1.28.2005
Dream On America
The U.S. Model: For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards.
By Andrew Moravcsik
in «Newsweek International»
Jan. 31 issue - Not long ago, the American dream was a global fantasy. Not only Americans saw themselves as a beacon unto nations. So did much of the rest of the world. East Europeans tuned into Radio Free Europe. Chinese students erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
You had only to listen to George W. Bush's Inaugural Address last week (invoking "freedom" and "liberty" 49 times) to appreciate just how deeply Americans still believe in this founding myth. For many in the world, the president's rhetoric confirmed their worst fears of an imperial America relentlessly pursuing its narrow national interests. But the greater danger may be a delusional America—one that believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the American Dream lives on, that America remains a model for the world, one whose mission is to spread the word.
The gulf between how Americans view themselves and how the world views them was summed up in a poll last week by the BBC. Fully 71 percent of Americans see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view Bush's election as positive for global security. Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe "American ideas and customs" should spread globally.
Foreigners take an entirely different view: 58 percent in the BBC poll see Bush's re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America's traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India viewed Bush's second Inaugural positively.
Tellingly, the anti-Bushism of the president's first term is giving way to a more general anti-Americanism. A plurality of voters (the average is 70 percent) in each of the 21 countries surveyed by the BBC oppose sending any troops to Iraq, including those in most of the countries that have done so. Only one third, disproportionately in the poorest and most dictatorial countries, would like to see American values spread in their country. Says Doug Miller of GlobeScan, which conducted the BBC report: "President Bush has further isolated America from the world. Unless the administration changes its approach, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs." Former Brazilian president Jose Sarney expressed the sentiments of the 78 percent of his countrymen who see America as a threat: "Now that Bush has been re-elected, all I can say is, God bless the rest of the world."
The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international institutions—globalization, in a word.
Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive ways—none made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that's caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate culture. "First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S. multinational, "then we overtake."
Many are tempted to write off the new anti-Americanism as a temporary perturbation, or mere resentment. Blinded by its own myth, America has grown incapable of recognizing its flaws. For there is much about the American Dream to fault. If the rest of the world has lost faith in the American model—political, economic, diplomatic—it's partly for the very good reason that it doesn't work as well anymore.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Once upon a time, the U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary document, full of epochal innovations—free elections, judicial review, checks and balances, federalism and, perhaps most important, a Bill of Rights. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countries around the world copied the document, not least in Latin America. So did Germany and Japan after World War II. Today? When nations write a new constitution, as dozens have in the past two decades, they seldom look to the American model.
When the soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt a European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It's very prone to certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies," he says. "Europeans would not want to follow that route." They also sought to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American campaigns where, Pehe says, "TV debates and photogenic looks govern election victories."
So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country, Kosovo opted for a European constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution, South Africa rejected American-style federalism in favor of a German model, which leaders deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to construct. Now fledgling African democracies look to South Africa as their inspiration, says John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official who currently heads the international relations department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: "We can't rely on the Americans." The new democracies are looking for a constitution written in modern times and reflecting their progressive concerns about racial and social equality, he explains. "To borrow Lincoln's phrase, South Africa is now Africa's 'last great hope'."
Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism. They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections. Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard, has become "provincial." The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are out of step with the rest of the world.
ECONOMIC PROSPERITY: The American Dream has always been chiefly economic—a dynamic ideal of free enterprise, free markets and individual opportunity based on merit and mobility. Certainly the U.S. economy has been extraordinarily productive. Yes, American per capita income remains among the world's highest. Yet these days there's as much economic dynamism in the newly industrializing economies of Asia, Latin America and even eastern Europe. All are growing faster than the United States. At current trends, the Chinese economy will be bigger than America's by 2040. Whether those trends will continue is not so much the question. Better to ask whether the American way is so superior that everyone else should imitate it. And the answer to that, increasingly, is no.
Much has made, for instance, of the differences between the dynamic American model and the purportedly sluggish and overregulated "European model." Ongoing efforts at European labor-market reform and fiscal cuts are ridiculed. Why can't these countries be more like Britain, businessmen ask, without the high tax burden, state regulation and restrictions on management that plague Continental economies? Sooner or later, the CW goes, Europeans will adopt the American model—or perish.
Yet this is a myth. For much of the postwar period Europe and Japan enjoyed higher growth rates than America. Airbus recently overtook Boeing in sales of commercial aircraft, and the EU recently surpassed America as China's top trading partner. This year's ranking of the world's most competitive economies by the World Economic Forum awarded five of the top 10 slots—including No. 1 Finland—to northern European social democracies. "Nordic social democracy remains robust," writes Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School of Economics and a "New Labour" theorist, in a recent issue of the New Statesman, "not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it."
This is much of the secret of Britain's economic performance as well. Lorenzo Codogno, co-head of European economics at the Bank of America, believes the British, like Europeans elsewhere, "will try their own way to achieve a proper balance." Certainly they would never put up with the lack of social protections afforded in the American system. Europeans are aware that their systems provide better primary education, more job security and a more generous social net. They are willing to pay higher taxes and submit to regulation in order to bolster their quality of life. Americans work far longer hours than Europeans do, for instance. But they are not necessarily more productive—nor happier, buried as they are in household debt, without the time (or money) available to Europeans for vacation and international travel. George Monbiot, a British public intellectual, speaks for many when he says, "The American model has become an American nightmare rather than an American dream."
Just look at booming bri-tain. Instead of cutting social welfare, Tony Blair's Labour government has expanded it. According to London's Centre for Policy Studies, public spending in Britain represented 43 percent of GDP in 2003, a figure closer to the Eurozone average than to the American share of 35 percent. It's still on the rise—some 10 percent annually over the past three years—at the same time that social welfare is being reformed to deliver services more efficiently. The inspiration, says Giddens, comes not from America, but from social-democratic Sweden, where universal child care, education and health care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately, economic productivity. In the United States, inequality once seemed tolerable because America was the land of equal opportunity. But this is no longer so. Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today he pulls in 1,000 times as much. Cross-national studies show that America has recently become a relatively difficult country for poorer people to get ahead. Monbiot summarizes the scientific data: "In Sweden, you are three times more likely to rise out of the economic class into which you were born than you are in the U.S."
Other nations have begun to notice. Even in poorer, pro-American Hungary and Poland, polls show that only a slender minority (less than 25 percent) wants to import the American economic model. A big reason is its increasingly apparent deficiencies. "Americans have the best medical care in the world," Bush declared in his Inaugural Address. Yet the United States is the only developed democracy without a universal guarantee of health care, leaving about 45 million Americans uninsured. Nor do Americans receive higher-quality health care in exchange. Whether it is measured by questioning public-health experts, polling citizen satisfaction or survival rates, the health care offered by other countries increasingly ranks above America's. U.S. infant mortality rates are among the highest for developed democracies. The average Frenchman, like most Europeans, lives nearly four years longer than the average American. Small wonder that the World Health Organization rates the U.S. healthcare system only 37th best in the world, behind Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia (26th), and on a par with Cuba.
The list goes on: ugly racial tensions, sky-high incarceration rates, child-poverty rates higher than any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country except Mexico—where Europe, these days, inspires more admiration than the United States. "Their solutions feel more natural to Mexicans because they offer real solutions to real, and seemingly intractable, problems," says Sergio Aguayo, a prominent democracy advocate in Mexico City, referring to European education, health care and social policies. And while undemocratic states like China may, ironically, be among the last places where the United States still presents an attractive political and social alternative to authoritarian government, new models are rising in prominence. Says Julie Zhu, a college student in Beijing: "When I was in high school I thought America was this dreamland, a fabled place." Anything she bought had to be American. Now that's changed, she says: "When people have money, they often choose European products." She might well have been talking about another key indicator. Not long ago, the United States was destination number one for foreign students seeking university educations. Today, growing numbers are going elsewhere—to other parts of Asia, or Europe. You can almost feel the pendulum swinging.
FOREIGN POLICY: U.S. leaders have long believed military power and the American Dream went hand in hand. World War II was fought not just to defeat the Axis powers, but to make the world safe for the United Nations, the precursor to the —World Trade Organization, the European Union and other international institutions that would strengthen weaker countries. NATO and the Marshall Plan were the twin pillars upon which today's Europe were built.
Today, Americans make the same presumption, confusing military might with right. Following European criticisms of the Iraq war, the French became "surrender monkeys." The Germans were opportunistic ingrates. The British (and the Poles) were America's lone allies. Unsurprisingly, many of those listening to Bush's Inaugural pledge last week to stand with those defying tyranny saw the glimmerings of an argument for invading Iran: Washington has thus far shown more of an appetite for spreading ideals with the barrel of a gun than for namby-pamby hearts-and-minds campaigns. A former French minister muses that the United States is the last "Bismarckian power"—the last country to believe that the pinpoint application of military power is the critical instrument of foreign policy.
Contrast that to the European Union—pioneering an approach based on civilian instruments like trade, foreign aid, peacekeeping, international monitoring and international law—or even China, whose economic clout has become its most effective diplomatic weapon. The strongest tool for both is access to huge markets. No single policy has contributed as much to Western peace and security as the admission of 10 new countries—to be followed by a half-dozen more—to the European Union. In country after country, authoritarian nationalists were beaten back by democratic coalitions held together by the promise of joining Europe. And in the past month European leaders have taken a courageous decision to contemplate the membership of Turkey, where the prospect of EU membership is helping to create the most stable democratic system in the Islamic world. When historians look back, they may see this policy as being the truly epochal event of our time, dwarfing in effectiveness the crude power of America.
The United States can take some satisfaction in this. After all, it is in large part the success of the mid-century American Dream—spreading democracy, free markets, social mobility and multilateral cooperation—that has made possible the diversity of models we see today. This was enlightened statecraft of unparalleled generosity. But where does it leave us? Americans still invoke democratic idealism. We heard it in Bush's address, with his apocalyptic proclamation that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But fewer and fewer people have the patience to listen.
Headlines in the British press were almost contemptuous: DEFIANT BUSH DOES NOT MENTION THE WAR, HAVE I GOT NUKES FOR YOU and HIS SECOND-TERM MISSION: TO END TYRANNY ON EARTH. Has this administration learned nothing from Iraq, they asked? Can this White House really expect to command support from the rest of the world, with its different strengths and different dreams? The failure of the American Dream has only been highlighted by the country's foreign-policy failures, not caused by them. The true danger is that Americans do not realize this, lost in the reveries of greatness, speechifying about liberty and freedom.
With Christian Caryl in Tokyo, Katka Krosnar in Prague, Mac Margolis in Rio de Janeiro, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris, Paul Mooney in Beijing, Henk Rossouw in Johannesburg and Marie Valla in London
By Andrew Moravcsik
in «Newsweek International»
Jan. 31 issue - Not long ago, the American dream was a global fantasy. Not only Americans saw themselves as a beacon unto nations. So did much of the rest of the world. East Europeans tuned into Radio Free Europe. Chinese students erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square.
You had only to listen to George W. Bush's Inaugural Address last week (invoking "freedom" and "liberty" 49 times) to appreciate just how deeply Americans still believe in this founding myth. For many in the world, the president's rhetoric confirmed their worst fears of an imperial America relentlessly pursuing its narrow national interests. But the greater danger may be a delusional America—one that believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the American Dream lives on, that America remains a model for the world, one whose mission is to spread the word.
The gulf between how Americans view themselves and how the world views them was summed up in a poll last week by the BBC. Fully 71 percent of Americans see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view Bush's election as positive for global security. Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe "American ideas and customs" should spread globally.
Foreigners take an entirely different view: 58 percent in the BBC poll see Bush's re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America's traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India viewed Bush's second Inaugural positively.
Tellingly, the anti-Bushism of the president's first term is giving way to a more general anti-Americanism. A plurality of voters (the average is 70 percent) in each of the 21 countries surveyed by the BBC oppose sending any troops to Iraq, including those in most of the countries that have done so. Only one third, disproportionately in the poorest and most dictatorial countries, would like to see American values spread in their country. Says Doug Miller of GlobeScan, which conducted the BBC report: "President Bush has further isolated America from the world. Unless the administration changes its approach, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs." Former Brazilian president Jose Sarney expressed the sentiments of the 78 percent of his countrymen who see America as a threat: "Now that Bush has been re-elected, all I can say is, God bless the rest of the world."
The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international institutions—globalization, in a word.
Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive ways—none made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that's caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate culture. "First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S. multinational, "then we overtake."
Many are tempted to write off the new anti-Americanism as a temporary perturbation, or mere resentment. Blinded by its own myth, America has grown incapable of recognizing its flaws. For there is much about the American Dream to fault. If the rest of the world has lost faith in the American model—political, economic, diplomatic—it's partly for the very good reason that it doesn't work as well anymore.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Once upon a time, the U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary document, full of epochal innovations—free elections, judicial review, checks and balances, federalism and, perhaps most important, a Bill of Rights. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countries around the world copied the document, not least in Latin America. So did Germany and Japan after World War II. Today? When nations write a new constitution, as dozens have in the past two decades, they seldom look to the American model.
When the soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt a European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It's very prone to certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies," he says. "Europeans would not want to follow that route." They also sought to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American campaigns where, Pehe says, "TV debates and photogenic looks govern election victories."
So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country, Kosovo opted for a European constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution, South Africa rejected American-style federalism in favor of a German model, which leaders deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to construct. Now fledgling African democracies look to South Africa as their inspiration, says John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official who currently heads the international relations department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: "We can't rely on the Americans." The new democracies are looking for a constitution written in modern times and reflecting their progressive concerns about racial and social equality, he explains. "To borrow Lincoln's phrase, South Africa is now Africa's 'last great hope'."
Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism. They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections. Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard, has become "provincial." The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are out of step with the rest of the world.
ECONOMIC PROSPERITY: The American Dream has always been chiefly economic—a dynamic ideal of free enterprise, free markets and individual opportunity based on merit and mobility. Certainly the U.S. economy has been extraordinarily productive. Yes, American per capita income remains among the world's highest. Yet these days there's as much economic dynamism in the newly industrializing economies of Asia, Latin America and even eastern Europe. All are growing faster than the United States. At current trends, the Chinese economy will be bigger than America's by 2040. Whether those trends will continue is not so much the question. Better to ask whether the American way is so superior that everyone else should imitate it. And the answer to that, increasingly, is no.
Much has made, for instance, of the differences between the dynamic American model and the purportedly sluggish and overregulated "European model." Ongoing efforts at European labor-market reform and fiscal cuts are ridiculed. Why can't these countries be more like Britain, businessmen ask, without the high tax burden, state regulation and restrictions on management that plague Continental economies? Sooner or later, the CW goes, Europeans will adopt the American model—or perish.
Yet this is a myth. For much of the postwar period Europe and Japan enjoyed higher growth rates than America. Airbus recently overtook Boeing in sales of commercial aircraft, and the EU recently surpassed America as China's top trading partner. This year's ranking of the world's most competitive economies by the World Economic Forum awarded five of the top 10 slots—including No. 1 Finland—to northern European social democracies. "Nordic social democracy remains robust," writes Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School of Economics and a "New Labour" theorist, in a recent issue of the New Statesman, "not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it."
This is much of the secret of Britain's economic performance as well. Lorenzo Codogno, co-head of European economics at the Bank of America, believes the British, like Europeans elsewhere, "will try their own way to achieve a proper balance." Certainly they would never put up with the lack of social protections afforded in the American system. Europeans are aware that their systems provide better primary education, more job security and a more generous social net. They are willing to pay higher taxes and submit to regulation in order to bolster their quality of life. Americans work far longer hours than Europeans do, for instance. But they are not necessarily more productive—nor happier, buried as they are in household debt, without the time (or money) available to Europeans for vacation and international travel. George Monbiot, a British public intellectual, speaks for many when he says, "The American model has become an American nightmare rather than an American dream."
Just look at booming bri-tain. Instead of cutting social welfare, Tony Blair's Labour government has expanded it. According to London's Centre for Policy Studies, public spending in Britain represented 43 percent of GDP in 2003, a figure closer to the Eurozone average than to the American share of 35 percent. It's still on the rise—some 10 percent annually over the past three years—at the same time that social welfare is being reformed to deliver services more efficiently. The inspiration, says Giddens, comes not from America, but from social-democratic Sweden, where universal child care, education and health care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately, economic productivity. In the United States, inequality once seemed tolerable because America was the land of equal opportunity. But this is no longer so. Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today he pulls in 1,000 times as much. Cross-national studies show that America has recently become a relatively difficult country for poorer people to get ahead. Monbiot summarizes the scientific data: "In Sweden, you are three times more likely to rise out of the economic class into which you were born than you are in the U.S."
