Euroblogger

Let Europe be Europe
You won’t be our friends? Fine, protect yourselves and at least be neutral.

Beware of punditry now assuring us that, because we have seen the error of our ways and are now penitent, Europe is back on board. A contrite Mr. Bush — his critics imply — now seeks to smile more like Reagan and bite his lip like Clinton, and drop the old, scary "dead or alive," "Old Europe," and "smoke 'em out" lingo.

All this spin hides the real problem, which has nothing to do with Bush. The ethicists of Europe don't want to see success in Iraq, since it might be interpreted as a moral refutation of their own opposition to Saddam's removal. So let us in turn stop begging old Europe, NATO, and the EU to participate in the rebuilding or policing of the country. To join or help, in the collective European mind, would be to suggest that an emerging democracy far away was worth our own sacrifice to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. Liberating Iraq, shutting down Baathist terror, and establishing consensual rule, after all, was a dangerous — and mostly Anglo-American — idea, antithetical to all the Europeans have become.

Understandably, they do not want to be lumped in with the "missionaries of democracy" who evoke the ire of terrorists or the disdain of oil-producing grandees. They do not wish to forgive the debts run up by Saddam Hussein for their overpriced junk. And they most certainly are not willing to do any favors for Texas-twanged George W. Bush, whom they hope will be gone in less than six months. All this is not their world, which operates on self-interest gussied up with the elevated rhetoric of the utopian EU — appealing to an Al Gore's Earth-in-the-Balance mindset rather than to serious folk who worry about genocide and mass murder.

So there are reasons our alliances cannot simply be glued back together again, and they transcend neo-con zeal and Bush as el Loco cowboy. Europeans, aside from a few tiny brave countries and courageous individuals, will no more participate in the "illegal" action in Iraq than they did in the "approved" and "legal" Afghanistan intervention, where about 7,000 NATO troops now help a postbellum liberated population of 26 million. Even if we sent Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Jesse Jackson as an obsequious trio, the Euros would not act in a resolute, muscular way.

To the small degree Mr. Bush supposedly encountered a more conciliatory attitude from Europeans, it was likely because wiser heads in Germany finally saw that their animus had nearly succeeded in generating an American consensus to end the free defense of Europe — not because of a new remorseful "multilateralism" by the president. A quarter of Americans now see France as an enemy — not an ally or even a neutral — and the number is growing. Any sane person who carefully examined America's relationship to Europe over the last 60 years would have advised the Germans and French not to throw away something so advantageous to their own national interests. But they did, and now we must move on.

It was moving to commemorate the Normandy invasion on its 60th anniversary, but politely left unsaid amid the French-hosted celebrations was the real story of 1944 and 1945. We owe it to the dead, not just the living, to remember it with some integrity and honesty. Most of the Nazis' own European subjects did little to stop their mass murdering. There was no popular civilian uprising inside Germany or out. Most Germans were hostile to the onslaught of American armies in their country, preferring Hitler and the Nazis even by 1945 to so-called American liberators. When they did slur the Fuhrer it was because he brought them ruin, not the blood of millions on their hands. When they did stop fighting the Americans, it was because the thought of surrendering to the Russians was far worse.

Most Frenchmen either refused to resolutely fight the Germans or passively collaborated. The idea of a broad resistance was mostly a postwar Gallic nationalist myth. Those who spearheaded a few attacks on German occupiers were more likely led by Communists than by allied sympathizers, and thus fought in hope more of an eventual Soviet victory over the Nazis than an American one.

Meanwhile, those born after World War II in these two countries either know nothing about the American sacrifice or chalk the invasion up to the insanity of war in general. I won't even speak of a sense of gratitude, because that is an emotion almost as archaic to the contemporary European mind as patriotism. Nearly 30 percent of all Frenchmen polled last year wished Saddam to defeat the United States in Iraq.

Of course, Europe and America are both democratic and Western — and will and should remain friends and partners. That said, we should also agree that our differences had been buried in the aftermath of World War II, the subsequent Marshall Plan, and American efforts to organize the defense of the continent against Soviet aggression.

But with European war, massive American aid, and Communism no longer present realities, the Atlantic world reverted to its natural tensions. Along with the Berlin wall, our NATO-inspired alliances also had a great fall. Well before George W. Bush assumed office, America and the Europeans split over differing ideas about liberty, free markets, class, race, and religion. And these shards are not going to be simply glued back into their proper places to reconstitute the fragile trans-Atlantic whole. As Europe addresses its demographic time bomb — with ever-increasing entitlements, less and less defense spending, and ever greater schizophrenia as it vacillates between paranoid repression and dangerous laxity — its angst about the freewheeling and upbeat United States will only grow.

Vocal supporters of the old Atlantic-American alliance are only half right in their bromides for putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Yes, they are correct that we should speak more softly and listen more. But if America had once done to NATO what the French or Germans did to us last year, the pretense of an alliance would now be long over. Imagine what would have happened if Paris or Berlin had mobilized to preempt Milosevic while the United States refused — claiming with Russia in the Security Council that such unilateral, non-U.N. approved action was brinksmanship of the worst sort — and then strong-armed other NATO countries to oppose European efforts.

Let us publicly hope for the miraculous reconstitution of NATO's shattered fragments into a real alliance; and then accept its quiet and permanent dismemberment on the pavement after a job well done. Meanwhile, seek bilateral partnerships with willing European countries, continue to unilaterally withdraw troops from Germany, and then start reducing elsewhere our unnecessary military presence — perhaps first in Spain. Of course, there will be difficulties — initial higher costs in redeployment, hurt Euro feelings, and hysteria from trans-Atlantic pundits — but scaling back from Europe is long overdue.

We seek not to punish Europe by our departure, but to save it from itself. The problem is not just that our troops are doing nothing in places like Germany, or merely that they are more needed elsewhere — they do real damage by their presence in enabling an increasingly strident and opportunistic pacifism and an anti-Americanism fueled by dependency and ignited by resentment.

The continent is now the repository of Western heritage — a beautiful museum or amusement park, if you will, of caretakers and custodians. Unless that changes, we should no more expect Europeans to participate in the slogging in Iraq or Afghanistan than we should count on Disneyland guides venturing into nearby South Central to adjudicate gang violence, or Smithsonian docents to keep the piece in D.C. neighborhoods. Barring a 9/11-like event at the Parthenon or Louvre, one cannot — and should not — ask people to do what they simply cannot and will not do.

But isn't the Atlantic Alliance critical to American security? Sadly, no. Right now it de facto does not exist and we are in no greater danger due to its absence. Instead, the key is not to force Europe to be an ally, but to ensure by our absence that it is a friend — or at least a Swiss-like neutral — in the present fight against terrorists and their sponsors. Shared intelligence and mutual encouragement against terrorists do not require NATO. Perhaps Mr. Powell needs to give up on expecting Europeans to do anything real in the present war, and Mr. Rumsfeld needs to praise them far more for doing nothing.

I fear that we should expect over the next 50 years some pretty scary things coming out of Europe as its impossible postmodern utopian dreams turn undemocratic and then ugly — once its statism and entitlement economy falter; Jews leave as Arabs stream in; its shaky German-French axis unravels; its next vision of an EU mare nostrum encompassing North Africa and Turkey begins to terrify Old Europe; and its pacifism brings it real humiliation from the likes of an Iran or China. Indeed, despite Europe's noble efforts to incorporate the former Warsaw Pact, we are already seeing such tensions in the most recent EU elections.

We all like the Europeans and wish them well in their efforts to create heaven on earth. But in the end I still think we Americans are on the right side of history in Iraq — while they are on no side at all.

— Victor Davis Hanson, an NRO contributor, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of The Soul of Battle and Carnage and Culture, among other books. His website is www.victorhanson.com.

HOW WE COULD HAVE DONE IT RIGHT.
Like It's 1999
by Fareed Zakaria Post date: 06.17.04
Issue date: 06.28.04

Foreign policy is not theology. The only way to make sensible choices in this realm is to weigh costs and benefits. A policy that might have been wise crumbles if the costs become prohibitive. For example, protecting South Vietnam from a communist invasion from the north was a worthwhile goal. The horrendous costs of doing so, however, made it a bad policy. For those of us who supported the war in Iraq, the question is simple--have the costs risen so high that they outweigh any benefit? It's a fair question, since the manner in which Iraq has been handled over the past 18 months has racked up enormous costs. Still, I think the intervention has the potential to be a success if we learn the lessons--the right lessons--of this last year and a half.

I was not one of those who had been urging another war against Iraq ever since the first Gulf war. Through the 1990s, I thought the strategy pursued by the first Bush and Clinton administrations--sanctions and containment--was a reasonable solution to a difficult problem. But, by the late '90s, this strategy was falling apart. In the isolated atmosphere created by sanctions, Saddam Hussein's grip on power had tightened. He had found ways to manipulate the sanctions system by cheating and smuggling (the best estimate of his take is $10 billion). Yet, the sanctions were pushing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis into poverty every year, a reality that was televised across the Arab world daily.

Keeping Saddam "in his box" meant air attacks almost weekly on Iraqi military facilities. It also meant the United States had to maintain a garrison in Saudi Arabia, something that was creating enormous regional instability. Recall that Osama bin Laden's infamous 1996 fatwa is titled "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." Bin Laden's main complaints against the United States were that it was "occupying" Saudi Arabia and starving the Iraqi people. Palestine came in a distant third. Being a man gifted with a great sense of mass appeal, bin Laden had calculated that these were the causes most likely to galvanize Arabs and Muslims.

