Author and screen­writer William Gold­man encap­su­lat­ed the movie busi­ness in two lines: “Nobody knows anything…Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an edu­cat­ed one.” There’s plen­ty of evi­dence the wis­dom equal­ly sums up prog­nos­ti­ca­tions and pro­nounce­ments on   today’s major issues; Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, the three Hs — Hamas, Hezbol­lah and the Houthis — and the Ukraine-Rus­sia imbroglio. 

The pun­dits and ana­lysts who appar­ent­ly think sprin­kling prose with “could”, “might” and “but” makes them sound cred­i­ble, seem equal­ly unable to grasp that his­tor­i­cal events or seis­mic and immutable shifts in the polit­i­cal land­scape rarely occur with­in in the space of a news cycle. The New Hamp­shire pri­ma­ry was a case in point.
Nik­ki Haley didn’t quite bel­ly flop, but that didn’t deter instant qua­si-wis­dom fudges like declar­ing Don­ald Trump being “on what could very well be a short march to the nomination”.
Ever notice how when it comes to com­men­tary or sound­bites-on-demand, being both vague and often wrong in the long run doesn’t seem to dis­qual­i­fy bestow­al of the hon­orif­ic “expert”?
Poll after poll putting the MAGA crowd in the Repub­li­can driver’s seat sure­ly ought to deem “expert” opin­ions the polit­i­cal report­ing equiv­a­lent of the footage movie edi­tors con­sign to the cut­ting room floor.
Short-term mem­o­ry and/or lack of research ren­ders expert to the same category.
As long ago as 2014 a Pew Research Cen­ter study of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal atti­tudes con­clud­ed that: “Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats are more divid­ed along ide­o­log­i­cal lines — and par­ti­san antipa­thy is deep­er and more exten­sive — than at any point in the last two decades.”

                    AND IT’S NOT JUST DOMESTIC

The same kind of “we’re right and any evi­dence to the con­trary be damned” atti­tude bedev­ils forums where the inter­na­tion­al equiv­a­lent of the pri­maries is find­ing a cease­fire in Gaza.
Israel needs one to help soothe the nation­al trau­ma of more than 100 hostages still in the hands of Hamas. Per­haps worse, with no end in sight, diplo­mat­ic sup­port and pop­u­lar sym­pa­thy for Israel is spin­ning like bath­wa­ter down the drain of revul­sion at the suf­fer­ing in Gaza, along with the image of invin­ci­bil­i­ty Israelis have fos­tered since the 1973 war with the imme­di­ate Arab world.
For Hamas, a cease­fire holds a key to emerg­ing from their tun­nels with a chance for polit­i­cal sur­vival, not least because retain­ing pop­u­lar sup­port sure­ly depends on being par­ty to a deal which can pull Pales­tin­ian civil­ians back from the brink of famine and pan­dem­ic-lev­el disease.
Instead, whether out of mal­ice or per­ceived self-inter­est rather than human­i­ty, both sides, and their back­ers who could force the  issue, keep find­ing ways to apply caveats and conditions.

                      THE UNSUPPORTING CAST

That’s fur­ther bedev­illed by less than cold-eyed per­cep­tions about what the biggest “H”, Hezbol­lah, might, or might not do. Depend­ing on the agen­da of the think-tankers or politi­cians weigh­ing in on it, the Iran­ian prox­ies who are a state with­in a state in Lebanon are either poised to unleash a ter­ri­fy­ing arse­nal of rock­ets and mis­siles against Israel, or are only inter­est­ed in mak­ing enough sturm und drang to main­tain their image as fear­some and fanat­i­cal defend­ers of Islam and  broth­er­hood with the Palestinians.
Mean­while, the spec­u­la­tion focus is shift­ing to the until recent­ly ignored  third “H”, the Houthis. Also known as Ansar Allah (Sup­port­ers of God), they start­ed out as a rag-tag rebel group in the 1990s, have held on for nine years in a war with a Sau­di-backed coali­tion that has killed hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple and pro­duced one of the world’s worst human­i­tar­i­an disasters.
They now effec­tive­ly con­trol most of Yemen and are seri­ous men­aces to world trade through the choke point of the Red Sea-Suez Canal ship­ping route.
The Biden admin­is­tra­tion pro­claims itself “clear-eyed about who the Houthis are”, admits there is no rea­son to assumed they can be cowed quick­ly, but is “cer­tain­ly try­ing to degrade and destroy their capabilities.”
A look back at Viet­nam, or today at Lebanon, Soma­lia, Iraq and Afghanistan ought to be clues as to how well that’s like­ly to work out in the long run.
Speak­ing of time frames, a year ago, Vladimir Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine was being mocked as a strate­gic blun­der des­tined for defeat.
Now it’s being fore­cast as “a pro­tract­ed con­flict, pro­ceed­ing with vary­ing degrees of inten­si­ty for years to come.”
Just to add to the joy of the moment, a senior NATO admi­ral warned that the alliance is “prepar­ing for con­flict with Rus­sia and the ter­ror groups if it comes to it.”
As a for­mer Boy Scout, I’m a fan of the “Be Pre­pared” motto.
When it comes to fret­ting about the future based on instant analy­sis and “expert opin­ion” how­ev­er. I’m find­ing myself inclined to wait for the movie version.

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