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July 26, 2005

Can Democratic Fantasy be Written?

Just finished The Golem's Eye (book 2 of the Bartimaeus series by Stroud). It is an interesting book which ends on a very disquieting note. The hero of the first book has turned into an evil character. I wonder if the author really knows what he is doing but we shall see.

My real question is: can one write fantasy in which the main characters either live in or fight for a democracy. So far, fantasy is the last bastion of the aristocracy what with princess and princesses and long-lost kings all forming the main characters of the stories (from Eddison's The Worm Ouroborus to Tad Williams series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (the first book is The Dragonbone Chair, a title that really makes no sense within the context of the book).

I'm not the first to point this out. David Brin clearly talked about this in his commentary about his novel Glory Season (which is not really a fantasy though it comes close in feel).

Why might this be? I can think of some reasons.

1) Democracy (or rather Democratic-Republic) is hard to understand, messy in practice, and free of a great deal of trouble which causes plot in normal books (i.e. rightful kings displaced by grasping nobles).

2) Democracy is new. The first real democratic government in the modern world is the U.S. and its only been around since 1792 (with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution).

3) Common sense suggests that democracy can't work as most people think other people are stupid and make poor decisions. Most people think Mackay was right (The Madness of Crowds). The new, alternative theory that crowds are smart (pushed valiantly by Surowiecki) is not widely understood nor believed.

Clearly this is something that I could write, if I could write fantasy.

Posted by rakhier at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2005

Mao - the great murderer...

The new book Mao - the Unknown Story by Jung Chang is reviewed in the London Times. Lots of history books will need to be re-writen based on this book. So much for the glorious leader...

Myth: The Long March was done against constant opposition. Fact: most of the way the Communists were allowed to proceed without fighting.

Myth: Mao ordered the Communist forces to fight the Japanese while the Nationalist did nothing. Fact: the Communists forces did almost nothing to fight the Japanese.

Myth: The Communists ended the use of opium in China. Fact: The Communists grew and exported vast amounts of opium to the rest of China.

Full review in the extended section.

Jung Chang not only demolishes Mao with her new book, she sets Beijing a new problem, says Jonathan Fenby

Three decades after his death the face of Mao Tse-tung still stares out over the huge expanse of Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. Though the authorities now admit that the founder of Communist China was “70% right, 30% wrong”, the man who led the greatest revolution since the second world war remains a sacrosanct figure in the world’s most heavily populated nation.

This summer, though, his reputation has been comprehensively demolished in the West by the bestselling biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang, author of the perennial bestseller Wild Swans, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday. It blames Mao for 70m deaths — far more than Hitler or Stalin.

Though travellers have brought in copies in their luggage, and it has been reviewed in newspapers in Hong Kong, the book is not on sale in mainland China. English-language newspapers in the Far East that carried articles about it were banned. On internet chat sites the censors have moved in to delete any postings critical to the man hailed as the Great Helmsman of China.

Chang’s book, published by Jonathan Cape, has attracted most attention for its portrayal of Mao as an utterly ruthless, evil figure who eliminated enemies by purges, poison and murderous traps, abandoned three wives and was driven by ambition, not ideology. But the shock might not be so great in China as in the West, given the killings and disasters the country suffered in the 20th century, the general absence of humanity among its leaders, and the personal experience so many people had of the disasters of the past half-century.

In its 70-30 valuation of Mao, Beijing is willing to admit to one major fault — the Cultural Revolution he launched in 1966 to assert his authority by unleashing the Red Guards on the political establishment, which he feared was escaping his control. But this disavowal is used for a political purpose, to argue how important it is to maintain stability and how dangerous political reform would be.

Otherwise, Mao remains untouchable in China, though it has become increasingly clear he is a figure surrounded by self-created myths that no longer hold water. There is a very good reason for this, which explains why the new biography and other recent research represent a real and present danger for the rulers of the last leading state run by a Communist party. Remove the props of Maoist history and you bring into question the foundations of the party’s legitimacy to govern 1.3 billion people and head an emerging global economic superpower.

Four elements lie at the heart of the Mao story. All are totally or largely false.

A key assertion is that he was a pure nationalist who put his country first and led the only true resistance to the Japanese invasion of China from 1931 to 1945. This is particularly important today, when the wilting appeal of communism has led the authorities to promote nationalism to win public support, particularly against Japan. Mao as patriotic hero is a potent recruiting sergeant.

But this new biography shows how a foreign leader, Joseph Stalin, aided and directed Mao’s rise. Halliday is a Russian expert, and has extracted a wealth of documentation from the Moscow archives. The Soviet role in establishing the Chinese Communist party around 1920 was already known, but what is new is how, despite some divergences, Mao followed Stalin’s dictates to win power.

Only the Kremlin could provide the political backing, money and arms he needed. Since Stalin played a double game in China, maintaining relations with the Nationalists and supplying Mao’s great opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, with arms, Mao’s greatest fear must have been that Moscow would desert him in the name of realpolitik. To avoid that, he kowtowed to Moscow — even after he achieved power he rose to his feet during a visit by a Soviet envoy to cry out three times “ May Stalin live ten thousand years”.

