Kennan's Telegram (Excerpt)

Kennan's Telegram (Excerpt) George F. Kennan to Secretary of State James Byrnes 22 February 1946 Part 1: Basic Features of Post War Soviet Outlook, as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine, Are as Follows: a.USSR still lives in antagonistic "capitalist encirclement" with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. . . . Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. . . . Internal conflicts in capitalism inevitably generate wars. . . . intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states, and wars of intervention against socialist world. . . . Intervention against USSR, while it would be disastrous to those who undertook it, would cause renewed delay in progress of Soviet socialism and must therefore be forestalled at all costs. . . . Conflicts between capitalist states, though likewise fraught with danger for USSR, nevertheless hold out great possibilities for advancement of socialist cause . . . Part 2: Background of Outlook . . . First, it does not represent natural outlook of Russian people. Latter are, by and large, friendly to outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it talents they are conscious of possessing, eager above all to live in peace and joyful fruits of their own labor. Party line only represents thesis which official propaganda machine puts forward . . . to a public often remarkably resistant in . . . its innermost thoughts. . . . Second, please note that premises on which this party line is based are for most part simply not true. Experience has shown that peaceful and mutually profitable coexistence of capitalist and socialist states is entirely possible. Basic internal conflicts in advanced countries are no longer primarily those arising out of capitalist ownership of means of production, but are ones arising from advanced urbanism and industrialism as such, which Russia has thus far been spared not by socialism but only by her own backwardness. Internal rivalries of capitalism do not always generate wars; and not all wars are attributable to this cause. . . . At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on a vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added . . . fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in [the West]. But this latter type of insecurity was one, which afflicted rather Russian rulers that Russian people. . . . And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it. . . . It was no coincidence that Marxism . . . caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. . . . Part 3: Projection of Soviet Outlook in Practical Policy on Official Level On official plane we must look for following: 2

Internal policy devoted to increasing in every way strength and prestige of Soviet state: . . . great displays to impress outsiders; continued secretiveness about internal matters, designed to conceal weaknesses and to keep opponents in dark. Wherever it is considered timely and promising, efforts will be made to advance official limits of Soviet power. For the moment, these efforts are restricted to certain neighboring points conceived of here as being of immediate strategic necessity, such as Northern Iran, Turkey, possibly Bornholm. However, other points may at any time come into question . . .Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others. Moscow sees in UNO [United Nations Organization] not the mechanism for a permanent and stable world society founded on mutual interest and aims of all nations, but an arena in which aims just mentioned can be favorably pursued. As long as UNO is considered here to serve this purpose, Soviets will remain in it. . . . Its attitude to that organization will remain essentially pragmatic and tactical. Toward colonial areas and backward or dependent peoples, Soviet policy, even on official plane, will be directed toward weakening of power and influence and contacts of advanced Western nations, on theory that in so far as this policy is successful, there will be created a vacuum which will favor Communist- Soviet penetration. . . . Russians will strive energetically to develop Soviet representation in, and strong ties with, countries in which they sense strong possibilities of opposition to Western centers of power. . . . In international economic matters, Soviet policy will really be dominated by pursuit of autarchy for Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated adjacent areas taken together. . . . I think it possible Soviet foreign trade may be restricted largely to Soviet's own security sphere . . . Part 4: Following May Be Said as to What We May Expect by Way of Implementation of Basic Soviet Policies on Unofficial, or Subterranean Plane, i.e., on Plane for Which Soviet Government Accepts no Responsibility [i.e., action through communist parties in other nations, the Pan-Slavic movement, governments friendly to Soviet purposes] . . . To undermine general political and strategic potential of major western powers. . . . On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken power and influence of Western Powers [on] colonial backward, or dependent peoples. . . . Where individual governments stand in path of Soviet purposes pressure will be brought for their removal from office. . . . In foreign countries Communists will, as a rule, work toward destruction of all forms of personal independence, economic, political, or moral. Their system can handle only individuals who have been brought into complete dependence on higher power. . . . Everything possible will be done to set major Western Powers against each other. . . . In general, all Soviet efforts on unofficial international plane will be negative and destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond reach of Soviet control. This is only in line with basic Soviet instinct that there can be no compromise with rival power and that constructive work can start only when Communist power is dominant. . . . Part 5: In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be 3 disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. . . In addition, [Soviet power] has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people who experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. . . . I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve-and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make: (1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force: For this reason it can easily withdraw-and usually does-when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige engaging showdowns. (2) Gauged against western world as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depends on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which western world can muster. . . . For these reasons I think we may approach calmly and with good heart problem of how to deal with Russia. . . . Our first step must be to apprehend . . . the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual. We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. . . . I am convinced there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. . . . It may be also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian American relations. . . . But I cannot see what we would be risking. . . . Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. . . . We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. . . . Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. . . . Source: Foreign Relations, 1946, Vol. VI, 696-709 4

Excerpts from "NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security", a Top Secret report outlining U.S. national security concerns for the Cold War submitted to President Truman on 14 April 1950. ANALYSIS I. Background of the Present Crisis Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions--the Russian and the Chinese--of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires--the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese--and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French. During the span of one generation, the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered. For several centuries it had proved impossible for any one nation to gain such preponderant strength that a coalition of other nations could not in time face it with greater strength. The international scene was marked by recurring periods of violence and war, but a system of sovereign and independent states was maintained, over which no state was able to achieve hegemony. Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered this historic distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war. On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled. It is in this context that this Republic and its citizens in the ascendancy of their strength stand in their deepest peril. The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions. II. Fundamental Purpose of the United States The fundamental purpose of the United States is laid down in the Preamble to the Constitution: ". . . to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." In essence, the fundamental purpose is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual. Three realities emerge as a consequence of this purpose: Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life, for which as in the Declaration of Independence, "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." 5

III. Fundamental Design of the Kremlin The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas now under their control. In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority. The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.

IV. The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of ideas and Values between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design A. NATURE OF CONFLICT The Kremlin regards the United States as the only major threat to the conflict between idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin, which has come to a crisis with the polarization of power described in Section I, and the exclusive possession of atomic weapons by the two protagonists. The idea of freedom, moreover, is peculiarly and intolerably subversive of the idea of slavery. But the converse is not true. The implacable purpose of the slave state to eliminate the challenge of freedom has placed the two great powers at opposite poles. It is this fact which gives the present polarization of power the quality of crisis. The free society values the individual as an end in himself, requiring of him only that measure of self- discipline and self-restraint which make the rights of each individual compatible with the rights of every other individual. The freedom of the individual has as its counterpart, therefore, the negative responsibility of the individual not to exercise his freedom in ways inconsistent with the freedom of other individuals and the positive responsibility to make constructive use of his freedom in the building of a just society. From this idea of freedom with responsibility derives the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society. This is the explanation of the strength of free men. It constitutes the integrity and the vitality of a free and democratic system. The free society attempts to create and maintain an environment in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers. It also explains why the free society tolerates those within it who would use their freedom to destroy it. By the same token, in relations between nations, the prime reliance of the free society is on the strength and appeal of its idea, and it feels no compulsion sooner or later to bring all societies into conformity with it. For the free society does not fear, it welcomes, diversity. It derives its strength from its hospitality even to antipathetic ideas. It is a market for free trade in ideas, secure in its faith that free men will take the best wares, and grow to a fuller and better realization of their powers in exercising their choice. The idea of freedom is the most contagious idea in history, more contagious than the idea of submission to authority. For the breadth of freedom cannot be tolerated in a society which has come under the domination of an individual or group of individuals with a will to absolute power. Where the despot holds absolute power--the absolute power of the absolutely powerful will--all other wills must be subjugated in 6 an act of willing submission, a degradation willed by the individual upon himself under the compulsion of a perverted faith. It is the first article of this faith that he finds and can only find the meaning of his existence in serving the ends of the system. The system becomes God, and submission to the will of God becomes submission to the will of the system. It is not enough to yield outwardly to the system--even Gandhian non-violence is not acceptable--for the spirit of resistance and the devotion to a higher authority might then remain, and the individual would not be wholly submissive. The same compulsion which demands total power over all men within the Soviet state without a single exception, demands total power over all Communist Parties and all states under Soviet domination. Thus Stalin has said that the theory and tactics of Leninism as expounded by the Bolshevik party are mandatory for the proletarian parties of all countries. A true internationalist is defined as one who unhesitatingly upholds the position of the Soviet Union and in the satellite states true patriotism is love of the Soviet Union. By the same token the "peace policy" of the Soviet Union, described at a Party Congress as "a more advantageous form of fighting capitalism," is a device to divide and immobilize the non-Communist world, and the peace the Soviet Union seeks is the peace of total conformity to Soviet policy. The antipathy of slavery to freedom explains the iron curtain, the isolation, the autarchy of the society whose end is absolute power. The existence and persistence of the idea of freedom is a permanent and continuous threat to the foundation of the slave society; and it therefore regards as intolerable the long continued existence of freedom in the world. What is new, what makes the continuing crisis, is the polarization of power which now inescapably confronts the slave society with the free. The assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere. The shock we sustained in the destruction of Czechoslovakia was not in the measure of Czechoslovakia's material importance to us. In a material sense, her capabilities were already at Soviet disposal. But when the integrity of Czechoslovak institutions was destroyed, it was in the intangible scale of values that we registered a loss more damaging than the material loss we had already suffered. Thus unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power. B. OBJECTIVES The objectives of a free society are determined by its fundamental values and by the necessity for maintaining the material environment in which they flourish. Logically and in fact, therefore, the Kremlin's challenge to the United States is directed not only to our values but to our physical capacity to protect their environment. It is a challenge which encompasses both peace and war and our objectives in peace and war must take account of it. 1. Thus we must make ourselves strong, both in the way in which we affirm our values in the conduct of our national life, and in the development of our military and economic strength. 2. We must lead in building a successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world. It is only by practical affirmation, abroad as well as at home, of our essential values, that we can preserve our own integrity, in which lies the real frustration of the Kremlin design. 3. But beyond thus affirming our values our policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system, a change toward which the frustration of the design is the first and perhaps the most important step. Clearly it will not only be less costly but more effective if this change occurs to a maximum extent as a result of internal forces in Soviet society. 7

In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership. It demands that we make the attempt, and accept the risks inherent in it, to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. We should limit our requirement of the Soviet Union to its participation with other nations on the basis of equality and respect for the rights of others. Subject to this requirement, we must with our allies and the former subject peoples seek to create a world society based on the principle of consent. Its framework cannot be inflexible. It will consist of many national communities of great and varying abilities and resources, and hence of war potential. The seeds of conflicts will inevitably exist or will come into being. To acknowledge this is only to acknowledge the impossibility of a final solution. Not to acknowledge it can be fatally dangerous in a world in which there are no final solutions. All these objectives of a free society are equally valid and necessary in peace and war. But every consideration of devotion to our fundamental values and to our national security demands that we seek to achieve them by the strategy of the cold war. It is only by developing the moral and material strength of the free world that the Soviet regime will become convinced of the falsity of its assumptions and that the pre-conditions for workable agreements can be created. By practically demonstrating the integrity and vitality of our system the free world widens the area of possible agreement and thus can hope gradually to bring about a Soviet acknowledgement of realities which in sum will eventually constitute a frustration of the Soviet design. Short of this, however, it might be possible to create a situation which will induce the Soviet Union to accommodate itself, with or without the conscious abandonment of its design, to coexistence on tolerable terms with the non-Soviet world. Such a development would be a triumph for the idea of freedom and democracy. It must be an immediate objective of United States policy. There is no reason, in the event of war, for us to alter our overall objectives. They do not include unconditional surrender, the subjugation of the Russian peoples or a Russia shorn of its economic potential. Such a course would irrevocably unite the Russian people behind the regime which enslaves them. Rather these objectives contemplate Soviet acceptance of the specific and limited conditions requisite to an international environment in which free institutions can flourish, and in which the Russian peoples will have a new chance to work out their own destiny. If we can make the Russian people our allies in the enterprise we will obviously have made our task easier and victory more certain. The objectives outlined in NSC 20/4 (November 23, 1948) ... are fully consistent with the objectives stated in this paper, and they remain valid. The growing intensity of the conflict which has been imposed upon us, however, requires the changes of emphasis and the additions that are apparent. Coupled with the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union, the intensifying struggle requires us to face the fact that we can expect no lasting abatement of the crisis unless and until a change occurs in the nature of the Soviet system. 8

Mao Zedong: The People's Democratic Dictatorship Mao gave the following speech on June 30, 1949, in commemoration of the Chinese Communist Party's twentyeighth anniversary. Communists the world over are wiser than the bourgeoisie, they understand the laws governing the existence and development of things, they understand dialectics and they can see farther The bourgeoisie does not welcome this g truth because it does not want to be overthrown. As everyone knows, our Party passed through these twentyeight years not in peace but amid hardships, for we had to fight enemies, both foreign and domestic, both inside and outside the Party. We thank Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin for giving us a weapon. This weapon is not a machinegun~ but Marxlsm- Leninisn, The Russians made the October Revolution and created the world's first socialist state. Under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, the revolutionary energy of the great proletariat and labouring people of Russia, hitherto latent and unseen by foreigners, suddenly erupted like a volcano, and the Chinese and all mankind began to see the Russians in a new light. Then, and only then, did the Chinese enter an entirely new era in their thinking and their life. They found MarxismLeninism, the universally applicable truth, and the face of China began to change.... There are bourgeois republics in foreign lands, but China cannot have a bourgeois republic because she is a country suffering under imperialist oppression. The only way is through a people's republic led by the working class.... Twentyfour years have passed since Sun Yatsen's death, and the Chinese revolution, led by the Communist Party of China, has made tremendous advances both in theory and practice and has radically changed the face of China. Up to now the principal and fundamental experience the Chinese people have gained is twofold: Internally, arouse the masses of the people. That is, unite the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, form a domestic united front under the leadership of the working class, and advance from this to the establishment of a state which is a people's democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.

Externally, unite in a common struggle with those nations of the world which treat us as equals and unite with the peoples of all countries. That is, ally ourselves with the Soviet Union, with the People's Democracies and with the proletariat and the broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front. "You are leaning to one side." Exactly. The forty years' experience of Sun Yatsen and the twentyeight years' experience of the Communist Party have taught us to lean to one side, and we are firmly convinced that in order to win victory and consolidate it we must lean to one side. In the light of the experiences accumulated in these forty years and these twentyeight years, all Chinese without exception must lean either to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism. Sitting on the fence will not do, nor is there a third road. We oppose the Chiang Kaishek reactionaries who lean to the side of imperialism, and we also oppose the illusions about a third road. "You are too irritating." We are talking about how to deal with domestic and foreign reactionaries, the imperialists and their running dogs, not about how to deal with anyone else. With regard to such 9 reactionaries, the question of irritating them or not does not arise. Irritated or not irritated, they will remain the same because they are reactionaries. Only if we draw a clear line between reactionaries and revolutionaries, expose the intrigues and plots of the reactlonaries, arouse the vigilance and attention of the revolutionary ranks, heighten our will to fight and crush the enemy's arrogance can we Isolate the reactionaries, vanquish them or supersede them. We must not show the slightest timidity before a wild beast. "Victory is possible even without international help." This is a mistaken idea. In the epoch in which imperialism exists, it is impossible for a genuine people's revolution to win victory in any country without various forms of help from the international revolutionary forces, and even if victory were won, it could not be consolidated. This was the case with the victory and consolidation of the great October Revolution, as Lenin and Stalin told us long ago. "We need help from the British and U.S. governments." This, too, is a naive idea in these times. Would the present rulers of Britain and the United States, who are imperialists, help a people's state? Why do these countries do business with us and, supposing they might be willing to lend us money on terms of mutual benefit in the future, why would they do so? Because their capitalists want to make money and their bankers want to earn interest to extricate themselves from their own crisis-it is not a matter of helping the Chinese people. "You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right. "Who are the people?" At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. These classes, led by the working class and the Communist Party unite to form their own state and elect their own government they enforce their dictatorship over the running dogs of imperialism-the landlord class and bureaucratbourgeoisie, as well as the representatives of those classes, the Kuomintang reactionaries and their accomplices-suppress them, allow them only to behave themselves and not to be unruly in word or deed. If they speak or act in an unruly way, they will be promptly stopped and punished. Democracy is practised within the ranks of the people, who enjoy the rights of freedom of speech, assembly, association and so on. The right to vote belongs only to the people, not to the reactionaries. The combination of these two aspects, democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, is the people's democratic dictatorship. "Why must things be done this way?" The reason is quite clear to everybody. If things were not done this way, the revolution would fail, the people would suffer, the country would be conquered.

"Don't you want to abolish state power?" Yes, we do, but not right now; we cannot do it yet. Why? Because imperialism still exists, because domestic reaction still exists, because classes still exist in our country. Our present task is to strengthen the people's state apparatus-mainly the people's army, the people's police and the people's courts-in order to consolidate national defence and protect the people's interests. Given this condition, China can develop steadily, under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party, from an agricultural into an industrial country and from a new-democratic into a socialist and communist society, can abolish classes and realize the Great Harmony. The state apparatus, Including the army, the police and the courts, is the instrument by which one class oppresses another It is an instrument for the oppression of antagonistic classes; it is violence and not "benevolence". "You are not benevolent!" Quite so We definitely do not apply a policy of benevolence to the reactionaries and towards the reactionary activities of the reactionary classes. Our policy of benevolence is applied only within the ranks of the people, not beyond them to the reactionaries or to the reactionary activities of 10 reactionary classes.... Here, the method we employ is democratic, the method of persuasion, not of compulsion. When anyone among the people breaks the law, he too should be punished, imprisoned or even sentenced to death; but this is a matter of a few individual cases, and it differs in principle from the dictatorship exercised over the reactionaries as a class. As for the members of the reactionary classes and individual reactionaries, so long as they do not rebel, sabotage or create trouble after their political power has been overthrown, land and work will be given to them as well in order to allow them to live and remould themselves through labour into new people. If they are not willing to work, the people's state will compel them to work.... Such remoulding of members of the reactionary classes can be accomplished only by a state of the people's democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the Communist Party. When it is well done, China's major exploiting classes, the landlord class and the bureaucratbourgeoisie (the monopoly capitalist class), will be eliminated for good. There remain the national bourgeoisie; at the present stage, we can already do a good deal of suitable educational work with many of them. When the time comes to realize socialism, that is, to nationalize private enterprise, we shall carry the work of educating and remoulding them a step further. The people have a powerful state apparatus in their hands-there is no need to fear rebellion by the national bourgeoisie.... The people's democratic dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and the peasants, because these two classes comprise 80 to 90 per cent of China's population. These two classes are the main force in overthrowing imperialism and the Kuomintang reactionaries. The transition from New Democracy to socialism also depends mainly upon their alliance. The people's democratic dictatorship needs the leadership of the working class. For it is only the working class that is most farsighted, most selfless and most thoroughly revolutionary. The entire history of revolution proves that without the leadership of the working class revolution triumphs. In the epoch of imperialism, in no country can any other class lead any genuine revolution to victory. This is clearly proved by the fact that the many revolutions led by China's petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie all failed.... To sum up our experienceand concentrate it into one point, it is: the people's democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class (through the Communist Party) and based upon the alliance of workers and peasants. This dictatorship must unite as one with the international revolutionary forces. This is our formula, our principal experience, our main programme. ... The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is our best teacher and we must learn from it. The situation both at home and abroad is in our favour we can rely fully on the weapon of the people's democratic dictatorship, unite the people throughout the country, the reactionaries excepted, and advance steadily to our goal. From Mao Zedong (Mao Tsetung), Speech "In Commemoration of the 28th Anniversary of the Communist Party of China, June 30, 1949," in Selected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, n.d.), pp. 411423. 11

“Declaration of Independence,Democratic Republic of Vietnam* Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi, 2 September 1945).

(SEPTEMBER 2, 1945) "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America m 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights." Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots- they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion; they have practised obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the fields of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolised the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers. In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese Fascists violated Indochina's territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two rnillion of our fellow-citizens died from starvation. On March 9, the French troops were disarmed by the lapanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered, showing that not only were they incapable of "protecting" us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese. On several occasions before March 9, the Vietminh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their 12 terrorist activities against the Vietminh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yen Bay and Cao Bang. Not withstanding all this, our fellow-citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese putsch of March 1945, the Vietminh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property. From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Vietnam and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland. The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam. A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent countryÑand in fact it is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty. Source: Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (Hanoi, 1960-1962), Vol. 3, pp. 17-21. * Note, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has been renamed The Socialist Republic of Vietnam. 13

The Manifesto of The Laodong Party, February, 1951 The main task of the Viet Nam Laodong Party now is: To unite and lead the working class, the working masses and the entire people of Viet Nam in their struggle to wipe out the French colonialists and defeat the American interventionists; to bring the liberation war of the Viet Nam people to complete victory, thereby making Viet Nam a genuinely independent and united country. The Viet Nam Laodong Party fully supports the Government of the Viet Nam Democratic Republic, unites and co-operates closely with other parties and organisations in the Lien Viet Front in order to realise fully the peoples democratic regime-politically, economically, socially and culturally. The Viet Nam Laodong Party stands for guaranteeing the legitimate interests of all strata of the people. It recommends that special care should be taken to raise the material and moral standards of living of the army, which fights for the defence of the country against the enemy, and which had been enduring the greatest hardships. The workers, who are fighters in production, must have the opportunity continually to improve their living conditions and to take part in running their own enterprises. The peasants, who are production combatants in the rural areas, must benefit from the reduction of land rent and interest and from appropriate agrarian reforms. The intellectual workers must be encouraged and assisted in developing their abilities. Small trades-people and small employers must be assisted in developing trade and handicrafts. The national bourgeoisie must be encouraged, helped and guided in their undertakings to contribute to the development of the national economy. The right of the patriotic landlords to collect land rent in accordance with the law must be guaranteed. The national minorities must be given every assistance and must enjo~ absolute equality in rights and duties. Effective help must be rendered to the women so as to bring about equality between men and women. Believers in all religions must enjoy freedom of worship. Overseas Vietnamese in foreign countries must be protected. The lives and properties of foreign residents in Viet Nam must be protected. Chinese nationals in particular, if they so desire, will be allowed to enjoy the same rights and perform the same duties as Vietnamese citizens. In the field of external affairs, the Viet Nam Laodong Party recommends: 'The Viet Nam people must unite closely with and help the peoples of Cambodia and Laos in their struggle for independence and, with them, liberate jointly the whole of Indo-China; actively support the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples; unite closely with the Soviet Union, China and other people's democracies; form close alliances with the peoples of France and the French colonies so as to contribute to the anti-imperialist struggle to defend world peace and democracy! Confident in the efforts of all its members, in the support of working men and women and in the sympathy of the entire people, the Viet Nam Laodong is sure to fulfil its tasks of: 14

Bringing the liberation war to complete victory. Developing the people's democratic regime. Contributing to the defence of world peace and democracy. Leading the Viet Nam people toward Socialism. Source: New China News Agency, April 6, 1951. 15

Viet Cong Program, 1962 PROGRAM OF THE PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY OF VIETNAM January, 1962 1. We will overthrow the Ngo Dinh Diem government and form a national democratic coalition government. 2. We will carry out a program involving extension of democratic liberties, general amnesty for political detainees, abolition of agrovilles and resettlement centers, abolition of the special military tribunal law and other undemocratic laws. 3. We will abolish the economic monopoly of the U.S. and its henchmen, protect domestically made products, promote development of the economy, and allow forced evacuees from North Vietnam to return to their place of birth. 4. We will reduce land rent and prepare for land reform. 5. We will eliminate U.S. cultural enslavement and depravity and build a nationalistic progressive culture and education. 6. We will abolish the system of American military advisers and close all foreign military bases in Vietnam. 7. We will establish equality between men and women and among different nationalities and recognize the autonomous rights of the national minorities in the country. 8. We will pursue a foreign policy of peace and will establish diplomatic relations with all countries that respect the independence and sovereignty of Vietnam. 9. We will re-establish normal relations between North and South as a first step toward peaceful reunification of the country. 10. We will oppose aggressive wars and actively defend world peace. Source: Reprinted from Viet Cong by Douglas Pike (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1966)

President Lyndon B. Johnson's Address at Johns Hopkins University: "Peace Without Conquest" April 7, 1965 Mr. Garland, Senator Brewster, Senator Tydings, Members of the congressional delegation, members of the faculty of Johns Hopkins, student body, my fellow Americans: Last week 17 nations sent their views to some two dozen countries having an interest in southeast Asia. We are joining those 17 countries and stating our American policy tonight which we believe will contribute toward peace in this area of the world. I have come here to review once again with my own people the views of the American Government. Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change. This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania. It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Viet-Nam. Viet-Nam is far away from this quiet campus. We have no territory there, nor do we seek any. The war is dirty and brutal and difficult. And some 400 young men, born into an America that is bursting with opportunity and promise, have ended their lives on Viet-Nam's steaming soil. Why must we take this painful road? Why must this Nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away? We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure. This kind of world will never be built by bombs or bullets. Yet the infirmities of man are such that force must often precede reason, and the waste of war, the works of peace. We wish that this were not so. But we must deal with the world as it is, if it is ever to be as we wish. The world as it is in Asia is not a serene or peaceful place. The first reality is that North Viet-Nam has attacked the independent nation of South Viet-Nam. Its object is total conquest. Of course, some of the people of South Viet-Nam are participating in attack on their own government. But trained men and supplies, orders and arms, flow in a constant stream from north to south. This support is the heartbeat of the war. And it is a war of unparalleled brutality. Simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnapping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to their government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large-scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities. The confused nature of this conflict cannot mask the fact that it is the new face of an old enemy. Over this war--and all Asia--is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peking. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is a nation which is 17 helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Viet-Nam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes.

WHY ARE WE IN VIET-NAM ? Why are these realities our concern? Why are we in South Viet-Nam ? We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Viet-Nam. We have helped to build, and we have helped to defend. Thus, over many years, we have made a national pledge to he!p South Viet-Nam defend its independence. And I intend to keep that promise. To dishonor that pledge, to abandon this small and brave nation to its enemies, and to the terror that must follow, would be an unforgivable wrong. We are also there to strengthen world order. Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Viet-Nam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and in the value of America's word. The result would be increased unrest and instability, and even wider war. We are also there because there are great stakes in the balance. Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next. We must say in southeast Asia--as we did in Europe--in the words of the Bible: "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." There are those who say that all our effort there will be futile--that China's power is such that it is bound to dominate all southeast Asia. But there is no end to that argument until all of the nations of Asia are swallowed up. There are those who wonder why we have a responsibility there. Well, we have it there for the same reason that we have a responsibility for the defense of Europe. World War II was fought in both Europe and Asia, and when it ended we found ourselves with continued responsibility for the defense of freedom.

OUR OBJECTIVE IN VIET-NAM

Our objective is the independence of South Viet-Nam, and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves--only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way. We will do everything necessary to reach that objective. And we will do only what is absolutely necessary. In recent months attacks on South Viet-Nam were stepped up. Thus, it became necessary for us to increase our response and to make attacks by air. This is not a change of purpose. It is a change in what we believe that purpose requires. We do this in order to slow down aggression 18

We do this to increase the confidence of the brave people of South Viet-Nam who have bravely borne this brutal battle for so many years with so many casualties. And we do this to convince the leaders of North Viet-Nam--and all who seek to share their conquest--of a very simple fact: We will not be defeated. We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement. We know that air attacks alone will not accomplish all of these purposes. But it is our best and prayerful judgment that they are a necessary part of the surest road to peace. We hope that peace will come swiftly. But that is in the hands of others besides ourselves. And we must be prepared for a long continued conflict. It will require patience as well as bravery, the will to endure as well as the will to resist. I wish it were possible to convince others with words of what we now find it necessary to say with guns and planes: Armed hostility is futile. Our resources are equal to any challenge. Because we fight for values and we fight for principles, rather than territory or colonies, our patience and our determination are unending. Once this is clear, then it should also be clear that the only path for reasonable men is the path of peaceful settlement. Such peace demands an independent South Viet-Nam--securely guaranteed and able to shape its own relationships to all others--free from outside interference--tied to no alliance--a military base for no other country. These are the essentials of any final settlement. We will never be second in the search for such a peaceful settlement in Viet-Nam. There may be many ways to this kind of peace: in discussion or negotiation with the governments concerned; in large groups or in small ones; in the reaffirmation of old agreements or their strengthening with new ones. We have stated this position over and over again, fifty times and more, to friend and foe alike. And we remain ready, with this purpose, for unconditional discussions. And until that bright and necessary day of peace we will try to keep conflict from spreading. We have no desire to see thousands die in battle--Asians or Americans. We have no desire to devastate that which the people of North Viet-Nam have built with toil and sacrifice. We will use our power with restraint and with all the wisdom that we can command. But we will use it. This war, like most wars, is filled with terrible irony. For what do the people of North Viet-Nam want? They want what their neighbors also desire: food for their hunger; health for their bodies; a chance to learn; progress for their country; and an end to the bondage of material misery. And they would find all these things far more readily in peaceful association with others than in the endless course of battle.

A COOPERATIVE EFFORT FOR DEVELOPMENT These countries of southeast Asia are homes for millions of impoverished people. Each day these people rise at dawn and struggle through until the night to wrestle existence from the soil. They are often wracked by disease, plagued by hunger, and death comes at the early age of 40. 19

Stability and peace do not come easily in such a land. Neither independence nor human dignity will ever be won, though, by arms alone. It also requires the work of peace. The American people have helped generously in times past in these works. Now there must be a much more massive effort to improve the life of man in that conflict-torn corner of our world. The first step is for the countries of southeast Asia to associate themselves in a greatly expanded cooperative effort for development. We would hope that North Viet-Nam would take its place in the common effort just as soon as peaceful cooperation is possible. The United Nations is already actively engaged in development in this area. As far back as 1961 I conferred with our authorities in Viet-Nam in connection with their work there. And I would hope tonight that the Secretary General of the United Nations could use the prestige of his great office, and his deep knowledge of Asia, to initiate, as soon as possible, with the countries of that area, a plan for cooperation in increased development. For our part I will ask the Congress to join in a billion dollar American investment in this effort as soon as it is underway. And I would hope that all other industrialized countries, including the Soviet Union, will join in this effort to replace despair with hope, and terror with progress. The task is nothing less than to enrich the hopes and the existence of more than a hundred million people. And there is much to be done. The vast Mekong River can provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA. The wonders of modern medicine can be spread through villages where thousands die every year from lack of care. Schools can be established to train people in the skills that are needed to manage the process of development. And these objectives, and more, are within the reach of a cooperative and determined effort. I also intend to expand and speed up a program to make available our farm surpluses to assist in feeding and clothing the needy in Asia. We should not allow people to go hungry and wear rags while our own warehouses overflow with an abundance of wheat and corn, rice and cotton. So I will very shortly name a special team of outstanding, patriotic, distinguished Americans to inaugurate our participation in these programs. This team will be headed by Mr. Eugene Black, the very able former President of the World Bank. In areas that are still ripped by conflict, of course development will not be easy. Peace will be necessary for final success. But we cannot and must not wait for peace to begin this job.

THE DREAM OF WORLD ORDER This will be a disorderly planet for a long time. In Asia, as elsewhere, the forces of the modern world are shaking old ways and uprooting ancient civilizations. There will be turbulence and struggle and even violence. Great social change--as we see in our own country now--does not always come without conflict. We must also expect that nations will on occasion be in dispute with us. It may be because we are rich, or powerful; or because we have made some mistakes; or because they honestly fear our intentions. However, no nation need ever fear that we desire their land, or to impose our will, or to dictate their 20 institutions. But we will always oppose the effort of one nation to conquer another nation. We will do this because our own security is at stake. But there is more to it than that. For our generation has a dream. It is a very old dream. But we have the power and now we have the opportunity to make that dream come true. For centuries nations have struggled among each other. But we dream of a world where disputes are settled by law and reason. And we will try to make it so. For most of history men have hated and killed one another in battle. But we dream of an end to war. And we will try to make it so. For all existence most men have lived in poverty, threatened by hunger. But we dream of a world where all are fed and charged with hope. And we will help to make it so. The ordinary men and women of North Viet-Nam and South Viet-Nam--of China and India--of Russia and America--are brave people. They are filled with the same proportions of hate and fear, of love and hope. Most of them want the same things for themselves and their families. Most of them do not want their sons to ever die in battle, or to see their homes, or the homes of others, destroyed. Well, this can be their world yet. Man now has the knowledge--always before denied--to make this planet serve the real needs of the people who live on it. I know this will not be easy. I know how difficult it is for reason to guide passion, and love to master hate. The complexities of this world do not bow easily to pure and consistent answers. But the simple truths are there just the same. We must all try to follow them as best we can.

CONCLUSION We often say how impressive power is. But I do not find it impressive at all. The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure. They are necessary symbols. They protect what we cherish. But they are witness to human folly. A dam built across a great river is impressive. In the countryside where I was born, and where I live, I have seen the night illuminated, and the kitchens warmed, and the homes heated, where once the cheerless night and the ceaseless cold held sway. And all this happened because electricity came to our area along the humming wires of the REA. Electrification of the countryside--yes, that, too, is impressive. A rich harvest in a hungry land is impressive. The sight of healthy children in a classroom is impressive. These--not mighty arms--are the achievements which the American Nation believes to be impressive. And, if we are steadfast, the time may come when all other nations will also find it so. Every night before I turn out the lights to sleep I ask myself this question: Have I done everything that I can do to unite this country? Have I done everything I can to help unite the world, to try to bring peace and hope to all the peoples of the world? Have I done enough? 21

Ask yourselves that question in your homes--and in this hall tonight. Have we, each of us, all done all we could? Have we done enough? We may well be living in the time foretold many years ago when it was said: "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." This generation of the world must choose: destroy or build, kill or aid, hate or understand. We can do all these things on a scale never dreamed of before. Well, we will choose life. In so doing we will prevail over the enemies within man, and over the natural enemies of all mankind. To Dr. Eisenhower and Mr. Garland, and this great institution, Johns Hopkins, I thank you for this opportunity to convey my thoughts to you and to the American people. Good night. NOTE: The President spoke at 9 p.m. in Shriver Hall Auditorium at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. In his opening words, he referred to Charles S. Garland, Chairman of the University's Board of Trustees, and Senators Daniel B. Brewster and Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland. Later he referred to Dr. Milton Eisenhower, President of Johns Hopkins University, and Eugene Black, former President of the World Bank and adviser to the President on southeast Asia social and economic development. Earlier, on the same day, the White House released the text of the statements, made to the press in the Theater at the White House, by George W. Ball, Under Secretary of State, Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President, which defined the context of the President's speech. Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965. Volume I, entry 172, pp. 394-399. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1966. Last Updated May 17, 2006 22

President Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh:Letter Exchange, 1967 PEACE NEGOTIATIONS IN VIETNAM Letter from President Johnson to Ho Chi Minh, President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, February 8, 1967 Dear Mr. President: I am writing to you in the hope that the conflict in Vietnam can be brought to an end. That conflict has already taken a heavy toll-in lives lost, in wounds inflicted, in property destroyed, and in simple human misery. If we fail to find a just and peaceful solution, history will judge us harshly. Therefore, I believe that we both have a heavy obligation to seek earnestly the path to peace. It is in response to that obligation that I am writing directly to you. We have tried over the past several years, in a variety of ways and through a number of channels, to convey to you and your colleagues our desire to achieve a peaceful settlement. For whatever reasons, these efforts have not achieved any results. . . . In the past two weeks, I have noted public statements by representatives of your government suggesting that you would be prepared to enter into direct bilateral talks with representatives of the U.S. Government, provided that we ceased "unconditionally" and permanently our bombing operations against your country and all military actions against it. In the last day, serious and responsible parties have assured us indirectly that this is in fact your proposal. Let me frankly state that I see two great difficulties with this proposal. In view of your public position, such action on our part would inevitably produce worldwide speculation that discussions were under way and would impair the privacy and secrecy of those discussions. Secondly, there would inevitably be grave concern on our part whether your government would make use of such action by us to improve its military position. With these problems in mind, I am prepared to move even further towards an ending of hostilities than your Government has proposed in either public statements or through private diplomatic channels. I am prepared to order a cessation of bombing against your country and the stopping of further augmentation of U.S. forces in South Viet-Nam as soon as I am assured that infiltration into South Viet-Nam by land and by sea has stopped. These acts of restraint on both sides would, I believe, make it possible for us to conduct serious and private discussions leading toward an early peace. I make this proposal to you now with a specific sense of urgency arising from the imminent New Year holidays in Viet-Nam. If you are able to accept this proposal I see no reason why it could not take effect at the end of the New Year, or Tet, holidays. The proposal I have made would be greatly strengthened if your military authorities and those of the Government of South Viet-Nam could promptly negotiate an extension of the Tet truce. As to the site of the bilateral discussions I propose, there are several possibilities. We could, for example, have our representatives meet in Moscow where contacts have already occurred. They could meet in some other country such as Burma. You may have other arrangements or sites in mind, and I would try to meet your suggestions. The important thing is to end a conflict that has brought burdens to both our peoples, and above all to the people of South Viet-Nam. If you have any thoughts about the actions I propose , it would be most important that I receive them as soon as possible. 23

Sincerelv, Lyndon B. Johnson

PRESIDENT HO CHI MINH'S REPLY TO PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S LETTER February 15, 1967 Excellency, on February 10, 1967, I received your message. Here is my response. Viet-Nam is situated thousands of miles from the United States. The Vietnamese people have never done any harm to the United States. But, contrary to the commitments made by its representative at the Geneva Conference of 1954, the United States Government has constantly intervened in Viet-Nam, it has launched and intensified the war of aggression in South Viet-Nam for the purpose of prolonging the division of Viet-Nam and of transforming South Viet-Nam into an American neo-colony and an American military base. For more than two years now, the American Government, with its military aviation and its navy, has been waging war against the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, an independent and sovereign country. The United States Government has committed war crimes, crimes against peace and against humanity. In South Viet-Nam a half-million American soldiers and soldiers from the satellite countries have resorted to the most inhumane arms and the most barbarous methods of warfare, such as napalm, chemicals, and poison gases in order to massacre our fellow countrymen, destroy the crops, and wipe out the villages. In North Viet-Nam thousands of American planes have rained down hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, destroying cities, villages, mills, roads, bridges, dikes, dams and even churches, pagodas, hospitals, and schools. In your message you appear to deplore the suffering and the destruction in Viet- Nam. Permit me to ask you: Who perpetrated these monstrous crimes? It was the American soldiers and the soldiers of the satellite countries. The United States Government is entirely responsible for the extremely grave situation in Viet-Nam. . . . The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, liberty, and peace. But in the face of the American aggression they have risen up as one man, without fearing the sacrifices and the privations. They are determined to continue their resistance until they have won real independence and liberty and true peace. Our just cause enjoys the approval and the powerful support of peoples throughout the world and of large segments of the American people. The United States Government provoked the war of aggression in Viet-Nam. It must cease that aggression, it is the only road leading to the re-establishment of peace. The United States Government must halt definitively and unconditionally the bombings and all other acts of war against the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, withdraw from South Viet-Nam all American troops and all troops from the satellite countries, recognize the National Front of the Liberation of South Viet-Nam and let the Vietnamese people settle their problems themselves. Such is the basic content of the four-point position of the Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, such is the statement of the essential principles and essential arrangements of the Geneva agreements of 1954 on Viet-Nam. It is the basis for a correct political solution of the Vietnamese problem. In your message you suggested direct talks between the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam and the United States. If the United States Government really wants talks, it must first halt unconditionally the bombings and all other acts of war against the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. It is only after the unconditional halting of the American bombings and of all other American acts of war against the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam that the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam and the United States could begin talks and discuss questions affecting the two parties. 24

The Vietnamese people will never give way to force, it will never accept conversation under the clear threat of bombs. Our cause is absolutely just. It is desirable that the Government of the United States act in conformity to reason. Sincerely, Ho Chi Minh

Source: from The Department of State Bulletin, LVI, No. 1450 (April 10, 1967), pp. 595-597. 25

"Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam" (April 1967) By the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

*From Ramparts (May 1967), pp. 33-37. This is the authorized form of the original address, slightly condensed for publication by Dr. King. In the two years after he received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, the Reverend Martin Luther King made occasional public statements about his growing concern over the Vietnam War. But until early 1967. Dr. King maintained a moderate position on the issue, as he attempted to stay in the middle of the surging forces of the black movement. On one side, militant groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party, as well as various nationalist organizations, were denouncing the war as an imperialist attack on another non-white people. On the other, such conservative older groups as the NAACP and the Urban League were attempting to fence off what they still called the "civil rights movement" bot h from the spontaneous urban rebellions and from the politically conscious younger activists who saw the war as a principal cause of the increasing desperation that was fueling these rebellions. On April 4, 1967, Dr. King implemented a fateful decision when he went to the pulpit of Manhattan's Riverside Church to deliver the sermon here reprinted. The three thousand people who packed the church rose in a tumultuous ovation at the end of what they may have sensed to be one of the most profound statements of this historical period. The significance of this "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam" was obvious at once to all the contending forces. Dr. King was denounced by The New York Times, black syndicated columnist Carl Rowan,, many leaders of the bla ck establishment, and of course by voices from the right shouting such epithets as "traitor" and "treason." The antiwar movement enthusiastically welcomed this powerful new recruit to its ranks. On April 15, in New York, Dr. King made a similar address to the hundreds of thousands who marched against the war from Central Park to the United Nations. Martin Luther King's "Declaration" had a profound influence, strengthening antiwar consciousness and activity everywhere from churches and colleges to the streets of the ghettos and the ranks of GIs in Vietnam (see Reading 50 for its influence within the military)..

Martin Luther King: OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church--the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorage--leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight. I come to this platform to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to 26

Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents. Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor--both black and white--through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam con tinued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest G eorgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor. My third reason grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years-- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't us ing massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearl y to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government. For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a Civil Rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed from the shackles they still wear. Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of 27

America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission--a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the "brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men-- for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my minstry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with hem my life? And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and their broken cries. They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Inde pendence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its re-conquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision, we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives. For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to re-colonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting 80 per cent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will to do so. After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watc hed again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators--our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunificatio n with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change--especially in terms of their need for land and peace. The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments 28 which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while, the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy--and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us--not their fellow Vietnamese--the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are ra rely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers destroy their precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least 20 casualties from American firepower for each Viet Cong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them-- mostly children. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medic ine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Now there is little left to build on--save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts'? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers. Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the NLF--that strangely anonymous group we call VC or communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize th at we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more ess ential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem, and charge them with violence while we pour new weapons of death into their land? How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25 per cent communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the m ilitary junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them_the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence--when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, a nd then were persuaded at Geneva to give up, as a temporary measure, the land they controlled between the 13th and 17th parallels. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. 29

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Genev a Agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands. Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the President claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and bu ilt up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggre ssion as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8000 miles from its shores. At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor. Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world , for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours. This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently, one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans a re forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism." If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinkin g that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of her people. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing the war to a halt. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricatin g ourselves from this nightmare: 1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. 2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. 30

3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military build- up in Thailand and our interference in Laos. 4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. 5. Set a date on which we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the NLF. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, in this country if necessary. Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible. As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than 70 students at my own Alma Mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest. There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within th e American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy--and laymen--concerned committees for the next generation. We will be marching and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound c hange in American life and policy. In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken--by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triple ts of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring. A true revolution of values will soon look easily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, 31 it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: " This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling difference s is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlef ields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from re-ordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are the days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense aga inst communism is to take: offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops. These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the lan d are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to ad just to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hos tility to poverty, racism, and militarism. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world--a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. Now let us begin. Now let us re-dedicate ourselves to the long and bitter--but beautiful--struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell th em the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. 32

Old Order in Cuba is Threatened by Forces of an Internal Revolt By HERBERT L. MATTHEWS This is the last of three articles by a correspondent of The New York Times who has just returned from Cuba. The New York Times, Tuesday, February 26, 1957. Traditionally Corrupt System Faces Its First Major Test as Reform Groups Challenge Batista Dictatorship The old, corrupt order in Cuba is being threatened for the first time since the Cuban Republic was proclaimed early in the century. An internal struggle is now taking place that is more than an effort by the outs to get in and enjoy the enormous spoils of office that have been the reward of political victory. This is the real and deeply significant meaning of what is happening in Cuba today, and it explains the gravity of the menace to the military dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista. This writer has studied Cuban affairs on repeated visits since General Batista seized power by a garrison revolt on March 10, 1952, and he has just spent ten days in Cuba talking to all sorts of conditions of men and women, Cuban and American, in various parts of the island. Majority Rule Is Lacking At last one gets the feeling that the best elements in Cuban life-the unspoiled youth, the honest business man, the politician of integrity, the patriotic Army officer-are getting together to assume power. They have always made up the vast majority of Cubans, but Cuba has never had majority rule, least of all since General Batista interrupted a democratic presidential election in 1952 to take over by force. The Cuban people have never forgiven him for that. By coincidence, economic and fiscal developments are going to bring a crisis of their own that will affect politics. This year's sugar crop will be very profitable and next year's also promises to be so, but the experts agree that after that a recession is almost certain. The public works program, an enormous slush fund providing colossal graft, but also much employment and accomplishment, will end in the summer of 1958. Economic Figures Unknown To finance the program, amounting to $350,000,000, the Government led by Joaquin Martinez Saenz, Governor of the National Bank, resorted to inflationary tactics, pledging the gold reserves and increasing the public debt. Even those best informed on the Banco Nacional and what it is doing do not know the real figures of reserves, public debt and the like. Economists believe that statistics and information are being twisted, and many believe that if present policies are continued the Cuban peso, now on a par with the United States dollar, will have to be devalued next year or protected by exchange regulations. The trade balance is still heavily against Cuba. These calculations are making many Cuban and United States bankers and business men critical of the Batista Government's fiscal policies. The Cuban elements ask whether President Batista should not be got out of the way in 1957 while the currency is still sound and the economy prosperous. They want to face the hard times with an honest, orthodox, democratic, patriotic Government. Opposition Is Anti-U. S. It is disturbing to find that the opposition, which contains some of the best elements in Cuban life, is 33 today bitterly or sadly anti-United States. This is a recent development in Cuba and it is one of the sharpest impressions a visitor from the United States now gets. It does not, of course, apply to United States tourists, who are not held responsible for the situation and who meet unfailing friendliness. The opposition says there is an infinitely harder problem because Washington is backing President Batista, and many proofs are offered. The first is the public cordiality and admiration for General Batista expressed on frequent occasions by United States Ambassador Arthur Gardner. Another is the friendliness of the United States investors and business men who, despite their misgivings, naturally want to protect their investments and businesses. "We all pray every day that nothing happens to Batista," one of the most prominent directors said to me. They fear that the alternative would be much worse, at least in the beginning, perhaps a military junta, perhaps a radical swing to the left; perhaps chaos. Sale of U. S. Arms an Issue There is also bitter criticism in Cuba, as in all Latin-American dictatorships, over the sale of United States arms. While I was there, seven tanks were delivered in a ceremony headed by Ambassador Gardner. Every Cuban I spoke with saw the delivery as arms furnished to General Batista for use in bolstering his regime and for use "against the Cuban people." Also while I was there, the United States aircraft carrier Leyte came on an official visit with four destroyers, and this, too, was taken as evidence that the United States was displaying its support of President Batista. An appeal in English was circulated in Santiago de Cuba during my visit. "To the People of the United States From the People of Cuba." "We do not wish to harbor resentment against you, our good neighbors of the North," it said. "But do give us your understandingand fairness when considering our crisis." A movement of civic resistance has been formed in Santiago, which is the capital of Oriente Province at the eastern end of the island where Fidel Castro, the rebel leader, is fighting a guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra. Business and professional men of the highest type are the leaders. The women of Oriente have cooperated so impressively that for many weeks they have refused to send their children to school. The University of Oriente is closed. A similar movement of civic resistance is getting tinder way in Havana. It is a non-violent movement of influential citizens in support of honesty, decency, democracy, apart from the political parties and movements, which are hopelessly divided and discredited, and also apart from the Army. The citizens want to demonstrate to the decent, patriotic elements in the Army that the people of Cuba, moderate, bourgeois people, will support them against the regime as the Argentine people did their Army and Navy against General Juan D. Perón. In this struggle one other element of prime importance must be added-the Cuban university students with their long traditions of struggle against Spanish oppressors and Cuban dictators. Student Faction Accused The directorate of the Federation of University Students has been on the run from the police for many weeks, thus far successfully. The authorities accuse them of complicity with Fidel Castro, with whom they signed a pact in Mexico City, but they say they are fighting a parallel, separate fight for the same goals. The real reason the police want them is that they are out for trouble, and the Superior Council of the University of Havana, headed by the rector Clemente Inclán, whom I saw, is clearly afraid to reopen the university in present circumstances. Through underground connections, I was able secretly to see five members of the student directorate, 34 including their leader, José Antonio Echeverria, whom the police want most of all, and who therefore has considerable fame in Cuba at the moment. His friends call him "El Gordo" (the Fat One), but in reality he is merely heavy set, florid, handsome, with a mass of hair in a pompadour, prematurely touched with gray. He is only 24 years old and is an architectural student. Señor Echeverria said the students were active in the present resistance, which may or may not have meant they were taking part in the bombings and sabotage. The students, he said, would get behind a respected civic resistance movement, but meanwhile they are waiting their chance to get into the streets and join a revolution, if there is one. They concede that they are in no position to start one. The directorate maintains that it has the almost solid backingof the student body. The students obviously are not seeking anything for themselves. As a whole, their traditions are anti-Communist and democratic. One boy said: "My father fought against Machado (Gen. Gerardo Machado, the brutal President and dictator of the Nineteen Twenties); my grandfather fought in the War of Independence (which began in 1895 and resulted in the Spanish-American War). I must fight now for the same ideals and the same reasons." Their talk was studded with phrases such as these: "Cuban students were never afraid to die," and "We are accustomed to clandestine struggle." This is true. So one see three elements lining up against President Batista today-the youth of Cuba, led by the fighting rebel, Fidel Castro, who are against the President to a man; a civic resistance formed of respected political, business and professional groups, and an honest, patriotic component of the Army, which is ashamed of the actions of the Government generals. Together these elements form the hope of Cuba and the threat to General Fulgencio Batista. 35

“CASTRO’S LAST BATTLE: Can the revolution outlive its leader?” by JON LEE ANDERSON The New Yorker, July 24, 2006.