Other nations have begun to notice. Even in poorer, pro-American Hungary and Poland, polls show that only a slender minority (less than 25 percent) wants to import the American economic model. A big reason is its increasingly apparent deficiencies. "Americans have the best medical care in the world," Bush declared in his Inaugural Address. Yet the United States is the only developed democracy without a universal guarantee of health care, leaving about 45 million Americans uninsured. Nor do Americans receive higher-quality health care in exchange. Whether it is measured by questioning public-health experts, polling citizen satisfaction or survival rates, the health care offered by other countries increasingly ranks above America's. U.S. infant mortality rates are among the highest for developed democracies. The average Frenchman, like most Europeans, lives nearly four years longer than the average American. Small wonder that the World Health Organization rates the U.S. healthcare system only 37th best in the world, behind Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia (26th), and on a par with Cuba.
The list goes on: ugly racial tensions, sky-high incarceration rates, child-poverty rates higher than any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country except Mexico—where Europe, these days, inspires more admiration than the United States. "Their solutions feel more natural to Mexicans because they offer real solutions to real, and seemingly intractable, problems," says Sergio Aguayo, a prominent democracy advocate in Mexico City, referring to European education, health care and social policies. And while undemocratic states like China may, ironically, be among the last places where the United States still presents an attractive political and social alternative to authoritarian government, new models are rising in prominence. Says Julie Zhu, a college student in Beijing: "When I was in high school I thought America was this dreamland, a fabled place." Anything she bought had to be American. Now that's changed, she says: "When people have money, they often choose European products." She might well have been talking about another key indicator. Not long ago, the United States was destination number one for foreign students seeking university educations. Today, growing numbers are going elsewhere—to other parts of Asia, or Europe. You can almost feel the pendulum swinging.
FOREIGN POLICY: U.S. leaders have long believed military power and the American Dream went hand in hand. World War II was fought not just to defeat the Axis powers, but to make the world safe for the United Nations, the precursor to the —World Trade Organization, the European Union and other international institutions that would strengthen weaker countries. NATO and the Marshall Plan were the twin pillars upon which today's Europe were built.
Today, Americans make the same presumption, confusing military might with right. Following European criticisms of the Iraq war, the French became "surrender monkeys." The Germans were opportunistic ingrates. The British (and the Poles) were America's lone allies. Unsurprisingly, many of those listening to Bush's Inaugural pledge last week to stand with those defying tyranny saw the glimmerings of an argument for invading Iran: Washington has thus far shown more of an appetite for spreading ideals with the barrel of a gun than for namby-pamby hearts-and-minds campaigns. A former French minister muses that the United States is the last "Bismarckian power"—the last country to believe that the pinpoint application of military power is the critical instrument of foreign policy.
Contrast that to the European Union—pioneering an approach based on civilian instruments like trade, foreign aid, peacekeeping, international monitoring and international law—or even China, whose economic clout has become its most effective diplomatic weapon. The strongest tool for both is access to huge markets. No single policy has contributed as much to Western peace and security as the admission of 10 new countries—to be followed by a half-dozen more—to the European Union. In country after country, authoritarian nationalists were beaten back by democratic coalitions held together by the promise of joining Europe. And in the past month European leaders have taken a courageous decision to contemplate the membership of Turkey, where the prospect of EU membership is helping to create the most stable democratic system in the Islamic world. When historians look back, they may see this policy as being the truly epochal event of our time, dwarfing in effectiveness the crude power of America.
The United States can take some satisfaction in this. After all, it is in large part the success of the mid-century American Dream—spreading democracy, free markets, social mobility and multilateral cooperation—that has made possible the diversity of models we see today. This was enlightened statecraft of unparalleled generosity. But where does it leave us? Americans still invoke democratic idealism. We heard it in Bush's address, with his apocalyptic proclamation that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But fewer and fewer people have the patience to listen.
Headlines in the British press were almost contemptuous: DEFIANT BUSH DOES NOT MENTION THE WAR, HAVE I GOT NUKES FOR YOU and HIS SECOND-TERM MISSION: TO END TYRANNY ON EARTH. Has this administration learned nothing from Iraq, they asked? Can this White House really expect to command support from the rest of the world, with its different strengths and different dreams? The failure of the American Dream has only been highlighted by the country's foreign-policy failures, not caused by them. The true danger is that Americans do not realize this, lost in the reveries of greatness, speechifying about liberty and freedom.
With Christian Caryl in Tokyo, Katka Krosnar in Prague, Mac Margolis in Rio de Janeiro, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris, Paul Mooney in Beijing, Henk Rossouw in Johannesburg and Marie Valla in London
1.27.2005
First know your donkey
Ukraine is the right way to spread freedom, Iraq the wrong way. Has this lesson come too late for Iran?
Timothy Garton Ash in Davos
Thursday January 27, 2005
«The Guardian»
This global stock-taking week of the World Economic Forum in Davos began with the inauguration of a new, democratically elected Ukrainian president and will end with elections in Iraq. Ukraine and Iraq represent two radically different ways - shall we call them the right way and the wrong way? - of attempting to expand freedom, a goal which Europeans and leftists should support, even though it is George Bush who proclaims it.
Ukraine is the right way. What President Yushchenko in his inaugural address justly called "a victory of freedom over tyranny, of law over lawlessness" was the latest in a long series of velvet revolutions which have helped spread democracy around the world over the last 30 years. Ukrainians did it for themselves. With a little help from their friends, to be sure. But whatever the role of western support, this was the Ukrainians' own idea, and the people I met on the ground taking risks for democracy, in the freezing camps of Kiev's tent city and on Independence Square, were Ukrainians.
This nation-building orange revolution was entirely peaceful. No one was killed, although Mr Yushchenko nearly died as a result of what was almost certainly an attempt to poison him by senior representatives of the secret police with close ties to the Russian-backed candidate. What follows will be messy, but the chances are that it will be better for the people who live there than what went before. In 15 years' time, if all goes well, Ukraine could yet be a democratic nation-state of both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking citizens, and a member of Europe's commonwealth of democracies, the European Union.
Iraq is the wrong way. It began with a war, on what turned out to be a false prospectus about weapons of mass destruction. The justification from democracy-building only rose to its present, unique salience as the evidence for WMD and direct terrorist links evaporated. Most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, but this was not their initiative. Granted, in a totalitarian dictatorship such as Saddam's, unlike in a democratura such as post-Soviet Ukraine, people can't say what they want. But many who were against Saddam turned out to be even more against foreign occupation. In such circumstances, it is right to listen to political exiles, but foolish to believe that they can tell you how their compatriots back home feel and will react.
The American occupation has been carried through with gross incompetence and insensitivity, not to mention the human rights abuses of Abu Ghraib. Its financial cost has been staggering. With Bush's latest funding request, I make the total cost of war and occupation more than $250bn. How many lives around the world could have been saved for $250bn?
And what is the result? Probably most Iraqis feel more free than they did under Saddam. They also feel more insecure. Despite the efforts of many brave Iraqis who, even more than the Ukrainians did, are risking their own lives for democracy, this is a country in a state of lawlessness and on the edge of civil war. It has become both a playground and a new breeding ground for terrorists - the very opposite of the effect intended by the Bush administration. Next to Palestine, it's now the main rallying cause for all the anti-western and anti-liberal forces in the Islamic world.
A single election does not make a democracy. Shias, led by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, call for participation in the elections in the hope of achieving majority rule. Their rule, that is. But democracy is not a tyranny of the majority. Sunnis and Kurds will not accept this. At the very best, what comes out of Iraq's civil war will be a decentralised, unstable federal state, something like Yugoslavia before its civil war. At best. In Ukraine, disparate ethno-linguistic groups are slowly coming together in a process of nation building from below. In Iraq, outside occupiers' attempts at nation building from above are catalysing fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines.
Meanwhile, the serious foreign policy debate in Washington now concerns how to get out of this mess. Two major articles in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs discuss strategies of disengagement, starting from the premise that the United States cannot win the war in Iraq. Two veteran heavyweights, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, have just laid out their guidelines for what they call "a realistic exit strategy". Kissinger, we recall, was the architect of American withdrawal from Vietnam.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who really does care about democracy in the Middle East, fairly complains about the European refrain of "we told you so". "What," he asks, "happens the morning after 'we told you so'?" Good question. If Osama bin Laden can declare victory in Iraq against the west and its godless democracy, that will be at least as dangerous for Europeans as it is for Americans. So what does Friedman think the European Union should be doing at this juncture? Answer: "Actively urging Iraqis to vote, and using its own moral legitimacy in the Arab world to delegitimise the insurgents". Right, let's do it. But will that save Iraq?
It's tempting for Europeans to say that Ukraine represents the European way to democracy, and Iraq the American one. Venus pats herself on the back; Mars buries his head in his hands. But Europe has not earned the right to such self-congratulation. The magnetism of the European Union was a significant factor in Ukraine's orange revolution and EU diplomacy played an important part in its success. But Americans - governmental, non-governmental, and quasi-non-governmental - have for years been more active than Europeans in supporting the democrats there. To the limited extent that what happened in Ukraine was a victory for external actors at all, it was a joint victory for Europeans and Americans.
The comparison between Ukraine and Iraq - that is, between the beginning and the end of this Davos week in world politics - is by no means just about the past. It's about what Europe and America can do together over the next four years, and what they might end up quarrelling over. The biggest, most obvious test case is Iran. If we had done for Iran over the last five years what we did for Ukraine, and not invaded Iraq, there was a chance that Iran could have been the Ukraine of the wider Middle East. The country, that is, where a peaceful democratic revolution from below, made at home with some discreet help from outside, could have set in motion a different dynamic in the region.
Now Iran's Islamic regime is more firmly entrenched than it was before the Iraq war, with the democratic elements of that country's own democratura further weakened. The mullahs feel themselves fully entitled to push ahead with a nuclear energy programme (probably with weapons potential on the side) and many of their democratic critics agree. If another crisis of the west is to be avoided, Europe and America have to agree a joint approach, with more European sticks and more American carrots. Neither the Ukraine nor the Iraq options are available. But we can learn one crucial lesson from both Ukraine and Iraq: everything depends on a correct analysis of the likely domestic consequences, in the country concerned, of our actions from outside. In short: before waving either carrots or sticks, know your donkey.
Timothy Garton Ash in Davos
Thursday January 27, 2005
«The Guardian»
This global stock-taking week of the World Economic Forum in Davos began with the inauguration of a new, democratically elected Ukrainian president and will end with elections in Iraq. Ukraine and Iraq represent two radically different ways - shall we call them the right way and the wrong way? - of attempting to expand freedom, a goal which Europeans and leftists should support, even though it is George Bush who proclaims it.
Ukraine is the right way. What President Yushchenko in his inaugural address justly called "a victory of freedom over tyranny, of law over lawlessness" was the latest in a long series of velvet revolutions which have helped spread democracy around the world over the last 30 years. Ukrainians did it for themselves. With a little help from their friends, to be sure. But whatever the role of western support, this was the Ukrainians' own idea, and the people I met on the ground taking risks for democracy, in the freezing camps of Kiev's tent city and on Independence Square, were Ukrainians.
This nation-building orange revolution was entirely peaceful. No one was killed, although Mr Yushchenko nearly died as a result of what was almost certainly an attempt to poison him by senior representatives of the secret police with close ties to the Russian-backed candidate. What follows will be messy, but the chances are that it will be better for the people who live there than what went before. In 15 years' time, if all goes well, Ukraine could yet be a democratic nation-state of both Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking citizens, and a member of Europe's commonwealth of democracies, the European Union.
Iraq is the wrong way. It began with a war, on what turned out to be a false prospectus about weapons of mass destruction. The justification from democracy-building only rose to its present, unique salience as the evidence for WMD and direct terrorist links evaporated. Most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, but this was not their initiative. Granted, in a totalitarian dictatorship such as Saddam's, unlike in a democratura such as post-Soviet Ukraine, people can't say what they want. But many who were against Saddam turned out to be even more against foreign occupation. In such circumstances, it is right to listen to political exiles, but foolish to believe that they can tell you how their compatriots back home feel and will react.
The American occupation has been carried through with gross incompetence and insensitivity, not to mention the human rights abuses of Abu Ghraib. Its financial cost has been staggering. With Bush's latest funding request, I make the total cost of war and occupation more than $250bn. How many lives around the world could have been saved for $250bn?
And what is the result? Probably most Iraqis feel more free than they did under Saddam. They also feel more insecure. Despite the efforts of many brave Iraqis who, even more than the Ukrainians did, are risking their own lives for democracy, this is a country in a state of lawlessness and on the edge of civil war. It has become both a playground and a new breeding ground for terrorists - the very opposite of the effect intended by the Bush administration. Next to Palestine, it's now the main rallying cause for all the anti-western and anti-liberal forces in the Islamic world.
A single election does not make a democracy. Shias, led by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, call for participation in the elections in the hope of achieving majority rule. Their rule, that is. But democracy is not a tyranny of the majority. Sunnis and Kurds will not accept this. At the very best, what comes out of Iraq's civil war will be a decentralised, unstable federal state, something like Yugoslavia before its civil war. At best. In Ukraine, disparate ethno-linguistic groups are slowly coming together in a process of nation building from below. In Iraq, outside occupiers' attempts at nation building from above are catalysing fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines.
Meanwhile, the serious foreign policy debate in Washington now concerns how to get out of this mess. Two major articles in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs discuss strategies of disengagement, starting from the premise that the United States cannot win the war in Iraq. Two veteran heavyweights, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, have just laid out their guidelines for what they call "a realistic exit strategy". Kissinger, we recall, was the architect of American withdrawal from Vietnam.
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who really does care about democracy in the Middle East, fairly complains about the European refrain of "we told you so". "What," he asks, "happens the morning after 'we told you so'?" Good question. If Osama bin Laden can declare victory in Iraq against the west and its godless democracy, that will be at least as dangerous for Europeans as it is for Americans. So what does Friedman think the European Union should be doing at this juncture? Answer: "Actively urging Iraqis to vote, and using its own moral legitimacy in the Arab world to delegitimise the insurgents". Right, let's do it. But will that save Iraq?
It's tempting for Europeans to say that Ukraine represents the European way to democracy, and Iraq the American one. Venus pats herself on the back; Mars buries his head in his hands. But Europe has not earned the right to such self-congratulation. The magnetism of the European Union was a significant factor in Ukraine's orange revolution and EU diplomacy played an important part in its success. But Americans - governmental, non-governmental, and quasi-non-governmental - have for years been more active than Europeans in supporting the democrats there. To the limited extent that what happened in Ukraine was a victory for external actors at all, it was a joint victory for Europeans and Americans.
The comparison between Ukraine and Iraq - that is, between the beginning and the end of this Davos week in world politics - is by no means just about the past. It's about what Europe and America can do together over the next four years, and what they might end up quarrelling over. The biggest, most obvious test case is Iran. If we had done for Iran over the last five years what we did for Ukraine, and not invaded Iraq, there was a chance that Iran could have been the Ukraine of the wider Middle East. The country, that is, where a peaceful democratic revolution from below, made at home with some discreet help from outside, could have set in motion a different dynamic in the region.
Now Iran's Islamic regime is more firmly entrenched than it was before the Iraq war, with the democratic elements of that country's own democratura further weakened. The mullahs feel themselves fully entitled to push ahead with a nuclear energy programme (probably with weapons potential on the side) and many of their democratic critics agree. If another crisis of the west is to be avoided, Europe and America have to agree a joint approach, with more European sticks and more American carrots. Neither the Ukraine nor the Iraq options are available. But we can learn one crucial lesson from both Ukraine and Iraq: everything depends on a correct analysis of the likely domestic consequences, in the country concerned, of our actions from outside. In short: before waving either carrots or sticks, know your donkey.
Britain Proposes New Anti-Terror Powers
By Glenn Frankel
«Washington Post»
Thursday, January 27, 2005
LONDON, Jan. 26 -- British officials proposed far-reaching new powers on Wednesday to control and monitor suspected terrorists without charge or trial, including house arrests, electronic tagging and curfews.
The measures were designed to address legal challenges to a post-Sept. 11 law under which the government has kept 11 foreign nationals imprisoned without charges for as long as three years for allegedly posing a threat to national security. Under the new proposal, the power to impose what officials called "control orders" would apply to British citizens as well as foreigners living in Britain.
Like the United States, Britain introduced new measures aimed at suspected terrorists following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Some of those steps have drawn public criticism that they violate British law and values.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke, the cabinet minister in charge of internal security, told the House of Commons that the 11 detainees, all of them Arab Muslims, would either be deported to their home countries or subjected to the new measures once a new bill passed Parliament.
