Does trauma inhibit Netanyahu?

During apartheid South Africa's real period of siege from 1974 to 1994 there were three white rulers: John Vorster (1966-1978), Pieter Willem Botha (1978-1989), and Frederick Willem de Klerk (1989-1994). South African political scientist Dan O'Meara, who chronicled the apartheid years of the ruling National Party in Forty Lost Years: The National Party in Power 19448-1994, wrote about John Vorster that division within the party during the first half of his rule inhibited him from making necessary reforms during the second half. From 1966 to 1970 the party was torn by an ideological division between conservatives--verkrampte--literally cramped--and moderates--verligte--literally enlightened. This led to the split in the party with a small portion of the verkrampte forming the Herstigte Nasionale Party--Reconstituted National Party--under the leadership of Albert Hertzog. Hertzog was the minister of mines and, ironically, the son of the first leader of the National Party who had ended his career in ignominy rejected by Afrikaner nationalists during World War II. Except for appointing a pair of commissions late in his period of rule Vorster made no attempts at domestic reforms. O'Meara contends that this was in order to avoid the trauma of another ideological battle and another possible split. The HNP did not elect a single MP until 1985 in a by-election and then this MP lost his seat in the next general election in 1987. By calling a snap election in 1970, Vorster largely destroyed the HNP as an election threat to the National Party.

Vorster in his final four years in office concentrated on foreign policy. In October 1974 he initiated a peace effort with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda aimed at mediating a peaceful solution within Rhodesia. This was before the guerrillas were a serious threat to white rule there. Vorster pressured Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith to release political detainees and to attend talks on a bridge overlooking Victoria Falls in August 1975. The talks got nowhere due to intransigence on both sides. Next Vorster teamed up with Henry Kissinger to pressure Smith into publicly conceding majority rule in September 1976. But when the nationalist leaders and their Frontline State backers rejected the concessions that Kissinger made to Smith, the initiative soon floundered. Both sides then headed to a constitutional conference presided over by a British diplomat at Geneva. The conference went nowhere as Smith refused to deviate from the Kissinger plan and the nationalists refused to accept that plan.

P.W. Botha came to power on the back of a corruption scandal--Infogate, which forced Vorster to resign as prime minister and to take up the then ceremonial position of state president. Botha spent the first half of his decade in power implementing several reforms to apartheid. First, he allowed certain black urban residents to have legal citizenship within South Africa, something which had previously been abolished under apartheid. Grand apartheid created bantustans or homelands, similar to Indian reservations in North America, and all Africans inside South African were assigned to one of them based on ethnicity. Next he legalized black trade unions and allowed them to collectively bargain over work conditions and wages. Then he implemented a major constitutional reform that created two new chambers of parliament for mixed-race "colored" South Africans, most of whom lived in the Cape Province, and for Indians, most of whom lived in Natal Province. But whites retained an overall majority in parliament and in the president's council that was created to replace the senate as the upper chamber. The president's council would reconcile disputes among the three houses over what were "general affairs" and what were "own affairs."  Seeing the powerlessness of these chambers, the vast majority--some 80-85 percent--of both communities boycotted the first elections for the new parliament in August 1984. The elections also led to protests that quickly turned into riots and an internal insurrection by blacks. The reform also changed South Africa from a parliamentary system to a presidential system.

Botha then spent the second half of his time in office repressing internal unrest, silencing domestic critics, and using South Africa's military to intimidate the surrounding countries that might pose a threat. From a triumphal tour of Western Europe in the summer of 1984, Botha was soon faced with trade sanctions from the U.S. and European Economic Community in 1986. 

So far there have been four Likud leaders in power as prime ministers: Menahem Begin (1977-1983), Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-1992), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-1999, 2009-present), and Ariel Sharon (2001-2006). Begin and Shamir were mainly responsible for the mass settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. That effort continued on subsequent Israeli governments. Begin had the solid backing of the American Jewish community and of the Reagan administration until he invaded Lebanon in June 1982. 

