Friday, October 24, 2003
President Bush Addresses Australian Parliament on the Advance of LibertyThe Australian Parliament House
Canberra, Australia
PRESIDENT BUSH: Governor General Michael Jeffery, Prime Minister John Howard, Speaker of the House, Leader of the Senate, Leader of the Opposition Simon Crean, distinguished members of the House and the Senate, Premiers, Members of the Diplomatic Corps, ladies and gentlemen: Laura and I are honored to be in the Commonwealth of Australia. I want to thank the Prime Minister for his invitation. I want to thank the Members and Senators for convening this session of the Parliament. And I want to thank the people of Australia for a gracious welcome.
Five months ago, your Prime Minister was a distinguished visitor of ours in Crawford, Texas, at our ranch. You might remember that I called him a "man of steel." (Laughter.) That's Texan for "fair dinkum." (Laughter.) Prime Minister John Howard is a leader of exceptional courage, who exemplifies the finest qualities of one of the world's great democracies. (Hear, hear.) I'm proud to call him friend.
Americans know Australia as a land of independent and enterprising and good-hearted people. We see something familiar here, something we like. Australians are fair-minded and tolerant and easy-going. Yet in times of trouble and danger, Australians are the first to step forward, to accept the hard duties, and to fight bravely until the fighting is done. (Hear, hear.)
In a hundred years of experience, American soldiers have come to know the courage and good fellowship of the diggers at their side. We fought together in the Battle of Hamel, together in the Coral Sea, together in New Guinea, on the Korean Peninsula, in Vietnam. And in the war on terror, once again we're at each other's side.
In this war, the Australia and American people have witnessed the methods of the enemy. We saw the scope of their hatred on September the 11, 2001. We saw the depth of their cruelty on October the 12, 2002. We saw destruction and grief -- and we saw our duty. As free nations in peril, we must fight this enemy with all our strength. (Hear, hear.)
No country can live peacefully in a world that the terrorists would make for us. And no people are immune from the sudden violence that can come to an office building, or an airplane, or a night club, or a city bus. Your nation and mine have known the shock and felt the sorrow, and laid the dead to rest. And we refuse to live our lives at the mercy of murderers. (Hear, hear.)
The nature of the terrorist threat defines the strategy we are using to fight it. These committed killers will not be stopped by negotiations. They will not respond to reason. The terrorists cannot be appeased. They must be found, they must be fought and they must be defeated. (Hear, hear.)
The terrorists hide and strike within free societies, so we're draining their funds, disrupting their plans, finding their leaders. The skilled work of Thai and Indonesia and other authorities in capturing the terrorist Hambali -- suspected of planning the murders in Bali and other attacks -- was a model of the determined campaign we are waging.
The terrorists seek safe harbor to plot and to train -- so we're holding the allies of terror to account. America, Australia and other nations acted in Afghanistan to destroy the home base of al-Qaeda and rid that country of a terror regime. And the Afghan people -- especially Afghan women -- do not miss the bullying and the beatings and the public executions at the hands of the Taliban. (Hear, hear.)
The terrorists hope to gain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons -- the means to match their hatred. So we're confronting outlaw regimes that aid terrorists, that pursue weapons of mass destruction, and that defy the demands of the world. America, Australia, and other nations acted in Iraq to remove a grave and gathering danger, instead of wishing and waiting while tragedy drew closer. (Hear, hear.)
Since the liberation of Iraq, we have discovered Saddam's clandestine network of biological laboratories, the design work on prohibited long-range missiles, his elaborate campaign to hide illegal weapons programs. Saddam Hussein spent years frustrating U.N. inspections, for a simple reason -- because he was violating U.N. demands. And in the end, rather than surrender his programs and abandon his lies, he chose defiance, and his own undoing.
Who can possibly think that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein still in power? Surely not the dissidents who would be in his prisons, or end up in his mass graves. Surely not the men and women who would fill Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms. Surely not the families of the victims he murdered with poison gas. Surely not anyone who cares about human rights and democracy and stability in the Middle East. Today, Saddam's regime is gone, and no one -- (audience interruption) --
SPEAKER ANDREW: Senator Brown, I warn you -- Senator Brown will excuse himself from the House. Senator Brown will excuse himself from the House. The Sergeant will remove Senator Brown from the House.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Surely no one who cares about human rights and democracy and stability in the Middle East. Today Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, and no one should mourn its passing. (Hear, hear.)
In the months leading up to our action in Iraq, Australia and America went to the United Nations. We are committed to multilateral institutions because global threats require a global response. We're committed to collective security, and collective security requires more than solemn discussions and sternly worded pronouncements -- it requires collective will. If the resolutions of the world are to be more than ink on paper, they must be enforced. If the institutions of the world are to be more than debating societies, they must eventually act. (Hear, hear.) If the world promises serious consequences for the defiance of the lawless, then serious consequences must follow. (Hear, hear.)
Because we enforced Resolution 1441, and used force in Iraq as a last resort, there is one more free nation in the world -- and all free nations are more secure. (Hear, hear.)
We accepted our obligations with open eyes, mindful of the sacrifices that had been made, and those to come. The burdens fall most heavily on the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families. The world has seen the bravery and skill of the Australian military. Your Special Operations forces were among the first units on the ground in Iraq. And in Afghanistan the first casualty among America's allies was Australian: Special Air Service Sergeant Andrew Russell. This afternoon I will lay a wreath at the Australian War Memorial, in memory of Sergeant Russell, and the long line of Australians who have died in service to this nation. (Hear, hear.) And my nation honors their service to the cause of freedom, to the cause we share.
Members and Senators, with decisive victories behind us, we have decisive days ahead. We cannot let up on our offensive against terror, even a bit. And we must continue to build stability and peace in the Middle East and Asia as the alternatives to hatred and fear.
We seek the rise of freedom and self-government in Afghanistan and in Iraq for the benefit of their people, as an example to their neighbors, and for the security of the world. America and Australia are helping the people of both those nations to defend themselves, to build the institutions of law and democracy, and to establish the beginnings of free enterprise.
These are difficult tasks in civil societies wrecked by years of tyranny. And it should surprise no one that the remnants and advocates of tyranny should fight liberty's advance. The advance of liberty will not be halted. (Hear, hear.) The terrorists and the Taliban and Saddam holdouts are desperately trying to stop our progress. They will fail. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq measure progress every day. They are losing the habits of fear, and they are gaining the habits of freedom.
Some are skeptical about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, and wonder if its culture can support free institutions. In fact, freedom has always had its skeptics. Some doubted that Japan and other Asian countries could ever adopt the ways of self-government. The same doubts have been heard at various times about Germans and Africans. At the time of the Magna Carta, the English were not considered the most promising recruits for democracy. (Laughter.) And to be honest, sophisticated observers had serious reservations about the scruffy travelers who founded our two countries. (Laughter.) Every milestone of liberty was considered impossible before it was achieved. In our time, we must decide our own belief: Either freedom is the privilege of an elite few, or it is the right and capacity of all humanity. (Hear, hear.)
By serving our ideals, we also serve our interests. If the Middle East remains a place of anger and hopelessness and incitement, this world will tend toward division and chaos and violence. Only the spread of freedom and hope in the Middle East in the long-term will bring peace to that region and beyond. And the liberation of more than 50 million Iraqis and Afghans from tyranny is progress to be proud of. (Hear, hear.)
Our nations must also confront the immediate threat of proliferation. We cannot allow the growing ties of trade and the forces of globalization to be used for the secret transport of lethal materials. So our two countries are joining together in the Proliferation Security Initiative. We're preparing to search planes and ships and trains and trucks carrying suspected cargo, to seize weapons or missile shipments that raise proliferation concerns. Last month, Australia hosted the first maritime interdiction exercise in the Coral Sea.
Australia and the United States are also keeping pressure on Iran to conform to its letter and spirit of the nonproliferation obligations. We're working together to convince North Korea that the continued pursuit of nuclear weapons will bring only further isolation. The wrong weapons, the wrong technology in the wrong hands has never been so great a danger -- and we are meeting that danger together. (Hear, hear.)
Our nations have a special responsibility throughout the Pacific to help keep the peace, to ensure the free movement of people and capital and information, and advance the ideals of democracy and freedom. America will continue to maintain a forward presence in Asia, continue to work closely with Australia.
Today, America and Australia are working with Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore, and other nations to expand trade and to fight terror, to keep the peace -- the peace in the Taiwan Straits.
Your country is hosting President Hu Jintao. Australia's agenda with China is the same as my country's. We're encouraged by China's cooperation in the war on terror. We're working with China to ensure the Korean Peninsula is free of nuclear weapons. We see a China that is stable and prosperous -- a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people.
Security in the Asia Pacific region will always depend on the willingness of nations to take responsibility for their neighborhood, as Australia is doing. Your service and your sacrifice helped to establish a new government and a new nation in East Timor. And working with New Zealand and other Pacific island states, you're helping the Solomon Islands reestablish order and build a just government. By your principled actions, Australia is leading the way to peace in Southeast Asia. And America is grateful.
Together -- (audience interruption) -- Together with my country, with Australia, is promoting greater economic opportunity. Our nations are now working to complete a U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement that will add momentum to the free trade throughout the Asia Pacific region, while producing jobs in our own countries. (Audience interruption.)
SPEAKER ANDREW: Senator Nettle will resume her seat. Sergeant, remove Senator Nettle. Senator Nettle will resume her seat. The President has the call. Senator Nettle is warned. The Sergeant will remove Senator Nettle.
PRESIDENT BUSH: I love free speech. (Laughter.)
The relationship between America and Australia is vibrant and vital. Together, we will meet the challenges and the perils of our own time. In the desperate hours of another time, when the Philippines were on the verge of falling and your country faced the prospect of invasion, General Douglas MacArthur addressed members of the Australian Parliament. He spoke of a code that unites our two nations -- the code of free people, which, he said, "embraces the things that are right, and condemns the things that are wrong."
