lebanon seek to link up more with the Alawite/Shiites of Syria, the
Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey try to link up with each other and create
an independent Kurdistan, and the Sunnis of Iraq, Jordan and Syria draw closer
to oppose the Shiites of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
We could be entering a new age of Middle East border-drawing — the
do-it-yourself version — where the borders of the Middle East get redrawn, not
by colonial outsiders from the top down but by the Middle Easterners themselves,
from the bottom up.
nytimes November 10, 2012
My President Is Busy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
ISRAELI friends have been asking me whether a re-elected President Obama will take revenge on Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for the way he and Sheldon Adelson, his foolhardy financier, openly backed Mitt Romney. My answer to Israelis is this: You should be so lucky.
You should be so lucky that the president feels he has the time, energy and political capital to spend wrestling with Bibi to forge a peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I don’t see it anytime soon. Obama has his marching orders from the American people: Focus on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not on Bethlehem, Palestine, and focus on getting us out of quagmires (Afghanistan) not into them (Syria). No, my Israeli friends, it’s much worse than you think: You’re home alone.
Of course, no one here will tell you that. To the contrary, there will surely be a new secretary of state visiting you next year with the umpteenth road map for “confidence-building measures” between Israelis and Palestinians. He or she may even tell you that “this is the year of decision.” Be careful. We’ve been there before. If you Google “Year of decision in the Middle East,” you’ll get more than 100,000,000 links.
Is this good for Israel? No. It is unhealthy. The combination of America’s internal focus, the post-Arab awakening turmoil and the exhaustion of Palestinians means Israel can stay in the West Bank indefinitely at a very low short-term cost but at a very high long-term cost of losing its identity as a Jewish democracy. If Israelis want to escape that fate, it is very important that they understand that we’re not your grandfather’s America anymore.
To begin with, the rising political force in America is not the one with which Bibi has aligned Israel. As the Israeli columnist Ari Shavit noted in the newspaper Haaretz last week: “In the past, both the Zionist movement and the Jewish state were careful to be identified with the progressive forces in the world. ... But in recent decades more and more Israelis took to leaning on the reactionary forces in American society. It was convenient to lean on them. The evangelists didn’t ask difficult questions about the settlements, the Tea Party people didn’t say a word about excluding women and minorities or about Jewish settlers’ attacks and acts of vandalism against Palestinians and peace activists. The Republican Party’s white, religious, conservative wing was not agitated when the Israeli Supreme Court was attacked and the rule of law in Israel was trampled.” Israel, Shavit added, assumed that “under the patronage of a radical, rightist America we can conduct a radical, rightist policy without paying the price.” No more. Netanyahu can still get a standing ovation from the Israel lobby, but not at U.C.L.A.
At the same time, U.S. policy makers have learned that the Middle East only puts a smile on our faces when it starts with them: with Israelis and Arabs. Camp David started with them. Oslo started with them. The Arab Spring started with them. When they have ownership over peace or democracy movements, those initiatives can be self-sustaining. We can amplify what they start, but we can’t create it. We can provide the mediation and even the catering, but it’s got to start with them.
We’ve learned something else from our interventions in Afghanistan and Libya: We willed the ends, but we did not will the means — that is, doing all that it would take to transform those societies. That is why we’re quitting Afghanistan, staying out of Syria and relying on sanctions, as long as possible, to dissuade Iran from building a nuclear bomb. These countries are too hard to fix but too dangerous to ignore. We’ll still try to help, but we’ll expect regional powers, and the locals, to assume more responsibility.
Finally, we really have work to do at home. Soon Americans will be asked to pay more taxes for less government. It’s coming. It will not make us isolationists, but it will change our mood and make us much pickier about where we’ll get involved. That means only a radical change by Palestinians or Israelis will get us to fully re-engage.
The other day, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority declared: “Palestine for me is the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital. This is Palestine. I am a refugee. I live in Ramallah. The West Bank and Gaza is Palestine. Everything else is Israel.”
This was a big signal, but Bibi scorned it. The Israeli novelist David Grossman wrote an open letter to Netanyahu in Haaretz, taking him to task: “This is a bit embarrassing, but I will remind you, Mr. Netanyahu, that you were elected to lead Israel precisely in order to discern these rare hints of opportunity, in order to transform them into a possible lever to extricate your country from the impasse in which it has been stuck for decades.”
So my best advice to Israelis is: Focus on your own election — on Jan. 22 — not ours. I find it very sad that in a country with so much human talent, the Israeli center and left still can’t agree on a national figure who could run against Netanyahu and his thuggish partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman — a man whose commitment to democracy is closer to Vladimir Putin’s than Thomas Jefferson’s. Don’t count on America to ride to the rescue. It has to start with you.
My president is busy.
September 22, 2012
Hard Lines, Red Lines and Green Lines
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Washington
ON Wednesday, Myanmar’s democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, came here and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal at a ceremony in the Capitol. I was not there, but I read the transcript and was deeply impressed by the emotional tribute delivered by Senator John McCain, who thanked “ ‘The Lady,’ for teaching me at my age a thing or two about courage.” In closing, McCain quoted Aung San Suu Kyi’s famous dictum that “it is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
I love that line: it’s not power but the fear of losing power that corrupts. It is deeply true and relevant today, when so few leaders now dare to throw caution and polls to the wind and tell people the truth about anything hard or controversial. Aung San Suu Kyi gave up 20 years of her life for her country. Many leaders today won’t even give up a news cycle.
You see it everywhere: Muslims go on a rampage against the U.S. Embassy in Cairo because of a despicable and juvenile anti-Muslim video on YouTube — and the new Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, at first refuses to condemn them or even properly protect America’s diplomatic mission. Only a blistering phone call from President Obama, who no doubt hinted that Egypt wouldn’t get another penny of foreign aid if Morsi didn’t act, prompted the Egyptian leader to condemn the attack. Muslim Brotherhood officials “explained” that Morsi was torn between the demands of diplomacy and not wanting to alienate his base or be outflanked by even more hard-line Salafist Muslims. Sorry, to lead is to choose. Not a good sign.
But you know what they say about people in glass houses. ... In July, Representative Michele Bachmann started a bogus campaign against Muslims in the U.S. government, including a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Bachmann wrote to the leaders of America’s national security agencies questioning whether the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the federal government. Both Senator McCain and the House speaker, John Boehner, chastised Bachmann for her politically inspired witch hunt — but not Eric Cantor, the House majority leader. The ambitious Cantor saw a chance to get a little political edge with the Republican base, against his rival Boehner, and told Charlie Rose of CBS News that we should understand Bachmann: “I think that her concern was about the security of the country.” Yes, right, Mr. Cantor, and I suppose that was all Senator Joe McCarthy was concerned about, too.
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel has been loudly demanding that America publicly draw a “red line” in respect to Iran’s nuclear program that would delineate exactly when the U.S. would launch a strike against Tehran. Bibi is Winston Churchill when it comes to demanding that the U.S. draw red lines, but he is a local party boss when America asks him to draw a “green line” delineating where Jewish settlements in the West Bank will stop and a Palestinian state might start. Oh, no! Can’t do that, Bibi tells American officials. “I would lose my coalition.” So America is supposed to risk a war with Iran, but Bibi won’t risk anything to advance a deal with the Palestinians that might create a little more global legitimacy and sympathy for Israel, and America, in the event of a war with Iran. Thanks a lot.
Obama made every mistake in the book in trying to negotiate a “grand bargain” on taxes and spending last year with Mr. Boehner. But I’ve always had one question: Boehner said that he walked away after Obama, at the 11th hour, asked for $400 billion more in taxes to bring along more Democrats. Why did Boehner just walk away and not call Obama back and say, “Here is my deal — no $400 billion more — take the original bargain or leave it.” He didn’t do that because he was afraid Obama might take it — and Boehner knew he could not deliver his Tea Party base or would lose his speakership trying. So he didn’t try.
As for Obama, he’s been at his best when he has dared to lead without fearing the politics: taking out Osama bin Laden, securing health care without a public option, racing to the top in education and saving the banks rather than throwing all the bankers in jail, which they deserved. And he has been at his worst when he’s put politics first: spurning Simpson-Bowles, doubling down on Afghanistan for fear of being called a wimp and dropping “climate change” from his speeches.
My gut tells me that this deficit of global leadership can’t last. For one thing, the world is getting so interdependent that weak leadership in one country now deeply impacts so many others. Think euro crisis, Israel-Iran or Chinese pollution. And, for another, I don’t believe the two most powerful disciplining forces on the planet — the market and Mother Nature — will sit idle for another decade and let us keep building these huge financial deficits and carbon surpluses without one day delivering some punishing blows that will require herculean leadership to deal with.
So let’s honor The Lady from Myanmar, not just with a medal, but in a way that really matters — with emulation.
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July 3, 2012 nytimes
What Does Morsi Mean for Israel?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Is the election of Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, as president of Egypt the beginning of the end of the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt? It doesn’t have to be. In fact, it could actually be the beginning of a real peace between the Israeli and the Egyptian peoples, instead of what we’ve had: a cold, formal peace between Israel and a single Egyptian pharaoh. But, for that to be the case, both sides will have to change some deeply ingrained behaviors, and fast.
First, let’s dispense with some nonsense. There is a mantra you hear from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel and various right-wing analysts: “We told you so.” It’s the idea that somehow President Obama could have intervened to “save” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and he was just too naïve to do so, and the inevitable result is that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken power. Sorry, naïveté is thinking that because it was so convenient for Israel to have peace with one dictator, Mubarak, rather than 80 million Egyptians, that this dictator — or some other general — would and could stay at the helm in Egypt forever. Talk about naïve.
I truly appreciate the anxiety Israelis feel at seeing their neighborhood imploding. But it is also striking that a people for whom the Exodus story of liberation is so central — and who for so long argued that peace will happen only when the Arabs become democratic — failed to believe that the liberation narrative might one day resonate with the people of Egypt and now proclaim that the problem with the Arabs is that they are becoming democratic. This has roots.
“In their relations with power, Jews in exile have always preferred vertical alliances to horizontal ones,” notes Leon Wieseltier, the Jewish scholar and literary editor of The New Republic. “They always preferred to have a relationship with the king or the bishop so as not to have to engage with the general population, of which they were deeply distrustful — and they often had reason to be distrustful. Israel, as a sovereign state, reproduced the old Jewish tradition of the vertical alliance, only this time with the Arab states. They thought that if they had a relationship with Mubarak or the king of Jordan, they had all they needed. But the model of the vertical alliance only makes sense with authoritarian political systems. As soon as authoritarianism breaks down, and a process of democratization begins, the vertical model is over and you enter a period of horizontality in which the opinions of the people — in this instance, ordinary Arabs — will matter.” As a result, Israel will have to make the man on the street “not only fear it, but also understand it. This will not be easy, but it may not be impossible. Anyway, nostalgia for dictators is not a thoughtful policy.”
I don’t know whether the current Palestinian leadership can be a partner for a secure, two-state peace with Israel, but I do know this: Israel needs to be more creative in testing whether that is possible. Because the alternative is a one-state solution that will be the death of Israel as a Jewish democracy and deadly for peace with a democratic Egypt.
And what are Morsi’s obligations? Have no illusions: the Muslim Brotherhood at its core holds deeply illiberal, anti-pluralistic, anti-feminist views. It aspires to lock itself into power and exploit a revolution it did not initiate. I just don’t think it is going to be so easy. Iran is political Islam in power with oil — to buy off all the pressures and contradictions. Saudi Arabia is political Islam in power with oil. Egypt will be political Islam in powerwithout oil. Egypt can’t survive without tourism, foreign investment and aid to create the jobs, schools and opportunities to satisfy the Egyptian youths who launched this revolution and many others who passively supported it. Also, the U.S. cannot, will not and should not give the Muslim Brotherhood the same deal it gave Mubarak — just arrest and torture the jihadists we want and you can have a cold peace with Israel and no constitutionalism at home.
As the analyst Hussein Ibish wrote in Now Lebanon, with the Muslim Brotherhood in power, it is now vital for liberals in Egypt and abroad to focus on ensuring that Egypt’s new constitution is built on laws that constrain “the powers of government and ensure ironclad, inviolable protection for the rights of individuals, minorities and women.”
So Morsi is going to be under enormous pressure to follow the path of Turkey, not the Taliban. Will he? I have no idea. He should understand, though, that he holds a powerful card — one Israelis would greatly value: real peace with a Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, which could mean peace with the Muslim world and a true end to the conflict. Of course, that’s the longest of long shots. Would Morsi ever dangle that under certain terms? Again, I don’t know. I just know this: The Mubarak era is over — and with the conservative Muslim Brotherhood dominating Egypt and with conservative religious-nationalists dominating Israeli politics, both will either change their behaviors to make Camp David legitimate for both peoples or it will gradually become unsustainable.
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June 16, 2012
First Tahrir Square, Then the Classroom
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
nytimes Istanbul
A FEW weeks ago, I was in Amman, Jordan, talking with educators, when I met a young American woman with the most remarkable job description. Her name was Shaylyn Romney Garrett. She introduced herself by saying that she and her husband, James, were former Peace Corps volunteers in Jordan who had stayed on to start a nonprofit, Think Unlimited. It helps Jordanian schoolteachers learn how to “teach creative thinking and problem solving” in their classrooms. “Now that,” I said, “would be the real Arab Spring.”
Rote learning is still the dominant education method in most Arab public schools. The Garretts, with some backing from Queen Rania of Jordan’s school-reform initiative, designed a program to enable and inspire Jordanian teachers to adopt a much more creative approach to education. They also conduct summer “Brain Camps” for young students to hone their problem-solving skills by creating solutions for water shortage. Garrett told me one story, though, that really stuck in my mind.
“There was a 16-year-old girl in our Peace Corps village in Jordan,” she said. “She came from a very conservative family, always wearing Islamic dress. When you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said ‘doctor,’ which is what they all say, because it is the most prestigious job. After completing our six-day summer camp, she realized, though, that she could do something else with her talent, that she could be a change-agent. So she started a girls’ club in the village. [At the camp,] we teach kids the concept of ‘brainstorming,’ and one day we were walking together and she was running ideas past me, and she said, ‘Miss Shaylyn, I stormed my brain last night to think of different ideas for what the theme of my club should be.’ She eventually made it a leadership club.” It was an example, said Garrett, of taking a specific creative-thinking skill — brainstorming — and applying it to her community.
The Arab awakenings may or may not succeed in ousting the dictators, but they will have no chance of really empowering the new generation without this kind of revolution in education. The Arab awakening — at its core — was a nonreligious event, led by young people frustrated that they lacked the space, job opportunities and educational tools to realize their full potential. That was the volcanic energy source that blew the lid off Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Yemen and Libya. While Islamist parties have seized this opening to initially take power, if they don’t satisfy the aspirations of those youths who stormed their brains and then stormed the barricades, they will — sooner or later — get blown away just like the Mubaraks and Qaddafis.
Dalia Mogahed runs polling in the Arab world for Gallup. She would not predict if the Muslim Brotherhood candidate would win this weekend’s Egyptian presidential election, but she did note that, since January, support for the Brotherhood and Salafists in Egypt has fallen by 20 percent. Why? Because they misinterpreted their parliamentary victory as a religious/ideological mandate, she said, “and it wasn’t.” When a female parliamentarian from the Brotherhood’s party made statements suggesting that female genital mutilation no longer be criminalized, it triggered a backlash from Egyptians worried that this is what the Brotherhood’s priorities were.
In tracking polls, Gallup asked Egyptians which parties they supported and, at the same time, what their priorities were for the new government. No matter which party they voted for, said Mogahed, “there is no difference across the board — not the slightest — between liberals and conservatives on priorities for the next government. They are jobs — No. 1 — then economic development, security and stability and education, in that order. Take out security and stability, and they look just like American voters. If the Muslim Brotherhood misreads their win as a popular ideological mandate, rather than a practical vote for good governance, they will work on the wrong things and, therefore, lose power.”
According to the Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2012, “Earning a fair wage and owning a home are now the two highest priorities for young people in the Middle East — displacing living in a democracy as the greatest aspiration of regional youth.” Democracy is now third. And no wonder. If you are not properly educated, you can’t get a decent job and buy an apartment — and, without that, you can’t get married. Record numbers of Arab youth today are still living with their parents after college. Indeed, 25 percent of all young Arabs ages 15 to 24 are unemployed. What makes this cohort so dangerous, though, is that they are the educated unemployed — who are not really educated. Most Arab state public schools score very low on the international math/reading comparisons, thanks to a system that asks students to take notes, spew back what they learned and pay for private tutoring from the same teachers after school if they want anything remotely better.
