In the last two days, the three major Israeli MSM online sites have been carrying stories on the evaporation of the Syrian threat. First, Barak said there was not enough ammunition and more money was needed for defense and IDF preparedness; then the IDF said there was not a problem-we have enough; yesterday Ha’aretz, the Jerusalem Post, and today YNET carried stories (in this order) that there was not a threat and the IDF was pulling back; the IDF was not pulling back; and the IDF is staying but there is no threat.

YNET’s piece is most interesting in light of the entire range of disinformation during the last several days. They say the threat is gone while over at the Jerusalem Post, they say the whole thing was due to the Russians wanting to sell Assad new toys thereby expanding Terrible Putin’s influence (great picture by Ariel Jerozolimski on the front page of the Post of the tanks).

But everyone within earshot of the Golan knows what’s up. The Syrian side, pool-table flat, is down hill and in the last week or two has been crystal clear and silent except for mechanical beasts and big guns firing non-stop from 2 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. except on Shabbat. They are Israeli guns. When we were in Yonatan for Shabbat, our hosts were relieved when I told them about my astronomy camping trip around the corner. The guns were loud.

Well, a couple of weeks of gunnery practice with live rounds, downhill, at night, is enough to rattle anyone’s cage. Sometimes the old methods are the best. When the armies of the Caliph crossed North Africa and into the Iberian penisula and similarly when the Great Khan crossed the Steppes, the armies would surround cities and beat on their drums and shields all night long. In the morning the gates would open. No combat!

Not far from the Golan, another great general fit the battle of Jericho with trumpets. Well, if you look at the picture of these tanks, think of them as trumpets turned around. God Willing, the Battle of the Golan 2007 was “fit” by the fanfare of these instruments.

There is a great deal of talk in the last month about peace with Syria, warwith Syria, and yet another American president wants to be the peacemaker before riding into the sunset. Ha’aretz (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/883052.html) revealed that the Syrians and Israelis have been talking. OpinionJournal.com carried an editorial by Michael Orens, insisting that Bush is not going to follow Clinton and Carter with another force-fed peace deal. Today, the Jerusalem Post carried a warning from President Peres not to upset the King of Syria (either because he lacks a sense of humor or may cry, or both):

President Shimon Peres reiterated concerns on Thursday expressed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert a day earlier that a misunderstanding with Syria could lead to war.

The head of state spoke in a meeting with visiting Republican Congressmen.

“The government and security establishment must strengthen the existing trust with Damascus - and this should be done through statements and proper deployment in the field,” Peres said.

In a country with two fronts—the Beach on the west and Asia on the east, these are the views from the Beach. Surf’s up and all the western oriented experts are paddling out to catch the next wave. Up in the Galilee and the Golan, no one is whooping with joy. Nowhere is the disconnect between the cultural worlds of Israel more apparent than the way the Galileans and the Golanians look at the continued noise of the same old story - some suit from beach will give up the moon with nothing secure in return except more violence and more billions to the violators.

Elsewhere in today’s Jerusalem Post, Shmuel Katz beseeched Olmert (or, “All Merde” as my French neighbors call him now) not to give up the Golan. Katz wrote that the King is being absolutely clear about where he stands on the issue and negotiation:

Whatever one may say about the Syrian President Bashar Assad he does not beat about the bush. In his recent speech in parliament he made it clear that peace with Israel is not his immediate concern. In evident response to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer to give him the Golan in exchange for peace, his haughty reply was that the Golan must be returned to Syria free, gratis and for nothing.

Then, with that achieved, he might, or he might not, be prepared to talk. This of course is in tune with the Pan-Arab policy of “phases” in the projected destruction of Israel. It was first propounded by president Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia in the 1950s, well before the Six Day War when Israel was locked into the 9-mile wide boundary of the 1949 Armistice Agreement. In more recent years, it became the mantra of the moderate Arab who will tell you gently over a cup of coffee, that a Palestinian state in the “occupied” territories will of course be only an interim step before they take the rest of the land.

Arafat consecrated this idea as the core of Arab strategy: take what you can, by diplomacy, by war, by whatever, and that will serve as a base for the next phase.