Another big hole in the Mao-as-patriot story comes during the full-scale war that broke out with Japan in 1937. Apart from one offensive, of which the Chairman disapproved, the Red Army avoided conflict, saving its resources for civil war with the Nationalists after Tokyo’s defeat. Petr Parfenovich Vladimirov, the main Soviet adviser at Mao’s headquarters, makes this evident in his diary, which was published in 1974 in India but escaped attention until recently.

Communist forces, Vladimirov noted in 1942-43, “have long been abstaining from both active and passive action against the aggressors”. Instead, they were ordered to retreat and seek truces. Visiting battle areas a little later, a US unit found that Communist units had struck non-aggression agreements with the invaders. Trade flourished across the lines.

Nor was this all. The Communists maintained contacts with the collaborationist regime set up by Japan. Mao even floated the idea of a ceasefire with Japan in northern China.

Similarly, the base from which the Chairman operated during the war years at Yenan in north China turns out to have been very different from the model society of selfless idealists portrayed in official writing, and reproduced by many western accounts. The truth was that the base writhed with political intrigue as Mao used terror and mass indoctrination to get unquestioning allegiance.

On top of this, the politburo decided to go into the opium trade. Vladimirov records a cadre telling him narcotics would “play a revolutionary vanguard role”. Trading as the Local Product Company and describing its output as “soap” in its records, the Communist drug enterprise exported millions of boxes of opium a year, supplying it to itinerant merchants or using the Red Army for transport through enemy lines. A Taiwanese researcher estimates this provided 40% of the base’s revenue.

The war against Japan over, the orthodox story is that, led by the all-wise Chairman, China’s peasants overthrew the reactionary Nationalists in a template of rural revolution. In fact, Mao had a low opinion of the peasantry, amounting to contempt. While the masses in the Communist rural areas were needed to provide manpower and act as bearers, the Chairman preferred attacking cities to waging war in the fields as the Chinese civil war unfolded after Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Initially, he was not very successful. Though it was exhausted by the long war with Japan, Chiang’s regime pushed the Communists to the far north of the country, and was poised to finish them off. At that moment, a powerful American emissary, the future secretary of state George Marshall, forced Chiang to call a truce, which allowed the Red Army to escape.

Stalin then came through as Moscow provided large quantities of supplies to the Chinese Communists. Using Russian arms and tactics, Communist forces swept south, crossed the Great Wall, took Beijing and defeated the Nationalists in an epic battle involving millions of men in east China. Despite the peasant legend, this was the victory of a modern army using American equipment captured from the Nationalists, as well as Soviet supplies — the first troops to enter Beijing rode in US trucks.

A hidden element in that victory, as Chang and Halliday lay out, was that key Nationalist generals were secret Communist agents or switched sides. These defections hammered the final nail in the Nationalist coffin and, at the end of 1949, Chiang flew to Taiwan to dream fruitlessly of reconquering the nation he had lost.

It is also clear that the most important plank in the Maoist platform is deeply worm-eaten. The year-long Long March out of southeast China to a safe haven in the north of the country in 1934-35 is extolled as one of the great heroic feats of the 20th century, in which the Red Army, under Mao’s leadership, scaled mountains, forded torrents and crossed murderous swamps as it fought off Chiang’s troops. Fanned by uncritical reports from western writers, the trek became proof of the Chairman’s genius and his natural-born aptitude to lead the cause.

The reality was that regional warlords allowed the Red Army to escape for fear that Chiang’s central government troops would set up permanent camp in their domains. The Communists killed huge numbers of peasants along the way.

Far from trekking with his men, Mao was carried on a litter. When his wife was severely wounded by shrapnel, he paid her no attention. Chang and Halliday even report that the most celebrated incident of the journey, in which intrepid soldiers were said to have climbed across the chain links of a demolished bridge above a foaming river, simply never happened. They also say that Chiang let the Communists escape because he hoped that, in return, Stalin would release his son, who was being held in Moscow.

Confronted with such a charge sheet, what would Beijing be left with if it allowed the myths to be stripped away? An inhuman dictator who cared nothing for the ideology on which the post-1949 state is supposed to be based. A revolution achieved by armed force, not popular support. A wartime leader who dealt with the enemy, and presided over a drug empire. A serial murderer who dreamt up torture methods and exulted in the suffering of victims. A man for whom relationships had no meaning, who despised the masses and who fabricated his own image for posterity.

Given that, it is no wonder the government and party hold back from allowing the founding myths of the regime to be brought into serious question. The party is intent on controlling any move towards openness for fear of being engulfed by a tide of change. But if China is to become a modern state, its leadership will have to recognise that, so long as it does not come to terms with history, it will be moored to the past and to a deeply distorted account of events.

Still, behind the censorship, there are some openings in the curtain. Mao’s misdeeds are becoming better known among the Chinese people. Jung Chang is working on a Chinese version of her book, which she hopes will be smuggled into the mainland. Last month a Chinese publisher said it wanted to bring out a translated edition of my book Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost.

Given its warts-and-all picture of the generalissimo, this may not seem surprising: he is still officially regarded on the mainland as an enemy of the people. But I wait with interest to see what the publisher does with the passages on the Red Army’s hands-off approach to the Japanese, the Communist opium business, the Long March, and the nature of the Communist victory.

Posted by rakhier at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

An Australian wonders about Islam...

An Australian writer wonders in his newspaper column if all the talk he has heard from Moslem leaders is just lies. It is pretty worrying that so few Moslem leaders will condem terrorism. Full essay in the extended section.

