This is a blog-like annex to the Enlightenment Network. It replaces the webmaster's previous blogs which were primarily devoted to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. This material is found here or here. The primary difference between this effort and the earlier blogs will be the greater range of entries, a weaker compulsion to come up with an entries on a regular basis, and, consequently, less repetition.

16:49 3/25/2006

Where's Iraq Heading and Where Are We?

The commentary on Iraq continues more eerily than ever down two very different tracks. On the one hand, the Administration keeps telling us that if we looked at the big picture, all is well and getting better. What appears to many to be an incipient civil war is no such thing, and the Iraqi security forces will soon have the situation well in hand. Unfortunately, the ranks of those accepting the Administration position seem to be getting thinner and thinner. On the other side of the discussion, we find those who think talk of success is either massive self-deception or willful propaganda. This group splits, however, on the subject of where it is possible to go from here. One group would apparently just say goodbye and bring the troops home. The other would . . . . They don't know exactly what they would do. There has been talk of ultimatums to the Iraqis or of the United States unilaterally setting a day to leave. But then what?

There is a question whether we are intending to leave at all? For a while American leaders talked about leaving behind a number of bases. Then they seemed to talk of taking all the troops home. The idea of bases has remained in a kind of alternate world of discussion, although the future presence has been whittled down to maintaining four major bases in the country. Major facilities to achieve this goal are now being constructed on at least a semi-permanent basis. Whether permanent bases will actually be acceptable to any democratically elected Iraqi government is unclear. Our fallback position is to maintain a major regional base in Kuwait. The Iraqi opposition has always asserted that our objective is to make Iraq a permanent colony. Our actions and statements have until now tried to undercut this argument. However, President's Bush recent statement that another President will have to decide on eventual withdrawal can only strengthen the suspicion that our talk of permanent withdrawal is just talk.

As this is written, it appears that the most likely future for Iraq will be a federal government in Baghdad with relatively little control. The Shi'as and their militias will control the bulk of the country. They will make repeated attempts to expand the Shi'a domain in and around Baghdad. The Kurds will hunker down in their enclave, using their militias aggressively in an attempt to control the Kirkuk area, to bring it into the Kurdish sphere, along with the oil under it. The Sunnis will continue to fight in the contested middle, as well as the more purely Sunni areas to the north and west of Baghdad. (Remember, almost nothing in Iraq is pure anything. There has been a lot of mixture, but as the struggle continues, people will tend to move out of areas where they are a minority into their majority areas. These areas will in turn drive out their minorities. It is quite similar to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.) The Sunnis are the only group that has a strong "investment" in the integrity and future of Iraq as a nation state. Yet paradoxically, they are the chief combatants in the war against the Americans and the American-inspired political system.

Where in the center of all this will be the Americans? Recently, they have been hard at work training and equipping Iraqi security forces. Yet these forces are widely understood by Iraqis to be operating in favor of sectarian rather than national interests. (The extent to which this is true is difficult to judge, but it is true enough that the perception among the Sunnis, at least, is widespread, and this counts as much as the actual situation.) We had and will have a defensible role in fighting the extreme Islamists, on the one hand, and the Baathist nationalists on the other. But if and when the major fighting is group against group (and this will not be a tidy war among three groups, there are cleavages within all three major groups that can quickly lead to violence), the Americans may increasingly find their role ambiguous. If they take a major role. they risk turning everyone against them. In this scenario, whether we leave or not, and when, will become increasingly irrelevant. We may try to quietly tiptoe away; we can only hope the world will let us.

16:45 3/20/2006

The Ironic Confusions of a Red America

For a person brought up on the red scare and the Cold War, the division of America by today's pundits into the Red States and the Blue States is a case of color confusion. Given the general thrust of Republican communications, the Red States are made up of hard-working, conservative, and devout Americans while the Blue states are inhabited by wild-eyed liberals, a species very close in their thinking to the Socialist Europeans and, yes, even the Communists. From the color-conscious perspective, the color labeling is backwards.

