Euroblogger

Look Who's Talking
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

One major criticism of the Iraq war is that by invading Iraq, the U.S. actually created more enemies in the Arab-Muslim world. I don't happen to believe that, but maybe it's true. What the critics miss, though, is that the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein has also triggered the first real "conversation" about political reform in the Arab world in a long, long time. It's still mostly in private, but more is now erupting in public. For this conversation to be translated into broad political change requires a decent political outcome in Iraq. But even without that, something is stirring.

The other day the always thoughtful Osama al-Ghazali Harb, a top figure at Egypt's semiofficial Al Ahram center for strategic studies, the most important think tank in Egypt, published an article in the country's leading political quarterly, Al Siyassa Al Dawliya, in which he chastised those Arab commentators who argue that the way in which the U.S. captured Saddam was meant to humiliate Arabs.

"What we, as Arabs, should truly feel humiliated about are the prevailing political and social conditions in the Arab world — especially in Iraq — which allowed someone such as Saddam Hussein to . . . assume the presidency. We should feel humiliated that Saddam was able . . . to single-handedly initiate a number of catastrophic policies that transformed Iraq, relatively rich in natural, human and financial resources, into the poorest, most debt-ridden country in the Arab world, not to mention the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced. We should feel humiliated that some of our intellectuals, supposedly the representatives of our nations' consciences and the defenders of their liberty and dignity, not only dealt with Saddam, but also supported him. . . . The Arabs should have been the ones to bring down Saddam, in defense of their own dignity and their own true interests."

Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari, the former dean of Qatar University's law school, just published an essay, in London's widely read Arabic-language daily Al Sharq Al Awsat, which asks whether the world is better off because of the U.S. ouster of Saddam. Those who say it is worse off, he argues, see only half the picture.

"Let us imagine the world if America had listened to the French and German logic saying: Give the murderers of the Serbs and the Arabs a chance for a diplomatic solution. Would Bosnia, Kuwait and Iraq be liberated? Let us describe the situation of the Arabs, and especially of Iraq, had America listened to the European counsel that said: democracy is not suited to the Arabs, their culture is contrary to it. . . . See now how many countries are turning toward democracy. Even Afghanistan has a constitution. In Iraq [they are drafting] a new constitution and handing over the regime, and Libya has changed." (Translation by Memri.)

Saudi Arabia's leading English-language newspaper, Arab News, published an editorial last week denouncing the murder of Iraqi police recruits by pro-Al Qaeda sympathizers and "Baathist thugs." The Saudi paper asks, What do these terrorists fear? It adds: "Iraqis are keen to take back control of their country, and many are acutely aware of the opportunity they now have to build a new and fairer society. There is once again a pride in being an Iraqi. It is this growing feeling of restored honor and the rising confidence of Iraqis which is now the target of the terrorists."

Reuters reported from Damascus on Feb. 5 that a Syrian human rights group has started circulating a petition via the Internet — so far signed by about 1,000 people — calling for an end to state-of-emergency laws. It says: "We, the signatories, herein demand the Syrian authorities lift the state of emergency and annul all associated measures." Syria suddenly just freed over 100 political prisoners.

The Lebanese analyst Sahar Baasiri, writing in the leading Lebanese daily An Nahar, said the response of Palestinian officials to two corruption charges — one in a French weekly about millions of dollars reportedly transferred to Yasir Arafat's wife in Paris and the other an Israeli report about a Palestinian cement factory, owned by a prominent Palestinian family, that is alleged to be secretly providing the cement for the wall Israel is building in the West Bank — was not sufficient. "A clear and decisive Palestinian response" is required, the paper wrote.

Maybe the Iraq war made America new enemies. But it's certainly triggered a new discussion.

Roots of Pakistan Atomic Scandal Traced to Europe
By CRAIG S. SMITH

PARIS, Feb. 18 — The Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been demonized in the West for selling atomic secrets and equipment around the world, but the trade began in Europe, not Islamabad, according to court documents and experts who monitor proliferation.

The records show that industry scientists and Western intelligence agencies have known for decades that nuclear technology was pouring out of Europe despite national export control efforts to contain it.

Many of the names that have turned up among lists of suppliers and middlemen who fed equipment, materials and knowledge to nuclear programs in Pakistan and other aspiring nuclear nations are well-known players in Europe's uranium enrichment industry, a critical part of many nuclear weapons programs. Some have been convicted of illegal exports before.

The proliferation has its roots in Europe's own postwar eagerness for nuclear independence from the United States and its lax security over potentially lethal technology. It was abetted, critics say, by competition within Europe for lucrative contracts to bolster state-supported nuclear industries. Even as their own intelligence services warned that Pakistan could not be trusted, some European governments continued to help Pakistan's nuclear program.

"It was an economic consideration," said Paul Stais, a former Belgian member of the European Parliament who lobbied unsuccessfully for tighter export controls.

One name to emerge from the international investigations of Dr. Khan's nuclear trade was that of Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer who monitored production of centrifuge parts at a factory in Malaysia. The parts were intended for Libya. Mr. Tinner's father, Friedrich Tinner, also an engineer, came under scrutiny by the Defense Department in the 1970's and again by Swiss export control authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the last decade, because he was involved in exports to Pakistan and Iraq of technology used in uranium enrichment.

In the 1970's, Friedrich Tinner was in charge of exports at Vakuum-Apparate-Technik, or VAT, when the company was identified by the Defense Department as shipping items with possible nuclear-related uses to Pakistan, according to documents and VAT company officials. He later set up his own company, now called PhiTec AG, which was investigated by the Swiss in 1996 for trying to ship valves for uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. The Tinners were never found to have broken any laws, Swiss officials said.

"Most of these people were heavily investigated in the 1970's, 80's and 90's," said Mark Hibbs, the European editor of the technical journal Nucleonics Week, published by McGraw-Hill.

The problem began with the 1970 Treaty of Almelo, under which Britain, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to develop centrifuges to enrich uranium jointly, ensuring their nuclear power industry a fuel source independent of the United States. Urenco, or the Uranium Enrichment Company, was established the next year with its primary enrichment plant at Almelo, the Netherlands.

Security at Urenco was by most accounts slipshod. The consortium relied on a network of research centers and subcontractors to build its centrifuges, and top-secret blueprints were passed out to companies bidding on tenders, giving engineers across Europe an opportunity to appropriate designs.

Dr. Khan, who worked for a Urenco Dutch subcontractor, Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory, was given access to the most advanced designs, even though he came from Pakistan, which was already known to harbor nuclear ambitions. A 1980 report by the Dutch government on his activities said he visited the Almelo factory in May 1972 and by late 1974 had an office there.

After Dr. Khan returned to Pakistan with blueprints and supplier lists for uranium enrichment centrifuges at the end of 1975, American intelligence agencies predicted that he would soon be shopping for the items needed to build the centrifuges for Pakistan's bomb. They soon detected a flow of equipment from Europe to Pakistan as Dr. Khan drew on Urenco's network of suppliers using a trusted group of former schoolmates and friends as agents.

The Dutch government report found that in 1976, two Dutch firms exported to Pakistan 6,200 unfinished rotor tubes made of superstrong maraging steel. The tubes are the heart of Urenco's advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges.

In 1983, a Dutch court convicted Dr. Khan in absentia on charges of stealing the designs, though the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. Nonetheless, in the late 1980's, Belgian ministers led delegations of scientists and businessmen to Pakistan, despite warnings from their own experts that they were meeting with people involved in the military application of nuclear technology.

"Every well-informed person knows the inherent danger of an intense collaboration with a country such as Pakistan," wrote René Constant, director of Belgium's National Institute of Radioactive Elements in February 1987, chastising Philippe Maystadt, then the country's minister of economic affairs, after one such visit.

That same year, despite American warnings to Germany that such a sale was imminent, a German firm exported to Pakistan a plant for the recovery of tritium, a volatile gas used to increase the power of nuclear bombs. The company simply called the plant something else to obtain an export license.

"The export control office didn't even inspect the goods," said Reinhard Huebner, the German prosecutor who handled the subsequent trial of the company's chief, Rudolf Ortmayers, and Peter Finke, a German physicist who went to Pakistan to train engineers there to operate the equipment. Both men were sentenced to jail for violating export control laws.

But there were clues that the technology had spread even further: a German intelligence investigation determined that Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea had obtained uranium-melting expertise stolen from Urenco in 1984, Mr. Hibbs reported in Nucleonics Week several years later.

In 1989, two engineers, Bruno Stemmler and Karl Heinz Schaab, who had worked for Germany's MAN New Technology, another Urenco subcontractor, sold plans for advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. They went to Baghdad to help solve problems in making the equipment work.

In 1991, after the first Iraq war, international inspectors were stunned to discover the extent of Saddam Hussein's hidden program. Mr. Schaab was later convicted of treason but only served a little more than a year in jail. Mr. Stemmler died before he could be tried.

David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he helped retrieve a full set of the blueprints from Iraq after the major combat operations ended last year. United States inspectors have not found evidence that Mr. Hussein had restarted his nuclear program, but Mr. Albright said there were still drawings unaccounted for.

"It's an unnerving issue," said Mr. Albright, who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "A lot of nuclear weapons design stuff could be missing in Iraq."

