Prospect

China's Final Frontier

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:47:00 -0400

The final stretch on the road to Yarkand, about 125 miles from China’s border with Pakistan, feels like the middle east. Each village is a collage of single-storey mud-brick homes with turquoise door-gates. People travel by donkey cart or scooter-rickshaw. Men greet each other the Muslim way (palm to the chest and a slight bow); women wear headscarves. In small villages many signs are still in Uighur, the local language. But for how much longer?

Fighting John McCain

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:26:00 -0400

By ancestry, John McCain is a Scots-Irishman. That is to say, he comes from one of the oldest, most admirable and most worrying ethno-cultural traditions in the US. To a remarkable extent, that tradition is reflected in McCain's character traits: his obstinancy; his tendency towards unshakeable friendship and implacable hatred; his hair-trigger temper; his deep patriotism; his obsession with American honor; and his furious response to any criticism of the US. These are not just the products of his military upbringing and experiences as a prisoner in North Vietnam, but also the result of his being the proud descendant of Indian-fighters and Confederate soldiers.

Non-Americans are not used to thinking of white Americans in terms of old ethno-cultural traditions, except when it comes to imported immigrants such as Italian-Americans. Yet the Scots-Irish cultural traits live on everywhere, from evangelical religion to country music. They have been examined by several great American scholars, including David Hackett Fischer and Kevin Phillips, as well as more popular authors like Walter Russell Mead.

Both sides of McCain's family come from the old Confederate southwest: his father's side from Missouri, his mother's from Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma. McCain's great-great-grandfather, William Alexander "Fighting Bill" McCain, was a Confederate soldier. His paternal family took the classic Scots-Irish route in the 18th century, from Scotland, down from Virginia through the Carolinas to the old frontier in the Appalachians and beyond. McCain's mother was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the setting for Merle Haggard's iconic anthem of patriotic, conservative small-town America, "Okie From Muskogee," where: "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don't take our trips on LSD/We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street/We like livin' right, and bein' free."

The Scots-Irish tradition has been praised, with reservations, by another Scots-Irishman, Democratic senator Jim Webb, in his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. Until he ruled himself out in early July, Webb was considered a favourite for Obama's vice-presidential pick. This would have given the election a flavour of a Scots-Irish family feud-and you can't get more combative than that.

The American Scots-Irish are the descendants of the Scottish Protestants settled in 17th-century Ulster by the Stuart kings, a process that involved the ethnic cleansing of much of the native Irish Catholic population. In the 18th century, those of the Scots-Irish who moved on to the western frontier of Britain's colonies in North America took with them a prior experience of frontier fighting and a fundamentalist identification of their cause with God. The American frontier's lawlessness, high levels of violence among white males and ferocious conflicts with the Native Americans perpetuated this culture into modern US society. In the words of a biographer of McCain's personal hero, Scots-Irish president Andrew Jackson: "It appears to be more difficult for a North-of-Irelander... to allow an honest difference of opinion in an opponent, so that he is apt to regard the terms opponent and enemy as synonymous." Similar things have often been said about McCain.

The Scots-Irish tradition belongs above all to the "greater south," and is indeed at the core of most white southern traditions. The southern historian Grady McWhiney has gone so far as to attribute most of the cultural difference between the south and the rest of the US to the Scots-Irish heritage. The most enduring political reflection of this has been "Jacksonian nationalism," named after President Jackson, whose career was shaped by ruthless conflict with Native Americans and their British, French and Spanish backers. Jacksonian nationalism has been described by Walter Russell Mead as one of the four key historical strands of US foreign and security policy.

The first defining character of the frontier was of course conflict with Native Americans, in which both sides committed appalling atrocities. This has bred in sections of the American tradition a capacity for ruthlessness and a taste for unqualified victory. The second was constant expansionism, often pushed for by the white frontier populations against the wishes of Washington administrations.

The frontier also helped keep alive a cult of personal weaponry associated with a certain kind of egalitarianism and belief in every man's right to defend his honor-a classic theme of Hollywood westerns, but one with real roots in the southern and frontier traditions.

One of my favourite stories of upper-class southern violence in the 19th century comes from the family history of William Faulkner (an old Ulster Protestant name; Faulkner added the "u")-a history which renders the lurid subject matter of some of his novels more comprehensible. In 1848, Faulkner's great-grandfather William C Falkner stabbed and killed a friend of his, another Mississippi gentleman, in an election dispute-one of several killings in the course of his life. The unusual aspect of this otherwise commonplace occurrence was that the election in question was to the local chapter of the Sons of Temperance.

As someone remarked of Appalachian society in the 1890s, "It has been found impossible to convict men of murder... provided the jury is convinced that the assailant's honor was aggrieved and that he gave his adversary notice of his intention to assail him." John Shelton Reed has described this as a tradition of "lawful violence": a socially sanctioned response to certain actions that observes codes and limits. This is related to the idea of the community right to administer "justice" when the state is unwilling or unable to follow the popular will. Lynching is most associated with the terrorization of blacks in the south in the century after the civil war, but the practice on the frontier was much older, and was usually deployed against deviant whites (as well as Native Americans).

Of course, these attitudes have faded greatly in the south and west, but they still stand out in these regions compared to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the developed world. According to one 2003 study-reportedly based in part on heroic researchers at US universities bumping into students, shouting "asshole" at them, and then comparing their reactions to their states of origin-"students from the southern part of the US reacted far more aggressively than those from the north... and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems. America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason-Dixon line."

This has had obvious effects on US attitudes in the wake of 9/11, when the world has come more than ever to seem to many Americans like a lawless frontier populated by alien savages.

Of course, it would be wrong to see the Scots-Irish of today as forming some tight community with uniform cultural traits. As their culture has spread to influence much of white culture in the US heartland, so it has weakened. Though both McCain and Webb stress their faith, neither espouses the fundamentalist religion at the core of the Scots-Irish tradition.

Nonetheless, there is enough of the Scots-Irishman in McCain to make me nervous about how he would behave as president. This is less because of his policies, which differ less from Obama's than it may appear from the election campaign (with admittedly the immense exception of Iran). Rather, my nerves stem from McCain's possible reaction to unexpected events, shocks and provocations, of which there will be plenty in the years to come.

For example, McCain's frequently expressed loathing of Putin's Russia and his deep attachment to Georgia and its president Mikheil Saakashvili could have serious implications if Georgia and Russia go to war over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. McCain may not set out to attack Pakistan, but how would he respond in the face of an increase in attacks on US troops by Taliban forces based there? In a crisis, where would McCain's explosive temper take him?

McCain's temper is the stuff of legend in Washington. Republican senator Thad Cochran recalls a confrontation with a Sandinista rebel in which McCain "got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

To sum up both McCain and his ethnic tradition in an old nutshell, one might say that there is no one better to have on your side in a fight--and no one more likely to get you into one.

Peter Bergen in Prospect Magazine | 'Is Bin Laden Losing?'

Communications — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:44:00 -0400

In May, two articles by western experts on al Qaeda suggested that Bin Laden's terrorist organisation might be in sharp decline. Both were meticulously researched and received wide attention. Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at New York University, and Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker are all authoritative observers of Islamic militancy. The article by the former pair, in the New Republic, focused on disillusion among ex-militants with the strategy adopted over the last ten years by the al Qaeda leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. This discontent, they said, was the result partly of the strategy's failure to achieve its aims and partly the appalling effects of the violence it has entailed, and they linked it to a broader decline in the popularity of al Qaeda and its ideology across both the Islamic world and immigrant communities in the west... LINK

Here Comes the Second World

Ron Tang — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:42:00 -0400

This article is adapted from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order.

The term "second world" has fallen out of use. It used to mean countries of the socialist world; today I use the phrase to refer to those countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia which are both rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, postmodern and pre-modern, cosmopolitan and tribal -- all at the same time. This is not a temporary state between third world and first, but a permanent condition in which winners and losers are chosen by collectives like cities and corporations rather than entire states.

I spent most of 2005-07 travelling through over 40 second-world countries, and the message I kept hearing was that each country plans to shape its future its own way, not according to the "Washington consensus" or any other foreign action plan. Kazakh ministers tout the "Kazakh way," Indian diplomats boast of the "Indian way," Brazilian officials confidently assert the "Brazilian way." They all want globalisation, not America, to be their patron. They may all have big internal weaknesses, but they are all players in the new geopolitical marketplace in which Europe and China offer packages of aid, trade and military assistance at least as attractive as the American one. Why align with any one patron when you can play off all sides to get what you want? India's trade with China is booming, while it gets many of its weapons from Russia and pursues a nuclear deal with the US. Non-alignment is passed; this is the age of multialignment.

There is a vast second world intermediate layer between the first-world core and third-world periphery. In his recent National Interest essay "World Without the West," Steven Weber pointed to Asian regionalism and new alliance blocs such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. But this is not just about the rise of China and India. It is also a story of oil-producing states around the world, Arab statelets with big sovereign wealth funds and other regional swing states from Brazil to Malaysia. In many ways these "emerging markets" have already emerged; they receive most of the world's foreign direct investment, hold a majority of its currency reserves, and are rapidly growing consumer markets whose preferences western producers cannot ignore.

The second world is shaking up the western order most visibly in economic bodies like the World Bank, IMF and WTO. Voting rights on the IMF's board are shifting, while each year brings new demands that neither the IMF nor World Bank leadership should automatically be chosen by Washington, London or Paris. Both institutions are now just aid and advisory bodies for Africa, since Asian nations have paid off their debts -- and are launching their own Asian Monetary Fund -- while Brazil and Argentina, previously the IMF's two largest debtors, have accelerated their payments of arrears (Argentina with the help of Hugo Chavez's $2.5bn) and have washed their hands of the Washington consensus. In the WTO, it is increasingly clear who has to make the concessions to move the Doha round forward: the west.

But the second world phenomenon is more than economic. Consider UN security council reform, where Brazil, India, South Africa and Nigeria are leading candidates for new permanent seats. Then there is the aforementioned Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a young alliance led by China and Russia sometimes called the "Nato of the east." It sets the terms of trade, business standards and counterterrorism and narcotics policies for all of central Asia. Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan are soon to become members. At the SCO's most recent summit in Kyrgyzstan, Russia and others called for an international conference to discuss options for stabilising Afghanistan -- implying that Nato had failed. A Chinese-led "provisional reconstruction team" is being planned for Afghanistan; China has acquired rights to develop what could be the world's largest copper mine in Logar province, where it will also build electric power plants and a railway.

Meanwhile, a new Arabism is emerging. It is fuelled by Gulf oil revenues being reinvested within the region rather than in London or Geneva, building hotels and housing, creating jobs, launching media such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, and even tacitly teaming up with Islamist movements to inspire an overall rejection of western meddling in Arab politics. You feel this energy most powerfully in Dubai, the new capital of Arab civilisation (see last month's Prospect). Here, first-world European technology and managerial skill has met the manpower coming from third-world Asia to create a 21st-century Manhattan on the Persian Gulf.

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The second world is reshaping the world, but it does not control it. What can be felt just as powerfully is the relative decline of the US and the increasing assertiveness of both the EU and China. It may not be a multipolar world -- certainly not militarily -- but these three represent distinct imperial systems whose gravity is pulling on the second and third worlds. The friction can already be felt in second-world zones such as South America, where China's growing economic presence, particularly in Venezuela and Brazil, has diminished America's Monroe doctrine -- that Latin America is in the US's exclusive sphere of influence -- prompting a quiet visit of US officials to Beijing to warn about not undermining democracy in the region. Meanwhile, China has extended a $50bn line of credit to Nigeria, more than the entire annual western foreign aid budget. The shift of leverage away from the US is also noticeable in Saudi Arabia, where American bases are being vacated and the royal regime's investments are being distributed more equally to American, European and Chinese recipients.