"There remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation," Clarke told lawmakers. "I believe that the steps I am announcing today will enable us more effectively to meet that threat."
Members of the two main opposition political parties cautiously welcomed the proposals. But David Davis, Conservative Party spokesman for internal security affairs, said he was concerned that the new measures would apply to British citizens as well as foreigners.
"Millions of British subjects have sacrificed their lives in defense of the nation's liberties, and it would be a sad paradox if we were to sacrifice the nation's liberty in defense of our own lives today," he told the House of Commons.
Human rights activists said the proposals could prove as draconian as the law they would replace. "Temporary restrictions upon a subject's liberty are only legitimate as long as a criminal charge and trial are in prospect," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, a London-based human rights group.
Under the law used to lock up the 11 men, foreign citizens living in Britain who were suspected of terrorism but who faced the prospect of torture or execution if they were deported to their home countries could be held indefinitely.
The detained include Omar Uthman Abu Omar, a Jordanian-born Palestinian cleric known as Abu Qatada, who allegedly helped recruit young Muslims for terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States and provided spiritual justification for such acts. The men, all of them alleged to belong to extremist organizations, are from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria.
The measure was declared illegal last month by the Law Lords, a panel of judges who act as Britain's highest court of appeals and who ruled that it violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The nine Law Lords said the law was discriminatory because it applied only to foreign nationals, not to British citizens, and because it was not proportional to the potential security threat posed by the men.
In their written judgments, some of the Law Lords branded the law a totalitarian measure that threatened fundamental freedoms. Human rights advocates have dubbed Belmarsh prison in London, where terror suspects are held, "Britain's Guantanamo," a reference to the U.S. military detention facility in Cuba where about 550 foreign terrorist suspects have been imprisoned indefinitely.
In his address to the House of Commons, Clarke said the new measures would allow him to impose control orders if there were "reasonable grounds" for suspecting terrorist activity.
Measures would include restrictions on the use of cell phones and the Internet and would allow curfews, tagging and a ban on contact with certain individuals, as well as house arrest, Clarke said.
Meanwhile, four British citizens who were flown back to England Tuesday from detention at Guantanamo Bay were released without charge by British authorities Wednesday. U.S. officials had held them for as long as three years, branding them as likely terrorists.
«Washington Post»
Thursday, January 27, 2005
LONDON, Jan. 26 -- British officials proposed far-reaching new powers on Wednesday to control and monitor suspected terrorists without charge or trial, including house arrests, electronic tagging and curfews.
The measures were designed to address legal challenges to a post-Sept. 11 law under which the government has kept 11 foreign nationals imprisoned without charges for as long as three years for allegedly posing a threat to national security. Under the new proposal, the power to impose what officials called "control orders" would apply to British citizens as well as foreigners living in Britain.
Like the United States, Britain introduced new measures aimed at suspected terrorists following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Some of those steps have drawn public criticism that they violate British law and values.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke, the cabinet minister in charge of internal security, told the House of Commons that the 11 detainees, all of them Arab Muslims, would either be deported to their home countries or subjected to the new measures once a new bill passed Parliament.
"There remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation," Clarke told lawmakers. "I believe that the steps I am announcing today will enable us more effectively to meet that threat."
Members of the two main opposition political parties cautiously welcomed the proposals. But David Davis, Conservative Party spokesman for internal security affairs, said he was concerned that the new measures would apply to British citizens as well as foreigners.
"Millions of British subjects have sacrificed their lives in defense of the nation's liberties, and it would be a sad paradox if we were to sacrifice the nation's liberty in defense of our own lives today," he told the House of Commons.
Human rights activists said the proposals could prove as draconian as the law they would replace. "Temporary restrictions upon a subject's liberty are only legitimate as long as a criminal charge and trial are in prospect," said Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, a London-based human rights group.
Under the law used to lock up the 11 men, foreign citizens living in Britain who were suspected of terrorism but who faced the prospect of torture or execution if they were deported to their home countries could be held indefinitely.
The detained include Omar Uthman Abu Omar, a Jordanian-born Palestinian cleric known as Abu Qatada, who allegedly helped recruit young Muslims for terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States and provided spiritual justification for such acts. The men, all of them alleged to belong to extremist organizations, are from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Algeria.
The measure was declared illegal last month by the Law Lords, a panel of judges who act as Britain's highest court of appeals and who ruled that it violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The nine Law Lords said the law was discriminatory because it applied only to foreign nationals, not to British citizens, and because it was not proportional to the potential security threat posed by the men.
In their written judgments, some of the Law Lords branded the law a totalitarian measure that threatened fundamental freedoms. Human rights advocates have dubbed Belmarsh prison in London, where terror suspects are held, "Britain's Guantanamo," a reference to the U.S. military detention facility in Cuba where about 550 foreign terrorist suspects have been imprisoned indefinitely.
In his address to the House of Commons, Clarke said the new measures would allow him to impose control orders if there were "reasonable grounds" for suspecting terrorist activity.
Measures would include restrictions on the use of cell phones and the Internet and would allow curfews, tagging and a ban on contact with certain individuals, as well as house arrest, Clarke said.
Meanwhile, four British citizens who were flown back to England Tuesday from detention at Guantanamo Bay were released without charge by British authorities Wednesday. U.S. officials had held them for as long as three years, branding them as likely terrorists.
Special Address by Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
On 27 January 2005, Tony Blair, Prime MInister of the United Kingdom (profile), spoke at the Annual Meeting in the session Opening Plenary by Tony Blair The transcript of his full remarks is below. Watch the webcast.
"Interdependence is the governing characteristic of modern international politics. Its obvious corollary is unity of purpose in the international community. Yet the past few years have been marked by division. The trauma of September 11th and its aftermath; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; MEPP stalled and slid back; disagreement over the Kyoto Protocol on climate change; and a feeling of helplessness as we watch the continent of Africa unique among the continents of the world, see its poverty intensify, and its peoples ravaged by conflict, famine and disease: all have contributed to a sense of alienation and discord.
In 2000 when I last addressed this Forum, the international atmosphere was unified, even benign. Yet in truth, the same issues were present; the unity often based in false hope.
Today the issues seem more raw. But they are also clearer. There is no pretence about the problems or the division. The question is: can we find an agenda that re-unifies us?
Curious as it may seem, given my introduction, I believe we can. There is no shortage of goodwill to resolve the problems if the perception of them is plain. The remarkable response, not only of Governments but most of all of people to the Tsunami shows there is an abundance of the human sentiment of solidarity. Bill Gates’s donation of $750 million – more than many countries’ entire aid budgets – to tackle the killer diseases of Africa, demonstrates the possibility of business compassion.
But there is a more fundamental political reason for optimism. We may disagree about the nature of the problems and how to resolve them, but no nation, however powerful, seriously believes today that these problems can be resolved alone. Interdependence is no longer disputed.
President Bush’s inauguration speech last week, marks a consistent evolution of US policy. He spoke of America’s mission to bring freedom in place of tyranny to the world. Leave aside for a moment the odd insistence by some commentators that such a plea is evidence of the “neo-conservative” grip on Washington – I thought progressives were all in favour of freedom rather than tyranny. The underlying features of the speech seem to me to be these. America accepts that terrorism cannot be defeated by military might alone. The more people live under democracy, with human liberty intact, the less inclined they or their states will be to indulge terrorism or to engage in it. This may be open to debate – though personally I agree with it – but it emphatically puts defeating the causes of terrorism alongside defeating the terrorists.
Secondly, by its very nature, such a mission cannot be accomplished alone. It is the very antithesis of isolationism; the very essence of international engagement. It requires long-term co-operation.
And it is based on enlightened self-interest. Freedom is good in itself. But it is also the best ultimate guarantee that human beings will live in sympathy with each other. The hard head has led to the warm heart.
None of this means the hard head won’t still be applied. America, as is perhaps inevitable being the world’s only superpower, who in the end is expected not just to talk abut the world’s problems but to solve them, approaches all issues with a propensity to question what others assume, treat the pressure of pressure groups with resistance and ask others to share responsibility as well have it demanded of America.
But no-one could say the inauguration speech was lacking in idealism.
However, if America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda too. It can do so, secure in the knowledge that what people want is not for America to concede, but to engage. The hard-headed approach should stay – the one that says: don’t assert it, prove it, face up to the difficult realities as well as the easy platitudes. But difficult reality does not only come in one form.
So there is common ground as to interdependence. There is a wish to re-unify. It is absurd to choose between an agenda focussing on terrorism and one on global poverty, especially as in part at least, they are linked.
What would be the subject matter of a common agenda?
First, obviously, to maintain vigilance and cooperation against global terrorism. Second, to take the high flown principles we set out in the United Nations Charter about human rights and freedom and as and when we can, seek to increase the number of people able to live in democracy, subject to the protection of the rule of law. We do not accept the right of states to abuse their citizens; and though progress to this end may for good cause, be slow, we are explicit about our ambition for humanity to reach this goal. This does not mean that we seek to impose democracy on every state or interfere in other nations’ proper internal affairs. But it does mean we know that dictatorship is, in the long run, incompatible with human progress. Incidentally, when people of talk of “Western-style” democracy, in my view there is no such thing: there is democracy or there isn’t. The notion of democracy being a “Western idea” is a nonsense, and mythology as, most recently the people of Afghanistan have powerfully demonstrated.
And, whatever divisions there were over the decision to remove Saddam from Iraq; we can surely all agree that we should support the brave Iraqi people who want to vote on 30 January and should be free to do so without violence.
Third, there is the urgent need to breath new life into the MEPP. The terms on which America will take this forward are increasingly clear. An independent Palestinian state must be viable not just in respect of territory but in its institutions of statehood-democracy, security and economy. The Palestinians wish for this. We should support them in doing it. If that happens, then, the disengagement from the Gaza and part of the West Bank, by Israel, can be the first not the last step to such a Palestinian state.
Then fourth and fifth are the two issues we have set aside for our Presidency of the G8: climate change and Africa.
Why do it? Not just because they matter. But because on both there are differences that need to be reconciled; and if they could be reconciled or at least moved forward, it would make a huge difference to the prospects of international unity; as well as to peoples lives and our future survival.
We live in a world where 300 million Africans still don't have access to safe drinking water. Not deprived simply of the relative luxuries of clothing or shelter or electricity, but the most basic requirement of existence: clean water. Three thousand African children under the age of five die every day from malaria. Six thousand people die each day from AIDS.
In the Congo alone, over five years, almost three million people have died in its war torn territory.
We know all of this. So what can be done? And given past history and Africa’s continuing suffering, what different can be done? The Africa Commission, established last May by me and half of whose membership is African, has at its heart two guiding principles.
First we cannot confront the endemic perpetual crisis of African poverty on any basis other than a partnership between African Governments and those of the developed world. The old donor/recipient relationship is patronising and unworkable. But we need to help African leadership grow further, building democratic and institutional capacity that allows African nations to govern effectively, create proper political, legal, fiscal and commercial systems of sound government and root out corruption. There are some positive signs. Democracy in Africa is spreading and is now the norm. African institutions, like the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development are growing stronger. But commitment by the developed world is rightly conditional. It is help on the only basis that works: help not as charity but as a route to independence from it.
Secondly when the Commission reports in March, some months before the G8, it will be seen that the report is more than a re-statement of conventional wisdom. It will attempt systematically and comprehensively to deal with all aspects of Africa’s plight. Of course it will state what is necessary over time on aid and debt relief. There is no doubt a substantial uplift in aid is needed. That is why Britain has proposed a doubling of aid. The International Finance Facility is one way to finance this, with the minimum possible impact on countries’ budgets. Britain has now agreed a timetable to achieve the UN 0.7 per cent aid target. But I know there are other options that will be put forward. We need 100 per cent debt relief for the most highly indebted nations and President Chirac, I know will make proposals for raising further money.
If a financing package such as the IFF is agreed, it will enable us to mobilise $50bn globally and within this $25bn for Africa. The Millennium Development Goals, agreed to by all the international community, can’t be met without such help. As 2015 approaches, so will the inadequacy of present provision be more manifest.
The killer diseases – HIV/AIDs/TB/malaria, are desperate, urgent, requiring money expertise with, of course, in-country health care systems capable of using them.
But the plan does not stop there. It is clear about the obligation of good governance. It will be frank about issues of trade: we must open our markets, cut our subsidies, including on controversial items such as cotton and sugar; and we must help build African economic capacity to allow poor countries to manage trade reforms in a way that makes them richer not poorer.
As much as anything else, we must confront the challenge of conflict resolution. Not until a continent, rich in resources, ceases to be a victim of wars of plunder will Africa have any hope of utilising the help given. This capability to intervene and keep the peace has to be built in Africa itself. Today in the Sudan AU peacekeeping forces do their best. Without them, progress would be impossible. But if there was the proper capability with sufficient numbers of forces, well equipped and trained, so much more could have been done. So much more must be done in future conflicts.
I do not pretend every part of this report will be to everyone’s liking. But I hope its essential principles can be accepted and I hope also to propose at the time of the G8 a mechanism to ensure that what is agreed, is then followed through and acted upon.
In respect of Africa, the problem is universally acknowledged. In respect of climate change it isn’t. There are facts that are accepted. The five hottest years on record have occurred in the last seven years; and ten hottest in the last fourteen. It is over eighteen years since the world recorded a “colder-than-normal” month. Snow cover has decreased 10 per cent since the 1960s.
Ever since Arrhenius first predicted global warming in 1896, it has been fiercely debated. I am not a scientific expert. I only see that the balance of evidence has shifted one way. Some argue this warming is part of a natural cycle such as, by contrast, the mini ice age in the Middle Ages. But glaciers are now in retreat that have not retreated since the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago. The impact of climate change predicted by modellers is uncannily coming to pass, not least in the European summer of 2003.
So it would be true to say the evidence is still disputed. It would be wrong to say that the evidence of danger is not clearly and persuasively advocated by a very large number of entirely independent and compelling voices. They are the majority. The majority is not always right; but they deserve to be listened to.
However, behind the dispute over science is another concern. Political leaders worry they are being asked to take unacceptable falls in economic growth and living standards to tackle climate change.
My view is that if we put forward, as a solution to climate change, something which involves drastic cuts in growth or standards of living, it matters not how justified it is, it simply won’t be agreed to. But fortunately that need not be the case. Science and technology cannot alone provide the answer. But they certainly provide the means to ensure that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions without damaging our economy. Indeed over time they provide the prospect of significant business and economic opportunities.
For example, in Europe all nations have ratified the Kyoto Treaty. It will come into force on February 16. The European trading scheme is in place. This will be a powerful driver to more sustainable means of energy generation, industrial production and to business activity.
So what do we hope for the G8 whose countries, after all, account for 65 per cent of global GDP and 47 per cent of global CO2 emissions?
First to set a direction of travel. Whether because of the risks associated with climate change or related issues of security of energy supply, we need to send a clear signal that whilst we continue to analyse science – and the conference in Exeter next week will help – we are united in moving in the direction of greenhouse gas reductions. I support the Kyoto Protocol. Others will not and that position is understood. But business and the global economy need to know this isn’t an issue that is going away. My clear view, for what it is worth, is that the debate will be how and on what time scale it is confronted; not whether. I intend to make progress on this with the EU Presidency later this year as well as through the G8.
Secondly, through the G8 process I want to develop a package of practical measures, largely focused on technology, to cut emissions. And here I don’t just mean research into new technologies, important though that is. I also think we need to work much harder to find ways to implement the vast range of low-carbon technologies that have already been developed. Energy efficiency. Renewable energy sources. Cleaner fossil fuels. Avoiding waste. All of this can be done, and often at a much lower cost than we realise.
Thirdly, the G8 need to work in partnership with the rapidly developing economies like China, India, Brazil and South Africa to find a way for them to grow and develop as low carbon economies. I was struck by the fact that by 2030, coal plants in developing countries could produce more carbon emissions than the entire power sector in the OECD does now. Developed and emerging economies must work together over the coming months and years to reach a new consensus on how we deal with the challenge of climate change.
It is through this fresh injection of political will, by the G8 and the emerging economies alike, that these differences can be broken down and a new global consensus reached.
So that is what we will try for.
Whatever the difficulties in moving this agenda forward, they are worth it. If we succeed there is a chance of an emerging consensus that would give so much hope and heart to so many.