From 1982 onwards Likud governments--except that of Sharon--faced some hostility from Washington over their settlement policies. Netanyahu opposed the Oslo agreements in his first term as prime minister but agreed to withdraw from territory on the West Bank under American pressure from Clinton in October 1998. As a result his coalition soon collapsed. Sharon had very good relations with George Bush as a result of American antipathy towards Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat after October 2000. Clinton blamed Arafat--rightfully in my opinion--for the collapse of the Oslo process in late 2000. Bush came into office determined to avoid Middle East mediation and to support Israel. His conservative Republican backers demanded no less and this squared with Bush's own personal preferences. Sharon, like Botha from 1984 to 1988, spent his first several years battling the Al-Aksa Intifada by reinvading the West Bank in 2002 and assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders.  He then unexpectedly withdrew from Gaza in 2005, defying his previous political support base of settlers and forcing the Gaza settlers to evacuate. Many Israeli conservatives now regard Sharon as the ultimate traitor.

Netanyahu has proven to be more like Vorster. He has consolidated his position within his own party following the exit of Sharon and his supporters in November 2005 to form the Kadima party. Now he has spent his second term in power balancing the various parties of the Right off against one another as Vorster did with the factions in the National Party. He implemented a temporary settlement freeze in 2010, but refused to renew despite the offer of considerable bribes from Washington. With Obama preoccupied with the economic crisis in the U.S. and with the support of American conservatives, Netanyahu can easily evade any serious pressure from Washington until at least well into 2013. By then there will be new elections in Israel. Netanyahu hopes that Mahmoud Abbas will disappear as a serious political force by then, leaving only Hamas to deal with on the Palestinian side. 

If a Republican president replaces Obama in 2013 the gamble will have paid off. Or if Obama is too weak in his second term to put pressure on Israel, it will also have worked. But in either case Netanyahu resembles Vorster in his political strategy.

An Opposition Strategy for the Northern Ireland Assembly

This past weekend the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) held its annual conference. With the party no longer running the Assembly, nor possessing even a single Westminster MP, the issues at stake seemed to be much less weighty than in previous years and this was reflected in the coverage--or lack thereof--that the conference attracted in the Ulster press. The most important event at the conference did not actually take place inside it, but rather outside when a group of members held a discussion on an opposition strategy for the party.

When the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated in the late winter and spring of 1998, the emphasis was on attracting a critical mass of support for the GFA by sharing out power in the Executive as widely as possible. It was contemplated that the UUP and Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which negotiated most of the first strand of the agreement (internal arrangements for Northern Ireland) among themselves, would remain the dominant parties in their respective communities for some time. This did not pan out--within three years Sinn Fein had overtaken the SDLP as the largest party among nationalists and two years later the DUP did the same to the UUP among unionists. It took another two years to confirm the DUP's dominance in the general election of 2005. Those involved in the Northern Ireland peace process spoke in terms of "sufficient consensus"--a term borrowed from South Africa--which meant in practice that the UUP, SDLP, and Sinn Fein were all in agreement on something. The UUP and SDLP because they were the largest parties in their communities and Sinn Fein because it spoke for the IRA.  After 2003 it was established that sufficient consensus meant the DUP as well--because without support from the DUP consensus was not stable on the unionist side. After 2007 the meaning of sufficient consensus soon became narrowed in practice to include just the dyarchy of the DUP and Sinn Fein.

Under the GFA, ministries in the Executive are divided up using the d'Hondt method which means that they are divided up proportionately based on the share of seats in the Assembly for each party with the largest party choosing a ministry followed by the next largest etc. in successive rounds until all the ministries are disposed of. This was designed to bribe all the major parties to support the GFA. But there was no provision for an official opposition--only a marginalized opposition of tiny parties like the PUP, Alliance, and initially the UKUP and UDP as well. The main priorities were to keep the shooting and bombing stopped and stabilize the peace in that order. Now that those have been accomplished it is time to seriously start thinking about making provision for an official opposition.

But that might not be so easy because the ruling DUP/Sinn Fein dyarchy want to continue feeding at the trough, suckling off the teets of the British taxpayer, and if possible completely destroying their respective rival parties. During the IRA's long war the leading members of the SDLP were periodically harassed by the Republican Movement that denounced them as collaborators with the British occupation. It was for this reason that former SDLP leader John Hume referred to the Republicans as fascists. And since 2003 there have been periodic proposals to create a new unified unionist party out of the DUP and UUP, which in practice would mean the former absorbing the latter.  If the Ulster Unionists want to modify the GFA to create an official opposition with funding, they will have to win the support of both the SDLP and Alliance for their project and then together convince London to call a review conference to modify the Agreement. This may, unfortunately, be beyond their capacity. Let's hope not.

