Perpetual Conflict

Interesting article advocating US-non involvement in military actions abroad.
The website :
http://www.d-n-i.net is very interesting to read for people with an interest in the debate within the USA about its wars abroad.

Nearly all wars in the twentieth century have both surprised and disillusioned all leaders, whatever their nationality. Given the political, social, and human elements involved in every conflict, and the near certainty that these mercurial ingredients will interact to produce unanticipated consequences, leaders who calculate the outcome of wars as essentially predictable military events are invariably doomed to disappointment. The theory and the reality of warfare conflict immensely, for the results of wars can never be known in advance.



Posted February 3, 2007
From The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World by Gabriel Kolko. Copyright © 2006 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used with permission of the author.

Nearly all wars in the twentieth century have both surprised and disillusioned all leaders, whatever their nationality. Given the political, social, and human elements involved in every conflict, and the near certainty that these mercurial ingredients will interact to produce unanticipated consequences, leaders who calculate the outcome of wars as essentially predictable military events are invariably doomed to disappointment. The theory and the reality of warfare conflict immensely, for the results of wars can never be known in advance.

Blind men and women have been the motor of modern history and the source of endless misery and destruction. Aspiring leaders of great powers can neither understand nor admit the fact that their strategies are extremely dangerous because statecraft by its very nature always calculates the ability of a nation's military and economic resources to overcome whatever challenges it confronts. To reject such traditional reasoning, and to question the value of conventional wisdom and react to international crises realistically on the basis of past failures would make them unsuited to command. The result is that politicians succeed in terms of their personal careers, states make monumental errors, and people suffer. The great nations of Europe and Japan put such illusions into practice repeatedly before 1945.

At the beginning of the 21st century only the U.S. has the will to maintain a global foreign policy and to intervene everywhere it believes necessary. Today and in the near future, America will make the decisions that will lead to war or peace, and the fate of much of the world is largely in its hands. It thinks it possesses the arms and a spectrum of military strategies all predicated on a triumphant activist role for itself. It believes that its economy can afford interventionism, and that the American public will support whatever actions necessary to set the affairs of some country or region on the political path it deems essential. This grandiose ambition is bipartisan and, details notwithstanding, both parties have always shared a consensus on it.

The obsession with power and the conviction that armies can produce the political outcome a nation's leaders desire is by no means an exclusively American illusion. It is a notion that goes back many centuries and has produced the main wars of modern times. The rule of force has been with mankind a very long time, and the assumptions behind it have plagued its history for centuries. But unlike the leaders of most European nations or Japan, the United States' leaders have not gained insight from the calamities that have so seared modern history. Folly is scarcely an American monopoly, but resistance to learning when grave errors have been committed is almost proportionate to the resources available to repeat them. The Germans learned their lesson after two defeats, the Japanese after World War Two, and both nations found wars too exhausting and politically dangerous. America still believes that if firepower fails to master a situation the solution is to use it more precisely and much more of it. In this regard it is exceptional – past failures have not made it any wiser.

Wars are at least as likely today as any time over the past century. Of great importance is the end of Soviet hegemony in East Europe and Moscow's restraining influence elsewhere. But the proliferation of nuclear technology and other means of mass destruction have also made large parts of the world far more dangerous. Deadly local wars with conventional weapons in Africa, the Balkans, Middle East, and elsewhere have multiplied since the 1960s. Europe, especially Germany, and Japan are far stronger and more independent than at any time since 1945, and China's rapidly expanding economy has given it a vastly more important role in Asia. Ideologically, Communism's demise means that the simplified bipolarism that Washington used to explain the world ceased after 1990 to have any value. With it, the alliances created nominally to resist Communism have either been abolished or are a shadow of their original selves; they have no reason for existence. The crisis in NATO, essentially, reflects this diffusion of all forms of power and the diminution of American hegemony. Economically, the capitalist nations have resumed their rivalries, and these have become more intense with the growth of their economies and the decline in the dollar – which by 2004 was as weak as it has been in over 50 years. These states have a great deal in common ideologically, but concretely they are increasingly rivals. The virtual monopoly of nuclear weapons that existed about a quarter-century ago has ended with proliferation.

Whether it is called a "multipolar" world, to use President Jacques Chirac's expression in November 2004, in which Europe, China, India, and even eventually South America follow their own interests, or another definition, the direction is clear. There may or may not be "a fundamental restructuring of the global order," as the chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council presciently reflected in April 2003, but the conclusion was unavoidable "that we are facing a more fluid and complicated set of alignments than anything we have seen since the formation of the Atlantic alliance in 1949." Terrorism and the global economy have defied overwhelming American military power: "Our smart bombs aren't that smart."

All of the many factors considered – ranging from events in Africa and the Middle East and Afghanistan to the breakup of Yugoslavia – wars, whether civil or between states, remain the principal (but scarcely the only) challenge confronting humanity in the twenty-first century. Ecological disasters relentlessly affecting all dimensions of the environment are also insidious because of the unwillingness of the crucial nations – above all the United States – to adopt measures essential for reversing their damage. The challenges facing humanity have never been so complex and threatening, and the end of the Cold War, while one precondition of progress, is scarcely reason for complacency or optimism. The problems the world confronts far transcend the Communist-capitalist tensions, many of which were mainly symptoms of the far greater intellectual, political, and economic problems that plagued the world before 1917 – and still exist.

Whatever its original intention, America's interventions can lead to open-ended commitments in both duration and effort. They may last a short time, and usually do, but unforeseen events can cause the U.S. to spend far more resources than it originally anticipated, causing it in the name of its "credibility" or some other doctrine to get into situations which are disastrous and which in the end produce defeats and will leave America much worse off. Vietnam is the leading example of this but Iraq, however different in degree, is the same. Should it confront even some of the forty or more nations that now have terrorist networks then it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere, but especially in Africa and the Middle East. The consequences of such commitments will be unpredictable.

The U.S. has more determined and probably more numerous enemies today than at any time, and many of those who hate it are ready and able to inflict destruction on its shores. Its interventions often triumphed in the purely military sense, which is all the Pentagon worries about, but in all too many cases they have been political failures and eventually led to greater American military and political involvement. Its virtually instinctive activist mentality has caused it to get into situations where it often had no interests, much less durable solutions to a nation's problems, and thereby repeatedly creating disasters and enduring enmities. America has power without wisdom, and cannot, despite its repeated experiences, recognize the limits of its ultra-sophisticated military technology. The result has been folly, and hatred, which is a recipe for disasters. September 11 confirmed that, and war has come to its shores.

That the U.S. end its self-appointed global mission of regulating all problems, wherever, whenever, or however it wishes to do so, is an essential precondition of stemming, much less reversing, the accumulated deterioration of world affairs and wars. We should not ignore the countless ethical and other reasons it has no more right or capacity to do so than any state over the past century, whatever justifications they evoked. The problems, as the history of the past century shows, are much greater than America's role in the world; but at the present time its actions are decisive and whether there is war or peace will be decided far more often in Washington than any other place. Ultimately, there will not be peace in the world unless all nations relinquish war as an instrument of policy, not only because of ethical or moral reasoning but because wars have become deadlier and more destructive of social institutions. A precondition of peace is for nations not to attempt to impose their visions on others, adjudicate their differences, and never to assume that their need for the economic or strategic resources of another country warrants interference of any sort in its internal affairs.

But September 11 proved that after a half-century of interventions America has managed to be increasingly hated. It has failed abysmally to bring peace and security to the world. Its role as a rogue superpower and promiscuous, cynical interventionist has been spectacularly unsuccessful even on its own terms. It is squandering vast economic resources, and it has now endangered the physical security of Americans at home. To cease the damage the U.S. causes abroad is also to fulfill the responsibilities that America's politicians have to their own people. But there is not the slightest sign at this point that voters will call them to account, and neither the American population nor its political leaders are likely to agree to such far-reaching changes in foreign policy. The issues are far too grave to wait for American attitudes and its political process to be transformed. The world will be safer to the extent that the U.S.' alliances are dissolved and it is isolated, and that is happening for many reasons, ranging from the unilateralism, hubris, and preemptory style of the Bush Administration to the fact that with the demise of Communism the world's political alignments are changing dramatically.

Communism and fascism were both outcomes of the fatal errors in the international order and affairs of states that the First World War spawned. In part, the Soviet system's disintegration was the result of the fact it was the aberrant consequence of a destructive and abnormal war, but at least as important was its leaders' loss of confidence in socialism. But suicidal Muslims are, to a great extent, the outcome of a half-century of America's interference in the Middle East and Islamic world, which radicalized so many young men ready to die for a faith. Just as the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 created Bolsheviks, the U.S.' repeated grave errors, however different the context or times, have produced their own abnormal, negative reactions. The twenty-first century has begun very badly because of America's continued aggressive policies. These are far more dangerous than those of the preceding century. The destructive potential of weaponry has increased exponentially and many more people and nations have access to it. What would once have been considered relatively minor foreign policy problems now have potentially far greater consequences. It all augurs very badly. The world has reached the most dangerous point in recent, perhaps all of history. There are threats of war and instability unlike anything that prevailed when a Soviet-led bloc existed.

Even if the U.S. abstains from interference and tailors its actions to fit this troubled reality, there will be serious problems throughout much of the world. Internecine civil conflicts will continue, as well as wars between nations armed with an increasing variety of much more destructive weapons available from outside powers, of which the U.S. remains, by far, the most important. Many of these sources of conflicts have independent roots, but both principles and experiences justify America staying out of them and leaving the world alone. Both the American people and those involved directly will be far better off without foreign interference, whatever nation attempts it.

The leaders of the United States are not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions have been counterproductive and its foreign policy is a disaster. Americans and those people who are the objects of successive administrations' efforts would be far better off if the U.S. did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest of world to find its own way. Communism is dead, and Europe and Japan are powerful and both can and will take care of their own interests. The U.S. must adapt to these facts. But if it continues as it has over the past half-century, attempting to attain the vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world, then there will be even deeper crises and it will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people. And it will fail yet again, for all states that have gone to war over the past centuries have not achieved the objectives for which they sacrificed so much blood, passion, and resources. They have only produced endless misery and upheavals of every kind.