As recently as last year, German customs agents seized high-tensile-strength aluminum tubes made by a German company and bound for North Korea. The tubes matched the specifications for the housings of Urenco's uranium-enriching centrifuges.

One name on a list of suppliers to Iran that came to light in recent investigations was Henk Slebos, who studied with Dr. Khan at Delft Technological University in Leuven, Belgium, in the late 1960's.

In the early 1980's, Mr. Slebos was arrested for shipping an oscilloscope, used in testing centrifuges, to Dr. Khan in Pakistan. He was convicted and sentenced to a brief prison term in 1985. Mr. Slebos declined to comment for this article.

In 1998, he withdrew five Pakistan-bound shipments that the Dutch authorities had stopped in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria because they contained "dual use" items, which could be used for uncovventional weapons as well as civilian purposes.

Last September, Mr. Slebos was among the sponsors of an international symposium on advanced materials in Pakistan organized by Dr. Khan. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who was then the Dutch foreign minister and is now NATO's secretary general, told Dutch members of Parliament that Mr. Slebos was still doing business with Dr. Khan, though he did not elaborate.

The French Interventionist Itch

By Michael A. Ledeen

Posted: Wednesday, February 18, 2004


New York Sun
Publication Date: February 18, 2004

The French are getting that interventionist itch again. It strikes them every so often, with no apparent pattern. There seems to be neither a temporal rhythm nor a moral or geopolitical issue that kicks it off, unless it is the very idea that some Frenchman, somewhere in the world, may be in some danger.

In any event, that's their story and they're sticking to it. And since there are many Frenchmen in many places, it works quite nicely.

You may recall that at the very same time President Chirac was lambasting his American counterpart for an excess of unilateralism with regard to the dictator of Baghdad, the French Foreign Legion was dispatched to Ivory Coast to put down a popular insurrection against an Ivorian government favored by the Quai d'Orsay.

Things did not go as smoothly as Mr. Chirac had hoped, and for a couple of wonderful days there were thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Abidjan, carrying banners and placards calling for "regime change" and an American armed intervention. The French press amused itself at his expense, and he no doubt has been looking for another opportunity to pursue the "glory" that General De Gaulle saw as the essence of La France.

The French have recently noticed that things are going badly for the government of President Aristide in Haiti, a country that was once part of the glorious French Empire, whose people actually speak a sort of French lingo, and there is considerable talk in Paris about the possibility of a "humanitarian mission."

The justification is the presence of about 2,000 French citizens, who are at some risk in the rapidly expanding conflict between Mr. Aristide's police force and a rebel force of perhaps 300 thugs, led by a notorious killer long since sentenced to death in absentia.

Mr. Aristide is poorly placed to deal with this insurgency, having dismantled the armed forces after having been defenestrated by them some years before and then restored to power by America's Marines. The talent of the police force can be judged by the fact that they were driven out of the city of Hinche by "about 50 rebels," according to the Associated Press.

The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, in an interview on French radio, observed that there is plenty of French military might in the region: some 4,000 troops in Martinique and Guadeloupe, which were, he said, well trained in "humanitarian work." French diplomats were talking to "all of our partners in the framework of the United Nations."

However, Secretary of State Powell has said that "there is frankly no enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down the violence that we are seeing," and called for "a political solution," which could then be supported by an international police force.

In other words, the American inclination is to let the conflict run its course and only then try to help the beleaguered Haitian people. Mr. Powell's reaction is certainly understandable. Mr. Aristide has proven to be a corrupt leader--sham elections four years ago were so obviously manipulated that foreign aid was blocked--and is clearly incapable of managing good government, despite years of American and other international support.

Yet the French reaction is also understandable, and in many ways quite in harmony with President Bush's call for the spread of democracy. To stand aside and let the bloodshed spread is not good for anyone, and whichever side wins, the Haitians will lose.

The happy thought of a "political solution" cannot be managed so long as Mr. Aristide remains in power--his opponents have said they will not participate in new elections until he is removed--and the thugs who are attempting an armed takeover do not seem at all inclined to embrace democratic principles.

The best way to think about the events in Haiti is to remember that Mr. Aristide is a part of the Clinton legacy, a presumed success of "humanitarian intervention" to make things better without actually imposing our will on a foreign culture.

Back in the happy 1990s, this sort of thing was quite popular, except for the locals, who knew they were the victims of a scam. Over the past decade, poverty has worsened in Haiti, a major achievement for a country that was always at or near the bottom of the world's misery index.

Humanitarian interventions only work if the international community has a clear vision of what is to be achieved and the will to impose the kind of political and moral order that any country needs to live decently. The sort of half-baked approach used to install Mr. Aristide will always lead to the current unhappy situation.

So let's try the old-fashioned way. Let's join with the French, proclaim a pox on both houses in the current conflict, depose Mr. Aristide and let him face the judgment of his own people, arrest and try the killers on the other side, install an interim government by force of arms, organize a serious privatization and aid program, and then conduct elections in six months or a year, under international auspices, with guarantees of future elections at regular intervals. And let's call it a democratic revolution.

It's good to remind the world that democracy is often spread by force of arms; it's delicious to get the French to participate in just such an enterprise, and it might even make it harder for them to oppose the spread of democracy in the Middle East. They'd feel so good being able to scratch their interventionist itch, they might forget how annoyed they are at Mr. Bush.

In the words of one of my favorite songs from the old days, "Delicious, Mr. Masoch? Delightful, Count de Sade."

Michael A. Ledeen holds the Freedom Chair at AEI.

This Blog is one year old!

A Tougher War for the U.S. Is One of Legitimacy

By Robert Kagan
Originally published in the New York Times, January 24, 2004.

What kind of world order do we want?" That question, posed by Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, has been on the minds of many Europeans these days.

Indeed, the great trans-Atlantic debate over the Iraq war was rooted in profound disagreement over "world order." Yes, Americans and Europeans differed on the specific question of what to do about Iraq. They debated whether Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat, and whether war was the right answer. A solid majority of Americans answered yes to both questions; even larger majorities of Europeans answered no.

But these disagreements reflected more than simple tactical and analytical assessments of the situation in Iraq. As the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, put it, the struggle was not so much about Iraq as it was about "two visions of the world." The differences were not only about policy. They were also about first principles.

Opinion polls taken before, during and after the war have shown two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets. More than 80 percent of Americans believe that war may achieve justice; less than half of Europeans believe that a war — any war — can ever be just. Americans and Europeans disagree about the role of international law and international institutions, and about the nebulous and abstract yet powerful question of international legitimacy.

These different worldviews predate the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush, although both the war and the Bush administration's conduct of international affairs have deepened and perhaps hardened this trans-Atlantic rift into an enduring feature of the international landscape. "America is different from Europe," Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany declared matter-of-factly months before the war. Who any longer can deny it?

Today a darker possibility looms. A great philosophical schism has opened within the West, and instead of mutual indifference, mutual antagonism threatens to debilitate both sides of the trans-Atlantic community. Coming at a time in history when new dangers and crises are proliferating, this schism could have serious consequences. For Europe and the United States to decouple strategically has been bad enough. But what if the schism over "world order" infects the rest of what we have known as the liberal West? Will the West still be the West?

It is the legitimacy of American power and American global leadership that has come to be doubted by a majority of Europeans. America, for the first time since World War II, is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy.

Americans will find that they cannot ignore this problem. The struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the critical contests of our time, in some ways as significant in determining the future of the international system and America's place in it as any purely material measure of power and influence.

Americans for much of the past three centuries have considered themselves the vanguard of a worldwide liberal revolution. Their foreign policy from the beginning has not been only about defending and promoting their material national interests. "We fight not just for ourselves but for all mankind," Benjamin Franklin declared of the American Revolution, and whether or not that has always been true, most Americans have always wanted to believe that it is true. There can be no clear dividing line between the domestic and the foreign, therefore, and no clear distinction between what the democratic world thinks about America and what Americans think about themselves.

Every profound foreign policy debate in America's history, from the time when Jefferson squared off against Hamilton, has ultimately been a debate about the nation's identity and has posed for Americans the primal question "Who are we?" Because Americans do care, the steady denial of international legitimacy by fellow democracies will over time become debilitating and perhaps even paralyzing.

Americans therefore cannot ignore the unipolar predicament. Perhaps the singular failure of the Bush administration is that it has been too slow to recognize this. Mr. Bush and his advisers came to office guided by the narrow realism that dominated in Republican foreign policy circles during the Clinton years. The Clinton administration, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, wrote in a famous essay in January 2000, had failed to focus on the "national interest" and instead had addressed itself to "humanitarian interests" or the interests of "the international community." The Bush administration, by contrast, would take a fresh look at all treaties, obligations and alliances and re-evaluate them in terms of America's "national interest."

The notion that the United States could take such a narrow view of its "national interest" has always been mistaken. But besides being an analytical error, the enunciation of this "realist" approach by the sole superpower in a unipolar era was a serious foreign policy error. The global hegemon cannot proclaim to the world that it will be guided only by its own definition of its "national interest."

This is precisely what even America's closest friends fear: that the United States will wield its unprecedented vast power only for itself. In her essay, Ms. Rice derided "the belief that the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else." But for the rest of the world, what other source of legitimacy can there be? When the United States acts in its own interests, Ms. Rice claimed, as would many Americans, it necessarily serves the interests of everyone.

