These issues do not affect most of my friends in the Unites States, frankly, because they are what would be considered to be high middle-class income earners in stable careers and working at large companies that provide family coverage as a benefit.  It is also true, though, that those friends — should they elect to leave their cushy jobs and form a startup, or move into consulting — will incur risk that they or their families could go without coverage.

This is one of those quixotic situations that often arise when there is no basic guarantee in a society.  Even the upper middle class must consider career and life decisions within the context of health care.  Leaving the warm embrace of your employer to pursue some new innovation is a tough decision, for more reasons than there should be, as a result.  So many employers view their health care packages as an employee retention tool and are not motivated to alter this.  COBRA does nothing to protect workers who leave their positions voluntarily, after all.

Regardless, lower-income families are under pressure in the US.  I posted this in response to a friend on Facebook:

… which is largely rhetoric but is probably true.  How can people who are repressed by the system (limited education, limited time) participate in the debate about restructuring that system?  With 40% voter turnout in recent US elections, we can see this actually impacting the functioning of a democracy in a real way.  The US is presently governed by an elite — much like China, and much like the Soviet Union.  And like modern-day Russia, the multi-billion dollar federal electoral process is now “democracy theatre” as the appearance of leadership is contested by two groups:  one which I will call the compassionate elites, and the other comprised of a group I can only describe as diffident elites.

In any case, and as I said above, the outcome of the US Health Care debate will reveal a lot more about which Elitist group holds sway over the other; or put more succinctly, which of the two groups of Elites is better able to hold in check the corporate interests the finance their electoral campaigns while simultaneously establishing some sort of remedy for the country’s desperately ill system.  The process will enjoy neither the participation from, or support of, the very lower-middle-class and poor majority that the system should benefit the most.

They are too busy trying to survive.

During this time the practise of Policy by Press Release rose to prominence as ill-founded concepts like the “Bomber Gap“, “Missile Gap“, and “Submarine Gap” were leveraged to justify a massive expansion in military spending.  U.S. Doctrine from the end of the Vietnam era to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to essentially outspend the Soviets while engaging them in proxy guerilla wars in weak communist ally states and financing developing countries through the World Bank.  It is thought by many (mostly Pro-Reagan) historians that it was indeed the US Military-Industrial Complex that won the Cold War and bankrupted the Soviet Union by simply outspending them.

Nowadays, we live under the spectre of far more benign [perceived] enemies.  Most of us in the technology industry fear Microsoft’s Goliath and align with Google’s David more meaningfully than any political discourse, though we only rarely cower under our desks in fear of a Vodka-soaked phone call between Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt (which I am positive has happened).

Google only stumbled its way into Microsoft’s crosshairs nine years ago, whereas Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates has long sought to get in on the action on the Internet and the Web in particular.  The two are presently in a pitched battle on a number of fronts, including Search (Microsoft recently launched Bing), Mobile (Google’s Android is a pattern-cut copy of MSFT’s Windows Mobile strategy), The Browser (Chrome versus the dreaded IE), Email (Google is making inroads into institutional and corporate email services), and Productivity Applications (Microsoft Office as an app and a hosted service versus a number of nascent Google Apps).

Most recently, Google responded to the Bing launch by going after MSFT’s supposed crown jewels with an announcement about Chrome OS.  Microsoft then parried with its own vapourware announcement about Web Office.  Engaging Microsoft on another front on an increasingly expansive battlefield might seem like the smart thing to do, but as Kevin wrote, Spite is not a business strategy. This is akin to pissing in your neighbour’s yard just because he took a whiz in yours.

The Soviets, like our more modern evil empire whose Kremlin sleeps in the dales just outside Seattle, were more cagey than we might have thought in those days.  They didn’t match the US and NATO move-for-move in force expansion, and rather than counter Reagan’s famous SDI initiative with a Star Wars system of its own, they simply rejiggered their ICBMs to penetrate airspace using different methods and geared fighters up to be able to shoot down satellites from within the mundane confines of our atmosphere.

No … the Soviets didn’t join in the arms race — instead they were quite content to watch their enemy blow its own brains out, expanding US debt in leaps and bounds (US debt doubled under Reagan in a single year, mostly on the back of military spending) while their own programs pursued less lofty goals, financing battlefield weaponry and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We didn’t know it at the time, thanks to a lot of propaganda from our own leaders, but the Commies were actually the underdog.  And like any underdog, the Soviets capitalized on American fear and loathing to nurture an inflated perception of its own militarism and level of armament, hoping that the US would collapse under its own weight trying to keep up — and it nearly worked.  Some would argue that it has — and that our current and previous economic hiccups, heaped atop rampant social problems in the US, are the reckoning for decades of rampant Cold War spending — and may not be remedied anytime soon.

Google is apparently trying to match Microsoft on every front in the technology industry — but it too is an underdog.  It’s attempting to do so with far fewer employees (Google has 20K employees – Microsoft has 90K), far fewer financial resources, and no apparent profit model associated with many of these businesses.  Microsoft has also had the benefit of nearly 30 years — all supported by revenue growth in the rising tide of the PC revolution — to expand its business aspirations from its core business of supplying Operating Systems.  Furthermore I would argue that the core of Microsoft is no longer Windows, and has instead long been its much more expensive product offering, Office.

If Google is attempting to parlay its underdog status into some sort of puffer fish role, in forcing Microsoft to compete on many more fronts than search, then the insincerity of these efforts is pretty transparent to most of us.  And it will fail.  I use MS Word and Apple’s Pages, but would not even consider using Google Docs.  As a web app, it delivers a far poorer user experience at the point of my absolute maximum requirement for efficiency and dexterity.  Google’s Chrome browser isn’t much better than Firefox, and as I’ve pointed out frequently, Android is a duplicate of Microsoft’s own floundering efforts in the mobile space with little improvement.

Microsoft is likely snickering (I know I am) as it watches Google’s many flailing attempts to strike it in different arenas.  Particularly so in Operating Systems.  Slapping a GUI onto Linux, particularly when said GUI developer is Google — a company apparently bereft of UX designers — is a cynical, me-too play that will alienate the Linux Community and pale in comparison to OSX.