Today's discussion of the elections in Belarus remind us, however, that in many world contexts the Bush people are supporting the local equivalents of the Red Americans, while the people they strive to expel from power are closer to the Blues in their orientation. President Lukashenko has just carried out another one-sided election that keeps him in power. As in many other cases in the former Soviet Union, this conservative figure actually has the support of a large percentage of the rural and less educated people, while the cosmopolitan, more urban people are generally opposed to him. Much the same seems to have been the case in the Ukraine, and some of the Central Asian states. The more liberal people in such countries are the ones attracted to Western democracy, while people attached to "family values" and traditional religions tend to support what the Western media consider to be authoritarians or dictators.

It is intriguing to realize that on much of the world stage, the Bush administration is the outside supporter of modern liberalism, of movements most likely to support rights for homosexuals or to oppose the death penalty. In another, somewhat different way, this is also the group the Administration backs in Iran.

15:45 3/20/2006

Where are We Now in Iraq?

The media and blogs are full of evaluations of what has been accomplished or not in Iraq. The latest in a series of careful reports on the situation in the New York Times (these come out as Op-Eds, the latest is March 19) gives a mixed report. Understanding the report is difficult because the text seems to be based on figures quite different from those in the Op-Ed's table. Sticking with the text for the moment, the best news is that fatalities among American and Iraqi security forces have gone down. The percentage of Iraqis optimistic about their future has remained high, about two-thirds (apparently Kurds and Shi'a). The number of intelligence tips received from Iraqis has markedly increased, and the Iraqi security forces have greatly increased in number. The bad side is that civilian casualties have not gone down and sectarian violence has markedly increased. Economically, the availability of electricity and petroleum products has declined, if anything, in recent months, while oil production for export remains very low.

One expert who has followed events closely and has his own stable of experts, Juan Cole, believes that the Sunnis have decided that the country is being taken away from them. In this situation, they are participating in the government as much as they can while at the same time supporting an insurrection concentrating on Americans, Shi'as, and infrastructure. One of his authorities paints the following picture:

Political parties didn’t overtly begin to speak in the name of sectarian groups until 2005. For Shias, it wasn’t necessary: after the war Iraq’s Shia triumphalism was shared by all Shia parties; Iraq was now theirs and could not be taken away except by the Americans. There was no threat of Sunnis retaking the country because they had never taken it before: they had been given it, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. Iraq’s Sunnis, unsurprisingly, felt intimidated, and they increasingly came to view Shias as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shias were the majority or that Shias had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis were the primary victims of American military aggression and viewed Shias as collaborators. As Shias became the primary victims of radical Sunni terror attacks against Iraqi civilians, they came to view Sunnis as Baathists, Saddamists, or Wahhabis.

I was surprised to see that Juan Cole agrees that the Iranians are heavily involved, and that the Badr brigade, allied with the Iranians, and using Iran's Revolutionary Guard as their trainers, is heavily involved in the execution of and torture of Sunnis. The Interior Ministry's forces are to a great extent recruited from the Badr brigade. Sunni charges against them are more than simple paranoia.

Looking at the war with the lens of the British reporter Robert Fisk (referenced below under 3/8), one can extract a deeper view of what is happening and may happen in Iraq. His evidence suggests that nearly all Iraqis have reason to hate us in their hearts. Just looking at recent history, we killed hundreds of thousands in the first Gulf War, killing at a rate on the battlefield and in the cities that even the Saudis objected to. We have killed perhaps as many people in this war. In both cases, our forces have ignored the Geneva Conventions on giving proper burial to those killed in war. After Kuwait was recaptured, we simply threw the bodies of dead soldiers into trenches and bulldozed over them, making no attempt to identify bodies, many of whom still had identity tags on them. During the early stages of the First Gulf War, our radio broadcasts to the Shi'a and Kurds urged them to rise against Saddam. Then after we had defeated Saddam's forces and they were fleeing north, we halted our advance and resisted all pleas from the Shi'a (who by then had captured large stretches of the South) for assistance of any kind. When Saddam's forces asked if they could use attack helicopters (because we had air control and they could not use them safely without our permission), we granted them this right. The result was that Iraq's army massacred hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'a (doing the same to Kurds but less successfully, because we finally stepped in with some assistance in Kurdistan about half way through the tragedy). Although ostensibly we had stopped our advance because we were afraid of getting stuck with the job of administering Iraq, the real reason was evidently that we wanted to preserve Saddam as a bulwark against the Iranians. We were scared of a Shi'a Iraq allied with Iran. Then in Gulf War II, we have repeatedly launched indiscriminate assaults on civilians who happened to be where there were also insurgents. And later we have set up torture chambers to extract information from civilians casually picked up in raids. This weekend we learn of a so far unrevealed military torture chamber near the Baghdad airport that was so vicious in its methods that the CIA at one point refused to let their people participate.