The Irish Presidential Race

On Thursday October 27 voters in Ireland--the Republic of Ireland--go to the polls to elect a new president. The presidency in Ireland is largely a ceremonial office devoid of any powers except for deciding on which party to turn to in order to form a government following an election. The presidency was created by the 1937 constitution written by Eamon de Valera. Until 1990 it was largely the property of Fianna Fail to hand out to worthy cultural figures and former senior party politicians. In 1990 Mary Robinson, a human rights lawyer running as an independent with the backing of both the Irish Labour Party and the Workers' Party, took the presidency away from Fianna Fail. Fianna Fail won it back in 1997 but ran Mary McAleese, a Northern nationalist and law professor at Queen's University of Belfast. She is now retiring.

In this election the main candidates have been four: Michael D. Higgins, a poet backed by the Labour Party; Sean Gallagher, a reality show star and former Fianna Fail member running as an independent; Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and number two in Sinn Fein; and David Norris, a former senator and gay rights activist. Norris has been badly damaged by the revelation that he wrote a letter on behalf of a former lover, an Israeli wanted for statutory rape of a Palestinian. He hasn't recovered. Martin McGuinness was off to a strong start but has faltered as victims of the IRA have stalked him and the Irish Independent and the Irish Times newspapers as well as TV questioners have openly challenged his version of his past. A poll from the Irish Times has Gallagher at 40%, Higgins at 25%, and McGuinness at 15%, with the other four candidates making up the remaining 20 percent.

It is doubtful is McGuinness either expected to win when he became a candidate or even wants to win. After all, I think that McGuinness probably relishes the challenge of replacing Peter Robinson as First Minister if Sinn Fein can replace the DUP as the largest party in the North. The candidacy was really about raising Sinn Fein's profile in the Republic and outperforming Fianna Fail.

Sinn Fein has two natural constituencies in the Republic. First, are traditional republicans who were always Fianna Fail supporters and now feel abandoned after Fianna Fail ditched most of its traditional rhetoric about Irish unity as well as Ireland's constitutional claim to the Six Counties of the North during the peace process in the 1990s. They may have stayed with FF during the 2000s, but when the party suddenly imploded as a result of the Irish economic collapse last year they felt free to find a new home. They are particularly prevalent in rural areas and in the border counties along the border with Northern Ireland. The second group are the urban poor who felt left out by the Irish economic boom of the 1990s. They have traditionally voted for the Workers' Party starting in the mid-1980s then most transferred to the Democratic Left when that party split off from the Workers' Party in 1992 and then began to vote for Sinn Fein once the Democratic Left merged with the Labour Party in 1998. Sinn Fein was still under ten seats in the Dail until the 2010 election. Now the question is whether McGuinness has raised the profile of Sinn Fein enough to allow it to surpass Fianna Fail in the next general election.

In American terms Fianna Fail is comparable to the Republicans, Fine Gael (now the party in power) to the right wing of the Democrats and the Labour Party to the left wing of the Democrats. The Labour Party has flirted with Marxism in the past before settling on social democracy of the Western European variety while Fine Gael flirted with social democracy in the 1970s and 1980s before returning to free market principles in the 1990s. Fianna Fail in the past had hegemonic status within the Irish party system based on a unique blend of nationalist rhetoric, free market rhetoric, and cronyism. It remains to be seen whether Sinn Fein can do a comparable job of mixing socialist and nationalist rhetoric (that some have claimed is reminiscent of the parties of the Radical Right in Europe during the 1930s).

Gaddaffi is Dead! Now what?

