“Islam has bloody borders.” So wrote Samuel Huntington in “The Clash of Civilizations?,” his 1993 Foreign Affairs article later expanded (minus the question mark) into a best-selling book. Huntington argued that, eclipsing past eras of national and ideological conflict, “the battle lines of the future” would be drawn along the “fault lines between civilizations.” Here, according to Huntington, was where current and coming generations would define the all-important “us” versus “them.”
At the time of its writing, “The Clash of Civilizations?” had, beyond the virtues of pithiness and historical sweep, something to recommend it on purely empirical grounds. It seemed especially plausible as applied to the “crescent-shaped Islamic bloc” from the Maghreb to the East Indies.
In the Balkans, for example, Orthodox Serbs were at the throats of Bosnian and later Kosovar Muslims. In Africa, Muslims were either skirmishing or at war with Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia. In the Caucasus, there was all-out war between Orthodox Russia and Muslim Chechnya, all-out war between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan, and violent skirmishes between Orthodox Ossetia and Muslim Ingushetia.
In the Middle East, some 500,000 U.S. troops had intervened to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Israel had just endured several years of the first Palestinian intifada, soon to be followed by a fraudulent peace process leading, in turn, to a second and far bloodier intifada. Further to the east, Pakistan and India were at perpetual daggers drawn over Kashmir. There were tensions—sometimes violent—between the Hindu majority and the large Muslim minority in India, just as there were between the Christian minority and the Muslim majority in Indonesia.
For Huntington, all this was of a piece with a pattern dating at least as far back as the battle of Poitiers in 732, when Charles Martel turned back the advancing Umayyads and saved Europe for Christianity. Nor was the pattern likely to end any time soon. “The centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline,” he wrote. To the contrary: “It could become more virulent.”
As predictions go, Huntington’s landmark thesis seemed in many ways to have been borne out by subsequent events. Long before 9/11, and long before George W. Bush came to office, anti-American hostility within the Muslim—and, particularly, the Arab—world was plainly on the rise. So was terrorist activity directed at U.S. targets. Meanwhile, the advent of satellite TV brought channels like al-Jazeera and Hizballah’s al-Manar to millions of Muslim homes and public places, offering their audience a robust diet of anti-American, anti-Israel, and often anti-Semitic “news,” propaganda, and Islamist indoctrination.
It should have come as no surprise, then, that Muslim reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001 tended toward the euphoric—in striking confirmation, it would seem, of Huntington’s bold thesis. And that thesis would seem to be no less firmly established today, when opinion polls show America’s “favorability ratings” plummeting even in Muslim countries once relatively well-disposed toward us: in Turkey, for example, descending from 52 percent in 1999 to 12 percent in 2008, and in Indonesia from 75 percent to 37 percent in the same period (according to the Pew Global Survey). These findings are all the more depressing in light of the massive humanitarian assistance provided to Indonesia by the U.S. after the 2004 tsunami. The same might be said of Pakistan where, despite similarly critical U.S. assistance after the 2005 earthquake, already low opinions of the U.S. have sunk still further.
Nor is the phenomenon of “Muslim rage” directed against America alone. In Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France and Germany—countries with widely varying foreign policies toward, and colonial histories in, the Muslim world—terrorist plots, terrorist attacks, spectacular murders, and mass rioting have made vivid the gulf that separates embittered and often radicalized Muslim minorities from the societies around them. Even in tiny, inoffensive Belgium, whose government was among the most vocal in opposing the war in Iraq and has bent over backward to respect the sensitivities of the Muslim community, the entire Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, according to the Flemish newspaper Het Volk, has been turned into a “breeding ground for thousands of jihad candidates.”
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And yet even as these trends unfolded, and continue to unfold, a second and almost opposite set of trends can be perceived today. Contrary to Huntington’s forecast, much of world conflict is now overwhelmingly characterized by fighting and competition not between or among civilizations but within them. And nowhere is this truer than in the Muslim world.
Look again at the peripheries of the Islamic crescent where Huntington perceived a collision course between Islam and the West. In the Balkans, NATO intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo secured Muslim populations and ultimately ended the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic. In Africa, U.S. diplomatic mediation helped to bring an end to the 22-year second Sudanese civil war and to initiate de-facto autonomy—with the ultimate goal of independence—for that country’s largely Christian south. In Israel, the second intifada with its wave of suicide bombings was all but stopped cold by a combination of aggressive counterinsurgency operations and the building of a separation fence.
In the Caucasus, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended with a ceasefire that has held to this day, while Chechnya was brought to heel by a brutal military campaign directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In Kashmir, there has been no direct fighting between India and Pakistan; the head of the main jihadist group lamented this past July that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had “murdered the Kashmir cause.” Even as far afield as Mindanao in the Philippines, the radical Islamist Abu Sayyaf movement has been crippled by a combination of Filipino and American arms.
True, not all the wars of the Islamic periphery have ended: Hamas’s Kassam rockets continue to fly from Gaza into Israel, and Hizballah, itself an Iranian proxy, has fully re-armed following the summer 2006 Lebanese war. In January 2007, Ethiopia invaded neighboring Somalia to depose a Taliban-like regime. Bombay was hit with a Madrid-style bombing attack on its commuter rails in 2006. Thailand’s Muslim minority has been restive and violent.
Remarkably, however, the wars that chiefly roil the Islamic world today are no longer at its periphery. They are at the center, and they pit Muslims against other Muslims. The genocide in Darfur is being perpetrated by a regime that is every bit as Muslim—and black—as its victims. The Palestinians went from intifada to civil war: in 2006 and 2007, nearly as many Palestinians died violently at the hands of other Palestinians as at the hands of Israelis. In Lebanon, there have been bloody clashes this year among Shiites, Sunnis, and Druze. Last year, the Lebanese government had to send troops into Palestinian refugee camps to suppress an insurrectionary attempt by a Syrian-sponsored terrorist group.
It does not end there. Saudi Arabia has been under attack by al Qaeda since 2003. In November 2005, Jordan suffered devastating suicide bombings at three Amman hotels in which nearly all the victims were, like their murderers, Sunni Muslims. In Afghanistan, a Muslim government led by Hamid Karzai—a Pashtun—fights an Islamist rebellion by Taliban remnants and their allies, also mostly Pashtun. In Pakistan, the axis of conflict has shifted from the east to the west, where sizable areas are under the control of Islamist militants; in 2007 alone, some 1,500 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto notably among them.
Then there is Iraq. Though Americans naturally focus on the more than 4,000 U.S. servicemen killed so far since the country was liberated in April 2003, that figure pales in comparison with the number of Iraqis killed in inter- and intra-sectarian violence: Sunnis against Shiites and Kurds, Sunnis against Sunnis, Shiites against Sunnis, Shiites against Shiites. Cumulatively, the number of civilian deaths since early 2006, when sectarian fighting got under way in earnest, now stands at just over 100,000 (according to the Brookings Institution).
All this serves as a useful reminder of another significant fact. In the years immediately prior to 9/11, non-Muslims tended to be the likeliest targets of terrorism. In recent years, Muslims themselves have overwhelmingly been their co-religionists’ primary victims. In 2007, of the nearly 8,000 deaths due to terrorism in the Middle East, only a handful were Israeli. Similarly, of the roughly 270 suicide bombings in 2007, some 240 took place in predominantly Muslim countries. Nearly 100 mosques were also the targets of terrorist attack, many at the hands of Muslims.
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Taking the long view, one might note that intra-Islamic feuding is as old as the religion itself. Of Muhammad’s immediate successors—the “righteous caliphs,” according to Sunni tradition—the first, Abu Bakr, may have been poisoned; the next three are all known to have been assassinated, with the murder of the third caliph (Othman) resulting in the schism from which the Shiite branch of Islam emerged. The Abassid revolt destroyed the Umayyad caliphate in the 8th century; the early 9th century was marked by civil war between the sons of the fifth Abassid caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Al Qaeda itself has ancient Islamic antecedents: the 8th-century Kharajites, for instance, were notorious for their extreme puritanism, frequent recourse to violence, and the belief that they could declare their Muslim opponents to be infidels and treat them accordingly.
To be sure, endless feuding is hardly unique to Islamic civilization: the history of the West is also one of intense competition, bitter conflict, and outbursts of religious fanaticism. On the whole, though, these conflicts have dissipated and evanesced as the West has almost universally adopted democratic forms of governance. By contrast, Islam’s foundational patterns not only persist into the present day but in many ways have intensified.
There have been devastating civil wars in Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, and an even more terrible war between Iran and Iraq. Even a partial list of prominent political assassinations in the Muslim world since World War II runs to over 100 names. It includes two prime ministers and a president of Egypt; two presidents and a prime minister of Bangladesh; three prime ministers and a president of Iran; a king and two prime ministers of Jordan; two presidents, a president-elect, a prime minister, and a former prime minister of Lebanon; a president of Syria; a king and two prime ministers of Jordan; a king and a former prime minister of Iraq; a president, a prime minister, and former prime minister of Pakistan; a king of Saudi Arabia. And these are just the successful attempts. The list of coups in the Muslim world is about as long. In Syria alone there have been no fewer than nine since 1949.
Several explanations have been offered for this history of violence. There is the absence of democracy, which forecloses opportunities for non-violent political change and pushes most forms of dissent into the mosque. There is the oil curse, which allows states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to finance expensive wars, buy political support, sustain huge sclerotic bureaucracies, and prevent the diversification and modernization of their economies. There is the endemic tribalism of Muslim, and particularly Arab, societies, and the values that go with it: the claims of kinship, the premium on familial honor, the submission to established hierarchies, suspicion of those outside the clan. There is the moral abdication of the Muslim intellectual class, which, with some notable exceptions, fell prey to nearly every bad idea that came its way, from fascism to socialism to third-worldism. And there is the history of Islam itself, which has made a virtue of military conquest, dealt sharply with heretics, and, until the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, typically combined political with religious authority.
There is also the fact that European colonial regimes overstayed their welcome in their Middle Eastern possessions, with the effect that more or less liberal movements like the Egyptian Wafd came to be seen as stooges of the West, incapable of achieving national goals through nonviolent means. Partly as a result of this failure, the Muslim world soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it, and traditional liberal parties and policies were discredited in favor of more radical alternatives: the Muslim Brotherhood, the violent Arab nationalisms of the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq, Gamal Abdel Nasser and the “Free Officers” in Egypt, Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and so on. Despite the manifest failings of these movements, and the triumph of liberal politics from Mexico City to Warsaw to Seoul, liberalism has never really recaptured its good name in the Muslim world beyond a handful of courageous individuals.