More then 60 years later, that code still guides us. We call evil by its name, and stand for freedom that leads to peace. Our alliance is strong. We value, more than ever, the unbroken friendship between the Australian and the American peoples. (Hear, hear.) My country is grateful to you, and to all the Australian people, for your clear vision and for your strength of heart. And I thank you for your hospitality. May God bless you all. (Applause.)
Canberra, Australia
PRESIDENT BUSH: Governor General Michael Jeffery, Prime Minister John Howard, Speaker of the House, Leader of the Senate, Leader of the Opposition Simon Crean, distinguished members of the House and the Senate, Premiers, Members of the Diplomatic Corps, ladies and gentlemen: Laura and I are honored to be in the Commonwealth of Australia. I want to thank the Prime Minister for his invitation. I want to thank the Members and Senators for convening this session of the Parliament. And I want to thank the people of Australia for a gracious welcome.
Five months ago, your Prime Minister was a distinguished visitor of ours in Crawford, Texas, at our ranch. You might remember that I called him a "man of steel." (Laughter.) That's Texan for "fair dinkum." (Laughter.) Prime Minister John Howard is a leader of exceptional courage, who exemplifies the finest qualities of one of the world's great democracies. (Hear, hear.) I'm proud to call him friend.
Americans know Australia as a land of independent and enterprising and good-hearted people. We see something familiar here, something we like. Australians are fair-minded and tolerant and easy-going. Yet in times of trouble and danger, Australians are the first to step forward, to accept the hard duties, and to fight bravely until the fighting is done. (Hear, hear.)
In a hundred years of experience, American soldiers have come to know the courage and good fellowship of the diggers at their side. We fought together in the Battle of Hamel, together in the Coral Sea, together in New Guinea, on the Korean Peninsula, in Vietnam. And in the war on terror, once again we're at each other's side.
In this war, the Australia and American people have witnessed the methods of the enemy. We saw the scope of their hatred on September the 11, 2001. We saw the depth of their cruelty on October the 12, 2002. We saw destruction and grief -- and we saw our duty. As free nations in peril, we must fight this enemy with all our strength. (Hear, hear.)
No country can live peacefully in a world that the terrorists would make for us. And no people are immune from the sudden violence that can come to an office building, or an airplane, or a night club, or a city bus. Your nation and mine have known the shock and felt the sorrow, and laid the dead to rest. And we refuse to live our lives at the mercy of murderers. (Hear, hear.)
The nature of the terrorist threat defines the strategy we are using to fight it. These committed killers will not be stopped by negotiations. They will not respond to reason. The terrorists cannot be appeased. They must be found, they must be fought and they must be defeated. (Hear, hear.)
The terrorists hide and strike within free societies, so we're draining their funds, disrupting their plans, finding their leaders. The skilled work of Thai and Indonesia and other authorities in capturing the terrorist Hambali -- suspected of planning the murders in Bali and other attacks -- was a model of the determined campaign we are waging.
The terrorists seek safe harbor to plot and to train -- so we're holding the allies of terror to account. America, Australia and other nations acted in Afghanistan to destroy the home base of al-Qaeda and rid that country of a terror regime. And the Afghan people -- especially Afghan women -- do not miss the bullying and the beatings and the public executions at the hands of the Taliban. (Hear, hear.)
The terrorists hope to gain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons -- the means to match their hatred. So we're confronting outlaw regimes that aid terrorists, that pursue weapons of mass destruction, and that defy the demands of the world. America, Australia, and other nations acted in Iraq to remove a grave and gathering danger, instead of wishing and waiting while tragedy drew closer. (Hear, hear.)
Since the liberation of Iraq, we have discovered Saddam's clandestine network of biological laboratories, the design work on prohibited long-range missiles, his elaborate campaign to hide illegal weapons programs. Saddam Hussein spent years frustrating U.N. inspections, for a simple reason -- because he was violating U.N. demands. And in the end, rather than surrender his programs and abandon his lies, he chose defiance, and his own undoing.
Who can possibly think that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein still in power? Surely not the dissidents who would be in his prisons, or end up in his mass graves. Surely not the men and women who would fill Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms. Surely not the families of the victims he murdered with poison gas. Surely not anyone who cares about human rights and democracy and stability in the Middle East. Today, Saddam's regime is gone, and no one -- (audience interruption) --
SPEAKER ANDREW: Senator Brown, I warn you -- Senator Brown will excuse himself from the House. Senator Brown will excuse himself from the House. The Sergeant will remove Senator Brown from the House.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Surely no one who cares about human rights and democracy and stability in the Middle East. Today Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, and no one should mourn its passing. (Hear, hear.)
In the months leading up to our action in Iraq, Australia and America went to the United Nations. We are committed to multilateral institutions because global threats require a global response. We're committed to collective security, and collective security requires more than solemn discussions and sternly worded pronouncements -- it requires collective will. If the resolutions of the world are to be more than ink on paper, they must be enforced. If the institutions of the world are to be more than debating societies, they must eventually act. (Hear, hear.) If the world promises serious consequences for the defiance of the lawless, then serious consequences must follow. (Hear, hear.)
Because we enforced Resolution 1441, and used force in Iraq as a last resort, there is one more free nation in the world -- and all free nations are more secure. (Hear, hear.)
We accepted our obligations with open eyes, mindful of the sacrifices that had been made, and those to come. The burdens fall most heavily on the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families. The world has seen the bravery and skill of the Australian military. Your Special Operations forces were among the first units on the ground in Iraq. And in Afghanistan the first casualty among America's allies was Australian: Special Air Service Sergeant Andrew Russell. This afternoon I will lay a wreath at the Australian War Memorial, in memory of Sergeant Russell, and the long line of Australians who have died in service to this nation. (Hear, hear.) And my nation honors their service to the cause of freedom, to the cause we share.
Members and Senators, with decisive victories behind us, we have decisive days ahead. We cannot let up on our offensive against terror, even a bit. And we must continue to build stability and peace in the Middle East and Asia as the alternatives to hatred and fear.
We seek the rise of freedom and self-government in Afghanistan and in Iraq for the benefit of their people, as an example to their neighbors, and for the security of the world. America and Australia are helping the people of both those nations to defend themselves, to build the institutions of law and democracy, and to establish the beginnings of free enterprise.
These are difficult tasks in civil societies wrecked by years of tyranny. And it should surprise no one that the remnants and advocates of tyranny should fight liberty's advance. The advance of liberty will not be halted. (Hear, hear.) The terrorists and the Taliban and Saddam holdouts are desperately trying to stop our progress. They will fail. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq measure progress every day. They are losing the habits of fear, and they are gaining the habits of freedom.
Some are skeptical about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, and wonder if its culture can support free institutions. In fact, freedom has always had its skeptics. Some doubted that Japan and other Asian countries could ever adopt the ways of self-government. The same doubts have been heard at various times about Germans and Africans. At the time of the Magna Carta, the English were not considered the most promising recruits for democracy. (Laughter.) And to be honest, sophisticated observers had serious reservations about the scruffy travelers who founded our two countries. (Laughter.) Every milestone of liberty was considered impossible before it was achieved. In our time, we must decide our own belief: Either freedom is the privilege of an elite few, or it is the right and capacity of all humanity. (Hear, hear.)
By serving our ideals, we also serve our interests. If the Middle East remains a place of anger and hopelessness and incitement, this world will tend toward division and chaos and violence. Only the spread of freedom and hope in the Middle East in the long-term will bring peace to that region and beyond. And the liberation of more than 50 million Iraqis and Afghans from tyranny is progress to be proud of. (Hear, hear.)
Our nations must also confront the immediate threat of proliferation. We cannot allow the growing ties of trade and the forces of globalization to be used for the secret transport of lethal materials. So our two countries are joining together in the Proliferation Security Initiative. We're preparing to search planes and ships and trains and trucks carrying suspected cargo, to seize weapons or missile shipments that raise proliferation concerns. Last month, Australia hosted the first maritime interdiction exercise in the Coral Sea.
Australia and the United States are also keeping pressure on Iran to conform to its letter and spirit of the nonproliferation obligations. We're working together to convince North Korea that the continued pursuit of nuclear weapons will bring only further isolation. The wrong weapons, the wrong technology in the wrong hands has never been so great a danger -- and we are meeting that danger together. (Hear, hear.)
Our nations have a special responsibility throughout the Pacific to help keep the peace, to ensure the free movement of people and capital and information, and advance the ideals of democracy and freedom. America will continue to maintain a forward presence in Asia, continue to work closely with Australia.
Today, America and Australia are working with Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore, and other nations to expand trade and to fight terror, to keep the peace -- the peace in the Taiwan Straits.
Your country is hosting President Hu Jintao. Australia's agenda with China is the same as my country's. We're encouraged by China's cooperation in the war on terror. We're working with China to ensure the Korean Peninsula is free of nuclear weapons. We see a China that is stable and prosperous -- a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people.
Security in the Asia Pacific region will always depend on the willingness of nations to take responsibility for their neighborhood, as Australia is doing. Your service and your sacrifice helped to establish a new government and a new nation in East Timor. And working with New Zealand and other Pacific island states, you're helping the Solomon Islands reestablish order and build a just government. By your principled actions, Australia is leading the way to peace in Southeast Asia. And America is grateful.
Together -- (audience interruption) -- Together with my country, with Australia, is promoting greater economic opportunity. Our nations are now working to complete a U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement that will add momentum to the free trade throughout the Asia Pacific region, while producing jobs in our own countries. (Audience interruption.)
SPEAKER ANDREW: Senator Nettle will resume her seat. Sergeant, remove Senator Nettle. Senator Nettle will resume her seat. The President has the call. Senator Nettle is warned. The Sergeant will remove Senator Nettle.
