Euroblogger

Giving Pakistan a Pass

Friday, February 6, 2004; Page A22


THE ATTEMPT by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to whitewash his country's marketing of nuclear weapons technology to rogue dictatorships and sponsors of terrorism comes as no surprise. The general and his government have been lying for years about the illegal traffic. Now that their cover has been blown by evidence supplied to the United Nations by Libya and Iran, they are attempting to pin all the blame on a single scientist while stonewalling any international investigation. On Wednesday Abdul Qadeer Khan, the chief designer of Pakistan's atomic weapons, confessed on television to selling his work through an international black market and claimed he acted alone -- contradicting his previous implication of Mr. Musharraf and other top generals. Yesterday Mr. Musharraf duly pardoned him, called him a hero and declared that Pakistan would not supply documentation to the International Atomic Energy Agency or admit its investigators.



Such belligerence could be expected from a military ruler. What's hard to believe is the Bush administration's reaction to it. Rather than moving to impose sanctions on Pakistan -- action that might be expected for a government that has been caught providing the technology for nuclear weapons to such countries as Iran, Libya and North Korea -- it has swallowed his coverup and even congratulated him on it. "We value the commitments Mr. Musharraf has made to prevent the expertise in Pakistan from reaching other places," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday. "We think that Pakistan is taking serious efforts to end the activities of a dangerous network." As for the pardon of Mr. Khan -- who by Pakistan's account is probably the worst criminal in the history of nuclear weapons proliferation -- "I don't think it's a matter for the United States to sit in judgment on," Mr. Boucher said.

President Bush has said since Sept. 11, 2001, that his first mission as president is to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and the regimes that sponsor them. His national security doctrine declares that even preemptive military action is justified in order to stop it. Yet now that Pakistan's regime has been caught making such transfers, his administration is seemingly prepared to accept its implausible alibi, allow the very generals who oversaw the traffic to investigate it, and trust that they won't do it again. There's no need for U.S. or U.N. action, suggests Mr. Boucher: "What penalties, sanctions, controls or steps are used to prevent it from happening again, those are up for individual governments to decide," he said. "It's up to the Pakistani government to make sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again." Iran and North Korea, which are facing U.S. demands for intrusive international inspections and the threat of a referral to the U.N. Security Council, may take comfort from those words.

The administration's dilemma is that it has banked its policy toward Pakistan on its relationship with Mr. Musharraf, who has been showered with aid and praise in exchange for half-measures against terrorism and promises about stopping proliferation. Perhaps there is no alternative to a relationship with the general. But that relationship cannot be the only defense against further delivery of Pakistan's nuclear weapons technology to enemies of the United States. Mr. Bush should insist that Pakistan supply the details of its trafficking to the IAEA and allow outside monitoring of its programs. Stopping Pakistan's proliferation is vital to U.S. security. It cannot be left to Mr. Musharraf to decide how or whether it will be done.

Restoring Trust in America

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Whether or how our national leadership should be held accountable for having inaccurately asserted, at war's outset, that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction is ultimately a matter for the politicians to debate and the electorate to resolve. But two consequences with ominous implications for our national security call for a more urgent response: U.S. credibility worldwide has been badly hurt by the WMD affair, and U.S. intelligence capabilities have been exposed as woefully inadequate.

America is preponderant in the world today, but it is not omnipotent. Thus America must have the capacity, when needed, to mobilize the genuine and sincere support of other countries, particularly of its closest allies. It can do so only if it is trusted.

That U.S. credibility has been hurt is indisputable. It is a serious matter when the world's No. 1 superpower undertakes a war claiming a casus belli that turns out to have been false. Numerous public opinion polls demonstrate there has been a worldwide drop in support for U.S. foreign policy. There is manifest resentment of recent American conduct and a pervasive distrust of America's leaders, even in countries that have participated in the coalition in Iraq. Trust is an essential ingredient of power, and its loss bears directly on our long-term national security. An America that is preponderant but distrusted is an America internationally weakened.

The first line of homeland defense as well as the point of departure for an effective global security policy is reliable and internationally credible U.S. intelligence. The sad fact is that in the Iraq crisis U.S. intelligence was not up to par. There are many reasons for that failure, but the most obvious one is the absence of an effective human clandestine intelligence service, compounded by excessive reliance on foreign intelligence services (the Niger uranium fabrications being a case in point).