This recitation of American and allied evil is relevant because it offers an explanation for the continued willingness of thousands of Iraqis to carry on what in some ways might seem a hopeless campaign against the Americans, as well as an explanation for the thousands of Iraqis that Moqtada al Sadr seemed able to recruit to fight the Americans. We must remember that Iraqi culture is heavily imbued with the ethic of revenge and the necessity to attack anyone who has attacked members of one's family or the family's honor. There must now be millions of Iraqis whose family members have been directly attacked or humiliated by Americans. Given a chance, these people will feel honor bound to kill Americans. Many have, and many will. Most Shi'a suffer the Americans in silence for now, for at this point the occupation is serving their purposes. But when this is no longer the case, look out. The well-being of our soldiers now and in the future is not promising.

16:21 3/15/2006

New United Nations Trusteeships

The crises discussed in the previous commentary suggest once again the need for the resuscitation of something like the trusteeship system that was set up for former colonies after World War I. In the form that was adopted then (having one Western state responsible for each trusteeship) it was too much like another form of colonialism. If a new attempt were made today, it would have to be more broadly based. In any event the international community should establish on more than an ad hoc basis an international governance agency that could be called upon to take over and govern parts of the world that are either unable to govern themselves or unable to govern in a responsible manner. Once established, the agency would develop its own management and civil service structure that would be intended to handle crisis and development problems anywhere in the world.

To become widely accepted, the initial "projects" of such an agency should be desperate situations where a society is so broken that the local people and the international community would have little choice but to accept massive outside intervention. Only after the agency developed a track record in such situations, would it be asked to expand its activities into a wider variety of situations. An initial step might be for the Security Council to grant the agency the rights and the resources necessary for governing Somalia for a period of ten years, to be extended as necessary. During this period the agency would establish comprehensive educational and medical services for all. It would establish an effective, modern police force, disarming all others. There would be no army under such a dispensation (compare Costa Rica). It would undertake economic development and land reclamation projects that would make possible a sustainable future. Since agriculture resources will never adequately support many of the countries at issue, other forms of economic development would also be undertaken. As national and municipal services and jobs began to be provided, the international agency would develop a modest level of taxation so that the people lands held in trust would not come to see themselves as little more than the uninvolved recipients of an endless stream of foreign goods and services.

16:18 3/15/2006

Darfur and American Responsibility

Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times Op-Ed writer, has pleaded with his audience for more than a year to "do something" about Darfur.  The situation in Somalia may not be quite so dramatic, but it is equally serious. There is no government. Many other areas in Africa also cry out for assistance, in fact for reorganization that goes beyond assistance. Closer to home, Haiti remains a running sore where elections and international forces come and go, but crime and viciousness remain the order of the day.  Let us review the problem and where we might go from here.