Assad is doing no more than recalling this principle and reminding us once more that handing over territory to the Arabs has never brought and will never bring peace. It would only accelerate and facilitate the coming of the final assault on the Jewish state.

A year ago, my wife and I took a how-to-do-business-in-Israel course offered by Israel’s equivalent of the Small Business Administration in the northern city of Haifa. The course ran for ten weeks, each week a different Anglo-Israeli lectured on the basic points of doing business with Israeli corporate and tax law always pitched to newcomers from the English-speaking world. The constant refrain of the course to people from the States, Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, and Australia was simple - this is not the world you came from.

On week eight, our instructor gave the course punch line in the following illustration. A mother comes into the kitchen to find her children fighting over an orange. The daughter says she needs the orange peel to make frosting for a cake. The son says he needs the orange to squeeze the pulp for juice. When the mother says stop, you can both share the orange getting both products, her children look at her as if she is from Mars. In unison they shout, “It’s my orange!”

The point, our instructor told us, is that the way of the Bazaar is to control the object the other wants. The Anglo world thinks like capitalists - business is something that benefits both parties to the exchange. Negotiations are for the purpose of approaching the price that the supplier and the buyer can both live with and feel that they have increased their individual and joint utility. Rather than a Market that sets an overall price, the Bazaar is made of an audience. Each transaction occurs in plain view and a win or loss not only reflects on price, but each party’s honor - how will all the others in the audience look at the deal. In the Bazaar, whenever a transaction occurs, there is increased risk that either the buyer or seller will lose in the deal. Was the buyer a sucker or was the seller a chump. Honor is the currency of the Bazaar.

So, out here in the Galilee, where the Arab, or Mizrachi, worldview is so evident, the rank and file just aren’t buying the new wave of talks. A wave, after all, is just a wave—not too different from the last wave and certainly no different than the one to follow. Any deal will be at Israel’s expense in the Bazaar as well as the Market. There will be no real concession from Israel’s neighbors, there will be more State Department influence purchased in the market for influence, and the inevitable result of more rockets, more terror, and more blood will be spilled.

Bush became a hero out here with the Galileans when he refused to talk with Arafat. Then, he strode the landscape like a real master of the Bazaar. He simply turned the tables in the influence market and followed Nancy Reagan’s advice to addiction—“Just say no!” Here, they said, is a man who understands how to bargain — say nothing until you hear what you want to hear. It was very refreshing.

However, the pitch has changed. No one in the Bazaar hears the part about recognizing Israel first; they only hear that more concessions and more withdrawals are required; they only hear that those prisoners in Israeli jails who murder and maim will go free.

Katz, who served in the Israeli Knesset years ago, continues: Olmert’s irresponsible proposal to reward Syria by giving it the Golan must be placed in a yet wider context, high in the scale of blunders committed and disasters generated by the prime minister in the past two years - first as adjunct to his mentor Ariel Sharon and then on his own account.They are inexplicably linked one to the other, from the Gaza “disengagement” of which was about to usher in the age of peace (remember Olmert’s messianic promise of such a “new morning” to a New York audience) down to the relaxed unpreparedness and then the amateurish handling of the Second Lebanon War. Thus one is able to reach an understanding of the state of disorientation in the nation. That is where Israel is today.

The warning is explicit. The Golan is not an empty no man’s land. It is a vital growing part of Israeli life with close to 30,000 residents — Israelis and Druze. Katz concludes: One must assume from Olmert’s callous behavior toward the expellees of Gush Katif, and since their expulsion, that he believes that the success of the operation at Gush Katif would be repeated on the Golan, that he will give the order to the army, and they will do the job. A few protests, a little violence here and there and nothing more.

He should be warned. He is dead wrong. The 20,000 [women and children] will not “go quietly.” There will be many more “Ya’alons” in the army to oppose such an evil move. Many, many more soldiers will refuse to accept the role of bullying the people into the victimhood of expulsion. Too many of the people bulldozed into supporting the Gaza adventure have realized how mistaken they were.

