Triggered by the desire to calibrate the value of the game theory research of Bruce Bueno De Mesquita (BDM) I found a useful review of his work by Michael Lerner. Following is a sample from the article — of BDM’s thoughts on more effective approaches to the Middle East conflict:
Recently, he’s applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this, it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”
Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”
As we have learned, “incentives matter”, in foreign policy just as in economics. Surely BDM’s proposal would at least improve the possibility of future cooperation. Will it take two generations of such policies to wash away enough of the Palestinian indoctrination of their young?
BDM founded Decision Insights Incorporated in 1981 and the New York consulting firm Mesquita & Roundell in 2003, but has been consulting independently for years for clients in the private sector and for a long list of governments:
…As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it’s defined.
To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”
Lerner closes with “A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s wilder—and most accurate—predictions”
Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.
Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. “The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility,” he says.
Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.
Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China’s hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.
Predicted France’s hair’s-breadth passage of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty.
Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.
Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.
For readers interested in a deeper assessment of Bueno de Mesquita’s work, see his 17-page CV at NYU [PDF].
It’s like the hardliners have an underpants gnome theory of expansion:
1) Build settlements
2) ???
3) Greater Israel
What feasible strategy do they think goes between 1 and 3?
Don’t miss this, one of Megan’s last pre-beach posts.
A quite excellent true history of the Middle East’s last sixty years by Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author most recently of “Islamic Imperialism: A History” (Yale). Much of this is based upon recently declassified documents from the British Mandate. Excerpt:
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-48) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paints a much more definitive picture of the historical record. These documents reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.
Highly recommended. I have archived the Karsh essay for future reference.
Karsh has authored several other books on the Middle East, including Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (2000).
Israel Radio’s Paris correspondent Gil Michaeli has just reported that the French Court of Appeals has overturned the libel judgment against Phillipe Karsenty and has determined that Karsenty did not libel France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin when he reported that the ‘death’ of 12-year old Mohamed Al-Dura at Netzarim in the Gaza Strip in September 2000 may have been staged, and that it was unlikely that the death was caused by IDF soldiers.
More at Israel Matzav
Technorati Tags: Al Durah
A useful overview from Strategy Page:
February 28, 2008: As a democracy, Israel cannot ignore threats to its citizens. So the continued rocket attacks on southern Israel create a public outcry for a solution. Moving Israeli troops out of Gaza three years ago was supposed to be a solution, but it wasn’t. Israelis can access Palestinian media, and all they see is the same old “kill the Jews and destroy Israel” propaganda (from both Fatah and Hamas, although the Hamas stuff is more strident and abundant.) So Israel is increasingly applying the same tactics in Gaza (go after the terrorist leadership and technical experts) that worked to stop the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign that began in 2000 (and was defeated by 2005). Even most pacifist Israelis have given up on trying to make deals with the Palestinians. There are too many Palestinian factions, conditioned by a century of “kill the Jews” propaganda, that will not abide by any deal, and will keep trying to kill Israelis.
Defensive measures often have serious limitations. For example, the Palestinian rocket attacks on the town (Sderot) closest to Gaza, continue to kill and wound and Israelis. The “Iron Dome” anti-rocket system Israel is building will not, it turns out, protect Sderot, because the town is too close (two kilometers) to where the rockets are launched. Iron Dome is designed to take down missiles fired from at least four kilometers away. That might change, because the basic problem is time. Missiles fired from two kilometers away arrive in 9-10 seconds, which is before Iron Dome can react. Some Israeli army commanders want to reoccupy part of northern Gaza, to force the Palestinians to launch their rockets four kilometers from Sderot. In the last year, these rockets have killed two Israelis, and wounded dozens more. Israeli attacks on the terrorist groups responsible have left over 300 Palestinians dead. The Israeli shift to mainly targeting the terrorist leaders and technicians has the best chance, in the near term, of crippling the Hamas attacks. The increased Israeli attacks are apparently the result of improved intelligence within Gaza, probably the result of Fatah ordering its supporters there to aid the Israelis in targeting the Hamas leadership.
