I’m doubly convinced that while the VANOC Gestapo is concerning itself on the front lawn with ebbing peaceful protests, sweeping our homelessness and drug problems under the rug, and thwarting any attempt by commercial enterprises to steal some Olympic mojo; they’ve left the back door open for morons who might claim some affiliation to the non-existent Al Qaeda to blow up a rented cube truck filled with god-knows-what in my neighbourhood.

Reinforcing my fear of their ineptitude, today it is revealed that Kinder Morgan, the company that has brought local residents a string of oil spills over the past few years, have .. um .. misplaced at least two tonnes of ammonium nitrate which was in a truck en route from Alberta to North Vancouver sometime over the December holidays.  Kinder Morgan is attempting to play this off as a “clerical error” however we’ve heard that from them before, as oil gushed into Burrard Inlet and drowned an entire Burnaby neighbourhood in a thick black film.

They lost two tonnes of ammonium nitrate.  In Vancouver.  You can’t be serious.

As Global Security reports, ammonium nitrate is used to make about 95% of the bombs in Afghanistan, and was also the medium of choice for the foiled efforts of the Toronto 18, who had themselves obtained 3 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.  The reason for this bomb-making method’s popularity is that the recipe for making such a device using ammonium nitrate is so simple an idiot could do it.

In 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (two complete idiots if I’ve ever seen one) used a 600-pound ammonium nitrate bomb, mixed with a fuel oil called nitromethane, to attack and destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City.  The attack killed 168 people.  McVeigh and Nichols had purchased exactly two tonnes of ammonium nitrate prior to constructing their bomb, which they assembled in the back of a cube truck.

Ask yourself this: do you trust with your safety the very same public officials who will allow a couple of tonnes of high-explosives to disappear while simultaneously announcing that you are no longer able to take books on airplanes?

UPDATE: Bob Mackin points out that Kinder Morgan’s North Vancouver dock will also host a cruise ship providing visitor accomodations during the Olympics.  Good luck with that!

“You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.”

Isaacson later claimed that he was buckling under pressure from CNN’s corporate interests, which exclaimed that the news was “too negative”. Failing to understand his own irony, he also later stated that he didn’t want CNN to be used “as a propaganda platform.” In actual context, the number of deaths occurring on September 11th pales by comparison to those civilians who’ve paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan, to say nothing of Iraq (which now accounts for as many as 70,000 civilian deaths).

Much more disturbing, the mainstream US Media bought and then massively resold the administration’s link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda without any hard evidence and without any further in-depth investigation. While even reporters, editors, and producers themselves were disinclined to believe the US Administration’s line they reported it breathlessly regardless of their concerns. Bushists and their army then descended upon the media to repeat the phrase “but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” which was an obvious manipulation of the public’s fear of a bigger, badder 9/11 — they were given a virtually infinite quantity of air time as a podium to sell the war, and very little in the way of counterpoint. In the history of mankind, there has rarely been such an abject failure of the Fourth Estate.

But today I’m not writing to indict the Bushists. Of far greater concern to me are the millions of born-again Hawks who channeled the anger, pain, and shock from the 9/11 attack into a seething, raging vengeance. Insodoing they allowed themselves to be manipulated by the dubious aims of an administration bent on war and naively seeking U.S. dominance of the Middle East (as though that is even a feasible goal).

Many of these faux-hawks (I’m attempting to hijack the phrase for comedic effect here) are now, with the benefit of hindsight, claiming that they were “lied to” and “manipulated”, as though that warrants immediate exoneration. This is the problem.

Why was I able to form an opinion, amid the froth of propaganda following 9/11 and leading up to the wars, that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, that there was likely no nuclear program in Iraq, and that there was no real justifiable reason to invade Iraq? Am I smarter than everyone else? Surely not.

The answer is simple. While I watched CNN and occasionally Faux News, I also read other articles, such as this one from Knight-Ridder. I’d also read a few books on Middle-Eastern and specifically Iraqi recent history to understand the longer-term context, and I did a hell of a lot of Googling. I read newspapers from around the world, I read and watched opposing viewpoints, and I discussed the issue with friends. I read the back pages of the NY Times and Washington Post, to where most of the cautionary reporting was relegated. In essence, I sought out perspective, and through no matter of luck I found it, and it turns out to have been the correct one.

This is the job of every citizen of a democracy — I would hazard to say every citizen of the world. I cannot forgive those who merely lapped up that which was spoon-fed to them, who were entirely governed by their emotions, and who abandoned their responsibility as citizens and voters by failing to protest — loudly — the march to war. Through inaction, and this is at times the worst crime in a civilized society, they permitted a culture which has survived for thousands of years in the birthplace of humanity to endure its most trying disparagement.

A hockey coach of mine once said that the hardest-working player on the ice should always the guy who just screwed up. That rule also applies here. If you succumbed to the rhetoric of the Bush sycophants and joined the march (to send other people) to war only to realize your mistake later, you owe more to your fellow man than to simply claim you were lied to. You need to, at last, take action to stop the injustice in which you were complicit.

Paint a sign, write a blog post, march in a parade, or simply raise the quality of your discourse among friend. Do anything to combat this blunder and make up to your fellow patriots and world citizens alike. No President or Congress can instigate a war without the support of the population. So whose fault is the current Iraqi debacle?

Well, maybe it’s yours.

-Ian.

washingtonpost.com

Dissertation Could Be Security Threat Student’s Maps Illustrate Concerns About Public Information

By Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 8, 2003; Page A01

Sean Gorman’s professor called his dissertation “tedious and unimportant.” Gorman didn’t talk about it when he went on dates because “it was so boring they’d start staring up at the ceiling.” But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman’s work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives — if they could get their hands on it — would find a terrorist treasure map.

Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them.

He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: “If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?” In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.

For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons. His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society.

“I’m this grad student,” said Gorman, 29, amazed by his transformation from geek to cybercommando. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I’d be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs.”

Invariably, he said, they suggest his work be classified. “Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?” he said. “They’re worried about national security. I’m worried about getting my degree.” For academics, there always has been the imperative to publish or perish. In Gorman’s case, there’s a new concern: publish and perish.

“He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it,” said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. “The fiber-optic network is our country’s nervous system.” Every fiber, thin as a hair, carries the impulses responsible for Internet traffic, telephones, cell phones, military communications, bank transfers, air traffic control, signals to the power grids and water systems, among other things.

“You don’t want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up,” he said.

The Washington Post has agreed not to print the results of Gorman’s research, at the insistence of GMU. Some argue that the critical targets should be publicized, because it would force the government and industry to protect them. “It’s a tricky balance,” said Michael Vatis, founder and first director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. Vatis noted the dangerous time gap between exposing the weaknesses and patching them: “But I don’t think security through obscurity is a winning strategy.”

Gorman compiled his mega-map using publicly available material he found on the Internet. None of it was classified. His interest in maps evolved from his childhood, he said, because he “grew up all over the place.” Hunched in the back seat of the family car, he would puzzle over maps, trying to figure out where they should turn. Five years ago, he began work on a master’s degree in geography. His original intention was to map the physical infrastructure of the Internet, to see who was connected, who was not, and to measure its economic impact.

“We just had this research idea, and thought, ‘Okay,’ ” said his research partner, Laurie Schintler, an assistant professor at GMU. “I wasn’t even thinking about implications.”

The implications, however, in the post-Sept. 11 world, were enough to knock the wind out of John M. Derrick Jr., chairman of the board of Pepco Holdings Inc., which provides power to 1.8 million customers. When a reporter showed him sample pages of Gorman’s findings, he exhaled sharply.

“This is why CEOs of major power companies don’t sleep well these days,” Derrick said, flattening the pages with his fist. “Why in the world have we been so stupid as a country to have all this information in the public domain? Does that openness still make sense? It sure as hell doesn’t to me.”

Recently, Derrick received an e-mail from an atlas company offering to sell him a color-coded map of the United States with all the electric power generation and transmission systems. He hit the reply button on his e-mail and typed: “With friends like you, we don’t need any enemies in the world.”

Toward the other end of the free speech spectrum are such people as John Young, a New York architect who created a Web site with a friend, featuring aerial pictures of nuclear weapons storage areas, military bases, ports, dams and secret government bunkers, along with driving directions from Mapquest.com. He has been contacted by the FBI, he said, but the site is still up.

“It gives us a great thrill,” Young said. “If it’s banned, it should be published. We like defying authority as a matter of principle.”

This is a time when people are rethinking the idea of innocent information. But it is hardly the first time a university has entangled itself in a war. John McCarthy, who oversees Gorman’s project at GMU’s National Center for Technology and Law, compared this period to World War II, when academics worked on code-breaking and atomic research. McCarthy introduced Gorman to some national security contacts. Gorman’s critical infrastructure project, he said, has opened a dialogue among academia, the public sector and the private sector. The challenge? “Getting everyone to trust each other,” McCarthy said. “It’s a three-way tension that tugs and pulls.”

When Gorman and Schintler presented their findings to government officials, McCarthy recalled, “they said, ‘Pssh, let’s scarf this up and classify it.’ ”

And when they presented them at a forum of chief information officers of the country’s largest financial services companies — clicking on a single cable running into a Manhattan office, for example, and revealing the names of 25 telecommunications providers — the executives suggested that Gorman and Schintler not be allowed to leave the building with the laptop.

Businesses are particularly sensitive about such data. They don’t want to lose consumer confidence, don’t want to be liable for security lapses and don’t want competitors to know about their weaknesses. The CIOs for Wells Fargo and Mellon Financial Corp. attended the meeting. Neither would comment for this story.

Catherine Allen, chief executive of BITS, the technology group for the financial services roundtable, said the attendees were “amazed” and “concerned” to see how interdependent their systems were. Following the presentation, she said, they decided to hold an exercise in an undisclosed Midwestern city this summer. They plan to simulate a cyber assault and a bomb attack jointly with the telecommunications industry and the National Communications System to measure the impact on financial services.

McCarthy hopes that by identifying vulnerabilities, the GMU research will help solve a risk management problem: “We know we can’t have a policeman at every bank and switching facility, so what things do you secure?”

Terrorists, presumably, are exploring the question from the other end. In December 2001, bin Laden appeared in a videotape and urged the destruction of the U.S. economy. He smiled occasionally, leaned into the camera and said, “This economic hemorrhaging continues until today, but requires more blows. And the youth should try to find the joints of the American economy and hit the enemy in these joints, with God’s permission.”

Every day, Gorman tries to identify those “joints,” sitting in a gray cinderblock lab secured by an electronic lock, multiple sign-on codes and a paper shredder. No one other than Gorman, Schintler or their research instructor, Rajendra Kulkarni, is allowed inside; they even take out their own trash. When their computer crashed, they removed the hard drive, froze it, smashed it and rubbed magnets over the surface to erase the data.

The university has imposed the security guidelines. It is trying to build a cooperative relationship with the Department of Homeland Security. Brenton Greene, director for infrastructure coordination at DHS, described the project as “a cookbook of how to exploit the vulnerabilities of our nation’s infrastructure.” He applauds Gorman’s work, as long as he refrains from publishing details. “We would recommend this not be openly distributed,” he said.

Greene is trying to help the center get federal funding. (“The government uses research funding as a carrot to induce people to refrain from speech they would otherwise engage in,” said Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School. “If it were a command, it would be unconstitutional.”)

All this is a bit heavy for Gorman, who is in many ways a typical student. His Christmas lights are still up in July; his living room couch came from a trash pile on the curb. Twice a day, Gorman rows on the Potomac. Out on the water, pulling the oars, he can stop thinking about how someone could bring down the New York Stock Exchange or cripple the Federal Reserve’s ability to transfer money.

On a recent afternoon, he drove his Jeep from the Fairfax campus toward the river. Along the way he talked about his dilemma: not wanting to hurt national security; not wanting to ruin his career as an academic.

“Is this going to completely squash me?” he said, biting his fingernail. GMU has determined that he will publish only the most general aspects of his work. “Academics make their name as an expert in something. . . . If I can’t talk about it, it’s hard to get hired. It’s hard to put ‘classified’ on your list of publications on your résumé.”

As he drove along Route 50, he pointed out a satellite tower and a Verizon installation. Somewhere in Arlington he took a wrong turn and stopped to ask for directions. It has always been that way with him. He’s great at maps, but somehow he ends up lost.

-Ian.