According to Yahoo Finance! on MSFT and GOOG, Microsoft has 3x the revenue and 20% more cash reserves than Google.  That’s an amiable war chest and revenue stream that means it’s unlikely that Google can cause Microsoft to spend itself into oblivion.  Google, on the other hand, is moving in too many areas and executing poorly in most of them.

If Google truly wants to hurt Microsoft it needs to double-down on a sincere effort to unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange and thereby dominate the ways in which we communicate at work.   Otherwise, much as the Soviet Union really collapsed due to radical downward shifts in the price of oil and lack of access to credit, Google may suffer from a decline in CPC advertising and all of the air will spew out from its puffer fish act.

In May Day parades, the Soviets would invite Western leaders to the review stand, as bombers and missile launchers would run circles past the parade ground.  These Westerners would return to their peers wide-eyed with parables of impressive arrays of weaponry and massively inflated estimates of actual force sizes.  Unlike during the real Cold War, Google’s foe is not self-invested in grandiose estimates of its enemy’s fortitude and the rest of us are quite aware that in many cases, such as the ill-fated Orkut and other flailing products, Google’s emperor has no clothes.

And unlike our former evil empire’s round-faced leader, Ballmer is under no pressure for Perestroika.

Do these people not even have a sense of their own irony? Are their morals so deeply buried in ambition and self-interest that they can’t see the sheer incongruity of soliciting a confessed dealer in international illegal arms to invest in a Venture Capital fund that provides funding to defense technologies in the US? Especially at a time when the US is about to embark on war with one of Khasshoggi’s best customers, and he himself is the architect of that war?

What is wrong with us that we don’t want to lynch this amoral swine?

-Ian.

On Saturday, March 29, 2003, at 11:09 AM, Ian Andrew Bell wrote:

> Richard Perle, whom I am sure will somehow now become a “consultant”
> to the White House, has resigned amid accusations that he had illegal
> dealings with shady Saudi arms dealers and had financial ties to
> companies servicing the Homeland Security effort through personal
> investments and a venture capital firm with which he worked. Many
> people believe that he is the chief architect of the Bush
> Administration’s current policy on the Middle East.
>
> -Ian.
>
> ——–
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38776-2003Mar27.html
> Key Rumsfeld Adviser Resigns His Post
>
> By ROBERT BURNS
> The Associated Press
> Thursday, March 27, 2003; 6:24 PM
>
> Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official,
> resigned Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board that is a
> key advisory arm for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
>
> In a brief written statement, Rumsfeld thanked Perle for his service
> and made no mention of why Perle resigned. He said he had asked Perle
> to remain as a member of the board.
>
> “He has been an excellent chairman and has led the Defense Policy
> Board during an important time in our history,” Rumsfeld said. “I
> should add that I have known Richard Perle for many years and know him
> to be a man of integrity and honor.”
>
> Perle was an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan
> administration. He took the advisory board chairman’s post early in
> Rumsfeld’s tenure.
>
> Perle became embroiled in a recent controversy stemming from a New
> Yorker magazine article that said he had lunch in January with
> controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi
> industrialist.
>
> The industrialist, Harb Saleh Zuhair, was interested in investing in a
> venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, of which Perle is a managing
> partner. Nothing ever came of the lunch in Marseilles; no investment
> was made. But the New Yorker story, written by Seymour M. Hersh,
> suggested that Perle, a longtime critic of the Saudi regime, was
> inappropriately mixing business and politics.
>
> Perle called the report preposterous and “monstrous.”
>
> Perle, 61, was so strongly opposed to nuclear arms control agreements
> with the former Soviet Union during his days in the Reagan
> administration that he became known as “the Prince of Darkness.”
>
> © 2003 The Associated Press

-Ian.

——– http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38776-2003Mar27.html Key Rumsfeld Adviser Resigns His Post

By ROBERT BURNS The Associated Press Thursday, March 27, 2003; 6:24 PM

Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official, resigned Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board that is a key advisory arm for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In a brief written statement, Rumsfeld thanked Perle for his service and made no mention of why Perle resigned. He said he had asked Perle to remain as a member of the board.

“He has been an excellent chairman and has led the Defense Policy Board during an important time in our history,” Rumsfeld said. “I should add that I have known Richard Perle for many years and know him to be a man of integrity and honor.”

Perle was an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He took the advisory board chairman’s post early in Rumsfeld’s tenure.

Perle became embroiled in a recent controversy stemming from a New Yorker magazine article that said he had lunch in January with controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi industrialist.

The industrialist, Harb Saleh Zuhair, was interested in investing in a venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, of which Perle is a managing partner. Nothing ever came of the lunch in Marseilles; no investment was made. But the New Yorker story, written by Seymour M. Hersh, suggested that Perle, a longtime critic of the Saudi regime, was inappropriately mixing business and politics.

Perle called the report preposterous and “monstrous.”

Perle, 61, was so strongly opposed to nuclear arms control agreements with the former Soviet Union during his days in the Reagan administration that he became known as “the Prince of Darkness.”

© 2003 The Associated Press

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.

If the decline in the conventional capability of the Russian Military forces them to rely more heavily on their nuclear capability, how does that affect how an adversary would size them up in a political or military dispute?

How does this impact the Americans? Does the fact that they have such a strong conventional force and the ability to wage war without using nasty weapons make them a lot less scary? Does the fact that US Voters (even if you scared them a LOT) might revolt against their government if they used weapons of mass destruction make them totally useless?

-Ian.

—— http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/214/other/news/071099russia- military.html

July 10, 1999

Maneuvers Show Russian Reliance on Nuclear Arms; Atomic Attack Simulated By MICHAEL R. GORDON

MOSCOW — Reflecting its growing dependence on nuclear weapons for defense, Russia’s military carried out mock nuclear strikes in a major exercise last month, the Defense Minister said Friday.