Exactly how to weigh the relative importance of these factors is hard to say; plainly they are mutually reinforcing. And while Muslim and especially Arab societies are not alone in suffering from them, they have come together in a unique way in those societies to produce a culture of perpetual failure and worsening crisis.
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Should this have been more apparent to Huntington when he wrote “The Clash of Civilizations?” Perhaps. It may have been obscured, in part, by what later turned out to be the Muslim world’s own version of a holiday from history. The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in the following year seemed to cool Iran’s revolutionary ardor. Civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen were brought to an end, leaving most existing Arab regimes as entrenched as ever. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the Middle East was no longer a cold-war battleground. Socialism lost favor, and some Middle Eastern regimes began expressing an interest in reforming their economies. From the outside, at least, one could almost begin imagining a “New Middle East,” as Israel’s Shimon Peres did with consummate naiveté in a 1993 book.
But the Soviet (and Yugoslav) collapse had another important consequence: it reshaped the map of the Muslim world by bringing newly independent post-Soviet states into its fold. Some independence movements, notably in Chechnya and Bosnia, took on an Islamic coloration. Elsewhere, a pan-Islamic consciousness, which had already gained considerable momentum with the 1979 Iranian revolution and the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was spreading rapidly. It was aided immeasurably by advances in mass communication and by the worldwide establishment of thousands of Saudi-funded madrassas preaching an inflexible version of desert Islam. If, previously, the very idea of an “Islamic civilization” would have seemed at most a remote abstraction to most Muslims living within it, in the 90’s it became at least possible to imagine this as an expression not only of common religious identity but also of shared political aspirations.
Most deeply invested in the concept were the Islamist radicals for whom the abolition of the caliphate represented not the passing of an outdated institution but a historical calamity. To them, the 90’s presented its own set of opportunities. Unable to dislodge the “apostate regimes” of the Middle East through terrorist campaigns, they decided to focus on dislodging their patron—the United States—from the region.
The idea of killing large numbers of Westerners, particularly Americans, had the additional advantage of being both plausible and popular. Plausible, because the Reagan administration’s precipitous withdrawal from Beirut after the 1983 bombings of our Marine barracks and embassy, followed a decade later by the Clinton administration’s equally precipitous withdrawal from Somalia, suggested a superpower easily frightened. And popular because the U.S. really was broadly detested throughout the Muslim world, not least on account of its support for the selfsame apostate regimes that were detested by the radicals.
The strategy of an “escalating sequence” of terrorist attacks on American targets was explicitly laid out by the jihadist theoretician Abu Bakr Naji (the name is almost certainly a pseudonym) in a document, The Management of Savagery, published on the Internet in 2004. Predicated on the idea that everyone loves a winner, it was not, in its own terms, a bad strategy.
In the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration and other governments had been quick to brand Osama bin Laden as an outcast among Muslims. But the overwhelming weight of evidence suggested differently. There were large public demonstrations of support for bin Laden in the Philippines and Indonesia. In the Muslim areas of Thailand, the name “Osama” became suddenly popular among newborn boys and girls, according to an October 2001 report in the Hindustan Times. Portraits of bin Laden were hot-selling items from Bangladesh to Nigeria. A poll found that fully 42 percent of Kuwaitis, whose country the U.S. had liberated only a decade earlier, considered bin Laden a “freedom fighter.” Among Palestinians, 9/11 made bin Laden “the most popular figure in the West Bank and Gaza, second only to Arafat,” according to a Fatah leader in Nablus.
Al Qaeda’s popularity would not soon fade. In 2004, the Pew Global Survey found 55 percent of Jordanians and 65 percent of Pakistanis holding a favorable view of bin Laden. Nor was al Qaeda slow to capitalize on its stardom. By 2002, European intelligence agencies were reporting a sharp uptick in the organization’s recruitment efforts. More worrisomely, al Qaeda was able to transform itself from a group into a movement. Some jihadist outfits, like Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s Tawhid wal-Jihad and the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, swore loyalty oaths directly to bin Laden. Others, including Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, began imitating al Qaeda’s methods by attacking prominent Western targets. Cells sprang up in Gaza. Al-Qaeda “wannabes” murdered 52 people in the London bombings of July 2005 and plotted to murder the prime minister of Canada.
But it was the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that, as Naji wrote in The Management of Savagery, had the most galvanizing effect on would-be jihadists. Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban, the radical televangelist Sheik Yussuf al-Qaradawi had decreed: “Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money, until it is liberated.” His call was widely heeded. By late 2006, al Qaeda could count on as many as 5,000 to 10,000 active members in Iraq, many of whom (including nearly all the senior leadership) had come from abroad. And while they were never the major part of the Sunni insurgency that gripped the country until last year, they accounted for an estimated 90 percent of all suicide bombings.
Late 2006 was also the moment when it became at least conceivable that Naji’s strategy, which foresaw the creation of “liberated zones” under the dominion of al-Qaeda-like groups, might actually succeed on the ground. Al Qaeda in Iraq had largely “liberated” Anbar province through an unbridled campaign of terror against other Sunnis. It had also pursued a policy of deliberate carnage against Iraq’s Shiites, with the intent, and effect, of creating all-but ungovernable chaos in the country. In the United States, the report of the Iraq Study Group, headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, recommended that no more U.S. troops be committed to Iraq, while the Democratic party, which had largely supported the initial decision to invade Iraq, began issuing increasingly hectic calls for immediate withdrawal.
Had those calls become U.S. policy, Naji’s strategy might have been vindicated. The “fall of prestige of America” that he prognosticated would have accelerated dramatically throughout the Muslim world. Precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would have been seen by jihadists and their fellow travelers in a similar light to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988—as proof that it was possible to defeat a superpower, and as a harbinger of their enemies’ complete rout. Al Qaeda would have had every incentive to apply the Iraq model—the “management of savagery”—to other Muslim states, particularly weaker secular states like Jordan, deemed guilty of “apostasy.” And al Qaeda’s own prestige would have been hugely boosted, offering a large pool of new recruits to replenish those who had been lost.
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That, however, is not how matters have turned out, at least so far. President Bush pushed ahead with his “surge” strategy, under a new commanding officer using tried and true counterinsurgency tactics. Its effects were soon felt. Al Qaeda’s ranks were decimated, and the flow of foreign fighters dried up.
In late 2007, the U.S. military captured letters from two of al Qaeda’s “emirs” in Iraq. One of them appraised his situation thus:
There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the [Sunni] tribes changed course 360 [sic] degrees. . . . Many of our fighters quit and some of them joined the deserters. . . . As a result of that the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less. We were mistreated, cheated, and betrayed by some of our brothers who used to be part of the jihadi movement, therefore we must not have mercy on those traitors until they come back to the right side or get eliminated completely.
The second emir offered similar testimony:
The Islamic State of Iraq [al Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al Qaeda’s expulsion from Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear, and the unwillingness to fight.
Nor was it only in Iraq that al Qaeda found itself on the run. In summer 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that the terrorist group was once again in a position to strike the U.S. Yet less than a year later, CIA Director Michael Hayden offered a strikingly different assessment to the Washington Post. “On balance, we’re doing pretty well,” he said. “Near-strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near-strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally . . . as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on [its] form of Islam.” Polls found declining levels of support for al Qaeda and other Islamist groups in several places in the Muslim world; in Pakistan, Islamist parties were trounced in February’s parliamentary elections. Key al-Qaeda leaders were also killed in Predator strikes in the Pakistani hinterland bordering Afghanistan.
In short, al Qaeda’s star has dimmed considerably, and it is important to consider the reasons why. Though there can be little question that the surge accounts for a large part of the explanation, it is equally true that the surge would not have succeeded without the support of the very Sunnis who, until 2007, had provided sanctuary and support to men like Zarqawi and his minions. This switch is in turn explained by al Qaeda’s barbaric treatment of ordinary Sunnis and their tribal leaders during the period of the “Anbar caliphate.”
And that raises a question: why did al Qaeda put itself “in a state of war with the masses in the region” (in Naji’s words) rather than using those masses as allies or pawns in their war against America and the so-called apostate governments? The answer, it turns out, is inscribed in the very nature of the jihadist movement.
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“All existing so-called Muslim societies are also Jahili societies,” wrote Sayyid Qutb, al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather, in his 1964 book Milestones. By “Jahili societies,” Qutb was referring to the pre-Islamic, pagan world of Arabia that lived in “ignorance of divine guidance.” Put simply, Qutb, his fellow travelers, and his spiritual heirs were, and are, not merely at war with the modern world, as defined by liberal democratic government and Western social mores. They are also murderously inclined toward “heretical Muslims,” particularly Shiites. They object violently to Muslim attempts to fashion a kind of compromise modernity between Western and Islamic norms. They seek to overthrow secular Muslim regimes like Indonesia and Jordan, and religious Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia that maintain relations with the West.
They are also—crucially—at war with the pre-modern world: traditional tribal societies in which authority is handed down from father to son and in which Islam is a religion and not a binding legal code or political ideology. Typically, Muslim regimes have been careful to accommodate their tribes, plying them with money, government jobs, small arms, and other tokens of honor, and above all by allowing them to govern their internal affairs. This was (generally) true even in Saddam’s Iraq. To the jihadists, however, tribal structures represent a twofold political challenge: first, they instill a powerful sense of local identity as opposed to a strictly pan-Islamic one; second, their systems of patronage and charity get in the way of the jihadists’ agenda of radical social change.
It was this anti-tribalist attitude, combined with the utter savagery with which the jihadists put it into practice, that proved to be al Qaeda’s undoing in Iraq. And that was not the only manner of its undoing. Precisely because of the post-9/11 transformation from a group to a movement, al Qaeda’s leadership lost control of what in the West would be called message discipline.
“I repeat the warning against separating from the masses, whatever the danger,” wrote Ayman al-Zawahiri to Zarqawi in an intercepted 2005 letter, stressing the need to avoid killing other Muslims, including Shiites. Zarqawi ignored the advice. The mass killings of fellow Muslims reversed the popular support previously garnered through attacks on Western targets. Worse, al Qaeda picked fights with countries that might have otherwise looked the other way at its activities. As late as early 2002, for example, Saudi Arabia’s interior minister, Prince Nayef, was flatly denying that al Qaeda even existed in his country. Four years later, after spectacular al-Qaeda attacks on the kingdom, the same prince was threatening to “cut off the tongues” of bin Laden and Zawahiri.
Most significantly, al Qaeda’s failures and reversals began to sow deeper doubts about its basic purposes. The breakthrough came with the publication of The Document of Right Guidance for Jihad Activity in Egypt and the World, a systematic refutation of al Qaeda’s theology and methods by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, a/k/a “Dr. Fadl.” The importance of this work derived from the standing of its author. Dr. Fadl was the first “emir” of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the author of the 1988 Foundations for the Preparation of Holy War, a bible among jihadists.