—- http://www1.iraqwar.ru/iraq-read_article.php?articleId”11&lang=en

The Real But Unspoken Reasons For The Iraq War – OIL U$ Dollar vs. Euro 08.04.2003 [12:37]

Summary Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking – it an an oil CURRENCY war. The Real Reason for this upcoming war is this administration’s goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the “petro-dollar” and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. THE REAL REASONS FOR THE UPCOMING WAR IN IRAQ A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth By W. Clark wrc92 [at] aol [dot] com “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be … The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.” Those words by Thomas Jefferson embody the unfortunate state of affairs that have beset our nation. As our government prepares to go to war with Iraq, our country seems unable to answer even the most basic questions about this war. First, why is there virtually no international support to topple Saddam? If Iraq’s WMD program truly possessed the threat level that President Bush has repeatedly purported, why is there no international coalition to militarily disarm Saddam? Secondly, despite over 300 unfettered U.N inspections to date, there has been no evidence reported of a reconstituted Iraqi WMD program. Third, and despite Bush’s rhetoric, the CIA has not found any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. To the contrary, some analysts believe it is far more likely Al Qaeda might acquire an unsecured former Soviet Union Weapon(s) of Mass Destruction, or potentially from sympathizers within a destabilized Pakistan. Moreover, immediately following Congress’s vote on the Iraq Resolution, we suddenly became aware of North Korea’s nuclear program violations. Kim Jong Il is processing uranium in order to produce nuclear weapons this year. President Bush has not provided a rationale answer as to why Saddam’s seemingly dormant WMD program possesses a more imminent threat that North Korea’s active program? Strangely, Donald Rumsfeld suggested that if Saddam were “exiled” we could avoid an Iraq war? Confused yet? Well, I’m going to give their game away – the core driver for toppling Saddam is actually the euro currency, the â,. Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking. The upcoming war in Iraq war is mostly about how the ruling class at Langley and the Bush oligarchy view hydrocarbons at the geo-strategic level, and the overarching macroeconomic threats to the U.S. dollar from the euro. The Real Reason for this upcoming war is this administration’s goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the “petro-dollar” and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. The following is how an astute and anonymous friend alluded to the unspoken truth about this upcoming war with Iraq… “The Federal Reserve’s greatest nightmare is that OPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in Nov. 2000 (when the euro was worth around 80 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar’s steady depreciation against the euro.” (Note: the dollar declined 15% against the euro in 2002.) “The real reason the Bush administration wants a puppet government in Iraq – or more importantly, the reason why the corporate-military-industrial network conglomerate wants a puppet government in Iraq – is so that it will revert back to a dollar standard and stay that way.” (While also hoping to veto any wider OPEC momentum towards the euro, especially from Iran – the 2nd largest OPEC producer who is actively discussing a switch to euros for its oil exports). Furthermore, despite Saudi Arabia being our ‘client state,’ the Saudi regime appears increasingly weak/ threatened from massive civil unrest. Some analysts believe a “Saudi Revolution” might be plausible in the aftermath of an unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq (ie. Iran circa 1979) (1). Undoubtedly, the Bush administration is acutely aware of these risks. Hence, the neo conservative framework entails a large and permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf region in a post Saddam era, just in case we need to surround and grab Saudi’s oil fields in the event of a coup by an anti-western group. But first back to Iraq. “Saddam sealed his fate when he decided to switch to the euro in late 2000 (and later converted his $10 billion reserve fund at the U.N. to euros) – at that point, another manufactured Gulf War become inevitable under Bush II. Only the most extreme circumstances could possibly stop that now and I strongly doubt anything can – short of Saddam getting replaced with a pliant regime.” Big Picture Perspective: Everything else aside from the reserve currency and the Saudi/Iran oil issues (i.e. domestic political issues and international criticism) is peripheral and of marginal consequence to this administration. Further, the dollar-euro threat is powerful enough that they’ll rather risk much of the economic backlash in the short-term to stave off the long-term dollar crash of an OPEC transaction standard change from dollars to euros. All of this fits into the broader Great Game that encompasses Russia, India, China.” This information about Iraq’s oil currency is censored by the U.S. media as well as the Bush administration & Federal Reserve as the truth could potentially curtail both investor and consumer confidence, reduce consumer borrowing/ spending, create political pressure to form a new energy policy that slowly weans us off middle-eastern oil, and of course stop our march towards war in Iraq. This quasi “state secret” can be found on a Radio Free Europe article discussing Saddam’s switch for his oil sales from dollars to the euros on Nov. 6, 2000 (2). “Baghdad’s switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington’s hard-line on sanctions and encourage Europeans to challenge it. But the political message will cost Iraq millions in lost revenue. RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel looks at what Baghdad will gain and lose, and the impact of the decision to go with the European currency.” At the time of the switch many analysts were surprised that Saddam was willing to give up millions in oil revenue for what appeared to be a political statement. However, contrary to one of the main points of this November 2000 article, the steady depreciation of the dollar versus the euro since late 2001 means that Iraq has profited handsomely from the switch in their reserve and transaction currencies. The euro has gained roughly 17% against the dollar in that time, which also applies to the $10 billion in Iraq’s U.N. “oil for food” reserve fund that was previously held in dollars has also gained that same percent value since the switch. What would happen if OPEC made a sudden switch to euros, as opposed to a gradual transition? “Otherwise, the effect of an OPEC switch to the euro would be that oil-consuming nations would have to flush dollars out of their (central bank) reserve funds and replace these with euros. The dollar would crash anywhere from 20-40% in value and the consequences would be those one could expect from any currency collapse and massive inflation (think Argentina currency crisis, for example). You’d have foreign funds stream out of the U.S. stock markets and dollar denominated assets, there’d surely be a run on the banks much like the 1930s, the current account deficit would become unserviceable, the budget deficit would go into default, and so on. Your basic 3rd world economic crisis scenario. The United States economy is intimately tied to the dollar’s role as reserve currency. This doesn’t mean that the U.S. couldn’t function otherwise, but that the transition would have to be gradual to avoid such dislocations (and the ultimate result of this would probably be the U.S. and the E.U. switching roles in the global economy).” In the aftermath of toppling Saddam it is clear the U.S. will keep a large and permanent military force in the Persian Gulf. Indeed, there is no “exit strategy” in Iraq, as the military will be needed to protect the newly installed Iraqi regime, and perhaps send a message to other OPEC producers that they might receive “regime change” if they too move to euros for their oil exportsâ¤. Another underreported story from this summer regarding the other OPEC ‘Axis of Evil’ country and their interest in the selling oil in euros, Iran. (3) “Iran’s proposal to receive payments for crude oil sales to Europe in euros instead of U.S. dollars is based primarily on economics, Iranian and industry sources said. But politics are still likely to be a factor in any decision, they said, as Iran uses the opportunity to hit back at the U.S. government, which recently labeled it part of an “axis of evil.” The proposal, which is now being reviewed by the Central Bank of Iran, is likely to be approved if presented to the country’s parliament, a parliamentary representative said.”There is a very good chance MPs will agree to this idea …now that the euro is stronger, it is more logical,” the parliamentary representative said.” More over, and perhaps most telling, during 2002 the majority of reserve funds in Iran’s central bank have been shifted to euros. It appears imminent that Iran intends to switch to euros for their oil currency (4) “More than half of the country’s assets in the Forex Reserve Fund have been converted to euro, a member of the Parliament Development Commission, Mohammad Abasspour announced. He noted that higher parity rate of euro against the US dollar will give the Asian countries, particularly oil exporters, a chance to usher in a new chapter in ties with European Union’s member countries. He said that the United States dominates other countries through its currency, noting that given the superiority of the dollar against other hard currencies, the US monopolizes global trade. The lawmaker expressed hope that the competition between euro and dollar would eliminate the monopoly in global trade.” Indeed, after toppling Saddam, this administration may decide that Iran is the next target in the “war on terror.” Iran’s interest in switching to the euro as their standard transaction currency for oil exports is well documented. Perhaps this recent MSNBC article illustrates the objectives of the neo conservatives (5). “While still wrangling over how to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration is already looking for other targets. President Bush has called for the ouster of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Now some in the administration⤔and allies at D.C. think tanks⤔are eyeing Iran and even Saudi Arabia. As one senior British official put it: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Aside from these political risks regarding Saudi Arabia and Iran, another risk factor isactually Japan. Perhaps the biggest gamble in a protracted Iraq war may be Japan’s weak economy (6). If the war creates prolonged oil high prices ($45 per barrel over several months), or a short but massive oil price spike ($80 to $100 per barrel), some analysts believe Japan’s fragile economy would collapse. Japan is quite hypersensitive to oil prices, and if its banks default, the collapse of the second largest economy would set in motion a sequence of events that would prove devastating to the U.S. economy. Indeed, Japan’s fall in an Iraq war could create the economic dislocations that begin in the Pacific Rim but quickly spread to Europe and Russia. The Russian government lacks the controls to thwart a disorderly run on the dollar, and such an event could ultimately force and OPEC switch to euros. Additionally, other risks might arise if the Iraq war goes poorly or becomes prolonged, as it is possible that civil unrest may unfold in Kuwait or other OPEC members including Venezuela, as the latter may switch to euros just as Saddam did in November 2000. Thereby fostering the very situation this administration is trying to prevent, another OPEC member switching to euros as their oil transaction currency. Incidentally, the final “Axis of Evil” country, North Korea, recently decided to officially drop the dollar and begin using euros for trade, effective Dec. 7, 2002 (7). Unlike the OPEC-producers, their switch will have negligible economic impact, but it illustrates the geopolitical fallout of the President Bush’s harsh rhetoric. Much more troubling is North Korea’s recent action following the oil embargo of their country. They are in dire need of oil and food; and in an act of desperation they have re-activated their pre-1994 nuclear program. Processing uranium appears to be taking place at a rapid pace, and it appears their strategy is to prompt negotiations with the U.S. regarding food and oil. The CIA estimates that North Korea could produce 4-6 nuclear weapons by the second half of 2003. Ironically, this crisis over North Korea’s nuclear program further confirms the fraudulent premise for which this war with Saddam was entirely contrived. Unfortunately, neo conservatives such as George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearle fail to grasp that Newton’s Law applies equally to both physics and the geo-political sphere as well: “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” During the 1990s the world viewed the U.S. as a rather self-absorbed but essentially benevolent superpower. Military actions in Iraq (90-91′ & 98′), Serbia and Kosovo (99′) were undertaken with both U.N. and NATO cooperation and thus afforded international legitimacy. President Clinton also worked to reduce tensions in Northern Ireland and attempted to negotiate a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, in both the pre and post 9/11 intervals, the “America first” policies of the Bush administration, with its unwillingness to honor International Treaties, along with their aggressive militarisation of foreign policy, has significantly damaged our reputation abroad. Following 9/11, it appears that President Bush’s “warmongering rhetoric” has created global tensions – as we are now viewed as a belligerent superpower willing to apply unilateral military force without U.N. approval.Lamentably, the tremendous amount of international sympathy that we witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th tragedy has been replaced with fear and anger at our government. This administration’s bellicosity haschanged the worldview, and “anti-Americanism” is proliferating even among our closest allies (8). Even more alarming, and completely unreported in the U.S media, are some monetary shifts in the reserve funds of foreign governments away from the dollar with movements towards the euro (China, Venezuela, some OPEC producers and last week Russia flushed some of their dollars for euros) (9). It appears that the world community may lack faith in the Bush administration’s economic policies, and along with OPEC, seems poised to respond with economic retribution if the U.S. government is regarded as an uncontrollable and dangerous superpower. The plausibility of abandoning the dollar standard for the euro is growing. An interesting U.K. article outlines the dynamics and the potential outcomes (‘Beyond Bush’s Unilateralism: Another Bi-Polar World or A New Era of Win-Win?’)(10) “The most likely end to US hegemony may come about through a combination of high oil prices (brought about by US foreign policies toward the Middle East) and deeper devaluation of the US dollar (expected by many economists). Some elements of this scenario: 1) US global over-reach in the “war on terrorism” already leading to deficits as far as the eye can see — combined with historically-high US trade deficits – lead to a further run on the dollar. This and the stock market doldrums make the US less attractive to the world’s capital. 2) More developing countries follow the lead of Venezuela and China in diversifying their currency reserves away from dollars and balanced with euros. Such a shift in dollar-euro holdings in Latin America and Asia could keep the dollar and euro close to parity. 3) OPEC could act on some of its internal discussions and decide (after concerted buying of euros in the open market) to announce at a future meeting in Vienna that OPEC’s oil will be re-denominated in euros, or even a new oil-backed currency of their own. A US attack on Iraq sends oil to â,40 per barrel. 4) The Bush Administration’s efforts to control the domestic political agenda backfires. Damage over the intelligence failures prior to 9/11 and warnings of imminent new terrorist attacks precipitate a further stock market slide. 5) All efforts by Democrats and the 57% of the US public to shift energy policy toward renewables, efficiency, standards, higher gas taxes, etc. are blocked by the Bush Administration and its fossil fuel industry supporters. Thus, the USA remains vulnerable to energy supply and price shocks. 6) The EU recognizes its own economic and political power as the euro rises further and becomes the world’s other reserve currency. The G-8 pegs the euro and dollar into a trading band — removing these two powerful currencies from speculators trading screens (a “win-win” for everyone!). Tony Blair persuades Brits of this larger reason for the UK to join the euro. 7) Developing countries lacking dollars or “hard” currencies follow Venezuela’s lead and begin bartering their undervalued commodities directly with each other in computerized swaps and counter trade deals. President Chavez has inked 13 such country barter deals on its oil, e.g., with Cuba in exchange for Cuban health paramedics who are setting up clinics in rural Venezuelan villages. “The result of this scenario? The USA could no longer run its huge current account trade deficits or continue to wage open-ended global war on terrorism or evil. The USA ceases pursuing unilateralist policies. A new US administration begins to return to its multilateralist tradition, ceases its obstruction and rejoins the UN and pursues more realistic international cooperation.” As for the events currently taking place in Venezuela, items #2 and #7 on the above list may allude to why the Bush administration quickly endorsed the failed military-led coup of Hugo Chavez in April 2002. Although the coup collapsed after 2 days, various reports suggest the CIA and a rather embarrassed Bush administration approved and may have been actively involved with the civilian/military coup plotters. (11) “George W. Bush’s administration was the failed coup’s primary loser, underscoring its bankrupt hemispheric policy. Now it is slowly filtering out that in recent months White Houseofficials met with key coup figures, including Carmona. Although the administration insists that it explicitly objected to any extra-constitutional action to remove Chavez, comments by senior U.S. officials did little to convey this.” “The CIA’s role in a 1971 Chilean strike could have served as the working model for generating economic and social instability in order to topple Chavez. In the truckers’ strike of that year, the agency secretly orchestrated and financed the artificial prolongation of a contrived work stoppage in order to economically asphyxiate the leftist Salvador Allende government.” “This scenario would have had CIA operatives acting in liaison with the Venezuelan military, as well as with opposition business and labor leaders, to convert a relatively minor afternoon-long work stoppage by senior management into a nearly successful coup de grace.” Interestingly, according to an article by Michael Ruppert, Venezuelan’s ambassador Francisco Mieres-Lopez apparently floated the idea of switching to the euro as their oil currency standard approximately one year before the failed coup attempt… Furthermore, there is evidence that the CIA is still active in its attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Chavez administration. In fact, this past December a Uruguayan government official recently exposed the ongoing covert CIA operations in Venezuela (12): “Uruguayan EP-FA congressman Jose Bayardi says he has information that far-reaching plan have been put into place by the CIA and other North American intelligence agencies tooverthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias” “Bayardi says he has received copies of top-secret communications between the Bush administration in Washington and the government of Uruguay requesting the latter’s cooperation to support white collar executives and trade union activists to “break down levels of intransigence within the Chavez Frias administration” Venezuela is the fourth largest producer of oil, and the corporate elites whose political power runs unfettered in the Bush/Cheney oligarchy appear interested in privatizing Venezuela’s oil industry. Furthermore, the establishment might be concerned that Chavez’s “barter deals” with 12 Latin American countries and Cuba are effectively cutting the U.S. dollar out of the vital oil transaction currency cycle. Commodities are being traded among these countries in exchange for Venezuela’s oil, thereby reducing reliance on fiat dollars. If these unique oil transactions proliferate, they could create more devaluation pressure on the dollar. Continuing attempts by the CIA to remove Hugo Chavez appear likely. The U.S. economy has acquired several problems, including as our record-high trade account deficit (almost 5% of GDP), $6.3 trillion dollar deficit (55% of GDP), and the recent return to annual budget deficits in the hundreds of billions. These are factors that would devalue the currency of any nation under the “old rules.” Why is the dollar still strong despite these structural flaws? Well, the elites understand that the strength of the dollar does not merely rest on our economic output per se. The dollar posses two unique advantages relative to all other hard currencies. The reality is that the strength of the dollar since 1945 rests on being the international reserve currency and thus fiat currency for global oil transactions (ie. “petro-dollar”). The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of these fiat petro-dollars, which are then used by nation states to purchase oil/energy from OPEC producers (except Iraq, to some degree Venezuela, and perhaps Iran in the near future). These petro-dollars are then re-cycled from OPEC back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, real estate, etc. The “old rules” for valuation of our currency and economic power were based on our flexible market, free flow of trade goods, high per worker productivity, manufacturing output/trade surpluses, government oversight of accounting methodologies (ie. SEC), developed infrastructure, education system, and of course total cash flow and profitability. While many of these factors remain present, over the last two decades we have diluted some of these “safe harbor” fundamentals. Despite imbalances and some structural problems that are escalating within the U.S. economy, the dollar as the fiat oil currency created “new rules”. The following exerts from an Asia Times article discusses the virtues of our fiat oil currency and dollar hegemony (or vices from the