I did not believe Saddam had a lethal arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and I wrote as much in the months before the war (though, like everyone who is being honest, I am utterly astonished by what appears to be the lack of any weapons). But Saddam was an erratic, unpredictable leader who had been actively working against the United States and its interests--and peace in the region--for two decades. That meant he was a looming threat. Given the collapsing sanctions regime, at some point the United States would have to decide to move in one direction or the other. It could either welcome Saddam back into the community of nations and let him do what he would as a free agent. Or it could gather an international coalition to replace him. I wish that this latter policy had been pursued slowly and deliberately, with a genuine effort to forge a broad coalition and get the United Nations behind it. But, in the end, you have to decide whether to support the policy the president is pursuing--not the variation of it you wish he were pursuing. And I decided that, while timing and circumstances were not perfect, getting rid of one of the most ghastly regimes in the world, one that was a continued threat to U.S. interests, was worth supporting. Morality and realpolitik came together in the case against Saddam.



iven what's happened in Iraq over the last year, was all this wrong? It is becoming conventional wisdom to speak of Iraq as an unmanageable crisis that no policy can untangle. "[Not] every problem has a solution," wrote Peter Galbraith in The New York Review of Books. But is that really the lesson of the last year? That nation-building is impossible in Iraq? That the Iraqis are savages who cannot govern themselves? That America is bound to fail in such endeavors?

If that is the case, then how to make sense of East Timor, Kosovo, and Bosnia (not to mention Japan, Germany, South Korea, and a host of other cases)? Over the last five years, the United States has helped these societies overcome terrible odds, maintain peace, and begin to build more decent governments. They are still far from perfect (Kosovo is, in fact, a mess), but they're a lot better off than they were. All of these places are quite different from Iraq, but, in some ways, the problems they posed were far more challenging. If, in Iraq, you face a potential civil war, in Bosnia you had an actual one, lasting for years, that had created deep scars. If Iraqi nationalism seems fierce, Serbian and Croatian nationalism was by any measure more violent and internecine. If--to take the unspoken assumption--Muslims are the problem, Bosnia and Kosovo have lots of them.

The real lesson of the last year is that the Bush administration's inept version of nation-building failed. The administration's strategists used Iraq as a laboratory to prove various deeply held prejudices: for example, that the Clinton administration's nation-building was fat and slow, that the United Nations was irrelevant, that the United States faced no problem of legitimacy in Iraq, that Ahmed Chalabi would become a Mesopotamian Charles de Gaulle. In almost every case, facts on the ground quickly disconfirmed these theories. But, so committed were these government officials to their ideology--and so powerful within the administration--that it took 14 months for policy to adjust to these failures. In the last month, the United States has finally reversed course, sending more troops, scaling back de-Baathification, dumping Chalabi, bringing in the United Nations, and listening to Iraqis on the ground. This shift in policy is already making a difference, easing the anti-Americanism and the sense of international isolation that has plagued the Iraq mission. If they keep up the reversals, Iraq still has a chance.

Compare Iraq with Afghanistan. Looked at in the abstract, Afghanistan is potentially far more chaotic than Iraq. It's a country riven with tribes and warlords that hasn't had a functioning state for 30 years--and perhaps not for three centuries. Yet, America's nation-building there has been more successful than in Iraq--with far less money spent on it. Many problems remain, but the country is unquestionably better off than it was under the Taliban. The simplest statistic to prove the point is that, since the fall of Kabul, two million Afghan refugees have returned to their country.

Why has Afghanistan been more successful than Iraq? In Afghanistan, the Bush administration adopted a version of postwar policies developed over the '90s. After the war, it handed the political process over to the United Nations and directed its military efforts through nato. The United Nations was able to structure a political process (the loya jirga) that had legitimacy within Afghanistan as well as internationally. With some massaging, it produced a pro-Western liberal as president. Making the military efforts multinational has meant that today, the European Union spends about as much on Afghanistan as the United States and that the new Afghan army is being trained jointly by the United States and ... France.

The biggest mistake I made on Iraq was to believe that the Bush administration would want to get Iraq right more than it wanted to prove its own prejudices right. I knew the administration went into Iraq with some crackpot ideas, but I also believed that, above all else, it would want success on the ground. I reasoned that it would drop its pet theories once it was clear they were not working. I still don't understand why the Bush team proved so self-defeatingly stubborn. Perhaps its initial success in Afghanistan emboldened it to move forward unconstrained. Perhaps its prejudices about Iraq had developed over decades and were deeply held. Perhaps the administration was far more divided and dysfunctional than I had recognized, making rational policy impossible.



ut, since we are listing mistakes, the biggest one many opponents of the war are making is to claim that Iraq is a total distraction from the war on terrorism. In fact, Iraq is central to that conflict. I don't mean this in the deceptive and dishonest sense that many in the Bush administration have claimed. There is no connection between Saddam's regime and the terrorists of September 11. But there is a deep connection between his regime and the terrorism of September 11. The root causes of Islamic terrorism lie in the dysfunctional politics of the Middle East, where failure and repression have produced fundamentalism and violence. Political Islam grew in stature as a mystical alternative to the wretched reality--secular dictatorships--that have dominated the Arab world. A new Iraq provides an opportunity to break this perverse cycle. The country is unlikely to become a liberal democracy any time soon. But it might turn out to be a pluralistic state that gives minorities limited protections, allows for some political participation, and has a reasonably open society. That would be a revolution in the Arab world.

The right lesson of Iraq so far is not that nation-building must fail, but rather that President Bush's approach to it, unless corrected, will fail. The right lesson is not that U.S. military intervention always ruptures alliances and creates an enraged international public, but rather that this particular intervention did. Most important, it is not that American power aggressively employed does more harm than good. Rather, the right lesson is that American power, because it is so overweening, must be used with extraordinary care and wisdom. Most of the world's problems--from aids to the Israeli-Palestinian issue--would be better served with more American intervention, not less. But, because of the blunders in Iraq, it is possible that most of the world, and far too many Americans, will draw the wrong lesson on this final point as well.



Fareed Zakaria Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International.

WHY I STILL HAVE HOPE.
People Power
by Thomas L. Friedman

Post date: 06.17.04
Issue date: 06.28.04
ince Iraq started spinning out of control in April, many supporters and opponents of the war have been pronouncing definitively one way or another: I was wrong. I was right. It's over. Lord knows, I have been tempted by all those sentiments at different times in recent months. But I haven't been willing to pull the trigger one way or another because I still don't feel that the three fundamental questions I had going into this war have been answered. This means a decent outcome--that is, one that tilts Iraq from a country threatening its neighbors and its own people toward a more benign, stable entity that at least allows its people to plan their own future and to develop their potential--is still possible.

Before the war in Iraq started, I argued that Iraq was a black box that had been sealed shut for more than 30 years of Baathist rule. We did not know what was inside, and we would know only after we broke the locks. As such, two questions tugged at me: First, is Iraq the Arab Germany or the Arab Yugoslavia? Is it a country of great natural resources and human talent, caught in the grip of a warped dictator? If we removed the dictator, could the country eventually be normalized and flourish? Or, is Iraq a totally artificial colonial construct that has never congealed--with Kurds, Sunnis, Shia, Turkmen, Assyrians, et cetera, all forced to live together against their will? If it is, such a country is only governable by a Tito-like iron fist--and, once we remove the Baathist iron fist, we would inevitably have to replace it with an American one.

The second question I had was: Was Iraq the way Iraq was because Saddam Hussein was the way Saddam Hussein was--a megalomaniacal fascist who made life in his country nasty, brutish, and short, and who diverted much of Iraq's resources to weaponry and palaces? Or was Saddam Hussein the way Saddam Hussein was because Iraq was the way Iraq was--a congenitally fractured society that could only be held together by a murderous thug? In short, did Saddam make Iraq, or did Iraq make Saddam?

Having been to Iraq three times since the war ended, I still don't have definitive answers, because the only way to answer these two big questions is for the United States to create enough security in Iraq for the will of Iraq's silent majority to manifest itself. A secure environment where Iraqis could look in the mirror and ask themselves for the first time, "Who are we? Who do we want to be?" has simply not been achieved.

Will we ever get these two fundamental questions answered? At this stage, given what the United States has been willing and unwilling, able and unable to do in Iraq, it now all depends on their answer to my third question: How will Iraqis react when they are handed the keys of sovereignty by the United States on June 30? Since American forces have neither the legitimacy nor the numbers to finish the war and truly secure Iraq, the only possible alternative force to do that is the new Iraqi government and whatever military might it is able to muster (backed up, no doubt, by whatever U.S. forces the new Iraqi government feels it can summon without sacrificing its legitimacy). The only way to secure Iraq today is to uncover, destroy, or deter the die-hard Baathists who have been attacking U.S. forces and Iraqi police units, and the Al Qaeda sympathizers who have filtered into the country from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Europe to conduct suicide bombings and wreak havoc. I don't believe non-Arabic speaking U.S. troops can get to the root of either problem. Only Iraqis can do that. The third question, therefore, is whether they will have the will to do so once they are given the way--once they are given the keys to Iraq.