As readers are aware, Darfur Province in western Sudan is inhabited by a number of Muslim ethnic groups. Over time, the nomadic herdsmen in the drier north have developed increasingly hostile relations with the farmers of the south. This has been exacerbated by population pressures and lack of sufficient moisture. On the political side, the larger farming community has felt neglected by the government. This feeling, as well as the knowledge of the relative success of a non-Muslim insurgency in the south, has led to the development of independence movements in the province. Failing to put the insurgents down with government troops, the government enlisted the support of the "janjaweed", mounted ruffians recruited among the nomads, to drive the farmers out of the country. Together, the army and the janjaweed have succeeded in driving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, off their farms and into refugee camps near Darfur's larger towns and across the border in Chad. Hundreds of villages have been destroyed, with the houses burned and the livestock killed. In many villages the men have been killed and the women raped before being driven out. Both sides are now fighting on the Chadian side of the border as well. Chad has so few troops in the area that it is hardly a factor.

At present, the chance of hundreds of thousands of additional deaths results from the inability of the international community to reach many of the displaced before they starve or die of disease. This inability is due to terrible roads and lack of cooperation, particularly by the Sudanese government, as well as by inadequate international response. In addition, in spite of many promises, the government seems both unwilling and unable to control the janjaweed. The process of cleaning out the unwanted peoples is apparently continuing; certainly no one is being resettled back in their former communities.

A recent Op-Ed by a Somali woman reminded us once again how much larger the problem is than Darfur. She points out that Somalia is no longer a country. Abandoned by the outside world, the area that was once Somalia is controlled, when controlled at all, by a maze of warring groups. If they have the courage, anyone can come and go at will. Kenyans, Ethiopians, Americans and others come in for short stays for their own purposes, but are soon gone. Public education is nonexistent. The only education is Islamic and in Arabic, which of course is not  their language. Everybody's property has been taken and retaken, so there is no longer any incentive for normal economic activity. One wonders how we can hope to rid the world of Islamic terrorism when this future Taliban paradise  festers in East Africa.

We are also reminded of the larger dimensions of the problem by a <a href="http://www.futurecasts.com/book%20review%206-3.htm">review</a> of Theroux's latest book, "Black Star Safari" by Dan Blatt at his excellent web site: Futurecasts. Theroux records a trip he recently took down the only trans-Africa road, Cairo to Cape Town. It is a dismal record of extreme poverty, failed aid programs, and hopelessly corrupt and noncaring governments. A student of Africa for forty years, Theroux sees most of the continent steady going backwards. We have heard such accounts for a long time now. Once hopeful exceptions such as Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe have recently been added to the sorry list. Congo is a running sore that will not heal. To say African countries need more democracy is hardly sufficient (Uganda with less is more promising than Kenya with more; Nigeria, a democratic "success" has three million people internally displaced by continual fighting.).

Aside from the United States, Haiti was the first colony to free itself from its colonial master in the Western Hemisphere. But  almost from the beginning, Haiti was arbitrarily ruled by corrupt and violent men. Leaders came and went through legal and illegal processes, but most of the time the real rulers were the men with the weapons. Governments did little for the people: grinding poverty and illiteracy remained the lot of nearly all. In 1915, the violence of government and people came to a head. The government executed 167 political prisoners. The ruling general responsible was torn apart by a raging mob. The American marines landed and  managed the country for the next nineteen years, most of the time under martial law. When they left in the 1930s, the country rapidly fell back into its authoritarian and violent ways, a tendency that has continued through the rules of the Duvaliers up to the present. Recently the country has been wracked by warring gangs under the light control of UN forces. The continuing drama is playing out among a people who have been suffering through countless years of inadequate nutrition, resource depletion, and an everlasting internal war of all against all.

What these situations demand is an international consortium that would devise plans to make over dysfunctional societies. It would be wonderful if interventions eventuated in a functioning democracies. But this would not be the goal initially. What the world needs is for such societies to have responsible governments, whether or not they are modern democracies. (See the discussion at the Saving the Future web site referenced in the accompanying menu.) The intervention would require the commitment of large sums of men and materiel. It would require massive interference in internal affairs. The demands of the consortium would be rejected by most governments. But perhaps not all. If the consortium could get an agreement from local parties and the United Nations to take over the direction of one country and succeeded in that, it might be able to move on to others. One thinks of Somalia as a country that the world might agree to have managed in this way.