Gabriel Kolko is one of the leading historians of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written a well regarded history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience. His latest book, After Socialism: Reconstructing Social & Political Thought, was published in September 2006.

He can be reached at: kolko@counterpunch.org.

Etwas Nonsense zum Wochenende!

Die Frau will ein Kind und setzt die Pille ab. Doch ihr Mann merkt das und kauft Kondome. Am Abend geht er ins Bad, streift sich das Kondom über und fällt über seine Frau her. Nach dem Beischlaf fragt sie überglücklich:"Und wie soll das Kind nun heissen?" Lässig streift der Mann das Kondom ab, und knotet es zu und antwortet."Wenn er da rauskommt: David Copperfield"

Erkenntnisse aus Schulaufsätzen (2. Grundschulklasse)
Bei uns dürfen Männer nur eine Frau heiraten. Das nennt man Monotonie.
(Frustrierend, wenn schon die Zweitklässler so denken...)

Bei uns hat jeder sein eigenes Zimmer. Nur Papi nicht, der muss immer bei Mami schlafen.
Es geht weiter bei : "Read more"

Erkenntnisse aus Schulaufsätzen (2. Grundschulklasse)

Bei uns dürfen Männer nur eine Frau heiraten. Das nennt man Monotonie.
(Frustrierend, wenn schon die Zweitklässler so denken...)

Bei uns hat jeder sein eigenes Zimmer. Nur Papi nicht, der muss immer bei Mami schlafen.
(ein schlimmes Schicksal!)

Männer können keine Männer heiraten, weil dann keiner das Brautkleid anziehen kann.
(wie schade aber auch *hach*)

Eine Lebensversicherung ist das Geld das man bekommt, wenn man einen tödlichen Unfall überlebt.
(Stimmt genau! Und diese Leute leben dann meist unter anderem Namen in Brasilien oder so!)

Meine Eltern kaufen nur das graue Klopapier, weil das schon mal benutzt wurde und das gut für die Umwelt ist.
(lecker!)

Eigentlich ist adoptieren besser. Da können sich die Eltern ihre Kinder aussuchen und müssen nicht nehmen, was sie bekommen.
(Bei Haustieren geht das schließlich auch.)

Adam und Eva lebten in Paris.
(Da ist es ja auch sehr, sehr schön!)

Unter der Woche wohnt Gott im Himmel. Nur Sonntag kommt er in die Kirche.
(Aber immer diese Qual der Wahl bei den vielen Kirchen…)

Mein Bruder ist vom Baum gefallen und hatte eine Gehirnverschüttung.

Die Nordhalbkugel dreht sich entgegengesetzt zur Südhalbkugel.
(Das muss am Äquator echt witzig aussehen…)

Ein Pfirsich ist wie ein Apfel mit Teppich drauf.

Nachdem die Menschen aufgehört haben, Affen zu sein, wurden sie Ägypter.
(DAS wusste ich noch nicht!)

Der Zug hielt mit kreischenden Bremsen und die Fahrgäste entleerten sich auf den Bahnsteig.
(War wohl dringend nötig nach der Fahrt…)

Alle Welt horchte auf, als Luther 1517 seine 95 Prothesen an die Schlosskirche zu Wittenberg schlug.
(Das glaub ich allerdings auch.)

Graf Zeppelin war der erste, der nach verschiedenen Richtungen schiffte.
(Nur kein Neid!)

In Lappland wohnen 2 Sorten Menschen. Die reichen Lappen fahren im Rentiergespann, die armen Lappen gehen zu Fuß. Daher der Name Fußlappen. Auch wohnen dort die Menschen sehr dicht zusammen. Daher das Sprichwort: Es läppert sich zusammen.

Vom Onkel wurde das Schwein in die Scheune gebracht und dort kurzerhand mit dem Großvater geschlachtet.
(wenn er schon gerade dabei ist...)

Als unser Hund nachts zu bellen anfing, ging meine Mutter hinaus und stillte ihn. Die Nachbarn hätten sich sonst aufgeregt.
(Ich glaub, jetzt haben sie sich erst recht aufgeregt.)

Vor 14 Tagen gab es in der Wirtschaft meiner Tante eine Schlägerei wegen einer Kellnerin, die sich auf der Straße fortpflanzte.
(Das tut man ja auch nicht!)

Die Menschen wurden früher nicht so alt, obwohl sie weniger Verkehr hatten.
(Oh Mist. Dann werde ich wohl überhaupt nicht alt…)

Ein Kreis ist ein rundes Quadrat.
(So kann man das natürlich auch sehen.)

Die Erde dreht sich 365Tage lang jedes Jahr. Alle vier Jahre braucht sie dazu einen Tag länger, und das ausgerechnet immer im Februar. Warum weis ich nicht. Vielleicht weil es im Februar immer so kalt ist und es deswegen ein bisschen schwerer geht.

Meine Schwester ist sehr krank. Sie nimmt jeden Tag eine Pille. Aber sie tut das heimlich, damit sich meine Eltern keine Sorgen machen.

Eines der nützlichsten Tiere ist das Schwein. Von ihm kann man alles verwenden, das Fleisch von vorn bis hinten, die Haut für Leder, die Borsten für Bürsten und den Namen als Schimpfwort.

USA; Exceptional Nation?

President George Bush has decided to disregard both the political message of the 2006 midterm election and congressional pressure for an early end to America's Iraq involvement, as well as the Baker-Hamilton proposals. These decisions are meeting much opposition, which is likely to fail. Bush's opponents have been unable to propose a course of withdrawal that is not a politically prohibited concession of American defeat and that does not risk still more destructive consequences in Iraq and probably the region—even though the result of delayed withdrawal could be worse in all respects. Most of Bush's critics in Congress, in the press and television, and in the foreign policy community are hostage to past support of his policy and to their failure to question the political and ideological assumptions upon which it was built.

New York Review of Books
Feature
Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America
By William Pfaff
Rather long article to print out as word file:
click here

President George Bush has decided to disregard both the political message of the 2006 midterm election and congressional pressure for an early end to America's Iraq involvement, as well as the Baker-Hamilton proposals. These decisions are meeting much opposition, which is likely to fail. Bush's opponents have been unable to propose a course of withdrawal that is not a politically prohibited concession of American defeat and that does not risk still more destructive consequences in Iraq and probably the region—even though the result of delayed withdrawal could be worse in all respects. Most of Bush's critics in Congress, in the press and television, and in the foreign policy community are hostage to past support of his policy and to their failure to question the political and ideological assumptions upon which it was built.

This followed from a larger intellectual failure. For years there has been little or no critical reexamination of how and why the limited, specific, and ultimately successful postwar American policy of "patient but firm and vigilant containment of Soviet expansionist tendencies...and pressure against the free institutions of the Western world" (as George Kennan formulated it at the time) has over six decades turned into a vast project for "ending tyranny in the world."[1]

The Bush administration defends its pursuit of this unlikely goal by means of internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture, and by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.

This is where the problem lies. Other American leaders before George Bush have made the same claim in matters of less moment. It is something like a national heresy to suggest that the United States does not have a unique moral status and role to play in the history of nations, and therefore in the affairs of the contemporary world. In fact it does not.
NYRB Savage War of Peace

This is a national conceit that is the comprehensible result of the religious beliefs of the early New England colonists (Calvinist religious dissenters, moved by millenarian expectations and theocratic ideas), which convinced them that their austere settlements in the wilderness represented a new start in humanity's story. However, the earlier Virginia settlements were commercial, as were those of the Dutch, and the proprietary colonies in Pennsylvania and Maryland were Quaker and Catholic, and had no such ideas. Nor did the earliest colonies, the Spanish in Florida and the Southwest, and the French on the Great Lakes and the Mississippi.

The nobility of the colonies' constitutional deliberations following the War of Independence, and the expression of the new thought of the Enlightenment in the institutions of government they created, contributed to this belief in national uniqueness. Thomas Paine wrote that

the case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of the world.... We have no occasion to roam for information into the obscure field of antiquity, nor hazard ourselves upon conjecture. We are...as if we had lived in the beginning of time.

Even Francis Fukuyama, a recovering neoconservative, acknowledges in a recent book that American economic and political policies today rest on an unearned claim to privilege, the American "belief in American exceptionalism that most non-Americans simply find not credible." Nor, he adds, is the claim tenable, since "it presupposes an extremely high level of competence" which the country does not demonstrate.[2]

The belief nonetheless is old and very powerful. The critic Edmund Wilson, scarcely a chauvinist, wrote nostalgically, near the end of his long life, about "the old idea of an anointed nation doing God's work in the world," although he deplored its corruption in his time by "moralistic cant."[3] It is true that by establishing a republic, Americans made themselves successors to the dynastic monarchies of Europe (although the Dutch Republic and Swiss Federation preceded us). But that God had taken a hand in this, nominating us as his Chosen and confiding to us an earthly mission, has yet to be demonstrated, and a moral theologian might see in the claim the grave sin of Presumption.

A claim to preeminent political virtue is a claim to power, a demand that other countries yield to what Washington asserts as universal interests. Since 1989, when the end of the cold war left the United States the "sole superpower," much has been made of this, with discussion of a benevolent (or even inevitable) American world hegemony or empire—a Pax Americana in succession to the Pax Britannica. While such ideas have not been explicit in official discourse, they seem all but universally assumed, in one or another form, in policy and political circles.

The most coherent and plausible official articulation of such reasoning was offered in the summer of 2003 by Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush's national security adviser, speaking in London at the annual meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She said that the time had come to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute state sovereignty. The UN is a faulty embodiment of international authority because it is an indiscriminate assembly of all the governments of the world, and should, she argued, be replaced as the ultimate world authority by an alliance or coalition of the democracies. This is a theme frequently promoted in conservative circles in Washington.