The exercise was the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It involved 50,000 troops, bombers, tanks and warships from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea.

One of the scenarios for the exercise underscored the expanding role nuclear weapons have been playing in the Russian military’s strategy and plans in recent years.

According to the script for the military exercise, disclosed Friday at a news conference by Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, Russia came under attack by an unspecified Western foe, which used non-nuclear forces.

At first, Russia also tried to limit its attacks to conventional forces. But its cash-starved non-nuclear forces failed to stop the enemy onslaught, forcing the leadership to turn to its still formidable nuclear arsenal.

“The exercise tested one of the provisions of Russia’s military doctrine concerning a possible use of nuclear weapons when all other measures are exhausted,” Marshal Sergeyev said. “We did pursue such an option. All measures were exhausted. Our defenses proved to be ineffective. An enemy continued to push into Russia. And that’s when the decision to use nuclear weapons was made.”

During Soviet times, Moscow and Washington piled up huge nuclear arsenals as they sought to best each other in the arms race.

Still, Russia’s conventional forces were enormous. In those years it was NATO, fearing that it was outnumbered, that openly threatened to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack.

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, however, the tables have turned. The West has become less dependent on nuclear weapons. As the conflict with Yugoslavia showed, NATO fights its wars with with laser-guided and satellite-guided non-nuclear bombs and missiles.

But with Russia’s military spending projected this year at about $4 billion (compared with about $260 billion for the Pentagon), the once-mighty conventional forces have deteriorated.

Russia’s forces failed to defeat Chechnya’s rebels, and Russian generals are no longer confident that they can prevail over more serious threats. And with a faltering economy, nuclear forces are virtually the only way Russia can lay claim to being a world power.

“Russia’s military believes that it must rely more than ever on the first use of nuclear weapons,” said Bruce Blair, a specialist on Russian nuclear capabilities at the Brookings Institution. “It is part psychological and partly a planning assumption.”

The first sign of Russia’s increasing dependence on nuclear weapons came in 1993 when the Defense Ministry abandoned the Soviet-era pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Then, as NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia reinforced the sense here that the West has a huge lead in conventional military technology, President Boris N. Yeltsin met with his top national security advisers to discuss plans to compensate for Russia’s faltering conventional capabilities by developing short-range, tactical nuclear weapons.

The projects and plans that were approved remain secret. But Vladim Putin, the secretary of the Security Council, said Yeltsin had approved a “blueprint for the development and use of non-strategic nuclear weapons.”

None of this means that NATO and Russia are necessarily on a collision course. The Yeltsin Government has pledged to cooperate on arms control, including seeking Parliament’s approval of the Start-2 treaty reducing strategic nuclear arms.

And on Thursday, Yeltsin enjoined a group of Russian generals to cooperate with NATO in enforcing the peace in Kosovo.

“The problem of our relations with NATO and the U.S.A. is very subtle, delicate and difficult,” Yeltsin said. “Every one of you must pursue the same line — the President’s line. We shall certainly not quarrel with NATO outright, but nor do we intend to flirt with it.”

Russia’s recent exercise, however, demonstrated the competitive nature of the relationship. The weeklong exercise, which was held in late June, was planned last year but adapted to take account of the Yugoslav conflict, including NATO’s ability to attack at long range with precision-guided bombs, Marshal Sergeyev said.

The military aim of the exercise was to test command procedures for defending western Russia and Belarus from an attack from the West.

“To verify the authenticity of the decisions and test procedures for troop control, more than 50 military units participated in the exercise,” Marshal Sergeyev said. “There have been extensive structural changes to the forces in recent years, and we have to practice their management and regain units’ operational skills.”

The political aim appeared to be to demonstrate to the world as well as to the Russian public that the military is still a credible fighting force.

During the exercise, two old turbo-prop Bear bombers approached Iceland while a couple of new Blackjack bombers approached Norway. Russian ships maneuvered under the watchful eyes of Western reconnaissance ships and aircraft.

Officially, the Defense Ministry declined to specify who the imaginary enemy was. The aim, Marshal Sergeyev told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency, was to rehearse the defeat of the enemy and the recapture of lost territory.

Some Russian observers were less diplomatic. The Defense Ministry, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted, refuses to say who the adversary is. “But few doubt that the enemy is NATO’s armed forces in Europe,” it added.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

Hey, it is a model that has proven to work, for a while…. e.g. Stalin in the Soviet Union, Russia in the Balkans, Hussein in his own country, Britain in India. Unfortunately, though, when peace is maintained by fear of the imposition of force it tends to flare up rather explosively and uncontrollably.

One authoritarian government replacing another isn’t peace. I suspect that whatever governance Iraq ends up with after the war will look a lot more like Saddam’s than ours.

Lots of Iraqis have been living rather peacefully for the last 12 years, except for sporadic bombings by US aircraft enforcing their “No-Fly Zone” by attacking ground targets. I’m sure they feel really peaceful right now.

I guess if I had a specific point to make in this ramble, it is that in these modern times most of us humans spend most of our days living our lives of quiet desperation, trying to protect our friends and families, and trying to have a little fun now and then. In the grand scheme of things these activities are affected very imperceptibly by who happens to hold the reigns of government.

-Ian.

WIRED: Issue 11.02 – February 2003

The Marshall Plan

For 40 years, the man Pentagon insiders call Yoda has foreseen the future of war – from battlefield bots rolling off radar-proof ships to GIs popping performance pills. And that was before the war on terror.

By Douglas McGray

Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s 81-year-old futurist-in-chief, fiddles with his security badge, squints, looks away, smiles, and finally speaks in a voice that sounds like Gene Hackman trying not to wake anybody. Known as Yoda in defense circles, Marshall doesn’t need to shout to be heard. Named director of the Office of Net Assessment by Richard Nixon and reappointed by every president since, the DOD’s most elusive official has become one of its most influential. Today, Marshall – along with his star protégés Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz – is drafting President Bush’s plan to upgrade the military. Supporters believe the force he envisions will be faster and more lethal; critics say it relies on unproven technology. As US troops gathered overseas, Marshall sat for a rare interview.