My own reporting in Iraq leaves me feeling torn. On the upside, I found a country with a lot more intermarriage, intermingling of ethnic and religious groups, and Iraqi national identity than I expected. Iraq may become Lebanon on steroids when we leave, but it is not there yet. Partly this is due to the U.S. military presence, but it is also partly due to the fact that most Iraqis desperately do not want to go there. On the downside, I was shocked at how devastated Iraq was from three decades of Saddam's misrule and the last ten years of sanctions--a devastation compounded by Donald Rumsfeld's cavalier attitude toward postwar looting. Iraq looked to me like Babylon with electricity poles. And that leads to another unpleasant surprise--what Christopher Hitchens aptly called "the extent of lumpen Islamization in Iraq, on both the Khomeinist and Wahhabi ends." Under the secular patina of Baathist rule in Baghdad, there is a lot more Tehran and Riyadh in the backstreets and among the urban youth there than anyone knew. This is not easy clay.

So where does all this leave me? There were always two ways to fight this war: One was to come in big, like empire-builders--lots of troops, lots of patience--and transform Iraq over a decade. The other was to come in small, break open the black box, dump out the contents onto the sidewalk, and see what Iraqis would make of it. The Bush team, to the extent that it even thought this through beforehand, chose the latter strategy, and it's too late to change now. That doesn't mean all is lost. It just means Iraq's future will be determined by what's now on the sidewalk--by who Iraqis tell us they are and who they want to be. They still don't know, so surely we can't. We assumed that Saddam's regime could not possibly be the expression of their collective will and identity. If, after they get the keys, they fail to produce an answer, or, worse, collapse into civil war, we will have to take precautions against them. If they succeed, we will applaud. There was way too much hubris a year ago in predicting easy success. Let's avoid a similar hubris today in predicting certain failure.

As for the enterprise as a whole, all I can say is this: The two Arab Human Development reports quantified something that any casual newspaper reader in the last two years could tell--that the Arab-Muslim world is badly tilting in the wrong direction. And the September 11, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, Tunisia, Morocco, Riyadh, and Khobar attacks by Muslim extremists all underscore how dangerous this is for Muslim civilization and for the world. Once it was clear to me that the Bush team had chosen a warpath, I wanted to see it done in a way that maximized the chances for a decent outcome in Iraq that could help tilt the Arab-Muslim world onto a more positive slope. And "tilt," for me, was the right word, not "transform." Only we can tilt the playing field, but only Iraqis can take advantage of that by transforming their own society and politics--and that takes a generation.

I believed that such an audacious project required so much better planning, so much more patience, and so many more resources than the Bush team devoted. Nevertheless, we are where we are and there is still, despite it all, the possibility of a decent outcome--depending largely on what Iraqis do.



s for the critics of this whole enterprise, let me simply say this: I am ready to believe that, because we went to Iraq, there is a war on terrorists elsewhere that we are not fighting. You'd have to prove it, but I can believe it. But I know one thing for certain: There is no war on terrorism--which is to say no war on the ideas of intolerance and hatred that spurred the boys of September 11 and their successors to act--that does not get at the issues of Arab governance and misgovernance laid out in the Arab Human Development reports. I never believed that Saddam possessed any WMD that could threaten us, and I never believed his alleged WMD was a legitimate rationale for going to war in Iraq. Saddam was always deterrable by conventional means--because he loved life more than he hated us. I did believe, though, in the importance of regime change and reform across the region, because I always believed that what threatens us most from the Arab-Muslim world were the "people of mass destruction"--the PMDs--produced by failing Arab states. These PMDs are undeterrable because they hate us more than they love life. These are young Muslim men and women ready to commit suicide, spurred by their own humiliation at how far behind the rest of the world their civilization has fallen and by bad ideas--ideas of intolerance, anti-pluralism, and anti-modernism, produced in a cauldron of misgovernance and religious obscurantism.

People who are ready to commit suicide using instruments from our daily lives--the car, the airplane, the tennis shoe--are a fundamental threat to open societies because they attack the trust that is needed to keep an open society open. The only way to protect open societies against these forces--short of building a wall--is to find a way to partner with moderate forces in the Arab-Muslim world to tilt it in another direction so that societies there can start to deliver more hope and opportunities for their people and so that different ideas can get a hearing and, one day, prevail. Only Arabs and Muslims can restrain their own.

Maybe trying to tilt Iraq in a different direction to help tilt the entire region will turn out to be a fool's errand. I would argue that it's still too soon to tell. When will we know? If Iraq collapses into civil war or the new Iraqi government proves incapable of organizing reasonably fair elections, this enterprise will rightly be seen as a failure. By contrast, if Iraqis come together around this new government, enough to produce a reasonably fair election and put Iraq on course for some kind of decent federal system of government, this enterprise will rightly be seen as pivotal and positive. We just have to let it play out and influence it as best we can, where we can.

But there is one thing I am as sure of today as I was a year ago, and it is this: Thinking that there is a war on terrorists that doesn't also involve a war on the roots of terrorism was a dangerous illusion on September 11 and remains a dangerous illusion today.



Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times.

FIVE LESSONS FROM A BAD YEAR.
Silence and Cruelty
by Paul Berman
Post date: 06.17.04
Issue date: 06.28.04
ne: We have learned that Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship was just as bad as everyone said, and worse. We have learned about the 300,000 Shia killed after the 1991 war, the perhaps 30,000 people buried in a single grave, the 40,000 marsh Arabs killed, the millions of refugees, and so forth--mass destruction with and without weapons of mass destruction. We have learned about the survivors. In Baghdad, a woman schoolteacher approached George Packer of The New Yorker and said, "Please, sir, can you help me? ... I must work with Americans, because my psychology is demolished by Saddam Hussein. Not just me. All Iraqis. Psychological demolition."

We have certainly learned that most Iraqis do not say, "I must work with Americans." But we have learned about psychological demolition. We have learned that victims are not always attractive--hardly a new lesson. We have learned that hundreds of political parties have sprouted up, not because democracy is in bloom, but because people have no idea how to proceed. And, so, they attend the sermons of Moqtada Al Sadr, who stands before his congregants dressed in a shroud, in order to prepare his flock to go where he intends to lead them.

We have learned a lesson about social conscience in the modern age--and this, too, is hardly new. In the twentieth century, crimes on the hugest scale took place in the open, yet somehow, through the alchemies of political ideology, the crimes were rendered invisible and thus were allowed to continue unimpeded. This has been Iraq's experience precisely. Saddam launched his slaughters 25 years ago, and, in the Western countries, everyone knew, yet most people managed not to see, and no one ever succeeded in organizing a truly mass protest.

A truly large and powerful protest movement took to the streets all over the Western world only in February 2003--and this was not to denounce the terrible dictatorship, but to prevent an invasion from overthrowing the terrible dictatorship. Those were the largest mass protests in the history of the world. Some of the protesters marched in a mood of cautious practicality, fearful that overthrowing Saddam might unleash still worse horrors, or might undermine the manhunt for Al Qaeda. But there was also in those marches, and in the larger mood of the moment, an unmistakable moral fervor--an outraged feeling that invading Iraq was a criminal act.

Some of the protesters invoked "just war" theory. In "just war" theory, to invade a country in order to stop massacres currently underway is deemed perfectly just. But to send in armies to rescue the survivors after the massacres have ended is deemed unjust. The marchers in 2003 gazed at Iraq and saw plainly enough that massacres had come to an end. (And logically so: The survivors had already been clubbed into submission, and no Iraqi was going to rise in rebellion ever again.) And the marchers therefore swelled in moral indignation.

Some of the protesters invoked the authority of the United Nations. The United Nations was founded in 1945 in a spirit of anti-Nazism, in order to struggle against every kind of racist and totalitarian state that might reflect Nazi or Nazi-like influences. This has always been a source of the U.N.'s singular prestige. The Baath party, on the other hand, was founded in 1943 (originally in Damascus) in a spirit of pro-Nazism, in order to adapt the racist and totalitarian ideas of Europe for the Arab world. The whole purpose of the United Nations, from a 1945 point of view, is to rid the world of parties like the Baath.

But the United Nations is also a parliament of states, eager to protect its members from one another. In 2003, the United Nations had to choose between humanitarianism and the sanctity of borders. The United Nations chose. And, all over the world, people came to look on the invasion as a terrible wrong yet again--an affront to the moral legitimacy of the parliament of states.

And how did the peace marchers react, afterward, to the mass graves and other discoveries? The abstract principles of "just war" and U.N. legitimacy pressed on one side of the balance and the human realities of extreme suffering pressed on the other. And the abstractions were found to be weightier. That is a main reason why a number of wealthy countries around the world have declined to send aid to the suffering Iraqis, even though everyone can now see how desperate are the needs. It is a matter of principle.



wo: We have learned that, in northern Iraq, the Kurds, for all their suffering (the genocide and gassings of 1988, the 4,000 villages destroyed, the million refugees, et cetera), have nonetheless put together a fairly healthy society, duly appointed with viable opposition parties and newspapers and even wise leaders. These successes owe something to Kurdistan's difference from the rest of Iraq. In the rest of Iraq, the ideological legacy of the Baath party has proved to be lamentably hardy, even among people who were fervent enemies of the Baath--a legacy of anti-liberalism, conspiracy theories, and racist hatreds.

But the Kurds were always an object of Baathist hatred. And this may have permitted the Kurdish provinces to shuck off the larger ideology with relative ease. Then, too, the Kurds have benefited from 13 years of military intervention by U.S. and British forces (and even by the French, at the start). America is an impatient country, but not always, it turns out, and this is good news.