Rice also told the institute's members that the time had come to reject ideas of multipolarity and balance of power in international relations. This was a reference to French and other arguments in favor of an international system in which a number of states or groups of states (like the EU) act autonomously, serving as counterweights to American power. It followed the controversy earlier that year over the UN Security Council's failure to authorize the US invasion of Iraq. In the past, she said, balance of power may have "sustained the absence of war" but did not promote an enduring peace. "Multipolarity," she continued, "is a theory of rivalry; of competing interests—and at its worst, competing values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War...."

Foreign policies of power balance were, of course, a response to the rise of nation-states of varying weight and ambition, which, in order to preserve their independence and protect their national interests, had no alternative to policies that "balanced" their relations and alliances with others in order to contain rival interests and conflicting ambitions. The only apparent alternative to such a policy is submission of all to a dominant power. Rice's seeming confidence that such conflicts and rivalries would not create problems in some new international organization of the democracies would seem very optimistic. Nonetheless both the professional foreign policy community and American opinion generally seem to assume that the international system is "naturally" headed toward an eventual American-led consolidation of democratic authority over international affairs.

During the first century and a half of the United States' history, the influence of the national myth of divine election and mission was generally harmless, a reassuring and inspiring untruth. During that period the country remained largely isolated from international affairs. The myth found expression in the idea of a "manifest destiny" of continental expansion— including annexation of Mexican land north of the Rio Grande—with no need to plead a divine commission.

With Woodrow Wilson, this changed. The national myth became a philosophy of international action, and has remained so. In the great crisis of World War I the United States and Wilson personally had thrust upon them seemingly providential international roles; Wilson said that he believed he had been chosen by God to lead America in showing "the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." The war's carnage and futility largely destroyed the existing European order and undermined confidence in European civilization. The European allies enthusiastically welcomed American intervention in 1917, which tipped the military balance, and Wilson's Fourteen Point plan for peace appealed to the people of the Central Powers as well as to the allies and neutrals.

Wilson's plan, however, did not prove a success. The principle of universal national self-determination did not solve Europe's problems but further complicated them, creating new ethnic and territorial grievances subsequently exploited by the fascist powers. A witness to the Versailles negotiations, the British diplomat Harold Nicolson, considered Wilson a man "obsessed, possessed...by the conviction that the League [of Nations] covenant was his own revelation and the solution of all human difficulties." The US Senate's failure to ratify the League of Nations treaty (which Wilson had imagined as a proto-world government) left most Americans persuaded of the prudence of national isolation, support for which remained majority opinion in the United States until Pearl Harbor.

When World War II ended, the isolationist bias remained, and foreign policy was an issue in the 1946 and 1948 elections. As late as 1949, the leading figure in the Republican Party, Senator Robert A. Taft, objected to the NATO treaty, saying that it involved unforeseeable commitments. (We can only imagine what he would have made of NATO in Afghanistan today.) He was, on the other hand, in favor of "international law defining the duties and obligations of nations ...international courts...and joint armed force to enforce the law and the decisions of that court." He felt the UN did not yet fulfill this ideal "but it goes a long way in that direction."

This seemingly contradictory position actually expressed the paradox of American sentiment concerning foreign relations: on the one hand apprehensive about involvement in international "power politics," and on the other open to utopian reform, provided that it confirmed the special position the US had always claimed. Despite his reservations about US military commitments abroad and his isolationist instincts, Taft accepted the utopian global visions of Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

The Korean War and developing political confrontation with Soviet Russia in Europe provided a new reason for American international involvement, interpreted in quasi-theological terms by John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of state, a lawyer and Presbyterian elder (a Calvinist, as both Wilson and the Puritan Pilgrims had been). The notion of the United States as the providential nation became integrated into American foreign policy under Dulles, so that George W. Bush in 2001 automatically articulated his global war on terror in imitation of Dulles's conception of cold war (even to the instant portrayal of the September 11 terrorists as agents of an organized global threat to freedom). The formulation was uncritically accepted in most political and press circles, and much of the professional policy community.

Bush administration policy continues to reflect the influence of cold war ideology, which in Dulles's case revealed the influence of the world-historical thinking of the Marxist enemy as well as personal religious assumptions about the meaning of history. The neo-conservative, "neo-Wilsonian" ideological influence on Bush's thinking, that history's course is moving toward universal democracy, was reinforced by the President's encounter in 2004 with Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident. Sharansky's argument that international stability is possible only under the rule of democracy was reflected in the President's second-term inaugural announcement that America's foreign policy objective had become "ending tyranny in our world."[4] This amounted to a naive instance of what the British-Austrian political philosopher Karl Popper called "historicism," meaning faith in large-scale "laws" of historical development.[5] The Bush vision is of a vast struggle between democracy and an effort by "the terrorists" to establish an oppressive Muslim caliphate of global scope. (How they are to do this against the opposition of the industrial West and non-Muslim Asia has yet to be given a persuasive explanation.)

The Bush administration and its sympathizers thus see themselves supporting the dominant force in history's development. If history's natural trajectory is toward democracy, US policy is simply to accelerate the inevitable. When, as in Iraq, this does not turn out to be so simple, a political equivalent of the economist Joseph Schumpeter's argument concerning "creative destruction" can be evoked, which says that destruction (in certain circumstances) clears the way for progress. Schumpeter describes a mechanism of the market economy, but when applied to the development of human society it reduces to a matter of secular belief in progress—which is a question of faith, not evidence.

The United States today is the leading world power by many if not most conventional measures. With the largest economy and the largest and most advanced arsenal of weapons, it is acknowledged as such and exercises wide influence. However, it is in the nature of political relationships that an effort to translate a position of material superiority into power over others will provoke resistance and may fail, possibly in costly ways. In the present case, it implies the subordination of others, notably the other democracies that are expected to accept US leadership in a new international order, and may resist this for a variety of well-founded reasons. In the past, societies that were more advanced in political and social organization, or economic or military power, or even so narrow a specialty as navigation, created empires, but in medieval and early modern times imperial powers were not necessarily technologically or militarily superior to their subject nations. The Hapsburg empire was the result of dynastic marriages and religious alliances.

Today's major democracies are all advanced societies; in some ways, in social standards, distribution of wealth and opportunity, the provision of universal health care and free or affordable education, and certain technologies and industries, many are more advanced than the United States. They are willing to cooperate with the United States in matters of common concern, as they have for a half-century, but not to subordinate themselves to Washington. They are aware that this administration's effort to establish a system of Central Asian and Middle Eastern client states (the "Greater Middle East") has already produced two ruinous and continuing wars, and worsened situations in Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian territories, and Israel.

Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins recently asked why, if other nations really objected to an American effort to establish a new international hegemony, there has been no effort to build a military coalition to oppose it. He describes the United States as already dominating the world, much as the elephant (in his genial comparison) dominates the African savanna: the calm herbivorous goliath that keeps the carnivores at a respectful distance, while supporting "a wide variety of other creatures—smaller mammals, birds and insects—by generating nourishment for them as it goes about the business of feeding itself."[6] Everyone knows the United States is not a predatory power, he says, so everyone profits from the stability the elephant provides, at American taxpayer expense.

Elephants are also known to trample people, uproot crops and gardens, topple trees and houses, and occasionally go mad (hence, "rogue nations"). Americans, moreover, are carnivores. The administration has attacked the existing international order by renouncing inconvenient treaties and conventions and reintroducing torture, and arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment, into advanced civilization. Where is the stability that Mandelbaum tells us has been provided by this American military and political deployment? The doomed and destructive war of choice in Iraq, continuing and mounting disorder in Afghanistan following another such war, war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as between Hamas and Fatah, accompanied by continuing crisis in Palestine, with rumbles of new American wars of choice with Iran or Syria, and the emergence of a nuclear North Korea —all demonstrate deep international instability.

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

Michael Mandelbaum's question about using military coalitions to contain American power seems spoken from another age. The utility of military coalitions is not what it used to be, as the United States has reason to know. No one today would rationally consider conventional war with the United States a useful (or feasible) response to American power, although North Korea and Iran (and undoubtedly others) have concluded that a nuclear deterrent to what is seen as the threat from the United States is a worthwhile investment.

The new American militarism, as Andrew Bacevich calls it, encourages reliance on obsolete notions about power based on quantitative military advantage. Power now comes primarily from economic, financial, industrial, political, and cultural assets and influence, in all of which the United States is vulnerable.[7] If American international hegemony is considered a threat, there are political and economic ways for international society to check it, not to speak of unconventional forms of military resistance, which have been employed with success in Iraq, in Lebanon last summer, and, much earlier, in Vietnam.

War tends now to be driven by nationalism and religious or political ideology. Nationalism and communalism, the defense of a community's identity and autonomy, remain eminently powerful political forces, as in Vietnam three decades ago. The recent history of Lebanon, Iraq, Chechnya, the Palestinian intifadas, failed states, the memory of the Vietnam War, and the specter of rogue nations possessing nuclear weapons combine to make military interventions in the non-Western world an unattractive prospect.

Is there an alternative policy? At the time of George Kennan's death in 2005, much was made of the cold war policy of containment, of which he was the author, and its vindication by the collapse of the Soviet Union from inner decay, as he had foreseen. Not much was written about Kennan's general view of the nature of relations between states, which was in radical contrast with the policies and assumptions of the present US government and most of those concerned with foreign policy in Washington. Kennan's volume of autobiographical reflections, Around the Cragged Hill, published in 1993 when he was eighty-nine, contained his mature reflections on this subject, as well as his thoughts on American foreign policy.