The cold war, and its aftermath, was a geographical anomaly: America was able to run the world from the other side of it. But it is the rising Europe and China which sit on opposite ends of Eurasia, their influence expanding towards each other to meet in the middle around the Caspian sea. This is why Russia is the second world's ultimate swing state. But Russia knows that in the long term its rhetoric of strategic partnership with China cannot hold, for China is exploiting the timber and mineral resources of the Russian far east at a rapid rate. Russians are voting with their feet, migrating westwards out of Siberia towards more amiable climes, and leaving behind them empty resource-rich expanses bordering the world's most resource-hungry nation. As Russia sees the real east rising, it will realise that it must throw its lot in with the west.

For now, however, Russia fits the second world archetype of an upstart power with a mind of its own. So too does Turkey, which despite being a Nato anchor in the cold war shunned America's Iraq war in 2003 and has set its sights ever more closely on some kind of permanent relationship with the EU. It takes only one glance at Istanbul's shimmering skyline to realise that even if Turkey never becomes an actual EU member, it is becoming ever more Europeanised. Turkey receives over $3bn in FDI from EU countries, plus 23m tourists last year. Ninety per cent of the Turkish diaspora lives in western Europe and sends home $1bn per year in remittances and investments. This capital is spreading growth and development eastwards with new housing, kilim factories and schools.

Yet growing Turkish wealth and confidence has also fuelled a neo-Ottoman spirit that is tangible in Istanbul and Ankara, a feeling that the Turks are powerful enough to play by their own rules with respect to Iraq and its Kurdistan region, Syria, Israel and the Caucasus. With the rising volume of oil coming through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan, Turkey is now the conduit for over 10 per cent of the west's energy needs.

We might ask: are the superpowers pulling the second world -- or the second world pulling the superpowers? The answer is: neither. The second world is becoming a self-bootstrapping anti-imperial belt, with links flourishing across its regional zones. Russia has offered to build nuclear reactors for Iran and Libya, Kazakhstan and Malaysia are holding trade conferences to link their regions, and an oil production alliance is sprouting between Iran, Indonesia and Venezuela. Chinese fly directly to Brazil, while Brazilians fly directly to Africa, Indians are investing from Syria to Vietnam and the Abu Dhabi investment authority spreads its wealth from Wall Street to Nanjing Road. The intensity, complexity and density of second-world ties within itself -- no longer routed through Washington or Moscow -- is more than any one power can control.

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The way to understand these changes is to think regionally: to evaluate how power dynamics are evolving within eastern Europe, central Asia, South America, the middle east, Africa and southeast Asia -- and to assess the relative and changing influence of America, Europe and China in these regions.

America once dominated the Pacific through a "hub-and-spoke" model of alliances with Australia, Japan, Korea and Thailand, but that is now giving way to Asian regional institutions ranging from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to the annual East Asian summit -- to which America is not invited. China will lead this new Asian hemispheric order, which ties together all countries falling in the India-Japan-Australia triangle, with China sitting at the centre. Trade within this greater Asian zone has surpassed trade across the Pacific. The region's impressive network of global cities -- Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Seoul -- increasingly serve as portals channelling capital and investments into China or into projects and companies with heavy Chinese involvement. Overall, it is as if the Asian tradition of imperial hierarchy, which pre-dates the western, Westphalian nation-state system by millennia, is returning, with China at its the heart.

China may be the imperial system which towers over the region as America does in its hemisphere and the EU in the eurozone, but remember that in second-world zones everyone is playing all sides at once. First-world Japan maintains a close alliance with the US and could rearm rapidly, while third-world India is drawing America ever closer as well through naval assistance, arms purchases and a nuclear deal. Malaysia and Thailand continue to conduct joint military exercises with the US, but also buy ever more weapons from China. Geopolitical theories would predict that in such a period of flux, and in such a region where the declining hegemon (America) and rising contender (China) experience a power transition, conflict is inevitable. We will soon find out whether the theory is correct.

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It is time to stop pretending that the US will stay on top until a clear rival emerges to directly challenge its pre-eminence. Look at its recent foreign policy record: failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, failure to eradicate al Qaeda or to create peace in Palestine, failure to advance global trade talks or to reconcile with Latin America -- the list goes on. The present caution on interventions and democratisation is motivated not by sudden enlightenment, but by the shock of failure. America is waking up to soft power and public diplomacy because hard power has failed and no alternative remains.

Getting America's house in order won't happen on a single chilly inauguration day in January 2009. The state department is broken to an extent that outsiders fail to appreciate. And nobody seems to know how to restore American prestige. One would expect hard-headed guidance based on experience, observation and connections, yet instead one hears -- from ex-administration officials from the Clinton or Bush eras -- the platitudes of detached utopians. Grand acronyms for new multilateral institutions are proposed -- ignoring the fact that even security council reform has not budged in over a decade. Massive civilian reserve corps are plotted -- while congress cuts the diplomatic budget by 10 per cent. These are proposals suited either to a world that no longer exists, or a country that no longer has the will or power to carry them out.

The test for the west is not whether an introspective Europe and a stubborn America can see eye-to-eye again, but whether or not they can shape an increasingly assertive second world. Can the transatlantic powers set global trade, labour and environmental standards? Can they roll back radicalism in the Arab world? Can they do anything about Chinese arms shipments to Sudan or Burma? Can they thwart Russia's attempts to regain control of its near abroad and its manipulation of gas markets? These are questions Bush, Barack, Barroso, Blair and anyone aspiring to a pan-western role must be able to answer if they still believe in the power of the west.

America Still Works

Ron Tang — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Anyone who reads the serious press about the condition of the US might be excused for believing that the country is headed towards a series of deep crises. This impression is exacerbated by economic slowdown and by the presidential primaries, in which candidates announce bold plans to rescue the country from disaster. But even in more normal times there are three ubiquitous myths about America that make the country seem weaker and more chaotic than it really is. The first myth, which is mainly a conservative one, is that racial and ethnic rivalries are tearing America apart. The second myth, which is mainly a liberal one, is that America will soon be overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists. The third myth, an economic one beloved of centrists, is that the retirement of the baby boomers will bankrupt the country because of runaway social security entitlement costs.

America does, of course, have many problems, such as spiralling healthcare costs and a decline in social mobility. Yet the truth is that apart from the temporary frictions caused by current immigration from Latin America, the US is more integrated than ever. Racial and cultural diversity is in long-term decline, as a result of the success of the melting pot in merging groups through assimilation and intermarriage, and many of the country's infamous social pathologies, from violent crime to teenage drug use, are also seeing improvements (see page 29). Americans are far more religious than Europeans, but the "religious right" is concentrated among white southern Protestants. And there is no genuine long-term entitlement problem in the US. The US suffers from healthcare cost inflation, a problem that will be solved one way or another in the near future, long before it cripples the economy as a whole. And the long-term costs of social security, America's public pension programme, could be met by moderate benefit cuts or a moderate growth in the US government share of GDP. With a linguistically united, increasingly racially mixed supermajority and a solvent system of middle-class entitlements, the US will remain first among equals for generations to come, even in a multipolar world with several great powers.

Let's begin with the alleged "balkanisation" of America by race and ethnicity. Almost everything that is written about this subject is misleading, not least official US government reports. For example, a 2004 press release by the US census bureau, based on analysis of data from the 2000 census, had this sensationalist title: "Census Bureau Projects Tripling of Hispanic and Asian Populations in 50 Years; Non-Hispanic Whites May Drop to Half of Total Population." Headlines like this have inspired leftists to declare that multiculturalism is inevitable in a post-white America, led nativists and racists to lament the supposed untergang of white America under a demographic avalanche from the third world, and caused Europeans to wonder whether in an America with a non-white majority, the focus of foreign policy will shift to Mexico and Central America, or Africa or Asia.

There's just one problem: there isn't going to be a non-white majority in the US in the 21st century. And probably not in the 22nd or 23rd, either. The "coming non-white majority" myth is based on a misuse of the arbitrary racial classification system adopted in the 1970s, which assigns all Americans to the categories of white, black, Asian, native American or "Hispanic." According to the government, "Hispanics" may be of any race as long as they are of Latin American ancestry. So, a blond, blue-eyed Argentinian-American whose grandparents showed up from Germany in Argentina mysteriously in 1946 is a "Hispanic" while an Arab-American Muslim is a "non-Hispanic white."

The myth of the non-white majority is based on treating "Hispanic" as the name of a race. Adding all Hispanics to all blacks and Asians makes it possible to claim that California and Texas already have "non-white" majorities, and that the US as a whole will follow in the second half of this century. But if you don't treat Hispanics as members of a single race, then the picture looks quite different. According to the census bureau, the US population in 2050 will look like this: non-Hispanic white, 50.1 per cent; Hispanic, 24.4 per cent; Asian, 8 per cent; black, 14.6 per cent, with a small residuum in other categories. The non-Hispanic white share of the population will drop from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to a bare majority in 2050.

But what if instead of bracketing all Hispanics together (white and non-white), we bracket all whites together (non-Hispanic and Hispanic)? In the 2000 census, 48 per cent of Hispanics identified themselves as "white," 2 per cent as black, 6 per cent as belonging to two or more races and 43 per cent as members of "some other race." Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the pattern of Hispanic self-identification by race is the same in 2050. If 48 per cent of the Hispanic population in 2050 calls itself "white" and that group is added to the non-Hispanic white category, then the combined non-Hispanic white and Hispanic white group in 2050 would be 61.8 per cent. So, instead of the decline in the non-Hispanic white population from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to 50.1 per cent in 2050, there would be a more moderate reduction in the white majority from 74.5 per cent in 2000 to 61.8 per cent in 2050.

Even this understates the proportion of the "white" population in 2050, because it ignores intermarriage. While fewer than 10 per cent of foreign-born Hispanics marry non-Hispanics, by the third generation the out-marriage rate is half. If the children of Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites are treated as white, then the white majority in 2050 will be even larger. Then there is intermarriage among whites with Asians and blacks. Black intermarriage rates, though rising, are low-around 15 per cent. Already about half of Asian-Americans (migrants from India, China and elsewhere) marry outside of their official "race," mostly to non-Hispanic whites, and whatever the government calls them, their children tend to be seen as generic whites. So let's take half of the Asian population in 2050 and add it to the white population. This increases the white majority to 65.8 per cent in 2050. Here, then, is the real story: the white American population will decline from 75 per cent to about 66 per cent between 2000 and 2050. Big deal.

Nor is there any long-term danger of the US becoming permanently polarised between anglophones and Spanish speakers. Among second-generation Hispanics, roughly half speak no Spanish at all, while fewer than 10 per cent speak only Spanish. By the third and fourth generations, Hispanics in the US are almost completely anglophone. In their rate of linguistic assimilation, they resemble the European immigrants of earlier generations. The claim that in a globalised, wired world the incentives for linguistic assimilation are weakened appears to be false, at least in the case of American Hispanics. And they are the only group that count, in this respect, because all other linguistic minorities in the US are negligible, as a percentage of the total population.