perspective of developing nations, whose debt is denominated in dollars). (13) “Ever since 1971, when US president Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard (at $35 per ounce) that had been agreed to at the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II, the dollar has been a global monetary instrument that the United States, and only the United States, can produce by fiat. The dollar, now a fiat currency, is at a 16-year trade-weighted high despite record US current-account deficits and the status of the US as the leading debtor nation. The US national debt as of April 4 was $6.021 trillion against a gross domestic product (GDP) of $9 trillion.” “World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies.To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world’s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world’s central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.” “By definition, dollar reserves must be invested in US assets, creating a capital-accounts surplus for the US economy. Even after a year of sharp correction, US stock valuation is still at a 25-year high and trading at a 56 percent premium compared with emerging markets.””The US capital-account surplus in turn finances the US trade deficit. Moreover, any asset, regardless of location, that is denominated in dollars is a US asset in essence. When oil is denominated in dollars through US state action and the dollar is a fiat currency,the US essentially owns the world’s oil for free. And the more the US prints greenbacks, the higher the price of US assets will rise. Thus a strong-dollar policy gives the US a double win.” This unique geo-political agreement with Saudi Arabia has worked to our favor for the past 30 years, as this arrangement has raised the entire asset value of all dollar denominated assets/properties, and allowed the Federal Reserve to create a truly massive debt and credit expansion (or ‘credit bubble’ in the view of some economists). These current structural imbalances in the U.S. economy are sustainable as long as: 1)Nations continue to demand and purchase oil for their energy/survival needs 2)The fiat reserve currency for global oil transactions remain the U.S. dollar (and dollar only) These underlying factors, along with the “safe harbor” reputation of U.S. investments afforded by the dollar’s reserve currency status propelled the U.S. to economic and military hegemony in the post-World War II period. However, the introduction of the euro is a significant new factor, and appears to be the primary threat to U.S. economic hegemony. More over, in December 2002 ten additional countries were approved for full membership into the E.U. In 2004 this will result in an aggregate GDP of $9.6 trillion and 450 million people, directly competing with the U.S. economy ($10.5 trillion GDP, 280 million people). Especially interesting is a speech given by Mr Javad Yarjani, the Head of OPEC’s Petroleum Market Analysis Department, in a visit to Spain (April 2002). He speech dealt entirely on the subject of OPEC oil transaction currency standard with respect to both the dollar and the euro. The following exerts from this OPEC executive provide insights into the conditions that would create momentum for an OPEC currency switch to the euro. Indeed, his candid analysis warrants careful consideration given that two of the requisite variables he outlines for the switch have taken place since this speech in early 2002. These vital stories are discussed in the European media, but have been censored by our own mass media (14) “The question that comes to mind is whether the euro will establish itself in world financial markets, thus challenging the supremacy of the US dollar, and consequently trigger a change in the dollar’s dominance in oil markets. As we all know, the mighty dollar has reigned supreme since 1945, and in the last few years has even gained more ground with the economic dominance of the United States, a situation that may not change in the near future. By the late 90s, more than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions, and half of all world exports, were denominated in dollars. In addition, the US currency accounts for about two thirds of all official exchange reserves. The world’s dependency on US dollars to pay for trade has seen countries bound to dollar reserves, which are disproportionably higher than America’s share in global output. The share of the dollar in the denomination of world trade is also much higher than the share of the US in world trade. Having said that, it is worthwhile to note that in the long run the euro is not at such a disadvantage versus the dollar when one compares the relative sizes of the economies involved, especially given the EU enlargement plans. Moreover, the Euro-zone has a bigger share of global trade than the US and while the US has a huge current account deficit, the euro area has a more, or balanced, external accounts position. One of the more compelling arguments for keeping oil pricing and payments in dollars has been that the US remains a large importer of oil, despite being a substantial crude producer itself. However, looking at the statistics of crude oil exports, one notes that the Euro-zone is an even larger importer of oil and petroleum products than the US.” “From the EU’s point of view, it is clear that Europe would prefer to see payments for oil shift from the dollar to the euro, which effectively removed the currency risk. It would also increase demand for the euro and thus help raise its value. Moreover, since oil is such an important commodity in global trade, in term of value, if pricing were to shift to the euro, it could provide a boost to the global acceptability of the single currency. There is also very strong trade links between OPEC Member Countries (MCs) and the Euro-zone, with more than 45 percent of total merchandise imports of OPEC MCs coming from the countries of the Euro-zone, while OPEC MCs are main suppliers of oil and crude oil products to Europe.” “Of major importance to the ultimate success of the euro, in terms of the oil pricing, will be if Europe’s two major oil producers ⤔ the United Kingdom and Norway join the single currency. Naturally, the future integration of these two countries into the Euro-zone and Europe will be important considering they are the region’s two major oil producers in the North Sea, which is home to the international crude oil benchmark, Brent. This might create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros.” “In the short-term, OPEC MCs, with possibly a few exceptions, are expected to continue to accept payment in dollars. Nevertheless, I believe that OPEC will not discount entirely the possibility of adopting euro pricing and payments in the future. The Organization, like many other financial houses at present, is also assessing how the euro will settle into its life as a new currency. The critical question for market players is the overall value and stability of the euro, and whether other countries within the Union will adopt the single currency.” Should the euro challenge the dollar in strength, which essentially could include it in the denomination of the oil bill, it could be that a system may emerge which benefits more countries in the long-term. Perhaps with increased European integration and a strong European economy, this may become a reality. Time may be on your side. I wish the euro every success.” Based on this important speech, momentum for OPEC to consider switching to the euro will grow once the E.U. expands in May 2004 to 450 million people with the inclusion of 10 additional member states. The aggregate GDP will increase from $7 trillion to $9.6 trillion. This enlarged E.U. will be an oil consuming purchasing population 33% larger than the U.S., and over half of OPEC crude oil will be sold to the EU as of mid-2004. This does not include other potential entrants such as the U.K., Norway, Denmark and Sweden. I should note that since this speech the euro has been trading at parity or above the dollar since late 2002, and analysts predict the dollar will continue its downward trending in 2003 relative to the euro. Further, if or when the U.K. adopts the euro currency, that development could provide critical motivation for OPEC to the make the transition to euros. It appears the final two pivotal items that would create the OPEC transition to euros will be based on if and when Norway’s Brent crude is re-dominated in euros, and when the U.K. adopts the euro. Regarding the later, Tony Blair is lobbying heavily for the U.K. to adopt the euro, and their adoption would seem imminent within this decade. Again, I offer the following information from my astute acquaintance who analyzes these matters very carefully regarding the euro: “The pivotal vote will probably be Sweden, where approval this next autumn of adopting the euro also would give momentum to the Danish government’s strong desire to follow suit. Polls in Denmark now indicate that the euro would pass with a comfortable margin and Norwegian polls show a growing majority in favor of EU membership. Indeed, with Norway having already integrated most EU economic directives through the EEA partnership and with their strongly appreciated currency, their accession to the euro would not only be effortless, but of great economic benefit. As go the Swedes, so probably will go the Danes & Norwegians. It’s the British who are the real obstacle to building momentum for the euro as international transaction & reserve currency. So long as the United Kingdom remains apart from the euro, reducing exchange rate costs between the euro and the British pound remains their obvious priority. British adoption (a near-given in the long run) would mount significant pressure toward repegging the Brent crude benchmark – which is traded on the International Petroleum Exchange in London – and the Norwegians would certainly have no objection whatsoever that I can think of, whether or not they join the European Union.” Finally, the maneuvers toward reducing the global dominance of the dollar are already well underway and have only reason to accelerate so far as I can see. An OPEC pricing shift would seem rather unlikely prior 2004 – barring political motivations (ie. motivations of OPEC members) or a disorderly collapse of the dollar (ie. prolonged high oil prices due to Iraq war causes Japanese bank collapse)- but appears quite viable to take place before the end of the decade.” In otherwords, around 2005, from an economic and monetary perspectivem, it will be logical for OPEC to switch to the euro for oil pricing. Of course that will devalue the dollar, and hurt the US economy unless it begins making some structual changes – or use its massive military power to force events upon the OPEC states… Facing these potentialities, I hypothesize that President Bush intends to topple Saddam in 2003 in a pre-emptive attempt to initiate massive Iraqi oil production in far excess of OPEC quotas, to reduce global oil prices, and thereby dismantle OPEC’sprice controls. The end-goal of the neo-conservatives is incredibly bold yet simple in purpose, to use the “war on terror” as the premise to finally dissolve OPEC’s decision-making process, thus ultimately preventing the cartel’s inevitable switch to pricing oil in euros. How would the Bush administration break-up the OPEC cartel’s price controls in a post-Saddam Iraq? First, the newly installed regime (apparently a U.S. General for the first several months) will convert Iraq back to the dollar standard. Next, with the U.S. military protecting the oil fields, the Bush junta will undertake the necessary steps to rapidly increase production of Iraq oil, quintupling Iraq’s current output – and well beyond OPEC’s 2 million barrel per day quota. Dr. Nayyer Ali offers a succinct analysis of how Iraq’s underutilized oil reserves will not be a “profit-maker” for the U.S. government, but it will serve as the crucial economic instrument used by the Bush junta to leverage and hopefully dissolve OPEC’s price controls, thus causing the neo conservative’s long sought goal of collapsing the OPEC cartel (15): “Despite this vast pool of oil, Iraq has never produced at a level proportionate to the reserve base. Since the Gulf War, Iraq’s production has been limited by sanctions and allowed sales under the oil for food program (by which Iraq has sold 60 billion dollars worth of oil over the last 5 years) and what else can be smuggled out. This amounts to less than 1 billion barrels per year. If Iraq were reintegrated into the world economy, it could allow massive investment in its oil sector and boost output to 2.5 billion barrels per year, or about 7 million barrels a day. Total world oil production is about 75 million barrels, and OPEC combined produces about 25 million barrels. What would be the consequences of this? There are two obvious things. First would be the collapse of OPEC, whose strategy of limiting production to maximize price will have finally reached its limit. An Iraq that can produce that much oil will want to do so, and will not allow OPEC to limit it to 2 million barrels per day. If Iraq busts its quota, then who in OPEC will give up 5 million barrels of production? No one could afford to, and OPEC would die. This would lead to the second major consequence, which is a collapse in the price of oil to the 10-dollar range per barrel. The world currently uses 25 billion barrels per year, so a 15-dollar drop will save oil-consuming nations 375 billion dollars in crude oil costs every year.” “The Iraq war is not a moneymaker. But it could be an OPEC breaker. That however is a long-term outcome that will require Iraq to be successfully reconstituted into a functioning state in which massive oil sector investment can take place.” The American people are largely oblivious to the economic risks regarding President Bush’s upcoming war. Not only is Japan’s economy at grave risk from a spike in oil prices, but additional risks relate to Iran and Venezuela as well, either of whom could move to the euros, thus providing further momentum for OPEC to act on their “internal discussions” and switch to the euro as the fiat currency for oil. The Bush administration believes that by toppling Saddam they will remove the juggernaut, thus allowing the US to control Iraqi’s huge oil reserves, and finally break-up and dissolve the 10 remaining countries in OPEC. This last issue is undoubtedly a significant gamble even in the best-case scenario of a quick and relatively painless war that topples Saddam and leaves Iraq’s oil fields intact. Undoubtedly, the OPEC cartel could feel threatened by the Bush junta’s stated goal of breaking-up OPEC’s price controls ($22-$28 per barrel). Perhaps the Bush administration’s ambitious goal of flooding the oil market with Iraqi crude may work, but I have doubts. Will OPEC simply tolerate quota-busting Iraqi oil production, thus delivering to them a lesson in self-inflicted hara-kiri (suicide)? Contrarily, OPEC could meet in Vienna and in an act of self-preservation re-denominate the oil currency to the euro. Such a decision by would mark the end of U.S. dollar hegemony, and thus the end of our precarious economic superpower status. Again, I offer the astute analysis of my expert friend regarding the colossal gamble this administration is about to undertake: “One of the dirty little secrets of today’s international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America’s preeminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future. That such a course hasn’t been pursued to date bears more relation to the fact that other Westernized, highly developed nations haven’t any interest to undergo the great disruptions which would follow – but it could assuredly take place in the event that the consensus view coalesces of the United States as any sort of ‘rogue’nation. In other words, if the dangers of American global hegemony are ever perceived as a greater liability than the dangers of toppling the international order (or, alternately, if an ‘every man for himself’ crisis as discussed above spirals out of control and forces their hand). The Bush administration and the neo conservative movement has set out on a multiple-front course to ensure that this cannot take place, in brief by a graduated assertion of military hegemony atop the existent economic hegemony. The paradox I’ve illustrated with this one narrow scenario is that the quixotic course itself may very well bring about the feared outcome that it means to preempt. We shall see!” Under this administration we have returned to massive deficit spending, and the lack of strong SEC enforcement has further eroded investor confidence. Regrettably, the flawed economic and tax policies and of the Bush administration may be exacerbating the weakness of the dollar, if not outright accelerating some countries to diversify their central bank reserve funds with euros as an alternative to the dollar. >From a foreign policy perspective, the terminations of numerous international treaties and disdain for international cooperation via the UN and NATO have angered even our closest allies. Lastly, and despite President Bush’s attempt to use the threat of applying military force to OPEC producers who may wish to switch to the euro for their oil payments, it appears their belligerent neo conservative policies may paradoxically bring about the dire outcome they hope to prevent – an OPEC currency switch to euros. The American people are not aware of such information due to the U.S. mass media, which has been reduced to a handful of consumption/entertainment and profit-oriented conglomerates that filter the flow of information in the U.S. Indeed, the Internet provides the only source of unfiltered “real news.” Synopsis: It would appear that any attempt by OPEC member states in the Middle East or Latin America to transition to the euro as their oil transaction currency standard shall be met with either overt U.S. military actions or covert U.S. intelligence agency interventions. Under the guise of the perpetual “war on terror” the Bush administration is manipulating the American people about the unspoken but very real macroeconomic reasons for this upcoming war with Iraq. This war in Iraq will have nothing to with any threat from Saddam’s old WMD program. This war will be over the global currency of oil. Sadly, the U.S. has become largely ignorant and complacent. Too many of us are willing to be ruled by fear and lies, rather than by persuasion and truth. Will we allow our government to initiate the dangerous “pre-emptive doctrine” by waging an unpopular war in Iraq, while we refuse to acknowledge that Saddam does not pose an imminent threat to the United States? We seem unable to address the structural weakness of our economy due to massive debt manipulation, unaffordable 2001 tax cuts, massive current account deficits, trade deficits, corporate accounting abuses, unsustainable credit expansion, near zero personal savings, record personal indebtedness, and our dependence and over consumption of cheap Middle Eastern oil. How much longer can we reliably import our oil from middle eastern states that dislike or despise us because of our biased foreign policy towards Israel? Lastly, we must bear in mind Jefferson’s insistence that a free press is our best, and perhaps only mechanism to protect democracy, and part of today’s dilemma lies within the U.S. media conglomerates that have failed to inform the People. Regardless of whatever Dr. Blix finds or doesn’t find in Iraq regarding WMD, it appears that President Bush is determined to pursue his “pre-emptive” imperialist war to secure a large portion of the earth’s remaining hydrocarbons, and then use Iraq’s underutilized oil to destroy the OPEC cartel. Will this gamble work? Undeniably our nation may suffer not only from economic retribution, but also from increased Al-Qaeda sponsored terrorism as well. Will we stand idle and watch CNN, as our government becomes an international pariah by discarding International Law as it wages a unilateral war in Iraq? Is it morally defensible to deploy our brave but naÃve young soldiers around the globe to enforce U.S. dollar hegemony for global oil transactions – via the barrel of their guns? Will we allow imperialist conquest in the Middle East to feed our excessive energy consumption, while ignoring the duplicitous overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Latin America? Shall we accept the grave price of an unjust war over the currency of oil? We must not stand silent and watchour country become a ‘rogue’ superpower, relying on brute force, thereby forcing the industrialized nations or OPEC to abandon the dollar standard – thus with the mere stroke of a pen – slay the U.S. Empire? Informed citizens believe this administration is pushing us towards that dire outcome. Remaining silent is not only misguided, but false patriotism. This need not be our fate. When will we demand that our government begin the long and difficult journey towards energy conservation, the development of renewable energy sources, and sustained balanced budgets to allow real deficit reduction? When will we repeal of the unaffordable 2001 tax cuts to create a balanced budget, enforce corporate accounting laws, and substantially reinvest in our manufacturing and export sectors to move our economy from a trade account deficit position back into a trade account surplus position? Undoubtedly, we must make these and many more painful structural changes to our economy if we are to restore our “safe harbor” investment status. Ultimately we will have to make sacrifices by reducing our excessive energy consumption that we have become accustomed to as a society. It is imperative that our government also begins economic and monetary reforms immediately. We must adopt our economy to accommodate the inevitable competition to the dollar from the euro as an alternative international reserve currency and oil transaction currency. The Bush administration’s seemingly entrenched political ideology appears quite incompatible with these necessary economic reforms. Ultimately We the People must demand a new and more responsible administration. We need leaders who are willing to return balanced, conservative fiscal policies, and to our traditions of engaging in multilateral foreign policies while seeking broad international cooperation. It has been said that all wars are fought over resources or ideology/religion. It appears that this administration may soon add “currency wars” as a third paradigm. I fear that the world community will not tolerate a U.S. Empire that uses its military power to conquer sovereign nations who decide to sell their oil products in euros instead of dollars. Likewise, if President Bush pursues an essentially unilateral war against Iraq, I suspect the historians will not be kind to his administration. Their agenda is clear to the world community, but when will U.S. patriots become cognizant of their modus operandi? “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945 END OF ESSAY