The dominant trend in the Arab world today remains “education for unemployment” rather than “education for employment,” said Mona Mourshed, an Egyptian-American who leads McKinsey’s global education practice. “You have a teaching method that is centuries old and a curriculum that does not support students with the competencies they need.” It takes the average employer in the Arab world nine months to train a new worker to be proficient. The single most popular thing the U.S. could do right now to support the Arab Spring is to identify six or seven specific fields of work — in light manufacturing, textiles, services, word processing, etc. — and establish education programs that can impart real skills for those jobs.
I read the other day that a U.S. drone had killed “the No. 2 man” in Al Qaeda. I am sure the world is a better place. But I don’t think President Obama realizes how much U.S. drone strikes have become his signature policy in the Middle East today. President Obama needs to remember, said Mogahed, what a radical act his election was. Every Arab knew that could never happen in their societies, and it had a huge impact on their sense of the possible. “It was such a symbolic win for American values, for the idea that it doesn’t matter who your grandfather is, you can succeed on merit,” she added. But we’re drifting away from that story line. If we don’t storm our own brains and redirect our Arab foreign aid to education for employment, we’ll forever be killing the No. 2 man in Al Qaeda.
===============================================
May 22, 2012
Power With Purpose
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (BiBi etc...)
Political power is always a double-edged sword. The more of it you amass, the more people expect you to use it to do big things, and, when you don’t, the more ineffectual you look. That’s the dilemma in which Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel finds himself. He avoided early elections by adding a new centrist coalition partner to his right-wing cabinet, giving him control of 96 of the 120 seats in Parliament. There are Arab dictators who didn’t have majorities that big after rigged elections. What is unclear is whether Bibi assembled these multitudes to be better able to do nothing or be better able to do something important to secure Israel’s future.
The stakes could not be higher — for him and Israel. Ami Ayalon, the former commander of Israel’s Navy and later its domestic intelligence service, put it to me this way: “I imagine a book called ‘Jewish Leaders in Recent History’ that one day Bibi’s grandson will be reading. What will it say? In one version, I imagine the section about the State of Israel will say that Herzl envisaged it, Ben-Gurion built it and Netanyahu secured it as a Jewish democracy.” But there is another version that could also be written, added Ayalon. “This version will describe Herzl and Ben-Gurion in the same way, but it will say of Netanyahu that he was the only Israeli leader who had the political power and he missed his moment in history” — and, thereby, created a situation in which Israel is not a Jewish democracy anymore. “Now is his moment to decide.”
I’m keeping an open mind, but the temptation for Bibi to do nothing will be enormous. The Palestinians are divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and both populations are tired. Moreover, economic conditions have improved in the West Bank in recent years, and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces are keeping a tight rein on anti-Israeli violence. Aid from the U.S., Europe and the Arabs pays a lot of the authority’s budget. Israel’s security wall keeps Palestinian suicide bombers out. The U.S. election silences any criticism coming from Washington about Israeli settlements. The Israeli peace camp is dead, and the Arab awakening has most Arab states enfeebled or preoccupied. So Israel gets to build settlements, while the Arabs, Americans, Europeans and Palestinians fund and sustain a lot of the occupation.
No wonder then that for most Israelis, the West Bank could be East Timor. “We see the writing on the wall, but we don’t care,” says the columnist Nahum Barnea of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, referring to the fact that Arabs could soon outnumber Jews in areas under Israeli control.
The exception to all of this is Iran’s nuclear program, but Bibi — either through brilliant bluffing that he will bomb Iran or a sincere willingness to do so — has managed to make stopping Iran’s nuclear program a top U.S. and global priority.
Whenever a nation or leader amasses this much power, with no checks coming from anywhere, the probability of misreading events grows exponentially. Bibi could be assuming that the Palestinians in the West Bank can be pacified simply with better economic conditions. Don’t count on it. Humiliation remains the single most powerful human emotion. It trumps economic well-being every time. Bibi could be assuming that the Palestinian security services will indefinitely act as Israel’s forward police force in the West Bank — absent any hopes of Palestinian statehood. Not likely — eventually they will be viewed as “traitors.” Bibi could be assuming that Israel could strike Iran — and upend the world economy — and still continue to build settlements in the West Bank. I would not bet on that; the global backlash could be severe. Bibi could be assuming that the West Bank Palestinian leadership will always be moderate, secular and pro-Western. If only ...
At the same time, Bibi is prime minister for a reason. He was elected because many Israelis lost faith in the peace process and see chaos all around them. So what to do? Here I think Ayalon has the best new idea: “constructive unilateralism.”
In an essay in this newspaper on April 24, Ayalon and two colleagues argued that Israel should first declare its willingness to return to negotiations anytime and that it has no claims of sovereignty on any West Bank lands east of its security barrier. It should then end all settlement construction east of that barrier and in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and establish an attractive housing and relocation plan to help the 100,000 Jewish settlers who live east of the barrier to relocate within Israel’s recognized borders. The Israeli Army would remain in the West Bank until the conflict was resolved with a final-status agreement. And Israel would not physically force any citizens to leave until an agreement was reached, even though relocations could begin well before then. Such an initiative would radically change Israel’s image in the world, dramatically increase Palestinian incentives to negotiate and create a pathway for securing Israel as a Jewish democracy. And Bibi could initiate it tomorrow.
“Heroic peacemaking is over,” says Ayalon. It is time for “coordinated” and “constructive” unilateralism. The way is there. Does Bibi have the will?
There Be Dragons
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In medieval times, areas known to be dangerous or uncharted were often
labeled on maps with the warning: “Beware, here be dragons.” That is
surely how mapmakers would be labeling the whole Middle East today.
After the onset of the Arab awakenings, it was reasonable to be, at
worst, agnostic and, at best, hopeful about the prospect of these
countries making the difficult transition from autocracy to democracy.
But recently, looking honestly at the region, one has to conclude that
the prospects for stable transitions to democracy anytime soon are
dimming. It is too early to give up hope, but it is not too early to
start worrying.
Lord knows it is not because of the bravery of the Arab youth, and many
ordinary citizens, who set off these awakenings, in search of dignity,
justice and freedom. No, it is because the staying power and mendacity
of the entrenched old guards and old ideas in these countries is much
deeper than most people realize and the frailty or absence of democratic
institutions, traditions and examples much greater.
“There is a saying that inside every fat man is a thin man dying to get
out,” notes Michael Mandelbaum, the foreign policy expert at Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “We also tend to
believe that inside every autocracy is a democracy dying to get out, but
that might not be true in the Middle East.”
It was true in Eastern Europe in 1989, added Mandelbaum, but there are
two big differences between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Many
Eastern European countries had a recent liberal past to fall back on —
after the artificially imposed Soviet communism was removed. And Eastern
Europe also had a compelling model and magnet for free-market democracy
right next door: the European Union. Most of the Arab-Muslim world has
neither, so when the iron lid of autocracy comes off they fall back, not
on liberalism, but Islamism, sectarianism, tribalism or military rule.
To be sure, we have to remember how long it took America to build its
own liberal political order and what freaks that has made us today.
Almost four years ago, we elected a black man, whose name was Barack,
whose grandfather was a Muslim, to lead us out of our worst economic
crisis in a century. We’re now considering replacing him with a Mormon,
and it all seems totally normal. But that normality took more than 200
years and a civil war to develop.
The Arabs and Afghans are in their first decade. You see in Syria how
quickly the regime turned the democracy push there into a sectarian war.
Remember, the opposition in Syria began as a largely peaceful,
grass-roots, pan-Syrian movement for democratic change. But it was
deliberately met by President Bashar al-Assad with murder and sectarian
venom. He wanted to make the conflict about his Alawite minority versus
the country’s Sunni Muslim majority as a way of discrediting the
opposition and holding his base.
As Peter Harling and Sarah Birke, experts on the Middle East who have
been in Syria, wrote in a recent essay: “Rather than reform, the
regime’s default setting has been to push society to the brink. As soon
as protests started ... state media showed staged footage of arms being
found in a mosque in Dara’a, the southern city where protests first
broke out, and warned that a sit-in in Homs ... was an attempt to erect a
mini-caliphate. This manipulation of Syrians meant the regime was
confident that the threat of civil war would force citizens and outside
players alike to agree on preserving the existing power structure as the
only bulwark against collapse.”
You see the same kind of manipulation of emotions in Afghanistan. U.S.
troops accidentally burned some Korans, and President Obama apologized.
Afghans nevertheless went on a weeklong rampage, killing innocent
Americans in response — and no Afghan leader, even our allies, dared to
stand up and say: “Wait, this is wrong. Every week in Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Iraq, Muslim suicide bombers kill other Muslims — holy
people created in the image of God — and there’s barely a peep. Yet the
accidental burning of holy books by Americans sparks outbursts and
killings. What does our reaction say about us?” They need to have that conversation.
In Egypt, every day it becomes clearer that the Army has used the Tahrir
uprising to get rid of its main long-term rival for succession —
President Hosni Mubarak’s more reform-minded son, Gamal. Now, having
gotten rid of both father and son, the Army is showing its real hand by
prosecuting American, European and Egyptian democracy workers for
allegedly working with “foreign agents” — the C.I.A., Israel and the
Jewish lobby — to destabilize Egypt. This is a patently fraudulent
charge, but one meant to undermine the democrats demanding that the Army
step aside.
The Arab/Muslim awakening phase is over. Now we are deep into the
counter-revolutionary phase, as the dead hands of the past try to
strangle the future. I am ready to consider any ideas of how we in the
West can help the forces of democracy and decency win. But, ultimately,
this is their fight. They have to own it, and I just hope it doesn’t end
— as it often does in the land of dragons — with extremists going all
the way and the moderates just going away.
February 21, 2012
Egypt’s Step Backward
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Sadly, the transitional government in Egypt today appears determined to shoot itself in both feet.
On Sunday, it will put on trial 43 people, including at least 16 U.S. citizens, for allegedly bringing unregistered funds into Egypt to promote democracy without a license. Egypt has every right to control international organizations operating within its borders. But the truth is that when these democracy groups filed their registration papers years ago under the autocracy of Hosni Mubarak, they were informed that the papers were in order and that approval was pending. The fact that now — after Mubarak has been deposed by a revolution — these groups are being threatened with jail terms for promoting democracy without a license is a very disturbing sign. It tells you how incomplete the “revolution” in Egypt has been and how vigorously the counter-revolutionary forces are fighting back.
This sordid business makes one weep and wonder how Egypt will ever turn the corner. Egypt is running out of foreign reserves, its currency is falling, inflation is rising and unemployment is rampant. Yet the priority of a few retrograde Mubarak holdovers is to put on trial staffers from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are allied with the two main U.S. political parties, as well as from Freedom House and some European groups. Their crime was trying to teach Egypt’s young democrats how to monitor elections and start parties to engage in the very democratic processes that the Egyptian Army set up after Mubarak’s fall. Thousands of Egyptians had participated in their seminars in recent years.
What is this really about? This case has been trumped up by Egypt’s minister of planning and international cooperation, Fayza Abul Naga, an old Mubarak crony. Abul Naga personifies the worst tendency in Egypt over the last 50 years — the tendency that helps to explain why Egypt has fallen so far behind its peers: South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brazil, India and China. It is the tendency to look for dignity in all the wrong places — to look for dignity not by building up the capacity of Egypt’s talented young people so they can thrive in the 21st century — with better schools, better institutions, export industries and more accountable government. No, it is the tendency to go for dignity on the cheap “by standing up to the foreigners.”
That is Abul Naga’s game. As a former Mubarak adviser put it to me: “Abul Naga is where she is today because for six years she was resisting the economic and political reforms” in alliance with the military. “Both she and the military were against opening up the Egyptian economy.” Both she and the military, having opposed the revolution, are now looking to save themselves by playing the nationalist card.
Egypt today has only two predators: poverty and illiteracy. After 30 years of Mubarak rule and some $50 billion in U.S. aid, 33 percent of men and 56 percent of women in Egypt still can’t read or write. That is a travesty. But that apparently does not keep Abul Naga up at night.
What is her priority? Is it to end illiteracy? Is it to articulate a new vision about how Egypt can engage with the world and thrive in the 21st century? Is it to create a positive climate for foreign investors to create jobs desperately needed by young Egyptians? No, it’s to fall back on that golden oldie — that all of Egypt’s problems are the fault of outsiders who want to destabilize Egypt. So let’s jail some Western democracy consultants. That will restore Egypt’s dignity.
The Times reported from Cairo that the prosecutor’s dossier assembled against the democracy workers — bolstered by Abul Naga’s testimony — accused these democracy groups of working “in coordination with the C.I.A.,” serving “U.S. and Israeli interests” and inciting “religious tensions between Muslims and Copts.” Their goal, according to the dossier, was: “Bringing down the ruling regime in Egypt, no matter what it is,” while “pandering to the U.S. Congress, Jewish lobbyists and American public opinion.”
Amazing. What Abul Naga is saying to all those young Egyptians who marched, protested and died in Tahrir Square in order to gain a voice in their own future is: “You were just the instruments of the C.I.A., the U.S. Congress, Israel and the Jewish lobby. They are the real forces behind the Egyptian revolution — not brave Egyptians with a will of their own.”
Not surprisingly, some members of the U.S. Congress are talking about cutting off the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. gives Egypt’s army if these Americans are actually thrown in prison. Hold off on that. We have to be patient and see this for what, one hopes, it really is: Fayza’s last dance. It is elements of the old regime playing the last cards they have to both undermine the true democratic forces in Egypt and to save themselves by posing as protectors of Egypt’s honor.
Egyptians deserve better than this crowd, which is squandering Egypt’s dwindling resources at a critical time and diverting attention from the real challenge facing the country: giving Egypt’s young people what they so clearly hunger for — a real voice in their own future and the educational tools they need to succeed in the modern world. That’s where lasting dignity comes from.
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February 7, 2012
Freedom at 4 Below
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Moscow
To observe the democratic awakenings happening in places like Egypt,
Syria and Russia is to travel with a glow in your heart and a pit in
your stomach.
The glow comes from watching people lose their fear and be willing to
take enormous risks to assert, not a particular ideology, but the most
human of emotions: the quest for dignity, justice and the right to shape
one’s own future. I was in Moscow on Saturday morning — just as the
demonstrations against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were gathering. It
was minus-4 Fahrenheit. A simple rule: Whenever 120,000 people gather to
rally for democracy — and you can see your breath and can’t feel your
fingers — take it seriously.
Putin’s allies were predicting that only a small crowd would brave the
weather. They were wrong, and it underscores something that a lot of
cynics regarding these awakening movements just don’t get. They’re like
earthquakes or volcanoes. They are totally natural phenomena, and they
emerge from a very deep place in people’s souls. Those mounting them are
not sitting around calculating the odds of success before they start.
They just happen. Anyone who thinks that President Obama could have
saved former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is as delusional as anyone
who thinks Obama is behind the protests against Putin. We’re all
spectators, watching an authentic human wave.
But that pit in the stomach comes from knowing that while the protests
are propelled by deep aspirations for dignity, justice and
self-determination, such heroic emotions have to compete with other less
noble impulses and embedded interests in these societies.
Take Syria. I have no doubt that many of the Syrians mounting the
uprising against the Assad regime — which is dominated by a Shiite
offshoot known as the Alawites, who make up about 10 percent of the
country — are propelled by a quest for a free and pluralistic Syria. But
have no illusions: Some are also Sunni Muslims — who are the majority
there — seeing this as their chance to overthrow four decades of Alawite
minority rule. Where win-win democratic aspirations stop in Syria and
rule-or-die sectarian fears begin is very hard to untangle.
Consider this paragraph from an article about Syria in The Times on
Saturday by Nada Bakri, a Beirut correspondent: “A 34-year-old teacher
from the Alawite sect said her life had changed in ways she never
imagined. Six months ago, she started covering her head like Sunni
Muslim women, hoping not to stand out. Her husband, an officer in the
Syrian Army, rarely leaves his base to come home. She said she and their
two sons had not seen him in months. A few weeks ago, her landlord, a
Sunni, asked her to leave the house because his newly married son wanted
to move in. ‘Sunnis have begun to feel empowered,’ the teacher said. ‘A
year ago, no one would have expected this to happen.’ She had already
made plans to return to her village.”
With good reason. There is a lot of pent-up anger there. The Assad
family has run Syria as an Alawite mafia syndicate since 1970. While the
Assad clan may have been a convenient enforcer at times for Israel and
the West, it has also been a huge agent of mayhem — killing Lebanese
journalists and politicians who dared to cross Syria, arming Hezbollah,
funneling insurgents into Iraq, serving as a launching pad for Iranian
mischief, murdering its own people seeking freedom and spurning any real
political and economic reform. Syria has no future under Assad rule.
But does it have a future without them? Can this multisectarian
population democratically rule itself, or does it crack apart? No one
can predict. The Syrian opposition is divided, by sects, by politics, by
region, by insiders and outsiders. We need to support them, provided
they come together on a pluralistic reform agenda. Opposition
leaders owe that to the brave Syrian youths who have taken on this
regime bare-handed. The only chance of President Bashar al-Assad
agreeing to some kind of peaceful transition, and not endless civil war,
is if he is faced with a real united opposition front. It’s also the
only hope for reforming Syria.