If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of "whiteness" that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar "non-Hispanic whites." In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today's old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry.

So the US is not going to fall apart along ethnic lines, like Yugoslavia or Iraq. Will it be taken over by religious fundamentalists? Many observers abroad have the impression that Americans are growing more religious, while Europeans are growing more secular. This simply isn't true. Americans are far more religious than western Europeans, but in the US, no less than in Europe, the long-term trend is towards greater secularism.

In a 2001 study of religious attitudes among Americans, researchers at the City University of New York discovered that the number of Americans who profess no religion had grown from 8.16 per cent in 1990 to 14.17 per cent in 2000. Americans with no religion at all are now the third largest belief group in the US after Catholics and Baptists, and their number, around 30m, is almost as great as that of Baptists, who number around 34m. Moreover, the number of Americans who, even if they believe in God, do not belong to any religious organisation went from 46 per cent in 1990 to a 54 per cent majority by 2000, according to the study.

When the subject is actual church attendance rather than vague spiritual belief, the gap between the US and Europe shrinks further. According to the Gallup millennium survey of religious views, the number of North Americans (the US plus Canada) who attend church at least once a week is 47 per cent, compared with the west European average of 20 per cent. And some scholars say that the number is inflated, because many Americans are embarrassed to tell pollsters how rarely they attend church.

According to the Gallup poll, the number of North Americans who believe that the Bible is "the actual word of God" has fallen from 65 per cent in 1963 to just 27 per cent in 2001. At the same time, attitudes among Americans toward homosexuality, sex out of marriage and censorship are growing steadily more liberal. Abortion is the major exception; younger Americans tend to be more opposed to abortion than their elders. Possibly this reflects the growing use of ultrasound by parents to view their offspring in the womb, a practice which may be inadvertently undermining the distinction that supporters of liberal abortion laws have tried to make between foetuses and babies.

If the American people are getting less religious, then why is "God talk" growing in public life? But the truth is that it isn't growing; it's always been part of public life. Liberal presidents of the 20th century like Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson referred to God and the Bible and Christ more often than most of today's conservative politicians. During the second world war, Franklin D. Roosevelt tended to use the phrases "western civilisation" and "Christian civilisation" interchangeably. At the 1941 Atlantic summit in Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill joined the British and American sailors in singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "O God Our Help in Ages Past" and "Eternal Father Strong to Save." Bush and Blair may have prayed together but they never would have sung hymns together in public.

The trend towards European-style secularism is most advanced among the "blue states" of the coasts. The American south is much more conservative. But even the south is far more secular and liberal than it was a generation or two ago. Religious southern politicians simply sound like the midwestern and northeastern politicians of previous times.

In fact, the "religious right" is almost entirely a phenomenon of white southern Protestants. It is as much an ethnic and regional movement as a religious movement. Before the civil rights movement, white southern Christians identified themselves as... well, white southern Christians. But after the civil rights era, talk about "whites" or "white southerners" sounded too much like the rhetoric of racists, so white southern conservatives emphasised the Christian part of their identity (hadn't Martin Luther King been a Christian minister?). White southerners never pursued another option, defining themselves in secular ethnic terms as "Scots-Irish" or "Anglo-Celtic," because as members of the majority in the south, and as descendants of pre-1776 settlers, they think of themselves simply as "Americans" or "southerners" rather than members of an immigrant group like Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans. In the same way, in Britain the majority English tend to think that the Scots, Irish and Welsh are "ethnic" while they are not. In short, the language of religion in the US, as in the Balkans and Iraq, has less to do with theology than with ethnocultural politics. Religious right conservatism is the ethnic identity politics of Scots-Irish and Anglo-American southerners in the former confederacy.

White southern populists and black Americans, a majority of whom still live in the south, have one thing in common. Because the now moribund southern planter aristocracy dominated secular political, commercial and educational institutions, the community leaders of blacks and poor whites alike tended to be Protestant pastors like Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson -- and Jerry Falwell and Mike Huckabee. And for outsiders to assume that American fundamentalists are mere pawns of the capitalist elite is a mistake. According to polls, the only group as hostile to big business and big banks as the radical left are members of the religious right. When Mike Huckabee, the presidential candidate from Arkansas and former Baptist minister, thunders against Wall Street, he is as serious as William Jennings Bryan was a century ago. (The white and black strains of southern religious populism were briefly united in the 1990s, when the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson teamed up to protest against the conditions of mostly white coal miners in Appalachia.)

The US, then, is no more likely to become a Protestant version of theocratic Iran than it is to become a Yugoslavia. Yet the conventional wisdom says America is still in danger of bankruptcy and economic collapse as a result of the looming costs of government entitlements for the retiring baby boom generation. But when alarmists talk about the "entitlements crisis" in the US, they conflate two programmes -- social security (the public pension system) and Medicare (the public health insurance system). The growth of social security, as a share of GDP, will be modest until the end of this century, and any shortfalls can be dealt with by minor adjustments in how it is paid for. There is a bigger problem with Medicare, whose costs, if they continue to grow as at present, will eat up an additional 10 per cent or more of GDP by the mid-century. But Medicare's budgetary problem is a reflection of the healthcare cost inflation that is affecting the entire US economy, private and public alike. The bad news is that there is no consensus about the cures for healthcare cost inflation, much less its causes. It is much easier to ignore the spreading cancer of healthcare costs while focusing on the toothache of long-term social security funding. To date the healthcare plans of many Democrats and Republicans alike have focused more on the spread of coverage than on the harder challenge of cost containment. But we can be sure eventually that the US will face and deal with healthcare cost inflation, perhaps by unpleasant methods, like rationing by government, employers or insurers.

In comparison with the problem of healthcare cost inflation, the alleged crisis of social security is puny. Claims of a "crisis" revolve around two dates: 2017, when the social security surplus runs out and the programme becomes a pure pay-as-you-go system based on annual payroll taxation; and 2041, when payroll tax revenues fall short of expenditures. Even in 2041, social security will be able to pay most of its obligations. The crisis, then, is nothing more than the fact that taxes will have to be raised or benefits cut before 2041 in order to supplement a mostly sound system. (Great confusion is spread by the phrase "unfunded liabilities." The only programmes with "unfunded liabilities" are those, like social security, paid for by dedicated taxes, in this case a payroll tax. This permits calculations of future divergences between dedicated tax revenues and expenditures. The Pentagon budget is paid from general tax, so the concept is inapplicable.)

The use of dates like 2017 and 2041, moreover, gives a specious precision to claims that in fact are extremely dubious. This is underlined by the fact that the US government regularly revises the date of the alleged social security apocalypse, as it reconsiders its assumptions. The "intermediate" calculations on which current estimates are based are almost certainly unrealistic. They assume a low rate of productivity growth in the US over the next half century of 1.7 per cent. This is only slightly higher than the average of 1.5 per cent in the long period of low productivity growth from 1973 to 1995. But from 1996 to 2006, US productivity growth boomed at an annual rate of between 2 and 3 per cent in most years. Productivity growth slowed after 2004, but surged ahead in the last quarter at 6.3 per cent. Nobody knows whether the resumption of high productivity growth in the last decade was a blip or the beginning of a new pattern. The point is that if US productivity grows at a rate near the historic average of 1945-2008, the picture for the solvency of social security is much brighter. (This is not the place for a full discussion of economic prospects, but it is worth noting that US industrial output rose nearly 35 per cent in the past ten years, faster than any other G7 country.)

Moreover, what the doomsayers neglect to tell the public is that if the cap on the amount of income subject to payroll taxation were lifted, the result would be such a flood of money from high earners that the problems of social security would be solved forever. And even if payroll taxes were raised on all workers, as a result of productivity growth the average earner in 2050 may well have wages that in real terms are at least 60 per cent higher than today's. As a share of my income, I pay far higher taxes than my great-grandfather, but I am much better off because less of a lot is greater than more of a little.

It is possible, and in my opinion likely, that in the future congress will choose to infuse general revenues into the social security system, as an alternative to raising payroll taxes on all workers. If that is the case, then the only question is whether social security is affordable. The answer is clearly yes. The share of government at all levels as a percentage of GDP is lower than that in almost all other industrial democracies. In the US, government expenditure at all levels -- federal, state and local -- as a share of GDP hovers just above 30 per cent (despite spending a staggering $626bn on military-related costs in 2007, over 22 per cent of the federal budget). By comparison, the EU-25 average was 47 per cent in 2005. An additional 2 per cent of GDP can be added to social security over the next half century without altering America's position as one of the least statist economies in the world.

Indeed, the baby boom generation caused an increase in US government expenditures once before -- when they were children. In the 25 years from 1950 to 1975, expenditures on public education (in the US, a local and state responsibility) rose from 2.5 per cent to 5.3 per cent. What counts is not the ratio of workers to retirees -- which will have gone from 18 to 1 in 1950 to slightly more than 2 to 1 in 2050 -- but the dependent-to-worker ratio, with dependents defined as children under 20 and retirees over 65. The dependent to worker ratio will be less in 2050 -- 80 to 100 -- than it was in the 1960s, when there were 90 dependents to 100 workers because fewer women worked and there was a large cohort of baby boomer children. What's more, American workers in 2050 will be far more productive than they were in the 1950s.

Barring catastrophes, the US in 2050 will be much more racially integrated; will remain culturally and linguistically quite homogeneous; and will be much richer, easily able to afford to pay for social security and decent healthcare. And partly as a result of this unity and prosperity, the US will continue to be a major power, though not a solitary hegemon.

The rise of China, India and other Asian powers is indeed shifting the balance of global wealth and power. On this point the conventional wisdom is correct. But the relative rise of Asia will come at the expense of Europe, whose share of global GDP will decline, chiefly because its population will be stable or shrinking. Not that relative proportions are all that important. The Europeans of 2050 will still be much richer than the Chinese and Indians in per capita income, and, thanks to productivity growth, much richer than the Europeans of today too. According to Goldman Sachs, the Nafta (the US plus Mexico and Canada) share of global GDP in 2050 will be 23 per cent. This is close to the US shares of global GDP in 1960 (26 per cent) and 1980 (22 per cent). And per capita income in the US will be far higher than that in China and India into the 22nd century, if not beyond.

Why is there such a gap between the conventional wisdom about America's future and the actual trends? Part of the answer involves the bias toward sensationalism that afflicts all commercial media. Another factor is the distortion of the facts by special interests. For example, the myth of the social security crisis has been spread by, among others, people in the securities industry who would like to see this successful public pension programme privatised.

The US is facing major challenges -- but they are not the ones usually identified. Long-term racial and linguistic balkanisation may not be a problem, but class lines in the US are hardening; there is now less social mobility in the US than in Europe. The US is not in danger of becoming a theocracy, but it is in danger of becoming a plutocracy. Social security does not threaten to bankrupt America, but healthcare cost inflation does. The US is not going to be eclipsed any time soon by another superpower, but it may exhaust itself by allowing its commitments to exceed the resources that the public is willing to allot to foreign policy. The sooner the mythical problems can be dismissed, the sooner the genuine challenges to America's future can be identified and addressed.

Dangerous History

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:59:00 -0400

Robert Kagan is one of a small group of neoconservative authors who are read because of their influence on the Bush administration. The son of Donald Kagan, a Yale classics scholar and prominent older neoconservative, Robert is the brother of Frederick Kagan, who is credited as one of the architects of Bush’s "surge" in Iraq. Robert has penned various manifestos in favour of unilateral US world domination with William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard and son of Irving Kristol, "godfather of neoconservatism." Like George W Bush, the son of a president, neoconservatives preach democracy while practicing nepotism.