ANDREW BOLT (20 July 2005) Herald Sun

It's time we accepted the difficult truth: many of the Muslims we invite to live in Australia want to destroy us.

FOR four years, since the September 11 attacks, I've begged our Islamic leaders to drive extremists from their mosques.

For four years I've also reassured you that most Muslims here are moderate.

I've even insisted they have some moderate Muslim leaders, and last week again endorsed Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam of Preston mosque as a man of peace.

How eager I was to praise. Heavens, I described as "moderate" the Melbourne-based Islamic Information Services Network of Australia (IISNA), which purged from its website articles I'd noted claiming democracy was a sin, Jews were behind September 11 and Western society was a pollution.

But was I just kidding myself? Isn't it becoming terribly clear that Islam -- at least the Islam of Australia's Arab sheiks and imams -- is hostile to our society?

Isn't it now obvious we should never have let into our country those imams who now preach hate?

Isn't the evidence that some cultures -- Muslim Arab ones -- pose more problems than their importation at this rate is worth? Isn't multiculturalism making these problems worse?

I know these are dangerous, hurtful questions. I also know many Muslims will feel deeply offended, loving this country and obeying its laws, and I wish only I heard from them far more often.

But the London bombings, perpetrated by home-grown Muslims, makes our silence on such issues not a sign of civility, but suicide.

So let me admit that the past few days have been terrible for those of us who thought we could count on Muslim leaders for real help against the Muslim extremists who threaten us.

Such setbacks we've had.

Only last week I'd praised Sheik Fehmi as a good man, who'd condemned the London bombings. But a day later he was asked about fellow Melbourne sheik Mohammed Omran, a friend of a suspected al-Qaida boss, who'd claimed September 11 was really the work of a US-based conspiracy.

"He is entitled to his own thinking," Fehmi replied meekly. Then, asked if Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists had committed those attacks, he added: "We cannot say. We do not know these things."

How can Muslim leaders fight terrorism, when the most moderate of them won't condemn even bin Laden, or admit that monster's self-confessed guilt?

Fehmi was not my only disappointment. I checked the IISNA site this week, and among the announcements of classes and prayers found this advice to a reader who'd asked if it was a sin to kill non-Muslims:

"In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them, because Allah says . . . 'Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.' "

If that's advice passed on by a "moderate" Islamic group, what must the radical ones here say?

Well, we know that, too. In a Melbourne bookshop run by Omran a Herald Sun reporter this month found books being sold that command Muslims to ready for war and to hate Jews.

In Sydney last week, the Islamic Bookshop, Australia's largest of the kind, was found (again) selling similar poison near the Lakemba mosque, including a book with tips on how to blow yourself up and kill plenty.

"The form this usually takes nowadays is to wire up one's body, or a vehicle or a suitcase with explosives and then to enter among a conglomeration of the enemy and to detonate," it says.

"There is no other technique which strikes as much terror into their hearts."

Again and again we're told such things aren't typical. Apologists, too often Muslim converts with little clout among ethnic groups, claim Islam means peace. But again and again we are left feeling like dupes.

The genuinely charming Waleed Aly, of the Islamic Council of Victoria, goes on 3AW to tell us the radical Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj el-Din el-Hilaly, who has praised suicide bombers as "heroes" and called the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors", is not a big worry because he represents no one. Aly says he doesn't even know who made the man a mufti, our highest ranking Islamic cleric.

But the truth, Waleed, is that your own council voted to make Hilaly the Mufti in a decision of the Federation of Islamic Councils of Australia. Why won't you sack him?

Everywhere disappointment. Hilaly's spokesman, Keysar Trad, soothes us with false claims that the Mufti is misquoted and is a proud Australian, but he turns out himself to have been a translator for the Islamic Youth Movement, a pro-bin Laden group whose leader, Bilal Khazal, now faces terrorism-related charges in Sydney.

We also find Trad has written articles with lines such as: "The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country (Australia) and . . . the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us."

Faced with such evidence whichever way I turn, what else can I think about Islam -- or Arab Islam, at least -- but that it is an enemy of our culture, our society? And I ask: How did we come to let in the extremist preachers of such a hostile creed?

Why did we let in sheiks such as the Jordanian-born Omran, who declares Islam rejects democracy and instructs Muslims to go to Iraq to fight coalition troops? Why did we let in the Egyptian-born Hilaly?

But so much that we did in the name of multiculturalism was dangerously naive. Just think: only a few years ago the jihad-preaching Islamic Youth Movement, which met in Hilaly's mosque, was given three grants -- two state multicultural grants to run language classes and one work-for-the-dole grant to smarten up its offices.

Then there was all that other multicultural pampering to help Muslim ethnic groups here keep their distance, their "identity".

In March, the Victorian Multicultural Commission, whose grants budget the Bracks Government has tripled, even ran a football carnival for teenagers who were split into ethnic teams -- the Turks playing the Greeks, the Lebanese the Jews and so on.

Does this make any sense in a society where the urgent need now is not to reinforce old tribal loyalties, but dissolve them in a warm pool called "Australia"?

As you figure the answer, remember that Lebanese Australian children at the Muslim-dominated Moreland Secondary College, now closed after non-Muslim students fled, danced for joy at the September 11 attacks. Remember Lebanese ethnic gangs are strong in Sydney.

How hapless we've been, refusing to admit we were importing a problem that multiculturalism could only make worse.