In the meantime, Israel continues its blockade of Gaza, allowing only food and medical supplies through. This has made Gaza Palestinians angry, but also apathetic and fearful. Hamas is running a police state, so the feelings of the average Palestinian have little impact. The blockade has enraged many Europeans, who are calling for diplomatic, economic and legal moves against Israel for “war crimes.” Many Israelis see this as the old European anti-Semitism, which led to the Nazi mass murder of six million Jews during World War II (with the cooperation of officials and citizens in many European countries). But the Palestinians see such support as one of the few weapons they have left. However, an increasing number of Arabs are getting tired of the Palestinian inability to work out a peace deal. These Arabs have come to recognize that the Israelis are trying harder to make a deal than the Palestinians are. Moreover, Arabs public opinion has turned against the Islamic terrorists, mainly because of the murderous tactics used by Islamic terrorists in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Arab world. The Palestinians are running out of allies, and options. It’s the Palestinians who are best able to control the radicals, whose violence is preventing any peace deal from being made, or kept. Fatah is trying to organize a “resistance” against Hamas, within Gaza. But so far, Hamas has proved too powerful for that to work. But after a few months of concentrated Israeli attacks on Hamas leadership, that may change.
[more]
The Israelis do not aim at civilians and would stop all military action tomorrow if the terrorism stopped.
Greg Sheridan is back from Israel.
AND so international donors have pledged $8.6 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority. This eye-popping amount of money will continue the Palestinians’ status as the highest per capita aid recipients in the world. Not that I’m suggesting Palestinians don’t have it tough, even if most of their suffering is caused by the appalling decisions of their corrupt, incompetent and extremist leadership.
The aid pledged in Paris may nonetheless do some good. It may stabilise living standards on the West Bank. And by exacerbating the contrast between a more prosperous West Bank, controlled by the secular Fatah, and an increasingly poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, controlled by the religious extremists, Hamas, it may strengthen Fatah against Hamas.
Assuming all this works out perfectly, at the very best we might get a slightly improved status quo. The chances of a long-term peace agreement, I would say, are almost nil.
I have just returned from three weeks in Israel. I spent quite a bit of time on the West Bank. I would say the situation is on a hair trigger and we are as far from peace as ever.
…It seems that every two-term American president feels a desperate need in his last year to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Bill Clinton was at it in his last 24 hours in office. Ronald Reagan had a plan in his last year. By trying so hard to get an agreement to bolster the legacy of a presidency in its dying days, the Americans often scramble and improvise, take foolish risks and by their own political desperation convince all parties that maximum results are possible. The result is frequently disastrous.
There are two short-term factors that will tend to keep a lid on the conflict, and one that will tend to make it explode, but all the long-term trends are unhelpful.
…Remove the Israelis and the estimates of how long Fatah would remain in power range from two weeks to two hours.
…The short-term trend that could cause a blow-up any day is the Qassam rockets being fired daily from Gaza at Israeli civilians in Sderot and increasingly near the sizeable Israeli city of Ashkelon, with its vital and vulnerable power station. Every day half a dozen of these rockets are fired. On one day when I was there recently 20 were fired. These are not fired at military targets. Their intent is to murder civilians.
Luckily, these rockets are crude, short-range and inaccurate. But they are becoming longer-range as outsiders, especially Iran, provide weaponry. Eventually one of these rockets will hit a school bus or a classroom and kill 20 Israeli children. When that happens the Israeli political process will demand a huge operation in Gaza to clean out the rocket factories. No Israeli wants to go back to Gaza. But they will if necessary and such an operation would be bloody and terrible. Many people would die. Amid all the criticism Israel would face, one question would be unanswerable: which democratic country would not respond if its civilians were being daily fired upon by rockets? There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli military action. The Israelis do not aim at civilians and would stop all military action tomorrow if the terrorism stopped.
…The question is whether the PA can ever get to a stage where it can govern Palestinian society, and whether the PA has any genuine interest in peace. Until very recently PA school text books contained traditional anti-Semitic propaganda against the Jews. Due to international pressure that has largely been removed. But still the text books, and the Palestinian media, are full of incitement to terrorism and no suggestion that Israel will be a peace partner, or even a state Palestinians will have to live with. Instead maps of Palestine are routinely printed which simply erase Israel altogether.
This means the peace talks, and the media commentary around it, are rigged against Israel because they don’t discuss the one real obstacle to peace: the refusal of the Palestinian leadership, and much of the Middle East Islamic leadership, to genuinely accept Israel’s right to exist.
<more>
I just found this Jim Hoagland essay dated 9/30/2007, wherein Jim argues that changes in European attitudes could enable a settlement.
