Tuesday, December 18, 1973. Fate unknown.

The Palestinian terrorists in Rome ordered a Lufthansa plane to fly to Kuwait, where the remaining hostages were freed.  A year later, Kuwait turned them over to the PLO, which promised to put them on trial. Their fate is unknown.

More observations on the Hamas Israeli War. A sort of primer, war aims, and campaign aims. Part I.

War Aims.

A lot of reporting on the Hamas Israeli War, indeed nearly all of it, is devoid of discussion on war aims.  Some of it vaguely discusses Israeli campaign aims.  None of it so far that I've seen has discussed Hamas campaign aims.  Given that, a lot of the reporting is sort of naive.

Hamas, having started the campaign, will be discussed first.

Hamas was formed in 1987 (probably considerably more recently than many suppose.  Hamas controls Gaza, Fatah, the political arm of what had been the Palestinian Liberation Organization, controls the West Bank.  The two entities have actually fought each other.  Hamas started off with the goal of pushing Jews out of the boundaries of what had been the 1948 Palestinian borders, but earlier in the 2000s seemed to lessen its demands.

It seems to have returned to them.  As far as can be told, its war aims are to remove the Jews from Israel, dead or alive, and of any age, and create an Arab Palestinian, and seemingly Islamic (not all Palestinians are Muslims) state in its wake.  That's what's summed up in the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which like a lot of slogans is catchy but doesn't really convey the full meaning of what it seeks.

Those are the war aims.

Without abandoning them, Hamas cannot back down, and Israel cannot unilaterally realistically convert the current war into a large scale punitive action at this point.  War aims can change, but Hamas shows no desire at all to do so.  A limited raid that was not aimed at civilians could have been undertaken if it has some other goal, but it didn't.

The campaign aims are much more difficult to discern.  Perhaps it was to spark a wider war in the belief that it could be won, or perhaps it was just a gross act of terrorism in furtherance of its remote, unobtainable goal.

Of course, discerning campaign aims, is often tricky in regard to an entity like Hamas, or even large entities.  In spite of long knowledge to the contrary, they may have thought that their raid, if that is what it was intended to be, would scare Israel into submission.  Hitting civilians never does that.  The British didn't surrender after the Blitz, and the air raids on civilian populations in Germany and Japan, perhaps if we exclude the atomic bomb, didn't cause them to surrender either.  Air raids on military targets in North Vietnam which inflicted civilian deaths didn't cause North Vietnam to give up.  9/11 only made Americans mad, it didn't achieve whatever it was that Al Queda thought it would, which seems to have been a hoped for general economic collapse.

Israel's war aims are also simple.  Its goal is to destroy Hamas as it views it, correctly, as irreconcilably opposed to its existence and genocidal in nature.  Its campaign aims seem to be to occupy Gaza, or perhaps the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, trap Hamas, and destroy it and its infrastructure.

Outright destroying an underground organization, however, is very difficult to do. The US basically did it in Afghanistan, however, so it can be done.

Nobody is talking at all about what's going to become of the Palestinians.  Israel isn't addressing it. The Arabs aren't either.  Hamas is simply using their own people as human shields and for propoganda.

A cultural existential difference, or Why can't everyone get along?

Cultures play a part in wars, which people in the West are oddly inclined to forget.  Jimmy Carter famously absent-mindedly quipped that the problems between the Israeli's and Palestinians would go away if they all started acting "like good Christians", but of course neither group is predominantly Christian.

I've taken some criticism on a more stretched observation in this area recently, so I'll explain a bit what I mean.

This question posed above is really a Western one, filtered through our eyes, which are the eyes of heavy Christian influence.  As a South American atheist friend of mine once stated, culturally, "we're all Catholics", even if we often don't behave like it.  That's why we're shocked when people don't behave accordingly.  

Historically and culturally, that's not necessarily the default human norm at all, which doesn't mean that every non-Christian culture (including the two in question) default to bad behavior.   But, as Genghis Khan supposedly noted (often filtered in our culture through Conan the Barbarian in a modified form):

The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.

We don't think that way, and we don't want others thinking that way.