It is most unlikely that Olmert will succeed. Even the financial cost of such an operation, which must amount to tens of billions would be prohibitive. Who would pay the cost? The Israeli taxpayer? The US? Not a chance.

To much of us in the western world, a negotiation is a process where an agreement is reached that benefits, ultimately, both parties. If the root cause to the conflict was water, then some sort of market process and mutual treaty could be worked out - similar to the agreements reached between Jordan and Israel, or even between Jordan and Syria. So, why not with Syria and Israel? Because this would be mixing apples and oranges - that’s why. The boy-king, the spectacle maker, wants to be the only one to have the orange.

Give back the Golan or else. This is a peacemaker? And lone wolf Olmert? He’d gnaw off his arm to stay in power for another week.

A highly read-worthy article in Scientific American offers, “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense” (printer version here). Part of the answer to the creationist claim, “Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created,” is this:

[E]volution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not-and does not-find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

But a recent announcement by anthropologist Meave Leakey (the most famous and respected family name in the business) busts a hole in the evolutionary descent of modern humans as presently accepted. Until now, scientists thought that the ancient species Homo habilis (”man with ability”), was the evolutionary ancestor of Homo erectus (”Erect man,” and no juvenile snickering, either). Dr. Leakey’s research postively disproves that idea.

Two fossils found in Kenya have shaken the human family tree, possibly rearranging major branches thought to be in a straight ancestral line to Homo sapiens.

Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens — a 1.44-million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55-million-year-old Homo erectus found in 2000 — said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.

If this interpretation is correct, the early evolution of the genus Homo is left even more shrouded in mystery than before. It means that both habilis and erectus must have originated from a common ancestor between two million and three million years ago, a time when fossil hunters had drawn a virtual blank. …

The challenge to the idea of a more linear succession of the three Homo species is being reported today in the journal Nature. The lead author is Fred Spoor, an evolutionary anatomist at University College London. …

Dr. Spoor, speaking by satellite phone from a field site near Lake Turkana, said the evidence clearly contradicted previous ideas of human evolution “as one strong, single line from early to us.” The new findings, he added, support the revised interpretations of “a lot of bushiness and experimentation in the fossil record.”

I amk not claiming that this discovery invalidates the theory of evolution, far from it. It just caught my eye how immediately SciAm’s defense of the existing theory of human evolution was knocked about. Who says? Not me. Here is what Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, had to say about the Spoor-Leakey report (same link):

The new findings, Dr. Lieberman said, highlight the need for obtaining more fossils that are more than two million years old. In addition, he said, they show “just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.”

So it seems that the human family tree is much less clear than SciAm makes it out to be. While the new finding does not affect the present understanding that H. erectus was the ancestor of modern humans, it does knock a huge hole in SciAm’s claim that there is a, “succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern.” In fact, the fossil researchers said they were surprised at how much less like modern humans the H. erectus fossil was than they expected it to be (read the article for why). So there seems now to be a big gap in our understanding of our descendancy, for which researchers will doubtless start to intensify their quest for additional finds.

Anyway, the rest of the SciAm piece is worth your time.

This is the Jordan River south of the Sea of Galilee. Click on the image for a larger version.

The protorosaur puzzle, solved!

In Great Britain, reports the Telegraph, “Holidaymakers are facing such severe delays at airports they are being forced to spend more time stuck in queues than on their flights … .”

Not that things are much better in the US, according to Slate:

For frequent fliers, it is clearly the worst of times. In the first quarter of 2007, only 71.4 percent of flights arrived on time, and 19,260 passengers were involuntarily bumped—up 13 percent from the year before. In July, 16,988 flights were canceled, up 54 percent from July 2006, according to FlightStats.com.

Now consider this news report in USA Today when the science fiction (and I do mean fiction) movie, The Day After Tomorrow, was released. Reported Ben Mutzabaugh,

NASA scientists say condensation trails from jet exhausts create cirrus clouds, likely trapping heat rising from the Earth’s surface, according to a Reuters report. In fact, those scientists say that could account for nearly all the warming over the United States between 1975 and 1994.