The alternative is the international community with competing agendas. That may help the political art of grandstanding but it won’t present constructive solutions. And the result of it, or to put it more specifically the danger of it, is that the world decides on an approach that recognises this fragmentation is inevitable, even welcome. In this way, different poles of power develop to balance each other. American and its allies here. Europe there. China, Russia, India, the larger nations of Asia and Latin America creating their own poles or moving towards shifting pulls of attraction or repulsion depending on the issue.
Of course these poles can interact; in theory they can form partnerships from time to time. But let us be clear this would not be a new global alliance. It would be a global acceptance of division; no amount of interaction will disguise that and different poles of power can just as easily choose to rival each other as co-operate with each other.
This year offers a unique set of opportunities. I am committed to using the UK's G8 and EU Presidencies to try to make a breakthrough on Africa and climate change. The UN Summit in September will review progress on the Millennium Development Goals including the Sachs Millennium Project report proposals, and discuss the Secretary General’s High Level panel report. There is the World Trade Ministerial in December; and the meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end of the year. All of these opportunities must be used to the full.
I started this speech with talk of dates.
It is 60 years ago tomorrow that Russian troops liberated Auschwitz. That day when the full horror of the holocaust was revealed to the world, was perhaps Europe’s lowest point. Devastated by war, disfigured by evil, divided by the Iron Curtain, the 20th century saw dark days indeed for this Continent.
On May 1st last year, Europeans from North, South, East and West celebrated as ten new countries joined the European Union. Now 450 million Europeans are enjoying peace, freedom and democracy.
We should never underestimate the capacity of people to make a difference and rise to new challenges.
The question is whether the hopes of the people are matched by the will of their leaders. I will do my best to ensure it is. I trust you will join me in that challenge."
"Interdependence is the governing characteristic of modern international politics. Its obvious corollary is unity of purpose in the international community. Yet the past few years have been marked by division. The trauma of September 11th and its aftermath; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; MEPP stalled and slid back; disagreement over the Kyoto Protocol on climate change; and a feeling of helplessness as we watch the continent of Africa unique among the continents of the world, see its poverty intensify, and its peoples ravaged by conflict, famine and disease: all have contributed to a sense of alienation and discord.
In 2000 when I last addressed this Forum, the international atmosphere was unified, even benign. Yet in truth, the same issues were present; the unity often based in false hope.
Today the issues seem more raw. But they are also clearer. There is no pretence about the problems or the division. The question is: can we find an agenda that re-unifies us?
Curious as it may seem, given my introduction, I believe we can. There is no shortage of goodwill to resolve the problems if the perception of them is plain. The remarkable response, not only of Governments but most of all of people to the Tsunami shows there is an abundance of the human sentiment of solidarity. Bill Gates’s donation of $750 million – more than many countries’ entire aid budgets – to tackle the killer diseases of Africa, demonstrates the possibility of business compassion.
But there is a more fundamental political reason for optimism. We may disagree about the nature of the problems and how to resolve them, but no nation, however powerful, seriously believes today that these problems can be resolved alone. Interdependence is no longer disputed.
President Bush’s inauguration speech last week, marks a consistent evolution of US policy. He spoke of America’s mission to bring freedom in place of tyranny to the world. Leave aside for a moment the odd insistence by some commentators that such a plea is evidence of the “neo-conservative” grip on Washington – I thought progressives were all in favour of freedom rather than tyranny. The underlying features of the speech seem to me to be these. America accepts that terrorism cannot be defeated by military might alone. The more people live under democracy, with human liberty intact, the less inclined they or their states will be to indulge terrorism or to engage in it. This may be open to debate – though personally I agree with it – but it emphatically puts defeating the causes of terrorism alongside defeating the terrorists.
Secondly, by its very nature, such a mission cannot be accomplished alone. It is the very antithesis of isolationism; the very essence of international engagement. It requires long-term co-operation.
And it is based on enlightened self-interest. Freedom is good in itself. But it is also the best ultimate guarantee that human beings will live in sympathy with each other. The hard head has led to the warm heart.
None of this means the hard head won’t still be applied. America, as is perhaps inevitable being the world’s only superpower, who in the end is expected not just to talk abut the world’s problems but to solve them, approaches all issues with a propensity to question what others assume, treat the pressure of pressure groups with resistance and ask others to share responsibility as well have it demanded of America.
But no-one could say the inauguration speech was lacking in idealism.
However, if America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda too. It can do so, secure in the knowledge that what people want is not for America to concede, but to engage. The hard-headed approach should stay – the one that says: don’t assert it, prove it, face up to the difficult realities as well as the easy platitudes. But difficult reality does not only come in one form.
So there is common ground as to interdependence. There is a wish to re-unify. It is absurd to choose between an agenda focussing on terrorism and one on global poverty, especially as in part at least, they are linked.
What would be the subject matter of a common agenda?
First, obviously, to maintain vigilance and cooperation against global terrorism. Second, to take the high flown principles we set out in the United Nations Charter about human rights and freedom and as and when we can, seek to increase the number of people able to live in democracy, subject to the protection of the rule of law. We do not accept the right of states to abuse their citizens; and though progress to this end may for good cause, be slow, we are explicit about our ambition for humanity to reach this goal. This does not mean that we seek to impose democracy on every state or interfere in other nations’ proper internal affairs. But it does mean we know that dictatorship is, in the long run, incompatible with human progress. Incidentally, when people of talk of “Western-style” democracy, in my view there is no such thing: there is democracy or there isn’t. The notion of democracy being a “Western idea” is a nonsense, and mythology as, most recently the people of Afghanistan have powerfully demonstrated.
And, whatever divisions there were over the decision to remove Saddam from Iraq; we can surely all agree that we should support the brave Iraqi people who want to vote on 30 January and should be free to do so without violence.
Third, there is the urgent need to breath new life into the MEPP. The terms on which America will take this forward are increasingly clear. An independent Palestinian state must be viable not just in respect of territory but in its institutions of statehood-democracy, security and economy. The Palestinians wish for this. We should support them in doing it. If that happens, then, the disengagement from the Gaza and part of the West Bank, by Israel, can be the first not the last step to such a Palestinian state.
Then fourth and fifth are the two issues we have set aside for our Presidency of the G8: climate change and Africa.
Why do it? Not just because they matter. But because on both there are differences that need to be reconciled; and if they could be reconciled or at least moved forward, it would make a huge difference to the prospects of international unity; as well as to peoples lives and our future survival.
We live in a world where 300 million Africans still don't have access to safe drinking water. Not deprived simply of the relative luxuries of clothing or shelter or electricity, but the most basic requirement of existence: clean water. Three thousand African children under the age of five die every day from malaria. Six thousand people die each day from AIDS.
In the Congo alone, over five years, almost three million people have died in its war torn territory.
We know all of this. So what can be done? And given past history and Africa’s continuing suffering, what different can be done? The Africa Commission, established last May by me and half of whose membership is African, has at its heart two guiding principles.
First we cannot confront the endemic perpetual crisis of African poverty on any basis other than a partnership between African Governments and those of the developed world. The old donor/recipient relationship is patronising and unworkable. But we need to help African leadership grow further, building democratic and institutional capacity that allows African nations to govern effectively, create proper political, legal, fiscal and commercial systems of sound government and root out corruption. There are some positive signs. Democracy in Africa is spreading and is now the norm. African institutions, like the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development are growing stronger. But commitment by the developed world is rightly conditional. It is help on the only basis that works: help not as charity but as a route to independence from it.
Secondly when the Commission reports in March, some months before the G8, it will be seen that the report is more than a re-statement of conventional wisdom. It will attempt systematically and comprehensively to deal with all aspects of Africa’s plight. Of course it will state what is necessary over time on aid and debt relief. There is no doubt a substantial uplift in aid is needed. That is why Britain has proposed a doubling of aid. The International Finance Facility is one way to finance this, with the minimum possible impact on countries’ budgets. Britain has now agreed a timetable to achieve the UN 0.7 per cent aid target. But I know there are other options that will be put forward. We need 100 per cent debt relief for the most highly indebted nations and President Chirac, I know will make proposals for raising further money.
If a financing package such as the IFF is agreed, it will enable us to mobilise $50bn globally and within this $25bn for Africa. The Millennium Development Goals, agreed to by all the international community, can’t be met without such help. As 2015 approaches, so will the inadequacy of present provision be more manifest.
The killer diseases – HIV/AIDs/TB/malaria, are desperate, urgent, requiring money expertise with, of course, in-country health care systems capable of using them.
But the plan does not stop there. It is clear about the obligation of good governance. It will be frank about issues of trade: we must open our markets, cut our subsidies, including on controversial items such as cotton and sugar; and we must help build African economic capacity to allow poor countries to manage trade reforms in a way that makes them richer not poorer.
As much as anything else, we must confront the challenge of conflict resolution. Not until a continent, rich in resources, ceases to be a victim of wars of plunder will Africa have any hope of utilising the help given. This capability to intervene and keep the peace has to be built in Africa itself. Today in the Sudan AU peacekeeping forces do their best. Without them, progress would be impossible. But if there was the proper capability with sufficient numbers of forces, well equipped and trained, so much more could have been done. So much more must be done in future conflicts.
I do not pretend every part of this report will be to everyone’s liking. But I hope its essential principles can be accepted and I hope also to propose at the time of the G8 a mechanism to ensure that what is agreed, is then followed through and acted upon.
In respect of Africa, the problem is universally acknowledged. In respect of climate change it isn’t. There are facts that are accepted. The five hottest years on record have occurred in the last seven years; and ten hottest in the last fourteen. It is over eighteen years since the world recorded a “colder-than-normal” month. Snow cover has decreased 10 per cent since the 1960s.
Ever since Arrhenius first predicted global warming in 1896, it has been fiercely debated. I am not a scientific expert. I only see that the balance of evidence has shifted one way. Some argue this warming is part of a natural cycle such as, by contrast, the mini ice age in the Middle Ages. But glaciers are now in retreat that have not retreated since the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago. The impact of climate change predicted by modellers is uncannily coming to pass, not least in the European summer of 2003.
So it would be true to say the evidence is still disputed. It would be wrong to say that the evidence of danger is not clearly and persuasively advocated by a very large number of entirely independent and compelling voices. They are the majority. The majority is not always right; but they deserve to be listened to.
However, behind the dispute over science is another concern. Political leaders worry they are being asked to take unacceptable falls in economic growth and living standards to tackle climate change.
My view is that if we put forward, as a solution to climate change, something which involves drastic cuts in growth or standards of living, it matters not how justified it is, it simply won’t be agreed to. But fortunately that need not be the case. Science and technology cannot alone provide the answer. But they certainly provide the means to ensure that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions without damaging our economy. Indeed over time they provide the prospect of significant business and economic opportunities.
For example, in Europe all nations have ratified the Kyoto Treaty. It will come into force on February 16. The European trading scheme is in place. This will be a powerful driver to more sustainable means of energy generation, industrial production and to business activity.
So what do we hope for the G8 whose countries, after all, account for 65 per cent of global GDP and 47 per cent of global CO2 emissions?
First to set a direction of travel. Whether because of the risks associated with climate change or related issues of security of energy supply, we need to send a clear signal that whilst we continue to analyse science – and the conference in Exeter next week will help – we are united in moving in the direction of greenhouse gas reductions. I support the Kyoto Protocol. Others will not and that position is understood. But business and the global economy need to know this isn’t an issue that is going away. My clear view, for what it is worth, is that the debate will be how and on what time scale it is confronted; not whether. I intend to make progress on this with the EU Presidency later this year as well as through the G8.
Secondly, through the G8 process I want to develop a package of practical measures, largely focused on technology, to cut emissions. And here I don’t just mean research into new technologies, important though that is. I also think we need to work much harder to find ways to implement the vast range of low-carbon technologies that have already been developed. Energy efficiency. Renewable energy sources. Cleaner fossil fuels. Avoiding waste. All of this can be done, and often at a much lower cost than we realise.
Thirdly, the G8 need to work in partnership with the rapidly developing economies like China, India, Brazil and South Africa to find a way for them to grow and develop as low carbon economies. I was struck by the fact that by 2030, coal plants in developing countries could produce more carbon emissions than the entire power sector in the OECD does now. Developed and emerging economies must work together over the coming months and years to reach a new consensus on how we deal with the challenge of climate change.
It is through this fresh injection of political will, by the G8 and the emerging economies alike, that these differences can be broken down and a new global consensus reached.
So that is what we will try for.
Whatever the difficulties in moving this agenda forward, they are worth it. If we succeed there is a chance of an emerging consensus that would give so much hope and heart to so many.
The alternative is the international community with competing agendas. That may help the political art of grandstanding but it won’t present constructive solutions. And the result of it, or to put it more specifically the danger of it, is that the world decides on an approach that recognises this fragmentation is inevitable, even welcome. In this way, different poles of power develop to balance each other. American and its allies here. Europe there. China, Russia, India, the larger nations of Asia and Latin America creating their own poles or moving towards shifting pulls of attraction or repulsion depending on the issue.
Of course these poles can interact; in theory they can form partnerships from time to time. But let us be clear this would not be a new global alliance. It would be a global acceptance of division; no amount of interaction will disguise that and different poles of power can just as easily choose to rival each other as co-operate with each other.
This year offers a unique set of opportunities. I am committed to using the UK's G8 and EU Presidencies to try to make a breakthrough on Africa and climate change. The UN Summit in September will review progress on the Millennium Development Goals including the Sachs Millennium Project report proposals, and discuss the Secretary General’s High Level panel report. There is the World Trade Ministerial in December; and the meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the end of the year. All of these opportunities must be used to the full.
I started this speech with talk of dates.
It is 60 years ago tomorrow that Russian troops liberated Auschwitz. That day when the full horror of the holocaust was revealed to the world, was perhaps Europe’s lowest point. Devastated by war, disfigured by evil, divided by the Iron Curtain, the 20th century saw dark days indeed for this Continent.
On May 1st last year, Europeans from North, South, East and West celebrated as ten new countries joined the European Union. Now 450 million Europeans are enjoying peace, freedom and democracy.
We should never underestimate the capacity of people to make a difference and rise to new challenges.
The question is whether the hopes of the people are matched by the will of their leaders. I will do my best to ensure it is. I trust you will join me in that challenge."
World leaders gather in Auschwitz, 60 years after liberation
Last Update: 27/01/2005 18:15
By Aviva Lori
«Haaretz.com»
Referring to Auschwitz as "the capital of the kingdom of death," President Moshe Katsav asked at a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation Thursday whether the memory of the Holocaust had lost its power to deter further acts of anti-Semitism.
"We see the shacks, the boulevards and the final stop of the railroad tracks from all over Europe. It feels as though we still hear the cries of the victims," he said. "We are witnessing an awakening of anti-Semitism in Europe; has the Holocaust's deterrent force waned?"
More than 40 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Jacques Chirac, gathered in Auschwitz on Thursday, along with survivors and liberators, to commemorate the anniversary.
Roughly 2,000 Holocaust survivors were to attend the ceremony at Auschwitz, which began with the sound of a train whistle to signify the mode in which Jews were brought to the camp.
German President Horst Koehler remained silent throughout the ceremony, as an acknowledgment of his country's responsibility under Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of the Nazi extermination camps, was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945. To listen to the live 1945 account of the camp's liberation by BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby, click here.
Earlier Thursday, world leaders joined survivors and liberators in a special forum in Krakow's Slovacki theater ahead of the main ceremony in Auschwitz.
Putin: I am ashamed of anti-Semitism
Putin acknowledged Thursday that anti-Semitism and xenophobia had surfaced in Russia, tackling an issue that the Kremlin had long failed to confront directly.
Putin said that many in the world should be ashamed of new manifestations of anti-Semitism six decades after the defeat of fascism.
"Even in our country, in Russia, which did more than any to combat fascism, for the victory over fascism, which did most to save the Jewish people, even in our country we sometimes unfortunately see manifestations of this problem and I, too, am ashamed of that," Putin said, to long applause.
Russian Jews earlier had expressed hope that Putin would use the occasion to address the issue of anti-Semitism. Earlier this month, a group of nationalist Russian lawmakers called for an investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organizations and punishing officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and saying they provoke anti-Semitism.
Katsav: Europe must educate its people about the Holocaust
Addressing world leaders and Holocaust survivors at the morning forum in Krakow, Katsav said Europe must educate its people about the Holocaust.
"We call upon the European Union - do not let Nazism dwell in the imaginations of the young generations as a 'horror' show, so to speak," Katsav said.
"We fear anti-Semitism," said the president. "We fear Holocaust denial, we fear a distorted approach by the youth of Europe. We fear a distorted approach that the youth of Europe might develop towards their past."
Katsav also said World War Two allies have failed to do enough to protect the Jews of Europe and prevent the Holocaust.