Late one Friday afternoon in March, a crowd gathered for a rally in downtown Havana to denounce an incident that had occurred the previous evening in San Juan, Puerto Rico. During a game between Cuba and the Netherlands in the first international Baseball Classic, a spectator held up a sign to the television cameras which said “Abajo Fidel”—“Down with Fidel”—and shouted similar sentiments to the Cubans on the field. Among them was Antonio Castro, an orthopedic surgeon, who is the Cuban team’s doctor and one of Fidel Castro’s sons. A Cuban official angrily confronted the protester, whereupon Puerto Rican policemen detained him. He was released after receiving a lecture about freedom of speech. Cuba won, 11–2, but the following day, in a tone of high umbrage, Cuba’s official Communist Party newspaper, Granma, decried the “cynical counter-revolutionary provocations” of U.S. and Puerto Rican officials. The rally was held, as are most such events in Havana these days, outside the U.S. Interests Section, a sleek seven-story building on a curving stretch of Havana’s seaside promenade, the Malecón. In the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, the Interests Section serves as the de-facto embassy. (The building is technically part of the Swiss Embassy.) Six years ago, during the custody battle over Elián González, the five-year-old boy who was rescued after his mother and others drowned while trying to reach Florida in a motorboat, Castro ordered the construction of a permanent protest forum on a traffic island in front of the Interests Section. Today, the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal, as it is known, consists of a raised stage studded with klieg lights atop a bunkerlike command center. A large banner bears a photomontage of men with guns, houses burning, people weeping, and the baleful verdict “You did this.” The rally was not open to the general public. Guarding the approaches at road barricades were several dozen policemen. A few hundred people, mostly sports officials, athletes, and their relatives, listened as a baseball player told the crowd, “In the face of the shameless robbery of our players, and the constant attacks against our people, they have still not been able to undermine the quality of our team!” An elderly black man got up onstage and said that in his youth he had played baseball in the United States. “I learned of that country’s racism personally when I was forced to sit in the back of buses, eat in kitchens,” he said. He was followed by the mother of one of the ballplayers. After denouncing the “provocation” in Puerto Rico, she signed off with “Viva Fidel!” Fidel wasn’t there, although, like most Cubans, he takes baseball very seriously. (For years, there was a popular myth that as a student he was scouted by an American major-league team.) Castro, who will celebrate his eightieth birthday on August 13th, appears less and less frequently in public, and only rarely at events where foreigners are present. For decades, Castro’s legendary stamina served him well. He was thirty-two when he overthrew Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, with a guerrilla army of bearded fighters that included Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Castro presented himself as a nationalist, determined to eradicate Cuba’s gangster-run casino culture and end its reputation as “the whorehouse of the Caribbean.” Once in power, he moved quickly to the left, nationalizing large plantations (his mother’s was among those seized) and foreign-owned businesses, and moved closer to the Soviet Union. In 1961, the C.I.A., with the help of Cuban émigrés, organized the Bay of Pigs invasion to remove Castro from power. The invasion was ignominiously defeated, and since then, despite a U.S. trade embargo and numerous assassination attempts, Fidel Castro has outlasted nine American Presidents. He is the world’s longest-serving ruler. 36

In June, 2001, Castro fainted from heat exhaustion during a lengthy public address, and in 2004, after delivering a speech, he stumbled and fell, shattering his left kneecap and breaking his right arm. Although he still gives the long speeches for which he is famous, his hands sometimes tremble and he walks unsteadily; he has occasional bouts of forgetfulness and incoherence; and he sometimes falls asleep in public. In briefings to Congress last year, the C.I.A. reported that Castro was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Castro has mocked the report and said that, even if it were true, he would be able to stay in office —citing Pope John Paul II as his model. This spring, a friend of Castro’s, a veteran Party loyalist, told me that the Cuban leader was angustiado— literally, “anguished”—over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls the Battle of Ideas. Castro’s goal is to reëngage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a precipitous end to Cuba’s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island’s economic and civil life, but he now seems determined to reverse that. In a speech last November, Castro said, “This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself.” Referring to the Americans, he said, “They cannot destroy it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.” And in May, during an angry, seven-hour televised panel discussion that he convened to protest his appearance on the Forbes list of the world’s richest leaders (the magazine estimated his net worth at nine hundred million dollars), Castro said, “We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against us. . . .This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.” Castro has approached the campaign in the manner of a field marshal, with a Central Command of ideological loyalists drawn from the Communist Youth Union, the U.J.C. Some Cubans refer to them sarcastically as “the Taliban.” A better analogy might be the Red Guards: the Battle of Ideas has, in a sense, become Cuba’s Cultural Revolution, although it does not have the same violent intensity. Castro’s Central Command organizes marches and dispatches specially recruited “battalions” of Trabajadores Sociales, or Social Workers, which now intervene in most areas of daily life. Earlier this year, when Castro announced that Cubans should begin using more energy-efficient light bulbs, the battalions went from house to house across the country to deliver the bulbs and make sure that they were installed. Privately, many Cubans regard the Battle of Ideas as a spectacle they must tolerate but which is irrelevant to their lives. Most of them do not earn enough money to eat well, much less live comfortably. As a result of the island’s endemic shortages, almost everyone has some contact with Cuba’s black market. The tension between the public Cuba of rallies and tribunals and this hidden one is growing, and a number of Cubans and American officials I spoke to fear that the pent-up chaos could erupt into open unrest upon Castro’s death: looting, rioting, and revenge killings. Senator Mel Martinez, of Florida, who left Cuba as a fifteen-year-old, in 1962, said, “My hope is that there will be one of those wonderful European revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, without violence, but because of what’s gone on—the repression and the iron grip of those in power for so long—there could be a vacuum, and that creates a potential for violence.” Cubans worry about how the United States, and the exile community in Miami—which has been poised for Castro’s departure for decades—will respond. For them, and for Castro’s possible successors, this is an exceedingly anxious time.

Jokes about Fidel Castro’s putative immortality once formed a canon in Havana. In one, Castro is presented with the gift of a Galápagos turtle, but he declines it after learning that it might live for more than a hundred years. “That’s the problem with pets,” Castro says. “You get attached to them, and then they die on you.” Most jokes now start from the opposite premise. For example: Castro has died, and his body is lying in state. Mourners have lined up to pay their respects. At the head of the line is Felipe Pérez Roque, Cuba’s forty-one-year-old Foreign Minister, who is often called Felipito. (Behind his back, he is 37 also called a Taliban.) Pérez Roque stands before Castro’s coffin, his head bowed, while Ricardo Alarcón, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, waits his turn. The minutes drag on; Alarcón becomes impatient and taps Pérez Roque on the shoulder, whispering, “Felipito, what are you waiting for? He’s dead, you know.” Pérez Roque whispers back, “I know he is; I just haven’t figured out how to tell him that.” Very few Cubans will speak on the record about “the succession.” Castro recently confirmed that, as many Cubans believed, he expected his brother Raúl, who is the Defense Minister, to inherit the leadership of Cuba’s Communist Party. In an interview with a European journalist, he said that he had “no doubt” that if he died the National Assembly would elect Raúl. But because of Raúl’s own age—he is seventy-five—the received wisdom in Havana is that he will share power with a civilian triumvirate made up of Pérez Roque; Alarcón, who is sixty-nine; and Carlos Lage, the country’s economics czar, who is fifty-four. Aurelio Alonso, a sociologist and editor who is a Communist Party member, told me, “This used to be a taboo subject, but Fidel has begun to speak about it lately. Anyway, Fidel’s exit doesn’t concern me in terms of who succeeds him; it’s known that there is a relief team prepared”—he mentioned Alarcón, Pérez Roque, and Lage. “This doesn’t mean there won’t be upset. There will be.” One evening in April, I met with Alarcón in the Baroque Presidential Salon of the venerable Hotel Nacional. The Nacional, with rooms that overlook the Malecón, was built in 1930, and in its pre-Castro heyday it was the Havana residence of gangsters like Meyer Lansky. Today, it is the hotel of choice for visitors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Muhammad Ali, and Naomi Campbell. As we looked at our menus, the manager informed me that Al Capone had once dined in the same room. Hearing this, Alarcón smiled somewhat uncomfortably. He is a slim, loquacious man with a boyish face and a prominent forehead, and was wearing, as usual, a white guayabera shirt. He began speaking about Cuba’s long and complicated relationship with the United States. “Fifty years of the same U.S. policy, which is, it has to be said, a failed one,” he said. “Of course, now they are waiting for the next generation, based on the idea that this government is finished. Well, if that’s the way it is, I guess I’m done with, too, because I’m a member of the outgoing generation.” Alarcón paused. “A half century in France passed from the time of the monarchy of Louis XVI, the great revolution, the guillotine, all the counter- revolution that ensued, Bonapartism, the bourgeois republic of the thirties. All the twists and turns that France underwent took place in the same period of time that we have managed to keep the Cuban revolution in power. Not even Robespierre could say that; Napoleon couldn’t say that. Hey, we’ve done a lot!” Alarcón has dealt with Americans for more than forty years. He left Havana University to head the Foreign Ministry’s U.S. office in 1962, when he was only twenty-five, and became Cuba’s Ambassador to the United Nations in 1966. In 1992, Castro made him Foreign Minister but, less than a year later, moved him to the comparatively low-profile post of president of the National Assembly. At the time, the position was widely seen as a demotion, but it gave Alarcón experience with domestic politics in Cuba for the first time since his youth. And he has continued to be Castro’s chief adviser on the United States. (He interrupted our dinner at the Hotel Nacional to take a call on his cell phone from Castro.) Alarcón was also intimately involved in the case of Elián González, acting as the chief adviser to the boy’s father, Juan Miguel González, who travelled to the United States to fight relatives in Miami for custody of his son. Two and a half months later, when Elián was finally flown home, Alarcón greeted him at the airport. For Castro, Elián’s return was a major symbolic victory over his opponents in the exile community. Alarcón’s latest cause involves the Five Heroes, as they are known in Cuba—five Cuban spies who are serving prison terms in the United States. In January, 1996, Alarcón, in the midst of secret negotiations with the Clinton Administration about improving relations, told the Americans that Cuba had received information that Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami exile group, was planning illegal flights to drop leaflets over Havana. They had made such flights before, and the Administration had offered to do what it could to stop them. The White House passed Alarcón’s information on to Florida’s F.B.I. headquarters, but 38 nothing was done to prevent the aircraft from taking off. The Cuban Air Force shot down two of them, killing four Cuban-American men. In retaliation, President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Law, tightening the embargo against Cuba. The F.B.I. also stepped up the search for Cuba’s sources, and the Five were arrested in September, 1998. In 2001, a Miami jury found them guilty of charges that included “espionage conspiracy” and, in the case of one, the murder of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots. They were given sentences ranging from fifteen years to two consecutive life terms. (Last August, an appeals court ordered a new trial, saying that the men had not received a fair trial because of “pervasive community prejudice.”) Alarcón acknowledges that the Five were spies, but he argues that they intended the United States no harm, and that their sole purpose was to prevent terrorism. “Look, these were five people who were performing a mission,” he said. “Just as the United States believes it should have a greater capacity to know and to predict, Cuba has for a long time had a need to defend ourselves, with the difference that the terrorism against Cuba has been sponsored by the United States.” Alarcón has made it his personal crusade to bring the Five home; every conversation with him turns to them. I asked him whether there was an element of guilty conscience involved. Hadn’t Cuba indirectly betrayed the men’s presence in Miami? Alarcón replied, “Don’t think for a minute that Cuba gullibly gave out information that somehow gave the Americans leads to find them. We may be amateurs in baseball, but in this subject we really are professionals.” Like most of those in Castro’s inner circle, Alarcón is determinedly self-effacing in public and never contradicts his boss, but because of his amiability and his long experience with Americans—who generally like him—most Cubans see him as a moderate. He is a familiar and reassuring figure for foreigners visiting Cuba; while I was in Havana, he hosted a delegation from Vietnam, and also Louis Farrakhan. Alarcón has long been a top contender for the position of Prime Minister in a transitional government. But nothing is certain; Castro has been known to abruptly shift people from one position to another. Alarcón may also have serious competition from Pérez Roque, who is perceived as the chief spokesman in Castro’s Battle of Ideas. Pérez Roque is a short, wide-bodied man whose demeanor is reminiscent of a bull terrier’s. He became Castro’s personal secretary at the age of twenty-one, and remained in the job for seven years. No one doubts that he is devoted to Castro, whose opinions and policies he assumes with a fervency that is unparalleled, even in Cuba. In 1999, Castro made him his Foreign Minister. Pérez Roque was only thirty- four, and seemed gauche and ill-prepared; he was nicknamed Fax, in the sense that he was merely a transmitter of Castro’s utterances. He has grown into the role, though, and earned a measure of respect, if not popularity. The veteran loyalist told me that it was clear that Castro had “chosen” Pérez Roque to lead the succession team under Raúl’s temporary supervision, but that Pérez Roque was “too narrow-minded” for the next generation of Cubans. Other Cubans I talked to agreed. Everyone recalled how, after Castro fainted in 2001, it was Pérez Roque who stepped up to the microphone and, in a display of zeal, rallied the crowd with shouts of “Viva Fidel! Viva Raúl!”

I lived in Havana during the Special Period. The government couldn’t afford to import fuel; bicycles replaced cars on Havana’s streets, and there were daily blackouts lasting up to twelve hours. Many people did not have enough to eat, subsisting on the Cuban staple chícharo—split-pea porridge—or on sugar and water. Crime spiralled. Castro responded by permitting limited private enterprise and the legal use of the dollar, and by opening Cuba to mass tourism, measures that saved the regime. In the past year, Castro—empowered by shipments of cheap oil from Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, and by Chinese investments—imposed a heavy tax on dollar transactions. This has made Cuba much more expensive for foreigners, although European package tourists continue to stay in all- 39 inclusive beach resorts, where they have little contact with Cubans. This seems to be the way Castro wants it. “Fidel has always felt revulsion toward tourism, because it encourages prostitution and increases social inequalities,” Aurelio Alonso told me. “Tourism is bad because it creates a contrast between a population that lives very badly and a population that lives very well.” In a recent speech, Castro referred to Cuba’s family-run private restaurants, paladares, another Special Period concession, saying, “I know this pains our neighbors to the north, but it could well be that in a few years there will be no paladares left in Cuba.” The reforms of the Special Period were carried out by Carlos Lage, the third member of the relief team. Lately, however, Lage appears to have been sidelined, at least in terms of domestic economic policy; instead, one Party insider told me, Castro was micromanaging it. “This has people worried, because, as we all know, the economy is not Fidel’s strong suit,” she said. An Eastern European diplomat said, “To me, the one distinguishing feature of this dictatorship”—he added quickly, “But please don’t use that word!”—“is how Fidel is building what comes afterward. His problem was that, after he opened up the economy, in the nineties, a new social stratum appeared here; it has its own political views and has produced leaders who supported those views. After some stabilization of the economic situation, Cuba’s leaders began to think about how to get rid of those social strata.” He went on, “I think they are doing all of this to prepare for the social problems that are inevitable when Fidel dies.” The contradictions of Cuban society are unsettlingly evident. Satellite-television dishes are banned, but many people install them secretly, and often tune in to anti-Castro Miami stations. The prostitutes who congregated openly on Havana’s streets in the hard years of the nineties are less visible today, but, despite a crackdown on the sex trade, they are still around. One evening, I went to a popular Havana night spot directly across the Plaza de la Revolución from the headquarters of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee. It was swarming with young jineteras, as they are called, and their foreign—mostly much older Italian or Spanish—“boyfriends.” One girl, who asked if I wanted a “date,” looked fifteen, or younger. I visited a veteran Party member who, as we sat on her terrace drinking tamarind juice, complained at length about Castro’s most recent drive—a grandiloquently proclaimed energy-saving campaign, one of the central features of which is to provide every Cuban household with a new Chinese-manufactured pressure cooker. “After forty-seven years of revolution, we get pressure cookers?” she said bitterly. They were not even free. “Energy is his latest obsession, and, like all of his other obsessions in the past”—she listed a few of the more quixotic ones, including Castro’s doomed effort, in the eighties, to breed a “super-cow”—“we have no choice but to go along with them.” She told me that it was time for Castro to step down. “When I see Fidel speaking nowadays, it’s as if I am seeing my great-grandfather there, talking away for no reason in particular. He’s got nothing to say anymore. It’s a great pity, too,” she said. “The people here still respect him—even though they don’t listen to him anymore. After him, there’s no one else. So his successors are going to open up, because they will have to; they aren’t stupid. The people are fed up.”

One Sunday afternoon, I went to Lenin Park, on the outskirts of Havana. A salsa band was playing for a crowd of four or five hundred mostly young people, who were dancing and drinking beer from paper cups. When the concert ended, a couple of hundred youths began walking out of the park along the road to the city. A police van was parked in the middle of the road, with a dozen blue-uniformed officers standing around. Suddenly, one of them hit a teen-ager with his nightstick. Other officers came over and joined in, kicking and hitting the boy. Then they dragged him to the van and threw him into the back. Several youths were 40 holding their faces with their hands and stumbling, and I realized that the officers had blinded them with pepper spray. In the next five minutes or so, the officers beat and arrested eight or nine young men, none of whom, as far as I could tell, had done anything to provoke them. People in the crowd simply stared, or moved away, out of striking range of the policemen. I asked a man what the youths had done, and he said quietly, “Nothing. Someone probably mouthed off to one of them. The cops are just trying to show who’s boss. They always do this.” The onlookers might be far less restrained in Castro’s absence. During the summer of 1994, at the height of the Special Period, after clashes between the authorities and would-be migrants, hundreds of men and youths rioted along the Malecón. Castro went to the scene and, with his nervous bodyguards, waded into the melee. The rioters were holding rocks and bricks, but when they saw Castro they dropped them and applauded. The tumult, which had been expanding dangerously, began to dissipate. After Castro left, police riot squads arrived, along with truckloads of stick-wielding men from an élite workers’ brigade, who then chased, beat, and arrested the remaining rioters. It is hard to imagine any of Castro’s potential successors having the authority to pull off such a move, and a bout of unrest might spread across the island if left unchecked, or if the security forces overreact. If Raúl is in charge, moderation will not be a foregone conclusion. Despite his reputation for warmth, Raúl can be impulsive, dogmatic, and, at times, brutal. In 1959, he oversaw the surrender of Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, while Castro made his way toward Havana. There, in the most notorious act of retribution to follow the guerrillas’ victory, Raúl presided over the execution of more than seventy soldiers and officers, who were machine-gunned and then dumped into a pit. More recently, in 1996, Raúl orchestrated a purge of Party intellectuals, whom he accused of being contaminated by “capitalist ideas.” In the past few years, Castro has increased the number of police officers in Havana considerably, and given them salaries equivalent to those earned by doctors. Many of the police are drawn from Cuba’s rural eastern provinces, where the government has strong support, and are held in contempt by many of the comparatively cosmopolitan habañeros. After the 1994 riots, Castro relieved some of the pressure on the regime by temporarily allowing people to leave the island by sea. As many as thirty thousand Cubans tried to reach Florida in the space of three weeks, in what became known as the “rafters’ crisis.” To forestall another sea exodus, the U.S. significantly increased its legal immigration quota for Cubans and instituted a “dry foot, wet foot” policy, under which those intercepted at sea by the Coast Guard are deported and those who manage to reach dry land are allowed to stay. This reduced the numbers for a while, but last year almost three thousand Cubans were stopped at sea and repatriated—double the figure for 2004. There are fears both in Cuba and in the United States that social instability after Castro’s death could provoke a huge wave of emigration. According to some scenarios, this could be used to justify American military intervention. Many young people in Cuba today wish for nothing more than to emigrate. On my latest trip, a longtime Party member confessed that he had recently helped his own son leave Cuba. “We have a lot of very good young people, but they don’t like to be administered,” he said. “And I’m afraid that the revolution has not yet learned that the consciences of others do not need to be administered.”

Randy Alonso Falcón, who is thirty-six, is one of the most recognizable figures in the Battle of Ideas. Alonso, the host of the political talk show “La Mesa Redonda Informativa”—“The News Round Table”— is on the national directorate of the Communist Youth Union, and is also a member of the Central Command for the Battle of Ideas. Everyone calls him Randy. One morning in April, I met Alonso, a short man with an easygoing demeanor and a heavily pockmarked 41 face, outside the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal. He gestured toward the Tribunal’s most recent innovation, the Mount of Flags, a cluster of a hundred and thirty-eight steel poles, as high as a hundred feet and rising from a series of concrete plinths, flying black flags that block the view of the Interests Section from the street. The Mount of Flags was Castro’s response to the U.S. chargé d’affaires’ installation, in January, of an electronic ticker in the Section’s windows, offering uncensored news reports twenty-four hours a day. To make room for the flags, the Cubans had appropriated the Americans’ parking lot. “Naturally, if they are going to fuck with us, we will fuck them, too,” Alonso said. We drove east out of Havana to the Villa Panamericana, a complex of sports facilities built to host the 1991 Pan American Games. One building had been converted into the School for Social Workers. Begun in 2000 for underprivileged—and potentially antisocial—youths, the school had turned out more than ten thousand graduates, and its alumni form the core of the Social Workers battalions. Alonso said that the leaders of the Battle of Ideas decided where to deploy the battalions by studying secret “opinion polls.” “Every day, we receive five thousand opinions that we get from across the country,” he told me. “It’s not a survey. There are activists who hear things, and then they send in exactly what was said.” These polls, if they can properly be called that, are one of Castro’s favorite sources of information. At the school, a large, rambling prefab concrete facility, we joined Enrique Cabezas Gómez, the director, who is one of Castro’s protégés. He invited us into a reception room with three of his students, and began a disquisition on the school’s role in the Battle of Ideas. He continued, without pausing, for three hours. As he spoke, the students listened quietly. It was hard to gauge their enthusiasm. Cabezas mentioned that recently, when Castro, as part of an ongoing Battle of Ideas anti-corruption drive, replaced employees at Cuba’s gas stations with the Social Workers, they unearthed systemic graft and theft. Some Cubans I spoke to predicted that it was just a matter of time before the Social Workers themselves were corrupted. Most didn’t believe that the anti-corruption campaign would work, because the many ruses that Cubans had devised for their survival were too deeply embedded. One Cuban told me that after the government had a fleet of cargo trucks equipped with G.P.S. to prevent pilferage, the drivers figured out how to use condoms filled with water to disable the devices. Confirming this story, a Western European diplomat told me that his biggest concern for Cuba’s future was the prospect that a powerful network of criminal Mafias would emerge, as they had in the former European Socialist states. In Havana, I visited a Cuban couple whom I’ve known for many years, and was shocked to see how they were living. Some of their furniture had been sold, and they both looked thin. Now in their sixties, they were getting by on the equivalent of about sixty dollars a month—more, in fact, than most Cubans earn. The wife told me, “You know, to live in Cuba we have only three alternatives, known as the three R’s— robar, remar, or rezingarse.” Robar is “to steal.” Remar is “to row”—as in to take a boat to Florida. Rezingarse is a play on the word resignarse, “to resign oneself,” but in Cuban slang zingar is “to fuck,” so rezingarse means, literally, “to fuck yourself.”

On June 2nd, the day before Raúl Castro’s seventy-fifth birthday, Granma published an eight-page special supplement titled “Raúl Up Close.” The article included headings such as “The Chief,” “Patriotic Values,” and “Capable, Responsible, and Brilliant.” In a typical passage, Raúl is described as “affable, affectionate, human, understanding; who knows how to be serious and demanding but is, at the same time, friendly and capable of listening to a story or enjoying a joke—a profoundly human being.” The article ends with Fidel explaining why Raúl should succeed him: “I choose him not because he is my brother, because the whole world knows how much we hate nepotism, but because on my honor I consider him to have sufficient qualities to substitute for me tomorrow in case I die in this struggle.” A couple of days later, I received an e-mail from a friend in Havana about the supplement: “Everyone here thinks this means ‘the electoral campaign’ has begun”—that is, the campaign to prepare Cubans for 42

Raúl’s succession to power. Raúl rarely appears in public with his older brother. Foreign journalists are never invited to his speeches, and he never grants interviews. In my visits to Cuba during the past fifteen years, I have seen Raúl only once in person, at the annual May Day rally in the Plaza de la Revolución, in 1993. He had joined the rest of the Politburo on a podium, standing near, but not next to, Fidel. While Fidel gazed solemnly over the proceedings, Raúl bantered with the others. In those days, a mantle of secrecy surrounded the Castro clan. Most Cubans did not know the name of Castro’s wife, or even how many children they had. Since then, however, several members of Cuba’s First Family have begun a kind of gradual début that seems intended to prepare them for more public roles. Dalia Soto del Valle, Castro’s wife of some forty years (it is not clear when, or whether, they were legally married), has become more visible since the Elián González standoff. She is the mother of five of his sons: Alexis, Alexander, Alejandro (Castro has a fascination with Alexander the Great), Antonio, and Angel. In 2000, I had lunch with Antonio Castro, the oldest, at the orthopedic hospital in Havana, where he was doing his residency before signing on with the baseball team; he was polite but reserved. Alexis was rumored to be the more troubled son; a couple of years ago, however, he began appearing at events as a photographer for Juventud Rebelde, the U.J.C. newspaper. The less known brothers are Alexander, who works as a cameraman for Cuban television; Alejandro, who is a computer programmer; and Angel, the youngest, who is not known to have found a profession. Castro divorced his first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, the mother of his firstborn son, Fidel, in 1955. She remarried and has lived in Madrid for many years, though she often travels to Cuba to visit her son. She has never spoken publicly about her former husband, but her nephew, Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a Republican congressman from Florida, is one of Castro’s most ardent critics. Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, or Fidelito, is a Soviet-educated nuclear physicist, and ran Cuba’s atomic-energy commission until the early nineties, when he was removed from the post; Castro said during a trip to Spain that he had fired his son for “incompetence.” Lately, however, Fidelito has reëmerged, and is now said to be an adviser to his father. One evening last April, I was at a restaurant in Old Havana when a chauffeur-driven Lada pulled up, and Fidelito came in. He had a beard and bore a striking resemblance to his father, with the same pronounced Roman nose and proud profile. It was as if Fidel Castro himself, thirty years younger, had just walked by. Castro also has a daughter, Alina Fernández, the product of his affair with a society woman, Naty Revuelta, in the late fifties. In 1993, Alina, who had long been estranged from her father, fled to Europe in disguise and later settled in Miami, where she hosts a radio show, “Simply Alina,” dedicated to attacking him. Raúl Castro and his M.I.T.-educated wife, Vilma Espín, the head of the Cuban Women’s Federation, have four children, and they, too, have been more visible lately. When I had dinner with Ricardo Alarcón this spring, he told me that Raúl’s eldest daughter, Mariela Castro Espín, a sexologist, had been lobbying the National Assembly to reform Cuba’s laws on behalf of transsexuals and transvestites. She has been “driving me crazy,” Alarcón said, laughing. I had heard about Mariela’s role as the godmother of Cuba’s transsexuals and transvestites when I attended a transvestite show at a house in western Havana. The occasion was the birthday of Imperio, one of the island’s most famous transformistas (as transvestites who perform in cabarets are called), a slim, handsome mixed-race man in his mid-thirties. In a large upstairs room, there was a bar, and a hundred or more gay men applauded and blew kisses as Imperio danced and lip-synched to songs by Gloria Gaynor and Rocío Jurado. I was struck by the openness of the event; I had been to a transvestite show in Havana in the late nineties, but it was a clandestine affair. Until very recently, Cuba’s gays, and transvestites in particular, were harassed and frequently arrested by the police. Imperio’s friends told me that the change was due to Mariela Castro. 43

I went to see Mariela Castro at the Instituto Nacional de Educación Sexual, CENESEX, which is housed in an old nineteenth-century mansion in the Vedado district, with a wide porch and shade trees on the grounds. Mariela, an attractive, relaxed-looking woman in her late thirties, has been the director of CENESEX since 2000. We sat down in a small upstairs office to talk. “Look, a lot of people think that we’ve been able to do what we’ve done because of family relations,” she said. “On the contrary, sometimes family connections are an obstacle in life—I can’t make my proposals through my father or mother, because neither of them would allow that. Whatever I do, I do through official channels. What happens, though, is that when I go to these official channels the people don’t know how to react, because of my family connections. They ask, ‘What does your father say about this?’ And I say, ‘It doesn’t matter what my father says.’ ” Three years ago, Mariela said, some transvestites complained to her that the police were harassing them, and asked for her help. “I felt really bad for them, because I felt that the revolution had some very beautiful proposals, but changing people’s attitudes takes a lot longer than we would sometimes like.” When there are problems with the police, “we go straight to the police station,” she said. “Speaking honestly, the cultural level of the policemen is not always good.” She had spoken to the Ministry of Defense—run by her father—but said that initially it had been difficult to convince her father that there was a need for change. In the sixties and seventies, the military, under Raúl’s control, presided over notorious camps known by the acronym UMAP (for Military Units to Help Production), where homosexuals, including Reinaldo Arenas, the late author of “Before Night Falls”—as well as some unemployed and religious Cubans— were “rehabilitated” through forced labor. During the eighties, men who were H.I.V.-positive were forcibly quarantined in medical asylums known colloquially as sidatorios (“AIDS,” in Spanish, is SIDA). In the past decade, official policies have relaxed, but laws guaranteeing sexual freedom are still nonexistent. Mariela told me that her legal team was preparing a brief that proposed specific changes in the penal and civil code; for example, transsexuals who had had sex-change operations would be able to marry and to enjoy the same inheritance and pension rights as heterosexual spouses. She said that her next project was to secure similar rights for Cuba’s gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. First, though, Mariela was enlisting the transvestites in the Battle of Ideas. “I thought it would be good if they had a social mission,” she told me. She said that two groups of transvestites had already completed training as sexual-health Social Workers. “Every time we have a course graduation ceremony, we let them put on their transvestite shows right here—the whole spectacle, just as they like it to be. It may not be to my aesthetic taste”—Mariela smiled—“but it is theirs, and we respect that.”

Both Mariela Castro and Ricardo Alarcón implied that the Battle of Ideas had initiated a sort of social and cultural opening. During our dinner at the Nacional, Alarcón mentioned that he had volunteered to inaugurate a recent exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in Havana. “That raised some eyebrows,” he said. Political openness is a different matter: over a four-day period in March, 2003, beginning the day before the United States invaded Iraq, Cuban authorities arrested seventy-eight dissidents, including labor unionists, human-rights activists, and journalists; many are still in jail. But the government seems serious about its initiatives in the arts—there are, for example, a host of new art and dance schools, and educationalextension programs—in part as a means of getting Cuba’s youths off the streets. Abel Prieto, Cuba’s Culture Minister, told me, “The appetite for culture, the social prestige of the artist, of the intellectual, of the writer, has grown enormously. There was a time when parents thought that the arts would turn their sons into gays, or their daughters into sluts, but now everyone wants to have an artist 44 in the family.” Prieto is well over six feet tall, and, with his muttonchop sideburns and shoulder-length hair, he cuts an incongruous figure as a senior Communist Party official. One of his proudest achievements was having one of Old Havana’s plazas dubbed Lennon Park, with a bronze statue of John Lennon. (In the sixties, the Beatles’ “decadent” music was banned.) He talks openly about using pirated programming on state television: “We don’t pay copyright for television material—we are blockaded. So we take a lot from the Discovery Channel, for instance.” When we visited Havana’s main art museum, an entourage of admirers followed him from gallery to gallery. Prieto had told me that the arts scene in Havana had become less conventional, and more “disquieting,” though I saw little evidence of this at the museum. A couple of days later, however, I visited a fringe exhibition put on by students at the School of Fine Arts. Their work was much more political than what I had seen elsewhere in Havana. In one display, a Cuban peso coin with the official slogan “Patria Libre o Muerte” (“Free Fatherland or Death”) had been cut so that it read, “Patria Libre o Suerte” (“Free Fatherland or Luck”). In one part of the room, an old reel-to-reel tape recorder and speaker blared out, in an endlessly repeating loop, an extract of a patriotic speech by Castro, and in front of it was a placard that read, “Just talk to me about baseball.”

Castro’s greatest obstacle, if he is to insure that his succession plan survives him, is the United States, which has, in effect, been trying to force a transition in Cuba for five decades. In that time, the relationship between Washington and the exile community in Miami has, more often than not, been unhealthily close. During the first years of Castro’s rule, U.S. policy was to try to overthrow him by force, or to assassinate him. The C.I.A. set up an office in Miami—then its largest for clandestine operations— and recruited thousands of exiles, forming a paramilitary organization that attacked Cuba’s interests. That aspect of the C.I.A.’s operations had mostly wound down in the seventies, but by then the anticastristas had formed groups of their own. Cuban exiles with C.I.A. links carried out bombings and assassinations aimed at Cuba and its allies, including the 1976 murder of Orlando Letelier, Chile’s Ambassador to the United States, in Washington, D.C. The hard-liners within Miami’s Cuban-exile community are now mostly elderly men themselves, but they are still a volatile factor. Castro has used the case of Luis Posada Carriles to argue that America has a double standard in its war on terror. Posada Carriles, a Cuban who holds Venezuelan citizenship, has spent the past forty-five years trying to kill or depose Castro. He is wanted in Venezuela for allegedly helping to plan the midair bombing of a Cuban passenger jet near Barbados in October, 1976, which killed all seventy-three people on board. (Cubans, citing recently declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. documents that appear to support them, accuse the agency of having had prior knowledge of the attack.) In between escaping from a Venezuelan jail and—as he admitted to the Times—planning the bombing of hotels in the summer of 1997, killing an Italian tourist, Posada Carriles worked for Oliver North’s program to resupply the Contras in Nicaragua. Last year, he surfaced, holding a press conference in Miami, and Hugo Chávez demanded his extradition. Posada Carriles was detained, but after several months a federal judge ruled that although he had entered the country illegally, the U.S. would not deport him to Cuba or Venezuela, because he might be tortured. He is now appealing to remain in the United States, on the ground that he worked covertly on its behalf for many years. In Miami, I met with Santiago Alvarez, a prominent Cuban exile and a close ally of Posada Carriles, in his office in a Hialeah strip mall. Alvarez, who runs a construction business, is a rough but good-looking man of sixty-four. “Look, Posada Carriles is not a saint. He is a Cuban freedom fighter, and he has made some mistakes,” Alvarez said. “But what’s happened here is that Fidel Castro has mounted a big show.” Alvarez went on, “As an anticastrista, I look upon Bush’s attempt to harden the embargo with a certain 45 pleasure. On the other hand, I can see how loosening it might well be the best weapon against Fidel. For instance, a relaxation on the restrictions of visits to the island—this could help us conspire against the regime. I do not believe that Fidel Castro will ever fall from power through the activities of a few dissidents. I maintain that he must be brought down by armed force.” Alvarez said that the time to attack is while Castro is still alive. “After Fidel dies, it will be a different game,” he told me. “And what happens if he lasts another ten years? We can’t wait that long. I would feel ashamed if I waited for him to die before I returned.” (Soon after our meeting, Alvarez was arrested for illegal possession of machine guns and a grenade launcher. He is now awaiting trial.) Senator Martinez didn’t want to comment directly on the Posada Carriles case, because it was in the courts. But he denied that it had anything to do with the war on terror. “Cuba began the practice of hijacking airliners, and if Luis Posada Carriles bombed an airliner”—Martinez paused—“without condoning any specific act of violence, there was a hostile state of affairs at the time. This is no longer an issue and is just being used by a failed regime to keep people stoked up. We need to talk about the future, not the past.”

In December, 2003, President Bush appointed Senator Martinez as co-chair of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, along with Colin Powell. Their mandate was to find ways to “hasten the end of Castro’s tyranny,” and to develop “a comprehensive strategy to prepare for a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba.” The result of their work was a five-hundred-page report, issued in May, 2004, that included guidelines for everything from setting up a market economy to holding elections. It also recommends “undermining the regime’s ‘succession strategy.’ ” “I looked for lessons from Iraq, for things the Cubans will need,” Martinez told me. “For instance, a governmental structure should remain in place. As in Iraq, in Cuba there are those with blood on their hands, but that’s not the case with everyone. And there are issues like the electrical grid, housing, and nutrition. What we learned in Iraq is that there would be a disruption of these things in an extraordinary moment.” The report, which the Bush Administration adopted as policy, recommended the appointment of a Cuba transition coördinator. The person named to the new post was Caleb McCarry, whose previous position was staff director for the House Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee. When I spoke with McCarry, he said, “My function is to be the senior U.S. official in charge of planning and supporting a genuine democratic transition in Cuba, and to work on it now.” He is, in effect, the Paul Bremer designate of Cuba. As with Iraq, however, the United States is hampered by its inability to operate openly in Cuba, and by its reliance on information from exiles and dissidents. And it does not seem to have a candidate for Castro’s replacement. McCarry said that, while the transition would be in Cuban hands, “we will be there to offer very concrete support.” The U.S. is already channelling money and aid to the opposition. Two leading dissidents, Osvaldo Paya and Elizardo Sánchez, have said that this tactic has been counterproductive, and criticized it as heavy-handed meddling. Many of the dissidents arrested in 2003 were accused of illegally receiving American funds. (In a speech, Castro called them “mercenaries.”) McCarry emphasized that the Administration would not regard the accession of Raúl Castro as a satisfactory outcome, even if it was accompanied by economic reforms. “We will continue to offer support for a real transition,” he said. “You know, this is not an imposition. It’s an offer, a very respectful offer, with respect for the sense of Cuban nationhood.” Not all exiles are in agreement with U.S. policy. Damian Fernández, a Cuban-American who runs the Cuba Research Institute, at Florida International University, told me, “There are some lessons to be 46 learned from the experience in Iraq. Do we really want a transition, a clean break with the past, or do we want succession, which would mean keeping some of the old state and the orderliness that would bring? The fact is that it’s unlikely there’ll be a tabula rasa after Fidel dies. But this Administration has this line on transition that ‘if we push we can make it happen.’ ” In Havana, the so-called Bush Plan is regularly denounced on lurid billboards and by Castro’s deputies. Felipe Pérez Roque said that the U.S. transition plan would “take away Cubans’ land and their houses and schools, in order to return them to their old Batistiano owners, who would come back from the United States.” Cubans are receptive to such talk. Many are living in homes that were confiscated from owners who fled the country, and the prospect of being made homeless by returning exiles frightens them. “The day when Cubans will rise up is when the gentlemen from Miami arrive and try to appropriate people’s homes, and to give orders,” one Cuban academic told me. (Martinez, whose own childhood home is now a youth center, said that a “vehicle” might be devised to restore homes to exiles or to compensate them, but he acknowledged that Cubans on the island had a claim to them as well. “The last thing we want to do is make people who’ve suffered so much feel more insecure,” he said. “I think the exiles should have a say, and I think it will be helpful, in terms of being able to provide resources and ideas. They can help lead Cuba to the economic miracle, which, given the Cuban people’s abilities, I think it should have. It is also their right—I should say our right—to be allowed a role.”) In a speech in March, Ricardo Alarcón called the Bush Plan “annexationist and genocidal.” In private, afterward, he was only slightly less adamant, telling me that it was “profoundly irresponsible, made up by people who prefer to ignore reality and who try and change it capriciously. Maybe it’s a messianic thing.” He added, “For us, our relation with the U.S. is the one great theme, the big problem. There is no other single issue of such force, of such permanent and universal importance to us, than having the U.S. normalize relations with Cuba.” Under the Bush Administration, all contacts have ceased, he told me, with the sole exception of low-level meetings over the “wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy. “There is nothing at all going on,” he said. “Nada.”

Cuba didn’t win the Baseball Classic, but it came close. On the night of the final match, in San Diego on March 20th, against Japan, large video screens were set up around Havana. I watched in the Parque Central, in Old Havana, along with hundreds of Cubans. By the bottom of the first inning, when Cuba scored, the plaza had become an animated wall of noise and celebration. Cuba’s winning streak didn’t hold, however, and Japan won, 10–6. Even so, the next day officials in Havana orchestrated a huge homecoming for the team, with a victory procession through Havana, along streets filled with flag- waving Young Pioneers, culminating in a rally in the city’s sports stadium which was presided over by Fidel Castro himself. The stands of the sports stadium were filled with thousands of students and Social Workers. A huge placard showed Che Guevara’s face in a Pop-art rendition of blue, red, and orange. I also noticed quite a few people wearing red T-shirts decorated with an image of Hugo Chávez. We were waiting for Fidel. I stood among a group of Cuban newsmen. The first Politburo member to appear was the ancient General Guillermo García Frías, a former peasant and guerrilla fighter who is famous for his passion for cockfighting. Next came Ricardo Alarcón. As the minutes dragged on, the students in the stadium began chanting, “Fi-del! Fi-del!” Carlos Lage appeared next, and Chávez’s brother Adan, Venezuela’s Ambassador. Suddenly, everyone stood and, as a new roar came from the youths in the stands, I spotted Castro’s bodyguard, José Delgado, a bald, bull-chested man with worried eyes. If Delgado was there, it meant that Castro was about to arrive. 47

Castro emerged from behind the tribune and, amid more cheers, took a seat. His personal secretary, Carlos Valenciaga, a pale man with spectacles and a large black portfolio, sat behind him. The ceremony began immediately. Dancers dressed in white guajiro peasant costumes were followed by modern dancers in yellow Lycra body stockings. Finally, Cuba’s baseball team walked out and stood in formation, each player holding the hand of a small child in uniform, as a singer lauded them for turning down the offer of “millions of dollars” to “betray the fatherland.” At the appropriate moments, Castro, like everyone else, waved a little Cuban flag. A local journalist pointed out a pale, overweight photographer, and told me that he was Alexis Castro. Like the other photographers, Alexis spent more time staring up into the stands, watching his father, than he did watching the athletes, and periodically raised his camera, with its long zoom lens, to shoot pictures of him. One by one, the players trooped up to greet Castro. He clapped each of them on the back, smiling, and presented them with new bats, which two young women in military tunics handed to him. When Antonio Castro, the team’s doctor, stepped forward, however, he and his father shook hands formally. Then it was time for Castro to speak. In a tone of grandfatherly admonishment, Castro said that so many Cubans had watched the Classic that “our electrical grid was at risk of collapsing.” He said that what Cuba’s team had achieved was colossal. “The fact that a modest little island in the Caribbean managed to compete against a country like Japan in an international sports event—this is an occurrence of great magnitude!” Castro then began shuffling some clippings he had brought with him; he grumbled that they were out of order. A couple of minutes rolled by before he found what he was looking for, an article praising Cuba’s performance in the Classic from one of the international wire agencies, and he proceeded to read it out loud. Castro’s voice was tremulous. He finished reading the dispatch, and then he read another, and another, and another, for more than a half hour. The students in the bleachers around me were, by now, clearly bored. Many fidgeted or talked. Some slept. As Castro read commentaries from Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, ESPN, and the BBC, it struck me that he was sharing information from sources that were out of bounds to most Cubans. But if he was aware of the paradox he didn’t show it. When he was done with the articles, he talked for another hour about Cuba’s achievements in medicine and education. The restless din in the stadium grew, but Castro seemed oblivious. I tried to read the faces of the members of the Politburo who were seated near Castro, but all I saw was their disciplined and neutral expressions. 48

From Mohandas Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, 1908. CHAPTER XVII: PASSIVE RESISTANCE Reader: Is there any historical evidence as to the success of what you have called soul-force or truth- force? No instance seems to have happened of any nation having risen through soul-force. I still think that the evil-doers will not cease doing evil without physical punishment. Editor: The poet Tulsidas has said: "Of religion, pity, or love, is the root, as egotism of the body. Therefore, we should not abandon pity so long as we are alive." This appears to me to be a scientific truth. I believe in it as much as I believe in two and two being four. The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force. But you ask for historical evidence. It is, therefore, necessary to know what history means. The Gujarati equivalent means: "It so happened". If that is the meaning of history, it is possible to give copious evidence. But, if it means the doings of the kings and emperors, there can be no evidence of soul-force or passive resistance in such history. You cannot expect silver ore in a tin mine. History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world, and so there is a proverb among Englishmen that a nation which has no history, that is, no wars, is a happy nation. How kings played, how they became enemies of one another, how they murdered one another, is found accurately recorded in history, and if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago. If the story of the universe had commenced with wars, not a man would have been found alive today. Those people who have been warred against have disappeared as, for instance, the natives of Australia of whom hardly a man was left alive by the intruders. Mark, please, that these natives did not use soul-force in self-defence, and it does not require much foresight to know that the Australians will share the same fate as their victims. "Those that take the sword shall perish by the sword." With us the proverb is that professional swimmers will find a watery grave. The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul. Two brothers quarrel; one of them repents and re-awakens the love that was lying dormant in him; the two again begin to live in peace; nobody takes note of this. But if the two brothers, through the intervention of solicitors or some other reason take up arms or go to law ? which is another form of the exhibition of brute force, ? their doings would be immediately noticed in the press, they would be the talk of their neighbours and would probably go down to history. And what is true of families and communities is true of nations. There is no reason to believe that there is one law for families and another for nations. History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history. Reader: According to what you say, it is plain that instances of this kind of passive resistance are not to be found in history. It is necessary to understand this passive resistance more fully. It will be better, therefore, if you enlarge upon it. Editor: Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force. For instance, the Government of the day has passed a law which is applicable to me. I do not like it. If by using violence I force the Government to repeal the law. I am employing what may be termed body-force. 49

If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self. Everybody admits that sacrifice of self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of others. Moreover, if this kind of force is used in a cause that is unjust, only the person using it suffers. He does not make others suffer for his mistakes. Men have before now done many things which were subsequently found to have been wrong. No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that a particular thing is wrong because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is therefore meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whetever it may be. This is the key to the use of soul-force. Reader: You would then disregard laws ? this is rank disloyalty. We have always been considered a law- abiding nation. You seem to be going even beyond the extremists. They say that we must obey the laws that have been passed, but that if the laws be bad, we must drive out the law- givers even by force. Editor: Whether I go beyond them or whether I do not is a matter of no consequence to either of us. We simply want to find out what is right and to act accordingly. The real meaning of the statement that we are a law-abiding nation is that we are passive resisters. When we do not like certain laws, we do not break the heads of law-givers but we suffer and do not submit to the laws. That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a newfangled nation. There was no such thing in former days. The people disregarded those laws they did not like and suffered the penalties for their breach. It is contrary to our manhood if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to a religion and means slavery. If the Government were to ask us to go about without any clothing, should we do so? If I were a passive resister, I would say to them that I would have nothing to do with their law. But we have so forgotten ourselves and become so compliant that we do not mind degrading law. A man who has realized his manhood, who fears only God, will fear no one else. Man-made laws are not necessarily binding on him. Even the Government does not expect any such things from us. They do not say: "You must do such and such a thing." but they say: "If you do not do it, we will punish you." We are sunk so low that we fancy that it is our duty and our religion to do what the law lays down. If man will only realize that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man's tyranny will enslave him. This is the key to self-rule or home-rule. It is a superstition and ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority. Many examples can be given in which acts of majorities will be found to have been wrong and those of minorities to have been right. All reforms owe their origin to the initiation of minorities in opposition to majorities. If among a band of robbers a knowledge of robbing is obligatory, is a pious man to accept the obligation? So long as the superstition that men should obey unjust laws exists, so long will their slavery exist. And a passive resister alone can remove such a superstition. To use brute force, to use gunpowder, is contrary to passive resistance, for it means that we want our opponent to do by force that which we desire but he does not. And if such a use of force is justifiable, surely he is entitled to do likewise by us. And so we should never come to an agreement. We may simply fancy, like the blind horse moving in a circle round a mill, that we are making progress. Those who believe that they are not bound to obey laws which are repugnant to their consience have only the remedy of passive resistance open to them. Any other must lead to disaster. Reader: From what you say I deduce that passive resistance is a splendid weapon of the weak, but that when they are strong they may take up arms. Editor: This is gross ignorance. Passive resistance, that is, soul-force, is matchless. It is superior to the force of arms. How, then, can it be considered only a weapon of the weak? Physical-force men are strangers to the courage that is requisite in a passive resister. Do you believe that a coward can ever disobey a law that he dislikes? Extremists are considered to be advocates of brute force. Why do they, 50 then, talk about obeying laws? I do not blame them. They can say nothing else. When they succeed in driving out the English and they themselves become governors, they will want you and me to obey their laws. And that is a fitting thing for their constitution. But a passive resister will say he will not obey a law that is against his conscience, even though he may be blown to pieces at the mouth of a cannon. What do you think? Wherein is courage required ? in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon, or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces? Who is the true warrior ? he who keeps death always as a bosom-friend, or he who controls the death of others? Believe me that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive resister. This however, I will admit : that even a man weak in body is capable of offering this resistance. One man can offer it just as well as millions. Both men and women can indulge in it. It does not require the training of an army; it needs no jiujitsu. Control over the mind is alone necessary, and when that is attained, man is free like the king of the forest and his very glance withers the enemy. Passive resistance is an all-sided sword, it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood it produces far-reaching results. It never rusts and cannot be stolen. Competition between passive resisters does not exhaust. The sword of passive resistance does not require a scabbard. It is strange indeed that you should consider such a weapon to be a weapon merely of the weak. Reader: You have said that passive resistance is a speciality of India. Have cannons never been used in India? Editor: Evidently, in your opinion, India means its few princes. To me it means its teeming millions on whom depends the existence of its princes and our own. Kings will always use their kingly weapons. To use force is bred in them. They want to command, but those who have to obey commands do not want guns; and these are in a majority throughout the would. They have to learn either body-force or soul-force. Where they learn the former, both the rulers and the ruled become like so many madmen: but where they learn soul-force, the commands of the rulers do not go beyond the point of their swords, for true men disregard unjust commands. Peasants have never been subdued by the sword, and never will be. They do not know the use of the sword, and they are not frightened by the use of it by others. That nation is great which rests its head upon death as its pillow. Those who defy death are free from all fear. For those who are labouring under the delusive charms of brute-force, this picture is not overdrawn. The fact is that, in India, the nation at large has generally used passive resistance in all departments of life. We cease to co-operate with our rulers when they displease us. This is passive resistance. I remember an instance when, in a small principality, the villagers were offended by some command issued by the prince. The former immediately began vacating the village. The prince became nervous, apologized to his subjects and withdrew his command. Many such instances can be found in India. Real Home Rule is possible only where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people. Any other rule is foreign rule. Reader: Then you will say that it is not at all necessary for us to train the body? Editor: I will certainly not say any such thing. It is difficult to become a passive resister unless the body is trained. As a rule, the mind, residing in a body that has become weakened by pampering, is also weak, and where there is no strength of mind there can be no strength of soul. We shall have to improve our physique by getting rid of infant marriages and luxurious living. If I were to ask a man with a shattered body to face a cannon's mouth I should make a laughing- stock of myself. Reader: From what you say, then, it would appear that it is not a small thing to become a passive resister, 51 and, if that is so, I should like you to explain how a man may become one. Editor: To become a passive resister is easy enough but it is also equally difficult. I have known a lad of fourteen years become a passive resister; I have known also sick people do likewise: and I have also known physically strong and otherwise happy people unable to take up passive resistance. After a great deal of experience it seems to me that those who want to become passive resisters for the service of the country have to observe perfect chastity, adopt poverty, follow truth, and cultivate fearlessness. Chastity is one of the greatest disciplines without which the mind cannot attain requisite firmness. A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great effort. This can be proved by innumerable instances. What, then, is a married person to do is the question that arises naturally; and yet it need not. When a husband and wife gratify the passions. it is no less an animal indulgence on that account. Such an indulgence, except for perpetuating the race, is strictly prohibited. But a passive resister has to avoid even that very limited indulgence because he can have no desire for progeny. A married man, therefore, can observe perfect chastity. This subject is not capable of being treated at greater length. Several questions arise: How is one to carry one's wife with one, what are her rights, and other similar questions. Yet those who wish to take part in a great work are bound to solve these puzzles. Just as there is necessity for chastity, so is there for poverty. Pecuniary ambition and passive resistance cannot well go together. Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it. They must be prepared to lose every penny rather than give up passive resistance. Passive resistance has been described in the course of our discussion as truth-force. Truth, therefore, has necessarily to be followed and that at any cost. In this connection. academic questions such as whether a man may not lie in order to save a life, etc., arise, but these questions occur only to those who wish to justify lying. Those who want to follow truth every time are not placed in such a quandary; and if they are, they are still saved from a false position. Passive resistance cannot proceed a step without fearlessness. Those alone can follow the path of passive resistance who are free from fear, whether as to their possessions, false honour. their relatives, the government, bodily injuries or death. These observances are not to be abandoned in the belief that they are difficult. Nature has implanted in the human breast ability to cope with any difficulty or suffering that may come to man unprovoked. These qualities are worth having, even for those who do not wish to serve the country. Let there be no mistake, as those who want to train themselves in the use of arms are also obliged to have these qualities more or less. Everybody does not become a warrior for the wish. A would-be warrior will have to observe chastity and to be satisfied with poverty as his lot. A warrior without fearlessness cannot be conceived of. It may be thought that he would not need to be exactly truthful, but that quality follows real fearlessness. When a man abandons truth, he does so owing to fear in some shape or form. The above four attributes, then, need not frighten anyone. It may be as well here to note that a physical-force man has to have many other useless qualities which a passive resister never needs. And you will find that whatever extra effort a swordsman needs is due to lack of fearlessness. If he is an embodiment of the latter, the sword will drop from his hand that very moment. He does not need its support. One who is free from hatred requires no sword. A man with a stick suddenly came face to face with a lion and instinctively raised his weapon in self-defence. The man saw that he had only prated about fearlessness when there was none in him. That moment he dropped the stick and found himself free from all fear. 52