This will be hard. You can’t have a democracy without citizens, and you
can’t have citizens without trust — without trust that everyone will be
treated with equality under the law, no matter who is in power, and
without trust in a shared vision of what kind of society people are
trying to build.
America has that kind of trust because our country started with a shared
idea that attracted the people. The borders came later. In most of the
Arab states awakening today, the borders came first, drawn by foreign
powers, and now the people trapped within them are trying to find a
shared set of ideas to live by and trust each other with as equal
citizens.
Iraq shows how hard it is to do that — the Sunni-Shiite divide still
cuts very deep — but Iraq also shows that it is not impossible.
We often forget how unusual America is as a self-governing, pluralistic
society. We elected a black man whose grandfather was a Muslim as
president at a time of deep economic crisis, and now we’re considering
replacing him with a Mormon. Who in the world does that? Not many,
especially in the Middle East. Yet, clearly, many people there now
deeply long to be citizens — not all, but many. If that region has any
hope of a stable future, we need to bet on them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 31, 2012
The Politics of Dignity
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Dateline: Moscow
Memo to: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev
Subject: Russia and the Arab Spring
From: A traveler to Cairo and Moscow
Dear Sirs: You may think that the situations in Egypt and Russia have nothing in common. Think again. Yes, these two countries have starkly different histories. But having visited both in recent weeks, I can tell you that they have one very big thing in common: the political eruptions in both countries were not initially driven by any particular ideology but rather by the most human of emotions — the quest for dignity and justice. Humiliation is the single most underestimated force in politics. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you force people to live indefinitely inside a rigged game that is flaunted in their face or make them feel like cattle that can be passed by one leader to his son or one politician to another, eventually they’ll explode. These are the emotions that sparked the uprisings in Cairo and Moscow. They don’t go away easily, which is why you’re in more trouble than you think.
Have you gentlemen looked at the homemade videos going viral around Russia these days? One of my favorites was made by two Russian paratroopers-turned-singers, posted on YouTube under the title “Russian airborne veterans against Vladimir Putin.” Their lyrics were aimed directly at you, Mr. Putin, in the wake of the Sept. 24 announcement that President Medvedev would step down and pave the way for you and your party (now widely known as “the party of crooks and thieves”) to run for president for two more six-year terms — 12 more years! Russians immediately started calculating how old they’d be when they might see their country led by someone other than you, Mr. Putin. It was depressing for many — made more so by the fact that Mr. Medvedev said that your “trading places” was planned long ago. Yet no one else was consulted, and you two didn’t even bother to offer a narrative as to why Putin should have 12 more years. No wonder that song by the paratroopers to Putin was all about dignity: “You’re no different from me,/a man and not God./I’m no different from you,/a man, not some hick./We won’t let you keep lying./We won’t let you keep stealing./We’re liberated troops who defended the motherland.”
Aleksei Navalny, the shareholder-activist-blogger who helped stoke the rallies against you, said to me that nothing spurred the protests more than the daily experience of Muscovites having to sit in traffic while a car with a flashing blue light carrying some Putin crony behind tinted glass speeds past. “It is all about dignity,” said Navalny. “Who are these people? Why don’t they care about our rights? It doesn’t matter at all how good a career you build. You will stand in this traffic, and these people and their sons will drive past you with their blue lights.”
Mr. Putin, you have substantial achievements. During your first eight years as president, starting in 2000, you stabilized a collapsing Russia and oversaw the emergence of a big urban middle class. Admittedly, you didn’t achieve this with kid gloves, and it was attended with widespread corruption and fueled by oil exports. But enough trickled down so that a real middle class of professionals and entrepreneurs emerged. They are your accidental political offspring — “maybe the first independent political class in modern Russian history,” says Max Trudolyubov, the editorial page editor of the Vedomosti newspaper — and now they want a voice in their future.
Have you spoken lately to Mikhail Dmitriev, the president of the Center for Strategic Research? He has been doing focus groups since 2009, which I am told your aides were shown but didn’t believe. The anti-Putin protests, Dmitriev found, were not driven by the unemployed but rather by “the highly skilled part of the Russian population” that has come to feel as though “Russian society is a two-lane highway, with one lane for the privileged individuals in proximity to state power,” with its own laws or lack of them, “and one lane for the rest of the population.”
Beginning in 2009, says Dmitriev, his focus groups all started indicating that this new “wealthy, self-respecting middle class,” felt that “they are not recognized as deserving individuals and entitled to be treated with equal rights of everyone else.” One phrase, he says, “suddenly appeared all over the country: ‘We are not cattle.’ ” This, he says, is when he realized that “this is a matter of dignity and self-respect.”
This struggle between you and your accidental offspring will play out over a long time. But, good sirs, have no doubt about this: politics is back in Russia. Watch out. You, Mr. Putin, will surely win the March presidential election, predicts Dmitriev, “but in a weakened way.” The Putin brand is declining, he says. “The trend is downward. This will ensure that Putin is a weak president with declining support.”
Therefore, argues Dmitriev, your only hope to remain relevant is to “set up a coalition government, including the opposition, on the basis of free and fair elections and move toward a more balanced and competitive political system.”
I’d listen to him this time.
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January 28, 2012
Made in the World
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
There is a big gap in how C.E.O.’s and political leaders look at the world.
THE Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban Web site, following a Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”
When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign. But they’re not alone.
There is today an enormous gap between the way many C.E.O.’s in America — not Wall Street-types, but the people who lead premier companies that make things and create real jobs — look at the world and how the average congressmen, senator or president looks at the world. They are literally looking at two different worlds — and this applies to both parties.
Consider the meeting that this paper reported on from last February between President Obama and the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October. The president, understandably, asked Jobs why almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were made overseas. Obama inquired, couldn’t that work come back home? “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs replied.
Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies — and they see their job as maximizing the economic benefits for the voters in their geography. Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere.
These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more and more of their products today as “Made in the World” not “Made in America.” Therein lies the tension. So many of “our” companies actually see themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the United States.
Victor Fung, the chairman of Li & Fung, one of Hong Kong’s oldest textile manufacturers, remarked to me last year that for many years his company operated on the rule: “You sourced in Asia, and you sold in America and Europe.” Now, said Fung, the rule is: “ ‘Source everywhere, manufacture everywhere, sell everywhere.’ The whole notion of an ‘export’ is really disappearing.”
Mike Splinter, the C.E.O. of Applied Materials, has put it to me this way: “Outsourcing was 10 years ago, where you’d say, ‘Let’s send some software generation overseas.’ This is not the outsourcing we’re doing today. This is just where I am going to get something done. Now you say, ‘Hey, half my Ph.D.’s in my R-and-D department would rather live in Singapore, Taiwan or China because their hometown is there and they can go there and still work for my company.’ This is the next evolution.” He has many more choices.
Added Michael Dell, founder of Dell Inc.: “I always remind people that 96 percent of our potential new customers today live outside of America.” That’s the rest of the world. And if companies like Dell want to sell to them, he added, it needs to design and manufacture some parts of its products in their countries.
This is the world we are living in. It is not going away. But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate” in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.
And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.
In a world where the biggest returns go to those who imagine and design a product, there is no higher imagination-enabling society than America. In a world where talent is the most important competitive advantage, there is no country that historically welcomed talented immigrants more than America. In a world in which protection for intellectual property and secure capital markets is highly prized by innovators and investors alike, there is no country safer than America. In a world in which the returns on innovation are staggering, our government funding of bioscience, new technology and clean energy is a great advantage. In a world where logistics will be the source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.
If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to enhance and expand all of our natural advantages: more immigration, most post-secondary education, better infrastructure, more government research, smart incentives for spurring millions of start-ups — and a long-term plan to really fix our long-term debt problems — nobody could touch us. We’re that close.
December 20, 2011 nytimes
The End, for Now
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
With the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Iraq, we’re finally going to get the answer to the core question about that country: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is — a collection of sects and tribes unable to live together except under an iron fist. Now we’re going to get the answer because both the internal iron fist that held Iraq together (Saddam Hussein) and the external iron fist (the U.S. armed forces) have been removed. Now we will see whether Iraqis can govern themselves in a decent manner that will enable their society to progress — or end up with a new iron fist. You have to hope for the best because so much is riding on it, but the early signs are worrying.Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track? After 9/11, the idea of helping to change the context of Arab politics and address the root causes of Arab state dysfunction and Islamist terrorism — which were identified in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report as a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and a deficit of women’s empowerment — seemed to me to be a legitimate strategic choice. But was it a wise choice?
My answer is twofold: “No” and “Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.”
I say “no” because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it. And, for that, I have nothing but regrets. We overpaid in lives, in the wounded, in tarnished values, in dollars and in the lost focus on America’s development. Iraqis, of course, paid dearly as well.
One reason the costs were so high is because the project was so difficult. Another was the incompetence of George W. Bush’s team in prosecuting the war. The other reason, though, was the nature of the enemy. Iran, the Arab dictators and, most of all, Al Qaeda did not want a democracy in the heart of the Arab world, and they tried everything they could — in Al Qaeda’s case, hundreds of suicide bombers financed by Arab oil money — to sow enough fear and sectarian discord to make this democracy project fail.
So no matter the original reasons for the war, in the end, it came down to this: Were America and its Iraqi allies going to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies in the heart of the Arab world or were Al Qaeda and its allies going to defeat them? Thanks to the Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq, and the surge, America and its allies defeated them and laid the groundwork for the most important product of the Iraq war: the first ever voluntary social contract between Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites for how to share power and resources in an Arab country and to govern themselves in a democratic fashion. America helped to midwife that contract in Iraq, and now every other Arab democracy movement is trying to replicate it — without an American midwife. You see how hard it is.
Which leads to the “maybe, sort of, we’ll see.” It is possible to overpay for something that is still transformational. Iraq had its strategic benefits: the removal of a genocidal dictator; the defeat of Al Qaeda there, which diminished its capacity to attack us; the intimidation of Libya, which prompted its dictator to surrender his nuclear program (and helped expose the Abdul Qadeer Khan nuclear network); the birth in Kurdistan of an island of civility and free markets and the birth in Iraq of a diverse free press. But Iraq will only be transformational if it truly becomes a model where Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the secular and religious, Muslims and non-Muslims, can live together and share power.
As you can see in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain, this is the issue that will determine the fate of all the Arab awakenings. Can the Arab world develop pluralistic, consensual politics, with regular rotations in power, where people can live as citizens and not feel that their tribe, sect or party has to rule or die? This will not happen overnight in Iraq, but if it happens over time it would be transformational, because it is the necessary condition for democracy to take root in that region. Without it, the Arab world will be a dangerous boiling pot for a long, long time.
The best-case scenario for Iraq is that it will be another Russia — an imperfect, corrupt, oil democracy that still holds together long enough so that the real agent of change — a new generation, which takes nine months and 21 years to develop — comes of age in a much more open, pluralistic society. The current Iraqi leaders are holdovers from the old era, just like Vladimir Putin in Russia. They will always be weighed down by the past. But as Putin is discovering — some 21 years after Russia’s democratic awakening began — that new generation thinks differently. I don’t know if Iraq will make it. The odds are really long, but creating this opportunity was an important endeavor, and I have nothing but respect for the Americans, Brits and Iraqis who paid the price to make it possible. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 17, 2011
Help Wanted
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN nytimes.com
THE historian Walter Russell Mead recently noted that after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, Russians had a saying that seems particularly apt today: “It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.” Indeed, from Europe to the Middle East, and maybe soon even to Russia and Asia, a lot of aquariums are being turned into fish soup all at once. But turning them back into stable societies and communities will be one of the great challenges of our time.
We are present again at one of those great unravelings — just like after World War I, World War II and the cold war. But this time there was no war. All of these states have been pulled down from within — without warning. Why?
The main driver, I believe, is the merger of globalization and the Information Technology revolution. Both of them achieved a critical mass in the first decade of the 21st century that has resulted in the democratization — all at once — of so many things that neither weak states nor weak companies can stand up against. We’ve seen the democratization of information, where everyone is now a publisher; the democratization of war-fighting, where individuals became superempowered (enough so, in the case of Al Qaeda, to take on a superpower); the democratization of innovation, wherein start-ups using free open-source software and “the cloud” can challenge global companies.
And, finally, we’ve seen what Mark Mykleby, a retired Marine colonel and former adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calls “the democratization of expectations” — the expectation that all individuals should be able to participate in shaping their own career, citizenship and future, and not be constricted.
I’ve been struck by how similar the remarks by Russians about Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who just basically reappointed himself president, are to those I heard from Egyptians about Hosni Mubarak, who kept reappointing himself president. The Egyptian writer Alaa al-Aswany said to me that Egyptians resented the idea that Mubarak would just hand power to his son Gamal as if the Egyptian people “were chickens,” who could be passed by a leader to his son. Last Sunday, a New York Times article from Moscow quoted the popular, imprisoned Russian blogger Aleksei Navalny as saying: “We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes and the power to uphold them.”
“The days of leading countries or companies via a one-way conversation are over,” says Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN and the author of the book “How.” “The old system of ‘command and control’ — using carrots and sticks — to exert power over people is fast being replaced by ‘connect and collaborate’ — to generate power through people.” Leaders and managers cannot just impose their will, adds Seidman. “Now you have to have a two-way conversation that connects deeply with your citizens or customers or employees.”
Netflix had a one-way conversation about raising prices with its customers, who instantly self-organized; some 800,000 bolted, and the stock plunged. Bank of America had a one-way conversation about charging a $5 fee on debit cards, and its customers forced the global bank to reverse itself and apologize. Putin thought he had power over his people and could impose whatever he wanted and is now being forced into a conversation to justify staying in power. Coca-Cola repackaged its flagship soft drink in white cans for the holidays. But an outcry of “blasphemy” from consumers forced Coke to switch back from white cans to red cans in a week. Last year, Gap ditched its new logo after a week of online backlash by customers.
A lot of C.E.O.’s will tell you that this shift has taken them by surprise, and they are finding it hard to adjust to the new power relationships with customers and employees.
“As power shifts to individuals,” argues Seidman, “leadership itself must shift with it — from coercive or motivational leadership that uses sticks or carrots to extract performance and allegiance out of people to inspirational leadership that inspires commitment and innovation and hope in people.”
The role of the leader now is to get the best of what is coming up from below and then meld it with a vision from above. Are you listening, Mr. Putin?
This kind of leadership is especially critical today, adds Seidman, “when people are creating a lot of ‘freedom from’ things — freedom from oppression or whatever system is in their way — but have not yet scaled the values and built the institutional frameworks that enable ‘freedom to’ — freedom to build a career, a business or a meaningful life.”
One can see this vividly in Egypt, where the bottom-up democracy movement was strong enough to oust Mubarak but now faces the long, arduous process of building new institutions and writing a new social contract from a democracy coalition that encompass Muslim Brothers, Christian liberals, Muslim liberals, the army and ultraconservative Muslim Salafis.
Getting all those fish back and swimming together in one aquarium will be no small task — one that will take a very courageous and special leader.
Help wanted.
December 6, 2011
Egypt, the Beginning or the End?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more fundamentalist Salafist Nour Party have garnered some 65 percent of the votes in the first round of Egypt’s free parliamentary elections since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak should hardly come as a surprise. Given the way that the military regimes in the Arab world decimated all independent secular political parties over the last 50 years, there is little chance of any Arab country going from Mubarak to Jefferson without going through some Khomeini.
But whether this is the end of the Egyptian democracy rebellion, just a phase in it or an inevitable religious political expression that will have to coexist with the military and secular reform agendas remains to be seen. The laws of gravity, both political and economic, have yet to assert themselves on whoever will lead Egypt, which is why today I am in a listening and watching mode, with more questions than answers.
QUESTION ONE Have the more secular reform parties, who led the Tahrir Square revolutions earlier this year and last month, learned from their mistakes? According to a recent poll done by Charney Research for the International Peace Institute, when Egyptians were asked last month whether the Tahrir protests were necessary to achieve the goals of the revolution or unnecessary disruptions “at a time when Egypt needs stability and economic recovery,” 53 percent to 35 percent of Egyptians wanted to focus on economic recovery.
The more secular, pro-democracy reformist demonstrators, who revived the Tahrir protests last month, deserve credit for getting the Egyptian Army to limit its power grab. But that seems to have come at the expense of alienating some more traditional-minded Egyptian voters — who still cling to the army as a source of stability — and it seems to have hampered the secular reformists in preparing to compete in the first round of elections. The liberal Egyptian Bloc came in third with about 15 percent of the votes. Egypt’s secular reformers need to get more organized and unified.