"The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people. It is a failure of humanity as a whole," Katsav told those in attendance in Krakow's Slovacki theater.
"The Allies did not do enough to stop the Holocaust, to stop the destruction of the Jewish people," he said. "The allies knew about the destruction of the Jews of Europe, the allies did not take any initiative to prevent the destruction of European Jewry."
Katsav said destroying Auschwitz, or the railroad tracks that led to the camp, from the air "could have saved many hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers."
"Hundreds of missions of fighting aircraft passed next to, and sometimes over Auschwitz and Birkenau," Katsav told the gathering. "But Auschwitz was not bombed, was not attacked by the armies of the allies."
Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the unit that captured the camp, opened the ceremony in the Krakow theater.
"I would like to say to all the people on the earth, unite and do not premit this evil that was committed," the elderly Shapiro said in a recorded video greeting. "This should never be repeated, ever."
The forum began with applause for Shapiro, who lives in the United States, and three other Soviet army veterans who helped liberate Auschwitz. Their chests decorated with medals, they stood in a theater box to take applause and appeared on stage to receive medals from Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski.
10,000 guests fill Krakow hotels
More than 10,000 guests and 1,600 journalists have come from around the world to Krakow, some 60 kilometers from the camp, filling every hotel in the city.
"I'm closing a circle," said one of the survivors. "I've returned after 60 years. I haven't been able to sleep for two weeks."
Dan Arad, an 83-year-old Israel Defense Forces pensioner and the author of a book called "Surviving Auschwitz," came with his wife from Haifa. He feels lucky. He was at Auschwitz-3, a forced labor camp, where "the fit and healthy were sent," he said.
"Conditions were good there," he said. "Each person had a bed. We had money in the form of coupons. We could trade with the Polish prisoners. They used it for prostitutes and we got bread in exchange."
"I spent six weeks at Birkenau, until [Josef] Mengele came to our barracks and looked at me," Arad said. "I still looked pretty good and he sent me to Auschwitz-3."
Some 1.5 million people perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau, over one million of them Jews. When the Soviet army arrived to liberate the camp, they found only 7,000 survivors, many of them barely alive. The retreating Nazis had driven most of the prisoners who still had strength to walk out into the snow, on a 'death march' toward camps further west.
On Wednesday, a ceremony was held at the Krakow military cemetery, where Polish, British and Russian soldiers who fell in World War Two are buried.
Additionally, there was an Israeli military ceremony in honor of 13 soldiers from British-mandate Palestine who fought in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, fell into German captivity and ended up buried in the British plot of Krakow's military cemetery, far from home.
Chief IDF Chaplain Rabbi Yisrael Weiss read psalms and chanted El Maleh Rahamim, the prayer for the dead. President Katsav laid a wreath, and later, in the freezing cold and the constantly falling snow, he placed tiny Israeli flags on the 13 graves. A Polish military band played teh Israeli national anthem Hatikva.
A meeting between Katsav and Putin planned for Wednesday was canceled, although Katsav said efforts are still being made to reschedule for Thursday.
The idea of holding the commemoration was born a year ago, when the secretary of Poland's national council on memorials, Andje Pshabuzhnik, suggested hosting a meeting of the liberators and survivors at the camp, 60 years later. Kwasniewski adopted the idea, which initially called only for inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
However, French President Jacques Chirac heard about the plan and asked to take part, and shortly after, other statesmen from around the world wanted to join in as well.
By Aviva Lori
«Haaretz.com»
Referring to Auschwitz as "the capital of the kingdom of death," President Moshe Katsav asked at a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation Thursday whether the memory of the Holocaust had lost its power to deter further acts of anti-Semitism.
"We see the shacks, the boulevards and the final stop of the railroad tracks from all over Europe. It feels as though we still hear the cries of the victims," he said. "We are witnessing an awakening of anti-Semitism in Europe; has the Holocaust's deterrent force waned?"
More than 40 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Jacques Chirac, gathered in Auschwitz on Thursday, along with survivors and liberators, to commemorate the anniversary.
Roughly 2,000 Holocaust survivors were to attend the ceremony at Auschwitz, which began with the sound of a train whistle to signify the mode in which Jews were brought to the camp.
German President Horst Koehler remained silent throughout the ceremony, as an acknowledgment of his country's responsibility under Adolf Hitler for the Holocaust.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of the Nazi extermination camps, was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945. To listen to the live 1945 account of the camp's liberation by BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby, click here.
Earlier Thursday, world leaders joined survivors and liberators in a special forum in Krakow's Slovacki theater ahead of the main ceremony in Auschwitz.
Putin: I am ashamed of anti-Semitism
Putin acknowledged Thursday that anti-Semitism and xenophobia had surfaced in Russia, tackling an issue that the Kremlin had long failed to confront directly.
Putin said that many in the world should be ashamed of new manifestations of anti-Semitism six decades after the defeat of fascism.
"Even in our country, in Russia, which did more than any to combat fascism, for the victory over fascism, which did most to save the Jewish people, even in our country we sometimes unfortunately see manifestations of this problem and I, too, am ashamed of that," Putin said, to long applause.
Russian Jews earlier had expressed hope that Putin would use the occasion to address the issue of anti-Semitism. Earlier this month, a group of nationalist Russian lawmakers called for an investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organizations and punishing officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and saying they provoke anti-Semitism.
Katsav: Europe must educate its people about the Holocaust
Addressing world leaders and Holocaust survivors at the morning forum in Krakow, Katsav said Europe must educate its people about the Holocaust.
"We call upon the European Union - do not let Nazism dwell in the imaginations of the young generations as a 'horror' show, so to speak," Katsav said.
"We fear anti-Semitism," said the president. "We fear Holocaust denial, we fear a distorted approach by the youth of Europe. We fear a distorted approach that the youth of Europe might develop towards their past."
Katsav also said World War Two allies have failed to do enough to protect the Jews of Europe and prevent the Holocaust.
"The Holocaust is not only a tragedy of the Jewish people. It is a failure of humanity as a whole," Katsav told those in attendance in Krakow's Slovacki theater.
"The Allies did not do enough to stop the Holocaust, to stop the destruction of the Jewish people," he said. "The allies knew about the destruction of the Jews of Europe, the allies did not take any initiative to prevent the destruction of European Jewry."
Katsav said destroying Auschwitz, or the railroad tracks that led to the camp, from the air "could have saved many hundreds of thousands of Jews from the gas chambers."
"Hundreds of missions of fighting aircraft passed next to, and sometimes over Auschwitz and Birkenau," Katsav told the gathering. "But Auschwitz was not bombed, was not attacked by the armies of the allies."
Maj. Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the unit that captured the camp, opened the ceremony in the Krakow theater.
"I would like to say to all the people on the earth, unite and do not premit this evil that was committed," the elderly Shapiro said in a recorded video greeting. "This should never be repeated, ever."
The forum began with applause for Shapiro, who lives in the United States, and three other Soviet army veterans who helped liberate Auschwitz. Their chests decorated with medals, they stood in a theater box to take applause and appeared on stage to receive medals from Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski.
10,000 guests fill Krakow hotels
More than 10,000 guests and 1,600 journalists have come from around the world to Krakow, some 60 kilometers from the camp, filling every hotel in the city.
"I'm closing a circle," said one of the survivors. "I've returned after 60 years. I haven't been able to sleep for two weeks."
Dan Arad, an 83-year-old Israel Defense Forces pensioner and the author of a book called "Surviving Auschwitz," came with his wife from Haifa. He feels lucky. He was at Auschwitz-3, a forced labor camp, where "the fit and healthy were sent," he said.
"Conditions were good there," he said. "Each person had a bed. We had money in the form of coupons. We could trade with the Polish prisoners. They used it for prostitutes and we got bread in exchange."
"I spent six weeks at Birkenau, until [Josef] Mengele came to our barracks and looked at me," Arad said. "I still looked pretty good and he sent me to Auschwitz-3."
Some 1.5 million people perished in Auschwitz-Birkenau, over one million of them Jews. When the Soviet army arrived to liberate the camp, they found only 7,000 survivors, many of them barely alive. The retreating Nazis had driven most of the prisoners who still had strength to walk out into the snow, on a 'death march' toward camps further west.
On Wednesday, a ceremony was held at the Krakow military cemetery, where Polish, British and Russian soldiers who fell in World War Two are buried.
Additionally, there was an Israeli military ceremony in honor of 13 soldiers from British-mandate Palestine who fought in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, fell into German captivity and ended up buried in the British plot of Krakow's military cemetery, far from home.
Chief IDF Chaplain Rabbi Yisrael Weiss read psalms and chanted El Maleh Rahamim, the prayer for the dead. President Katsav laid a wreath, and later, in the freezing cold and the constantly falling snow, he placed tiny Israeli flags on the 13 graves. A Polish military band played teh Israeli national anthem Hatikva.
A meeting between Katsav and Putin planned for Wednesday was canceled, although Katsav said efforts are still being made to reschedule for Thursday.
The idea of holding the commemoration was born a year ago, when the secretary of Poland's national council on memorials, Andje Pshabuzhnik, suggested hosting a meeting of the liberators and survivors at the camp, 60 years later. Kwasniewski adopted the idea, which initially called only for inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
However, French President Jacques Chirac heard about the plan and asked to take part, and shortly after, other statesmen from around the world wanted to join in as well.
Military Rumblings on Iran
EDITORIAL «NEW TORK TIMES»
Published: January 27, 2005
President Bush began his second term with speculation rising about future military moves against Iran. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney placed Iran first on the list of world trouble spots and darkly hinted that unless tougher measures were taken to curtail its nuclear program, Israel might launch its own pre-emptive airstrikes. Earlier this month, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that secret reconnaissance operations have already gotten under way inside Iran, as the Pentagon prepares target lists of nuclear sites that could be attacked from the air or by ground-based commando units.
Thus far, Mr. Bush has kept his own counsel. But these hawkish rumblings eerily recall the months before the American invasion of Iraq when some of the same officials pressed hardest for military action, while the president remained publicly uncommitted. Given that experience, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the current rhetorical buildup. We hope that this time, wiser heads in the administration will intervene before it is too late.
There is no question that Iran has been covertly developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons, and that diplomacy has so far failed to end these efforts. But precipitate American military action would almost certainly do far more harm than good. No major American ally, including Britain, favors such an approach. American planes and missiles alone cannot knock out all of Iran's many secret nuclear sites.
An invasion of a country almost three times as populous as Iraq is well beyond the means of America's depleted ground forces. And an American military attack is probably the one thing still able to unite Iran's restive but nationalist population behind the unpopular clerical dictatorship.
The most effective leverage available to Washington is international economic sanctions. If American diplomacy can line up traditional European allies, there is a fair chance that the Iranian nuclear program can still be stopped.
Iran's nuclear ambitions predate the 1979 Islamic revolution. With crucial help from Pakistan and perhaps other countries, Iran now has centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade. It also has considerable supplies of uranium ready to be enriched. Iran has promised not to enrich any of that uranium for now, under the terms of an agreement recently negotiated with Britain, France and Germany, and some experts believe there are still technical hurdles to overcome. Even if it mastered enrichment, Iran would still have to design, build and test a usable weapon. The best guess is that Iran remains at least three to five years from having the bomb.
A nuclear-armed Iran is an alarming prospect, given the radical nature of the Iranian regime, with its long and continuing record of sponsoring international terrorism, its undiluted hostility to the United States and Israel, and its intense regional rivalries with Iraq and Saudi Arabia. So effective crisis diplomacy needs to move into high gear.
The freeze on uranium enrichment that Iran agreed to is only temporary. Its duration depends on the results of talks in which the Europeans are seeking a more definitive renunciation of nuclear enrichment. The Iranians, in return, want economic and trade rewards.
Expanded commercial ties with America and Europe are very appealing to Iran's ruling mullahs. Having marginalized the reformist political parties, they now see economic sluggishness and high unemployment as the only remaining threat to their continued grip on power. But the mullahs are unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons efforts, which are popular among Iranians of all political persuasions, unless they are plainly told that refusing will bring punishing economic isolation in the very near future. European leaders have not been willing to send that firm message yet, and need to do so.
The next step should be a unified European-American stand that forces Iran to make a clear choice. Either fully renounce its nuclear enrichment programs and win significant trade and economic incentives or fail to do so and suffer severe economic penalties.
The Iranian nuclear challenge could not be more dangerous or more pressing. It is time to put aside unilateral American military bluster and European wishful diplomacy and get serious.
Published: January 27, 2005
President Bush began his second term with speculation rising about future military moves against Iran. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney placed Iran first on the list of world trouble spots and darkly hinted that unless tougher measures were taken to curtail its nuclear program, Israel might launch its own pre-emptive airstrikes. Earlier this month, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that secret reconnaissance operations have already gotten under way inside Iran, as the Pentagon prepares target lists of nuclear sites that could be attacked from the air or by ground-based commando units.
Thus far, Mr. Bush has kept his own counsel. But these hawkish rumblings eerily recall the months before the American invasion of Iraq when some of the same officials pressed hardest for military action, while the president remained publicly uncommitted. Given that experience, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the current rhetorical buildup. We hope that this time, wiser heads in the administration will intervene before it is too late.
There is no question that Iran has been covertly developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons, and that diplomacy has so far failed to end these efforts. But precipitate American military action would almost certainly do far more harm than good. No major American ally, including Britain, favors such an approach. American planes and missiles alone cannot knock out all of Iran's many secret nuclear sites.
An invasion of a country almost three times as populous as Iraq is well beyond the means of America's depleted ground forces. And an American military attack is probably the one thing still able to unite Iran's restive but nationalist population behind the unpopular clerical dictatorship.
The most effective leverage available to Washington is international economic sanctions. If American diplomacy can line up traditional European allies, there is a fair chance that the Iranian nuclear program can still be stopped.
Iran's nuclear ambitions predate the 1979 Islamic revolution. With crucial help from Pakistan and perhaps other countries, Iran now has centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade. It also has considerable supplies of uranium ready to be enriched. Iran has promised not to enrich any of that uranium for now, under the terms of an agreement recently negotiated with Britain, France and Germany, and some experts believe there are still technical hurdles to overcome. Even if it mastered enrichment, Iran would still have to design, build and test a usable weapon. The best guess is that Iran remains at least three to five years from having the bomb.
A nuclear-armed Iran is an alarming prospect, given the radical nature of the Iranian regime, with its long and continuing record of sponsoring international terrorism, its undiluted hostility to the United States and Israel, and its intense regional rivalries with Iraq and Saudi Arabia. So effective crisis diplomacy needs to move into high gear.
The freeze on uranium enrichment that Iran agreed to is only temporary. Its duration depends on the results of talks in which the Europeans are seeking a more definitive renunciation of nuclear enrichment. The Iranians, in return, want economic and trade rewards.
Expanded commercial ties with America and Europe are very appealing to Iran's ruling mullahs. Having marginalized the reformist political parties, they now see economic sluggishness and high unemployment as the only remaining threat to their continued grip on power. But the mullahs are unlikely to give up their nuclear weapons efforts, which are popular among Iranians of all political persuasions, unless they are plainly told that refusing will bring punishing economic isolation in the very near future. European leaders have not been willing to send that firm message yet, and need to do so.
The next step should be a unified European-American stand that forces Iran to make a clear choice. Either fully renounce its nuclear enrichment programs and win significant trade and economic incentives or fail to do so and suffer severe economic penalties.
The Iranian nuclear challenge could not be more dangerous or more pressing. It is time to put aside unilateral American military bluster and European wishful diplomacy and get serious.
Lines in the Sand: Western State Building in the Muslim World
26 January 2005
Yevgeny Bendersky
«The Power and Interest News Report»
Modern day maps of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia reflect a pattern and a principle ingrained in the foreign policies of major European, and now American, powers -- the existence of numerous sovereign Muslim countries. While wars and invasions against Muslim states by outside powers have taken place in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, none of such major military and political moves in the last several decades sought to redraw boundaries or radically change the modern map of the Islamic world.
Today's Muslim states -- countries where Islam is a majority religion adhered to by the overwhelming percentage of the population -- emerged on the ruins of the last major Muslim power -- Ottoman Turkey, and as a result of the dissolution of British India. Following the end of WWI, and later on, in 1947, young nation-states emerged in place of the centuries-old established order and principles. For many decades, Western European powers, the United States and the Soviet Union all promoted the emergence of these states onto the world arena, and supported them based on their own political, military or economic interests. Assistance to these states as separate political units drove the diverse foreign policies of the major powers after both world wars, during the Cold War, and in the current unipolar environment.