Not only that, but jet engines exhaust tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and at high altitudes. The paper reported elsewhere,

… On a New York-to-Denver flight, a commercial jet would generate 840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That’s about what an SUV generates in a month.

So it’s less polluting to drive than fly, right? And it appears that is is rapidly becoming just as quick to drive as fly on not only short-range flights, but increasingly on medium-range flights as well.

So here’s my global-warming-fighting plan: significantly increase the speed limits on the nation’s interstate highways. That will make driving rather than flying even more appealing, more financially attractive and less time consuming.

By “significantly increase” the speed limits, I mean to triple-digit speeds. The present limit in Tennessee in 70 mph. So let’s reset it to 100, minimum.

Consider two comparisons:

Nashville to Memphis, 200 ground miles, flying Northwest Airlines flt. 457. Depart Nashville (BNA) at 0612, arrive Memphis (MEM) at 0715. Cool, just an hour, right? Of course not. You must arrive at the airport no fewer than 90 minutes earlier than flight departure (they say two hours, but let’s assume you check no baggage). And you have to drive to the airport, call that 30 minutes. So you leave home at 0412. Three hours later you arrive at the Memphis airport and have to spend another 30 minutes, minimum, getting to your place of business for the day. Use more time if you checked baggage.

So you spend 3 1/2 hours getting to your destination in Memphis from your Nashville home.

If you drive, Google Maps says it would take 3 1/2 hours just to drive from BNA to MEM. Of course, you wouldn’t start from BNA or end at MEM, so shave a half-hour. Still, many business travelers would consider the extra half-hour spent flying to be worth it, especially if they can use the down time to work.

So let’s raise the speed limit to 100 mph. Using the same route, BNA - MEM, uses 205 interstate miles. Some of this is too congested to permit high-speed driving, probably about 20 miles. Heck, to make it easy let’s say 25 miles. So you cover 180 miles in 1 hour, 48 minutes and the other 25 miles in as many minutes. That leaves 16 miscellaneous miles left, which might take you another 25 minutes. Total time, 2 hours, 38 minutes. You save, basically, an hour.

I would guess that a lot of people would find saving an hour worth driving, especially if it puts them back home that much earlier, also (or a combined two hours earlier).

Second example: my home in Clarksville, Tenn., to my Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where my son matriculates.

Clarksville to BNA, one hour. There are no passenger flights to Winston-Salem; you debark at Greensboro’s airport. There are no nonstop flights from BNA to GSO; you have to go through Atlanta, Cincinnati or another city. I’ll use the shortest travel I found on Orbitz. You depart BNA at 1024 and arrive at GSO at 1347, making air-travel time of 3 1/2 hours. Add the hour getting to the airport and another 90 minutes for security before flying, as above. Then add 37 minutes driving your rental from GSO to Wake. The add another 20 minutes at least for putz-around time at the GSO terminal itself, and your trip comes to 417 minutes, or 6 hours, 57 minutes.

Three minutes shy of seven hours - that’s only 47 minutes shorter than driving at present speed limits.

Driving straight from Clarksville to WFU at present speed limits, says Google Maps, takes 7 hours, 44 minutes. (Google says the distance is 491 miles, but it’s actually 480 miles. I’ve driven it many times, but I’ll let it pass.)

The vast majority of that 491 miles is high-speed worthy, call it 90 percent easily, or 442 miles. So that’s 265 minutes. The other 49 miles will take about an hour since it’s almost all either low-speed-worthy interstate or major thoroughfare. Add another 12 minutes for a refueling stop. Total trip time: 5 hours, 37 minutes. Time saved: one hour, 20 minutes.

So, since even SUVs are many times less polluting than jet liners, especially of carbon dioxide, then would it not make sense for the global warming alarmists to lobby for raising interstate speed limits to make driving more attractive than flying for many trips?

Oh, wait, I forgot.

Update: Don’t forget all the other, non-fuel pollution the airline industry produces - thousands of tons of food packaging per day, for example. Also, the average wait with engines running waiting to get to the head of the line to takeoff has been growing rapidly; in fact, some major airports have routine waits of an hour. And the enginines are running the whole time. How cabn airlines get away with this? They either build in the wait time to the schedule or simply ignore it. Here’s why - an on-time departure is neither when the liner pulls away from the ramp, nor when it actually takes off.