For example, we have allowed into Australia Lebanese -- many of them Muslim -- who are often uneducated, unskilled and poor

in English. Their Islam was yet another barrier to their assimilation.

The results were as predictable as they were politely ignored -- a jobless rate and imprisonment rate double that of other Australians. Gangs. Poverty. A near ghetto in Lakemba.

What an unholy recipe: First we build a vulnerable underclass of unassimilated people with a religion of rejection. Then we let loose on them imported radicals preaching a hatred of our society; teachers who instruct them in the shame of our history; and multiculturalists who pay them to keep their distance and retain their much nicer ways.

A LL this always was foolish. Now we see it was dangerous as well, since British-born Muslims bred in a similar stew of multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves and Islamist extremism, have gone to war.

We need now to change ideas once thought sacred by our cultural elite.

First, we must be more wary about the dangers of importing cultures that clash with the one that has built this free, rich and democratic society.

As a former Chief Justice, the late Sir Harry Gibbs, said in 2002: "A state is entitled to prevent the immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into society, or at least to ensure that persons of that kind do not enter the country in such numbers that they will be likely to form a distinct and alien section of society, with the resulting problems that we have seen in the UK."

Second, we must ban mosques from hiring imams from overseas, or at least those who preach race hate or damn democracy. If Islam does mean peace, let only peace be preached.

And, third, we must show more pride in this country, and switch our multicultural cash from funding division to building unity.

After all, the duty of government is to make one nation out of many tribes -- and not the deadly reverse.

Posted by rakhier at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2005

Norman Geras attacks the apologists for Islamic Terrorism

An interesting essay found in the Guardian - by Norman Geras

Within hours of the bombs going off two weeks ago, the voices that one could have predicted began to make themselves heard with their root-causes explanations for the murder and maiming of a random group of tube and bus passengers in London. It was due to Blair, Iraq, illegal war and the rest of it. The first voices, so far as I know, were those of the SWP and George Galloway, but it wasn't very long - indeed no time at all, taking into account production schedules - before the stuff was spreading like an infestation across the pages of this newspaper, where it has remained.

No words of dismay, let alone grief, could be allowed to pass some people's lips without the accompaniment of a "We told you so" and an exercise in blaming someone other than the perpetrators. No sense of what such a tragedy might call for or rule out on the first day. Exactly as if you were to hear from a distraught friend that her husband had just been murdered while walking in a "bad" neighbourhood, and to respond by saying you were sorry about this but it was foolish of him to have been walking there by himself. We had the same after 9/11; still, one nurtures the illusion that people learn. Evidently some don't.

It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them. The plea will be - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy seeking to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else.

Note the selectivity in the way root-causes arguments function. Purporting to be about causal explanation rather than excuse-making, they are invariably deployed on behalf of movements or actions for which their proponent wants to engage our indulgence, and in order to direct blame towards some party towards whom he or she is unsympathetic.

A hypothetical example illustrates the point. Suppose that, on account of the present situation in Zimbabwe, the government decides to halt all scheduled deportations of Zimbabweans. Some BNP thugs are made angry by this and express their anger by beating up a passer-by who happens to be an African immigrant. Can you imagine a single person of left or liberal outlook who would blame this act of violence on the government's decision or urge us to consider sympathetically the root causes of the act? It wouldn't happen, because the anger of the thugs doesn't begin to justify what they have done. The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding, but they're very selective in what they want to "understand".

If causes and explanation are indeed a serious enterprise and not merely a convenient partisan game, then it needs to be recognised that causality is one thing and moral responsibility another, though the two are related. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity doesn't show that they, as well as the direct agents, are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn't serve to justify it. Furthermore, even when what someone else has contributed causally to the occurrence of the criminal or atrocious act is wrong, this won't necessarily show they bear any of the blame for it.

The "We told you so" crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an effective cause of the deaths in London. How do they know this, these clever people? For what they need to know is not just that Iraq was one of a number of influencing causes, but that it was the specific, and a necessary, motivating cause for the London bombings. If it was only an influencing motivational cause among others, and if, more particularly, another such motivational cause was supplied by the military intervention in Afghanistan, then it's not the case that the London bombings wouldn't have happened but for the Iraq war.

Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don't murder people when they are angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder. That cause somehow gets a free pass from the hunters-out of causes.

There are apologists among us, and they have to be fought intellectually and politically. They do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we all share. Because we believe in and value these, we have to contend with what such people say. But contend with is precisely it. We have to challenge their excuses without let-up.

· Norman Geras is professor emeritus in government at the University of Manchester; a longer version of this article can be found at www.normblog.typepad.com

Posted by rakhier at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

Charles Krauthammer on the Triumph of the Neo-Con world view...

Krauthammer writes an excellant essay in which he talks about the poltical experiment of the last 20 years in which the "three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism" all held power in Washington D.C.

I don't know if the essay will remain online so I'm putting it into the extended entry below.

The Neoconservative Convergence
Some once famously dissenting ideas now govern U.S. foreign policy, maturing as they go.

BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism--has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

The era began with the senior George Bush and a classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without Kissinger--although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe its vision--the New World Order--captured the core idea: an orderly world with orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.