QUESTION TWO Do the Egyptian Islamist parties, which could dominate a future cabinet, have any idea of how to generate economic growth at a time when the Egyptian economy is sinking? Egypt today is burning through about $1 billion in foreign currency reserves a month and is now down to $21 billion. The Egyptian pound has crumbled to a seven-year low. Youth unemployment is 25 percent. Egypt’s main foreign currency earner is tourism, bringing in $39 billion last year, and today hotel occupancy is way down.
But the main focus of the Salafists is not boosting the economy. It’s segregating the sexes, banning alcohol and ensuring that women are veiled. The Muslim Brotherhood has been less doctrinaire but is a long way from liberal. How will it be able to advance its fundamentalist religious/social mores when this could drive away Egypt’s biggest source of income, not to mention foreign direct investment, not to mention foreign assistance from the European Union and the U.S.?
I don’t know. I just know that a key reason the Khomeini forces were able to hang on for so long in Iran was because the ayatollahs had a huge, unending source of oil revenue with which to buy off their people and ignore the world. And even then they faced a popular revolt. Egypt does not have such resources. Its only hope for growth is still free-market capitalism — spawning companies and workers who can compete on the global market. Therefore, whoever inherits power in Egypt will have to deliver a less corrupt form of capitalism, with more competition, more privatization and fewer government jobs, at a time when the Egyptian economy is sinking.
As Egypt’s Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and reformist leader, told The Associated Press, “I think the Brotherhood in particular, and some of the Salafis, should send quickly messages of assurance both inside the country and outside the country to make sure that society continues to be cohesive, to make sure that investment will come in.”
QUESTION THREE Will Egypt follow the pattern of Iraq? Religious and sectarian parties in Iraq also swept its first elections, and, after they performed badly, the Iraqi public swung away from them toward more secular, pluralistic parties. Arab voters want a clean government that creates jobs and provides stability. Iraq also demonstrates that once fighting stops, and politics starts, all kinds of square dancing begins between secular and religious parties. The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists are archenemies — there’s nothing like a fight within the faith — so who knows what coalitions will emerge.
BOTTOM LINE The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis have been living underground, focused largely on what they were both against and confined in their ideology to platitudes like “Islam is the answer.” Now that they are emerging from the Arab basement to the Arab street, they not only have to define what they are for but do it in the context of a highly competitive global economy that will leave Egypt’s 85 million people, about one-third of whom are illiterate, even further behind if they don’t get moving.
This will eventually require some wrenching ideological adjustments by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis to reality.
This story is just beginning.
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November 29, 2011
The Arab Awakening and Israel
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Israel is facing the biggest erosion of its strategic environment since its founding. It is alienated from its longtime ally Turkey. Its archenemy Iran is suspected of developing a nuclear bomb. The two strongest states on its border — Syria and Egypt — are being convulsed by revolutions. The two weakest states on its border — Gaza and Lebanon — are controlled by Hamas and Hezbollah.
It was in this context that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went before the Knesset last Wednesday and argued that the Arab awakening was moving the Arab world “backward” and turning into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave.” Ceding territory to the Palestinians was unwise at such a time, he said: “We can’t know who will end up with any piece of territory we give up.”
Netanyahu added: “In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we’re facing a new era of liberalism and progress. They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don’t see where things are heading.” But, he told the Knesset, events had proved him correct. Netanyahu reportedly said that when he cautioned President Obama and other Western leaders against backing the uprising against Egypt’s then-president, Hosni Mubarak, he was told that he didn’t understand reality: “I ask today, who here didn’t understand reality?”
Netanyahu’s analysis of the dangers facing Israel is valid, and things could still get worse. What is wrong is Netanyahu’s diagnosis of how it happened and his prescription of what to do about it — and those blind spots could also be very dangerous for Israel.
Diagnosis: From the very start, Israeli officials have insisted that Obama helped to push Mubarak out rather than saving him. Nonsense. The Arab dictators were pushed out by their people; there was no saving them. In fact, Mubarak had three decades to gradually open up Egyptian politics and save himself. And what did he do? Last year, he held the most-rigged election in Egyptian history. His party won 209 out of 211 seats. It is amazing that the uprising didn’t happen sooner.
Israel’s fear of Islamists taking power all around it cannot be dismissed. But it is such a live possibility precisely because of the last 50 years of Arab dictatorship, in which only Islamists were allowed to organize in mosques while no independent, secular, democratic parties were allowed to develop in the political arena. This has given Muslim parties an early leg up. Arab dictators were convenient for Israel and the Islamists — but deadly for Arab development and education. Now that the lid has come off, the transition will be rocky. But, it was inevitable, and the new politics is just beginning: Islamists will now have to compete with legitimate secular parties.
Netanyahu’s prescription is to do nothing. I understand Israel not ceding territory in this uncertain period to a divided Palestinian movement. What I can’t understand is doing nothing. Israel has an Arab awakening in its own backyard in the person of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. He’s been the most radical Arab leader of all. He is the first Palestinian leader to say: judge me on my performance in improving my peoples’ lives, not on my rhetoric. His focus has been on building institutions — including what Israelis admit is a security force that has helped to keep Israel peaceful — so Palestinians will be ready for a two-state solution. Instead of rewarding him, Israel has been withholding $100 million in Palestinian tax revenues that Fayyad needs — in punishment for the Palestinians pressing for a state at the U.N. — to pay the security forces that help to protect Israel. That is crazy.
Israel’s best defense is to strengthen Fayyadism — including giving Palestinian security services more areas of responsibility to increase their legitimacy and make clear that they are not the permanent custodians of Israel’s occupation. This would not only help stabilize Israel’s own backyard — and prevent another uprising that would spread like wildfire to the Arab world without the old dictators to hold it back — but would lay the foundation for a two-state solution and for better relations with the Arab peoples. Remember, those Arab peoples are going to have a lot more say in how they are ruled and with whom they have peace. In that context, Israel will be so much better off if it is seen as strengthening responsible and democratic Palestinian leaders.
This is such a delicate moment. It requires wise, farsighted Israeli leadership. The Arab awakening is coinciding with the last hopes for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli rightists will be tempted to do nothing, to insist the time is not right for risk-taking — and never will be — so Israel needs to occupy the West Bank and its Palestinians forever. That could be the greatest danger of all for Israel: to wake up one day and discover that, in response to the messy and turbulent Arab democratic awakening, the Jewish state sacrificed its own democratic character.
PS: Tom I also agree with the above (S.C.) here they call it Arab Spring that is Becoming Arab Winter!
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September 27, 2011
2 for 2, or 2 for 1?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN nytimes.com
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and President Obama all spoke at the U.N. last week and, honestly, it is hard to decide whose speech was worse. Netanyahu’s read like a pep rally to the Likud Central Committee. Abbas’s read like an address to an Arab League meeting. Obama’s read like an appeal to Jewish voters in Florida. The president meant well, but domestic politics required that he whisper where he once spoke bold truths to both sides.
The whole soap opera was just another reminder of how broken the peacemaking effort is today and how much both sides still suspect the other of really wanting two states for one people rather than two states for two people.
I’ll explain that in a moment, but, first, let me note that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz summed up the Netanyahu and Abbas performances perfectly, saying: “From these two narratives of demand and complaint, it appeared as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict traveled in a time machine back to the end of the last century, and decades of dialogue were wiped out — to the great joy of the extremists on both sides. Not peace, but rather the very fact of direct contact between the parties is once more perceived as a goal, and even that is increasingly fading into the distance.”
That is, indeed, where we are — questioning whether the two sides will even talk to each other anymore, let alone negotiate an implementable deal. Yet both sides act as if time is on their side. I beg to differ.
This is a “New Middle East” — but not in the way that we had hoped. When you leave the field empty of diplomacy now, with so many unstable characters roaming around — like extremist Israeli settlers given to occasionally daubing “Muhammad is a Pig” on Muslim buildings in the West Bank and extremist Palestinians from groups like Islamic Jihad given to shooting Israeli civilians or lobbing mortars from Gaza onto Israeli towns — you are really asking for trouble because many of the old firewalls are gone.
If clashes erupt between Israelis and Palestinians today, there is no President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to absorb the flames. Now there is a Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ready to fan them — toward Israel. It is not an exaggeration to say that if serious clashes erupted between Israelis and Palestinians, both the peace treaties between Egypt and Israel and Egypt and Jordan could be undermined. And if Palestinian violence spreads in the West Bank, Abbas may just tell the Israelis that he is shutting down the Palestinian Authority and will no longer serve as Israel’s policeman on the West Bank. That would be the last nail in the coffin of the Oslo accords. So all three pillars of peace — imperfect as they may have been, but so vital to Israel’s security since the 1970s — are in danger.
Given these stakes, here is what a farsighted Israeli government would say to itself: “We have so much more to lose than the Palestinians if all this collapses. So let’s go the extra mile. Abbas says he will not come to peace talks without a freeze on settlement-building. We think that is bogus. We gave him a 10-month partial freeze and he did nothing with it. But you know what? There is so much at stake here, let’s test him again. Let’s offer him a six-month total freeze on settlement-building. What is six months in the history of 5,000-year-old people? We already have 300,000 settlers in place. It is a win-win strategy that in no way imperils our security. If the Palestinians still balk, they will be the ones isolated, not us. And, if they come, who knows? Maybe we cut a deal.”
That is what a wise Israeli leader would do now. And when this Israeli government won’t do that, it fans the Palestinian fears that Israel really wants two states — both for itself. That is pre-1967 Israel and post-1967 Israel, i.e., Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian leadership, though, could do much more to encourage such an overture because the only thing that can force Netanyahu to move is the Israeli center. It has done so before. Why not now? Because when the Israeli silent majority sees its army unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and uproot settlements there and get rockets in return, and when they see previous, dovish, Israeli prime ministers make far-reaching withdrawal proposals and get nothing back, and when they hear that Palestinians insist on the “right of return” for some of their people — not only to the West Bank, but to Israel proper — it raises Israeli fears that the Palestinians still dream of having two states, both for themselves: the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel. If Abbas spoke more directly to those fears, Netanyahu would be under much more domestic pressure to move.
We really are back at the beginning of this conflict. Until each side reassures the other that both of them really do want two states for two people — not just for one — nothing good is going to happen out there, but something really bad might.
September 17, 2011 nytimes.com
Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I’VE never been more worried about Israel’s future. The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation.This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.
Israel is not responsible for the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt or for the uprising in Syria or for Turkey’s decision to seek regional leadership by cynically trashing Israel or for the fracturing of the Palestinian national movement between the West Bank and Gaza. What Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, is responsible for is failing to put forth a strategy to respond to all of these in a way that protects Israel’s long-term interests.
O.K., Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack. There, who says Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t have a strategy?
“The years-long diplomatic effort to integrate Israel as an accepted neighbor in the Middle East collapsed this week, with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassadors from Ankara and Cairo, and the rushed evacuation of the embassy staff from Amman,” wrote Haaretz newspaper’s Aluf Benn. “The region is spewing out the Jewish state, which is increasingly shutting itself off behind fortified walls, under a leadership that refuses any change, movement or reform ... Netanyahu demonstrated utter passivity in the face of the dramatic changes in the region, and allowed his rivals to seize the initiative and set the agenda.”
What could Israel have done? The Palestinian Authority, which has made concrete strides in the past five years at building the institutions and security forces of a state in the West Bank — making life there quieter than ever for Israel — finally said to itself: “Our state-building has not prompted Israel to halt settlements or engage in steps to separate, so all we’re doing is sustaining Israel’s occupation. Let’s go to the U.N., get recognized as a state within the 1967 borders and fight Israel that way.” Once this was clear, Israel should have either put out its own peace plan or tried to shape the U.N. diplomacy with its own resolution that reaffirmed the right of both the Palestinian and the Jewish people to a state in historic Palestine and reignited negotiations.
Mr. Netanyahu did neither. Now the U.S. is scrambling to defuse the crisis, so the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.
On Turkey, the Obama team and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers worked tirelessly these last two months to resolve the crisis stemming from the killing by Israeli commandos of Turkish civilians in the May 2010 Turkish aid flotilla that recklessly tried to land in Gaza. Turkey was demanding an apology. According to an exhaustive article about the talks by the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, the two sides agreed that Israel would apologize only for “operational mistakes” and the Turks would agree to not raise legal claims. Bibi then undercut his own lawyers and rejected the deal, out of national pride and fear that Mr. Lieberman would use it against him. So Turkey threw out the Israeli ambassador.
As for Egypt, stability has left the building there and any new Egyptian government is going to be subjected to more populist pressures on Israel. Some of this is unavoidable, but why not have a strategy to minimize it by Israel putting a real peace map on the table?
I have great sympathy for Israel’s strategic dilemma and no illusions about its enemies. But Israel today is giving its friends — and President Obama’s one of them — nothing to defend it with. Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation.
Unfortunately, Israel today does not have a leader or a cabinet for such subtle diplomacy. One can only hope that the Israeli people will recognize this before this government plunges Israel into deeper global isolation and drags America along with it.
August 27, 2011 nytimes.com
All Together Now
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
HOLD onto your hats and your wallets. Since the end of the cold war, the global system has been held together to a large degree by four critical ruling bargains. Today all four are coming unstuck at once and will need to be rebuilt. Whether and how that rebuilding happens — beginning in the U.S. — will determine a lot about what’s in your wallet and whether your hat flies off.Now let me say that in English: the European Union is cracking up. The Arab world is cracking up. China’s growth model is under pressure and America’s credit-driven capitalist model has suffered a warning heart attack and needs a total rethink. Recasting any one of these alone would be huge. Doing all four at once — when the world has never been more interconnected — is mind-boggling. We are again “present at the creation” — but of what?
Let’s start with the Middle East, the world’s oil tap. Libyans just joined Tunisians, Egyptians and Yemenis in ousting their dictator, while Syrians and Iranians hope to soon follow suit. In time, virtually every Middle East autocrat will be deposed or forced to share power. The old model can’t hold. That model was based on kings and military dictators capturing the oil revenue, ensconcing themselves in power — protected by well-financed armies and security services — and buying off key segments of their populations. That lid has been blown off by an Arab youth bulge that today can see just how everyone else is living and is no longer ready to accept being behind, undereducated, unemployed, humiliated and powerless. But while this old Middle East system — based on an iron fist and a fistful of petro-dollars holding together multiethnic/multireligious societies — has broken down, it will take time for these societies to write their own social contracts for how to live together without an iron fist from above. Hope for the best, prepare for anything.
Farther north, it was a nice idea, this European Union and euro-zone: Let’s have a monetary union and a common currency but let everyone run their own fiscal policy, as long as they swear to work and save like Germans. Alas, it was too good to be true. Large government welfare programs in some European countries, without the revenue to finance them from local production, eventually led to a piling up of sovereign debt — mostly owed to European banks — and then a lender revolt. The producer-savers in northern Europe are now drawing up a new deal with the overspenders — the PIIGS: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain. It is unlikely that the Germans would just break out of the European Union, since a good chunk of their exports go to those overspending, uncompetitive countries. Instead, the northern Europeans are trying to force stronger, rule-based discipline on the PIIGS. But how much more austerity can these countries absorb, especially if there are further social stresses from deeper recessions? More than Londoners will take to the streets. One way or another, the European Union is going to get smaller or tighter, but in the process it could go through a chaotic, world-shaking transition that is not priced into the market yet.
Going East, China has been relying on a model built on a deliberately undervalued currency and export-led growth, with low domestic consumption and high savings. This has allowed the Communist Party to sustain a unique bargain with its people: We give you jobs and rising standards of living, and you give us power. This bargain is now under threat. Persistent unemployment in China’s American and European markets is making Beijing’s undervalued-currency/low-consumption/high-export model less sustainable for the world. China also has to get rich before it gets old. It has to move from two parents saving for one kid, to one kid paying for the retirement of two parents. To do that, it has to move from an assembly-copying-manufacturing economy to a knowledge-services-innovation economy. This requires more freedom and rule of law, and you can already see mounting demands for it. Something has to give there.
As for America, we’ve thrived in recent decades with a credit-consumption-led economy, whereby we maintained a middle class by using more steroids (easy credit, subprime mortgages and construction work) and less muscle-building (education, skill-building and innovation). It’s put us in a deep hole, and the only way to dig out now is a new, hybrid politics that mixes spending cuts, tax increases, tax reform and investments in infrastructure, education, research and production. But that mix is not the agenda of either party. Either our two parties find a way to collaborate in the center around this new hybrid politics, or a third party is going to emerge — or we’re stuck and the pain will just get worse.
When the world is experiencing so many wrenching changes at once — with already high unemployment and weak economies — the need for America, the most important pillar of all, to be rock solid is greater than ever. If we don’t get our act together — which will require collective action normally reserved for wartime — we are not going to just be prolonging an American crisis, but feeding a global one.
PS this is better than following earlier article from last week (S.C.)