PRESIDENT BUSH: I love free speech. (Laughter.)
The relationship between America and Australia is vibrant and vital. Together, we will meet the challenges and the perils of our own time. In the desperate hours of another time, when the Philippines were on the verge of falling and your country faced the prospect of invasion, General Douglas MacArthur addressed members of the Australian Parliament. He spoke of a code that unites our two nations -- the code of free people, which, he said, "embraces the things that are right, and condemns the things that are wrong."
More then 60 years later, that code still guides us. We call evil by its name, and stand for freedom that leads to peace. Our alliance is strong. We value, more than ever, the unbroken friendship between the Australian and the American peoples. (Hear, hear.) My country is grateful to you, and to all the Australian people, for your clear vision and for your strength of heart. And I thank you for your hospitality. May God bless you all. (Applause.)
Iran's European Bargain
GIVEN AN OCT. 31 deadline for meeting a series of demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran faced a choice between concessions on its nuclear programs or a likely referral to the U.N. Security Council, where most governments might have felt compelled to support U.S. demands for sanctions. From Tehran's point of view, the agreement it announced Tuesday with Britain, France and Germany offered a clever way out of this bind. In exchange for promises to meet IAEA concerns, Iran virtually assured that its thinly disguised drive to develop nuclear weapons will not be considered by the Security Council soon and that the United States will not be able to enlist European governments for any other action. In exchange, the Europeans could claim credit for Iran's agreement to fully disclose the nuclear programs it was recently caught hiding, accept tougher inspections and temporarily refrain from producing enriched uranium. If those pledges are kept, the odds that Iran can be stopped from producing nuclear weapons in the next several years might improve. Yet there is a considerable risk that the agreement will merely allow an aspiring nuclear power to escape from what looked like a tight corner.
The first concern raised by the agreement involves timing. Iran submitted its promised disclosure statement to the IAEA yesterday, but officials said it did not cover the most important question, which is the origin of traces of bomb-grade uranium discovered by a recent inspection. There is no timetable for resolving such unanswered questions or implementing more aggressive inspections. Nor is it clear how long Iran will refrain from uranium enrichment or how the moratorium will be verified -- one top official said at the announcement in Tehran that it could be "for one day or one year." Timing is vital because Iran's strategy, since its secret nuclear programs were uncovered earlier this year, has been to stall, even as those programs go forward. Some senior Iranian officials have suggested publicly that full cooperation with the IAEA could be delayed for several years -- a period that most experts believe would be more than enough for Iran to complete its capacity to build bombs.
A deeper problem with the European accord could prove to be the holes it leaves for continued Iranian development. Once it answers the IAEA's questions, Tehran will be free under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to resume its construction of large facilities for the enrichment of uranium and even to begin enrichment. The accord also imposes no restraint on the continuing construction of a large nuclear power plant, which when completed will provide a potential source of plutonium. The United States has sought for years to stop construction of the plant, which oil-rich Iran hardly needs for electricity; only that freeze, and an Iranian commitment to dismantle its facilities for uranium enrichment, would seriously impede nuclear weapons development. Since the IAEA cannot impose such restrictions, they ought to be the focus of any accord between Iran and Western governments. Yet the European ministers limited themselves to backing up the international inspectors -- who may or may not have needed their help, given the deadline and threat of a referral to the Security Council.
It's hard to judge to what degree the European initiative was motivated by a desire to preempt the Bush administration and undermine its tougher approach to Iran, though the gloating comments from the French and Germans suggest that was an important factor. What ought to be clear is that there is little chance of really preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons -- as opposed to getting it to make promises to the IAEA -- unless Europe, the United States and Russia effectively combine in seeking verifiable action going well beyond what so far has been promised. The three European governments said this week's accord "will open the way to a dialogue on a basis for longer-term cooperation." Let's hope that dialogue will be aimed solely at containing the nuclear threat from Iran, and not at countering the United States.
GIVEN AN OCT. 31 deadline for meeting a series of demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran faced a choice between concessions on its nuclear programs or a likely referral to the U.N. Security Council, where most governments might have felt compelled to support U.S. demands for sanctions. From Tehran's point of view, the agreement it announced Tuesday with Britain, France and Germany offered a clever way out of this bind. In exchange for promises to meet IAEA concerns, Iran virtually assured that its thinly disguised drive to develop nuclear weapons will not be considered by the Security Council soon and that the United States will not be able to enlist European governments for any other action. In exchange, the Europeans could claim credit for Iran's agreement to fully disclose the nuclear programs it was recently caught hiding, accept tougher inspections and temporarily refrain from producing enriched uranium. If those pledges are kept, the odds that Iran can be stopped from producing nuclear weapons in the next several years might improve. Yet there is a considerable risk that the agreement will merely allow an aspiring nuclear power to escape from what looked like a tight corner.
The first concern raised by the agreement involves timing. Iran submitted its promised disclosure statement to the IAEA yesterday, but officials said it did not cover the most important question, which is the origin of traces of bomb-grade uranium discovered by a recent inspection. There is no timetable for resolving such unanswered questions or implementing more aggressive inspections. Nor is it clear how long Iran will refrain from uranium enrichment or how the moratorium will be verified -- one top official said at the announcement in Tehran that it could be "for one day or one year." Timing is vital because Iran's strategy, since its secret nuclear programs were uncovered earlier this year, has been to stall, even as those programs go forward. Some senior Iranian officials have suggested publicly that full cooperation with the IAEA could be delayed for several years -- a period that most experts believe would be more than enough for Iran to complete its capacity to build bombs.
A deeper problem with the European accord could prove to be the holes it leaves for continued Iranian development. Once it answers the IAEA's questions, Tehran will be free under the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to resume its construction of large facilities for the enrichment of uranium and even to begin enrichment. The accord also imposes no restraint on the continuing construction of a large nuclear power plant, which when completed will provide a potential source of plutonium. The United States has sought for years to stop construction of the plant, which oil-rich Iran hardly needs for electricity; only that freeze, and an Iranian commitment to dismantle its facilities for uranium enrichment, would seriously impede nuclear weapons development. Since the IAEA cannot impose such restrictions, they ought to be the focus of any accord between Iran and Western governments. Yet the European ministers limited themselves to backing up the international inspectors -- who may or may not have needed their help, given the deadline and threat of a referral to the Security Council.
It's hard to judge to what degree the European initiative was motivated by a desire to preempt the Bush administration and undermine its tougher approach to Iran, though the gloating comments from the French and Germans suggest that was an important factor. What ought to be clear is that there is little chance of really preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons -- as opposed to getting it to make promises to the IAEA -- unless Europe, the United States and Russia effectively combine in seeking verifiable action going well beyond what so far has been promised. The three European governments said this week's accord "will open the way to a dialogue on a basis for longer-term cooperation." Let's hope that dialogue will be aimed solely at containing the nuclear threat from Iran, and not at countering the United States.
WHITE HOUSE MEMO
On High-Speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap
By DAVID E. SANGER
ANBERRA, Australia, Oct. 23 — Minutes after President Bush finished an hourlong meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.
"Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?" he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.
It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.
In his six-day dash from Tokyo to the Philippines to Singapore, Indonesia and Australia, rarely did the searing suspicions of America's intentions — and the intentions of Mr. Bush himself — pierce the president's fearsome security bubble. But when they did, they revealed a huge gulf between how the president views himself, and how Asians view George W. Bush's America.
By and large the encounters were painfully polite, even when Mr. Bush decided to take on directly Malaysia's cantankerous prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who declared that Jews run the world, and run it from the United States. More boisterous in their anti-Bush enthusiasm were the members of the Australian Parliament who heckled him during a speech, shouting that the United States had no right to become the world's sheriff.
White House officials wrote off the first to the anti-Semitic mutterings of a soon-to-be-retired autocrat, and the second to the local traditions of parliamentary decorum here, which bear a close resemblance to Australian rugby rules. But beneath both incidents lay uncomfortable realities for Mr. Bush: Mr. Mahathir's speech drew a standing ovation from world leaders at a major Islamic conference last week — including American allies — and polls show that Mr. Bush's approach to the world is deeply unpopular among Australians.
Yet for his part, Mr. Bush seemed determined to show that Iraq was a special case and to dispel the impression held in many parts of the world that he is impatient, trigger-happy and uninterested in building alliances. He sounds like a man who believes himself genuinely misunderstood.
"I've been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be dealt with by force," Mr. Bush insisted in the conference room of Air Force One as he left Bali and headed here to Australia's capital.
He invited reporters to look at how he is now handling North Korea. Mr. Bush spent most of his visit whipping South Korea, Japan, Russia and China into a common approach — telling North Korea that some form of written guarantee of the country's security, in return for full disarmament of its nuclear programs, is the best deal it will ever get.
Similarly, he welcomed Europe's intervention to get Iran to stop its nuclear program, saying he was happy to have someone else play the heavy. "It's the same approach," he said, "the kind of approach we're taking in North Korea as well, a collective voice trying to convince a leader to change behavior."
But even some of Mr. Bush's aides concede that Mr. Bush has only begun to discover the gap between the picture of a benign superpower that he sees, and the far more calculating, self-interested, anti-Muslim America the world perceives as he speeds by behind dark windows.
"On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse," one senior official who sat in on several meetings said. "Of course, when you are moving at warp speed, there isn't a lot of time to think about what you are hearing."
Notably missing from this trip were the big crowds that have almost always turned out for a glimpse of the world's most powerful leader. To some extent, that was planned: Thailand, where Mr. Bush stayed the longest for the annual Asian economic forum, gave workers a holiday and made it clear that protests would not be tolerated.