An on-time departure is accomplished when the captain releases the aircraft’s parking brakes within a small +/- window of the scheduled departure time, as signaled by the “Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (or ACARS).” Link:

This computer transmits the “out”, “off”, “on” and “in” times for the flight. The “out” time starts when the captain drops the parking brake with the main cabin door closed. The “in” time is recorded as the last time the parking brake was applied. The main cabin door opening sends a signal that transmits the “in” time. Unless the captain reset the brake while waiting for the door to be opened, that time is what is recorded

So, the door may open 20 minutes after scheduled arrival, however the time that is transmitted may very well be D.O.T “on time” if the last application of parking brake was within the time limits. Once the chocks are in, the brakes are then released (they can get hot otherwise), so if it takes 10 minutes to open the door after that, the time that is recorded will still be the last time the parking brake was set. That said, you can have an “on time” departure as well- even if you sit at the gate for half an hour, because as soon as the brake is dropped the flight is “out”.

But wait, there’s more!

As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Realistically, I should factor in the high probability (about .25) in my examples that the plane trips will be late, delayed or canceled. Of course, that’s possible with auto trips, too, but 25 percent of the time? Nope.

A couple of commenters pointed out that the average airliner is more full, as a percentage of capacity, than the average passenger car. True, but it only worsens the problem for airliners because the highest occupancies are found on routes and times that are already so jammed with planes that adding capacity isn’t possible even though passenger loads still increase. The result? More delays and more time planes spend sitting on the ground spewing CO2 into the air while not moving anyone. Example:

Let’s use Los Angeles International as an example. At any given time, the most number of runways dedicated to take-offs is two. But if you look at airline schedules, there are currently more than 35 take-offs scheduled for 8 a.m. each morning. Assuming at least a two- to three-minute minimum time separation between each take-off, you don’t have to be a member of Mensa to figure out that a lot of folks will not be taking off at 8 a.m.

But if the captain releases the parking brake at 8 a.m., the plane is on time for departure, even it takes off at 9:30.

Folks, I never sit in my car idling for an hour waiting for the rest of my family to come out to the car or waiting for my driveway to be clear for driving away.

Not even a year ago the Democrats in Congress and others of their allies vehemently charged President Bush for not listening to the military. They criticized the civilian leadership of our defense establishment for creating a culture of fear wherein generals were afraid to challenge military policy. The capital sin, said they, was failing to listen to and heed General Eric Shinseki when he testified before Congress that we would need several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq as opposed to the 100,000-plus that Rumsfeld wanted to send.

Congress said they were listening and accused the administration of willfully deaf ears and further accused the administration of being married to a strategy of defeat.

Within this last year the Democrats in Congress got their wish. They won control and Bush listened as he sent Rumsfeld packing and appointed a man in Secretary Gates who promised to listen to the generals. The administration also replaced the generals who had gone along with the failed policy (or so as the Democrats had accused them) and replaced them with generals who preached a new strategy and whom Congress overwhelmingly approved. Enter General David Petraeus.

In the same vein as General Shinseki – previously hailed as a sage by the Democrats (and who did happen to be correct as was former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni at the same time) – General Petraeus asked for more troops. Bush, who had been reluctant to send overwhelming force before, agreed to send a surge of the bare minimum – but send them he did. And Congress squealed. Why? Hadn’t they been the ones who were listening all along? Bush was finally listening!

And the military continues to speak its needs to those who will listen…and to those who won’t. Recently General Petraeus stated that while generals would always like more troops, what he really needs is time. Major General Rick Lynch, commander of thousands of US and Iraqi troops south of Baghdad states that we need time to capitalize on the success of the surge to date. He tells us that the first question he gets from Iraqis is “Are you going to stay?” That’s the same question Afghans asked me during my own tour in Afghanistan. Time is the precious commodity needed.