In his book Of Paradise and Power (2003), Kagan famously explained that Americans are from Mars while Europeans are from Venus. He argued that pusillanimous Europeans, freed from defending themselves by their reliance on US power, like to denounce as reckless militarism what is in fact a tough-minded American appreciation of the power realities of the world. (Kagan’s claims about American and European attitudes were demolished by Miroslav Nincic and Monti Narayan Datta in the summer 2007 issue of Political Science Quarterly. They point out that according to polling data, most liberal, blue-state Americans share "European" attitudes toward force. Kagan’s "American" worldview is no more than that of red-state Republicans.)

Of Paradise and Power was a neoconservative polemic disguised as comparative politics.

Dangerous Nation, Kagan’s most recent book, is a neoconservative polemic disguised as a history of US foreign policy from the colonial period to the Spanish-American war of 1898 (a second volume, focusing on the 20th century, is promised). The implicit targets of Of Paradise and Power were Europeans and Americans who criticised the Iraq war and the neoconservative policy of unilateral US hegemony. The implicit targets of Dangerous Nation are those who argue that the Iraq war, and neoconservative strategy in general, represent a departure from US foreign policy traditions, rather than their inevitable and desirable fulfilment.

Consider this paean to the Iraq war, from the conclusion of Dangerous Nation: "Most American historians have been no less condemnatory than Europeans of the American decision for war. That the US should have gone to war for abstract reasons -- for morality, for humanitarianism, for the liberation of others, and when ‘no vital American interests was involved’ -- has baffled and disturbed commentators, historians and political scientists. Yet by far the most persuasive interpretation of the war with Iraq is that it was indeed undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, for humanitarian purposes, just as Bush and everyone who supported the war claimed at the time... Measured against the real world of nations and human beings, the intervention in Iraq had an unusually high degree of selflessness."

Well, in fact Kagan didn’t actually write that. I lied to you. In the paragraph above, I substituted "Iraq" for "Cuba" and "Bush" for "McKinley" in order to show what Kagan is up to. Critics of neoconservative grand strategy and the Iraq war often compare them to the Spanish-American war and the US naval imperialism of a century ago, denouncing both episodes as violations of US political traditions. Very well then, Kagan is saying, I’ll accept the comparison -- but invert the evaluation. Thus the alleged precedent for Iraq, the Spanish-American war, becomes a "good war" -- a democratic crusade.

Kagan concludes, in the final paragraph of the book: "Too few have seen or perhaps have wanted to see how the war was the product of deeply ingrained American attitudes toward the nation’s place in the world. It was the product of a universalist ideology as articulated in the declaration of independence."

The declaration of independence made us do it! Fidelity to the principles of the founding fathers not only compelled the US to crush and reconstruct the slave south during and after the civil war, but also compelled it to spread the "universal ideology" of Jefferson and Lincoln by seeking coaling stations in the Pacific, seizing Guantanamo bay from Spain in 1898-and, presumably, by invading Iraq in 2003.

Kagan’s polemical history is aimed not only at anti-Iraq liberals, but also at America’s realists like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jim Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the first President Bush. Here a little explanation is in order. The theory of Realpolitik was introduced to the US in the mid-20th century by European emigre intellectuals like Hans Morgenthau, Nicholas Spykman and Henry Kissinger; it found an eloquent American ally in George Kennan. Puzzled that American statesmen like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt did not behave as Bismarck and Metternich would have done, the mostly continental European realists argued that Americans were political innocents who failed to understand power politics and were deluded by notions of spreading democracy.

Enter the "first-wave" neoconservatives of the 1970s. These cold war liberals and anti-Soviet leftists criticised Nixon’s detente policies and Kissingerian Realpolitik, instead emphasising the moral and ideological dimension to the struggle. Following the cold war, the "second-wave" neoconservatives of the 1990s, who for the most part had jettisoned social and economic liberalism, took this reasonable reaction against Kissingerian realism to an extreme, promoting a vision of US foreign policy as altruistic Idealpolitik that was as unbalanced as Realpolitik.

Dangerous Nation is an anti-realist tract, the first sustained US diplomatic history written from a neoconservative Idealpolitik viewpoint. Ironically --- or perhaps fittingly, given the origins of neoconservatism on the anti-Soviet left -- Kagan owes a big intellectual debt to histories of US foreign policy written by progressives and radical leftists, who dominated the field for much of the 20th century. Here again, a word of explanation is in order. The progressive historians tended to blame American wars on particular special interests, holding slave-owners responsible for the Mexican-American war and blaming US entry into the first world war on munitions-makers and financiers. The radical historians, by contrast, have tended to view foreign policy in more systemic terms as the result of an inexorable drive toward capitalist expansion. Moralistic progressives and anti-capitalist radicals alike have tended to agree on one point: the US faced no genuine foreign threats after the end of the British-American war of 1812. Invocations of foreign threats by American policymakers have therefore been propaganda, disguising the genuine (usually economic) reasons behind America’s expansion.

A minority of historians, most of them military historians, take a different view. These historians take the belief of American statesmen and soldiers in foreign threats seriously. The threats posed at various times by France, Britain, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union may have been exaggerated or unreal, but American policymakers believed them. Their beliefs are sufficient explanation for most US military policies, which, even if they incidentally benefited American businesses, were not carried out because of them.

Call the two schools of American foreign policy history the inner compulsion school and the threat-and-response school. The one sees US foreign policy as the manifestation of internal social dynamics; the other, as a response, not always a rational one, to perceived security threats. The realist critique of US foreign policy traditions is a variant of the inner compulsion school. The realists explain US foreign policy history in terms of naive, crusading idealism, instead of the machinations of special interests (the progressive historians) or the dynamics of imperialism (the radicals). But whatever their political differences, realists, progressives and radicals tend to agree that because the US has faced no serious great-power threats since its early days, the explanation of its foreign policy must be sought in some inner compulsion-be it ideological or economic.

But the fact is that little if any of what the US did in the late 19th and early 20th century can be understood except as a response -- an exaggerated response, in some cases, but still a response -- to great-power threats, in particular the threat of imperial Germany. Having rejected Bismarck’s moderate foreign policy in favour of an aggressive strategy of Weltpolitik, the Kaiser and his officers in the 1890s began seeking bases and allies in Mexico, the Caribbean and South America, as well as islands in the Pacific and protectorates in China. Germany’s rapid naval build-up inspired America’s. Germany and the US competed for Pacific island bases in Samoa and the Philippines, where, during the Spanish-American war, Germany’s fleet threatened the US fleet. In order to combine the Atlantic and Pacific fleets in the event of war with Germany or Japan, the US rigged Panama’s independence and hastily built the Panama canal. And it was to deny Germany any excuses for occupation of Caribbean or Central American countries that the US asserted the exclusive prerogative of its own military to enforce international law on behalf of foreign creditors in Latin America. As early as 1903, the navy drew up plans for pre-empting German landings in the western hemisphere by occupying key Caribbean islands, a plan carried out by the US in the early years of the first world war.

The late Eugene Rostow, one of the original generation of neoconservatives, got this right in his book Toward Managed Peace (1993), written in the threat-and-response tradition: "Thus on the surface of things, the US decision to declare war on Spain was a humanitarian intervention....Viewed in the context of world politics, however, the Spanish-American war was also something quite different, the first act of America’s visible adaptation to the emerging structure of world politics. The US had confronted German ambition directly in Samoa, Hawaii and the Caribbean. And the US and especially its navy were already sensitive to the military potential of Japan."

By contrast, Kagan argues that America went to war with Spain not because the government sought naval bases like Guantanamo in an independent Cuba to strengthen it in its naval rivalry with Germany and others, but because America felt sorry for the Cubans and hated Spanish monarchism.

Following the same method, Kagan minimises the threats to US security posed by Britain and France in North America in the first half of the 19th century. Rostow, by contrast, puts US rivalry with these powers at the centre of his explanation of the annexation of Texas and the incorporation of California during the Mexican-American war. "Britain and France... began to take measures to stop US expansion to the south." The British "opposed the annexation of Texas to the US, frowned on US aspirations toward Cuba and were engaged in a long and difficult negotiation with the US about how to partition Oregon between the US and Canada." As for California, President James K Polk "had already taken naval and other precautions in California, because the British and French governments had been urged by their representatives both in Mexico and California to seize California before the US could."

Of the British interest in California in the 1840s, Kagan does not say a word. He acknowledges that "The British... wanted to turn Texas into a buffer against further American southward expansion." True to his theme, however, he interprets British actions, like American actions, in terms of ideology. Citing Britain’s offer to support Texas against Mexico if Texas abolished slavery, he argues that Britain was motivated by the desire to abolish slavery worldwide. According to Kagan, the unintended result of Britain’s altruistic intentions toward black Texans was the Mexican-American war, a bad war waged by a southern Democratic president, and brought about by a conspiracy of southern slave-owners to create a tropical empire in their own interest.

Kagan’s treatment of the Mexican-American war as an attempt by American slave-owners to stamp out British abolitionism is typical of his tendency to find ideology behind every tree. Kagan interprets British policy toward the US in the early 19th century on the basis of George Canning’s concern about "a division of the world into Europe and America, republic and monarchy." Curiously, in the 1820s, Britain was a militant ideological power dedicated to promoting monarchy (albeit moderate) at the expense of American republicanism. Then, in the 1840s, Britain was a militant ideological power again, this time an admirable one, threatening southern slavery by promoting the abolition of slavery in Texas. For Kagan, it is not enough for Britain and France to have preferred a simple divide-and-rule strategy. The strategies of European powers, like those of the US, must be explained in terms of ideological polarities.

It is a fair guess that in his second volume, Kagan will claim that pure idealism and hatred for Prussian militarism, fascism and communism, rather than a mundane search to ensure US national security and prosperity in a peaceful global environment, explains the US interventions in the world wars and cold war, followed by the disinterested wars to replace dictatorship with democracy in Panama, Serbia and Iraq. With something of the spirit of Jacobin radicals and Soviet communists, neocons like Kagan view the US as the headquarters of a militant, universal ideology that must be spread by force of arms. Mainstream Americans, by contrast, have been reluctant warriors.

The owl of Minerva flies at dusk; Kagan’s ingenious but unconvincing attempt to rewrite American history to make Americans into neoconservatives and the Iraq war the logical consequence of the declaration of independence is doomed to fail, just as the policy for which he seeks to provide a usable past has already failed. Dangerous Nation is of no value to students of the history of US foreign policy. It will be of some interest, however, to students of the history of neoconservative propaganda.

Back to Bhutto?

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 12:21:00 -0400

One of the nice things about Pakistan at the moment is that it makes me feel young again. I first went there in 1988 as a stringer for the Times to cover the aftermath of General Zia's assassination and the military-managed "transition to democracy." The inheritors of government were Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s party (PPP), but the military was careful to balance her electoral victory by keeping an ally of theirs, Mian Nawaz Sharif, as chief minister of the most populous province, Punjab.

Nineteen years have passed, the Soviet Union has fallen, the US has invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, China has emerged as an economic superpower and my own life has been transformed -- and yet in Pakistan we are once again talking about a managed transition from military rule to that of Benazir Bhutto.