WIRED: Until recently, defense planners talked about a “revolution in military affairs.” Now the buzzword is “transformation.” Why the change? MARSHALL: Transformation is more of an imperative: We’ve got to transform the force. I personally don’t like the term. It tends to push people in the direction of changing the whole force. You need to be thinking about changing some small part of the force more radically, as a way of exploring what new technologies can really do for you.

What is the next radical change the US will reveal on the battlefield? “One future intelligence problem: knowing what drugs the other guys are on.” One that’s still under way is the emergence of a variety of precision weapons, and also coupling them with sensors. Another is the ability to coordinate the activities of separate elements of the forces to a level that has never been possible before. That’s promising, but less far along than precision weapons. A third is robotic devices: unmanned vehicles, of which the UAVs are the furthest along, but also similar kinds of devices undersea, and smaller devices that might change urban warfare by being able to crawl through buildings.

Are there revolutionary developments that don’t involve combat? There are ways of psychologically influencing the leadership of another state. I don’t mean information warfare, but some demonstration of awesome effects, like being able to set off impressive explosions in the sky. Like, let us show you what we could do to you. Just visually impressing the person.

Did 9/11 change your mind about anything? Not much. It was obvious that we were wide open to attack.

Has anything happened that surprised you? The rapidity of the collapse of the Soviet Union surprised me. I thought they were in trouble, but the rapidity and completeness of the withdrawal were really striking.

Is there a precedent for one country staying on top through a series of military revolutions? Or does one country always leapfrog another? Through most of the 19th century, the British Navy exhibited that kind of thing. But it was quite interesting the way they did it. They tended to let other countries, mainly France, do the early experiments and come out with new kinds of ships. If something looked like a good idea, they could come in and quickly overtake the innovator. They seemed to do that as a way of capitalizing on their advantage and saving resources.

Isn’t the United States in a similar position now? That’s probably the case. But some of the countries that would be candidates to make innovations aren’t doing it. The Japanese and West Europeans aren’t really making big changes. The Swedes are an interesting case. For 200 years their basic problem was the possibility of a large-scale land invasion by the Russians. They’ve decided that that has gone away. If anything could happen, it would happen across the Baltic. So they’re rethinking, given modern technology, how to create a defense largely on sea frontiers. It’s possible that they will make some innovations that we’ll pick up and capitalize on.

For instance? They’ve designed three new naval vessels. One is an air-independent submarine [running on fuel cells rather than nuclear power, which allows it to travel almost silently and remain submerged for extended periods]. They have a surface ship that’s a bit more conventional. And then a radically new naval vessel called the Visby, which has practically no metal in it other than the engine. It’s constructed to be very stealthy.

You’re known for following technology outside the traditional realm of national security. Pharmaceuticals, for instance. People who are connected with neural pharmacology tell me that new classes of drugs will be available relatively shortly, certainly within the decade. These drugs are just like natural chemicals inside people, only with behavior-modifying and performance-enhancing characteristics. One of the people I talk to jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on.

In an era of terrorism and peacekeeping, are Cold War ideas based on striking a big enemy from afar and defending against missile attack still relevant? Yes, if we want to stay in the business of long-range power projection. And if we play the role of intervening in messy disputes, some of this weaponry is still useful, as it was in Afghanistan. However, we need ground forces to go in and keep the peace.

Does new technology ultimately make us more or less vulnerable? A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is to draw a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves, and how that has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn’t very many for a long time, and now it’s going up. In that sense, it’s not just the US. All the world is getting less safe.

Douglas McGray interviewed J. Craig Venter in Wired 10.12.

———–

Cairo dispatch: The papers that cried wolf Brian Whitaker looks at how the American media are softening up public attitudes to war with Iraq

Monday December 16, 2002

Last week brought yet another terrifying headline from an American newspaper: “US suspects al-Qaida got nerve agent from Iraqis”.

The 1,800-word story in the Washington Post last Thursday got off to a reasonably promising start by saying: “The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al-Qaida took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source.”

Less promisingly, the second paragraph begins: “If the report proves true … ” The remaining 28 paragraphs offer little to suggest that it actually is true, and several reasons for thinking it may not be. Paragraph six tells us: “Like most intelligence, the reported chemical weapon transfer is not backed by definitive evidence.”

Paragraph eight says: “Even authorised spokesmen, with one exception, addressed the report on the condition of anonymity. They said the principal source on the chemical transfer was uncorroborated, and that indications it involved a nerve agent were open to interpretation.”

In paragraph 12, we are told that the report may be connected to a warning message circulated to American forces overseas and an unnamed official is cited as saying that the message resulted only from an analyst’s hypothetical concern.

As one would expect from the Washington Post, the story is carefully written and meticulously researched. But it’s basically worthless.

The reporter had clearly spoken to a lot of different people but he failed – not for want of effort – to substantiate the claim that Iraq provided al-Qaida with nerve gas. Although some officials were happy to describe the claim as “credible”, none appeared willing to stand up and say that they, personally, believed it.

The sensible course of action at that stage would have been to abandon the story, or at least file it away in the hope of more evidence coming to light. That might have happened with any other story, but in the case of Iraq at present the temptation to publish is hard to resist.

This particular story was more tempting than many because it carried, as the American military would say, a multiple warhead. It not only suggested that Iraq – contrary to its recent declaration – does possess chemical weapons but, additionally, that it has close links with al-Qaida.

The effect, if not the intention, of publishing the story was to give currency to both these ideas. Stories in the Washington Post are instantly regurgitated by other news organisations around the world, usually at much shorter length and without all the cautionary nuances of the original.

Iraq itself helped the story along by issuing a denial which – since it could produce no evidence by way of rebuttal – simply sounded unconvincing.

The Post’s story is also discussed on the BBC website. Under the headline “Wanted: an Iraqi link to al-Qaida “, Paul Reynolds, the website’s world affairs correspondent, views it as part of a long and unsuccessful effort to link Iraq with al-Qaida.