And the surge is working. The latest report comes no less from the New York Times in an essay written by leading members of the left leaning Brookings Institution. Regular critics of the war effort, this time Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack proclaim that “there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008,” exactly the minimum time that the military is asking for.

The conventional wisdom is that al Qaeda only needs to outwait the US. Time is on al Qaeda’s side, we are told. Well, al Qaeda has no more time than we do. Why would we cede a strategic advantage to our enemies by imagining that we have less time to accomplish our objectives than they do? We have as much time as we are willing to take. Away with electioneering when lives are at stake!

President Bush is willing to stake the remainder of his presidency and indeed his entire legacy on giving Petraeus what he needs - time. The military is speaking. Bush is listening. The skeptical Brookings Institute is no less listening. And even the Bush-hating New York Times is listening inasmuch as they are willing to publish such essays and reports of surge success. The momentum has shifted in our favor in Iraq. Nothing is lost so long as we don’t give it away. So is the Congress – anti-war Democrats and weakening Republicans alike - listening? Who is now married to a strategy of defeat?

Presidential candidate Barack Obama says that he will order combat missions inside Pakistan.

“Let me make this clear,” Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” …

Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and putting them “on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Good grief.

Here’s a short blogosphere roundup:

Thomas Lifson: “Nothing is more dangerous than a naïve appeaser, other than a naïve appeaser who erratically takes rash steps in order to look tougher than he really is.”

BCB: “To Heck With Our Enemies, Let’s Invade Our Allies”: “[I]n a week or so we have had Obama say that stopping genocide was no reason to stay in Iraq, that he would personally meet with heads of rogue states and that he would invade a nuclear-armed ally.”

Michelle Malkin, who has a link roundup of her own.

Bush goes to the bazaar - and plays the sucker again

The net is ablaze with stories about the Saudi arms deal with the Jerusalem Post running three pieces on how this will impact Israel as well as the US.

The first features a ghastly picture of the Iron Maiden as she prepares to go to Jeddah to convince the Saudis to take a “more active role” in the peace process.

A second piece examines the potential opposition Bush faces in Congress over the deal given the largely open-ended nature of the deal.

The final piece in the Post delivers the really bad news. These three items, which are really one long piece chopped up Israeli salad style, contained two underlying comments—one hidden yet spoken once and the other completely hidden to all but Israelis and their neighbors—the Bald Eagle is being fried once again.

US President George W. Bush’s administration said there is no trade-off in its plans to sell billions in sophisticated weaponry to oil-rich Persian Gulf states whose cooperation Washington is courting in Iraq.

“There isn’t an issue of quid pro quo,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said of the proposed sales to Saudi Arabia and other nations that have until recently committed little other than rhetoric to the US-backed democratic experiment in Iraq.

The sales, along with an aid package for Israel and Egypt announced Monday, are the fruit of years of partnership and recognition of the region’s strategic importance, Rice said.

The article goes on to explain that in the world view of the State Department, this means that the US hopes to buy Saudi goodwill for things that were previously agreed to but never delivered.

The administration announced the proposed US arms package, estimated at more than $20 billion (€14.64 billion), the morning that Bush’s two top national security aides left for meetings with Saudi King Abdullah and other leaders.

The administration framed the weapons sales, which must be approved by Congress, as a way to strengthen relatively moderate regimes against extremist regimes and ideologies. An increasingly ambitious Iran is the chief opponent.

“There isn’t a doubt, I think, that Iran constitutes the single most important, single-country challenge to … US interests in the Middle East and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see,” Rice said.

The meeting Tuesday, at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, is the first time Gates and Rice have joined for a diplomatic visit, suggesting an almost last-ditch effort to get Iraq’s Arab neighbors to fulfill their promises to help stabilize the war-ravaged country.

In the other article about Congressional opposition to the deal, Under Secretary of State, Nicolas Burns, was quoted thus:

Asked about demands made of the Saudis in return for the weapons they will receive, Burns said, “There are no formal quid pro quos in this, but it figures that we would want our friends to be supportive of Iraq.”

So, if I understand all of this, the US is giving the large men of Saudi Arabia $20 billion worth of high tech toys with no strings attached. Now, it is true that Condi is going to ask the large men to help out in the West Bank a little—does that mean they get to use some of those new toys?

House Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos, who was briefed on the issue by administration officials Tuesday, announced over the weekend that he had concerns about any offensive capabilities the US was considering supplying. Other members went further, saying they would be sponsoring legislation to block such a weapons deal.

“We must not supply arms to Saudi Arabia while they are financing the teaching of Wahhabi terrorism all over the world,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), whose office said he would help draft the legislation necessary to block the deal once Congress had been officially notified.

“Arms supplies to the Saudis may very well be turned against Israel and could easily end up in the hands of terrorists,” he warned. “And we should remember that the hi-tech arms we gave to the Shah of Iran ended up in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s hands. The same thing could end up happening in Saudi Arabia.”

Other members of Congress questioned administration support for the Gulf power at a time of increased US-Saudi tension.

Okay, here is the first warning—the Shah of Iran. Five years after the fall of Vietnam (the dread of the liberal left), Jimmy Carter lost the first round of this war without a shot. According to Professor Steve Brahms at NYU, it was largely due to the inability of the State Department to understand what Khomeini’s value preferences were in the emerging standoff.

To the point, as history has shown, it was unthinkable to the State Department mind that a rational actor might prefer death (read martyrdom) to money. Who would not want to talk to the US and not get lots of money?

While the liberal left is worried that Iraq as another Vietnam, they are ignoring the first total failure of the post-Vietnam foreign policy culture—Iran. Carter’s failure, and the first complete humiliation of the US, was simply because of a refusal to work in the Bazaar. There is no market/capitalist mode of production out here.

As I mentioned before, negotiating in the Bazaar is not working the Market. Possession is everything and all transactions are conducted in front of all other actors in the Bazaar. Whoever wins is considered to be a Big Man because he was able to force the other person (the loser) to take a lower price or pay more than the item was worth. There is nothing here about mutual benefit—whoever has the good has the power and dictates the price. Just look at Hamas’s recent change in the price for Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped (he was 19 then) last year. It is not about price, it is about power.

The worst, however, position to be in the Bazaar is to be the one who gives up something for nothing. This is the freier—a term that can only be roughly approximated as a sucker, but this lacks the total humiliation of the term. The freier is the guy who gives up a good or does a job for nothing. Even the concept of “getting ripped off” lacks the appropriate derogatory abuse that accompanies being labeled a freier.

Westerners think nothing of doing work on speculation. This could be providing a prospective client with samples, prices, and maybe even writing a grant contingent on future earnings. Pro bono efforts are considered to be the life blood of many professions—a kind of priming the economic pump. To the Middle Easterners in the Bazaar, these western traits are the mark of the freier. To work a freier is the mark of a Bazaar master and the process always starts with tokens of good will.

When I was a boy, my father taught me the meaning of the Yiddish word gonef, which is loosely translated as thief. “You meet a man in the street and when you part you discover that he has taken all of your clothes—in fact you are standing naked in the street and you think he has done you a favor.” What my father neglected to tell me was that the naked guy is the freier.

So, what’s going on here? The Saudis are working the US, once again. Since WWII, the Saudis have mastered the art of revealing to all that the State Department is a freier. The money flows but the large men do nothing in return. In English, they laud the US but in Arabic they revile US for the freier it has become.

It is perhaps the irony of living in a capitalist age that the very thing that makes a society like the US work and generates its wealth and freedoms is exactly the thing that impedes and hobbles the Middle East. Mind you, the political system of Israel, the socialist legacy of the Kibbutz collectivist mentality, is not much better. IMRA reported last week that Olmert’s recent peace rounds are nothing more than his attempt to survive to September. Likud holds its opposition party election on August 14, and Netanyahu is the sure winner—elections will not be long after. That is unless Olmert is able to make the bulk of the electorate into freiers once more.

Will the big men of Saudi Arabia play ball? Local money is ten to one against it—a long shot at best. Indeed, the latest rounds of the peace process resemble the opening rounds of negotiations in the Bazaar. The only critical question at this point is who will be made the bigger freier?