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Background Information on Hydrocarbons To understand hydrocarbons and how we got to this desperate place in Iraq, I have listed four articles in the Reference Section from Michael Ruppert’s controversial website: ‘From the Wilderness.’ Although some of Ruppert’s articles are overwrought from time to time, their research detailing the issues of hydrocarbons, and the interplay between energy and the Bush junta’s perpetual “war on terror” is quite informative. Other than the core driver of the dollar versus euro currency threat, the other issue related to the upcoming war with Iraq appears related to the Caspian Sea region. Since the mid-late 1990s the Caspian Sea region of Central Asiawas thought to hold approx. 200 billion barrels of untapped oil (the later would be comparable to Saudi Arabia’s reserve base)(16). Based on an early feasibility study by Enron, the easiest and cheapest way to bring this oil to market would be a pipeline from Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan to the Pakistan border at Malta. In 1998 then CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, expressed much interest in building that pipeline. In fact, these oil reserves were a *central* component of Vice President Cheney’s energy plan released in May 2001. According to his report, the U.S. will import 90% of its oil by 2020, and thus tapping into the reserves in the Caspian Sea region was viewed as a strategic goal that would help meet our growing energy demand, and also reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East (17). According to the French book, The Forbidden Truth (18), the Bush administration ignored the U.N. sanctions that had been imposed upon the Taliban and entered into negotiations with the supposedly ‘rogue regime’ from February 2, 2001 to August 6, 2001. According to this book, the Taliban were apparently not very cooperative based on the statements of Pakistan’s former ambassador, Mr. Naik. He reports that the U.S. threatened a “military option” in the summer of 2001 if the Taliban did not acquiesce to our demands. Fortuitous for the Bush administration and Cheney’s energy plan, Bin Laden delivered to us 9/11. The pre-positioned U.S. military; along with the CIA providing cash to the Northern Alliance leaders, led the invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban were routed. The pro-western Karzai government was ushered in. The pipeline project was now back on track in early 2002, well, sort… After three exploratory wells were built and analyzed, it was reported that the Caspian region holds only approximately 10 to 20 billion barrels of oil (although it does have a lot of natural gas) (16). The oil is also of poor quality, with high sulfur content. Subsequently, several major companies have now dropped their plans for the pipeline citing the massive project was no longer profitable. Unfortunately, this recent realization about the Caspian Sea region has serious implications for the U.S., India, China, Asia and Europe, as the amount of available hydrocarbons for industrialized and developing nations has been decreased downward by 20%. (Globalestimates reduced from 1.2 trillion to approx. 1 trillion) (18, 19). The Bush administration quickly turned its attention to a known quantity, Iraq, with it proven reserves totaling 11% of the world’s oil reserves. Our greatest nemesis, Bin Laden, was quickly replaced with our new public enemy #1, Saddam Hussein… For those who would like to review the impact of depleting hydrocarbon reserves from the geo-political perspective, and the potential ramifications to how this may ultimately create an erosion of our civil liberties and democratic processes, retired U.S. Special Forces officer Stan Goff offers a sobering analysis in his essay: ‘The Infinite War and Its Roots’ (20). Likewise, for those who wish to review the unspeakable evidence surrounding the September 11th tragedy, the controversial essay “The Enemy Within” by the famous American writer Gore Vidal offers a thorough introduction. Although published in Italy and a major UK newspaper, The Observer, you will not read Gore Vidal’s controversial essay in the U.S. media. Note: Gore Vidal’s latest book, ‘Dreaming War’ features this as the opening essay (21). Finally, ‘The War on Freedom” by British political scientist Nafeez Ahmed asks disconcerting questions about the 9/11 tragedy (22). FOOTNOTES (1)London, Heidi Kingstone, ‘Middle East: Trouble in the House of Saud’ (January 13, 2003) http://www.jrep.com/Mideast/Article-0.html (2)Recknagel, Charles, ‘Iraq: Baghdad Moves to Euro’ (November 1, 2000) http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/01112000160846.asp (3)Gutman, Roy & Barry, John, Beyond Baghdad: Expanding Target List: Washington looks at overhauling the Islamic and Arab world (August 11, 2002) http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/2002/newsweek081102.html (4)’Economics Drive Iran Euro Oil Plan, Politics Also Key’ (August 2002) http://www.iranexpert.com/2002/economicsdriveiraneurooil23august.htm (5)’Forex Fund Shifting to Euro,’ Iran Financial News, (August 25, 2002) http://www.payvand.com/news/02/aug/1080.html (6)Costello, Tom, ‘Japan’s Economy at Risk of Collapse’ (December 11, 2002) http://www.msnbc.com/news/845708.asp?0cl=cR (7) Gluck, Caroline, ‘North Korea embraces the euro’ (December 1, 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2531833.stm (8) ‘What the World Thinks in 2002 : How Global Publics View: Their Lives, Their Countries, The World, America’ (2002) http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID5 (9) ‘Euro continues to extend its global influence’ (January 7, 2002) http://www.europartnership.com/news/02jan07.htm (10) Henderson, Hazel, ‘Beyond Bush’s Unilateralism: Another Bi-Polar World or A New Era of Win-Win?’ (June 2002) http://www.hazelhenderson.com/Bush’s%20unilateralism.htm (11) Birms, Larry & Volberding, Alex, ‘U.S. is the Primary Loser in Failed Venezuelan Coup,’ Newsday (April 21, 2002) http://www.coha.org/COHA%20_in%20_the_news/ Articles%202002/newsday_04_21_02_us__venezuela.htm (12) ‘USA intelligence agencies revealed in plot to oust Venezuela’s President,’ (Dec 12, 2002) http://www.vheadline.com/0212/14248.asp (link now dead) (13) Liu, Henry C K, ‘US Dollar hegemony has got to go,’ (Asia Times, April 11, 2002) http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DD11Dj01.html (14) ‘The Choice of Currency for the Denomination of the Oil Bill,’ Speech given by Javad Yarjani, Head of OPEC’s Marketing Analysis Department (April, 2002) http://www.opec.org/NewsInfo/Speeches/sp2002/spAraqueSpainApr14.htm (15) Dr. Ali, Nayyer, ‘Iraq and Oil,’ (December 13, 2002) http://www.pakistanlink.com/nayyer/12132002.html (16) Pfeiffer, Dale, ‘Much Ado about Nothing — Whither the Caspian Riches? ‘ (December 5, 2002) http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/120502_caspian.html (17) Ruppert, Michael, ‘The Unseen Conflict,’ (October 18, 2002) http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101802_the_unseen.html (18) Jean Charles-Briscard & Guillaume Dasquie, ‘The Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden’, Nation Books, 2002. (19) Ruppert, Michael, ‘Colin Campbell on Oil.'(October 23, 2002) http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html (20) Golf, Stan, ‘The Infinite War and its Roots,’ http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/082702_infinite_war.html (21) Vidal, Gore, ‘Dreaming War: Blood for Oil & the Cheney-Bush Junta,’ Nation Books, 2002. His essay, ‘The Enemy Within’ was first printed in the UK’s Observer (Oct 27, 2002) http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/EnemyWithin.html (22) Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001’, Tree of Life Publications, 2002.

Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq’s oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence–talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration’s thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a “world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism … a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.”

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table–to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative–Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria–while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks’ broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats’ seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism’s evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow’s increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power,” even raising the possibility that America’s only options might be “surrender or war.” We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive–both themselves and others–expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as “freedom fighters.” The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush’s father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks’ policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn’t believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it’s okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam’s regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally “pro-American” regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks–including Perle–even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own–advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community’s formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn’t. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can’t we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help “liberate” Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we’ve ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won’t get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that’s a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks’ other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. “We need to be more assertive,” argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there’s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs’ days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran’s border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they’ll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran’s brother Shi’a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn’t quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the “physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression.” Give it one good hit, and you’ll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it’s unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can’t live with–as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

The New York Times March 23, 2003

The Philosopher of Islamic Terror By PAUL BERMAN

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many people anticipated a quick and satisfying American victory over Al Qaeda. The terrorist army was thought to be no bigger than a pirate ship, and the newly vigilant police forces of the entire world were going to sink the ship with swift arrests and dark maneuvers. Al Qaeda was driven from its bases in Afghanistan. Arrests and maneuvers duly occurred and are still occurring. Just this month, one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants was nabbed in Pakistan. Police agents, as I write, seem to be hot on the trail of bin Laden himself, or so reports suggest.

Yet Al Qaeda has seemed unfazed. Its popularity, which was hard to imagine at first, has turned out to be large and genuine in more than a few countries. Al Qaeda upholds a paranoid and apocalyptic worldview, according to which ”Crusaders and Zionists” have been conspiring for centuries to destroy Islam. And this worldview turns out to be widely accepted in many places — a worldview that allowed many millions of people to regard the Sept. 11 attacks as an Israeli conspiracy, or perhaps a C.I.A. conspiracy, to undo Islam. Bin Laden’s soulful, bearded face peers out from T-shirts and posters in a number of countries, quite as if he were the new Che Guevara, the mythic righter of cosmic wrongs.

The vigilant police in many countries, applying themselves at last, have raided a number of Muslim charities and Islamic banks, which stand accused of subsidizing the terrorists. These raids have advanced the war on still another front, which has been good to see. But the raids have also shown that Al Qaeda is not only popular; it is also institutionally solid, with a worldwide network of clandestine resources. This is not the Symbionese Liberation Army. This is an organization with ties to the ruling elites in a number of countries; an organization that, were it given the chance to strike up an alliance with Saddam Hussein’s Baath movement, would be doubly terrifying; an organization that, in any case, will surely survive the outcome in Iraq.

To anyone who has looked closely enough, Al Qaeda and its sister organizations plainly enjoy yet another strength, arguably the greatest strength of all, something truly imposing — though in the Western press this final strength has received very little attention. Bin Laden is a Saudi plutocrat with Yemeni ancestors, and most of the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 were likewise Saudis, and the provenance of those people has focused everyone’s attention on the Arabian peninsula. But Al Qaeda has broader roots. The organization was created in the late 1980’s by an affiliation of three armed factions — bin Laden’s circle of ”Afghan” Arabs, together with two factions from Egypt, the Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the latter led by Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s top theoretician. The Egyptian factions emerged from an older current, a school of thought from within Egypt’s fundamentalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the 1950’s and 60’s. And at the heart of that single school of thought stood, until his execution in 1966, a philosopher named Sayyid Qutb — the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda, their Karl Marx (to put it that way), their guide.

Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb) wrote a book called ”Milestones,” and that book was cited at his trial, which gave it immense publicity, especially after its author was hanged. ”Milestones” became a classic manifesto of the terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. A number of journalists have dutifully turned the pages of ”Milestones,” trying to decipher the otherwise inscrutable terrorist point of view.

I have been reading some of Qutb’s other books, and I think that ”Milestones” may have misled the journalists. ”Milestones” is a fairly shallow book, judged in isolation. But ”Milestones” was drawn from his vast commentary on the Koran called ”In the Shade of the Qur’an.” One of the many volumes of this giant work was translated into English in the 1970’s and published by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, an organization later widely suspected of participation in terrorist attacks — and an organization whose Washington office was run by a brother of bin Laden’s. In the last four years a big effort has been mounted by another organization, the Islamic Foundation in England, to bring out the rest, in what will eventually be an edition of 15 fat English-language volumes, handsomely ornamented with Arabic script from the Koran. Just in these past few weeks a number of new volumes in this edition have made their way into the Arab bookshops of Brooklyn, and I have gobbled them up. By now I have made my way through a little less than half of ”In the Shade of the Qur’an,” which I think is all that exists so far in English, together with three other books by Qutb. And I have something to report.

Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ”In the Shade of the Qur’an” is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.

Qutb’s special ability as a writer came from the fact that, as a young boy, he received a traditional Muslim education — he committed the Koran to memory by the age of 10 — yet he went on, at a college in Cairo, to receive a modern, secular education. He was born in 1906, and in the 1920’s and 30’s he took up socialism and literature. He wrote novels, poems and a book that is still said to be well regarded called ”Literary Criticism: Its Principles and Methodology.” His writings reflected — here I quote one of his admirers and translators, Hamid Algar of the University of California at Berkeley — a ”Western-tinged outlook on cultural and literary questions.” Qutb displayed ”traces of individualism and existentialism.” He even traveled to the United States in the late 1940’s, enrolled at the Colorado State College of Education and earned a master’s degree. In some of the accounts of Qutb’s life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America’s sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear.

I am skeptical of that interpretation, though. His book from the 1940’s, ”Social Justice and Islam,” shows that, even before his voyage to America, he was pretty well set in his Islamic fundamentalism. It is true that, after his return to Egypt, he veered into ever more radical directions. But in the early 1950’s, everyone in Egypt was veering in radical directions. Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of nationalist army officers overthrew the old king in 1952 and launched a nationalist revolution on Pan-Arabist grounds. And, as the Pan-Arabists went about promoting their revolution, Sayyid Qutb went about promoting his own, somewhat different revolution. His idea was ”Islamist.” He wanted to turn Islam into a political movement to create a new society, to be based on ancient Koranic principles. Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood, became the editor of its journal and established himself right away as Islamism’s principal theoretician in the Arab world.

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.

The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists could be compared, in these ambitions, with the Italian Fascists of Mussolini’s time, who wanted to resurrect the Roman Empire, and to the Nazis, who likewise wanted to resurrect ancient Rome, except in a German version. The most radical of the Pan-Arabists openly admired the Nazis and pictured their proposed new caliphate as a racial victory of the Arabs over all other ethnic groups. Qutb and the Islamists, by way of contrast, pictured the resurrected caliphate as a theocracy, strictly enforcing shariah, the legal code of the Koran. The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists had their similarities then, and their differences. (And today those two movements still have their similarities and differences — as shown by bin Laden’s Qaeda, which represents the most violent wing of Islamism, and Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, which represents the most violent wing of Pan-Arabism.)