“One of the most intriguing questions in the ‘war on terrorism’,” he writes, “is whether there are contacts between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. Intelligence agencies are constantly looking for the ‘missing link’.”

The quotation marks around “missing link” distance the BBC from the idea that such a link exists, though the definite article preceding it suggests otherwise. Why are intelligence agencies looking for “the” missing link and not “a” missing link?

Journalistically, it’s more interesting to talk about a “missing” link than a “possible” link but even when the tone of discussion is sceptical – as it was in the BBC’s case – there’s still a drip effect. The more we mention missing links, the more people will assume they are out there somewhere, waiting to be found.

The risk of giving currency to false or questionable claims is now a daily problem for those of us who try to write about Iraq without turning into other people’s weapons of mass deception.

Even a simple reference to Iraq’s weaponry can be problematic. Some readers object that “weapons of mass destruction” is a tendentious phrase. “Chemical, biological and nuclear” is accurately descriptive, though it becomes too much of a mouthful when used repeatedly in a story. Reuters news agency and others increasingly – and rather emotively – talk about “doomsday weapons”. In practice, “doomsday” is beginning to mean anything nasty possessed by Iraq, though not by the United States.

Last Wednesday, for example, a Reuters report stated: “The United States threatened possible nuclear retaliation against Iraq if its forces or allies were attacked with doomsday weapons.” Let’s see how that looks the other way round: “The United States threatened retaliation with doomsday weapons against Iraq if its forces or allies were attacked with chemicals.”

In terms of mass death, it takes 28 Halabjas to make one Hiroshima.

Meanwhile, to the delight of pharmaceutical companies, the United States is pressing ahead with its smallpox vaccination programme – though the recent New York Times “scoop” about an Iraqi smallpox threat looks increasingly shaky. On December 3, Judith Miller, the paper’s “bioterrorism expert” reported an unverified claim that a Russian scientist, who once had access to the Soviet Union’s entire collection of 120 strains of smallpox, may have visited Iraq in 1990 and may have provided the Iraqis with a version of the virus that could be resistant to vaccines and could be more easily transmitted as a biological weapon. (See “Poisoning the Air”, World Dispatch, December 9.)

Since the article was published, colleagues of the now-dead scientist, Nelja Maltseva, have said that she last visited Iraq in 1971-72 (as part of a global smallpox eradication effort) and last travelled abroad (to Finland) in 1982.

Another of Ms Miller’s scoops, on November 12, cited “senior Bush administration officials” as saying that Iraq had ordered a million doses of atropine, which is an antidote to nerve gas, but also a routine drug for treating heart patients. This was interpreted as evidence that Iraq not only possesses nerve gas but intends to use it in a conflict with the United States – hence the need to protect its own forces from accidental injury.

The US then threatened to block a continuation of Iraq’s oil-for-food programme unless atropine were included in the list of “suspect” items that Iraq cannot import without permission from the United Nations’ sanctions committee.

As I pointed out in world dispatch last week, the sudden horror over atropine was very strange, given that the US had previously allowed Iraq to buy large quantities on normal medical grounds, and that UN had lifted all restrictions on Iraqi purchases of the drug only six months earlier.

This highly relevant information, which Ms Miller had failed to mention, eventually found its way into the Washington Post and the wires of Associated Press. The response from the New York Times was to run the Associated Press report without reference to Ms Miller’s flawed scoop.

By no means do all the dubious scare stories about Iraq come from shadowy intelligence sources or officials who can’t be named.

Last September, Turkish police announced the arrest of two men in a taxi who were apparently smuggling 35lb of weapons-grade uranium to Iraq from somewhere near the Syrian border. But a few days later it emerged that the material was harmless, containing only zinc, iron, zirconium and manganese. Its actual weight was only 5lb but the police, in their excitement, had weighed the lead container as well.

One day, perhaps, one of these scare stories may turn out to be true – but don’t hold your breath waiting for it. In the meantime, readers are welcome to send more examples by email, to the address below.

———–

The decline and fall of the American empire An expert on geopolitics says forget Islamic terrorism — the real future threat to America’s supremacy will come from Europe.

– – – – – – – – – – – – By Suzy Hansen

Dec. 2, 2002 | The title of Charles A. Kupchan’s new book, “The End of the American Era,” sounds grim, but after a year of terrorist violence, “spectacular” attack warnings and ominous analyses of fundamentalist Islam, his argument is almost refreshing. According to Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, it isn’t radical Islam that we should be most concerned about. It’s our friends across the Atlantic, the European Union, that pose the greatest threat to American primacy.

In “The End of the American Era,” Kupchan compares the current world situation to past turning points in history — the end of World War I, the federation of the American colonies, the Great Depression — to suggest ways in which the world might transform itself. In some of his most illuminating passages, Kupchan disputes the predictions of such optimistic leading thinkers as Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman, who perceive democracy and globalization as great panaceas, and pessimists such as Samuel Huntington who foresees a “clash of civilizations.” Instead, Kupchan’s global map resembles that of the 19th century, when the reigning empire, Great Britain, gave the rising United States entree as a world power. This time, Kupchan says, it’s America’s turn to make room for Europe.

Kupchan spoke to Salon from his office in Washington, D.C.

I know historians and scholars hate the word “inevitable,” but you imply that sooner or later all great empires will fall. Is that right?

If there’s any trend that keeps coming back, it’s that great powers come and go. No one stays at the top forever. Rome was a great empire with a huge territory under its weight for probably 300 to 400 years, which is a pretty long time. Some have come and gone much more quickly.

One of the reasons that America’s moment at the top will be short-lived is that history is moving much more quickly than it used to. The countries that get into the digital age go into fast-forward. If you take a snapshot of the world today and say, “A-ha! This is what the world’s going to look like for the next century,” it’s very dangerous. Tomorrow could look very different.

Which empire do we compare most to? Is it Rome?

