WPR’s World Citizen, Frida Ghitis, called my attention to this AP report on recent polling in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, after a recent surge, has lost quite a bit of ground, and while still ahead of Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, only leads by what amounts to four Knesset seats. It seems to me that a weak Netanyahu victory would probably be the worse possible scenario, since as Frida pointed out in her column last week, he had been making a pitch towards the moderate center. A bare margin victory would increase the leverage of the far-right parties he’d need to [...]
With 2008 drawing to a close, I decided to look back at the year’s columns and update some stories where important developments have occurred. The stark, if obvious, realization arising from this review is that world politics is shaped by people — people of all kinds: smart, stupid, brave, crafty, or cowardly. But behind every movement, trend and event stand individuals, whose actions shape the course of history. We can easily lose sight of that fact when we focus on the larger picture of global events. In places such as Yemen, Iraq, Israel, and beyond, history-makers do not stand still. [...]
Via today’s WPR Media Roundup, I noticed this ME Times item about the UAE agreeing to buy into a U.S. missile shield network in the Gulf. It’s an interesting deal, not least because it comes fast on the heels of the completion of negotiations on the U.S.-UAE nuclear energy deal a few days back (which I mistakenly said had been signed). But it also allows the Emirates to operate the system themselves, which is a significant transfer of training and know-how. So there’s a lot of quid here, but also a lot quo, and it’s hard to tell who got [...]