…Europe’s long-standing political and romantic fascination with Palestinian radicals and their cause has ebbed to its lowest point in four decades. The destruction wrought by suicide bombings and other terrorist acts in the second intifada, as well as Gaza’s implosion after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal, have contributed to a more equal rebalancing of European sentiment.
Arab officials are dismayed by the dramatic change that has occurred in France since Nicolas Sarkozy’s election as president in May. Sarkozy has openly expressed his intent to offer Israel greater support internationally. He has also indicated that he will move away from the pro-Arab policy established by Charles de Gaulle in 1967 and pursued with vigor by Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac.
But it is not only France. When Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi visited Israel this summer, he made clear his coalition government’s backing of the Quartet’s initiative, which now features former British prime minister Tony Blair as a special envoy.
“We see exactly what you are doing,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told a European official recently in a dismissive manner, according to notes of the conversation taken by the official. “You will lose a lot in the Arab world.”
Mubarak’s defiance points to a third, less positive, change: his entrenched immobility on peace with Israel, as well as on political change and on deepening social problems at home. Under Anwar Sadat, Egypt was a catalyst for peace and regional change. Now Egypt says it will come to the U.S.-sponsored conference in November in a completely passive mode. It will be there to support Saudi Arabia, not American peacemaking.
Don’t miss Paul Landau’s new paper, via Richard Landes:
Some 20 years after its founding, the Palestinian organization Hamas remains little understood in the West. Although it is invoked nearly daily in the media, it has been the subject of only a very small number of serious studies. The most common error made by observers in considering contemporary Islamist movements — and notably, Hamas — is that of attempting to grasp them in terms of concepts and modes of thought that are proper to the West. Most western analyses of the phenomenon of Islamism tend to underestimate or even obscure a fundamental element that is common to all the various Islamist currents and organizations: namely, the role of specifically Muslim religious beliefs and, more precisely, of Islamic eschatology.
<more>
Richard Landes:
The primary fallacy that shapes Western policy makers’ views is that Israeli occupation is the main problem for the Palestinians. The Palestinians certainly don’t think so. Tom Gross points out in his blog a recent Palestinian poll in which Israeli occupation is the most pressing problem for only 9% of Palestinians.
As polls and recent history have shown, there is a significant percentage of Palestinians prefer Israeli rule to any realistic alternative.
President Bush, who today visited the West Bank, might want to consider the results of this poll, taken by a leading Palestinian polling company. It shows that contrary to what Condoleezza Rice and various journalists would have us believe, most Palestinians are much less concerned about ending the Israeli “occupation” than they are about finding reliable and honest leaders to govern any future Palestinian state.
The poll was taken in the run-up to Bush’s visit by the Near East Consulting company in Ramallah on the West Bank. 959 Palestinians over the age of 18 from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were interviewed by phone.
Among the results:
What is the main issue that makes you feel concerned?
The economic hardship of my household: 29%
The absence of security for my family and me: 19%
The internal power struggle: 27%
The Israeli occupation: 9%
Family problems: 3%
I have no concerns: 13%
***
Do you support the security plan by the caretaker (Palestinian) government, and the collection of weapons (from Palestinian militia)?
Support: 83%
Oppose: 17%
***
What is your level of optimism about the future?
Very optimistic: 10%
Optimistic: 56%
Pessimistic: 25%
Very Pessimistic: 9%
9% concern regarding “occupation”. 56% optimistic. Where is this coverage in the New York Times?
BTW, the results would be much more negative in Gaza under the Hamas occupation.
(much more — the complete poll)
An important analysis by Richard Landes:
Ben Wederman, CNN’s veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote an article on CNN’s website in which he places the blame for the Palestinian’s economic situation squarely on Israel’s shoulders. Wederman does not blame Hamas, who took control by murdering Fatah supporters and who spend millions on weapons, or Fatah, whose leaders have embezzled billions of dollars meant for the Palestinian public.
Note to readers: Lazar initially put up this piece. My additional comments are in italics.
This is a perfect article for describing the Augean habits of the media, from the language used to the framing of the problem in which Palestinian behavior — against Israel or against their own people — doesn’t figure. Wederman — against heavy competition — takes the Most Valuable Idiot of the Day award.
Recommended.
Latest Comments
RSS