And so, during this last year we have learned that people who smirk at putting the words "liberal democracy" and "Iraq" into a single sentence ought to reduce their smirk by 20 percent, in proportion to Iraq's Kurdish population. We have learned that, in Kurdistan, the democratic left has turned out to be especially strong. And we have learned that, in some of the world's liberal democracies, other democratic leftists couldn't care less. "They shall not pass" was the slogan of the left in the Spanish Civil War. "Yes, they will," is the slogan of Spanish socialism today. Iraqi success, as much as Iraqi suffering, turns out to be invisible in the modern world.



hree: We have learned that there are many paths to hell, and one of those paths is called the "National Security Strategy" of 2002. This is the White House document that affirmed U.S. hegemony over everyone else as the national goal and preemptive war as the policy--two ideas that were guaranteed to strike terror in half the world. The statement affirmed, "For most of the 20th century, the world was divided by a great struggle over ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus freedom and equality. That great struggle is over"--which, in regard to the Muslim world, is simply not the case.

Yet, this most wrongheaded of national security strategies expressed the mentality that governed the invasion--the hubris and the indifference toward waging a battle of ideas. A good many people always dreaded the probable effect of this set of attitudes, and I'm reassured to see, when I glance back at my own writings and statements from the weeks before the invasion, that I, too, warned against Bush's approach. I participated in a New Republic symposium very much like this present exercise early in March 2003, and I howled piteously about the president's rhetoric, ignorance, and Hobbesian brutishness, and concluded by declaring myself "terrified" at the dangers he was courting--terrified that American power, stripped of liberal principles, was going to end up as no power at all ("Resolved," March 3, 2003).

And then, like everyone else who had issued a few warnings, I had to figure out what to do when these warnings turned out to be on the mark. I responded by devoting most of this past year to composing op-eds, conference papers, Q&As, and statements of every shape and size, and lobbing these things into the pages of newspapers and magazines in some 15 or 20 countries in a one-man campaign to minimize whatever sorry consequences the National Security Strategy and sundry related White House policies might be having on world opinion and events in Iraq.

I tried to persuade people that severe oppression justifies intervention, no matter what other explanations Bush may have offered; that Baathism and radical Islam are extremist movements with a visible link to European fascism and have worked together to achieve their shared ideal, the human bomb; that a great struggle over totalitarian ideas is precisely the issue in Iraq; that Muslim liberals do exist in both Iraq and Afghanistan (though I am willing to be tolerantly flexible about the definition of liberalism, under the circumstances), and merit our support; that liberalism's gain will be terrorism's loss; and that every country in the liberal democratic world has a role to play, even if certain passages in the damnable National Security Strategy might suggest otherwise.

This, you may say, has surely been a quixotic way to spend a year. But, in distributing these opinions to the world, I have learned one more thing, which is that, in spite of everything you may have heard, opinions like these do enjoy some support, here and there, even among the journalists and intellectuals of Western Europe. I suppose the White House itself has become dimly aware of the appeal of these arguments. The president's speeches have certainly taken to beating an anti-totalitarian tattoo lately, which you would never have predicted from his National Security Strategy or his initial justifications for the war in Iraq.

Some of his speeches have been rather good. I would have applauded him at the Air Force Academy in early June. He laid out a more coherent explanation of the Iraq war than ever before. But these speeches have had no impact. It is because they have come too late, and people don't know whether to take Bush's words seriously anymore, and because the newspapers don't even print these speeches (a big mistake, on their part). Anyway, as a recent convert to the cause of idealism against totalitarianism, the president can never seem to get his new message entirely right. He goes on about World War II and the early cold war. But the obvious place to begin, if he wants to undo his old errors, is to speak about the principles and lessons of Kosovo.

The people I have encountered around the world who root for liberal victories in Iraq tend to be the very people who dragged their various countries into the Kosovo war. The White House might pause to reflect that reconstructing the alliance of 1999 ought to be a lot easier to do than reconstructing the alliances that defeated fascism in 1945 or formed to combat communism in 1949. But Bush is not going to sing the virtues of the Kosovo war--or has he changed his mind about this, too? In my one-man campaign, therefore, I have thrown in a few extra points, touching on Bush--a few remarks to acknowledge that America's president does make people cringe, and that, even so, in the wars presently taking place between liberalism and extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the liberals do need our aid. I have found that, in most places, the best way to call for solidarity is to begin by deploring the policies, character, rhetoric, culture, political tradition, and diplomacy of America's president. People become surprisingly open-minded if you begin this way.

To be honest, I have come to notice a weak point in arguments like mine. The weak point rests on a perhaps too-easy assumption that I have tended to make ever since the Kosovo war. This is the assumption that, regardless of a given president's views, the U.S. military can be counted on to be disciplined, professional, and reasonably skillful at the tasks of modern war. The U.S. military and its allies did seem to be pretty effective in Kosovo--even if the Air Force accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy. They seem to have done well enough in Afghanistan, too--though, maybe in Afghanistan, the other shoe has yet to drop. But the news from Iraq makes me wonder if President Bush's armed forces are the same armed forces that used to operate so skillfully under (the slitted eyes of tough-guy readers widen in horror) President Clinton. Military professionals can't outperform their commanders back in Washington, I suppose.



our: I am dreading what some people claim already to have learned from the blunders in Iraq. Even now, some people are saying: You see! There's no point in overthrowing dictators by force! (Though many dictators have been forcibly overthrown, to good effect--from Germany to Afghanistan.) And no point in trying to do good for anyone else! (Though humanitarian intervention has had its successes, from Kosovo to East Timor, not to mention Kurdistan.)

The U.S. failure in Somalia led to a different kind of U.S. failure in Rwanda. There will surely be Rwandas in the future--there is one right now in Darfur, Sudan (where the ethnic cleansers come out of the same mix of radical Islamism and Arab nationalism that has caused so much suffering in many other places, including our own places). Who in his right mind is going to call for U.S. intervention? Doubtless, in the future, when things are not so grim for us, some people will, in fact, call for U.S. interventions, and justly so. And yet, other people are going to say, Oh, right, and let's put Donald Rumsfeld in charge. And this will be a devastating reply.



ive: We have learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald's axiom--about intelligence as the ability to hold in mind two contradictory thoughts at the same time--has a corollary in the field of emotion. Sometimes you also have to hold in your heart two contradictory emotions. This is difficult. To understand Saddam Hussein and the history of modern Iraq, you have to feel anger--or else you have understood nothing.

But what if, in addition to feeling anger at Saddam (and at Sadr in his shroud, and at Mussab Al Zarqawi with his knife, and at Saddam's army, which was organizing suicide terrorists even before the invasion), you have also come to feel more than a little anger at George W. Bush? What if you gaze at events in Iraq and say to yourself: Things did not have to be this way. We could have presented a human rights case to the world, instead of trying to deceive people about weapons and conspiracies--and we would have ended up with more allies, or, at least, with allies who understood the mission.

We could have applied the lessons of Kosovo, which would have meant dispatching a suitable number of soldiers. We could have protected the government buildings and the National Museum, and we could have co-opted Saddam's army--further lessons from Kosovo. We could have believed Saddam when he threatened to wage a guerrilla war in Baghdad. We could have prepared in advance to broadcast TV shows that Iraqis wanted to watch. We could have observed the Geneva Conventions. (What humiliation in having to write such a sentence!) We could have--but I will stop, in order to ask: What if, in mulling these thoughts, you find that angry emotions toward George W. Bush are seeping upward from your own patriotic gut?

Here is the challenge: to rage at Saddam and other enemies, and, at the same time, to rage in a somewhat different register at Bush, and to keep those two responses in proper proportion to one another. That can be a difficult thing to do, requiring emotional balance, maturity, and analytic clarity--a huge effort.

It is said that Bush should have asked America as a whole to make large efforts and sacrifices--and not just the soldiers and civilian workers who have put themselves in danger. The complaint is unfair. Bush has asked a great deal of America. He has asked us to draw on our emotional balance, maturity, and analytic clarity: the qualities that are needed to help us distinguish our feelings about the enemy from our feelings about the commander in chief. To distinguish between outright hatred and a certain kind of contempt. And so we have learned how to do this--the final thing we have learned during this past year. And we will have to go on learning how to do this, perhaps for a few months, perhaps for a few years.



Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism.

DESPITE EVERYTHING, THE RIGHT WAR.
Hard Truth
by John McCain
Post date: 06.17.04
Issue date: 06.28.04

ast August, during my first trip to Iraq, I was struck not by hostility toward the United States for toppling Saddam Hussein--I encountered none--but by a burning ambition among Iraqis to build their country anew. Nothing I saw then and nothing I have learned since has changed my conviction that the war was just. We were right to liberate Iraq and end Saddam's threat to the world.

Still, we have learned some bitter lessons in the process. Our intelligence failed--we greatly overestimated Iraq's weapons of mass destruction while underestimating Saddam's destruction of Iraq's human capital. We invaded Iraq with enough troops to topple the regime, but not enough to prevent looting, stabilize the country, or maintain security. The administration misjudged the natural nationalism of the Iraqi people and hesitated to hand them true power over their own affairs--an error that has compounded the sense of unwanted occupation that prevails in some parts of the country. Yet, while we have made costly mistakes and encountered serious obstacles, the decision to invade Iraq was the correct one, on both security and moral grounds.



y early 2003, the status quo Iraq policy--a kind of weak containment that no longer enjoyed much international support--was crumbling and simply could not be sustained. The sanctions regime no longer constrained Saddam's ability to spend money as he wished, and the regime was growing stronger, not weaker. Critics around the world were demanding that sanctions be lifted, U.S. and British warplanes were taking frequent fire in the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, thousands of American troops were based in Saudi Arabia to deter Saddam, and Iraq remained in violation of 17 Security Council resolutions. Things were falling apart.