That the world can have changed so much, and Pakistan so little, says a great deal about the relationship between socioeconomic stagnation and political stability there -- an underlying stability which belies the surface volatility of Pakistani affairs. Pakistani society, with its thick network of clan and family allegiances, has proved incapable of generating modern political mass parties. What it has is one dynastic party, the PPP, and others which are mere congeries of local bosses and landowners. There are only two "real" Pakistani parties in the western sense -- with grassroots organisation and some sort of programme -- and both of them would tear the country apart if they ever gained supreme power. These are the MQM, an ethnic Muhajir party, and the Jamaat-Islami, a radical Islamist force.

Closely related to the weakness of the parties is the strength of the military. The military is strong because it is the only Pakistani institution which works according to modern Weberian rules, as a more or less orderly, meritocratic and bureaucratic force with an esprit de corps and a capacity for self-discipline. The weakness and corruption of the civilian parties has allowed the military repeatedly to seize power -- and military power in turn has contributed to civilian weakness.

While General Musharraf’s days are probably numbered, it is unlikely his replacement will make much difference to Pakistan’s future, because the underlying factors determining that future will remain. According to the constitution, Pakistan must hold parliamentary elections by early next year. There has been talk of Musharraf postponing the elections, but this seems unlikely. Washington is opposed, and generals will be unhappy about a move that would probably involve the army in domestic repression.

The office of president is elected by members of parliament. Fearing that the parliamentary elections will lead to a victory for the opposition parties, Musharraf plans to have himself re-elected by the existing parliament this autumn -- something the opposition rejects as illegal.

The US is discreetly pushing for a deal in which Musharraf would remain as president but step down as military head, and either Bhutto or one of her nominees would become prime minister. For Bhutto to become premier would, however, require not only dropping the corruption charges that have driven her into exile, but also an amendment to the constitution, which at present permits only two terms as prime minister.

Such a deal would probably be the best way forward for Musharraf, Bhutto and indeed Pakistan. However, following the protests that have erupted in recent months following Musharraf’s suspension of the country’s chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhary, Musharraf’s authority has slipped so badly that many PPP activists are now hoping to get rid of him altogether. Bhutto has formed a tenuous alliance with her old enemy Nawaz Sharif, with a view to putting together a coalition government after the elections. As for Musharraf, such is his contempt for Bhutto and the PPP -- which is not unjustified, given their record in power -- that he still appears to be hoping to keep them out of power altogether. It is even possible that he would feel so humiliated by the prospect of sharing power with Bhutto that he would prefer to resign.

Despite the protests, the president’s declining power is not the result of a new mass movement demanding radical change, but of the same factors that have brought down most previous Pakistani administrations: the inability of the government to provide enough patronage to political elites; and an alliance of those elites with the perpetually discontented, semi-employed youth of Pakistan’s cities.

At a certain point, when serious unrest spreads to those areas of northern Punjab from where the army recruits most of its soldiers, the high command steps in and forces a change of administration -- whether civilian or military. In my view, this is by far the most likely scenario for Musharraf’s eventual departure: other generals will demand it, and will then manage a "transition to democracy," just as they did in 1988. The Pakistani opposition and media are dubbing the current unrest a "revolution," but it is nothing of the kind. The only truly revolutionary force in Pakistan today are the radical Islamists, and while they are increasingly troublesome and violent, they are -- thankfully -- very far from being able to stir a nationwide revolution.

So the first thing to understand about Pakistan’s coming "transition to democracy" is that it won’t be that at all. It will be a return to civilian government, by the same old civilian elites, with the military retaining a strong, if veiled, share of power. It will be helped by the fact that the PPP, while it will certainly be the biggest party after next year’s elections, is unlikely to gain more than 30 per cent of the vote. It will therefore have to create a more or less unstable coalition with other parties, most of which have no reason to love it.

The actual nature of governance will not change at all, as far as most Pakistanis are concerned. It is certainly unlikely to get any better. Management of the economy could get a great deal worse -- for in this area at least, Musharraf and his prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, have the best record since another military ruler, Ayub Khan, in the 1960s.

A return of civilian rule is also unlikely to make Pakistan a more reliable US client state in the "war on terror." A dangerous illusion is growing in Washington, fuelled by PPP representatives, that a future PPP-led government, because it will be democratically elected, will have the legitimacy to launch a military crackdown on the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan frontier.

This is deeply counterintuitive, since every poll shows that a big majority of Pakistanis detest US strategy in general and the US role in Afghanistan in particular, and disapprove even of existing levels of Pakistani help. This is especially true of the Pashtuns -- 15 per cent of the population -- from whom most Taliban support in Pakistan is drawn. When I visited Peshawar in May, I asked a group of students at Peshawar University -- including PPP supporters -- if they would accept a military crackdown in the tribal areas if a democratic government ordered it. Every one said no.

When the army launched a major campaign against the Taliban in Waziristan in 2005, the result was anger and even desertion among Pashtun troops. Given the military’s deep fears of mutiny, it seems unlikely that a civilian government, even one backed by Washington, could force the military to obey.

So whatever happens, Pakistan will be stuck with a highly imperfect system in which the military continues to wield a great deal of power; and the west will be stuck with a very imperfect ally in the "war on terror," or at least the war in Afghanistan. Then again, an imperfect ally is a great deal better than the military mutiny and state collapse that could result if Washington does manage to subjugate a Pakistani government to its will.

The World After Bush

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:15:00 -0500

On 20th January 2009, George W Bush, barring his death, resignation or impeachment, will be succeeded by the 44th US president. Whether Republican or Democrat, the next president will not only inherit a number of crises, but will be in a considerably weaker position to deal with them.

Much of America’s weakness will be the result of self-inflicted wounds: the unnecessary invasion of Iraq, along with the Bush administration’s gratuitous insults to allies, its arrogant unilateralism and its hostility to international law. But as tempting as it may be to put all of the blame on the Bush administration, the truth is that most of the trends that will limit American power and influence in the next decade are long-term phenomena produced by economic, demographic and ideological developments beyond the power of the US or any government to influence. The rise of China, the shift in the centre of the world economy to Asia, the growth of neo-mercantilist petro-politics, the spread of Islamism in both militant and moderate forms -- these trends are reshaping the world order in ways that neither the US nor any of its allies can do much to control.

In retrospect, we can view the period in US and world history that has just ended as "the long 1990s." Those years began in euphoria with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and expired in frustration in late 2003, when the swift victory of the US and its allies over Iraq’s armed forces was succeeded by an insurgency that exposed the limits of US power. But even if 9/11 and the Iraq invasion had never occurred, the conventional wisdom of the long 1990s would have crumbled at some point after colliding with reality.

Take the central assumption that at the end of the cold war a bipolar world was replaced by a unipolar one. This was true only in the military dimension -- and even there American power was exaggerated. The US has no peers when the task is breaking the conventional armed forces of second and third-tier states like Iraq and Serbia. But when it comes to asymmetric warfare, in the form of campaigns against insurgents like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military, like all conventional militaries, finds itself in the position of a clumsy Goliath trying to quash a nimble and determined David. Stealth bombers and world-class fleets are no help in house-to-house fighting, and missile defences are no good against improvised explosive devices. As the wars in Vietnam and Iraq tragically demonstrate, the US military is not very good at "military operations other than war" -- and America’s enemies know it.

If dimensions of power other than military hardware are included, then it is clear that bipolarity gave way not to unipolarity but to multipolarity -- and did so as early as the 1970s, after Europe and Japan had recovered from the devastation of the second world war and China began its rise. In 1971, President Nixon famously announced the emergence of a world with five power centres: the US, the Soviet Union, Europe, Japan and China. The world was already multipolar a decade before the cold war ended, and the fact that the other great powers have been content to let the US battle various minor states from the Balkans to Afghanistan no more makes the world unipolar than Britain’s 19th-century naval hegemony made Britain the hegemon of Europe, rather than one of several European great powers.

Consider another piece of 1990s conventional wisdom -- the global human rights revolution. The winner of the ideological wars of the 20th century, we were told, was libertarian, capitalist democracy. The enthusiastic embrace of western European norms by former communist eastern European nations seemed to provide evidence for this. But even in eastern Europe, nationalism has been the most powerful movement -- witness the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia and the bloodless partition of Czechoslovakia, not to mention the disintegration of the Soviet Union along ethnonational lines.

The fact is that most of the people engaged in political violence today -- from the Basque country to the Philippines -- are not fighting for individual rights, nor for that matter are they fighting to establish an Islamist caliphate. Most are fighting for a national homeland for the ethnic nation to which they belong. For most human beings other than deracinated north Atlantic elites, the question of the unit of government is more important than the form of government, which can be settled later, after a stateless nation has obtained its own state. And as the hostility towards Israel of democratically elected governments in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon shows, democracy can express, even inflame, pre-existing national hatreds and rivalries; it is not a cure for them.

Then there is economics. The conventional wisdom of the long 1990s was correct that capitalism had defeated socialism, but mistaken to assume that the libertarian capitalism fashionable in the US in the late 20th century was the winner. The Japanese never adopted laissez-faire capitalism and China and Russia in recent years have devised their own mixes of state capitalism and free markets.

The growth of China and India, which was supposed to herald a global free market, may instead inaugurate a new age of mercantilism, as Asian industrial powers like China, unwilling to rely on free markets for energy sources and commodities, engage in negotiations with supplier countries. Already bilateral contracts are displacing free markets in oil and gas, and regional trade pacts are proliferating even as global trade talks are stalled. The competition between the rising industrial nations of Asia and the older industrial democracies enhances the leverage of authoritarian and nationalist states endowed with critical resources, particularly oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. These countries view China not only as a customer but also as a counterweight to the US.

In the US press, China is often portrayed as an aggressive, threatening power. China may indeed become a dangerous revisionist state in the future. In the past two decades, however, China has been a conservative, status quo power, seeking to defend the state-centred international system that many in the US and Europe have sought to transcend. It was the US that designed the state-based UN system in the 1940s, and in rejecting its norms, the US under both Clinton and Bush in the long 1990s repudiated its own earlier foreign policy tradition.

The conventional wisdom of the long 1990s, then, was mistaken in every respect. The world did not become unipolar in the 1990s; it has been effectively multipolar since the 1970s. Ethnic nationalism, not liberalism or democracy, is the most powerful force in the world today. And the competition of the industrial nations for sources of supply and markets is bolstering mercantilism and economic regionalism, incompatible with the laissez-faire utopia touted by panegyrists of globalisation in the long 1990s.

All of these trends would constrain US foreign policy, even if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001 rather than George W Bush. It will now be additionally constrained by the legacy of the eight-year Bush administration. When the next president is inaugurated, the US will almost certainly still be in Iraq. Rather than have the world witness the inglorious departure of US forces from a chaotic Iraq in the final years of his presidency, Bush is likely to cede the problem to his successor.

Like Nixon between 1969 and 1973, the next president may be forced to cut America’s losses in a failed war while trying to preserve as much of US military credibility as possible. The American right can be counted on to accuse even a Republican president of being weaker than Bush, whose record neoconservatives in the media will idealise in retrospect. So the need to ward off domestic political attack and to demonstrate US power to the world even after failure in Iraq, make it likely that the next president will only pull out of Iraq after a show of strength against enemies in Iraq itself or some other target.

The eventual withdrawal of most US forces from Iraq is not likely to be as complete as the abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975. The US probably will not occupy bases for decades, as it has done in South Korea. But it may well continue to provide military support in some form, either to an embattled Iraqi government or to favoured clients in an Iraqi civil war.