This may be a wrong-headed or simply impossible approach, but the usual political, economic, or financial palliatives are not working. Theroux would have us stop aiding these countries; he believes foreign aid simply makes the rich richer and the rest beggars. But his approach will not be widely accepted for many reasons; the desperately poor and hungry can and should be given basic international humanitarian assistance, at least in the short-term.

Ideally, in situations such as Darfur, we would work out an agreement to mount another Kosovo operation, this time with a capable international force on the ground in support of an aerial offensive. Our argument in the Security Council would be that the developed world must prove to Africans that we value African lives and rights just as much as we value European or Indonesian. It would also be based on the experience that the Sudanese government is simply not a reliable partner for a long-term relief effort. Our goals here must be much more modest than in Iraq: no talk of instituting democracy, but rather of establishing a functioning society able to support itself with long-term international aid.

The likelihood the United States would undertake such a program today is quite low. It would first require a commitment to spend a great deal more worldwide than we have been willing to do on both our military capacity and our foreign assistance programs. Intervention in the Sudan is not a program for budget cutters. It would also require that major American leaders seriously address the issue. The popular response to such a proposal would be that we were taking on another entangling obligation at a time when we are just emerging (hopefully) from Iraq and Afghanistan, and still face the challenges of North Korea and global terrorism. Many Americans are familiar with the Sudan because of its problems in the south. But here American support was fueled largely by the fact that many southern rebels were Christians. Support for the Darfur farmers in the west could undercut what many believe is a growing acceptance by both sides of peace in the south - another reason for hesitancy.

To turn this policy stance around for Darfur and the Darfurs of the world, we badly need a long-term educational campaign in this country that teaches the importance of accepting the burden of responsibility that rests on the shoulders of the most powerful people in the world. At this moment in history, we do have unrivaled power and great wealth. But our people have still not accepted the fact that this places obligations on all Americans to play a leading role in the establishment of an international order that serves the interests of all peoples. A real superpower has a larger responsibility than throwing its weight around.

10:25 3/9/2006

War Against Terrorism: War Against All

The consequences of announcing a war against terrorism are only beginning to catch up with us. As explained in an accompanying web site on terrorism, a "war against terrorism" is obviously a misnomer. Terrorism is a tactic for achieving political or quasi-political objectives. It might be possible to fight a war against terrorists, but even this involves us in difficulties.

One problem surfaced yesterday in the Times. It reported that the anti-terrorism law is holding up the entry into this country of many deserving escapees because they are ostensibly violators of that law. The writers of the law apparently thought that a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist. The law broadened the terrorist category beyond that of the State Department's list of terrorist organizations (which was already questionable). It defines as a terrorist anyone who has resisted, or helped those who resisted, any established government. This definition includes members of groups fighting against some of the most repressive regimes in the world, including persons still fighting the government in Burma, Laos and Vietnam — and Cuba! Some lawyers argue that we should even keep out those who can be shown to have fought against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan before we helped defeat it.

Another alarming note is the reported assignment of Special Forces units to American Embassies around the world. These units are to keep track of, search out, and in some cases destroy terrorists in the countries where they are stationed. The job of these paramilitary groups is, according to new Pentagonese, to "find, fix, finish, and follow-up". Many in the State Department and the CIA (which used to be responsible for this mission) are upset by the dilution of their authority through direct Special Forces involvement. But aside from the bureaucratic complications, this new assignment reinforces the idea that to fight terrorism, we have to be everywhere and engaged everywhere. No country is exempt from the "plague", and thereby no country is exempt from American intrusion.

A terrorist appears to be anybody who is on the wrong side in a conflict with American forces or the forces of America's allies. In Israel, Palestinians who fight the Israelis are uniformly declared terrorists, while Jews, in government forces or not (for example settlers) who attack and kill Palestinians, are never labeled terrorists. The Jewish Irgun and Stern gangs that fought the British in the mid-1940s assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East, in Cairo, made bomb attacks on British installations, and blew up the King David Hotel (killing nearly a hundred civilians). These combatants were apparently "good terrorists"; at any rate few want to remember them today in societies making war on all "terrorists".