In 1952, in the days before staging his coup d’etat, Colonel Nasser is said to have paid a visit to Qutb at his home, presumably to get his backing. Some people expected that, after taking power, Nasser would appoint Qutb to be the new revolutionary minister of education. But once the Pan-Arabists had thrown out the old king, the differences between the two movements began to overwhelm the similarities, and Qutb was not appointed. Instead, Nasser cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, and after someone tried to assassinate him, he blamed the Brotherhood and cracked down even harder. Some of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most distinguished intellectuals and theologians escaped into exile. Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, was one of those people. He fled to Saudi Arabia and ended up as a distinguished Saudi professor of Islamic Studies. Many years later, Osama bin Laden would be one of Muhammad Qutb’s students.

But Sayyid Qutb stayed put and paid dearly for his stubbornness. Nasser jailed him in 1954, briefly released him, jailed him again for 10 years, released him for a few months and finally hanged him in 1966. Conditions during the first years of prison were especially bad. Qutb was tortured. Even in better times, according to his followers, he was locked in a ward with 40 people, most of them criminals, with a tape recorder broadcasting the speeches of Nasser 20 hours a day. Still, by smuggling papers in and out of jail, he managed to continue with his writings, no longer in the ”Western tinged” vein of his early, literary days but now as a full-fledged Islamist revolutionary. And somehow, he produced his ”In the Shade of the Qur’an,” this gigantic study, which must surely count as one of the most remarkable works of prison literature ever produced.

Readers without a Muslim education who try to make their way unaided through the Koran tend to find it, as I have, a little dry and forbidding. But Qutb’s commentaries are not at all like that. He quotes passages from the chapters, or suras, of the Koran, and he pores over the quoted passages, observing the prosodic qualities of the text, the rhythm, tone and musicality of the words, sometimes the images. The suras lead him to discuss dietary regulations, the proper direction to pray, the rules of divorce, the question of when a man may propose marriage to a widow (four months and 10 days after the death of her husband, unless she is pregnant, in which case after delivery), the rules concerning a Muslim man who wishes to marry a Christian or a Jew (very complicated), the obligations of charity, the punishment for crimes and for breaking your word, the prohibition on liquor and intoxicants, the proper clothing to wear, the rules on usury, moneylending and a thousand other themes.

The Koran tells stories, and Qutb recounts some of these and remarks on their wisdom and significance. His tone is always lucid and plain. Yet the total effect of his writing is almost sensual in its measured pace. The very title ”In the Shade of the Qur’an” conveys a vivid desert image, as if the Koran were a leafy palm tree, and we have only to open Qutb’s pages to escape the hot sun and refresh ourselves in the shade. As he makes his way through the suras and proposes his other commentaries, he slowly constructs an enormous theological criticism of modern life, and not just in Egypt.

Qutb wrote that, all over the world, humans had reached a moment of unbearable crisis. The human race had lost touch with human nature. Man’s inspiration, intelligence and morality were degenerating. Sexual relations were deteriorating ”to a level lower than the beasts.” Man was miserable, anxious and skeptical, sinking into idiocy, insanity and crime. People were turning, in their unhappiness, to drugs, alcohol and existentialism. Qutb admired economic productivity and scientific knowledge. But he did not think that wealth and science were rescuing the human race. He figured that, on the contrary, the richest countries were the unhappiest of all. And what was the cause of this unhappiness — this wretched split between man’s truest nature and modern life?

A great many cultural critics in Europe and America asked this question in the middle years of the 20th century, and a great many of them, following Nietzsche and other philosophers, pointed to the origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece, where man was said to have made his fatal error. This error was philosophical. It consisted of placing an arrogant and deluded faith in the power of human reason — an arrogant faith that, after many centuries, had created in modern times a tyranny of technology over life.

Qutb shared that analysis, somewhat. Only instead of locating the error in ancient Greece, he located it in ancient Jerusalem. In the Muslim fashion, Qutb looked on the teachings of Judaism as being divinely revealed by God to Moses and the other prophets. Judaism instructed man to worship one God and to forswear all others. Judaism instructed man on how to behave in every sphere of life — how to live a worldly existence that was also a life at one with God. This could be done by obeying a system of divinely mandated laws, the code of Moses. In Qutb’s view, however, Judaism withered into what he called ”a system of rigid and lifeless ritual.”

God sent another prophet, though. That prophet, in Qutb’s Muslim way of thinking, was Jesus, who proposed a few useful reforms — lifting some no-longer necessary restrictions in the Jewish dietary code, for example — and also an admirable new spirituality. But something terrible occurred. The relation between Jesus’ followers and the Jews took, in Qutb’s view, ”a deplorable course.” Jesus’ followers squabbled with the old-line Jews, and amid the mutual recriminations, Jesus’ message ended up being diluted and even perverted. Jesus’ disciples and followers were persecuted, which meant that, in their sufferings, the disciples were never able to provide an adequate or systematic exposition of Jesus’ message.

Who but Sayyid Qutb, from his miserable prison in Nasser’s Egypt, could have zeroed in so plausibly on the difficulties encountered by Jesus’ disciples in getting out the word? Qutb figured that, as a result, the Christian Gospels were badly garbled, and should not be regarded as accurate or reliable. The Gospels declared Jesus to be divine, but in Qutb’s Muslim account, Jesus was a mere human — a prophet of God, not a messiah. The larger catastrophe, however, was this: Jesus’ disciples, owing to what Qutb called ”this unpleasant separation of the two parties,” went too far in rejecting the Jewish teachings.

Jesus’ disciples and followers, the Christians, emphasized Jesus’ divine message of spirituality and love. But they rejected Judaism’s legal system, the code of Moses, which regulated every jot and tittle of daily life. Instead, the early Christians imported into Christianity the philosophy of the Greeks — the belief in a spiritual existence completely separate from physical life, a zone of pure spirit.

In the fourth century of the Christian era, Emperor Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. But Constantine, in Qutb’s interpretation, did this in a spirit of pagan hypocrisy, dominated by scenes of wantonness, half-naked girls, gems and precious metals. Christianity, having abandoned the Mosaic code, could put up no defense. And so, in their horror at Roman morals, the Christians did as best they could and countered the imperial debaucheries with a cult of monastic asceticism.

But this was no good at all. Monastic asceticism stands at odds with the physical quality of human nature. In this manner, in Qutb’s view, Christianity lost touch with the physical world. The old code of Moses, with its laws for diet, dress, marriage, sex and everything else, had enfolded the divine and the worldly into a single concept, which was the worship of God. But Christianity divided these things into two, the sacred and the secular. Christianity said, ”Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Christianity put the physical world in one corner and the spiritual world in another corner: Constantine’s debauches over here, monastic renunciation over there. In Qutb’s view there was a ”hideous schizophrenia” in this approach to life. And things got worse.

A series of Christian religious councils adopted what Qutb thought to be irrational principles on Christianity’s behalf — principles regarding the nature of Jesus, the Eucharist, transubstantiation and other questions, all of which were, in Qutb’s view, ”absolutely incomprehensible, inconceivable and incredible.” Church teachings froze the irrational principles into dogma. And then the ultimate crisis struck.

Qutb’s story now shifts to Arabia. In the seventh century, God delivered a new revelation to his prophet Muhammad, who established the correct, nondistorted relation to human nature that had always eluded the Christians. Muhammad dictated a strict new legal code, which put religion once more at ease in the physical world, except in a better way than ever before. Muhammad’s prophecies, in the Koran, instructed man to be God’s ”vice regent” on earth — to take charge of the physical world, and not simply to see it as something alien to spirituality or as a way station on the road to a Christian afterlife. Muslim scientists in the Middle Ages took this instruction seriously and went about inquiring into the nature of physical reality. And, in the Islamic universities of Andalusia and the East, the Muslim scientists, deepening their inquiry, hit upon the inductive or scientific method — which opened the door to all further scientific and technological progress. In this and many other ways, Islam seized the leadership of mankind. Unfortunately, the Muslims came under attack from Crusaders, Mongols and other enemies. And, because the Muslims proved not faithful enough to Muhammad’s revelations, they were unable to fend off these attacks. They were unable to capitalize on their brilliant discovery of the scientific method.

The Muslim discoveries were exported instead into Christian Europe. And there, in Europe in the 16th century, Islam’s scientific method began to generate results, and modern science emerged. But Christianity, with its insistence on putting the physical world and the spiritual world in different corners, could not cope with scientific progress. And so Christianity’s inability to acknowledge or respect the physical quality of daily life spread into the realm of culture and shaped society’s attitude toward science.

As Qutb saw it, Europeans, under Christianity’s influence, began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here; intellectual inquiry over there. On one side, the natural human yearning for God and for a divinely ordered life; on the other side, the natural human desire for knowledge of the physical universe. The church against science; the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the European mind split finally asunder. The break became total. Christianity, over here; atheism, over there. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.

Europe’s scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their ”hideous schizophrenia” on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery — the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe’s leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well. Here Qutb was on to something original. The Christians of the West underwent the crisis of modern life as a consequence, he thought, of their own theological tradition — a result of nearly 2,000 years of ecclesiastical error. But in Qutb’s account, the Muslims had to undergo that same experience because it had been imposed on them by Christians from abroad, which could only make the experience doubly painful — an alienation that was also a humiliation.

That was Qutb’s analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognize, if only vaguely — the feeling that human nature and modern life are somehow at odds. But Qutb evoked this feeling in a specifically Muslim fashion. It is easy to imagine that, in expounding on these themes back in the 1950’s and 60’s, Qutb had already identified the kind of personal agony that Mohamed Atta and the suicide warriors of Sept. 11 must have experienced in our own time. It was the agony of inhabiting a modern world of liberal ideas and achievements while feeling that true life exists somewhere else. It was the agony of walking down a modern sidewalk while dreaming of a different universe altogether, located in the Koranic past — the agony of being pulled this way and that. The present, the past. The secular, the sacred. The freely chosen, the religiously mandated — a life of confusion unto madness brought on, Qutb ventured, by Christian error.

Sitting in a wretched Egyptian prison, surrounded by criminals and composing his Koranic commentaries with Nasser’s speeches blaring in the background on the infuriating tape recorder, Qutb knew whom to blame. He blamed the early Christians. He blamed Christianity’s modern legacy, which was the liberal idea that religion should stay in one corner and secular life in another corner. He blamed the Jews. In his interpretation, the Jews had shown themselves to be eternally ungrateful to God. Early in their history, during their Egyptian captivity (Qutb thought he knew a thing or two about Egyptian captivity), the Jews acquired a slavish character, he believed. As a result they became craven and unprincipled when powerless, and vicious and arrogant when powerful. And these traits were eternal. The Jews occupy huge portions of Qutb’s Koranic commentary — their perfidy, greed, hatefulness, diabolical impulses, never-ending conspiracies and plots against Muhammad and Islam. Qutb was relentless on these themes. He looked on Zionism as part of the eternal campaign by the Jews to destroy Islam.

And Qutb blamed one other party. He blamed the Muslims who had gone along with Christianity’s errors — the treacherous Muslims who had inflicted Christianity’s ”schizophrenia” on the world of Islam. And, because he was willing to blame, Qutb was able to recommend a course of action too — a revolutionary program that was going to relieve the psychological pressure of modern life and was going to put man at ease with the natural world and with God.

Qutb’s analysis was soulful and heartfelt. It was a theological analysis, but in its cultural emphases, it reflected the style of 20th-century philosophy. The analysis asked some genuinely perplexing questions — about the division between mind and body in Western thought; about the difficulties in striking a balance between sensual experience and spiritual elevation; about the steely impersonality of modern power and technological innovation; about social injustice. But, though Qutb plainly followed some main trends of 20th-century Western social criticism and philosophy, he poured his ideas through a filter of Koranic commentary, and the filter gave his commentary a grainy new texture, authentically Muslim, which allowed him to make a series of points that no Western thinker was likely to propose.

One of those points had to do with women’s role in society — and these passages in his writings have been misinterpreted, I think, in some of the Western commentaries on Qutb. His attitude was prudish in the extreme, judged from a Western perspective of today. But prudishness was not his motivation. He understood quite clearly that, in a liberal society, women were free to consult their own hearts and to pursue careers in quest of material wealth. But from his point of view, this could only mean that women had shucked their responsibility to shape the human character, through child-rearing. The Western notion of women’s freedom could only mean that God and the natural order of life had been set aside in favor of a belief in other sources of authority, like one’s own heart.

But what did it mean to recognize the existence of more than one source of authority? It meant paganism — a backward step, into the heathen primitivism of the past. It meant life without reference to God — a life with no prospect of being satisfactory or fulfilling. And why had the liberal societies of the West lost sight of the natural harmony of gender roles and of women’s place in the family and the home? This was because of the ”hideous schizophrenia” of modern life — the Western outlook that led people to picture God’s domain in one place and the ordinary business of daily life in some other place.