"To be sure," she argued, "there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect."

But could even America's closest friends ever be persuaded that an America always pursuing its self-interest could be relied upon to serve their interests, too, as some kind of "second-order effect"?

Both the unipolar predicament and the American character require a much more expansive definition of American interests. The United States can neither appear to be acting only in its self-interest, nor can it in fact act as if its own national interest were all that mattered. Even at times of dire emergency, and perhaps especially at those times, the world's sole superpower needs to demonstrate that it wields its great power on behalf of its principles and all who share them.

The manner in which the United States conducts itself in Iraq today is especially important in this regard. At stake is not only the future of Iraq and the Middle East more generally, but also the future of America's reputation, its reliability and its legitimacy as a world leader. The United States will be judged, and should be judged, by the care and commitment it takes to secure a democratic peace in Iraq. It will be judged by whether it really advances the cause of liberalism, in Iraq and elsewhere, or whether it merely defends its own interests.

No one has made this argument more powerfully, and more presciently, than that quintessential realist, Henry A. Kissinger.

The task in Iraq, Mr. Kissinger argued in an essay, was not just to win the war but to convey "to the rest of the world that our first pre-emptive war has been imposed by necessity and that we seek the world's interests, not exclusively our own." America's "special responsibility, as the most powerful nation in the world," he said, "is to work toward an international system that rests on more than military power — indeed, that strives to translate power into cooperation. Any other attitude will gradually isolate and exhaust us."

The United States, in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature, by promoting the principles of liberal democracy, not only as a means to greater security, but as an end in itself. Success in such endeavors will provide the United States a measure of legitimacy in the liberal, democratic world, and even in Europe.

The United States should try to fulfill its part of a new trans-Atlantic bargain by granting Europeans some influence over the exercise of American power — if, that is, the Europeans in turn will wield that influence wisely. The NATO alliance — an alliance of and for liberal democracies — could be the locus of such a bargain. NATO is where the United States has already ceded influence to Europeans, who vote on an equal footing with the American superpower in all the alliance's deliberations. Indeed, NATO has for decades been the one organization capable of reconciling American hegemony with European autonomy and influence. And even today NATO retains a sentimental attraction for Americans, more potent than the attraction they feel for the United Nations.

But can the United States cede some power to Europe without putting American security, and indeed Europe's and the entire liberal democratic world's security, at risk in the process? Here lies the rub. For even with the best of intentions, the United States cannot enlist the cooperation of Europeans if there is no common assessment of the nature of global threats today, and of the means that must be employed to meet them. But it is precisely this gap in perception that has driven the United States and Europe apart in the post-cold-war world.

If it is true, as the British diplomat Robert Cooper suggests, that international legitimacy stems from shared values and a shared history, does such commonality still exist within the West now that the cold war has ended? For while the liberal trans-Atlantic community still shares much in common, the philosophical schism on the fundamental questions of world order may now be overwhelming those commonalities. It is hard to imagine the crisis of legitimacy being resolved as long as this schism persists. For even if the United States were to fulfill its part of the bargain, and grant the Europeans the influence they crave, would the Europeans, with their very different perception of the world, fulfill theirs?

As long as Europeans and Americans do not share a common view of the threat posed by terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, they will not join in a common strategy. Nor will Europeans accord the United States legitimacy when it seeks to address those threats by itself, and by what it regards as sometimes the only means possible, force.

And what, then, is the United States to do? Should Americans, in the interest of trans-Atlantic harmony, try to alter their perceptions of global threats to match that of their European friends? To do so would be irresponsible. Not only American security but the security of the liberal democratic world depends today, as it has depended for the past half-century, on American power. Even Europeans, in moments of clarity, know that is true.

"The U.S. is the only truly global player," Joschka Fischer has declared, "and I must warn against underestimating its importance for peace and stability in the world. And beware, too, of underestimating what the U.S. means for our own security."

But the United States has played that role not by adopting Europe's postmodern worldview, but by seeing the world through its own eyes. Today most Europeans believe that the United States exaggerates the dangers in the world. After Sept. 11, most Americans fear that they haven't taken those dangers seriously enough.

Herein lies the tragedy. To address today's global threats, Americans will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide. But Europeans may well fail to provide it. In their effort to constrain the superpower, they will lose sight of the mounting dangers in the world. In their nervousness about unipolarity, they may forget the dangers of a multipolarity in which nonliberal and nondemocratic powers come to outweigh Europe in the global competition.

Europeans thus may succeed in debilitating the United States, but since they have no intention of supplementing American power with their own, the net result will be a diminution of the total amount of power that the liberal democratic world can bring to bear in its defense — and in defense of liberalism itself.

Right now many Europeans are betting that the risks from the "axis of evil," from terrorism and tyrants, will never be as great as the risk of an American Leviathan unbound. Perhaps it is in the nature of a postmodern Europe to make such a judgment. But now may be the time for the wisest heads in Europe, including those living in the birthplace of Pascal, to begin asking what will result if that wager proves wrong.

A piece of wisdom coming from Iraq:

The predators latest message
(A translated article by Iraqi writer and columnist Abdul Mun'im Al-Assam).

In the last ten days, it was the desire of predator beasts to slaughter two hundred Iraqi civilians, and to dismember and permanently disfigure over a thousand of them. In Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, and in the town of Al-Iskandariyah south of Baghdad, and lately at Muthanna airport in the heart of the Iraqi capital. What comes first to attention is that the nationality of the victims of all these atrocities is an Iraqi one flowing with a sense of belonging to Iraq, with love, and fear for it's future. The murderers, on the other hand, remain anonymous and unidentified, nurtured and unleashed to our streets from the factories of terrorism and Islamic extremism, the heresy of the barbaric resistance and regional smugglers, and the remnants of the dictatorship retreating from their dens to behind the borders with the funds and deposits they plundered from the Iraqi Central Bank.

One of the predators described his feelings on a website promoting the bloodshed in Iraq: "I was there. Praise Allah, I was able to participate in some missions.. The Iraqis watched me.. I hated them, and I hated their accents".

Another thing that comes to attention is that with each of these awful bombings, there is a clear message that does not require much skill or research to unravel. The latest message of the Arbil, Iskandariya, Muthanna airport atrocities was however eloquent in defining the goal of killing the greatest number of Iraqis as possible in areas that are to some extent stable and peaceful. Also within the details of this message is a sectarian mine not very much concealed from the eyes of experts. The vast majority of the victims were Kurdish and Shi'ite citizens, and that the perpetrators are attempting to stir sectarian schisms to give the impression that these attacks are carried out in the name of the Sunni population or avenging it, gambling on a reaction to be followed by a series of others which would eventually lead Iraq into a fire that no one can predict its consequences.

Also, contained in the details of the message, is an implied call to Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites that says: the appropriate solution to provide security and safety from rigged vehicles and blind suicidal bombers is to form two independent entities, an ethnic one in the north, and a sectarian one in the south, leaving the rest to the emirate of Sheikh Bin Laden who has been exhausted from living in Afghani caves.

Yes it is truely a resistance, not to expel foreign occupiers from Iraq, but to expel Iraq from the map.

'New' China, Old Repression

By James Mann
Tuesday, February 17, 2004; Page A19


Has China been transformed? That is the suggestion of French President Jacques Chirac, who is trying to persuade the European Union to lift its embargo on arms sales to China. Europe, like the United States, imposed the arms ban in 1989, soon after the Chinese regime brought its tanks and army into Beijing to end the weeks of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.



Urged on by the French defense industry, Chirac contends that China today is different from 10 or 15 years ago. That argument seems to dovetail with visitors' impressions of a glitzy China and with the currently fashionable cliches about how China is being integrated into the international community.

The problem is that in fundamental ways relating to human rights and political repression, China today is not much different than it was a decade ago. Yes, China has been brought into the international community, if we define that phrase exclusively in terms of economics. But ordinarily the international community is not defined solely by membership in the World Trade Organization.

To illustrate this point, let's take an example: China's unwillingness to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons.

China has never allowed the ICRC (which is an excellent example of the international community) to visit its prisons. One stumbling block has been that the Red Cross insists on the right to interview prisoners privately and with its own interpreters.

Over a decade ago, on the eve of President Bill Clinton's first meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen said at a news conference that China was prepared to let the ICRC into Chinese jails. This was treated as a great breakthrough, and it eased the climate for Clinton's meeting.

But nothing happened. At first there were suggestions that China might give the Red Cross access to its prisons only after the Clinton administration dropped its attempt to impose human rights conditions on China's trade benefits. Clinton did that, but China didn't act on the ICRC. The Clinton administration raised the issue of prison access again and again in Clinton's second term, without success. The current Bush administration has tried too, but today, 10 years after China first hinted it was about to open up its prisons to inspection by the international community, it still hasn't done so.

This is not some abstract or bureaucratic issue. The significance of ICRC access to prisons was explained by one International Red Cross official in this way: "At a minimum, our visits give the prisoner the solace of an hour's conversation with a reasonable human being in his own language. In the most extreme cases, a visit can prevent the prisoner from disappearance and death."

Those eloquent words happen to have been spoken with a particular case in mind -- the U.S. detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Last year, the ICRC said publicly that the U.S. policies at Guantanamo were unacceptable, and its criticisms, many of them legitimate, were widely reported in Europe.