Win Together or Lose Together
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN August 6, 2011 nytimes.com
IN the wake of the hugely disappointing budget deal and the S.& P.’s debt downgrade, maybe we need to hang a new sign in the immigration arrival halls at all U.S. ports and airports. It could simply read: “Welcome. You are entering the United States of America. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.”Because our country is now finding itself in the worst kind of decline — a slow decline, just slow enough for us to keep deluding ourselves that nothing really fundamental needs to change if our future is to match our past.
Our slow decline is a product of two inter-related problems. First, we’ve let our five basic pillars of growth erode since the end of the cold war — education, infrastructure, immigration of high-I.Q. innovators and entrepreneurs, rules to incentivize risk-taking and start-ups, and government-funded research to spur science and technology.
We mistakenly treated the end of the cold war as a victory that allowed us to put our feet up — when it was actually the onset of one of the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced. We helped to unleash two billion people just like us — in China, India and Eastern Europe. For us to effectively compete and collaborate with them — to maintain the American dream — required studying harder, investing wiser, innovating faster, upgrading our infrastructure quicker and working smarter.
Instead of doing that at the scale we needed — that is, building muscle — we injected ourselves with massive amounts of credit steroids (just like our baseball players). This enabled millions of people to buy homes they could not afford and to fill jobs in construction and retail that did not require that much education. Our European friends went on a similar binge.
All this debt blew up in 2008 in the U.S. and Europe, and that led to the second problem: Homeowners, firms, banks and governments are all now “deleveraging” or trying to — meaning that they are saving more, shopping less, paying off debts and trying to dig out from mortgages that are under water.
No one better explains the implications of this than Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard, who argued in an essay last week for Project Syndicate that we are not in a Great Recession but in a Great (Credit) Contraction: “Why is everyone still referring to the recent financial crisis as the ‘Great Recession?’ ” asked Rogoff. “The phrase ‘Great Recession’ creates the impression that the economy is following the contours of a typical recession, only more severe — something like a really bad cold. ... But the real problem is that the global economy is badly overleveraged, and there is no quick escape without a scheme to transfer wealth from creditors to debtors, either through defaults, financial repression, or inflation. ...
“In a conventional recession,” Rogoff noted, “the resumption of growth implies a reasonably brisk return to normalcy. The economy not only regains its lost ground, but, within a year, it typically catches up to its rising long-run trend. The aftermath of a typical deep financial crisis is something completely different. ... It typically takes an economy more than four years just to reach the same per capita income level that it had attained at its pre-crisis peak. ... Many commentators have argued that fiscal stimulus has largely failed not because it was misguided, but because it was not large enough to fight a ‘Great Recession.’ But, in a ‘Great Contraction,’ problem No. 1 is too much debt.” Until we find ways to restructure and forgive some of these debts from consumers, firms, banks and governments, spending to drive growth is not going to come back at the scale we need.
Our challenge now, therefore, is to deleverage the economy as fast as possible, while, at the same time, getting back to investing as much as possible in our real pillars of growth so our recovery is built on sustainable businesses and real jobs and not just on another round of credit injections.
Regarding deleveraging, Rogoff suggests, for example, that the government facilitate the writing down of mortgages in exchange for a share of any future home-price appreciation.
Regarding growth, we surely need a much smarter long-term fiscal plan than the one that just came out of Washington. We need to cut spending in areas and on a time schedule that will hurt the least; we need to raise taxes in ways that will hurt the least (now is the perfect time for a gasoline tax rather than payroll taxes); and we need to use some of these revenues to invest in the pillars of our growth, with special emphasis on infrastructure, research and incentives for risk-taking and start-ups. We need to offer every possible incentive to get Americans to start new businesses to grow out of this hole.
If juggling all these needs at once sounds hard and complicated, it is. There is no easy, one-policy fix. We need to help people deleverage, cut some spending, raise some revenues and reinvest in our growth engines — as an integrated strategy for national renewal. Something this big and complex cannot be accomplished by one party alone. It will require the kind of collective action usually reserved for national emergencies. The sooner we pull together the better. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is It Weird Enough Yet?
September 13, 2011 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN nytimes.com
Every time I listen to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota talk about how climate change is some fraud perpetrated by scientists trying to gin up money for research, I’m always reminded of one of my favorite movie lines that Jack Nicholson delivers to his needy neighbor who knocks on his door in the film “As Good As It Gets.” “Where do they teach you to talk like this?” asks Nicholson. “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”Thanks Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann, but we really are all stocked up on crazy right now. I mean, here is the Texas governor rejecting the science of climate change while his own state is on fire — after the worst droughts on record have propelled wildfires to devour an area the size of Connecticut. As a statement by the Texas Forest Service said last week: “No one on the face of this earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”
Remember the first rule of global warming. The way it unfolds is really “global weirding.” The weather gets weird: the hots get hotter; the wets wetter; and the dries get drier. This is not a hoax. This is high school physics, as Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist in Texas, explained on Joe Romm’s invaluable Climateprogress.org blog: “As our atmosphere becomes warmer, it can hold more water vapor. Atmospheric circulation patterns shift, bringing more rain to some places and less to others. For example, when a storm comes, in many cases there is more water available in the atmosphere and rainfall is heavier. When a drought comes, often temperatures are already higher than they would have been 50 years ago, and so the effects of the drought are magnified by higher evaporation rates.”
CNN reported on Sept. 9 that “Texas had the distinction of experiencing the warmest summer on record of any state in America, with an average of 86.8 degrees. Dallas residents sweltered for 40 consecutive days of grueling 100-plus degree temperatures. ... Temperature-related energy demands soared more than 22 percent above the norm this summer, the largest increase since record-keeping of energy demands began more than a century ago.”
There is still much we don’t know about how climate change will unfold, but it is no hoax. We need to start taking steps, as our scientists urge, “to manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” If you want a quick primer on the latest climate science, tune into “24 Hours of Reality.” It is a worldwide live, online update that can be found at climaterealityproject.org and will be going on from Sept. 14-15, over 24 hours, with contributors from 24 time zones.
Not only has the science of climate change come under attack lately, so has the economics of green jobs. Here the critics have a point — sort of. I wasn’t surprised to read that the solar panel company Solyndra, which got $535 million in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy to make solar panels in America, filed for bankruptcy protection two weeks ago and laid off 1,100 workers. This story is an embarrassment to the green jobs movement, but the death by bankruptcy was a collaboration of the worst Democratic and Republican impulses.
How so? There is only one effective, sustainable way to produce “green jobs,” and that is with a fixed, durable, long-term price signal that raises the price of dirty fuels and thereby creates sustained consumer demand for, and sustained private sector investment in, renewables. Without a carbon tax or gasoline tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.
President Obama has chosen not to push for a price signal for political reasons. He has opted for using regulations and government funding. In the area of regulation, he deserves great credit for just pushing through new fuel economy standards that will ensure that by 2025 the average U.S. car will get the mileage (and have the emissions) of today’s Prius hybrid. But elsewhere, Obama has relied on green subsidies rather than a price signal. Some of this has really helped start-ups leverage private capital, but you also get Solyndras. The G.O.P. has blocked any price signal and fought every regulation. The result too often is taxpayer money subsidizing wonderful green innovation, but with no sustainable market within which these companies can scale.
Let’s fix that. We need revenue to balance the budget. We need sustainable clean-tech jobs. We need less dependence on Mideast oil. And we need to take steps to mitigate climate change — just in case Governor Perry is wrong. The easiest way to do all of this at once is with a gasoline tax or price on carbon. Would you rather cut Social Security and Medicare or pay a little more per gallon of gas and make the country stronger, safer and healthier? It still amazes me that our politicians have the courage to send our citizens to war but not to ask the public that question.
October 25, 2011
Barack Kissinger Obama
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Who would have predicted it? Barack Obama has turned out to be so much more adept at implementing George W. Bush’s foreign policy than Bush was, but he is less adept at implementing his own. The reasons, though, are obvious.
In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama handled his role exceedingly well.
No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
So let’s be clear: Up to now, as a commander in chief in the war on terrorism, Obama and his national security team have been so much smarter, tougher and cost-efficient in keeping the country safe than the “adults” they replaced. It isn’t even close, which is why the G.O.P.’s elders have such a hard time admitting it.
But while Obama has been deft at implementing Bush’s antiterrorism policy, he has been less successful with his own foreign policy. His Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been a mess. His hopes of engaging Iran foundered on the rocks of, well, Iran. He’s made little effort to pull together a multilateral coalition to buttress the Arab Awakening, in places like Egypt, to handle the postrevolution challenges. His ill-considered decision to double down on Afghanistan could prove fatal. He is in a war of words with Pakistan. His global climate policy is an invisible embarrassment. And the coolly calculating Chinese and Russians, while occasionally throwing him a bone, pursue their interests with scant regard to Obama’s preferences. Why is that?
Here I come to defend Obama not to condemn him.
True, he was naïve about how much his star power, or that of his secretary of state, would get others to swoon in behind us. But Obama’s frustrations in bagging a big, nonmilitary foreign policy achievement are rooted in a much broader structural problem — one that also explains why we have not produced a history-changing secretary of state since the cold war titans Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker.
The reason: the world has gotten messier and America has lost leverage. When Kissinger was negotiating in the Middle East in the 1970s, he had to persuade just three people to make a deal: an all-powerful Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad; an Egyptian pharaoh, Anwar Sadat; and an Israeli prime minister with an overwhelming majority, Golda Meir.
To make history, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, need to extract a deal from a crumbling Syrian regime, a crumbled Egyptian regime, a fractious and weak Israeli coalition and a Palestinian movement broken into two parts.
We don’t even bother anymore to negotiate with the flimsy civilian government in Pakistan. We just go right to its military, which only wants to perpetuate the conflict with India — and exploit Afghanistan as a chip in that war — to justify the Pakistani Army’s endless consumption of so many state resources.
Making history through diplomacy “depends on making deals with other governments,” says Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert (and co-author with me on “That Used to Be Us”). “But now, to make such deals, we actually have to build the governments we want to negotiate with — and we can’t do that.” Indeed, in so many hot spots today, we have to do nation-building before we can do diplomacy. So many states propped up by the cold war are failing.
And where states are stronger — like Russia, China and Iran — we have less leverage because leverage is ultimately a function of economic strength. And while many of America’s companies are still strong, our government is mired in debt. When a nation is in debt as deep as we are — with severe defense cuts inevitable — its bark is always bigger than its bite.
The best way for us to gain leverage on Russia and Iran would be with an energy policy that reduced the price and significance of oil. The only way to gain more leverage on China is if we increase our savings and graduation rates — and export more and consume less. That isn’t in the cards.
So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president — not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we’ve done more nation-building at home.
October 22, 2011 nytimes.com
One Country, Two Revolutions
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I take no pleasure in seeing anyone lose a job, but I can’t say that the recent headlines showing that America’s biggest banks have been losing money on their trading operations, and are having to radically shrink as a result, are entirely bad news for the country. Over the last decade, America’s banking sector got pumped up by steroids — in the form of cheap credit and leverage — every bit as much as Major League Baseball’s home run hitters. And if one result of the downsizing of Wall Street is that more of America’s best and brightest math and physics students decide to go into science and real engineering rather than financial engineering, the country will be a whole lot better off.
Why? Because, to paraphrase the Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Wall Street, which was originally designed to finance “creative destruction” (the creation of new industries and products to replace old ones), fell into the habit in the last decade of financing too much “destructive creation” (inventing leveraged financial products with no more societal value than betting on whether Lindy’s sold more cheesecake than strudel). When those products blew up, they almost took the whole economy with them.
I was on Wall Street two weeks ago, and I’ve been in Silicon Valley this past week. What a contrast! While Wall Street is being rattled by a social revolution, Silicon Valley is being by transformed by another technology revolution — one that is taking the world from connected to hyperconnected and individuals from empowered to superempowered. It is the biggest leap forward in the I.T. revolution since the mainframe computer was replaced by desktops and the Web. It is going to change everything about how companies and societies operate.
The latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga — with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.
The emergence of the cloud, explained Alan Cohen, a vice president of Nicira, a new networking company, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.” This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition.
The October issue of Fast Company has an article about the designer Scott Wilson, who thought of grafting the body of an iPod Nano onto colorful wristbands, turning them into watchlike devices that could wake you up and play your music. He had no money, though, to bring his concept to market, so he turned to Kickstarter, the Web-based funding platform for independent creative projects. He posted his idea on Nov. 16, 2010, reported Fast Company, and “within a month, 13,500 people from 50 countries had ponied up nearly $1 million.” Apple soon picked up the product for its stores. Said Alexis Ringwald, 28, who recently founded an education start-up, her second Silicon Valley venture: “I have many friends — they introduce themselves as ‘reformed’ Wall St. bankers and lawyers — who have abandoned conventional careers and are now launching start-ups.”
Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed — everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don’t have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges — from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before — as individuals.
A is for alignment. “There has never been a more important time to have all your ships sailing in the same direction,” said Benioff. “The power of social media is that it is easier than ever to both articulate, and reinforce, the vision and values that create and inspire alignment.” And L is for the leadership that does that. Leadership in a SOCIAL world has to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down. Leaders need to inspire, enable and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then edit and sculpt it with a vision from above into a final product.
The great thing about the new I.T. revolution, says Jeff Weiner, the C.E.O. of LinkedIn, is that “it makes it easier and cheaper than ever for anyone anywhere to be an entrepreneur” and to have access to all the best infrastructure of innovation. “And despite all of our challenges,” he adds, “it is happening here in America.”
Like I said, the news isn’t all bad.
The Start-Up of You
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN july 12th 2011
The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.
Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.
Indeed, what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics — anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people — people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.
Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.
Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.
But you would never know that from listening to the debate in Washington, where some Democrats still tend to talk about job creation as if it’s the 1960s and some Republicans as if it’s the 1980s. But this is not your parents’ job market.
This is precisely why LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley — besides co-founding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook and sits on the board of Mozilla — has a book coming out after New Year called “The Start-Up of You,” co-authored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career today.”
Hoffman argues that professionals need an entirely new mind-set and skill set to compete. “The old paradigm of climb up a stable career ladder is dead and gone,” he said to me. “No career is a sure thing anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s now like for all of us fashioning a career. Therefore you should approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business.”
To begin with, Hoffman says, that means ditching a grand life plan. Entrepreneurs don’t write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they’re always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.
It also means using your network to pull in information and intelligence about where the growth opportunities are — and then investing in yourself to build skills that will allow you to take advantage of those opportunities. Hoffman adds: “You can’t just say, ‘I have a college degree, I have a right to a job, now someone else should figure out how to hire and train me.’ ” You have to know which industries are working and what is happening inside them and then “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”
Finally, you have to strengthen the muscles of resilience. “You may have seen the news that [the] online radio service Pandora went public the other week,” Hoffman said. “What’s lesser known is that in the early days [the founder] pitched his idea more than 300 times to V.C.’s with no luck.”
June 18, 2011
What to Do With Lemons
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN nytimes
While President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have gotten a lot of things right on foreign policy, they’ve made quite a mess in Israeli-Palestinian relations, where they’ve alienated all sides and generated zero progress. They’ve been inconsistent — demanding a settlements freeze then backing down — unimaginative and politically wimpy. Then again, the actors they’ve had to work with were both lemons — a Palestinian government that was too divided to make any big decisions and an elusive right-wing Israeli government that was strong enough to make big decisions but had no will to do so.But you know what they say to do with lemons? Make lemonade.
The Obama team is in a fix. The Palestinian Authority, having lost faith in both Israel and the U.S., is pushing for the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state, within the 1967 lines in the West Bank and Gaza. Once that is in hand, the Palestinian Authority could then start a global push to pressure Israel into withdrawing its settlers and security forces, or face sanctions and delegitimization. Israel is obviously opposed to this move. The U.S. has no desire to support such a one-sided resolution, which would alienate Israel and American Jews. But it also has no desire to veto such a resolution, which would only complicate America’s standing in the Arab-Muslim world.
As an alternative, the U.S. is trying to get the parties to resume peace talks on a comprehensive agreement based on terms laid out by the president in mid-May — two states for two peoples, with the 1967 lines as the starting point, and then whatever land swaps Israelis and Palestinians mutually agree to beyond that. But if the parties won’t accept this — and for now they are resisting — then we’re headed for a real train wreck at the U.N. in September.
How about a different approach?
If the Palestinians want to take this whole problem back to where it started — the U.N. — I say let’s do it. But let’s think much bigger and with more imagination.
On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. passed General Assembly Resolution 181, partitioning Palestine into two homes for two peoples — described as “Independent Arab and Jewish States.” This is important. That is exactly how Resolution 181 described the desired outcome of partition: an “Arab” state next to a “Jewish” state.
So why don’t we just update Resolution 181 and take it through the more prestigious Security Council? It could be a simple new U.N. resolution: “This body reaffirms that the area of historic Palestine should be divided into two homes for two peoples — a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. The dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed border adjustments and security arrangements for both sides. This body recognizes the Palestinian state as a member of the General Assembly and urges both sides to enter into negotiations to resolve all the other outstanding issues.” Very simple.