If we are to think clearly about terrorism, we should distinguish between those who attack civilians (real terrorists?) and those who attack soldiers and police (insurgents?). Unfortunately in actual conflicts these distinctions get muddied, and "collateral damage" from purely military operations are commonplace, whether the action is by official forces or insurgents.

It would be better for the health of us all, and for the clarity of information sources when news is delivered to a concerned public, if the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" were retired. The actor or actors involved could be replaced by a variety of terms, including guerrilla, insurgent, fanatic, arsonist, maniac, policeman, soldier, military commander, — whatever fits, with or without a condemnatory connotation.

15:01 3/8/2006

Americans and Arabs: The Burden of Israel

In evaluating the attitudes of Muslims and particularly Arabs toward the United States it is important to look at the way in which many Arabs understand our role. (As a note, it is important to understand that in discussing these issues, when we speak of religious communities we are seldom talking about religious differences. "Christians", "Americans", "Muslims", "Arabs", and "Jews": these are best understood as labels for different "teams", competing groups of people identifying with their own in-groups; we are seldom speaking of people concerned with differences in ritual or theology.

From the Muslim and Arab perspective, Israel is a European colony carved out of an Arab homeland. The Zionist invasion is not the first time the West has attempted to wrest Palestine from Muslim control. The crusades from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries were attempts to reassert Christian control over the "holy places", including, of course, Jerusalem. The Zionist movement in the nineteenth century was a secular nationalist reaction of the Jews of Europe to the increasing pressure of the many nationalisms that thrived in Central Europe at the time. Their leaders concluded that the only hope for the Jews was to establish a new homeland. At first, they considered several alternatives, but eventually settled on Palestine when the others did not work out. The first settlers tried to buy up Arab lands, but they soon realized that the Arabs were simply not going to go away.

To secure Jewish financial support in World War I, the British promised them that they could settle in Palestine (although the details of what this meant were left unclear). As more Jewish migrants settled in Palestine after World War I (now under British control), conflict with the Arabs increased. After World War II, the conflict escalated when the Arabs rejected a United Nations plan to divide the country between Jews and Arabs. (We must remember that the United States was the dominant power in the United Nations at the time and Western leaders had decided in spite of Arab objections that the Jews must have their homeland, in part because of they had "allowed" millions of Jews to be killed in the holocaust. The Arabs have never understood why they should pay the bill for the holocaust.) In the resulting war 700,000 Arabs were driven from their homes and they have never been allowed to return.

As the result of later conflicts, which the Arabs generally lost, the Jewish share of Palestine has steadily increased. The portion of the "West Bank" that remains theoretically outside Jewish control is actually a maze of Jewish settlements, the larger of which, and the majority of which, Israel has no intention of abandoning. Israel has abandoned direct control over the greatly overpopulated enclave of Gaza, although it still claims the right to do almost anything it wants there. Israel has, in particular taken East Jerusalem and established large settlements surrounding Jerusalem, land which it has no intention of leaving again.

Over the last thirty years, the United States has brokered many deals for the resolution of conflict in Palestine. But the most obvious feature of these deals from the Palestinian perspective is that they assume that the Jews have a right to essentially all that they have taken, and that the Palestinians that have been driven out have no right to return, and no right to Jerusalem. When the Palestinians balk at such deals, they are considered an intransigent, stubborn people uninterested in peace.

The last generation has seen the ebb and flow of many armed conflicts between Jews and Arabs (usually Muslim, but sometimes Christian). The chief characteristic of these conflicts has been the use of overwhelming power by the Israelis to "teach the Arabs a lesson". Much Arab violence has been stone throwing, often met by Israeli firepower or bulldozers. More recently, the Arabs have increased the use of guns, bombs, and suicide bombers, especially against Israeli civilians. These attacks have outraged the world. But the Western media have failed to note that many more Palestinian civilians have been killed on a regular basis in Israeli-Arab violence than have Israelis (soldiers and civilians). In addition, the material destruction by the Israelis of Arab properties and homes has been massive. (All this is amply documented in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, 2005, pages 400ff.