But please note that at least the United States permitted the ICRC to visit Guantanamo. That's more than China has done for its entire prison system. And yet the Europeans who are so forthright in condemning American policies at Guantanamo seem to be silent about a Chinese regime whose jails are still considered entirely off-limits to the ICRC. That is a classic double standard.

Over the past 10 years, China has managed to defuse international human rights complaints by channeling them into endless disputes over meetings, visits, human rights "dialogues," requests by various organizations for offices in Beijing -- anything that doesn't substantively require China to alter its policies.

Yes, China has changed in some ways in the past decade. The Chinese people now have the freedom to wear what they want. Ordinary citizens can generally say what they want in private or in some public settings -- so long as they remain completely unorganized and unchallenging to the regime.

But when it comes to tolerance of any political opposition, or to human rights standards as generally defined by the international community, China is essentially the same as it was a decade ago. The regime has never expressed the slightest remorse for using weaponry against its own people.

Chirac is right about one thing -- something has changed over the past decade. But it's not China. Rather, the rest of the world has become far more tolerant of the same Chinese political repression that it condemned in the early 1990s. A lifting of the EU arms embargo would be one more big step in this tawdry policy of accepting repression.

Extremely interesting attack on Neocon policy from the New Yorker:

A DEMOCRATIC WORLD
by GEORGE PACKERCan liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans?
Issue of 2004-02-16 and 23
Posted 2004-02-09
In December, 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, President Bush asked Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat who was then the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, to draft a legislative proposal for winning the minds of young people around the Muslim world. The following month, Biden went to Kabul, where he toured a new school—one that was bitterly cold, with plastic sheeting over the windows and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. When the visit was over and Biden started to leave, a young girl stood ramrod straight at her desk and said, “You cannot leave. You cannot leave.”

“I promise I’ll come back,” Biden told her.

“You cannot leave,” the girl insisted. “They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay.”

As Biden put it in a recent interview, the Afghan girl was telling him, “Don’t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.”

Biden described the encounter as “a catalytic event for me.” Its lesson was one that he had already begun to absorb in the Balkans, where he had travelled extensively during the nineteen-nineties. There is a worldwide struggle, he explained, between the values of liberal democracy and the destructive ideologies that fester with dictatorship, misery, and humiliation; in this struggle, America needs to expand the conditions for democracy in the most concrete ways, with serious commitments of energy and resources, or risk greater instability. After September 11th, this insight became a matter of urgent national security. When Biden returned from Kabul, he followed up on the President’s request and wrote a proposal to build, staff, and supply a thousand schools in Afghanistan, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars each. By thinking small, Biden believed, he had a better chance of success: “You could shove twenty million dollars anywhere in a two-trillion budget, and this was something specific.” The schools would employ teachers, many of them women, who had been jobless and desperate under the Taliban, and they would teach a modern curriculum to children who, if they had any schooling at all, knew only the Islamist education of the madrassa. “It was something concrete we could show the Afghanis we’re doing,” Biden said. “It was something other than the butt of a gun.”

The idea went nowhere. Biden’s Democratic colleagues didn’t get behind it, and very soon the Administration moved on. The most important front in the worldwide struggle largely dropped from Washington’s view, and the Senator stopped receiving invitations to the White House.

By the fall of 2002, the Bush Administration had begun mobilizing for the invasion of Iraq. Biden’s view was that Saddam Hussein, who had violated every international agreement he had signed but was not an immediate threat, would have to be confronted sooner or later. But he also worried that a unilateral war with Iraq would distract America from the tasks it had only just begun—stabilizing Afghanistan and defeating Al Qaeda—and seriously damage the alliances necessary to eliminate terrorism and other problems that freely cross borders: weapons proliferation, disease, environmental damage, ethnic conflict, impoverishment. “The burden was on Saddam,” Biden said. “But I would not have prematurely forced the world’s hand on whether or not to go to war, because I’d get the wrong answer.”

Instead, he tried to slow the Administration’s momentum without shifting the burden from Saddam. It was in his party’s power to do so—Democrats still held the majority in the Senate (though they were about to lose it, in part because the public didn’t trust them on the issue of national security). Together with Senator Richard Lugar, of Indiana, the committee’s ranking Republican, Biden drafted an alternative to the Administration’s Iraq resolution that would have placed various restraints on the President, making it harder for him to wage war unilaterally and forcing him to bolster his case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Lugar had assembled a surprisingly large number of Republicans—twenty-five or so out of the forty-nine—who were uneasy with the Administration’s bellicose stance. In order to deliver their votes, Lugar needed Biden to line up at least forty Democrats; and Biden was sure of only thirty-eight.

As Biden recalled, on September 30th Lugar, who was in touch with the White House, called him. “Joe, I fear in the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours, the President’s going to cut a deal with Gephardt,” he said.

Biden was stunned. “Gephardt? Gephardt’s not going to do this.”

“Joe, I’m telling you. They’re working two sides here. They’re working us, keeping us occupied, but they’re working just as hard meeting with him. Whoever they reach an agreement with first, they’re going to go with.”

If Richard Gephardt, the House Democratic minority leader, came out for the Administration’s resolution, it would be politically almost impossible for any Republican to support the Biden-Lugar alternative. Biden had to gather the Democratic holdouts immediately and persuade them to stand behind his resolution so that he and Lugar could move it onto the Senate floor the next day.

That evening, Biden met with half a dozen leading Democrats who were opposed to any war resolution at all. “They said, ‘It’s not right, you’re not principled, asking us to do this,’” Biden recalled. “I said, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Please spare me the lecture. I thought our job was to do as much as we could to prevent this President from going off to war half-cocked. Does anybody in here believe that we’re going to get any resolution remotely approaching the constraints this resolution has?’” Biden warned his colleagues, “Guess what? Your principle is going to kill a lot of Americans.” But the antiwar Democrats were intractable. At the end of the meeting, Senator Paul Wellstone, of Minnesota, and Senator Barbara Boxer, of California, left the room arm in arm, chuckling.

Two days later, with no alternative making its way through the Senate, Gephardt appeared at Bush’s side in the Rose Garden and announced his support for the Administration’s war resolution. Nine days later, both houses of Congress approved it, and the President had all the authority he needed to invade Iraq.

Biden told me these stories in answer to a simple question: Why hasn’t the Democratic Party played a serious role in shaping the national debate about foreign policy since September 11th? Biden has been one of the few Democrats to try. His views defy Party orthodoxy. He has criticized the Administration relentlessly, not for doing too much in the war on terrorism but for doing too little, and in the wrong way—for failing to understand that this war has to be waged on many fronts, the most important of which is ideological. The fate of the schoolgirl in Kabul is as critical to ultimate victory as the next generation of unmanned aircraft.

Biden’s own party has all but forfeited the chance to make this case. The two complementary tendencies that doomed his effort on Iraq have characterized Democrats since the war on terrorism began: on one side, the urge to take cover under Republican policies in order not to be labelled weak; on the other, a rigid opposition that invokes moral principle but often leads to the very results it seeks to prevent. Neither posture shows a willingness to grapple with the world as it is, to do the hard work of imagining a foreign policy for the post-September-11th era.



The Democratic Party hasn’t always been stymied by foreign policy. A half century ago, the Party’s ideas were ascendant, transforming America’s international role in the postwar years as dramatically as President Bush has since September 11th. In 1945, the United States had more relative power and prestige than it has today. Instead of seizing the occasion to strip the country of constraints and dominate the world, the ruling Democrats, most of whom were New Dealers, realized that the global fight against Communism required partners. The postwar Democratic leadership under President Truman helped bring into being institutions and alliances—the United Nations, nato, the World Bank—through which the country’s goals could be met. These goals were as much economic and political as military. The thinking behind Truman’s speech in March, 1947, asking Congress for economic as well as military aid to Greece and Turkey against Communist insurgents, and the speech by his Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, a few months later, calling for a massive reconstruction package for a devastated Europe was the same: containing and ultimately defeating totalitarianism required an investment in countries where conditions made Communism a threat. It also required the participation of Americans at every level of society. Anti-Communist liberals in the labor movement and the Democratic Party funded social-democratic parties in Western Europe as alternatives to Communism; politicians and intellectuals organized themselves in associations like Americans for Democratic Action and around magazines like Encounter to fight the war of ideas. These liberals understood that the new war could not afford to be rigidly doctrinaire; it required a practical effort to understand realities in Europe and elsewhere, in order to know what would be necessary to prevent Communism from winning over individuals and countries. It had to be wise as well as tough. Above all, it needed the help of other democracies—there had to be alliances, reciprocity. This is what was meant by liberal internationalism.

Vietnam, of course, badly divided Democrats, turning some into Republicans and others into pacifists. And here is a remarkable fact: since the nineteen-sixties, the Democratic Party has had no foreign policy. Its leaders have continued to speak the language of liberal internationalism, but after Vietnam most Democrats haven’t wanted to back up the talk with power. They continued to put their faith in institutions like the United Nations (where Saddam’s Iraq was a member in good standing and Libya chaired the human-rights commission) long after it was apparent that these institutions needed repair. By the nineteen-nineties, liberal internationalism had become an atrophied muscle, with little fibre or sinew left. The Clinton Administration allowed a genocidal war to bleed away in the Balkans for two and a half years before acting to end it. In the dot-com decade, a lot of Democrats simply lost interest in the rest of the world. Clinton’s foreign policy was globalization: encouraging the economic interconnectedness of the world, without developing a mechanism to prevent threats and conflicts from becoming catastrophes without borders.