Back to this war, the fact of the matter is that these two groups of people aren't going to get along.  The Western concept that somehow they can be made to is simply in error at this point.

It might have been true a couple of times.  One was in 1948, just before the first Arab Israeli War broke out, although that's pretty debatable. The second time was when the 1993 and 1995 Palestinian Accords were reached. The big problem is that both times, large numbers of Palestinians simply rejected a future which included Jews within the 1948 Palestinian boundaries.

The 1948 rejection was accompanied by voting with their feet by the Palestinians, a logical choice but one that was taken advantage of by Israel in that it offered the opportunity to truly make the country principally Jewish.  Nobody can fault somebody for fleeing fighting, but the fact that it occured meant that a large Arab population removed itself.  If it had not, demographics alone would have repeated what in fact occured in Lebanon, where a majority Christian population at that time is now 32% of the population.

Instead of taking that route, the Palestinians first relied on Arab hostility to take the country back for them, and then for the PLO, which ultimately compromised on that, to do so.  Now, a certain percentage are relying on Hamas.

Regarding that calculation, relying on it in the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, wasn't irrational.  After that, it really started to be. At some point, the land belongs to those who live there.  It was Zapata who stated; “The land belongs to those who work it with their own hands”, which is how it should be (and how it's increasingly ceasing to be in the United States)  That same analogy pertains to revolutions.  It instinctively makes sense for the people ruled by another people to rebel, but not so much a people that had once lived in a land where the majority of the population isn't yours, and the majority of your population wasn't born in that land.  Indeed, the fact that the initial Jewish war for independence sort of violated that tenant is part of the reason that many nations around the globe were quite hesitant about supporting Israel early on, combined with the fact that it appeared they'd lose.

Beyond that, as an essay in Minding The Campus has related:

(Professor Mordechai) Kedar, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, has spent his academic life studying Islamic and Arab history and society. He explains that the animus of Palestinians, Arabs, and Islamists against the Jewish state is based on the consensus of Islamic religious thought that believes that Jews as a religion, people, or nation are never to be the equals of Muslims, and so their independent state, Israel, must be “struck down.”

While that can be debated, there's at least something to it, or there has come to be.   For the most part, since World War Two, Middle Eastern Islam, which is its cradle, has become increasingly more "conservative", if that is the correct term, and militant over the decades.  That was always there, and indeed Saudi Arabia was founded due to the Saud family's alliance with a group so conservative it was regarded as heretical.  Islam does not have a real coexistence ethos as we'd understand it towards other religions.  It's often noted that it has allowances for "People of the Book", meaning both Jews and Christians, but that tolerance is limited and provides that they are to be second class citizens.

Neither Christianity nor Judaism have something similar towards other religions, which doesn't mean that individual Christian or Jewish societies are de facto tolerant.  People tend to generally be intolerant of any group that's different from themselves.

Interestingly, early Middle Eastern governments didn't have this feature to them, or at least not to the same extent.  Turkey just celebrated its 100th founding as a modern state, and that state was founded as a secular one.  Atatürk suppressed Islam in his country.  Jordan has always been a Muslim state, but the Hashemite family that rules it, and once controlled Mecca, has tended towards moderation consistently.  The Baath movement that controls most of Syria and once controlled Iraq was a fascist movement early on that included Muslim and Christian Arabs and which sought a secular state in the Middle East.  The PLO was a secular organization that leaned heavily on Communist thought.  There was at one time a strong sense amongst Arab nationalist that Islam had to be suppressed or, if not outright suppressed, the state's had to be secular. That really began to fall way with the Iranian revolution, and there's been a good deal of retreat from it since that time.

Which takes us to the current highly conservative (again, if that is the right word) Israeli government.

The current Israeli government is the most conservative, again if that's the word, one ever.  It follows part of the global drift towards far right populism.  Prior to the Hamas attack, it was receiving a good deal of pushback from Western nations and internally, in no small part due to an effort to subordinate the Israeli supreme court to the Knesset.  In the irony that all such conflicts create, that's all been forgotten now.  At any rate, a sharp turn to the right by Israel made it pretty clear that any current Israeli desires to really find a mutual solution to the problems now being fought over just weren't there.

All of which leaves us with this.