Two analogies come to my mind as most insightful to the present. First, the Roman case. The split that we’re now seeing between Europe and America reminds me of the split between Rome and Byzantium that occurred in the end of the third century and into the fourth century. You had a unitary imperial zone divided into two, and once you had two separate capitals, Rome and Constantinople, you immediately had rivalry rather than unity. The same thing is happening between Washington and Brussels.

As far as the nature of our empire, I’d say the British probably comes closer to ours. The Roman empire was more contiguous. We have a more far-flung empire that relies on offshore balancing, which is what the Brits did: Send troops abroad but more to keep the balance than to occupy. You could almost call it Empire Lite. That’s more or less how we run the show. One of the benefits of that is that Empire Lite is cheaper and it also provokes less resistance.

But one of the real dangers that we face at the moment is that Empire Lite might become Empire Heavy and rather than reassure others, we’ll alienate them. Rather than appear as a benign hegemon, we appear predatory. We appear to lose our legitimacy as a great power, which is probably our most precious commodity. If that happens, then all bets are off. Then you really see countries run for cover and join arms against the United States.

What mistakes do historians and scholars make when they say that America is different, that for some reason American primacy will last indefinitely?

Part of it stems from looking at what I would say are the wrong indicators. They look at the GDP and the military capability of the United States vs. other countries. If you do that, it doesn’t look like anybody is going to come close for many decades. I agree with that. But Europe is no longer a group of sovereign countries; it’s coming together just like [the United States] did [in the 18th century]. That’s why you have to talk about Europe as a collective entity and its ability to serve as a counterweight to the United States.

Also, oftentimes historians and particularly political scientists tend to look at the world structurally. They say, “Forget about what’s going on inside states and just look at the relations among states.” The end of America’s dominance will to some extent be made in America. It will come from America’s domestic politics, its own ambivalence about empire and its own stiff-necked unilateralism, which alienates others. In that sense, a lot of where we go as a country will come from internal factors — demographics, politics, political culture, populism. Those are issues that lots of political scientists don’t pay attention to.

Now, is that a trend that you see happening regardless of what political party is in power?

Yes. That’s a debate that I have with my colleagues here because they say, “Listen. Once the Bushies are gone everything will be fine. If Gore had won, everything would be fine.” I don’t agree. If Gore had won, the changes we are seeing now would have taken longer to come about, but both parties face the same political pressures in the end. If the Democrats win by 2015, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be in the same place.

Still, you’re basing a lot of your argument on what you’ve seen in the last year, aren’t you? The idea that American intervention and multilateralism is on the wane … that has a lot to do with what happened in the last year. And that’s just one year.

Interestingly enough, I wrote the first draft of the book before Bush was elected. The core themes were all there. What I’m quite shocked by is the speed with which all of this has happened. I thought that my general analysis would take a good decade to play out. Once Bush came to office it seemed like someone stepped on the gas. I had to rewrite the book and I put much more emphasis on America’s turning inward and its ambivalence about running the world. After Sept. 11, the unilateralists’ angry lashing-out side came back. The emphasis in the book on that was written after Bush came to office, and after Sept. 11.

So you think this trend might slow down with Democrats — if they’re ever in power again — but not halt.

Yes, and that’s partly because when I was in the Clinton administration in the early 1990s — only a few years after the end of the Cold War — I already saw trends that were seeds for the book. Congress was beginning to check out. The media was stopping its coverage of foreign affairs. Even Clinton, who was a liberal internationalist by inclination, wasn’t so wild about the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court and all this other stuff that the Bush people said no to. When it all comes down to it, I see the arrows all pointing in one direction, but the emphasis and the speed changes from party to party.

Part of your theory is that now we see isolationist and unilateralist extremes working at the same time. The alternative you propose is liberal internationalism? What does that mean? What conflicts would we have engaged in during the 1990s, and now, if we followed that line of thought?

The world I envisage is one where the U.S. enters a period of transition in which it helps other actors build up the capability to do what we’ve been doing. I just don’t believe that, given American politics, we will intervene in [situations such as] Rwanda and East Timor. I don’t think that’s the way the world works. Rather than no one doing it, we ought to work toward a world in which there are alternative centers of authority with the will and capability to do peacekeeping and intervention. I would love to see the European Union get to the point where it can take care of Kosovo and the Balkans. I’d love to see some sort of association of African states that could go into a Rwanda-type activity. The U.S. will no doubt remain willing and able to intervene in the Western hemisphere, but my view is that intervention far afield will diminish over time with a couple of exceptions — where there are clear strategic interests like Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf.

How does the Bush administration’s desire to attack Iraq fit into these trends? You did write that we would be staying home and shoring up defenses post-Sept. 11, but here we are ready to wage another war already. What does this war represent?

The political landscape is so skewed that the unilateralist camp is essentially unchecked. In the Republican Party, there are three ideological camps: the neoconservatives, who are unilateralists; the moderate centrists, who are essentially liberal internationalists of the sort that I advocate such as Father Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger; and this new, young ascendant wing of the Republican Party represented by President Bush. That’s the heartland wing — the agrarian South and the mountain West. It’s populous and its inclinations are neo-isolationist.

That’s why from Jan. 20 to Sept. 11 the centrist wing was pushed to the margins and the neoconservatives and the heartland conservatives were duking it out. That’s why one day Bush would say we can’t be everything to everybody and the next day Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz at the Pentagon would say, “We’re going to run the world.” Then comes Sept. 11 and the heartland conservatives have their legs cut off. So right now there’s no check on the neoconservatives and the Democratic Party has folded its tent, lost the midterm elections. That’s why there’s so little debate about Iraq. That doesn’t mean, however, that the heartland wing is gone. They’re in suspension now politically, but they will be back.

The other thing that is important on Iraq is that the Bush administration could, if it’s not careful, find itself in over its head and have a set of commitments on its plate — including a five- to 10-year occupation of Iraq — that ultimately causes a political backlash in which the American people say enough already.

Could that scenario speed up this whole process of the decline of the American era?