The 42-year reign of power and terror of Muammar Gaddafi/Kaddafi  came to an end yesterday with the fall of Sirte and his death. It is unclear at this point whether he died from wounds received in his capture or was executed afterwards. Here is a link with an embedded video purporting to be the confession of a Libyan rebel who executed him.  It makes little real difference. Gaddafi (I'm seen probably a dozen different spellings of his name in English) was one of the world's longest-serving heads of state. His reign goes back to the Nasserist era when pan-Arabism was king in the Arab world and military dictators were all the rage. His fall is also the biggest victory of the Arab Spring (or al-intifada al-Arabiya or al-thawra al-Arabiya if you prefer) to date. Previously the heads of state had changed in Egypt and Tunisia, but at least in the former the military regime remains in place.

For months now the Syrian opposition has been calling for the West to double-down and mount a military offensive against the Ba'athist Assad regime as it had aided the rebels in Libya. But this was not on the cards for two reasons. First, Italy was threatened with an influx of illegal immigrants from Libya if Gaddafi remained in power. Second, Gaddafi had created scores to be settled by many Western governments by his indiscriminate use of terrorism. Whereas Assad pere and Assad fils believed in the discriminate use of terrorism against their regime's most dangerous enemies at home and in occupied Lebanon. Damascus carried out no Lockerbies, Gaddafi carried out at least two--against the U.S. in December 1988 and against France in Septermber 1989. He also supported the IRA for decades--he was the Provisional IRA's only governmental supporter abroad. This contributed to hundreds of deaths in Northern Ireland and Britain from the tons of Semtex explosive and the hundreds of assault rifles that he exported to Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s. Thus, at least four governments felt that they had an incentive to get rid of him when the opportunity arose. Such is not the case with the Assad regime, or with any other regime in the Arab world at the moment.  See this discussion with George H.W. Bush official Richard Haass on why Libya isn't a precedent.

Gaddafi was always the leader of a weak, thinly -populated country that was not a major player in inter-Arab affairs. Rather than use his oil wealth to improve the lot of his population, he used it mainly to play at enhancing his influence in Africa and the Middle East by supporting rebel movements and rulers in neighboring countries. President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda was an early recipient of such aid when Gaddafi sent troops to fight alongside Uganda's against invading Tanzanian troops in 1979. But the Libyan soldiers performed rather poorly. In the 1980s he was preoccupied with influencing politics in neighboring Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa, as well as supporting the Abu Nidal organization, a terrorist organization that broke from Fatah and specialized in assassinating any Palestinian who spoke of peace with Israel. This was after Abu Nidal had left Iraq and then Syria. Gaddafi liked to sound more Palestinian than the Palestinians, rejecting any prospects of peace with Israel. But Israel never really bothered with him because he was never considered a serious threat--certainly much less of a threat than the Palestinian rejectionist terror organizations, Iraq, and Syria. Here is a link to an article that attempts to explain Gaddafi's eccentric behavior.

The Western press always treated him as a buffoon rather than as a serious figure. But this disguised that he had much in common with his fellow Arab dictators like Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak in Egypt,  Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Like these other dictators he either took power in a coup or inherited it from a predecessor who had taken power in a coup--Gaddafi carried out his when Libya's King Idris was outside the country undergoing an operation. He spoke of power deriving from the people but maintained a ruthless security apparatus. He was a Soviet client until Moscow could no longer supply his needs. And most of his oil wealth was used to create a large military and thus appease the supporters who put him in the palace and might be tempted to replace him.

I predict that the Arab Spring will now go into hibernation while the "new" regimes in Egypt and Tunisia attempt to consolidate themselves through elections and while the new Libyan regime attempts to reconstruct and repair the damage from the war against the dictator.

The Progressive Unionist Party has a new leader. Will it make any difference?

It was announced yesterday that Billy Hutchinson, a former member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) arrested for a double murder in 1974 and a former member of the Assembly, will be the new leader of the sole remaining loyalist party, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). He takes over from Brian Ervine, the brother of David Ervine, who was the leader of the party during its glory days from 1998 to 2003 and who served in the Assembly with Hutchinson. Hutchinson will be the fourth party leader in 18 months. After David Ervine's death Dawn Purvis took over as party leader and managed to retain his East Belfast seat in the Assembly. But then the UVF carried out a murder of a former Red Hand Commando prisoner who had criticized the continued criminality of the organization. Purvis then resigned from the party when its leadership refused to break the link with the UVF. There was a temporary interim leader before Brian Ervine took over. Now Ervine is giving up the position because he cannot afford to give up his job.