Each side would get something vital provided it gives the other what it wants. The Palestinians would gain recognition of statehood and U.N. membership, within provisional boundaries, with Israel and America voting in favor. And the Israelis would get formal U.N. recognition as a Jewish state — with the Palestinians and Arabs voting in favor.
Moreover, the Palestinians would get negotiations based on the 1967 borders and Israel would get a U.N.-U.S. assurance that the final border would be shaped in negotiations between the parties, with land swaps, so theoretically the 5 percent of the West Bank where 80 percent of the settlers live could be traded for parts of pre-1967 Israel.
Both sides would have the framework for resuming negotiations they can live with. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel told the U.S. Congress that he was prepared for a two-state solution and painful compromises, but wants Israel accepted as a Jewish state with defensible borders. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has insisted that the 1967 border be the basis for any negotiations, and he wants to negotiate with Israel as a sovereign equal.
Meanwhile, the U.S., rather than being isolated in a corner with Israel, can get credit for restarting talks — without remaining stuck on the settlements issue.
“September can be a confrontational zero-sum moment with potentially disastrous consequences or a transformative breakthrough, if it is done right,” argues Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Institute, one of Israel’s top strategy groups. “Israelis and Palestinians are playing chicken. The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank doesn’t really want this U.N. resolution, which could unleash populist forces that might overwhelm them. The Israelis know that going all-out to block the Palestinians at the U.N., without any counterproposal, could have enormously damaging consequences in a Middle East already in turmoil. A deal that recognizes the Palestinian state in terms that address Israel’s concerns could not only help both sides walk back from the abyss but also pin down a historic two-state solution in 2011.”
Bibi and Barack
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN May 17th 2011 nytimes
Reading the headlines from the Middle East these days — Christians and Muslims clashing in Egypt, Syria attempting to crush its democracy rebellion and Palestinians climbing over fences into Israel — you get the sense of a region where the wheels could really start to come off.
In such a moment, President Obama has to show the same decisiveness he showed in tracking down Osama bin Laden. A useful analogy for this moment comes from climate science, where a popular motto says: Given how much climate change is already baked into our future, the best we can do now is manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.
In Middle East terms, the “unmanageable” we have to avoid is another war between Israel and any of its neighbors. The “unavoidable” we have to manage is dealing with what is certain to be a much more unstable Arab world, sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves. The strategy we need is a serious peace policy combined with a serious energy policy.
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can’t speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.
I repeat: It may not be possible. But Netanyahu has not spent his time in office using Israel’s creativity to find ways to do such a deal. He has spent his time trying to avoid such a deal — and everyone knows it. No one is fooled.
Israel is in a dangerous situation. For the first time in its history, it has bad relations with all three regional superpowers — Turkey, Iran and Egypt — plus rapidly eroding support in Europe. America is Israel’s only friend today. These strains are not all Israel’s fault by any means, especially with Iran, but Israel will never improve ties with Egypt, Turkey and Europe without a more serious effort to safely get out of the West Bank.
The only way for Netanyahu to be taken seriously again is if he risks some political capital and actually surprises people. Bibi keeps hinting that he is ready for painful territorial compromises involving settlements. Fine, put a map on the table. Let’s see what you’re talking about. Or how about removing the illegal West Bank settlements built by renegade settler groups against the will of Israel’s government. Either move would force Israel’s adversaries to take Bibi seriously and would pressure Palestinians to be equally serious.
Absent that, it’s just silly for us to have Netanyahu addressing the U.S. Congress when he needs to be addressing Palestinians down the street. And it is equally silly for the Palestinians to be going to the United Nations for a state when they need to be persuading Israelis why a Hamas-Fatah rapprochement is in their security interest.
As for managing the unavoidable, well, Obama just announced that he was opening up more federal areas for oil exploration, as Republicans have demanded. Great: Let’s make America even more dependent on an energy resource, the price of which is certain to go up as the world’s population increases and the greatest reserves of which lie beneath what is now the world’s most politically unstable region.
Frankly, I have no problem with more oil drilling, as long as it is done under the highest environmental standards. I have no problem with more nuclear power, if you can find a utility ready to put up the money. My problem is with an energy policy that focuses exclusively on oil drilling and nuclear power. That is not an energy policy. That is a policy for campaign donations. It will have no impact at the pump.
A real energy policy is a system. It has to start with a national renewable energy standard that requires every utility to build up their use of renewable energy — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, bio — to 20 percent of their total output by 2020. This would be accompanied with higher auto mileage standards and higher national appliance and building efficiency standards. All these standards would then be reinforced with a price on carbon. That is how you get higher energy prices but lower energy bills, because efficiency improvements mean everyone uses less.
We are going to have to raise taxes. Why not a carbon tax that also reduces energy consumption, drives innovation, cleans the air and reduces our dependence on the Middle East?
We don’t want the Arab democracy rebellions to stop, but no one can predict how they will end. The smart thing for us and Israel to do is avoid what we can’t manage, and manage what we can’t avoid. Right now we’re doing neither.
May 31, 2011
The Bin Laden Decade
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Visiting the Middle East last week, and then coming back to Washington, I am left with one overriding impression: Bin Laden really did a number on all of us.I am talking in particular about the Arab states, America and Israel — all of whom have deeper holes than ever to dig out of thanks to the Bin Laden decade, 2001 to 2011, and all of whom have less political authority than ever to make the hard decisions needed to get out of the holes.
Let’s start with the Arabs. In 2001, Osama bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Just a few months later, in 2002, the U.N. issued the “Arab Human Development Report,” which described the very pathologies that produced Al Qaeda and prescribed remedies for overcoming them. The report, written by Arab experts, said the Arab states suffered from three huge deficits: a deficit of freedom and respect for human rights as the bases of good governance, a deficit of knowledge in the form of decent schooling and a deficit of women’s empowerment.
Instead of America and the Arab world making that report their joint post-Bin Laden agenda, they ignored it. Washington basically gave the Arab dictators a free pass to tighten their vise grip on their people — as long as these Arab leaders arrested, interrogated and held the Islamic militants in their societies and eliminated them as a threat to us.
It wasn’t meant as a free pass, and we really did have a security problem with jihadists, and we really didn’t mean to give up on our freedom agenda — but Arab leaders, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, sensed where our priorities were. That is why Mubarak actually arrested the one Egyptian who dared to run against him for president in his last election, and he and the other Arab autocrats moved to install their sons as successors.
As the Arab leaders choked their people that much tighter, along came Facebook, Twitter and cellphone cameras, which enabled those people to share grievances, organize rebellions, lose their fear and expose their leaders: “Smile, your brutality is on Candid Camera.”
That’s the good news. The challenging news is that because of the Bin Laden decade, these newly liberated Arab states are in an even deeper hole in terms of economic development, population growth and education. They each have a huge amount of catch-up to do that will require some painful economic and educational reforms.
But as one can quickly detect from a visit to Cairo, right now Egypt has a political vacuum and, if anything, is tending toward more populist, less-market-oriented economics. Yet, in return for infusions of cash, Egypt will probably have to accept some kind of I.M.F.-like austerity-reform package and slash government employment — just when unemployment and expectations are now sky high. Right now, no Egyptian party or leader has the authority that will be required to implement such reforms.
In America, President George W. Bush used the post-9/11 economic dip to push through a second tax cut we could not afford. He followed that with a Medicare prescription drug entitlement we cannot afford and started two wars in the wake of 9/11 without raising taxes to pay for them — all at a time when we should have been saving money in anticipation of the baby boomers’ imminent retirement. As such, our nation’s fiscal hole is deeper than ever and Republicans and Democrats — rather than coming together and generating the political authority needed for us to take our castor oil to compensate for our binge — are just demonizing one another.
As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi points out, governance is based on authority “that is generated in one of two ways — by trust or by fear. Both of those sources of authority are disintegrating right now.” The Arab leaders governed by fear, and their people are not afraid anymore. And the Western democracies governed by generating trust, but their societies today are more splintered than ever.
Israel has the same problem. The combination of Yasir Arafat’s foolhardy decision to start a second intifada rather than embrace President Bill Clinton’s two-state peace plan, followed by the rise of Bin Laden, which diverted the U.S. from energetically pursuing the peace process, gave the Israeli right a free hand to expand West Bank settlements. There are now some 500,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Absent some amazing Palestinian peace overture, and maybe even with one, I do not see any Israeli leader with enough authority today to pull Israel out of the West Bank. So, for now, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Bin Laden both win: In the short run, Bibi gets to keep the West Bank, with 300,000 Jews occupying 2.4 million Palestinians. And in the long run, Bin Laden helps to destroy Israel as a Jewish democracy.
For all these reasons, I find myself asking the same question in Cairo, Washington and Jerusalem: “Who will tell the people?” Who will tell the people how deep the hole is that Bin Laden helped each of us dig over the last decade — and who will tell the people how hard and how necessary it will be to climb out?
Pray. Hope. Prepare.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN April 12, 2011
When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings. The young-sounding Egyptian woman who spoke with me from the reservations department offered me a room and then asked: “Do you have a corporate rate?” I said, “I don’t know. I work for The New York Times.” There was a silence on the phone for a few moments, and then she said: “ Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Are we going to be O.K.? I’m worried.”
I made a mental note of that conversation because she sounded like a modern person, the kind of young woman who would have been in Tahrir Square. We’re just now beginning to see what may have been gnawing at her — in Egypt and elsewhere.
Let’s start with the structure of the Arab state. Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In Europe, virtually every state was like Germany, a homogenous nation, except Yugoslavia. The Arab world is exactly the opposite. There, virtually every state is like Yugoslavia — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.
That is to say, in Europe, when the iron fist of communism was removed, the big, largely homogenous states, with traditions of civil society, were able to move relatively quickly and stably to more self-government — except Yugoslavia, a multiethnic, multireligious country that exploded into pieces.
In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities. So when you take the lid off these countries, you potentially unleash not civil society but civil war.
That is why, for now, the relatively peaceful Arab democracy revolutions are probably over. They have happened in the two countries where they were most able to happen because the whole society in Tunisia and Egypt could pull together as a family and oust the evil “dad” — the dictator. From here forward, we have to hope for “Arab evolutions” or we’re going to get Arab civil wars.
The states most promising for evolution are Morocco and Jordan, where you have respected kings who, if they choose, could lead gradual transitions to a constitutional monarchy.
Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, countries fractured by tribal, ethnic and religious divisions, would have been ideal for gradual evolution to democracy, but it is probably too late now. The initial instinct of their leaders was to crush demonstrators, and blood has flowed. In these countries, there are now so many pent-up grievances between religious communities and tribes — some of which richly benefited from their dictatorships while others were brutalized by them — that even if the iron fist of authoritarianism is somehow lifted, civil strife could easily trample democratic hopes.
Could anything prevent this? Yes, extraordinary leadership that insists on burying the past, not being buried by it. The Arab world desperately needs its versions of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk — giants from opposing communities who rise above tribal or Sunni-Shiite hatreds to forge a new social compact. The Arab publics have surprised us in a heroic way. Now we need some Arab leaders to surprise us with bravery and vision. That has been so lacking for so long.
Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states. But I don’t see anyone signing up for that job.
Absent those alternatives, you get what you got. Autocrats in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain shooting their rebels on the tribal logic of “rule or die.” Meaning: either my sect or tribe is in power or I’m dead. The primary ingredient of a democracy — real pluralism where people feel a common destiny, act as citizens and don’t believe their minority has to be in power to be safe or to thrive — is in low supply in all these societies. It can emerge, as Iraq shows. But it takes time.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which is 90 percent Sunni and 10 percent Shiite, has made clear that it will oppose any evolution to constitutional monarchy in neighboring Bahrain, where a Sunni minority rules over a Shiite majority. Saudi Arabia has no tradition of pluralism. When we say “democratic reform” to Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, we might as well be speaking Latin. What their rulers hear is “Shiites taking over from Sunnis.” Not gonna happen peacefully.
Even evolution is difficult in Egypt. The army overseeing the process there just arrested a prominent liberal blogger, Maikel Nabil, for “insulting the military.”
Make no mistake where my heart lies. I still believe this Arab democracy movement was inevitable, necessary and built on a deep and authentic human quest for freedom, dignity and justice. But without extraordinary leadership, the Arab transitions are going to be much harder than in Eastern Europe. Pray for Germanys. Hope for South Africas. Prepare for Yugoslavias.
March 29, 2011
Looking for Luck in Libya
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
There is an old saying in the Middle East that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. That thought came to my mind as I listened to President Obama trying to explain the intervention of America and its allies in Libya — and I don’t say that as criticism. I say it with empathy. This is really hard stuff, and it’s just the beginning.
When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history — and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them — well, folks, you’re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we’re going to face in the “new” Middle East.
How could it not be? In Libya, we have to figure out whether to help rebels we do not know topple a terrible dictator we do not like, while at the same time we turn a blind eye to a monarch whom we do like in Bahrain, who has violently suppressed people we also like — Bahraini democrats — because these people we like have in their ranks people we don’t like: pro-Iranian Shiite hard-liners. All the while in Saudi Arabia, leaders we like are telling us we never should have let go of the leader who was so disliked by his own people — Hosni Mubarak — and, while we would like to tell the Saudi leaders to take a hike on this subject, we can’t because they have so much oil and money that we like. And this is a lot like our dilemma in Syria where a regime we don’t like — and which probably killed the prime minister of Lebanon whom it disliked — could be toppled by people who say what we like, but we’re not sure they all really believe what we like because among them could be Sunni fundamentalists, who, if they seize power, could suppress all those minorities in Syria whom they don’t like.
The last time the Sunni fundamentalists in Syria tried to take over in 1982, then-President Hafez al-Assad, one of those minorities, definitely did not like it, and he had 20,000 of those Sunnis killed in one city called Hama, which they certainly didn’t like, so there is a lot of bad blood between all of them that could very likely come to the surface again, although some experts say this time it’s not like that because this time, and they could be right, the Syrian people want freedom for all. But, for now, we are being cautious. We’re not trying nearly as hard to get rid of the Syrian dictator as we are the Libyan one because the situation in Syria is just not as clear as we’d like and because Syria is a real game-changer. Libya implodes. Syria explodes.
Welcome to the Middle East of 2011! You want the truth about it? You can’t handle the truth. The truth is that it’s a dangerous, violent, hope-filled and potentially hugely positive or explosive mess — fraught with moral and political ambiguities. We have to build democracy in the Middle East we’ve got, not the one we want — and this is the one we’ve got.
That’s why I am proud of my president, really worried about him, and just praying that he’s lucky.
Unlike all of us in the armchairs, the president had to choose, and I found the way he spelled out his core argument on Monday sincere: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And, as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”
I am glad we have a president who sees America that way. That argument cannot just be shrugged off, especially when confronting a dictator like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. But, at the same time, I believe that it is naïve to think that we can be humanitarians only from the air — and now we just hand the situation off to NATO, as if it were Asean and we were not the backbone of the NATO military alliance, and we’re done.
I don’t know Libya, but my gut tells me that any kind of decent outcome there will require boots on the ground — either as military help for the rebels to oust Qaddafi as we want, or as post-Qaddafi peacekeepers and referees between tribes and factions to help with any transition to democracy. Those boots cannot be ours. We absolutely cannot afford it — whether in terms of money, manpower, energy or attention. But I am deeply dubious that our allies can or will handle it without us, either. And if the fight there turns ugly, or stalemates, people will be calling for our humanitarian help again. You bomb it, you own it.
Which is why, most of all, I hope President Obama is lucky. I hope Qaddafi’s regime collapses like a sand castle, that the Libyan opposition turns out to be decent and united and that they require just a bare minimum of international help to get on their feet. Then U.S. prestige will be enhanced and this humanitarian mission will have both saved lives and helped to lock another Arab state into the democratic camp.
Dear Lord, please make President Obama lucky.
B.E., Before Egypt. A.E., After Egypt.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
RAMALLAH, West Bank Feb 1st 2011 (Beware Israel S.C.)I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. As I take my seat, he begins the conversation with: “Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.”
That pretty much sums up the disorienting sense of shock and awe that the popular uprising in Egypt has inflicted on the psyche of Israel’s establishment. The peace treaty with a stable Egypt was the unspoken foundation for every geopolitical and economic policy in Israel for the last 35 years, and now it’s gone. It’s as if Americans suddenly woke up and found both Mexico and Canada plunged into turmoil on the same day.
“Everything that once anchored our world is now unmoored,” remarked Mark Heller, a Tel Aviv University strategist. “And it is happening right at a moment when nuclearization of the region hangs in the air.”
This is a perilous time for Israel, and its anxiety is understandable. But I fear Israel could make its situation even more perilous if it succumbs to the argument one hears from a number of senior Israeli officials today that the events in Egypt prove that Israel can’t make a lasting peace with the Palestinians. It’s wrong and dangerous.