Hamas has attacked and made it clear that it thinks it can murder its way towards achieving its goals, a sort of accelerated variant of the 1939-1945 lebensraum at this point.  Israel can't allow that to happen.

There are paths to a lasting peace here, but nobody involved, or even with influence, is going to try to bring them about, so the question is whether the warring parties, or more precisely Israel, can bring it about by force.

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?

Lex Anteinternet: Some additional observations on the Hamas v. Israe...: 1.  "Was this an American intelligence failure?" Why does the press keep asking this really stupid question?  Hamas didn't att...

Some additional observations, yet again.

It was inevitable that the war in Israel would spill over to the United States in terms of internal politics.  That this makes it different from every war since the Anglo Irish War, which also did, makes it unique. North America does have a fairly large Ukrainian ex pat population, and a fairly large population of descendants of Ukrainians, but they're largely out of view, and therefore out of mind. Because of that, people like Matt Gaetz can choose to suggest that we leave Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians, but he can't say the same thing about Israel.

But we now also have a large immigrant Palestinian population in the US, and a significant one in Australia as well.  Other Palestinian populations are in Europe. This has given us the shocking, to most people, example of people demonstrating either for Palestine or against Israel, depending upon how you think of it.

Which leads me to this:

I think people will not believe the reports of what happened in Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Beeri. Even though Hamas posted photos and videos on their own Telegram channel. Because these are ISIS tactics. Beheaded babies and burned corpses. Yes, I saw the photos.

I don't care if you are of Palestinian extraction or not, although I frankly feel that this adds fuel to the fire that the further away from the prevailing culture an immigrant population is, the harder it is for the "melting pot" (the antithesis of the currently popular but demonstratively false concept of "diversity is strength" ethos) to work.  It can, but it's harder.  At any rate, people had no sympathy at all with German immigrants and German Americans who were in support of the Nazis during the Second World War, and Hamas deserves no sympathy either.  It doesn't matter if you are of Palestinian extraction or not.

I'd also note that one member of Congress of Middle Eastern extraction keeps a Palestinian flag outside of her door, and as of yesterday, still was.  Frankly, no Congressman should keep any flag other than that of the U.S. or perhaps their state outside their door.  

None.

This causes me to recall my father, who never liked people using hyphens in their name to identify themselves as something other than American.  Half German and half Irish by descent, he didn't like, for example, when people called themselves "Irish Americans", a trait he shared with Theodore Roosevelt.

This also says something about preserving old fights, something many cultures and peoples do.

Palestinians are upset, in part, about something that took place running from the late 19th Century to the mid 20th Century, that being the return of Jews to what is now Israel, as well as the history that followed.  The spreading of Jews around the ancient world started as long ago as 586 BC but it got rolling in the modern era in the 60s and of course we can famously date it to 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple.  The Zionist movement began the return starting in 1897 with the creation of a modern Jewish state an expressed goal.  Palestine, part of the Arab world, but in a region that already had a Jewish and Greek population, was the old Israel, territory wise.  Its population was also not uniformly Islamic, having an Arab Christian population, which it still does, and which is hated by Hamas along with the Jewish Israeli population.  The Jewish population of the country doesn't necessarily get along that well with the Christian population either.  The Palestinian identity itself is hard to define, as the region was so mixed up to the point of Israeli independence.  The term apparently wasn't used in modern times, ironically, until 1898, although some argue that Palestinian nationalism was around as early as an 1834 rebellion against Egypt.  Like other regions of the coast Middle East during the Ottoman period, the region was inhabited by nomadic Bedouins, still not identified as Palestinians, and then more urban and agricultural people, something true of Lebanon and Syria as well.

For this reason It's occasionally suggested that the Palestinians are not a real people at all, and to some slight extent, and it would be slight, that would have been almost sort of true at one time.  Having said that, the people who inhabit Lebanon historically are a different ethnicity.  So the Palestinians are a real people, or came to be, and certainly are now.