After being released from prison in the 1990s, Hutchinson worked as a social worker in loyalist areas and found that he had a talent for dealing with people. He served as David Ervine's assistant both in the Assembly and in running the party. Both men were given a political education in prison by UVF founder Gusty Spence, who was imprisoned for murder of a Catholic barman in 1966 before the Troubles formally began. Spence died recently. Hutchinson and Ervine then served their political apprenticeship on the outside under party founder Hugh Smyth, who served briefly as mayor of Belfast in the early 1990s.

Two loyalist paramilitary parties were founded in the mid-1980s: the UVF-aligned Progressive Unionists and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA)-aligned Ulster Democratic Party. In Northern Ireland there are three tiers of representation: the Westminster parliament in London, the Assembly in Belfast, and the local councils throughout the province. Westminster has always been beyond the reach of the loyalists. The Assembly proved to be beyond the reach of the UDP once the "topping-up" feature was removed in 1998. The PUP was able to elect Ervine from East Belfast and Hutchinson from North Belfast in 1998, but in 2003 in the election to the Second Assembly Hutchinson lost his seat. 

There are three countries in the West with paramilitary parties: Israel (up until 1992 when Yitzhak Shamir retired as the leader of the Likud), the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the Republic most parties can claim some connection to the IRA--either the original IRA of the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, the Official IRA of the 1970s, or the Provisional IRA of the 1970s-2000s. In the Republic, as in Israel, most of these paramilitary parties have been continuity parties--parties that were a continuation of the paramilitary group in a new form after it had ceased its armed operations. But in Northern Ireland the three paramilitary parties (UDF, PUP, Sinn Fein) were political wing parties where they ran candidates for operations while the terrorist operations of the armed wings were still ongoing.

In Northern Ireland nationalists have had no problem voting for former terrorists either because they supported the terrorist campaign or because they wanted to reward the IRA for ending it. But on the unionist/loyalist side things are quite different. Most unionists regarded the loyalist paramilitaries as terrorists and criminals rather than as freedom fighters. Even working class loyalists who supported the loyalist terror campaigns against nationalists usually ended up voting for the DUP rather than for the UDP or the UVF. The UDP lacked a geographically-concentrated base of supporters that would allow it to elect members to the Assembly. The PUP had such a base only in North Belfast and East Belfast. The loyalist parties have fulfilled their historic role in bringing about the loyalist ceasefire in October 1994 and finally bringing about decommissioning in 2009. But they still have a role to play in representing the political and social concerns of working class unionists. To do this they must do two things. First, cut all links with the paramilitaries and the criminal rackets. Second, combine figures from the UDP like Gary McMichael, Tommy Kirkham, and David Adams and those from the PUP in a single party. In 2001, shortly before the UDP disbanded McMichael told me that the animosity between the two paramilitary organizations was too strong to allow for a single party. But a decade has passed since then. Yitzhak Shamir, one of the former leaders of the Lehi terrorist movement, did not get to be prime minister by being elected from the Lehi's party--which lasted for only two years--but by joining the party of the rival Irgun Zvai Leumi paramilitary group.

Israel's Defense Partners

Last year Sasha Polakow-Suransky, an American Jew whose parents were from South Africa, published a book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, based on extensive interviews with Israeli and South African officials, generals and anti-apartheid activists. According to Polakow-Suransky the relationship, which began in 1974 and lasted until the early 1990s, was based largely on commercial considerations on Israel's part. In the early 1970s Israel had developed a major domestic arms industry as a result of France having suddenly cut its arms sales to Israel. Because of economies of scale it made more sense for Jerusalem to manufacture more than it needed for the IDF and sell the surplus abroad on the open arms market or through country-to-country arrangements. Jerusalem was also looking for a rich uncle that could subsidize its research and development efforts in certain key areas such as missile development. Israel had a deal with the Shah's Iran to co-develop a missile that abruptly ended in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Pretoria was able to take up the slack.