Over the years the United States has been remarkably innovative in technological-scientific intelligence aimed at the Soviet Union, whose arsenal also depended heavily on science and technology. Consequently, the United States was well informed about the scale, deployments and even war plans of its most likely strategic opponent.

Regarding Iraq, the opposite has been the case. The United States, we now know, was uninformed not only about the level of Iraqi military capabilities but also about Iraqi military and political planning. That indicates the means used to define with reasonable accuracy the nature and scale of the Soviet arsenal were not helpful in deciphering Saddam Hussein's relatively backward military capabilities or in penetrating his primitive regime, even though it was hated by significant portions of the Iraqi population.

There is no excuse for the inadequacy of the intelligence that provided the background for the decision-making and the articulation of U.S. policy. Though an autocracy, Iraq was a much more porous state than the totalitarian Soviet Union had been. It was certainly much more porous than contemporary North Korea. The misjudgments made and the imprecision of the information provided, based (we now know) largely on extrapolations and hypothetical conclusions, are just not acceptable. The evident shortcomings of U.S. intelligence, if allowed to persist, pose too many risks for the future.

Today, in the more diffused post-Cold War circumstances, access to reliable political intelligence derived from high-level human penetration of potential adversaries is the essential requirement of responsible and globally credible strategic policymaking. It is therefore a matter of high national urgency that several steps be promptly taken to give our national decision makers a more reliable basis for shaping policies that command international support:

? The administration should candidly acknowledge that the United States was misinformed about the state and level of Iraqi armaments, a fact already quite evident to much of the world. Continued evasion on this subject is a disservice to America.

? A shake-up of leadership in the intelligence community is needed and appropriate; measures to that end should be promptly taken. Accountability is needed to restore credibility.

? A small committee of experienced individuals trusted by the administration (hence not including its critics, such as the undersigned) should be tasked on a short deadline to present the president a plan for changing the priorities and the modus operandi of the intelligence community, with high emphasis on the development of an effective clandestine service.

Our national security is too much at risk for the issue to be handled in a traditional fashion. The usual reliance on a comprehensive review by a high-level commission working at a leisurely pace would not be an adequate response. Sweeping the matter under a rug would be even worse. A globally preponderant power, if blind, can only lash out when it senses danger. America's leadership in the world calls for something better than that. For the world at large, America's word should again be America's bond.

The writer was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. His latest book, "The Choice: Domination or Leadership," is to be published this month.

Op-Ed Columnist: Electing the Electable

January 31, 2004
By DAVID BROOKS


Let us review the Democratic presidential primaries so far:


In the beginning, John Kerry surged to a big lead in the
New Hampshire polls because he seemed so electable. He had
plenty of experience, lots of money and big hair, and, as
somebody said, he looks like an animatronic version of
Abraham Lincoln. But then Howard Dean raised a lot of
money, and New Hampshire voters figured that he was
bringing so many new people into the process that he must
be electable - and if he was electable, then they should
probably support him because they wanted somebody who could
beat George Bush.

So Dean's poll numbers rose, and the news media noticed his
momentum, and other voters noticed how much great press he
was getting. And that led to a self-reinforcing upward
spiral of electability as more people concluded that he was
electable because so many other people were concluding he
was electable. People around the country saw that Dean was
doing so well in New Hampshire they, too, concluded that he
must be electable, a perception that led to an impressive
rise in the national polls, which only enhanced his
electability.

All this time, Kerry had not changed his views
particularly, and he had not changed his campaign style,
though he might have changed the bags under his eyes,
depending on whom you ask. But savvy Democratic voters
wanted to vote for somebody who could win the most votes in
November, and they decided that since Dean was ahead of
Kerry, therefore Kerry must be less electable, so voters
moved away from Kerry. So Kerry's support plummeted, and
the more his support plummeted the more he looked
pathetically unelectable.

So Kerry fired his campaign manager and moved to Iowa,
where fewer people had formed a conclusion about his
electability. And lo and behold, Dean started saying some
weird things.