Qutb wrote bitterly about European imperialism, which he regarded as nothing more than a continuation of the medieval Crusades against Islam. He denounced American foreign policy. He complained about America’s decision in the time of Harry Truman to support the Zionists, a strange decision that he attributed, in part, to America’s loss of moral values. But I must point out that, in Qutb’s writings, at least in the many volumes that I have read, the complaints about American policy are relatively few and fleeting. International politics was simply not his main concern. Sometimes he complained about the hypocrisy in America’s endless boasts about freedom and democracy. He mentioned America’s extermination of its Indian population. He noted the racial prejudice against blacks. But those were not Qutb’s themes, finally. American hypocrisy exercised him, but only slightly. His deepest quarrel was not with America’s failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal society.

The truly dangerous element in American life, in his estimation, was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women’s independence. The truly dangerous element lay in America’s separation of church and state — the modern political legacy of Christianity’s ancient division between the sacred and the secular. This was not a political criticism. This was theological — though Qutb, or perhaps his translators, preferred the word ”ideological.”

The conflict between the Western liberal countries and the world of Islam, he explained, ”remains in essence one of ideology, although over the years it has appeared in various guises and has grown more sophisticated and, at times, more insidious.” The sophisticated and insidious disguises tended to be worldly — a camouflage that was intended to make the conflict appear to be economic, political or military, and that was intended to make Muslims like himself who insisted on speaking about religion appear to be, in his words, ”fanatics” and ”backward people.”

”But in reality,” he explained, ”the confrontation is not over control of territory or economic resources, or for military domination. If we believed that, we would play into our enemies’ hands and would have no one but ourselves to blame for the consequences.”

The true confrontation, the deepest confrontation of all, was over Islam and nothing but Islam. Religion was the issue. Qutb could hardly be clearer on this topic. The confrontation arose from the effort by Crusaders and world Zionism to annihilate Islam. The Crusaders and Zionists knew that Christianity and Judaism were inferior to Islam and had led to lives of misery. They needed to annihilate Islam in order to rescue their own doctrines from extinction. And so the Crusaders and Zionists went on the attack.

But this attack was not, at bottom, military. At least Qutb did not devote his energies to warning against such a danger. Nor did he spend much time worrying about the ins and outs of Israel’s struggle with the Palestinians. Border disputes did not concern him. He was focused on something cosmically larger. He worried, instead, that people with liberal ideas were mounting a gigantic campaign against Islam — ”an effort to confine Islam to the emotional and ritual circles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete predominance over every human secular activity, a pre-eminence it earns by virtue of its nature and function.”

He trembled with rage at that effort. And he cited good historical evidence for his trembling rage. Turkey, an authentic Muslim country, had embraced secular ideas back in 1924. Turkey’s revolutionary leader at that time, Kemal Ataturk, abolished the institutional remnants of the ancient caliphate — the caliphate that Qutb so fervently wanted to resurrect. The Turks in this fashion had tried to abolish the very idea and memory of an Islamic state. Qutb worried that, if secular reformers in other Muslim countries had any success, Islam was going to be pushed into a corner, separate from the state. True Islam was going to end up as partial Islam. But partial Islam, in his view, did not exist.

The secular reformers were already at work, throughout the Muslim world. They were mounting their offensive — ”a final offensive which is actually taking place now in all the Muslim countries. . . . It is an effort to exterminate this religion as even a basic creed and to replace it with secular conceptions having their own implications, values, institutions and organizations.”

”To exterminate” — that was Qutb’s phrase. Hysteria cried out from every syllable. But he did not want to be hysterical. He wanted to respond. How?

That one question dominated Qutb’s life. It was a theological question, and he answered it with his volumes on the Koran. But he intended his theology to be practical too — to offer a revolutionary program to save mankind. The first step was to open people’s eyes. He wanted Muslims to recognize the nature of the danger — to recognize that Islam had come under assault from outside the Muslim world and also from inside the Muslim world. The assault from outside was led by Crusaders and world Zionism (though sometimes he also mentioned Communism).

But the assault from inside was conducted by Muslims themselves — that is, by people who called themselves Muslims but who polluted the Muslim world with incompatible ideas derived from elsewhere. These several enemies, internal and external, the false Muslims together with the Crusaders and Zionists, ruled the earth. But Qutb considered that Islam’s strength was, even so, huger yet. ”We are certain,” he wrote, ”that this religion of Islam is so intrinsically genuine, so colossal and deeply rooted that all such efforts and brutal concussions will avail nothing.”

Islam’s apparent weakness was mere appearance. Islam’s true champions seemed to be few, but numbers meant nothing. The few had to gather themselves together into what Qutb in ”Milestones” called a vanguard — a term that he must have borrowed from Lenin, though Qutb had in mind a tiny group animated by the spirit of Muhammad and his Companions from the dawn of Islam. This vanguard of true Muslims was going to undertake the renovation of Islam and of civilization all over the world. The vanguard was going to turn against the false Muslims and ”hypocrites” and do as Muhammad had done, which was to found a new state, based on the Koran. And from there, the vanguard was going to resurrect the caliphate and take Islam to all the world, just as Muhammad had done.

Qutb’s vanguard was going to reinstate shariah, the Muslim code, as the legal code for all of society. Shariah implied some fairly severe rules. Qutb cited the Koran on the punishments for killing or wounding: ”a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear.” Fornication, too, was a serious crime because, in his words, ”it involves an attack on honor and a contempt for sanctity and an encouragement of profligacy in society.” Shariah specified the punishments here as well. ”The penalty for this must be severe; for married men and women it is stoning to death; for unmarried men and women it is flogging, a hundred lashes, which in cases is fatal.” False accusations were likewise serious. ”A punishment of 80 lashes is fixed for those who falsely accuse chaste women.” As for those who threaten the general security of society, their punishment is to be put to death, to be crucified, to have their hands and feet cut off, or to be banished from the country.”

But Qutb refused to regard these punishments as barbarous or primitive. Shariah, in his view, meant liberation. Other societies, drawing on non-Koranic principles, forced people to obey haughty masters and man-made law. Those other societies forced people to worship their own rulers and to do as the rulers said — even if the rulers were democratically chosen. Under shariah, no one was going to be forced to obey mere humans. Shariah, in Qutb’s view, meant ”the abolition of man-made laws.” In the resurrected caliphate, every person was going to be ”free from servitude to others.” The true Islamic system meant ”the complete and true freedom of every person and the full dignity of every individual of the society. On the other hand, in a society in which some people are lords who legislate and some others are slaves who obey, then there is no freedom in the real sense, nor dignity for each and every individual.”

He insisted that shariah meant freedom of conscience — though freedom of conscience, in his interpretation, meant freedom from false doctrines that failed to recognize God, freedom from the modern schizophrenia. Shariah, in a word, was utopia for Sayyid Qutb. It was perfection. It was the natural order in the universal. It was freedom, justice, humanity and divinity in a single system. It was a vision as grand or grander than Communism or any of the other totalitarian doctrines of the 20th century. It was, in his words, ”the total liberation of man from enslavement by others.” It was an impossible vision — a vision that was plainly going to require a total dictatorship in order to enforce: a vision that, by claiming not to rely on man-made laws, was going to have to rely, instead, on theocrats, who would interpret God’s laws to the masses. The most extreme despotism was all too visible in Qutb’s revolutionary program. That much should have been obvious to anyone who knew the history of the other grand totalitarian revolutionary projects of the 20th century, the projects of the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists.

Still, for Qutb, utopia was not the main thing. Utopia was for the future, and Qutb was not a dreamer. Islam, in his interpretation, was a way of life. He wanted his Muslim vanguard to live according to pious Islamic principles in the here and now. He wanted the vanguard to observe the rules of Muslim charity and all the other rules of daily life. He wanted the true Muslims to engage in a lifelong study of the Koran — the lifelong study that his own gigantic commentary was designed to enhance. But most of all, he wanted his vanguard to accept the obligations of ”jihad,” which is to say, the struggle for Islam. And what would that mean, to engage in jihad in the present and not just in the sci-fi utopian future?

Qutb began Volume 1 of ”In the Shade of the Qur’an” by saying: ”To live ‘in the shade of the Qur’an’ is a great blessing which can only be fully appreciated by those who experience it. It is a rich experience that gives meaning to life and makes it worth living. I am deeply thankful to God Almighty for blessing me with this uplifting experience for a considerable time, which was the happiest and most fruitful period of my life — a privilege for which I am eternally grateful.”

He does not identify that happy and fruitful period of his life — a period that lasted, as he says, a considerable time. Perhaps his brother and other intimates would have known exactly what he had in mind — some very pleasant period, conceivably the childhood years when he was memorizing the Koran. But an ordinary reader who picks up Qutb’s books can only imagine that he was writing about his years of torture and prison.

One of his Indian publishers has highlighted this point in a remarkably gruesome manner by attaching an unsigned preface to a 1998 edition of ”Milestones.” The preface declares: ”The ultimate price for working to please God Almighty and to propagate his ways in this world is often one’s own life. The author” — Qutb, that is — ”tried to do it; he paid for it with his life. If you and I try to do it, there is every likelihood we will be called upon to do the same. But for those who truly believe in God, what other choice is there?”

You are meant to suppose that a true reader of Sayyid Qutb is someone who, in the degree that he properly digests Qutb’s message, will act on what has been digested. And action may well bring on a martyr’s death. To read is to glide forward toward death; and gliding toward death means you have understood what you are reading. Qutb’s writings do vibrate to that morbid tone — not always, but sometimes. The work that he left behind, his Koranic commentary, is vast, vividly written, wise, broad, indignant, sometimes demented, bristly with hatred, medieval, modern, tolerant, intolerant, paranoid, cruel, urgent, cranky, tranquil, grave, poetic, learned and analytic. Sometimes it is moving. It is a work large and solid enough to create its own shade, where Qutb’s vanguard and other readers could repose and turn his pages, as he advised the students of the Koran to do, in the earnest spirit of loyal soldiers reading their daily bulletin. But there is, in this commentary, something otherworldly too — an atmosphere of death. At the very least, it is impossible to read the work without remembering that, in 1966, Qutb, in the phrase of one of his biographers, ”kissed the gallows.”

Martyrdom was among his themes. He discusses passages in the Koran’s sura ”The Cow,” and he explains that death as a martyr is nothing to fear. Yes, some people will have to be sacrificed. ”Those who risk their lives and go out to fight, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the cause of God are honorable people, pure of heart and blessed of soul. But the great surprise is that those among them who are killed in the struggle must not be considered or described as dead. They continue to live, as God Himself clearly states.”

Qutb wrote: ”To all intents and purposes, those people may very well appear lifeless, but life and death are not judged by superficial physical means alone. Life is chiefly characterized by activity, growth and persistence, while death is a state of total loss of function, of complete inertia and lifelessness. But the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood. Their influence on those they leave behind also grows and spreads. Thus after their death they remain an active force in shaping the life of their community and giving it direction. It is in this sense that such people, having sacrificed their lives for the sake of God, retain their active existence in everyday life. . . .

”There is no real sense of loss in their death, since they continue to live.”

And so it was with Sayyid Qutb. In the period before his final arrest and execution, diplomats from Iraq and Libya offered him the chance to flee to safety in their countries. But he declined to go, on the ground that 3,000 young men and women in Egypt were his followers, and he did not want to undo a lifetime of teaching by refusing to give those 3,000 people an example of true martyrdom. And, in fact, some of those followers went on to form the Egyptian terrorist movement in the next decade, the 1970’s — the groups that massacred tourists and Coptic Christians and that assassinated Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, after he made peace with Israel; the groups that, in still later years, ended up merging with bin Laden’s group and supplying Al Qaeda with its fundamental doctrines. The people in those groups were not stupid or lacking in education.

On the contrary, we keep learning how well educated these people are, how many of them come from the upper class, how wealthy they are. And there is no reason for us to be surprised. These people are in possession of a powerful philosophy, which is Sayyid Qutb’s. They are in possession of a gigantic work of literature, which is his ”In the Shade of the Qur’an.” These people feel that, by consulting their own doctrines, they can explain the unhappiness of the world. They feel that, with an intense study of the Koran, as directed by Qutb and his fellow thinkers, they can make sense of thousands of years of theological error. They feel that, in Qutb’s notion of shariah, they command the principles of a perfect society.