Then there were the weapons of mass destruction. Former chief weapons inspector David Kay has said that "we were almost all wrong," and, at this point, it is hard to argue with his assessment. I am serving on the commission that will examine prewar intelligence failures, and we will get to the bottom of this critical issue. But, while supporters of the war probably erred in depending too heavily on WMD as the basis for their argument, the key word in Kay's phrase is "all." Let's recall the facts as we knew them in March 2003. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons and might be pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Most European intelligence services agreed that Saddam had active WMD programs. Even Hans Blix and his U.N. inspectors, often critics of U.S. positions, acknowledged that Baghdad may have been concealing weapons of mass destruction. If Saddam had secretly destroyed the weapons he was believed to possess, he had numerous opportunities to document this destruction and announce it to the world. But he did not do so.

At the same time, the world was painfully familiar with Saddam's use of WMD in the past, including his chemical attacks on Iranians and Kurds. We knew that Saddam was by far the most belligerent leader in the region, having invaded and pillaged Kuwait, launched missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel, killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, and attempted to assassinate a former American president. We also knew of Saddam's past involvement in terrorism and his hatred of America. And we knew that, even if Saddam's WMD programs were destroyed, he planned to restart them once the time was right--presumably, once sanctions had fallen apart, he had his hands on billions of dollars in oil revenue, and international attention was again distracted. This was the situation in early 2003: The threat was grave and gathering.

But, even if Saddam had forever abandoned his WMD ambitions, it was still right to topple the dictator. I supported humanitarian intervention in order to stop genocide in Kosovo, and I wish the United States had acted--with force if necessary--to stop genocide in Rwanda. In neither of these places were America's vital national security interests at stake. But our national values were: The United States should not stand silently by in the face of massive humanitarian destruction. Time and time again, the world has witnessed vast brutality, done nothing, and then said "never again." In Iraq last year, we ensured that Saddam could never again slaughter Iraqis.

Added to this justification for war were the potential benefits to the region--the ripple effects that a free and democratic Iraqi state can still have on the Middle East. Naysayers have accused hawks of playing dice with people's lives: How could we possibly know that a democratic Iraq would have a demonstration effect on the region? On one level, they are correct; we cannot know. But we did know what would happen if we didn't try. The ossified situation in the Middle East, with its utter lack of political freedom or economic opportunity for millions of men and women, helps breed murderous ideologies that threaten the United States. And the region's autocratic but pro-American regimes are increasingly incapable of stifling these deadly, anti-Western tendencies in their own people. The Saudi regime pledges its love and respect for the United States, yet 15 of 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi. Establishing a democratic Iraq in the heart of the region was, and remains, our best chance for encouraging the necessary transformation of the Middle East. Already, the effects of Iraq are being felt: A major reform conference recently took place in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Arab League has endorsed a reform agenda.



o, in the end, we had essentially three choices--deal with Saddam early, while we could; deal with Saddam later, after sanctions had lost force, he had resuscitated his weapons programs, and more Iraqis had lost their lives; or simply sit back and hope for the best. We were right to act. And we have paid a high price for our noble ambitions--over 800 Americans dead, well over $100 billion and counting spent on the war, disgrace at Abu Ghraib. But, when I stood in August at the mass grave at Hilla, where 10,000 Iraqis were executed--some tied together and shot so as to save bullets--I did not wish to take it all back. We believed we would be greeted as liberators, and in many places we have been--not everywhere, to be sure, but, during my visit to the country, there was widespread thanks for the coalition.

Should we have done things differently? Of course. We should have worked harder before the war to get more European allies on board and offered greater political support to those nations that did join our coalition. We should have invaded with more troops, acted more quickly to stop looting, stabilized key cities, secured arms depots and borders, and established checkpoints in key areas. We should have handed power more rapidly to Iraqis. But were we wrong to invade? No. On the biggest question of all--whether Saddam had to go, by force if necessary--we were right. I would do it again today.



John McCain is the senior senator from Arizona.

IS THE VIETNAM SYNDROME BACK?
Fires Next Time
by Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Post date: 06.18.04
Issue date: 06.28.04

A year and a half ago, I voted to give President Bush the authority to use force in Iraq. I still believe my vote was just--but the president's use of that authority was unwise in ways I never imagined. I've served with seven presidents during my 32 years in the Senate. Four of them--Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush--were governors who came to office with virtually no foreign policy experience. I assumed that Bush would do what his predecessors had done: pick the smartest people on his side of the aisle, encourage them to argue and advocate--and keep an open mind.

Consequently, I thought I could be more effective working behind the scenes with those in the administration who generally shared my views than I could lobbing partisan bombs in public. I was encouraged in this course by the president's initial reaction to September 11: Instead of lashing out, he looked for international support, building a case and a coalition before attacking Afghanistan. Conferring regularly with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, I kept most of my criticism private and publicly praised the administration when it did what I thought was right, to the occasional consternation of some of my Democratic colleagues.

In the long run-up to Iraq, I expected the president to follow a similar course, siding not with the ideologues in his administration but with the cooler heads in Powell's camp and with the political hands in Karl Rove's shop (polling data showed the American people wanted Bush to go to Congress and the United Nations and to try everything short of war before invading Iraq).

At first, that is what he did. He resisted the advice of some in his administration to attack Iraq immediately after September 11. He ignored those who urged him to bypass the United Nations, and he similarly rejected the advice of his own White House legal counsel, who said it was not necessary to go to Capitol Hill for support.

When the president did come to Congress in September 2002, authorizing the use of force made sense. Following the 1991 Gulf war, the United Nations had ordered Iraq to declare and destroy its weapons of mass destruction capabilities unconditionally. But, instead of doing so, Saddam Hussein spent a decade playing cat and mouse with the U.N. inspectors sent to verify his compliance with the Security Council's demands. The international community's need to enforce these U.N. resolutions provided a compelling case for war. After all, absent enforcement, such rules would become meaningless, and the international system of laws and norms, which benefits the United States more than any other country, would be badly undermined.

To be sure, many others cheat on or ignore the rules. But Iraq was the perfect storm. Saddam was a sadistic dictator who had used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians, murdered tens of thousands of Shia, and fired Scud missiles at Israel. He posed a permanent threat to his neighbors. If we had allowed the sanctions system to collapse, or even atrophy, and left Saddam alone for five years with billions of dollars in oil revenue, I'm convinced he would have acquired a nuclear weapon--intelligence suggested he still wanted one--thereby dramatically changing the strategic equation in the Middle East.

The draft resolution the White House initially sent to Congress would have given the president extraordinarily broad authority to wage war. Senator Richard Lugar and I joined forces to significantly restrict that mandate. While the alternative resolution we proposed was not enacted, it helped force the administration to accept more limited terms. The objective of the authorization Congress ultimately endorsed was disarmament, not regime change. The rationale was enforcement of the relevant U.N. resolutions as opposed to preemption of a gathering threat. The scope of the authorization was narrowed from allowing Bush to use force anywhere in the Middle East to Iraq specifically. And the desirability of enlisting international support was made very clear. In voting for the resolution, I believed Congress was giving the president a strong hand to play at the United Nations whereby he could convince the world to speak with one voice to Saddam: Disarm or be disarmed. If he failed to listen and forced us to act, at least we would have the world with us.

But, as pragmatists in the administration like Powell labored to keep the focus on enforcement, the ideologues were trying to use Iraq to ensconce a new doctrine for U.S. foreign policy: military preemption. The right to act preemptively against an imminent threat has always been a weapon in our foreign policy arsenal. And, while deterrence and containment got us through the cold war, after September 11 there was legitimate concern that they would not suffice against a stateless enemy with WMD. Unfortunately, the administration tried to turn preemption from a necessary option to a one-size-fits-all strategy--a strategy to which other countries roundly objected. Using Iraq as the test case for this new doctrine made little sense because Iraq posed no near-term threat to U.S. security, and it made it infinitely harder for us to get international backing, thereby planting the seeds for some of our current troubles.

Nevertheless, by the end of 2002, the president had sided with the ideologues. He allowed military strategy to trump diplomatic efforts. He hyped intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs to create a sense of urgency. And he gave up on securing more international support when he abandoned the effort to pass a second Security Council resolution. As a result, we rushed to war on misguided premises. We're paying a price for that haste today.



I've asked myself many times whether there is more Congress could and should have done to slow the rush to war, even after we authorized the use of force, but the truth is that many of us repeatedly warned the administration about the mistakes it was making.

First, we urged the administration to plan for the day after an invasion of Iraq. Eight months before the war, Lugar and I wrote in The New York Times, "[W]hen Saddam Hussein is gone, what would be our responsibilities? This question has not been explored but may prove to be the most critical. ... Given Iraq's strategic location, its large oil reserves and the suffering of the Iraqi people, we cannot afford to replace a despot with chaos. We need to assess what it would take to rebuild Iraq economically and politically." Experts at hearings we convened, think-tank studies, and even some in the administration itself--such as the authors of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project--predicted many of the problems we now face: the sorry state of Iraq's infrastructure, the likelihood of postwar looting and resistance, the impossibility that Iraq's oil revenue would pay for reconstruction, the need for 5,000 international police to train the Iraqis, and the folly of relying on exiles with no constituencies in Iraq.

