Smile for a while and let’s be jolly…. (Israel: I’m talking to you!)

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been a bad mother, and introduced my kids to 70s music.  (Sirius satellite radio is the vehicle for this mental and spiritual corruption.)  My 12 year old son, who is a pretty cool kid, heard Tony Orlando and Dawn singing “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round The Old Oak Tree,” and became obsessed with the tune.  “I don’t know why, Mommy, but I just really like it.”  While scouting around for the best recording on YouTube, I came across Lynn Anderson’s “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden,” a song I loved when I was his age, but had managed to forget with the passing years:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO4wcNVbYOQ[/youtube]

It’s quite an interesting song:  Anderson sings that life isn’t going to be perfect, so you need to stop pretending perfection is even possible and start enjoying the good things life has to offer.  The song’s basic message is that realism can offer its own consolations, a message it conveys with a bouncing country melody, some nice rhymes, and a pretty singer.

I think Barry Rubin, one of the absolute best Middle East analysts around, had Anderson in mind when he wrote Israel’s Strategic Situation: Plenty to Worry About But Little to Fear.  The title says it all.  Things aren’t perfect around Israel (i.e., there’s no rose garden in the offing), but there’s no need to get all apocalyptic about it (“life shouldn’t be so melancholy”).  While the chaos in the Arab world destabilizes things, something that always carries risk, that same destabilization renders it increasingly difficult for Arab and Muslim countries to put together a coherent game plan that genuinely threatens Israel’s survival.  Rubin doesn’t blink at the bad stuff, but he puts it all into a context that Lynn Anderson might approve.