Palestine, like the entire Middle East, east of Egypt, was an Ottoman possession prior to World War One. For that matter, things west of Palestine technically were as well, although the oddities of colonialism and international politics meant that the British controlled Egypt and the Ottomans really controlled nothing, at that point, further east.  World War One brought Palestine under British rule, as a League of Nation's mandate, and brought Syria and Lebanon under French rule the same way.  Jordan came to be administered by the British as well, through the Hashemite ruling family, as did Iraq.

Allenby entering Jerusalem.

Palestine always proved to be problematic for the British and between the wars there was increasing tension between its Jewish and Arab populations, in part brought about by the fact that the British had made promises in the Balfour Agreement which supported, more or less, the concept of Palestine becoming the home for a future Jewish state.

At the time of Balfour's declaration, the Jewish population, even with two decades if immigration, was pretty small and the declaration wasn't really very specific.  From a British prospective, they were really dealing with a sparsely populated land. At the same time, however, they made promises to Arabs through their leaders to support outright Arab independence in the Middle East.  The two sets of promises were not necessarily irrconcilable, but they weren't necessary easy to deal with on the ground.

The additional problem really was that the land was not the United Kingdom's to give and indeed, in 1917, when made, it was still an Ottoman possession.

Between World War One and World War Two the British had to live with this, which wasn't easy.

By the 1930s Palestinian populations were getting seriously agitated with the direction in which things seemed to be going.  In 1936 this lead to a revolt against the British in which the Palestinians demanded independence and an end to open ended Jewish immigration.  To an extent, because of the involvement of the local populations, this may be regarded as the first Arab Isreali War, or perhaps a proto war, a sign of things to come.  Interestingly, Bernard Law Montgomery had a signficant role in putting it down.

Perhaps because of this, during World War Two, while the British did have armed Arab formations, they were reluctant to really use them.  Also during World War Two, the Grand Mufti of Jersusalem came down on the side of the Germans.  The nature of the conflict as an ethnic one was clearly drawn.

World War Two created the drive towards an independent Jewish Israel as an unstoppable one, with refugees flooding ino the coutnry. The British saw the handwriting on the wall and looked for a way out of the region, which they succeeded in doing in 1948.  Before that, an attempt at imposing a sort of two state solution was made.

Israel delcared independence in 1948 and the Arabs opposed it. In spite of an advantage of arms on part of the Arab armies, and in spite of having established military units of some standing, and in the case of the Arab Legion, partial European leadership, Israel won the war.  The war had huge demographic consequences as 700,000 or more Palestinians became refugees and were later unable to return to the lands they'd abandoned or been forced out of. That's the root of the Palestinian discontent today.

The ultimate cause of Palestinian dispersal is mixed, some of it being due to fear, some of it being due to force, and some of it being Israel preventing their return by operation of law.  I'm not claiming it was just.  But an added factor to it was that the neighboring Arab states did not accommodate a permanent resettlement of the displaced, hoping instead to see Israel defeated in a series of subsequent wars. By the early 1960s the population was radicalizing and in 1964 the Palestinian Liberation Organization formed.  The PLO ended up going to war with one of its host nations, Jordan, in 1970 in a war which looked as if the PLO might overthrow the Hashemite kingdom and claim it for its own. Jordan prevailed in the Black September war and the PLO relocated to troubled Lebanon.  In 1982, it was driven out of that country, which had been created in the first place as a separate political entity for Christian Syrians, and it relocated to Tunis.  Ultimately the PLO came around to the political solution that's in place to day, with the Palestinian authority being a quasi independent Palestinian satellite territory, of which Gaza is part.

After the War of Independence.

What was never foreseen is that Hamas, which is more radical than the PLO and its political expression Fatah, would become the dominant political entity in the Palestinian parliament.  It is.  Backed by money brought in from the outside, and notably Iran, it thrives on the fantasy of driving the Jews out of what had been Palestine.