“IDENTITY CRISIS” (symbolism of Gandhi in India-Pakistan conflict). By Hendrik Hertzberg. The New Yorker (June 17, 2002) Last Monday, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister of India, and his host, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, took an hour out of their busy schedules to participate in a ceremony. Their schedules were busy because they, along with fourteen other Presidents and Prime Ministers, were taking part in something called the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia. The purpose of the ceremony was to mark the renaming of Panfilov Street, in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city. The old name honored Ivan Panfilov, a Red Army hero. The new name is--wait for it--Mahatma Gandhi Street. Although the twentieth century's greatest advocate of nonviolence had a pretty good sense of humor (asked once what he thought of Western civilization, he replied that he thought it would be a good idea), this was one joke he might have found a bit forced. And although Mohandas K. Gandhi knew all about paradoxes (he turned a homespun loincloth into a raiment more commanding than any bemedalled uniform), this particular ceremony might have been a little too fraught with paradox even for him. Never mind that the President of Kazakhstan is known for corruption and bullying, two of Gandhi's least favorite vices. The other speaker at the renaming ceremony, Prime Minister Vajpayee, is the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., the political ancestors of which include the Hindu-nationalist fanatics who conspired in Gandhi's assassination, on January 30, 1948. What's more, this nice tribute to a man who lived and died for peace and brotherhood came at a moment when India was mobilizing for war over Kashmir, while India's estranged younger brother, Pakistan, was hinting that its own options, should things get bad enough, would include the use of nuclear weapons. As for Gandhi, he might have preferred to be honored by some actual Confidence-Building Measures, and maybe by some actual Interaction, too. Instead, he got a street sign, while Vajpayee and his Pakistani opposite number, President Pervez Musharraf, managed to spend the better part of two days in the same room without speaking to each other, or even shaking hands. Gandhi's ideas are largely ignored on the subcontinent nowadays, but he was right about many things, including the two great historical mistakes that are at the root of the current crisis. He was right in his opposition to the partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan. In 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru and the other leaders of the Indian National Congress reluctantly accepted the division, thinking that the alternative was bloodshed. But the carnage that followed anyway was greater than anyone except Gandhi had imagined, and it has continued sporadically down to the present. (A million died in 1947 and 1948, and by 1949 Nehru was bitterly regretting his acquiescence.) The other mistake was the disposition of Kashmir, which, given the brutal logic of partition, ought to have been part of Pakistan. The majority of its population was, and is, Muslim, but its maharaja was Hindu, and the maharaja dithered, and there was fighting, and Kashmir ended up divided but mostly in Indian hands--a partition within the partition, a wound within the wound. Like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the Middle East, the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir is one of overlapping rights and wrongs, religious and ethnic hatreds, and existential fears. Pakistan sees itself as defending the principles of self-determination and majority rule; India sees itself as defending a larger idea of democracy, and the principles that terrorism must not be rewarded and borders altered by force. Each fears that the "loss" of Kashmir would be fatal to its very identity--Pakistan's as a Muslim state, India's as a secular one. Despite the alliance of India's present government with Hindu fundamentalism, India's conception of itself--one that Westerners naturally find sympathetic--remains that of a multi-ethnic society held together by a democratic political and social contract. To India, the surrender of Kashmir would invite the collapse of the whole national experiment. Yet Pakistan's dilemma--its need to 53 simultaneously resist, coopt, and appease Islamism--is at least as vexing. What makes the situation especially dangerous, of course, is the nuclear arsenals on both sides. Even though each side is capable of destroying the other as a functioning society (and plunging itself and the rest of the world into unthinkable horror), deterrence cannot be relied upon. The United States and the Soviet Union took pains to avoid direct hostilities between their armed forces; but the 1947, 1965, and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan were hot, not cold, and their soldiers are shooting, shelling, and killing each other at this moment along the Line of Control that divides Kashmir. Between the two countries there is a perilous asymmetry. Pakistan is weaker than India in every way--in military power, in economic resources, in political stability, in civic strength. The result is a combustible dynamic of desperation on one side and arrogance on the other. And, as has been widely reported, neither side appears to have anything like a realistic picture of what a nuclear war would be like. In the Middle East, everyone knows what the solution must be: land for peace. Kashmir offers no such obvious formula. It is possible to envision a future arrangement whereby Kashmir remains, in some confederated sense, part of India but also has both a high degree of autonomy and some kind of formal political association with Pakistan. To get there, however, the world is going to have to accept that Kashmir is--like the Middle East, like the terrorism emergency--one of the handful of problems that demand unrelenting international attention and involvement. As in the Middle East, the world, led by the United States, has to provide cover for the sides to make the compromises they can't make on their own. The crisis (along with its international dignity) has to be elevated to the point where it is understood as singular and unique, so that its solution, whatever that turns out to be, is understood to have as few implications as possible for the self-conception of the countries involved. The intensity of the crisis seems to have ebbed a little in recent days, and, for the most banal of reasons-- the weather--a serious outbreak is unlikely before autumn. Heat and rain should see to that. Meanwhile, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, are hastening to the subcontinent, in an effort to persuade the region's generals and statesmen that nuclear war is something about which they simply have no idea. Perhaps Armitage and Rumsfeld, of all unlikely pacifists, can convince them that Gandhi--who, in 1946, called atomic weapons "the supreme tragedy"-- knew what he was talking about. 54

“How Suez made Nasser an Arab icon” By Roger Hardy (BBC News Middle East analyst) http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5204490.stm Published: 2006/07/25 06:09:53 GMT

When he nationalised the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser became the hero of the Arab world. He was one of the army officers who had taken part in the coup which overthrew the country's British- backed monarchy in 1952. The Arab response to the new military regime, writes historian Rashid Khalidi, was at first lukewarm. "Suez changed this, firmly establishing Nasser as the pre-eminent Arab leader until the end of his life, and Arab nationalism as the leading Arab ideology." Taking control of the canal was an act of national self-assertion - and defiance of Britain - which electrified Arabs everywhere. Nasser was seen as a new breed of ruler ready to stand up to the old colonial order. By the time the Suez Crisis had run its course - and Britain and France had been forced to make a humiliating withdrawal from Egyptian territory - his regional position had become unassailable. The dream of Arabism Arab nationalism, or "Arabism", embodied the idea that all Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf should unite in a single state. It was an illusion, but a potent one.

NASSER'S LIFE Born in 1918, the son of a postal clerk Graduate of military academy, promoted to colonel in 1950 Led the Free Officers in 1952 in a coup that seized power by toppling the British-backed monarchy Elected president in 1956 and nationalised the Suez Canal shortly after Resigned after Arab defeats of 1967, but popular demonstrations brought him back to power Died of a heart attack in 1970

During the heyday of Nasser's influence in the 1950s and 1960s, the idea that the Arabs should join together under Egyptian leadership became very popular. Using the new medium of the transistor radio, Nasser spread the Arabist message into the most remote 55 corners of the region. Leaders tainted by their association with the former colonial powers found themselves seriously undermined. Two years after the Suez affair, the British-backed Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in a bloody coup. This sent a strong signal that Arab nationalists were now in the driving seat. The young King Hussein of Jordan, derided by nationalists as a puppet of the British, survived on his throne - but only by the skin of his teeth. The Israel issue With Nasser's ascendancy, three ideas came to dominate Arab politics: Arabism, social justice and the struggle against Israel. By allying itself with Britain and France in the Suez affair, Israel confirmed the Arabs in their view that it was the creation of colonialism. The struggle against Israel became the predominant Arab cause, but it also in the end contributed to Nasser's undoing. Some analysts think his success in 1956 led him to overplay his hand in the June War of 1967. The Egyptian leader thought the big powers would come to his rescue, as the US had done in 1956. Instead, Israel defeated the Arab armies in a mere six days. Worn out from a succession of regional crises, Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970. For many Arabs, the light of Arabism had been extinguished. 56

“Nasser's Arab nationalism is revisited” By Ramadan Al Sherbini, Correspondent http://archive.gulfnews.com/region/Egypt/10055044.html 07/26/2006 Cairo: In a series of anti-Israeli protests in Cairo in the past few days, demonstrators raised portraits of the late Egyptian President Jamal Abdul Nasser with a caption reading "the symbol of Arab dignity". The protesters chanted slogans against incumbent Arab leaders whom they accused of weakness towards the Israeli attacks on Lebanon. "Nasser and his Arab nationalism are always revived whenever the Arab world faces hard times," said Abdullah Al Senawi, the editor of the Nasserist newspaper Al Arabi. "A closer look will show that even the discourse used by Hassan Nasrallah [the chief of the Lebanese group Hezbollah] is basically inspired by the concept of Arab nationalism championed by Nasser," Al Senawi told Gulf News. Israel's sustained onslaught against Lebanon coincides with the 50th anniversary of Egypt's nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The decision proclaimed by Nasser on July 26, 1956, culminated in what came to be known as the Suez Crisis, which pitted Britain and France against Egypt. "This decision marked a turning point for Egypt and the Third World. For Egypt, it underscored independence and control of national resources. Also it gave rise to Egypt's pivotal role in the region, a role which has, unfortunately, been marginalised during recent years," said Al Senawi. Nasser nationalised the strategic waterway to spend its revenues on building the High Dam in southern Egypt after the World Bank turned down an Egyptian request to fund the project. "The ensuing Suez Crisis with the attacks mounted by Israel, Britain and France on Egypt wrote the death certificate for one-time powerful empires such as the British Empire," said Fouad Aref, a professor of modern history. "It also established the Non-Aligned Movement led by Egypt, India and Yugoslavia as a new bloc in the then bipolar world," he told Gulf News. He argued that Nasser had emerged from the crisis as the unchallenged leader of Egypt and the architect of Arab nationalism. "He became the revolutionary, who played a direct role in the independence of several Arab countries. No wonder, he still commands a huge following among ordinary and intellectual Arabs almost 36 years after his death." In recent protests, many Egyptians likened Hezbollah's Naserallah to Nasser. "Nasser was the hero of Suez in 1956 and Nasrallah is the hero of Beirut in 2006," said a protester, who was raising two portraits of Nasser and Nasrallah during a pro-Lebanon demonstration in Cairo last week. "Both leaders truly embody Arab identity, determination and dignity. Nasser never let down any sisterly Arab country in distress. And Nasrallah is following in his footsteps," the protester, who gave his name as Ahmad, told this paper. 57

Theodor Herzl: On the Jewish State, 1896 There were Jew leaders who called for the return of the Jews to Palestine for decades before Theodor Herzl (1860 1904) wrote his influential pamphlet, The Jewish State. But Herzl's work pushed the formation of a political movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The first Zionist Congress, convened by Herzl, was held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Herzl was less attached to Palestine than some other "Zionists", and considered at one stage the creation of a Jewish state in what is now Uganda.

The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish State. The world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea. We are a people-one people. We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellowcitizens; in vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers, and often by those whose ancestors were not yet domiciled in the land where Jews had already had experience of suffering. The majority may decide which are the strangers; for this, as indeed every point which arises in the relations between nations, is a question of might. I do not here surrender any portion of our prescriptive right, when I make this statement merely in my own name as an individual. In the world as it now is and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenotsl who were forced to emigrate. If we could only be left in peace...... [However,] oppression and persecution cannot exterminate us. No nation on earth has survived such struggles and sufferings as we have gone through. Jew-baiting has merely stripped off our weaklings; the strong among us were invariably true to their race when persecution broke out against them.... However much I may worship personality-powerful individual personality in statesmen, inventors, artists, philosophers, or leaders, as well as the collective personality of a historic group of human beings, which we call a nation-however much I may worship personality, I do not regret its disappearance. Whoever can, will, and must perish, let him perish. But the distinctive nationality of Jews neither can, will, nor must be destroyed. It cannot be destroyed, because extemal enemies consolidate it. It will not be destroyed; this is shown during two thousand years of appalling suffering. It must not be destroyed .... Whole branches of Judaism may wither and fall, but the trunk will remain.

The Jewish Question No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!" Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys-for example, 58 their exclusion from certain hotels-even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecutions varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur....

The Plan Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves. The creation of a new State is neither ridiculous nor impossible. We have in our day witnessed the process in connection with nations which were not largely members of the middle class, but poorer, less educated, and consequently weaker than ourselves. The Governments of all countries scourged by Anti- Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want. The plan, simple in design, but complicated in execution, will be carried out by two agencies: The Society of Jews and the Jewish Company. The Society of Jews will do the preparatory work in the domains of science and politics, which the Jewish Company will afterwards apply practically. The Jewish Company will be the liquidating agent of the business interests of departing Jews, and will organize commerce and trade in the new country. We must not imagine the departure of the Jews to be a sudden one. It will be gradual, continuous, and will cover many decades. The poorest will go first to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan, they will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own dwellings; their labor will create trade, trade will create markets and markets will attract new settlers, for every man will go voluntarily, at his own expense and his own risk. The labor expended on the land will enhance its value, and the Jews will soon perceive that a new and permanent sphere of operation is opening here for that spirit of enterprise which has heretofore met only with hatred and obloquy. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, ed. Jacob M. Alkow (New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, 1946), pp. 69, 7677, 7980, 85, 9293. 59

“After Victory” by Tony Judt The New Republic, July 29, 2002. Review of: Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle Eastby Michael B. Oren (Oxford University Press, 446 pp., $30)Click here to purchase the book. I.Thirty-five years ago this summer, in one of the shortest wars in modern history, Israel confronted and destroyed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, established itself as a regional superpower, and definitively re-configured the politics of the Middle East and much else besides. Since we are still living with its consequences, the Six Day War itself seems somehow familiar. Its immediacy is reinforced by the presence today at the head of Israel's government of one of the generals who played an important part in the victory in 1967, and by the salience of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (occupied in the course of the campaign) in contemporary international politics. The detailed implications of Israel's lightning victory are etched into our daily news. In truth, however, 1967 was a very long time ago. Hitler had been dead just twenty-two years, and the state of Israel itself had not yet celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The overwhelming majority of today's Israeli citizens were not yet born or not yet Israelis. Nineteen years after its birth, the country was still shaped by its origins in turn-of-the-century Labor Zionism. The only leaders whom Israel had known were men and women of the Second Aliyah, the Russian and Polish immigrants of the first years of the twentieth century; and the country was still utterly dominated by that founding generation and its sensibilities. A time traveler returning to Israel in 1967 must traverse not just time, but also space: in many crucial respects the country still operated, as it were, on Bialystok time. This had implications for every dimension of Israeli life. The kibbutzim, curious communitarian progeny of an unlikely marriage of Marx and Kropotkin, dominated the cultural landscape no less than the physical one. Even though it was already clear to some observers that the country's future lay in technology, in industry, and in towns, the self-description of Israel drew overwhelmingly on a socialist realist image of agrarian pioneers living in semi-autarkic egalitarian communes. Most of the country's leaders, beginning with David Ben-Gurion himself, were members of a kibbutz. Kibbutzim were attached to national movements that were affiliated with political parties, and all of them reflected, to the point of caricature, their fissiparous European heritage, splitting and re-splitting through the years along subtle doctrinal fault lines. Political conversation in Israel in those years thus echoed and recapitulated the vocabulary and the obsessions of the Second International, circa 1922. Labor Zionism was sub-divided over issues of dogma and politics (in particular the question of Socialist Zionism's relationship to communism) in ways that might have seemed obsessive and trivial to outsiders but were accorded respectful attention by the protagonists. Laborites of various hues could indulge such internecine squabbles because they had a monopoly of power in the country. There were some religious parties, and above all there were also the "Revisionists," the heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his nationalist followers, now incarnated in Menachem Begin's Herut party (the forerunner of today's Likud). But the latter were in a permanent minority; and anyway it is significant that Begin and his like were still referred to disparagingly as "revisionist," as though it were the doctrinal schisms of the early twentieth century that still determined the colors and the contours of Israeli politics.

There were other aspects of Israeli life and Zionist education that echoed the founders' European roots. On the kibbutz where I spent much time in the mid-1960s, a fairly representative agricultural community 60 in the Upper Galilee affiliated with one of the splinter parties to the left of the main Labor Party (Mapai), the concerns of the early Zionists were still very much alive. The classical dilemmas of applied socialism were debated endlessly. Should an egalitarian community impose sameness? Is it sufficient to distribute resources equally to all participants, allowing them to dispose of these according to preference, or is preference itself ultimately divisive and taste best imposed uniformly by the collective? How far should the cash nexus be allowed into the community? Which resources and activities are communal in their essence, which private? The dominant tone on the kibbutz and in the country was provincial and puritanical. I was once earnestly reprimanded by a kibbutz elder for singing "inappropriate" popular songs, that is, the latest Beatles hits; and Zionist education went to great lengths to encourage intracommunity fellow feeling and affection among the young while eviscerating it of any hint of the erotic. The prevailing ethos, with its faith in the redemptive value of Land and Labor, its scout-like clothing and communal dances, its desert hikes and dutiful ascents of Masada (the hard way, of course), its lectures on botany and biblical geography, and its earnest weekly discussion of socialist "issues," represented nothing so much as a transposition into the Middle East of the preoccupations and mores of the Independent Labour Party of 1890s Britain, or the Wandervogel walking clubs of late Wilhelminian Germany. Not surprisingly, Arabs figured very little in this world. In discussions of the writings of Ber Borochov and the other iconic texts of Labor Zionism, much attention was of course paid to the question of "exploitation." But in accordance with the Marxist framework in which all such debates were couched, "exploitation" was restricted in its meaning to the labor theory of value: you exploit someone else by employing them, remunerating them at the minimum required to keep them working productively, and pocketing the difference as profit. Accordingly, as seen from the perspective of kibbutz-based Labor Zionists, to hire Arabs (or anyone else) for wages was to exploit them. This had been the subject of animated practical quarrels as well as doctrinal arguments among kibbutz members--historically it was part of what distinguished kibbutzim from the labor-employing village cooperatives, or moshavim. But beyond such rather abstruse considerations, which were of little relevance to the real Israeli economy, relations between Jews and Arabs were not much discussed. It is easy, looking back, to see in this curious oversight the source of our present troubles. And critics of the whole Zionist project are quick to remark that this refusal to engage with the presence of Arabs was the original sin of the Zionist forefathers, who consciously turned away from the uncomfortable fact that the virgin landscape of unredeemed Zion was already occupied by people who would have to be removed if a Jewish state was ever to come about. It is true that a few clear-sighted observers, notably Ahad Ha'am, had drawn attention to this dilemma and its implications, but most had ignored it. And yet I do not believe that the matter was quite so simple, to judge from my own recollection of the last years of the old Zionism. Many Israelis of that time rather prided themselves on their success in living peacefully alongside Arab neighbors within the national borders. Far from deliberately denying the Arab presence, they boasted of their acquaintance with Arabs, and especially with Druze and Bedouins. They encouraged the young to familiarize themselves with local Arab society no less than with the flora and the fauna of the landscape. But that, of course, is just the point. For pre-1967 Zionists, Arabs were a part of the physical setting in which the state of Israel had been established, but they were decidedly not part of the mental template, the Israel-of-the-mind, through which most Israelis saw their politics and their environment. Taking the Jews out of Europe did not take Europe out of the Jews. Notwithstanding the presence of Yemenite and North African Jews, condescendingly tolerated by the Ashkenazi majority, Israel in 1967 was a European country in all but name. The country was born of a European project, and it was geographically and sociologically configured by the vagaries of European history. Its laws were shaped by European precedent, its leaders and ideologists were marinated in late-nineteenth-century European socialism and nationalism. 61

However much they had consciously turned their backs on Europe--and a significant proportion of the adult population of that time consisted of concentration-camp survivors with few fond memories of the old continent--Israelis were European to the core. I do not just mean the German-speaking Jews on Mount Carmel who reproduced every little detail of life in late-Habsburg Vienna and never bothered to learn Hebrew, or the English-speaking Jews drinking tea, eating fruitcake, and playing cricket in Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi; I am speaking about the whole country. The result was an uncomfortable tension in Israeli sensibilities. A part of the Zionist enterprise was the wholehearted commitment to Zion, after all. It entailed a root-and-branch rejection of the old world: its assumptions, its comforts, its seductions. At first, this had been a choice; later, thanks to Hitler, Zionism became an urgent necessity. The European Jews who ended up in Palestine after 1945 were committed to adapting to life in a small state of their own making in far Western Asia. But the process of adaptation had not advanced very far by the mid-1960s, and Arabs (like the Middle East in general) were simply not at the center of most Israelis' concerns. There was nothing particularly anti-Arab about this. As I recall, many Israelis were just as prejudiced against local Jews from North Africa or the Near East as they were against Arabs, and perhaps more so.

II. The Six Day War was to change all that, utterly. And yet, for all its lasting consequences, there was nothing particularly unusual about the origin of the conflict. Like its predecessor, the Suez War of 1956, the war of 1967 is best regarded in the light in which Israel's generals saw it at the time: as unfinished business left over from the War of Independence. None of the parties to that earlier conflict was happy with the outcome, and all regarded the 1948 armistice as temporary. Although Israel had succeeded in expanding its borders beyond those of the original partition, it was still left with what were regarded, in the military calculations of the time, as virtually indefensible frontiers. In the course of the early 1950s, the Egyptians encouraged guerrilla incursions across Israel's southern border, inviting regular retaliation from Israel, whose military had by 1955 decided to provoke Cairo into open conflict. In October 1956, taking advantage of Anglo-French alarm at Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist ambitions, Israel conspired with Paris and London to mount an attack on Egypt. Although initially successful, the campaign was cut short under pressure from Moscow and Washington. The European powers were humiliated, and Israel was obliged to withdraw back to the 1948 line. In these circumstances Israel was as insecure and vulnerable as ever. Acknowledging this, the United States undertook to guarantee that the Straits of Tiran, leading from the Red Sea to Eilat, Israel's port on the Gulf of Aqaba, would henceforth be kept open. In the meantime United Nations forces were to be stationed along the Egypt-Israel frontier, and also at Sharm-el-Sheikh, at the entrance to the Straits on the southeastern tip of the Sinai peninsula. Thereafter the Egyptian frontier was quiet, and it was Syria--whose Ba'athist leaders nursed ambitions to displace Nasser at the head of Arab radicalism--that emerged in the early 1960s as Israel's chief antagonist. In addition to providing hospitality to Palestinian irregulars raiding across Israel's northeast borders or through Jordan, Damascus had various well-attested plans to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River. Largely for this reason, Israeli strategists had by 1967 come to regard Syria as the main short-term threat to national security. From the Golan Heights above the Sea of Galilee, Syria could and did target Israeli kibbutzim and villages; and it was a destabilizing influence on neighboring states, Jordan especially. Still, it was Nasser's Egypt that had by far the larger armed forces. Were Israel seriously to entertain going to war with Syria, it would inevitably have first to neutralize the threat from its historic enemy to the south. There is good reason to believe now that the chain of events leading to the outbreak of war on June 5 62 began with at least a partial misunderstanding. Frustrated by Syrian obduracy and the continuing cross- border attacks on frontier kibbutzim, Israeli jets struck Syrian targets in the spring of 1967. In April, Israeli generals (including Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin) publicly threatened Damascus with worse to come if the border harassments did not stop. Rabin himself seems to have favored toppling the Syrian regime, but Prime Minister Levi Eshkol felt otherwise: Syria was a client state of the Soviet Union, and Eshkol had no desire to provoke the Russians. He was not alone in his assessment. The former Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, not yet in the government, is quoted by Michael B. Oren as regretting Rabin's outburst: "He who sends up smoke signals has to understand that the other side might think there's really a fire." And that, in effect, is what happened. Russian intelligence misconstrued Israeli intentions and secretly advised the Syrians that the Israelis were planning to attack--an interpretation given some plausibility by Rabin's broadcast threats, widely commented upon in the foreign press. The Syrians duly informed Cairo. Nasser had no immediate plans to go to war with Israel, for whose military he had a well-founded respect; but he felt constrained to offer public backing for Syria or else lose standing in the Arab world. In practice, such backing took the conventional and not unfamiliar form of bombastic public expressions of full support for Damascus and grand promises to confront Israel at some unspecified future date. So far, so commonplace. What ratcheted the crisis from rhetoric into war was Nasser's grandstanding demand, on May 17, that U.N. forces be withdrawn from Gaza. The Egyptian dictator almost certainly calculated thus: either the United Nations would do his bidding and withdraw, giving him a cost-free and highly visible public success, or else it would refuse the request and Egypt would score a moral victory as the aggrieved party. Nasser surely did not anticipate the reaction of the U.N.'s ineffective Secretary- General U Thant, which was to order the immediate withdrawal of all U.N. troops the following day not just from Gaza but from the whole Sinai peninsula. There is some reason to think that Nasser would have preferred that U.N. troops not be withdrawn from Sharm-el-Sheikh. He could hardly be seen to regret U Thant's strange decision, which in practice returned all of Sinai to Egyptian control, but it put him in a predicament. He was obliged to move Egyptian armies forward to the Israeli border and down to Sharm-el-Sheikh, which he duly did; but with Egyptian soldiers once again stationed across from the island of Tiran, Nasser could not resist the temptation, on May 22, to announce that once again the Straits were closed to all Israel-bound shipping, as they had been in the early 1950s. From this point on, as Nasser probably realized, war would be hard to avoid. From the outside Nasser's moves seemed self-evidently the prelude to a declaration of war; and in any case the closing of the Straits of Tiran was itself, for Israel, a casus belli. Surrounded by enemies, and accessible from the outside only by air and sea, Israel had once again lost its vital link to the Red Sea and beyond. But even so, as Foreign Minister Abba Eban explained at the time, what mattered was not so much the Straits themselves but Israel's deterrent capacity, which would lose all credibility if the country accepted Nasser's blockade without a fight. Still, Israeli diplomats tried at first to bring international pressure to bear on Egypt to re-open the Straits; and at the same time they asked the Great Powers openly to express their backing for Israel's response. The British and the French refused point blank, De Gaulle confining himself to a warning against any preemptive Israeli strike and an embargo on all French arms deliveries to Israel. (This was a time when the Israeli air force was overwhelmingly dependent on French-made Mirage and Mystère jet fighters.) The Americans were a bit more sympathetic. Lyndon Johnson tried unsuccessfully to round up support for an international convoy of merchant ships to "run" the Straits and to call Egypt's bluff. He assured Eshkol and Eban of American sympathy, and of American backing in the event of an unprovoked attack on Israel. But more he could not give, despite John Foster Dulles's guarantee in 1957; in the mood of the time, he pleaded, Congress would not allow an American president openly to back Israeli aggression, 63 however justified. Privately, his military experts assured Johnson that the Israelis had little to fear: given the freedom to "shoot first," they would win within a week. But to Eshkol, Johnson merely announced that "Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone." That, of course, is what Israel did. The Israeli military, with Dayan newly installed by popular demand as defense minister, resented being made to wait for two long weeks of "phony war," but Eshkol's diplomatic strategy surely paid dividends. The Soviet Union put considerable pressure on Egypt not to start a war, but with rather greater success--at the end of May, at the last minute, Nasser abandoned a plan to attack Israel first, and he seems to have assumed that the crisis he had half-reluctantly set in motion had been defused. Israel, meanwhile, was seen to have tried every diplomatic means to avert a fight--even though most Israeli leaders and all the generals were now committed to war unless Nasser re-opened the Straits, which they rightly assumed he would not do. The American military experts who anticipated an easy Israeli victory were well-informed, but they were in a minority. Many civilian Israelis feared the worst. From President `Abd al-Rahman Muhammad 'Aref of Iraq ("Our goal is clear--we shall wipe Israel off the face of the map. We shall, God willing, meet in Tel Aviv and Haifa") to Palestinian leader Ahmed al-Shuqayri ("We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors--if there are any--the boats are ready to deport them"), Arab leaders appeared united in their determination to demolish the Jewish state. Their threats seemed credible enough: between them, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and their friends comprised some nine hundred combat planes, five thousand tanks, and half a million men. At best the Israelis had one-quarter that number of planes, one-fifth the tanks, and only 275,000 men.

The story of the war itself is well known. On June 5, Day One, Israeli planes struck first and demolished much of the Egyptian air force on the ground, destroying 286 combat planes and killing nearly one-third of Egypt's pilots. On Days Two and Three, the Israeli army shattered or dispersed the bulk of the Egyptian armed forces in Sinai, thanks in large measure to Israel's complete domination of the skies. Meanwhile, ignoring Eshkol's invitation to stay out of the war, Jordan's King Hussein--believing that his survival depended upon his being seen to join the struggle against Israel--aligned himself with the Arab coalition ("the hour of decision has arrived"). In the ensuing battles the Israelis, after some hard fighting, seized all of Jerusalem and Jordanian territory west of the Jordan River. By the end of Day Four, the war was effectively over. At the United Nations, the United States and the major European powers (including the Soviet Union) had from the outset been pressing urgently for a cease-fire as the Israelis had anticipated: when the war began, Abba Eban estimated that the Israeli armed forces would have at most seventy-two hours before the superpowers intervened. But the Egyptians rejected a cease-fire--their ambassador at the United Nations, Mohammad El Kony, was assured from Cairo that things were going well for the Arabs and that time was on their side; and he in turn blithely reassured his Soviet counterpart Nikolai Federenko that the Israelis were bluffing and that the planes they had destroyed were plywood decoys. The Israelis were lucky, and they knew it: had the Egyptians accepted a U.N. cease-fire on June 6, when it was first proposed, instead of on June 8, when Nasser finally acknowledged the extent of the catastrophe, they might have saved at least part of their army, and Israel would never have occupied the Old City of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Once the cease-fire was agreed (and Israel could hardly oppose it, having fought what was officially a "pre-emptive defensive war"), Dayan took a snap decision on his own initiative to attack Syria--the real object of Israeli concern--before the cease-fire could take effect. This incurred the enduring wrath of Moscow and ran the risk of undoing the benefits of all Eban's painstaking pre-war diplomatic maneuvers, but it paid off. After some tough hours on the slopes of the Golan, the Israelis overran the Syrian defenses and literally raced to Quneitra to occupy the Heights themselves before time ran out. 64

The scale of Israel's victory was unprecedented and took some time for all the parties fully to appreciate.

Egyptian losses alone amounted to perhaps fifteen thousand men and eighty-five percent of the country's pre-war military hardware. Between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand Arabs fled Gaza and the West Bank into exile, many of them already refugees from 1948. Israel now controlled land covering an area four and a half times its pre-war size, from the Jordan to the Suez Canal, from the Lebanese uplands to the Red Sea. The fighting had not been quite so one-sided as the brevity of the war and its outcome might suggest--had it not been for their utter superiority in the air, the Israelis might have been quite closely matched, especially by some of the Jordanian units and the best Egyptian divisions; but it was the result that counted. One outcome of the war, certainly the most important from the Israeli perspective, was this: no responsible Arab leader would ever again seriously contemplate the military destruction of the Jewish state. III. Michael B. Oren, in his new history of the war, tells the story in gripping detail. He has done an immense amount of research in many sources, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and English, and although his narrative is keyed to the Israeli perspective, this produces no significant distortion. The Egyptian and Jordanian viewpoints are acknowledged, and Israel's responsibility for pre-war misunderstandings and wartime errors (notably the bombing of the American ship Liberty) is given reasonable prominence. One particular virtue of Oren's book is that it pays full attention to the international dimension of the conflict, especially the concerns and the actions of the two superpowers. This allows Oren to set what was in one sense a very local war into its wider context: the war nearly did not happen thanks to international efforts at prevention, and it certainly would not have been allowed to go on much longer, as the Israelis fully understood. Oren is good, too, on some of the personalities of the time, especially the Israelis, for whom I think he has a better feel. The stories of Rabin's near-breakdown on the eve of battle, of Dayan's rakish duplicity, of Nasser's horror at the scale of his defeat, are all skillfully told. Some, such as Yigal Allon, the hawkish leader of the left-leaning Achdut Ha'Avodah Party and the sometime hero of the Independence War, come off badly: hungry for battle, eager for territory, loath to relinquish any land in exchange for peace. Others, such as the much underestimated Levi Eshkol, receive a distinct boost in their reputation. It was Eshkol who admonished General Ariel Sharon (when Sharon offered to destroy the Egyptian army "for a generation") that "nothing will be settled by a military victory. The Arabs will still be here." And it was Eshkol who asked his military adviser Yigal Yadin, the day after the lightning conquest of the West Bank: "Have you thought yet about how we can live with so many Arabs?" (Yadin's reply is not recorded.) And yet Oren's book, for all its great learning and vivid writing, is somehow unsatisfactory. This is not because of his weakness for verbal infelicities: we read of someone seeking to "palliate the Syrians," that "Hussein was once again caught between clashing rocks," and so forth. Nor is it because Oren's grasp grows insecure as he moves beyond the Middle East: France in 1956 assuredly did not conspire with Israel because its government "shared Israel's socialist ideals" (how then account for the co-conspiratorial enthusiasm of Britain's Conservative leaders?); and it was President Eisenhower's economic arm-twisting, not Marshall Bulganin's empty threat to "use missiles," that brought the Suez War to an abrupt end. These slips suggest that Oren may be out of his depth in the broader currents of international history, but they do not vitiate his project. The problem lies in the project itself. Oren announces at the outset that he plans to put the Six Day War back in its context, and to present its origins and its outcome in such a manner that they will never be looked at in the same way again. And with respect to the origins he does indeed offer a comprehensive, if 65 narrowly diplomatic, account. The story of the war itself is very well told, and for its source base alone this book should now be considered the standard work of reference. Yet neither the origins nor the war come across, at least to this reader, in any strikingly novel way. More thorough than previous accounts, to be sure. Better documented, certainly. Better balanced than many previous histories, no question. But different? Not really.

As for the long-term outcome of the most fateful week in modern Middle Eastern history, Oren does not even begin to engage it. To be fair, any serious attempt at assessing the war's consequences would require another book. But the main consequences of Israel's victory can be summarized fairly succinctly. There was a widespread belief among Arab commentators, swiftly communicated to the Arab "street," that the United States and Britain had helped Israel--how else could its air force have achieved such dazzling successes? This prepared the way for a significant increase in anti-American sentiment across the region, a change of mood that proved lasting and with the consequences of which we are living still. The ironic outcome is that whereas American public support for Israel in June 1967 had actually been rather lukewarm--Washington feared alienating moderate Arab opinion--the two countries did draw much closer thereafter. Israel was now a force to be reckoned with, a potential ally in an unstable region; and whereas in June 1967 Johnson's advisers had warned him against committing America openly to the Zionist cause, future administrations would have no such anxieties. With Arab states increasingly hostile, the United States had less to lose. France, meanwhile, released from the embarrassment of its imbroglio in Algeria, turned its back on the Jewish state ("un peuple sûr de lui et dominateur," in De Gaulle's notorious phrase) and made the strategic decision to re-build its bridges to the Arab world. International public opinion also began to shift. Before the war, in Europe as well as the United States, only the far right and the far left were avowedly anti-Israel. Progressives and conservatives alike were sympathetic to Israel, the underdog seemingly threatened with imminent extinction. In some circles comparisons were drawn with the Civil War in Spain just thirty years earlier, with Israel cast as the legitimate republic besieged by aggressive dictators. Throughout Western Europe and North America, in South Africa and Australia, a significant effort was mounted from May 1967 to send volunteers to help Israel, if only by replacing in the fields the men called up to fight. I played a very minor role in these events, returning in my own case from the United Kingdom to Israel on the last commercial flight to land there before the outbreak of hostilities. Consequently I met a lot of these volunteers, in Europe and then in Israel. There were many non-Jews among them and most would have classed themselves as politically "left." With the trial of Eichmann and the Frankfurt trials of concentration-camp personnel a very recent memory, defending Israel became a minor international cause. According to Abba Eban, speaking in the aftermath of victory, "Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world." I am not sure that this was so. Israel was certainly respected in a new way. But the scale of its triumph actually precipitated a falling-away of support. Some might plausibly attribute this to the world's preference for the Jew as victim--and there was indeed a certain post-June discomfort among some of Israel's overseas sympathizers at the apparent ease with which their cause had triumphed, as though its legitimacy were thereby called retrospectively into question. But there was more to it than that. The European Old Left had always thought of Israel, with its long- established Labor leaders, its disproportionately large public sector, and its communitarian experiments, as "one of us." In the rapidly shifting political and ideological currents of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, Israel was something of an anomaly. The New Left, from Berlin to Berkeley, was concerned less with exploited workers and more with the victims of colonialism and racism. The goal was no longer 66 the emancipation of the proletariat; it was rather the liberation of the third-world peasantry and what were not yet called "people of color." Kibbutzim retained a certain romantic aura for a few more years, but for hard-nosed Western radicals they were just collective farms and as such a mere variant of the discredited Soviet model. In defeating the Arab armies and occupying Arab land, Israel had drawn attention to itself in ways calculated to encourage New Left antipathy, at just the moment when hitherto disparate radical constituencies--Ulster Catholics, Basque nationalists, Palestinian exiles, German extra-Parliamentarians, and many others--were finding common cause. As for the conventional right, through the 1950s and 1960s it enthusiastically took Israel's side against Nasser--the bête noire of every Western government, Raymond Aron's "Hitler on the Nile." With Nasser thoroughly humiliated, however, and with the colonial era retreating into memory, many European conservatives lost interest in Israel and sought instead to curry favor among its oil-producing neighbors: before the energy crisis of 1973, but especially afterwards. In a variety of ways, then, the international context after 1967 turned increasingly unfavorable for Israel, despite, and even because of, its dramatic victory. Yet the most important change of all, the transformation that would color all of Israel's dealings with the rest of the world, took place in the country itself. Relieved of any serious threat, ostensibly sufficient unto themselves, Israelis became complacent. The attitude of Yael Dayan, addressing her diary as the war ended, is quite typical: "The new reality in the Middle East presented Israel as the strongest element, and as such it can talk a different language and had to be talked to differently." The prickly insecurity that characterized the country in its first two decades changed to a self-satisfied arrogance. From 1967 until the shock of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel was "dizzy with success." The apparent ease of the June victory led both the public and--less forgivably--the generals to believe that they were invincible. The image of the Israeli Defense Forces was burnished to a shine. Self-congratulatory (and implicitly contradictory) myths were espoused: that the Six Day War had been won with consummate ease thanks to the technical and cultural superiority of the Israeli forces; that the climactic battles (for Jerusalem, for the Golan) had seen heroic feats of soldiering against harsh odds. Books such as Yael Dayan's Israel Journal reflected and nourished a widespread sense of spiritual superiority. Attached to Sharon's Southern Command during the war, she sneers at the contents of captured Egyptian officers' tents: thrillers, nylons, candies. "I knew what our officers' bedside tables contained. An Egyptian soldier would have found a few pens, writing paper, a few books and study matter-- perhaps a book of poems." Comparing the two sides, Dayan concludes that the Egyptians had the material advantage, but "we had spiritual superiority." Perhaps, perhaps not. As I recall Israeli junior officers' quarters on the Golan in the late summer of 1967, there were more pin-ups than poems. But from encounters with soldiers at the time I can confirm the astonishingly quick transition from quiet confidence to an air of overweening superiority. Sharon was not the only one to sweep his arm across the captured landscape and declare (in his case to Yael Dayan) that "all this is ours." And the new mood was reinforced by the appearance in fairly short order of a new kind of Israeli. The great victory of 1967 gave Zionism a shot in the arm, with a new generation of enthusiastic immigrants arriving from America especially; but these new Zionists brought with them not the old socialist texts of emancipation, redemption, and community, but rather a Bible and a map. For them, Israel's accidental occupation of Judea and Samaria was not a problem, it was a solution. In their religious and jingoistic eyes, the defeat of Israel's historical enemies was not the end of the story, but rather the beginning. In many cases their aggressive nationalism was paired with a sort of born-again, messianic Judaism, a heady combination hitherto largely unknown in Israel. In the aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem, the chief rabbi of the army, Shlomo Goren, had proposed that the mosques on the Temple Mount be blown up. The general in command on the Jordanian front, Uzi Narkiss, had ignored him; but in years to come 67 the voice of intolerant, ultra-religious Zionism would become more insistent and not so easy to turn away. The demography of Israel was altered in other ways, too. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, Jews in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere were subjected to persecution and discrimination, and the rate of Jewish immigration to Israel from Arab lands rose sharply. Hitherto it had been mostly confined to Jews expelled or fleeing from the newly independent states of the Maghreb; these continued to come, either directly or via France, but they were no longer a small minority of the overall population. These new Israelis not only did not share the political and cultural background of the earlier European immigrants. They had strong and distinctly unfriendly opinions about Arabs. After all, relations between Jews and Arabs in the places they had come from were often based on little more than mutual contempt. When the old Labor parties predictably failed to attract their support (or did not even bother to try), they turned to the erstwhile revisionists, whose chauvinist prejudices they could appreciate. The rise to power of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and their successors, literally unimaginable before June 1967, now became possible and even inexorable. This was the irony of the victory of 1967: it was the only war Israel ever won that gave the country a real chance to shape the Middle East to everyone's advantage, its own above all--but the very scale of the victory somehow robbed the country's leaders of imagination and initiative. The "overblown confidence" (this is Oren's apt phrase) after June 1967 led to the initial disasters of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when, unable to imagine that Arab military planning was as good as their own intelligence suggested, the Israeli general staff was caught napping. That same misplaced confidence led Israel's politicians to let policy drift in the course of the 1970s, at a time when the initiative was still very much in their hands. As for the occupied territories, Eshkol's question to Yadin remained unanswered. The habit of encouraging frontier settlements in the name of security--a building block of the original Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine) and the origin of many kibbutzim--made sense in the military circumstances of the 1930s. But half a century later it was an utter anachronism. It was in this context, however, that mainstream politicians connived, sometimes unwittingly, at the subsidized establishment in the West Bank of tens of thousands of religious and political extremists. Some politicians--Allon, Sharon--always intended to install a permanent Israeli presence on the captured lands. Others merely preferred not to oppose the mood of the hour. Nobody thought much about how to remove the settlements when the time came to exchange land for peace, though it had been clear from the outset that come it would. On June 19, 1967, the Israeli cabinet secretly voted to accept the principle of returning occupied land in exchange for lasting peace. As Eshkol had noted when the war began: "Even if we conquer the Old City and the West Bank, in the end we will have to leave them." It is easy to wax nostalgic for the old Israel, before the victories of 1967 and the disturbing changes they brought in their wake. The country may have had what some now refer to as "Auschwitz frontiers," but its identity within them was at least clear. Yet if the Jewish state was ever to be at home in the Middle East, to be the "normal" polity that its Zionist founders envisaged, then its curious European orientation, a time- space capsule in an alien continent, could not last. And there is no doubt that, for better or for worse, since June 1967 Israel has entered fully into the Middle Eastern world. It, too, has crazed clerics, religious devotees, nationalist demagogues, and ethnic cleansers. It is also, sadly, less secure than at any time in the past thirty-five years. The idea that Jews in Israel might lead their daily lives oblivious of the Arab world, as many did before 1967, is today tragically unthinkable. Short of forcibly expunging the Arab presence from every inch of soil currently controlled by Israel, the dilemma facing Israel today is the same as it was in June 1967, when the aging David Ben-Gurion advised his fellow countrymen against remaining in the conquered territories. A historic victory can wreak almost as much havoc as a historic defeat. In Abba Eban's words, "The exercise of permanent rule 68 over a foreign nation can only be defended by an ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness that are incompatible with the ethical legacy of prophetic Judaism and classical Zionism." The risk that Israel runs today is that for many of its most vocal defenders, Zionism has become such an "ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness" and not much more. In that case, Israel's brilliant victory of June 1967, already a classic in the annals of pre-emptive defensive warfare, will have borne bitter fruits for the losers and the winners alike. TONY JUDT is a contributing editor at TNR. 69