To be sure, Hosni Mubarak, Israel’s longtime ally, deserves all the wrath being directed at him. The best time to make any big, hard decision is when you are at your maximum strength. You’ll always think and act more clearly. For the last 20 years, President Mubarak has had all the leverage he could ever want to truly reform Egypt’s economy and build a moderate, legitimate political center to fill the void between his authoritarian state and the Muslim Brotherhood. But Mubarak deliberately maintained the political vacuum between himself and the Islamists so that he could always tell the world, “It’s either me or them.” Now he is trying to reform in a panic with no leverage. Too late.
But Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is in danger of becoming the Mubarak of the peace process. Israel has never had more leverage vis-à-vis the Palestinians and never had more responsible Palestinian partners. But Netanyahu has found every excuse for not putting a peace plan on the table. The Americans know it. And thanks to the nasty job that Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV just did in releasing out of context all the Palestinian concessions — to embarrass the Palestinian leadership — it’s now obvious to all how far the Palestinians have come.
No, I do not know if this Palestinian leadership has the fortitude to close a deal. But I do know this: Israel has an overwhelming interest in going the extra mile to test them.
Why? With the leaders of both Egypt and Jordan scrambling to shuffle their governments in an effort to stay ahead of the street, two things can be said for sure: Whatever happens in the only two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, the moderate secularists who had a monopoly of power will be weaker and the previously confined Muslim Brotherhood will be stronger. How much remains to be seen.
As such, it is virtually certain that the next Egyptian government will not have the patience or room that Mubarak did to maneuver with Israel. Same with the new Jordanian cabinet. Make no mistake: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has nothing to do with sparking the demonstrations in Egypt and Jordan, but Israeli-Palestinian relations will be impacted by the events in both countries.
If Israel does not make a concerted effort to strike a deal with the Palestinians, the next Egyptian government will “have to distance itself from Israel because it will not have the stake in maintaining the close relationship that Mubarak had,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster. With the big political changes in the region, “if Israel remains paranoid and messianic and greedy it will lose all its Arab friends.”
To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
What the turmoil in Egypt also demonstrates is how much Israel is surrounded by a huge population of young Arabs and Muslims who have been living outside of history — insulated by oil and autocracy from the great global trends. But that’s over.
“Today your legitimacy has to be based on what you deliver,” the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, explained to me in his Ramallah office. “Gone are the days when you can say, ‘Deal with me because the other guys are worse.’ ”
I had given up on Netanyahu’s cabinet and urged the U.S. to walk away. But that was B.E. — Before Egypt. Today, I believe President Obama should put his own peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and demand that the two sides negotiate on it without any preconditions. It is vital for Israel’s future — at a time when there is already a global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state — that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story as much as possible. There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way.
Hoping for Arab Mandelas
March 26, 2011 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
With Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria now all embroiled in rebellions, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the authoritarian lid that has smothered freedom in the Arab world for centuries may be coming off all 350 million Arab peoples at once. Personally, I think that is exactly what is going to happen over time. Warm up the bus for all the Arab autocrats — and for you, too, Ahmadinejad. As one who has long believed in the democracy potential for this part of the world, color me both really hopeful and really worried about the prospects.I am hopeful because the Arab peoples are struggling for more representative and honest government, which is what they will need to overcome their huge deficits in education, freedom and women’s empowerment that have been holding them back. But getting from here to there requires crossing a minefield of tribal, sectarian and governance issues.
The best way to understand the potential and pitfalls of this transition is to think about Iraq. I know that the Iraq war and the democracy-building effort that followed have been so bitterly divisive in America that no one wants to talk about Iraq. Well, today we’re going to talk about Iraq because that experience offers some hugely important lessons for how to manage the transition to democratic governance of a multisectarian Arab state when the iron lid is removed.
Democracy requires 3 things: citizens — that is, people who see themselves as part of an undifferentiated national community where anyone can be ruler or ruled. It requires self-determination — that is, voting. And it requires what Michael Mandelbaum, author of “Democracy’s Good Name,” calls “liberty.”
“While voting determines who governs,” he explained, “liberty determines what governments can and cannot do. Liberty encompasses all the rules and limits that govern politics, justice, economics and religion.”
And building liberty is really hard. It will be hard enough in Middle East states with big, homogenous majorities, like Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, where there is already a powerful sense of citizenship and where national unity is more or less assumed. It will be doubly hard in all the other states, which are divided by tribal, ethnic and sectarian identities and where the threat of civil war is ever present.
Not one was more divided in that way than Iraq. What did we learn there? First, we learned that when you removed the authoritarian lid the tensions between Iraqi Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis erupted as each faction tested the other’s power in a low-grade civil war. But we also learned that alongside that war many Iraqis expressed an equally powerful yearning to live together as citizens. For all of the murderous efforts by Al Qaeda to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened. And in Iraq’s last election, the candidate who won the most seats, a Shiite, Ayad Allawi, ran on a multisectarian platform with Sunnis. Lesson: While these tribal identities are deeply embedded and can blow up at anytime, there are also powerful countertrends in today’s more urbanized, connected, Facebooked Middle East.
“There is a problem of citizenship in the Arab world,” said Michael Young, the Lebanese author of “The Ghosts of Martyr’s Square,” “but that is partly because these regimes never allowed their people to be citizens. But despite that, you can see how much the demonstrators in Syria have been trying to stay nonviolent and speak about freedom for the whole nation.”
Lesson two: What was crucial in keeping the low-grade civil war in Iraq from exploding, what was crucial in their writing of their own Constitution for how to live together, and what was crucial in helping Iraqis manage multiple fair elections was that they had a credible neutral arbiter throughout this transition: the U.S.
America played that role at a staggering cost, and not always perfectly, but played it we did. In Egypt, the Egyptian Army is playing that arbiter role. Somebody has to play it in all these countries in revolt, so they can successfully lay the foundations of both democracy and liberty. Who will play that role in Libya? In Syria? In Yemen?
The final thing Iraq teaches us is that while external arbiters may be necessary, they are not sufficient. We’re leaving Iraq at the end of the year. Only Iraqis can sustain their democracy after we depart. The same will be true for all the other Arab peoples hoping to make this transition to self-rule. They need to grow their own arbiters — their own Arab Nelson Mandelas. That is, Shiite, Sunni and tribal leaders who stand up and say to each other what Mandela’s character said about South African whites in the movie “Invictus”: “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”
This is what the new leaders of these Arab rebellions will have to do — surprise themselves and each other with a sustained will for unity, mutual respect and democracy. The more Arab Mandelas who emerge, the more they will be able to manage their own transitions, without army generals or outsiders. Will they emerge? Let’s watch and hope. We have no other choice. The lids are coming off.
Amman, Jordan By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: February 5, 2011
China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs. the Pyramids
Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google without a ripple.
But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status quo here for so long — oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of the chaos that could come with change — have finally met an engine of change that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.
Of course, China per se is not fueling the revolt here — but China and the whole Asian-led developing world’s rising consumption of meat, corn, sugar, wheat and oil certainly is. The rise in food and gasoline prices that slammed into this region in the last six months clearly sharpened discontent with the illegitimate regimes — particularly among the young, poor and unemployed.
This is why every government out here is now rushing to increase subsidies and boost wages — even without knowing how to pay for it, or worse, taking it from capital budgets to build schools and infrastructure. King Abdullah II of Jordan just gave every soldier and civil servant a $30-a-month pay raise, along with new food and gasoline subsidies. Kuwait’s government last week announced a “gift” of about $3,500 to each of Kuwait’s 1.1 million citizens and about $850 million in food subsidies.
But China is a challenge for Egypt and Jordan in other ways. Several years ago, I wrote about Egyptian entrepreneurs who were importing traditional lanterns for Ramadan — with microchips in them that played Egyptian folk songs — from China. When China can make Egyptian Ramadan toys more cheaply and appealingly than low-wage Egyptians, you know there is problem of competitiveness.
Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia today are overflowing with the most frustrated cohort in the world — “the educated unemployables.” They have college degrees on paper but really don’t have the skills to make them globally competitive. I was just in Singapore. Its government is obsessed with things as small as how to better teach fractions to third graders. That has not been Hosni Mubarak’s obsession.
I look at the young protesters who gathered in downtown Amman today, and the thousands who gathered in Egypt and Tunis, and my heart aches for them. So much human potential, but they have no idea how far behind they are — or maybe they do and that’s why they’re revolting. Egypt’s government has wasted the last 30 years — i.e., their whole lives — plying them with the soft bigotry of low expectations: “Be patient. Egypt moves at its own pace, like the Nile.” Well, great. Singapore also moves at its own pace, like the Internet.
The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.
I have not been to Jordan for a while, but my ears are ringing today with complaints about corruption, frustration with the king and queen, and disgust at the enormous gaps between rich and poor. King Abdullah, who sacked his cabinet last week and promised real reform and real political parties, has his work cut out for him. And given some of the blogs that my friends here have shared with me from the biggest local Web site, Ammonnews.net, the people are not going to settle for the same-old, same-old. They say so directly now, dropping the old pretense of signing antigovernment blog posts as “Mohammed living in Sweden.”
Jordan is not going to blow up — today. The country is balanced between East Bank Bedouin tribes and West Bank Palestinians, who fought a civil war in 1970. “There is no way that the East Bankers would join with the Palestinians to topple the Hashemite monarchy,” a retired Jordanian general remarked to me. But this balance also makes reform difficult. The East Bankers overwhelmingly staff the army and government jobs. They prefer the welfare state, and hate both “privatization” and what they call “the digitals,” the young Jordanian techies pushing for reform. The Palestinians dominate commerce but also greatly value the stability the Hashemite monarchy provides.
Egypt was definitely a wake-up call for Jordan’s monarchy. The king’s challenge going forward is to convince his people that “their voices are going to be louder in the voting booth than in the street,” said Salah Eddin al-Bashir, a member of Jordan’s Senate.
As for Cairo, I think the real story in Egypt today is the 1952 revolution, led from the top by the military, versus the 2011 revolution, led from below by the people. The Egyptian Army has become a huge patronage system, with business interests and vast perks for its leaders. For Egypt to have a happy ending, the army has to give up some of its power and set up a fair political transition process that gives the Egyptian center the space to build precisely what Mubarak refused to permit — legitimate, independent, modernizing, secular parties — that can compete in free elections against the Muslim Brotherhood, now the only authentic party.
If that happens, I am not the least bit worried about the Muslim Brotherhoods in Jordan or Egypt hijacking the future. Actually, they should be worried. The Brotherhoods have had it easy in a way. They had no legitimate secular political opponents. The regimes prevented that so they could tell the world it is either “us or the Islamists.” As a result, I think, the Islamists have gotten intellectually lazy. All they had to say was “Islam is the answer” or “Hosni Mubarak is a Zionist” and they could win 20 percent of the vote. Now, if Egypt and Jordan can build a new politics, the Muslim Brotherhood will, for the first time, have real competition from the moderate center in both countries — and they know it.
“If leaders don’t think in new ways, there are vacancies for them in museums,” said Zaki Bani Rsheid, political director of Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm. When I asked Rsheid if his own party was up for this competition, he stopped speaking in Arabic and said to me in English, with a little twinkle in his eye: “Yes we can.”
I hope so, and I also hope that events in Egypt and Jordan finally create a chance for legitimate modern Arab democratic parties to test him.
December 11, 2010
Reality Check
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The failed attempt by the U.S. to bribe Israel with a $3 billion security assistance package, diplomatic cover and advanced F-35 fighter aircraft — if Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu would simply agree to a 90-day settlements freeze to resume talks with the Palestinians — has been enormously clarifying. It demonstrates just how disconnected from reality both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships have become.
Oil is to Saudi Arabia what unconditional American aid and affection are to Israel — and what unconditional Arab and European aid and affection are to the Palestinians: a hallucinogenic drug that enables them each to think they can defy the laws of history, geography and demography. It is long past time that we stop being their crack dealers. At a time of nearly 10 percent unemployment in America, we have the Israelis and the Palestinians sitting over there with their arms folded, waiting for more U.S. assurances or money to persuade them to do what is manifestly in their own interest: negotiate a two-state deal. Shame on them, and shame us. You can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and that is exactly where America is today. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them — and to live with the consequences.
They just don’t get it: we’re not their grandfather’s America anymore. We have bigger problems. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators should take a minute and put the following five words into Google: “budget cuts and fire departments.” Here’s what they’ll find: American city after city — Phoenix, Cincinnati, Austin, Washington, Jacksonville, Sacramento, Philadelphia — all having to cut their fire departments. Then put in these four words: “schools and budget cuts.” One of the top stories listed is from The Christian Science Monitor: “As state and local governments slash spending and federal stimulus dries up, school budget cuts for the next academic year could be the worst in a generation.”
I guarantee you, if someone came to these cities and said, “We have $3 billion we’d like to give to your schools and fire departments if you’ll just do what is manifestly in your own interest,” their only answer would be: “Where do we sign?” And so it should have been with Israel.
Israel, when America, a country that has lavished billions on you over the last 50 years and taken up your defense in countless international forums, asks you to halt settlements for three months to get peace talks going, there is only one right answer, and it is not “How much?” It is: “Yes, whatever you want, because you’re our only true friend in the world.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, what are you thinking? Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, offered you a great two-state deal, including East Jerusalem — and you let it fritter away. Now, instead of chasing after Obama and telling him you’ll show up for negotiations anywhere under any conditions that the president asks, you’re also setting your own terms. Here’s some free advice: When America goes weak, if you think the Chinese will deliver Israel for you, you’re wrong. I know China well. It will sell you out for a boatload of Israeli software, drones and microchips so fast that your head will spin.
I understand the problem: Israeli and Palestinian leaders cannot end the conflict between each other without having a civil war within their respective communities. Netanyahu would have to take on the settlers and Abbas would have to take on Hamas and the Fatah radicals. Both men have silent majorities that would back them if they did, but neither man feels so uncomfortable with his present situation to risk that civil war inside to make peace outside. There are no Abe Lincolns out there.
What this means, argues the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, is that the window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing. Israel will end up permanently occupying the West Bank with its 2.5 million Palestinians. We will have a one-state solution. Israel will have inside its belly 2.5 million Palestinians without the rights of citizenship, along with 1.5 million Israeli Arabs. “Then the only question will be what will be the nature of this one state — it will either be apartheid or Lebanon,” said Halbertal. “We will be confronted by two horrors.”
The most valuable thing that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could do now is just get out of the picture — so both leaders and both peoples have an unimpeded view of their horrible future together in one state, if they can’t separate. We must not give them any more excuses, like: “Here comes the secretary of state again. Be patient. Something is happening. We’re working on a deal. We’re close. If only the Americans weren’t so naïve, we were just about to compromise. ... Be patient.”
It’s all a fraud. America must get out of the way so Israelis and Palestinians can see clearly, without any obstructions, what reckless choices their leaders are making. Make no mistake, I am for the most active U.S. mediation effort possible to promote peace, but the initiative has to come from them. The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them.
Oil is to Saudi Arabia what unconditional American aid and affection are to Israel — and what unconditional Arab and European aid and affection are to the Palestinians: a hallucinogenic drug that enables them each to think they can defy the laws of history, geography and demography. It is long past time that we stop being their crack dealers. At a time of nearly 10 percent unemployment in America, we have the Israelis and the Palestinians sitting over there with their arms folded, waiting for more U.S. assurances or money to persuade them to do what is manifestly in their own interest: negotiate a two-state deal. Shame on them, and shame us. You can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and that is exactly where America is today. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them — and to live with the consequences.
They just don’t get it: we’re not their grandfather’s America anymore. We have bigger problems. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators should take a minute and put the following five words into Google: “budget cuts and fire departments.” Here’s what they’ll find: American city after city — Phoenix, Cincinnati, Austin, Washington, Jacksonville, Sacramento, Philadelphia — all having to cut their fire departments. Then put in these four words: “schools and budget cuts.” One of the top stories listed is from The Christian Science Monitor: “As state and local governments slash spending and federal stimulus dries up, school budget cuts for the next academic year could be the worst in a generation.”
I guarantee you, if someone came to these cities and said, “We have $3 billion we’d like to give to your schools and fire departments if you’ll just do what is manifestly in your own interest,” their only answer would be: “Where do we sign?” And so it should have been with Israel.
Israel, when America, a country that has lavished billions on you over the last 50 years and taken up your defense in countless international forums, asks you to halt settlements for three months to get peace talks going, there is only one right answer, and it is not “How much?” It is: “Yes, whatever you want, because you’re our only true friend in the world.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, what are you thinking? Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, offered you a great two-state deal, including East Jerusalem — and you let it fritter away. Now, instead of chasing after Obama and telling him you’ll show up for negotiations anywhere under any conditions that the president asks, you’re also setting your own terms. Here’s some free advice: When America goes weak, if you think the Chinese will deliver Israel for you, you’re wrong. I know China well. It will sell you out for a boatload of Israeli software, drones and microchips so fast that your head will spin.