In Indonesia, the Secret Service would not let the president get more than a mile off the grounds of the airport in Bali — the overwhelmingly Hindu island of the world's largest Islamic nation. The result was that only ordinary Indonesians to see the first American president to to visit their country in more that a decade were selling Coke from a stand outside the airport fence.
Similarly, in Australia Mr. Bush visited only this prim-and-proper capital, where few Australians without government business ever step. (Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, was beginning to take a much more extensive tour of the country as Mr. Bush was leaving.)
All this is in sharp contrast to the last presidential tour of the region, when President Bill Clinton visited Vietnam at the end of 2000, talking to mayors about housing and health care, touring ancient temples and new factories, his car weaving through streets packed five- and six-deep with Vietnamese who said America, once an enemy, was now the path to prosperity.
That, of course, was a different time, and Mr. Bush's aides say Mr. Clinton viewed Southeast Asia through the cheery glasses of economic globalization, while Mr. Bush is forcing governments that would rather turn the other way to face the threats brewing in their own villages.
It is an unpleasant message, and the risk facing Mr. Bush is that important parts of it get lost in translation. In Indonesia and the Philippines, one American official with long experience in Asia noted during the president's tour, "people are tired of hearing that they are the front line of terrorism, and over time they come to blame the messenger."
Mr. Bush, in his exchange with reporters on Air Force One, expressed some regret that he did not have the time to explain himself better. "There was kind of a sense that American believe that Muslims are terrorists," he said, and he tried to defuse that by assuring them that "Americans know that these terrorists are hiding behind Islam in order to create fear and chaos and death." And he tried to explain his Middle East policy, he said, but seemed to acknowledge that his message probably did not sink in.
"I didn't really have time to go in further than that," he said.
On High-Speed Trip, Bush Glimpses a Perception Gap
By DAVID E. SANGER
ANBERRA, Australia, Oct. 23 — Minutes after President Bush finished an hourlong meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali on Wednesday, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.
"Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?" he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that.
It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.
In his six-day dash from Tokyo to the Philippines to Singapore, Indonesia and Australia, rarely did the searing suspicions of America's intentions — and the intentions of Mr. Bush himself — pierce the president's fearsome security bubble. But when they did, they revealed a huge gulf between how the president views himself, and how Asians view George W. Bush's America.
By and large the encounters were painfully polite, even when Mr. Bush decided to take on directly Malaysia's cantankerous prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who declared that Jews run the world, and run it from the United States. More boisterous in their anti-Bush enthusiasm were the members of the Australian Parliament who heckled him during a speech, shouting that the United States had no right to become the world's sheriff.
White House officials wrote off the first to the anti-Semitic mutterings of a soon-to-be-retired autocrat, and the second to the local traditions of parliamentary decorum here, which bear a close resemblance to Australian rugby rules. But beneath both incidents lay uncomfortable realities for Mr. Bush: Mr. Mahathir's speech drew a standing ovation from world leaders at a major Islamic conference last week — including American allies — and polls show that Mr. Bush's approach to the world is deeply unpopular among Australians.
Yet for his part, Mr. Bush seemed determined to show that Iraq was a special case and to dispel the impression held in many parts of the world that he is impatient, trigger-happy and uninterested in building alliances. He sounds like a man who believes himself genuinely misunderstood.
"I've been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be dealt with by force," Mr. Bush insisted in the conference room of Air Force One as he left Bali and headed here to Australia's capital.
He invited reporters to look at how he is now handling North Korea. Mr. Bush spent most of his visit whipping South Korea, Japan, Russia and China into a common approach — telling North Korea that some form of written guarantee of the country's security, in return for full disarmament of its nuclear programs, is the best deal it will ever get.
Similarly, he welcomed Europe's intervention to get Iran to stop its nuclear program, saying he was happy to have someone else play the heavy. "It's the same approach," he said, "the kind of approach we're taking in North Korea as well, a collective voice trying to convince a leader to change behavior."
But even some of Mr. Bush's aides concede that Mr. Bush has only begun to discover the gap between the picture of a benign superpower that he sees, and the far more calculating, self-interested, anti-Muslim America the world perceives as he speeds by behind dark windows.
"On a trip like this he can get a glimpse of it, but only a glimpse," one senior official who sat in on several meetings said. "Of course, when you are moving at warp speed, there isn't a lot of time to think about what you are hearing."
Notably missing from this trip were the big crowds that have almost always turned out for a glimpse of the world's most powerful leader. To some extent, that was planned: Thailand, where Mr. Bush stayed the longest for the annual Asian economic forum, gave workers a holiday and made it clear that protests would not be tolerated.
In Indonesia, the Secret Service would not let the president get more than a mile off the grounds of the airport in Bali — the overwhelmingly Hindu island of the world's largest Islamic nation. The result was that only ordinary Indonesians to see the first American president to to visit their country in more that a decade were selling Coke from a stand outside the airport fence.
Similarly, in Australia Mr. Bush visited only this prim-and-proper capital, where few Australians without government business ever step. (Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, was beginning to take a much more extensive tour of the country as Mr. Bush was leaving.)
All this is in sharp contrast to the last presidential tour of the region, when President Bill Clinton visited Vietnam at the end of 2000, talking to mayors about housing and health care, touring ancient temples and new factories, his car weaving through streets packed five- and six-deep with Vietnamese who said America, once an enemy, was now the path to prosperity.
That, of course, was a different time, and Mr. Bush's aides say Mr. Clinton viewed Southeast Asia through the cheery glasses of economic globalization, while Mr. Bush is forcing governments that would rather turn the other way to face the threats brewing in their own villages.
It is an unpleasant message, and the risk facing Mr. Bush is that important parts of it get lost in translation. In Indonesia and the Philippines, one American official with long experience in Asia noted during the president's tour, "people are tired of hearing that they are the front line of terrorism, and over time they come to blame the messenger."
Mr. Bush, in his exchange with reporters on Air Force One, expressed some regret that he did not have the time to explain himself better. "There was kind of a sense that American believe that Muslims are terrorists," he said, and he tried to defuse that by assuring them that "Americans know that these terrorists are hiding behind Islam in order to create fear and chaos and death." And he tried to explain his Middle East policy, he said, but seemed to acknowledge that his message probably did not sink in.
"I didn't really have time to go in further than that," he said.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Rumsfeld's war-on-terror memo
Below is the full text of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memo on the war on terror:
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
Below is the full text of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memo on the war on terror:
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
Defence: Atlantic or European?
by Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent
A row between the United States and the European Union has raised questions about the defence of Europe - should it be based on Nato or in the long run should it defend itself? And what should happen in the meantime?
There are some who see in this the first fractures in the defence relationship between the United States and Europe, the inevitable result of the removal of the threat from the Soviet Union.
Others see a relatively small spat develop into an unnecessary row because people were not talking to each other properly.
A well-informed European diplomat told News Online that there was "a definite problem which should not have become a row".
The Americans, he said, were worried about the European agenda and even the trustworthiness of the British.
But their concerns might have "gone too far", he went on, and could have been calmed by better diplomacy and explanations.
EU constitution at heart of issue
At the heart of the problem is the draft EU constitution and what it says about defence.
It states that there should be "de Israel pelos atentados suicidas dos terrotistas palestinianos e o estado de insegurança, pavor e tortura psicológica em que vive a sociedade israelita, por culpa da incomensurável crueldade desses fanáticos do Hamas e da Jihad Islámica convertidos em bombas humanas que fazem voar autocarros, cafés, discotecas, hospitais. As imagens da televisão ilustram de maneira comovente o calvário daquelas famílias de Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv... A semana passada, o New York Times apresentava o dramático testemunho de um rabino que se referia ao sobressalto permanente das pessoas da sua cidade.... Porém, só excepcionalmente e, por norma, de uma forma muito breve, aparecem informações sobre os estragos e tragédias que faz padecer a sociedade palestina a ferocidade com que o governo de Ariel Sharon responde a esses ataques terrotistas. O norte-americano médio, que não leia a imprensa europeia, nem veja a BBC, ou as notícias da televisão francesa, alemã, italiana ou espanhola, provavelmente desconhece que os bombardeamentos dos helicópteros israelitas contra as casas de reais ou supostos terrotistas palestinos provocam muitos mais mortos inocentes, e que a demolição sistemática de casas e a deportação de implicados em actos de violência deixam desamaparadas - e às vezes sepultadas debaixo dos escombros - famílias tão inocentes como as que morrem nos atentados contra civis prepertados pelos fanáticos palestinos».
A verdade é que Israel vive há muitas décadas em completa impunidade. Deve ser o único país do mundo que sistematicamente desrespeita toda e qualquer decisão da ONU tomada a seu respeito. Verdade ou mentira, meu caro Francisco José Viegas?vive há muitas décadas em completa impunidade. Deve ser o único país do mundo que sistematicamente desrespeita toda e qualquer decisão da ONU tomada a seu respeito. Verdade ou mentira, meu caro Francisco José Viegas?
<$BlogItemTitle$>
by Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online world affairs correspondent
A row between the United States and the European Union has raised questions about the defence of Europe - should it be based on Nato or in the long run should it defend itself? And what should happen in the meantime?
There are some who see in this the first fractures in the defence relationship between the United States and Europe, the inevitable result of the removal of the threat from the Soviet Union.
Others see a relatively small spat develop into an unnecessary row because people were not talking to each other properly.
A well-informed European diplomat told News Online that there was "a definite problem which should not have become a row".
The Americans, he said, were worried about the European agenda and even the trustworthiness of the British.
But their concerns might have "gone too far", he went on, and could have been calmed by better diplomacy and explanations.
EU constitution at heart of issue
At the heart of the problem is the draft EU constitution and what it says about defence.