There are various theories as to why Dr. Fadl—now imprisoned in Egypt—wrote the book; these range from a long and bitter personal feud with Zawahiri to coercion by the Egyptian government to a genuine ideological volte face. Whatever the case, its chief significance lies in its insistence that jihadist activities must be subordinate to ordinary moral considerations. The jihadi, Dr. Fadl writes, cannot steal for the sake of jihad, or murder Muslim civilians, religious minorities, or foreign tourists, or seek the overthrow of existing Muslim governments, or cavalierly decree the apostasy of others, or disobey his parents. (“We find parents,” Dr. Fadl states severely, “who only learn that their son has gone to fight jihad after his picture is published in the newspaper as a fatality or a prisoner.”)
Even now, after his “conversion,” Dr. Fadl is no one’s idea of a modern secular thinker. Rather, his manifesto rejects the inherent radicalism of jihadism in favor of more orthodox conservative values, a return to a kind of Islamic mean. More than that, it is a frank recognition of reality—namely, that the jihadist fervor of men like Zawahiri can only lead Muslims down one dead-end street after another.
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How widespread is this recognition? That remains to be seen, as do its consequences. As Max Boot has noted in COMMENTARY,1 it takes neither a large organization nor particularly deep pockets to perpetrate devastating terrorist attacks, and terrorist groups have shown considerable resilience even in the face of the most devastating setbacks. Furthermore, although al Qaeda may have been gravely wounded in the past year, Hizballah has grown considerably stronger and more confident. The Bush administration kept its nerve in Iraq, and may finally have won the war. But it seems to have lost its nerve vis-à-vis Iran’s quest to become a nuclear power. Israel defeated Yasir Arafat’s second intifada, but it may soon be beset by a third one, this time planned and instigated by Hamas.
Still, al Qaeda’s decline offers a kind of portrait-in-miniature of a civilization that seems perpetually to be collapsing in on itself. Here is a movement in which suicide—that is, self-destruction—is treated as the ultimate act of self-assertion. A movement that sees itself as an Islamic vanguard, leading the way toward a genuine Muslim umma, but is permanently at war with the Muslim communities it inhabits. A movement whose attacks beyond the Islamic world have mainly had the effect of accelerating the very forces by which it is sealing its own fate. To use an inexact astronomical analogy, this is a movement with the quality of a supernova: even as an envelope of superheated gas rapidly expands outward, its core is compressing and ultimately implodes.
A similar pattern played out with the pan-Arabist regimes of the 1950’s and 60’s. And the same forces are at work today in Iran, where the regime’s outward-directed, “revolutionary” activities—from supporting Hamas to engineering Hizballah’s de-facto takeover of Lebanon to developing nuclear weapons—seem almost purposely designed to counterbalance the weight of the regime’s manifold domestic discontents.
As for how the United States and its allies should attempt to deal with this new reality, one temptation is simply to stay away, on the theory that no good can come from putting our hands in such a mess. This is roughly the view of the libertarian and paleoconservative Right, and perhaps a majority of the Left. But the view hardly bears discussion: all mention of Israel aside, access to Middle Eastern energy resources is a vital American interest and will almost certainly remain so for decades. The Muslim world is also inextricably a part of the Western one, particularly in Europe. Nor is the global terrorist threat likely to go away even if al Qaeda does. The possibility that a regime that sponsors or supports terrorists might be in a position to supply them with weapons of mass destruction is a direct threat to us.
A second option, associated with the so-called realist school, contends that with rare exceptions, the U.S. should deal with the Muslim world more or less as it is, without seeking to change it.2 This is a view that has much to recommend it—at least in the hands of a master diplomatic practitioner. But Metternichs are hard to come by, and in the hands of lesser statesmen, realism easily slides into passive acquiescence in an intolerable status quo—or into intolerable changes to it. Witness the readiness of Colin Powell, as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during the first Bush administration, to accept Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 as a fait accompli.
A third view, shared to varying degrees by neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, is that the U.S. and the West have no choice but actively to seek domestic reforms in Muslim countries. Needless to say, such a course is fraught with risks and often prone to mishandling, overreaching, and failure. But some version of it is the only approach that can, if not heal the pathologies of the Muslim world, then at least ameliorate and contain them so that they do not end up arriving unbidden on our doorstep, as they did one morning in September 2001.
This is not the place to lay out precisely how the U.S. might go about pursuing such a course with greater success than it has achieved thus far. But a few points are worth noting in light of the experience detailed above:
• First, while we should pursue democratic (and economic) openings wherever we realistically can do so, our overarching and primary aim is to make the Muslim world unsafe for radicalism—whether that radicalism is of the Islamist, pan-Arabist, or Baathist variety. This means a policy of unyielding opposition to groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and to the Iranian and Syrian regimes, despite growing calls to come to terms with all of them. But we must also come to terms with the limits of what intervention in Muslim politics can plausibly achieve. In particular, we need to be attentive to the fact that Western-style political or social prescriptions can often be counterproductive.3
• Second, the experience of the so-called Anbar Awakening of tribal leaders against al Qaeda is an instructive reminder that the Muslim world does not, as was widely asserted in the wake of September 11, divide merely between a handful of extremists and a “vast majority” of moderates who can easily be rallied to our side. Instead, Muslim societies typically divide into at least three significant blocs: a “pre-modern” element, consisting mainly of tribesmen, peasants, nomads, and the like; a “modern” element, typically urban, educated, and, by the standards of their societies, middle-class; and an “anti-modern” element, consisting mostly of Islamists but also of members of the Baath party and other fascistic groups.
So far, many of our democracy-promotion efforts have been aimed at the middle group, the one most familiar to us. But this is not, in all cases, politically the most consequential element. What we have learned in Iraq is that it is possible, indeed necessary, to isolate anti-moderns by creating political alliances between the urban middle class and the tribes.
• Third, we can seek ways to cultivate nationalist sentiment in the Muslim world, not least because jihadists detest, and fear, the notion of Arab and Muslim nationalism as yet another locus of loyalty that has nothing to do with Islam. In hindsight, Iraq’s near-miraculous soccer victory in last year’s Asian Cup was a significant moment in its evolution as a post-Baathist state, confirming that there really is such a thing as an Iraqi nationalism shared by Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds alike.
• Finally, although the internal factors that ultimately did so much to cripple al Qaeda were, so to speak, written into its very DNA, they were not triggered until the United States proved itself capable of defeating the bin Laden gang militarily—first incompletely in Afghanistan, later decisively in Iraq. The importance of these confrontations lay not only in the actual killing or capture of al Qaeda’s leadership and its foot soldiers but also in the demonstration to a watching Muslim world of the full extent of American power and the comparative weakness of al Qaeda. Its defeat finally pricked the Muslim myth that the jihadists were a military match for the U.S., just as Israel’s victory in the Six-Day war of 1967 made a mockery of the martial pretensions of pan-Arabism and dealt Nasser a near-fatal blow.
Now the government of neighboring Iran has invested some $20 billion of scarce national treasure, and the weight of the regime’s prestige, in its nuclear programs. Aside from the inherent case for getting rid of these programs for the threat they pose to core U.S. interests, it ought at least to be considered that their swift destruction might, far from rallying Iranians to their leaders’ side, produce precisely the opposite effect.
These suggestions are only a sketch of a policy. But effective policy depends above all on a correct understanding of the people, places, and things toward which it is being applied. To speak of an Islamic civilization is to speak in error. Rather, there is a Muslim world. It is fractured, and fractious. At times, Muslim causes or conflicts spill over into the non-Islamic world, as they did in the 1990’s. Today, thanks in no small part to our actions, they remain internal—expression not, or not merely, of a clash of civilizations, but of the convulsion of one. In this internal disunity lie our strength and our opportunity—and ultimately, perhaps, the reform of the Muslim world itself.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Obama’s “Talking” Cure
In the never-ending torrent of attacks on the Bush administration’s conduct of American foreign policy, the President’s supposed neglect of the peaceful instruments of diplomacy has come in for especially pointed criticism. Bush has been faulted, for example, for his unwillingness to talk directly with Iran and to negotiate one-on-one with North Korea, for his crude attempts to “isolate” Syria, and for his failure to immerse himself in the Israel-Palestinian peace process. The general line was encapsulated by the television news star Anderson Cooper last year in a leading question to Barack Obama:
In the spirit of . . . bold leadership would you be willing to meet . . . during the first year of your administration . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?
Obama did not hesitate. “I would,” he replied. “And the reason is . . . that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous.”
As is his wont, Obama later offered up a number of qualifications and clarifications of this statement. Electoral maneuvering aside, however, he stuck to his main position, which he seemed to treat as so obviously true as to be irrefutable. But is it? How valuable is diplomacy? Can it in fact “bridge the gap” with enemies by disclosing unsuspected common ground and thereby changing the equation between them and us? Has it ever done so?
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The most frequently cited example of the power of transformative diplomacy is Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. Yet, for all the stirring drama of the event, Nixon’s visit was itself made possible only by a preceding momentous development—namely, a radical turn in China’s perception of its own situation vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. As Henry Kissinger would put it, “Only extraordinary concern about Soviet purposes”—and about the large buildup of Soviet forces on the Chinese border—“could explain the Chinese wish to sit down with the nation heretofore vilified as the archenemy.” In addition, according to the Sinologist Jonathan Spence, Chinese leaders were desperate to expand domestic oil production, a task for which they had “neither the resources nor the technology.” There thus ensued, over a period of years, an exchange of hints, signals, and messages through third parties, leading first to secret talks between Kissinger and the Chinese leaders and finally to Nixon’s visit.
Of that visit, Kissinger would write:
I know of no presidential trip that was as carefully planned. . . . The voluminous briefing books . . . contained essays on the trip’s primary objectives and on all subjects of the agenda previously established. . . . They suggested what the Chinese position would be on each topic, and the talking points the President might follow. . . . Nixon . . . committed the talking points to memory and followed them meticulously in his meetings with Chou En-Lai.
The responses from Chou and Mao were no less scripted.
The visit to China, in other words, consecrated but did not cause a change in course by the two nations; it was a culmination of new thinking, not a catalyst of or occasion for it. And something analogous may be said of the other famous peacemaking summit of recent decades, namely, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking trip to Jerusalem in 1977.
Notwithstanding the surprise attack he launched on Israel in October 1973, Sadat had led Egypt away from the bankrupt “revolution” of his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, including by expelling Soviet military forces and turning Egypt toward the West. In July 1977, in an interview on ABC TV, the Egyptian president signaled his intention to end the conflict with Israel. He reiterated the point in a speech to the Egyptian People’s Assembly in November: “I state in all seriousness that I am prepared to go to the end of the world—and Israel will be surprised to hear me tell you that I am ready to go to their home, to the Knesset itself.” Two days later, Prime Minister Menachem Begin responded in a televised speech addressed to the Egyptian public, saying that “it will be a pleasure to welcome and receive your president with the traditional hospitality you and we have inherited from our common father, Abraham.” Eight days later, Sadat arrived.