Muslim States: Past and Present
Taking a look at the modern map of the Islamic world reveals a rather strange picture. In North Africa and the Middle East, actual boundaries of states hardly correspond to the historical, cultural and ethnic make-ups of these regions. The prevalence of straight lines on the map that cut the Saharan or Arabian Deserts into independent states is just that -- lines in the sand. They divide tribes, clans, families and their corresponding histories and aspirations in an arbitrary manner.
In some cases, all that is required to cross from one North African or Arabian state to the next is to walk over a sand dune. In a region where natural boundaries such as mountains, rivers, valleys or seas are largely absent, the new "borders" came to represent independent Libya, Egypt, Algeria or Jordan. People living on the border areas of these states are hardly aware of the fact that they live across another country. Likewise, in South Asia, Pakistan and India are divided by hastily-designed borders that have been the source of conflict between these two states for the last five decades.
The powers that divided the Islamic world into modern states sought to preserve their own influence. British, French and Italian colonial holdings had to be clearly defined in the newly acquired territories of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The easiest way to do this was to create clearly defined boundaries on the world map. The results are straight lines running across the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara. These lines, however, did not -- and still do not -- reflect the realities on the ground, where people were used to moving around with ease, unobstructed by any border checkpoints and patrols.
The Muslim concept of umma, or one's belonging to the worldwide Islamic community, is one of the chief principles of Islam. According to the Quran, every practicing Muslim's loyalty should be to his religion first, and to any other state or political entity second. Furthermore, a true believer of Islam should not follow the rules and customs of other governments, but instead must obey Islamic principles, as millions of fellow Muslims do every day.
Thus, the actual reading of certain Islamic teachings would indicate that Muslims living across the globe belong to the worldwide Islamic "nation," and not to any particular state on the map. Today's headlines are full of statements by some Muslim groups or individuals all over the world who refuse to obey the secular laws of various countries, preferring instead to establish Islamic rule in those very states. Many countries today grapple with this principle, and the state responses to such Islamic claims vary considerably.
Until the end of WWI, most Islamic nations were part of great Muslim empires. Following the demise of the Mughal and Persian empires, the last such empire, Ottoman Turkey, was comprised of what are now nearly twelve independent states of the Middle East and North Africa. It was once a regional hegemon and a superpower, threatening both Europe and Russia. The Ottoman Empire held sway over Islam by controlling two of the religion's holiest cities -- Mecca and Medina in present-day Saudi Arabia.
While internally weak, and under constant attacks from within and without starting with the dawn of the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire represented the strength and hope to millions of Muslims around the world. As WWI drew to a close and the dissolution of this once-great power was imminent, a powerful movement was born in British India, home to the majority of the world's Muslims at that time. The movement, called the Khilafat -- after the Islamic notion that a Muslim state unifying all the world's Muslims should exist, governed by a religious-political head, the khalif, or caliph -- sought to preserve Turkey's role as the leader of the Islamic world.
While many Muslims living under the decaying Ottoman rule did not support such a movement, and fought against it alongside European powers, the concept itself was a powerful force to millions of Muslims in British India. It eventually died once Turkey became a republic and embarked on the road to modernization in the early 1920s. Nonetheless, Western foreign policies since that time have been directed at preserving the political disunity of the Muslim world, fostering various political developments with the eventual aim at avoiding the resurgence of a powerful Islamic state that would unify hundreds of millions of Muslims into one political, economic and military entity.
That process was greatly assisted by the start of the Cold War and the American-Soviet rivalry. As the newly created Islamic states ended their domination by the British, French and Italian colonial powers in the 1950s, they actively sought to protect their newly acquired independence from the repeat of colonial encroachment. Both the West and the Soviet Union were happy to oblige their new clients, supporting each one independently from the other. Pan-Arabic nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s was a perfect example of such a policy, as the U.S.S.R. supported Egypt's nationalism, while the West invested resources to support the states of the Arabian Peninsula.
Elsewhere, in North Africa, states like Morocco and Algeria were seen as a counterweight to strong claims by Egypt for the leadership of the Arab world. Supporting each state separately, giving it incentives to act independently of others in the region, made it possible for the Western and Soviet world to deal with each Muslim state on its own. Pan-Arab national aims replaced religious Islam as a rallying cry for unity -- a cry that was followed by various indigenous attempts to modernize the Muslim world and bring it closer to Western economic and political standards.
While the Soviet Union actively supported secular nationalistic Egypt, Syria, and Libya, the United States supported secular Iran and Pakistan, as well as Israel and monarchic Arabian kingdoms. Conflicting political and economic programs by the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian states replaced relative Muslim unity and cohesion that might have existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, these countries were drawn into economic interdependence with the West through the exploration and trade in oil, the chief source of fuel for the rapidly growing Western and Asian economies.
Modern Challenges to the West
The Iranian revolution of 1979 delivered the first shock to the established principles of splitting the Muslim world into separate political entities. While the coming to power of a theocratic government was not by itself shocking -- most oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula were monarchic theocracies supported by the Western world -- the message and policies of the new Iranian government were alarming. The new rulers of Tehran sought to export their religious revolution to other Muslim countries and to overthrow the regimes that were either leaning towards, or were supported by, the secular, non-religious United States, Soviet Union and Western Europe.
Their motives met with relative success with the Iranian-style revolution in Sudan in the early 1980s, and the creation of the Lebanese Hizbollah movement. In effect, the Iranian theocratic government assumed the leadership of the movement to unify the Islamic world, hoping to rid it of any non-Islamic influence, or to at least unify Shi'a Muslims living in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. This has been Iran's consistent policy and while it has varied its statements and policies since 1979, the overall message is the same. What makes Iran more powerful in this scenario is the fact that it is one of the world's largest oil producers, and its aims are directed at the main oil-producing region of the world that is of immense strategic and economic importance to practically every industrialized country.
The second challenge to the non-Islamic governments of the West was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This time, the United States and its worldwide coalition responded with a powerful military operation against the Iraqi regime, an operation that became known as the Gulf War. Iraq's aims at that time were two-fold -- to achieve military hegemony in the Persian Gulf and to conquer a major oil-producing state in the region. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, espoused claims to the leadership of the Arab world, acting as the protector of Arab Sunni countries against a recalcitrant Iranian Shi'a regime.
At that time, many Muslim states supported Iraq as the bulwark against Iran. Once Iraq invaded Kuwait, the regional powers and the West saw the possible emergence of Iraq as a major power in control of the world's oil supplies. Prior to the U.S.-led military action, the Iraqi regime stood within striking distance of Saudi Arabia and its massive oil fields, a territory that would not have been able to protect itself adequately without outside assistance. A military attack on Iraqi forces became a necessary option for Western interests to prevent the emergence of a powerful Muslim state with the capacity to act as a possible unifying force in the Muslim world due to its growing military and economic strength.
The third challenge came in the face of al-Qaeda, a powerful, worldwide militant organization that calls for the unity of the umma against the United States and the West, the overthrow of secular, military, political or monarchic regimes associated with the West, and the establishment of an Islamic khilafat, or caliphate. Al-Qaeda has been linked to various Muslim militant groups with similar goals operating all around the world.
Recently, it has been suspected of cooperating with the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militant organization, as well as with other non-Arab groups and movements. This particular cooperation is significant because it marks the first known operational linkage across religious and ethnic lines -- al-Qaeda is an ultra-conservative movement adhering to the Sunni branch of Islam, while Hizbollah and Iran follow Shi'a Islamic teachings. This worldwide cooperation of this network marks a serious development that is already unsettling the entire Muslim world. While al-Qaeda has been temporarily crippled by the U.S.-led assault after the September 11 terrorist attacks, there is no indication that it is letting up its efforts in the Middle East, Southeast Asia or even Europe -- in fact, its popularity is growing among the world's Muslims.
The Western response to Iranian, Iraqi and al-Qaeda threats include the support and cooperation with several key Muslim states, such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. All of them receive varying degrees of military, logistical, economic and political support. Following the defeat of the Iraqi regime in 2003, the United States made public its desire to contain Iran and to destroy al-Qaeda. The harder that both al-Qaeda and Iran try to create a Muslim movement capable of challenging the outside world, the harder the U.S. and its partners push back in preserving and supporting regimes as different from each other as the military dictatorship in Pakistan, the Saudi monarchy or the quasi-military government of Egypt.
From a geopolitical standpoint, it is easier to deal with a relatively small state than with a large and powerful country. When Egypt sought to create the United Arab Republic in the 1960s by attempting to unify Egypt, Syria, Yemen and potentially other states in the Middle East, the United States supported Israel's successful military moves and countermoves that eventually ended the Egyptian initiative. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 did not seek to change these countries radically -- rather, it seeks to install a friendly government within the existing borders.
The current administration's drive to spread democracy in the Middle East does not envision the melting away of boundaries and decades-long political sovereignty -- rather, Washington seeks to preserve the existing states as they are by hopefully bringing democratically-oriented governments to power. This policy is driven by a premise that democratic states would not pose a danger to each other, would respect each other's sovereignty within the existing borders and would not easily launch war on their neighbors for a religious, political or ethnic purpose. The collection of pacific, but independent, Muslim states would allow for unobstructed access to the world's oil resources and would preclude the emergence of a regional hegemon capable of upsetting the existing balance of power.
That is precisely what Iran and al-Qaeda want to avoid. The melting away of artificial Middle Eastern and North African boundaries that were imposed by now defunct governments of Western Europe would create a massive state with the majority Muslim population in the hundreds of millions and in control of the crucial oil and natural gas reserves. Such an outcome would effectively create another superpower on the world arena. There are indications that Muslim states are seeking to move closer to such a reality.
The creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (O.P.E.C.), a supranational organization comprised of major oil exporters from North Africa, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, was a major development in the Muslim world. It has already demonstrated its power by causing an oil crisis in the United States in the 1970s, and it could still be a powerful force affecting world governments that grow more dependent on oil imports. The Organization of Islamic Conference (O.I.C.) is another powerful organization that unifies Muslim states around the world.
The O.I.C. has a major influence in world affairs, since even Russia is seriously contemplating joining it in order to foster greater religious freedom for millions of its Muslim citizens. Other organizations exist that seek to speak with a unified Arabic, North African or Islamic voice. While at present these organizations are not powerful or unified enough to stop U.S. political and military developments, their clout is steadily increasing as the powers of the European Union and China -- both entities with a heavy reliance on oil -- grow on the world arena.
Conclusion
Given the historical progression that at one time saw powerful Islamic states play a major role in world developments, followed by their internal dissolution, later subjugation and colonization by outside powers, and their eventual emergence as many distinct entities with varying degrees of religious, political and military governance, today's Islamic world presents a fragmented picture within artificial political boundaries. If the world's current dependence on oil continues to grow -- as recent reports about China's oil consumption seem to indicate -- many Muslim states will assume greater clout in world affairs, making it harder to treat each of them separately as distinct "identities" vis-à-vis other states.
The latest developments in the "war on terrorism" point to unifying movements in the Islamic world, either with Iran's help or under the banner of al-Qaeda and its allies -- a more coordinated attack on Western principles and Western interests in the Muslim world that cut across the religious and ethnic divides. While U.S. efforts in Iraq have faltered since 2003, the January 30 Iraqi election following a relatively successful election in Afghanistan will prove to be one of the turning points in the development of the Islamic world, which will either accept and foster the Western model and emerge as a collection of distinct and friendly states, or will finally break under the pressure of Iran and al-Qaeda and begin to emerge as a unified religious, political and military entity, heralding a new chapter in world history.
Yevgeny Bendersky
«The Power and Interest News Report»
Modern day maps of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia reflect a pattern and a principle ingrained in the foreign policies of major European, and now American, powers -- the existence of numerous sovereign Muslim countries. While wars and invasions against Muslim states by outside powers have taken place in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, none of such major military and political moves in the last several decades sought to redraw boundaries or radically change the modern map of the Islamic world.
Today's Muslim states -- countries where Islam is a majority religion adhered to by the overwhelming percentage of the population -- emerged on the ruins of the last major Muslim power -- Ottoman Turkey, and as a result of the dissolution of British India. Following the end of WWI, and later on, in 1947, young nation-states emerged in place of the centuries-old established order and principles. For many decades, Western European powers, the United States and the Soviet Union all promoted the emergence of these states onto the world arena, and supported them based on their own political, military or economic interests. Assistance to these states as separate political units drove the diverse foreign policies of the major powers after both world wars, during the Cold War, and in the current unipolar environment.
Muslim States: Past and Present
Taking a look at the modern map of the Islamic world reveals a rather strange picture. In North Africa and the Middle East, actual boundaries of states hardly correspond to the historical, cultural and ethnic make-ups of these regions. The prevalence of straight lines on the map that cut the Saharan or Arabian Deserts into independent states is just that -- lines in the sand. They divide tribes, clans, families and their corresponding histories and aspirations in an arbitrary manner.
In some cases, all that is required to cross from one North African or Arabian state to the next is to walk over a sand dune. In a region where natural boundaries such as mountains, rivers, valleys or seas are largely absent, the new "borders" came to represent independent Libya, Egypt, Algeria or Jordan. People living on the border areas of these states are hardly aware of the fact that they live across another country. Likewise, in South Asia, Pakistan and India are divided by hastily-designed borders that have been the source of conflict between these two states for the last five decades.
The powers that divided the Islamic world into modern states sought to preserve their own influence. British, French and Italian colonial holdings had to be clearly defined in the newly acquired territories of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The easiest way to do this was to create clearly defined boundaries on the world map. The results are straight lines running across the deserts of Arabia and the Sahara. These lines, however, did not -- and still do not -- reflect the realities on the ground, where people were used to moving around with ease, unobstructed by any border checkpoints and patrols.
The Muslim concept of umma, or one's belonging to the worldwide Islamic community, is one of the chief principles of Islam. According to the Quran, every practicing Muslim's loyalty should be to his religion first, and to any other state or political entity second. Furthermore, a true believer of Islam should not follow the rules and customs of other governments, but instead must obey Islamic principles, as millions of fellow Muslims do every day.
Thus, the actual reading of certain Islamic teachings would indicate that Muslims living across the globe belong to the worldwide Islamic "nation," and not to any particular state on the map. Today's headlines are full of statements by some Muslim groups or individuals all over the world who refuse to obey the secular laws of various countries, preferring instead to establish Islamic rule in those very states. Many countries today grapple with this principle, and the state responses to such Islamic claims vary considerably.
Until the end of WWI, most Islamic nations were part of great Muslim empires. Following the demise of the Mughal and Persian empires, the last such empire, Ottoman Turkey, was comprised of what are now nearly twelve independent states of the Middle East and North Africa. It was once a regional hegemon and a superpower, threatening both Europe and Russia. The Ottoman Empire held sway over Islam by controlling two of the religion's holiest cities -- Mecca and Medina in present-day Saudi Arabia.
While internally weak, and under constant attacks from within and without starting with the dawn of the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire represented the strength and hope to millions of Muslims around the world. As WWI drew to a close and the dissolution of this once-great power was imminent, a powerful movement was born in British India, home to the majority of the world's Muslims at that time. The movement, called the Khilafat -- after the Islamic notion that a Muslim state unifying all the world's Muslims should exist, governed by a religious-political head, the khalif, or caliph -- sought to preserve Turkey's role as the leader of the Islamic world.
While many Muslims living under the decaying Ottoman rule did not support such a movement, and fought against it alongside European powers, the concept itself was a powerful force to millions of Muslims in British India. It eventually died once Turkey became a republic and embarked on the road to modernization in the early 1920s. Nonetheless, Western foreign policies since that time have been directed at preserving the political disunity of the Muslim world, fostering various political developments with the eventual aim at avoiding the resurgence of a powerful Islamic state that would unify hundreds of millions of Muslims into one political, economic and military entity.
That process was greatly assisted by the start of the Cold War and the American-Soviet rivalry. As the newly created Islamic states ended their domination by the British, French and Italian colonial powers in the 1950s, they actively sought to protect their newly acquired independence from the repeat of colonial encroachment. Both the West and the Soviet Union were happy to oblige their new clients, supporting each one independently from the other. Pan-Arabic nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s was a perfect example of such a policy, as the U.S.S.R. supported Egypt's nationalism, while the West invested resources to support the states of the Arabian Peninsula.
Elsewhere, in North Africa, states like Morocco and Algeria were seen as a counterweight to strong claims by Egypt for the leadership of the Arab world. Supporting each state separately, giving it incentives to act independently of others in the region, made it possible for the Western and Soviet world to deal with each Muslim state on its own. Pan-Arab national aims replaced religious Islam as a rallying cry for unity -- a cry that was followed by various indigenous attempts to modernize the Muslim world and bring it closer to Western economic and political standards.