The elder Mr. Bush had two enormous achievements to his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure of imagination. Mr. Bush brilliantly managed the reconstitution of Germany and the restoration of the independence of the East European states, but he could not see far enough to the liberation of the Soviet peoples themselves. His notorious "chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, warning Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism," seemed to prefer Soviet stability to the risk of 15 free and independent states.

But we must not be retrospectively too severe. Democracy in Ukraine was hard to envision even a few years ago, let alone in the early 1990s, and Mr. Bush's hesitancy did not stop the march of liberation in the Soviet sphere. It was the failure of imagination in Mr. Bush's other area of triumph--Iraq--that had truly stark, even tragic, consequences.

Leaving Saddam in place, and declining to support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the first Gulf War, begat more than a decade of Iraqi suffering, rancor among our war allies, diplomatic isolation for the U.S., and a crumbling regime of U.N. sanctions. All this led ultimately and inevitably to a second war that could have been fought far more easily--and with the enthusiastic support of Iraq's Shiites, who to this day remain suspicious of our intentions--in 1991. One recalls with dismay that the first two of Osama bin Laden's announced justifications for his declaration of war on America were the garrisoning of the holy places (i.e., Saudi Arabia) by crusader (i.e., American) soldiers and the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. Both were a direct result of the inconclusive end to the first Gulf War.

Still, the achievements of the elder Mr. Bush far outweigh the failures. The smooth and peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire began, Saddam was stopped, and Arabia was saved. But then came the second, radically different experiment. For the balance of the 1990s, for reasons having nothing to do with foreign policy, realism was abruptly replaced by the classic liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration.

It is hard to be charitable in assessing the record. Liberal internationalism's one major achievement in those years--saving the Muslims in the Balkans and creating conditions for their possible peaceful integration into Europe--was achieved, ironically, in defiance of its own major principle. It lacked what liberal internationalists incessantly claim is the sine qua non of legitimacy: the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

Otherwise, the period between 1993 and 2001 was a waste, eight years of sleepwalking, of the absurd pursuit of one treaty more useless than the last, while the rising threat--Islamic terrorism--was treated as a problem of law enforcement. Perhaps the most symbolic moment occurred at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France in October 2000, after Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's peace offer at Camp David and instead launched his bloody second intifada. In Paris for another round of talks, Arafat abruptly broke off negotiations and was leaving the residence when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ran after him, chasing him in her heels on the cobblestone courtyard to induce him, to cajole him, into signing yet another worthless piece of paper.

Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked of the New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, "Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege." During its 7 1/2-year Oslo folly, the Clinton administration abused the privilege consistently.

Then came another radical change. By a fluke or a miracle, depending on your point of view, because of the confusion of a few disoriented voters in Palm Beach, Fla., this has been the decade of neoconservatism. Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that he works in very mysterious ways.

In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the president offered its most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

The remarkable fact that the Bush doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism's own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history. In the spring and summer of 2004, in the midst of increasing difficulties in Iraq, it was very widely believed that neoconservative policies had been run to the ground, that the administration that had purveyed them would soon be thrown out of office, and that internecine recriminations were about to begin over who lost the war on terror, the war in Iraq and indeed the reins of American foreign policy. One prominent columnist, speaking for the conventional wisdom of the moment, called the Bush project in Iraq "a childish fantasy." And this, from a friend of neoconservatism.

As for the liberals who had come on board the project of liberating Iraq, they took its perceived foundering as an opportunity to engage in a mass jumping of ship. Some justified their abandonment of the Bush doctrine on the grounds that it was they who had been betrayed--by an administration whose incompetence, mendacity, political opportunism and various other crimes had ruined a policy that would already have been crowned with success if only they had been in charge of postwar Iraq, calibrating brilliantly precise troop levels, calculating to three decimal places the required degree of de-Baathification, and overseeing just about every other operational detail according to the dictates of their own tactical genius.

Other liberals donned the guise of realists, who by the summer of 2004 were back in fashion. At the height of this new vogue, just before the November election, even John Kerry's advisers, noting that the liberal-internationalist critique of the war (namely, that it lacked international support and legitimacy) was not exactly winning converts, settled instead on a "realist" line of attack. From then on, Iraq would be known as the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," which, translated, meant that we should be chasing terrorists cave-to-cave in Afghanistan rather than pursuing an ideological crusade in the Middle East.

If you add to this mix the classical realists, from Brent Scowcroft to Dimitri Simes, who had opposed the entire project from the beginning and were now penning their I-told-you-so's, there seemed scarcely anyone left on board the neoconservative ship. But the most interesting about-face was that of some professed neoconservatives themselves. Among these, the most prominent was Francis Fukuyama, whose lead article in the summer 2004 National Interest was a "realist" attack on the entire ideological underpinnings of the Iraq war and the liberationist idea. The article's very title, "The Neoconservative Moment," made the mocking suggestion, also very much in vogue, that neoconservative foreign policy was finished, that its moment had come and gone, that it had been done in by Iraq, by its own overweening arrogance, and by its blindness to the realist wisdom that failure in Iraq was, as Mr. Fukuyama put it, "predictable in advance."

As it happens, Mr. Fukuyama had neglected to make that prediction in advance; at the time of the war and during the months of debate preceding it, he had been silent. Moreover, from the perspective of today, even his retroactive prediction in summer 2004 of inevitable and catastrophic failure in Iraq appears doubtful, to say the least. Getting a retroactive prediction wrong is quite an achievement, but it tells you much about the intellectual climate just a year ago.