Excerpts of Address by Mikhail Gorbachev 43rd U.N. General Assembly SessionDecember 7, 1988 . . . The history of the past centuries and millennia has been a history of almost ubiquitous wars, and sometimes desperate battles, leading to mutual destruction. They occurred in the clash of social and political interests and national hostility, be it from ideological or religious incompatibility. All that was the case, and even now many still claim that this past -- which has not been overcome -- is an immutable pattern. However, parallel with the process of wars, hostility, and alienation of peoples and countries, another process, just as objectively conditioned, was in motion and gaining force: The process of the emergence of a mutually connected and integral world. Further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind, in movement toward a new world order. We have arrived at a frontier at which controlled spontaneity leads to a dead end. The world community must learn to shape and direct the process in such a way as to preserve civilization, to make it safe for all and more pleasant for normal life. It is a question of cooperation that could be more accurately called "co-creation" and "co-development." The formula of development "at another's expense" is becoming outdated. In light of present realities, genuine progress by infringing upon the rights and liberties of man and peoples, or at the expense of nature, is impossible. The very tackling of global problems requires a new "volume" and "quality" of cooperation by states and sociopolitical currents regardless of ideological and other differences. Of course, radical and revolutionary changes are taking place and will continue to take place within individual countries and social structures. This has been and will continue to be the case, but our times are making corrections here, too. Internal transformational processes cannot achieve their national objectives merely by taking "course parallel" with others without using the achievements of the surrounding world and the possibilities of equitable cooperation. In these conditions, interference in those internal processes with the aim of altering them according to someone else's prescription would be all the more destructive for the emergence of a peaceful order. In the past, differences often served as a factor in puling away from one another. Now they are being given the opportunity to be a factor in mutual enrichment and attraction. Behind differences in social structure, in the way of life, and in the preference for certain values, stand interests. There is no getting away from that, but neither is there any getting away from the need to find a balance of interests within an international framework, which has become a condition for survival and progress. As you ponder all this, you come to the conclusion that if we wish to take account of the lessons of the past and the realities of the present, if we must reckon with the objective logic of world development, it is necessary to seek -- and the seek jointly -- an approach toward improving the international situation and building a new world. If that is so, then it is also worth agreeing on the fundamental and truly universal prerequisites and principles for such activities. It is evident, for example, that force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be instruments of foreign policy. [...] The compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice is also clear to us. The failure to recognize this, to recognize it, is fraught with very dire consequences, consequences for world peace. Denying that right to the peoples, no matter what the pretext, no matter what the words are used to conceal it, means infringing upon even the unstable balance that is, has been possible to achieve. Freedom of choice is a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions. We have not come to the conclusion of the immutability of this principle simply through good motives. We have been led to it through impartial analysis of the objective processes of our time. The increasing varieties of social development in different countries are becoming in ever more perceptible feature of these processes. This relates to both the capitalist and socialist systems. The variety of sociopolitical structures which has grown over the last decades from national liberation movements also demonstrates this. This objective fact presupposes respect for other people's vies and stands, tolerance, a preparedness to see phenomena 70 that are different as not necessarily bad or hostile, and an ability to learn to live side by side while remaining different and not agreeing with one another on every issue. The de-ideologization of interstate relations has become a demand of the new stage. We are not giving up our convictions, philosophy, or traditions. Neither are we calling on anyone else to give up theirs. Yet we are not going to shut ourselves up within the range of our values. That would lead to spiritual impoverishment, for it would mean renouncing so powerful a source of development as sharing all the original things created independently by each nation. In the course of such sharing, each should prove the advantages of his own system, his own way of life and values, but not through words or propaganda alone, but through real deeds as well. That is, indeed, an honest struggle of ideology, but it must not be carried over into mutual relations between states. Otherwise we simply will not be able to solve a single world problem; arrange broad, mutually advantageous and equitable cooperation between peoples; manage rationally the achievements of the scientific and technical revolution; transform world economic relations; protect the environment; overcome underdevelopment; or put an end to hunger, disease, illiteracy, and other mass ills. Finally, in that case, we will not manage to eliminate the nuclear threat and militarism. Such are our reflections on the natural order of things in the world on the threshold of the 21st century. We are, of course, far from claiming to have infallible truth, but having subjected the previous realities -- realities that have arisen again -- to strict analysis, we have come to the conclusion that it is by precisely such approaches that we must search jointly for a way to achieve the supremacy of the common human idea over the countless multiplicity of centrifugal forces, to preserve the vitality of a civilization that is possible that only one in the universe. [...] Our country is undergoing a truly revolutionary upsurge. The process of restructuring is gaining pace; We started by elaborating the theoretical concepts of restructuring; we had to assess the nature and scope of the problems, to interpret the lessons of the past, and to express this in the form of political conclusions and programs. This was done. The theoretical work, the re-interpretation of what had happened, the final elaboration, enrichment, and correction of political stances have not ended. They continue. However, it was fundamentally important to start from an overall concept, which is already now being confirmed by the experience of past years, which has turned out to be generally correct and to which there is no alternative. In order to involve society in implementing the plans for restructuring it had to be made more truly democratic. Under the badge of democratization, restructuring has now encompassed politics, the economy, spiritual life, and ideology. We have unfolded a radical economic reform, we have accumulated experience, and from the new year we are transferring the entire national economy to new forms and work methods. Moreover, this means a profound reorganization of production relations and the realization of the immense potential of socialist property. In moving toward such bold revolutionary transformations, we understood that there would be errors, that there would be resistance, that the novelty would bring new problems. We foresaw the possibility of breaking in individual sections. However, the profound democratic reform of the entire system of power and government is the guarantee that the overall process of restructuring will move steadily forward and gather strength. […] We are more than fully confident. We have both the theory, the policy and the vanguard force of restructuring a party which is also restructuring itself in accordance with the new tasks and the radical changes throughout society. And the most important thing: all peoples and all generations of citizens in our great country are in favor of restructuring. We have gone substantially and deeply into the business of constructing a socialist state based on the rule 71 of law. A whole series of new laws has been prepared or is at a completion stage. Many of them come into force as early as 1989, and we trust that they will correspond to the highest standards from the point of view of ensuring the rights of the individual. Soviet democracy is to acquire a firm, normative base. This means such acts as the Law on Freedom of Conscience, on glasnost, on public associations and organizations, and on much else. There are now no people in places of imprisonment in the country who have been sentenced for their political or religious convictions. It is proposed to include in the drafts of the new laws additional guarantees ruling out any form or persecution on these bases. Of course, this does not apply to those who have committed real criminal or state offenses: espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and so on, whatever political or philosophical views they may hold. The draft amendments to the criminal code are ready and waiting their turn. In particular, those articles relating to the use of the supreme measure of punishment are being reviewed. The problem of exit and entry is also being resolved in a humane spirit, including the case of leaving the country in order to be reunited with relatives. As you know, one of the reasons for refusal of visas is citizens' possession of secrets. Strictly substantiated terms for the length of time for possessing secrets are being introduced in advance. On starting work at a relevant institution or enterprise, everyone will be made aware of this regulation. Disputes that arise can be appealed under the law. Thus the problem of the so-called "refuseniks" is being removed. We intend to expand the Soviet Union's participation in the monitoring mechanism on human rights in the United Nations and within the framework of the pan-European process. We consider that the jurisdiction of the International Court in The Hague with respect to interpreting and applying agreements in the field of human rights should be obligatory for all states. Within the Helsinki process, we are also examining an end to jamming of all the foreign radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union. On the whole, our credo is as follows: Political problems should be solved only by political means, and human problems only in a humane way. [...] Now about the most important topic, without which no problem of the coming century can be resolved: disarmament. [...] Today I can inform you of the following: The Soviet Union has made a decision on reducing its armed forces. In the next two years, their numerical strength will be reduced by 500,000 persons, and the volume of conventional arms will also be cut considerably. These reductions will be made on a unilateral basis, unconnected with negotiations on the mandate for the Vienna meeting. By agreement with our allies in the Warsaw Pact, we have made the decision to withdraw six tank divisions from the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and to disband them by 1991. Assault landing formations and units, and a number of others, including assault river-crossing forces, with their armaments and combat equipment, will also be withdrawn from the groups of Soviet forces situated in those countries. The Soviet forces situated in those countries will be cut by 50,000 persons, and their arms by 5,000 tanks. All remaining Soviet divisions on the territory of our allies will be reorganized. They will be given a different structure from today's which will become unambiguously defensive, after the removal of a large number of their tanks. [...] By this act, just as by all our actions aimed at the demilitarization of international relations, we would also like to draw the attention of the world community to another topical problem, the problem of changing over from an economy of armament to an economy of disarmament. Is the conversion of military production realistic? I have already had occasion to speak about this. We believe that it is, indeed, realistic. For its part, the Soviet Union is ready to do the following. Within the framework of the economic reform we are ready to draw up and submit our internal plan for conversion, to prepare in the course of 1989, as an experiment, the plans for the conversion of two or three defense enterprises, to publish our experience of job relocation of specialists from the military industry, and also of using its equipment, buildings, and works in civilian industry, It is desirable that all states, primarily the major 72 military powers, submit their national plans on this issue to the United Nations. It would be useful to form a group of scientists, entrusting it with a comprehensive analysis of problems of conversion as a whole and as applied to individual countries and regions, to be reported to the U.N. secretary-general, and later to examine this matter at a General Assembly session. Finally, being on U.S. soil, but also for other, understandable reasons, I cannot but turn to the subject of our relations with this great country. ... Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States of America span 5 1/2 decades. The world has changed, and so have the nature, role, and place of these relations in world politics. For too long they were built under the banner of confrontation, and sometimes of hostility, either open or concealed. But in the last few years, throughout the world people were able to heave a sigh of relief, thanks to the changes for the better in the substance and atmosphere of the relations between Moscow and Washington. No one intends to underestimate the serious nature of the disagreements, and the difficulties of the problems which have not been settled. However, we have already graduated from the primary school of instruction in mutual understanding and in searching for solutions in our and in the common interests. The U.S.S.R. and the United States created the biggest nuclear missile arsenals, but after objectively recognizing their responsibility, they were able to be the first to conclude an agreement on the reduction and physical destruction of a proportion of these weapons, which threatened both themselves and everyone else. Both sides possess the biggest and the most refined military secrets. But it is they who have laid the basis for and are developing a system of mutual verification with regard to both the destruction and the limiting and banning of armaments production. It is they who are amassing experience for future bilateral and multilateral agreements. We value this. We acknowledge and value the contribution of President Ronald Reagan and the members of his administration, above all Mr. George Shultz. All this is capital that has been invested in a joint undertaking of historic importance. It must not be wasted or left out of circulation. The future U.S. administration headed by newly elected President George Bush will find in us a partner, ready -- without long pauses and backward movements -- to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness, and goodwill, and with a striving for concrete results, over an agenda encompassing the key issues of Soviet- U.S. relations and international politics. We are talking first and foremost about consistent progress toward concluding a treaty on a 50 percent reduction in strategic offensive weapons, while retaining the ABM Treaty; about elaborating a convention on the elimination of chemical weapons -- here, it seems to us, we have the preconditions for making 1989 the decisive year; and about talks on reducing conventional weapons and armed forces in Europe. We are also talking about economic, ecological and humanitarian problems in the widest possible sense. [...] We are not inclined to oversimplify the situation in the world. Yes, the tendency toward disarmament has received a strong impetus, and this process is gaining its own momentum, but it has not become irreversible. Yes, the striving to give up confrontation in favor of dialogue and cooperation has made itself strongly felt, but it has by no means secured its position forever in the practice of international relations. Yes, the movement toward a nuclear-free and nonviolent world is capable of fundamentally transforming the political and spiritual face of the planet, but only the very first steps have been taken. Moreover, in certain influential circles, they have been greeted with mistrust, and they are meeting resistance. The inheritance of inertia of the past are continuing to operate. Profound contradictions and the roots of many conflicts have not disappeared. The fundamental fact remains that the formation of the peaceful period will take place in conditions of the existence and rivalry of various socioeconomic and political 73 systems. However, the meaning of our international efforts, and one of the key tenets of the new thinking, is precisely to impart to this rivalry the quality of sensible competition in conditions of respect for freedom of choice and a balance of interests. In this case it will even become useful and productive from the viewpoint of general world development; otherwise; if the main component remains the arms race, as it has been till now, rivalry will be fatal. Indeed, an ever greater number of people throughout the world, from the man in the street to leaders, are beginning to understand this. Esteemed Mr. Chairman, esteemed delegates: I finish my first speech at the United Nations with the same feeling with which I began it: a feeling of responsibility to my own people and to the world community. We have met at the end of a year that has been so significant for the United Nations, and on the threshold of a year from which all of us expect so much. One would like to believe that our joint efforts to put an end to the era of wars, confrontation and regional conflicts, aggression against nature, the terror of hunger and poverty, as well as political terrorism, will be comparable with our hopes. This is our common goal, and it is only by acting together that we may attain it. Thank you. 74

Excerpts from Francis Fukyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest (Summer, 1989)

IN WATCHING the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict.

And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines. The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.

The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants' markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so, we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of historical change.

THE NOTION of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known propagator was Karl Marx, who believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end only with the achievement of a communist utopia that would finally resolve all prior contradictions. But the concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

For better or worse, much of Hegel's historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on 75 his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes. The mastery and transformation of man's natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court, however, Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.

[. . . ]

Hegel . . . proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality. Kojève, far from rejecting Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the next century and a half, insisted that the latter had been essentially correct.[2] The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there was considerable work to be done after 1806 - abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc. - the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon. The two world wars in this century (20th) and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending those principles spatially, such that the various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most advanced outposts, and of forcing those societies in Europe and North America at the vanguard of civilization to implement their liberalism more fully.

The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man's universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed. . . . this so-called "universal homogenous state" found real-life embodiment in the countries of postwar Western Europe - precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-looking, weak-willed states whose grandest project was nothing more heroic than the creation of the Common Market.[3] But this was only to be expected. For human history and the conflict that characterized it was based on the existence of "contradictions": primitive man's quest for mutual recognition, the dialectic of the master and slave, the transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle for the universal recognition of rights, and the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist. But in the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs are satisfied. There is no struggle or conflict over "large" issues, and consequently no need for generals or statesmen; what remains is primarily economic activity….

FOR HEGEL, the contradictions that drive history exist first of all in the realm of human consciousness, i.e. on the level of ideas[4] - not the trivial election year proposals of American politicians, but ideas in the sense of large unifying world views that might best be understood under the rubric of ideology. Ideology in this sense is not restricted to the secular and explicit political doctrines we usually associate with the term, but can include religion, culture, and the complex of moral values underlying any society as well.

Hegel's view of the relationship between the ideal and the real or material worlds was an extremely complicated one, beginning with the fact that for him the distinction between the two was only apparent. 76

[5] He did not believe that the real world conformed or could be made to conform to ideological preconceptions of philosophy professors in any simpleminded way, or that the "material" world could not impinge on the ideal. Indeed, Hegel the professor was temporarily thrown out of work as a result of a very material event, the Battle of Jena. But while Hegel's writing and thinking could be stopped by a bullet from the material world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of liberty and equality that had driven the French Revolution.

For Hegel, all human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a prior state of consciousness - an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard Keynes when he said that the views of men of affairs were usually derived from defunct economists and academic scribblers of earlier generations. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware, as are modern political doctrines, but may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material world, indeed creates the material world in its own image. Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously from the material world; hence the real subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology.

HAVE WE in fact reached the end of history? Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure? If we accept the idealist premises laid out above, we must seek an answer to this question in the realm of ideology and consciousness. Our task is not to answer exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah around the world, but only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements, and which are therefore part of world history. For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.

In the past century, there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of communism. The former[11] saw the political weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies that could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a new "people" on the basis of national exclusiveness. Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success. After the war, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. [. . .]

The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. . . . The egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent 77 years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.

ONE MAY argue that the socialist alternative was never terribly plausible for the North Atlantic world, and was sustained for the last several decades primarily by its success outside of this region. But it is precisely in the non-European world that one is most struck by the occurrence of major ideological transformations. Surely the most remarkable changes have occurred in Asia. Due to the strength and adaptability of the indigenous cultures there, Asia became a battleground for a variety of imported Western ideologies early in this century. Liberalism in Asia was a very weak reed in the period after World War I; it is easy today to forget how gloomy Asia's political future looked as recently as ten or fifteen years ago. It is easy to forget as well how momentous the outcome of Asian ideological struggles seemed for world political development as a whole.

The first Asian alternative to liberalism to be decisively defeated was the fascist one represented by Imperial Japan. Japanese fascism (like its German version) was defeated by the force of American arms in the Pacific war, and liberal democracy was imposed on Japan by a victorious United States. Western capitalism and political liberalism when transplanted to Japan were adapted and transformed by the Japanese in such a way as to be scarcely recognizable.[12] Many Americans are now aware that Japanese industrial organization is very different from that prevailing in the United States or Europe, and it is questionable what relationship the factional maneuvering that takes place with the governing Liberal Democratic Party bears to democracy. Nonetheless, the very fact that the essential elements of economic and political liberalism have been so successfully grafted onto uniquely Japanese traditions and institutions guarantees their survival in the long run. More important is the contribution that Japan has made in turn to world history by following in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state. . . . Desire for access to the consumer culture, created in large measure by Japan, has played a crucial role in fostering the spread of economic liberalism throughout Asia, and hence in promoting political liberalism as well.

BUT THE power of the liberal idea would seem much less impressive if it had not infected the largest and oldest culture in Asia, China. The simple existence of communist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction, and as such constituted a threat to liberalism. But the past fifteen years have seen an almost total discrediting of Marxism-Leninism as an economic system. Beginning with the famous third plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in 1978, the Chinese Communist party set about decollectivizing agriculture for the 800 million Chinese who still lived in the countryside. The role of the state in agriculture was reduced to that of a tax collector, while production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order to give peasants a taste of the universal homogenous state and thereby an incentive to work. The reform doubled Chinese grain output in only five years, and in the process created for Deng Xiaoping a solid political base from which he was able to extend the reform to other parts of the economy. Economic Statistics do not begin to describe the dynamism, initiative, and openness evident in China since the reform began.

China could not now be described in any way as a liberal democracy. At present (1989 – a lot has 78 changed since then), no more than 20 percent of its economy has been marketized, and most importantly it continues to be ruled by a self-appointed Communist party which has given no hint of wanting to devolve power. Deng has made none of Gorbachev's promises regarding democratization of the political system and there is no Chinese equivalent of ghost. The Chinese leadership has in fact been much more circumspect in criticizing Mao and Maoism than Gorbachev with respect to Brezhnev and Stalin, and the regime continues to pay lip service to Marxism-Leninism as its ideological underpinning. But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bourgeois consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution. The various slowdowns in the pace of reform, the campaigns against "spiritual pollution" and crackdowns on political dissent are more properly seen as tactical adjustments made in the process of managing what is an extraordinarily difficult political transition. By ducking the question of political reform while putting the economy on a new footing, Deng has managed to avoid the breakdown of authority that has accompanied Gorbachev's perestroika. Yet the pull of the liberal idea continues to be very strong as economic power devolves and the economy becomes more open to the outside world. There are currently over 20,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. and other Western countries, almost all of them the children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that when they return home to run the country they will be content for China to be the only country in Asia unaffected by the larger democratizing trend. The student demonstrations in Beijing that broke out first in December 1986 and recurred recently on the occasion of Hu Yao-bang's death were only the beginning of what will inevitably be mounting pressure for change in the political system as well.

What is important about China from the standpoint of world history is not the present state of the reform or even its future prospects. The central issue is the fact that the People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia's future, became an anachronism, and it was the mainland Chinese who in fact were decisively influenced by the prosperity and dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics - the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan.

Important as these changes in China have been, however, it is developments in the Soviet Union - the original "homeland of the world proletariat" - that have put the final nail in the coffin of the Marxist- Leninist alternative to liberal democracy. It should be clear that in terms of formal institutions, not much has changed in the four years since Gorbachev has come to power: free markets and the cooperative movement represent only a small part of the Soviet economy, which remains centrally planned; the political system is still dominated by the Communist party, which has only begun to democratize internally and to share power with other groups; the regime continues to assert that it is seeking only to modernize socialism and that its ideological basis remains Marxism-Leninism. [But] Émigrés from the Soviet Union have been reporting for at least the last generation now that virtually nobody in that country truly believed in Marxism-Leninism any longer, and that this was nowhere more true than in the Soviet elite, which continued to mouth Marxist slogans out of sheer cynicism. The corruption and decadence of the late Brezhnev-era Soviet state seemed to matter little, however, for as long as the state itself refused to throw into question any of the fundamental principles underlying Soviet society, the system was capable of functioning adequately out of sheer inertia and could even muster some dynamism in the realm of foreign and defense policy. Marxism-Leninism was like a magical incantation which, however absurd and devoid of meaning, was the only common basis on which the elite could agree to rule Soviet society.

WHAT HAS happened in the four years since Gorbachev's coming to power is a revolutionary assault on the most fundamental institutions and principles of Stalinism, and their replacement by other principles which do not amount to liberalism per se but whose only connecting thread is liberalism. This is most evident in the economic sphere, where the reform economists around Gorbachev have become steadily more radical in their support for free markets, to the point where some like Nikolai Shmelev do not mind 79 being compared in public to Milton Friedman. There is a virtual consensus among the currently dominant school of Soviet economists now that central planning and the command system of allocation are the root cause of economic inefficiency, and that if the Soviet system is ever to heal itself, it must permit free and decentralized decision-making with respect to investment, labor, and prices. After a couple of initial years of ideological confusion, these principles have finally been incorporated into policy with the promulgation of new laws on enterprise autonomy, cooperatives, and finally in 1988 on lease arrangements and family farming. [. . .]

In the political sphere, the proposed changes to the Soviet constitution, legal system, and party rules amount to much less than the establishment of a liberal state. Gorbachev has spoken of democratization primarily in the sphere of internal party affairs, and has shown little intention of ending the Communist party's monopoly of power; indeed, the political reform seeks to legitimize and therefore strengthen the CPSU'S rule.[13] Nonetheless, the general principles underlying many of the reforms - that the "people" should be truly responsible for their own affairs, that higher political bodies should be answerable to lower ones, and not vice versa, that the rule of law should prevail over arbitrary police actions, with separation of powers and an independent judiciary, that there should be legal protection for property rights, the need for open discussion of public issues and the right of public dissent, the empowering of the Soviets as a forum in which the whole Soviet people can participate, and of a political culture that is more tolerant and pluralistic - come from a source fundamentally alien to the USSR's Marxist-Leninist tradition, even if they are incompletely articulated and poorly implemented in practice.

IF WE ADMIT for the moment that the fascist and communist challenges to liberalism are dead, are there any other ideological competitors left? Or put another way, are there contradictions in liberal society beyond that of class that are not resolvable? Two possibilities suggest themselves, those of religion and nationalism.

The rise of religious fundamentalism in recent years within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions has been widely noted. One is inclined to say that the revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies. Yet while the emptiness at the core of liberalism is most certainly a defect in the ideology - indeed, a flaw that one does not need the perspective of religion to recognize[15] - it is not at all clear that it is remediable through politics. Modern liberalism itself was historically a consequence of the weakness of religiously-based societies which, failing to agree on the nature of the good life, could not provide even the minimal preconditions of peace and stability. In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non- Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance. Other less organized religious impulses have been successfully satisfied within the sphere of personal life that is permitted in liberal societies.

The other major "contradiction" potentially unresolvable by liberalism is the one posed by nationalism and other forms of racial and ethnic consciousness. It is certainly true that a very large degree of conflict since the Battle of Jena has had its roots in nationalism. Two cataclysmic world wars in this century have been spawned by the nationalism of the developed world in various guises, and if those passions have been muted to a certain extent in postwar Europe, they are still extremely powerful in the Third World. Nationalism has been a threat to liberalism historically in Germany, and continues to be one in isolated parts of "post-historical" Europe like Northern Ireland.

But it is not clear that nationalism represents an irreconcilable contradiction in the heart of liberalism. In the first place, nationalism is not one single phenomenon but several, ranging from mild cultural nostalgia 80 to the highly organized and elaborately articulated doctrine of National Socialism. Only systematic nationalisms of the latter sort can qualify as a formal ideology on the level of liberalism or communism. The vast majority of the world's nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization. As such, they are compatible with doctrines and ideologies that do offer such agendas. While they may constitute a source of conflict for liberal societies, this conflict does not arise from liberalism itself so much as from the fact that the liberalism in question is incomplete. Certainly a great deal of the world's ethnic and nationalist tension can be explained in terms of peoples who are forced to live in unrepresentative political systems that they have not chosen.

While it is impossible to rule out the sudden appearance of new ideologies or previously unrecognized contradictions in liberal societies, then, the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of sociopolitical organization have not advanced terribly far since 1806. Many of the wars and revolutions fought since that time have been undertaken in the name of ideologies which claimed to be more advanced than liberalism, but whose pretensions were ultimately unmasked by history. In the meantime, they have helped to spread the universal homogenous state to the point where it could have a significant effect on the overall character of international relations.

WHAT ARE the implications of the end of history for international relations? Clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come. But let us focus for the time being on the larger and more developed states of the world who after all account for the greater part of world politics. Russia and China are not likely to join the developed nations of the West as liberal societies any time in the foreseeable future, but suppose for a moment that Marxism-Leninism ceases to be a factor driving the foreign policies of these states - a prospect which, if not yet here, the last few years have made a real possibility. How will the overall characteristics of a de- ideologized world differ from those of the one with which we are familiar at such a hypothetical juncture?

The most common answer is - not very much. For there is a very widespread belief among many observers of international relations that underneath the skin of ideology is a hard core of great power national interest that guarantees a fairly high level of competition and conflict between nations. Indeed, according to one academically popular school of international relations theory, conflict inheres in the international system as such, and to understand the prospects for conflict one must look at the shape of the system - for example, whether it is bipolar or multipolar - rather than at the specific character of the nations and regimes that constitute it. This school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of politics to international relations, and assumes that aggression and insecurity are universal characteristics of human societies rather than the product of specific historical circumstances.

Believers in this line of thought take the relations that existed between the participants in the classical nineteenth century European balance of power as a model for what a de-ideologized contemporary world would look like. [. . . ] But is it true? (Fukuyama argues it is not true) [. . .]

In fact, the notion that ideology is a superstructure imposed on a substratum of permanent great power interest is a highly questionable proposition. For the way in which any state defines its national interest is not universal but rests on some kind of prior ideological basis, just as we saw that economic behavior is determined by a prior state of consciousness. In this century, states have adopted highly articulated doctrines with explicit foreign policy agendas legitimizing expansionism, like Marxism-Leninism or National Socialism. The Expansionist and competitive behavior of nineteenth-century European states rested on no less ideal a basis; it just so happened that the ideology driving it was less explicit than the doctrines of the twentieth century. [. . .] 81

The developed states of the West do maintain defense establishments and in the postwar period have competed vigorously for influence to meet a worldwide communist threat. This behavior has been driven, however, by an external threat from states that possess overtly expansionist ideologies, and would not exist in their absence. To take the "neo-realist" theory seriously, one would have to believe that "natural" competitive behavior would reassert itself among the OECD states were Russia and China to disappear from the face of the earth. That is, West Germany and France would arm themselves against each other as they did in the 193Os, Australia and New Zealand would send military advisers to block each others' advances in Africa, and the U.S.-Canadian border would become fortified. Such a prospect is, of course, ludicrous . . .

The automatic assumption that Russia shorn of its expansionist communist ideology should pick up where the czars left off just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore a curious one. It assumes that the evolution of human consciousness has stood still in the meantime, and that the Soviets, while picking up currently fashionable ideas in the realm of economics, will return to foreign policy views a century out of date in the rest of Europe. This is certainly not what happened to China after it began its reform process. Chinese competitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have virtually disappeared [. . .]

"New political thinking," the general rubric for their views, describes a world dominated by economic concerns, in which there are no ideological grounds for major conflict between nations, and in which, consequently, the use of military force becomes less legitimate. As Foreign Minister Shevardnadze put it in mid-1988:

The struggle between two opposing systems is no longer a determining tendency of the present- day era. At the modern stage, the ability to build up material wealth at an accelerated rate on the basis of front-ranking science and high-level techniques and technology, and to distribute it fairly, and through joint efforts to restore and protect the resources necessary for mankind's survival acquires decisive importance.[18]

THE PASSING of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance. For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing "Common Marketization" of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.

This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. For the world at that point would be divided between a part that was historical and a part that was post-historical. Conflict between states still in history, and between those states and those at the end of history, would still be possible. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical 82 problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post- historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post- historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. 83

“Defending The Indefensible” By Tina Rosenberg New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1998

The last time the world got a glimpse of Milan Kovacevic, he was guarding the portals of hell. He was a swaggering, beefy, profane man in a secondhand U.S. Marines shirt, and he was explaining to the television cameras why Serbs could never be secure until non-Serbs were removed from what he considered Serb territory. It was August 1992 in Prijedor, a city in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina. A small group of reporters wanted permission to enter Omarska, a concentration camp not far from Prijedor. Omarska was the most notorious camp of the Bosnian war. Reports had already emerged that the guards there did not merely kill Muslim and Croat inmates but beat and tortured them to death with singular sadism and personal brutality. Kovacevic told the reporters they could visit Omarska but said that they would find ''not concentration camps but transit centers,'' and that what they were witnessing was ''a great moment in the history of the Serbian nation.'' Three years later, on a Radio Prijedor program commemorating that great moment, he boasted, ''I'm not afraid of any of those 21 cells in The Hague.'' There are actually 24 cells in the jail to hold the accused at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Since July of last year, one has been occupied by Milan Kovacevic. When he goes on trial on May 11, he will be the first man brought to justice at The Hague on charges of genocide, a crime considered the most heinous in human history, and one that is likely to carry the maximum penalty the tribunal can dispense, a life sentence. Kovacevic is depressed and suicidal according to a psychiatrist who interviewed him. He has developed heart problems and has had two, possibly three, strokes. When I saw him recently, in a courtroom at The Hague during a hearing on his case, it was hard to believe he was 56. He looked 70. At the time Kovacevic issued his challenge to the tribunal, he was the director of Prijedor's General Hospital. At the height of the Bosnian war, however, he had been an anesthesiologist and, more significantly, the vice chairman of Prijedor's Crisis Staff, a Serb council that took control of the city in April 1992, after the Serb Republic broke away from Bosnia. He had little reason to fear those jail cells at The Hague. There had been no international courts with the power to punish individuals since the tribunals that were established to try the war crimes of World War II. In some respects, the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that the United Nations Security Council voted into existence in May 1993 (a tribunal for Rwanda was added 19 months later) has more legitimacy than its predecessors in Nuremberg and the Far East. It is not a court judging the vanquished, but an effort to try all the parties in the former Yugoslavia accused of committing serious crimes. It was established not by powerful victor nations, as Nuremberg and the Far East tribunals were, but by a truly international body that represents virtually all of the world's countries. And it rests on a more advanced body of international law, one that has adopted the Geneva Conventions on warfare and formally outlawed genocide, which is now defined as acts committed with the intent to partly or wholly destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Yet it is understandable why Milan Kovacevic (pronounced ko-VATCH-eh-vitch) did not take the tribunal seriously. The reason it won crucial backing from the Clinton Administration was that it could give the impression that Washington -- that the West -- was doing something about the war in Bosnia without putting Western lives in danger. Moreover, the absence of victors' justice carried with it a debilitating absence of victors' powers -- or of a vanquished. The most powerful men publicly indicted -- the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic -- remain free, as do 44 other indicted Serbs and 2 Croats. 84

Perhaps one illustration of the world's lack of commitment to the tribunal is that it was built with only a single courtroom. The tribunal has held just one full trial, of Dusko Tadic, a guard at Omarska, one of the camps that Kovacevic is charged with helping to set up. On May 7, 1997, Tadic was acquitted on several counts, but found guilty on 11 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, and sentenced to 20 years. (He is appealing to the tribunal's five-judge appellate chamber.) In the last year, however, the tribunal has become a serious and even feared force for justice in Bosnia. The shift occurred last summer, when NATO and United Nations troops began arresting accused criminals, including, on July 10, Milan Kovacevic. British Special Forces soldiers entered Prijedor's hospital, arrested Kovacevic in his office and flew him to the Netherlands. The same morning the infamous former Police Chief of Prijedor, Simo Drljaca, was killed in a shootout with his would-be captors. NATO soldiers do seem willing to arrest suspects who are not likely to shoot back. Earlier this month, two men accused of having helped run Omarska were arrested in Prijedor. And pressure from NATO may be one reason Karadzic is said to be negotiating his own surrender. Kovacevic's capture also represented the public debut of a new practice, the sealed indictment: his name was on a secret list, the existence of which is now disturbing the sleep of many in the former Yugoslavia who do not deserve a good night's rest. A court designed to give the impression of doing something -- about Bosnia and about justice, ethnic hatred and human rights in the post-cold-war world -- is actually doing something. The Hague tribunal is building two new courtrooms and is scheduled to start 11 trials this year. But the tribunal will not provide justice, or help break the cycle of ethnic killings in the former Yugoslavia, or have any global impact on human rights if it is not perceived to be holding fair trials. What this means, above all, is that it must pay scrupulous attention to the rights of the accused. Defending those accused of war crimes at The Hague is complicated for many reasons that go beyond the usual quandaries faced by attorneys representing clients charged with heinous crimes. These cases must be investigated far from the courtroom, often without cooperation from pertinent local authorities who disdain the tribunal and may fear arrest themselves. Politics is a constant presence, as the tribunal is a world stage. Any judgments about criminal responsibility are of particular concern to those Serbs, Croats and Muslims who feel their ethnic group is in the dock alongside the defendants and want the world to endorse their understanding of what happened in the former Yugoslavia -- their notions of truth and history. Thus there is the temptation for an attorney to mount not just a detailed legal defense of an accused war criminal -- he wasn't there, or wasn't in charge -- but also a public information campaign to assert the victimhood of a whole people. None of the lawyers at Nuremberg defended their clients by recycling the Nazi propaganda that the Jews deserved extermination because they were a threat to the Germans. But Kovacevic's lead attorney, Dusan Vucicevic, a Serb emigre who practices law in a Chicago suburb, wants to use the Yugoslav equivalent of this myth. When I traveled with Vucicevic (pronounced vu-CHEECH- eh-vitch) to Prijedor not long ago, he was preparing a defense that argues, among other things, that the Serbs of Prijedor were provoked by Muslim threats -- the same spurious message that, broadcast nightly on Serb television, incited people to kill their Muslim neighbors. ''What the Muslims tried to do in Bosnia is what happened in Armenia in 1915,'' he said, referring to the Turkish genocide of Armenians. ''The Serbs were preparing to defend themselves. There was no way to control things.'' Vucicevic's belief that stories of Serb victimization could help acquit his client is strongly opposed by Anthony D'Amato, an international-law expert at Northwestern University School of Law and Kovacevic's co-counsel. But the notion that the Serbs killed Muslims to defend themselves against a coming Muslim onslaught remains the reigning one among many Serbs in Bosnia and elsewhere. The racist myths of Nazi Germany were discredited after the war, but the Yugoslav wars have probably strengthened the sense of victimization and hatred among the involved ethnic groups. This, more than anything else, perhaps, points up the difference between the Nuremberg and The Hague tribunals, and raises the question of what Kovacevic's trial, and those of the others, can actually do to establish the truth, 85 prevent the rekindling of ethnic warfare in Bosnia or provide a legal framework to help the world take its pronouncements about punishing evil seriously. On July 30, 1997, Vucicevic happened to be visiting family in his hometown of Cacak, Serbia, about 60 miles from Belgrade. The TV news that night showed Kovacevic being arraigned at The Hague. The two men were distantly related. And Vucicevic, who is 50, had gone to high school in Cacak with Kovacevic's wife, Ljubica. Shortly after the broadcast, she called Vucicevic and asked him to defend her husband. Vucicevic was hesitant. He told Ljubica that he was not an international-law specialist but that he would try to find her one. Vucicevic practiced law -- mostly personal injury, some criminal defense -- in Oakbrook Terrace, a Chicago suburb. The Chicago area is home to America's largest Balkan population, with a quarter million Serbs alone, and his clients were mainly other Yugoslav emigres. He left Yugoslavia in 1974, while on a ski trip, and settled in Chicago, where he worked at first as an anesthesiologist. (He and Kovacevic had actually attended the same medical school in Belgrade.) When he got bored with that, he went to law school, and opened his own practice in 1989. Upon returning from Serbia last summer, Vucicevic called the offices of some well-known criminal lawyers, including Gerry Spence and Alan Dershowitz. ''But he was too small a fish,'' Vucicevic said of Kovacevic. (Dershowitz had several conversations with the biggest fish, Radovan Karadzic, but has not yet agreed to represent him, citing a policy of not working for fugitives.) Then someone suggested that maybe Vucicevic could work with Anthony D'Amato, a widely respected law professor and advocate of an international criminal court. D'Amato, 61, is the opposite of Vucicevic: short and trim where Vucicevic is big; precise, controlled and soothing while Vucicevic is voluble and excitable. (D'Amato has likewise had other lives. He was the co-producer of the original Broadway production of ''Grease'' and wrote three musicals with his wife that were staged in Chicago.) ''My initial reaction was that he's got a right to a lawyer, but not to me,'' D'Amato said recently over dinner at an Italian restaurant near the tribunal building. But he went with Vucicevic to The Hague last September and met with Kovacevic. This is D'Amato's account of the meeting: ''Doctor, are you telling me you didn't know about this?'' D'Amato asked Kovacevic about the concentration camps established in and around Prijedor while he was an official there. Kovacevic said he knew nothing until media reports filtered back into Prijedor. When he found out, Kovacevic said, it sickened him. ''Why didn't you resign?'' D'Amato asked him. I tried, Kovacevic told him. Kovacevic said he went to Simo Drljaca, the Police Chief. ''He said he would personally put a bullet through my head if I quit,'' Kovacevic told D'Amato. D'Amato agreed to help Vucicevic defend Kovacevic. D'Amato's motives are similar to those of many of the tribunal's lawyers who are not ethnically affiliated with the former Yugoslavia: for international legal scholars like D'Amato, it is tempting to play a role in shaping an international court. ''If I were to win this case, it may help the tribunal,'' he said. ''It seemed to me from the beginning very important that they acquit some people. What divides me from the Serb lawyers is that they want to slam the tribunal.'' Early on at least, Vucicevic seemed to be such a lawyer. ''It's a kangaroo court,'' he said of the tribunal during our first phone conversation. And what are Vucicevic's motives? I asked D'Amato. ''He's a patriot,'' D'Amato said, not seeming to mean it as a compliment. I asked D'Amato if he and Vucicevic got along. He smiled. ''His heart is in the right place, and he brought me onto this case,'' he said. A few miles outside Prijedor, the highway passes Kozarac, once a largely Muslim village, now a ghost town. A month after the Serbs took over Prijedor in April 1992, Kozarac was shelled, and its inhabitants 86 were removed to the Prijedor concentration camps. Their homes have since been looted and blown up. Today the carcasses of houses stretch for miles.

In Prijedor, there are no visible signs of the war. The city, with a population of 30,000, looks like many others in the former Communist world, with neighborhoods of pretty cottages and a downtown with identical five-story apartment buildings and hideously massive architecture. However, since the war, and the imposition of economic sanctions, its industry and jobs have evaporated. In the cafes, men sit over tiny cups of coffee all day; the stores have few customers. Until the spring of 1992, Prijedor's population was fairly balanced between Muslims and Serbs, with a small number of Croats. Thirty percent of the townspeople married outside their ethnic group. Yet Prijedor was home to some of the most brutal men of Bosnia's war. Of the 74 men publicly indicted by The Hague tribunal, 32, all of them Serbs, are charged with crimes alleged to have been committed in Prijedor. What happened to transform Prijedor is something that will be seriously contested in Kovacevic's trial. Prosecutors are not revealing their strategy, but they will presumably draw on a 300-page opinion the tribunal issued in the case of Dusko Tadic, the camp guard. It sets out a history of the war in Prijedor, one that largely confirms the judgment of most Western journalists and other independent observers, including a U.N. commission of experts. The judges concluded that Prijedor's camps were part of a well- planned Serb takeover of northern Bosnia. Alarmed that the breakup of Yugoslavia would create countries where Serbs would be a minority, Serb leaders aimed to unite all the territory where Serbs lived and the land they felt was historically theirs. The Serb strategy was to slice off bits of Bosnia in order to create a contiguous territory with a preponderance of Serbs and join them to Serbia proper. This entailed driving out or killing Muslims and Croats. In 1991, Serbs in northern Bosnia, under the leadership of the Serbian Democratic Party, or S.D.S., of Radovan Karadzic, began to create parallel governing structures. The Yugoslav Army -- by then a Serb Army -- and various paramilitary groups started to surround the region's cities and set up checkpoints. Kovacevic was a founder of the S.D.S. in Prijedor, where Serbs established a shadow city government in January 1992, along with their own police force and security unit. A propaganda campaign intensified, warning Serbs that ''fundamentalist'' Muslims and ''Ustashe'' Croats -- the term refers to Croatia's Nazi puppet state during World War II, which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs -- were planning another genocide. In the spring of 1992, as Bosnia declared its independence and the Serb Republic broke away, Serb paramilitary units took over the television transmitter in the Kozara Mountains, which overlook Prijedor, blocking the town's access to broadcasts from Sarajevo and Zagreb. Residents could get only Serb TV, whose news essentially consisted of anti-Croat and anti-Muslim propaganda. In each town the S.D.S. established a Crisis Staff made up of local party leaders, army commanders and police officials. In Prijedor, where the elected government had been led by Muslims, the Crisis Staff staged a coup on April 30, 1992. Beginning in late May, Muslims and Croats were herded into concentration camps. The worst were in an iron-ore mining complex in Omarska, a village a few miles from Prijedor, and at Keraterm, a ceramics factory on the edge of Prijedor. At least 2,000 men, perhaps many more, were killed in the Omarska and Keraterm camps in the 10 weeks before they were discovered by reporters and closed late that summer. The inmates suffered the worst conditions imaginable: they were starved; forced to live in their own filth; jammed by the hundreds into rooms, so tightly packed that they could not lie down. The city's richest and most powerful Muslims were singled out for special torture. The few women at Omarska were regularly raped and some were killed. Survivors have reported that some prisoners were decapitated with chain saws. Others were burned alive. 87

Milan Kovacevic, who had been the city manager before the Crisis Staff was formed, was now the second in command in Prijedor, after the Mayor, Milomir Stakic. He was also everyone's drinking buddy. According to the indictment, the prosecutors will make the case that as vice chairman of the Crisis Staff, Kovacevic helped to plan and organize the camps. They will also argue that he knew, or should have known, that Croats and Muslims were being murdered and abused inside them, the aim being, according to the indictment, ''to destroy them, in part, as a national, ethnic or religious group.'' In a word, genocide. In late February, I traveled to Prijedor with Vucicevic. It was his second trip to Bosnia to search for evidence and interview potential witnesses. Part of his case, he said, would be to prove that while Kovacevic was responsible on paper, in practice he was not. Vucicevic spent much of his time in Prijedor talking to former Crisis Staff members and S.D.S. officials who he hoped would testify that within the Crisis Staff, the military and especially Police Chief Drljaca had been dominant and that they were the ones who organized the camps. Vucicevic maintains that Kovacevic had no interest in his political duties and spent all of his time at the hospital. ''He never attended a single Crisis Staff meeting,'' Vucicevic repeatedly told me. ''He did not visit any of the camps.'' What did he know? I asked. ''He heard hush-hush things in taverns,'' Vucicevic said. I asked when Kovacevic found out about the killings in the camps. Vucicevic declined to answer. In Prijedor, I met Serbs who had heard about the killings while they were going on. I did not meet anyone who claimed to have seen Kovacevic visit a camp, and the prosecutors declined to talk to me about their evidence before the trial. In evidence disclosed by prosecutors to the defense there is a witness who claimed to have seen Kovacevic in the Omarska camp several times, but the account contains inconsistencies. Still, Keraterm is right on the main highway, and anyone driving into Prijedor would have been able to see the prisoners in the barred doorways of their cells. I spoke with a credible source, a man afraid to be named or identified in any way, who had attended a Crisis Staff meeting at the military police headquarters directly across the highway from Keraterm in the final weeks of the camp's existence. He said that although Kovacevic didn't speak much, he was among a handful of people present at the meeting. Minka Cehajic is a Muslim from Prijedor now living in Sanski Most, a town that is today home to many of Prijedor's surviving Muslims, and her story suggests that Kovacevic had more power during the war than he contends. Minka's husband, Muhamed Cehajic, was Prijedor's Mayor until the Crisis Staff's coup. Minka was told after the coup that her husband was being detained in a police jail but that she could not get in to see him. She ran into Kovacevic on the street and asked him for help. She said that he called the police and got her in to see her husband. She visited him twice; when she went back a third time, he was no longer there. Minka called Kovacevic again, but was told he was in a Crisis Staff meeting. Her husband was taken to Keraterm, and then to Omarska, where he was killed. On Aug. 2, 1992, Roy Gutman of Newsday broke the story of Omarska and Keraterm, based on interviews with survivors. Radovan Karadzic, in London for a meeting, went on television to deny reports of atrocities in the camps and invited those interested to go see for themselves. The television network ITN and a reporter for The Guardian, Ed Vulliamy, took him up on it and flew to Belgrade the next day. They arrived in Prijedor on Aug. 5 and went to the Crisis Staff offices, where they first spoke to Col. Vladimir Arsic, the local military commander. ''I do not have the authority to allow you to go to Omarska,'' he said. ''Talk to the civilians.'' He gestured at Mayor Stakic and Kovacevic. Kovacevic gave the journalists a lecture on Greater Serbia. ''The first and main duty imposed on Serbs today is to create and organize a homogenous Serbia to encompass the whole ethnic region in which the 88

Serbs live,'' he said. Then he told them they could go to the camps. A few days later he let another group of journalists into Omarska, after a similar lecture.

''He was saying that extremists should be separated,'' Vucicevic told me, by way of explaining ''Greater Serbia.'' ''And he was singled out to do briefings for reporters not because he was in charge, but because he was educated in Europe.'' There is no how-to manual for defending a man accused of genocide, because it has virtually never been done. Last month the Rwanda tribunal completed the first international trial for genocide, but it has not yet issued a verdict in the case of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a Hutu Mayor accused of ordering the deaths of 2,000 Tutsis. So how certain precedents are applied, what the prosecutor needs to prove, what can be argued -- the three judges who will hear Kovacevic's case and reach a verdict will sort these things out as the trial proceeds. A trial at the tribunal is the legal equivalent of gathering people from all over the world to put on a play in an Esperanto that no one has really learned. Attorneys question witnesses from a far-off country in a foreign language. Almost everyone who works there has come from someplace else and must travel elsewhere to investigate cases. It is startling to see the United Nations flag next to the judges' bench, to realize that if the tribunal labeled its cases the way American courts do, the case would be called The World v. Kovacevic. (It is actually Prosecutor v. Kovacevic.) The tribunal is dealing with a body of law that has, for the most part, never been applied, and international law has no ''supreme court'' to indicate which interpretations and decisions are ''right.'' Bootstrapping is inevitable. The tribunal draws its precedents mainly from a limited group of international legal forums -- Nuremberg and Tokyo; the International Court of Justice, which adjudicates civil cases between nations, and regional courts like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. But the judges also raid national court decisions when they feel like it. Such improvisation taxes a defendant's ability to mount a proper defense. Even well-trained and aggressive defense lawyers can have trouble. Michail Wladimiroff and Alphons Orie, the Dutch criminal lawyers who represented Dusko Tadic, the camp guard, were not accustomed to cross-examining witnesses, which in the Continental system is handled mainly by a judge, and had to take a training course and study a video to learn how to do it. They ended up recruiting one of their trainers to handle cross- examinations. A larger problem for defendants is their very choice of lawyers. The quality of counsel has improved since pay was raised two years ago to $110 an hour, up from $200 per day. But problems remain. Defendants before the tribunal at The Hague generally choose lawyers of their own ethnicity from the former Yugoslavia, not trusting others to fight on their behalf. The courts in Belgrade and Zagreb are highly politicized, and lawyers used to practicing before these courts are not trained to be assertive and know little about international law. Such lawyering creates delay and embarrassment. For instance, the tribunal's appeals chamber dismissed Drazan Erdemovic's plea of guilty to crimes against humanity because it felt his attorney had not sufficiently informed him of the consequences of his plea. Erdemovic later pled guilty to a lesser charge. While it is clear that the tribunal needs to raise its standards for defense counsel and give attorneys training and legal advice, the judges themselves, who hail from 11 different countries, and their efforts to compensate for some of the attorneys' deficiencies are frequently praised. Even Vucicevic appears to have come around. ''All those things I said about the unfairness of the tribunal -- I take them all back,'' he said, elated, after winning a recent motion. 89

Vucicevic's major complaint is that the tribunal is not paying enough attention to Kovacevic's physical well-being. Vucicevic spent the fall fruitlessly trying to have Kovacevic released because of poor health to await trial back in Bosnia, and argues that Kovacevic has not received the medical attention he needs in jail. Vucicevic is also in a state of war with the registrar, the administrative office of the tribunal. Preparing a case of the scope and magnitude of Kovacevic's demands a team of attorneys and plenty of money for investigations and experts. But one month before the trial is scheduled to begin, Vucicevic has not been able to hire much help besides D'Amato. He says that the registrar is three or four months in arrears paying his bills. But money is a problem for everyone at the tribunal, even with its 1998 budget of $64 million. Prosecutors have had to curtail investigations, and now, with 25 men in custody, their staff is stretched thin. This January, 10 months after Kovacevic was indicted for complicity in genocide, prosecutors asked to add 14 counts, including murder, torture, crimes against humanity, war crimes and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Most counts stemmed from the same crimes as the charge of genocide. If the judges permitted prosecutors to expand the indictment, it would greatly increase their chance of convicting Kovacevic, because any genocide conviction probably requires proof of some degree of intent on the part of the defendant. The lawyers at the Feb. 27 hearing on expanding the indictment wore black robes and ascots; the judges were resplendent in red robes. But the majestic effect was lost in a building that greatly resembles an insurance office, which in fact it used to be. Kovacevic, flanked by two guards, sat behind his attorneys; above him were the glass booths built for the simultaneous translators. The lawyers and judges used French or English, but the defendants all spoke what the court lists as ''Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian'' -- a language once known as Serbo-Croatian. A glass wall separated the public. During a break, Vucicevic pointed me out, and Kovacevic nodded at me. The prosecution was represented by Michael Keegan, a former U.S. Marine Corps Judge Advocate General, who was on crutches after having broken his leg skiing. Keegan argued that he had informed the defense at the time of Kovacevic's arrest that the prosecution intended to broaden the indictment, mainly with what in the United States would be called ''lesser included'' offenses -- lesser charges for the same acts. Then D'Amato began the defense reply. Working from yellow Post-Its he had plastered on his lectern, D'Amato argued that amending the indictment six months after arrest was too late and that the delay violated Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which covers the right to a speedy trial, among other things. Vucicevic followed with a vintage performance, racing from point to point. He questioned the credibility of the witness who said he saw Kovacevic in the Omarska camp, argued that civilians on the Crisis Staff had no authority and started in on the history of Yugoslav Communism. The presiding judge, Richard May, gently interrupted him. ''It seems we are entering the realm of argument about the merits that is more appropriate at trial,'' he said. But the defense won. While the prosecutor is currently appealing, it is very likely that Kovacevic will be tried solely for complicity in genocide. He is indicted under three different parts of the tribunal's statute, which allow the tribunal to punish those who aided in the planning and execution of genocide, those who committed acts that made them accomplices to genocide and those with command responsibility. D'Amato remains worried, especially because of a case known as ''Yamashita.'' Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita commanded the Japanese Army in the Philippines during World War II. An American military tribunal sentenced him to hang because his men had committed atrocities that he did not prevent. There was no evidence that he knew of the atrocities, but the court ruled that he should have known about them and had failed to prevent them. Over dinner in The Hague, D'Amato had said that he takes ''Yamashita'' to mean that if at some point 90

Kovacevic knew of the killings and could have stopped or limited them and did not, he would be culpable. ''There is an opening for the prosecutor,'' he said. ''If there weren't, this wouldn't be a case.''

Vucicevic maintains, by contrast, that it would suffice to prove that Kovacevic was out of the loop. As for the other aspects of the crime, Vucicevic argues that the prosecutor must show that Kovacevic intended to commit genocide. Vucicevic contends that Kovacevic had no such intent, in part because he treated Muslims at Prijedor's hospital during the war. International-law experts say it isn't clear whether such intent is necessary to convict, because Kovacevic is accused not of genocide itself but of complicity in genocide. It might be enough to show that he deliberately contributed to the crime even though he may not have had genocidal intent, said Diane Orentlicher, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law and director of its War Crimes Research Office. ''Suppose someone built gas ovens knowing how they'd be used in the Holocaust, but didn't carry out the gassings himself,'' Orentlicher hypothesized. ''He might not have shared Hitler's genocidal intent, but might well be liable to punishment as an accomplice to genocide.'' It is easier to convict Omarska's guards, the men who personally tortured and killed, whose crimes were witnessed by dozens of people. The role of the higher-ups is more elusive. According to D'Amato, Karadzic wrote orders telling his men not to commit war crimes and warning that anyone who did would be prosecuted -- an utterly cynical exercise, if in fact he did do it, but one that could keep him out of prison: the commanders weren't really commanding, couldn't have done anything, had no control, didn't plan it, couldn't have stopped it, didn't know. Showing that Kovacevic had no responsibility for the events in Prijedor was one aspect of the strategy Vucicevic outlined during the trip. The other was to argue that what happened in Prijedor was not a Serb- organized genocide at all. In fact, he was looking for evidence that the Muslims in and around Prijedor were planning a genocide of their own -- that the Serbs, in rounding up Muslims, acted in self-defense. D'Amato strongly disagreed with this strategy, in part for tactical reasons: he thought that contesting the prosecutor's assertion that what happenened to the Muslims was genocide would bring a parade of unhelpful witnesses testifying about the atrocities they suffered in the camps. ''This court was set up to investigate genocide,'' he said. ''I'm not sure they would be prepared to say it didn't occur.'' His view that the no-genocide defense was doomed was echoed by every non-Serb lawyer I asked about it. ''Any claim to justify genocide on the grounds that it is designed to prevent genocide by an adversary, a sort of anticipatory genocide, is simply beyond the pale,'' said Theodor Meron, Denison Professor of International Law at New York University Law School. ''In international law's hierarchy of prohibitions, those of genocide and crimes against humanity are absolute. There are no exceptions.''