Long and tortuous negotiations, mediated by Jimmy Carter, lay ahead before this breakthrough would result in a peace treaty. If the visit itself constituted a watershed, this was due not to any of the words that passed between Egyptian and Israeli leaders but to the fact that Sadat, as a result of much thought and calculation of Egypt’s self-interest, had decided to address at long last the crux of the conflict: the refusal of the Arabs to recognize the existence of Israel. For him as for Chou and Mao, meeting his opposite numbers face to face was the result, not the cause, of the change in direction, with summitry serving as a confirming ritual.
Numerous other reversals and re-positionings have taken place without or in spite of extraordinary bouts of diplomacy. One of them was the ending of the cold war—the most monumental shift in modern times. Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet General Secretary in 1985 and met President Ronald Reagan later that year. They met again in 1986 and 1987 and twice in 1988, and Gorbachev met President George H.W. Bush in 1989. But neither in Gorbachev’s own accounts nor in those of outside observers can one find any evidence that these tête-à-têtes exercised a significant influence on his intellectual evolution—which was the real motive force behind the transformation and eventual abolition of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev has described that inner journey as being driven by the wish to modernize and revitalize the country he ruled. By his third year in office he was ready to confess that the system gave him a “troubled conscience,” to speak positively of “pluralism,” and to exhort the Central Committee that “we need democracy like air.” The liquidation of the cold war was a by-product of his encounters with Soviet reality, not with American presidents.
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It is actually difficult to think of any case where diplomacy has served to “bridge the gap” with a hostile or enemy nation. Which is hardly to say that such diplomacy has not been tried. Time and time again, American and other Western statesmen have undertaken strenuous diplomatic efforts at the highest levels in order to reach and change the minds of enemy leaders. As the history of cold-war summitry attests, the results have been at best trivial, at worst deleterious.
After World War II, the first conclave of Soviet with American (and British and French) heads of state was held in Geneva in July 1955, soon after the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as General Secretary. The press enthused over “the spirit of Geneva,” but Charles Bohlen, then America’s ambassador to Moscow, called the outcome “disappointing and discouraging.” Within a year, Soviet tanks suppressed the Hungarian revolution and Khrushchev was threatening London and Paris with nuclear attack over the issue of Suez.
The first bilateral U.S.-Soviet summit took place in 1959 in the course of a visit by Khrushchev to the United States. His private conversations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Camp David were marked by cordiality and gave rise to talk of a “spirit of Camp David.” But in substance, as the Kremlinologist Adam Ulam noted, “the visit produced nothing beyond the predictable agreement to hold [another] summit meeting” of the Big Four. At the opening of that session, in May 1960, Khrushchev demanded an apology for the overflight of a U-2 spy plane that the Soviets had just downed. Ike refused, and the meeting ended before it began.
Summitry resumed in Vienna soon after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. This time, it was the turn of the Soviet press to hail “the spirit of Vienna.” But to Bohlen, who was present as an adviser to the new President,
The results of the discussions were meager. . . . The Soviet leader assured Kennedy that the Soviet Union would resume nuclear testing only if another country did first. He must have lied, because in August the Soviet Union began a two-month series of blasts, ending with the detonation of the most powerful explosion ever set off.
The unhappy aftermath did not stop there. In his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote that he came away “generally pleased” at finding JFK to be “interested in . . . avoiding conflict with the Soviet Union.” So pleased, evidently, that two months later the Communists laid down barbed wire and began to erect the Berlin Wall.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, met Khrushchev’s successor (or co-successor) Alexei Kosygin in 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey; like clockwork, the American media invoked “the spirit of Glassboro.” So empty was this particular diplomatic exercise that no communiqué was issued at its conclusion. The following year, Warsaw Pact forces crushed Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” and the Communists mounted their Tet offensive in Vietnam.
Far more ambitious talks were undertaken by President Nixon, aided by Henry Kissinger as his National Security Adviser. Nixon’s interlocutor was Leonid Brezhnev, who had elbowed aside Kosygin as the Kremlin’s top man, and the talks culminated in a 1972 Moscow summit that saw the signing of a Declaration of Basic Principles and the SALT I and other agreements. American critics, led by Senator Henry M. Jackson, protested that SALT I allowed the USSR an advantage in intercontinental missiles. Defenders argued that the importance of the agreement lay not in its impact on the two nations’ respective arsenals but rather in its symbolic function as a cornerstone of détente—one element, in Kissinger’s words, “of a larger decision to place relations on a new foundation of restraint, cooperation, and steadily evolving confidence.”
These high hopes were dashed a year later by the Soviet role in arming Egypt and Syria for their surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war and subsequent threat to intervene directly in the fighting. Over the next years, so great a mockery did the Kremlin make of the declaration that Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, forbade any further use of the term “détente.”
Jimmy Carter, for his part, renewed the pursuit of détente on terms even more conciliatory and self-effacing than those struck by Kissinger. In 1979, having stood by as a handful of countries in Africa and the Americas fell to Communism, Carter at last reached his holy grail, a new SALT agreement signed at a summit meeting at which the President eagerly hugged and kissed a visibly nonplussed Brezhnev. A few months later, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, and the U.S. Senate shelved the pact.
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If 35 years of U.S.-Soviet summitry were barren of positive results, the outcomes of other high-level talks with Communist regimes were outright damaging. In 1973, Kissinger and North Vietnam’s negotiator Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel Peace Prize for an agreement committing both countries to withdraw their troops from South Vietnam. The Americans kept their side of the bargain; the North Vietnamese ignored theirs. In further violation, Hanoi launched an all-out offensive that completed its conquest of the south. Kissinger complained bitterly when Congress cut off support to the Saigon government—which, he said, would otherwise “not have collapsed in 1975.” He may well have been right, but this hardly redeemed the wisdom of the deal negotiated with the Communists.
Similarly with the “agreed framework” between the Clinton administration and North Korea in 1994. This was engineered by ex-President Carter, still sublimely confident of his diplomatic talents despite the dismal record of his own administration. Carter undertook a pilgrimage to North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung that eventuated in a fraudulent structure of disarmament behind which Pyongyang sped its development of nuclear weapons.
To appreciate the persistence of this drearily repetitive pattern, one is inevitably pushed back to earlier but still-emblematic efforts of Western leaders to talk with their enemies. In World War II, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was not an enemy but an ally. Some in Washington and London vaguely foresaw the possibility of future conflict with the USSR—a conflict that Stalin on his side took as axiomatic. In hopes of securing the continued cooperation of Moscow following the war, both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill placed great store in their personal contacts with Stalin. After visiting the Soviet leader in Moscow in 1942, Churchill informed FDR: “I feel I have established a personal relationship that will be helpful.” In April 1943, the American ambassador in Moscow conveyed FDR’s wish to “sit down with Stalin and talk over problems” so as to avoid any “lack of understanding.” As the President wrote Churchill, “I think I can handle Stalin better than either your foreign office or my State Department. . . . He thinks he likes me better, and I intend to keep it that way.”
Stalin played on these illusions like a drum, maneuvering for Western assent to postwar Soviet rule over Eastern Europe while answering every appeal for moderation by referring to supposed hardliners in the Kremlin who were making it “impossible for me to fulfill your wish.” Stalin likewise ran circles around FDR when it came to the latter’s pet project of creating a structure through which the wartime allies would work together to uphold the postwar peace. He declined to agree to the idea of the UN until Roosevelt assured him in a private meeting that it would be headed by “four policemen”—the U.S., the UK, the USSR, and China—and that the burden of “policing” Europe would fall to Britain and the Soviet Union. Even then he continued to toy with Roosevelt, demanding that the USSR be given fifteen memberships in the UN (one for each Soviet republic) before finally settling for three.
At the final wartime summit, held in Potsdam in July 1945, America’s principal goal was to secure Soviet entry into the war against Japan. While the conference was under way, Harry Truman, who by then had succeeded FDR—and who today is justly remembered as the President who faced up to the Soviet threat and devised our counter-strategy of containment—received a coded message that an atomic weapon had been successfully tested. He shared the news with Stalin, who, according to Truman’s memoirs, said “that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.” On August 9, the day the second bomb was dropped, the Soviet Union descended like a vulture to devour what it could of Japan’s now-moribund empire. In the five days until Tokyo’s formal surrender, the Russians seized and occupied Manchuria and northern Korea, with consequences that plague us to this day.
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Going back still further in time, we arrive at the disaster wrought by the democracies’ summitry with Hitler. The era of appeasement did not amount to a solitary moment of misjudgment by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. Rather, it encompassed several years of diplomatic exertions by means of which the democracies attempted to cope with the looming threat from both the fascist and the Communist world.
As early as 1935, when Hitler defied the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty, British Foreign Secretary John Simon hastened to Germany for talks with the Fuehrer. Ignoring Germany’s violations of the treaty, he agreed with Hitler on a new pact aimed at limiting naval forces. Hitler, who had not the slightest intention of abiding by the pact, would refer to the signing ceremony as “the happiest day of my life.” The French, meanwhile, sent Foreign Minister Pierre Laval to Moscow to sign a defense pact with Stalin, and to Rome to offer Benito Mussolini a “free hand” in Ethiopia. When Mussolini subsequently declared his aim of conquering Ethiopia, London dispatched Anthony Eden to try to buy him off by offering up a chunk of British Somaliland instead. The democracies’ avidity for talks with any and all potential enemies convinced Mussolini of their weakness; in late 1936 he announced the formation of a “Rome-Berlin Axis.”
The story of Munich itself has been too often told to bear repeating, but it is worth recalling that it was not a single meeting but a series of three, with each serving to embolden Hitler further. Not confronting only would the democracies get the war they had hoped to avert, they would get it on the most disadvantageous terms. For in addition to delivering to Hitler the considerable industrial strength of Czechoslovakia, the pusillanimity of the West at Munich had an effect on Stalin similar to what earlier displays of accommodation had on Mussolini. Within months, the Soviet ambassador would visit the German foreign office in Berlin to initiate the conversations that would blossom into the Stalin-Hitler pact.
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Whether confronting with fascism in the 1930’s, or meeting with Stalin during World War II, Western leaders were played for fools, and their mistakes cost dearly. In their defense, it may be said that they were dealing with something new: messianic revolutionary ideologies and ambitions far more sweeping than those entertained by any conventional power, and men whose behavior was unconstrained by even the least trace of a common morality. Little in diplomatic history had prepared these democratic statesmen to deal with totalitarian dictators.