It states that there should be "de Israel pelos atentados suicidas dos terrotistas palestinianos e o estado de insegurança, pavor e tortura psicológica em que vive a sociedade israelita, por culpa da incomensurável crueldade desses fanáticos do Hamas e da Jihad Islámica convertidos em bombas humanas que fazem voar autocarros, cafés, discotecas, hospitais. As imagens da televisão ilustram de maneira comovente o calvário daquelas famílias de Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv... A semana passada, o New York Times apresentava o dramático testemunho de um rabino que se referia ao sobressalto permanente das pessoas da sua cidade.... Porém, só excepcionalmente e, por norma, de uma forma muito breve, aparecem informações sobre os estragos e tragédias que faz padecer a sociedade palestina a ferocidade com que o governo de Ariel Sharon responde a esses ataques terrotistas. O norte-americano médio, que não leia a imprensa europeia, nem veja a BBC, ou as notícias da televisão francesa, alemã, italiana ou espanhola, provavelmente desconhece que os bombardeamentos dos helicópteros israelitas contra as casas de reais ou supostos terrotistas palestinos provocam muitos mais mortos inocentes, e que a demolição sistemática de casas e a deportação de implicados em actos de violência deixam desamaparadas - e às vezes sepultadas debaixo dos escombros - famílias tão inocentes como as que morrem nos atentados contra civis prepertados pelos fanáticos palestinos».
A verdade é que Israel vive há muitas décadas em completa impunidade. Deve ser o único país do mundo que sistematicamente desrespeita toda e qualquer decisão da ONU tomada a seu respeito. Verdade ou mentira, meu caro Francisco José Viegas?vive há muitas décadas em completa impunidade. Deve ser o único país do mundo que sistematicamente desrespeita toda e qualquer decisão da ONU tomada a seu respeito. Verdade ou mentira, meu caro Francisco José Viegas?
<$BlogDateHeaderDate$>
<$BlogItemTitle$>
How to Keep the Franco-German Axis at Bay
By Jacek Rostowski
Posted: Tuesday, October 21, 2003
ARTICLES
Wall Street Journal Europe (Brussels)
Publication Date: September 30, 2003
After having driven the Atlantic alliance to the edge of break-up over the Iraq war, the Franco-German axis is becoming ever more open about its contempt for its European partners.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French prime minister, has flaunted his dismissal of the eurozone 3% ceiling on budgetary deficits. For his part, Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, has reacted to the Swedish electorate's rejection of the euro by proposing to press ahead with a "two-speed" Europe. Britain, Sweden and the new accession countries of central and eastern Europe would be relegated to the "second league."
However, most revealing is the proposal by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the European Constitutional Convention, that countries that reject the new constitutional treaty be asked to leave the Union. A domestic politician making a similar threat to voters would be hounded out of public life. In EU politics it is accepted without a murmur.
The threat might matter less if the draft of new constitution had been arrived at in an open and fair way, or if it was likely to achieve the original aims of bringing the Union closer to its people and making it more democratic. In fact, the Giscard draft was devised in the small "Presidium" of the Convention that was tightly controlled by Giscard and his Italian sidekick Giuliano Amato. Opposition in the plenary sessions was suppressed by giving each delegate only a few minutes to speak. The document's managers also tried to diffuse criticism by emphasizing that the Convention's draft had still to be accepted unanimously by all the current and future members states at the inter-governmental conference (IGC) starting next month.
Once completed, the draft was presented as a compromise, the best proof of its suitability being that it supposedly equally dissatisfied everyone. However, at the end of the Convention it transpired that far from requiring extensive discussion at the IGC, in Mr. Giscard's view the draft should be accepted almost without change. Moreover, despite earlier claims, dissatisfaction is clearly asymmetrical. France, Germany and Italy are pressing strongly for "whole hog" acceptance of the draft, while 17--yes, 17--small and medium sized countries are opposed to its current form. The smart money, however, is on its acceptance largely unchanged by the Rome summit in December.
And it is not as if the Constitution were just a "tidying up exercise" as Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair naively claims. The Giscard draft proposes a fundamental shift in the balance of power among member states in favor of France and Germany. In the crucial Council of Ministers, governments will now vote their nation's population weight, with only a 60% majority needed to pass legislation. The new voting procedure will make it much harder for anyone to block policies they strongly disagree with, though it would be much easier for France and Germany acting in tandem.
The French and the Germans constitute a blocking minority of 40%, able to stop legislation with only the support of either Britain or Italy, or Poland or Spain plus any two of the eight smaller countries with populations of over nine million.
The argument that the new procedure is more democratic is spurious. How democratic would the U.S. House of Representatives be if it met in closed session, attended only by the 50 state governors, each voting all of his state's districts? Yet that is how the EU Council works. As a result, it hardly ever formally votes on anything. Three votes a year being about standard. Everything is decided through backroom deals, where each country's weight compared to the blocking minority is decisive.
Not surprisingly, in the Giscard draft the biggest losers are to be Poland and Spain, two of the United States' staunchest allies during the clash over the Iraq war. The time has come for them to pay for having been so "badly brought up," to use French President Jacques Chirac's famous phrase.
Britain and Italy support the new procedure because they fancy that they too will be gainers. In fact, they will lose. Until Silvio Berlusconi appeared on the scene, Italian policy has traditionally been to desperately seek admission to the Franco-German duo, whatever the cost in terms of national humiliation. Britain has fluctuated between negotiating opt-outs for itself on policies it dislikes and ingratiating itself with France and Germany.
What the EU needs instead is an alternative center of power. Britain, Italy, Poland and Spain, the four largest U.S. allies, need to devise common policies, build up trust in their mutual solidarity and get into the habit of trading favors. Their present ad-hoc coalition must, in other words, be made more permanent, and domestically bipartisan. They have the added advantage of constituting a blocking minority in themselves. They should therefore copy France and Germany and sign an Elysee treaty of their own. The Franco-German treaty's structure, with its regular meetings and policy co-ordination, has helped buttress the duo's power.
Of course, this will be harder to do among four than between two, but until it happens France and Germany will always have the initiative in the EU, with other member states having to negotiate their interests individually with the dominant duo.
By Jacek Rostowski
Posted: Tuesday, October 21, 2003
ARTICLES
Wall Street Journal Europe (Brussels)
Publication Date: September 30, 2003
After having driven the Atlantic alliance to the edge of break-up over the Iraq war, the Franco-German axis is becoming ever more open about its contempt for its European partners.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French prime minister, has flaunted his dismissal of the eurozone 3% ceiling on budgetary deficits. For his part, Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, has reacted to the Swedish electorate's rejection of the euro by proposing to press ahead with a "two-speed" Europe. Britain, Sweden and the new accession countries of central and eastern Europe would be relegated to the "second league."
However, most revealing is the proposal by Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the European Constitutional Convention, that countries that reject the new constitutional treaty be asked to leave the Union. A domestic politician making a similar threat to voters would be hounded out of public life. In EU politics it is accepted without a murmur.
The threat might matter less if the draft of new constitution had been arrived at in an open and fair way, or if it was likely to achieve the original aims of bringing the Union closer to its people and making it more democratic. In fact, the Giscard draft was devised in the small "Presidium" of the Convention that was tightly controlled by Giscard and his Italian sidekick Giuliano Amato. Opposition in the plenary sessions was suppressed by giving each delegate only a few minutes to speak. The document's managers also tried to diffuse criticism by emphasizing that the Convention's draft had still to be accepted unanimously by all the current and future members states at the inter-governmental conference (IGC) starting next month.
Once completed, the draft was presented as a compromise, the best proof of its suitability being that it supposedly equally dissatisfied everyone. However, at the end of the Convention it transpired that far from requiring extensive discussion at the IGC, in Mr. Giscard's view the draft should be accepted almost without change. Moreover, despite earlier claims, dissatisfaction is clearly asymmetrical. France, Germany and Italy are pressing strongly for "whole hog" acceptance of the draft, while 17--yes, 17--small and medium sized countries are opposed to its current form. The smart money, however, is on its acceptance largely unchanged by the Rome summit in December.
And it is not as if the Constitution were just a "tidying up exercise" as Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair naively claims. The Giscard draft proposes a fundamental shift in the balance of power among member states in favor of France and Germany. In the crucial Council of Ministers, governments will now vote their nation's population weight, with only a 60% majority needed to pass legislation. The new voting procedure will make it much harder for anyone to block policies they strongly disagree with, though it would be much easier for France and Germany acting in tandem.
The French and the Germans constitute a blocking minority of 40%, able to stop legislation with only the support of either Britain or Italy, or Poland or Spain plus any two of the eight smaller countries with populations of over nine million.
The argument that the new procedure is more democratic is spurious. How democratic would the U.S. House of Representatives be if it met in closed session, attended only by the 50 state governors, each voting all of his state's districts? Yet that is how the EU Council works. As a result, it hardly ever formally votes on anything. Three votes a year being about standard. Everything is decided through backroom deals, where each country's weight compared to the blocking minority is decisive.
Not surprisingly, in the Giscard draft the biggest losers are to be Poland and Spain, two of the United States' staunchest allies during the clash over the Iraq war. The time has come for them to pay for having been so "badly brought up," to use French President Jacques Chirac's famous phrase.
Britain and Italy support the new procedure because they fancy that they too will be gainers. In fact, they will lose. Until Silvio Berlusconi appeared on the scene, Italian policy has traditionally been to desperately seek admission to the Franco-German duo, whatever the cost in terms of national humiliation. Britain has fluctuated between negotiating opt-outs for itself on policies it dislikes and ingratiating itself with France and Germany.
What the EU needs instead is an alternative center of power. Britain, Italy, Poland and Spain, the four largest U.S. allies, need to devise common policies, build up trust in their mutual solidarity and get into the habit of trading favors. Their present ad-hoc coalition must, in other words, be made more permanent, and domestically bipartisan. They have the added advantage of constituting a blocking minority in themselves. They should therefore copy France and Germany and sign an Elysee treaty of their own. The Franco-German treaty's structure, with its regular meetings and policy co-ordination, has helped buttress the duo's power.
