He is still advocating that Israel's best move is to return to the '67 borders, but -- while following his logic -- there is one thing I wonder about. The Hamas/Fatah detente seems to be largely seen as a winning move by the Palestinians, but doesn't that slide them closer to being in the Iranian orbit? Is that really in their long-term interest?
As Friedman notes, the Arabs already don't have much use for the Palestinians, will they really sit back and support them if it seems they are swinging too far towards Tehran? Finally, what if Syria goes up in smoke for the Iranians and is lost to them? Wouldn't Fatah, Hamas and Hezbullah then be cut off from Iranian easily supporting them?
Regardless, the mess of the Middle East made me chose Evangeline Lilly, messy from mud wrestling, as the last article's Hot Stratfor Babe. As strange as it may sound, finding classy examples of woman mud wrestlers is easier said than done. As a result, I switched from that line of search to actresses on Lost with messy hairdos. Eh, whatever works.
Following that criteria, for this article I chose Emile de Raven as the Hot Strafor Babe. Emile played Claire, who started out as a sweet and kind single mother who was one of the people stranded when the plane crashed. I say 'started out' because by the final season she had gone completely insane. As an example of her nuttiness, the picture of her above is just before she buries an axe in some poor schmoe's belly.
Claire's gone nuts, and is killing guys left and right, because she lost her baby and her new friend the Smoke Monster (hey, just go with it) told her the other people on the island kidnapped him. Hence, she's been slaughtering them off one at a time because she's sworn blood revenge on the person who took her kid.
Well, the reality is Claire, upon going bonkers, had left the little brat on a tree stump. Her fellow castaway Kate found him and took him along when she escaped the island. So, while Claire was still stranded, jabbering to herself in a jungle shack and tending to her surrogate doll baby made out of squirrel skin and an animal's skull, Kate was, after beating the rap for blowing her dad up and going on a multi-state crime spree, living it up and pawning herself off as the real mom of Claire's kid.
As I mentioned in the previous article -- Lost is about as complicated, and makes about as much sense, as Middle East politics. See what I mean?
Anyway, this all lead to a quite hilarious scene where Kate, who has returned to the island, first encounters crazy Claire and cheerily tells her she's been raising her beautiful baby boy for her. Meanwhile Claire is standing there with smoke squirting out of her ears and wishing her axe was handy. Quite the social gaffe, all in all.
As a bonus after the article I've included a brief scene where you can see Claire gathering up the knife she plans on sticking Kate with, get a good look at the creepy Squirrel Baby, and see Kate with a bewildered WTF look on her face through the whole thing.
THE PALESTINIAN MOVE
By George Friedman, June 7, 2011
A former head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, has publicly criticized the current Israeli government for a lack of flexibility, judgment and foresight, calling it "reckless and irresponsible" in the handling of Israel's foreign and security policies. In various recent interviews and speeches, he has made it clear that he regards the decision to ignore the 2002 Saudi proposal for a peace settlement on the pre-1967 lines as a mistake and the focus on Iran as a diversion from the real issue -- the likely recognition of an independent Palestinian state by a large segment of the international community, something Dagan considers a greater threat.
What is important in Dagan's statements is that, having been head of Mossad from 2002 to 2010, he is not considered in any way to be ideologically inclined toward accommodation. When Dagan was selected by Ariel Sharon to be head of Mossad, Sharon told him that he wanted a Mossad with "a knife between its teeth." There were charges that he was too aggressive, but rarely were there charges that he was too soft. Dagan was as much a member of the Israeli governing establishment as anyone. Therefore, his statements, and the statements of some other senior figures, represent a split not so much within Israel but within the Israeli national security establishment, which has been seen as being as hard-line as the Likud.
In addition, over the weekend, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Golan Heights tried to force their way into Israeli-held territory, Israeli troops opened fire. Eleven protesters were killed in the Golan, and six were killed in a separate but similar protest in the West Bank. The demonstrations, like the Nakba-day protests, were clearly intended by the Syrians to redirect anti-government protests to some other issue. They were also meant to be a provocation, and the government in Damascus undoubtedly hoped that the Israelis would open fire. Dagan's statements seem to point at this paradox. There are two factions that want an extremely aggressive Israeli security policy: the Israeli right and countries and militant proxies like Hamas that are actively hostile to Israel. The issue is which benefits more.
3 Strategic Phases
Last week we discussed Israeli strategy. This week I want us to consider Palestinian strategy and to try to understand how the Palestinians will respond to the current situation. There have been three strategies on Palestine. The first was from before the founding of Israel until 1967. In this period, the primary focus was not on the creation of a Palestinian state but on the destruction of Israel by existing Arab nation-states and the absorption of the territory into those states.
Just a few years before 1967, the Palestine Liberation Army (PLO) came into existence, and after Israel's victory in the June 1967 war, the Arab nations began to change their stance from simply the destruction of Israel and absorption of the territories into existing nation-states to the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The PLO strategy at this time was a dual track divided between political and paramilitary operations and included terrorist attacks in both Israel and Europe. The political track tried to position the PLO as being open to a negotiated state, while the terrorist track tried to make the PLO seem extremely dangerous in order to motivate other nations, particularly European nations, to pressure Israel on the political track.
The weakness of this strategy was that the political track lost credibility as the terrorist track became bound up with late Cold-War intrigues involving European terrorist groups like Italy's Red Brigade or Germany's Red Army Faction. Their networks ranged from the Irish Republican Army to the Basque terrorist group ETA to Soviet bloc intelligence services. The PLO was seen as a threat to Europe on many levels as well as a threat to the Arab royal houses that they tried to undermine. [continued after jump]