Israel has been independent for seventy-five years now.  Almost everyone who fought for or against its independence is now dead.  The youngest displaced Palestinians are 75 years old.  The land that they were displaced from has been in other hands for 75 years.  The legacy of this however goes on and on with both sides focusing on a narrow aspect of the history.  Israelis, and the country's supporters around the world, imagine an early Israeli history like that glamorized by Leon Uris which ignored the realities of Palestinian displacement. Palestinians remain bitter about being displaced, a bitterness which is aided by their untenable situation in some parts of the Palestinian Authority but fail to appreciate that they made a bad bargain in 1948 by insisting on taking all of the country. Part of that bad bargain is that there is no reason to believe that had the Arabs won in 1948, the result would have been murderous and certainly would have resulted in the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine, just as Europeans were expelled from Algeria (and their Berber allies murdered) and the Europeans from Libya. For much of the post 1948 period, and for Hams to this day, Arab goals have been been to expel the Jewish population rather than to live with it, although over time, Egypt and Jordan have relented. Hamas also fails to appreciate that they're as boxed in by the Arab neighbors who claim to support them as they are by Israel.

Impacting the entire matter, both sides, now 75 years into this, rely upon economic aid from the outside.  Israel, while often gaining the admiration of Americans for such things as "making the desert bloom" has consistenly relied on US aid from its independence, something that frankly does not make a great deal of sense in an era when US ecnomic fortunes have declined and there is no good reason why a capable foeign nation of this vintage is receiving US aid.  Ireland, for instance, was simply independent when it became independent.  Included in the aid is military aid, even though Israel is itself an arms manufacuturer.  The close economic link to the US makes the US a participant in the Middle East in a way that it would not otherwise be, which in turn has an impact on domestic politics.

Hamas depends entirely on aid from donors and regional states, with Iran being a signficant one.  Oddly enough, the relocation of Palestinians to the US is beginning to also have an impact on domestic U.S. politics.

Seventy-five years is not a long time in historical terms, but the reality of this is that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that is fighting for a fantasy against living people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, for the most part, against the Palestinians.  The murderous fantasy is helping to keep a real solution, if there is one, from occurring.  No sane people would enter into a bargain with a group whose goals are essentially genocidal. Also helping to prevent it from occurring is the fact that the Arabs are a group of people, not one people, and the other Arab nations really don't want the Palestinians on their land.  Egypt is not going to open up the border with Gaza and let them in. Jordan was happy to take the West Bank early on, but it's not clamoring for it back now.  Israel, by having the Palestinians within some sort of border, neatly keeps them from being within other Arab borders.

People have talked about a two-state solution for a long time, but no such solution can come about when one party will not think of it.  Hamas won't, and now surely Israel will not either.

So now what?

That's hard to say, but what seems certain is that Israel will go into Gaza and will be unwilling to let the enclave repeat this recent murderous history.  Hamas will cause the Palestinians to suffer for holding on to a pipe dream and allowing murder to be perpetrated in their name.  The Palestinians will be seemingly unable to grasp this and howl in rage and despair, rather than taking the example of other 20th Century displaced persons, such as the Germans and Poles, and build new lives in their new situation.  Of course, unlike the Germans and the Poles, there isn't much for them to build with, but by the same token, there was never much of a Palestine in the first place.  Other Arab nations that import labor, such as Saudi Arabia, are unlikely for their part to take in the Palestinian displaced population, even though they share, albeit more remotely than we might suppose, an ethnicity.

Tuesday, May 8, 1973. End of the Seige at Wounded Knee.

Today In Wyoming's History: May 8: 1973    Militant American Indians who had held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 10 weeks surrendered.

US Marshals with duck hunter pattern camouflage raise the flat at Wounded Knee. From https://www.usmarshals.gov/who-we-are/history/historical-reading-room/incident-wounded-knee

Sudan, much in the news recently, released all of its political prisoners as a new constitution went into effect.

Palden Thandup Namgyal gave up his absolute authority of Sikkim in an agreement with India.

Fighting broke out between Lebanon and the PLO.

Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals made his 242nd consecutive start, a 20th Century record, in a game against the San Francisco Giants.

Monday, April 9, 1973. Operation Spring of Youth.

Israel launched Operation Spring of Youth on Palestinian Liberation Organization targets in Beirut and Sidon, Lebanon.  Over 50 PLO operatives were killed to the loss of two Israeli commandos.

Shipboard Israeli commandos during the operation. By ניר מאור מוזיאון ההעפלה וחיל הים - ניר מאור מוזיאון ההעפלה וחיל הים, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43634278

The operation was part of the ongoing retaliation for the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The United Nations Organization for African Unity conference on Southern Africa opened in Oslo, Norway, which is not anywhere near Southern Africa.  Norway was hosting the event.