Of course, this will be harder to do among four than between two, but until it happens France and Germany will always have the initiative in the EU, with other member states having to negotiate their interests individually with the dominant duo.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
What It Takes to Be a Neo-Neoconservative
By JAMES ATLAS
war against an enemy whose threat to us remains a matter of debate. The need to commit troops indefinitely. Growing doubts at home. As the American involvement in Iraq has become a commitment of unknown duration, comparisons to the Vietnam War are more and more common.
Whether or not the comparison proves valid, there is another historical parallel to the Vietnam War, one that involves a group of intellectuals responsible for articulating the rationale for the Iraq war. Among the enduring legacies of the earlier era was the split between liberals who opposed the war and the small splinter group that would become known as the neoconservatives. The group's decision to support the Vietnam War — or at least to oppose those who opposed it — was a shift that would lead them to a new level of power and influence.
The war in Iraq has shown signs of a similar split: a pro-war faction of the liberal intelligentsia has rejected a reflexive antiwar stance to form a movement of its own. The influence of these voices isn't to be underestimated. The marginality of intellectuals is a myth; even in the resolutely hermetic world of Washington, their voices are heard.
For the liberal intellectuals of this generation, the war in Iraq has required nuanced positions. Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a self-styled "liberal centrist," focused on the human rights issue: if liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein saved opponents of the regime from torture or death, that in itself justified the war.
The political philosopher Michael Walzer, the editor of Dissent magazine, was ambivalent, but directed much of his anger at the rigid politics of the anti-interventionist left in the face of Sept. 11.
Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair who had disapproved of United States intervention in the first Persian Gulf war, was excited about Americanization as a revolutionary force. Calling himself a "Paine-ite," he saw the new war as an uprising against an illegitimate state.
The writer Paul Berman forcefully expressed the opinion that not only was President Bush justified in his prosecution of the war but that he had dragged his feet. Terrorism, Mr. Berman wrote in his book "Terror and Liberalism," is a form of totalitarianism; the war in the Middle East is a war to defend liberal civilization.
How does the war look seven months later? Mr. Ignatieff hasn't changed his mind. "Would you prefer to have Bremer in Baghdad or Saddam Hussein?" he asked, referring to L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq. "For me the key issue is what would be the best result for the Iraqi people — what is most likely to improve the human rights of 26 million Iraqis? What always drove me crazy about the opposition was that it was never about Iraq. It was a referendum on American power."
The going has been tougher than he expected, Mr. Ignatieff said: "I freely admit, the one thing I didn't anticipate was hit-and-run guerrilla attacks. The regime didn't fall when the statue came down."
But this is hardly a propitious moment to oppose the war, he was quick to add. "Anybody who wants the people who are shooting American soldiers in the backs at night to win ought to have their heads examined," Mr. Ignatieff said, referring to a recent Gallup poll showing that two-thirds of Baghdad residents believe that the removal of the Iraqi dictator has been worth the hardships. "Do I think I was wrong? No."
Mr. Walzer said he was just as uncertain as he was at the beginning, but for different reasons. "The issues that were in dispute last March have been superseded by new issues," he said. "Many of us who opposed the war are not prepared to call for the withdrawal of American troops. It's hard to work out a political position opposed to that of the administration. The issues now are not the kinds of issues around which you can have a political mobilization: issues like not enough troops, no unilateralism, no domestic security."
Mr. Hitchens is more gung-ho than ever. In his October column for Vanity Fair, he reports from his latest trip to Iraq that definite progress is being made. United States military officers are kinder, gentler men than the "grizzled, twitchy" American veterans of Cambodia or El Salvador. "Their operational skills are reconstruction, liaison with civilian forces, the cultivation of intelligence, and the study of religion and ethnicity," he wrote.
Mr. Berman said he supported the American occupation but not the Bush administration. "Before the war I took the position that it was important to overthrow Saddam and that I couldn't stand Bush — the worst president the U.S. has ever had," he said. "My prediction was that we were going to pay for this, and we are paying for it."
What's the solution? "Everybody else — the United Nations, Democrats, liberals, the left — has to do their best," Mr. Berman said. "To overthrow Saddam is still a good thing, and we must ensure that it turns out to be a success and not a failure. Cheering on the sidelines doesn't do a lot of good. What we need to do is try and persuade people that this is not a war about Bush but about totalitarianism in the Middle East."
A mandate of intellectuals is that they be open to changing their opinions. Skepticism, the weighing of options, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind simultaneously," in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, are the tools of the trade. Why should a liberal be required to be a liberal at all costs? What if historical events demand a revision of beliefs?
For the neoconservatives who emerged out of the Vietnam era — most notably Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol — that war had what they felt was a persuasive rationale: the need to avoid the spread of Communism. The analogy is clear: Just as the neoconservatives' support for the Vietnam War grew out of their disenchantment with the Stalinist left during the cold war, so has the support for the war in Iraq and Sept. 11 become the defining issue for a new generation of intellectuals. To oppose the war and occupation in Iraq, according to this argument, is to embolden Mr. Hussein. Or to suggest, as the liberal journalist Ian Buruma put it, that "liberalism is strictly for sissies."
"The administration has the upper ground," said Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Education. "You don't want to go against the commander in chief. The afterglow of the war against terrorism inhibited people from making the argument against it."
In the early stages of their ideological development, neoconservatives saw themselves more as reformed liberals than as true conservatives. Mr. Bell, who predicted "the end of ideology," identified himself as a socialist; Mr. Kristol identified himself — in a famous formulation — as a liberal who has been "mugged by reality."
Yet in the end, all were liberals who, by the 1970's and the midpoint in their careers, were proud to identify themselves as neoconservatives, who were not the heirs of classical conservatism but rather had discovered the limitations of liberalism. A neoconservative, it might be postulated, is one who read and repudiated Marx; a conservative, one who read and embraced Hume, Locke and Hobbes.
This generation of liberal intellectuals, like its precursors, prefers to see itself less as a political coalition than as an assemblage of writers with diverse views — which of course it is. Ideological labels are always provisional. Yet however much their attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become . . . neoconservatives?
James Atlas is the president of Atlas Books and the author of "Bellow: A Biography."
By JAMES ATLAS
war against an enemy whose threat to us remains a matter of debate. The need to commit troops indefinitely. Growing doubts at home. As the American involvement in Iraq has become a commitment of unknown duration, comparisons to the Vietnam War are more and more common.
Whether or not the comparison proves valid, there is another historical parallel to the Vietnam War, one that involves a group of intellectuals responsible for articulating the rationale for the Iraq war. Among the enduring legacies of the earlier era was the split between liberals who opposed the war and the small splinter group that would become known as the neoconservatives. The group's decision to support the Vietnam War — or at least to oppose those who opposed it — was a shift that would lead them to a new level of power and influence.
The war in Iraq has shown signs of a similar split: a pro-war faction of the liberal intelligentsia has rejected a reflexive antiwar stance to form a movement of its own. The influence of these voices isn't to be underestimated. The marginality of intellectuals is a myth; even in the resolutely hermetic world of Washington, their voices are heard.
For the liberal intellectuals of this generation, the war in Iraq has required nuanced positions. Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a self-styled "liberal centrist," focused on the human rights issue: if liberating Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein saved opponents of the regime from torture or death, that in itself justified the war.
The political philosopher Michael Walzer, the editor of Dissent magazine, was ambivalent, but directed much of his anger at the rigid politics of the anti-interventionist left in the face of Sept. 11.
Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair who had disapproved of United States intervention in the first Persian Gulf war, was excited about Americanization as a revolutionary force. Calling himself a "Paine-ite," he saw the new war as an uprising against an illegitimate state.
The writer Paul Berman forcefully expressed the opinion that not only was President Bush justified in his prosecution of the war but that he had dragged his feet. Terrorism, Mr. Berman wrote in his book "Terror and Liberalism," is a form of totalitarianism; the war in the Middle East is a war to defend liberal civilization.
How does the war look seven months later? Mr. Ignatieff hasn't changed his mind. "Would you prefer to have Bremer in Baghdad or Saddam Hussein?" he asked, referring to L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq. "For me the key issue is what would be the best result for the Iraqi people — what is most likely to improve the human rights of 26 million Iraqis? What always drove me crazy about the opposition was that it was never about Iraq. It was a referendum on American power."
The going has been tougher than he expected, Mr. Ignatieff said: "I freely admit, the one thing I didn't anticipate was hit-and-run guerrilla attacks. The regime didn't fall when the statue came down."
But this is hardly a propitious moment to oppose the war, he was quick to add. "Anybody who wants the people who are shooting American soldiers in the backs at night to win ought to have their heads examined," Mr. Ignatieff said, referring to a recent Gallup poll showing that two-thirds of Baghdad residents believe that the removal of the Iraqi dictator has been worth the hardships. "Do I think I was wrong? No."
Mr. Walzer said he was just as uncertain as he was at the beginning, but for different reasons. "The issues that were in dispute last March have been superseded by new issues," he said. "Many of us who opposed the war are not prepared to call for the withdrawal of American troops. It's hard to work out a political position opposed to that of the administration. The issues now are not the kinds of issues around which you can have a political mobilization: issues like not enough troops, no unilateralism, no domestic security."
Mr. Hitchens is more gung-ho than ever. In his October column for Vanity Fair, he reports from his latest trip to Iraq that definite progress is being made. United States military officers are kinder, gentler men than the "grizzled, twitchy" American veterans of Cambodia or El Salvador. "Their operational skills are reconstruction, liaison with civilian forces, the cultivation of intelligence, and the study of religion and ethnicity," he wrote.
Mr. Berman said he supported the American occupation but not the Bush administration. "Before the war I took the position that it was important to overthrow Saddam and that I couldn't stand Bush — the worst president the U.S. has ever had," he said. "My prediction was that we were going to pay for this, and we are paying for it."