He did not think that democracy along North American and Western European lines can prevail internationally. "To have real self-government, a people must understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it." Many nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. "But so what?" he asked. "We are not their keepers. We never will be." (He did not say that we might one day try to be.) He suggested that nondemocratic societies should be left "to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse."[8]

With the cold war over, Kennan saw no need for the continuing presence of American troops in Europe, and little need for them in Asia, subject to the security interests of Japan, allied to the United States by treaty. He deplored economic and military programs that existed in "so great a profusion and complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to mention private oversight." He asked why the United States was [in 1992] giving military assistance to forty-three African countries and twenty-two (of twenty-four) countries in Latin America. "Against whom are these weapons conceivably to be employed?... [Presumably] their neighbors or, in civil conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?"

In the late 1950s, a colleague, the late Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an argument that eventually became a magazine article and book, suggesting that the American obsession with Soviet Communist power was turning the United States toward an American version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism. We said that Washington had fallen under the influence of "the ideological politics of the Thirties and moral fervor of the second world war" in assuming that we and Soviet Russia were struggling, so to speak, for the soul of the world.[9]

We argued that quite the opposite was true. We said that common sense about the nature of Russia's and China's real interests suggested that time was not on their sides, and that Kennan's policy of containing the major Communist powers, until what Marx would have called their internal contradictions undermined them, was the correct one. The interest of China was mainly to weaken Soviet supremacy among the Communists. Russia itself was in material decline, its messianism faded. Western Europe, Japan, and other Asian nations were increasingly dynamic, and could be expected to reclaim their pre-war influence. The 1950s, we concluded, were already a time of plural power centers and multiple interests, a system in which international power and ambitions were increasingly expressed by independent state actors, a system in which the United States could flourish, but the Soviet Union, in the long term, could not. We ended by recommending patience.

This went against much thinking of the period. In retrospect, it is the loser's tale, describing a road not taken. It might seem of little interest now, if the direction actually followed had not proven so disastrous. It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new administration in two years' time might change direction seems the relevant question.

Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.

The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.

What is the threat that America keeps at bay? Neither China nor Russia directly threatens Western security interests, at least in the opinion of most governments other than the one in Washington. Obviously all the major nations have energy and resource needs and interests that intersect and conflict, but there is little reason to think that these and other foreseeable problems are not negotiable. Warmongering speculation of the kind one sometimes hears when American conservatives discuss China or Russia— not to speak of Iran—is a product of world-hegemonic thinking, and a disservice to true American interests.

America's so-called war against terrorism has not saved its allies from violence. The terrorist problem is generally seen in Europe as one of domestic social order and immigrant integration—a matter for political treatment and police precautions— related to a religious and political crisis inside contemporary Islamic culture that is unsusceptible to foreign remedy. Few leaders outside the United States, other than Tony Blair, consider the terrorist threat a global conspiracy of those "who hate freedom"—a puerile formulation—or think the existing militarized response to it a success. The positive results have been meager, and the negative consequences in relations with Muslim countries have been disastrous. The US approach has become perceived as a war against Islamic "nationalism"—a reaffirmation of cultural as well as political identity (and separatism)—which like most nationalisms has thrown up terrorist fighting organizations (as did another nationalism without a nation, Zionism, in its day).

The noninterventionist alternative to the policies followed in the United States since the 1950s is to minimize interference in other societies and accept the existence of an international system of plural and legitimate powers and interests. One would think the idea that nations are responsible for themselves, and that American military interference in their affairs is more likely to turn small problems into big ones than to solve them, would appeal to an American public that believes in individual responsibility and the autonomy of markets, considers itself hostile to political ideology (largely unaware of its own), and professes to be governed by constitutional order, pragmatism, and compromise.

A noninterventionist policy would shun ideology and emphasize pragmatic and empirical judgment of the interests and needs of this nation and of others, with reliance on diplomacy and analytical intelligence, giving particular attention to history, since nearly all serious problems between nations are recurrent or have important recurrent elements in them. The current crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Iran are all colonial or postcolonial in nature, which is generally ignored in American political and press discussion.

Such a noninterventionist policy would rely primarily on trade and the market, rather than territorial control or military intimidation, to provide the resources and energy the United States needs. Political and diplomatic action would be the primary and essential instruments of international relations and persuasion; military action the last and worst one, evidence of political failure. Military deployments abroad would be reexamined with particular attention to whether they might actually be impediments to solutions of the conflicts of clients, or reinforce intransigence in the complex dynamics of relations among nations such as the two Koreas, China, Taiwan, and Japan, where lasting solutions can only be found in political settlements between principals.

Had a noninterventionist policy been followed in the 1960s, there would have been no American war in Indochina. The struggle there would have been recognized as nationalist in motivation, unsusceptible to solution by foreigners, and inherently limited in its international consequences, whatever they might be—as has proved to be the case. The United States would never have been defeated, its army demoralized, or its students radicalized. There would have been no American invasion of Cambodia, which precipitated the Khmer Rouge genocide. The tribal peoples of Laos would probably have been spared their ordeal.

The United States would not have suffered its catastrophic implication in what was essentially a domestic crisis in Iran in 1979, which still poisons Near and Middle Eastern affairs, since there would never have been the huge and provocative American investment in the Shah's regime as American "gendarme" in the region, compromising the Shah and contributing to the fundamentalist backlash against his secularizing modernization.

Without entering further into what rapidly would become an otiose discussion of the "mights" or "might nots" of the last half-century, one can certainly argue that a noninterventionist United States would not be at war in Iraq today. While obviously concerned about the free flow of Middle Eastern oil, Washington would have assumed that the oil-using states bought their oil on the market and that oil producers had to sell, having nothing else they can do with their oil, and that politically motivated interference in the market by the oil producers would in the mid- and long term fail, as happened after the OPEC oil price rise of 1973.

Israel, with its conventional and unconventional arms, is capable of assuring its own defense against external aggression, if newly aware of the limits of its ability to combat irregular forces. It cannot expect total security without political resolution of the Palestinian question, a problem only it can solve, by withdrawing from the territories to some negotiated approximation of the 1967 border. International engagement would undoubtedly be necessary to a solution, and would willingly be supplied. Forty years of American involvement have unfortunately served mainly to allow the Israelis to avoid facing facts, contributing to radicalization in Islamic society.

Washington might reasonably have considered people who are victims of domestic despots, such as the Iraqis before 2003, as responsible for their own solutions, and usually capable of their own revolutions—if they really wanted revolution. No foreign power occupied Iraq, imposing Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The current Iraqi insurgencies against military occupation and an American-imposed government, accompanied by mounting sectarian conflict, now tie down the quasi totality of available American ground forces. "Regime change" is better left to the people whose regime it is, who know what they want, and who will benefit from or suffer the consequences of change.

A hard-headed doctrine concerning the responsibilities of people themselves may seem unacceptable when the CNN audience witnesses mass murder in Darfur, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. However an interventionist foreign policy in which the US aggressively interferes in other states in order to shape their affairs according to American interest or ideology is not the same as responding to atrocious public crimes.

The latter may be relatively simple to deal with, as in the case of Charles Taylor, onetime president of Liberia, responsible for several rapacious and exceptionally bloody West African conflicts, now being tried for war crimes in The Hague. The adroit British intervention that ended civil chaos and conflict in Sierra Leone was a public service, as was the pacification of Liberia.

There are limits to the feasibility of humanitarian intervention. It can create its own problems, as nongovernmental groups now acknowledge. Their and UN efforts to feed and support refugees can facilitate aggression by taking the victims off the aggressor's hands, as happened in the initial Yugoslav intervention, where the Security Council limited the UN force to "protection" of civilians while a war of sectarian and territorial aggression was going on.[10] Eventual military intervention produced the Dayton agreement, which nonetheless left Kosovo and the explosive problem of the Albanian regional diaspora unsettled.

Humanitarian crises are often the current manifestation of intractable historical grievances, as in the former Yugoslavia, and in Rwanda, where the Tutsi, Hamitic cattle-raising people who migrated to the Lake Kivu area some four centuries ago, presumably from Ethiopia, had imposed a form of monarchical and aristocratic rule on the Bantu-speaking Hutus, despite the latter's much greater numbers. German and Belgian colonial authorities left this system as they found it, and it persisted until independence in the 1960s, when the Hutus' bid for democratic power launched the conflicts that followed, culminating in the genocidal upheaval of 1994 against the Tutsis that ended with them once again in power.

Such crises are often intensified by material developments, like the droughts in recent years in the semi-arid Sahel, the geographical and climactic zone running from Senegal to Ethiopia that separates the coastal deserts of Africa from the savannah to the south. Its occupants have mainly been nomadic pastoral peoples identified as Arabs, distinct from the black peasant cultivators of the more fertile south. Arable land has been reduced, producing conflict, population movement, and political unrest in fragile states. The Darfur victims are refugees from political conflict inside Sudan, and their plight has spilled over into Chad and the Central African Republic, and threatens trouble elsewhere.

This is not, obviously, a situation susceptible to solution by foreign military intervention. However the US Army is pressing for a new Africa Command, possibly based in Djibouti, with "forward-based troops" ready to deal with Africa's "emergence...as a strategic reality" (as Marine General James Jones, departing commander of US forces in Europe, said in December). The 2004 US National Security Strategy declaration identifies "failed states" in Africa as well as "rogue states" as threats to American interests.

US support of the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia, which overturned Islamist rule in that "failed state," together with demands in the US and Europe for military intervention against the Muslim "Arab" tormentors of the Darfur refugees, suggest that in government circles as well as the public mind, the African humanitarian crisis is beginning to be confused with or assimilated to the larger US "war on terror." This is a profound error, and risks setting the United States on a course of endless and fruitless military interventions against Africa's miseries—a "long war" indeed.

Nuclear weapons proliferation, since North Korea's recent nuclear claims, is now more than ever an American preoccupation. In North Korea and elsewhere, the most important incentive for obtaining nuclear weapons is to deter American (or in Iran's case, Israeli) military intervention. The advantage provided by possession of such weapons is intimidation of neighboring states and inhibition of foreign interference. On the other hand, as Iran is finding out, the effort to obtain nuclear weapons may invite a precautionary foreign attack, so the choice of proliferation presents its own risks.