Vucicevic, for his part, said he has no intention of acknowledging that there was a Serb-led genocide. ''Let's be good old-fashioned defense attorneys and make them prove every point,'' he told me at first. But as I spent more time with Vucicevic in Prijedor, it became evident that his real reason for denying that genocide had been carried out was that he believed his people had been maligned in the press and wanted to correct the record. ''D'Amato's been prejudiced by media stories and pictures,'' he said. D'Amato had told me that many Serbs believe something ''a little schizo: it's not genocide, but if it is, it's totally justified.'' Most of the Serbs I met in Prijedor hold this view. More disconcerting, at times so did Vucicevic. He seemed fully aware of the tensions between the American and Serb inside him. ''I get so mad at everyone here for the war,'' he said. ''But I guess I have some of these genes myself.'' Though there are undoubtedly Serbs in Prijedor who would say out loud that Muslims were victims of 91

Serb atrocities, what I found was a list of excuses and justifications, often contradictory. Typical was the view of Zoran Baros, then as now the director of the propaganda-spewing Radio Prijedor, who said that the Serbs had to act to prevent a takeover of Prijedor by Muslim extremists. And this from a high-ranking Prijedor police official who spoke only on condition of anonymity: ''Write about the 11,000 Serb children killed in the Kozara Mountains in World War II. Perhaps you will have a deeper understanding of why this happened in 1992.'' Since most of these men began our conversations with a denunciation of the anti-Serb foreign media, I was not expecting any of them to unburden their consciences to me. They were also aware of the tribunal's secret list. But the justifications were not invented for my benefit. The imminent Muslim genocide and the victimization of Serbs were themes of the war. The Serbs have been victims many times this century. The Ustashe Nazi puppet state in wartime Croatia had promised to kill, deport or convert to Catholicism the Serbs in Croatian territory. Because Serb partisans were particularly active in the Prijedor area, which borders Croatia, it was the scene of some of the worst killings of Serbs, including Serb children. The German Army also participated. Among those in the German Army in the Kozara Mountains at that time was Kurt Waldheim, which does not inspire Serb confidence in the United Nations. The Ustashe concentration camp of Jasenovac is an hour's drive from Prijedor. Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Serbs, depending on who does the counting, were murdered there. Many were killed with a brutality later to be echoed in Omarska. This is not a coincidence. Kovacevic says he himself was interned as a baby in a Croatian concentration camp, although he is not sure which one. Almost every person I met in Prijedor replied to my questions about 1992 with references to 1942. This history made the propaganda believable to ordinary Serbs. A psychopath with a television station seems to be a necessary ingredient of modern genocide, but so does a historical resonance. (In Rwanda, genocide was sparked by a radio station that stirred up Hutu memories of victimization.) Television did not have to tell the Serbs, Go kill your neighbor. It was enough to tell them, Your neighbor is coming to kill you. The Kovacevic family lives in a comfortable but not luxurious apartment on the fourth floor of a building at the edge of downtown, with firewood piled up in the yard and chickens scratching in the dirt. When I first visited the apartment, Kovacevic's 24-year-old son, Ljubo, was sitting on a leather couch in the living room, watching music videos on Sarajevo TV. When the news came on, showing Bosnia's President, Alija Izetbegovic, Ljubo jumped up in mock respect. He had once studied to be a veterinary technician, but now he mostly hung out, unemployed, like almost everyone in Prijedor. Kovacevic's wife, Ljubica, a teacher of retarded children, brought out a cheese pie, salad, cake and a bottle of her husband's excellent homemade plum brandy, even though we were about to go out to eat. People have treated her well, she said, though she does get phone threats from one Muslim man -- whose voice she thinks she recognizes. We all went to dinner at the Balkan Express, a restaurant on the highway outside town that Kovacevic had considered his second office. Over very loud Serb folk songs sung by a woman with frosted hair and white high heels, Vucicevic and Zoran Baros, the Prijedor Radio boss, talked about supposed Muslim arms caches in Kozarac. Ljubica Kovacevic mused: ''It's the journalists who started the war. They showed us pictures of dead Serb children.'' ''That wasn't journalism,'' I said. ''That was propaganda.'' ''I don't know what it was,'' she said. ''It's what I saw.'' Mostly, though, Ljubica sat silently, her thoughts obviously far away, saying at one point, ''It's so despicable that a victim has to prove he's innocent.'' 92

It is not clear whether the people I talked to in Prijedor do not believe the reports of atrocities in Omarska and Keraterm or are simply lying. On my last day in town I went to lunch with Vucicevic and the Kovacevic family at a restaurant near the hospital. At another table was Gojko Klickovic, the Prime Minister of the Serb Republic from May 1996 until three months ago and now head of the S.D.S. I went over with Vucicevic, and when the conversation turned to the war I asked how many people had died in the concentration camps. ''People couldn't have died in concentration camps, because we didn't have them,'' Klickovic said. ''We had detention camps, where people came beginning on the first day because it was the safest. The Red Cross then allowed them to relocate.'' Back at our table, Vucicevic and I got into an argument. ''He's not credible,'' I said. ''Maybe he didn't know,'' Vucicevic replied. Of all the views I heard, Vucicevic's were the most disquieting. At times he was willing to acknowledge the horrors of the camps, at times he played them down and at times he excused them. ''In tribal societies you have revenge and retaliation as justice,'' he said. ''For 500 years, Serbs haven't known anything else.'' Whatever bad happened was ordered from Belgrade, Vucicevic said, but he also often spoke of the Muslim threat. He gave me articles on genocide against the Serbs and recommended that I read a book on the Turkish genocide of Armenians, to show me what Muslims were capable of. When we were driving around Prijedor, he sometimes gave people we passed the three-fingered Serb salute, a sign used today by only the most nationalist Serbs. He also said: ''When I heard Serbs were accused of raping Muslim women I had to laugh. When I was young we always joked that no one would want a Muslim because their personal hygiene is not too good.'' Omarska, the former iron-ore mine, is today a military base for the Serb Republic's Army. Keraterm is starting to make ceramic tile again. Practically no Muslims have returned to live in Prijedor itself. In early March a few were beginning to commute daily from Sanski Most. One commuter was Muharem Murselovic, Prijedor's new Deputy Mayor -- elected because the surviving Muslims came back in large numbers to vote in municipal elections in September. He had been imprisoned in Omarska in the summer of 1992 and beaten repeatedly. Some of his Serb colleagues in the municipal building today had helped send him to the camp, he told me. ''If they are uncomfortable to see me, that's their problem,'' he said. ''I can look everyone in the eye.'' The tribunal has improved the quality of leadership in Prijedor -- mainly by ridding the city of Drljaca, the former Police Chief, who continued to blow up Muslim houses and sponsor attacks on Muslims long after the war ended. And The Hague tribunal is scaring other wartime leaders. I heard a high-ranking police official ask Vucicevic if he knew which other names were on the sealed indictments list, and Vucicevic said that others had asked as well. He said that there are three or four former Crisis Staff members still in Prijedor but that they are keeping their heads down. Milomir Stakic, the former Mayor and Crisis Staff chief, who is probably on the list, is nowhere to be found. The tribunal is so present in the minds of Prijedor Serbs that the local prosecutor has been nicknamed Goldstone, after Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who was the tribunal's first prosecutor. After the hearing that quashed the expanded indictment, Vucicevic did phone interviews with radio stations all over the Serb Republic, telling them that for the first time a Serb defendant had won a victory at the tribunal. Such statements are important to counter the near-universal belief among Serbs that the tribunal is an anti-Serb instrument. The local media, of course, depict it that way. This will have to change if the tribunal is to meet the ambitious goals of its founders. The tribunal's only legitimate purpose -- the only purpose a court can have -- is to mete out justice. But a successful tribunal will do other important things. On a practical level, it appears that fear of the tribunal may be preventing 93

Serbian leaders from intensifying their violence in Kosovo, where tribunal prosecutors are beginning investigations. Beyond this, the tribunal makes a moral statement, showing that some crimes are so heinous that the whole world condemns and punishes them. Like Nuremberg's, its decisions will trickle into international treaties and national legal codes: thanks to Nuremberg, for example, most nations hold that soldiers cannot evade responsibility for illegal acts by pleading that they were following orders. A successful tribunal may encourage the world to establish a permanent international criminal tribunal, which the United Nations is now discussing. It might also encourage the world's powers to examine their own roles in the tragedy of Yugoslavia and strengthen their resolve to prevent genocide the next time rather than settling for judging its perpetrators.

The tribunal's most fervid supporters have made more extravagant claims for the court as well. They believe the tribunal can discourage blind ethnic hatred by showing that responsibility rests with individuals, not whole groups. They see the tribunal as a means to promote tolerance by smashing the cherished myths of victimhood, demonstrating to people that individuals in their own ethnic group can also do evil. Justice has helped to demolish nationalist myths. It did so in Japan and Germany. In these countries, however, justice was accompanied by Allied occupation. NATO's mission in Bosnia is no such occupation. Just as crucial, the myths of Nazism and Japanese imperialism did not truly die until they were discredited by the Germans and Japanese themselves, and this took time. Time will not produce the same reckoning in the former Yugoslavia without efforts by the Serbs and Croats themselves, efforts like trials of their own war criminals or a South Africa-style truth commission that encourages the perpetrators to confess. Communism's state-enforced unity kept the Yugoslavs from dealing with World War II atrocities, and now nationalist governments, especially those in Serbia and Croatia, perpetuate the story of national victimhood. Fear is powerful, rationalization easy and remorse painful; truth will win out only if the message comes from one of your own. There is one Prijedor leader who seems to be remorseful about the events of 1992. That is Milan Kovacevic. Not that he has abandoned the gospel of Greater Serbia. In 1996, Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, who had listened to Kovacevic's speech on the subject four years earlier, sought him out again. Kovacevic reiterated the importance of making the area free of Muslims. But as the bottle of slivovitz came out, a different man emerged according to Vulliamy. ''Omarska was planned as a reception center,'' Kovacevic said after four glasses. ''But then it turned into something else. I cannot explain this loss of control. I don't think even the historians will explain it in the next 50 years. You could call it collective madness.'' He resigned from the Crisis Staff in December 1992. He left political life ''because I saw many evil things,'' he told Vulliamy. ''That is my personal secret. If you have to do things by killing people, well...now my hair is white, now I don't sleep too well.'' Don't take that as an admission, D'Amato said; Kovacevic's anguish and remorse came after the war, when he learned what others did, and are not legally relevant. That is for the tribunal to decide. But the agonies of a drunk are relevant in other ways, if only Serbs could hear them. The tribunal may help prevent the next Balkan war by imprisoning some of the criminals of the last one and discouraging those who would follow. But its decisions will always be those of outsiders, powerless against the overwhelming emotional weight of Jasenovac, of 11,000 children murdered in the Kozara Mountains; against that malignantly selective memory that embraces ethnic hatred. Only anguish and remorse from those who once preached it can persuade people that they are human beings as well as victims, that those who remember history are also condemned to repeat it.

“A Woman’s Work” By PETER LANDESMAN New York Times Magazine, September 15, 2002 Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting and burning. Roadblocks had been set up to cull fleeing Tutsis. By the third week of April, as the Rwanda genocide was reaching its peak intensity, tens of thousands of corpses were rotting in the streets of Kigali, the country's capital. Butare, a stronghold of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus that had resisted the government's orders for genocide, was the next target. Its residents could hear gunfire from the hills in the west; at night they watched the firelight of torched nearby villages. Armed Hutus soon gathered on the edges of town, but Butare's panicked citizens defended its borders. Enraged by Butare's revolt, Rwanda's interim government dispatched Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the national minister of family and women's affairs, from Kigali on a mission. Before becoming one of the most powerful women in Rwanda's government, Pauline -- as everyone, enemy and ally alike, called her -- had grown up on a small farming commune just outside Butare. She was a local success story, known to some as Butare's favorite daughter. Her return would have a persuasive resonance there. Soon after Pauline's arrival in town, cars mounted with loudspeakers crisscrossed Butare's back roads, announcing that the Red Cross had arrived at a nearby stadium to provide food and guarantee sanctuary. By April 25, thousands of desperate Tutsis had gathered at the stadium. It was a trap. Instead of receiving food and shelter, the refugees were surrounded by men wearing bandoleers and headdresses made of spiky banana leaves. These men were Interahamwe, thuggish Hutu marauders whose name means ''those who attack together.'' According to an eyewitness I spoke with this summer in Butare, supervising from the sidelines was Pauline, then 48, a portly woman of medium height in a colorful African wrap and spectacles. Before becoming Rwanda's chief official for women's affairs, Pauline was a social worker, roaming the countryside, offering lectures on female empowerment and instruction on child care and AIDS prevention. Her days as minister were similarly devoted to improving the lives of women and children. But at the stadium, a 30-year-old farmer named Foster Mivumbi told me, Pauline assumed a different responsibility. Mivumbi, who has confessed to taking part in the slaughter, told me that Pauline goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, ''Before you kill the women, you need to rape them.'' Tutsi women were then selected from the stadium crowd and dragged away to a forested area to be raped, Mivumbi recalled. Back at the stadium, he told me, Pauline waved her arms and then observed in silence as Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees. The Hutus finished off survivors with machetes. It took about an hour, ending at noon. Pauline stayed on, Mivumbi told me, until a bulldozer began piling bodies for burial in a nearby pit. (When questioned about this incident, Pauline's lawyers denied that she took part in atrocities in Butare.) Shortly afterward, according to another witness, Pauline arrived at a compound where a group of Interahamwe was guarding 70 Tutsi women and girls. One Interahamwe, a young man named Emmanuel Nsabimana, told me through a translator that Pauline ordered him and the others to burn the women. Nsabimana recalled that one Interahamwe complained that they lacked sufficient gasoline. ''Pauline said, 'Don't worry, I have jerrycans of gasoline in my car,' '' Nsabimana recalled. ''She said, 'Go take that gasoline and kill them.' I went to the car and took the jerrycans. Then Pauline said, 'Why don't you rape them before you kill them?' But we had been killing all day, and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning.'' 95

Round the same time, some Interahamwe arrived at the local hospital, where a unit of Doctors Without Borders was in residence. Rose, a young Tutsi woman who had sought refuge at the hospital, watched in terror as soldiers stormed the complex. (Rose, who is now under military protection, requested that her last name not be printed.) ''They said that Pauline had given them permission to go after the Tutsi girls, who were too proud of themselves,'' Rose told me. ''She was the minister, so they said they were free to do it.'' Pauline had led the soldiers to see rape as a reward. Chief among the Interahamwe at the hospital was Pauline's only son, a 24-year-old student named Arsène Shalom Ntahobali. Shalom, as he was known, was over six feet tall, slightly overweight and clean- shaven. He wore a track suit and sneakers; grenades dangled from his waist. Rose said that Shalom, who repeatedly announced that he had ''permission'' from his mother to rape Tutsis, found her cowering in the maternity ward. He yanked her to her feet and raped her against the wall. Before leaving Rose to chase after some students who had been hiding nearby, he promised that he'd return to kill her. But before Shalom could do so, she fled the hospital and ran home to her family. A few days later, Rose recalled, a local official knocked on her door. Rose told me that the official informed her that even though all Tutsis would be exterminated, one Tutsi would be left alive -- one who could deliver a progress report to God. Rose was to be that witness. And her instruction on her new role began that moment. ''Hutu soldiers took my mother outside,'' Rose told me, ''stripped off her clothes and raped her with a machete.'' On that first day, 20 family members were slaughtered before her eyes. Rose told me that until early July, when the genocide ended, she was led by Interahamwe to witness atrocity after atrocity. She said that even though the Interahamwe's overarching objective was to kill, the men seemed particularly obsessed by what they did to women's bodies. ''I saw them rape two girls with spears then burn their pubic hair,'' she said. ''Then they took me to another spot where a lady was giving birth. The baby was halfway out. They speared it.'' All the while, Rose repeatedly heard the soldiers say, ''We are doing what was ordered by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.'' I met Rose in Butare this summer. She is 32 now, a pretty woman with high cheekbones and small features. Speaking in an airless hotel room, Rose pitched slightly forward in a red business suit, her gaze direct. She explained that since the genocide she has suffered from stomach ulcers, and occasionally slips into semiconsciousness, racked with delirium and pain. ''People think I'm possessed,'' she said. These fits, she said, frighten her children -- her two born before 1994 and the four genocide orphans she adopted afterward. As we spoke, it was clear that Rose was telling her horrific story as carefully as possible, to finally fulfill, in a way much different from intended, her role as witness. Rose said that during the months the genocide was carried out, she saw Pauline Nyiramasuhuko three times. The minister was an unforgettable sight. She'd exchanged her colorful civilian wraps for brand-new military fatigues and boots. She was seen carrying a machine gun over her shoulder. Other survivors told me they heard the minister for women and family affairs spit invectives at Tutsi women, calling them ''cockroaches'' and ''dirt.'' She advised the men to choose the young women for sex and kill off the old. By one account, women were forced to raise their shirts to separate the mothers from the ''virgins.'' Sometimes, I was told, Pauline handed soldiers packets of condoms. Much of the violence took place in the scrubby yard in front of Butare's local government offices, or prefecture, where at one point hundreds of Tutsis were kept under guard. Witnesses recalled that Pauline showed up at night in a white Toyota pickup truck, often driven by Shalom, and supervised as Interahamwe loaded the truck with women who were driven off and never seen again. Often, when a woman at the prefecture saw Pauline, she appealed to her, as a fellow woman and mother, for mercy. But this, claimed survivors, only enraged Pauline. When one woman wouldn't stop crying out, a survivor recalled, the minister told the Interahamwe to shut her up. They stabbed the pleading woman and then slit her throat. 96

There will never be a precise accounting of how many Rwandans were massacred between April and July 1994. Human Rights Watch calculates the number to be at least 500,000, while the United Nations estimates that between 800,000 and one million Rwandans died during that period. Whatever the total, the rate of carnage and the concentration of the killing (Rwanda is roughly the size of New Jersey) give it the distinction of being the most ferocious mass slaughter in recorded history. Three-quarters of the Tutsi population was exterminated. Today, Rwanda's common greeting, the Kinyarwanda expression mwaramutse -- which translates as ''did you wake?'' -- is less an expression of ''good morning'' than it is of relief that one is breathing at all. Understandably, the world's attention subsequently focused on the sheer volume of the Rwandan slaughter. But the prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, are now coming to recognize the equally alarming and cynical story of what was left behind. Though most women were killed before they could tell their stories, a U.N. report has concluded that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide. Some were penetrated with spears, gun barrels, bottles or the stamens of banana trees. Sexual organs were mutilated with machetes, boiling water and acid; women's breasts were cut off. According to one study, Butare province alone has more than 30,000 rape survivors. Many more women were killed after they were raped. These facts are harrowing. More shocking still is that so many of these crimes were supposedly inspired and orchestrated by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, whose very job was the preservation, education and empowerment of Rwanda's women. In July 1994 Pauline fled Rwanda in a mass exodus of more than one million Hutus fearing retribution by the advancing Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. After finding safety in a refugee camp in Congo, she eventually slipped into Kenya, where she lived as a fugitive for almost three years. On July 18, 1997, however, Pauline was apprehended in Nairobi by Kenyan and international authorities. (Shalom was seized six days later, in a Nairobi grocery store he was running.) After interrogation by investigators, Pauline was transferred with Shalom to Tanzania, where both were delivered to the International Tribunal in Arusha. At the tribunal, Pauline faces 11 charges, including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. She is the first woman ever to be charged with these crimes in an international court. And she is the first woman ever to be charged with rape as a crime against humanity. (Her son, Shalom, faces 10 charges, to which he has pled innocence.) For the last five years mother and son have spent their days at the U.N. Detention Facility in Arusha in nearby 16-by-19 cells. They have access to a gym and a nurse. Pauline often spends time tending flowers and singing to herself in a common open-air courtyard. Since June 2001, when their trials began, Pauline and Shalom have spent most of their weekdays in a courtroom inside Arusha's dilapidated conference center. The U.N. Security Council established the Arusha tribunal in November 1994, 18 months after establishing a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. With all of Rwanda's judicial and law-enforcement personnel dead or in exile, and the country's physical infrastructure reduced to rubble, the U.N. chose to house the tribunal in this tourist hub near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Fifty-three Rwandan genocidaires are in custody in Arusha; 20 more have been indicted and are on the lam, most likely in Kenya and Congo.

This summer, I attended sessions of Pauline's trial. In court, her appearance suggested a schoolteacher. Now 56, she favored plain high-necked dresses that showed off the gleaming gold crucifix she usually wears. According to observers, at the beginning of the trial she shook her head and smirked as charges were read out. But as more and more survivors have come from Butare to testify against her, she has grown subdued. During my visit, Pauline mostly looked blankly around the courtroom past a pair of 97 scholarly bifocals, taking copious notes on a legal pad and avoiding the gaze of witnesses. Sometimes, I was told, she wears wild hairstyles and headdresses and slumps behind a computer screen that sits in front of her, as if she were trying to disguise herself from witnesses asked to identify her. On one such day 11 months ago, she didn't show up at all, preferring, her attorneys told the court, to worship in chapel; that morning, when asked to identify the defendant, the witness could point only to Pauline's chair. The courtroom is typically crowded with three judges, 12 defense attorneys and prosecutors, clerks, interpreters and other staff. Most days there are only a handful of spectators watching all this in a narrow gallery behind bulletproof glass -- and frequently there are none at all. Pauline and Shalom are being tried together with four other Hutu leaders from Butare who are also accused of genocide. Fourteen witnesses for the prosecution have testified so far, with 73 more still to go, most of whom will have something to say against Pauline, who faces life imprisonment. In most cases, she is accused of inciting crimes rather than carrying them out herself. However, according to a document prepared by tribunal investigators in preparation for the trial, one witness, code-named Q.C., saw a Tutsi community leader die ''at the hands of Nyiramasuhuko.'' (The report does not specify what weapon Pauline used.) Attorneys for each of the six accused will most likely open their defenses in 2004 and will probably call more than 100 witnesses of their own as the trial creeps along for at least another two years. Justice at the tribunal has moved at a glacial pace, with only eight convictions and one acquittal handed down in seven years. Pauline has consistently denied the charges against her. In 1995, before she was arrested, she gave an interview to the BBC in a squalid Hutu refugee camp across the Congo border, where she had been leading the camp's social services; her job duties included the reuniting of separated parents and children. When asked what she did during the war, Pauline replied: ''We moved around the region to pacify. We wrote a pacification document saying people shouldn't kill each other. Saying it's genocide, that's not true. It was the Tutsi who massacred the Hutu.'' Told that witnesses had accused her of murder, Pauline shot back: ''I cannot even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman -- a mother -- killed, then I'll confront that person.'' Over lunch during a break in court this summer, one of Pauline's attorneys, Nicole Bergevin, accused the Tribunal of making her client a scapegoat of the vindictive current government in Rwanda and of an international community guilt-ridden over its failure to stop the bloodletting. ''I'm sure there were some rapes,'' Bergevin said, ''but Pauline never ordered any rapes.'' Later she added: ''She was never known to be anti-Tutsi. I'm not saying that no one wanted the Tutsis to be exterminated. Probably there were, but it was not a plan. It was never the government's intention. If it was, Pauline was not aware of it.'' Bergevin then told me that Pauline didn't have any knowledge about the rapes taking place in Rwanda during the genocide. Pauline has only one concern, Bergevin said, and it is for Shalom, who like his mother, faces life imprisonment. ''She feels helpless,'' Bergevin said. My many requests to see Pauline were denied. The tribunal bars prisoners from contact with anyone other than family and friends (and even these visits are limited). I did, though, reach Pauline's husband, Maurice Ntahobari, who at the time of the genocide was the rector of National University in Butare. He now lives in Antwerp, Belgium; his Rwandan passport has been taken away. Though he admits to being in Butare during the genocide, Ntahobari insists he didn't see or hear any killing. As for the charges against Pauline, he reminded me that she had been a social worker. ''She was committed to promoting equality between men and women,'' he said defiantly. ''It is not culturally possible for a Rwandan woman to make her son rape other women. It just couldn't have taken place.'' Pauline's only error, he insisted, was in belonging to the side that lost. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was born in 1946 amid lush banana groves and green, misty valleys. Her parents were subsistence farmers in Ndora, a small, neat roadside settlement six miles east of Butare. Her family 98 and friends remember her as more ambitious and disciplined than bright. Her sister, Vineranda Mukandekaze, who is 60, told me that Pauline was ''good but not generous. She kept everything to herself.'' Juliana Niyirora, an old friend of Pauline's, said: ''From her childhood Pauline had political ambition. She always wanted to achieve high. If she saw someone build a house, she wanted a bigger house. If she saw someone do well, she wanted to do better.'' In high school, Pauline became friends with Agathe Kanziga, the eventual wife of the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was a crucial connection. After graduating, Pauline left Butare for Kigali to join the Ministry for Social Affairs, which was then establishing a network of centers teaching women how to take care of their families, providing instruction on such basics as cooking and supervising children. When Pauline was only 22, Agathe helped her skip up the bureaucratic ladder to become national inspector of the ministry. In 1968 Pauline married Maurice Ntahobari, who later became president of the Rwanda National Assembly, then minister of higher education and later rector of National University in Butare. By all accounts, however, Pauline was the dominant force in the family. ''Maurice was like the woman; he didn't say anything,'' said Jean-Baptist Sebukangaga, a professor of art at National University who has known Pauline since her childhood. ''Pauline directed everything. She got Maurice his job as rector at the university.'' A friend and neighbor told me that she once saw Pauline screaming at Maurice for not being more committed to the politics of the MRND, the ruling Hutu extremist party. At 24, nine months pregnant, Pauline, already the mother of a little girl, traveled to Israel on a government mission and gave birth to a son there. (Hence, Shalom.) She returned to Kigali, where in the years that followed she had two more daughters. But Pauline never gave up her job and eventually enrolled in law school, one of the few women in Rwanda to do so. ''She had four children, but she still wanted to go back to school,'' her friend Niyirora marveled. Already a local MRND party boss, in 1992 she was appointed minister of family and women's affairs. Pauline's brother-in-law, Matthias Ngiwijize, told me that when Pauline became a government minister, she changed. ''She stopped coming to her family's homes,'' he said. ''She didn't talk to anybody. She was only close to herself. She resented the poor part of the family. She even stopped visiting her mother.'' A woman eager to prove herself in a party structure built around men and Rwanda's patriarchal society, Pauline soon found that the road to political success led her back to her birthplace. Butare had become the government's biggest headache. Home to National University and a scientific-research institute -- and with the highest concentration of Tutsis in Rwanda -- Butare had the most enlightened citizens in the country. The town had been largely immune to Hutu extremism; the MRND never gained a foothold there. But Pauline tried to change all that through a program of intimidation. She would convoy through town with party thugs, setting up barricades in the streets, paralyzing traffic and disrupting town life. Pauline's periodic invasions of the town became known as Ghost Days, days when Butare stood still. Pauline was soon caught up in the anti-Tutsi ideology of her party. ''Before 1994 there was no racism in Butare,'' said Leoncie Mukamisha, an old schoolmate of Pauline's who worked under her at the ministry. ''Then Pauline came and organized demonstrations in town. The local papers described her as a frenzied madwoman.'' Leoncie said that Pauline's actions won the favor of the president, who recognized her obedience and anti-Tutsi virulence, and assigned to her a number of extremist Hutu ideologues as advisers.

Other friends I spoke with claimed that Pauline's anti-Tutsi conversion was a purely careerist move meant only to please the higher-ups. It was an echo of the old argument that many Nazis were ''just following orders.'' Her sister told me that even in 1994, just before the genocide, Pauline had many Tutsi friends, and that a number of Tutsis worked peacefully under Pauline at the ministry. 99

Leoncie portrayed her differently. She said Pauline's racism was ardent; at the ministry, she said, Pauline was ''horrified at having to be in daily contact with Tutsis.'' And a former Hutu political figure who met Pauline in 1992 says that in private discussions, her antipathy toward Tutsis was chillingly clear. ''When one spoke with her, one became aware that the Tutsi were people to be destroyed,'' he said. It may never be possible to answer what motivated Pauline's actions. She may have genuinely felt rage toward Tutsis; she may have been a simple opportunist, hungering for power. But certainly by 1994, her anti-Tutsi zealousness was public. During the genocide Pauline delivered admonishing speeches over Radio Rwanda. A witness recalled one speech: ''We are all members of the militia,'' Pauline said. ''We must work together to hunt down members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.'' In his confession to genocide and crimes against humanity, former Hutu Prime Minister Jean Kambanda identifies the members of his inner sanctum, where the blueprint of the genocide was first drawn up. The confession names only five names. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko's is one of them. During my visit to Butare this summer, two young women, Mary Mukangoga, 24, and Chantal Kantarama, 28, led me into the center of Butare to the prefecture, where they first met and became friends. ''I went to the prefecture because other refugees were there,'' Mary said in a near whisper. ''I preferred to be killed when we were all together.'' In the first weeks of the genocide, Chantal said, she had been abducted and raped by two Hutu men. She escaped and took refuge at a school near the prefecture. One day, Chantal recalled, she heard Pauline announcing through a microphone: ''I have a problem. The cockroaches are now near my house. Tomorrow come and help me. Help me get rid of them.'' Chantal fled to the prefecture. The next day, Chantal said, Pauline visited the prefecture with Shalom. Mother and son came with the young men of the Interahamwe and selected girls to rape. In silence, Mary and Chantal led me to the ruins of what was once a plastics factory, in a shady grove of trees 200 yards from the prefecture office. They explained that the Interahamwe used to store their ammunition in the factory, and that many evenings they were taken from the prefecture, led there and raped. ''Pauline would come and say, 'I don't want this dirt here, get rid of this dirt,''' Chantal recalled. The two young women became part of a group of five sex slaves who were kept at the prefecture and raped, repeatedly and together, every night for weeks. Then one day, the women were thrown into a nearby pit that was full of corpses. The pit, about 400 feet square, is now half-filled in with rubble and weeds. Chantal took me there, stepping to the edge; at that point she turned aside, refusing to look in. ''They used machetes to kill the ones who resisted and dumped them into the hole,'' she explained. She began to weep. She remained inside the pit for a night and a day, she said; then, on the second night, she climbed the jumbled corpses to pull herself out. I took Chantal back to her home, a neat mud hut in a bustling, dusty neighborhood of shops and wandering livestock. Chantal is married with two children; she was the only genocidal-rape survivor I met who was married. Her husband knows what happened to her. But for thousands of Rwandan survivors, one of the most insidious legacies of the rapes is the stigma -- and the inevitable isolation. In Rwandan society, it is almost impossible for a woman who is known to have been raped to marry. One witness who testified against Pauline in Arusha had been engaged to be married a month later. When her fiancé heard about the testimony, he broke off the engagement. Then there is the generation of children born of the rapes. As many as 5,000 such children have been documented and, most likely, there are many more than that who haven't. These children will most likely never know their fathers -- in most cases, the mother was raped so many times that the issue of paternity was not only pointless but emotionally perilous: in effect, all of her attackers had fathered that child. Compounding the dishonor, the mere sight of these children -- those who aren't abandoned -- can bring on 100 savage memories to survivors. Two women I met who gave birth to their rapists' children named the children with words that translate as ''Blessing From God'' as a way to ease the pain. But others in the community gave them names that put them in the same category as their fathers: ''Children of Shame,'' ''Gifts of the Enemy,'' ''Little Interahamwe.'' ''Did you ever see the look in a woman's eyes when she sees a child of rape?'' asked Sydia Nduna, an adviser at the International Rescue Committee Rwanda who works for a program in Kigali aimed at reducing gender violence. ''It's a depth of sadness you cannot imagine.'' The impact of the mass rapes in Rwanda, she said, will be felt for generations. ''Mass rape forces the victims to live with the consequences, the damage, the children,'' Nduna explained. Making matters worse, the rapes, most of them committed by many men in succession, were frequently accompanied by other forms of physical torture and often staged as public performances to multiply the terror and degradation. So many women feared them that they often begged to be killed instead. Often the rapes were in fact a prelude to murder. But sometimes the victim was not killed but instead repeatedly violated and then left alive; the humiliation would then affect not only the victim but also those closest to her. Other times, women were used as a different kind of tool: half-dead, or even already a corpse, a woman would be publicly raped as a way for Interahamwe mobs to bond together. But the exposure -- and the destruction -- did not stop with the act of rape itself. Many women were purposely left alive to die later, and slowly. Two women I met outside Butare, Francina Mukamazina and Liberata Munganyinka, are dying of AIDS they contracted through rape. ''My biggest worry is what will happen to my children when I'm gone,'' Francina told me. These children are as fragile as Francina fears: a U.N. survey of Rwandan children of war concluded that 31 percent witnessed a rape or sexual assault, and 70 percent witnessed murder. Francina's and Liberata's daughters survived but watched their siblings slaughtered and their mothers violated. They will grow up beside children born of rape, all of them together forced to navigate different but commingling resentments. During my visit to Chantal's home, I asked her how she coped with her savage memories. She replied: ''I just want to forget. My children are my consolation. Most rape survivors have nothing. We're poor, but I have my family. It's all I want.'' I found Mary later that afternoon a few miles of dirt track away. She was sitting alone in her home, a stifling mud hut about 20 feet square with one small window. Mary told me that the rapes were her first and only sexual experience. Then, eyes averted, twisting her hands, she told me that five months ago she discovered she had AIDS. She said that two of the other young women she and Chantal were kept with are already dead. Their fate is not the exception but the rule. According to one estimate, 70 percent of women raped during the Rwanda genocide have H.I.V.; most will eventually die from it. In an interview at the State House in Kigali, Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, talked about the mass rapes in measured, contemplative sentences, shaking his head, his emotions betraying him. ''We knew that the government was bringing AIDS patients out of the hospitals specifically to form battalions of rapists,'' he told me. He smiled ruefully, as if still astonished by the plan. The most cynical purpose of the rapes in Butare was to transmit a slower, more agonizing form of death. ''By using a disease, a plague, as an apocalyptic terror, as biological warfare, you're annihilating the procreators, perpetuating the death unto the generations,'' said Charles B. Strozier, a psychoanalyst and professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. ''The killing continues and endures.'' The use of AIDS as a tool of warfare against Tutsi women helped prosecutors in Arusha focus on rape as a driving force of the genocide. ''H.I.V. infection is murder,'' said Silvana Arbia, the Rwanda Tribunal's acting chief of prosecutions. ''Sexual aggression is as much an act of genocide as murder is.'' 101

During my visit with Mary, I learned that she had been ''murdered'' in just this way. This young woman has only one relative who lived through the genocide, a younger brother who lives in Kigali. ''All of my friends have AIDS,'' she told me in June. ''But I'll die of loneliness before I die of AIDS,'' she whispered, choking on her tears. ''All I wanted was to marry and have a family.'' Today, she lies gravely ill in her hut, cared for by Chantal, withering away. Mass rape has long been a weapon of war. According to legend, ancient Rome was united after Romulus and his soldiers terrorized their rivals, the Sabines, by raping their women. Widespread sexual assault has been documented in conflicts ranging from the Crusades to the Napoleonic Wars. It was Abraham Lincoln who approved the laws that eventually established the modern understanding of rape as a war crime. In 1863, he commissioned Francis Lieber, an expert jurist, to develop a set of instructions for governing armies during the Civil War. Lieber specifically named rape as a crime serious enough to be subject to the death penalty. ''The Lieber code was revolutionary,'' said Kelly Askin, director of the International Criminal Justice Institute. ''Before, gender crimes had been very much ignored.'' International law was more reticent about the problem. ''Rape was considered a kind of collateral damage,'' said Rhonda Copelon, a professor of law at CUNY. ''It was seen as part of the unpreventable, fundamental culture of war.'' After World War II, the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers in Nanking were prosecuted as war crimes by an international tribunal. However, rape was prosecuted only in conjunction with other violent crimes. The same tribunal, moreover, failed to prosecute the most institutionalized form of sexual violence, the enslavement of ''comfort women'' by the Japanese Army. In 1946, rape was named a crime against humanity by an Allied statute governing German war-crimes trials, but the law was never implemented. It was not until 1995, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, that rape was prosecuted as a grave crime tantamount to torture. The defendant in that 1995 case was a Serbian policeman named Dusan Tadic. The tribunal charged him with various crimes, including the rape of a Muslim woman in a Bosnian prison camp. The rape was labeled a crime against humanity. So was another sexual crime, this one perpetrated against men. Tadic tortured two male Muslim prisoners, forcing one man to bite off the testicles of another, who then bled to death. The tribunal's indictments set an important precedent. Disappointingly, tribunal prosecutors were forced to drop the rape charge after Tadic's victim refused to testify -- she was afraid of reprisal if she did so. The prosecutors were successful, however, with the sexual-mutilation charge. Convicted of torture, among other crimes, Tadic was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Individual stories of rape in Rwanda had begun to accumulate as soon as the genocide ended, mostly through interviews collected by groups like Human Rights Watch. But because Rwandan culture discourages women from talking about sexual matters -- and also because the idea that rape was merely ''collateral damage'' remained ingrained in the judicial community -- the prosecutors in Arusha did not initially connect the dots between rape and the Hutus' genocide blueprint. The legal breakthrough came by a willful accident, during the 1998 trial in Arusha of Jean Paul Akayesu, mayor of Taba, a Rwandan commune. Initially, Akayesu had been charged only with genocide. Among the survivors who testified against him was a woman code-named H. (The identities of tribunal witnesses are shielded.) ''H. disclosed to me prior to her going on the stand that she was raped out in the bush,'' explained Pierre- Richard Prosper, the current U.S. ambassador at large for war-crimes issues, who led the tribunal's prosecution against Akayesu. ''She said that the Interahamwe would come in at the end of the day and start raping the women, and that Akayesu was there.'' Sensing a window into not just the act of H.'s rape but the intention of her rapists, Prosper dispatched investigators to Rwanda, specifically to find women who were raped in Taba during the third and fourth weeks of April. Of the 500 or so women they knew had been held captive, investigators discovered that almost all had been killed and dumped in a mass 102 grave. Witness H. was one of about a dozen who was able to escape. So was a woman code-named J.J. Prosper put J.J. on the stand. Her tale was sickeningly familiar: she said she had been dragged away by Interahamwe and raped repeatedly. Then she mentioned that Akayesu watched her being raped from the doorway and goaded the Interahamwe, saying with a laugh, ''Never ask me again what a Tutsi woman tastes like.'' The indictment against Akayesu was amended to include the first-ever charge of rape as a crime against humanity. Prosper argued that Akayesu, in making that flip remark as the Interahamwe proceeded with raping J.J., was effectively ordering them to continue raping others. On Sept. 2, 1998, Akayesu was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape. He was sentenced to three life sentences, plus 80 years imprisonment, and transferred to a U.N.-sponsored prison in Mali, in West Africa. ''The intention in Rwanda was an abstraction: to kill without killing,'' said Arbia, the tribunal prosecutor. She described the case of a 45-year-old Rwandan woman who was raped by her 12-year-old son -- with Interahamwe holding a hatchet to his throat -- in front of her husband, while their five other young children were forced to hold open her thighs. ''The offense against an individual woman becomes an offense against the family,'' Arbia said, ''which becomes an offense against the country, and so, by deduction, against humanity.'' On Aug. 10, 1999, a year after Akayesu's conviction, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko's indictment was amended to include rape as a crime against humanity. According to prosecutors and witnesses, her frequent instructions to Interahamwe at the prefecture to rape before they killed, or to rape women instead of killing them, had triggered a collective sadism in Butare -- one that had even inspired violence in the local peasants. One Tutsi rape survivor I met in Butare, a farmer named Suzanne Bukabangwa, had never met Pauline, but became her victim by extension all the same. Her neighbors, uneducated farmers, had kept her as a sex slave during the genocide, she said, torturing her nightly. She remembered two things most of all: the stamens from the banana trees they used to violate her, leaving her body mutilated, and the single sentence one of the men used: ''We're going to kill all the Tutsis, and one day Hutu children will have to ask what did a Tutsi child look like.'' In Butare, I spoke to a local peasant, Lucien Simbayobewe, who was caught up in this cycle of humiliation. Now 40, he was being held prisoner in the local prison. (Only leaders of the genocide have been sent to Arusha.) He wore the pink shorts and matching pink shirt of the Rwandan inmate's uniform. Wringing his hands in his lap, he told me about one woman he killed who still comes to him every night in his dreams. He couldn't remember this apparition's name, but he said he'd killed her when Pauline first organized the Butare Interahamwe. Choking on emotion, he said, ''She comes in the night dancing and gesturing with her hands invitingly, like a lover.'' My translator gyrated her arms to show me the motion. ''The woman smiles, and says, 'How are you?' But before I can answer, she says, 'Goodbye,' and then she vanishes -- and I wake up.'' Lucien then told me in detail about killing her. But when I asked Lucien if he'd raped the woman, he fell silent and fought back tears. Every prisoner I spoke with described explicitly whom he killed and how. Not a single one admitted to raping a Tutsi woman. Perhaps this is because after the war, Rwanda's Legislature declared that rapes committed during the genocide were the highest category of crime; those convicted are sentenced to death. Or maybe these men could somehow justify to themselves having murdered but not raped. In any event, the weight of that level of confession was obviously too much to bear, and if there could be any tangible proof that rape was considered the more shameful crime, it was this. Some scholars are beginning to share this opinion. ''Rape sets in motion continuous suffering and extreme 103 humiliation that affects not just the individual victim but everyone around her,'' said the philosopher and historian Robert Jay Lifton, who in books like ''The Nazi Doctors'' has explored the psychology of genocide. ''A woman is seen as a symbol of purity. The family revolves around that symbol. Then here is the brutal attack on that, stigmatizing them all. All this perpetuates the humiliation, reverberating among survivors and their whole families.'' He paused. ''In this way, rape is worse than death.'' Gerald Gahima, Rwanda's prosecutor general, agrees. ''Rape was the worst experience of victims of the genocide,'' he said. ''Some people paid to die, to be shot rather than tortured. Their prayers were for a quick and decent death. Victims of rape did not have that privilege.'' The case against Pauline further cements the precedent established in the Akayesu trial: namely, that inciting mass rape is a crime against humanity. But Pauline's case transcends jurisprudence. She presents to the world a new kind of criminal. ''There is a shared concept across cultures that women don't do this kind of thing,'' said Carolyn Nordstrom, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. ''Society doesn't yet have a way to talk about it, because it violates all our concepts of what women are.'' I found Pauline's mother, Theresa Nyirakabue, on the same plot of land in Ndora where Pauline was born and reared. Directly across the road is one of the many orderly settlements of sturdy homes the government built for Tutsi survivors of the genocide. Theresa is 86, diminutive and half-blind, and keeps upright by grasping a tall staff. But her milky eyes are electric, her smile is quick and she was eager to invite strangers into her home to talk about her daughter. She hadn't seen Pauline since the genocide began and was hungry for news of her. I asked her if she knew that Pauline was in detention in Arusha, and she nodded. I asked her if she knew why, and she nodded again. Then I said that I saw Pauline three weeks before in the courtroom and that she looked healthy enough. Smiling broadly, Theresa said: ''Pauline wanted to teach at the health center. She liked to teach good health.'' She paused, still smiling, and said, ''Pauline's ministership was the joy of my heart.'' I asked her if she thought her daughter was innocent of the charges against her. Theresa sobered instantly. ''It is unimaginable that she did these things,'' she said. ''She wouldn't order people to rape and kill. After all, Pauline is a mother.'' Then Theresa leaned forward, her hands outstretched. ''Before the war, Hutu and Tutsi were the same,'' she said. She told me that Pauline had many Tutsi friends. Theresa added that during the genocide, she herself had hidden a Tutsi boy in her home. At first, Theresa's story took me by surprise. But then, Rwanda's lethal racialism could never be as starkly delineated as, say, Nazi Germany's. Whether Hutus and Tutsis are separate ethnic groups is a subject of debate, but it was only after European colonists arrived in Rwanda that any political distinction was made between them. Intermarriage had long been common, and both groups spoke the same language and practiced the same religion. Around the turn of the 20th century, however, German and Belgian colonists used dubious racialist logic -- namely, that Tutsis had a more ''Caucasian'' appearance -- to designate the minority Tutsi the ruling class, empowering them as their social and governing proxy. In the 1930's, the Belgians, deciding to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, needed to decide exactly who was who in Rwanda. The most efficient procedure was simply to register everyone and require them to carry cards identifying them as one or the other. Eighty-four percent of the population declared themselves Hutu and 15 percent Tutsi. Considering the degree of intermarriage in Rwandan history, this accounting was hardly scientific. What's more, Rwandans sometimes switched ethnic identities, the wealthy relabeling themselves as Tutsis and the poor as Hutus. ''Identity became based on what you could get away with,'' said Alison Des Forges, a senior adviser to the African Division of Human Rights Watch who has studied Rwanda for 30 years. ''Half of the people are not clearly distinguishable. There was significant intermarriage. Women who fit the Tutsi stereotype -- taller, lighter, with more Caucasian-like features -- became desirable. But it 104 didn't necessarily mean that the women were one or the other.'' With desire comes its emotional alter ego, resentment. A revolution in 1959 brought the majority Hutus to power. As tensions increased around 1990, politicians began disseminating propaganda denouncing Tutsi females as temptresses, whores and sexual deviants. Before the 1994 genocide began, Hutu newspapers ran cartoon after cartoon depicting Tutsi women as lascivious seducers. Unlike the Nazis, who were fueled by myths of Aryan superiority, the Hutus were driven by an accumulated rage over their lower status and by resentment of supposed Tutsi beauty and arrogance. ''The propaganda made Tutsi women powerful, desirable -- and therefore something to be destroyed,'' Rhonda Copelon told me. ''When you make the woman the threat, you enhance the idea that violence against them is permitted.'' This pernicious idea, of course, came to full fruition during the genocide. The collective belief of Hutu women that Tutsi women were shamelessly trying to steal their husbands granted Hutu men permission to rape their supposed competitors out of existence. Seen through this warped lens, the men who raped were engaged not only in an act of sexual transgression but also in a purifying ritual. ''Once women are defiled as a group, anything one does to them is done in some kind of higher purpose,'' Robert Jay Lifton said. ''It becomes a profound, shared motivation of eliminating evil. Tutsis must be killed down to the last person in order to bring about utopia. They are seen, in a sense, as already dead.'' This explanation conformed with my sense of Pauline's view of the Tutsis; like many of her countrymen, she seemed able to view individual Tutsis as abstractions. But in my conversations with Pauline's mother, things became even more complicated. After Theresa told me about the Tutsi boy she had hidden, she paused, looked at me intently and told me, matter-of-factly, that Pauline's great-grandfather was a Tutsi. The great-grandfather had been redesignated a Hutu, Theresa explained, because he became poor. Stunned, and knowing that in Rwanda kinship is defined patrilineally -- through the blood of fathers -- I asked Theresa if that didn't mean that Pauline was a Tutsi. ''Yes, of course,'' she said eagerly. And would Pauline have known that she came from Tutsi lineage? Theresa pursed her lips and gave a firm, affirmative nod. The young man Theresa hid was not difficult to find. His name is Dutera Agide, 36, a jobless handyman in Ndora. He told me that he is Pauline's second cousin, and that he is a Tutsi. He said he had spent one week hiding in Theresa's house, listening to the slaughter going on outside. Then he said something even more surprising. At one point, he said, he was hidden in Pauline's house. ''I saw Pauline twice a week during the genocide,'' Dutera told me. ''One day she came home, and she said: 'The war is not ending. I'm starting to get afraid. I don't know what will happen.' Then she came back again with her husband, loaded things from the house into a car and left. She looked scared.'' After my conversation with Dutera, I went back to Theresa's home one more time. Her exuberance had all but gone. She seemed to have settled into the truth, or a form of it. ''People killed people because of fear to be also killed by the perpetrators of the genocide,'' she said. ''My daughter, who was also a minister in the government, could have participated in the killing not because she wanted to kill but because of fear.'' Theresa then used the Kinyarwanda expression Mpemuke ndamuke: ''to be dishonest in order to escape death.'' I spoke again with Pauline's sister, Vineranda. ''In 1959, when the Tutsi regime changed, our family changed with the situation,'' Vineranda explained. ''Because she was a Tutsi, Pauline was afraid that maybe the government would find out. And she was among many men in the government. And she had money and a position. She didn't want to lose that.''

Robert Jay Lifton was intrigued by the revelation that Pauline was of Tutsi descent. ''Part of Pauline 105

Nyiramasuhuko's fierceness had to do with eliminating the Tutsi in her,'' he hypothesized. ''She was undergoing an individual struggle to destroy that defiled element in herself.'' Pauline's husband, Maurice Ntahobari, denied irritably that there were Tutsi roots in either his or Pauline's family. After being asked repeatedly about Pauline's and Shalom's actions during the genocide, he sighed and said: ''Try to understand, try to be in my shoes. This is about my wife and my son.'' When I spoke again with Pauline's attorney, Nicole Bergevin, in July, and told her what Pauline's mother had told me about Pauline being of Tutsi descent, Bergevin said she knew. (In an odd reversal, she later denied that Pauline was Tutsi.) Bergevin's demeanor had changed since we had last spoken. This time around, she sounded defeated. Though she still insisted that Pauline knew nothing of the mass raping or murdering, she said, ''I'm sure she's going to be found guilty.'' Then she paused and said with resignation, ''When you do murder trials, you realize that we are all susceptible, and you wouldn't even dream that you would ever commit this act.'' There was a short silence. ''But you come to understand that everyone is. It could happen to me, it could happen to my daughter. It could happen to you.'' The crimes Pauline Nyiramasuhuko are accused of are monstrous. Her capacity for pity and compassion, and her professional duty to shield the powerless, deserted her, or collapsed under the irresistible urge for power. But in seeking a reasonable explanation for Pauline's barbarity, I remembered something that Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch told me. ''This behavior lies just under the surface of any of us,'' Des Forges said. ''The simplified accounts of genocide allow distance between us and the perpetrators of genocide. They are so evil we couldn't ever see ourselves doing the same thing. But if you consider the terrible pressure under which people were operating, then you automatically reassert their humanity -- and that becomes alarming. You are forced to look at these situations and say, 'What would I have done?' Sometimes the answer is not encouraging.'' Pauline did possess humanity, but it was in short supply, and she reserved it for her only son, Shalom, whom she had helped turn into a rapist and a killer. In one of her last moments as an engineer of the genocide, however, she returned to her role as woman and mother. It was in July 1994, right when the Hutu Army was collapsing. Butare had descended into mayhem, and Pauline's side had lost. One of Pauline's neighbors, Lela, spotted the minister in the streets. ''I saw Pauline and Shalom at a roadblock,'' she said. ''Pauline was wearing military fatigues, and she was still trying to separate Tutsis and Hutus, but the confusion was massive. There were people running everywhere. The Rwandan Patriotic Front was coming.'' A short time later, Lela saw Pauline again. This time she was standing alone outside her home, looking worried. ''I was shocked,'' Lela said. ''She was wearing camouflage. She was standing upright in her uniform like a soldier, trying to see what was happening up and down the road. She just looked furious. She was looking everywhere for Shalom. He was her pet. She loved Shalom so much.'' 106

“Not Women Anymore…” The Congo’s rape survivors face pain, shame and AIDS by Stephanie Nolen It took Thérèse Mwandeko a year to save the money. She knew she could walk the first 40 kilometers of her journey, but would need to pay for a lift for the last 20. So she traded bananas and peanuts until she’d saved $1.50 in Congolese francs, then set out for Bukavu. She walked with balled-up fabric clenched between her thighs, to soak up blood that had been oozing from her vagina for two years, since she had been gang-raped by Rwandan militia soldiers who plundered her village in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Finally, she arrived at Panzi Hospital. Here, Thérèse takes her place in line, along with 80 women, waiting for surgery to rebuild her vagina. Dr. Denis Mukwege, Panzi’s sole gynecologist and one of two doctors in the eastern Congo who can perform such reconstructive surgeries, can repair only five women a week. The air is thick with flies. It reeks from women with fistula: rips in the vaginal wall where rape tore out chunks of flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina. Yet Thérèse, 47, is happier than she’s been in years. “Until I came here, I had no hope I could be helped,” she says. Across the DRC are tens of thousands of women like this: physically ravaged, emotionally terrorized, financially impoverished. Except for Thérèse and a few fortunate others, these women have no help of any kind: Eight years of war have left the country in ruins, and Congolese women have been victims of rape on a scale never seen before. Every one of dozens of armed groups in this war has used rape as a weapon. Amnesty International (AI) researchers believe there has been more rape here than in any other conflict, but the actual scale is still unknown. “They rape a woman, five or six of them at a time — but that is not enough. Then they shoot a gun into her vagina,” says Dr. Mukwege. “In all my years here, I never saw anything like it. … [T]o see so many raped, that shocks me, but what shocks me more is the way they are raped.” Each armed group has a trademark manner of violating, he explains. The Burundians rape men as well as women. The Mai Mai — local defense forces — rape with branches or bayonets, and mutilate their victims. The Rwandans, like those who attacked Thérèse, set groups of soldiers to rape one woman.