Second, many of us implored the administration to build an effective coalition. Not because we needed a single foreign soldier to win the war, but because we needed them to secure the peace and to increase the legitimacy of our temporary, but necessary, occupation of Iraq. Because Iraq posed no imminent threat to our security, we could have taken the time to do it right. For some of our allies, such as France and Germany, war probably was never an option, but, according to my sources (and many reports in the media), for the price of a 30-day delay, we could have convinced a majority of the Security Council to support a second U.N. resolution.

Third, many in Congress questioned the administration's plan to go into Iraq with relatively few troops in order to validate a new theory of warfare and invalidate the Powell Doctrine, which called for the use of overwhelming force in any conflict. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was ridiculed for suggesting it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq. He looks prescient today. The failure to heed such warnings made it difficult to secure post-Saddam Iraq and produced a power vacuum that was filled by militias, insurgents, and criminals.

Fourth, many of us warned the administration that it would take years, not months, to train Iraqis to provide for their own security. When Senators Chuck Hagel, Dick Lugar, and I went to Baghdad last summer, American experts on the ground told us it would take five years to train an Iraqi police force of 75,000 and three years to train an Iraqi army of 40,000. But the administration insisted on putting 200,000 Iraqis in uniform right away, and, as a result, only about 10 percent of the police and army now operating in Iraq have been fully trained. Virtually none are adequately equipped. While many have acted with incredible bravery, others have abandoned their posts, and some have even taken up arms against us.

In the months following the war, many of us have sounded like broken records, repeatedly calling on the president to unite the international community in helping reconstruct Iraq. At the end of major combat operations, when our apparent success gave us the high ground, many who sat out the war were ready to help--if we had just asked. Both France and Germany publicly volunteered police trainers, for example, and last December, French President Jacques Chirac told me he would support nato involvement in Iraq, though it's clear today that France is very unlikely to send troops. Instead of soliciting such assistance, the administration tried to deny its critics postwar reconstruction contracts and served "freedom toast" on Air Force One. Maybe there was no way to convince France and Germany to send troops to Iraq. But, since Saddam was toppled, we've denied ourselves the help of tens of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Turks, and others. I hope the administration's belated success in securing a new U.N. resolution begins to change that dynamic.



Much has been said about the potential consequences of failure in Iraq--how it would provide a new haven for terrorists, deal a blow to reformers and modernizers throughout the region, and encourage radicals in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But perhaps failure's most pernicious legacy will be a further hardening of the Vietnam syndrome that afflicts some in the Democratic Party--a distrust of the use of American power.

That syndrome is one reason why, from day one, many of us in Congress pressed the president to level with the American people about what would be required to prevail in Iraq. But he didn't. He didn't tell them that well over 100,000 troops would be needed for well over two years. He didn't tell them the cost would surpass $200 billion--and far exceed Iraq's oil revenue. He didn't tell them that our children and grandchildren would pay the bill because of his refusal to rescind even a small portion of the tax cut he gave to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. He didn't tell them that, even after paying such a heavy price, success was not assured, because no one had ever succeeded at forcibly democratizing a nation in the Middle East, let alone an entire region.

As a result, today those who recognize that we must persevere in Iraq risk losing public support. Americans sense that our policy is adrift and that we do not have a plan for success. Worse, they may conclude that this is what happens when we venture abroad. Someday, probably sooner rather than later, there will be another Slobodan Milosevic or another Saddam, and the profound mistakes in Iraq will make it harder to generate domestic and international political support for the use of force. That is a legacy we can ill afford.

Maybe, as some argue, so many mistakes have been made in Iraq that it is impossible to turn the corner. Anti-American attitudes and a nascent warlordism may already be so deeply entrenched that there is little we can do to succeed. It would be foolhardy to deny that possibility. But it would be even more foolhardy, and dangerous, to accept failure as inevitable and move to cut our losses. Despite the naysayers, it is not too late. But only the president can alter our course in Iraq. As he did when Congress first authorized him to use force, the president has the choice of using his power effectively or squandering it to satisfy ideological predilections. Let us hope he has grown wiser in the past year.



Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Were We Wrong?
by the Editors

Post date: 06.16.04
Issue date: 06.28.04

This magazine supported the Iraq war for two reasons, one primarily strategic, one primarily moral. The strategic reason was simple: We considered war the only way to ensure that Saddam Hussein never acquired a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration spoke about "weapons of mass destruction"--lumping biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons together and making the former appear more menacing by their association with the latter. But we believed Iraqi chemical and biological weapons constituted a threat only if transferred to Al Qaeda--a scenario for which there was no evidence. An Iraqi bomb, by contrast, would by its mere existence transform the Middle Eastern balance of power, vaulting Saddam toward his long-standing goal of regional domination. To assume a nuclear-tipped Iraq could be deterred--given Saddam's history of reckless miscalculation and mass murder--struck us as naïve.

Many opponents of the war also considered a nuclear Iraq intolerable. But they believed that containment--the system of inspections, sanctions, and no-fly zones upon which the world had relied since 1991--could prevent such an outcome. We were less sanguine. The further the Gulf war receded into memory, the harder America's European and Middle Eastern allies pushed to weaken--and ultimately end--the sanctions regime. Inspections, already undermined by repeated Iraqi obstruction, collapsed altogether in 1998. Under U.S. pressure, the Security Council reversed this trend in late 2002 and demanded intrusive, unimpeded inspections. But we worried that, when President Bush's threats of war passed, so would the world's vigilance. And, when France, Russia, and China responded to Saddam's refusal to comply fully with the new inspections by proposing extensions, rather than the "serious consequences" promised in U.N. Resolution 1441, we felt our pessimism vindicated. The world's long-term will to deny Saddam a nuclear weapon seemed weak. Saddam's hunger to acquire one seemed self-evident.

Today, it no longer seems so self-evident. More than a year after the fall of Baghdad, the United States has found no evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program. Iraq's nuclear scientists say there was none. The central assumption underlying this magazine's strategic rationale for war now appears to have been wrong.

Perhaps Saddam was merely biding his time, waiting for sanctions to be lifted before resuming his nuclear efforts in earnest. Given his history, that strikes us as a plausible interpretation of events. Which is why, even knowing what we know now, Saddam may still have been a threat.

But saying he was a threat does not mean he was a threat urgent enough to require war. We lack John Kerry's confidence that waiting to confront Iraq would have produced a broader coalition for attack. France, Russia, and China would likely always have feared a U.S. beachhead in the Arab world more than they feared Saddam. But waiting to confront Iraq would have allowed the United States to confront more immediate dangers. In late 2002, Al Qaeda was regrouping in southern Afghanistan and launching a campaign to destabilize not only the government in Kabul, but also the nuclear-armed government in Islamabad. In Iran, evidence was mounting that a regime with far closer terrorist ties than Saddam's, really was trying to build a nuclear bomb. In North Korea, a regime with a record of trading nuclear secrets, was building several.

Resources are finite. To defeat and occupy Iraq, the United States has transferred special operations units from the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Because our military is stretched so thin in Iraq, we cannot threaten military action in Iran or North Korea, which has reduced our diplomatic leverage. The tradeoffs even extend to the nonmilitary sphere. The Bush administration's refusal to adequately fund security for U.S. chemical and nuclear plants, for inspections at our ports, and for the police officers and firemen who would be the first to respond to a terrorist attack is well-documented. Absent its enormous expenditures in Iraq, the administration could have far better addressed these threats--threats more urgent than a tyrant in Baghdad with nuclear dreams, but no nuclear plans.

Should we have known that the key assumption underlying our strategic rationale for war would prove false? By early 2003, it was becoming clear that at least two pieces of evidence the administration cited as proof of Saddam's nuclear program--his supposed purchase of uranium from Niger and his acquisition of aluminum tubes for a supposed nuclear centrifuge--were highly dubious. By mid-February, Mohammed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), announced that his agency's inspectors had "found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq."

In retrospect, we should have paid more attention to these warning signs. But, at the time, there seemed good reason not to. After all, Saddam had tried desperately to build a bomb before the first Gulf war. While there was no proof he had revived this nuclear program in the '90s, he acted like a guilty man--relentlessly impeding inspections, even though such behavior perpetuated the sanctions that ravaged his people and made him an international pariah. Even after he allowed IAEA inspectors to return in late 2002, he denied them unfettered access to Iraqi nuclear scientists--although, by then, the cost of noncompliance was more than just continued sanctions; it was war. And, beyond Saddam's past history and current behavior, there were the claims of American --and foreign--intelligence. In October 2002, the National Intelligence Estimate, the combined assessment of America's various intelligence agencies, stated that "all intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons." We know now that some experts didn't agree, but few outside the administration thought so at the time. Indeed, even most opponents of the war assumed Iraq was trying to build a bomb. We feel regret--but no shame.

ut, if our strategic rationale for war has collapsed, our moral one has not. In the '90s, this magazine supported military intervention to prevent slaughter in Bosnia, Kosovo, and (unsuccessfully) Rwanda. And, in the process, we learned that stopping genocide brings unexpected rewards. Because the United States went to war twice in the Balkans, southeastern Europe is now largely at peace, increasingly democratic, and slowly integrating into Europe. By contrast, in Rwanda, where the United States stood by, genocide's aftershocks have helped plunge much of Central Africa into war, killing millions and destabilizing an entire region.

