Bankrupt China Becomes Economic Threat
Posted May 12, 2004
By Christopher Whalen

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao promised "resolute" measures to rein in excessive economic growth.

Financial and political analysts have been predicting the demise of China's economic miracle for months now, but the latest policy shift by the Federal Reserve toward a more restrictive interest-rate posture has caused the alarm bells to ring from Hong Kong to Wall Street. The rebound of the dollar that began in February has taken the pressure off other central banks, particularly the Bank of Japan, to sop up the fiat greenbacks printed by the Fed, thus placing added upward pressure on U.S. interest rates. By no accident, April was the worst month for emerging market debt in years.
More expensive dollar credit means the end of speculative booms in markets such as China, whose economy has grown to account for 10 percent of global trade. Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, promised "resolute" measures to rein in excessive economic growth, while assuring investors that Beijing would seek to orchestrate a "soft landing," the Financial Times reports. Like Alan Greenspan at the Fed, China's communist bureaucrats have used excessive credit and investment to boost short-term economic activity, but at a dire cost in terms of future inflation. Indeed, there is great debate whether China's economy is growing or is just pumped up with cheap dollars - money proffered by the latest generation of credulous gringos.
Many Bush administration officials remind Insight that China is a corrupt, chaotic country where the central government has only a tenuous grip on events, especially in the interior of the country. Local Communist Party officials loot private companies and banks with impunity, leaving all investors - foreign and domestic - at terrible risk. Foreign banks and investors, meanwhile, are providing a critical source of foreign exchange to bolster China's authoritarian rulers, who use fantastic claims of economic performance to entice new financial and direct investment from abroad.
This reporter always keeps in mind a comment of liberal economist Lester Thurow to an investment conference in Hong Kong a few years back when the MIT sage observed that China's economic statistics were so remarkable as to be unbelievable. Few of the investment-banking types in the audience appreciated the full import of Thurow's remarks, but the bottom line is that economic data from China is even less reliable than the politically biased economic and labor statistics that emanate from Washington.
For example, China's National Bureau of Statistics reports annualized growth of 9.7 percent for the first quarter of 2004, a problem the Bush administration wishes it had. China claims to have expanded its economy at a brisk pace; 9.1 percent growth for all of 2003 and a 9.7 percent annualized growth rate for first quarter of 2004. The good news is that these numbers may indeed reflect the increase in economic activity caused by foreign dollar inflows, but the bad news is that these levels cannot be maintained, experts tell Insight.
China's statistics agency reports that investment in fixed assets in the first quarter ran 43 percent ahead of the previous year's levels. "The scale of investment in fixed assets is too large and growth is too fast," a National Bureau of Statistics spokesman told Pacific News Service. Officially, consumer prices rose 2.8 percent in the quarter, but observers in Hong Kong tell Insight that the actual rate of inflation in the major Chinese cities is running at 20 to 30 percent above annual rates. Indeed, even the International Monetary Fund said last week that China's economy is "overheating."
"By definition, a shock is something that catches us by surprise," wrote Walter Molano of BCP Securities in a missive to his clients, mostly investors who follow his research on Latin American economies. "We expect a shock from Asia, but we do not know how, when and why."
Molano warns that the Chinese economy is badly overheated and that the rise in the inflation rate well into double digits is creating factors that will decelerate the pace of Chinese economic growth. Nevertheless, he argues, "the rampant corruption and the weakness in the banking sector suggest that the controlled adjustment could manifest itself into a hard landing." Such a scenario, Molano writes, "would ricochet immediately into Latin America."