Today, there is no euphoria regarding the Iraq project, but sobriety has replaced panic. Things have changed, and what changed them was four elections: two in the West, and two in the Middle East. First came the re-election in Australia of John Howard, a firm ally of the administration. This presaged the re-election of George W. Bush, which reaffirmed to the world America's staying power, gave popular legitimacy to the Bush doctrine, and established a clear mandate to continue the democratic project. The refusal of the American people last November to turn out a president who, rejecting an "exit strategy," pledged instead to remain until Iraqi self-governance had been secured, was a seminal moment.

The other two elections took place in the areas of our exertion: first the Afghan elections, scandalously underplayed by the American media, then the Iraqi elections, impossible to underplay even by the American media. The latter were a historical hinge point. After a string of other important steps in Iraq that had been confidently dismissed as impossible and certainly impossible to do on time--the writing of an interim constitution, the transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government--came the greatest impossibility of all: free elections as scheduled. The overwhelming popular turnout, in what was essentially a referendum on the insurgency and on the democratic idea, sent a clear-cut message. Those who had said that the Iraqis, like Arabs in general, had no particular interest in self-government were wrong--as were those who claimed that the insurgency was a nationalist, anti-imperialist and widely popular movement.

This is hardly to say that things have not remained difficult in Iraq. The insurgency is still raging. It has the capacity to kill, to instill fear, and perhaps ultimately to destabilize the elected government. What the election did do, however, was to confirm what was already suggested by the insurgency's clear lack of any political program, any political wing, any ideology, indeed even any pretense of competing for hearts and minds. The election exposed the insurgency as an alliance of Baathist nihilism and atavistic jihadism, neither of which has a large constituency in Iraq.

And that is hardly all. The elections newly empowered fully 80% of the Iraqi population--the Kurds and the Shiites--and created an indigenous representative leadership with a life-and-death stake in defeating the insurgency. By giving that 80% the political and institutional means to build the necessary forces, the elections infinitely improved the chances that a stable, multiethnic, democratic Iraq can emerge, despite the current mayhem. As Fouad Ajami wrote in The Wall Street Journal on May 16, upon returning from a visit to the region:

The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. . . . By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world.

The elections' effect on the wider Arab world was likewise both immediate and profound. Millions of Arabs watched on television as Iraqis exercised their political rights, and were moved to ask the obvious question: Why are Iraqis the only Arabs voting in free elections--and doing so, moreover, under American aegis and protection? The rest is so well known as barely to merit repeating. The Beirut spring. Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. Open demonstrations and the beginnings of political competition in Egypt. Women's suffrage in Kuwait. Small but significant steps toward democratization in the gulf. Bashar Assad's declared intent to legalize political parties in Syria, purge the ruling Baath party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007, and move toward a market economy. (Not that Assad is likely to do any of this, but the fact that he must pretend to be doing it shows the astonishing reach of the Bush doctrine to date.)

Mr. Ajami has called this (in the title of a recent article in Foreign Affairs) the "Autumn of the Autocrats." Not the winter--nothing is certain, and we know of many democratizing movements in the past that were successfully put down. There are too many entrenched dictatorships and kleptocracies in the region to declare anything won. What we can declare, with certainty, is the falsity of those confident assurances before the Iraq war, during the Iraq war and after the Iraq war that this project was inevitably doomed to failure because we do not know how to "do" democracy, and they do not know how to receive it.

In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, the forces of democratic liberalization have emerged on the political stage in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. They have been energized and emboldened by the Iraqi example and by American resolve. Until now, it was widely assumed that the only alternative to pan-Arabist autocracy, to the Nassers and the Saddams, was Islamism. We now know, from Iraq and Lebanon, that there is another possibility, and that America has given it life. As the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, hardly a noted friend of the Bush doctrine, put it in late February in an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush doctrine. First, that the desire for freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. Second, that America is genuinely committed to democracy in and of itself. Contrary to the cynics, whether Arab, European or American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony but for liberation--a truth that on Jan. 30 even al-Jazeera had to televise. Arabs in particular had had sound historical reason to doubt American sincerity: six decades of U.S. support for Arab dictators, a cynical "realism" that began with FDR's deal with the House of Saud and reached its apogee with the 1991 betrayal of the anti-Saddam uprising that the elder Bush had encouraged in Iraq. Today, however, they see a different Bush and a different doctrine.

The Iraqi elections had one final effect. They so acutely embarrassed foreign critics, especially in Europe, that we began to see a rash of headlines asking the rhetorical question: Was Bush Right? The answer to that is: Yes, so far. The democratic project has been launched, against the critics and against the odds. That in itself is an immense historical achievement. But success will require maturation--a neoconservatism of discrimination and restraint, prepared to examine both its principles and its practice in shaping a truly governing philosophy.

In a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last year, I tried to draw a distinction between a more expansive and a more restrictive neoconservative foreign policy. I called the two types, respectively, democratic globalism and democratic realism.

The chief spokesman for democratic globalism is the president himself, and his second inaugural address is its ur-text. What is most breathtaking about it is not what most people found shocking--his announced goal of abolishing tyranny throughout the world. Granted, that is rather cosmic-sounding, but it is only an expression of direction and hope for, well, the end of time. What is most expansive is the pledge that America will stand with dissidents throughout the world, wherever they are.