By 2003, of course, Iraq was no longer the scene of genocide. But it remained among the ghastliest regimes of our time, a moral cancer at the center of a region whose pathologies were threatening the world. In the Balkans, as well as in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, we had seen that decency in one country often begets decency in its neighbors. At some point in the '80s or '90s, each region had reached a political tipping point. And, while we did not think the overthrow of Saddam could, by itself, produce one in the Middle East, we hoped it would shift the balance--showing the Arab world's besieged liberals that the forces of ignorance, fanaticism, and bigotry were no longer on the march.

In the year since Saddam's statue fell, those hopes have suffered some devastating setbacks. Iraqis, who we hoped (and still hope) will become a model for their region, have proved more susceptible to its pathologies than we expected. Fanatical Islam, America--hatred, and a penchant for conspiracy theories--all forces we hoped a free Iraq would undermine--have instead undermined our efforts to build liberal institutions. And, in our inability to provide democracy's fundamental prerequisite--security--we have undermined ourselves.

As a result, this war's moral costs have been higher than we foresaw. The deaths of any Americans, and any innocent Iraqis, would have been painful. But, because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush refused to listen to their generals and send enough troops, hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis have died needlessly. Because Rumsfeld, Bush, and Attorney General John Ashcroft winked at torture, it will take years for America to regain the moral credibility it needs to effectively champion human rights. And, just as incompetence in Somalia led to inaction in Rwanda, the Iraq war could--in a terrible irony--turn Americans against intervention the next time innocents are slaughtered.

With all these tragedies, how can there still be a moral case for the war in Iraq? Because Iraqis today--no matter how scared and how bitter--are, in some meaningful sense, free. From the hundreds of Iraqi newspapers to the roughly 40 new Iraqi political parties to the local councils being elected across the country, Iraqis are developing the independent civil society and open politics that the Middle East desperately needs. Could this embryonic freedom be extinguished? Of course. Given the militias roaming the country, Iraq's political future could well be decided by guns rather than ballots. If another dictator murders his way to power, or the country dissolves into violent fiefdoms, the war will have proved not just a strategic failure, but a moral one as well.

But that is clearly not what Iraqis want. Polls show that most Iraqis desire a democracy with Islamic characteristics and think they will achieve one. Prominent Iraqis like Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani don't denounce the United States for bringing too much democracy, but for not bringing it quickly enough.

And, throughout the Arab and Muslim world, people are watching. They may not hate America any less than they did before the war--for the time being, they may even hate it more. But, with the fall of Iraq's dictator, they can finally envision the fall of their own. And the new discourse emerging in Iraq is reverberating across its borders, changing what is conceivable. In March, demonstrators gathered outside the parliament building in Damascus, demanding an end to the country's longstanding state of emergency. A few days later, Kurds rioted in the country's northeast, prompting eleven Syrian human rights groups to blame the unrest on "the absence of democratic life and public freedoms." That same month, a group of prominent Arab intellectuals and activists met in Alexandria, Egypt, where they issued what famed Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim called "a sort of Arab Magna Carta" demanding reform. "In the Middle East today, you talk about food, you talk about football--and you talk about democracy," a young Egyptian political scientist named Mohammed Kamal recently told Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl. "There is a serious debate going on in the Arab world about their own societies. The United States has triggered this debate."

The outcome of that debate is in Arab hands, not American ones. Even in Iraq, although we must still assist as best we can, our control is slipping away. Ultimately, it is this new, bewildering, liberating debate, rather than U.S. force of arms, upon which our hopes for Iraq, and the whole Arab world, now rest. Americans no longer have the power to redeem this war. But Iraqis still can.

A Moral Chernobyl
Prepare for the worst of Abu Ghraib.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 14, 2004, at 1:46 PM PT


In a recent public debate, so I was told, an American officer referred to the Abu Ghraib scandal as a "moral Chernobyl." You might think that this was overstating matters, even if in one important sense—because Chernobyl was morally an accident, albeit in some ways a "systemic" one—it is actually understating them.

But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.

So far, the press has focused on the questions "who knew" and "how far up did it go?" I'm equally interested in the question of how far down it has gone and how widespread it is. As Seymour Hersh has pointed out, the original imperative for harsh measures came from a Defense Department, and by extension a White House, that was under intense pressure to get results in the battle against al-Qaida and felt itself hampered by nervous lawyers. Almost the whole of public opinion is complicit in this, as is shown by the fury over the administration's failure to pre-empt the Sept. 11 assault: a pre-emption that would almost certainly have involved some corner-cutting in the interrogation room.

Many, many people must have fantasized about getting Osama Bin Laden into some version of an orange jumpsuit and then shackling him for a while to the wrong end of a large pig. It's not very far from that mass reverie to "Hey, Mustapha, you're gonna get to really know this porker" and similar or worse depravities. So in a distressing sense—of course you can all write to me if you like and say that you never even thought about it—we face something like a collective responsibility, if not exactly a collective guilt.

However, this very voyage to the pits may be of some moral use. Nobody has yet even suggested that the disgusting saturnalia in Abu Ghraib produced any "intelligence" worth the name or switched off any "ticking bomb." How could it? It was trashily recreational. But this doesn't relieve the security forces of democratic countries from their sworn responsibility to protect us—yes us, the very people who demand results but don't especially want to know the full price of our protection.

I have a historical example to offer. In the early 1970s, there was a gigantic scandal in England over the torture of Irish Republican detainees. (Harold Evans, then editor of the Sunday Times, deserves credit for printing the facts in spite of immense government pressure not to do so—or not to do so without being accused of "helping the terrorists.") The resulting outrage led to a commission of inquiry chaired by a judge named Sir Edmund Compton. His report took a dim view of some of the methods used but said that these did not amount to "torture," at least in most cases, because those inflicting them had not derived any pleasure from doing so. At the time, I thought this must be some kind of a sick joke, perhaps derived from Monty Python or the rigors of English boarding school. ("I didn't really enjoy it, Sir." "Oh well, that's all right, then. Carry on, Perkins.") However, the government did tell the army to stop it, and it pretty much did stop, and the terrorists didn't win.

They didn't win because their idea of bombing a large Protestant community into joining a united Catholic Ireland was a bit mad to begin with. And they also didn't win because security methods became tremendously more professional. Skill, in these matters, depends on taking pains and not on inflicting them. You make the chap go through his story several times, preferably on video, and then you ask his friends a huge number of tedious questions, and then you go through it all again to check for discrepancies, and then you watch the first (very boring and sexless) video all over once more, and then you make him answer all the same questions and perhaps a couple of new and clever ones. If you have got the wrong guy—and it does happen—you let him go and offer him a ride home and an apology. And you know what? It often works. Only a lazy and incompetent dirtbag looks for brutal shortcuts so that he can get off his shift early. And sometimes, gunmen and bombers even have changes of heart, as well as mind.

Yes, but what about the ticking bomb? Listen: There's always going to be a ticking bomb somewhere. Some of these will go off, and it's just as likely to be in my part of Washington, D.C., as anywhere else. But we shall be fighting a war against jihad for decades to come. And the jihadists will continue to make big mistakes based on their mad theory. And they are not superhuman: They can be infiltrated, bribed, and turned. You don't have to tell them what time of day it is, or where they are, or when the next meal will be served. (Though it must be served.) But you must not bring in that pig or that electrode. That way lies madness and corruption and the extraction of junk confessions. So even if law and principle didn't enter into the question, we sure as hell know what doesn't work. The cranky Puritan voice of Sir Edmund Compton comes back to me down the corridor of the years: If it gives anyone pleasure, then you are doing it wrong and doing wrong into the bargain.

Is Al Qaeda Winning in Saudi Arabia?

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 7:00 AM


"We entered one of the companies' [offices], and found there an American infidel who looked like a director . . . When he turned to me, I shot him in the head, and his head exploded. We entered another office and found one infidel from South Africa, and our brother Hussein slit his throat. We asked Allah to accept [these acts of devotion] from us, and from him."



That's how Fawwaz bin Muhammad Nashami described one part of an attack last month in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 22 people. The terrorist commander, who escaped after the attack, was interviewed by Sawt al-Jihad, a journal sympathetic to al Qaeda. As translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, the interview provides both a detailed account of the attack and a vivid glimpse into the minds of the jihadists who seek to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia.

Since that attack, al Qaeda sympathizers in Saudi Arabia have killed three American military contractors and kidnapped a fourth. Their plan, according to a statement posted June 6 on an al Qaeda Web site and translated by the Washington-based SITE Institute, is to "fight and exterminate" all non-Muslims working on the Arabian peninsula.

Is the new jihadist campaign a threat to the government of Saudi Arabia, custodian of one-fourth of the world's known oil reserves?

In a piece for The Washington Post's Outlook section on Sunday, former correspondent Thomas Lippman said probably not. But several reports circulating in the international online media argue the al Qaeda campaign is gaining ground.

The Saudi government is in a "state of terminal denial and paralysis," according to Mai Yamani, a Saudi analyst based in London, interviewed by the Lebanon-based Daily Star.