Jerusalem has obviously needed to find new partners since the end of apartheid and white minority rule in 1994. Ideal partners would be either pariah states with healthy economies that are not naturally hostile to the Jewish State and would be unlikely to turn around and pass on the technology to its enemies. One obvious candidate is Taiwan. Taiwan because of its developed electronics industry is one of the East Asian Tiger economies. It has a major potential threat from the Chinese mainland. This threat, however, unlike that faced by Israel or apartheid South Africa is not primarily in terms of conventional land armies and guerrilla/terrorist low-intensity conflict but is mostly a threat of seaborne invasion. Israel Defense Industries manufactures everything from small arms (Uzi submachine guns, Galil assault rifles) to armored vehicles (Merkava tanks) to aircraft (Kfir jet fighters), medium-range missiles (Jericho II) and missile boats (Reshef). No doubt Israel  could equip the Taiwanese armed forces with small arms and armored vehicles. And maybe Taiwan would be interested in buying Israeli corvette missile ships to augment its American frigates. But it is doubtful that Taiwan would want the 35-year old technology in the Kfir fighter or Israel's Merkava tanks in large quantity. 

So Israel would need another defense partner. Israel mainly competes in the market for Third World sales against other Third World countries like Brazil and minor European manufacturers like Swedish and Austrian firms. It cannot compete against the major European manufacturers who individually or in consortium fill the orders of European countries for tanks, planes, missiles, and ships. Part of the glue that held together the Israeli-South African defense alliance was an ideological affinity between the Likud and the ruling National Party in South Africa. Both countries saw themselves in a similar situation as outsiders in regions that rejected them. The South African ANC and the Palestinian PLO were ideological allies and had common Soviet and Third World backers. Does Israel have a potential ally in the Third World with common enemies?

Israel should look for countries that are targeted by Islam. India has faced a conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir since 1947. In the past it was a Soviet ally with extensive defense ties to Moscow. But when the Cold War ended these ties largely ended. Israel has specialized in revamping outdated Soviet technology with new Western technology in upgrades by aiding new avionics, ranging and aiming systems, etc. In the past Israel has exported such technology to China. Israel would be a natural partner to upgrade aged Soviet tanks in the Indian inventory along with the avionics of its obsolescent Soviet and British fighters. India has a quite large domestic arms industry, but it could no doubt use Israeli technologies in some areas.

There was always speculation that the Israeli-South African alliance involved cooperation in nuclear technology. Actually Pretoria had enough domestic scientific talent to produce crude nuclear devices. If Israel assisted it was probably to make them more deliverable by helping to shrink down the warheads.  In the 1970s Taiwan had a nuclear weapons research program that it eventually ended due to pressure from Washington. If Taipei should eventually decide that it needs the ultimate deterrent to dissuade Beijing from invading, look to it to turn to Jerusalem for assistance. Whether Israel would respond positively and risk the wrath of both Washington and Beijing is another matter. But Likud governments were willing to defy Washington over cooperation with Pretoria and over settlements.

South Africa and Israel: What is the Lag Time?

I recently had the experience of reading an authorized biography of Pik Botha, the long-serving South African foreign minister during the 1970s and 1980s who was also a leading leadership contender in the National Party because of his combination of liberalism (or what passed for it among most whites) and defiance of the West and the world. As I read his chapters on the dark days of apartheid in the mid-1980s I was struck by the parallels with Israel today. Botha fulfilled the same role in National Party governments as Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak have filled in Likud coalitions since 2001--the respectable face of the government that deals with the West.

So I started to think, what is the lag time between developments in South Africa and their equivalents in Israel? South Africa was initially ruled by the centrist Afrikaner South Africa Party (SAP). The National Party split from the SAP in 1913 and came to power for the first time in 1924. It then alternated with the SAP's successor, the United Party, until 1948 when it began an uninterrupted period of 46 years in power. The Likud first came to power  forming a coaliton in 1977, some 53 years after the National Party came to power. Twenty four years later--the same period as in South Africa--it began a period of uninterrupted rule of the Right, first the Likud under Sharon then the splinter Kadima under Sharon's successor Ehud Olmert, and finally the Likud again under Netanyahu.