It depends on how it goes. If the war goes smoothly and Saddam falls and all goes well and there aren’t chemical weapons exploding in Tel Aviv, I think it will probably turn out OK and not change the landscape all that much. If anything, it will fuel the neoconservative view.

If it goes poorly … I think the war will go smoothly actually. What I really worry about is the occupation. You ought to see a therapist if you want to occupy Iraq. It’s just the last place I would want to set up shop. The whole region is deeply anti-American. They’ll probably be dancing in the streets for 24 to 48 hours and then they’ll take up sniper positions. That’s where I think things could go wrong with barracks exploding, etc. If that were to happen, at the end of the day it would cause us to pull in our horns and cause Americans to say, “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

And our main challenger, in your view, is not radical Islam or Saddam Hussein, but the European Union. What kind of threat do you really see the European Union posing? Do you ever see us going to war with Europe?

To work backwards, no. The likelihood of military conflict between the U.S. and Europe is very low, almost beyond the stretch of imagination. The main threat is to order. The main threat is to the stability of the world. Everyone right now is focusing on terrorism and environmental degradation, and I’m all for those things. But we’ve gotten complacent about the big picture. We’re used to a world where America runs the show. We may wake up one morning and find that we don’t have complete control, that we go to the IMF or the World Bank or the United Nations, and say, “Here’s our plan for the next week.” And the E.U. looks at us and says, “We’re not onboard. We’re not going to do that.”

In fact, everyone saw the recent voting at the U.N. Security Council as victory for the U.S. But what really happened? The U.S. went in and said, “This is our position, take it or leave it.” Most of the Security Council, save Britain, said, “Leave it.” They locked arms with France rather than with us, which is what they’ve been doing for the last 50 years. That’s just the beginning of what the world could look like — main powers not working together. If it comes to that, then these other threats will diminish in importance and pale in comparison to a world in which the key players are no longer on the same sheet of music, in which Europe sets itself against us, rather than with us.

The illusion, however, is that we control the major international organizations. Also, we seem to be reaching out to NATO. How could we lose control of them?

We still do control them, but that control is slipping away in several respects. First of all, we see major institutions devolving against our wishes. The E.U. takes the lead and says, “You want to drive SUVs and drill wells in the Alaska wilderness? Well, we’re going to go ahead with the Kyoto Protocol without you. You don’t like the International Criminal Court? We’ll do it without you.” Does it hurt the ICC that we’re not there? Yes. But does it also start building a world where you have these other countries coming together with major steps forward and we’re not there? Yes. Does that degrade order? Yes.

In existing institutions we’ll find ourselves increasingly isolated. One of the reasons that we tend to have as much say as we do is that, for example, in the IMF, the U.S. has a larger share than any other country. But that’s because the countries are represented solely by their country representatives. If the E.U. starts coming together with its own single representative, then we will no longer be the dominant country. We’re not going to be able to go in and pound our fist on the table anymore.

It’s a subtle shift that I’m talking about and that’s why most people say, “Oh, it’s nothing compared to Osama bin Laden.” But, on the other hand, it’s the superstructure, it’s the guts of the international system, and that’s why the stakes are so high.

What issues and conflicts will we diverge on with the E.U.? The Middle East?

That’s probably the area where the U.S. and Europe most disagree. It’s quite striking if you go to Europe and turn on the TV. The presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is so different that you scratch your head and say, “What part of the world are they talking about?” That’s part of the problem. We reside in different mind-sets.

The trade and monetary issues will grow more difficult over time if the euro gradually rises. It’s a real challenger to the dollar. That’s going to make us look like we’re back in the 1930s where you had the pound sterling and the dollar together and the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England trying to manage jointly the international economy. It didn’t work; the two went off in their own direction. Now it’s going to be the Federal Reserve vs. the European Central Bank. If we don’t get that relationship right, there could be very serious implications. We are so used to being alone at the top that it’s going to be hard for us to get used to that.

Where will England stand in all of this? They’re our best friends these days.

The Brits are right now trying to have their cake and eat it too. They’re kind of edging into the E.U. but also playing the traditional role of bridge to America. Those days are numbered. It’s a strategy that will diminish over time in terms of its utility, but also in terms of its political feasibility. The Brits will change their strategy to trying to change the Franco-German coalition into the Franco-German-British troika. That’s because if the Brits don’t get into the driver’s seat in Europe, they’ll be marginalized. My guess is that by 2005 and certainly by the end of the decade, the Brits will be buying their fish and chips with euros and they will be one of the engines behind European integration rather than lagging behind.

When Bush said you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists, was he trying to create a new map of the world, one that’s black and white and similar to the Cold War bipolar world? It’s almost nostalgic for the Cold War. Why would he want to do that, and why can’t that work with terrorism?

Part of it may be instrumental. It’s a useful talking point for both domestic and international politics. Part of it is sincere — the Bush people really do believe the world has changed and that it’s all about terrorism and either you are against the terrorists or with them.

First of all, that grossly distorts the implications of Sept. 11, in that I don’t think the world has changed all that much. Beneath the surface, the same old agenda is still relevant, it’s just got one new thing on it: terrorism. If we’re terrorism 24/7 we’re going to miss all those other issues. We’re going to miss the fact that we’re alienating the Europeans, we’re going to miss the fact that we have a potential environmental disaster looming on the horizon.

The other problem is that terrorism is a very weak reason upon which to build American internationalism. That’s partly because it’s not the type of threat that — similar to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — gets us riled up for the long haul. It’s elusive. We’re in this weird zone where we’re being told we’re at war but when asked what should we do about it, we’re supposed to go shopping and take vacations so that our planes have people on them. It doesn’t quite click. Something’s not right about this story. Some of the greatest successes in this battle will be the ones we never hear about — covert operations, the averted attack — and so in that sense, it’s very tough to get this country into a mode of centrist moderate internationalism on terrorism.

I also think — and this definitely cuts against the grain for now — that ultimately there will be a counterresponse. Right now, it’s, “Let’s go get the barbarians,” but over time there will be an alternative voice that says, “Let’s raise protective barriers, let’s get out of some of our overseas commitments.” Going back to the founding fathers, we can, because of our location, enjoy a sort of natural security.