These people believe that, in the entire world, they alone are preserving Islam from extinction. They feel they are benefiting the world, even if they are committing random massacres. They are certainly not worried about death. Qutb gave these people a reason to yearn for death. Wisdom, piety, death and immortality are, in his vision of the world, the same. For a pious life is a life of struggle or jihad for Islam, and struggle means martyrdom. We may think: those are creepy ideas. And yes, the ideas are creepy. But there is, in Qutb’s presentation, a weird allure in those ideas.

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas — it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society’s every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.

Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding — one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

Paul Berman has written for the magazine about Vaclav Havel, Vicente Fox and other subjects. He is the author of the coming ”Terror and Liberalism” (W.W. Norton), from which this essay is adapted.

THE FAILED PROMISE OF NEW JOURNALISM Greg Hughes takes a harsh, unflinching look at why political journalism on the web is falling short of its potential.

| Dec.13.2002 |

The world of modern journalism has become a much busier (and more complicated) place in the last ten years.

For the average Westerner, the early 21st century is already turning out to be an interesting, albeit dangerous, era of political and economic change. And in this feeding frenzy of stories, some journalists and activists have been turning to the web to write, record and publish their views.

In effect, these reporters are trying to create a new form of historical record that is D.I.Y., innovative and above all else, independently-run.

But in spite of independent news groups like indymedia.org, mediachannel.org, mediaaccess.org and fair.org, there hasn’t exactly been a renaissance in the number of media outlets that actually get heard. Quite the opposite.

By the time you read this, a United Nations-endorsed, American-led coalition of nations bent on eliminating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his military apparatus will be making plans for a second visit to the Persian Gulf in a decade.

Yet besides the prospect of yet another war in this extremely unsettling political environment is the fact that, at least in the United States, popular support for such an attack on Iraq has been given the virtually unanimous support of the mainstream media; Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, CNN’s Pat “Soviet Canuckistan” Buchanan and a host of other television and radio hosts and networks gave their tacit approval to George W. Bush — permission to “go forth young man” and end what daddy couldn’t ten years earlier.

The irony of Americans’ continued deference to their media and political elites came when President Bush addressed the U.N. last month, stating that “Iraq’s state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.”

And it’s not as though Canada hasn’t been willing to follow suit. Foreign Affairs minister Bill Graham was quoted saying, “I think what will happen is Iraq will conform. I think its neighbours are now putting pressure on it to say, ‘Look, there is no alternative.’ And it’s very much thanks to the role of the United States that we’ve got the pressure there to make sure that this happens.”

In a perfect world, potential conflicts like Gulf War II wouldn’t even be happening. But even in a less-than-perfect situation, opposition to such an obvious, cloying attempt at masking U.S. oil interests in the Middle East should have better popular support — especially amongst the netizen journalists.

It seems so self-evident: The internet generation has been raised on, if you’re politically-minded, a steady diet of Noam Chomsky conspiracy theories, a five-party Canadian Parliament and youthful, invigorating political zines like punditmag.com. A medium like the net, rightly or wrongly, lets all voices (some abhorrent, some amusing) be heard.

Or so we figured.

Believing the internet to be a vehicle for real political change and dissenting voices is a view we might have subscribed to in, say, 1995. Nowadays, even the most compelling web site, the most well-organized chatroom or the best email listserv can’t hide the fact that the most effective means for political dialogue is a face-to-face dynamic.

The internet was supposed to help facilitate new kinds of communication and new kinds of thinking that went beyond the video screen or audio connection. What was hoped to link people, places and events beyond traditional media has turned into, well, every other mass medium. The lines have been drawn between corporate media juggernauts and bathtub gin operations — there is no middle ground anymore.

So why hasn’t the web given us a news source that promises ideas in a forum of immediacy and relevancy beyond corporate media?

Legitimate news groups like the CBC, CTV and CityTV are so strong in propagating their presence online because they are trusted and have the institutional memory to back up claims of their legitimacy. For one, the web remains in its infancy in terms of reporting legitimate news. While more opinions and views are present online, the culture of Matt Drudge — news based on rumours, not facts — remains dominant. While the public’s hunger for information has increased since the web’s breakthrough into popular consciousness, our demand for trustworthy sources has as well.

Yet web-based media has made the mistake of trying not only to emulate television, radio and print media all at once, but effectively reinventing the wheel several times over: Even sites like Plastic or Slashdot, some of the most “credible web media,” remain locked into niche reporting that relies mostly on second-hand information. And yes, Slashdot users are basically a large community of reporters, as are many web media sites. Even Salon, a zine conceived during the web’s initial foray into public life in 1995, has become a fluffier, less relevant source.

Does this mean that the net has matured to the point that, while any John or Jane Q. Public can set up a website on al Qaeda and voice their views, they won’t even be heard in the sea of CNNs and News Corps? Can independent voices and FTAA be taken seriously online if they don’t have the historical legacy to support themselves?

Well, not exactly.

Truly successful web-based journalism depends on going back to the basics of reportage; writing narratives and historical legacies that reflect the web’s non-linear perspectives. What this really means is that the adage “everything old is new again” is becoming more important in a medium that thrives on unique approaches to storytelling.

In many ways, some of the more successful forms of authorship online have been basically old forms of storytelling; weblogs are the electronic equivalent of written correspondence, serialized news stories are reported in a format similar to old newspaper serials, and websites such as bitbooks.com are writing and adapting works of fiction exclusively to reflect electronic realities.

While streamed video, Flash animation and audio feeds are only just beginning to make their mark on the web, this means the web must take a journalistic approach that harkens back to an era that did not have video or audio capabilities.

In effect, this means going back to the days of George Orwell, Charles Krauthammer and Hunter S. Thompson, in which stories were written with an almost literary feel that drew the reader in.

While political chatrooms, Ontario Premier Ernie Eves or emaillist servs can talk on end about the virtues of Maoist China, the New Democrats’ hopes for the future or even Friedrich Hayek’s libertarianism, the net will truly realize its potential for high-quality journalism when it has the power of original narratives behind it.

By Javier David

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Magazine named two women who uncovered massive accounting fraud at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. and a third who detailed FBI (news – web sites) failures after the Sept. 11 attacks as its 2002 “Persons of the Year” on Sunday.

Photo Reuters Photo

The magazine praised Sherron Watkins, a vice president at Enron, and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, as well as Coleen Rowley, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for exposing malfeasance that eroded public confidence in their institutions.

“It came down to did we want to recognize a phenomenon that helped correct some of the problems we’ve had over the last year and celebrate three ordinary people that did extraordinary things,” Time managing editor Jim Kelly said.

In May, Rowley wrote a scathing 13-page memo to FBI Director Robert Muller detailing how supervisors at a Minneapolis, Minnesota, field office brushed aside her requests to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, weeks before they occurred.

Watkins, a former accountant, is best known for a blunt, prescient 7-page memo to Enron chairman Kenneth Lay in 2001 that uncovered questionable accounting and warned that the company could “implode in a wave of accounting scandals.”

Her letter came to light during an inquiry Congress conducted after the company declared bankruptcy.

Cooper undertook a one-woman crusade inside telecommunications behemoth WorldCom, after she discovered that the company had disguised $3.8 billion in losses through improper accounting.

When the scandal came to light in June after that company declared bankruptcy, jittery investors laid siege to global stock markets.

SELECTIONS APPLAUDED

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (news – web sites) and a leading congressional advocate for whistle-blower protections, applauded Time’s selection.

“Sherron Watkins’ example helped us enact the first corporate whistle-blower protections in history. Cynthia Cooper also showed the good that can come when courageous whistle-blowers come forward. Coleen Rowley’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is leading to FBI reforms,” Leahy said in a statement.

Other people considered by the magazine, which hits stores on Monday, included President Bush (news – web sites), al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (news – web sites), Vice President Dick Cheney (news – web sites) and New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer.

Bush was seen by some as the front-runner, especially after he led his party to a mid-term electoral upset in November that cemented the Republican majority in Congress.

However, Kelly said, “Some of (Bush’s) own goals: the capture of Osama bin Laden, the unseating of Saddam Hussein (news – web sites), the revival of a sluggish economy, haven’t happened yet. There was a sense of bigger things to come, and it might be wise to see how things played out.”

FBI agent and lawyer Rowley’s secret memo was leaked to the press in May. Weeks before Sept. 11, Rowley suspected Moussaoui might have ties to radical activities and bin Laden, and she asked supervisors for clearance to search his computer.

Her letter sharply criticized the agency’s hidebound culture and its decision-makers, and gave rise to new inquiries over the intelligence-gathering failures of Sept. 11, 2001.

The magazine’s 2001 Person of the Year was former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (news – web sites), for his handling of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, which killed 3,000 people.

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WASHINGTON

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under its new chairman, Richard Lugar, should make its first order of business an inquiry into President Bush’s maladroit and shortsighted decision-making in the So San affair.

Our National Security Agency, to its credit, spotted the movement of 15 Scud missiles and 85 drums of chemicals from a factory in North Korea to its secret loading aboard the freighter So San, and tracked the unflagged ship around the world to the Arabian Sea.

The C.I.A. was unable to determine the customer of these offensive weapons, unreliable in military combat but useful in striking terror into cities. State and Defense, worried that the ultimate customer might be Iraq, enlisted the Spanish Navy in stopping and boarding the vessel.

Apparently nobody thought the crisis through enough to ask: What do we do when we find the missiles? What if they are destined for an ally in the war on Al Qaeda like Egypt or Yemen or Saudi Arabia? What’s our policy on the movement of terror weapons into a tinderbox?

Then came Saleh into our alley. The dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh (pronounced sally), claimed the destructive cargo, for which I am told he had paid North Korea $41 million.

U.S. officials were thunderstruck. Had Saleh not solemnly assured us 18 months ago, when we purchased his support in the war on terror, that he would no longer buy Scuds from North Korea? His disputes with the Saudis and Eritreans were long since resolved; the only logical explanation was that he planned to re-sell the secret shipment at a whopping profit to a nation or group that did not wish us well.

The Yemeni insisted he had bought the missiles years before he made his promise to us and just never got around to telling us about it. Nobody believed that, but Saleh lets us kill Al Qaeda leaders on his territory, and our knowledge of this shipment means he won’t be able to re-sell it easily.

So President Bush decided to sacrifice the principle of the interdiction of terror weaponry entering a war zone on the altar of practicality. Instead of suggesting a fair compromise — “We’ll reimburse you for your $41 million purchase, and we’ll impound the cargo” — he chose to appease an unreliable ally and turned the 15 missiles, with the unidentified chemicals, over to the man who had made the U.S. look foolish.

Because the news of our turnover broke before we had alerted Madrid, we humiliated a real ally, Spain, which — at our request — had put its sailors’ lives at risk by firing across the bow of a hostile vessel and boarding it. Spain has been a stalwart European supporter against Saddam, and is almost alone with us in urging Turkey’s admission to the European Union. Our So San signal to eight other U.S. allies patrolling waters against Al Qaeda in the region: Go out on a limb for America, then watch us saw the limb off behind you.

Meanwhile, the interdiction of this unflagged ship on the high seas was seized upon as an insult by the North Koreans. Pyongyang trumpeted plans to start up plutonium production, which could be seen as a provocative use of Saleh’s fungible $41 million.

The Bush administration’s embarrassment at this irate reaction to its high-seas flip-flop was heightened by former President Bill Clinton. He struck a fierce pose in Rotterdam: “We actually drew up plans to attack North Korea and destroy their reactors,” the retroactive hawk told a security forum, “and we told them we would attack unless they ended their nuclear program.” (Talk about secrecy: Who knew, in 1994, that those cowboys in the Clinton White House were threatening preventive war?)

The So San affair, still shrouded in diplomatic secrecy, does not show the vaunted Bush national security team at its best. With plenty of time provided by satellite intelligence, Bush did not formulate plans to deal with operational contingencies; humiliated by a Yemeni double-crosser, the president had the White House spokesman retreat into pettifoggery to explain away a policy flinch on the spread of terror’s weaponry.

Yes, we need unstable Yemen’s help at the moment. But President Bush is duty bound to drive home the message to our least savory “partners” that they need America more.

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Apparently this is footage from a Predator reconnaissance aircraft which was guiding an AC-130 gunship over Afghanistan. The AC-130 is a devastating aircraft, as we have discussed before..

https://ianbell.com:8888/junk/AC130_GunshipMed.wmv

-Ian.

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