The exception was Kosovo. nato’s intervention in the Balkans, in the spring of 1999, was one of the successes of the Clinton years, stopping the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians, preventing the Balkan wars from spreading into Macedonia and Albania, and ultimately making possible Slobodan Milosevic’s removal from power and his current trial at The Hague. However flawed aspects of the military strategy were—three months of aerial bombing with no contingency for ground troops—the Kosovo war was a singular example of American power creating international coöperation on behalf of stability and human rights.

But Kosovo never became the Clinton Doctrine. Clinton himself seemed ambivalent about the war, and obstacles thrown up by a Republican Congress kept nato’s first war from becoming the foundation of post-Cold War American foreign policy.

The humanitarian interventions of the nineties—Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo—and the glaring failure in Rwanda made a minority of Democrats willing, sometimes even eager, advocates of the use of American power for liberal ends abroad. But the Party’s base remains instinctively uncomfortable with activism and armed force. In Biden’s words, most Democrats still “worship at the shrine of multilateral institutions, and without absolute consensus there’s no action.”

While the Democrats held the White House, the ideological children of Ronald Reagan were thinking hard about America’s place in the world after the Cold War. At conferences and in journal articles, the singular idea of these conservatives was that, with no Soviet threat, the United States was uniquely positioned to exert power all over the world—to discourage rivals, to pursue interests, to spread values, with or without partners. Coalitions might be temporary; force might be used unilaterally and preventively, not just as a matter of convenience but as a point of doctrine. Their view admitted no daylight between American interests and democratic ideals: our motives are good, therefore our unleashed power will have good effects. These thinkers were also skilled publicists, and they defined the difference between the two parties as the difference between strength and weakness.

Within hours of the September 11th attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were suggesting that Iraq—the unflagging obsession of the conservatives throughout the nineties—should receive the brunt of American wrath. Whether or not this was a sound analysis of the threat, the conservatives were organized; they had ideas, and they were poised to put them into action. The Iraq war was nothing if not a war of ideas—an elective war that came of arguments and theories about America and the world. It was exactly on this level that Democrats were ill-prepared to join the contest.



But from the start, and at its core, the Administration’s idea of the war on terrorism has been flawed. This flaw, which is often discussed as a matter of tone, is so substantive that the Administration constantly undermines even its own best efforts.

President Bush has given a number of speeches in support of global democracy, and they have been some of his finest. Nine days after the attacks in New York and Washington, he went before Congress and described the war on terrorism as a continuation of the twentieth-century conflict between freedom and totalitarianism. More recently, in the wake of the Iraq war, he has championed the spread of democracy through the world’s meanest precincts. “Iraqi democracy will succeed,” the President said in November, “and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation.”

The soaring language recalls that of Bush’s hero Ronald Reagan. It gives the new conservative foreign policy its poetry. The first President Bush never made such proclamations about Iraq, or about any other benighted country, for he belonged to the Nixon-Kissinger wing of the Republican Party—“realists” who believe in a balance of power and distrust idealistic talk of “global democratic revolution.” But there is a problem with the language of Bush the son: his actions rarely measure up to his rhetoric. A case in point was the President’s November speech at the National Endowment for Democracy’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations. After the fall of Baghdad, an institute funded by the endowment sent a team to Iraq to organize a series of focus groups so that Iraqis could talk about their collective future. The institute wanted to follow up with workshops that would train Iraqis in forming moderate civic groups and political parties, but its money soon ran out. Despite repeated requests, the funding wasn’t replenished until last month.

It happens often enough to form a pattern: the President talks of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan at the Virginia Military Institute in April, 2002, and then he fails to include any dollars for Afghanistan in his 2004 budget proposal; the President gives a landmark speech at the American Enterprise Institute in February, 2003, proposing a democratic Iraq as a model for the transformation of the entire Middle East, and within two months the Pentagon’s minimalist planning for postwar Iraq has that country in chaos, its state institutions gutted, its people demoralized; the State Department sets out to improve public diplomacy in the Islamic world, then puts the campaign in the hands of Charlotte Beers, a Madison Avenue executive, who produces a slick video about Muslims in the United States that is widely ridiculed; the Administration vows to get tough on Saudi sources that finance terrorism and the spread of extremist ideology, then suppresses the section of a congressional report on September 11th having to do with Saudi Arabia; after the Iraq war the President vows to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only to stand aside a few months later.

In Iraq, at least, the Administration, having accepted that its initial democracy efforts were wholly inadequate, has begun to make serious commitments. In a frantic rush to educate voters and strengthen institutions before its June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty, it is about to flood the country’s civic desert with almost half a billion dollars, including twelve and a half million for building political parties.

Elsewhere, the Administration remains averse to such commitments. The President and his chief advisers have long expressed disdain for the “soft” uses of American power. In the 2000 campaign, Bush ran against the nation-building efforts of the Clinton Administration. In an article in Foreign Affairs in 2000, Condoleezza Rice called for an end to such missions, asserting that the United States Army “is not a civilian police force.” “Peacekeeping” is a dirty word at the Rumsfeld Pentagon: its peacekeeping division was renamed the Office of Stability Operations, and its importance was downgraded, even after war created the need for such an operation in Afghanistan and then again, on an even larger scale, in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the peacekeepers never ventured beyond Kabul and Kunduz, and the country’s admirable new constitution is jeopardized by warlords and the resurgent Taliban.

The Bush Administration has always been more interested in military power than in any of the other tools that are available to advance its goals. The hostility to nation-building, the attitude that treaties and international institutions are disposable nuisances, the treatment of alliances as matters of convenience—all these reflect a belief that the country will be safer, and the world ultimately better off, if America is free to use its awesome strength.

The President speaks idealistically of spreading democracy around the world. “The advance of freedom is the calling of our time,” he said in November. “It is the calling of our country.” Since Bush took office, favorable views of America have plunged globally—especially in the Muslim world. The Pew Research Center found that in Turkey, our secular Muslim nato ally, favorable opinion of the United States fell from fifty-two per cent three years ago to fifteen per cent last spring. For an Administration rhetorically devoted to the calling of freedom, this trend ought to cause great concern. But Bush expresses only bewilderment, and his hard-line advisers scoff that we can’t make decisions about American security based on opinion polls in foreign countries. Since September 11th, the President and his spokesmen have regarded the crisis as a test of personal will. Do you pass or not? So they’ve waged the war by self-assertion, guided by the assumption that American might always equates with freedom. But when promoting democracy seems in practice to mean bullying other people into doing what you want, the poetry is lost on the world, and not even the overthrow of tyrants is taken as proof of America’s sincerity.



In treating the war on terrorism as a mere military struggle, the Administration’s mistake begins with the name itself. “Terrorism” is a method; the terror used by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is not the enemy in this war. The enemy is an ideology—in the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s phrase, “Islamist totalitarianism”—that reaches from Karachi to London, from Riyadh to Brooklyn, and that uses terror to advance its ends. The Administration’s failure to grasp the political nature of the war has led to many crucial mistakes, most notably the Pentagon’s attitude that postwar problems in Afghanistan and Iraq would essentially take care of themselves, that we could have democracy on the cheap: once the dictators and terrorists were rooted out, the logic went, freedom would spontaneously grow in their place. As Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, recently told the Times, “There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee.” Instead, in both countries the real struggle has just begun, and it will last a generation or more, with little international help in sight and victory not at all assured.

“They don’t get it, because they don’t believe this is an ideology,” Ivo H. Daalder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution, said of the Administration. “They believe that this is a state-based threat—that if you get rid of evil people, who are in finite supply, you will have resolved the problem. And the proof of the pudding is a very simple statement that the President keeps repeating: ‘It’s better to kill them there than to have them kill us here.’ Which assumes there are a finite number.”

Remarkably, this narrow approach has met with no systematic criticism from the Democratic Party. Democratic leaders attack the Administration for its unilateralism, but, with a few exceptions, they have been unprepared to reckon with the nature and scale of the conflict; and this has to do with the Party’s own intellectual shortcomings. Certain mental traits that have spread among Democrats since the Vietnam War get in the way—not just the tendency toward isolationism and pacifism but a cultural relativism (going by the name of “multiculturalism”) that makes it difficult for them to mount a wholehearted defense of one political system against another, especially when the other has taken root among poorer and darker-skinned peoples. Like the Bush Administration, the Democrats have failed to grasp the political dimensions of the struggle. They, too, have cast it narrowly, as a matter of security (preferring the notion of police action to that of war). They’ve pushed the Administration only for greater effort on the margins, such as upgrading communications equipment for firemen and federalizing airport security. And the Iraq war let Democrats off the hook, allowing them to say what they wouldn’t do rather than what they would do.