How then are we to judge our most practiced statesmen today who continue to indulge in similar follies with no such excuse? Two years ago, with America’s fortunes in Iraq at a low ebb, Congress formed an Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton and comprising former Senators, Secretaries of State and Defense, White House chiefs of staff, and a Supreme Court Justice. Concluding that the U.S. was losing the war, these eminences rejected either “staying the course,” or “precipitous withdrawal,” or sending more troops. To square the circle of escaping from Iraq without incurring an American defeat or surrender, they proposed instead a “robust diplomatic effort” involving Iran and Syria—two countries that allegedly “share[d] an interest in avoiding the horrific consequences that would flow from a chaotic Iraq, particularly a humanitarian catastrophe and regional destabilization.”
Let us review briefly what we know of these two suggested interlocutors. In the 1980’s, the Syrian Baathist regime annihilated 20,000 of its own citizens in order to suppress an Islamist uprising, while the Islamic Republic of Iran in its war with Iraq used waves of human beings as mine sweepers. Both regimes practice systematic torture, and both have reduced their prison populations by slaughtering hundreds of defenseless inmates. The two collaborate in arming Hamas and Hizballah and in turning Lebanon and Gaza into platforms for war. They are the principal conduits for moving, respectively, terrorists and advanced explosives into Iraq.
To imagine that a devotion to “humanitarian” concerns and regional “stability” would lead either of these regimes to set aside its oft-voiced resentments toward the “Great Satan” so as to pull our chestnuts from the fire is to indulge in illusions on the order of those that misled FDR at Yalta, Laval in Rome, and Chamberlain at Munich—without their excuse of historical inexperience. Fortunately, President Bush adopted instead a course specifically rejected by the Baker-Hamilton commission. He ordered the “surge,” and as a result, by all accounts, we began to turn the tide in Iraq. If we win the war, it will be in no small measure because the counsel of Baker-Hamilton was ignored.
Alas, however, the diplomatic temptation persists, and in the corridors of the Bush White house itself. Having spent, so it seems, its last reservoir of political capital on the surge, the administration has given ground to its critics in other arenas. It has resumed trying to reason with North Korea, sponsored a new round of Israel-Palestinian negotiations, and most recently joined talks with Tehran even while that regime continued enriching uranium. All in all, the verdict on these exercises is likely to be the same as the verdict on all those preceding them: much ventured, little if anything gained, much potentially lost.
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To say that talking with our enemies has more often done harm than good does not mean that we should always avoid it. But when we do speak, it is essential that we eschew the conceit that, whoever they may be and whatever their own purposes, it lies within our power to manipulate or seduce them into becoming friends or serving our interests. If they have truly undergone a metamorphosis and wish to revise their relations with us, they will find ways to let us know about it—as happened, despite early missed signals, both in the case of Mao and Chou and in that of Sadat. That is why it is preposterous to assert, as some continue to do, that at a certain moment in 2003 Tehran sent a message through a Swiss diplomat that it was ready to settle all of its differences with Washington—but, because the Bush administration failed to seize the opportunity, the moment was lost forever.
What is essential is to understand whom we are talking to. In particular, messianic revolutionary regimes operate in a moral universe whose values are antithetical to ours. Their goal in talking is virtually never to have better relations for their own sake, but to have the advantage of us. The fatal allure of transformative diplomacy is that, by means of summitry, the lions can be charmed not just into lying down with lambs but into becoming lambs. That goal is a chimera; it has never happened.
Finally, we must always remember that such regimes are in a state of permanent war with their own subjects, and that every measure of legitimation they receive from the outside serves to discourage those subjects’ hopes for freedom and impair their will to resist. Even the government of the Soviet Union, our superpower counterpart, was eager for the symbolism of being treated by America as an equal. How much more so would the power of the petty tyrants or would-be tyrants who rule Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea—the countries with whose leaders Barack Obama expressed his readiness to meet and talk in the first year of his administration—be inflated by an audience with an American President. In this, especially, there is much to be lost—by ourselves and by those under their rule.
Should we talk with our enemies? Yes—to tell them what we think of them, and what we ourselves stand for. We should talk to them, that is, on our own terms and not theirs, and with their captive peoples in mind. But to the question that Anderson Cooper put to Senator Obama, the simple and correct answer was “No.” If Obama ever gains the presidency, the world will be safer if he has figured that out before he enters office.
In the spirit of . . . bold leadership would you be willing to meet . . . during the first year of your administration . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?
Obama did not hesitate. “I would,” he replied. “And the reason is . . . that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration—is ridiculous.”
As is his wont, Obama later offered up a number of qualifications and clarifications of this statement. Electoral maneuvering aside, however, he stuck to his main position, which he seemed to treat as so obviously true as to be irrefutable. But is it? How valuable is diplomacy? Can it in fact “bridge the gap” with enemies by disclosing unsuspected common ground and thereby changing the equation between them and us? Has it ever done so?
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The most frequently cited example of the power of transformative diplomacy is Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972. Yet, for all the stirring drama of the event, Nixon’s visit was itself made possible only by a preceding momentous development—namely, a radical turn in China’s perception of its own situation vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. As Henry Kissinger would put it, “Only extraordinary concern about Soviet purposes”—and about the large buildup of Soviet forces on the Chinese border—“could explain the Chinese wish to sit down with the nation heretofore vilified as the archenemy.” In addition, according to the Sinologist Jonathan Spence, Chinese leaders were desperate to expand domestic oil production, a task for which they had “neither the resources nor the technology.” There thus ensued, over a period of years, an exchange of hints, signals, and messages through third parties, leading first to secret talks between Kissinger and the Chinese leaders and finally to Nixon’s visit.
Of that visit, Kissinger would write:
I know of no presidential trip that was as carefully planned. . . . The voluminous briefing books . . . contained essays on the trip’s primary objectives and on all subjects of the agenda previously established. . . . They suggested what the Chinese position would be on each topic, and the talking points the President might follow. . . . Nixon . . . committed the talking points to memory and followed them meticulously in his meetings with Chou En-Lai.
The responses from Chou and Mao were no less scripted.
The visit to China, in other words, consecrated but did not cause a change in course by the two nations; it was a culmination of new thinking, not a catalyst of or occasion for it. And something analogous may be said of the other famous peacemaking summit of recent decades, namely, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking trip to Jerusalem in 1977.
Notwithstanding the surprise attack he launched on Israel in October 1973, Sadat had led Egypt away from the bankrupt “revolution” of his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, including by expelling Soviet military forces and turning Egypt toward the West. In July 1977, in an interview on ABC TV, the Egyptian president signaled his intention to end the conflict with Israel. He reiterated the point in a speech to the Egyptian People’s Assembly in November: “I state in all seriousness that I am prepared to go to the end of the world—and Israel will be surprised to hear me tell you that I am ready to go to their home, to the Knesset itself.” Two days later, Prime Minister Menachem Begin responded in a televised speech addressed to the Egyptian public, saying that “it will be a pleasure to welcome and receive your president with the traditional hospitality you and we have inherited from our common father, Abraham.” Eight days later, Sadat arrived.
Long and tortuous negotiations, mediated by Jimmy Carter, lay ahead before this breakthrough would result in a peace treaty. If the visit itself constituted a watershed, this was due not to any of the words that passed between Egyptian and Israeli leaders but to the fact that Sadat, as a result of much thought and calculation of Egypt’s self-interest, had decided to address at long last the crux of the conflict: the refusal of the Arabs to recognize the existence of Israel. For him as for Chou and Mao, meeting his opposite numbers face to face was the result, not the cause, of the change in direction, with summitry serving as a confirming ritual.
Numerous other reversals and re-positionings have taken place without or in spite of extraordinary bouts of diplomacy. One of them was the ending of the cold war—the most monumental shift in modern times. Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet General Secretary in 1985 and met President Ronald Reagan later that year. They met again in 1986 and 1987 and twice in 1988, and Gorbachev met President George H.W. Bush in 1989. But neither in Gorbachev’s own accounts nor in those of outside observers can one find any evidence that these tête-à-têtes exercised a significant influence on his intellectual evolution—which was the real motive force behind the transformation and eventual abolition of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev has described that inner journey as being driven by the wish to modernize and revitalize the country he ruled. By his third year in office he was ready to confess that the system gave him a “troubled conscience,” to speak positively of “pluralism,” and to exhort the Central Committee that “we need democracy like air.” The liquidation of the cold war was a by-product of his encounters with Soviet reality, not with American presidents.
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It is actually difficult to think of any case where diplomacy has served to “bridge the gap” with a hostile or enemy nation. Which is hardly to say that such diplomacy has not been tried. Time and time again, American and other Western statesmen have undertaken strenuous diplomatic efforts at the highest levels in order to reach and change the minds of enemy leaders. As the history of cold-war summitry attests, the results have been at best trivial, at worst deleterious.
After World War II, the first conclave of Soviet with American (and British and French) heads of state was held in Geneva in July 1955, soon after the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as General Secretary. The press enthused over “the spirit of Geneva,” but Charles Bohlen, then America’s ambassador to Moscow, called the outcome “disappointing and discouraging.” Within a year, Soviet tanks suppressed the Hungarian revolution and Khrushchev was threatening London and Paris with nuclear attack over the issue of Suez.
The first bilateral U.S.-Soviet summit took place in 1959 in the course of a visit by Khrushchev to the United States. His private conversations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Camp David were marked by cordiality and gave rise to talk of a “spirit of Camp David.” But in substance, as the Kremlinologist Adam Ulam noted, “the visit produced nothing beyond the predictable agreement to hold [another] summit meeting” of the Big Four. At the opening of that session, in May 1960, Khrushchev demanded an apology for the overflight of a U-2 spy plane that the Soviets had just downed. Ike refused, and the meeting ended before it began.
Summitry resumed in Vienna soon after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. This time, it was the turn of the Soviet press to hail “the spirit of Vienna.” But to Bohlen, who was present as an adviser to the new President,
The results of the discussions were meager. . . . The Soviet leader assured Kennedy that the Soviet Union would resume nuclear testing only if another country did first. He must have lied, because in August the Soviet Union began a two-month series of blasts, ending with the detonation of the most powerful explosion ever set off.
The unhappy aftermath did not stop there. In his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote that he came away “generally pleased” at finding JFK to be “interested in . . . avoiding conflict with the Soviet Union.” So pleased, evidently, that two months later the Communists laid down barbed wire and began to erect the Berlin Wall.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, met Khrushchev’s successor (or co-successor) Alexei Kosygin in 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey; like clockwork, the American media invoked “the spirit of Glassboro.” So empty was this particular diplomatic exercise that no communiqué was issued at its conclusion. The following year, Warsaw Pact forces crushed Czechoslovakia’s “Prague Spring” and the Communists mounted their Tet offensive in Vietnam.