In Washington, Iranian possession of nuclear weapons is usually described as a threat to Israel, or to American bases or interests in the region, or even to Europe. Given the ability of all of these governments to retaliate conventionally as well as by nuclear means, it seems implausible or even unreasonable that Iran would initiate such an attack, or even imagine that there would be something to gain from doing so.

The possession of nuclear weapons provides mainly symbolic power, since their actual use implies unforeseeable and uncontrollable consequences, while this same uncertainty contributes to their deterrence effect. Building and testing a nuclear weapon makes a country ostensibly more important, or a more notorious and more feared actor on the international and regional stage, but the positive exploitation of nuclear status, even for purposes of blackmail, is not easy.

The nuclear threat is not automatically a credible one since its execution would be so disproportionate to any easily imagined provocation. Whatever the motive, a nuclear attack against a nonnuclear state with no means for deterrence or retaliation would provoke enormous international uproar and anxiety, invite intervention by one (or all) of the old nuclear states as well as by the UN and other international organizations, bring intense international opprobrium upon the state making use of the nuclear weapon—and of course inspire any other government in the region that thought itself potentially threatened to go after its own nuclear deterrent.

Would, for example, either the United States or Israel really gain by using nuclear penetration weapons against Iran's nuclear installations, breaking the nuclear truce that has lasted since Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Would this not add to the incentives that Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, perhaps states in the Persian Gulf, and certain countries in the Far East already may feel to seek nuclear deterrents? And would it not give the Europeans reason seriously to reconsider their own situation?

As the last sixty years of nuclear strategy studies suggest, the value of these weapons for any purpose other than deterrence seems slight. Their utility for coercion or blackmail seems very doubtful when not linked to a secure second-strike capability to deter retaliation, of the kind possessed by the cold war nuclear states, and this is beyond the means of the countries now considered candidates for nuclear status.[11]

History does not offer nations permanent security, and when it seems to offer hegemonic domination this usually is only to take it away again, often in unpleasant ways. The United States was fortunate to enjoy relative isolation for as long as it did. The conviction of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the country was exempt from the common fate has been succeeded in the twenty-first century by an American determination to fight (to "victory," as the President insists) against the conditions of existence history now actually does offer. It sets against them the consoling illusion that power will always prevail, despite the evidence that this is not true.

Schumpeter remarked in 1919 that imperialism necessarily carries the implication of

an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which are temporarily being pursued...an aggressiveness for its own sake, as reflected in such terms as "hegemony," "world dominion," and so forth...expansion for the sake of expanding....

"This determination," he continues,

cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring it into action, by any of the aims for which it seems to be struggling at the time.... Such expansion is in a sense its own "object."[12]

Perhaps this has come to apply in the American case, and we have gone beyond the belief in national exception to make an ideology of progress and universal leadership into our moral justification for a policy of simple power expansion. In that case we have entered into a logic of history that in the past has invariably ended in tragedy.

—January 18, 2007
Notes

[1] "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs, July 1947.

[2] America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 111, 112. Fukuyama and others, such as Robert Kagan, now in retreat from the neoconservative project, nonetheless insist on their continued belief in an American national mission to bring democracy to the world, despite the disastrous practical consequences of that effort since 2002, which they ascribe to faulty execution.

[3] See Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 522.

[4] Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror(Public Affairs, 2004).

[5] Popper's allusion is to "Hegel, Marx, Comte, Spengler, and Toynbee." Writing at a time of totalitarian ascendancy in the middle of the twentieth century, he observed that all these systems of historical interpretation offered a foundation on which a totalitarian political ideology might be built.

[6] Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the Twenty-first Century (PublicAffairs, 2005), p. 10.

[7] Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism(Oxford University Press, 2004), and Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic(Metropolitan Books, 2003).

[8] George Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (Norton, 1993), pp. 64–65, 201, 223–224. Later in his memoirs he outlined what these standards of diplomatic relations should be: the United States should conduct itself

at all times in world affairs as befits a country of its size and importance. This...would mean

• that it would show patience, generosity, and a uniformly accommodating spirit in dealing with small countries and small matters;

• that it would observe reasonableness, consistency, and steady adherence to principle in dealings with large countries and large matters;

• that it would observe in all official exchanges with other governments a high tone of dignity, courtesy, and moderation of expression;

• that, while always bearing in mind that its first duty is to the national interest, it would never lose sight of the principle that the greatest service this country could render to the rest of the world would be to put its own house in order and to make of American civilization an example of decency, humanity and societal success from which others could derive whatever they might find useful to their own purposes.

[9] Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The New Politics: America and the End of the Postwar World (Coward McCann, 1961, and Harper's, January 1961). See also Stillman and Pfaff, Power and Impotence: The Failure of America's Foreign Policy (Random House, 1966). Among other critics of the established policy of the period were, of course, Kennan himself, the Christian theologian and political realist Reinhold Niebuhr (whom Kennan called "the father of us all"), Hans Morgenthau, Louis Halle, Ronald Steel (whose important books The End of Alliance and Pax Americanaappeared in 1964 and 1966, respectively), Kenneth W. Thompson, and, to some extent, the columnist Walter Lippmann.

[10] See, for example, David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (Simon and Schuster, 1995), and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (Simon and Schuster, 2005).

[11] The India-Pakistan case is an exception since the perceived threat is strictly bilateral, and the concerned countries have simply replicated for themselves, at great expense, the "balance of terror" that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war.

Some have suggested that the adoption of suicide bombing by certain Muslim terrorist groups implies the possibility of "suicidal" use of nuclear weapons, in defiance of conventional notions about deterrence. Noah Feldman, for example, writing in The New York Times Magazine on October 29, 2006, says that "religious thinkers... believe almost by definition that there is something in heaven greater than government here on earth. Under the right circumstances, they might sacrifice lives—including their own—to serve the divine will as they interpret it." However, his own subsequent examination of Muslim tradition and religious thought, particularly of the eschatological element in Shia religion, tends to discount this possibility. To that I would add that launching a nuclear attack requires the cooperation of a large number of military and technical people, as well as political collaborators of the leaders making such a decision, and they seem unlikely to be collectively suicidal.

The danger of terrorist-held nuclear weapons exists, if barely. It requires the complicity of a nuclear state; the political plausibility of any government allowing terrorists to control such weapons seems negligible, while the technical and logistical complexity of such an operation would be great. In any case, there is little to be done about this possibility that is not already being done. See William Langewiesche, "How to Get a Nuclear Bomb," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2006; Robin M. Frost, "Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11," Adelphi Papers #378 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies); and John Mueller, "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?, The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy," Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006.

[12] Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and the Social Classes, translated by Heinz Norden (A.M. Kelly, 1951) pp. 5-6.

Bushs Klima-Dilemma

In seiner Rede zur Lage der Nation hat US-Präsident Bush erstmals die globale Klimaerwärmung ernst genommen. Diese ist für viele Amerikaner längst ein dringliches Problem.

28. Januar 2007, NZZ am Sonntag
Bushs Klima-Dilemma
Tribut an das zunehmende Umweltbewusstsein im Volk

In seiner Rede zur Lage der Nation hat US-Präsident Bush erstmals die globale Klimaerwärmung ernst genommen. Diese ist für viele Amerikaner längst ein dringliches Problem.

Ronald D. Gerste, Washington

In den ersten Januartagen wehte des Abends ein ungewöhnlicher Duft durch manche Vororte Washingtons. Es war der appetitanregende Geruch frisch grillierter Würstchen und saftiger Steaks. Der vermeintliche Winter war so mild, dass nicht wenige Bewohner der Hauptstadt-Region Freunde und Nachbarn zum Barbecue einluden und dabei eine denkwürdige Frage diskutierten: Würde die Kirschblüte, eine der grossen Natur- und Touristenattraktionen Washingtons nahe dem Jefferson Memorial, in diesem Jahr nicht wie gewohnt Anfang April, sondern vielleicht Mitte Januar beginnen?

Wie in der Hauptstadt war das Wetter in weiten Teilen des Landes zeitweise das Gesprächsthema Nummer eins gewesen, bevor in den letzten Tagen mit dem Vordringen einer Kaltfront scheinbare klimatische Normalität zurückkehrte. Noch vor dem ungewöhnlich warmen Winter hatte eine Umfrage des Meinungsforschungsinstituts Zogby festgestellt, 74 Prozent der Amerikaner seien stärker als noch vor zwei Jahren davon überzeugt, dass es eine globale Klimaerwärmung gibt. Mehr als zwei Drittel der Befragten äusserten die Überzeugung, dass der Klimawandel schwere Hurrikane wie «Katrina» zumindest mitverursacht.

Dem geschärften Bewusstsein seiner Landsleute trug Präsident George Bush am Dienstag Rechnung, als er in der Rede zur Lage der Nation die Erwähnung neuer Technologien, die Amerikas Abhängigkeit vom Erdöl mindern sollen, mit den Worten schloss: «Sie werden uns gegenüber der ernsten Herausforderung des globalen Klimawandels helfen.» Bush hatte zwar schon früher verschiedentlich von diesem Problem gesprochen, nie jedoch bei so prominenter Gelegenheit und ohne die Dringlichkeit durch Hinweise auf vermeintliche wissenschaftliche Unsicherheiten zu relativieren. Bushs Plan sieht eine Reduzierung des Benzinverbrauchs um 20 Prozent über die nächsten 10 Jahre vor, die durch das Umsteigen auf Ethanol und andere alternative Energieträger erreicht werden soll. Der Effekt auf die Gesamtmenge der Emissionen entspräche nach den Berechnungen des Weissen Hauses der Stilllegung von 26 Millionen Autos und Lastwagen.