Another approach remains available to the Democrats—one that draws on the Party’s own not so distant history. The parallels between the early years of the Cold War and our situation are inexact. The Islamist movement doesn’t have the same hold on Westerners that Communism had. It draws on cultures that remain alien to us; the history of colonialism and the fact of religious difference make it all the harder for the liberal democracies of the West to effect change in the Muslim world. Waving the banner of freedom and mustering the will to act aren’t enough. Anyone who believes that September 11th thrust us into a Manichaean conflict between good and evil should visit Iraq, where the simplicity of that formula lies half buried under all the crosscurrents of foreign occupation and social chaos and ethnic strife. Simply negotiating the transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis has proved so vexing that an Administration that jealously guarded the occupation against any international control has turned to the battered and despised United Nations for help in dealing with Iraq’s unleashed political forces. Iraq and other battlegrounds require patience, self-criticism, and local knowledge, not just an apocalyptic moral summons.

Nonetheless, for Democrats and for Americans, the first step is to realize that the war on terrorism is actually a war for liberalism—a struggle to bring populations now living under tyrannies and failed states into the orbit of liberal democracy. In this light, it makes sense to think about the strategy and mind-set that the postwar generation brought to their task: the marriage of power and coöperation. Daalder said, “The fundamental challenge—just as the fundamental challenge in ’46 and ’47 and ’48 in France and Italy was to provide Italians and Frenchmen with a real constructive alternative to Communism, to defeat it politically—is to provide people in the Islamic world with an alternative that gives them hope in a period where they have only despair.” He pointed out that America now spends forty times more on defense than it does on foreign aid, and that half of this aid goes to Israel and Egypt. “This is like the new Cold War, and we’ve got to fight it as a generational fight in which we need to invest,” he said.

As it happens, an increasing number of Democrats are pursuing this theme. Wesley Clark talks about a “new Atlantic Charter” that would make nato the first resort of American military power, starting in Iraq. “Uncertainties, nations looking for leadership, a multidimensional challenge on a global scale—all of that is similar” to the early Cold War, he told me. “As is the indefinite duration of the challenge.” Clark argued that nato’s war in Kosovo, which he conducted as Supreme Allied Commander, could become the basis for a new foreign policy. “You could call it efficient multilateralism—the recognition that if you link diplomacy, law, and force, you can achieve decisive results without using decisive force.”

Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, has for some time advocated the extension of nato forces in Kabul to the whole of Afghanistan, and he recently called for expanding public diplomacy in the Muslim world and imposing international sanctions against countries and institutions that fund terrorism, a money flow that the Bush Administration has had little success in shutting off. In a recent debate, Kerry said, “Most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven’t embraced, because otherwise we’re inviting a clash of civilizations.” Senator John Edwards, of North Carolina, proposes publishing an annual list of dissidents imprisoned around the world, and forming an organization of Western democracies and Arab countries moving toward liberalization which would be modelled on efforts to reform the former Eastern Bloc. Invoking Truman and Marshall, Senator Biden talks about a Prevention Doctrine: long-term engagement in troubled regions to head off threats before they lead to war—for example, by funding programs to destroy nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union. (The Bush Administration’s remarkably sluggish approach to securing “loose nukes” is one consequence of a policy aimed narrowly at terrorists and their state sponsors, like cards in a deck.) All these Democrats advocate a domestic policy that would acknowledge the reality of wartime, including alternative energy, tax fairness, and greater spending on security. But Biden reminded me, “It took the Democratic Party after World War II six years to get that figured out.”

If you’re paying attention, you can hear the sound of Democratic leaders straining to pry the Party away from its long aversion to America’s world leadership. The ghosts of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy are frequently summoned. These leaders have a thankless job, and, politically, a difficult one. Whatever they thought of the Iraq war, the struggle there is now the epicenter of the war of ideas, and leading Democrats have to show more commitment to the new Iraq’s success than they did in opposing the Administration’s reconstruction package. A broader approach to the war includes a willingness to fight—and, for Democrats out of power, it’s all the harder to persuade a skeptical public that they will fight. But this approach also demands an ability to make judgments about when and where and how to fight—or not. Compared with “axis of evil,” “efficient multilateralism” is a pallid phrase. Millions won’t rally behind the banner of the Prevention Doctrine. Spending twenty million dollars on schools in Afghanistan is a harder sell than spending four hundred billion on defense; fear is more compelling than foresight. Biden admitted, “This is a place where the President’s bragging to me, ‘Mr. Chairman, I don’t do nuance’—where he has an advantage.”

I asked Thomas Carothers, an expert on democracy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to name one project that might help change the political culture of the Arab world. He mentioned a nonprofit group, the Center for International Private Enterprise, that is working to spread the idea among Arab business associations that transparency and the rule of law will attract foreign investment. Carothers has studied democracy-building programs for two decades, and he compared them to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. His experience has left him wary of the rhetoric coming out of Washington these days. Compared with the revolutions of 1989 in Central Europe, he said, “this is a made-in-Washington democratic transformation. It’s very hard to do it when there are no democratic trends in the area.” Success can come only over a period of years, mainly by finding local groups and helping them do what they already want to do. The United States achieved this in Serbia during the late nineties—funding pro-democracy student groups that helped in the overthrow of the Milosevic dictatorship. It’s possible for something of the kind to occur in Muslim countries. Government agencies and nonprofit groups could fund new organizations like the Iranian dissident Ladan Boroumand’s democracy foundation, whose Web site will post a library of liberal ideas for young people in Iran to read behind the privacy of their computer screens. But all this will take more time and commitment than American Administrations, including the present one, have been interested in showing.

“It’s long-term, it’s not flashy, it’s not expensive,” Carothers said. “All of our programs now are showy, expensive, big-impact. And maybe we need to do that, but we also need to do things for fifteen to twenty years down the line.” When we spoke, he had just returned from the former Soviet republics, which he described as “a democratic wasteland.” A decade ago, reform in those countries seemed as urgent as it now seems in the Middle East; but America’s attention moved on, and the Administration has made its peace with the region’s post-Soviet strongmen. The President, Carothers said, has failed to make the struggle to liberalize the Muslim world the concern of ordinary Americans—to take one small example, by creating high-school exchange programs. “He’s unable to connect it to us in any way other than fear,” Carothers said. “And I don’t think that’s going to do it.”

A political struggle on the part of a democracy requires the involvement of the public, not as frightened spectators but as active participants. In recent decades, our leaders—both Democrats and Republicans—have asked very little of us as citizens, to the point where the word itself sounds quaint. The dominant theme of American politics since the nineteen-sixties has been freedom: cultural freedoms under Democrats, economic freedoms under Republicans. The pursuit of happiness became a private affair, and the sense of civic responsibility withered among liberals and conservatives alike. The political choice was between two versions of hedonism.

In the days that followed the September 11th attacks, we saw the early stages of something like a national self-mobilization. The long lines of would-be blood donors, the volunteers converging on lower Manhattan from around the country, the fumbling public efforts at understanding Islam: the response took on very personal tones. People spoke as if they wanted to change their lives. An unemployed young video producer waiting to give blood in Brooklyn said to me, “I volunteered so I could be part of something. All over the world, people do something for an ideal. I’ve been at no point in my life when I could say something I’ve done has affected mankind.” A generation legendary for its self-centeredness seemed to grasp that here was a historic chance to aim for something greater.

It has been much remarked that President Bush did nothing to tap this palpable desire among ordinary people to join a larger effort. Americans were told to go shopping and watch out for suspicious activity. Nothing would ever be the same, and everything was just the same. “How urgent can this be if I tell you this is a great crisis and, at the time we’re marching to war, I give the single largest tax cut in the history of the United States of America?” Biden said. The tax cuts haven’t just left the country fiscally unsound during wartime; their inequity has been terrible for morale. But the President’s failure to call for shared, equal sacrifice followed directly on the governing spirit of the modern Republican Party. After years of a sustained assault on the idea of collective action, there was no ideological foundation left on which Bush could stand up and ask what Americans can do for their country. We haven’t been asked to study Arabic, to join the foreign service or international aid groups, to form a national civil reserve for emergencies—or even to pay off the cost of the war in our own time. The war’s burdens are borne solely by a few hundred thousand volunteer soldiers.

Perhaps this was a shrewd political intuition on Bush’s part—a recognition that Americans, for all their passion after September 11th, would inevitably slouch back to their sofas. It’s fair to ask, though, how a body politic as out of shape as ours is likely to make it over the long, hard slog of wartime; how convincingly we can export liberal democratic values when our own version shows so many signs of atrophy; how much solidarity we can expect to muster for Afghanis and Iraqis when we’re asked to feel so little for one another.

“Why does not democracy believe in itself with passion?” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked in “The Vital Center,” his 1949 book about totalitarianism and America’s anxious postwar mood. “Why is freedom not a fighting faith?” The only hope (Schlesinger turned to Walt Whitman for the words—who else?) lay in “the exercise of Democracy.” The process of struggling for freedom, accepting conflict, tolerating uncertainty, joining community—this would allow democracy to survive and not die. What if we now find ourselves, at this stage of thickening maturity, in the middle of a new crisis that requires us to act like citizens of a democracy? It’s impossible to know how the public would respond to a political party that spoke about these things—because, so far, no party has.

In Iraqi Towns, Electoral Experiment Finds Some Success By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A01


CHEBAYISH, Iraq -- The banner outside declared the occasion: the first free elections in this hardscrabble southern town, battered by President Saddam Hussein and neglected in the disarray that followed. Campaign posters of men in turbans, suits and street clothes crowded for space along the wall of the polling station, peering at the gathering crowds. Inside was Tobin Bradley, a 29-year-old American trying to pull off the vote and, in the process, possibly reshape Iraq's transition from occupation.