As part of the Nixon effort to combat inflation, grocery stores were required to post signs at their meat counters listing the limit for prices per pound for meat. 

Thursday, January 14, 1973. Elvis in Hawaii.

Uncle Mike's Musings: A Yankees Blog and More January 14, 1973: The Dolphins Finish Undefeated & Elvis Says Aloha - *January 14, 1973, 50 years ago:* Super Bowl VII is played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. At stake for both teams was the Championship of the Natio...

Well that's notable.  

What's additionally notable that the football season wrapped up so much earlier then, than now.  Would that this would not have changed.

The Dolphins beat the Redskins 14 to 7 and took the only perfect season with no defeates.

The Elvis Presley television specials were a big deal at the time.  I can recall us watching them on television from our kitchen, where the tv was located.

The Mossad prevented a PLO attempt at shooting down an aircraft transporting Prime Minister Golda Meir to Rome.

Friday, December 8, 1972. Violent ends.

Dr. Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO representative in France, was fatally wounded when a bomb exploded in his residence.  His assassination was the second reprisal killing by Israel for the Munich Olympic's killings.

United Airlines Flight 553, a 737 flight from Lincoln to Chicago, crashed at Chicago Midway International Airport, killing 43 out of 61 occupants, and two people on the ground, including several notable figures.

Illinois Congressman George W. Collins, who lost his life due to the United Airlines Flight 553 accident.

Among those who died was Dorthy Hunt, the wife of E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame, as well as journalist Michelle Clark. This has given rise to conspiracy theories regarding the incident.

Mrs. Hunt had met her husband when they were both employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.  As things began to go badly for her husband, she began to levy inside threats that if things didn't go well, she would blow the lid on things about the conspiracy and, according to some, other clandestine matters.

Hunt met with journalist Clark on the evening of December 8.  The plane hit tree branches while landing, which lead to the disaster.  Prior to boarding the plane Hunt had purchased $250,000 in flight insurance, a substantial amount, particularly in 1972, with her husband as the beneficiary.  She was carrying $10,000 in her purse, which E. Howard Hunt explained as down payment money for investments in area Holiday Inns.

All of this, and rumors about the investigation, have contributed to a conspiracy theory that the plane was sabotaged in order to kill Mrs. Hunt.

Friday, September 8, 1972. Israel begins to strike back.

On this day in 1972 the Israeli air force bombed ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon in retaliation for the Munich Massacre.  An attempted interception by the Syrian air force resulted in three Syrian aircraft being shot down.

Crest of the Israeli air force.

The British sitcom Are You Being Served? premiered.

Wednesday, September 5, 1972. An Olympic Tragedy

On this day in 1972 the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September attacked the Israeli quarters at the Olympic village in Munich, killing two athletes and taking nine hostages.

Black September was named for the failed Palestinian attempt to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in September 1970, an event which was a Palestinian disaster. This event itself led to the Palestinians being expelled from Jordan and going to Lebanon.  The organization's connection with the Palestinian Liberation Organization has never been clear, but it is clear that there was one.  In 1973 the PLO caused the shutting down of the organization, whose violent acts had not been successful in engendering any support for the Palestinian cause.

This is an event I can recall happening, and oddly enough I believe I learned about it after the family went swimming on a Wednesday afternoon, something that was pretty common for us to do.  Indeed, we swam a lot during the summer, and almost always did on Saturday afternoons and often on Sunday afternoons.  It wasn't a tradition I kept up with my own family, but I probably should have.  The day prior Mark Spitz had won his seventh gold medal at the Olympics, the first athlete to do so.

Mark Spitz at the 1972 Olympics.

Spitz, then only 22 years of age, retired from swimming after the 72 Olympics, but competed again in 199w after filmmaker Bud Greenberg offered  him $1,000,0000 if he made the team that year. He failed to do so by only two seconds.

Spitz had intended to become a dentist, but the Olympics interrupted that pursuit, and he did not resume it after 1992, other opportunities having developed.  He married the next year and the couple have two children.