Kritiker weisen allerdings darauf hin, dass die 20-Prozent-Senkung sich auf den für das Jahr 2017 vorausgesagten Schadstoffausstoss bezieht und nicht vom heutigen Wert ausgeht. Die Administration bleibt nach wie vor unter den Vorgaben des von ihr abgelehnten Kyoto-Protokolls, das eine Senkung des Ausstosses bis 2012 um 5 Prozent unter das Niveau von 1990 vorsieht. Auch sind bei der Konzentration auf den Strassenverkehr keine verbindlichen Richtlinien für die Industrie zu erkennen. Das Weisse Haus setzt grosse Hoffnungen in neue Technologien. Für deren Entwicklung und für Klimaforschung insgesamt hat es nach Angaben eines Sprechers 29 Milliarden Dollar vorgesehen. Präsident Bush wies diese Woche die Regierungsbehörden an, künftig Autos mit Hybridantrieb als Dienstwagen zu benutzen.

Gliedstaaten warten nicht
Die Administration in Washington ist indes nicht die einzige treibende Kraft beim Klimaschutz. Kalifornien hat auf Initiative von Gouverneur Arnold Schwarzenegger eine Vorreiterrolle eingenommen, der andere Gliedstaaten folgen wollen. Seit dem 1. Januar gilt dort das «Clean Air»-Programm, mit dem der Schadstoffausstoss auf den Stand von 1990 gesenkt werden soll. Hier wie auch in anderen Teilen der USA ist der rapide Bevölkerungszuwachs und mit ihm die Zunahme der Verkehrsdichte ein Hindernis auf dem Weg zu diesem Ziel.

Im Kongress zirkulieren inzwischen mehrere Gesetzesvorschläge. Ein von Senatoren beider Parteien unterstützter Entwurf des Senators Jeff Bingaman zielt auf eine jährliche Verringerung der Emissionen um 2,6 Prozent. Der unabhängige Senator Bernie Sanders aus Vermont fordert in seinem Entwurf eine Treibhausgas-Senkung um 80 Prozent bis 2050.

Forschung vernachlässigt
Geringerer Aufmerksamkeit durch die Politiker erfreut sich hingegen die wissenschaftliche Erforschung des Klimawandels. Die Mittel der Weltraumbehörde Nasa für Geowissenschaften sind seit dem Jahr 2000 um 30 Prozent geschrumpft. Die National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hat das Budget ihres Satellitenprogramms weit überzogen. Von hier kommt auch eine Warnung davor, sich zu grosse Hoffnungen zu machen. Selbst wenn alle Länder ihre selbstauferlegten Verpflichtungen erfüllten, so erklärte Tom Wigley, der wissenschaftliche Leiter des U.S. Center for Atmospheric Research, würde die Durchschnittstemperatur auf unserem Planeten im Jahr 2050 nur um 0,07 Grad unter jener des Jahres 2006 liegen. Damals erlebten die USA den wärmsten Sommer seit Beginn der Aufzeichnungen.

Das Bewusstsein von der Bedrohung greift auch bei Präsident Bushs Anhängern um sich. In der Zogby-Umfrage erklärten 56 Prozent der befragten Republikaner, von der Tatsache der globalen Erwärmung überzeugt zu sein - gegenüber 87 Prozent unter erklärten Demokraten. Aus deren Lager kommt ein Mahner, der immer mehr Gehör findet und jetzt vor einer Ehrung steht, die dem Problem weitere Aufmerksamkeit sichern würde: Ex-Vizepräsident Al Gores Dokumentarfilm «Eine unbequeme Wahrheit» über eine drohende Klimakatastrophe wurde diese Woche für zwei Oscars nominiert.

Wassermangel in Australien - und die Folgen.

Australiens Bauern leiden unter grosser Trockenheit, und viele begehen Selbstmord. Neue Beratungsstellen sollen Hilfe gegen Depressionen bieten.

28. Januar 2007, NZZ am Sonntag
Australiens Farmer in Not
Die Dürre bringt die harten Männer an psychische Grenzen

Australiens Bauern leiden unter grosser Trockenheit, und viele begehen Selbstmord. Neue Beratungsstellen sollen Hilfe gegen Depressionen bieten.

Ruedi Hermann, Goulburn

Zwanzig Jahre ist es her, dass Noel Trevaskis eine Farm hatte in der Riverina in Australiens Südosten, wo die grossen Flüsse des Murray und des Murrumbidgee mit ihrem Wasser das Land zur Speisekammer des Kontinents machen. Milchwirtschaft gedeiht; Getreide, Südfrüchte, Wein, ja sogar Reis wachsen hier. Trevaskis war ein ehrgeiziger Bauer in einer kleinen, eingeschworenen ländlichen Gemeinschaft. Er wollte der Beste von ihnen sein.
Gefährlicher Machokult

«Ich habe mir eingeredet, dass ich das für die Familie tue, für meine Frau und meine Kinder», sagt Trevaskis. «Ich sah die Zeichen an der Wand nicht, als ich mich immer mehr in die Arbeit flüchtete. Dann kam der grosse Knall. Ich war so tief in der Depression, dass ich fünf Monate im Spital behandelt werden musste.» Doch der schwerste Schritt kam erst dann: die Rückkehr in eine Dorfgemeinschaft, in der es keine Geheimnisse gibt. Wie würde er aufgenommen als Mann, der Schwäche gezeigt hatte? Trevaskis versuchte es und scheiterte. Es gab keine Hilfe von aussen, seine Ehe ging in die Brüche. Um zu genesen, fing er fünfhundert Kilometer entfernt ein neues Leben an.

Australiens Bauern sind ein eigener Menschenschlag. Mehr als achtzig Prozent der Bevölkerung des Landes wohnen in städtischen Agglomerationen, doch es sind die Kerle aus dem Busch und dem Outback, die das Selbstverständnis der Nation geprägt haben. In den Farmern von heute spiegeln sich die unerschrockenen europäischen Entdecker, die einst der unbarmherzigen Natur einen ganzen Kontinent abzuringen vermochten.

Australische Farmer leben auf riesigen Höfen in grosser Einsamkeit. Sie sind völlig auf sich gestellt, sie müssen Probleme allein bewältigen, ohne fremde Hilfe ihre Entscheidungen treffen und die Konsequenzen tragen können. Deshalb müssen sie stark sein, sie dürfen keine Schwäche zeigen. «Es ist dieser Machokult, der es einem Mann auf dem Land nicht erlaubt, sich zu psychischen Problemen zu bekennen», meint Trevaskis.

Mehr Bereitschaft zu solcher Ehrlichkeit wäre gerade jetzt nötiger denn je. Der Südosten Australiens befindet sich im Griff der schlimmsten Dürre seit hundert Jahren. Die Flüsse, die den Landwirtschaftsgürtel am Leben halten, sind am Austrocknen. Viele Bauern haben nur noch wenig oder gar kein Wasser mehr, ganze Landstriche sind braun und gelb. Kornbauern haben gar nicht mehr angesät; sie werden diesen Sommer nichts verdienen. Wer Schafe und Rinder hat, muss die Herden reduzieren, weil es kein Gras mehr gibt und sich die Farmer Futter je länger, desto weniger leisten können. Die Tiere aber will niemand kaufen; die Preise sind eingebrochen. Zukunftsangst macht sich breit.

Der Dürre sind die Bauern hilflos ausgeliefert. Dazu kommt das Gefühl, dass man die eigene Familie hängenlasse, statt für sie zu sorgen, dass man versagt habe. Alle vier Tage nimmt sich in Australien ein Farmer das Leben; so heisst es in einem Informationsblatt der Organisation «Beyondblue», die sich mit Prävention und Heilung von Depression auseinandersetzt.

Trevaskis wäre trotz allem gerne Bauer geblieben, doch er hatte das Geld nicht, um sich nach seiner Genesung wieder einen Hof zu leisten. Nun ist er Regionalvertreter eines Düngemittelproduzenten. Zudem reist er seit sechs Jahren in seiner Freizeit unermüdlich durchs Land und spricht im Namen von «Beyondblue» in Dörfern und an Konferenzen von seinen Erfahrungen. Er will anderen die Begegnung mit der Depression ersparen helfen.
Grassierende Selbstmorde

Die Statistiken sprechen eine deutliche Sprache. Die Selbstmordrate unter Männern zwischen zwanzig und dreissig Jahren ist in entlegenen Gebieten mehr als doppelt so hoch wie in den Städten. Aber auch wenn ein Bauer bereit ist zu akzeptieren, dass er ein psychisches Problem hat - um es zu lösen, muss er auch noch einen Ansprechpartner finden. Der Berufskollege in der Kneipe, mit dem er bisher seinen Kummer im Alkohol ertränkte, wird es kaum sein. Die nächste Fachperson kann Dutzende, vielleicht sogar Hunderte von Kilometern weit weg sein. Schon bei «normalen» Gesundheitsproblemen sehen sich Outback-Familien oft mit der Frage konfrontiert, ob sie stundenlange Autofahrten in Kauf nehmen sollen, um einen Arzt aufzusuchen, oder ob sie die Situation allein durchstehen sollen.

Die Dürre, die viele Bauern in Australien unter grossen Druck bringt, hat das Problem der ungenügenden psychischen Gesundheitsversorgung auf dem Land zwar nicht geschaffen, aber es stark akzentuiert. Nun wird intensiv nach Lösungen gesucht. «Beyondblue» und andere Organisationen sind dabei, ein Netz von einfach zu erreichenden Beratungsstellen aufzubauen. Die Depression soll vertrieben werden.

Inside Baghdad: A city paralysed by fear

Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.


Inside Baghdad: A city paralysed by fear
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 25 January 2007

Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar fire every night. This is mayhem beyond the comprehension of George Bush and Tony Blair.

Black smoke was rising over the city centre yesterday as American and Iraqi army troops tried to fight their way into the insurgent district of Haifa Street only a mile north of the Green Zone, home to the government and the US and British embassies. Helicopters flew fast and low past tower blocks, hunting snipers, and armoured vehicles manoeuvred in the streets below.