"Ask them if they read and write," Bradley called out in Arabic to volunteers and staff. He positioned police to keep order. "One officer goes here," he said. "One goes there." To a handful of candidates gathered at the door, he lifted up a ballot box, painted in white. "You can see the boxes are empty." He caught his breath, rolled up his sleeves, then called out, "Yalla, let's go."

"We'll see how it works out," Bradley said, as voters surged through the doors. "It's always figure-it-out-as-we-go."

With a knack for improvisation and little help from Baghdad, Bradley, the political adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Nasiriyah, has carried out what may stand as one of the most ambitious democratic experiments in Iraq's history, a project that goes to the heart of the debate about how Iraq's next government should be chosen. In the province of Dhi Qar, about 230 miles southeast of Baghdad and a backwater even by Iraq's standards, residents voting as families will have elected city councils in 16 of the 20 biggest cities by next month. Bradley will have organized 11, more than half of them this month.

At every turn, the elections have set precedents, some of them unanticipated. Voters have typically elected professionals rather than tribal or religious leaders, although the process has energized Islamic parties. Activists have gone door to door to organize women, who turned out in their largest numbers this past week in some of Iraq's most conservative towns. Most important is the way residents qualify to cast ballots -- cards issued by Hussein's government to distribute monthly rations.

In the debate over the U.S.-administered transfer of power to an Iraqi government, those cards have emerged as a crux of the dispute. U.S. authorities have resisted elections for choosing the next government, fearing that -- in the absence of up-to-date voter rolls -- logistical challenges and the potential for fraud could not be addressed before June 30, the date of the scheduled handover. But Iraq's most influential religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has suggested that ration cards could substitute for voter rolls.

While making clear they are not endorsing the idea for all of Iraq, U.S. and British officials say the ration-card system works strikingly well in this province, Iraq's fourth-largest. "In principle, we here are quite in favor of it, and people like it," said John Bourne, the British coordinator in the province. "The question is, will it work on a larger scale here, and the next question is, will it work elsewhere?"

So far, Bourne has not advocated widening the voting experiment to the entire province.

"If we jump into it now, there would be a big splash," he said.

Bradley, too, stopped short of endorsing the system for the rest of the country. But in Dhi Qar province, which is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim, it has proved the surest way to ensure the councils that run the towns are viewed as legitimate -- unlike many U.S.-appointed councils elsewhere in Iraq.

"I think we need to trust Iraqis a little bit," Bradley said. "If it works here, what does that say? It's worked in one city, it's worked in 11 cities, it could work in more. But we're taking it one city at a time."

$600 Elections

With about a month of planning -- at a cost of about $600 each -- Bradley organized back-to-back elections this past week in Chebayish and Fuhud, towns of dirt roads, stagnant puddles and cinder-block huts that border the resurrected marshes Hussein sought to drain in the 1990s. Banners in Fuhud that called voting "a moral, religious and national duty" competed with Hussein-era slogans still painted on walls of the one-story girls' school. "Down with the Jews," one intoned.

Hundreds lined up outside the school, carrying the sometimes smudged, creased or torn ration cards issued to their families, plus one other form of identification. In this election, each family was allowed two votes -- one for a man, one for a woman. Ration cards were marked with two stamps, and voters then sat at battered school desks, choosing between five and 10 names from a list of 44 candidates.

"One at a time, one at a time, organization is beautiful," shouted one of the judges running the voting, Kamil Rashad Fleih.

Naim Aboud, wearing the checkered headdress of tribal Iraqis, showed up only with his ration card, asking for a ballot.

"You have to bring identification," Fleih said.

"It's far away," said an exasperated Aboud, throwing up his arms.

"You must," Fleih answered. "That's the law today."

Another man brought his wife's identification, trying to cast her vote for Fuhud's 10-member council.

"She has the children at home," he protested to the judges.

Bradley interrupted. "You go home, you stay with the children, and she comes," he said in Arabic.

For a civilian administration often criticized for its isolation and disproportionate presence in Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Dhi Qar has demonstrated a flexibility and improvisation more commonly exhibited by the U.S. military in Iraq.

In each election, Bradley has started with a preparation committee of unaffiliated residents. Beginning a month before the vote, they come up with conditions for candidates: minimum age, no Baath Party affiliation and an often contentious education requirement. Judges from outside run the voting, and lately, nongovernmental organizations have played a growing role.

The hard-to-forge ration cards, a slip of computer-generated paper, identify the head of the household. While some have contended the former government abused the system, Bradley said he believes 95 percent of families in the province have ration cards. Voters with the cards then prove they belong to the family. In the early elections, Iraq's patriarchal society meant only men voted, so Bradley changed the rules to give two votes to each family -- a red stamp for women, a blue stamp for men.

"It's not a perfect system," he acknowledged.

The Female Vote

Women's participation was a particular problem. A total of three women voted in the two elections before the rule change. In the election after the revision, in Batha, 62 women -- from a total of 1,200 -- cast ballots. Then female activists from Nasiriyah, the provincial capital, got involved, going door to door with leaflets and broadcasting a message from the mosque loudspeaker after the noon prayers.

"To all respected women of the town of Fuhud, to every housewife, teacher and doctor, to the educated and uneducated, we would like to tell you that your presence at the elections center is a duty," called out 26-year-old Rasha Muhsin Aboudi.

Within an hour, dozens of women showed up at the polling station, some carrying barefoot children. More than half were completely veiled, their faces hidden. The judges cast a cursory, futile glance at their identification cards.

"I think we'll be a little lax on that one," Bradley said.

The activists from Nasiriyah read out the candidates' names to the illiterate women, marking off their choices for them. Aboudi, herself veiled, hunched over the ballot with 31-year-old Samira Geitan, who chose only two names.

"You have to choose at least five," Aboudi said, shaking her head. "Fewer than that won't work."

"I don't know any other names," Geitan complained. "I should know the person I choose."

At that, her friends crowded around and helped her select three more names.

In all, 145 women voted in Fuhud, out of a total of 1,221 votes cast. The next day in Chebayish, 231 women voted, out of a total of 1,264 votes.

For many of the women -- and men, as well -- the act of voting was perceived less as a conscious exercise of newfound rights and more as a means to better conditions in one of Iraq's most deprived regions. Complaints ran rife -- most residents lacked jobs, tomatoes cost four times their prewar price, rice and sugar were missing from rations and three times more expensive in the market.

"We're tired, and we're weary, very weary," Wabria Thahid, 54, the mother of three and draped in a black abaya, said after voting. "We need help from God and from the people who will lead us. We'll choose the people who can understand us."

In Chebayish, in the region where the 1991 Shiite uprising began, the complaints verged on exasperation, even anger.

"There's freedom, but there's pressure on the people. There's no one caring for the people," said Dakhil Rihan, a 52-year-old dressed in a tribal headdress. Others crowded around, shouting their grievances.

"This place is worn out, really worn out -- not 99 percent, but 100 percent," said Ahmed Hussein, a day laborer.

"We hear they're exporting oil. Where's the revenue?" asked Rihan.

"Freedom without a leader is meaningless," interjected Ahmed Rizaq, 28, a policeman.

Bradley said he views that frustration as the greatest threat to the experiment underway in the province. Through elections -- even Dhi Qar's abbreviated sort -- he has guaranteed legitimacy, he said, and turnout runs between 30 percent and 40 percent.

What he lacks, he said, is credibility.

"It's been nine, 10 months, with no results, really," Bradley said. "We don't want people losing faith in the democratic process. There's no point in having elections if there are no tangible results after the elections."

Idealism and Frustration

In town after town, Bradley brings an earnestness tinged with authority that allows him to navigate innumerable hassles. A graduate of Georgetown University, with fluency in Arabic and French, Bradley is a Foreign Service officer who served at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, from 1999 to 2001. He was brought from the U.S. mission to NATO in Brussels and arrived in Nasiriyah in September. His father was a city manager, and he says his job now is "dealing with the same problems, but in a different place."

He is righteous but frustrated -- the two qualities that perhaps best define the American experience in Iraq. His view of the country he is trying to change is grim, and he said he never expected to find "such a broken society."

"There's no national pride, it seems like to me. People want to take," he said in an interview at his office, guarded by Italian troops. "Everybody's thinking about themselves. That's what Saddam encouraged, that's what he rewarded."

But to him, the stakes are higher. He recalled working in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research for four nights after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He was angry and, with a bent of idealism, he was determined to bring about change, he said.

"We have an opportunity to start something good here. Whatever you think of the war, I have the opportunity to build a stable democracy here in Iraq," he said. "It doesn't matter whether you were for it or against it. The fact of the matter is we're here."

At times, his frustrations have overshadowed his idealism. The election Wednesday in Fuhud almost didn't come off. It had been scheduled for Feb. 6, but when he arrived at 7:40 a.m. that day, the only other person there was a man pushing a cart.

"I said, 'What about the elections?' He said, 'They've been broken.' "

The night before, as Bradley was helping count votes in another election, the preparation committee in Fuhud had canceled the vote. The committee had struggled with political parties over candidates suspected of ties to the Baath Party or security forces. As the fight dragged on, the committee feared the wrath of the parties if they went one way, tribal vendettas if they went the other.