This sort of talk immediately opens itself up to the accusation of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. After all, the United States retains cozy relations with autocracies of various stripes, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. Besides, if we place ourselves on the side of all dissidents everywhere, must we not declare our solidarity not only with democrats but with Islamist dissidents sitting in Pakistani, Egyptian, Saudi and Russian jails?

But we do not act this way, and we need not. The question of alliances with dictators, of deals with the devil, can be approached openly, forthrightly and without any need for defensiveness. The principle is that we cannot democratize the world overnight and, therefore, if we are sincere about the democratic project, we must proceed sequentially. Nor, out of a false equivalence, need we abandon democratic reformers in these autocracies. On the contrary, we have a duty to support them, even as we have a perfect moral right to distinguish between democrats on the one hand and totalitarians or jihadists on the other.

In the absence of omnipotence, one must deal with the lesser of two evils. That means postponing radically destabilizing actions in places where the support of the current nondemocratic regime is needed against a larger existential threat to the free world. There is no need to apologize for that. In World War II we allied ourselves with Stalin against Hitler. (As Churchill said shortly after the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.") This was a necessary alliance, and a temporary one: When we were done with Hitler, we turned our attention to Stalin and his successors.

During the subsequent war, the Cold War, we again made alliances with the devil, in the form of a variety of right-wing dictators, in order to fight the greater evil. Here, again, the partnership was necessary and temporary. Our deals with right-wing dictatorships were contingent upon their usefulness and upon the status of the ongoing struggle. Once again we were true to our word. Whenever we could, and particularly as we approached victory in the larger war, we dispensed with those alliances.

Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators. In 1986, we openly and decisively supported the Aquino revolution that deposed and exiled Marcos, and later in the '80s we pressed very hard for free elections in Chile that Mr. Pinochet lost, paving the way for the return of democracy.

Alliances with dictatorships were justified in the war against fascism and the Cold War, and they are justified now in the successor existential struggle, the war against Arab/Islamic radicalism. This is not just theory. It has practical implications. For nothing is more practical than the question: After Afghanistan, after Iraq, what?

The answer is, first Lebanon, then Syria. Lebanon is next because it is so obviously ready for democracy, having practiced a form of it for 30 years after decolonization. Its sophistication and political culture make it ripe for transformation, as the massive pro-democracy demonstrations have shown.

Then comes Syria, both because of its vulnerability--the Lebanon withdrawal has gravely weakened Assad--and because of its strategic importance. A critical island of recalcitrance in a liberalizing region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border, Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. Serious, prolonged, ruthless pressure on the Assad regime would yield enormous geopolitical advantage in democratizing, and thus pacifying, the entire Levant.

Some conservatives (and many liberals) have proposed instead that we be true to the universalist language of the president's second inaugural address and go after the three principal Islamic autocracies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Not so fast, and not so hard. Autocracies they are, and in many respects nasty ones. But doing this would be a mistake.

In Egypt, we certainly have liberal resources that should be supported and encouraged. But, keeping in mind the Algerian experience, we should be wary of bringing down the whole house of cards and thereby derailing any progress from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. Saudi Arabia has a Byzantine culture, and an equally Byzantine method of governance, which must be delicately reformed short of overthrow. And Pakistan, which has great potential for democracy, is simply too critical as a military ally in the war on al Qaeda to risk anything right now. Pervez Musharraf is no bastard; but even if he were, he is ours. We should be encouraging the evolution of democracy in all of these countries, but relentless and ruthless means--of the kind we employed in Afghanistan and Iraq and should, perhaps short of direct military invention, be employing in Syria--are better applied to enemies, not friends.

What is interesting is that the Bush administration, in practice, is proceeding precisely along these lines. It pushes on Hosni Mubarak, but gently. It moves even more gingerly with Saudi Arabia, fearing what may emerge in the short term if the royal kleptocracy is deposed. And, because Pakistan is so central to the war on terror, it disturbs not a hair on the head of Mr. Musharraf.

In short, the Bush administration--if you like, neoconservatism in power--has been far more inclined to pursue democratic realism and to consign democratic globalism to the realm of aspiration. This kind of prudent circumspection is, in fact, a practical necessity for governing in the real world. We should, for example, be doing everything in our power, both overtly and covertly, to encourage a democratic revolution in Iran, a deeply hostile and dangerous state, even while trying carefully to manage democratic evolution in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Indeed, the behavior of the Bush administration implies that in practice, the distinction between democratic realism and democratic globalism may collapse, because globalism is simply not sustainable.

Another important sign of the maturing of neoconservative foreign policy is that it is no longer tethered to its own ideological history and paternity. The current practitioners of neoconservative foreign policy are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. They have no history in the movement, and before 9/11 had little affinity to or affiliation with it.

The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Ms. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Mr. Cheney served as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism--not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers' past experience, more mature.

What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined and reshaped the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world. As a result, the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown even more vast than liberals could imagine. And even as the tent has enlarged, the great schisms and splits in conservative foreign policy--so widely predicted just a year ago, so eagerly sought and amplified by outside analysts--have not occurred. Indeed, differences have, if anything, narrowed.

This is not party discipline. It is compromise with reality, and convergence toward the middle. Above all, it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.

Mr. Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post

Posted by rakhier at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2005

Research about why women might not be naturally monogamous...