What's the solution? "Everybody else — the United Nations, Democrats, liberals, the left — has to do their best," Mr. Berman said. "To overthrow Saddam is still a good thing, and we must ensure that it turns out to be a success and not a failure. Cheering on the sidelines doesn't do a lot of good. What we need to do is try and persuade people that this is not a war about Bush but about totalitarianism in the Middle East."
A mandate of intellectuals is that they be open to changing their opinions. Skepticism, the weighing of options, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind simultaneously," in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, are the tools of the trade. Why should a liberal be required to be a liberal at all costs? What if historical events demand a revision of beliefs?
For the neoconservatives who emerged out of the Vietnam era — most notably Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol — that war had what they felt was a persuasive rationale: the need to avoid the spread of Communism. The analogy is clear: Just as the neoconservatives' support for the Vietnam War grew out of their disenchantment with the Stalinist left during the cold war, so has the support for the war in Iraq and Sept. 11 become the defining issue for a new generation of intellectuals. To oppose the war and occupation in Iraq, according to this argument, is to embolden Mr. Hussein. Or to suggest, as the liberal journalist Ian Buruma put it, that "liberalism is strictly for sissies."
"The administration has the upper ground," said Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Education. "You don't want to go against the commander in chief. The afterglow of the war against terrorism inhibited people from making the argument against it."
In the early stages of their ideological development, neoconservatives saw themselves more as reformed liberals than as true conservatives. Mr. Bell, who predicted "the end of ideology," identified himself as a socialist; Mr. Kristol identified himself — in a famous formulation — as a liberal who has been "mugged by reality."
Yet in the end, all were liberals who, by the 1970's and the midpoint in their careers, were proud to identify themselves as neoconservatives, who were not the heirs of classical conservatism but rather had discovered the limitations of liberalism. A neoconservative, it might be postulated, is one who read and repudiated Marx; a conservative, one who read and embraced Hume, Locke and Hobbes.
This generation of liberal intellectuals, like its precursors, prefers to see itself less as a political coalition than as an assemblage of writers with diverse views — which of course it is. Ideological labels are always provisional. Yet however much their attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become . . . neoconservatives?
James Atlas is the president of Atlas Books and the author of "Bellow: A Biography."
From the NRO :
Defeating Fascism, Again
A similar enemy.
“Fascism," the subject of my first 15 years' professional study, is used so often as a term of general opprobrium that it has been gutted of all serious content in popular usage. More's the pity, since fascism is back, big-time, and it would be worthwhile to try to understand it in order to drive it back under the slimy rocks where it was hidden for much of the last half-century.
It's hard to see fascism plain, because many of its essential features are obscured by its most infamous variation: German National Socialism. Hardly anybody knows that fascism had already been in power in Italy for more than a decade when Hitler seized Germany, and fewer still are aware that, in the late Twenties and early Thirties, there were so many fascist movements — from Latin America to Western, Central and Eastern Europe, from Great Britain to the Middle East — that Mussolini could realistically dream of organizing a fascist "international." Most of the fascist leaders who looked to Rome for inspiration were not racists, and did not share the Nazis' vision of a great empire ruled by a single führer. They were intensely nationalistic, and believed that each national unit would develop its own unique form of fascism, which they saw as a "third way" between capitalism and bolshevism, both of which they despised.
They shared a wildly optimistic vision of human potential and a common political style. Above all, fascism foresaw a transformation of man from a supine servant of modern bourgeois society to a creative warrior who would transform the world in his new image. The fascists believed that the prototype of the "new fascist man" had been forged in the trenches of the first world war — above all, the willingness to risk all, and sacrifice all, for the cause — and that only such men were worthy of positions of power and prestige (there were no female fascist leaders, although Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, was apparently the creator of the myth of "Romanness" that inspired the second decade of Italian fascism). The values of fascism were the values of war, and fascist societies and movements were invariably led by military veterans with great charismatic appeal (we've all seen the crowd scenes, at least). And the interplay between leader and the faithful was ritualized to the point where many came to believe that fascism was a form of civic religion, and the interplay of ritual chants in response to standardized phrases by the leader was a sort of political mass.
Finally, fascism sought to engage its followers and enlist them in great spectacles of political and national enthusiasm. The best-known example is the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which portrayed Hitler as a kind of superman, dominating the frenzied German crowds below him. These spectacles helped overcome one of fascism's most vexing paradoxes, namely that while the political doctrine emphasized individual creativity, the actual practice of fascist regimes imposed a monotonous conformity, enforced in the name of the collective, whether it be nation, race, or people. Communism, for example, never went in for political enthusiasm; it was (and is) didactic. No fascist leader would have dreamt of delivering endless speeches of the sort heard from Stalin, Castro, or Mao. Fascist speeches were much shorter, much more colorful, and far more emotionally intense.
Thankfully we never got to see what fascism's second generation would look like (although I have suggested that the People's Republic of China is the world's first mature fascist state). But we know enough about fascism's first wave to recognize it today among the terrorists we are currently fighting. Two of the most important terrorist leaders are classic examples of the genre: Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Osama's speeches and sermons are (were?) remarkably short, melodramatic, and invariably couched in the language of war (jihad). Just as fascist heroes were often men who had fallen in battle, for Osama and his ilk the greatest act for a Muslim warrior is sacrifice, and Khomeini too extolled martyrs over all others, even creating a fountain in central Tehran from which red waters bubbled. Khomeini's speeches were typically dramatic, and the exchanges between him — the Supreme Leader, a typically fascist construct — and the faithful were as carefully programmed as any between Mussolini and the Roman in Piazza Venezia.
In one important respect, the current jihad is more like the German variation: The notion that all believers are part of a greater whole, transcending national boundaries. Hitler had his Reich, Osama wants his Caliphate, and Khomeini foresaw a global Islamic state in which all believers would be brought together in an irresistible unity.
I think I was the first to call Khomeini a clerical fascist, back in the days when one could still use "fascism" with a certain degree of specificity rather than as a pure epithet. That analysis has stood up for a quarter century, and I think also helps define the magnitude of our task. Fascism was not driven from power by internal discontent, or by freedom fighters within the fascist domain. There was precious little in the way of internal resistance, whether in Germany or Italy. Resistance in both of fascism's core states only emerged once the regimes were seen to be losing in war. Ditto for the global appeal of fascism: So long as Mussolini's trains ran on time, and both the Third Reich and the Italian fascist empire were expanding, their popularity increased.
But once the regimes were revealed to be vulnerable, once the leaders were seen to be as corrupt and as fallible as any others, the tide began to turn. In Iran, resistance ironically grew out of war, the long and bloody conflict with Iraq. With so many dead young men, and the visible presence of enormous numbers of handicapped and mutilated veterans, the appeal of Khomeini's fascism began to wane.
A similar phenomenon is under way following the humiliating defeat of Saddam, and it cannot be accidental that within months of the liberation of Iraq, there are pro-freedom demonstrations in the heartland of the Wahhabi fanatics, Saudi Arabia. In like manner, the unforeseen divisions within the Palestinian ranks flow directly from the stunning American victory. Remember that, in good fascist style, the jihadists proclaimed that only they were capable of the real military virtues. The West could only bomb from a distance, not triumph in hand-to-hand combat. But in Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqis and foreign terrorists were cut down man to man. American fighters were superior, and that reality undermined the entire jihadist vision.
The clerical fascists of the Middle East are now vulnerable, terribly vulnerable, and they know it. That is why they are seeking at all costs to distract us from the war against terror, which surely means above all the liberation of Iran. Whether you call it a roadmap or Saudi peace plan, it is a snare, a distraction from the main order of business, the defeat of the latest version of fascism and the spread of freedom to the region. Amazingly, our unschooled president has intuitively understood this, while many of his colleagues have not. He knows, as any good student of fascism learned half a century ago, that fascism has to be defeated on the battlefield from which it emerged. We have shown our ability to do it militarily. We need now press our advantage and drive the stake of freedom through the hearts of the fascist tyrants.
Faster, please.
Defeating Fascism, Again
A similar enemy.
“Fascism," the subject of my first 15 years' professional study, is used so often as a term of general opprobrium that it has been gutted of all serious content in popular usage. More's the pity, since fascism is back, big-time, and it would be worthwhile to try to understand it in order to drive it back under the slimy rocks where it was hidden for much of the last half-century.
It's hard to see fascism plain, because many of its essential features are obscured by its most infamous variation: German National Socialism. Hardly anybody knows that fascism had already been in power in Italy for more than a decade when Hitler seized Germany, and fewer still are aware that, in the late Twenties and early Thirties, there were so many fascist movements — from Latin America to Western, Central and Eastern Europe, from Great Britain to the Middle East — that Mussolini could realistically dream of organizing a fascist "international." Most of the fascist leaders who looked to Rome for inspiration were not racists, and did not share the Nazis' vision of a great empire ruled by a single führer. They were intensely nationalistic, and believed that each national unit would develop its own unique form of fascism, which they saw as a "third way" between capitalism and bolshevism, both of which they despised.
They shared a wildly optimistic vision of human potential and a common political style. Above all, fascism foresaw a transformation of man from a supine servant of modern bourgeois society to a creative warrior who would transform the world in his new image. The fascists believed that the prototype of the "new fascist man" had been forged in the trenches of the first world war — above all, the willingness to risk all, and sacrifice all, for the cause — and that only such men were worthy of positions of power and prestige (there were no female fascist leaders, although Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, was apparently the creator of the myth of "Romanness" that inspired the second decade of Italian fascism). The values of fascism were the values of war, and fascist societies and movements were invariably led by military veterans with great charismatic appeal (we've all seen the crowd scenes, at least). And the interplay between leader and the faithful was ritualized to the point where many came to believe that fascism was a form of civic religion, and the interplay of ritual chants in response to standardized phrases by the leader was a sort of political mass.