Many Iraqis who watched the State of the Union address shrugged it off as an irrelevance. "An extra 16,000 US soldiers are not going to be enough to restore order to Baghdad," said Ismail, a Sunni who fled his house in the west of the city, fearing he would be arrested and tortured by the much-feared Shia police commandos.

It is extraordinary that, almost four years after US forces captured Baghdad, they control so little of it. The outlook for Mr Bush's strategy of driving out insurgents from strongholds and preventing them coming back does not look good.

On Monday, a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni neighbourhood of al-Fadhil, close to the central markets of Baghdad. Several of the five American crew members may have survived the crash but they were later found with gunshot wounds to their heads, as if they had been executed on the ground.

Baghdad has broken up into hostile townships, Sunni and Shia, where strangers are treated with suspicion and shot if they cannot explain what they are doing. In the militant Sunni district of al-Amariyah in west Baghdad the Shia have been driven out and a resurgent Baath party has taken over. One slogan in red paint on a wall reads: "Saddam Hussein will live for ever, the symbol of the Arab nation." Another says: "Death to Muqtada [Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist Shia cleric] and his army of fools."

Restaurants in districts of Baghdad like the embassy quarter in al-Mansur, where I once used to have lunch, are now far too dangerous to visit. Any foreigner on the streets is likely to be kidnapped or killed. In any case, most of the restaurants closed long ago.

It is difficult for Iraqis to avoid joining one side or the other in the conflict. Many districts, such as al-Hurriya in west Baghdad, have seen the minority - in this case the Sunni - driven out.

A Sunni friend called Adnan, living in the neighbouring district of al-Adel, was visited by Sunni militiamen. They said: "You must help us to protect you from the Shia in Hurriya by going on patrol with us. Otherwise, we will give your house to somebody who will help us." He patrolled with the militiamen for several nights, clutching a Kalashnikov, and then fled the area.

The fear in Baghdad is so intense that rumours of even bloodier battles sweep through the city. Two weeks ago, many Sunni believed that the Shia Mehdi Army was going to launch a final "battle of Baghdad" aimed at killing or expelling the Sunni minority in the capital. The Sunni insurgents stored weapons and ammunition in order to make a last-ditch effort to defend their districts. In the event, they believe the ultimate battle was postponed at the last minute. Mr Bush insisted that the Iraqi government, with US military support, "must stop the sectarian violence in the capital". Quite how they are going to do this is not clear. American reinforcements might limit the ability of death squads to roam at will for a few months, but this will not provide a long-term solution.

Mr Bush's speech is likely to deepen sectarianism in Iraq by identifying the Shia militias with Iran. In fact, the most powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, is traditionally anti-Iranian. It is the Badr Organisation, now co-operating with US forces, which was formed and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. In the Arab world as a whole, Mr Bush seems to be trying to rally the Sunni states of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to support him in Iraq by exaggerating the Iranian threat.

Iraqis also wonder what will happen in the rest of Iraq while the US concentrates on trying to secure Baghdad. The degree of violence in the countryside is often underestimated because it is less reported than in the capital. In Baquba, the capital of Diyala province north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders were lauding their achievements at a press conference last weekend, claiming: "The situation in Baquba is reassuring and under control but there are some rumours circulated by bad people." Within hours, Sunni insurgents kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.

The situation in the south of Iraq is no more reassuring. Five American soldiers were killed in the Shia holy city of Karbala last Saturday by gunmen wearing American and Iraqi uniforms, carrying American weapons and driving vehicles used by US or Iraqi government forces. A licence plate belonging to a car registered to Iraq's Minister of Trade was found on one of the vehicles used in the attack. It is a measure of the chaos in Iraq today that US officials do not know if their men were killed by Sunni or Shia guerrillas.

US commanders and the Mehdi Army seem to be edging away from all-out confrontation in Baghdad. Neither the US nor Iraqi government has the resources to eliminate the Shia militias. Even Kurdish units in the capital have a high number of desertions. The Mehdi Army, if under pressure in the capital, could probably take over much of southern Iraq.

Mr Bush's supposedly new strategy is less of a strategy than a collection of tactics unlikely to change dramatically the situation on the ground. But if his systematic demonising of Iran is a precursor to air strikes or other military action against Iran, then Iraqis will once more pay a heavy price.

Yo-Yo Ma, Dvorak Cello Concerto, 3rd mvmt

Taking refuge in music....after the post below.
keep smiling

Iran: US agenda according to Paul Craig Roberts

1/25/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- Bush’s state of the union address did not describe the deplorable state of the union. The speech’s importance consists of Bush’s plea to Congress to please let him fool them one more time in order that he can attack Iran and start a bigger war that Congress will have to support in order to support Israel.

That is all the president had to say.

More Deception from the War Criminal Print
Thursday, 25 January 2007

By Paul Craig Roberts

01/25/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- Bush’s state of the union address did not describe the deplorable state of the union. The speech’s importance consists of Bush’s plea to Congress to please let him fool them one more time in order that he can attack Iran and start a bigger war that Congress will have to support in order to support Israel.

That is all the president had to say.

The “surge” of US troops for Iraq is another deception. The surge’s purpose has nothing to do with achieving victory in Iraq. Its purpose is to counter the pressure from the American public, Congress, and the US military to withdraw US troops from Iraq. Once a withdrawal begins, the neoconservative misadventure in the Middle East is at an end before its goals can be achieved. Delaying the withdrawal by proposing an escalation and provoking a debate gives Bush and Israel time to orchestrate an attack on Iran.

No one in Congress or print and TV media is prepared to call Bush on this transparent deception. Instead, critics focus on the fact that the surge cannot succeed. For example, in the Democratic response to Bush’s address, Senator Jim Webb, who served as Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, stressed the recklessness and cost of Bush’s invasion of Iraq:

“The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command, whose jurisdiction includes Iraq, the director of operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that has followed.”

Sen. Webb is the best that the Democrats have and with Ron Paul the best that Congress has. Yet, not even Webb can cut to the chase.

Consequently, while Congress wastes time with non-binding resolutions against the surge in Iraq, Bush proceeds to implement plans to start war with Iran.

I have said that the only hope of stopping Bush from initiating war with Iran is for the leadership of both parties in both houses of Congress to make unequivocally clear that Bush will be impeached if he attacks Iran without the approval of Congress. Even this might not be enough. The Bush Regime is capable of orchestrating an incident, such as an attack on a US aircraft carrier, that can be blamed on Iran and, in that way, sweep Congress along on a patriotic outburst against “Iranian aggression against US forces.”

Many of the people who have come to oppose Bush’s war in Iraq mistakenly believe that Bush is a good person who is trying to protect America, but that he is going about it in the wrong way and is too inflexible to learn from his mistakes. They have no clue as to the evil agenda that guides the Bush Regime.

The Bush Regime is the first neoconservative regime in US history. Bush hides the neoconservative agenda behind “the war on terror,” which essentially is a hoax. The main purpose of the neoconservatives’ “war on terror” it to eliminate any effective Muslim opposition to Israel’s theft of Palestine and the Golan Heights.

To silence Muslim opposition to Israel’s theft of Arab lands, the US must eliminate or intimidate Middle Eastern governments that are not under US control--Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah which governs southern Lebanon. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have failed to establish US control, but they have left both countries in a destructive civil war. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon appears to have renewed civil war in that country.

Bush is not going to be forthright about the neoconservative agenda, because he knows it is one that Congress and the American people must be manipulated and maneuvered into accepting. However, neoconservatives themselves are very forthright about their war plans. Let’s listen to their most recent pronouncements.

On January 23, former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a leading neoconservative, told a conference in Herzliya, Israel, that the United States and Israel were in danger of nuclear attack from Iran. The crazed Gingrich, who is considering a run for the US presidency in 2008, said: “Our enemies are fully as determined as Nazi Germany, and more determined than the Soviets. Our enemies will kill us the first chance they get. There is no rational ability to deny that fact.”

Gingrich says: “We don’t have the right language, goals, structure, or operating speed, to defeat our enemies. My hope is that being this candid and direct, I could open a dialogue that will force people to come to grips with how serious this is, how real it is, how much we are threatened.”

Who are “our enemies?” Why, Iran, of course.

Iran is such a dangerous determined enemy that “the threat of a nuclear Holocaust” hovers over the US and Israel. “Israel is in the greatest danger it has been in since 1967.” The US could “lose two or three cities to nuclear weapons, or more than a million people to biological weapons. Freedom as we know it will disappear.”

Another American presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, told the Israeli audience that Islamic jihadism was “the nightmare of this century.” Israel, Romney declared, “is facing a jihadist threat that runs through Tehran, to Damascus, to Gaza.” Hezbollah, he declared, is not fighting for a Palestinian state but for the destruction of Israel.

The world has not experienced this level of warmongering since Hitler.

Also at the Israeli conference was US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who added fuel to the fire by alleging without any evidence that “Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, there’s no doubt about it. There’s no debate among experts. It’s seeking a nuclear weapon at its plant at Nantz.”

A truthful statement, which no one any longer expects from any member of the Bush Regime, would be that the weapons inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have poured over Iran’s nuclear program and have found no evidence of a weapons program. A number of experts, such as Gordon Prather, have fiercely disputed the propagandistic claims of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

What concerns experts is that once Iran has succeeded with a nuclear energy program, it could go on, in the absence of inspections, to develop nuclear weapons in about 10 years. However, as a signatory nation to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran would undergo the inspections, as it was doing prior to the recent provocations orchestrated by the Bush Regime. In contrast, Israel has not signed the non-proliferation treaty and has a large number of nuclear weapons, the existence of which Israel has denied for years.

Burns told the Israeli conference that the US will not allow Iran to go nuclear. This is an extraordinary statement, because every signatory country to the non-proliferation treaty has the right to develop nuclear energy. Some people speculate that an oil-producing country doesn’t need nuclear power. However, oil is Iran’s only significant export. The less Iran uses its own oil, the greater its exports.