These weird things didn't really bother Democratic primary
voters, but primary voters imagined they might bother
general election swing voters. And since electability is
all about Iowa and New Hampshire liberals trying to imagine
what Palm Beach County, Fla., independents will want in a
presidential candidate nine months from now, this created
ripples of concern that Dean might not be so electable
after all. The media picked up on the doubts, which created
a downward unelectability spiral.

Meanwhile, a bunch of Democratic insiders drafted Wesley
Clark, who may have been a Republican and who didn't seem
to have a single domestic policy idea in his head. But he
did seem electable because he had worn a military uniform
and thus could negate the Republicans' biggest electability
advantage, national security.

Clark seemed so immediately electable to so many Democrats
that the day after he announced his candidacy, he shot up
toward the top of the national polls. These voters are
nothing if not principled, and their primary principle is
that they should win. This, after all, is a party of ideas.


But Clark decided not to campaign in Iowa because everyone
knew that organization is everything in Iowa, and a defeat
there might mar his aura of electability.

Suddenly Kerry, who had not changed his views particularly,
nor his campaign style, began to see his poll numbers rise
in Iowa because Dean seemed a little less electable. Then
other Iowa voters began to notice the momentum behind
Kerry, which made him look still more electable, so more
voters decided that maybe Kerry was the man to support
after all.

And, what do you know, Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, and
from that moment on the election turned into a
postmodernist literary critic's idea of heaven. It became
an election about itself, with voters voting on the basis
of who could win votes later on.

It's the tautology, stupid.

So New Hampshire voters who
had dismissed Kerry as a pathetic, unelectable loser days
before took a new look at him after Iowa and figured that
if he could win an election, he must be electable (which is
sort of definitional), and concluded he is a triumphantly
electable winner. Now Kerry is riding this great wave of
electability, and he has a huge seething army of fanatical
Kerry supporters who will follow him to the death, unless,
of course, he stumbles - in which case they will abandon
him faster than you can say "electability."

In which case, John, don't let the door hit you on the way
out.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

Women In the New Iraq


By Paul D. Wolfowitz
Sunday, February 1, 2004; Page B07


My second trip to Iraq since the liberation of Baghdad grabbed some headlines because of a rocket attack on our hotel. But a visit to a new women's center in the city of Hillah said more about Iraq's future than did that act of violence.

A predominantly Shiite town known as the site of one of Iraq's largest mass graves, where as many as 15,000 may have been killed, Hillah is also the location of something very hopeful, the Al Hillah Women's Center -- a center to advance the cause of women's rights.

The women I met with were proud of their center. One young woman wearing a conservative Muslim head covering pressed me forcefully about what the United States was doing to support women's rights. In return, I asked if she saw any contradiction between her conservative dress and her advocacy of women's rights. With evident conviction, she said, "There is no inconsistency between my practice of my religion and human rights and rights for women."

In such words we find the hope of a new Iraq.

And in people like Rajaa Khuzai, a 57-year-old mother of seven and one of three women on the Iraq Governing Council. In 1991, when Saddam Hussein sent Republican Guards to put down a rebellion in her town of Diwaniya, Khuzai was the only doctor left functioning in her hospital. An obstetrician, she remembers performing more than 20 Caesareans working alone by candlelight.

Today Khuzai remains undaunted by the challenges of helping give birth to freedom in a country that was abused for more than three decades by a regime of murderers and torturers. A few weeks ago a delegation of Iraqi women, led by Khuzai, visited the Pentagon -- there were doctors, engineers and teachers, Sunnis, Shiites and Chaldean/Assyrians, Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds. Khuzai has described her group as symbolic of the new "one-nation" Iraq. Some spoke about problems, others about the progress already made. What they had in common is that they are all working for a free and peaceful Iraq where they will have an equal voice.

The delegation told us that if Iraq is to become a democracy, women must have an equal role and more women should be included in Iraqi governing bodies and ministries. They pointed out that only three of the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council are women. They expressed the need to have women more directly involved in drafting the Iraqi constitution. They are concerned that if women are not involved, women will not be guaranteed equality under the law. They wanted Americans to know that Iraqis are grateful to be liberated from Hussein. And they also pointed out that we are now engaged with Iraqis in seeking a far greater prize: a chance for lasting change in the region that will help make our country and the world safer.