"Termites of terrorism and violence are eating at the foundation of the state," said Yamani, an associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Yamani says she has been barred from working in Saudi Arabia because of her writings.

Saudi leaders "have not shown a united front in dealing with security issues or the question of reform in the country," she said.

The government has few good options: "If they embark on reforms, they are accused of bowing to the Americans... If they don't do anything, even the moderates are going to throw themselves in the arms of the jihadists. If they try to curb the power of the religious police -- the Mutawa -- they will have a backlash."

Others note the Saudi kingdom is vulnerable because of its dependence on skilled foreign workers to run the oil industry, the foundation of the royal family's power.

"The [terrorist] operations are small in number but their impact could be major, particularly within the enormous foreign labor market in Saudi Arabia that includes over six million people from all over the world," notes the London-based daily Asharq al-Awsat (in Arabic).

"Several governments in the West have predicted a mass exodus of expatriate workers from the Kingdom, reliable European sources told the News," a leading Pakistani daily.

Without these engineers, technicians and scientists, the Saudis may not be able to sustain current production levels. According to the News story, the London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest (JID) has drawn "significant parallels between the current situation in Saudi Arabia and the final months of the Shah of Iran before his flight into exile" in 1979.

But Bruce Stanley of the Associated Press reports from Saudi Arabia that while "expatriate oil workers are taking greater precautions and venturing less often outside their fortified compounds," there has been no mass exodus.

"Industry analysts and staff of the state-run oil company Saudi Aramco see little evidence yet that a surge in anti-western violence is triggering a mass departure of foreign workers," Stanley wrote in a story picked up by the Canadian Broadcasting Company and many other foreign and U.S. news outlets.

James Zogby, an Arab-American pollster writing in the Arab News, says the notion that extremists are poised to take power is "laughable."

But just because the jihadists are not about to overthrow the government does not mean they are failing.

"The decision of the United States and Great Britain to withdraw their diplomats shows the terrorist offensive has "scored noticeable success," according to Al-Quds al-Arabi (in Arabic), a Saudi-owned, London-based newspaper.

The paper said U.S. demands that the Saudi government "put more efforts into confronting the perpetrators of these attacks, dry up all their financial sources, and exchange information with the United States" are misplaced. The editors argue that U.S. pressure for a forceful crackdown on the Islamic extremists will not succeed.

"The use of security solutions might achieve some successes but they remain limited ones because the problem has political, economic, and social dimensions," they wrote. Until those problems are addressed, the attackers may be able to "achieve the aim of toppling the ruling family or turning the country into a stage for bloody chaos."

Maids vs. Occupiers
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

EIJING

Visiting India and now China in the past few months tells me how much we Americans need to finish our business in Iraq and lower our profile there — not so we can wash our hands of the idea, and necessity, of promoting reform in the Arab world, but so we can advance that effort.

We can't dictate reform to the Arabs. Look at how even a watered-down reform proposal from the G-8 summit meeting — the Broader Middle East Initiative — was received in the Arab-Muslim world. No one paid any attention to it. The whole concept was dead on arrival because it was made in America, which is now radioactive in the Arab world.

The pressure for change has to come from within, and I think it can — if we lower our profile. Then the Arab world will have to look clearly at the fact that China, India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — all the countries that provide maid service for the Saudi and other Arab ruling elites and manual labor for their construction — have leapt so far ahead with their own development that they are now taking good jobs away from America.

To put it another way, there are two ways for the U.S. to promote reform in the Arab world — where there is an ocean of untapped brainpower, particularly among women. One way is to try to dictate it, which is not working. American policy has become so unpopular in the Arab world that anti-reformers can easily delegitimize the reform process by labeling it a "U.S. plot to destroy Islam," and reformers are silenced because they don't want to be seen as promoting a made-in-America agenda.

The other way for us to promote reform is to get out of the way so people in the Middle East can see clearly that many of their maids' children — from India, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — are excelling at math, science and engineering, leaving Arab children, not to mention many American children, in the dust. (Over one million Indians work in Saudi Arabia alone.)

Only when the Arabs focus on how their maids' children are doing in the world, not what the Americans are doing in their region, will they revisit one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet Muhammad: "Seek knowledge, even unto China. That is the duty for every Muslim."

I hadn't been to China since 2001, and one of the first new things I noticed here was the number of women selling phone cards for cellphone minutes. While Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Saudi Arabia are using cellphone technology and cars to create bombs, China and India are making themselves the world's new-car manufacturing centers and are inventing new profit-making uses for Internet-enabled cellphones — none of which involve blowing anything or anyone up.

An Arab journalist friend living in London told me that there is today — sadly — an all too pervasive sense in too many quarters of the Arab world of a once-great civilization having been left behind, not unlike Weimar Germany. Because Germany was already a modern state, it created a massive military response to its humiliation: the Third Reich. "The Arabs can't," he said. "So they create bin Ladenism instead, which can't build a state, only demolish one."

So how does one get a healthy reform debate started? "You need a courageous intelligentsia," he said. "You can't have that as long as people feel besieged. The new historians in Israel only emerged during Oslo. When you feel besieged, you will never start a debate with your brother and sister. Now it is the battle against the enemy, be it real or imaginary."

All the more reason why we — the perceived enemy — need to hand over power to an elected Iraqi government, and move our troops into the background. If we can do that, I would suggest that next year the G-8 invite both India and China to join, and hold the next G-10 summit either at one of the manicured campuses of Indian outsourcing companies or in Shanghai's manufacturing hub. Then invite Arab leaders to attend. India and China were once seen as their equals.

Real change happens when people see something in those they compare themselves to, and draw their own conclusions — not when it's imposed on them. Our job was to smash Iraq's old order and lay the foundations for a new one. Now we need to lower our profile so people in that Arab-Muslim world can see clearly something we've been obstructing and they've been deliberately ignoring: that the world today wants to invest more in their maids' children than in their own children. Once that reality sinks in, so, too, will reform.

Why Schroeder Lost, and What It Means for America
By Kevin A. Hassett
Posted: Wednesday, June 16, 2004

ARTICLES
Tech Central Station
Publication Date: June 16, 2004

German Chancellor Schroeder's party suffered an astonishing defeat in the European parliamentary election, garnering less than 22 percent of the vote. The week before the election, I traveled to Berlin to participate in an economic conference. During my visit I spoke at length with German economists and politicians about the state of affairs in their country. The discussions foreshadowed nicely the election results, and gave me a very surprising perspective on the state of politics and policy in Germany.



Schroeder, recall, was far behind in the polls going up to the last election. Germans were enormously dissatisfied with the moribund state of their economy, and blamed the liberal big-government SPD party for their misery. But at the last minute, Schroeder happened upon a successful political formula. He openly and aggressively opposed the U.S. war in Iraq, and ignited a groundswell of pacifist support.



It is not really surprising that such a strategy could win an election for the SPD. The Germans have a long history (dating back to 1945 or so) of pacifism. Germans are also fond of their close relationship with the U.S., but their pacifism trumped that in this election. These opposing forces created something of a delicate balancing act for Mr. Schroeder, who needed to oppose the U.S., but not write America off. He clearly went too far, and constructed a gulf between our countries that was unthinkable a few years ago.



While this occurred, the German economy continued to fall behind, with annual GDP growth of around 1-1/2 percent and unemployment above 10 percent.



Thus a German can look at his once proud country and see an economy that has become a laughingstock with a political influence amongst successful countries that is at an all time low. One German politician at my conference summed up the nation's mood nicely when he recounted a conversation he had recently had with his child. His son asked him what Germans have to be proud of, and the saddened German parent could think of nothing. "I might have answered luxury cars," he said, "but even those are having quality problems."



The analysts in the conference unanimously pointed to one major factor when explaining the sagging German economy: labor unions and government have regulated and taxed capitalists within an inch of their lives. Mr. Schroeder has publicly advocated reforms, but the actual steps he has taken have been inconsequential. At the same time, he has revealed his emotional attachment to big government by pressuring central European countries that are joining the EU to adopt Germany's high-tax/low-growth policies.



This pressure is a nasty reminder for Germans of a lost opportunity. When the country was reunited, the SPD foisted the German regulatory state on East Germany. The result has been economic catastrophe for that former communist country. The other former communist states that had to come of age without a "big brother" have outperformed East Germany to an astonishing degree. GDP growth in Poland over the last year was almost 7 percent. The unemployment rate in former East Germany is almost 18.4 percent.



The Germans now face what is to them an unthinkable possibility. Their eastern neighbors are dramatically more successful than they are and may soon enough be richer. The costs of their lazy socialism are apparent even to their children, and the country is in a panic. "We all recognize," one participant told me, "that Germany needs its own Reagan."



As that has become obvious even to liberal Germans, it was perhaps bad luck for the SPD that Ronald Reagan died when he did. His death reminded the Germans of all that Schroeder had squandered. Germany was once an economic marvel, closely bound to the most powerful nation on earth. By choosing economic policies that are the opposite of those advocated by Reagan, and a foreign policy that offended the nation that helped unify Germany, Schroeder has taken his country down a path that is perhaps as bad as can be imagined. And the German people know it.



For the United States, the latest election is tremendous news. A chastened Schroeder will have to be a more reasonable political ally. And the pressure for the EU to adopt centralized German socialism rather than free market principles is now significantly lower than it once was. This will be a strong boon for the European economy, and will be an even bigger plus for Germany if the voter revolt begins a dramatic overhaul of its economic policies.