A drop in the much noted Chinese demand for commodity products, he continues, "would coincide with a large increase in production" to accommodate the market's expectations that China's voracious appetite for everything from U.S. grain to steel is insatiable. "The result would be downward gap in commodity prices, thus affecting the balance of payments for most of the region. Unfortunately, this could coincide with a rise in U.S. interest rates, creating a more worrisome situation for Latin America."
The torrid growth rates observed in China during the last several years have been a bonanza for investors and exporters, but the prospect of a sudden drop in China's demand for everything foreign implies that the Chinese central bank may need to allow the country's currency to fall. The restrictive measures put in place so far by China's authoritarian government have not yet reduced the economic surge, but there are indications that the vast speculative boom in China is nearing an end.
In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reports that prices for just about every local asset class began heading south simultaneously. Commodities, currencies, H shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and even every equity bear's safe haven - gold - are tumbling, while the U.S. dollar has experienced a sudden rejuvenation. Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that the economic constraints felt by millions of Chinese, which caused the central government to embrace a "great leap forward" via hyper economic expansion in the first place, are causing social instability, the dark menace that has followed China's history.
Keith Bradsher of the New York Times describes how a flotilla of Chinese warships sailed slowly down the length of Victoria Harbor in early May "in a rare show of force that comes as democracy advocates here say they face growing intimidation by Beijing." He continues: "Two guided-missile destroyers, four guided-missile frigates and two submarines displayed China's military strength for the first time since the territory was handed over by Britain in 1997. It marked a distinct change of tactics by Beijing. The Chinese military has been a nearly invisible presence here for the last seven years. Soldiers are required to wear civilian clothing when they leave their bases, and the main base is tucked away on an island at the harbor's western end. But today, residents here watched as a submarine sailed past the downtown Bank of China tower, designed by I.M. Pei. Sailors in dress whites lined the sides of the destroyers and frigates, and some gave friendly waves to workers on a passing tugboat."
If astute financial observers are correct and China's economy experiences another sudden "adjustment," particularly via a currency devaluation, the political ramifications may be even more important than the financial fallout. While China has hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign reserves, the imbalances in its economy, surging imports and losses hidden within corrupt banks and state-owned companies could easily wipe out these assets several times over. But then again, it is impossible to say for sure whether the financial statements of China's central bank are any more truthful than the other statistics produced by the nation's communist government.
So far, the Bush administration has been too distracted by the Iraq mess to notice that the world's largest nation is on a collision course with the wall of financial reality. The White House refused, for example, to confront China over its manipulation of its currency (thus fueling the present boom) and suppression of worker's wages (thus artificially suppressing visible inflation), in essence encouraging Beijing's self-destructive economic course. While the Bush administration likes to kid itself into thinking that China can be coaxed into embracing market norms via a policy of "engagement with leverage," say savvy China watchers, if recent history is any guide China's financial implosion is likely to confirm the market's worst fears.