The equipment the Israelis use in their attacks, and the money that supports their system has come largely from the United States, officially and unofficially. The diplomatic cover for Israel's actions in the United Nations has been provided by the United States. It is no wonder the Arabs see the United States as their enemy, as a colonial power. When the Palestinians elect a parliament dominated by Hamas, the Arabs are not surprised that the United States and its allies talk of ignoring the result. Their experience in Palestine does not lead them to believe that the United States is a neutral power in the region intent on supporting human rights and establishing democratic systems. Similarly, they do not regard Hamas to be an illegitimate organization simply because it denies that Israel has a right to exist. To them, Israel is a colonizing state that the Arabs have ever right to eliminate, just as their ancestors eliminated the Crusader colonies.

This is the reality the United States has to deal with. Every decision and initiative we make in the region is shadowed by the Palestinian problem and the Arab interpretation of that problem. What we think of as a peaceful intermediary role is judged by them to be merely another deceptive means of guaranteeing the Zionist acquisition of their land. It would be nice if we could be more even-handed; relations with the Arab Middle East would certainly improve. But U.S. internal politics has made this impossible, and will probably continue to do so. What concerned Americans need to do is work around the edges, perhaps by giving a leading role to the Europeans who are less invested in the existence of Israel. We can never live with the Hamas solution, but we might be able to bring about the creation of two authentically sovereign states, each secure within its own borders, and each with a role to play in Jerusalem. Some Israeli opinion is tending this way, but reaching such a conclusion will not be easy for either side.

14:14 2/24/2006

Iraq: It's All About Oil, Stupid!

In today's NY Times, Ted Koppel has an op-ed that asserts that we should fess up to the fact that the main reason we are in Iraq is oil. He gives many arguments in the course of attempting to show that protecting oil supplies has been the basis of most of our moves in the Middle East, going back to the unseating of Mossadegh through American and British efforts in the 1950s and our subsequent support of the Shah.

Koppel's case has always been popular with materialists, in the Middle East as well as the United States. But it is much oversimplified. While the British may have connived in the removal of Mossadegh because of his threat to the profits of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the United States was primarily concerned with the possibility that a weak Mossadegh would succumb to Iran's Tudeh (communist) party backed by the USSR (that had already intervened in the country once after World War II). In the Cold War years, opposing the spread of communism was the driving consideration of most of our Third World policy, for us oil or other resources were secondary. (Some Americans even dreamed up the idea that oil must have been discovered off Vietnam as the reason we were in that conflict.) If oil had been our primary consideration in Iraq in this century, we would have worked toward making an arrangement with Saddam that opened the spigots once again. This is what the oil importers wanted and what the Europeans wanted. What Koppel is unwilling to acknowledge is the power of ideology and the power of the pro-Israeli lobby in our government (this time reenforcing one another). There really was a neocon cabal that thought Saddam should be overthrown as a prelude to ushering in a more democratic Middle East (see Fukuyama's piece in the latest Times Sunday Magazine). Some of the same people also believed that the security of Israel depended on eliminating the always present threat of Iraq's armed forces, with or without WMD.

Koppel's piece is also irresponsible in a manner exhibited by many other opinion pieces. At a time when the success or failure of our experiment in Iraq is ever more threatened, he comes out with an opinion piece that says what our opponents in the area have been saying all along. In particular, he asserts that one reason we attacked Iraq was to obtain military bases and goes on to say that we will maintain those bases after we "leave" Iraq. This is, of course, the accusation of the suicide bombers in Iraq, not something that a leading American opinion maker should casually assert as though it were already decided policy. Such irresponsibility is in the same category as those opinion pieces that point to the lack of security in our trains, planes, and ports, and then go on to give specific examples of how easy the present controls are to bypass. Admittedly, we all need to be free to express ourselves about serious problems that come before the public and to give our "take" on situations as the occur. But somehow the media and those who contribute through the media should censor out what is likely to benefit the nation's opponents.

