"Are we sliding toward war with Iran?"

"Are we sliding toward war with Iran?" - a good question to ask
"Amid all of this, the one place that the United States has resolutely marched forward—or perhaps been dragged by the Congress and our European allies—has been in applying ever greater pressure on Iran. But if the Obama administration’s forward progress is clear enough when it comes to its Iran policy, its ultimate destination is not. The sanctions against Iran may well succeed on their own terms while producing regrettable, if unintended, consequences.

[...]


Doubtless such a war would leave Iran far, far worse off than it would leave us. But it would be painful for us too, and it might last far longer than anyone wants because that is the nature of wars, especially wars involving this Iranian regime. Thus, if we continue down this path, we had best be ready to walk it to its very end. And if we don’t have the stomach to realistically prepare for war, we should seriously reconsider our current embrace of sanctions."

 My comments:
1. If not war and not sanctions, what does the authors of the article suggests? Allowing Iran to have nuclear arms might be "fair" from the "progressive" point of view, but it also would be irresponsible from the point of view of the Worldwide safety (ironically, this is very similar to the claim that making guns freely available for self-defense would reduce the number of violent deaths - something with which the "progressive" community correctly disagrees.)

2. The next legitimate question to ask is why US is sliding into war, rather than preparing to have it on its own terms and at the time of its own choice? Isn't such a hands down approach the most certain way to maximize the damage that the eventual war will cause?

"Two-state" game

President Obama compliments the Jordanian King for the latter's role in confronting Syria and trying to restart the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations:
"Noting Abdullah's role in decrying the Syrian government's violent crackdown on protesters, Obama said of the Jordanian leader, "I want to thank him for his willingness to stand up. As a consequence, Jordan has been part of an overall Arab League effort to encourage this sort of peaceful transition inside of Syria that is needed."
 
[...]

The US president also addressed Israel-Palestinian peace talks, saying that "the Jordanians have taken great leadership on this issue, and we very much appreciate their direction."

My comments:
1. The commendation for His Majesty's "willingness to stand up" to the Syrian dictator, sounds strange on two counts: 
i) President Obama has consistently refused to do the same vis-a-vis the Syrian dictator. This notably involved consistent refusal to withdraw the US ambassador despite the continuing massacres. The ambassador himself behaved honorably and had to be withdrawn after Assad's collaborators attacked the US embassy. 

ii) King Abdullah is himself an autocrat, which explains his desire to end protests and otherwise calm the situation - he is very much afraid that similar things may happen in his domain. While there is nothing wrong with Obama assisting a US ally, so explicitly supporting an undemocratic leader is inappropriate for the US president and potentially risky. (Just recall the uncomfortable 180 degrees turn that the Obama Administration had to make within a few days in regard to Mubarak.)  

2. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations:
i) President's praise for King Abdullah is in striking contrast with his treatment of the Israeli Prime-minister or the Palestinian leadership, from whom he however requires greater sacrifices. (and arguably receives them - settlement freeze is an example.) 

ii) The motivation behind King's efforts to make peace is well-known - half of his subjects are Jordanian Palestinians, who would be happy to united with their brothers in West Bank and form a truly Palestinian state. Two-state solution is a way to postpone this outcome by creating an artificial Palestinian state that will be a home to less than a half of all the Palestinians living in the neighborhood. 

The President perfectly knows that "two-state solution" seems like a solution only to the concerned public in the US and Europe, but not to the Palestinians or Israelis. He also knows that the "two-state solution" does not resolve the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. While all the Western politicians are obliged to play this "two-state" game, there is no need to be more zealous than necessary.  

iii) One still may wonder why the most unstable moment in the recent history of the Middle East is supposedly the best time to make Arab-Israeli Peace. (I mean government changes in many countries and the shift of power confrontation line from Arab-Israeli to pro-Iranian and anti-Iranian.)

Progressive chauvinism

For my "Theatre of the Absurd" section:
It seems that "The Iron Lady" cuts right in the middle of the modern political debate. While the conservative side complains about inexact depiction of the Thatcher's hard-core right-wing politics, the American left wing tries to downgrade the value of the movie that has a potential to attract more attention to the Thatcher's ideas.

Here is the full list of complaints against Thatcher:
"In The Iron Lady, a figure named Margaret Thatcher orders the sinking of the Argentinean battleship, the Belgrano. She “wins” the war of the Falkland Islands, just as she had won leadership of the Conservative party in Great Britain and had become the nation’s first female prime minister. As such, she imposed austerity cuts; she beat down the trade union movement; she gutted many parts of her country, especially the manufacturing north; and she restored a version of prosperity in the financial services industry that was lifted on the wave of the Internet. She was the most significant leader Britain had had since Churchill. But she was more drastic than the wartime premier. He responded to an external threat when he had no other choice. Mrs. Thatcher was an innovator determined on radical surgery. Churchill was resolute, and she was an ideologue—which is most useful or more dangerous?"

Unfortunately, further this article becomes a dirty and ungrounded slur... a rather chauvinistic one (this is unfortunately typical of liberal media when attacking non-liberal opponents. Just recall the same edition making racist remarks about Israeli Russians):
"As you might expect, Streep is magnificent but speciously sympathetic in the Alzheimer-like coda to the real drama, even if her husband Denis (played by Jim Broadbent) proves such a bore you can’t understand why so decisive a woman stayed with him. One answer is hinted at: that she had to be married to a businessman to win a seat in Parliament. Another is easily imagined: like many people fixed on power she had no interest in love or sex, except where it might assist her.