I think this article by FuturePundit speaks for itself. The implications are obvious. BTW: one study done in one part of an ordinary town in Britain found fully 25% of the children in the population tested were genetically NOT related to the man listed who was listed on the child's birth certificate.

Posted by rakhier at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Well, there is at least one Moderate Moslem...

An Arab intellectual named Sadik al-Azm published an essay called Islam and Secular Humanism. Worth the read

His comments on Turkey are facinating:

Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Martin Kramer.

Posted by rakhier at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

Editorial in the Telegraph about the lack of a Moderate Islam...

Yet another writer bemoans the fact that there are few "moderate" Moslems.

Yes. Where is the Moslem stand against violence?

Posted by rakhier at 06:31 AM | Comments (0)

Is there a relationship between a set of fake documents?

JunkYardBlog describes a possible linkage between 2 sets of fake documents. First, the forged intel documents that purported to prove Iraqi interest in fissile nuclear materials from African sources. Second, the fake documents Bill Burkett furnished to CBS 60 Minutes that appeared to prove that then Lt. George W. Bush violated a direct order from a superior officer when he was in the Texas Air National Guard. I don't see these as related but still...

Posted by rakhier at 06:26 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2005

Two new web sites...

Here is a site, WorldChanging, which looks at changes in technology and effects on the world.

This web site History in Film, could be better but its got a lot of materials highly useful to teachers of history.

Posted by rakhier at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

So much for that mystery...

For a shot time there was some question about whether the new president-elect of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) was one of the U.S Embassy hostage takers.


According to his own official website (all in Farsi), the appointed Mayor of Tehran and now president-elect boasts of his involvment in the U.S Embassy take-over. The Wikipedia article on Ahmadinejad list various pieces of evidence for and against the claim. Given his history and the fact that major power blocks in Iran support him, I believe that he was part of the hostage takers.

It really is hard to imagine how the Iranians could do more alienate the U.S. But I'm sure they will find a way...

Posted by rakhier at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

A Conference run by Women Bloggers...

A conference run by women bloggers will be held at the end of this month in the Santa Clara TechMart Meeting Center. Its called BlogHer.

Good for them. Sounds pretty cool. More bloggers is good.

Posted by rakhier at 02:09 PM | Comments (0)

Some quotes from the Koran on violence against infidels...

Sura 4-89: “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): but take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (from what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks…”

Sura 9-29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Sura 22-9: “As for the unbelievers for them garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skins shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.”

Sura 47-4: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives”

A vast majority of Muslims regard the Koran (the source of these quotes) as the Word of God. The word is fixed, immutable, and cannot be changed by man. The Koran is what it is. No discussion of the text as a human work which shows cultural influences and evolves over time is allowed. Show me comparable passages in the teachings of the Buddha, or of Jesus, or Confucius. You can not.

BTW: Moslems argue not over the words but the meaning. Translations are done and since none are "offical" (all translation of the Koran are officially considered inaccurate) the meaning in English has some variations. I've read one Moslem scholar argue that all these passages are not to be interperted literally. Yes, they will say the Koran does contain these passages but either (a) these commands are not to be taken litterally or (b) the words don't mean what they used to mean. Personally, I don't buy that theory.

Islam is the most violent major religion.

Posted by rakhier at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2005

No More Despots!

Blogger Dean points out that the key idea behind the U.N. was the proposition that

The evidence is clear on this and Dean is right. Internal deaths caused by evil governments killing their own people vastly exceed the deaths caused by all the wars of the last 100 years put together. In fact, internall killings are about four times the number of the deaths caused by international war.

Certainly international wars tend to be far more destructive than internal executions but that must be balanced against the sheer destructiveness of mudering hundreds of millions of people.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2005

London is Bombed...

So, the first big Al Qaeda terror attack in Europe or America since the Madrid bombing is this. My reaction: Is this the best they can do?

Londoners and the British public in general are not going to be frightened by this terror attack. There is no political point to trying to change British opinion by terror bombing three or four underground trains. Its been tried in the past and it doesn't work.

My sympathies to the families and friends who were killed or injured. As fellow warriors for Western Civilization, the road is rough, our enemies are evil. I salute you.

Posted by rakhier at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2005

The Joys of Eminent Domain...

NYTimes Columnist John Tierney has a very nice column about the many abuses of the power of eminent domain. Starting in the 1950s the city of Pittsburgh began using the power to remake their city, and the result has been a failure by all measures over the last 50 years.

Cities are very hard to set up and once built, they are hard to change. In yet another arguement for conservatism, most of the time we really don't understand how cities work well enough so that we can "fix" them.

Posted by rakhier at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2005

Kelo not that bad? Hmm...

One of the writers for Powerline Blog offers this support for the Kelo decision in the Weekly Standard.

Its worth the read though I'm not convinced. I will admit that (as others have pointed out) the Kelo decision doesn't really break much new ground.

Posted by rakhier at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)

The Russian Army Rates Our Armour...

This is an interesting analysis of the performace of the U.S. Armor (M-1 Abrams, M-2 Bradly and the Stryker). It appears in something called Moscow Defence Brief.

It is a highly detailed analysis which talks about a number of tank losses which were not talked about during the war.

Here is a commentary by a group which has long opposed the Stryker but now admits that it seems to be much more effective than they thought...

Posted by rakhier at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)