Christopher Whalen is a contributing writer for Insight magazine.


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>> REWORK 1

Senator airs GOP war discomfort
May 13, 2004
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas is an old-fashioned conservative and a loyal Republican who happens to be the current chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That's why his Landon Lecture last week at his alma mater, Kansas State University, is a remarkable document. While benefitting from the most highly classified information, he is expressing the concerns of ordinary conservatives and Republicans.
The lecture paid sincere tribute to George W. Bush for the ''courage to act'' after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and in this election year Roberts is not sniping at the Republican president. Nevertheless, the former Marine officer from Dodge City, Kan., is blunt in addressing two overriding problems in the war on terror: lack of accountability in the intelligence community and a messianic desire to recast the world in the American image.
These are precisely the concerns I have heard all over the country from people who call themselves Republicans and are distraught about the U.S. adventure in Iraq. They ask questions. Who is responsible for the false forecast of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that was the immediate cause for war? Are we really intent on planting democracy throughout the Arab world? These skeptics are not about to vote for John Kerry for president, but they are very unhappy.
Roberts, unlike the previous Republican Intelligence chairman (Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama), is not calling for CIA Director George Tenet's dismissal. But he showed in his Kansas State lecture he is concerned about the lack of accountability on two major counts:
''Almost three years after 9/11, no one in the intelligence community has been disciplined, let alone fired. Almost two years since the publication of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that declared Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was reconstituting his nuclear program, no one has been disciplined or fired.''
While not mentioning Tenet by name, Roberts nailed the CIA director with this telling comment: ''Rarely is any intelligence case a 'slam dunk.''' In Bob Woodward's new book Plan of Attack, Tenet is quoted declaring weapons evidence in Iraq to be a ''slam dunk.'' These are not complaints of a backbencher, but the considered statements of a committee chairman whose long committee inquiry is due for completion this week.
Roberts' broader criticism goes beyond intelligence failure to the U.S. mission of planting the seeds of democracy on Arab soil. ''In fighting the global war against terrorism,'' he said, ''we need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts -- a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy -- by force, if necessary.'' While stressing U.S. willingness ''to use force unilaterally if necessary,'' he called it ''time for some hard-headed assessment of American interests.''
Roberts has the sense of history that the Bush policymakers seem to lack. Dating back to his days as a Marine officer, he has studied the misadventures of Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia in dealing with the same people who are proving so troublesome for the Americans more than 80 years later.
As a loyal Republican and strong Bush supporter, Roberts is torn. His president is under incessant assault from Democrats, and for this reason, Roberts comes to Bush's defense. In his Landon Lecture, he suggested ''we may transform the world for the better'' in fighting the war against terrorism.
But Bush can be faulted for lack of interest in accountability and for succumbing to messianic pretensions of spreading democracy, even though Roberts does not single out the president. The questions remain whether any official ever will pay for the intelligence failures and whether the difficulty of nation-building is a lesson learned.
Roberts is not alone among Republicans. The GOP's top two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska -- have their own misgivings. These Midwestern Republicans know their constituents are concerned about Iraq and what comes next. But how does George W. Bush adjust to these realities while fighting a shooting war and campaigning for re-election?


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>> REWORK 2

Bush Team to Rework Iraq Funding After Senate Balks
Thu May 13, 4:11 PM ET Add Politics to My Yahoo!
By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration officials said they would rework a plan for a $25 billion reserve fund for Iraq (news - web sites) operations after Republican and Democratic senators on Thursday deplored it as an effort to get "a blank check" without congressional oversight.
In a frequently testy Senate Armed Services hearing, even reliable Republican allies balked at the White House's unusual proposal to let it allocate the money to help finance Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites) operations for coming months without the approval of Congress.
"Our forefathers would have scorned such arrogance as has been demonstrated by this request," said Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat. "I'm going to support this $25 billion but we're going to put limitations on it."
Pressed by lawmakers, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House deputy budget director Joel Kaplan agreed to try to rework the plan to give Congress more oversight.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain criticized the administration's handling of Iraq, citing "mistakes that have been made which have led us to a situation which I think is very grave," and said Congress must increase its oversight.
Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry (news - web sites), a Massachusetts senator, said in a statement he would back the additional money despite voting against a previous supplemental bill for Iraq. "The situation in Iraq has deteriorated far beyond what the administration anticipated. The money is urgently needed," he said."
The White House late on Wednesday sent Congress its formal request for the $25 billion fund it says it needs until Congress acts on a larger supplemental bill next year.
BIGGER BILL EXPECTED
Wolfowitz said that bill "will certainly be much larger than $25 billion," which would push the cost next year well above the $50 billion the White House originally projected.
Under the White House plan, the reserve funds could be shifted among accounts without congressional approval, which lawmakers said would give the Pentagon (news - web sites) full control over the money, cutting Congress out of its constitutional role of overseeing expenditures.
The Senate will debate the issue next week when it takes up a $422 billion bill for defense programs.
Congress has so far sent the White House about $160 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Until last week when it suddenly asked for the $25 billion, the administration had insisted it would not seek more money for Iraq until next year, which would have put off debate on the issue until after the Nov. 2 presidential election.
Pressed by the military, which was running short of money with the heightened Iraq conflict, the White House sought the fund as a bridge until it gets a bigger bill next year.
With the Pentagon putting the monthly cost of Iraq and Afghanistan operations at nearly $5 billion, Democrats questioned why the Pentagon did not simply ask for a full supplemental spending bill instead of the reserve fund.
"There is no reason not to be direct on this issue and to acknowledge what the costs are of this war," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's top Democrat. "This is the very definition of a blank check."
Wolfowitz said the fund was needed to help the Pentagon manage its accounts until Congress acted on the larger bill next year. "You can do the arithmetic, Senator, we're not hiding the ball on what we're spending now."