The middle east outside of Iraq may look much as it does today, barring unforeseen events like coups, revolutions or major wars. If Bush in his final years in office were to wage war against Iran to degrade its nuclear capability, all bets would be off. But it seems unlikely that he would choose to wage war on three fronts simultaneously, across an area from the Mediterranean to Pakistan, against three foes who have little in common -- Sunni nationalists in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Shia Iran. More likely than direct Iranian-American conflict would be a proxy war fought out in the shattered states of Iraq and Lebanon.

Assuming that the US does not attack Iran and that the Iranian theocracy does not give way to some other regime, the next president may be forced to deal with a nuclear Iran. Despite claims that Iran’s leaders are "insane," the fact that nuclear states as unstable as Mao’s China and Musharraf’s Pakistan have been deterred from using nuclear weapons suggests that Iran, too, could be deterred.

But if Iran breaks Israel’s monopoly of nuclear weapons in the middle east, one result might be further nuclear proliferation. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s son and likely successor Gamal has speculated that Egypt needs its own nuclear energy programme, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and even post-Saddam Iraq, or its successor states, might follow suit. Fear of North Korea’s new nuclear status might, similarly, prompt Japan and even South Korea to develop a deterrent. And if several new nuclear states emerge south and east of Europe, it is possible that even Germany might be tempted to develop its own nuclear force de frappe.

In any event, the Atlantic is likely to grow even wider after Bush leaves office in 2009. Those who hope for a resumption of warm transatlantic ties will probably be disappointed. The old Atlanticist northeastern foreign policy establishment has gone the way of the dodo. Its place has been taken chiefly by career military officers, who are mainly moderate conservative nationalists from the American south, and by a bewildering variety of civilian ideological, ethnic and economic pressure groups that contribute political appointees to the executive branch. The political centre of gravity in the US will continue to shift south and west. Even if blue-state liberalism wins power, it will do so on the basis of largely foreign-born Latino immigrants in the sunbelt, who are not a likely constituency for a new Atlanticism.

Some hope that one result of the Iraq debacle will be a new US commitment to a lasting settlement of the Palestinian question. The opposite is more likely to be the case. As long as it is occupying an Arab country, the US must seek to appeal to Arab public opinion. Even Bush has offered rhetorical support for a Palestinian state. But if the US extricates itself from Iraq and Afghanistan and stays out of other Muslim countries, then the already feeble incentive for American politicians to try to balance support for Israel with appeals to Arab and Muslim public opinion will be even weaker. The abandonment of the US attempt to be the hegemon of the middle east, and US withdrawal from Iraq, might actually empower those in the US who make the simple claim that the US and Israel are allies in world war four (Norman Podhoretz’s term; he considers the cold war to be world war three) against the hydra-headed menace of "Islamofascism."

The strengthening of the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim right in the US following an inglorious retreat from Iraq would strain US-European ties even further. In the second decade of the 21st century, Europeans may be surprised to find themselves denounced by some liberal Democrats as well as by conservative Republicans as "Eurabian" appeasers.

In US domestic politics, the long-term beneficiaries of the Iraq war may be the Republicans who waged and lost it, rather than the Democrats who (mostly) opposed it. This is less paradoxical than it seems. Countries that win wars are relaxed about their security and more open to parties of the left -- think of Clinton’s two terms after the cold war and before 9/11, or Britain’s rejection of Churchill after the second world war. Defeated countries tend to seek strong men on the right, as France did after Algeria and the US did after Vietnam, which was followed by a series of Republican presidencies.

American history teaches that opposition even to failed or unpopular wars can be fatal to a political party. The Federalist party ceased to exist following the war of 1812, which most of its members had opposed, and the Whig party, which was highly critical of the Mexican war of 1846-48, collapsed following that war’s conclusion. The fact that both those parties, like today’s anti-war Democrats, were based in New England does not bode well for American liberals. Already the right is dusting off the "stab in the back" legend used after Vietnam in order to blame the failure in Iraq on liberals in the media and the Democratic minority in congress. This is absurd, of course, but the equally absurd effort to shift blame for the US failure in Vietnam to reporters and the anti-war movement was a political success in the 1970s and 1980s.

Retrospective glorification of the failed Iraq war, however, may be accompanied by a much more cautious military policy on the part of the next few presidents. There is likely to be a revival of the Powell doctrine: the US should send troops only as a last resort, only where military action is appropriate, and only with overwhelming amounts of force. Almost certainly, public rejection of further large-scale military adventures will produce an "Iraq syndrome."

The next president or two is likely to emulate Ronald Reagan in combining rhetorical toughness with operational caution. Reagan was decried as a warmonger for his rhetoric -- such as his description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." In practice, however, Reagan avoided costly military engagements. He pulled US troops out of Lebanon in 1983, following the Hizbullah attack on the US marine barracks, and his one conquest was the comic-opera invasion of tiny Grenada. The rest of the time Reagan preferred to rely on proxies armed, subsidised and trained by the US, like the Contras who fought Soviet proxies in Nicaragua and the mujahedin who battled the Soviets in Afghanistan. As those cases attest, reliance on proxies who may not share American values can cause moral and political dilemmas. Equally troubling, sometimes, are long-range bombing and missile attacks designed to spare the lives of US soldiers, like Clinton’s air war on Serbia and the use of missiles by the US and Israel in attempts to assassinate enemies at a distance. Nevertheless, it seems likely that if the alternative is a high American body count, Bush’s successors are likely to prefer sending CIA advisers or missiles to deploying the marines.

The collapse of the neoconservative strategy of US hegemony in the middle east and the world does not mean success for the major alternative. In the Democratic party’s complacent foreign policy establishment -- although not among its restive voters -- neoliberalism continues to be the preferred alternative to the strategy of the Bush administration. Neoliberals agree with neoconservatives about the goal of US foreign policy -- a global free market in a world policed by a benevolent, hegemonic US. Their differences are in the details. Although they are as opposed in practice to a multipolar world order as neoconservatives, neoliberals argue that the US should make its global hegemony more palatable to other countries by endorsing international law and working through international institutions like the UN and NATO. And while many neoliberals like Kenneth Pollack, Ivo Daalder and Peter Beinart joined with neoconservatives to endorse "regime change" by war in Iraq, neoliberals are more sympathetic to the idea of "humanitarian intervention" in countries like Kosovo and Sudan to end ethnic massacres.

Following Tony Blair’s election in 1997, Clinton and Blair promoted the neoliberal agenda in the name of the third way. At home, this meant embracing free markets while also relegitimising and modernising the welfare state. In foreign policy, neoliberals envisioned a Euro-American partnership that would send troops on missions of mercy around the world. Neoliberalism rested on a utopian vision of history as progress from the modern world of sovereign nation states to a postmodern world order, in which individual human rights replaced state sovereignty as the organising principle of global politics.

The idea of a Euro-American entente intervening in the name of human rights in former western colonies in Africa, the middle east and elsewhere always looked very much like colonialism by another name. In any event, the grandiose ambitions ofeoliberal "humanitarian hawks" and "liberal imperialists" never had a chance of being realised because of the unwillingness of western publics to support such a costly policy in the absence of other strategic concerns.

The Gulf war in 1991 and the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan involved classic threats to security, and even the Iraq war was justified on the grounds of the alleged nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi links to al Qaeda, not on humanitarian grounds. The only humanitarian war to date has been the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999. It was so unpopular in the US that Clinton waged it unconstitutionally without a declaration of war from the US congress, and without UN security council authorisation because of the opposition of China and Russia. It seems unlikely that the US and its European allies would have sent tens or hundreds of thousands of troops to Darfur, even without the Iraq war, whose costs now make it all but certain that no such large-scale western intervention will take place. If it did, then the US and perhaps some European allies like Britain would find themselves fighting and killing Muslims on three fronts -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan -- while being blamed for Israel’s actions in Palestine and Lebanon.

Even if there were political support in the US for an ambitious neoliberal policy of humanitarian intervention, the instruments for it simply do not exist. The US military has been strained to the point of shattering by the Iraq debacle, ruling out significant interventions in the name of nation-building, peace-making or peacekeeping elsewhere. To meet manpower goals, the military has been forced to cancel leave for many units, and to meet recruitment goals, the military has been forced to induct 40 year olds and to lower educational and IQ requirements. As was the case after Vietnam, it will take a decade or longer to rebuild the demoralised US military.

To make matters worse for would-be liberal imperialists in the Democratic party, the failure of the US military in Iraq, as in Vietnam, shows that US military culture remains deeply hostile to pacification and nation-building efforts of the kind that would dominate a foreign policy devised by humanitarian hawks. Policy wonks in Washington may fantasise about creating US "constabulary forces" to engage in small-scale interventions, but that idea will not be supported by congress, the public or the military itself after Iraq.

Bush’s economic policy, like his foreign policy, dooms any attempt by his successors to implement the foreign policy vision of Clinton-Blair neoliberalism. Some neoliberals call for a vast programme of investment in developing countries and the middle east in particular. Whether the problems of these countries can be ameliorated by a new Marshall plan is questionable. The original plan merely restarted factories and markets in West Germany and western Europe, which were already industrialised nation states, and did not attempt to modernise primitive territories contested by rival ethnic nations.

In any event, the experiment will never be put to the test, because the money is not there. Bush and the Republican congress have spent it on the Iraq war and tax cuts for the wealthy few, creating the biggest deficits since the Reagan years. In the second decade of the 21st century, reducing the federal budget deficit at a time when the retirement of the baby boomers is driving up government costs is likely to be the priority in Washington. US foreign aid is unlikely to increase, and may well be slashed, even as China and petropowers like Iran and Russia extend their influence by means of subsidies and arms sales.

Whatever happens, it is clear that the long 1990s are finally over, their utopian hopes beyond realisation. The neoconservative vision of one big global market policed by the hegemonic US in a unipolar world now looks quaint. So does the related neoliberal vision of an alliance of north Atlantic democracies repudiating post-1945 notions of state sovereignty in order to dispatch soldiers and democratic missionaries to end ethnic conflicts, enforce human rights and bring democracy and liberty to the middle east and Africa. The multipolar and mercantilist world coalescing around us looks very different from the unipolar free-market order described by Clinton, Blair and Bush, even though it would have seemed familiar to Richard Nixon and Charles de Gaulle.

The neoconservative fantasy of unilateral global hegemony has been discredited, and the neoliberal dream of a UN-led international order is an illusion as well. A concert of great powers, organised and led by the US, offers the best hope for reconciling international peace with liberal order, in a world in which the perfect remains the enemy of the good.

What Were the Causes of 9/11?

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 11:28:00 -0400

No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some -- especially in the Muslim world -- to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11’s grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government engineered them; the "Cheney-Bush energy junta" planned them so that they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.

Osama bin Laden himself claims that al Qaeda was solely responsible for 9/11. In 2004, he released a video in which he explained his dealings with lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. After the largest criminal investigation in history, the US government’s 9/11 commission also concluded that al Qaeda was solely responsible for the attacks.

Attributing the sole responsibility for 9/11 to al Qaeda then brings us to the larger question: what caused al Qaeda to launch the attacks? Explanations for the attacks can be sorted into two categories -- the seemingly plausible but flawed, and the more credible.