Bradley convened a meeting that day. It lasted three hours, replete with shouting matches. Some were with candidates. Others were between secular residents and representatives of the clergy. Some protested that a 36-year-old candidate with a genetic condition that gave him the appearance of an 8-year-old couldn't run for office. "That's discrimination," Bradley said. To the puzzled crowd, he went on to cite the example of actor Gary Coleman's candidacy in the California gubernatorial election.

After a break for noon prayers and round after round of Pepsis and tea, the elections were rescheduled.

"It was almost like, what was the problem, there was no problem," Bradley said.

The next day, the preparation committee resigned anyway. The chairman said he feared for the lives of his six children. Bradley had to scramble to get the assistance of political parties, then looked for help from nongovernmental organizations.

There was none of that discord on Wednesday, as the elections went on without a hitch. The mood was festive, and workers with the nongovernmental organizations weaved through the voters, bantering with men voting in their first free elections. "If you have a question, ask me," called out Hassan Ajil, 32. "Don't be embarrassed."

He moved the voters along. "Less than five names and more than 10 won't do," he said.

"What about six or seven?" one voter called out. "That's fine," Ajil answered.

As some voters left, they made the point that they were doing what Sistani, the grand ayatollah, had urged. Others were encouraged that if elections could take place in a town like Fuhud, they could take place anywhere. An undercurrent in the conversations was that, given the success in Dhi Qar, the U.S. administration had less of an excuse to refuse to allow a vote soon.

"If the Americans reject the elections, we'll reject them," Faraj Alaywi, a 26-year-old nurse, said as a gusty wind blew through the town. "The Iraqi people want elections, 200 percent. The world says elections aren't possible, but we want them."

One reservation cited by opponents of quick elections is the fear that religious extremists would emerge victorious. But in many of the elections in Dhi Qar, Bradley said, teachers, doctors, lawyers and others have won. In the town of Rifai, professionals won seven of 10 races. In Batha, only two representatives of Islamic parties won seats on the 10-member council.

In the elections this past week, though, there were signs that the parties were beginning to mobilize. In Chebayish, members of the two strongest Islamic parties -- the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa party -- passed out lists of candidates. Some were handwritten, others typed. Many voters brought the lists inside and obediently marked off the choices.

In Fuhud, the candidates sat patiently as the vote was tallied. The count began at 3:30 p.m. and wrapped up three hours later, as a few fluorescent lights cast a pale glow over the desks. The top vote-getter was Zaki Hanoun, a member of the Supreme Council who fled Iraq in 1999 and returned after the war. Two of the next three most popular candidates had ties to the Dawa party.

In a dark courtyard of the school, the candidates put a hand on a green Koran and took the oath, one by one. "I swear to Almighty God to do my work, to serve my country and to implement the law." Afterward, supporters kissed winners on both cheeks.

"This is the first step toward democracy," Hanoun said. "It's a wonderful example for the other provinces in Iraq."

I thought they hated us:

Arabs in U.S. Raising Money to Back Bush
By LESLIE WAYNE


Wealthy Arab-Americans and foreign-born Muslims who strongly back President Bush's decision to invade Iraq are adding their names to the ranks of Pioneers and Rangers, the elite Bush supporters who have raised $100,000 or more for his re-election.

This new crop of fund-raisers comes as some opinion polls suggest support for the president among Arab-Americans is sinking and at a time when strategists from both parties say Mr. Bush is losing ground with this group. Mr. Bush has been criticized by Arab-Americans who feel they are being singled out in the fight against terrorism and who are uneasy over the administration's Palestinian-Israeli policies.

Yet the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq have been a catalyst for some wealthy Arab-Americans to become more involved in politics. And there are still others who have a more practical reason for opening their checkbooks: access to a business-friendly White House. Already, their efforts have brought them visits with the president at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., as well as White House dinners and meetings with top administration officials.

The fund-raisers are people like Mori Hosseini, the Iranian-born chief executive of ICI Homes, a home builder in Daytona Beach, Fla. Mr. Hosseini is a Ranger, gaining the top designation after raising $200,000 from his family and acquaintances. (The minimum level of money raised for a Ranger is $200,000, while it takes $100,000 to be a Pioneer.)

Never before has Mr. Hosseini been this active politically. But he said he was inspired by Mr. Bush's "decisive" action, especially in Iraq, and Mr. Hosseini's efforts have led to an invitation to a White House Christmas party and a private meeting with the president and a handful of other donors at a recent fund-raiser at Disney World.

"He has saved Iraq," said Mr. Hosseini, who left Iran when he was 13. "He's the savior, if not of Iraq, but also of the other countries around Iraq. They want freedom. I am so sure of this because I am from that part of the world."

Mr. Hosseini's enthusiasm runs counter to what some polls say is a drop in Mr. Bush's popularity among Arab-Americans. In a recent release, the Arab American Institute, a nonprofit organization representing Arab-American interests in government and politics, said Mr. Bush's support had fallen sharply since the 2000 election. A January poll conducted for the group by Zogby International, which is headed by John Zogby, a Lebanese-American, found that Mr. Bush's approval rating among Arab-Americans had fallen to 38 percent from as high as 83 percent in October 2001.

The biggest reason for this drop-off, according to the institute's poll, is concern over Arab-Americans' No. 1 issue, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. To many Arab-Americans, the administration's actions are seen as more pro-Israel than evenhanded, especially its support of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister.

In addition, a program begun after 9/11 that required thousands of Arab and Muslim men to register with the immigration officials has sent chills through Arab-Americans, as has the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, which Arab-Americans say is a threat to their civil liberties.

Even so, prominent Arab-Americans have kept the money flowing.

"It's like the Catholic Church," said Mr. Zogby, whose brother, James, is president of the Arab American Institute. "The total dollars are up, but the number of donors is down."

One reason may be that Arab-Americans are not a monolithic group. The term is used generally to refer to people from Arab countries, but they may have diverse religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, like Lebanese and other Arab Christians or Muslims from Egypt and Pakistan. Many Arab-Americans left their countries because of political and economic oppression and are now small-business owners or entrepreneurs who say the Republican Party best represents their values.

As with any specific group, it is impossible to determine exactly how much of Mr. Bush's campaign money comes from Arab-Americans.

Fred Pezeshkan counts himself among the Republican hard core. For the past 25 years, Mr. Pezeshkan has lived in Naples, Fla., where he is president of the Krate Construction Company. He is also a first-time Ranger, having raised $200,000 for Mr. Bush. In previous years, except for voting Republican, the Iranian-born Mr. Pezeshkan was not politically active.

But to Mr. Pezeshkan, the invasion of Iraq shows "a strong American interest to go to those countries in the Middle East and bring democracy, culture, education, hospitals and the things that they need."

Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said that the campaign was "working hard to maintain" support given by Arab-Americans in 2000, but that it had no special outreach programs for them.

George Salem, chairman of the Arab American Institute and a political adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, said the younger Mr. Bush was "a more difficult sell to some segments" of the Arab-American population, especially because of the new antiterrorism law.

Mr. Salem, a Washington lawyer, said Mr. Bush had two big selling points: he was the first president in recent memory to call for an independent Palestinian state, and he made two high-level Arab-American appointments, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., whose father is from Syria.

One of the largest concentrations of Arab-Americans is in Detroit, home to Yousif Ghafari, a Lebanese Christian who came to the United States in 1972 and now heads his own engineering firm.

For years Mr. Ghafari donated to the Republican Party, but this year he stepped up the pace, raising $350,000 to become a Ranger. He said that "the 9/11 situation was a bad situation for us" but that he supported Mr. Bush for "taking the initiative" to oust Saddam Hussein and believed that Mr. Bush had the capacity to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

"The Western-educated and business-motivated know that the whole Middle Eastern region has to change," said Mr. Ghafari, who collected donations from non-Arabs as well.

One of those Mr. Ghafari tapped is Tim Attallah, a Dearborn lawyer and a first-generation Palestinian-American. Mr. Attallah, who donated $2,000, said he was having a hard time reconciling his personal beliefs with some of the Bush administration's policies.

In 1993, Mr. Attallah stood on the White House lawn as an invited guest when the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord was signed. But now, he said, he is troubled by the administration's stance in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is concerned about the antiterrorism law and the lack of Republican leaders campaigning for Arab-American votes.

"These are tough times for us, and we have not seen our friends," Mr. Attallah said.

Big donations have brought high-level access for Dr. Malik Hasan, a native of Pakistan and the former chief executive of Foundation Health Systems of Denver, one of the largest health maintenance organizations. In the past decade, Dr. Hasan has given several hundred thousand dollars to Mr. Bush and the Republican Party, including a $100,000 check to the Bush inaugural committee.

This year, Dr. Hasan is a Pioneer. In the past few months he has met personally with Mr. Bush, once at a White House dinner and again at a fund-raiser in Washington. He visited with Mr. Bush at the president's ranch, and Dr. Hasan's wife, Seeme, has been brought into high-level meetings on Arab-American concerns.

The couple say they are still fans of Mr. Bush, even though, Mrs. Hasan said, their American-born son was recently surrounded by the police and detained at an airport for no apparent reason other than his ethnic background.

"As a Muslim I felt it was wonderful that Saddam Hussein was removed," Dr. Hasan said. "The rest of the Muslim countries were standing there doing nothing. Honestly, I wrote to the president and said I adored his accomplishments."