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>> REWORK 3

Trade Sanctions Pile Up While Congress Fiddles
May 10, 2004 | |

If private companies worked the way Congress does, we'd probably never be able to compete in the global marketplace. Efficiency, productivity, responsiveness to changing conditions -- all seem lacking under the Capitol Dome.
Consider how long it's taking lawmakers to fix a costly problem with our tax laws.
Several years ago, the World Trade Organization ruled that certain tax breaks given by the federal government for export subsidiaries of American companies (know as "Foreign Sales Corporations," or FSCs) were illegal. That decision gave European nations the power to impose tariffs against many popular American exports, including paper, cotton and a variety of agricultural products.
Congress tried to fix the problem by passing the Extraterritorial Income Exclusion Act (ETI). The EU sued again -- and won another victory at the WTO.
More than four years later, nothing has changed. The federal government is still giving "illegal" tax breaks to American companies. So on March 1, the European Union began imposing tariffs of 5 percent on our exports. It plans to increase them by one percentage point per month up to 17 percent. The WTO has authorized sanctions that could increase the cost of American exports by up to $4 billion a year, creating a tremendous competitive disadvantage for U.S. producers.
Now, we can argue about whether the WTO should impose sanctions. It's running a big risk, since sanctions might trigger a trade war between Europe and the United States. After all, we need more free trade, not less. If sanctions put that at risk, everybody gets hurt.
Still, the United States voluntarily agreed to join the WTO, and to abide by its rulings. We should live up to our commitment, and as an added bonus, improve our domestic tax system at the same time.
Lawmakers should act immediately to repeal the FSC and ETI. They should then help American businesses by trimming corporate income tax rates. Doing so would lower tax rates and reduce the double taxation of capital income. It also would make our companies more competitive at home and abroad.
The U.S. has the world's second-highest corporate tax rate -- higher than the rates in socialist welfare states like France and Sweden. Lowering the rate is always a good idea; lowering it to settle a complaint by the EU would be even better. After all, the EU seems to be attempting to use the World Trade Organization against us, but if we lower corporate tax rates in response, we'll actually end up stronger and generate more jobs.
Unfortunately, many politicians are using this issue as an excuse to push for more special-interest tax breaks. A Senate bill, for instance, replaces the special tax break for export-oriented income with a special tax break for certain manufacturers.
Amazingly, some lawmakers want to make the bill worse. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, for example, has succeeded in tacking on a measure that would block the Bush administration's recent effort to ease government-imposed overtime regulations.
In the business world, this amendment process would be like a company insisting that if you want to buy a DVD, you must also buy some other unpopular titles that company sells, whether you liked them or not. That company wouldn't sell many discs or would quickly go out of business. In the nation's capital, this process simply rolls on, day after day.
The answer seems pretty simple. Just as companies allow you to buy only the DVDs you want, lawmakers should bring the tax reform measure up, without all the unrelated amendments, and vote on it. And the Senate tried that with what's known as a cloture vote, on March 24.
Unfortunately, parliamentary rules allowed a minority to block the will of the majority. It takes 60 votes to bring a bill to the floor, and "only" 51 senators supported the motion to invoke cloture. This is the same process, by the way, that's kept so many well-qualified judges who enjoy majority support in the Senate from being confirmed.
So far, the Senate has managed to whittle down the number of amendments from about 150 to about 80. That's still far too many. Until the world's self-proclaimed "greatest deliberative body" can agree to get rid of dozens more amendments, the bill will remain in limbo.
Sadly, in Washington, this is just business as usual. The lawmakers fiddle while sanctions pile up. And we'll all end up paying higher prices for goods and services while U.S. firms lose markets because of increased tariffs on our exports. There ought to be a law against such shenanigans. Unfortunately, we already know it would never pass.