I understand the problem: Israeli and Palestinian leaders cannot end the conflict between each other without having a civil war within their respective communities. Netanyahu would have to take on the settlers and Abbas would have to take on Hamas and the Fatah radicals. Both men have silent majorities that would back them if they did, but neither man feels so uncomfortable with his present situation to risk that civil war inside to make peace outside. There are no Abe Lincolns out there.
What this means, argues the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, is that the window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing. Israel will end up permanently occupying the West Bank with its 2.5 million Palestinians. We will have a one-state solution. Israel will have inside its belly 2.5 million Palestinians without the rights of citizenship, along with 1.5 million Israeli Arabs. “Then the only question will be what will be the nature of this one state — it will either be apartheid or Lebanon,” said Halbertal. “We will be confronted by two horrors.”
The most valuable thing that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could do now is just get out of the picture — so both leaders and both peoples have an unimpeded view of their horrible future together in one state, if they can’t separate. We must not give them any more excuses, like: “Here comes the secretary of state again. Be patient. Something is happening. We’re working on a deal. We’re close. If only the Americans weren’t so naïve, we were just about to compromise. ... Be patient.”
It’s all a fraud. America must get out of the way so Israelis and Palestinians can see clearly, without any obstructions, what reckless choices their leaders are making. Make no mistake, I am for the most active U.S. mediation effort possible to promote peace, but the initiative has to come from them. The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them.
October 19, 2010
Just Knock It Off
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Some of Israel’s worst critics are fond of saying that Israel behaves like America’s spoiled child. I’ve always found that analogy excessive. Say what you want about Israel’s obstinacy at times, it remains the only country in the United Nations that another U.N. member, Iran, has openly expressed the hope that it be wiped off the map. And that same country, Iran, is trying to build a nuclear weapon. Israel is the only country I know of in the Middle East that has unilaterally withdrawn from territory conquered in war — in Lebanon and Gaza — only to be greeted with unprovoked rocket attacks in return. Indeed, if you want to talk about spoiled children, there is no group more spoiled by Iran and Syria than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia. Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006 that brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese — and Hezbollah’s punishment was to be rewarded with thousands more missiles and millions more dollars to do it again. These are stubborn facts.And here’s another stubborn fact: Israel today really is behaving like a spoiled child.
Please spare me the nonsense that President Obama is anti-Israel. At a time when the president has made it one of his top priorities to build a global coalition to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon, he took the very logical view that if he could advance the peace process in the Middle East it would give him much greater leverage to get the Europeans and U.N. behind tougher sanctions on Iran. At the same time, Obama believed — what a majority of Israelis believe — that Israel can’t remain a Jewish democracy in the long run if it continues to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.
On top of it all, while pressing Israel to stop expanding settlements for as little as 60 days, Obama ordered his vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright of the Marines, to lead a U.S. team to work with Israel’s military on an unprecedented package of security assistance to enable Israel to maintain its “qualitative edge” over its neighbors. And, for all this, Obama is decried as anti-Israel. What utter nonsense.
Given what Obama has done, and is trying to do, it is hardly an act of hostility for him to ask Israel to continue its now-expired 10-month partial moratorium on settlement-building in the West Bank in order to take away any excuse from the Palestinians to avoid peace talks. Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, has been either resisting this request or demanding a payoff from the U.S. for a brief continuation of the freeze. He is wrong on two counts.
First — I know this is a crazy, radical idea — when America asks Israel to do something that in no way touches on its vital security but would actually enhance it, there is only one right answer: “Yes.” It is a measure of how spoiled Israel has become that after billions and billions of dollars in U.S. aid and 300,000 settlers already ensconced in the West Bank, Israel feels no compunction about spurning an American request for a longer settlement freeze — the only purpose of which is to help the United States help Israel reach a secure peace with the Palestinians. Just one time you would like Israel to say, “You know, Mr. President, we’re dubious that a continued settlement freeze will have an impact. But you think it will, so, let’s test it. This one’s for you.”
Yes, I know, Netanyahu says that if he did that then the far right-wingers in his cabinet would walk out. He knows he can’t make peace with some of the lunatics in his cabinet, but he tells the U.S. that he only wants to blow up his cabinet once — for a deal. But we will never get to that stage if he doesn’t blow it up now and construct a centrist coalition that can negotiate a deal.
Second, I have no idea whether the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has the will and the guts to make peace with Israel. In fact, when you go back and look at what Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu’s predecessor, offered Abbas — a real two-state compromise, including a deal on Jerusalem — and you think that Abbas spurned that offer, and you think that Netanyahu already gave Abbas a 10-month settlement freeze and Abbas only entered serious talks in the ninth month, you have to wonder how committed he is.
But the fact is that the team of Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have built a government that is the best the Palestinians have ever had, and, more importantly, a Palestinian security apparatus that the Israeli military respects and is acting as a real partner. Given this, Israel has an overwhelming interest to really test — that is all we can ask — whether this Palestinian leadership is ready for a fair and mutually secure two-state solution.
That test is something the U.S. should not have to beg or bribe Israel to generate. This moment is not about Obama. He’s doing his job. It is about whether the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are up to theirs. Abbas is weak and acts weaker. Netanyahu is strong and acts weak. It is time for both to step it up. And it is time for all the outsiders who spoil them to find another hobby.
November 2, 2010
Do Believe the Hype
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New Delhi
The Hindustan Times carried a small news item the other day that, depending on your perspective, is good news or a sign of the apocalypse. It reported that a Nepali telecommunications firm had just started providing third-generation mobile network service, or 3G, at the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, to “allow thousands of climbers and trekkers who throng the region every year access to high-speed Internet and video calls using their mobile phones.”
I can hear it already: “Hi, mom! You’ll never guess where I’m calling from ...”
This is just one small node in what is the single most important trend unfolding in the world today: globalization — the distribution of cheap tools of communication and innovation that are wiring together the world’s citizens, governments, businesses, terrorists and now mountaintops — is going to a whole new level. In India alone, some 15 million new cellphone users are being added each month.
Having traveled to both China and India in the last few weeks, here’s a scary thought I have: What if — for all the hype about China, India and globalization — they’re actually underhyped? What if these sleeping giants are just finishing a 20-year process of getting the basic technological and educational infrastructure in place to become innovation hubs and that we haven’t seen anything yet?
Here’s an example of why I ask these questions. It’s a typical Indian start-up I visited in a garage in South Delhi, EKO India Financial Services. Its founders, Abhishek Sinha and his brother Abhinav, began with a small insight — that low-wage Indian migrant workers flocking to Delhi from poorer states like Bihar had no place to put their savings and no secure way to send money home to their families. India has relatively few bank branches for a country its size, so many migrants stuff money in their mattresses or send cash home through traditional “hawala,” or hand-to-hand networks.
The brothers had an idea. In every Indian neighborhood or village there’s usually a mom-and-pop kiosk that sells drinks, cigarettes, candy and a few groceries. Why not turn each one into a virtual bank? So they created a software program whereby a migrant worker in Delhi using his cellphone, and proof of identity, could open a bank account registered on his cellphone text system. Mom-and-pop shopkeepers would act as the friendly neighborhood local banker and do the same.
Then the worker in New Delhi could give a kiosk owner in his slum 1,000 rupees (about $20), the shopkeeper would record it on his phone and text receipt of the deposit to the system’s mother bank, the State Bank of India. Then the worker’s wife back in Bihar could just go to the mom-and-pop kiosk in her village, also tied into the system, and make a withdrawal using her cellphone. The shopkeeper there would give her the 1,000 rupees sent by her husband. Each shopkeeper would earn a small fee from each transaction. Besides money transfers, workers could also use the system to bank their savings.
Since opening 18 months ago, their virtual bank now has 180,000 users doing more than 7,000 transactions a day through 500 “branches” — mom-and-pop kiosks — in Delhi and 200 more in Bihar and Jharkhand, the hometowns of many maids and migrants. EKO gets a tiny commission from the Bank of India for each transaction and two months ago started to turn a small profit.
Abhishek, who was inspired by a similar program in Brazil, said the kiosk owners “are already trusted people in each community” and are already in the habit of extending credit to their poor customers: “So we said, ‘Why not leverage them?’ We are the agents of the bank, and these retailers are our subagents.” The cheapest cellphone today has enough computing power to become a digital “mattress” and digital bank for the poor.
The whole system is being run out of a little house and garage with a dozen employees, a bunch of laptops, servers and the Internet. The core idea, says Abhishek, is “to close the last mile — the gap where government services end and the consumer begins.” There is a huge business in bridging that last mile for millions of poor Indians — who, without it, can’t get proper health care, education or insurance.
What is striking about the small EKO team is that it includes graduates from India’s most prestigious institutes of technology who were working in America but decided to come home for the action, while the chief operating officer — Matteo Chiampo — is an Italian technologist who left a good job in Boston to work here “where the excitement is,” he said.
India today is this unusual combination of a country with millions of people making $2 and $3 a day, but with a growing economy, an increasing amount of cheap connectivity and a rising number of skilled technologists looking to make their fortune by inventing low-cost solutions to every problem you can imagine. In the next decade, I predict, we will see some really disruptive business models coming out of here — to a neighborhood near you. If you thought the rate of change was fast thanks to the garage innovators of Silicon Valley, wait until the garages of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore get fully up to speed. I sure hope we’re ready.
Can’t Keep a Bad Idea Down
October 26, 2010
( This reminds me of Israeli Politics but in the opposite, Not Everything from USA is Good S.C.)
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I confess, I find it dispiriting to read the polls and see candidates, mostly Republicans, leading in various midterm races while promoting many of the very same ideas that got us into this mess. Am I hearing right?Let’s have more tax cuts, unlinked to any specific spending cuts and while we’re still fighting two wars — because that worked so well during the Bush years to make our economy strong and our deficit small. Let’s immediately cut government spending, instead of phasing cuts in gradually, while we’re still mired in a recession — because that worked so well in the Great Depression. Let’s roll back financial regulation — because we’ve learned from experience that Wall Street can police itself and average Americans will never have to bail it out.
Let’s have no limits on corporate campaign spending so oil and coal companies can more easily and anonymously strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to limit pollution in the air our kids breathe. Let’s discriminate against gays and lesbians who want to join the military and fight for their country. Let’s restrict immigration, because, after all, we don’t live in a world where America’s most important competitive advantage is its ability to attract the world’s best brains. Let’s repeal our limited health care reform rather than see what works and then fix it. Let’s oppose the free-trade system that made us rich.
Let’s kowtow even more to public service unions so they’ll make even more money than private sector workers, so they’ll give even more money to Democrats who will give them even more generous pensions, so not only California and New York will go bankrupt but every other state too. Let’s pay for more tax cuts by uncovering waste I can’t identify, fraud I haven’t found and abuse that I’ll get back to you on later.
All that’s missing is any realistic diagnosis of where we are as a country and what we need to get back to sustainable growth. Actually, such a diagnosis has been done. A nonpartisan group of America’s most distinguished engineers, scientists, educators and industrialists unveiled just such a study in the midst of this campaign.
Here is the story: In 2005 our National Academies responded to a call from a bipartisan group of senators to recommend 10 actions the federal government could take to enhance science and technology so America could successfully compete in the 21st century. Their response was published in a study, spearheaded by the industrialist Norman Augustine, titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”
Charles M. Vest, the former M.I.T. president, worked on the study and noted in a speech recently that “Gathering Storm,” together with work by the Council on Competitiveness, led to the America Competes Act of 2007, which increased funding for the basic science research that underlies our industrial economy. Other recommendations, like improving K-12 science education, were not substantively addressed.
So, on Sept. 23, the same group released a follow-up report: “Rising Above the Gathering Storm Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5.” “The subtitle, ‘Rapidly Approaching Category 5,’ says it all,” noted Vest. “The committee’s conclusion is that ‘in spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.’ ”
But I thought: “We’re number 1!”
“Here is a little dose of reality about where we actually rank today,” says Vest: sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.
“This is not a pretty picture, and it cannot be wished away,” said Vest. The study recommended a series of steps — some that President Obama has already initiated, some that still need Congress’s support — designed to increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education, to reinforce long-term basic research, and to create the right tax and policy incentives so we can develop, recruit and retain the best and brightest students, scientists and engineers in the world. The goal is to make America the premier place to innovate and invest in innovation to create high-paying jobs.
You’ll have to Google it, though. The report hasn’t received 1/100th of the attention given to Juan Williams’s remarks on Muslims.
A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers.
Third Party Rising
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
October 2, 2010
A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.
I’ve just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this region has not lost its “inner go.” But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.
There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.
President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.
But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn’t deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not have an energy bill until 2013.
Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.
“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.
We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.
“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”
We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”
You Ain't Seen This Before
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
August 31, 2010
President Obama is embarking on something I've never seen before — taking on two
Missions Impossible at the same time. That is, a simultaneous effort to heal the
two most bitter divides in the Middle East: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
the Shiite-Sunni conflict centered in Iraq. Give him his due. The guy's got
audacity. I'll provide the hope. But kids, don't try this at home.
Yet, if by some miracles the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that open in
Washington on Thursday do eventually produce a two-state solution, and Iraqi
Shiites and Sunnis do succeed in writing their own social contract on how to
live together, one might be able to imagine a Middle East that breaks free from
the debilitating grip of endless Arab-Israeli wars and autocratic Arab regimes.
President Obama deserves credit for helping to nurture these opportunities. But
he, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,
the Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and the newly elected leaders of Iraq
need to now raise their games to a whole new level to seize this moment — or
their opponents will.
Precisely because so much is at stake, the forces of intolerance, extreme
nationalism and religious obscurantism all over the Middle East will be going
all out to make sure that both the Israeli and Iraqi peace processes fail.
The opponents want to destroy the idea of a two-state solution for Israelis and
Palestinians, so Israel will be stuck with an apartheid-like, democracy-sapping,
permanent occupation of the West Bank. And they want to destroy the idea of a
one-state solution for Iraqis and keep Iraq fractured, so it never coheres into
a multisectarian democracy that could be an example for other states in the
region.
I hope that one of my personal rules about the Middle East is proved wrong —
that in this region extremists go all the way and moderates tend to just go
away.
Mr. Obama was right to keep to his troop-withdrawal schedule from Iraq. Iraqi
politicians need to stand on their own. But this is tricky. The president will
not be remembered for when we leave Iraq but for what happens after we leave.
That is largely in Iraqi hands, but it is still very much in our interest. So we
need to retain sufficient diplomatic, intelligence, Special Forces and Army
training units there to promote a decent outcome.
Because all the extremists are now doubling down. Last week, insurgents aligned
with Al Qaeda boasted of killing 56 innocent Iraqis. On Tuesday, Palestinian
gunmen murdered four West Bank Israeli settlers, including a pregnant woman;
Hamas proudly claimed credit. In Israel, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who heads the
largest ultra-Orthodox party, Shas, used his Shabbat sermon to declare that he
hoped the Palestinian president and his people would die. "All these evil people
should perish from this world ... God should strike them with a plague, them and
these Palestinians," Yosef said.
Trust me, this is just the throat-clearing and gun-cleaning. Wait until we have
a deal. Even if Israel agrees to swap land with the Palestinians so that 80
percent of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank can stay put, it will mean that
60,000 will still have to be removed. It took Israel 55,000 soldiers to remove
8,100 Jewish settlers from Gaza, which was never part of the Land of Israel.
Imagine when today's Israeli Army, where the officer corps is increasingly drawn
from religious Zionists who support the settler movement, is called on to remove
settlers from the West Bank.
None of this is a reason not to proceed. It is a reason to succeed. There is so
much to hate about the Iraq war. The costs will never match the hoped-for
outcome, but that outcome remains hugely important: the effort to build a
decent, consensual government in Iraq is the most important democracy project in
the world today. If Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites can actually write a social
contract for the first time in modern Arab history, it means that viable
democracy is not only possible in Iraq, but everywhere in the region.
"Iraq is the Germany of the Middle East," says Michael Young, opinion editor of
The Beirut Daily Star and author of a very original book about Lebanon, "The
Ghosts of Martyrs Square." "It is at the heart of the region — affecting all
around it — and the country's multi-ethnic, multisectarian population represents
all the communities of the region. Right now, what is going on in Iraq
represents all the worst trends in the region, but if you can make it work, it
could represent the best."
The late Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin used to say he would pursue peace with the
Palestinians as if there were no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there were
no peace process. That dual approach is one that Iraqi, Arab, Palestinian and
Israeli moderates are all going to have to adopt. Mao said a revolution is not a
dinner party, and neither is bringing revolutionary change to the Middle East. I
hope the forces of moderation are up to it. The bad guys will be offering no
timeouts. They know the stakes, and they will be going all the way.