Finally, fascism sought to engage its followers and enlist them in great spectacles of political and national enthusiasm. The best-known example is the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, which portrayed Hitler as a kind of superman, dominating the frenzied German crowds below him. These spectacles helped overcome one of fascism's most vexing paradoxes, namely that while the political doctrine emphasized individual creativity, the actual practice of fascist regimes imposed a monotonous conformity, enforced in the name of the collective, whether it be nation, race, or people. Communism, for example, never went in for political enthusiasm; it was (and is) didactic. No fascist leader would have dreamt of delivering endless speeches of the sort heard from Stalin, Castro, or Mao. Fascist speeches were much shorter, much more colorful, and far more emotionally intense.
Thankfully we never got to see what fascism's second generation would look like (although I have suggested that the People's Republic of China is the world's first mature fascist state). But we know enough about fascism's first wave to recognize it today among the terrorists we are currently fighting. Two of the most important terrorist leaders are classic examples of the genre: Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Osama's speeches and sermons are (were?) remarkably short, melodramatic, and invariably couched in the language of war (jihad). Just as fascist heroes were often men who had fallen in battle, for Osama and his ilk the greatest act for a Muslim warrior is sacrifice, and Khomeini too extolled martyrs over all others, even creating a fountain in central Tehran from which red waters bubbled. Khomeini's speeches were typically dramatic, and the exchanges between him — the Supreme Leader, a typically fascist construct — and the faithful were as carefully programmed as any between Mussolini and the Roman in Piazza Venezia.
In one important respect, the current jihad is more like the German variation: The notion that all believers are part of a greater whole, transcending national boundaries. Hitler had his Reich, Osama wants his Caliphate, and Khomeini foresaw a global Islamic state in which all believers would be brought together in an irresistible unity.
I think I was the first to call Khomeini a clerical fascist, back in the days when one could still use "fascism" with a certain degree of specificity rather than as a pure epithet. That analysis has stood up for a quarter century, and I think also helps define the magnitude of our task. Fascism was not driven from power by internal discontent, or by freedom fighters within the fascist domain. There was precious little in the way of internal resistance, whether in Germany or Italy. Resistance in both of fascism's core states only emerged once the regimes were seen to be losing in war. Ditto for the global appeal of fascism: So long as Mussolini's trains ran on time, and both the Third Reich and the Italian fascist empire were expanding, their popularity increased.
But once the regimes were revealed to be vulnerable, once the leaders were seen to be as corrupt and as fallible as any others, the tide began to turn. In Iran, resistance ironically grew out of war, the long and bloody conflict with Iraq. With so many dead young men, and the visible presence of enormous numbers of handicapped and mutilated veterans, the appeal of Khomeini's fascism began to wane.
A similar phenomenon is under way following the humiliating defeat of Saddam, and it cannot be accidental that within months of the liberation of Iraq, there are pro-freedom demonstrations in the heartland of the Wahhabi fanatics, Saudi Arabia. In like manner, the unforeseen divisions within the Palestinian ranks flow directly from the stunning American victory. Remember that, in good fascist style, the jihadists proclaimed that only they were capable of the real military virtues. The West could only bomb from a distance, not triumph in hand-to-hand combat. But in Iraq, tens of thousands of Iraqis and foreign terrorists were cut down man to man. American fighters were superior, and that reality undermined the entire jihadist vision.
The clerical fascists of the Middle East are now vulnerable, terribly vulnerable, and they know it. That is why they are seeking at all costs to distract us from the war against terror, which surely means above all the liberation of Iran. Whether you call it a roadmap or Saudi peace plan, it is a snare, a distraction from the main order of business, the defeat of the latest version of fascism and the spread of freedom to the region. Amazingly, our unschooled president has intuitively understood this, while many of his colleagues have not. He knows, as any good student of fascism learned half a century ago, that fascism has to be defeated on the battlefield from which it emerged. We have shown our ability to do it militarily. We need now press our advantage and drive the stake of freedom through the hearts of the fascist tyrants.
Faster, please.
Hear it straight from the horse's ( frog's ? ) mouth:
What the French don't see across the Atlantic
André Kaspi IHT Tuesday, October 21, 2003
France-U.S.
PARIS uite a few among the French think they know everything about the United States. Some have traveled there, visiting New York or the marvelous national parks of the West. More often they've seen television reports, scanned the press or listened to the tales of a friend or cousin. In short, they know for sure that Americans are remarkable, infantile, obese, imperialist, lacking in culture, generally insufferable and always hostile toward France.
It's true that every country has its stereotypes. But is it not in the best interest of the French to make a better effort to understand others, including the Americans? Is it acceptable, for example, that there are only a dozen historians in France who research the United States, while on the other side of the Atlantic about 2,000 historians patiently and skillfully dissect French history?
Among all the sources of anti-Americanism, the death penalty ranks at the top. While all members of the European Union have renounced capital punishment (France was not in the avant-garde), the states of the American South, and Texas above all, continue to put people to death. This is a deep gulf that separates the two continents. It needs to be explained.
From 1977 through spring of 2003, 852 people were put to death in the United States. In 2002, there were 71 executions, and 3,700 men and women are currently on death row. It is legitimate to be indignant. On the condition, however, that we understand the functioning of the federal and state judicial system, that we understand the role of lawyers and public opinion, that we understand that racism is not the one and only explanation for the death penalty, that we take note of the countless appeals and other legal avenues open to the condemned, and that we appreciate the debate about the death penalty within the United States.
There are so many questions the French don't ask, as if the answers are obvious, as if they are totally familiar with the history, laws and sociology of the United States.
Whatever sympathy or antipathy we feel for America and the Americans, there are a few truths that need to be repeated again and again.
First, the United States is growing more and more removed from Europe. This is related to demography. There was a time when Americans were, for the most part, daughters and sons of Europe. Today, they are increasingly the daughters and sons of the entire world. Out of a million immigrants who enter American territory each year, two-fifths come from Asia, two-fifths from Latin America. This is a reality that is weighing more and more on attitudes, ideas and foreign policy.
Second, a recent investigation reported that religious convictions are weakening at an astonishing rate in Europe, while maintaining their strength in the United States. The rate of religious observation is at more than 40 percent on the other side of the Atlantic, four or five times higher than that in France.
Third, the French have not sufficiently analyzed the strong measure of U.S. patriotism that has surged in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The multicultural American society, which we had regarded as Balkanized, has better integrated newcomers than a centralized France. The United States, on the other hand, is having difficulties understanding a Europe that is more interested in commercial deals than in its own defense, that is loosely united and that has trouble defining its own identity.
It's tempting to extend the list of differences. They explain the tensions and the frictions. America and Europe are not coming closer; they grow farther from each other day by day. If we, the French, want to understand the Americans, we will have to make an effort. Do we have the will?
The writer is a professor of U.S. history at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), where he directs the center for North American history. He has just published "La peine de mort aux Etats-Unis."
What the French don't see across the Atlantic
André Kaspi IHT Tuesday, October 21, 2003
France-U.S.
PARIS uite a few among the French think they know everything about the United States. Some have traveled there, visiting New York or the marvelous national parks of the West. More often they've seen television reports, scanned the press or listened to the tales of a friend or cousin. In short, they know for sure that Americans are remarkable, infantile, obese, imperialist, lacking in culture, generally insufferable and always hostile toward France.
It's true that every country has its stereotypes. But is it not in the best interest of the French to make a better effort to understand others, including the Americans? Is it acceptable, for example, that there are only a dozen historians in France who research the United States, while on the other side of the Atlantic about 2,000 historians patiently and skillfully dissect French history?
Among all the sources of anti-Americanism, the death penalty ranks at the top. While all members of the European Union have renounced capital punishment (France was not in the avant-garde), the states of the American South, and Texas above all, continue to put people to death. This is a deep gulf that separates the two continents. It needs to be explained.
From 1977 through spring of 2003, 852 people were put to death in the United States. In 2002, there were 71 executions, and 3,700 men and women are currently on death row. It is legitimate to be indignant. On the condition, however, that we understand the functioning of the federal and state judicial system, that we understand the role of lawyers and public opinion, that we understand that racism is not the one and only explanation for the death penalty, that we take note of the countless appeals and other legal avenues open to the condemned, and that we appreciate the debate about the death penalty within the United States.
There are so many questions the French don't ask, as if the answers are obvious, as if they are totally familiar with the history, laws and sociology of the United States.
Whatever sympathy or antipathy we feel for America and the Americans, there are a few truths that need to be repeated again and again.
First, the United States is growing more and more removed from Europe. This is related to demography. There was a time when Americans were, for the most part, daughters and sons of Europe. Today, they are increasingly the daughters and sons of the entire world. Out of a million immigrants who enter American territory each year, two-fifths come from Asia, two-fifths from Latin America. This is a reality that is weighing more and more on attitudes, ideas and foreign policy.
Second, a recent investigation reported that religious convictions are weakening at an astonishing rate in Europe, while maintaining their strength in the United States. The rate of religious observation is at more than 40 percent on the other side of the Atlantic, four or five times higher than that in France.
Third, the French have not sufficiently analyzed the strong measure of U.S. patriotism that has surged in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The multicultural American society, which we had regarded as Balkanized, has better integrated newcomers than a centralized France. The United States, on the other hand, is having difficulties understanding a Europe that is more interested in commercial deals than in its own defense, that is loosely united and that has trouble defining its own identity.
It's tempting to extend the list of differences. They explain the tensions and the frictions. America and Europe are not coming closer; they grow farther from each other day by day. If we, the French, want to understand the Americans, we will have to make an effort. Do we have the will?
The writer is a professor of U.S. history at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), where he directs the center for North American history. He has just published "La peine de mort aux Etats-Unis."