The Afrikaners first experienced a period of siege--by the British Empire--in the early 1840s when they were chased out of Natal and across the Vaal River into the Transvaal. Here they formed their South African Republic in 1859. It remained independent until annexed by the British without resistance in 1877. After the British had defeated the Zulus, the main African threat to the Afrikaners, in 1879 the Afrikaners in the SAR revolted two years later and reestablished their independence from the British. However, they were under British threat for the next twenty years. In 1910 the Union of South Africa became independent within the British Commonwealth and was free from significant foreign threat for the next fifty years until 1961. In 1960-61 a low-level state of siege was established with significant political isolation. In 1975-76 this became major with the former Portuguese colonies of Southern Africa coming under Leninist governments and severe internal unrest starting in June 1976. The first serious trade sanctions followed a decade later. This lasted for only four years before the National Party leadership capitulated.

Israel was in a state of severe political siege within the region for more than a quarter century from 1948 to 1975, when it signed the Sinai II disengagement agreement with Egypt. The state of siege disappeared in 1979 with the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. It now may be coming back with the Arab Spring with the unrest in Egypt and Syria, the  falling out with Turkey over the Mavi Marmara incident, and continued wars with both Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south. So Israel is at least entering a period of light political siege after thirty years without it. If Israel follows the South African pattern, expect this state of siege to tighten up considerably after another decade and a half.

South Africa experienced three major periods of violence: the early 1960s when the African National Congress (ANC) carried out its sabotage campaign against electricity pylons and mail boxes and the Pan-Africanist Congress's Poqo carried out a terrorist campaign against ordinary whites; the Soweto uprising of June to December 1976; and the internal unrest of 1984-88 (which in Natal continued on almost until majority rule was implemented in the form of interorganizational violence between the ANC and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party).

Although Israel has experienced both of the Intifadas in the Palestinian territories, from 1987 to 1993 and from 2000 to 2006, the only large-scale Arab violence within Israel itself since 1948 was in October 2000. This only lasted for about two weeks at the start of the Al Aksa Intifada.  SWAPO's insurgency campaign against South African rule in Namibia began in 1966 and lasted for 22 years. Most of the heavy fighting was from 1976 to 1988.  The first serious sustained Palestinian insurgency inside the territories was in 1987. So there the gap is only a decade. The shortest time lag is probably the seven years between when Defense Minister P.W. Botha led his country into an adventure in Angola in 1975 without the permission of the cabinet, and when Defense Minister Ariel Sharon repeated this feat in Lebanon in 1982. Botha kept his job and went on to become prime minister three years later. Sharon was sacked as defense minister and had to wait two decades before becoming prime minister.

So which time lag is the significant one: the half-century lag before the Right came to power, the half- century lag before Israel entered its second state of siege, the twenty-four year gap between insurgencies in the home territory, or the decade lag between insurgencies in the conquered territories? This will become an increasingly important question as time goes by.

The presidential race in Ireland heats up

The presidential race with only about three weeks left, is getting tighter. And some are getting worried. Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, is now in second place behind the Labour Party candidate.

Until 1992 the presidency was a retirement home for old successful politicians who had finished their careers. And because until last year Fianna Fail was the dominant party in Ireland, it was a rest home for Fianna Fail politicians. The first president, Douglas Hyde, was a literary figure, one of the few Protestant revivers of Irish. Then came Sean T. O'Kelly, who served for two terms from 1945 to 1959, he was the deputy prime minister or tanaiste under Eamon de Valera. Then in 1959 Eamon de Valera finally retired from the premiership after 27 years and was made president when he was nearly blind. He finally retired from the presidency in 1973 after two terms. Then came Erskine H. Childers, the son of an Anglo-Irish literary figure who ran guns for the Irish rebels before the Easter Rising of 1916. The son served as a deputy in the Irish Dail. After he died in office after only 17 months there was an all-party nomination of Cearbhall O Dalaigh, a Fianna Fail politician. But because by then a Fine Gael--Labour Party coalition was in one of its periodic spells in power, he had problems and ended up resigning after only two years. He was followed by another Fianna Fail politician, Patrick Hillery, who served two terms from 1976 to 1990.