While the Soviet Union actively supported secular nationalistic Egypt, Syria, and Libya, the United States supported secular Iran and Pakistan, as well as Israel and monarchic Arabian kingdoms. Conflicting political and economic programs by the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian states replaced relative Muslim unity and cohesion that might have existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, these countries were drawn into economic interdependence with the West through the exploration and trade in oil, the chief source of fuel for the rapidly growing Western and Asian economies.
Modern Challenges to the West
The Iranian revolution of 1979 delivered the first shock to the established principles of splitting the Muslim world into separate political entities. While the coming to power of a theocratic government was not by itself shocking -- most oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula were monarchic theocracies supported by the Western world -- the message and policies of the new Iranian government were alarming. The new rulers of Tehran sought to export their religious revolution to other Muslim countries and to overthrow the regimes that were either leaning towards, or were supported by, the secular, non-religious United States, Soviet Union and Western Europe.
Their motives met with relative success with the Iranian-style revolution in Sudan in the early 1980s, and the creation of the Lebanese Hizbollah movement. In effect, the Iranian theocratic government assumed the leadership of the movement to unify the Islamic world, hoping to rid it of any non-Islamic influence, or to at least unify Shi'a Muslims living in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. This has been Iran's consistent policy and while it has varied its statements and policies since 1979, the overall message is the same. What makes Iran more powerful in this scenario is the fact that it is one of the world's largest oil producers, and its aims are directed at the main oil-producing region of the world that is of immense strategic and economic importance to practically every industrialized country.
The second challenge to the non-Islamic governments of the West was Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This time, the United States and its worldwide coalition responded with a powerful military operation against the Iraqi regime, an operation that became known as the Gulf War. Iraq's aims at that time were two-fold -- to achieve military hegemony in the Persian Gulf and to conquer a major oil-producing state in the region. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, espoused claims to the leadership of the Arab world, acting as the protector of Arab Sunni countries against a recalcitrant Iranian Shi'a regime.
At that time, many Muslim states supported Iraq as the bulwark against Iran. Once Iraq invaded Kuwait, the regional powers and the West saw the possible emergence of Iraq as a major power in control of the world's oil supplies. Prior to the U.S.-led military action, the Iraqi regime stood within striking distance of Saudi Arabia and its massive oil fields, a territory that would not have been able to protect itself adequately without outside assistance. A military attack on Iraqi forces became a necessary option for Western interests to prevent the emergence of a powerful Muslim state with the capacity to act as a possible unifying force in the Muslim world due to its growing military and economic strength.
The third challenge came in the face of al-Qaeda, a powerful, worldwide militant organization that calls for the unity of the umma against the United States and the West, the overthrow of secular, military, political or monarchic regimes associated with the West, and the establishment of an Islamic khilafat, or caliphate. Al-Qaeda has been linked to various Muslim militant groups with similar goals operating all around the world.
Recently, it has been suspected of cooperating with the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militant organization, as well as with other non-Arab groups and movements. This particular cooperation is significant because it marks the first known operational linkage across religious and ethnic lines -- al-Qaeda is an ultra-conservative movement adhering to the Sunni branch of Islam, while Hizbollah and Iran follow Shi'a Islamic teachings. This worldwide cooperation of this network marks a serious development that is already unsettling the entire Muslim world. While al-Qaeda has been temporarily crippled by the U.S.-led assault after the September 11 terrorist attacks, there is no indication that it is letting up its efforts in the Middle East, Southeast Asia or even Europe -- in fact, its popularity is growing among the world's Muslims.
The Western response to Iranian, Iraqi and al-Qaeda threats include the support and cooperation with several key Muslim states, such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. All of them receive varying degrees of military, logistical, economic and political support. Following the defeat of the Iraqi regime in 2003, the United States made public its desire to contain Iran and to destroy al-Qaeda. The harder that both al-Qaeda and Iran try to create a Muslim movement capable of challenging the outside world, the harder the U.S. and its partners push back in preserving and supporting regimes as different from each other as the military dictatorship in Pakistan, the Saudi monarchy or the quasi-military government of Egypt.
From a geopolitical standpoint, it is easier to deal with a relatively small state than with a large and powerful country. When Egypt sought to create the United Arab Republic in the 1960s by attempting to unify Egypt, Syria, Yemen and potentially other states in the Middle East, the United States supported Israel's successful military moves and countermoves that eventually ended the Egyptian initiative. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 did not seek to change these countries radically -- rather, it seeks to install a friendly government within the existing borders.
The current administration's drive to spread democracy in the Middle East does not envision the melting away of boundaries and decades-long political sovereignty -- rather, Washington seeks to preserve the existing states as they are by hopefully bringing democratically-oriented governments to power. This policy is driven by a premise that democratic states would not pose a danger to each other, would respect each other's sovereignty within the existing borders and would not easily launch war on their neighbors for a religious, political or ethnic purpose. The collection of pacific, but independent, Muslim states would allow for unobstructed access to the world's oil resources and would preclude the emergence of a regional hegemon capable of upsetting the existing balance of power.
That is precisely what Iran and al-Qaeda want to avoid. The melting away of artificial Middle Eastern and North African boundaries that were imposed by now defunct governments of Western Europe would create a massive state with the majority Muslim population in the hundreds of millions and in control of the crucial oil and natural gas reserves. Such an outcome would effectively create another superpower on the world arena. There are indications that Muslim states are seeking to move closer to such a reality.
The creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (O.P.E.C.), a supranational organization comprised of major oil exporters from North Africa, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, was a major development in the Muslim world. It has already demonstrated its power by causing an oil crisis in the United States in the 1970s, and it could still be a powerful force affecting world governments that grow more dependent on oil imports. The Organization of Islamic Conference (O.I.C.) is another powerful organization that unifies Muslim states around the world.
The O.I.C. has a major influence in world affairs, since even Russia is seriously contemplating joining it in order to foster greater religious freedom for millions of its Muslim citizens. Other organizations exist that seek to speak with a unified Arabic, North African or Islamic voice. While at present these organizations are not powerful or unified enough to stop U.S. political and military developments, their clout is steadily increasing as the powers of the European Union and China -- both entities with a heavy reliance on oil -- grow on the world arena.
Conclusion
Given the historical progression that at one time saw powerful Islamic states play a major role in world developments, followed by their internal dissolution, later subjugation and colonization by outside powers, and their eventual emergence as many distinct entities with varying degrees of religious, political and military governance, today's Islamic world presents a fragmented picture within artificial political boundaries. If the world's current dependence on oil continues to grow -- as recent reports about China's oil consumption seem to indicate -- many Muslim states will assume greater clout in world affairs, making it harder to treat each of them separately as distinct "identities" vis-à-vis other states.
The latest developments in the "war on terrorism" point to unifying movements in the Islamic world, either with Iran's help or under the banner of al-Qaeda and its allies -- a more coordinated attack on Western principles and Western interests in the Muslim world that cut across the religious and ethnic divides. While U.S. efforts in Iraq have faltered since 2003, the January 30 Iraqi election following a relatively successful election in Afghanistan will prove to be one of the turning points in the development of the Islamic world, which will either accept and foster the Western model and emerge as a collection of distinct and friendly states, or will finally break under the pressure of Iran and al-Qaeda and begin to emerge as a unified religious, political and military entity, heralding a new chapter in world history.
1.25.2005
Bush's democracy vow was no threat of force
January 25, 2005
by JOHN O'SULLIVAN
«CHICAGO SUNTIMES»
Was President Bush too eloquent for his own good in his inaugural speech? Many listeners thought they had heard him announce that it was henceforth the policy of the United States to overthrow tyrants and establish democracy everywhere. So powerful was this impression that the following day "a senior administration official" was wheeled out to explain that there had been no change in U.S. foreign policy and that the president was not proposing to spread democracy by military force.
As it happens, the "senior administration official" had a point. Bush's promise to support democracy abroad was hedged about with qualifications: It would be the work of several generations, not one administration. It was not primarily a "task of arms." Freedom could not be imposed on other countries by the United States. We would merely help them to achieve it. It would inevitably reflect their distinctive traditions and end up looking very different from our own democracy.
But these qualifications were obscured by the soaring rhetorical promises to advance the ideals of freedom and self-government throughout the world. This, said Bush, was "the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time." Indeed, the "ultimate goal" of U.S. foreign policy was "ending tyranny in our world."
Even heavily qualified, this is quite a goal. And as several commentators have pointed out -- notably, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations -- it may conflict with other U.S. goals, notably recruiting and keeping non-democratic U.S. allies in the war on terror.
This criticism is not unreasonable, but such conflicts can probably be managed. Throughout the Cold War U.S. presidents combined the rhetoric of freedom and democracy with the realpolitik of maintaining alliances with imperfect democracies (Turkey) and outright dictatorships (Spain, Portugal, South Korea).
Bush sometimes condemns this past policy -- mainly in the Middle Eastern context -- as a bankrupt and amoral strategy. In fact it was quite justifiable morally as the only practical way of securing the larger victory of liberty against the world-wide assault of communist totalitarianism. It worked. America won the Cold War at the modest cost of occasionally sounding hypocritical in such local contexts as the Congo or the Philippines. It continues in the war on terror. Bush has forged alliances with undemocratic rulers in central Asia and the Middle East to obtain U.S. bases against al-Qaida.
Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in the Washington Post, adds a further and more subtle benefit: The presidential rhetoric of liberty in the Cold War eventually undermined even our friends among dictators. Reagan's ringing endorsement of freedom, for instance, weakened Pinochet and Marcos at home and, when they got into difficulties, restrained even the president from coming to their assistance. Bush similarly pushed himself to take the side of Ukraine's "orange revolution" against his anti-terror ally, Russia's President Putin.
But Kagan's argument exhibits two glaring omissions. First, in none of the cases he cites -- Ukraine, the Philippines, Chile -- was the United States called upon to do anything more than encourage and warn. We did not have to intervene militarily. Second, in all of these cases, the end-result of revolution and "people power" was a friendly regime perfectly acceptable to the United States. We had no reason of interest to obstruct the change. In both cases, promoting democracy cost relatively little. That has not always been true in the past -- and it is unlikely always to be true in the future.
Imagine, for instance, a revolution in Saudi Arabia. Rebels have seized key positions in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dahran, issued a manifesto establishing a Revolutionary Salvation Council, and promised to hold elections within six months. But our intelligence suggests that key figures on the Council are linked to anti-American terror networks.
Do we (a) intervene on their side in the hope of influencing the new regime? (b) intervene on the side of the present royal despots? Or (c) let events take their course? If we do (a), then we are true to our democratic rhetoric but we probably replace a pro-American despot with anti-American ones. Both the other options make us look hypocritical. And the third makes us look weak as well. It is almost needless to add that option (c) is the one Jimmy Carter actually chose when the Shah of Iran was threatened with the Islamist revolution of 1979 that created the present terrorist state.
Or take a different kind of tragedy. Imagine a revolt of oppressed Sunni Muslims in Syria who cite the president's speech as their inspiration and appeal for American intervention. Reports arrive that they are being shot out of hand.
One assumes we would not intervene on behalf of the Syrian despots. But which of the other two options above would we choose? Almost certainly we would choose to do nothing -- or to issue appeals for restraint which amounts to much the same thing. That at any rate is what we did when the Iraqi Shiites rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 in the hope that America would come to their assistance. As a result, the Shiites were slow to trust us in both the invasion of 2003 and in its political aftermath. What goes around comes around.
Neither America nor any other country, however idealistic, can be expected to intervene militarily against its own interests or when it has no real interests at stake. And it is immoral as well as unrealistic to encourage others to rebel by promises of intervention we cannot keep.
But that does not mean we cannot take lesser steps -- imposing trade penalties on regimes that jail and torture dissidents, offering a safe haven to despots who agree to go quietly, giving training and technical assistance to free media in authoritarian states that permit some freedoms -- to assist gradual movement toward greater freedom. Promoting democracy in those ways is eminently realist in a world of rapid change. Such a policy, however, must place equal weight on the promise of democracy and the qualification of gradualism. Indeed, the "senior administration official" realized something the president did not: In the grammar of international politics, the qualifications are the main point.
by JOHN O'SULLIVAN
«CHICAGO SUNTIMES»
Was President Bush too eloquent for his own good in his inaugural speech? Many listeners thought they had heard him announce that it was henceforth the policy of the United States to overthrow tyrants and establish democracy everywhere. So powerful was this impression that the following day "a senior administration official" was wheeled out to explain that there had been no change in U.S. foreign policy and that the president was not proposing to spread democracy by military force.
As it happens, the "senior administration official" had a point. Bush's promise to support democracy abroad was hedged about with qualifications: It would be the work of several generations, not one administration. It was not primarily a "task of arms." Freedom could not be imposed on other countries by the United States. We would merely help them to achieve it. It would inevitably reflect their distinctive traditions and end up looking very different from our own democracy.
But these qualifications were obscured by the soaring rhetorical promises to advance the ideals of freedom and self-government throughout the world. This, said Bush, was "the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time." Indeed, the "ultimate goal" of U.S. foreign policy was "ending tyranny in our world."
Even heavily qualified, this is quite a goal. And as several commentators have pointed out -- notably, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations -- it may conflict with other U.S. goals, notably recruiting and keeping non-democratic U.S. allies in the war on terror.
This criticism is not unreasonable, but such conflicts can probably be managed. Throughout the Cold War U.S. presidents combined the rhetoric of freedom and democracy with the realpolitik of maintaining alliances with imperfect democracies (Turkey) and outright dictatorships (Spain, Portugal, South Korea).
Bush sometimes condemns this past policy -- mainly in the Middle Eastern context -- as a bankrupt and amoral strategy. In fact it was quite justifiable morally as the only practical way of securing the larger victory of liberty against the world-wide assault of communist totalitarianism. It worked. America won the Cold War at the modest cost of occasionally sounding hypocritical in such local contexts as the Congo or the Philippines. It continues in the war on terror. Bush has forged alliances with undemocratic rulers in central Asia and the Middle East to obtain U.S. bases against al-Qaida.
Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing in the Washington Post, adds a further and more subtle benefit: The presidential rhetoric of liberty in the Cold War eventually undermined even our friends among dictators. Reagan's ringing endorsement of freedom, for instance, weakened Pinochet and Marcos at home and, when they got into difficulties, restrained even the president from coming to their assistance. Bush similarly pushed himself to take the side of Ukraine's "orange revolution" against his anti-terror ally, Russia's President Putin.
But Kagan's argument exhibits two glaring omissions. First, in none of the cases he cites -- Ukraine, the Philippines, Chile -- was the United States called upon to do anything more than encourage and warn. We did not have to intervene militarily. Second, in all of these cases, the end-result of revolution and "people power" was a friendly regime perfectly acceptable to the United States. We had no reason of interest to obstruct the change. In both cases, promoting democracy cost relatively little. That has not always been true in the past -- and it is unlikely always to be true in the future.
Imagine, for instance, a revolution in Saudi Arabia. Rebels have seized key positions in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dahran, issued a manifesto establishing a Revolutionary Salvation Council, and promised to hold elections within six months. But our intelligence suggests that key figures on the Council are linked to anti-American terror networks.
Do we (a) intervene on their side in the hope of influencing the new regime? (b) intervene on the side of the present royal despots? Or (c) let events take their course? If we do (a), then we are true to our democratic rhetoric but we probably replace a pro-American despot with anti-American ones. Both the other options make us look hypocritical. And the third makes us look weak as well. It is almost needless to add that option (c) is the one Jimmy Carter actually chose when the Shah of Iran was threatened with the Islamist revolution of 1979 that created the present terrorist state.
Or take a different kind of tragedy. Imagine a revolt of oppressed Sunni Muslims in Syria who cite the president's speech as their inspiration and appeal for American intervention. Reports arrive that they are being shot out of hand.
One assumes we would not intervene on behalf of the Syrian despots. But which of the other two options above would we choose? Almost certainly we would choose to do nothing -- or to issue appeals for restraint which amounts to much the same thing. That at any rate is what we did when the Iraqi Shiites rose up against Saddam Hussein in 1991 in the hope that America would come to their assistance. As a result, the Shiites were slow to trust us in both the invasion of 2003 and in its political aftermath. What goes around comes around.
Neither America nor any other country, however idealistic, can be expected to intervene militarily against its own interests or when it has no real interests at stake. And it is immoral as well as unrealistic to encourage others to rebel by promises of intervention we cannot keep.