Far more ambitious talks were undertaken by President Nixon, aided by Henry Kissinger as his National Security Adviser. Nixon’s interlocutor was Leonid Brezhnev, who had elbowed aside Kosygin as the Kremlin’s top man, and the talks culminated in a 1972 Moscow summit that saw the signing of a Declaration of Basic Principles and the SALT I and other agreements. American critics, led by Senator Henry M. Jackson, protested that SALT I allowed the USSR an advantage in intercontinental missiles. Defenders argued that the importance of the agreement lay not in its impact on the two nations’ respective arsenals but rather in its symbolic function as a cornerstone of détente—one element, in Kissinger’s words, “of a larger decision to place relations on a new foundation of restraint, cooperation, and steadily evolving confidence.”
These high hopes were dashed a year later by the Soviet role in arming Egypt and Syria for their surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war and subsequent threat to intervene directly in the fighting. Over the next years, so great a mockery did the Kremlin make of the declaration that Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, forbade any further use of the term “détente.”
Jimmy Carter, for his part, renewed the pursuit of détente on terms even more conciliatory and self-effacing than those struck by Kissinger. In 1979, having stood by as a handful of countries in Africa and the Americas fell to Communism, Carter at last reached his holy grail, a new SALT agreement signed at a summit meeting at which the President eagerly hugged and kissed a visibly nonplussed Brezhnev. A few months later, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, and the U.S. Senate shelved the pact.
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If 35 years of U.S.-Soviet summitry were barren of positive results, the outcomes of other high-level talks with Communist regimes were outright damaging. In 1973, Kissinger and North Vietnam’s negotiator Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel Peace Prize for an agreement committing both countries to withdraw their troops from South Vietnam. The Americans kept their side of the bargain; the North Vietnamese ignored theirs. In further violation, Hanoi launched an all-out offensive that completed its conquest of the south. Kissinger complained bitterly when Congress cut off support to the Saigon government—which, he said, would otherwise “not have collapsed in 1975.” He may well have been right, but this hardly redeemed the wisdom of the deal negotiated with the Communists.
Similarly with the “agreed framework” between the Clinton administration and North Korea in 1994. This was engineered by ex-President Carter, still sublimely confident of his diplomatic talents despite the dismal record of his own administration. Carter undertook a pilgrimage to North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung that eventuated in a fraudulent structure of disarmament behind which Pyongyang sped its development of nuclear weapons.
To appreciate the persistence of this drearily repetitive pattern, one is inevitably pushed back to earlier but still-emblematic efforts of Western leaders to talk with their enemies. In World War II, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was not an enemy but an ally. Some in Washington and London vaguely foresaw the possibility of future conflict with the USSR—a conflict that Stalin on his side took as axiomatic. In hopes of securing the continued cooperation of Moscow following the war, both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill placed great store in their personal contacts with Stalin. After visiting the Soviet leader in Moscow in 1942, Churchill informed FDR: “I feel I have established a personal relationship that will be helpful.” In April 1943, the American ambassador in Moscow conveyed FDR’s wish to “sit down with Stalin and talk over problems” so as to avoid any “lack of understanding.” As the President wrote Churchill, “I think I can handle Stalin better than either your foreign office or my State Department. . . . He thinks he likes me better, and I intend to keep it that way.”
Stalin played on these illusions like a drum, maneuvering for Western assent to postwar Soviet rule over Eastern Europe while answering every appeal for moderation by referring to supposed hardliners in the Kremlin who were making it “impossible for me to fulfill your wish.” Stalin likewise ran circles around FDR when it came to the latter’s pet project of creating a structure through which the wartime allies would work together to uphold the postwar peace. He declined to agree to the idea of the UN until Roosevelt assured him in a private meeting that it would be headed by “four policemen”—the U.S., the UK, the USSR, and China—and that the burden of “policing” Europe would fall to Britain and the Soviet Union. Even then he continued to toy with Roosevelt, demanding that the USSR be given fifteen memberships in the UN (one for each Soviet republic) before finally settling for three.
At the final wartime summit, held in Potsdam in July 1945, America’s principal goal was to secure Soviet entry into the war against Japan. While the conference was under way, Harry Truman, who by then had succeeded FDR—and who today is justly remembered as the President who faced up to the Soviet threat and devised our counter-strategy of containment—received a coded message that an atomic weapon had been successfully tested. He shared the news with Stalin, who, according to Truman’s memoirs, said “that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.” On August 9, the day the second bomb was dropped, the Soviet Union descended like a vulture to devour what it could of Japan’s now-moribund empire. In the five days until Tokyo’s formal surrender, the Russians seized and occupied Manchuria and northern Korea, with consequences that plague us to this day.
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Going back still further in time, we arrive at the disaster wrought by the democracies’ summitry with Hitler. The era of appeasement did not amount to a solitary moment of misjudgment by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938. Rather, it encompassed several years of diplomatic exertions by means of which the democracies attempted to cope with the looming threat from both the fascist and the Communist world.
As early as 1935, when Hitler defied the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty, British Foreign Secretary John Simon hastened to Germany for talks with the Fuehrer. Ignoring Germany’s violations of the treaty, he agreed with Hitler on a new pact aimed at limiting naval forces. Hitler, who had not the slightest intention of abiding by the pact, would refer to the signing ceremony as “the happiest day of my life.” The French, meanwhile, sent Foreign Minister Pierre Laval to Moscow to sign a defense pact with Stalin, and to Rome to offer Benito Mussolini a “free hand” in Ethiopia. When Mussolini subsequently declared his aim of conquering Ethiopia, London dispatched Anthony Eden to try to buy him off by offering up a chunk of British Somaliland instead. The democracies’ avidity for talks with any and all potential enemies convinced Mussolini of their weakness; in late 1936 he announced the formation of a “Rome-Berlin Axis.”
The story of Munich itself has been too often told to bear repeating, but it is worth recalling that it was not a single meeting but a series of three, with each serving to embolden Hitler further. Not confronting only would the democracies get the war they had hoped to avert, they would get it on the most disadvantageous terms. For in addition to delivering to Hitler the considerable industrial strength of Czechoslovakia, the pusillanimity of the West at Munich had an effect on Stalin similar to what earlier displays of accommodation had on Mussolini. Within months, the Soviet ambassador would visit the German foreign office in Berlin to initiate the conversations that would blossom into the Stalin-Hitler pact.
_____________
Whether confronting with fascism in the 1930’s, or meeting with Stalin during World War II, Western leaders were played for fools, and their mistakes cost dearly. In their defense, it may be said that they were dealing with something new: messianic revolutionary ideologies and ambitions far more sweeping than those entertained by any conventional power, and men whose behavior was unconstrained by even the least trace of a common morality. Little in diplomatic history had prepared these democratic statesmen to deal with totalitarian dictators.
How then are we to judge our most practiced statesmen today who continue to indulge in similar follies with no such excuse? Two years ago, with America’s fortunes in Iraq at a low ebb, Congress formed an Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton and comprising former Senators, Secretaries of State and Defense, White House chiefs of staff, and a Supreme Court Justice. Concluding that the U.S. was losing the war, these eminences rejected either “staying the course,” or “precipitous withdrawal,” or sending more troops. To square the circle of escaping from Iraq without incurring an American defeat or surrender, they proposed instead a “robust diplomatic effort” involving Iran and Syria—two countries that allegedly “share[d] an interest in avoiding the horrific consequences that would flow from a chaotic Iraq, particularly a humanitarian catastrophe and regional destabilization.”
Let us review briefly what we know of these two suggested interlocutors. In the 1980’s, the Syrian Baathist regime annihilated 20,000 of its own citizens in order to suppress an Islamist uprising, while the Islamic Republic of Iran in its war with Iraq used waves of human beings as mine sweepers. Both regimes practice systematic torture, and both have reduced their prison populations by slaughtering hundreds of defenseless inmates. The two collaborate in arming Hamas and Hizballah and in turning Lebanon and Gaza into platforms for war. They are the principal conduits for moving, respectively, terrorists and advanced explosives into Iraq.
To imagine that a devotion to “humanitarian” concerns and regional “stability” would lead either of these regimes to set aside its oft-voiced resentments toward the “Great Satan” so as to pull our chestnuts from the fire is to indulge in illusions on the order of those that misled FDR at Yalta, Laval in Rome, and Chamberlain at Munich—without their excuse of historical inexperience. Fortunately, President Bush adopted instead a course specifically rejected by the Baker-Hamilton commission. He ordered the “surge,” and as a result, by all accounts, we began to turn the tide in Iraq. If we win the war, it will be in no small measure because the counsel of Baker-Hamilton was ignored.
Alas, however, the diplomatic temptation persists, and in the corridors of the Bush White house itself. Having spent, so it seems, its last reservoir of political capital on the surge, the administration has given ground to its critics in other arenas. It has resumed trying to reason with North Korea, sponsored a new round of Israel-Palestinian negotiations, and most recently joined talks with Tehran even while that regime continued enriching uranium. All in all, the verdict on these exercises is likely to be the same as the verdict on all those preceding them: much ventured, little if anything gained, much potentially lost.
_____________
To say that talking with our enemies has more often done harm than good does not mean that we should always avoid it. But when we do speak, it is essential that we eschew the conceit that, whoever they may be and whatever their own purposes, it lies within our power to manipulate or seduce them into becoming friends or serving our interests. If they have truly undergone a metamorphosis and wish to revise their relations with us, they will find ways to let us know about it—as happened, despite early missed signals, both in the case of Mao and Chou and in that of Sadat. That is why it is preposterous to assert, as some continue to do, that at a certain moment in 2003 Tehran sent a message through a Swiss diplomat that it was ready to settle all of its differences with Washington—but, because the Bush administration failed to seize the opportunity, the moment was lost forever.
What is essential is to understand whom we are talking to. In particular, messianic revolutionary regimes operate in a moral universe whose values are antithetical to ours. Their goal in talking is virtually never to have better relations for their own sake, but to have the advantage of us. The fatal allure of transformative diplomacy is that, by means of summitry, the lions can be charmed not just into lying down with lambs but into becoming lambs. That goal is a chimera; it has never happened.
Finally, we must always remember that such regimes are in a state of permanent war with their own subjects, and that every measure of legitimation they receive from the outside serves to discourage those subjects’ hopes for freedom and impair their will to resist. Even the government of the Soviet Union, our superpower counterpart, was eager for the symbolism of being treated by America as an equal. How much more so would the power of the petty tyrants or would-be tyrants who rule Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea—the countries with whose leaders Barack Obama expressed his readiness to meet and talk in the first year of his administration—be inflated by an audience with an American President. In this, especially, there is much to be lost—by ourselves and by those under their rule.