In 1990 human rights lawyer Mary Robinson, a former Labour Party minister, broke the mold. She was nominated by both the Labour Party, the third largest party in Ireland, and by Sinn Fein--the Workers' Party, which was then still the political wing of the Official IRA, and some independents. Two years later most of the party in the Republic broke with the IRA to become the Democratic Left. Eventually they ended up merging with Labour. Robinson resigned just three months short of having completed her term to take up a position with the UN. She was followed by Mary McAleese, a law professor at Queen's University at Belfast, who had once beat future First Minister David Trimble out of a tenured faculty position. McAleese was nominated by both Fianna Fail and some independents. Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Bertie Ahern led former Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, who had pushed the peace process in Northern Ireland, that he was supporting him when he was really supporting McAleese. But because she wasn't a politician and was from Northern Ireland, McAleese seemed more like Robinson than like her other predecessors. President McAleese is now retiring after two terms. Click here for a list of Irish presidents.

Now Martin McGuinness is trying to break the mold again by combining the IRA background of De Valera and the Northern background--although he is from Derry and not Belfast--of McAleese. I expect that the Labour candidate will end up winning in the end, but McGuinness has added a lot of excitement to the race.

The Republicans and Foreign Policy

About a month or two ago--I never saved the article--Real Clear World ran an article on the foreign policy experts advising the candidates. The only one to have many names I recognized was then frontrunner and establishment favorite Mitt Romney. He had three names I recognized: Richard Haass, Stephen Hadley, and Mitchell Reiss. Richard Haass was/is an expert on regional conflicts especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and Northern Ireland. He served as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the George H W Bush administration. For Dubya he served as the first American envoy to Northern Ireland, where he played a major role in convincing Gerry Adams that the IRA was actually disarm. Upon leaving there he took up a position with the Council on Foreign Relations that puts out the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine. Stephen Hadley served as Condi Rice's assistant at the National Security Council and then took over during Dubya's second term as National Security Advisor to George Bush. Mitchell Reiss was an expert on nuclear proliferation and a country expert on North Korea. When Haass left Belfast for New York, Reiss became his successor as American envoy. Reiss recently wrote a book exploring the question of when terrorist movements should be co-opted by negotiation and power sharing and when they should be shunned.

Perry relies on figures that he met while serving as governor of Texas. I did not recognize any names. The other candidate who had some recognizable names is Ron Paul. Paul has Leon Hadar, a former journalist working for the Jerusalem Post and the author of two books on American policy in the region, Sandstorm and Quagmire. He advocates an American military and political disengagement from the region. The opinion would be considered mainstream in the Democratic Party but is unsaleable to the Republicans. Because Paul is a libertarian running in a conservative party--a square peg in a round hole--he has no chance of being nominated.

Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and American ambassador to China, basically serves as his own foreign policy advisor. He was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan as a young man, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is quite knowledgeable about trade matters and economic policy. But he registers at about two percent in the polls and is betting his whole future on New Hampshire, where he will have to compete with Romney, the other Mormon.

So far foreign policy, as distinct from immigration, has hardly registered in the Republican debates. The party is agitated by economic and social policies: abortion, immigration, health care, tax levels and debt. By slowly withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to oversee the assassination of leading Al Qaeda figures around the Middle East, Obama has effectively removed terrorism as a major political issue. Democrats still debate the American presence in Afghanistan; Republicans do not. It is almost a repeat of Vietnam forty years ago, but with the roles of the two parties reversed. The Democrats got us involved in Vietnam and then Nixon oversaw the withdrawal and the GOP spent twenty years talking about the Democrats as the party that was unreliable on national security. Maybe the Democrats can do the same about the Republicans for the next twenty years.

Should Perry or someone else other than Romney end up as the nominee, he (or she) can inherit the establishment foreign policy advisors by default. After all, Kissinger was never a Nixon advisor in the 1960s. He was a Nelson Rockefeller advisor whom Nixon inherited after he won the election in 1968. Obama inherited Clinton's stable of foreign policy advisors once he named her as his secretary of state. But he could have done so even without naming her--anyone who wanted to serve in government in a senior position had nowhere else to go in the short term. 

In American politics the conservatives determine who the Republican nominee is; the progressives determine who the Democratic nominee is. It is then up to the independents, who rarely vote based on foreign affairs, to determine which party's foreign policy establishment serves in office.

As a postscript let me add that on Friday Oct. 7, 2011 Romney gave his first foreign policy address of the race. Here is a link to a commentary on it. (See the article by  James Joyner in the Atlantic on the Sat. Oct. 8 panel.)                        )