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At Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, two rape victims await vaginal surgery / photo by Stephanie Nolen The ward where Thérèse waits for surgery is run by a social worker, Louise Nzigire. The women tell her they are “not women anymore.” They are often too physically damaged to farm, or bear children, and there is such stigma associated with rape in Congo — where female virginity is prized and the husband of a rape survivor is considered shamed — that rape survivors are routinely shunned by husbands, parents and communities. Nzigire believes rape has been a cheap, simple weapon for all parties in the war, more easily obtainable than bullets or bombs: “This violence was designed to exterminate the population,” she says quietly. The Congo war has claimed more lives than any conflict since the end of World War II, yet receives almost no attention outside central Africa. An estimated 4 million people have died here since 1996 — the vast majority not by firepower but starvation or preventable diseases, as people hid in the jungle to escape the fighting. It began when Rwanda’s Tutsi government sent troops over the border to pursue Hutu militias responsible for the 1994 genocide, since many Hutu had escaped to the impenetrable Congolese bush. When the then- Zairian army offered little resistance, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame formed a hasty alliance with a Congolese rebel group attempting to overthrow dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Tutsi-run Burundi and neighboring Uganda saw a lucrative opportunity, and sent troops to help the putsch. The rebels took Kinshasa in 1997, installing Laurent Kabila as president. But the next year, Rwandan and Ugandan troops turned on Kabila, so he called in Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe to back his army. All of Congo’s neighbors joined the war, which gave them a chance to indulge in a frenzy of looting diamonds and other minerals, in which Congo is abundant. After a 2002 peace deal, a fragile, transitional government holds power, in a uniquely Congolese power- sharing: President Joseph Kabila (thrust into the job at age 29 after his father’s 2001 assassination) shares power with four of the major warlords whose militias have wrought havoc for the past years. This is peace enough to placate international donors, who’ve poured money in to prop up this flimsy government and to repair roads and phone lines in the capital — and reassure international mining companies, who are reopening up shop all over the country. But beyond Kinshasa’s city limits, there is little sign the war has ended. In the east, where the worst hostilities were fought, a half-dozen armed groups still control territory, holding civilians hostage. Here there is no rebuilding, no phone service, no electrical grid, no roads. Hospitals, when they still stand, have been looted of everything from beds to bandages. No government employee — teachers, judges, nurses — has been paid in 14 years. There is a United Nations peacekeeping mission charged with maintaining order, but it has 12,000 soldiers for an area the size of Western Europe (the U.N. mission to tiny Kosovo, by contrast, had 40,000 troops); furthermore, the troops lack the ability to move outside town centers, while the militias move freely in the forests. The people who live out here have been rendered feral by the war. Their homes have been burned, their possessions pillaged, men shot, women and girls raped, boys abducted to serve as soldiers. Any survivors took refuge in the forest, living naked, eating grubs and roots. This season, for the first time in six years, people in most of the eastern provinces have returned to their fields and planted crops. Shami Alubu, 21, came out of the jungle and back to the town of Kibombo last year, although she can’t go home. In early 2002, while working in her fields, she was snatched by Mai Mai militants, who dragged 108 her into town, then kept her there for a full day, beating and raping her with guns and sticks. The whole time, she was within earshot of her 7-month-old son Florent, who was sobbing wildly. When it was over, she limped back to her house — but at the sight of her, her husband ordered her away. “It was like he thought I wanted to go with the Mai Mai,” Shami says bitterly. Shami’s town, Kibombo, changed hands a half-dozen times during the war: the Rwandan army, then the Mai Mai, then Rwandans again. Every time new troops seized Kibombo, they set out systematically to rape. When the soldiers lost the town to a new militia, they often dragged dozens of women with them as they fled, holding them as sexual slaves and cooks in their jungle retreats until the next time they raided the town. Today, Shami is thin and hunched; she breathes with difficulty. “Maybe I have AIDS,” she murmurs. An estimated 30 percent of the women raped in Congo ’s war are infected with HIV; as many as 60 percent of the combatants are believed to have the virus. Shami also suffers continual pain in her shredded vagina, but has had no medical help since the rape. There is a hospital in Kibombo, with six wards: Four are empty; two each contain three iron bed frames, stripped of any mats. The director, Jean- Yves Mukamba (the only doctor for this region of 25,000 square kilometers) knows he is surrounded by women suffering raging venereal infections, HIV, prolapsed uteruses, torn vaginas. “I think it was a large majority of the women here who were raped, almost all of them. But I can’t help them with just my bare hands,” he says. When he decided, late last year, to consult with sexual-violence victims, more than 100 women turned up the first morning. “I had nothing, not even antibiotics, to give them.” Not that antibiotics would have helped much: “Most cases were traumatization of the genitals: These women had been raped with a tree branch or the barrel of a gun, or a bayonet. When you see a woman who was forced by 10 men — the trauma…” The doctor holds out his thin hands, as if to push the memory away. Nor is it just Kibombo. “The women rely on a national health system that has been totally destroyed,” says Andrew Philip, coauthor of an AI report on the Congo : “They walk for days…then are charged for health care because none of the doctors or nurses is paid [by the state], and it’s beyond the means of most patients.” A typical doctor’s visit costs about 70 cents. Although the government now collects substantial revenues on exports, particularly diamonds, it insists it cannot afford to pay nurses or doctors, or abolish consultation fees. Dr. Mukamba has not received so much as a Band-Aid from Kinshasa in two years. Legal assistance is even rarer than medical help. There have been fewer than a dozen prosecutions of sexual assault in the eastern DRC. Many rape survivors know where their assailants are; in some cases, they see them every day. But large parts of the country lack judges, lawyers, police or detectives. Staff that are present often answer to the militias, which still control large chunks of territory. No senior officer of any military (as well as the national armies of Rwanda , Uganda and Burundi , which committed thousands of rapes) has ever been held accountable for sexual violence committed by his staff.

There is yet another problem. “Most women won’t pursue this legally, because they are afraid it’s not over. They figure that when the militia is back in power, they will be targeted,” explains Emiliane Tuma Sibazuri, who heads a women’s group supporting rape survivors in the eastern town of Kasongo. “They think, ‘If I give my name to try to get justice, then when they come back, I will be attacked, or my family.’ All we can do is try to help them forget.” 109

The grossly underfunded U.N. mission is in little position to assist. Last October, when the mission went to the Security Council to ask for additional soldiers and money, it won a laughably small increase. Then, weeks later, came the revelation that U.N. peacekeepers themselves are contributing to Congo’s frenzy of sexual assault. The U.N. said that 150 allegations of sexual abuse were reported committed by peacekeepers (from Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Tunisia and Uruguay) in Congo, and that there were likely hundreds more that would never be reported; commanders were allegedly resisting measures to curb such abuses. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced there was “clear evidence that acts of gross misconduct have taken place.” Furthermore, U.N. investigators found that peacekeepers and civilian workers were paying an average of US $2 for sex with women in populations they were assigned to protect, or bartering for sex with food, basic supplies or a fictitious promise of work in safe, well-guarded U.N. compounds. A recent International Rescue Committee survey, conducted in all regions of the Congo , found that 31,000 people a month are still dying, almost all for preventable reasons. But as the delicate peace inches out across the country, more people emerge from the jungle, and more women like Thérèse Mwandeko are able to make their way to a hospital. “We treat one, and send her home to the village,” says Dr. Mukwege, “and she returns with five more.” Stephanie Nolen is the Africa correspondent for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. She lives in Johannesburg. 110

A Black Mud From Africa Helps Power the New Economy By BLAINE HARDEN New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2001. Before you make another call on that cell phone, take a moment, close your eyes and reflect on all you've done for Mama Doudou, queen of the rain-forest whores. Thanks to dollars that you and millions like you have spent on cell phones and Sony PlayStations, Mama Doudou had a knockout spring season in a mining camp called Kuwait, deep in central Africa. Kuwait -- a name suggesting big money from below ground -- was one of 20 illegal mines hacked in the past year out of the Okapi Faunal Reserve, a protected area in the Ituri rain forest of eastern Congo. The reserve is named after a reclusive, big-eared relative of the giraffe that is found only in Congo. Along with about 4,000 okapi, the reserve is home to a rich assemblage of monkeys (13 species), an estimated 10,000 forest elephants and about the same number of Mbuti people, often called pygmies, who live by hunting, gathering and trading. Mama Doudou, though, didn't mess with wildlife or pygmies. She sold overpriced bread in the mining camp and negotiated terms of endearment among 300 miners and 37 prostitutes. For a miner to secure the affections of a prostitute, he had to bring Mama Doudou some of the precious ore he was digging up in the reserve: a gritty, superheavy mud called coltan. Coltan is abundant and relatively easy to find in eastern Congo. All a miner has to do is chop down great swaths of the forest, gouge S.U.V.-size holes in streambeds with pick and shovel and spend days up to his crotch in muck while sloshing water around in a plastic washtub until coltan settles to the bottom. (Coltan is three times heavier than iron, slightly lighter than gold.) If he is strong and relentless and the digging is good, a miner can produce a kilogram a day. Earlier this year, that was worth $80 -- a remarkable bounty in a region where most people live on 20 cents a day. Coltan is the muck-caked counterpoint to the brainier-than-thou, environmentally friendly image of the high-tech economy. The wireless world would grind to a halt without it. Coltan, once it is refined in American and European factories, becomes tantalum, a metallic element that is a superb conductor of electricity, highly resistant to heat. Tantalum powder is a vital ingredient in the manufacture of capacitors, the electronic components that control the flow of current inside miniature circuit boards. Capacitors made of tantalum can be found inside almost every laptop, pager, personal digital assistant and cell phone. Mama Doudou, who is 45, is formally known as Doudou Wangonda, but she is called Mama because in the rain forest she is widely respected. She told me she doesn't understand what ''rich white people'' do with coltan. But she's exceptionally well versed in how much they pay for it. Late last year, exploding demand for tantalum powder created a temporary worldwide shortage, which contributed to Sony's difficulties in getting its new PlayStation 2 into American stores, as well as to a tenfold price increase on the world tantalum market. Mama Doudou abandoned her position as a traditional chief and joined thousands of people who walked into the Ituri forest hoping to get rich quick. When the price of coltan was soaring, Mama Doudou made an absolute killing. First, she sold bread to miners at a scandalous price. She made as much as $800 worth of coltan for every $50 in cash that she spent on baking supplies. Then she used what she called her ''natural leadership abilities'' to win election as president of the camp prostitutes, most of whom were poorly educated, town-bred women in their late 111 teens. As president, Mama Doudou collected -- and turned over to the owner of the mine -- a variety of fees and fines related to the mating habits of miners and their women. The normal arrangement in the camp was for a miner, after forking over a kilo of coltan to Mama Doudou, to pair off with one woman for the duration of their respective stays in the forest. The miner's ''temporary wife'' would cook his food, haul his water and share his bed in a shack made of sticks and leaves. In return, he would give her enough coltan to keep her in cosmetics, clothes and beer. If a miner decided that he wanted a prettier young woman to haul his water, he had to pay Mama Doudou another kilo of coltan. ''This is called the infringement fee,'' she explained. Likewise, if a woman decided, as many did, to dump one miner in favor of another who happened to be a better producer of coltan, then she, too, had to pay Mama Doudou a kilo of coltan. ''This also is called the infringement fee,'' she said. Frequent swapping of ''temporary wives'' in an equatorial forest where hygiene was problematic and condoms all but nonexistent led to an explosion of gonorrhea. ''There was too much sofisi,'' Mama Doudou said, using the Swahili word for the disease. Soon half the people in Kuwait had it. Antibiotics that could knock down gonorrhea were on sale in the camp for a tomato tin of coltan (worth about $27). They sold exceptionally well. Mama Doudou's business ventures were part of a squalid encounter between the global high-tech economy and one of the world's most thoroughly ruined countries. Congo -- always too well endowed with natural resources and too weakly governed for its own good -- is a nation in name only. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the late stages of a political malady that students of modern Africa call ''failed state syndrome.'' Roads, schools and medical clinics barely exist. Malnutrition and poverty have brought back diseases, like sleeping sickness, that had been under control. The World Health Organization recently estimated that the monthly toll of ''avoidable deaths'' in Congo was 72,800. The eastern half of the country, with about 20 million residents, has no real government and no laws except the ever-changing rules imposed by invading armies from Rwanda and Uganda and roving bands of well-armed predators. A scalding report that was presented this spring to the United Nations Security Council said that coltan perpetuates Congo's civil war. The report, based on a six-month investigation by an expert panel, said the war ''has become mainly about access, control and trade'' of minerals, the most important being coltan. The one thing that unites the warring parties, according to the report, is a keen interest in making money off coltan. ''Because of its lucrative nature,'' the report said, the war ''has created a 'win-win' situation for all belligerents. Adversaries and enemies are at times partners in business, get weapons from the same dealers and use the same intermediaries. Business has superseded security concerns.'' Environmental groups have added emotional fuel to the accusations in the U.N. report by cataloging the devastation that the coltan trade has brought to Congo's wildlife. About 10,000 miners and traders have overrun Kahuzi-Biega National Park, according to a report released in May by a coalition of environmental groups. Before the civil war, the park was home to about 8,000 eastern lowland gorillas. That number may have since been reduced to fewer than 1,000, the report estimated, because miners and others in the forest are far from food supplies and must rely on bush meat. Apes are killed for food or killed in traps set for other animals. If something is not done to stop mining and poaching, the report said 112 that the eastern lowland gorilla ''will become the first great ape to be driven to extinction -- a victim of war, human greed and high technology.'' While coltan extraction has taken advantage of Congo's ruin, it did not cause it. That has taken more than 110 years of misrule, during which Congo has attracted a string of shady suitors. The most malign of the courtships began in the late 19th century, when agents of King Leopold II of the Belgians started stripping central Africa of ivory and rubber. To enforce production quotas on the locals, Leopold's agents chopped off their hands, noses and ears. Before the king was forced to trade away the hugely profitable colony in 1908, an estimated five million to eight million Congolese were killed. In the 1960's, the Americans waded in. To fight Communism and secure access to cobalt and copper, the Central Intelligence Agency helped bring about the assassination of Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. That was followed by three decades of White House coddling of his successor, Mobutu Sese Seku, Africa's most famous billionaire dictator, who set a poisoned table for the chaos that followed his eventual overthrow in 1997. Since then, Congo has been locked in a sprawling and numbingly complicated civil war that by some estimates has become the deadliest conflict in the history of independent Africa. The war has caused the deaths of 2.5 million people over the past two and a half years in eastern Congo alone, according to a recent report by the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid agency, which described the emergency in Congo as ''perhaps worse than any to unfold in Africa in recent decades.'' The Coltan story seemed clear when I flew to Congo early this summer. Globalization was causing havoc in a desperate country. For the sake of our electronic toys, guerrillas were getting rich, gorillas were getting slaughtered and the local people were getting paid next to nothing to ruin their country's environment. Traveling inside Congo, however, I found clarity on the question of coltan to be as scarce as paved roads, functioning schools or sober soldiers. What muddied up the story, first of all, was the curiously egalitarian quality of coltan mining. Just about anyone with a shovel and a strong back can dig it up. It's easier to find and more plentiful than diamonds, which have created their own blood frenzy in Africa. It has injected hundreds of millions of dollars into an economy that had virtually ceased to function. True, much of that money has been creamed off by warlords and profiteers, and very little of it has been redistributed in social services. Some, though, has filtered down to miners, middlemen and commerçants. To discover the importance of coltan's trickle-down effect (and to meet Mama Doudou), I first had to take a spine-mashing, 13-hour ride on the back of a Yamaha trail bike over a mud track that used to be the main east-west highway across northern Congo. The road I traveled is all but impassable to motorized vehicles, excepting a trail bike driven by someone who knows how to negotiate mammoth mudholes, many of which are deeper and longer than a New York City garbage truck, as well as when to bribe drunken rogue soldiers and when to run from them. Riding through the reserve, I was menaced by a Congolese soldier, a member of the Front for the Liberation of Congo, a poorly disciplined rebel group supported by the Ugandan Army. He demanded my boots, explaining that he didn't have boots. He demanded money, explaining that he had none. He pointed his AK-47 at my stomach. Gunning the Yamaha, my driver sped away before the soldier, who was stumble-down drunk, could react. This encounter, my driver later explained, was normal. In Epulu, a village that is the administrative center of the Okapi reserve, I spent an afternoon with a coltan miner named Munako Bangazuna, a quiet, wary man who stood only 4 feet 6 inches tall. Early this year, Bangazuna enjoyed what he called ''my richest period.'' In a mine inside the Okapi reserve, he dug about a kilo of coltan a day, he said. Working seven days a week, he made more than $2,000 a month for two 113 months in a row -- a fortune in the forest. He is 26 and married with children. Mining allowed him to provide his family with food and consumer goods he never dreamed he'd be able to afford. Besides food, he bought a bicycle, a radio, a foam mattress, cooking pots, dishes and clothes for himself, his wife and his kids. Bangazuna does not claim to have spent his money wisely. The mining camp where he lived was called Boma Libala, a phrase that means ''kill the marriage.'' It was the largest and, by reputation, nastiest mining camp in the reserve, with 3,000 miners and several hundred prostitutes. ''I lost a lot of my money on prostitution and also on Primus,'' said Bangazuna, referring to a brand of Congolese beer. His wife cooked for him in Boma Libala, he said, during the time he was drinking lots of beer and spending most of his money on prostitutes. ''I was lucky,'' he said. ''She did not divorce me.'' Bangazuna was hardly alone in his bad behavior. One coltan moment that particularly nauseates authorities occurred this spring in Epulu, when a drunken miner and a seminaked prostitute fornicated in broad daylight on the lawn of the primary school, in front of village children. Like several miners I interviewed in the reserve, a territory controlled by the Ugandan military and its rebel allies, Bangazuna was compelled to give up a slice of his coltan diggings to an extortion racket run by Ugandan soldiers. ''In the morning, when you get up, the Ugandans hand you a pack of cigarettes, and they give you two bottles of beer,'' said Bangazuna, explaining his daily routine. ''In the evening, when you finish digging, you have to pay them back with coltan. It was very expensive. One bottle of beer cost me two spoons of coltan'' -- about $8 -- and cigarettes were one spoon. If you refuse to pay or if you don't have coltan, they beat you and threaten to shoot you.'' When I talked to Bangazuna, he was broke. He had spent all the money he'd earned digging coltan. He also happened to be under arrest. Game wardens (whose expenses are paid partly by donations from several American zoos) had caught him digging coltan in the reserve after he'd been warned not to do so. When the wardens let him go, Bangazuna confided, he planned to dig more coltan. This spring, the price of coltan crashed, falling from $80 a kilo in March to $8 in June. As cell phone sales slumped and the Nasdaq shrank, demand for coltan from companies like Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola fell precipitously. Suddenly, a Congolese coltan miner had to dig coltan all day simply to afford to eat in a mining camp, and he had to dig for three or four days to find enough coltan to pay for the drugs that would clear up a case of sofisi. At the Kuwait mine, everything came unglued. The prostitutes, then the merchants, then the miners and, finally, Mama Doudou herself abandoned the mine and walked out of the rain forest. A few days before game wardens burned it to the ground, I visited another mine in the Okapi reserve. It was more accessible than Kuwait and, unlike the infamous but shut-down Boma Libala camp, where Bangazuna had squandered so much of his money, it still had a few working miners. To get to Tuko-Tu camp, I walked for about two hours on a well-trod trail beneath a high canopy of trees. They shrouded the rain forest in permanent shadow. It rained hard as I walked, and the dark, soggy forest was threaded with filigrees of mist. For all its gloom, the forest was about as primeval as a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. Every half hour or so, two or three giggly women, seemingly dressed for a party in glistening lipstick and gaudy dresses, smelling of strong perfume, would materialize out of the dank greenery. Their bare feet were caked with mud; they carried their shoes. They were prostitutes from Tuko-Tu, and they were walking out to buy bread and beer in a village on the main road. 114

On both sides of the footpath, a towering mainstay of the forest was dying for the sake of coltan. The eko, one of three giant trees that form the rain forest's canopy, has a durable, waterproof bark. Miners strip off a long girdle of the bark to make a trough into which they shovel coltan-bearing mud, which is then flushed with water. Stripping bark has killed thousands of eko trees in the reserve, which greatly upsets the local pygmies. They rely on the tree, whose flowers attract bees, as depots for gathering honey. The mining camp squatted in a clearing hacked out of the forest. It was a jumble of stick huts with roofs made from forest leaves. Most of the huts were empty. The camp was down to 57 residents, from a high of 320 when coltan was at $80 a kilo. Out in front of the huts, a few toddlers stood stoically in the mud as bored young mothers picked lice from their hair. Ugandan soldiers used to come here, I was told, to force miners to buy beer and cigarettes. But they had stopped coming in May, when the price of coltan began to fizzle. There were still miners, of course, but they were out digging, deeper in the forest. So I walked on, following a streambed. After about an hour and a half of walking, the streambed suddenly disappeared. A bombing range took its place -- or what looked like a bombing range. Craters, hundreds of them, many 10 feet deep, all of them partly filled with muck, marched on for miles through the forest -- until they ended in a cluster of about 25 miners. With shovels, picks and plastic wash tubs, they were creating more craters in the streambed. Jean Pierre Asikima, 43, was among them. He gave up digging gold two months earlier, he said, to come into the forest in search of coltan. But the digging was poor, the price was low and he said he was losing weight in the forest. ''I have come too late, and soon I will quit,'' he said, standing in a crater he had dug, waist-deep in muddy water that was the color of chicken gravy. Still, Asikima worked with a fury. With mud and gravel from his crater, he built a seven-foot-high mound. Then he shoveled and scraped the mud into an eko-bark trough, while another miner, a 16-year- old who said his name was Dragon went to work with a blue plastic washtub, pouring several hundred tubs full of water through the makeshift sluice. After about an hour, a glittering black stain had gathered at the foot of the trough. It was an ounce or so of coltan, the fruit of five hours of digging and washing. Asikima said it was not enough to buy a tin of rice for dinner. As he began to dig another crater, I asked him about his life in the forest. He said he despised it. ''If I had another job,'' he said, ''I would not come here. But there are no other jobs. When this mine closes, I will go and find another one.'' He is not alone. Although the price has crashed, many coltan-bearing regions of eastern Congo remain thick with miners, commerçants and prostitutes. In a country with a 20-cents-a-day living standard, the chance of earning a few dollars from coltan is still a powerful enough reason to live in the bush and shovel muck, sell bread and risk sofisi. To halt war profiteering and the destruction of wildlife, the report to the U.N. Security Council called for an embargo on the export of coltan and other natural resources from Uganda and Rwanda. Although the embargo has yet to be imposed by the Security Council, European and American companies that profit from the coltan trade have been scurrying to avoid bad publicity. Pictures of dead gorillas and of environmental ruin in Congo's national parks have been particularly effective in triggering alarm among companies that pride themselves on their environmental images. Sabena, the Belgian airline named in the report for hauling Congolese coltan to Europe, announced in June that it will no longer carry the ore. Nokia and Motorola are among several major mobile-phone makers that have publicly demanded that their suppliers stop using ore mined illegally in Congo. And so 115 it has gone down the supply chain. The world's largest maker of tantalum capacitors, Kemet, in Greenville, S.C., has asked its suppliers to certify that ore does not come from Congo or bordering countries, including Uganda and Rwanda. Cabot Corporation, a Boston-based company that is the world's second-largest processor of tantalum powder, announced this spring that it ''deplores all unlawful and immoral activities'' connected with coltan mined in Congo and declared that it will not buy any ore from that part of the world. The high moral ground that companies have been quick to stake out has the added attraction of being profit-neutral, at least for the moment. The tantalum market is glutted because of declining demand in the slumping technology sector. As important, there has been a sharp increase in production by a giant Australian mining company, called Sons of Gwalia, which now produces half the world's supply. In the immediate future, it looks as though less and less of the world's tantalum will come from Congo's coltan mines. And as the U.N. sees it, this will be a very good thing. Its report concluded, ''The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.'' But inside what's left of Congo, a wide array of influential people (who are not combatants in the war and are not getting rich from coltan) make a persuasive case that these demands are naive and could well produce disastrous consequences. They argue that in a collapsed state where the likelihood of constructive Western intervention is next to nil, there simply are no easy fixes. ''For local people who are trying to make a bit of money out of coltan, how can an embargo possibly help?'' asked Aloys Tegera, who directs the Pole Institute, a nongovernmental social-research institute in Goma, in eastern Congo. Tegera is well aware of coltan's destructive side: he is the lead author of a study on the severe social impact of coltan mining, which describes how teachers have been lured to the mines from the country's few functioning classrooms and explains why teenage girls have turned to prostitution. ''Coltan fuels the war; nobody can deny that,'' said Tegera. ''That is why we maybe will never get peace. But civilians, especially those who are organized, also are getting some money from this.'' He and many others find it more than slightly insulting that in a country where millions are hungry and coltan is helping to feed some of them, a de facto embargo is gathering steam among high-tech companies apparently worried less about human beings than about the public-relations downside of dead gorillas. And, like many other Congolese, he declines to become morally riled up about foreign domination. ''Of course, the Rwandans are pillaging us,'' he said. ''But they are not the first to do it and they are no worse than the others. King Leopold did it. The Belgians did it. Mobutu and the Americans did it. The most sorrowful thing I have to live with is that we are incapable of coming up with an elite that can run things with Congolese interests in mind.'' Terese Hart, an American botanist who helped create the Okapi Faunal Reserve and has worked there since the early 1980's, supports neither an embargo on coltan nor a quick pullout of Ugandan forces from northeast Congo. ''The world wants to intervene from a distance and pull the strings on the puppet,'' said Hart, who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society. ''The problem is that the strings are not connected to anything. When outsiders struggle to find solutions for Congo, they often assume there is some kind of government. There is no government. There is nothing.'' As for coltan mining, Hart said it is silly for the outside world to try to squeeze one of the few ways for poor people to make a bit of money. ''Outside the reserve, I think that coltan mining is the lesser evil of the types of exploitation that occur when there is no government,'' Hart said. ''I prefer mining to logging. Cutting timber in the rain forest is part of an irreversible ecological process. I don't think coltan mining does as much permanent damage. 116

The miner will not get much, but at least he will continue to live.'' Among the Congolese I spoke to about coltan, the consensus was that they could not risk the simple solutions that outsiders had prescribed. Struggling to survive in a failed state, they saw no straightforward answers, no moral high ground. For them, the only thing worse than mining coltan is not mining it. What progress there is in eastern Congo tends to be slow, small-scale and subject to sudden reversal. The World Health Organization has succeeded in working with rebel groups to vaccinate most children for polio, but it says 7 of 10 children have not received any other vaccines in the past decade. Western donors are distributing some medicines, seeds and tools, but three-quarters of the population still has no access to basic health care. When progress is being made, it often involves the mixed blessing of coltan. In eastern Congo, two mining entrepreneurs, Edouard Mwangachuchu, a Congolese Tutsi, and his American partner, Robert Sussman, a physician from Baltimore, are struggling to build a legitimate business in an illegitimate state. They run a company that even their competitors say treats miners fairly. It supplies shovels and picks to about a thousand men who operate as independent contractors in mines located far from national parks, protected forests and endangered gorillas. The land belongs to Mwangachuchu, whose herds were slaughtered in 1995, as the Mobutu era was sputtering to an end. Desperate to shore up popular support, Mobutu encouraged Congolese in the east to attack the ethnic Tutsi minority. A mob pulled Mwangachuchu, then a financial adviser to the provincial government in Goma, out of his Suzuki jeep on his way to work. They choked him with his necktie, ripped off his clothes and dumped him at the Rwandan border. Crowds later stoned and shot at his house. Mwangachuchu, his wife and their six children were granted political asylum in the United States in 1996, and they rented a house in Laurel, Md. Two years later, homesick and bored with his job at a Carvel ice-cream plant, Mwangachuchu returned home for a visit. Civil war was raging. His cattle farm had been destroyed, his herds gone, his buildings burned. But he still owned the land, which he had long known was rich in coltan. In 1999, a year after his first trip home, he heard that there was money to be made mining it. All he needed was a partner, someone with a bit of money. Robert Sussman, 55, sold his medical practice in Baltimore in the early 1990's. Comfortably well off, he began a second career as a mining-camp doctor in remote countries, including Myanmar and Congo. Intrigued by mining, he began thinking of going into the business himself. He met Mwangachuchu in a Goma hotel in 1998, and they became partners the following year, as the price of coltan began to go up. Sussman and Mwangachuchu say they are investing in Congo for the long term. They believe they can operate profitably despite the recent slump in coltan prices and despite the fact that their mines are still periodically fought over by roving bands of armed men. The partners say they have laid the foundation for a solid business. ''We are proud of what we are doing in Congo,'' Sussman told me. ''We want the world to understand that if it's done right, coltan can be good for this country.'' Sussman and Mwangachuchu, of course, are also in it for the money. High coltan prices last year gave them an unexpected windfall. Sussman said they sold 22 metric tons of coltan, which earned them about $7.5 million -- before they paid their many bills. Since then, they have bought about 25 more tons of coltan from miners in the field -- ore that they have not been able to sell. 117

Last year, Sussman and Mwangachuchu shipped their ore to Europe on Sabena airlines. That airline now refuses their business, and they are scrambling to find another shipper. They fear that a corporate embargo could cripple their business and idle miners who have come to depend on them. ''We don't understand why they are doing this,'' Mwangachuchu told me. ''The Congolese have a right to make business in their own country.'' Blaine Harden is a national correspondent for The Times. His last article for the magazine was about a doctor who died fighting the ebola virus. 118

THE CLIMATE OF MAN—II: The curse of Akkad. by ELIZABETH KOLBERT The New Yorker, Issue of 2005-05-02 The world’s first empire was established forty-three hundred years ago, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The details of its founding, by Sargon of Akkad, have come down to us in a form somewhere between history and myth. Sargon—Sharru-kin, in the language of Akkadian—means “true king”; almost certainly, though, he was a usurper. As a baby, Sargon was said to have been discovered, Moses-like, floating in a basket. Later, he became cupbearer to the ruler of Kish, one of ancient Babylonia’s most powerful cities. Sargon dreamed that his master, Ur-Zababa, was about to be drowned by the goddess Inanna in a river of blood. Hearing about the dream, Ur-Zababa decided to have Sargon eliminated. How this plan failed is unknown; no text relating the end of the story has ever been found. Until Sargon’s reign, Babylonian cities like Kish, and also Ur and Uruk and Umma, functioned as independent city-states. Sometimes they formed brief alliances—cuneiform tablets attest to strategic marriages celebrated and diplomatic gifts exchanged—but mostly they seem to have been at war with one another. Sargon first subdued Babylonia’s fractious cities, then went on to conquer, or at least sack, lands like Elam, in present-day Iran. He presided over his empire from the city of Akkad, the ruins of which are believed to lie south of Baghdad. It was written that “daily five thousand four hundred men ate at his presence,” meaning, presumably, that he maintained a huge standing army. Eventually, Akkadian hegemony extended as far as the Khabur plains, in northeastern Syria, an area prized for its grain production. Sargon came to be known as “king of the world”; later, one of his descendants enlarged this title to “king of the four corners of the universe.” Akkadian rule was highly centralized, and in this way anticipated the administrative logic of empires to come. The Akkadians levied taxes, then used the proceeds to support a vast network of local bureaucrats. They introduced standardized weights and measures—the gur equalled roughly three hundred litres—and imposed a uniform dating system, under which each year was assigned the name of a major event that had recently occurred: for instance, “the year that Sargon destroyed the city of Mari.” Such was the level of systematization that even the shape and the layout of accounting tablets were imperially prescribed. Akkad’s wealth was reflected in, among other things, its art work, the refinement and naturalism of which were unprecedented. Sargon ruled, supposedly, for fifty-six years. He was succeeded by his two sons, who reigned for a total of twenty-four years, and then by a grandson, Naram-sin, who declared himself a god. Naram-sin was, in turn, succeeded by his son. Then, suddenly, Akkad collapsed. During one three-year period, four men each, briefly, claimed the throne. “Who was king? Who was not king?” the register known as the Sumerian King List asks, in what may be the first recorded instance of political irony. The lamentation “The Curse of Akkad” was written within a century of the empire’s fall. It attributes Akkad’s demise to an outrage against the gods. Angered by a pair of inauspicious oracles, Naram-sin plunders the temple of Enlil, the god of wind and storms, who, in retaliation, decides to destroy both him and his people: For the first time since cities were built and founded, The great agricultural tracts produced no grain, The inundated tracts produced no fish, The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine, The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow. At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart, One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . . These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities! He who slept on the roof, died on the roof, He who slept in the house, had no burial, People were flailing at themselves from hunger. 119

For many years, the events described in “The Curse of Akkad” were thought, like the details of Sargon’s birth, to be purely fictional.

In 1978, after scanning a set of maps at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, a university archeologist named Harvey Weiss spotted a promising-looking mound at the confluence of two dry riverbeds in the Khabur plains, near the Iraqi border. He approached the Syrian government for permission to excavate the mound, and, somewhat to his surprise, it was almost immediately granted. Soon, he had uncovered a lost city, which in ancient times was known as Shekhna and today is called Tell Leilan. Over the next ten years, Weiss, working with a team of students and local laborers, proceeded to uncover an acropolis, a crowded residential neighborhood reached by a paved road, and a large block of grain- storage rooms. He found that the residents of Tell Leilan had raised barley and several varieties of wheat, that they had used carts to transport their crops, and that in their writing they had imitated the style of their more sophisticated neighbors to the south. Like most cities in the region at the time, Tell Leilan had a rigidly organized, state-run economy: people received rations—so many litres of barley and so many of oil—based on how old they were and what kind of work they performed. From the time of the Akkadian empire, thousands of similar potsherds were discovered, indicating that residents had received their rations in mass-produced, one-litre vessels. After examining these and other artifacts, Weiss constructed a time line of the city’s history, from its origins as a small farming village (around 5000 B.C.), to its growth into an independent city of some thirty thousand people (2600 B.C.), and on to its reorganization under imperial rule (2300 B.C.). Wherever Weiss and his team dug, they also encountered a layer of dirt that contained no signs of human habitation. This layer, which was more than three feet deep, corresponded to the years 2200 to 1900 B.C., and it indicated that, around the time of Akkad’s fall, Tell Leilan had been completely abandoned. In 1991, Weiss sent soil samples from Tell Leilan to a lab for analysis. The results showed that, around the year 2200 B.C., even the city’s earthworms had died out. Eventually, Weiss came to believe that the lifeless soil of Tell Leilan and the end of the Akkadian empire were products of the same phenomenon—a drought so prolonged and so severe that, in his words, it represented an example of “climate change.” Weiss first published his theory, in the journal Science, in August, 1993. Since then, the list of cultures whose demise has been linked to climate change has continued to grow. They include the Classic Mayan civilization, which collapsed at the height of its development, around 800 A.D.; the Tiwanaku civilization, which thrived near Lake Titicaca, in the Andes, for more than a millennium, then disintegrated around 1100 A.D.; and the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which collapsed around the same time as the Akkadian empire. (In an account eerily reminiscent of “The Curse of Akkad,” the Egyptian sage Ipuwer described the anguish of the period: “Lo, the desert claims the land. Towns are ravaged. . . . Food is lacking. . . . Ladies suffer like maidservants. Lo, those who were entombed are cast on high grounds.”) In each of these cases, what began as a provocative hypothesis has, as new information has emerged, come to seem more and more compelling. For example, the notion that Mayan civilization had been undermined by climate change was first proposed in the late nineteen-eighties, at which point there was little climatological evidence to support it. Then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, American scientists studying sediment cores from Lake Chichancanab, in north-central Yucatán, reported that precipitation patterns in the region had indeed shifted during the ninth and tenth centuries, and that this shift had led to periods of prolonged drought. More recently, a group of researchers examining ocean-sediment cores collected off the coast of Venezuela produced an even more detailed record of rainfall in the area. They found that the region experienced a series of severe, “multiyear drought events” beginning around 750 A.D. The collapse of the Classic Mayan civilization, which has been described as “a demographic disaster as profound as any other in human history,” is thought to have cost millions of lives. The climate shifts that affected past cultures predate industrialization by hundreds—or, in the case of the 120

Akkadians, thousands—of years. They reflect the climate system’s innate variability and were caused by forces that, at this point, can only be guessed at. By contrast, the climate shifts predicted for the coming century are attributable to forces that are now well known. Exactly how big these shifts will be is a matter of both intense scientific interest and the greatest possible historical significance. In this context, the discovery that large and sophisticated cultures have already been undone by climate change presents what can only be called an uncomfortable precedent.

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS, is situated just south of Columbia University’s main campus, at the corner of Broadway and West 112th Street. The institute is not well marked, but most New Yorkers would probably recognize the building: its ground floor is home to Tom’s Restaurant, the coffee shop made famous by “Seinfeld.” GISS, an outpost of NASA, started out, forty-four years ago, as a planetary-research center; today, its major function is making forecasts about climate change. GISS employs about a hundred and fifty people, many of whom spend their days working on calculations that may—or may not—end up being incorporated in the institute’s climate model. Some work on algorithms that describe the behavior of the atmosphere, some on the behavior of the oceans, some on vegetation, some on clouds, and some on making sure that all these algorithms, when they are combined, produce results that seem consistent with the real world. (Once, when some refinements were made to the model, rain nearly stopped falling over the rain forest.) The latest version of the GISS model, called ModelE, consists of a hundred and twenty- five thousand lines of computer code. GISS’s director, James Hansen, occupies a spacious, almost comically cluttered office on the institute’s seventh floor. (I must have expressed some uneasiness the first time I visited him, because the following day I received an e-mail assuring me that the office was “a lot better organized than it used to be.”) Hansen, who is sixty-three, is a spare man with a lean face and a fringe of brown hair. Although he has probably done as much to publicize the dangers of global warming as any other scientist, in person he is reticent almost to the point of shyness. When I asked him how he had come to play such a prominent role, he just shrugged. “Circumstances,” he said. Hansen first became interested in climate change in the mid-nineteen-seventies. Under the direction of James Van Allen (for whom the Van Allen radiation belts are named), he had written his doctoral dissertation on the climate of Venus. In it, he had proposed that the planet, which has an average surface temperature of eight hundred and sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, was kept warm by a smoggy haze; soon afterward, a space probe showed that Venus was actually insulated by an atmosphere that consists of ninety-six per cent carbon dioxide. When solid data began to show what was happening to greenhouse- gaslevels on earth, Hansen became, in his words, “captivated.” He decided that a planet whose atmosphere could change in the course of a human lifetime was more interesting than one that was going to continue, for all intents and purposes, to broil away forever. A group of scientists at NASA had put together a computer program to try to improve weather forecasting using satellite data. Hansen and a team of half a dozen other researchers set out to modify it, in order to make longer-range forecasts about what would happen to global temperatures as greenhouse gasescontinued to accumulate. The project, which resulted in the first version of the GISS climate model, took nearly seven years to complete. At that time, there was little empirical evidence to support the notion that the earth was warming. Instrumental temperature records go back, in a consistent fashion, only to the mid-nineteenth century. They show that average global temperatures rose through the first half of the twentieth century, then dipped in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Nevertheless, by the early nineteen-eighties Hansen had gained enough confidence in his model to begin to make a series of increasingly audacious predictions. In 1981, he forecast that “carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise of natural climate variability” around the year 2000. During the exceptionally hot summer of 1988, he appeared before a Senate 121 subcommittee and announced that he was “ninety-nine per cent” sure that “global warming is affecting our planet now.” And in the summer of 1990 he offered to bet a roomful of fellow-scientists a hundred dollars that either that year or one of the following two years would be the warmest on record. To qualify, the year would have to set a record not only for land temperatures but also for sea-surface temperatures and for temperatures in the lower atmosphere. Hansen won the bet in six months.

Like all climate models, GISS’s divides the world into a series of boxes. Thirty-three hundred and twelve boxes cover the earth’s surface, and this pattern is repeated twenty times moving up through the atmosphere, so that the whole arrangement might be thought of as a set of enormous checkerboards stacked on top of one another. Each box represents an area of four degrees latitude by five degrees longitude. (The height of the box varies depending on altitude.) In the real world, of course, such a large area would have an incalculable number of features; in the world of the model, features such as lakes and forests and, indeed, whole mountain ranges are reduced to a limited set of properties, which are then expressed as numerical approximations. Time in this grid world moves ahead for the most part in discrete, half-hour intervals, meaning that a new set of calculations is performed for each box for every thirty minutes that is supposed to have elapsed in actuality. Depending on what part of the globe a box represents, these calculations may involve dozens of different algorithms, so that a model run that is supposed to simulate climate conditions over the next hundred years involves more than a quadrillion separate operations. A single run of the GISS model, done on a supercomputer, usually takes about a month. Very broadly speaking, there are two types of equations that go into a climate model. The first group expresses fundamental physical principles, like the conservation of energy and the law of gravity. The second group describes—the term of art is “parameterize”—patterns and interactions that have been observed in nature but may be only partly understood, or processes that occur on a small scale, and have to be averaged out over huge spaces. Here, for example, is a tiny piece of ModelE, written in the computer language FORTRAN, which deals with the formation of clouds: C**** COMPUTE THE AUTOCONVERSION RATE OF CLOUD WATER TO PRECIPITATION RHO=1.E5*PL(L)/(RGAS*TL(L)) TEM=RHO*WMX(L)/(WCONST*FCLD+ 1.E-20) IF(LHX.EQ.LHS) TEM=RHO*WMX(L)/ (WMUI*FCLD+1.E-20) TEM=TEM*TEM IF(TEM.GT.10.) TEM=10. CM1=CM0 IF(BANDF) CM1=CM0*CBF IF(LHX.EQ.LHS) CM1=CM0 CM=CM1*(1.- 1./EXP(TEM*TEM))+1. *100.*(PREBAR(L+1)+ * PRECNVL(L+1)*BYDTsrc) IF(CM.GT.BYDTsrc) CM=BYDTsrc PREP(L)=WMX(L)*CM END IF C**** FORM CLOUDS ONLY IF RH GT RH00 219 IF(RH1(L).LT.RH00(L)) GO TO 220. All climate models treat the laws of physics in the same way, but, since they parameterize phenomena like cloud formation differently, they come up with different results. (At this point, there are some fifteen major climate models in operation around the globe.) Also, because the real-world forces influencing the climate are so numerous, different models tend, like medical students, to specialize in different processes. GISS’s model, for example, specializes in the behavior of the atmosphere, other models in the behavior of the oceans, and still others in the behavior of land surfaces and ice sheets. Last fall, I attended a meeting at GISS which brought together members of the institute’s modelling team. When I arrived, about twenty men and five women were sitting in battered chairs in a conference room across from Hansen’s office. At that particular moment, the institute was performing a series of runs for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The runs were overdue, and apparently the I.P.C.C. was getting impatient. Hansen flashed a series of charts on a screen on the wall summarizing some of the results obtained so far. The obvious difficulty in verifying any particular climate model or climate-model run is the prospective 122 nature of the results. For this reason, models are often run into the past, to see how well they reproduce trends that have already been observed. Hansen told the group that he was pleased with how ModelE had reproduced the aftermath of the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, which took place in June of 1991. Volcanic eruptions release huge quantities of sulfur dioxide—Pinatubo produced some twenty million tons of the gas—which, once in the stratosphere, condenses into tiny sulfate droplets. These droplets, or aerosols, tend to cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. (Man-made aerosols, produced by burning coal, oil, and biomass, also reflect sunlight and are a countervailing force to greenhouse warming, albeit one with serious health consequences of its own.) This cooling effect lasts as long as the aerosols remain suspended in the atmosphere. In 1992, global temperatures, which had been rising sharply, fell by half of a degree. Then they began to climb again. ModelE had succeeded in simulating this effect to within nine-hundredths of a degree. “That’s a pretty nice test,” Hansen observed laconically.

One day, when I was talking to Hansen in his office, he pulled a pair of photographs out of his briefcase. The first showed a chubby-faced five-year-old girl holding some miniature Christmas-tree lights in front of an even chubbier-faced five-month-old baby. The girl, Hansen told me, was his granddaughter Sophie and the boy was his new grandson, Connor. The caption on the first picture read, “Sophie explains greenhouse warming.” The caption on the second photograph, which showed the baby smiling gleefully, read, “Connor gets it.” When modellers talk about what drives the climate, they focus on what they call “forcings.” A forcing is any ongoing process or discrete event that alters the energy of the system. Examples of natural forcings include, in addition to volcanic eruptions, periodic shifts in the earth’s orbit and changes in the sun’s output, like those linked to sunspots. Many climate shifts of the past have no known forcing associated with them; for instance, no one is certain what brought about the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in Europe some five hundred years ago. A very large forcing, meanwhile, should produce a commensurately large—and obvious—effect. One GISS scientist put it to me this way: “If the sun went supernova, there’s no question that we could model what would happen.” Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or levelling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since pre-industrial times, the concentration of CO2in the earth’s atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 parts per million to 378 p.p.m. During the same period, concentrations of methane, an even more powerful (but more short-lived) greenhouse gas, have more than doubled, from .78 p.p.m. to 1.76 p.p.m. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square metre, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts of energy have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, subtracted) for every single square metre of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square metre. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans—all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy- Bake oven.) It could be argued that the delay that is built into the system is socially useful, because it enables us—with the help of climate models—to prepare for what lies ahead, or that it is socially disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren. Either way, if current trends continue, which is to say, if steps are not 123 taken to reduce emissions, carbon-dioxide levels will probably reach 500 parts per million—nearly double pre-industrial levels—sometime around the middle of the century. By that point, of course, the forcing associated with greenhouse gases will also have increased, to four watts per square metre and possibly more. For comparison’s sake, it is worth keeping in mind that the total forcing that ended the last ice age—a forcing that was eventually sufficient to melt mile-thick ice sheets and raise global sea levels by four hundred feet—is estimated to have been just six and a half watts per square metre. There are two ways to operate a climate model. In the first, which is known as a transient run, greenhouse gases are slowly added to the simulated atmosphere—just as they would be to the real atmosphere—and the model forecasts what the effect of these additions will be at any given moment. In the second, greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere all at once, and the model is run at these new levels until the climate has fully adjusted to the forcing by reaching a new equilibrium. Not surprisingly, this is known as an equilibrium run. For doubled CO2, equilibrium runs of the GISS model predict that average global temperatures will rise by 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Only about a third of this increase is directly attributable to more greenhouse gases; the rest is a result of indirect effects, the most important among them being the so-called “water-vapor feedback.” (Since warmer air holds more moisture, higher temperatures are expected to produce an atmosphere containing more water vapor, which is itself a greenhouse gas.) GISS’s forecast is on the low end of the most recent projections; the Hadley Centre model, which is run by the British Met Office, predicts that for doubled CO2the eventual temperature rise will be 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, while Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies predicts 7.7 degrees. In the context of ordinary life, a warming of 4.9, or even of 7.7, degrees may not seem like much to worry about; in the course of a normal summer’s day, after all, air temperatures routinely rise by twenty degrees or more. Average global temperatures, however, have practically nothing to do with ordinary life. In the middle of the last glaciation, Manhattan, Boston, and Chicago were deep under ice, and sea levels were so low that Siberia and Alaska were connected by a land bridge nearly a thousand miles wide. At that point, average global temperatures were roughly ten degrees colder than they are today. Conversely, since our species evolved, average temperatures have never been much more than two or three degrees higher than they are right now. This last point is one that climatologists find particularly significant. By studying Antarctic ice cores, researchers have been able to piece together a record both of the earth’s temperature and of the composition of its atmosphere going back four full glacial cycles. (Temperature data can be extracted from the isotopic composition of the ice, and the makeup of the atmosphere can be reconstructed by analyzing tiny bubbles of trapped air.) What this record shows is that the planet is now nearly as warm as it has been at any point in the last four hundred and twenty thousand years. A possible consequence of even a four- or five-degree temperature rise—on the low end of projections for doubled CO2—is that the world will enter a completely new climate regime, one with which modern humans have no prior experience. Meanwhile, at 378 p.p.m., CO2 levels are significantly higher today than they have been at any other point in the Antarctic record. It is believed that the last time carbon-dioxide levels were in this range was three and a half million years ago, during what is known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, and they likely have not been much above it for tens of millions of years. A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me—only half-jokingly—this way: “It’s true that we’ve had higher CO2levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs.” David Rind is a climate scientist who has worked at GISS since 1978. Rind acts as a trouble-shooter for the institute’s model, scanning reams of numbers known as diagnostics, trying to catch problems, and he also works with GISS’s Climate Impacts Group. (His office, like Hansen’s, is filled with dusty piles of computer printouts.) Although higher temperatures are the most obvious and predictable result of increased CO2, other, second-order consequences—rising sea levels, changes in vegetation, loss of snow cover—are likely to be just as significant. Rind’s particular interest is how CO2levels will affect water 124 supplies, because, as he put it to me, “you can’t have a plastic version of water.” One afternoon, when I was talking to Rind in his office, he mentioned a visit that President Bush’s science adviser, John Marburger, had paid to GISS a few years earlier. “He said, ‘We’re really interested in adaptation to climate change,’ ” Rind recalled. “Well, what does ‘adaptation’ mean?” He rummaged through one of his many file cabinets and finally pulled out a paper that he had published in the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled “Potential Evapotranspiration and the Likelihood of Future Drought.” In much the same way that wind velocity is measured using the Beaufort scale, water availability is measured using what’s known as the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Different climate models offer very different predictions about future water availability; in the paper, Rind applied the criteria used in the Palmer index to GISS’s model and also to a model operated by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He found that as carbon-dioxide levels rose the world began to experience more and more serious water shortages, starting near the equator and then spreading toward the poles. When he applied the index to the GISS model for doubled CO2, it showed most of the continental United States to be suffering under severe drought conditions. When he applied the index to the G.F.D.L. model, the results were even more dire. Rind created two maps to illustrate these findings. Yellow represented a forty-to- sixty-per-cent chance of summertime drought, ochre a sixty-to-eighty-per-cent chance, and brown an eighty-to-a-hundred-per-cent chance. In the first map, showing the GISS results, the Northeast was yellow, the Midwest was ochre, and the Rocky Mountain states and California were brown. In the second, showing the G.F.D.L. results, brown covered practically the entire country. “I gave a talk based on these drought indices out in California to water-resource managers,” Rind told me. “And they said, ‘Well, if that happens, forget it.’ There’s just no way they could deal with that.” He went on, “Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there’s no adaptation that’s possible. But let’s say it’s not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you’ve adapted to one decade you’re going to have to change everything the next decade. “We may say that we’re more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it’s potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we’re not only more technologically able; we’re more technologically able destructively as well. I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen. I guess—though I won’t be around to see it—I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed.” He paused. “That’s sort of an extreme view.”