Where’s that voice going to come from? The left or the right?

It’s going to come from all different quadrants. More from the right and the heartland than from the left. I make a point to give talks in Kansas and Texas, Birmingham and Nashville, and there’s just a different view of the world there. Even people who are involved in the international economy are not quite as gung ho about the American empire as we hear in Washington today. That’s why over time that voice will gain strength. It’s important to keep in mind that if you look at how other countries have responded to terrorism or how we have responded, sometimes it does make you pull in your horns. We got out of Lebanon in 1983, we left Aden when the Cole was bombed; Nigerian attacks on the French mainland got the French to leave Algeria. It’s not particularly politically correct to say so, but terrorism does engender one to hunker down.

What other alliances might we see? Where does China fit in all this?

In the near term, the main actor is Europe because it has the clout, population and economic weight. It’s beginning to have the collective character as the states pass more and more authority up to the supranational authority.

I spent less time on China in the book because most people exaggerate China’s importance. China is still a relatively small country economically with an economy smaller than California’s. Ten years from now China will be an Italy with nuclear weapons. Once you get into the second quarter of the century, 2025 and beyond, then China starts to begin to take its place as one of the top-ranking countries. Then, you might spend a lot more time worrying about China.

But, what do I think the most volatile relationship will be, the one that changes most this decade? It’s U.S.-Europe.

How will that affect ordinary Americans? What changes will we see if it’s not a military threat? I mean, the American people can’t see past terrorism right now because we can see very clearly what that threat is.

I’d say that right across the board there are some consequences. The trade and investment with Europe is very strong and healthy. If that becomes politicized it could be a problem. There are already looming disputes over biotech, bioengineered greens.

The disputes on other areas — on the Middle East, on Iran, on Iraq — could lead to trouble. NATO, which has been our main tool in influencing Europe, is withering on the vine, partly of our own doing. We’re just losing interest in Europe.

I’d probably put it in these terms: Europe will be our competitor but not necessarily our adversary. That’s why we’re in a switching point where we really have to get it right. Negotiating a treaty, rebuilding Afghanistan, dealing with the Middle East process — all that stuff usually moves forward with the U.S. taking the lead and Europe backing off. If we wake up one day and the U.S. tries to take the lead and Europe tells us to take a hike, then we’re in a brave new world. Doing business on a day-to-day basis becomes much more difficult. At the broadest level, all the money and lives that we expended since World War II to tame the international system and give it a benign character — all of that’s at stake. It’s possible that we could wake up and it will be 1935 and I don’t think any American wants that.

You do say that the unipolar world that we have now is a peaceful one and historically unipolar worlds are always peaceful. You say that a world without American primacy will be an unpredictable and unpleasant world. For everyone, or just for Americans?

Everybody. Even though a lot of countries wouldn’t necessarily say so, they’ve had a pretty good deal. Big Daddy’s been there and he takes care of everything. The Europeans don’t have to spend much on defense. China and Japan basically don’t like each other, but they’re not gnawing at each other’s heels because the U.S. keeps a presence there. We provide stability. What we’re seeing now is the end of that. The U.S. is decamping from Europe because we’ve got nothing else to do there, but it does leave the Europeans with the new onerous task of taking care of themselves. That’s going to be scary for them even though there’s a certain schizophrenia. The Europeans are annoyed with us but scared of what Europe will look like without the American pacifier. In the same respect, the Saudis believe that the U.S. destabilizes them but what happens if the U.S. leaves? The stakes are very high.

I’ll take a wild guess that most Americans will be surprised that Europe might challenge us. Are Europeans?

Depends on what you mean. They will never be a superpower; they’re never going to spend the money to rival the U.S. in military terms. What we’ll see is that they will build up enough capability to take care of the Balkans and other small conflicts, and the U.S. will take care of other parts of the world. Sort of a division of labor. But that division of labor means the end of the Atlantic alliance.

You say most Americans will be surprised at this and I think that’s right. I don’t think most Europeans will be. This issue gets much more traction there. They are engaged in international issues in ways that we are now. There is this abiding sense that we’re all in the same family, that these are our cousins. That’s probably what will keep us from going to war, but it’s not going to keep us from drifting apart.

So how do you fear that America might react to this?

The worst that we can do is bite back. The historical analogy that is most useful here is what happened in the 19th century when America rose because it federated. Basically, history is reversing itself: This time we’re at the top and Europe is coming together, last time Europe was at the top and we came together. There wasn’t war over America’s rise because the British made room for us. They cut deals on all kinds of issues and they said we need to have a rapprochement with the rising great power, America. We ought to do the same thing.

We ought to say: Europe is rising, Europe wants voice, influence, and we’re going to make room. I don’t think that we’ve been doing that. We’re still in the mode of “How dare you challenge us?” Probably the best anecdote is about the E.U. Defense Force. The U.S. fought the war over Kosovo, and then Congress said, “This is ridiculous. This is not our problem. Europe, you need to spend more and build your own military.” So Europe said, “OK.” And then the U.S. went bonkers: “What do you mean you’re going to build your own military? You don’t love us anymore?”

Europe is growing up and leaving home to go to college and we’re just not ready for it. We ought to say, “Go to college, be independent, and just call us once a year or something.”

But you don’t think that terrorism is the unifying great threat that it’s been made out to be?

No. Everyone was saying, “Aha, the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century!” This couldn’t be further from the truth. We have quite rapidly drifted back to disengagement.

Couldn’t a couple more attacks change that?

Yes. That’s the big unknown. If a nuclear weapon goes off, God forbid, if there’s another catastrophic attack, then I think we’re in a brave new world. Do I think it will bring the country together and make us internationalist? I don’t know. It could also make us pull in and retreat. It’s dangerous to be confident that terrorism is the sort of threat that will keep us engaged in the world. It does the opposite — pushing us to both unilateralist and isolationist extremes.

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About the writer Suzy Hansen is an assistant editor at Salon.

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