Plausible but Flawed Theories

Poverty. Many politicians and commentators see the poverty of the middle east as a factor. (Some political leaders even argued that the Doha round of trade talks, launched soon after 9/11, were intended partly to quash terrorism.) This claim is not supported by the evidence. Those who attacked on 9/11 were sons of the middle eastern middle and upper class, not the dispossessed. Throughout recent history, from the Russian anarchists to the German Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s, terrorism has largely been a bourgeois endeavour. Al Qaeda is no different.

Madrassas. A related argument to the poverty canard is that madrassas, religious schools that teach the Koran by rote and sometimes instill a simplistic view of jihad, are breeding grounds for terrorists. Quite the opposite. Madrassa graduates have rarely, if ever, carried out major anti-western attacks. None of the 9/11 hijackers attended a madrassa and most had been to college, several of them in the west. Bin Laden went to the European-influenced Al Thagr high school and then studied economics at King Abdulaziz University, both in Jeddah.

They hate us because of the freedom-loving people we are. President Bush has been the principal exponent of this view. In 2004, Bin Laden responded by asking why, if this were true, had he not attacked freedom-loving Sweden?

The CIA. The notion that Bin Laden is a CIA creation, and that the attacks on the Trade Centre and Pentagon were "blowback," is a standard analysis among leftists around the world. Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has written that Bin Laden was "among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA." This theory is advanced as axiomatic but it has no supporting evidence. The real scandal here is not that the CIA helped to create Bin Laden during the 1980s, but that the agency had no idea of his significance until sometime in 1996, when it set up a special unit to track the Saudi exile.

Weak and failing states. It is a staple of international relations theorists that weak and failed states are attractive bases for terrorists and criminals. That the 9/11 attack was first hatched in 1996, as al Qaeda moved its base from a weak state, Sudan, to a failed state, Afghanistan, seems to underline this theory. Certainly al Qaeda thrived under the incompetent rule of the Taliban. However, much of the 9/11 plot took shape in Hamburg, where most of the pilots and secondary planners of the attack became more radical than they had been while living in their home countries. Although Afghanistan was critical to the rise of al Qaeda, it was the experience that the plotters acquired in the west that made them both more militant and better equipped to carry out the attacks.

Saudi financiers. Little or no hard evidence has been proffered for the claim that Saudi financiers were sponsoring al Qaeda, and the 9/11 report determined that there was no evidence that the money for the attacks came from Saudi Arabia. Moreover, money is not the "oxygen" of terrorism. Terrorism is a cheap form of warfare -- the first Trade Centre attack in 1993 cost only a few thousand dollars. No amount of money will buy you 19 young men willing to commit suicide in a terrorist operation. According to court documents entered in the trial of the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 operation cost a little over $ 200,000, a trivial sum considering the damage it inflicted. The pilots who flew the hijacked planes into two of the world’s most famous buildings saw what they were doing as an act of worship. Al Qaeda’s strength lies not in its material resources, which are small, but in its beliefs.

The Saudis in general. Some commentators have assigned much of the responsibility for the rise of al Qaeda to the Saudis. This is also the contention of many of the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, who have signed on to a class action lawsuit against a range of Saudi institutions and individuals. In this view, the Saudi royal family made an unholy alliance with the purist Wahabbi sect and exported Wahabbism in order to shore up its shaky credibility as the custodian of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. The historian Bernard Lewis has observed: "The custodianship of the holy places and the revenues of oil have given worldwide impact to what would otherwise have been an extremist fringe in a marginal country... Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or some similar group obtains total control of the state of Texas, of its oil and therefore its oil revenues, and having done so, uses this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom, peddling their own peculiar brand of Christianity."

The Saudi export of Wahabbism did eventually bear disastrous fruit in Afghanistan with the advent of the Taliban, a regime that was recognised and supported by only three countries, including Saudi Arabia, and was influenced by Wahabbist doctrines. However, since at least the mid-1990s, al Qaeda’s ultimate goal has been the destruction of the Saudi royal family and so it is a stretch to blame the Saudi state for al Qaeda’s recent activities. Moreover, there are millions of Muslims who follow a Wahabbist version of Islam, yet only a very few turn to violence.

The clash of civilisations. Samuel Huntington famously predicted that clashes between civilisations would replace cold war rivalries, and 9/11 seemed to vindicate his theory. But did it? Most Muslims condemned 9/11, and after the attacks Bin Laden’s attempt to ignite a clash of civilisations fizzled out. It is rather the US war of choice in Iraq that galvanised anti-Americanism among Muslims.

Suicide terrorism, including 9/11, is a response to foreign occupation. In his influential 2005 book Dying to Win, political scientist Robert Pape examined a series of modern suicide campaigns and concluded that they are driven not by religious zeal but by foreign occupations (see review by Peter Nolan and Patrick Belton, Prospect online). Pape pointed out that the secular Tamil Tigers have engaged in one of the most protracted and bloody campaigns of suicide terrorism of the modern era. Pape’s theory might explain why 15 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, as there was a substantial US presence in the Saudi kingdom around that time, but it does not explain the other four hijackers, who were Lebanese, Egyptian and Emirati, none of whose countries were occupied by the US.

Moreover, events in Iraq have undermined Pape’s contention that foreign occupation is the driving force behind suicide attacks, particularly in the Islamic world. Suicide attackers in Iraq are largely foreigners, and half or more are estimated to be Saudis, while the rest are from other middle eastern countries, with a sprinkling of Europeans. Only around 10 per cent of the suicide attacks in Iraq are undertaken by Iraqis. It is not foreign occupation, but rather a globalised culture of martyrdom that is driving suicide attacks in the Muslim world. Indeed, in 2003, US forces in Saudi Arabia -- Bin Laden’s original casus belli -- were reduced almost to zero, yet Bin Laden and his followers continued to advocate attacking the US.

We are in a clash with a totalitarian ideology, similar to communism. The most serious proponent of this idea is Paul Berman, whose 2003 book Terror and Liberalism places "Binladenism" squarely in the tradition of modern millennial totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism: "9/11 was an event in the 20th-century mode. It was the clash of ideologies. It was the war between liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilisation ever since the calamities of the first world war." While this idea has some attractions, Binladenism does not pose the existential threat to the west presented by the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. And although it is certainly an ideology, it has precious little to do with either communism or Nazism, both of which abolished the very notion of God. Binladenism is not just another totalitarian ideology of the kind which we have seen before. Al Qaeda may use modern technology but it is animated by a 7th-century view of the world that has nothing in common with Hitler or Stalin.

The death rattle of political Islam. Could 9/11 be the last gasp of the radical Islamists? French academic Gilles Kepel has made the point that Islamist states such as Sudan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan have turned out to be abject failures. In his book Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam, published after 9/11, Kepel argued, "in spite of what many commentators contended in its immediate aftermath, the attack on the US was a desperate symbol of the isolation, fragmentation and decline of the Islamist movement, not a sign of its strength." However, Kepel was writing before the US occupation of Iraq, the election of Hamas in Palestine, and the present troubles in Lebanon. Today political Islam seems to be on the march around the middle east, and to treat 9/11 as the swansong of militant Islamists seems like wishful thinking.

The Most Credible Explanations

None of the following explanations is alone sufficient to explain the attacks, but together they do help us to understand 9/11. They are ranked in ascending order of importance.

10. Radicalisation caused by the Afghan jihad. While there is no evidence that the CIA trained or funded Bin Laden or his followers, the Afghan war against the Soviet Union nonetheless radicalised a generation of Arab militants. They swapped business cards, gained battlefield experience and came to believe that they had played a big role in the destruction of the Soviet Union. All of these factors would lead to the founding of al Qaeda in 1988, established to take the jihad to other parts of the globe.

9. A particular reading of Islamic texts. In the many discussions of the "root causes" of Islamist terrorism, Islam itself is rarely mentioned. But if you were to ask Bin Laden, he would say that his war is about the defence of Islam. We need not believe him but we should nevertheless listen to what our enemies are saying. Bin Laden bases justification of his war on a corpus of Muslim beliefs and he finds ammunition in the Koran to give his war Islamic legitimacy. He often invokes the "sword" verses of the Koran, which urge unprovoked attacks on infidels. Of course, that is a selective reading of the Koran and does not mean Islam is an inherently violent faith, but to believers the book is the word of God.

8. Decline and stagnation in the middle east and the "humiliation" of the Islamic world. Bernard Lewis is the best-known exponent of the idea that the Muslim world is in a crisis largely attributable to centuries of decline, symbolised by the fate of the once powerful Ottoman empire and its ignominious carve-up by the British and French after the first world war. Lewis also argues that the problems of the middle east were later compounded by the import of two western ideas -- socialism and secular Arab nationalism -- neither of which delivered on their promises of creating prosperous and just societies. The economic and political failures in much of the Muslim world are underlined by statistics such as the fact that the non-oil revenues of all of the gulf states add up to less than the GDP of Finland.

Three weeks after 9/11, as the US began launching air strikes against Taliban positions, a video of Bin Laden sitting on a rocky outcrop was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. On the tape, Bin Laden said, "What America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we have tasted for scores of years. The Islamic world has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for 80 years... Neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live in it in Palestine, and not before the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad." So in his first statement following 9/11, Bin Laden emphasised the "humiliation" of the Muslim world and the negative effect of US policies in the middle east. In this sense, Bin Laden seems to agree with Bernard Lewis. Indeed, Bin Laden often talks about the "humiliation" suffered by Muslims at the hands of the west. For Bin Laden, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Ottoman empire between the French and British has the same resonance that the 1919 treaty of Versailles did for Hitler. It must be avenged and reversed.

7. The spread of communications technology. The humiliation felt by some Muslims is amplified by the communications revolution. The umma, the global community of Muslims, is far more aware of conflicts around the Islamic world -- and the role of the west in some of those conflicts -- than was the case a decade ago. The creation of Al-Jazeera in 1996 coincided with Bin Laden’s first call for a holy war against the US. Since then Arabic satellite channels and jihadist websites have proliferated, sensitising Muslims to the oppression of their co-religionists in Kashmir, Palestine, the Balkans and so on. These grievances have fuelled the spread of al Qaeda’s ideology and underpinned the rage of the 9/11 hijackers.

6. Authoritarian middle east regimes helped incubate the militants. Sayyid Qutb, the Lenin of the militant jihadist movement, and later Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s number two, were radicalised by their time in the jails of Cairo. It is no accident that so many members of al Qaeda have been Egyptians and Saudis.

5. The alienation of Muslim immigrants in the west. Three of the four 9/11 pilots and two key planners, Ramzi bin al Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, became more militant while living in the west. Perceived discrimination, alienation and homesickness seem to have turned them all in a more radical direction. This is true for other anti-western terrorists. Swati Pandey and I have examined the biographies of 79 terrorists responsible for five of the worst recent anti-western terrorist attacks. We found that one in four of these terrorists had attended colleges in the west.

4. US foreign policies in the middle east, in particular its support of Israel. By Bin Laden’s own account, this is why al Qaeda is attacking America. His critique has never been cultural; he never mentions Madonna, Hollywood, homosexuality or drugs in his diatribes. US support for Israel, especially the support it gave to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, first triggered Bin Laden’s anti-Americanism, which during the 1980s took the form of urging a boycott of US goods. He was later outraged by the "defiling" export of 500,000 US troops to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

3. Bin Laden is an astute tactical leader and rational political actor fighting a deeply felt religious war against the west. Like others before him, Bin Laden has made a rational choice to adopt terrorism as a shortcut to transforming the political landscape. It is clear from the 9/11 commission report that Bin Laden intervened to make two key decisions that ensured the success of the attacks. The first was to appoint Mohammed Atta to be the lead hijacker; Atta would carry out his responsibilities with grim efficiency. The second was to rein in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plans for ten planes to crash into targets in Asia and on the east coast of America simultaneously. That number of attacks would have been hard to synchronise and might not have succeeded.