On the other side of the Hudson River and slightly to the north of GISS, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory occupies what was once a weekend estate in the town of Palisades, New York. The observatory is an outpost of Columbia University, and it houses, among its collections of natural artifacts, the world’s largest assembly of ocean-sediment cores—more than thirteen thousand in all. The cores are kept in steel compartments that look like drawers from a filing cabinet, only longer and much skinnier. Some of the cores are chalky, some are clayey, and some are made up almost entirely of gravel. All can be coaxed to yield up—in one way or another—information about past climates. Peter deMenocal is a paleoclimatologist who has worked at Lamont-Doherty for fifteen years. He is an expert on ocean cores, and also on the climate of the Pliocene, which lasted from roughly five million to two million years ago. Around two and a half million years ago, the earth, which had been warm and relatively ice-free, started to cool down until it entered an era—the Pleistocene—of recurring glaciations. DeMenocal has argued that this transition was a key event in human evolution: right around the time that it occurred, at least two types of hominids—one of which would eventually give rise to us—branched off from a single ancestral line. Until quite recently, paleoclimatologists like deMenocal rarely bothered with anything much closer to the present day; the current interglacial—the Holocene—which began some ten 125 thousand years ago, was believed to be, climatically speaking, too stable to warrant much study. In the mid-nineties, though, deMenocal, motivated by a growing concern over global warming—and a concomitant shift in government research funds—decided to look in detail at some Holocene cores. What he learned, as he put it to me when I visited him at Lamont-Doherty last fall, was “less boring than we had thought.” One way to extract climate data from ocean sediments is to examine the remains of what lived or, perhaps more pertinently, what died and was buried there. The oceans are rich with microscopic creatures known as foraminifera. There are about thirty planktonic species in all, and each thrives at a different temperature, so that by counting a species’ prevalence in a given sample it is possible to estimate the ocean temperatures at the time the sediment was formed. When deMenocal used this technique to analyze cores that had been collected off the coast of Mauritania, he found that they contained evidence of recurring cool periods; every fifteen hundred years or so, water temperatures dropped for a few centuries before climbing back up again. (The most recent cool period corresponds to the Little Ice Age, which ended about a century and a half ago.) Also, perhaps even more significant, the cores showed profound changes in precipitation. Until about six thousand years ago, northern Africa was relatively wet—dotted with small lakes. Then it became dry, as it is today. DeMenocal traced the shift to periodic variations in the earth’s orbit, which, in a generic sense, are the same forces that trigger ice ages. But orbital changes occur gradually, over thousands of years, and northern Africa appears to have switched from wet to dry all of a sudden. Although no one knows exactly how this happened, it seems, like so many climate events, to have been a function of feedbacks—the less rain the continent got, the less vegetation there was to retain water, and so on until, finally, the system just flipped. The process provides yet more evidence of how a very small forcing sustained over time can produce dramatic results. “We were kind of surprised by what we found,” deMenocal told me about his work on the supposedly stable Holocene. “Actually, more than surprised. It was one of these things where, you know, in life you take certain things for granted, like your neighbor’s not going to be an axe murderer. And then you discover your neighbor is an axe murderer.”

Not long after deMenocal began to think about the Holocene, a brief mention of his work on the climate of Africa appeared in a book produced by National Geographic. On the facing page, there was a piece on Harvey Weiss and his work at Tell Leilan. DeMenocal vividly remembers his reaction. “I thought, Holy cow, that’s just amazing!” he told me. “It was one of these cases where I lost sleep that night, I just thought it was such a cool idea.” DeMenocal also recalls his subsequent dismay when he went to learn more. “It struck me that they were calling on this climate-change argument, and I wondered how come I didn’t know about it,” he said. He looked at the Science paper in which Weiss had originally laid out his theory. “First of all, I scanned the list of authors and there was no paleoclimatologist on there,” deMenocal said. “So then I started reading through the paper and there basically was no paleoclimatology in it.” (The main piece of evidence Weiss adduced for a drought was that Tell Leilan had filled with dust.) The more deMenocal thought about it, the more unconvincing he found the data, on the one hand, and the more compelling he found the underlying idea, on the other. “I just couldn’t leave it alone,” he told me. In the summer of 1995, he went with Weiss to Syria to visit Tell Leilan. Subsequently, he decided to do his own study to prove—or disprove—Weiss’s theory. Instead of looking in, or even near, the ruined city, deMenocal focussed on the Gulf of Oman, nearly a thousand miles downwind. Dust from the Mesopotamian floodplains, just north of Tell Leilan, contains heavy concentrations of the mineral dolomite, and since arid soil produces more wind-borne dust, deMenocal figured that if there had been a drought of any magnitude it would show up in gulf sediments.“In a wet period, you’d be getting none or very, very low amounts of dolomite, and during a 126 dry period you’d be getting a lot,” he explained. He and a graduate student named Heidi Cullen developed a highly sensitive test to detect dolomite, and then Cullen assayed, centimetre by centimetre, a sediment core that had been extracted near where the Gulf of Oman meets the Arabian Sea. “She started going up through the core,” DeMenocal told me. “It was like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Then one day, I think it was a Friday afternoon, she goes, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was really classic.” DeMenocal had thought that the dolomite level, if it were elevated at all, would be modestly higher; instead, it went up by four hundred per cent. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. He decided to have the core re-analyzed using a different marker: the ratio of strontium 86 and strontium 87 isotopes. The same spike showed up. When deMenocal had the core carbon-dated, it turned out that the spike lined up exactly with the period of Tell Leilan’s abandonment. Tell Leilan was never an easy place to live. Much like, say, western Kansas today, the Khabur plains received enough annual rainfall—about seventeen inches—to support cereal crops, but not enough to grow much else. “Year-to-year variations were a real threat, and so they obviously needed to have grain storage and to have ways to buffer themselves,” deMenocal observed. “One generation would tell the next, ‘Look, there are these things that happen that you’ve got to be prepared for.’ And they were good at that. They could manage that. They were there for hundreds of years.” He went on, “The thing they couldn’t prepare for was the same thing that we won’t prepare for, because in their case they didn’t know about it and because in our case the political system can’t listen to it. And that is that the climate system has much greater things in store for us than we think.”

Shortly before Christmas, Harvey Weiss gave a lunchtime lecture at Yale’s Institute for Biospheric Studies. The title was “What Happened in the Holocene,” which, as Weiss explained, was an allusion to a famous archeology text by V. Gordon Childe, entitled “What Happened in History.” The talk brought together archeological and paleoclimatic records from the Near East over the last ten thousand years. Weiss, who is sixty years old, has thinning gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and an excitable manner. He had prepared for the audience—mostly Yale professors and graduate students—a handout with a time line of Mesopotamian history. Key cultural events appeared in black ink, key climatological ones in red. The two alternated in a rhythmic cycle of disaster and innovation. Around 6200 B.C., a severe global cold snap—red ink—produced aridity in the Near East. (The cause of the cold snap is believed to have been a catastrophic flood that emptied an enormous glacial lake—called Lake Agassiz—into the North Atlantic.) Right around the same time—black ink—farming villages in northern Mesopotamia were abandoned, while in central and southern Mesopotamia the art of irrigation was invented. Three thousand years later, there was another cold snap, after which settlements in northern Mesopotamia once again were deserted. The most recent red event, in 2200 B.C., was followed by the dissolution of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the abandonment of villages in ancient Palestine, and the fall of Akkad. Toward the end of his talk, Weiss, using a PowerPoint program, displayed some photographs from the excavation at Tell Leilan. One showed the wall of a building—probably intended for administrative offices—that had been under construction when the rain stopped. The wall was made from blocks of basalt topped by rows of mud bricks. The bricks gave out abruptly, as if construction had ceased from one day to the next. The monochromatic sort of history that most of us grew up with did not allow for events like the drought that destroyed Tell Leilan. Civilizations fell, we were taught, because of wars or barbarian invasions or political unrest. (Another famous text by Childe bears the exemplary title “Man Makes Himself.”) Adding red to the time line points up the deep contingency of the whole enterprise. Civilization goes back, at the most, ten thousand years, even though, evolutionarily speaking, modern man has been around for at least ten times that long. The climate of the Holocene was not boring, but at least it was dull enough to allow people to sit still. It is only after the immense climatic shifts of the glacial epoch had run their course that 127 writing and agriculture finally emerged. Nowhere else does the archeological record go back so far or in such detail as in the Near East. But similar red-and-black chronologies can now be drawn up for many other parts of the world: the Indus Valley, where, some four thousand years ago, the Harappan civilization suffered a decline after a change in monsoon patterns; the Andes, where, fourteen hundred years ago, the Moche abandoned their cities in a period of diminished rainfall; and even the United States, where the arrival of the English colonists on Roanoke Island, in 1587, coincided with a severe regional drought. (By the time English ships returned to resupply the colonists, three years later, no one was left.) At the height of the Mayan civilization, population density was five hundred per square mile, higher than it is in most parts of the U. S. today. Two hundred years later, much of the territory occupied by the Mayans had been completely depopulated. You can argue that man through culture creates stability, or you can argue, just as plausibly, that stability is for culture an essential precondition. After the lecture, I walked with Weiss back to his office, which is near the center of the Yale campus, in the Hall of Graduate Studies. This past year, Weiss decided to suspend excavation at Tell Leilan. The site lies only fifty miles from the Iraqi border, and, owing to the uncertainties of the war, it seemed like the wrong sort of place to bring graduate students. When I visited, Weiss had just returned from a trip to Damascus, where he had gone to pay the guards who watch over the site when he isn’t there. While he was away from his office, its contents had been piled up in a corner by repairmen who had come to fix some pipes. Weiss considered the piles disconsolately, then unlocked a door at the back of the room. The door led to a second room, much larger than the first. It was set up like a library, except that instead of books the shelves were stacked with hundreds of cardboard boxes. Each box contained fragments of broken pottery from Tell Leilan. Some were painted, others were incised with intricate designs, and still others were barely distinguishable from pebbles. Every fragment had been inscribed with a number, indicating its provenance. I asked what he thought life in Tell Leilan had been like. Weiss told me that that was a “corny question,” so I asked him about the city’s abandonment. “Nothing allows you to go beyond the third or fourth year of a drought, and by the fifth or sixth year you’re probably gone,” he observed. “You’ve given up hope for the rain, which is exactly what they wrote in ‘The Curse of Akkad.’ ” I asked to see something that might have been used in Tell Leilan’s last days. Swearing softly, Weiss searched through the rows until he finally found one particular box. It held several potsherds that appeared to have come from identical bowls. They were made from a greenish-colored clay, had been thrown on a wheel, and had no decoration. Intact, the bowls had held about a litre, and Weiss explained that they had been used to mete out rations—probably wheat or barley—to the workers of Tell Leilan. He passed me one of the fragments. I held it in my hand for a moment and tried to imagine the last Akkadian who had touched it. Then I passed it back. (This is the second part of a three-part article.) 128

“Clash of Civilizations?”(Excerpts) by Samuel P. Huntington Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University From: Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs Summer 1993, 72/3. Full article available at: http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/CCT510/Sources/Huntington-ClashofCivilizations- 1993.html

I. THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT WORLD POLITICS IS entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be -- the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years. It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase of the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the modern international system of the Peace of Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among princes -- emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the ward of peoples had begun." This nineteenth-century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, neither of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and each of which defined its identity in terms of ideology. These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center-piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of civilizations, the people and governments of non-Western civilizations no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history. 129

III. WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH CIVILIZATION IDENTITY will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another. Why will this be the case? First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts. Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasings; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptivity to immigration by "good" European Catholic Poles. Americans react far more negatively to Japanese investment than to larger investments from Canada and European countries. Similarly, as Donald Horowitz has pointed out, "An Ibo may be . . . an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." The interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history. Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled "fundamentalist." Such movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most religions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, college-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons. The "unsecularization of the world," George Weigel has remarked, "is one of the dominant social factors of life in the late twentieth century." The revival of religion, "la revanche de Dieu," as Gilles Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations. Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civilizations. Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning inward and "Asianization" in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and the "Hinduization" of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism and nationalism and hence "re- Islamization" of the Middle East, and now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris Yeltsin's country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways. In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the people who were most involved with the 130

West, had been educated at Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western attitudes and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture. Now, however, these relationships are being reversed. A de-Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non-Western countries at the same time that Western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people. Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians cannot become Estonians and Azeris cannot become Armenians. In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was "Which side are you on?" and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion discriminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim. Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of total trade that are intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from 51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will reinforce civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civilization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation of European culture and Western Christianity. The success of the North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to itself. However strong the trade and investment links Japan may develop with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences with those countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting regional economic integration like that in Europe and North America. Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid expansion of the economic relations between the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over, cultural commonalities increasingly overcome ideological differences, and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural commonality is a prerequisite for economic integration, the principal East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered on China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. […] Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. One impetus to the revival and expansion of this organization, founded originally in the 1960s by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the realization by the leaders of several of these countries that they had no chance of admission to the European Community. Similarly, Caricom, the Central American Common Market and Mercosur rest on common cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader Caribbean-Central American economic entity bridging the Anglo- Latin divide, however, have to date failed. As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they are likely to see an "us" versus "them" relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences over policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democracy and liberalism to universal values, 131 to maintain its military predominance and to advance its economic interests engender countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, governments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by appealing to common religion and civilization identity. The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values.

IV. THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS THE FAULT LINES between civilizations are replacing the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged. […] Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at Ottoman power declined Britain, France, and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and the Middle East. After World War II, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colonial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to, weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (created by the West). France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria for most of the 1950s; British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956; American forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged in various military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists, supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed the weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression by another. In its aftermath NATO planning is increasingly directed to potential threats and instability along its "southern tier." This centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West's military presence in the Persian Gulf, the West's overwhelming military dominance, and their apparent inability to shape their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social development where autocratic forms of government become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic countries and the West. 132

VI. THE WEST VERSUS THE REST The West in now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from the map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West faces no economic challenge. It dominates international political and security institutions and, with Japan, international economic institutions.Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world economic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan, all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries. Decisions made at the UN Security Council or in the International Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very phrase "the world community" has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing "the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers.(2)Western domination of the UN Security Council and its decisions, tempered only by occasional abstention by China, produced UN legitimation of the West's use of force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and its elimination of Iraq's sophisticated weapons and capacity to produce such weapons. It also produced the quite unprecedented action by the United States, Britain and France in getting the Security Council to demand that Libya hand over the Pan Am 103 bombing suspects and then to impose sanctions when Libya refused. After defeating the largest Arab army, the West did not hesitate to throw its weight around in the Arab world. The West in effect is using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western predominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political and economic values. That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and institutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is, basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S. Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the "universal civilization" that "fits all men." At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against "human rights imperialism" and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that there could be a "universal civilization" is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the author of a review of 100 comparative studies of values in different societies concluded that "the values that are most important in the West are least important worldwide."(3)In the political realm, of course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.

IX. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST THIS ARTICLE DOES not argue that civilization identities will replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that groups within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other. This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences between civilizations are real and important; civilization-consciousness is 133 increasing; conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict; international relations, historically a game played out within Western civilization, will increasingly be de-Westernized and become a game in which non-Western civilizations are actors and not simply objects; successful political, security and economic international institutions are more likely to develop within civilizations than across civilizations; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of world politics will be the relations between "the West and the Rest"; the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states. This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and long-term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of counter military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions. In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civilization will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology, skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to accommodate these non- Western modern civilizations whose power approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others. 134

The Clash of Ignorance by EDWARD W. SAID The Nation, October 22, 2001. Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years." Unhesitatingly he pressed on: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future." Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity" and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam. The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular. More troubling is Huntington's assumption that his perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations" and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same title in 1996, Huntington tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was. The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible events of 135

September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is--the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries from former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for his insult to "Islam.") But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 22-28, can't resist reaching for the vast generalization, praising Huntington extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.'" Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that? Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member of the "West," and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps. This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember interrupting a man who, after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1994, rose from the audience and started to attack my ideas as "Western," as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and tie?" was the first retort that came to mind. "They're Western too." He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when information on the September 11 terrorists started to come in: how they had mastered all the technical details required to inflict their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi declared, "Islam's" inability to be a part of "modernity"? One cannot easily do so, of course. How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs." In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced 136 to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the Islamic--religion, society, culture, history or politics--as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power, not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political agenda." What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of discourse. It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation. For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now. Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition between Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew its vocabulary in the first days after the September 11 attacks. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on. One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab- Islamic conquests, which began in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno. Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers--not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp--of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring 137 to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity." But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. "The Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time. 138

Islam and Islamism. By Daniel Pipes. The National Interest (Spring 2000): p87. Faith and Ideology ONE CANNOT emphasize too much the distinction between Islam--plain Islam--and its fundamentalist version. Islam is the religion of about one billion people and is a rapidly growing faith, particularly in Africa but also elsewhere in the world. The United States, for example, boasts almost a million converts to Islam (plus an even larger number of Muslim immigrants). Islam's adherents find their faith immensely appealing, for the religion possesses an inner strength that is quite extraordinary. As a leading figure in the Islamic Republic of Iran maintains, "Any Westerner who really understands Islam will envy the lives of Muslims." Far from feeling embarrassed about its being temporally the last of the three major Middle Eastern monotheisms, Muslims believe that their faith improves on the earlier ones. In their telling, Judaism and Christianity are but defective variants of Islam, which is God's final, perfect religion. Contributing to this internal confidence is the memory of outstanding achievements during Islam's first six or so centuries. Its culture was the most advanced, and Muslims enjoyed the best health, lived the longest, had the highest rates of literacy, sponsored the most advanced scientific and technical research, and deployed usually victorious armies. This pattern of success was evident from the beginning: in A.D. 622 the Prophet Muhammad fled Mecca as a refugee, only to return eight years later as its ruler. As early as the year 715, Muslim conquerors had assembled an empire that extended from Spain in the west to India in the east. To be a Muslim meant to belong to a winning civilization. Muslims, not surprisingly, came to assume a correlation between their faith and their worldly success, to assume that they were the favored of God in both spiritual and mundane matters. And yet, in modern times battlefield victories and prosperity have been notably lacking. Indeed, as early as the thirteenth century, Islam's atrophy and Christendom's advances were already becoming discernible. But, for some five hundred years longer, Muslims remained largely oblivious to the extraordinary developments taking place to their north. Ibn Khaldun, the famous Muslim intellectual, wrote around the year 1400 about Europe, "I hear that many developments are taking place in the land of the Rum, but God only knows what happens there!" Such willful ignorance rendered Muslims vulnerable when they could no longer ignore what was happening around them. Perhaps the most dramatic alert came in July 1798, when Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt--the center of the Muslim world--and conquered it with stunning ease. Other assaults followed over the next century and more, and before long most Muslims were living under European rule. As their power and influence waned, a sense of incomprehension spread among Muslims. What had gone wrong? Why had God seemingly abandoned them? The trauma of modern Islam results from this sharp and unmistakable contrast between medieval successes and more recent tribulations. Put simply, Muslims have had an exceedingly hard time explaining what went wrong. Nor has the passage of time made this task any easier, for the same unhappy circumstances basically still exist. Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom--whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity or literacy. Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy 139 prime minister of Malaysia who now languishes in jail, estimates in The Asian Renaissance (1997) that whereas Muslims make up just one-fifth of the world's total population, they constitute more than half of the 1.2 billion people living in abject poverty. There is thus a pervasive sense of debilitation and encroachment in the Islamic world today. As the imam of a mosque in Jerusalem put it not long ago, "Before, we were mast ers of the world and now we're not even masters of our own mosques." SEARCHING FOR explanations for their predicament, Muslims have devised three political responses to modernity--secularism, reformism and Islamism. The first of these holds that Muslims can only advance by emulating the West. Yes, the secularists concede, Islam is a valuable and esteemed legacy, but its public dimensions must be put aside. In particular, the sacred law of Islam (called the Shari'a)--which governs such matters as the judicial system, the manner in which Muslim states go to war, and the nature of social interactions between men and women--should be discarded in its entirety. The leading secular country is Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk in the period 1923-38 reshaped and modernized an overwhelmingly Muslim society. Overall, though, secularism is a minority position among Muslims, and even in Turkey it is under siege. Reformism, occupying a murky middle ground, offers a more popular response to modernity. Whereas secularism forthrightly calls for learning from the West, reformism selectively appropriates from it. The reformist says, "Look, Islam is basically compatible with Western ways. It's just that we lost track of our own achievements, which the West exploited. We must now go back to our own ways by adopting those of the West." To reach this conclusion, reformers reread the Islamic scriptures in a Western light. For example, the Koran permits a man to take up to four wives--on the condition that he treat them equitably. Traditionally, and quite logically, Muslims understood this verse as permission for a man to take four wives. But because a man is allowed only one in the West, the reformists performed a sleight of hand and interpreted the verse in a new way: the Koran, they claim, requires that a man must treat his wives equitably, which is clearly something no man can do if there is more than one of them. So, they conclude, Islam prohibits more than a single wife. Reformists have applied this sort of reasoning across the board. To science, for example, they contend Muslims should have no objections, for science is in fact Muslim. They recall that the word algebra comes from the Arabic, al-jabr. Algebra being the essence of mathematics and mathematics being the essence of science, all of modern science and technology thereby stems from work done by Muslims. So there is no reason to resist Western science; it is rather a matter of reclaiming what the West took (or stole) in the first place. In case after case, and with varying degrees of credibility, reformists appropriate Western ways under the guise of drawing on their own heritage. The aim of the reformists, then, is to imitate the West without acknowledging as much. Though intellectually bankrupt, reformism functions well as a political strategy. The Ideological Response THE THIRD response to the modern trauma is Islamism, the subject of the remainder of this essay. Islamism has three main features: a devotion to the sacred law, a rejection of Western influences, and the transformation of faith into ideology. Islamism holds that Muslims lag behind the West because they're not good Muslims. To regain lost glory requires a return to old ways, and that is achieved by living fully in accordance with the Shari'a. Were Muslims to do so, they would once again reside on top of the world, as they did a millennium ago. This, however, is no easy task, for the sacred law contains a vast body of regulations touching every aspect of life, many of them contrary to modern practices. (The Shari'a somewhat resembles Jewish law, but nothing comparable exists in Christianity.) Thus, it forbids usury or any taking of interest, which has deep and obvious implications for economic life. It calls for cutting off the hands of thieves, which runs contrary to all modern sensibilities, as do its mandatory covering of women and the separation of the sexes. Islamism not only calls for the application of these laws, but for a more rigorous application than 140 ever before was the case. Before 1800, the interpreters of the Shari'a softened it somew hat. For instance, they devised a method by which to avoid the ban on interest. The fundamentalists reject such modifications, demanding instead that Muslims apply the Shari'a strictly and in its totality. In their effort to build a way of life based purely on the Shar'i laws, Islamists strain to reject all aspects of Western influence--customs, philosophy, political institutions and values. Despite these efforts, they still absorb vast amounts from the West in endless ways. For one, they need modern technology, especially its military and medical applications. For another, they themselves tend to be modern individuals, and so are far more imbued with Western ways than they wish to be or will ever acknowledge. Thus, while the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was more traditional than most Islamists, attempted to found a government on the pure principles of Shiite Islam, he ended up with a republic based on a constitution that represents a nation via the decisions of a parliament, which is in turn chosen through popular elections--every one of these a Western concept. Another example of Western influence is that Friday, which in Islam is not a day of rest but a day of congregation, is now the Muslim equivalent of a sabb ath. Similarly, the laws of Islam do not apply to everyone living within a geographical territory but only to Muslims; Islamists, however, understand them as territorial in nature (as an Italian priest living in Sudan found out long ago, when he was flogged for possessing alcohol). Islamism thereby stealthily appropriates from the West while denying that it is doing so. Perhaps the most important of these borrowings is the emulation of Western ideologies. The word "Islamism" is a useful and accurate one, for it indicates that this phenomenon is an "ism" comparable to other ideologies of the twentieth century. In fact, Islamism represents an Islamic-flavored version of the radical utopian ideas of our time, following Marxism-Leninism and fascism. It infuses a vast array of Western political and economic ideas within the religion of Islam. As an Islamist, a Muslim Brother from Egypt, puts it, "We are neither socialist nor capitalist, but Muslims"; a Muslim of old would have said, "We are neither Jews nor Christians, but Muslims." Islamists see their adherence to Islam primarily as a form of political allegiance; hence, though usually pious Muslims, they need not be. Plenty of Islamists seem in fact to be rather impious. For instance, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, Ramzi Yousef, had a girlfriend while living in the Philippines and was "gallivanting around Manila's bars, strip joints and karaoke clubs, flirting with women." From this and other suggestions of loose living, his biographer, Simon Reeve, finds "scant evidence to support any description of Yousef as a religious warrior." The FBI agent in charge of investigating Yousef concluded that, "He hid behind a cloak of Islam." On a grander level, Ayatollah Khomeini hinted at the irrelevance of faith for Islamists in a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev early in 1989, as the Soviet Union was rapidly failing. The Iranian leader offered his own government as a model: "I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system." Khomeini here seemed to be suggesting that the Soviets should turn to the Islamist ideology--converting to Islam would almost seem to be an afterthought. Contrary to its reputation, Islamism is not a way back; as a contemporary ideology it offers not a means to return to some old-fashioned way of life but a way of navigating the shoals of modernization. With few exceptions (notably, the Taliban in Afghanistan), Islamists are city dwellers trying to cope with the problems of modern urban life--not people of the countryside. Thus, the challenges facing career women figure prominently in Islamist discussions. What, for example, can a woman who must travel by crowded public transportation do to protect herself from groping? The Islamists have a ready reply: she should cover herself, body and face, and signal through the wearing of Islamic clothes that she is not approachable. More broadly, they offer an inclusive and alternative way of life for modern persons, one that rejects the whole complex of popular culture, consumerism and individualism in favor of a faith- based totalitarianism. 141

Deviations From Tradition WHILE Islamism is often seen as a form of traditional Islam, it is something profoundly different. Traditional Islam seeks to teach humans how to live in accord with God's will, whereas Islamism aspires to create a new order. The first is self-confident, the second deeply defensive. The one emphasizes individuals, the latter communities. The former is a personal credo, the latter a political ideology. The distinction becomes sharpest when one compares the two sets of leaders. Traditionalists go through a static and lengthy course of learning in which they study a huge corpus of information and imbibe the Islamic verities much as their ancestors did centuries earlier. Their faith reflects more than a millennium of debate among scholars, jurists and theologians. Islamist leaders, by contrast, tend to be well educated in the sciences but not in Islam; in their early adulthood, they confront problems for which their modern learning has failed to prepare them, so they turn to Islam. In doing so they ignore nearly the entire corpus of Islamic learning and interpret the Koran as they see fit. As autodidacts, they dismiss the traditions and apply their own (modern) sensibilities to the ancient texts, leading to an oddly Protestant version of Islam. The modern world frustrates and stymies traditional figures who, educated in old-fashioned subjects, have not studied European languages, spent time in the West, or mastered its secrets. For example, traditionalists rarely know how to exploit the radio, television and the Internet to spread their message. In contrast, Islamist leaders usually speak Western languages, often have lived abroad, and tend to be well versed in technology. The Internet has hundreds of Islamist sites. Francois Burgat and William Dowell note this contrast in their book, The Islamist Movement in North Africa (1993): The village elder, who is close to the religious establishment and knows little of Western culture (from which he refuses technology a priori) cannot be confused with the young science student who is more than able to deliver a criticism of Western values, with which he is familiar and from which he is able to appropriate certain dimensions. The traditionalist will reject television, afraid of the devastating modernism that it will bring; the Islamist calls for increasing the number of sets ... once he has gained control of the broadcasts. Most important from our perspective, traditionalists fear the West while Islamists are eager to challenge it. The late mufti of Saudi Arabia, 'Abd al-'Aziz Bin-Baz, exemplified the tremulous old guard. In the summer of 1995, he warned Saudi youth not to travel to the West for vacation because "there is a deadly poison in travelling to the land of the infidels and there are schemes by the enemies of Islam to lure Muslims away from their religion, to create doubts about their beliefs, and to spread sedition among them." He urged the young to spend their summers in the "safety" of the summer resorts in their own country. Islamists are not completely impervious to the fear of these schemes and lures, but they have ambitions to tame the West, something they do not shy from announcing for the whole world to hear. The most crude simply want to kill Westerners. In a remarkable statement, a Tunisian convicted of setting off bombs in France in 1985-86, killing thirteen, told the judge handling his case, "I do not renounce my fight against the West which assassinated the Prophet Muhammad. We Muslims should kill every last one of you [Westerners]." Others plan to expand Islam to Europe and America, using violence if necessary. An Amsterdam-based imam declared on a Turkish television program, "You must kill those who oppose Islam, the order of Islam or Allah, and His Prophet; hang or slaughter them after tying their hands and feet crosswise... as prescribed by the Shari'a." An Algerian terrorist group, the GIA, issued a communique in 1995 that showed the Eiffel Tower exploding and bristled with threats: We are continuing with all our strength our steps of jihad and military attacks, and this time in the heart of France and its largest cities.... It's a pledge that [the French] will have no more sleep and no more leisure and Islam will enter France whether they like it or not. The more moderate Islamists plan to use non-violent means to transform their host countries into Islamic 142 states. For them, conversion is the key. One leading American Muslim thinker, Isma'il R. AlFaruqi, put this sentiment rather poetically: "Nothing could be greater than this youthful, vigorous and rich continent [of North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]." This contrast not only implies that Islamism threatens the West in a way that the traditional faith does not, but it also suggests why traditional Muslims, who are often the first victims of Islamism, express contempt for the ideology. Thus, Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's Nobel Prize winner for literature, commented after being stabbed in the neck by an Islamist: "I pray to God to make the police victorious over terrorism and to purify Egypt from this evil, in defense of people, freedom, and Islam." Tujan Faysal, a female member of the Jordanian parliament, calls Islamism "one of the greatest dangers facing our society" and compares it to "a cancer" that "has to be surgically removed." Cevik Bir, one of the key figures in dispatching Turkey's Islamist government in 1997, flatly states that in his country, "Muslim fundamentalism remains public enemy number one." If Muslims feel this way, so can non-Muslims; being anti- Islamism in no way implies being anti-Islam. Islamism in Practice LIKE OTHER radical ideologues, Islamists look to the state as the main vehicle for promoting their program. Indeed, given the impractical nature of their scheme, the levers of the state are critical to the realization of their aims. Toward this end, Islamists often lead political opposition parties (Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) or have gained significant power (Lebanon, Pakistan, Malaysia). Their tactics are often murderous. In Algeria, an Islamist insurgency has led to some 70,000 deaths since 1992. And when Islamists do take power, as in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, the result is invariably a disaster. Economic decline begins immediately. Iran, where for two decades the standard of living has almost relentlessly declined, offers the most striking example of this. Personal rights are disregarded, as spectacularly shown by the re-establishment of chattel slavery in Sudan. Repression of women is an absolute requirement, a practice most dramatically on display in Afghanistan, where they have been excluded from schools and jobs. An Islamist state is, almost by definition, a rogue state, not playing by any rules except those of expediency and power, a ruthless institution that causes misery at home and abroad. Islamists in power means that conflicts proliferate society is militarized, arsenals grow, and terrorism becomes an instrument of state. It is no accident that Iran was engaged in the longest conventional war of the twentieth century (1980-88, against Iraq) and that both Sudan and Afghanistan are in the throes of decades-long civil wars, with no end in sight. Islamists repress moderate Muslims and treat non-Muslims as inferior specimens. Its apologists like to see in Islamism a force for democracy, but this ignores the key pattern that, as Martin Kramer points out, "Islamists are more likely to reach less militant positions because of their exclusion from power.... Weakness moderates Islamists." Power has the opposite effect. Islamism has now been on the ascendant for more than a quarter century. Its many successes should not be understood, however, as evidence that it has widespread support. A reasonable estimate might find 10 percent of Muslims following the Islamist approach. Instead, the power that Islamists wield reflects their status as a highly dedicated, capable and well-organized minority. A little bit like cadres of the Communist Party, they make up for numbers with activism and purpose. Islamists espouse deep antagonism toward non-Muslims in general, and Jews and Christians in particular. They despise the West both because of its huge cultural influence and because it is a traditional opponent--the old rival, Christendom, in a new guise. Some of them have learned to moderate their views so as not to upset Western audiences, but the disguise is thin and should deceive no one. Daniel Pipes is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, and author of three books on Islam. 143

Graham Fuller, “The Future of Political Islam,” Lecture delivered at the Carnegie Council on 5/22/03. It is easy to talk about Muslim grievances, many of which are not well known in the West. Many are very legitimate; others are partial truths about some things that happened; and there are yet other issues that concern Muslims that are often the product of conspiratorial thinking or anxieties that are perhaps rather distant from reality. These three elements are mixed together -- real realities, real grievances and concerns; partial stories; and fears and paranoia that amplify the rest. As a result, political Islam today is the major political opposition movement across most of the Muslim world. We can say that it is partly good/partly bad. It is imperative that we understand why and how this phenomenon comes about, why a great deal of Islamist thinking is not some exotic belief that could only come from a strange reason, but in many ways is reflective of the anxieties, concerns, and problems of the entire developing world. It perhaps has a different garb in the Middle East, some of it not fully familiar. But at a closer look, you can see elements that resemble Chinese angers and frustrations at their former eclipsed greatness; you can see it reflected in India or Latin American or Africa. It has local characteristics, but it also has some very broad, general characteristics. When some people talk about political Islam or Islamism, they have bin Laden or the Taliban in mind. Both of those are part – but on the fringes – of what is a very broad movement of political Islam. They cannot be excluded, but they are simply violent and extremist parts of the spectrum. This spectrum is growing and diversifying all the time as events proceed in the Middle East. I define political Islam as anyone who believes that the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet -- what the Prophet said and did during his lifetime in an effort to apply his best understanding of the Qur’an -- have something important to say about the way politics and society should operate in the Middle East. On this spectrum we have, on the one hand, violent radicals or non-violent radicals or moderates. We have rather totalitarian-minded individuals, but a much greater number of Islamists who increasingly see benefits of democratic process. We see traditionalists who believe that somehow the old, glorious days of the golden age of the Islamic world is the goal to return to. The greater majority would say, “No, we are moving on into a new world” and would be more modernist in their interpretation. So you can be traditionalist, you can be modernist, you can be anywhere along the spectrum which is broadening as any number of people consider themselves driven in one way or another by their concern with linking Islam and politics. There are several reasons why political Islam today is very successful, particularly in opposition. First, saying “in opposition” is an important statement in itself, because it is much easier to be in opposition than it is to be in power anywhere. We can criticize what is wrong with any number of governments and regimes, but to say what we would do if we were in power and had to assume those problems is rather different. So right away Muslim Islamists, like any other opposition group, have that advantage. Secondly, most regimes in the area help the Islamists, wittingly or unwittingly, by eliminating most other political opposition. So you can take the socialist party and close it down, or the nationalist party, or the communist party, or the liberal party. But with Islamists it is much harder, because they are operating out of mosques and neighborhoods. Islamist movements have deep grassroots, much more than any other movement. I regret to say that because my bias would be to see reforming liberal movements as dominant. But the reality is you can get a mass of crowds into Liberation Square in any Arab or Muslim city in the world and you could not fill up 144 any square in any part of the Muslim world with liberal democrats. It is simply not a vibrant tradition, at least so far. So with legal or illegal elimination of other rivals, Islamists win by default, or they gain by default, in this position, including both the extremists and the others. Extreme conditions generally produce extremist results. Many of the situations now in so much of the Arab world are negative conditions: oppressive governments, incompetent governance; un-elected, and hence you might say illegitimate, governance in many cases; violent governance; brutal and destructive governance, of which the late and unlamented Saddam Hussein was the supreme example. These regimes produce the frustration and anger that ultimately pushes people towards political Islam. There are many reasons why someone would join an Islamist party, or even want to turn to Islam even for political belief. For us in the West we wonder: Why would you go to the Qur’an? Why would you turn to a religion for political thought? In the West our great documents, the sources of our philosophical and political ideas, are, say, the Magna Carta, the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution. These are some of the great documents and movements in the development of modern Western history. But for the Muslim world those events are not part of their tradition, and if you are looking for a moral source to describe what kind of social and political morality you might have, you turn to the Qur’an. The Qur’an talks much more about the nature of a good society, and the nature of governance than either the Old or New Testaments, which are much older documents. Neither of those documents had much to do with building a modern state, whereas the Qur’an was in the full light of history and was involved in state-building from day one. There are many general thoughts within the Qur’an about what is a moral and virtuous ruler, that the ruler should consult with the people. There is a key element, shura in Arabic, consultation or a council. Many Islamists or Muslims today will say, “Sure, in those days shura meant that the ruler consults with his people; today that means parliament, period, it’s that simple.” There is discussion of social justice, the good society, fair distribution of wealth. These are very general principles and nothing that we’re not familiar with in the West. But in Islam they are religiously derived. So this brings you back to the Qur’an inevitably and why religion tends to be the source of much political thought. Muslims, like everyone else, are human beings in the way they operate. Politics is very much a human art; it has human weaknesses. Many Islamists, practitioners of this, exploit this to their own ends. They use the Qur’an or quotations from the Qur’an highly selectively. They will choose certain passages that support their position, and not others, to make radical, even violent positions. Others will choose texts to justify other positions, much more moderate, democratic, that encourage coexistence, conciliation among peoples. And it is like the Bible, Old or New Testament -- you can find whatever you want to justify almost anything. All of these documents have some horrendous, bloody-minded passages which talk about what you do to enemies of your faith and your religion. And in other parts we find ideas that are filled with wonder and delight and glory and compassion. The Qur’an is very much in that category, and it is both used and abused by Muslims. Political Islam, in part, appeals to people who want to go back to their own traditions. Muslims have had a great tradition for upwards of a thousand years, surpassing anything the West had for a very long time, up until the fifteenth/sixteenth century. 145

But something happened. The West, which had been a rather crude and backward place, especially northern Europe, suddenly began to surpass Islam and become the great power of the world. Muslims anguish over: “What happened? What went wrong? Did God avert his face?” And here we see echoes of the Old Testament prophecies about why God seemingly averted his face from the people and how you have to get back to righteousness. There is a lot of similarity to this type of thinking. Some Muslims say, “We must get back to the traditions. We don’t have a moral society anymore. Some of this immorality is homegrown, but some of it comes from the West, or the West took away our traditions in the imperial period or the colonial period.” There are some elements of truth to this. The French went into Algeria and banned the use of even Arabic for any official use, so you have entire generations growing up ignorant even of their own language and of their own traditions, and now you have this French-speaking elite, and then an Arabic-speaking class. You cannot blame the West by any means for everything that has happened, but there are some legitimate grievances that go back to the Crusades or imperialism or Western intervention. Political Islam is partly harkening back to those old days. But religions serve many functions. If you are an Islamist and you feel that your government is illegitimate, incompetent, or brutal, you will find the best justification for critique from the Qur’an or from the traditions of Muslim about political values. No Muslim leader wants to be criticized from the point of view of Islam because this would seemingly be the most devastating critique that could be set forward. This is precisely one of the reasons why Muslims, Islamists in particular, offer critiques of their regimes or others on the basis of Islam. It is a very convenient instrument against other states. With new communications and media, the Muslim world is becoming ever more aware of itself as a totality: Indonesia to Morocco, Tatarstan in the former Soviet Union all the way down through multiple countries of Africa, and now large Muslim communities in Western Europe and indeed in this country. The Uma, the international community of Muslims, is becoming more self-aware. Chechyans can say, “Aha! We see sufferings of Palestinians in Israel and therefore we see our Chechyans” -- and then Kashmiris pick up on this, and so you now have a whole litany of groups. And Muslims will tick this off and say, “Muslims are under oppression in Palestine and Bosnia and Kosovo and Kashmir and Chechnya and Xinjiang and the 8 million Turkish Weigers in western China and the Moros in the Philippines.” The question is often asked: Why is it that there are many grievances in Latin America or Africa that we don’t hear about so much, or there isn’t necessarily the same degree of terrorism? What’s the matter with Muslims that if they have problems, it ends up being terrorism or a huge international movement?” One reason is because you do have Muslims, from Indonesia to Morocco, and north and south in those areas, so there is almost an echo effect, especially today. You turn on any television in the Muslim world and they are talking about issues of other Muslims elsewhere. This echo effect suddenly makes the Uma, the Muslim world, become a very powerful force attracting the equivalent of international adventurers or French Legionnaires, who are willing to go and fight in Chechnya, Bosnia, Palestine, Kashmir or Afghanistan. I want to emphasize greatly the multiple functions that Islam or political Islam performs in this world. We can’t simply look at it as an ideology, but need to recognize the functions that it serves. If there were no problems, there might not be much of a political Islamic movement. Political Islam may ultimately inevitably, decline. It is not about to right now. On the contrary, it is growing, and since 9/11, the war against terrorism and the war in Iraq, I am afraid that the intensity, if anything, is rising. But the story is obviously unfolding even as we speak. 146

Political Islam will begin to decrease under one of two or three circumstances. The first would be that it does gain power in one or another places and fails fairly palpably. We can point to Iran. If we were talking seven or eight years ago, I would probably say virtually a total story of failure. But in the last five or six years we begin to see very interesting politics emerging in Iran, perhaps more political progress in Iran towards opening up of the system and transparency than we see anywhere in the Arab world in that same period. The Islamists in Iran have made a lot of mistakes. They have partly learned from this, as have others. But Iranians today are not terribly open to the idea that we should have more Islam in politics. They want less Islam, want to fine-tune this, and there is great discussion about what is the proper role. They don’t say “no Islam”; they say, “What is the proper role?” So Islam coming to power and failing is certainly not a good advertising for elements of the ideology. Secondly, political Islam talks about problems that have nothing to do with religion. If you look at the agendas of these movements, they talk about corruption in the country, bad leadership, police brutality, police state, unemployment, lack of social services, imperialism, weak rulers who kowtow to the United States because they want protection from their own people more than they want to bring good governance. But you don’t have to be an Islamist to talk about these things. You can be a socialist or a nationalist or a communist. The minute that these societies start to open up and you do have socialists, nationalists, liberals or others who are talking about these same problems, the Islamists will lose the monopoly over the critique of societies as they exist. In some way or other a new ideology will come along. We wouldn’t have been sitting in this room some twenty-five years ago talking about Islam except as some exotic academic exercise, talking about a religion. In those days Arab nationalism was the great bugaboo. It was Abdul Nassar in Egypt, it was the great “put the fear of God into the West about the force of Arab nationalism, rallying mobs and masses.” That is gone for multiple reasons, and today it is political Islam. Political Islam will never go away altogether. In Turkey we have a very interesting new movement in power. For the first time in the history of Islam, we have a political party that has come to power through free elections and is doing what it can do -- making mistakes, doing some good things. This is normalcy. Since these movements are not going to go away and cannot be defeated by the sword, I would hope that gradually, by allowing more moderate elements among these Islamists into the system, into parliament, they will learn the rules of the game, of compromise. Then through that process, we may begin to tame what is otherwise a powerful movement that can be both very dangerous and can possibly bring change to the region in the garb of a nativist ideology rather than something imported from abroad. 147