History offers many examples of democratic principles at work in nations once dismissed by skeptics as unfit for democracy. Representative government, once thought impossible in Eastern Europe, is taking hold, though slowly in some places. In a country where only a few years ago women were brutalized and shunted from public view, Afghans recently adopted a constitution that establishes equal rights for men and women.

Democracy, they once said, was impossible in most of East Asia. Only 20 years ago, when I became assistant secretary of state for East Asia, people said that Koreans had no experience of democracy and would be incapable of it. Or that the Philippines could never do better than the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. The Confucian culture of East Asia was said to be antithetical to democracy. Yet, in the past 20 years, not only South Korea and the Philippines but Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia have joined the democratic ranks. While each of these Asian democracies still faces challenges, each has made substantial progress.

In the end, it will be up to Iraqis to fashion a democracy that suits their circumstances. One of the critical tests of an Iraqi democracy will be whether it empowers women to enjoy the benefits of freedom and prosperity without sacrificing their religious faith. This is an issue that concerns everyone, not only women. A government that does not respect the rights of half its citizens cannot be trusted to safeguard the rights of any.

For that reason, the United States is giving special emphasis to helping Iraqi women achieve greater equality and has allocated $27 million for women's programs. Education for women is one of the highest priorities, and the United States has committed more than $86.8 million to education projects, with special emphasis on ensuring that girls are registered and attending school. Another effort is focused on legal reform. Substantial funding is also going to help women's groups throughout the country, including the center in Hillah. There are now 10 women's centers throughout the country and eight more are in the works. And with U.S. support, Iraqi women are being trained for the first time to serve as police officers, prison guards and security officers.

These efforts are strongly supported by the legislative branch. Reps. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) and Tom Osborne (R-Neb.), who recently visited Iraq, have begun to organize a congressional caucus for Iraqi women to maintain effort and focus in this critical area. And these efforts are strongly supported by President Bush, who has said our aim is "a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman."

It was clear that day in Hillah that the women were eager to be full participants in Iraq's democratic process. I gave them this challenge: I said that some people in this world say that Arabs can't build democracy. As I looked at the brave people of Hillah, men and women who'd already begun to find their voice, I added that I believe that is nonsense. "You have a chance," I said, "to prove them wrong. So please do it."

And we should do everything we can to help them.

The writer is deputy secretary of defense.

Just and Unjust Occupations

by Michael Walzer

How is postwar justice related to the justice of the war itself and the conduct of its battles? Iraq poses this question in an especially urgent way, but the question would be compelling even without Iraq. It seems clear that you can fight a just war, and fight it justly, and still make a moral mess of the aftermath-by establishing a satellite regime, for example, or by seeking revenge against the citizens of the defeated (aggressor) state, or by failing, after a humanitarian intervention, to help the people you have rescued rebuild their lives. But is the opposite case also possible: to fight an unjust war and then produce a decent postwar political order? That possibility is harder to imagine, since wars of conquest are unjust ad bellum and post bellum, before and after, and so, presumably, are wars of economic aggrandizement. These two are acts of theft-of sovereignty, territory, or resources-and so they end with critically important goods in the wrong hands. But a misguided military intervention or a preventive war fought before its time might nonetheless end with the displacement of a brutal regime and the construction of a decent one. Or a war unjust on both sides might result in a settlement, negotiated or imposed, that is fair to both and makes for a stable peace between them. I doubt that a settlement of this sort would retrospectively justify the war (in the second case, whose war would it justify?), but it might still be just in itself.

If this argument is right, then we need criteria for jus post bellum that are distinct from (though not wholly independent of) those that we use to judge the war and its conduct. We have to be able to argue about aftermaths as if this were a new argument-because, though it often isn't, it might be. The Iraq War is a case in point: the American debate about whether to fight doesn't seem particularly relevant to the debate about the occupation: how long to stay, how much to spend, when to begin the transfer of power-and, finally, who should answer these questions. The positions we took before the war don't determine the positions we take, or should take, on the occupation. Some people who opposed the war demand that we immediately "bring the troops home." But others argue, rightly, it seems to me, that having fought the war, we are now responsible for the well-being of the Iraqi people; we have to provide the resources-soldiers and dollars-necessary to guarantee their security and begin the political and economic reconstruction of their country. Still others argue that the aftermath of the war has to be managed by international agencies like the UN Security Council-with contributions from many countries that were not part of the war at all. And then the leaders of those countries ask, Why are we responsible for its costs?