2. 9/11 was the collateral damage of a clash within Islam. The view that 9/11 was the result of a conflict within the Muslim world was brilliantly articulated in early 2002 by middle east scholar Michael Scott Doran in a Foreign Affairs essay, "Somebody Else’s Civil War." Doran argued that Bin Laden’s followers "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity and think that the future of religion itself, and therefore the world depends on them and their battle." In particular, Egyptians in al Qaeda, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, hold this view, inheriting it from Sayyid Qutb, who believed that most of the modern middle east is living in a state of pagan ignorance. The Egyptian jihadists believed that they should overthrow the "near enemy"-middle east regimes run by "apostate" rulers. Bin Laden took the next step, urging Zawahiri that the root of the problem was not the "near enemy" but the "far enemy," the US, which propped up the status quo in the middle east.

1. The 9/11 attacks were the fruit of Bin Laden’s flawed strategic reasoning. Bin Laden’s total dominance of al Qaeda meant the organisation was hostage to his strategic vision. His analysis of US foreign policy was based on the US withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, after the attack on the barracks that killed 241 American servicemen, and from Somalia in 1993 after 18 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu. From these retreats, Bin Laden concluded that the US was a paper tiger, capable of withstanding only a few strikes before it would withdraw, leaving client regimes in the middle east vulnerable. But the US response to 9/11 was to destroy the Taliban regime and decimate al Qaeda. Although 9/11 was a tactical success for al Qaeda, it actually threatened the organisation’s future.

Some of the harshest critics of the 9/11 attacks have been al Qaeda insiders such as Abd-Al-Halim Adl, who in June 2002 wrote to the 9/11 operational commander, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "Today we must completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused. The east Asia, Europe, America, horn of Africa, Yemen, Gulf, and Morocco groups have fallen."

To conclude, 9/11 was collateral damage in a civil war within the world of political Islam. On one side there are those, like Bin Laden, who want to install Taliban-style theocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. On the other side there is a silent majority of Muslims who are prepared to deal with the west, who do not see the Taliban as a workable model for modern Islamic states, and who reject violence. Bin Laden adopted a war against "the far enemy" in order to hasten the demise of the "near enemy" regimes in the middle east. And he used 9/11 to advance that cause. That effort has, so far, largely failed.

Yet Bin Laden and his attacks on the US have shaped an ideological movement that will outlive him. Binladenism has drawn tremendous energy from the war in Iraq, and will probably gain further adherents from the conflict in Lebanon. Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was prescient when he warned in 2003 that the Iraq war would spawn "100 new Bin Ladens." It is that new generation of militants that is Bin Laden’s legacy.

Bipartisan Disaster

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:21:00 -0400

The foreign and security strategy of the Bush administration lies in ruins. The battering of the Lebanese state by Israel, with US support, came only months after US leaders vowed to support and defend that country as a beacon of democracy and progress in the middle east. The doublethink in US policy does not relate only to the contrast between the language of democracy and the disasters in Iraq and Lebanon. Even more striking is that this public rhetoric is diametrically opposed to America’s actual strategy in the middle east, admitted privately by many officials, which is a reversion to the pre-9/11 norm: US and Israel reliance on autocracies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere to hold down their own people. This is the strategy which Bush and the neoconservatives insist was proved to be bankrupt by 9/11; and whose proponents have been dismissed by Bush as racists because they supposedly don’t "believe that Muslims can self-govern."

America’s pre-9/11 strategy was based on a commitment to maintain stability in the middle east -- a tenuous and unsatisfactory stability, but stability nonetheless. The problem is that this strategy is now combined with a parallel US and Israeli strategy that is in effect promoting anarchy. In the case of the latest Israeli attack on Lebanon, this is deliberate.

Some leading neoconservative commentators, like Michael Ledeen in The National Review, speak openly of the need to cause "creative destruction" in the middle east by toppling the Syrian and Iranian regimes and risking the overthrow from within of key US allies like Saudi Arabia. But this ultra-radical approach is not the policy of the administration as it stands, which is much more confused and contradictory.

The bankruptcy of US strategy extends far beyond the middle east. Partly because the Bush administration neglected Afghanistan in order to attack Iraq, the Taliban is growing in strength. Incredibly, Osama bin Laden and the other planners of 9/11 are still at large on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, and killing or capturing them no longer seems even a second-order interest of the Bush administration.

North Korea’s nuclear missile plans have been hindered only by their own technological backwardness, and not in the least by US pressure. The plan to bring Ukraine and other former Soviet countries into NATO has collapsed, while still leaving Moscow infuriated. And more than 2,500 US soldiers are dead in a war in Iraq, which was launched on false pretences and conducted with great incompetence.

Among the US public, there is growing unease. But oddly for a mature democracy, there is no formal foreign policy opposition. Both Democrats and moderate Republicans oppose the most extreme plans of Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives, but on the great majority of issues -- the environment being a partial exception -- the Democratic establishment stands squarely behind the official line of the Bush administration. There are, it is true, two separate political oppositions to the present course of the Bush administration, but both oppose their party leaderships. The opposition among the Democrats consists of the old left liberals, descendants of those who opposed the Vietnam war. They are the forces that in August ousted the liberal hawk Joe Lieberman from his position as Democratic senator for Connecticut, forcing him to run as a pro-Bush independent. The opposition within the Republican party consists of the old-style moderate conservative realists, whose leading elder statesman is former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and whose most promising younger figure is Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

The lack of real opposition from mainstream Democrats has been disguised by the noisy demands from within the party for early withdrawal from Iraq and the counterattacks on this line both from within the Republican party and from leading Democrats. This however is something of a mock battle. In the first place, the Democrats concerned have absolutely no idea of what strategy to follow in the middle east after a US withdrawal. Second, on this issue the Democrats will be pushing on an open door over the two years to the next presidential election. The consensus among political analysts is that the Bush administration will have withdrawn US troops well before November 2008, if not from Iraq altogether, then from the streets.

As to the wider issues of US world strategy, the almost identical approach of the two party establishments is easy to demonstrate. One only has to read the speeches and statements of the two figures who at present seem most likely to be the contenders for the presidency in November 2008, Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

Both Clinton and McCain advocate early NATO membership for Ukraine, and have expressed strong hostility to the Putin administration in Russia. On Iraq, they differ mostly over the degree to which they criticise Bush’s execution of policy. But both oppose early or unconditional withdrawal. On the latest middle east crisis their words might as well have been drafted by the same speechwriter. Clinton states: "I want us here in New York to imagine, if extremist terrorists were launching rocket attacks across the Mexican or Canadian border, would we stand by or would we defend America against these attacks from extremists?... We will support Israel’s efforts to send a message to Hamas, Hizbullah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians... They do not believe in human rights, they do not believe in democracy. They are the new totalitarians of the 21st century."

In McCain’s words: "What would we do if somebody came across our borders and killed our soldiers and captured our soldiers? Do you think we would be exercising total restraint?... Israel has neighbours on its borders that are bent on its extinction." Both Clinton and McCain call for negotiations with Iran, but only on condition of Iranian surrender to US wishes, and with the military option as a threat.

On spreading democracy in the middle east, McCain says: "The promotion of democracy and freedom is... inseparable from the long-term security of the United States." In Clinton’s words: "Human freedom and the quest for individuals to achieve their God-given potential must be at the heart of American approaches across the region."

The simplest and most commonly cited explanation for this Democratic behaviour is domestic electoral calculation, based on the following very curious statistics from a New York Times/CBS poll in July. According to this survey, 54 per cent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of foreign policy, while only 35 per cent approve. Sixty-two per cent disapprove of how the administration is handling Iraq. Yet 51 per cent continue to approve of how the administration is conducting the war on terror in general, while only 42 per cent do not. And this reflects repeated polls showing that while disapproving of the actual Republican record over security, most respondents continue to have more faith in the Republicans when it comes to security. On the crisis in the middle east, while small majorities hold both Israel and Hizbullah responsible for the conflict and say that it would be better for the US not to take sides, 47 per cent approved and only 27 per cent disapproved of how George Bush was responding to the conflict.

It would be understandable if the Democrats were reacting cautiously to such poll figures by talking tough on foreign policy while developing an alternative strategy. However, after almost seven years of interacting with intellectuals from the Democratic establishment (above all during my previous job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) I am afraid that the bulk of the Democrat and Republican establishments speak the same way on foreign policy because they think the same way. And of course the elites do not just react to popular views, they also shape them.

First, both wings of the bipartisan establishment are American nationalists. They both believe passionately in the founding myths of American civic nationalism: America as the world’s greatest country, the world’s greatest democracy, the irreplaceable representative of freedom and democracy in the world, and therefore by moral right the world’s hegemon.

Second, the bipartisan establishment is made up of American imperialists. The ideological underpinning of the imperial programme stems from the aforementioned nationalist beliefs. Support for it is strengthened, however, by the class interests of the American policymaking establishment, with its immense professional and individual stakes in America’s global power. This power is not in itself bad. It has played a hugely positive role for humanity at certain points in the past, and could do so again. At present, however, the US establishment is pursuing a very dangerous course in the middle east and beyond. This is above all because the US is present everywhere, and thus impinges on the interests of every other major state in the world. And thanks to a combination of arrogance and confusion, it seems incapable of establishing priorities and taking domestically unpopular decisions.

The third reason why the Republicans and Democrats sound so alike is that both identify so closely with Israel, whether out of genuine belief or fear of the influence of the Israel lobby. This was demonstrated by the overwhelming votes in the Senate and House pledging unqualified support for Israel’s offensive in Lebanon (410 votes to eight in the case of the House). Unfortunately, the power of the lobby, and of the affinity to Israel, has come to have a critical effect on US policy towards Syria, Iran and, indeed, the Muslim world in general.

Since the present general line on foreign and security policy is adhered to by the bipartisan establishment, it follows that any revolt against it would have to enjoy huge support from ordinary Americans, and in particular the most important political constituency, the white middle classes of the "heartland." It would therefore have to appeal to the core traditions of this constituency. In this context, that means a mixture of intense nationalism with deep distrust of foreign entanglements -- a mixture unfairly dubbed "isolationism" by the imperial elites.

The left faces immense obstacles in appealing to the heartland. Its cosmopolitan traditions and above all its hostility to religion make it culturally alien to the world of the suburbs and small towns. It is also wedded to its own version of liberal interventionism in Darfur and elsewhere.

A more hopeful prospect in the long run lies in a coalition between the moderate realists and populists in the heartland in revolt against the costs of empire. As soon as it becomes clear to the white middle classes that a continuation of present levels of military spending and foreign policy activism will require sharp reductions in middle-class entitlements-social security, Medicare, mortgage relief and so on -- mass pressure for a withdrawal from present levels of engagement will become overwhelming.

In the long run I have faith in America’s ability to return to the path of rational and enlightened self-interest. My fear is that for this to happen, the US and the world will have to plunge into even greater disasters; and that before America returns to sanity, America’s obedient and much more vulnerable British vassals will have been attacked a dozen times, and with increasing degrees of savagery.