THE DEMOCRACY GAME.(West Bank). David Remnick. The New Yorker 82.1 (Feb 27, 2006): p58. Every Friday, just before midday prayers, thousands of men and women in the West Bank town of Dura stop to gossip and shop in the market stalls that lead to the steps of the Grand Mosque. I visited Dura on the first Friday after Hamas had swept the Palestinian elections. And yet that morning all the talk was of cartoons: a dozen caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad had been published in the Danish daily JyllandsPosten, igniting a worldwide paroxysm of apocalyptic hysteria that brought into use, once more, that "Star Wars"-like phrase "a clash of civilizations." The imam at the Dura Grand Mosque is a man in his late forties named Nayef Rajoub. Although Sheikh Nayef is a leader of Hamas and the top votegetter in the entire West Bank, his supporters told me that he, too, was focussed on the cartoons. He would be speaking that day on the Danish caricatures as a "weapon of the Western Crusaders." Outside the mosque, I met a group of people standing around a fruit-andvegetable store run by a man called Eichmann Abu Atwan. I thought I'd misheard his name, but he smiled, showed his identity card, and said, "Eichmann. Like the Nazi." His father had named him during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem in 1961. "He was an early fighter, killing Israelis in the seventies," Eichmann said proudly. "And my brother was such a fierce fighter that a Syrian paper compared him to Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi"-- one of the founders of Hamas. Eichmann was a supporter of Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist group that Yasir Arafat founded some fifty years ago, and, like everyone else I'd been talking to in the occupied territories, he said that Hamas had won for a variety of reasons: the financial corruption of Fatah and its leadership; the utter failure of the Oslo process; a marked increase in Islamic practice throughout Gaza and the West Bank; Hamas's dual mastery in providing social services for Palestinians and launching armed assaults on the Israelis. "Time has run out for Fatah," Eichmann said. As the muezzin summoned the people of Dura to the mosque, Nayef's fraternal twin, Yasir, stopped by the store. "Are you all coming to hear the Sheikh?" he said. Like Nayef, Yasir had been affiliated with Hamas from the start, but their older brother, Jibril Rajoub, was one of Arafat's most powerful aides and a Fatah lord. Jibril had run the Preventive Security Service in the West Bank, and he was one of the losers in the elections. Prayers began at eleven-thirty, and we filed into the mosque and knelt down. The walls were whitewashed. A dozen fluorescent tubes dangled low from the ceiling, giving off a vague yellow light. The room was filled entirely with men, but I was hardly inconspicuous. My translator, an aspiring young journalist from the West Bank named Khaldoun, quickly came to realize that his principal task, after rendering the Sheikh's sermon into English, was to explain to all who inquired (and many did) that the foreign visitor was "not Danish." Al Jazeera and the other Arab-language television stations had broadcast fiery protests throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. "Danish?" a man asked me. Khaldoun responded with a prolonged explanation featuring the word "Am-rika," which has not been something to brag about in recent years, but this time it did the trick. Sheikh Nayef has a graying beard, close-cropped hair, and a tranquil, strangely distant gaze. His posture was as straight as the microphone stand before him. I was told that outside the mosque his personality was shy, even remote--a marked contrast to his worldly and fierce-looking brother Jibril--but he soon rose to a register of high dudgeon in his sermon. The Danish cartoons, the Sheikh said, were reminiscent of the calumnies hurled at the Prophet fourteen hundred years ago. Muhammad "was accused of being a magician, of being insane. The same thing is happening now in Denmark, in France, although many 148 mosques in Europe are spreading his message. . . . What happened in Denmark is an offense against Muhammad and his followers. It is an act of aggression against us and against our feelings." The Sheikh was not about to get into the origins of the demonstrations, how they had been fanned not only by an imam in Copenhagen and various jihadi groups but also by regimes, like the Saudis', that make a show of their piety in order to placate their Islamist subjects. "That's not my topic today," he said. His theme was power and humiliation, Western offense and Islamic will. The cartoon affair, he said, was yet another episode in the Crusaders' assault on the faith, and the reason for "the Prophet's humiliation is the weakness of our nation." The demonstrations proved that Hamas and the Islamic movement around the world were unimpressed by such "excuses" as freedom of speech, and were absolutely determined to reject the pieties of "the heathen." The Sheikh continued, "The people who bow down to the White House and to the Western way of life must all wake up and realize that this life is not suitable for us. Today we are told to accept our enemies, to give up our principles, to give up resistance, and do the same as the previous government"--the Palestinian Authority under Fatah. "But that is not our model. Our model is the Prophet Muhammad. What did the previous government get from compromise? It got failure, the denial of our rights, a blockade--Arafat was caught in a blockade. We have no partner in Israel. A people with principles will not repeat this failure. If our people repeat this, the next thing will be the Israelis telling us to stop praying, to stop fasting, to change our names, to take off the hijab. We will not repeat these mistakes. Palestine is for the Muslims, and no one can give it up. . . . Those who injure God and his Prophet will suffer now and after death." Dura is a town in the region of Hebron, and Hebron is the largest city in the West Bank. It is also one of the most purely Islamic cities in the occupied territories, and a center of terror. One reason for the extraordinary tension in Hebron, beyond the general privations of the nearly four-decades-long occupation, is the presence, amid a hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians, of five hundred Jewish settlers protected by more than two thousand Israeli troops. On the Jewish holiday of Purim in 1994, a doctor and settler from Brooklyn, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire with an assault rifle on Arabs praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, killing twenty-nine and setting off riots and reprisals all over the region. A few years ago, at the height of the Al Aqsa intifada, Jihad, a soccer team sponsored by a local mosque, instituted a rigorous training schedule: the players fasted on Mondays and Thursdays, pledged daily allegiance to Hamas, and practiced nearly every afternoon wearing jerseys bearing a hand brandishing an axe and the inscription "Al Jihad: Prepare for Them." The team's fame relied only secondarily on an impressive record on the field. Eight team members, including the player-coach, carried out suicide bombing operations, one after the other, killing more than twenty people and wounding dozens more. The city exhausted its sense of hope years ago. What now greets every visitor on the road running south from Jerusalem into Hebron is a huge green banner reading, "Welcome to Hamas City!" Hamas, which was founded in 1987, during the first intifada, and is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, and the European Union, won seventy-four of the hundred and thirty-two seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Fatah won only forty-three. Hamas swept the slate in the Hebron region, taking nine of nine seats. Ever since Arafat signed the Oslo accords, in 1993, and the Palestinian leadership ended its long exile in Tunis to establish the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he had used the leaders of Fatah, men like Jibril Rajoub, to make sure that Islamists like Nayef Rajoub did not extend their influence beyond the mosque. Jibril made his bones as a resistance fighter by spending seventeen years of his youth in Israeli prisons--much of that time for throwing a dud grenade at a convoy of Israeli soldiers--but his political prospects in middle age have been dashed. As Preventive Security chief, he jailed members of Hamas and other Islamist groups. Soon it is likely that Hamas will control Preventive Security--its five thousand troops and its arms. The Rajoub family was conservative and provincial, but not especially religious. Nayef became devout when he studied Islamic law in Jordan. Yasir, who is a director of an Islamic charity that looks after 149 orphans, has been arrested nine times and spent a total of eleven years in Israeli jails. In 1992, he and Nayef, along with more than four hundred other members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were forcibly deported by Israel to the mountain village of Marj al-Zahour, in southern Lebanon, where they lived in tents for a year until the government let them go home. The meetings and discussions conducted among the deportees helped form the core of the Islamist leadership that is now coming to power; the Islamists called their Lebanese exile "Ibn Taymiyya University," referring to a medieval Islamic thinker. Seven of the nine Hamas candidates in Hebron had been among the deportees. When I asked Yasir Rajoub about his brother Jibril, he smiled magnanimously and said that the family was close and the brothers' disagreements were "nothing personal." "Jibril even arrested me and detained me for a month," he said. "I was taken to Jericho," where Preventive Security had its offices and jail cells. "Others were tortured in that jail, but not me--maybe because Jibril is my brother. When the Israelis arrested us, Jibril tried to look after us. He sent money to my family." After the midday prayers, Sheikh Nayef accepted congratulations for his sermon on the steps of the mosque and in the market stalls. He shook hands, blessed children, and then, because he does not own a car, started looking for a ride home. He invited me along for lunch. "Jibril is rich, but the Sheikh is poor, a simple man," one of his admirers told me. "He had to seek a loan just to pay the fee to get his name on the election ballot." The Fatah chieftains are known in the territories for skimming aid money and for taking kickbacks on businesses like oil, gas, and concrete. Their opulent houses, on the beach in Gaza, in the hills of the West Bank, mock the crumbling apartment blocks of their subjects. The Sheikh's modest house squats at the end of a pitted dirt road on the outskirts of Dura. A group of women, including the Sheikh's wife, daughters, and nieces, were in the garage tending a gas stove and stacking loaves of pita; in a cauldron they were boiling hunks of mutton and rice. With some of his children trailing behind him, the Sheikh led his guests--family members, aides, and friends from the mosque--into the house, to a room furnished only with carpets and a floor lamp. A teen-aged son spread several oilcloths over the floor and another laid out plates and platters of food. "Go ahead," the Sheikh said. "It's not easy preaching for so long. Let's eat for a while and then we'll talk." It is an irony of history that the first Islamist party in the Arab world to come to power in democratic elections is based not in Cairo or Amman but, rather, in the territories occupied by the Jewish state. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan have kept Islamists in their countries at bay by alternating repression, co-option, and limited access to meaningless ballots; Mubarak and Abdullah were just as dismayed as the Israelis to see the rise of Hamas on their borders. Israel and the United States are already discussing schemes to isolate and destabilize the Palestinian Authority if Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and renounce violence. According to a report by Steven Erlanger in the Times, the Israelis could cause a financial crisis in the Palestinian territories by refusing to hand over the more than fifty million dollars a month in taxes and customs duties that they collect on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. They could make economic life even more arduous by tightening control on the movement of goods and workers between Israel and the territories. Western governments have said that they, too, could discontinue financial aid. These moves might result in a billion-dollar annual deficit leaving the Palestinian Authority unable to pay its hundred and forty thousand employees, who support more than a third of the Palestinian population. If Hamas decides to rebel rather than yield to outside pressure, that could lead to yet another armed conflict with Israel--a third intifada. The Israelis are gambling that Hamas--which won the elections without a majority of the votes and gained more support for its promises of reform than for its extremist views on Israel--would rather compromise than be forced to choose between poverty and war. Islamist resistance movements appeared in Palestine well before the creation of Israel. The military 150 battalions of Hamas are named for Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a Syrian-born sheikh who, during the Mandate period, carried out numerous attacks on British and Jewish officials. (He was killed by the British in 1935.) In one sermon he said, "Nothing will save us but our arms." The Muslim Brotherhood, the root organization of Hamas and of nearly every contemporary Islamist group in the Arab world, was founded in 1928 by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna, who decried both English colonial rule and secular Arab nationalism. For Banna and the Muslim Brothers, the Koran was both spiritual guide and worldly constitution. In the nineteen-sixties, as the Brotherhood gained popularity, the Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser cracked down, trying and executing the group's most influential and radical thinker, Sayyid Qutb. In the same series of arrests, the Egyptian police briefly imprisoned a young Gazan sheikh named Ahmed Yassin. When, following the 1967 Six-Day War, Gaza became Israeli-occupied territory, Sheikh Yassin set up a range of charities and social-service organizations, and took over professional associations and the Islamic University of Gaza, all of which were linked to the authority of the mosques. Because thousands of Palestinians worked each day in Israeli cities like Tel Aviv, Yassin was obsessed with the whore-of-Babylon influence that such places might have on his people. In 1973, he started the Islamic Center, the Al-Mujamma al-Islami, whose aim was to strengthen the authority of Islam over the population. "In those days, Yassin's concern was men and women swimming together," Emmanuel Sivan, one of Israel's leading scholars of modern Islam, told me. Yassin's emphasis was on da'wa--social work and preaching--and he skillfully attracted aid from local donors, the Palestinian diaspora, and other Islamists abroad. The Israeli government, which was pouring its resources into combating Arafat, determined that the Islamists were more of a threat to the P.L.O. than to Israel, and so did little to get in Yassin's way. "Israel operated on the simple Western logic of supporting the rival of your enemy," said Shaul Mishal, a professor at Tel Aviv University and the co-author of a scholarly history, "The Palestinian Hamas." "That strategy did not last long." By the early eighties, many disaffected young men among the Palestinian Islamists were getting involved in the violent resistance to Israel, which was dominated by P.L.O. fighters. To keep them within the authority of the mosques, Yassin and his associates began importing arms and organizing militias of their own. When, in December, 1987, the intifada began--first in the Jabalia refugee camp, in Gaza, then throughout the occupied territories--the Islamists joined the rebellion full force, and Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was born. ("Hamas" means "zeal.") The Hamas charter, a nine-thousand-word document adopted by the leadership in August, 1988, remains the group's ideological foundation, melding Islamic fundamentalism with a national movement. From the start, the P.L.O. had included a range of ideologies and tendencies, among them Arab nationalism and Marxism, but Hamas rejected such "foreign" influence. In its charter, historical Palestine--the territory min al-nahr ila al-bahr, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean--is declared part of the Islamic waqf ("endowment"), "consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day," and indivisible. To relinquish any part of the land--in other words, to permit the presence of an alien Jewish state--is forbidden. Hamas "strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine," the charter reads, for, under the Jews, "the state of truth has disappeared and been replaced by the state of evil." The Hamas charter also reflects an unabashedly anti-Semitic, conspiracy-based view of regional and world history. Article 22 asserts that the Jewish people have "ignited revolutions" throughout the world from 1789 to 1917. Jews triggered the First World War in order to destroy the Islamic caliphate and the Second World War in order to make "huge profits from trading war materiel." In short, "No war broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it." The Jews also have formed "secret organizations" and "destructive spying" agencies--Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, and others--to promote the 151

Zionist project, which "has no limits. . . . After Palestine it will strive to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates." This plan is "outlined in 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' " the tsarist-era forgery of a Jewish plan for world domination. The charter's view of negotiations and "the so-called peaceful solutions" is unambiguous. "There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. The initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are but a waste of time and sheer futility." After the first intifada and the advent of the Oslo process, in 1993, Arafat became wary of Hamas and its refusal to accept the peace process, Israel's right to exist, or, above all, his authority in Gaza and the West Bank. According to Mishal's book, Arafat once referred to Hamas as a "Zulu tribe," an allusion to the Inkatha movement, which refused to come under the command of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. Arafat also found himself competing with Hamas for money; when he supported Iraq in the Gulf War in 1991, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other states on the Arabian Peninsula began diverting to Hamas funds that had once gone to the P.L.O. In the early nineteen-nineties, according to Gilles Kepel, the author of "Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam," Hamas gained adherents from three social classes: impoverished young men, who took part in the armed resistance; the devout middle classes; and Islamist intellectuals in the region and in the West. Israel and the United States, in the meantime, grew deeply frustrated with Arafat's inability, or unwillingness, to confront Hamas, which had become a pioneer in the art of terror. The first modern suicide bombing was carried out in 1981 against the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut; in 1983, Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded Shiite militia in southern Lebanon, used suicide bombers to attack American and French barracks in Beirut. In 1993, Hamas took it up with terrifying frequency. After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995, Hamas became perhaps the most important factor in the search for a successor: a series of bombings that it carried out in Israel during the campaign turned Israeli voters toward the right-wing Likud Party and brought Benjamin Netanyahu, who promised no concessions to the Palestinians, to power. Netanyahu declared himself determined to destroy Hamas, but he managed instead to return the favor, ordering an operation that helped its leadership immeasurably. In 1997, Netanyahu dispatched a team of Mossad agents to Amman to assassinate Khaled Meshal, the chief Hamas leader abroad. Two agents approached Meshal on the street from behind and one pricked his ear with a needle loaded with a deadly nerve toxin. Meshal's bodyguard, however, turned out to be a spectacular athlete and ran down the Israeli agents, first by car and then on foot, beat them, and brought them to a local prison. Once the Israeli agents confessed to the poisoning on videotape, King Hussein, furious that the Mossad had carried out the mission on Jordanian territory long after he had made peace with Israel, called Netanyahu and demanded the antidote to the poison. Netanyahu refused. Only after Hussein appealed to Bill Clinton and the Israeli press began criticizing Netanyahu for ordering such a spectacularly stupid operation did he relent. Meshal survived. Hussein, who had his own Palestinian majority to placate, extracted another concession from Netanyahu: rather than lose the peace with Jordan, the Israeli Prime Minister agreed to release Sheikh Yassin from prison. For several years, Yassin served as the strategic and spiritual guide for Hamas. Israel maintained that he gave the final assent to terrorist operations. In 2004, during the Al Aqsa intifada and the Israeli attempt to wipe out the Hamas leadership, Yassin was killed in a missile attack. Since then, when I have visited Hamas leaders in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood's headquarters in Cairo, I've seen portraits of Yassin in every office. "He is our holy man," Mahmoud al-Zahar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, told me. "He is our greatest martyr." The principal Hamas leaders--Zahar and Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, and Musa Abu-Marzuq and Khaled Mashel in Damascus--have never feigned innocence of the attacks committed in their name, but they are fairly schooled in the arts of diplomatic wrangling and media manipulation. Their public language 152 attempts to yoke contradictory goals. Like the leaders of the I.R.A. decades ago, they are trying to enter the realm of politics without relinquishing the perquisites of armed resistance and the purity of ideological rejectionism. They want to maintain the support of their most radical fighters without losing the funding of the European Union. They hint at the possibility of a hudna--a prolonged truce--if Israel retreats to the borders that existed before the Six-Day War, but they also reserve the "historical" goal of absolute dominion made plain in their charter. Sheikh Nayef Rajoub is more typical of the men and women of Hamas who will make up the majority of the next Palestinian legislature. Unlike the Fatah politicians, who have travelled the world, navigated diplomatic receptions, and dealt closely with the Israelis for many years, they are provincial, inexperienced, and leery of the task of governing even a proto-state. Few polls showed that Hamas would win the election, and its leaders were as surprised as Fatah or Israeli intelligence. But now Sheikh Nayef was prepared to be magnanimous toward his more famous older brother. "In the past, my brother and I had reasons for tension," he said as we ate the last of the mutton. "These days, our relationship is better than ever. We are civilized people, and everyone has his choice, including religion. My choice is Islam and Jibril's choice is something else. I think Jibril did pray for a little while and then he stopped. It's sad for me." The Sheikh felt that he was part of a "worldwide historical wave." He said that Hamas, after years of keeping its distance from official politics, had decided to "accept the democracy game," and he was sure that if the same opportunity were available elsewhere in the Arab world Islamist parties would prevail. "The failure of all other ideologies is sending Muslims toward Islam, and this is the case in Palestine," he said. "Twenty years ago when I was working in the mosque, around a hundred and fifty, two hundred people came on Friday. Now it's a few thousand. At that time, there was only one mosque in Dura. Now there are twelve." Hamas even won a considerable crossover vote, polling well in cities with sizable Christian populations, such as Ramallah and Bethlehem. The Sheikh said he knew that, despite the heavy vote for Hamas, the majority of Palestinians tell pollsters that they favor an end to the occupation and a two-state solution. But Hamas, he added, would "never" bow to Israeli, American, European, and even Egyptian demands that it acknowledge the existence of Israel and disarm. "How can the world want us to recognize the state of Israel when Israel will not give us the right to exist, when it took our land and imposed occupation and does not recognize our rights?" he said. "Resistance for us is a legitimate action. Divine and human laws give us the right to resist." Hamas has not executed any suicide bombings in the past few months, but the Israelis do not take the lull to reflect a nascent desire for compromise. "The conflict with Israel is not a matter of land," Sheikh Nayef said. "It's a matter of ideology. All the Israeli slogans--the 'chosen people,' the 'promised land'--the basis of their state is religious. But these are religious legends, false stories. God did not give them this land as if Israelis, Jews, are preferred above all other peoples on earth and all other peoples were meant to serve them." The Sheikh went on, "Two hundred years ago in Europe, they were conservative people, but now the fashion world, the media--it's controlled by the Jews. And their people are sexually open. Freud, a Jew, was the one who destroyed morals, and Marx destroyed divine ideologies. If it is not all Jews, well, they were a big part of this. And now it is the Jewish lobby in the United States that is setting policy in the world and causing the United States to wage war all over the world." One of the biggest financial supporters of Hamas has been the fundamentalist Shiite regime in Tehran, according to Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies. At a conference in Tehran last October called "A World Without Zionism," Iran's current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, urged the Palestinians to maintain a maximalist position toward Israel. Quoting Ayatollah Khomeini's statement that Israel "must be eliminated from the pages of history," Ahmadinejad instructed the Palestinians never to bow to the 153 demands of diplomacy. They must not recognize Israel--and anyone who does, he declared, "should know that he will burn in the fire of the Ummah," the Islamic nation. I asked the Sheikh if he agreed with Ahmadinejad's argument, much publicized in recent months, that the Holocaust was a myth, and a pretext for the creation of Israel. The question, the Sheikh said, had direct bearing on his morning homily about the Danish cartoons and the will of the Muslims to resist humiliation: "When Ahmadinejad spoke, everyone in the West condemned him, but why didn't the West say that Ahmadinejad had his right of freedom of speech?" The Sheikh smiled like one who has scored an irrefutable point. "If the issue concerns Jews, it's always anti- Semitism, anti-Semitism, but when it concerns other religions it's a matter of freedom of speech." But did he agree with the Iranian leader? I asked. The Sheikh smiled again, this time indulgently. "If I answer, you'll provide me with a real headache, won't you?" he said. "I don't want to tell you my opinion on this. No doubt, it's too controversial. If I say I agree with Ahmadinejad, Hamas will be added to the list of those who deny the Holocaust. If I don't agree with him, it will provide the Jews with the excuse that, since they suffered a lot in the Second World War, it justifies what they are doing now. What I do know about for sure is the crimes of the Jews in Lebanon and the West Bank and Gaza." Word came that the Sheikh's brother Jibril was going to visit. Through the window we could see a convoy led by an armored Land Cruiser and a BMW sedan--the rewards of Fatah power--pulling up in front of the house. The Sheikh sighed. He did not seem entirely ready to greet his big brother. To cheer him up I asked him what else he did besides preach and teach the Koran. "I am also the head of the Hebron Beekeepers Union," he said. I asked him if he got stung a lot. The Sheikh rolled his eyes. "Don't ask," he said. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Jibril Rajoub, Marwan Barghouti, who led the Fatah militia, and Muhammad Dahlan, the head of security for the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, were considered potential successors to "the Old Man"--Arafat. Unlike Jibril, his colleagues won seats in the new parliament, despite certain disadvantages: Barghouti is in jail serving five life sentences (plus forty years) for helping to kill four Israelis and a Greek monk; Dahlan is thought to have enriched himself and his extended family outrageously and illegally. Jibril, however, could not overcome the complexities of his history and his personality. During the campaign, his reputation suffered not only because of his arrogance--the swaggering demeanor, the wealth he has allegedly acquired--but also because he had lost touch with his potential voters. Since returning to the West Bank from the P.L.O.'s exile in Tunis, he has lived and worked almost entirely in Jericho and Ramallah. Khalid Amayreh, a journalist in Dura who writes for the Al Jazeera Web site, told me, "Jibril is flamboyant, ostentatious, a self-inflated egomaniac with a sense of megalomania. His tongue often functions much more quickly than his mind. He is no intellectual. As they say, 'Manchester born, Manchester bred, / Strong in the arm, weak in the head.' In his speeches he attacked his opponents hysterically and frantically, calling them all kinds of names. He said, 'I was shooting Israelis when Sheikh Nayef was still playing with little kids.' And he mocked Hamas. It was all a public-relations disaster." Mocking Hamas when Hamas has been able to build a reputation among Palestinians for grass-roots charity and incorruptibility was a dubious strategy for any Fatah candidate. In Palestinian eyes, Hamas had created a kind of shadow civil society long before it won a reputation for suicide bombings. One morning, I visited the Islamic Charitable Society, in Hebron, a sprawling facility for several thousand 154 children that includes schools, a medical clinic, and an orphanage. The director, a former marketing manager named Khalil Herbawi, said that the society was funded by various Western non-governmental organizations, by Arab groups, and by private donors. Herbawi's predecessor was in Hamas and had been arrested in 2002 for helping to finance and plan an attack on the nearby settlement of Adora. Herbawi said that he had voted for Hamas in the elections but added, "I am not in Hamas myself." Last September, Israeli troops took over the society's administrative building, confiscating documents, fax machines, printers, and computers and then sealing the doors as if it were a crime scene, an action that outraged Herbawi. "The Israelis say that we take care of children whose parents martyred themselves," Herbawi said. "But we take all the orphans, the ones whose parents are suicide bombers or who died of cancer or heart attacks. . . . Of the thousand orphans here, only twenty or twenty-one are orphans because of suicide bombing. Another twenty or so are children of collaborators who were killed. So it evens out." As we looked in on classrooms full of children learning math and science and then looked out from a balcony onto a playground filled with girls, all of them wearing the hijab, Herbawi said, "Is this terrorism? Maybe they will arrest me, too." Such institutions understandably helped make Hamas popular. Gaza and the West Bank are poor, and although in the past decade Western and Arab governments have poured billions of dollars into the accounts of the Palestinian Authority, most Palestinians believe that, thanks to the corruption of Fatah, they have been systematically robbed of much of that aid money. Western intelligence agencies believe that Hamas has used its social institutions for armed operations, indoctrinating children in schools, inciting violence and recruiting cells in mosques, establishing safe houses, and providing funds for weapons and for the families of fighters who have blown themselves up for the cause. In 1998, Sheikh Yassin said that the political and social branches of Hamas could not be distinguished from the military. "We cannot separate the wing from the body," he said, according to a report by Reuters. "If we do so, the body will not be able to fly. Hamas is one body." In most Palestinian cities and towns, the elections were so consuming that for weeks campaign placards replaced the usual posters of young men and women hoisting AK-47 rifles in their last moments alive. Democracy obscured the cult of martyrdom. Fatah outspent Hamas and the smaller parties, and the Bush Administration funnelled nearly two million dollars through U.S.A.I.D. funding projects in the occupied territories that it hoped would help Fatah's election chances. Hamas did manage to hire Nashat Aqtash, a professor of media studies at Bir Zeit University, to advise them on public relations. Aqtash told me when I visited him in Ramallah that his job was not as difficult as it seemed to outsiders. "For you, Hamas is suicide bombing and that's it," he said. "But suicide bombing is only a small fraction of what Hamas is for the Palestinian people." Hamas, he insisted, was "all pluses, no minuses." Its image of distributing charity and having borne the brunt of the Al Aqsa intifada and, by contrast, Fatah's almost surreal disorganization was just part of the story. The American contributions backfired. "The Palestinians are stubborn and don't want to be told what to do, least of all by the United States of America," he said. Hamas ran three television commercials in the last week of the campaign, and none of them called on the familiar imagery of teen-age martyrs and declarations of jihad. Aqtash showed me the ads on his computer screen. One ad alternated images of Palestinian children suffering at the hands of Israeli soldiers and the words "Our blood"--in red--"is a fence to protect our holy places." Very soft-soap by Hamas standards. Another featured Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's lead candidate on the national slate, who is expected to be named Prime Minister. "We will protect the resistance movement until we gain back all the occupied territories," Haniyeh said, speaking almost in a whisper. Aqtash had counselled Hamas candidates not to talk about killing Israelis and to limit their speeches 155 about taking back all of historical Palestine. "You see," he said proudly, "it is clear that he means the territories occupied in 1967. Only crazy people talk about going beyond the 1967 borders." If a Hamas-led government was going to attract funds from abroad for the Palestinians, I asked, what was its next public-relations strategy? Aqtash smiled and reminded me that his contract had run out on Election Day; nevertheless, he offered some final words of advice. "Our rhetoric was ineffective because we used Islamic rhetoric that is understandable to us but incomprehensible, and scary, to you," he said. "At funerals, you would see masked people carrying rifles. In Gaza, this is a cultural thing, trying to show our grief and support to the families. But these images in the West mean 'We will kill you.' We need to organize the Palestinian message to the West and put it in a context that the West can understand. Israelis kill Palestinians, but they also have the talent to explain themselves." Stout, smiling through a scowl, and sitting in his chair with one arm slung over his seatback like a sultan, Jibril Rajoub instantly became the focal point of his younger brother's living room. A boy appeared balancing a tray holding many glasses of tea. Jibril was served first. Sheikh Nayef began to work his worry beads at a fantastic clip while Jibril talked about devoting himself to the revival of Fatah and trying to coexist with Hamas as a matter of familial duty. "Having a brother in Hamas is O.K., and I am proud of him," he said. "Sheikh Nayef is a moderate, he's realistic, a pragmatist. He was never an extremist. Politically, in the nineties, there were two different strategies. We in Fatah saw certain things as the rules of the game where negotiations were concerned. But in the past five years the Israelis stopped dealing with the Palestinian Authority as a partner, and the gap between the two Palestinian factions grew smaller. . . . We'll remain in the opposition as an honest partner, and we won't try to undermine Hamas's authority. We wish them success." Jibril had imprisoned many Hamas activists in his time, but now he acted the part of the defeated opponent graciously offering advice to his successors. "Most people in Hamas are realistic," he said. "I don't think anything will take place on a social level--like forcing women to wear the hijab. Hamas has to focus on international legitimacy and assure the international community that an Islamic leadership will contribute to regional stability." A couple of days later, I visited Jibril at his office in Ramallah. During the Al Aqsa intifada, the Israelis shelled the building, but now it was repaired and filled with aides gossiping about Jibril's future and the coming of Hamas. Jibril gave me a copy of his "autobiography"--a book-length series of interviews about his years in Israeli prisons, his ascension to Arafat's circle, and his contacts with Israeli and American intelligence. The book featured photographs of him as a young man in Israeli custody and also ones of him--older, heavier--with George Tenet, Nelson Mandela, and Israeli officials. Jibril knew that such relationships, a remnant of the Oslo years, were part of what killed his election chances. "There are all kinds of stories about how close I was to the Americans, the C.I.A., and all the rest," Jibril said bitterly. "But how close? When I had cancer in 2002, after I left Preventive Security, I was treated first in Egypt, and they urged me to go to the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota. But I was refused an American visa." He went to England instead. "I never once talked with the Israelis without a green light from Abu Amar," he went on, using Arafat's nom de guerre. "And after I met with the Israelis I always reported straight to him." Jibril had been at Arafat's side, but it had always been a prickly relationship. In Tunis, according to Matt Rees's book "Cain's Field," Rajoub once refused Arafat's request to drive his future wife, Suha Tawil, to the airport on the ground that he would not "chauffeur a whore." In May, 2002, Arafat fired Jibril as the head of Preventive Security after the Israelis demanded that the various Palestinian security agencies be put under Rajoub's control. A month earlier, Israel had 156 attacked Jibril's compound. Jibril and his men had been allowed to escape, but only after giving up the Islamist prisoners in their custody. In 2003, Arafat brought Jibril back into the Palestinian leadership, appointing him national-security adviser. "Our relationship had its ups and downs, which happens in any relationship that goes on for many years," Jibril said. "At a certain point, Arafat felt that I was a threat to his regime, but I was always loyal to him. He was always the symbol of the Palestinian people and contributed to the cause more than anyone else." After Arafat died, in November, 2004, and his heir in Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas, won election as President of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas had an easier time portraying itself as the incorruptible champion of resistance and Fatah as a spent force. Among his doubters, Abbas is considered timid, indecisive, and incapable of extracting anything from the Israelis. Jibril fought with Arafat over many issues, but he said, "If Arafat were still alive, Hamas would never have won. Arafat's loss was a loss for everyone and in every way. He was the only Palestinian leader truly committed to the reconciliation of two peoples. He had the long view." If Arafat had such a long view, I asked, why did he turn down a deal at Camp David in 2000 that, for all its deficiencies, would have been a far better arrangement than anything contemplated by the Israelis today? Sheikh Nayef had told me that Camp David would have been an "unacceptable betrayal." His brother did not answer directly, but it was clear that his opinion was not the same. "Excuse me! Why ask this question?" he said. "The Israelis talk of unilateralism now. Camp David is long over. There's no use crying over spilled milk." The Israelis have begun an election campaign of their own, to choose a successor to Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma since early January, when he suffered a stroke. And even though they are well aware that Sharon's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year has been interpreted by Hamas as a credit to armed resistance, all polls show that the Kadima Party, led by Olmert, Sharon's deputy prime minister, will win. Olmert gave an interview to Israel's Channel 2 making it plain that, like Sharon, he planned to close dozens of smaller settlements on the West Bank but retain the main blocs of Ariel, Gush Etzion, and Ma'ale Adumim. He said that he would also retain "control" of the Jordan Valley and sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. This is less than what Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton proposed to Arafat five years ago, and it came as no surprise that the Hamas leadership dignified Olmert's offer only with mockery. In Cairo, Musa Abu-Marzuq, who once led the Hamas political bureau from northern Virginia, said, "When we restore historical Palestine, the Jews can come live with us. They will then acquire the Palestinian nationality." In early February, while the Hamas leadership made plans for a new government, the security situation deteriorated. Gaza was turning into a lawless state, with Palestinian militias launching Qassam rockets into Israeli territory and the Israeli Army killing militants, mainly from the air. In Hebron, local Islamists assaulted the headquarters of a European observer team; a dozen Danes on the team had to be escorted out of Hebron by the Israeli Army--precisely the soldiers they had been sent to observe. The same week, the Israelis arrested a group of religious militants who "identify with Hamas" and charged them with killing six Jews in the past year. In Israel, there was no sense that the rise of Hamas could be dismissed simply as a protest vote. Even a liberal scholar like Emmanuel Sivan, an expert in fundamentalism who has met Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas representatives over the years, told me, "If you are living in Israel it is always good to be anxious. We are a state living on edge." He did say, however, that "the typical American-Jewish oy-vey reaction" was not warranted. "An Arab friend told me, 'Fatah is the crime and Hamas is the punishment,' " Sivan said. "Three-quarters of the Palestinians want a long-term arrangement with Israel and understand they have got only so far with violence, but they also want the rascals out." The biggest danger facing Israel, he said, was that anarchy would begin to prevail, with uncontrolled militias and criminal gangs causing such a state of 157 unrest that elements from Al Qaeda could exploit the situation and make their way to Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli security establishment is particularly worried about the relationship between Hamas and the Islamic regime in Tehran. "I am concerned about Iran's efforts to engulf Israel with Islamist fundamentalist terror groups on the border: with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and with Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank," Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the Defense and Foreign Affairs committee in the Knesset, told me. "If Hamas takes control of the Palestinian armed forces and police, that means it will establish an armed threat right near Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and BenGurion airport." Avi Dichter, who recently stepped down as the head of Shin Bet, the Israeli F.B.I., and is now running for a seat in the Knesset, said that while the Israeli military had killed, arrested, or detained dozens of Hamas fighters and leaders during the Al Aqsa intifada, support from Iran, and the new ability to operate in Gaza with less Israeli interference, means that the militias remain a threat. In addition, Fatah's own battalions, which adopted suicide bombing as a tactic in order to keep up with Hamas in the race for street credibility, have not disbanded, despite repeated statements from Abbas decrying violence. For all the anxiety about Hamas, there remains in Israeli society a broad consensus for a two-state solution--a desire born less of an Oslo-era optimism about an integrated "new Middle East" and more of sheer weariness with occupation and an understanding that to retain the territories is to risk the Zionist idea of maintaining a Jewish majority in a democratic state. "I don't see any chance of reaching an agreement that you would call real peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians," Shlomo Gazit, a retired, dovish Army general who used to command the West Bank and Gaza, told me. "This is not in the stars for the next hundred years. The Arab world does not accept a foreign people, a foreign religion, in the Middle East. All we can strive for is practical coexistence." "There is no resolution to this conflict," Yehoshua Porath, a scholar of Middle Eastern history, says. "It is like a person living with a chronic disease for which there is no cure. You take palliatives and partial remedies. You know there is no final cure yet, but you keep investing in the search. Here the final cure is a peace settlement." In Gaza and the West Bank, the politicians, academics, and activists who were shocked by the Hamas victory have also searched for ways to soften the blow. The most common argument is that Hamas did not win many more votes than Fatah; it took fifty-six per cent of the seats but with only fortyfour per cent of the vote. Part of the reason for the landslide is that Fatah ran an inept campaign, often putting forward more than one candidate against a single Hamas candidate, and splitting the vote. Hamas was also the beneficiary of a collective protest against the Palestinian Authority's inability to cope with Sharon and Olmert, and the indignity of occupation. But the idea that Hamas will modify its ideology because it is now faced with the prospect of making good on its promises, of creating jobs and collecting the garbage, of day-to-day governing, does not impress many Palestinian analysts. In Iran, after all, Ahmadinejad came to power not because of his insistence on building a nuclear weapon or his anti-Semitic rhetoric; he, too, won popularity largely on social issues. Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian Authority's minister of planning, told me that the Fatah hierarchy is worried that there is a direct relationship between poverty and radical fundamentalism, and if the situation in the territories worsens an even more radical Hamas will take hold. "The Muslim Brotherhood believes that it is possible to reestablish the Islamic regimes in the Islamic world and reach the point of a single Islamic superpower, as in the old days," Khatib said. "It wants to be a huge modern state and compete with the modern superpowers. But it's a fantasy. You cannot govern by Islam. Islamic ideology is not suitable for that. It has fixed ideas on economics and government that are inflexible and irrelevant for modern times. "Hamas can moderate in the tactical sense, but not fundamentally. It will play tactics on the question of 158 violence and in its political slogans. What it wants is the freedom to maneuver, to build people into 'real and proper Muslims,' to keep building its base. . . . This is very dangerous for the Palestinians, and they should think about ending this Hamas majority. The Israelis need to take the opportunity to negotiate with Abbas and the peace camp. There are three years until the next Presidential elections. This is the historical window of opportunity. If Hamas wins the Presidency, that will be the end of it." For the moment, Abbas does have greater power than the legislature. But Hamas has every intention of continuing to play what its leaders call "the democracy game" and winning it outright. One night in Hebron, I dropped by the Hamas headquarters to see Aziz al-Dweik, who will be joining the legislature next month as speaker of parliament. When he was a young man, Dweik studied in Jordan and then earned a doctorate in urban and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. The geography of his life has been varied: he spent eight years in Philadelphia, one year in southern Lebanon with his fellow-Islamists in forced exile, and four in an Israeli prison. When Dweik returned to Hebron in 1988, he said, "I spoke my mind just as I did in the mosque at the University of Pennsylvania." The Israelis did not appreciate it, jailing him several times for incitement and for membership in Hamas, which had been outlawed by Israel. I mentioned that the Jerusalem Post had published a Hamas poster from the Al Aqsa intifada period that yoked together portraits of Sheikh Yassin, Shamil Basayev, a Chechen rebel leader, and Osama bin Laden. If Hamas was going to present itself as a rational political group, I said, why was it linking itself to Al Qaeda? "Bin Laden is a fighter for the cause of Islam, and this man has his way of serving his God," Dweik said. "He has offered the West a truce many times, saying that he will put down his arms if the West stops interfering in our affairs. We have no right to hate bin Laden. We respect him. Hiding this fact does not serve the truth." This was the most arresting aspect of the Hamas leaders; their thinking--their charter, their goals, short- range and long--was unconcealed and calmly provided. While diplomats and journalists sifted through the language looking for shades of meaning, Hamas was politely answering every question. Hamas is focussed primarily on the question of Palestine, of forming a government and resisting the Israeli occupation, but it also sees the election as part of a regional phenomenon, a historical tide, which, with time, not only would dislodge a few hundred settlers from Hebron but could cross borders into Egypt, Jordan, and beyond. "Whenever and wherever people are given the choice, this is what happens," Dweik said. "Secularism is an import. It's not indigenous. Islam is a practical and idealistic way of life. Islam is the religion of God, which God has chosen for the guidance of mankind. "Please stop asking us to recognize the occupier and not the needs of our own lives. This is slavery, slavery of a kind that did not even happen in Africa or in any other country! The Jews suffered the Holocaust, but it only happened for a short period of time. The Palestinians have been living a whole century in a holocaust. . . . The truth is on our side. The Israelis have the illusion that truth is on their side, but the Koran is the last revelation. The Israelis in this city have to move somewhere else. They have to acknowledge the facts on the ground. The future is ours. "The situation with the Rajoub brothers, well, you may call it the ongoing conflict between secularism and Islam. The big brother is a secularist and the younger is an Islamist. But the Islamist won in a democratic vote. The two brothers gave you the shape of history--one has prevailed and the other will vanish." 159

The Case for American Empire The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role. by Max Boot

The Weekly Standard, 10/15/2001, Volume 007, Issue 05

MANY HAVE SUGGESTED THAT THE September 11 attack on America was payback for U.S. imperialism. If only we had not gone around sticking our noses where they did not belong, perhaps we would not now be contemplating a crater in lower Manhattan. The solution is obvious: The United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan's phrase, "a republic, not an empire." In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.

It has been said, with the benefit of faulty hindsight, that America erred in providing the mujahedeen with weapons and training that some of them now turn against us. But this was amply justified by the exigencies of the Cold War. The real problem is that we pulled out of Afghanistan after 1989. In so doing, the George H.W. Bush administration was following a classic realpolitik policy. We had gotten involved in this distant nation to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union. Once that larger war was over, we could safely pull out and let the Afghans resolve their own affairs. And if the consequence was the rise of the Taliban--homicidal mullahs driven by a hatred of modernity itself--so what? Who cares who rules this flyspeck in Central Asia? So said the wise elder statesmen. The "so what" question has now been answered definitively; the answer lies in the rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

We had better sense when it came to the Balkans, which could without much difficulty have turned into another Afghanistan. When Muslim Bosnians rose up against Serb oppression in the early 1990s, they received support from many of the same Islamic extremists who also backed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. The Muslims of Bosnia are not particularly fundamentalist--after years of Communist rule, most are not all that religious--but they might have been seduced by the siren song of the mullahs if no one else had come to champion their cause. Luckily, someone else did. NATO and the United States intervened to stop the fighting in Bosnia, and later in Kosovo. Employing its leverage, the U.S. government pressured the Bosnian government into expelling the mujahedeen. Just last week, NATO and Bosnian police arrested four men in Sarajevo suspected of links to international terrorist groups. Some Albanian hotheads next tried to stir up trouble in Macedonia, but, following the dispatch of a NATO peacekeeping force, they have now been pressured to lay down their arms. U.S. imperialism--a liberal and humanitarian imperialism, to be sure, but imperialism all the same--appears to have paid off in the Balkans.

The problem is that, while the Clinton administration eventually did something right in the Balkans, elsewhere it was scandalously irresolute in the assertion of U.S. power. By cutting and running from Somalia after the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers, Bill Clinton fostered a widespread impression that we could be chased out of a country by anyone who managed to kill a few Americans. (Ronald Reagan did much the same thing by pulling out of Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks.) After the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Clinton sent cruise missiles--not soldiers-- to strike a symbolic blow against bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Those attacks were indeed symbolic, though not in the way Clinton intended. They symbolized not U.S. determination but rather passivity in the face of terrorism. And this impression was reinforced by the failure of either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush to retaliate for the attack on the USS Cole in October 160

2000, most likely carried out by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. All these displays of weakness emboldened our enemies to commit greater and more outrageous acts of aggression, much as the failure of the West to contest Japan's occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, or Mussolini's incursion into Abyssinia, encouraged the Axis powers toward more spectacular depravities.

The problem, in short, has not been excessive American assertiveness but rather insufficient assertiveness. The question is whether, having now been attacked, we will act as a great power should.

IT IS STRIKING--and no coincidence--that America now faces the prospect of military action in many of the same lands where generations of British colonial soldiers went on campaigns. Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, Persia, the Northwest Frontier (Pakistan)--these are all places where, by the 19th century, ancient imperial authority, whether Ottoman, Mughal, or Safavid, was crumbling, and Western armies had to quell the resulting disorder. In Egypt, in 1882, Lieutenant General Sir Garnet Wolseley put down a nationalist revolt led by a forerunner of Nasser, Colonel Ahmed Arabi. In Sudan, in the 1880s, an early-day bin Laden who called himself the Mahdi (Messiah) rallied the Dervishes for a jihad to spread fundamentalist Islam to neighboring states. Mahdism was crushed by Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener on the battlefield of Omdurman in 1898. Both Sudan and Egypt remained relatively quiet thereafter, until Britain finally pulled out after World War II.

In Afghanistan, the British suffered a serious setback in 1842 when their forces had to retreat from Kabul and were massacred--all but Dr. William Brydon, who staggered into Jalalabad to tell the terrible tale. This British failure has been much mentioned in recent weeks to support the proposition that the Afghans are invincible fighters. Less remembered is the sequel. An army under Major General George Pollock forced the Khyber Pass, recaptured Kabul, burned down the Great Bazaar to leave "some lasting mark of the just retribution of an outraged nation," and then marched back to India.

Thirty-six years later, in 1878, the British returned to Afghanistan. The highlight of the Second Afghan War was Lieutenant General Frederick Roberts's once-famous march from Kabul to Kandahar. Although the British were always badly outnumbered, they repeatedly bested larger Afghan armies. The British did not try to impose a colonial administration in Kabul, but Afghanistan became in effect a British protectorate with its foreign policy controlled by the raj. This arrangement lasted until the Third Afghan War in 1919, when Britain, bled dry by World War I, finally left the Afghans to their own devices. Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets. Is imperialism a dusty relic of a long-gone era? Perhaps. But it's interesting to note that in the 1990s East Timor, Cambodia, Kosovo, and Bosnia all became wards of the international community (Cambodia only temporarily). This precedent could easily be extended, as suggested by David Rieff, into a formal system of United Nations mandates modeled on the mandatory territories sanctioned by the League of Nations in the 1920s. Following the defeat of the German and Ottoman empires, their colonial possessions were handed out to the Allied powers, in theory to prepare their inhabitants for eventual self-rule. (America was offered its own mandate over Armenia, the Dardanelles, and Constantinople, but the Senate rejected it along with the Treaty of Versailles.) This was supposed to be "for the good of the natives," a phrase that once made progressives snort in derision, but may be taken more seriously after the left's conversion (or, rather, reversion) in the 1990s to the cause of "humanitarian" interventions.

The mealy-mouthed modern euphemism is "nation-building," but "state building" is a better description. Building a national consciousness, while hardly impossible (the British turned a collection of princely states into modern India), is a long-term task. Building a working state administration is a more practical short-term objective that has been achieved by countless colonial regimes, including the United States in Haiti (1915-1933), the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), Cuba (1899-1902, 1906-1909), and the Philippines (1899-1935), to say nothing of the achievements of generals Lucius Clay in Germany and 161

Douglas MacArthur in Japan.

Unilateral U.S. rule may no longer be an option today. But the United States can certainly lead an international occupation force under U.N. auspices, with the cooperation of some Muslim nations. This would be a huge improvement in any number of lands that support or shelter terrorists. For the sake of simplicity, let's consider two: Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Afghanistan, as I write, the Special Forces are said to be hunting Osama bin Laden and his followers. Let us hope they do not catch him, at least not alive. It would not be an edifying spectacle to see this scourge of the infidels--this holy warrior who rejects the Enlightenment and all its works--asserting a medley of constitutional rights in a U.S. courtroom, perhaps even in the federal courthouse located just a short walk from where the World Trade Center once stood. But whatever happens with bin Laden, it is clear we cannot leave the Taliban in power. It is a regime that can bring nothing but grief to its people, its neighbors, and the United States.

But when we oust the Taliban, what comes next? Will we repeat our mistake of a decade ago and leave? What if no responsible government immediately emerges? What if millions of Afghans are left starving? Someone would have to step in and help--and don't bet on the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees getting the job done. The United States, in cooperation with its allies, would be left with the responsibility to feed the hungry, tend the sick, and impose the rule of law. This is what we did for the defeated peoples of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and it is a service that we should extend to the oppressed people of Afghanistan as well. Unlike 19th-century European colonialists, we would not aim to impose our rule permanently. Instead, as in Western Germany, Italy, and Japan, occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over.

Then there is Iraq. Saddam Hussein is a despised figure whose people rose up in rebellion in 1991 when given the opportunity to do so by American military victories. But the first Bush administration refused to go to Baghdad, and stood by as Saddam crushed the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions. As a shameful moment in U.S. history, the abandonment of these anti-Saddam rebels ranks right up there with our abandonment of the South Vietnamese in 1975. We now have an opportunity to rectify this historic mistake.

The debate about whether Saddam Hussein was implicated in the September 11 attacks misses the point. Who cares if Saddam was involved in this particular barbarity? He has been involved in so many barbarities over the years--from gassing the Kurds to raping the Kuwaitis--that he has already earned himself a death sentence a thousand times over. But it is not just a matter of justice to depose Saddam. It is a matter of self defense: He is currently working to acquire weapons of mass destruction that he or his confederates will unleash against America and our allies if given the chance.

Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq. It will probably not be possible to remove Saddam quickly without a U.S. invasion and occupation--though it will hardly require half a million men, since Saddam's army is much diminished since the Gulf War, and we will probably have plenty of help from Iraqis, once they trust that we intend to finish the job this time. Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us.

OVER THE YEARS, AMERICA HAS EARNED opprobrium in the Arab world for its realpolitik backing of repressive dictators like Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. This could be the chance to right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as 162 committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe. To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt. Does America have the will? That is an open question. But who, on December 6, 1941, would have expected that in four years' time America would not only roll back German and Japanese aggression, but also occupy Tokyo and Berlin and impose liberal democracy where dictators had long held sway? And fewer American lives were lost on December 7, 1941, than on September 11, 2001.

"With respect to the nature of the regime in Afghanistan, that is not uppermost in our minds right now," Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said. If not uppermost, though, it certainly should be on our minds. Long before British and American armies had returned to the continent of Europe--even before America had entered the struggle against Germany and Japan--Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met on a battleship in the North Atlantic to plan the shape of the postwar world. The Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, pledged Britain and America to creating a liberal world order based on peace and national self-determination. The leaders of America, and of the West, should be making similar plans today.

Once they do, they will see that ambitious goals--such as "regime change"--are also the most realistic. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will hardly end the "war on terrorism," but it beats the alternatives. Killing bin Laden is important and necessary; but it is not enough. New bin Ladens could rise up to take his place. We must not only wipe out the vipers but also destroy their nest and do our best to prevent new nests from being built there again.

Max Boot, editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, is author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, due out in spring 2002 from Basic Books.

October 15, 2001 - Volume 7, Number 5 163

“After Neoconservatism” By Francis Fukuyama New York Times Magazine, February 19, 2006

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point. The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rouge states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document. But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy ''realists'' in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that ''America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,'' but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan. The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives -- red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East -- supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived 164 failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States ''should mind its own business'' has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War. More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a ''realistic Wilsonianism'' that better matches means to ends.

The Neoconservative Legacy How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends. The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering -- which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare -- suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering. In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called ''Arguing the World.'' The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism. It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that ''real existing socialism'' had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that 165 would underlie the life work of many members of this group. If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes. How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the ''root cause'' of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended. Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an ''evil empire'' and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to ''tear down this wall.'' His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the ''prince of darkness'' for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien- pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war. And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated. The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book ''Present Dangers'': ''To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades.'' This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, ''The Assassins' Gate,'' the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion. 166

By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the ''crisis of modernity'' brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for ''peaceful'' nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through. I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller ''The Closing of the American Mind''; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book ''The End of History and the Last Man'' (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. ''The End of History'' is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern -- that is, technologically advanced and prosperous -- society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

''The End of History,'' in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long- term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of ''benevolent hegemony'' over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, ''It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its 167 otherwise daunting power.'' (Italics added.) It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them. There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre- emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court. Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society. Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient. The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping. 168

What to Do Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But ''war'' is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a ''long, twilight struggle'' whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight. The United States needs to come up with something better than ''coalitions of the willing'' to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states. The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a ''multi-multilateral world'' of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action. The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies. We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and -- yes, unfortunately -- terrorism. But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli- 169

Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't ''impose'' democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective. The Bush administration has been walking -- indeed, sprinting -- away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about ''transformational diplomacy'' and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics. Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world -- ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about. 170

The End of Fukuyama. Why his latest pronouncements miss the mark. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Wednesday, March 1, 2006, at 6:59 AM ET

I have a feeling that last week was a disappointing one for Francis Fukuyama, whose essay "After Neoconservatism" (adapted from his upcoming book America at the Crossroads) was awarded seven pages in the Feb. 19 New York Times Magazine. The anti-Danish mayhem that had been dominating the news was surpassed by the fantastic criminality and sacrilege in Samarra, and nobody seemed to have time for the best-advertised defection from the neocon ranks. This, I think, is a pity, since the essay exhibits several points of interest. However, it must also be said that Fukuyama himself made it hard for people to concentrate on his words. There appears to be an arsenal of clichés and stock expressions located somewhere inside his word processor, so that he has only to touch the keyboard for one of them to spring abruptly onto the page. Thus, in the first paragraph, we are told that Iraq has become "a magnet" for jihadists, later that democracy-promotion has been attacked both from the left and (gasp) the right, later that neocons have issues with "overreaching," and soon after that "it is not an accident" that many neoconservatives started out as "Trotskyites." Not everyone will appreciate the unironic beauty of those last two formulations; they will appeal most to the few who are connoisseurs of leftist sectarianism. The opening words, "It is no accident, comrades," used to be the dead giveaway of a wooden Stalinist hack (who would also make use of the deliberately diminishing term Trotskyite instead of Trotskyist). And these nuances matter, because Fukuyama now tells us that the book that made him famous, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), "presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism." Alas, the purity of his Marxism was soon to be corrupted by the likes of William Kristol and Robert Kagan, whose position was "by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States." Pause to note, then, that even the advocate of the new foreign-policy "realism" feels compelled to borrow the most overused anti-Hegelian line from Karl Marx's 18 th Brumaire . For all this show of knowledge about the arcana of Marxism and Straussianism, Fukuyama's actual applications of them are surprisingly thin. It is not even a parody of the Trotskyist position to say that the lesson they drew from Stalinism was "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes." Nor is it even half-true to say, of those who advocated an intervention in Iraq, that they concluded "that the 'root cause' of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq." The first requirement of anyone engaging in an intellectual or academic debate is that he or she be able to give a proper account of the opposing position(s), and Fukuyama simply fails this test. The term "root causes" was always employed ironically (as the term "political correctness" used to be) as a weapon against those whose naive opinions about the sources of discontent were summarized in that phrase. It wasn't that the Middle East "lacked democracy" so much that one of its keystone states was dominated by an unstable and destabilizing dictatorship led by a psychopath. And it wasn't any illusion about the speed and ease of a transition so much as the conviction that any change would be an improvement. The charge that used to be leveled against the neoconservatives was that they had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein (pause for significant lowering of voice) even before Sept. 11, 2001. And that "accusation," as Fukuyama well knows, was essentially true—and to their credit. 171

The three questions that anyone developing second thoughts about the Iraq conflict must answer are these: Was the George H.W. Bush administration right to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Is it right to say that we had acquired a responsibility for Iraq, given past mistaken interventions and given the great moral question raised by the imposition of sanctions? And is it the case that another confrontation with Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus being implicitly right in saying that we, not he, should choose the timing of it? Fukuyama does not even mention these considerations. Instead, by his slack use of terms like "magnet," he concedes to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses. That's why last week was a poor one for him to pick. Surely the huge spasm of Islamist hysteria over caricatures published in Copenhagen shows that there is no possible Western insurance against doing something that will inflame jihadists? The sheer audacity and evil of destroying the shrine of the 12th imam is part of an inter-Muslim civil war that had begun long before the forces of al-Qaida decided to exploit that war and also to export it to non-Muslim soil. Yes, we did indeed underestimate the ferocity and ruthlessness of the jihadists in Iraq. Where, one might inquire, have we not underestimated those forces and their virulence? (We are currently underestimating them in Nigeria, for example, which is plainly next on the Bin Laden hit list and about which I have been boring on ever since Bin Laden was good enough to warn us in the fall of 2004.) In the face of this global threat and its recent and alarmingly rapid projection onto European and American soil, Fukuyama proposes beefing up "the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like." You might expect a citation from a Pew poll at about this point, and, don't worry, he doesn't leave that out, either. But I have to admire that vague and lazy closing phrase "and the like." Hegel meets Karen Hughes! Perhaps some genius at the CIA is even now preparing to subsidize a new version of Encounter magazine to be circulated among the intellectuals of Kashmir or Kabul or Kazakhstan? Not such a bad idea in itself, perhaps, but no substitute for having a battle- hardened army that has actually learned from fighting in the terrible conditions of rogue-state/failed-state combat. Is anyone so blind as to suppose that we shall not be needing this hard-bought experience in the future? I have my own criticisms both of my one-time Trotskyist comrades and of my temporary neocon allies, but it can be said of the former that they saw Hitlerism and Stalinism coming—and also saw that the two foes would one day fuse together—and so did what they could to sound the alarm. And it can be said of the latter (which, alas, it can't be said of the former) that they looked at Milosevic and Saddam and the Taliban and realized that they would have to be confronted sooner rather than later. Fukuyama's essay betrays a secret academic wish to be living in "normal" times once more, times that will "restore the authority of foreign policy 'realists' in the tradition of Henry Kissinger." Fat chance, Francis! Kissinger is moribund, and the memory of his failed dictator's club is too fresh to be dignified with the term "tradition." If you can't have a sense of policy, you should at least try to have a sense of history. America at the Crossroads evidently has neither. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2137134/