Whatever one thinks about these different views, the debate about them requires an account of postwar justice. Democratic political theory, which plays a relatively small part in our arguments about jus ad bellum and in bello, provides the central principles of this account. They include self-determination, popular legitimacy, civil rights, and the idea of a common good. We want wars to end with governments in power in the defeated states that are chosen by the people they rule-or, at least, recognized by them as legitimate-and that are visibly committed to the welfare of those same people (all of them). We want minorities protected against persecution, neighboring states protected against aggression, the poorest of the people protected against destitution and starvation. In Iraq, we have (officially) set our sights even higher than this, on a fully democratic and federalist regime, but postwar justice is probably best understood in a minimalist way. It is not as if victors in war have been all that successful at achieving the minimum.

The timetable for self-determination depends heavily on the character of the previous regime and the extent of its defeat. After the defeat of Germany in World War II, there was a four-year military occupation, during which many Nazi leaders were brought to trial and a general "denazification" was instituted. I don't believe that any of the allied powers called for an early transfer of sovereignty to the German people. It was widely accepted that the neighboring states and all the internal and external victims of Nazism had this entitlement: that the new German regime be definitively post-Nazi. We can argue for a much quicker transfer of power in Iraq since the large majority of the population, Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, were not complicit in Baathist tyranny, which seems to have had a narrowly regional and sectarian base. But the tyrannical regime is still being defended from that base, which means that "debaathification" is still a necessary political/military process, so that Iraqis participating in (what we hope will be) an open society, forming civil associations, joining parties and movements, making choices, don't do so in fear of a restoration.

We don't seem to have thought much about this process in advance of the war or to have carried it out, thus far, with anything like the necessary understanding of Iraqi politics or history. What is the relation of planned and unplanned occupations to just and unjust occupations? Surely occupying powers are morally bound to think seriously about what they are going to do in someone else's country. That moral test we have obviously failed to meet.

But what determines the overall justice of a military occupation is less its planning or its length than its political direction and the distribution of the benefits it provides. If its steady tendency is to empower the locals and if its benefits are widely distributed, the occupying power can plausibly be called just. If power is tightly held and the procedures and motives of decision-making are concealed, if resources accumulated for the occupation end up in the hands of foreign companies and local favorites, then the occupation is unjust. These post-bellum judgments are probably easier than the ones we are forced to make in the heat of battle; still, I want to make them explicit.

A just occupation costs money; it doesn't make money. Of course, the occupying army, like every army, will attract camp followers; these are the scavengers of war, profiteering at the margins. In the Iraqi case, however, President Bush and his advisers seem committed to profiteering at the center. They claim to be bringing democracy to Iraq, and we all have to hope that they succeed. But with much greater speed and effectiveness, they have brought to Iraq the crony capitalism that now prevails in Washington. And this undercuts the legitimacy of the occupation and puts its putative democratic goals in jeopardy.

The distribution of contracts to politically connected American companies is a scandal. But would it make any difference if the United Nations were distributing contracts to politically connected French, German, or Russian companies? In both cases, there has to be someone regulating the conduct of the companies-not only their honesty and efficiency but also their readiness to employ, and gradually yield authority to, competent Iraqi managers and technicians. An international agency of proven impartiality would be best, but even American regulators, under congressional mandate, would be an improvement over no regulators at all. The combination of unilateralism and laissez-faire is a recipe for disaster.

A multilateral occupation would be better than the unilateralist regime we have established-for legitimacy, certainly, and probably for efficiency-but at this writing that does not seem a lively prospect. It is easy and right to argue for an authoritative role for the UN, but the argument is plausible only if the UN can mobilize the resources to take charge of Iraq as it is today. The countries that would have to provide the resources insist, however, that since this was an American war, America must bear the costs of the occupation-and also of political and economic reconstruction. This was a war of choice, they say, politically and morally unnecessary, and what one chooses in such a case is the whole thing: the war and its aftermath, with all their attendant burdens. This is a good argument; many critics of the war made it even before the fighting began. Jus post bellum can't be entirely independent of jus ad bellum. The distribution of the costs of the post bellum settlement is necessarily related to the moral character of the war. But there is still a case to be made for the partial independence of the two and then for a wider distribution of the burdens of Iraq's reconstruction.