Should we talk with our enemies? Yes—to tell them what we think of them, and what we ourselves stand for. We should talk to them, that is, on our own terms and not theirs, and with their captive peoples in mind. But to the question that Anderson Cooper put to Senator Obama, the simple and correct answer was “No.” If Obama ever gains the presidency, the world will be safer if he has figured that out before he enters office.
Jews and Their DNA
Eight years ago, I published an article in these pages called “Wandering Jews—and Their Genes” (September 2000). At the time I was working on a book about a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group in the northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, many of whose members believe that they descend from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, and about a group of Judaizers among them known as the B’nei Menashe, over a thousand of whom live today in Israel as converts to Judaism.
This led me to an interest in Jewish historical genetics, then a new discipline. Historical genetics itself was still a pioneering field, launched by the discovery that two sources of DNA in the human body, the Y chromosome that determines male sex and the mitochondria that aid cell metabolism, never change (barring rare mutations) in their transmission from fathers to sons and from mothers to children of both sexes. This made it possible to trace paternal and maternal lines of descent far into the past and to learn about the movements and interactions of human populations that originated hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of years ago.
...Since then, eight years have gone by, historical genetics has greatly refined its methods and taxonomy, and several major new studies in Jewish genetic history have been published. What, viewed from their perspective, does Jewish history look like now?
This led me to an interest in Jewish historical genetics, then a new discipline. Historical genetics itself was still a pioneering field, launched by the discovery that two sources of DNA in the human body, the Y chromosome that determines male sex and the mitochondria that aid cell metabolism, never change (barring rare mutations) in their transmission from fathers to sons and from mothers to children of both sexes. This made it possible to trace paternal and maternal lines of descent far into the past and to learn about the movements and interactions of human populations that originated hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of years ago.
...Since then, eight years have gone by, historical genetics has greatly refined its methods and taxonomy, and several major new studies in Jewish genetic history have been published. What, viewed from their perspective, does Jewish history look like now?
Democrats Release Sarah Palin's Social Security Number
The Politico has received an opposition research file from the Alaska Democrats.
In the file, the Democrats have released Sarah Palin's social security number minus the last four digits. Also tied to the information are her various home addresses.
Back in 2005, Democrats used Michael Steele's social security number to get his credit record.
It is atrocious that the Democrats would not only seek out Sarah Palin's social security number, but release it in opposition research to the press.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
A Speech to the Delegates
My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”
One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.
We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.
We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.
We meet today to heal the divisions that have torn this country. For we are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans. We must bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there’s a 25-minute delay.
Ladies and gentleman, I never expected to be speaking before you today. Like so many of our speakers at this convention, I come from a hard-working, middle-class family. I was leading a miserable little life, but, nevertheless, overcame great odds to live the American Dream. My great-grandfather fought in Patton’s Army, along with Barack Obama’s great-grand uncles’ fourth cousin once removed.
As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn’t have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits.
And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, “A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming.”
And in Denver, we Democrats showed America that we have cute daughters who will someday provide us with prestigious car-window stickers. We heard Hillary Clinton’s ringing endorsement of “the weak-looking thin guy who’s bound to lose.”
We heard from Joe Biden, whose 643 years in the Senate make him uniquely qualified to talk to the middle class, whose family has been riding the Acela and before that the Metroliner for generations, who has been given a lifetime ban from the quiet car and who is himself a verbal train wreck waiting to happen.
We got to know Barack and Michelle Obama, two tall, thin, rich, beautiful people who don’t perspire, but who nonetheless feel compassion for their squatter and smellier fellow citizens. We know that Barack could have gone to a prestigious law firm, like his big donors in the luxury boxes, but he chose to put his ego aside to become a professional politician, president of the United States and redeemer of the human race. We heard about his time as a community organizer, the three most fulfilling months of his life.
We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, “Yanni, Live at the Acropolis.” We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office. We were moved by his campaign slogan, “Vote Obama: He’s better than you’ll ever be.” We were inspired by dozens of Democratic senators who declared their lifelong love of John McCain before denouncing him as a reactionary opportunist who would destroy the country.
No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!
For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I’ll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America!
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Reaction to Obama speech
What it didn’t do, though, was answer the basic question the McCain campaign has worked to plant in voters’ minds: what makes this guy think he’s qualified and ready to be president? If the question has really sunk in, Obama is in no less trouble than he was before this convention, and the Republican convention—where McCain’s readiness and experience will be front and center—will do him real harm. But if it hasn’t, and if what people basically want is to get away from the Bush administration, he has certainly given them a reason to see him as their guy.
Obama: "This election is not about me. It's about you." Is Obama breaking up with us?
Obama: "A Promise is the Only Reason I'm Standing Here." Well, it's certainly not because of his qualifications or experience.
Jimmy Carter - "this black boy"
Jimmy Carter called Barack Obama a "black boy" during a chat with Jim Lehrer.
JIMMY CARTER: Around the world. Around the world. And I think it already has sent a wave of approbation and admiration in many countries around the world, just knowing that this black boy who grew up with just a loving mother and grandparents — and that was about all he had to start with — does now have a chance to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.
JIMMY CARTER: Around the world. Around the world. And I think it already has sent a wave of approbation and admiration in many countries around the world, just knowing that this black boy who grew up with just a loving mother and grandparents — and that was about all he had to start with — does now have a chance to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.
U2 is not enough to close Obama's TV deal
Over the past few days, watching the TV coverage from Denver has been a fascinating experience, especially those long reports that attempt to answer the question, "Who is Barack Obama?" Each piece includes much coverage of his campaign, and what has struck me is that there's a distinctive soundtrack. It's U2. Always U2.
Early in his campaign, Obama chose U2's City of Blinding Lights as a campaign song. Later, when he'd won the nomination, and when he appeared recently with Senator Joe Biden, it was U2's Beautiful Day that boomed out at the public events.
Of course, all of these events are choreographed for a TV audience. The point is to get the clip, the report, on the TV news and use it as a commercial-by-proxy. Like any powerful commercial, the act of selling Obama and his message must have a catchy or uplifting musical accompaniment.
There's nothing casual about Obama's use of U2. If you go to the Internet to sites devoted to supporters of Obama, you'll find a subgroup called U2 Fans for Obama '08. And that group's mission statement is this: "Since Bono can't run for U.S. president, Obama is the next best thing. A group for those of us who see in Obama a progressive Christian who embodies the ideas and sentiments we find so compelling in U2's music."
Me, I find it unnerving...
The thing is, the power of the music is in its vagueness. It's about yearning, not achievement. It articulates aching needs. It is simultaneously all-meaningful and meaningless. As a selling tool, it's too vague. Beautiful Day is as powerful at a World Cup soccer game as it is at an Obama rally.
If it is used tonight, Obama is still only selling yearning, and he's not closing the deal. Like anyone selling something, he's got to be more concrete, to deal with the stony ground. Beautiful Day opens with "The heart is a bloom/ shoots up through the stony ground" and it's on the stony ground that elections are won. I don't think U2 closes the sale.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Obama’s Friend, America’s Enemy
Have you ever been a friend or business associate of a terrorist? Not someone who, to your shock and horror, turned out secretly to have bombed government buildings. No, the question is whether you’ve ever befriended an unreconstructed radical whose past was well known to you when you entered his orbit and walked through doors he opened for you. Have you been chummy with an unapologetic terrorist who, years after you’d known and worked closely with him, was still telling the New York Times he regretted only failing to carry out more attacks — and that America still “makes me want to puke”?
Barack Obama has.
An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obama’s troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.
The Obama campaign’s rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama maintains ties to Ayers. Obama’s second move was to launch a heavy-handed effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers — which effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation — a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.
Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.
Obama’s campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends. Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicago’s hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entrée as a young “community organizer.” In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career in Chicago politics.
Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he calls “education reform” but what is actually the use of the classroom to proselytize for the Left’s political agenda.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Obama called A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers’ polemic on the Chicago court system, “a searing and timely account.” Michelle Obama, then a dean at the University of Illinois, invited Ayers to participate in a panel with her husband, then a state senator who, the program explained, was “working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”
Obama apologists dismiss all this as “guilt by association” based on a single joint appearance. But it was far from the only one.
In fact, by 1997 Obama and Ayers were collaborators on a far more significant level. They sat together for several years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing Chicago charitable organization. There, they doled out tens of thousands of dollars to such beneficiaries as the Trinity Church (where Obama was a longtime member and where another Obama mentor, Jeremiah Wright, preached a radical, anti-American brand of Black Liberation Theology) and the Arab American Action Network (co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat apologist who has supported attacks against Israel and now directs Columbia University’s notorious Middle East Institute, founded by Edward Said).
Even more intriguing, in 1995 Ayers won a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation — matched two-to-one by public and private contributions — to promote “reform” in the Chicago school system. He quickly brought in Obama, then all of 33 and bereft of any executive experience, to chair the board. With Ayers directing the project’s operational arm and Obama overseeing its financial affairs until 1999, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in public education.
Until this week, moreover, the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers works, was blocking access to the project’s files (examination of which was being sought by frequent National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz), until finally relenting under public pressure. Less than three months from Election Day, analysis of the records from Barack Obama’s only significant executive experience is just beginning.
The mainstream media has been derelict on the Obama/Ayers relationship. Perhaps now, finally, it will get the scrutiny it deserves.
Barack Obama has.
An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obama’s troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.
The Obama campaign’s rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama maintains ties to Ayers. Obama’s second move was to launch a heavy-handed effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers — which effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation — a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.
Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.
Obama’s campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends. Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicago’s hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entrée as a young “community organizer.” In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career in Chicago politics.
Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he calls “education reform” but what is actually the use of the classroom to proselytize for the Left’s political agenda.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Obama called A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers’ polemic on the Chicago court system, “a searing and timely account.” Michelle Obama, then a dean at the University of Illinois, invited Ayers to participate in a panel with her husband, then a state senator who, the program explained, was “working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”
Obama apologists dismiss all this as “guilt by association” based on a single joint appearance. But it was far from the only one.
In fact, by 1997 Obama and Ayers were collaborators on a far more significant level. They sat together for several years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing Chicago charitable organization. There, they doled out tens of thousands of dollars to such beneficiaries as the Trinity Church (where Obama was a longtime member and where another Obama mentor, Jeremiah Wright, preached a radical, anti-American brand of Black Liberation Theology) and the Arab American Action Network (co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat apologist who has supported attacks against Israel and now directs Columbia University’s notorious Middle East Institute, founded by Edward Said).