Burns told the Israelis that “We are committed to our alliance with Israel. We are committed to being Israel’s strongest security partner. I can’t remember a time when the relationship between our two countries was stronger than it is today.”

Chief US neoconsevative Richard Perle told the Israeli conference that President Bush would give the green light if US military involvement was needed for a successful strike on Iran. According to the Israeli press, “Perle hypothesized a nightmare scenario, saying: ‘In possession of nuclear weapons, or even in possession of nuclear material, Iran is perfectly capable of using its terrorist networks to enable others to inflict grievous damage.’”

Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, who met privately with Burns prior to their joint appearance at the Herzliya conference, said that 2007 would decide the future of the Middle East. Mofaz declared, “The year of 2007 is a year of decisiveness. Iran of 2007 has all the components to threaten us existentially, and the whole of the region.”

Any expert or knowledgeable person who examines these statements sees nothing but unsupported assertions, paranoid speculations, fear- mongering and blatant lies. It is on this basis, and this basis alone, that the Bush Regime will initiate war with Iran.

Iran is being set up by the identical propaganda machine that set up Iraq with fearful imagery of “mushroom clouds over American cities” and nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction.”

After years of blaming al-Qaeda for the Iraqi insurgency, the Bush Regime propagandists have suddenly switched gears and now are blaming Iran for the failure of the US occupation in Iraq and for the deaths of US troops. The Bush Regime recently arrested Iranian diplomats in northern Iraq and made charges so preposterous that the charges were even rejected by Bush’s Kurdish and Iraqi allies. Powerful US naval attack fleets have been stationed off Iran’s coast, and attack aircraft have been moved to Turkey and other locations on Iran’s borders.

Meanwhile, Iran has done nothing.

Iran has refrained from arming and encouraging its Iraqi Shi’ite allies to join the insurgency against US troops. Iran could deliver the weapons that can knock out US tanks and helicopter gunships, thus eliminating the US military advantage from the conflict.

Neoconservative and Israeli propagandists have spread the lie that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has declared Iran’s intention “to wipe Israel off the map.” This lie is today regularly repeated even by such formerly careful newspapers as the New York Times and London Times.

A number of experts have examined the speech by the Iranian president. What Ahmadinejad actually said was a direct quote from the deceased Ayatollah Khomeini: “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” The experts explain that in the context of the text of the speech, what is being said is that peace in the Middle East requires regime change in Israel. In place of a Zionist regime hell bent on stealing more land from Muslims, Zionism will pass away and Israel will cease its aggressive policies and live at peace with its neighbors.

A great number of Western experts agree that the problem in the Middle East is neither Islamic jihad nor Israel per se, but Zionism, which keeps Israel on a land expansionist course at the expense of Arab peoples.

The failure of US policy in the Middle East is the failure to deter Israel from this Zionist policy. A large number of Israelis are opposed to this policy and recognize that Zionism is the cause of Israel’s conflict with Arabs.

The real problem that Americans face is that the Zionist influence on US policy is so powerful that instead of dealing with the real cause of strife in the Middle East, the US is about to join Zionism in attempting to eliminate all Muslim opposition to Zionist expansion.

Bush’s “war on terror” and Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons are just propagandistic cover for the real agenda, which is to silence opponents of Zionist expansion.

The fanaticism of Zionists has been made clear by their ferocious attack on President Jimmy Carter, who stated in his current book both clearly and reasonably that the only path to peace in the Middle East is for Israel to accept a viable Palestinian state.

Carter has done more for peace between Israelis and Arabs than anyone. Moreover, Israel, as opposed to Zionism, has had no greater friend or stronger supporter than Carter. But because Carter pointed out Zionism’s role in the conflict, America’s most decent and truthful president was demonized.

The unjustified Zionist attack on Carter should tell everyone where the real problem lies.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Carmina Burana - O Fortuna

No comment - just listen!
More about Carmina Burana
in German: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana
in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana

Mexiko in der Tortilla-Krise

Der Preis für Tortillas, das tägliche Brot der Mexikaner, ist in die Höhe geschossen. In der Bevölkerung wächst der Unmut, die Regierung ist beunruhigt.
...und was dies mit dem Treibstoffverbrauch der Automobile zu tun hat.

21. Januar 2007, NZZ am Sonntag
Mexiko in der Tortilla-Krise
Die arme Bevölkerung kann sich das Grundnahrungsmittel Mais immer weniger leisten

Der Preis für Tortillas, das tägliche Brot der Mexikaner, ist in die Höhe geschossen. In der Bevölkerung wächst der Unmut, die Regierung ist beunruhigt.

Victor Merten

Der neue mexikanische Präsident Felipe Calderón hat keinen guten Start erwischt. Der Preis der Tortilla steigt und steigt und droht dieser Tage völlig ausser Kontrolle zu geraten. In der ärmeren Bevölkerung wächst der Unmut über die Verteuerung ihres Grundnahrungsmittels mit jedem Peso, den sie mehr für die dünnen Maisfladen hinzulegen hat. Nur eineinhalb Monate nach seinem Amtsantritt, den ihm die Wahlverlierer mit allen Mitteln verderben wollten, steht Calderón bereits vor der ersten Bewährungsprobe.

Der Preis für Tortillas schoss letzte Woche dramatisch in die Höhe. In der Hauptstadt kostete das Kilo zwischen 10 und 17 Pesos statt der üblichen 6 bis 7 Pesos (10 Pesos entsprechen etwa 1 Franken 10). Das nachdem der Preis letztes Jahr um 14 bis 20 Prozent gestiegen war, wie die Zentralbank berichtet. Bei einem Durchschnittseinkommen von 200 Pesos im Tag ist dies für viele eine schwere Belastung. Die Hälfte der 107 Millionen Mexikaner lebt in ärmlichen bis elenden Verhältnissen. «4 von 10 Familien sind vom Preisanstieg betroffen; so viele wenden für Tortillas zehn Prozent ihres Einkommens auf», erklärte die Vizeministerin für Industrie und Handel, Rocío Ruiz.

Mexiko befindet sich in einer Tortilla-Krise. Das zum Luxus gewordene tägliche «Vitamin T» ist derzeit beherrschendes Thema. Noch ist es zu keinen grösseren Kundgebungen gekommen. Am Mittwoch versammelten sich in Mexiko-Stadt nur einige Dutzend Unzufriedene zum Protest mit Spruchbändern und Pfannendeckeln vor dem Volkswirtschafts- und dem Landwirtschaftsministerium. Sie kündigten einen grossen Protestmarsch gegen die Regierung am 31. Januar an. Bei anderer Gelegenheit schimpfte der linke Oppositionsführer Andrés Manuel López Obrador den Präsidenten in gewohnt hemdsärmliger Art einen Lügner, der sein Wahlversprechen, die Preise zu senken, nicht einhalte.

Das Konflikt- und Mobilisierungspotenzial einer Preisexplosion könne unvorhersehbare Folgen haben, schreibt der Ökonom und Kolumnist Alejandro Villagómez in der Zeitung «El Universal». Dessen scheint sich die konservative Regierung nur zu gut bewusst zu sein. Präsident Calderón höchstpersönlich stellte am Donnerstag Gegenmassnahmen vor. Unter anderem soll die zollfreie Einfuhr von 750 000 Tonnen Mais dessen Preis stabilisieren. Mit Produzenten und Unternehmern der Branche wurde ein Höchstpreis von 8 Pesos 50 das Kilo vereinbart. Missbräuchliche Preise und Spekulation werden scharf geahndet.

Spekulationsgewinne
Als eine der Ursachen der Tortilla-Krise gilt, dass Spekulanten grosse Maismengen horteten, um das Marktangebot zu verknappen und nach einem Preisanstieg höhere Gewinne zu erzielen. Die Linke fordert daher staatlich festgesetzte Preise für Grundnahrungsmittel wie Mais und Tortillas.

Bis 1999 stützte die Regierung den Tortilla-Preis. Sie gab dies jedoch auf, nachdem sich dank des Freihandelsabkommens Nafta die Maiseinfuhren aus den Vereinigten Staaten verbilligten. Wirtschaftsminister Eduardo Sojo sieht vor allem die zunehmende Herstellung von Treibstoff aus Mais in den USA und damit das sinkende Maisangebot im Nahrungsmittelmarkt als Ursache. Gestützt wird er von Lester R. Brown vom Earth Policy Institute in Connecticut. In einem neuen Bericht warnt Lester vor der Gefahr, dass Mais immer mehr für die Ethanol-Herstellung statt als Nahrungsmittel verwendet wird. Die USA bauen die Zahl der Ethanol-Brennereien seit dem Ölpreis- Anstieg Ende 2005 stark aus, um die Abhängigkeit vom Öl zu mindern. Dies wird laut dem Bericht dazu führen, dass statt des erwarteten Bedarfs von 60 Millionen Tonnen im nächsten Jahr 139 Millionen Mais benötigt werden. Ende 2006 gab es in den USA 116 Brennereien, 11 davon wurden ausgebaut, 79 waren im Bau und 200 in Planung.

Autos gegen Menschen
«Der Wettbewerb zwischen Autos und Menschen um Mais wird den Preis wohl in ungeahnte Höhen treiben», schreibt Brown. Da die US-Ernte weltweit für 40 Prozent der Maisproduktion und 70 Prozent der Exporte sorge, würde ein Rückgang der US-Exporte die Weltwirtschaft erschüttern.

Mexiko kann hoffen, dass die amerikanischen Bauern die Produktion erhöhen. Der viertgrösste Maisproduzent sollte aber auch seine eigene Produktion schleunigst steigern. Dazu müsste das Land laut dem Ökonomen Villagómez allerdings den lange vor ausländischer Konkurrenz geschützten Maisanbau modernisieren. Im Durchschnitt erwirtschaften Mexikos Maisbauern nur 2,8 Tonnen je Hektare, verglichen mit 8,2 Tonnen in den USA. Kurzfristig ist eine Produktivitätssteigerung jedoch nicht zu erreichen.