Whatever the prehistory of its achievement, a stable and democratic Iraq, even a relatively stable and more or less democratic Iraq, would be a good thing for the Middle East generally, for Europe and Japan, and (if it was involved in the achievement) for the UN. Given the likely benefits, why shouldn't the international community contribute to the costs of an occupation whose justice it could then guarantee? If the European Union had a larger sense of its global responsibilities, if its constituent states were really interested in modifying American behavior (rather than just complaining about it), they would make the contribution. But that is not going to happen. The Europeans want to share authority without sharing costs; the Bush administration wants to share costs without sharing authority. It is possible to imagine a makeshift compromise between them but not a serious cooperation. These are opposed but equally untenable positions, and the result of the opposition is simply to confirm American unilateralism.

So the justice of the occupation is up to the citizens of the United States. These are the tests that the Bush administration has to meet, and that we should insist on: first, the administration must be prepared to spend the money necessary for reconstruction; second, it must be committed to debaathification and to the equal protection of Iraq's different ethnic and religious groups; third, it must be prepared to cede power to a legitimate and genuinely independent Iraqi government-which could even, if the bidding went that way, give its oil contracts to European rather than American companies.

It sometimes turns out that occupying is harder than fighting.

Michael Walzer is co-editor of Dissent.

A Friendly Drink in a Time of War




by Paul Berman




A friend leaned across a bar and said, "You call the war in Iraq an antifascist war. You even call it a left-wing war-a war of liberation. That language of yours! And yet, on the left, not too many people agree with you."

"Not true!" I said. "Apart from X, Y, and Z, whose left-wing names you know very well, what do you think of Adam Michnik in Poland? And doesn't Vaclav Havel count for something in your eyes? These are among the heroes of our time. Anyway, who is fighting in Iraq right now? The coalition is led by a Texas right-winger, which is a pity; but, in the second rank, by the prime minister of Britain, who is a socialist, sort of; and, in the third rank, by the president of Poland-a Communist! An ex-Communist, anyway. One Texas right-winger and two Europeans who are more or less on the left. Anyway, these categories, right and left, are disintegrating by the minute. And who do you regard as the leader of the worldwide left? Jacques Chirac?-a conservative, I hate to tell you."

My friend persisted.
"Still, most people don't seem to agree with you. You do have to see that. And why do you suppose that is?"
That was an aggressive question. And I answered in kind.

"Why don't people on the left see it my way? Except for the ones who do? I'll give you six reasons. People on the left have been unable to see the antifascist nature of the war because . . . "-and my hand hovered over the bar, ready to thump six times, demonstrating the powerful force of my argument.

"The left doesn't see because -" thump!-"George W. Bush is an unusually repulsive politician, except to his own followers, and people are blinded by the revulsion they feel. And, in their blindness, they cannot identify the main contours of reality right now. They peer at Iraq and see the smirking face of George W. Bush. They even feel a kind of schadenfreude or satisfaction at his errors and failures. This is a modern, television-age example of what used to be called 'false consciousness.'"

Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of otherwise intelligent people have decided, a priori, that all the big problems around the world stem from America. Even the problems that don't. This is an attitude that, sixty years ago, would have prevented those same people from making sense of the fascists of Europe, too."
Thump! "Another reason: a lot of people suppose that any sort of anticolonial movement must be admirable or, at least, acceptable. Or they think that, at minimum, we shouldn't do more than tut-tut-even in the case of a movement that, like the Baath Party, was founded under a Nazi influence. In 1943, no less!"

Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs.

"The old-fashioned left used to be universalist-used to think that everyone, all over the world, would some day want to live according to the same fundamental values, and ought to be helped to do so. They thought this was especially true for people in reasonably modern societies with universities, industries, and a sophisticated bureaucracy-societies like the one in Iraq. But no more! Today, people say, out of a spirit of egalitarian tolerance: Social democracy for Swedes! Tyranny for Arabs! And this is supposed to be a left-wing attitude? By the way, you don't hear much from the left about the non-Arabs in countries like Iraq, do you? The left, the real left, used to be the champion of minority populations-of people like the Kurds. No more! The left, my friend, has abandoned the values of the left-except for a few of us, of course."