Even more intriguing, in 1995 Ayers won a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation — matched two-to-one by public and private contributions — to promote “reform” in the Chicago school system. He quickly brought in Obama, then all of 33 and bereft of any executive experience, to chair the board. With Ayers directing the project’s operational arm and Obama overseeing its financial affairs until 1999, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in public education.
Until this week, moreover, the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers works, was blocking access to the project’s files (examination of which was being sought by frequent National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz), until finally relenting under public pressure. Less than three months from Election Day, analysis of the records from Barack Obama’s only significant executive experience is just beginning.
The mainstream media has been derelict on the Obama/Ayers relationship. Perhaps now, finally, it will get the scrutiny it deserves.
The Denver Dems Aren’t Making the Sale
There is no Biden bounce according to the latest Gallup tracking poll, as John McCain actually is taking a 46-44 lead over Barack Obama. Scott Rasmussen reports a 46-46 tie after the Democratic National Convention’s first night, which reverses a 3 percentage point Obama lead.
Meanwhile, another Gallup poll says 50 percent expect their taxes to be raised under Obama, despite the complaints of his economic advisors that they’re only raising taxes on the top few percent.
Make no mistake about it: There are many doubts and unanswered questions about the Illinois senator regarding his experience, his foreign policy, his economics, and his prior political and spiritual relationships. And despite some good moments last night, I don’t think Michelle Obama made the sale. At the end, only her husband can do it. Hillary can’t do it. If the badly split Democrats can be united at this late date, only Obama can do the job. No one else.
Reagan united a split GOP in 1980. George W. Bush united the McCain, Forbes, and cultural-conservative factions in 2000. Goldwater couldn’t do it in ’64. Neither could Humphrey in ’68. Of course, Jerry Ford couldn’t do it in ’76. And Carter failed dismally in 1980. But Bill Clinton succeeded in 1992.
Now it’s Obama’s task in 2008. That’s his job. No one else can do it for him.
And as the stock market looks on warily, falling slightly today after plunging yesterday, the lead story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal is a serious indictment of Obama’s economic program. “Senator Obama is proposing to use the government to remake economic policies in a way that hasn’t been seen in Washington in decades.” And if it’s a three-house Dem sweep, it will be Katy bar the door. Big-government spending programs, tax increases, trade restraints, a government health-care plan, cap-and-trade on climate change — all without any real deficit restraints, which are accorded a low priority.
Incidentally, while the public clamors for drill, drill, drill, Obama wants high-cost, cap-and-trade carbon regulation enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, McCain also wants cap-and-trade, but not if India and China don’t go along. Apparently Obama will not be constrained by the rest of the world.
Sure, the economy is languishing. But do we really want a big-government, high-tax solution? Do we really want higher investment taxes that would leave government bigger and private enterprise smaller? Do Americans really blame “rich” people? Or do they actually believe success is a good thing and should not be punished? Do rank-and-file working folks really want to do away with the secret ballot for unionization in the form of the so-called card check? And if there were a three-house Dem sweep, wouldn’t Obama’s middle-class tax credit be overturned in favor of even more government spending, just as Bill Clinton’s plans were subverted back in 1993? The National Taxpayers Union says Obama’s new spending would total $344 billion. That’s a big number. One has to wonder if that’s the opening bid or the final one.
The Obama economists sincerely believe that theirs is a growth program. His advisors are friends of mine — all of them terribly smart: Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee, Robert Reich, Jarrod Bernstein. So this is surely not personal on my part. But I question their economic model. Raising marginal tax rates will minimize — not maximize — economic growth and jobs. Ditto for enlarging the size, scope, and sweep of government.
Business cycles come and go. Each has its own set of excesses and subsequent corrections. It is the nature of free-market capitalism. But heavy-handed government solutions are being rejected worldwide, and it seems foolhardy for the USA to move away from economic freedom when virtually the rest of the world is moving toward it.
One of the greatest tax reformers of all time was John F. Kennedy. He slashed marginal tax rates across the board for businesses and people of all income levels. The economy boomed in the 1960s. Reagan copied the JFK model in the 1980s. Are we turning back this supply-side model? I fear the Obama men are doing just that. I think that fear is worrying the stock market right now.
John McCain’s economic program is certainly not flawless. And his ad bashing business, oil, and others nearly reaches the class-warfare level of Obama-Biden. It’s a Big Mac mistake. Nor does McCain have a solid tax-cutting program for the middle class. More on all that later.
But as the Democrats discuss the economy tonight, I’m willing to bet they are not gonna make the sale. Obama’s task Thursday night will be a monumental challenge.
Scott Redd Appointed to Professor of O.T. Position
Utah Utes vs. Michigan Wolverines
Saturday, August 30
3:30 p.m. EDT
Michigan Stadium
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Television: ABC
Radio: Michigan Sports Network | Stations
Live Stats | Ticket information
Game Notes
Utah Utes (0-0, 0-0 MWC) utahutes.com
Roster | Schedule/Results | Statistics (2007) | Media Guide
Michigan Wolverines (0-0, 0-0 Big Ten) MGoBlue.com
Roster | Schedule/Results | Statistics (2007) | Media Guide
All-time Series: U-M leads, 1-0
Last meeting: U-M 10, Utah 7 (09/21/02, Ann Arbor)
• Michigan Record Book: Part 1 | Part 2
• Big Ten: Releases | Schedule
• NCAA Statistics
Michigan Notes:
- Rich Rodriguez will coach his first game for Michigan. He is 8-6-1 in his previous 15 home openers. He will be the 18th coach in the school's history and 11th since 1901.
- Wolverine coaches have accumulated a 15-2 record in their debuts.
- U-M is 106-17-2 in home openers and has won 13 of 15 season openers at the Big House. It's last loss was against Appalachian St. in 2007.
- Michigan is 3-1 against schools that currently make up the MWC.
AP:
ESPN: Preview | Scouts Preview
ESPN: Michigan Clubhouse
Yahoo!: Michigan Team Page
Detroit Free-Press: Michigan Team Page
Detroit News: Michigan Clubhouse
Sports Illustrated: Michigan Wolverines
Big Ten Network: Michigan Wolverines
Michigan Stats
- Michigan is #32 in the AP Poll, #24 in the USA Today Coaches' Poll, #36 in the ESPN Power Rankings, #54 in the Sports Illustrated Ranking and #18 in the Sporting News rankings
- Michigan has more wins that any football program in NCAA history, 869.
- Michigan has the highest winning percentage of any team in NCAA history 869-286-36 (.745).
- Michigan ranks #1 all-time in composite AP final football polls (1936-2006)
- Michigan has 42 Big 10 titles which is the most conference titles of any NCAA school and is 461-166-18 in Big 10 play.
- Michigan has the most weekly appearances in the AP poll, appearing 748 times. They have finished in the top 25 54 times and Top 10 37 times since its inception in 1936
- Michigan has led the nation in attendance 33 of the last 34 years
- Michigan has had 208 consecutive crowds of 100,000+ fan at "The Big House" - a streak started Nov. 8, 1975
- Michigan has compiled a 373-109-15 record at "The Big House"
- Michigan has appeared in 33 straight bowls, the longest current streak in NCAA history.
- 382 Michigan football games have been televised (257-117-8).
- The Michigan football program is the only Big 10 team in any sport to win a conference title in each decade. It is the winningest overall athletic program in Big 10 Conference history
- Michigan has appeared in more Rose Bowls (20) than any other Big 10 Conference school
- Michigan has 11 national championships (5th all-time) to OSU's 7
- Head coach Rich Rodriguez has a career winning percentage of .627 (105-62-2). He was 60-26 (.698) as the head coach of West Virginia.
- He is 25-8 against regular season non-conference foes during his Division I career.
- Big House Football
- Blah Me To Death
- The Blog That Yost Built
- Champions Of The West
- The Diag
- iBlog For Cookies
- Maize 'n' Brew
- The M Zone
- MGoBlog
- Michigan Sports Center
- Michigan Football Saturdays
- Mr. Wolverine
- Ron Bellamy's Underachieving All Stars
- Schembechler Hall
- Stadium And Main
- Westsider Rider
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
U2 Academic Conference: Exploring The Music, Work and Influence of U2 | May 13-15, 2009, NYC
"Considering the enormous success and influence U2 has had during their 30+ year career in the worlds of music, live entertainment, popular culture, humanitarian work and the global politics of peace and social justice, we think a critical mass of interest exists for bringing together people from various fields to discuss the music, work and influence of U2. We’re looking forward to having the first academic conference on U2."
Scholars, teachers, students, journalists, clergy, musicians and intellectually curious U2 fans: for more than 30 years, U2 has asked us to look at the world, wrestle with ourselves and then dream out loud. From “I Will Follow” and “Running to Stand Still,” to “The Wanderer,” “Walk On,” and “One Step Closer,” U2 has charted the human heart and the ways of the world, calling out some of their more dynamic points of intersection. While doing so, they have created what Bruce Springsteen described as "some of the most beautiful sonic architecture in rock and roll."
A band of paradoxes, ironies, ambition and sincerity, their influence in the worlds of music, entertainment, popular culture, humanitarian relief and the global politics of peace and social justice should be the stuff of spirited conversation. Hype? Feedback? Or the real thing? Come join the conversation as we see what U2 has done.
The following list of works is offered as a courtesy for those researching U2 or for those simply wishing to learn more about the band. This list contains major books and essays about U2, with only select magazine or newspaper articles. Entries are listed alphabetically by author’s last name. Inclusion on this list does not imply specific endorsement of the particular work.
Please click here to open the U2 Bibliography in a new window.
Please click here to download the
U2 Bibliography as a PDF.
U2: The Hype and The Feedback is the first conference to examine U2’s considerable catalog of music as well as their influence in the areas of the music and entertainment industry, popular culture, humanitarian relief and the global politics of peace and social justice.
We invite proposals for papers, presentations or panels on any topic relating to the music, work or influence of U2 that would appeal to an audience of scholars, students, journalists, musicians and intellectually curious U2 fans.
We encourage proposals from established or independent scholars; faculty, graduate or undergraduate students; journalists, critics,
musicians and fans.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
‘Black genocide’
Protesters want the NAACP to speak up on the slaughter of unborn African-Americans | Alisa Harris
If someone wiped out the entire African-American population in Oakland, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., the number still wouldn't equal the number of black babies lost to abortion in one year: 683,294. According to the Allan Guttmacher Institute, African-American women are nearly five times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost one in every two African-American pregnancies ends in abortion.
If someone wiped out the entire African-American population in Oakland, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., the number still wouldn't equal the number of black babies lost to abortion in one year: 683,294. According to the Allan Guttmacher Institute, African-American women are nearly five times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost one in every two African-American pregnancies ends in abortion.
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