But that does not mean we cannot take lesser steps -- imposing trade penalties on regimes that jail and torture dissidents, offering a safe haven to despots who agree to go quietly, giving training and technical assistance to free media in authoritarian states that permit some freedoms -- to assist gradual movement toward greater freedom. Promoting democracy in those ways is eminently realist in a world of rapid change. Such a policy, however, must place equal weight on the promise of democracy and the qualification of gradualism. Indeed, the "senior administration official" realized something the president did not: In the grammar of international politics, the qualifications are the main point.
Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq
By Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
«WASHINGTON POST»
The debate on Iraq is taking a new turn. The Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30, only recently viewed as a culmination, are described as inaugurating a civil war. The timing and the voting arrangements have become controversial. All this is a way of foreshadowing a demand for an exit strategy, by which many critics mean some sort of explicit time limit on the U.S. effort.
We reject this counsel. The implications of the term "exit strategy" must be clearly understood; there can be no fudging of consequences. The essential prerequisite for an acceptable exit strategy is a sustainable outcome, not an arbitrary time limit. For the outcome in Iraq will shape the next decade of American foreign policy. A debacle would usher in a series of convulsions in the region as radicals and fundamentalists moved for dominance, with the wind seemingly at their backs. Wherever there are significant Muslim populations, radical elements would be emboldened. As the rest of the world related to this reality, its sense of direction would be impaired by the demonstration of American confusion in Iraq. A precipitate American withdrawal would be almost certain to cause a civil war that would dwarf Yugoslavia's, and it would be compounded as neighbors escalated their current involvement into full-scale intervention.
We owe it to ourselves to become clear about what post-election outcome is compatible with our values and global security. And we owe it to the Iraqis to strive for an outcome that can further their capacity to shape their future.
The mechanical part of success is relatively easy to define: establishment of a government considered sufficiently legitimate by the Iraqi people to permit recruitment of an army able and willing to defend its institutions. That goal cannot be expedited by an arbitrary deadline that would be, above all, likely to confuse both ally and adversary. The political and military efforts cannot be separated. Training an army in a political vacuum has proved insufficient. If we cannot carry out both the political and military tasks, we will not be able to accomplish either.
But what is such a government? Optimists and idealists posit that a full panoply of Western democratic institutions can be created in a time frame the American political process will sustain. Reality is likely to disappoint these expectations. Iraq is a society riven by centuries of religious and ethnic conflicts; it has little or no experience with representative institutions. The challenge is to define political objectives that, even when falling short of the maximum goal, nevertheless represent significant progress and enlist support across the various ethnic groups. The elections of Jan. 30 should therefore be interpreted as the indispensable first phase of a political evolution from military occupation to political legitimacy.
Optimists also argue that, since the Shiites make up about 60 percent of the population and the Kurds 15 to 20 percent, and since neither wants Sunni domination, a democratic majority exists almost automatically. In that view, the Iraqi Shiite leaders have come to appreciate the benefits of democratization and the secular state by witnessing the consequences of their absence under the Shiite theocracy in neighboring Iran.
A pluralistic, Shiite-led society would indeed be a happy outcome. But we must take care not to base policy on the wish becoming father to the thought. If a democratic process is to unify Iraq peacefully, a great deal depends on how the Shiite majority defines majority rule.
So far the subtle Shiite leaders, hardened by having survived decades of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, have been ambiguous about their goals. They have insisted on early elections -- indeed, the date of Jan. 30 was established on the basis of a near-ultimatum by the most eminent Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The Shiites have also urged voting procedures based on national candidate lists, which work against federal and regional political institutions. Recent Shiite pronouncements have affirmed the goal of a secular state but have left open the interpretation of majority rule. An absolutist application of majority rule would make it difficult to achieve political legitimacy. The Kurdish minority and the Sunni portion of the country would be in permanent opposition.
Western democracy developed in homogeneous societies; minorities found majority rule acceptable because they had a prospect of becoming majorities, and majorities were restrained in the exercise of their power by their temporary status and by judicially enforced minority guarantees. Such an equation does not operate where minority status is permanently established by religious affiliation and compounded by ethnic differences and decades of brutal dictatorship. Majority rule in such circumstances is perceived as an alternative version of the oppression of the weak by the powerful. In multiethnic societies, minority rights must be protected by structural and constitutional safeguards. Federalism mitigates the scope for potential arbitrariness of the numerical majority and defines autonomy on a specific range of issues.
The reaction to intransigent Sunni brutality and the relative Shiite quiet must not tempt us into identifying Iraqi legitimacy with unchecked Shiite rule. The American experience with Shiite theocracy in Iran since 1979 does not inspire confidence in our ability to forecast Shiite evolution or the prospects of a Shiite-dominated bloc extending to the Mediterranean. A thoughtful American policy will not mortgage itself to one side in a religious conflict fervently conducted for 1,000 years.
The Constituent Assembly emerging from the elections will be sovereign to some extent. But the United States' continuing leverage should be focused on four key objectives: (1) to prevent any group from using the political process to establish the kind of dominance previously enjoyed by the Sunnis; (2) to prevent any areas from slipping into Taliban conditions as havens and recruitment centers for terrorists; (3) to keep Shiite government from turning into a theocracy, Iranian or indigenous; (4) to leave scope for regional autonomy within the Iraqi democratic process.
The United States has every interest in conducting a dialogue with all parties to encourage the emergence of a secular leadership of nationalists and regional representatives. The outcome of constitution-building should be a federation, with an emphasis on regional autonomy. Any group pushing its claims beyond these limits should be brought to understand the consequences of a breakup of the Iraqi state into its constituent elements, including an Iranian-dominated south, an Islamist-Hussein Sunni center and invasion of the Kurdish region by its neighbors.
A calibrated American policy would seek to split that part of the Sunni community eager to conduct a normal life from the part that is fighting to reestablish Sunni control. The United States needs to continue building an Iraqi army, which, under conditions of Sunni insurrection, will be increasingly composed of Shiite recruits -- producing an unwinnable situation for the Sunni rejectionists. But it should not cross the line into replacing Sunni dictatorship with Shiite theocracy. It is a fine line, but the success of Iraq policy may depend on the ability to walk it.
The legitimacy of the political institutions emerging in Iraq depends significantly on international acceptance of the new government. An international contact group should be formed to advise on the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq. Such a step would be a gesture of confident leadership, especially as America's security and financial contributions will remain pivotal. Our European allies must not shame themselves and the traditional alliance by continuing to stand aloof from even a political process that, whatever their view of recent history, will affect their future even more than ours. Nor should we treat countries such as India and Russia, with their large Muslim populations, as spectators to outcomes on which their domestic stability may well depend.
Desirable political objectives will remain theoretical until adequate security is established in Iraq. In an atmosphere of political assassination, wholesale murder and brigandage, when the road from Baghdad to its international airport is the scene of daily terrorist or criminal incidents, no government will long be able to sustain public confidence. Training, equipping and motivating effective Iraqi armed forces is a precondition to all the other efforts. Yet no matter how well trained and equipped, that army will not fight except for a government in which it has confidence. This vicious circle needs to be broken.
It is axiomatic that guerrillas win if they do not lose. And in Iraq the guerrillas are not losing, at least not in the Sunni region, at least not visibly. A successful strategy needs to answer these questions: Are we waging "one war" in which military and political efforts are mutually reinforcing? Are the institutions guiding and monitoring these tasks sufficiently coordinated? Is our strategic goal to achieve complete security in at least some key towns and major communication routes (defined as reducing violence to historical criminal levels)? This would be in accordance with the maxim that complete security in 70 percent of the country is better than 70 percent security in 100 percent of the country -- because fully secure areas can be models and magnets for those who are suffering in insecure places. Do we have a policy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran from which the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge and time to regroup? Are we designing a policy that can produce results for the people and prevent civil strife for control of the state and its oil revenue? Are we maintaining American public support so that staged surges of extreme violence do not break domestic public confidence at a time when the enemy may, in fact, be on the verge of failure? And are we gaining international understanding and willingness to play a constructive role in what is a global threat to peace and security?
An exit strategy based on performance, not artificial time limits, will judge progress by the ability to produce positive answers to these questions. In the immediate future, a significant portion of the anti-insurrection effort will have to be carried out by the United States. A premature shift from combat operations to training missions might create a gap that permits the insurrection to rally its potential. But as Iraqi forces increase in number and capability, and as the political construction proceeds after the election, a realistic exit strategy will emerge.
There is no magic formula for a quick, non-catastrophic exit. But there is an obligation to do our utmost to bring about an outcome that will mark a major step forward in the war against terrorism, in the transformation of the Middle East and toward a more peaceful and democratic world order.
Henry A. Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates, was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. George P. Shultz, Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
«WASHINGTON POST»
The debate on Iraq is taking a new turn. The Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30, only recently viewed as a culmination, are described as inaugurating a civil war. The timing and the voting arrangements have become controversial. All this is a way of foreshadowing a demand for an exit strategy, by which many critics mean some sort of explicit time limit on the U.S. effort.
We reject this counsel. The implications of the term "exit strategy" must be clearly understood; there can be no fudging of consequences. The essential prerequisite for an acceptable exit strategy is a sustainable outcome, not an arbitrary time limit. For the outcome in Iraq will shape the next decade of American foreign policy. A debacle would usher in a series of convulsions in the region as radicals and fundamentalists moved for dominance, with the wind seemingly at their backs. Wherever there are significant Muslim populations, radical elements would be emboldened. As the rest of the world related to this reality, its sense of direction would be impaired by the demonstration of American confusion in Iraq. A precipitate American withdrawal would be almost certain to cause a civil war that would dwarf Yugoslavia's, and it would be compounded as neighbors escalated their current involvement into full-scale intervention.
We owe it to ourselves to become clear about what post-election outcome is compatible with our values and global security. And we owe it to the Iraqis to strive for an outcome that can further their capacity to shape their future.
The mechanical part of success is relatively easy to define: establishment of a government considered sufficiently legitimate by the Iraqi people to permit recruitment of an army able and willing to defend its institutions. That goal cannot be expedited by an arbitrary deadline that would be, above all, likely to confuse both ally and adversary. The political and military efforts cannot be separated. Training an army in a political vacuum has proved insufficient. If we cannot carry out both the political and military tasks, we will not be able to accomplish either.
But what is such a government? Optimists and idealists posit that a full panoply of Western democratic institutions can be created in a time frame the American political process will sustain. Reality is likely to disappoint these expectations. Iraq is a society riven by centuries of religious and ethnic conflicts; it has little or no experience with representative institutions. The challenge is to define political objectives that, even when falling short of the maximum goal, nevertheless represent significant progress and enlist support across the various ethnic groups. The elections of Jan. 30 should therefore be interpreted as the indispensable first phase of a political evolution from military occupation to political legitimacy.
Optimists also argue that, since the Shiites make up about 60 percent of the population and the Kurds 15 to 20 percent, and since neither wants Sunni domination, a democratic majority exists almost automatically. In that view, the Iraqi Shiite leaders have come to appreciate the benefits of democratization and the secular state by witnessing the consequences of their absence under the Shiite theocracy in neighboring Iran.
A pluralistic, Shiite-led society would indeed be a happy outcome. But we must take care not to base policy on the wish becoming father to the thought. If a democratic process is to unify Iraq peacefully, a great deal depends on how the Shiite majority defines majority rule.
So far the subtle Shiite leaders, hardened by having survived decades of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, have been ambiguous about their goals. They have insisted on early elections -- indeed, the date of Jan. 30 was established on the basis of a near-ultimatum by the most eminent Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The Shiites have also urged voting procedures based on national candidate lists, which work against federal and regional political institutions. Recent Shiite pronouncements have affirmed the goal of a secular state but have left open the interpretation of majority rule. An absolutist application of majority rule would make it difficult to achieve political legitimacy. The Kurdish minority and the Sunni portion of the country would be in permanent opposition.
Western democracy developed in homogeneous societies; minorities found majority rule acceptable because they had a prospect of becoming majorities, and majorities were restrained in the exercise of their power by their temporary status and by judicially enforced minority guarantees. Such an equation does not operate where minority status is permanently established by religious affiliation and compounded by ethnic differences and decades of brutal dictatorship. Majority rule in such circumstances is perceived as an alternative version of the oppression of the weak by the powerful. In multiethnic societies, minority rights must be protected by structural and constitutional safeguards. Federalism mitigates the scope for potential arbitrariness of the numerical majority and defines autonomy on a specific range of issues.
The reaction to intransigent Sunni brutality and the relative Shiite quiet must not tempt us into identifying Iraqi legitimacy with unchecked Shiite rule. The American experience with Shiite theocracy in Iran since 1979 does not inspire confidence in our ability to forecast Shiite evolution or the prospects of a Shiite-dominated bloc extending to the Mediterranean. A thoughtful American policy will not mortgage itself to one side in a religious conflict fervently conducted for 1,000 years.
The Constituent Assembly emerging from the elections will be sovereign to some extent. But the United States' continuing leverage should be focused on four key objectives: (1) to prevent any group from using the political process to establish the kind of dominance previously enjoyed by the Sunnis; (2) to prevent any areas from slipping into Taliban conditions as havens and recruitment centers for terrorists; (3) to keep Shiite government from turning into a theocracy, Iranian or indigenous; (4) to leave scope for regional autonomy within the Iraqi democratic process.
The United States has every interest in conducting a dialogue with all parties to encourage the emergence of a secular leadership of nationalists and regional representatives. The outcome of constitution-building should be a federation, with an emphasis on regional autonomy. Any group pushing its claims beyond these limits should be brought to understand the consequences of a breakup of the Iraqi state into its constituent elements, including an Iranian-dominated south, an Islamist-Hussein Sunni center and invasion of the Kurdish region by its neighbors.
A calibrated American policy would seek to split that part of the Sunni community eager to conduct a normal life from the part that is fighting to reestablish Sunni control. The United States needs to continue building an Iraqi army, which, under conditions of Sunni insurrection, will be increasingly composed of Shiite recruits -- producing an unwinnable situation for the Sunni rejectionists. But it should not cross the line into replacing Sunni dictatorship with Shiite theocracy. It is a fine line, but the success of Iraq policy may depend on the ability to walk it.
The legitimacy of the political institutions emerging in Iraq depends significantly on international acceptance of the new government. An international contact group should be formed to advise on the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq. Such a step would be a gesture of confident leadership, especially as America's security and financial contributions will remain pivotal. Our European allies must not shame themselves and the traditional alliance by continuing to stand aloof from even a political process that, whatever their view of recent history, will affect their future even more than ours. Nor should we treat countries such as India and Russia, with their large Muslim populations, as spectators to outcomes on which their domestic stability may well depend.
Desirable political objectives will remain theoretical until adequate security is established in Iraq. In an atmosphere of political assassination, wholesale murder and brigandage, when the road from Baghdad to its international airport is the scene of daily terrorist or criminal incidents, no government will long be able to sustain public confidence. Training, equipping and motivating effective Iraqi armed forces is a precondition to all the other efforts. Yet no matter how well trained and equipped, that army will not fight except for a government in which it has confidence. This vicious circle needs to be broken.
It is axiomatic that guerrillas win if they do not lose. And in Iraq the guerrillas are not losing, at least not in the Sunni region, at least not visibly. A successful strategy needs to answer these questions: Are we waging "one war" in which military and political efforts are mutually reinforcing? Are the institutions guiding and monitoring these tasks sufficiently coordinated? Is our strategic goal to achieve complete security in at least some key towns and major communication routes (defined as reducing violence to historical criminal levels)? This would be in accordance with the maxim that complete security in 70 percent of the country is better than 70 percent security in 100 percent of the country -- because fully secure areas can be models and magnets for those who are suffering in insecure places. Do we have a policy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran from which the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge and time to regroup? Are we designing a policy that can produce results for the people and prevent civil strife for control of the state and its oil revenue? Are we maintaining American public support so that staged surges of extreme violence do not break domestic public confidence at a time when the enemy may, in fact, be on the verge of failure? And are we gaining international understanding and willingness to play a constructive role in what is a global threat to peace and security?
An exit strategy based on performance, not artificial time limits, will judge progress by the ability to produce positive answers to these questions. In the immediate future, a significant portion of the anti-insurrection effort will have to be carried out by the United States. A premature shift from combat operations to training missions might create a gap that permits the insurrection to rally its potential. But as Iraqi forces increase in number and capability, and as the political construction proceeds after the election, a realistic exit strategy will emerge.
There is no magic formula for a quick, non-catastrophic exit. But there is an obligation to do our utmost to bring about an outcome that will mark a major step forward in the war against terrorism, in the transformation of the Middle East and toward a more peaceful and democratic world order.
Henry A. Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates, was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. George P. Shultz, Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989.