Thump! "Another reason: A lot of people honestly believe that Israel's problems with the Palestinians represent something more than a miserable dispute over borders and recognition-that Israel's problems represent something huger, a uniquely diabolical aspect of Zionism, which explains the rage and humiliation felt by Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia. Which is to say, a lot of people have succumbed to anti-Semitic fantasies about the cosmic quality of Jewish crime and cannot get their minds to think about anything else.

"I mean, look at the discussions that go on even among people who call themselves the democratic left, the good left-a relentless harping on the sins of Israel, an obsessive harping, with very little said about the fascist-influenced movements that have caused hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths in other parts of the Muslim world. The distortions are wild, if you stop to think about them. Look at some of our big, influential liberal magazines-one article after another about Israeli crimes and stupidities, and even a few statements in favor of abolishing Israel, and hardly anything about the sufferings of the Arabs in the rest of the world. And even less is said about the Arab liberals-our own comrades, who have been pretty much abandoned. What do you make of that, my friend? There's a name for that, a systematic distortion-what we Marxists, when we were Marxists, used to call ideology."

Thump! "The left doesn't see because a lot of people are, in any case, willfully blind to anti-Semitism in other cultures. They cannot get themselves to recognize the degree to which Nazi-like doctrines about the supernatural quality of Jewish evil have influenced mass political movements across large swaths of the world. It is 1943 right now in huge portions of the world-and people don't see it. And so, people simply cannot detect the fascist nature of all kinds of mass movements and political parties. In the Muslim world, especially."

Six thumps. I was done. My friend looked incredulous. His incredulity drove me to continue.

"And yet," I insisted, "if good-hearted people like you would only open your left-wing eyes, you would see clearly enough that the Baath Party is very nearly a classic fascist movement, and so is the radical Islamist movement, in a somewhat different fashion-two strands of a single impulse, which happens to be Europe's fascist and totalitarian legacy to the modern Muslim world. If only people like you would wake up, you would see that war against the radical Islamist and Baathist movements, in Afghanistan exactly as in Iraq, is war against fascism."
I grew still more heated.

"What a tragedy that you don't see this! It's a tragedy for the Afghanis and the Iraqis, who need more help than they are receiving. A tragedy for the genuine liberals all over the Muslim world! A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else who has gone to Iraq lately, the nongovernmental organization volunteers and the occupying forces from abroad, who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world's richest and fattest neighborhoods.

"What a tragedy for the left-the worldwide left, this left of ours which, in failing to play much of a role in the antifascism of our own era, is right now committing a gigantic historic error. Not for the first time, my friend! And yet, if the left all over the world took up this particular struggle as its own, the whole nature of events in Iraq and throughout the region could be influenced in a very useful way, and Bush's many blunders could be rectified, and the struggle could be advanced."

My friend's eyes widened, maybe in astonishment, maybe in pity.
He said, "And so, the United Nations and international law mean nothing to you, not a thing? You think it's all right for America to go do whatever it wants, and ignore the rest of the world?"

I answered, "The United Nations and international law are fine by me, and more than fine. I am their supporter. Or, rather, would like to support them. It would be better to fight an antifascist war with more than a begrudging UN approval. It would be better to fight with the approving sanction of international law-better in a million ways. Better politically, therefore militarily. Better for the precedents that would be set. Better for the purpose of expressing the liberal principles at stake. If I had my druthers, that is how we would have gone about fighting the war. But my druthers don't count for much. We have had to choose between supporting the war, or opposing it-supporting the war in the name of antifascism, or opposing it in the name of some kind of concept of international law. Antifascism without international law; or international law without antifascism. A miserable choice-but one does have to choose, unfortunately."

My friend said, "I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!"
I said, "I'm for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left?"
"But isn't George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it!"

My own eyes widened. "You haven't the foggiest idea what fascism is," I said. "I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush's cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush's ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend . . ."

But this made not the slightest sense to him, and there was nothing left to do but to hit each other over the head with our respective drinks.

Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism. His book The Passion of Joschka Fischer will come out in the spring.

This article is from the Winter 2004 issue of Dissent Magazine