14:59 2/19/2006

Increased American Support for Democracy in Iran

We read in the New York Times (2/16) that Condoleezza Rice has announced an $85 million program to increase support for democratic development in Iran. Her answer to critics of such an effort is that the United States has used such programs to bring democracy to Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia. Unfortunately, the preconditions for what was accomplished in Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia are simply not present in Iran. In Poland, for example, we found an overwhelmingly Catholic country already attached emotionally to the West. Iran today is in many ways comparable to Iraq before our invasion. We should note that extensive American attempts to support democracy and regime change in the 1990s in Iraq accomplished less than nothing. American attempts to support democracy in Pakistan and Nepal in the nineties, an effort I was briefly involved in, were similarly fruitless. The reasons for failure are different in each case. The major difficulties are that the objectives of the people, democratic or not, are far from our national objectives and our objectives to democratize a country often conflicts with other and quite different American objectives. This a lesson we are still learning in Iraq, and will be learning in Palestine and Egypt.

Whatever our intentions in Iran, for the foreseeable future the effort should proceed slowly. It should be based on continual interaction of American democracy experts with responsible Iranians within and without the country. A good beginning could be made with the administration's planned expansion of television and radio broadcasts, as long as the emphasis is on passing along otherwise unavailable information rather than on the dissemination of propaganda. It might be suggested that such programming be beamed to all Persian speakers, including those in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. By including Tajikistan, especially, this would lend credence to the argument that we are interested in a struggle for democracy and human rights that goes beyond protecting narrow American interests.

16:20 2/19/2006

Economics and the Social Sciences

In a curious op-ed in today's Times, David Brooks begins with this peroration: "Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures . . . As societies grew richer and more modern, they would become more secular" etc. He follows this with the assertion that none of this has come true.

I do not know what planet Brooks was living on, but he certainly was not living among "social scientists". Economics was considered the "queen of the social sciences", if you will, not because of its purported relation to a materialist ideology, but because it was more able to use "hard numbers" and thereby to employ the mathematical manipulations and proofs common to the physical sciences. It was, in a word, regarded as "more of a science". The bloom has come off of this view of economics, not because of any failures of materialist ideology, but because the generalizations have often not held up — the numbers have not turned out to be as hard as was thought.

Few serious economists ever thought that the material issues dealt with by economists were somehow determinative of nonmaterial issues. Certainly they could not believe that since most of the nonmaterial issues were simply outside their purview as economists. As is well known, the greatest historical figure in economics, Adam Smith, wrote a companion volume on "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". This was an inquiry into quite a different world; Adam Smith could not imagine this world determined by economics.

In other words, in spite of his excellent education, Brooks never understood that the "social sciences" consisted of more than a group of warring factions, each characterized by an ideology rather than a science. That he could imagine this, testifies to the weakness of the social sciences, both in reality and in the public imagination, a question considered in the accompanying essay on science

12:14 2/18/2006

Mideast Oil Production and Non-democratic Tyrannies

In "Addicted to Oil" (New York Times, Op-Ed, February 1), Freedman makes a much oversimplified connection between the possession of oil riches and lack of democracy in the Islamic world. He contrasts the record in the Middle East with that in East Asia, particularly Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. This is hardly a new argument, but it has never been very convincing. Democratic development has had as difficult a history in oil-poor Muslim countries, such as Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania, as it has in Iraq, Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. It requires a tortured analysis to argue that Egypt's lack of democratic development is somehow connected to the oil wealth of other Arab states. Perhaps the major reason Taiwan and South Korea have successfully democratized is not that they lacked a major natural resource, as Freedman argues, but rather that they lacked the pervasive religious impediment to welcoming modern universal education that persists among the general population in the Middle East. This is not a politically correct conclusion, but it is a part of the answer that has to be faced.

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Iranian Civilization

Saving the Future

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