Thatcher in lonely dementia has nothing to do with the mounting isolation of her leadership, but it softens the project. I do not intend to suggest that Thatcher used actual sex to gain power, but winning the leadership of her party was her most startling achievement. She appropriated a men’s club, and that took charm, warmth and ways of impressing men. But Streep is as chilled in this film as she is inventive, and she does not convey how Thatcher affected her male associates. There is no reason for making this story if you can’t get inside Thatcher’s head and feel her instinct for manipulation. Streep is endlessly creative and actressy; but there is no nature in her Thatcher, and no secret to draw us in."

Dura lex sed lex

What really undermines the Israeli democracy is disrespect to the law by the political fringes, equally by the extreme right, often represented by settlers and ultra-religious community, and the extreme left, represented by Meretz, Hadash and their supporters:
"MK Zehava Gal-On (Meretz) on Thursday slammed a High Court of Justice decision Wednesday upholding the Citizenship and Entry Law, saying the decision leaves a stain on Israel's law books. The court rejected a petition against the law, which makes Palestinians married to Israelis ineligible for Israeli citizenship. Gal-On filed the petition along with The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah)."

I might agree with Gal-On's opinion on the matter, but I do disagree with her thinking that her opinion is more correct than the supreme court decision.

Note: MK Gal-On has already a rather scandalous reputation - see here.

What is autocracy?

An addition to my "theatre of the absurd" section:
"A leadership transition is scheduled in two major autocracies in 2012. Neither is likely to be a surprise. Xi Jinping is set to replace Hu Jintao as President in China, and, in Russia, Vladimir Putin has announced that he will reclaim the presidency from Dmitri Medvedev. Among the world’s democracies, political outcomes this year are less predictable. Nicolas Sarkozy faces a difficult presidential re-election campaign in France, as does Barack Obama in the United States."

You may say whatever you want about China and Russia, but neither of them is an autocracy. I added to my glossary the Wikipedia definition:
"An autocracy is a system of government in which supreme political power to direct all the activities of the state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of coup d'état or mass insurrection)."

I am not sure what the author of the "Project Syndicate" article thought when calling China and Russia "autocracies": China is not an authocracy simply because the power is no concentrated in the hands of one person - it is shared by a group of individuals, who even take care to rotate between the leading government positions - something that the quoted author points out himself.

Russia is not authocratic either. This may strike you as being contrary of the commongly held wisdom that the power is concentrated in the hands of Putin - there is however little to substantiate this claim, except the private opinions expressed in the media and by politicians. Putin has taken great care to abide by the Russian constitution, which is modeled on the American one.

Indeed, he has the support of the majority of the parliament and there are no other politicians who could compete with him in popularity among Russians - but isn't this the situation that existed in the United States just a few years ago, after 2008 election? Then President Obama won the presidency by a landslide, and the Democratic party held majority in the Congress and a filibuster proof 60-place majority in the Senate?

Indeed, Putin is planning to return to the presidency... which is, if he wins the next election. But does it make him different from Franklin D. Roosevelt who won the presidency four times in a row (American constitution then allowed it). Would anyone call the United States of 1933-1945 and authocracy?! 

Finally, what is really bothering - is the blurring of the lines between the countries with struggling democracy, such as Russia; undemocratic but not truly totalitarian countries, such as China; and the true totalitarian authocracies, such as Cuba, North Korea and Syria, as well as the autocratic monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates. Ironically, the true authocracies weren't even mentioned in the article.

Dating as a market failure

I discuss a commonly used dating model and show that it is highly prone to failure. The only sensible alternative seems to be the age-old belief in an unexpected “romantic” encounter.

The idea of “romance” is ubiquitous in modern culture. Books, movies, and everyday conversations routinely tell us that there is one person that we are destined to be with, yet this person may turn out to be the complete opposite of what we imagine as our soul mate, and little can be done to increase the likelihood of meeting this person – it may happen anytime and anywhere…

… or not happen. Indeed, the “romantic” assumption looks quite unrealistic and we are frequently following a very different model of choosing a partner, which is described below.

Economic growth and happiness

Kenneth Rogoff touches upon an interesting subject - the relation between the economic growth and the people's well-being:
"But there might be a problem even deeper than statistical narrowness: the failure of modern growth theory to emphasize adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. They evaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not just on some absolute standard.


The economist Richard Easterlin famously observed that surveys of “happiness” show surprisingly little evolution in the decades after World War II, despite significant trend income growth. Needless to say, Easterlin’s result seems less plausible for very poor countries, where rapidly rising incomes often allow societies to enjoy large life improvements, which presumably strongly correlate with any reasonable measure of overall well-being."

My comments:
This should certainly excite the participants of the Israeli social protests, who pointedly complained that the healthy state of the Israeli economy indicators has nothing to do with their well-being.

My objection is that we can hardly measure happiness. In fact, I doubt that one can talk about growth of happiness between generations - it is too personal a category. Every generation estimates its level of happiness by the worst level of the unhappiness that it has known: regardless of how high we make today the welfare benefits and the taxes on "the rich," and regardless of how low we make the apartment rent and the prices on the cottage cheese -  thirty years from now our children will wine just like we do that the welfare is decreasing, that rich do not pay enough, and that the prices are too high.