Ed Feulner is the president of The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org), a Washington-based public policy research institute.

? 1995 - 2004 The Heritage Foundation
All Rights Reserved.




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The War that Dare Not Speak Its Name
The battle is against militant Islam, not "Terror"

By Andrew C. McCarthy

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is adapted from a speech given last month at the annual conference of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG). The theme of this year's CIAG conference was "Countering Suicide Terrorism: Risks, Responsibilities and Realities."
At any gathering of analysts, academics, and law-enforcement officers who specialize in counter-terrorism, it certainly is appropriate that we should focus on risks, responsibilities, and realities. My question, though, is whether we have the order backwards. Our most urgent imperative today is the need to confront reality. Only by doing that can we get a true understanding of the risks we face and our responsibilities in dealing with them.
What reality am I talking about?
Well, we are now well into the third year of what is called the "War on Terror." That is the language we all use, and it is ubiquitous. The tabloids and the more prestigious journals of news and opinion fill their pages with it. The 24-hour cable television stations are not content merely to repeat "War on Terror" as if it were a mantra; they actually use it as a floating logo in their dizzying set designs.
Most significant of all, the "War on Terror" is our government's top rhetorical catch-phrase. It is the way we define for the American people and the world -- especially the Islamic world -- what we are doing, and what we are about. It is the way we explain the nature of the menace that we are striving to defeat.
But is it accurate? Does it make sense? More importantly, does it serve our purposes? Does it make victory more identifiable, and hence more attainable? I humbly suggest that it fails on all these scores. This, furthermore, is no mere matter of rhetoric or semantics. It is all about substance, and it goes to the very core of our struggle.
Terrorism is not an enemy. It is a method. It is the most sinister, brutal, inhumane method of our age. But it is nonetheless just that: a method. You cannot, and you do not, make war on a method. War is made on an identified -- and identifiable -- enemy.
In the here and now, that enemy is militant Islam -- a very particular practice and interpretation of a very particular set of religious, political and social principles.
Now that is a very disturbing, very discomfiting thing to say in 21st-century America. It is very judgmental. It sounds very insensitive. It is the very definition of politically incorrect. Saying it aloud will not get you invited to chat with Oprah. But it is a fact. And it is important both to say it and to understand it.
We have a rich and worthy tradition of religious tolerance in America. Indeed, in many ways our reverence for religious practice and tolerance is why there is an America. America was a deeply religious place long before it was ever a constitutional democracy. That tradition of tolerance causes us, admirably, to bend over backwards before we pass judgment on the religious beliefs and religious practices of others. It is an enormous part of what makes America great.
It led our government, within hours of the 9/11 attacks, to announce to the world that Islam was not and is not our enemy. Repeatedly, the president himself has said it: "The 19 suicide terrorists hijacked a great religion." The message from all our top officials has been abundantly clear: "That's that; Islam off the table; no need to go deeper."
But we have the ostrich routine way too far. A commitment in favor of toleration is not the same as a commitment against examination. We have been so paralyzed by the fear of being portrayed as an enemy of Islam -- as an enemy of a creed practiced by perhaps a billion people worldwide -- that we've lost our voice on a very salient question: What will be the Islam of the 21st century? Will it be the Islam of the militants, or the Islam of the moderates? That's the reality we need to grapple with.
Let's make no mistake about this: We have a crucial national-security interest in the outcome of that struggle. We need the moderates to win. And here, when I speak of moderates, I am not talking about those who merely pay lip service to moderation. I am not talking about those who take advantage of America's benign traditions and our reluctance to examine the religious practices of others. I am not talking about those who use that blind eye we turn as an opportunity to be apologists, enablers, and supporters of terrorists.
I am talking about authentic moderates: millions of Muslims who want an enlightened, tolerant, and engaged Islam for today's world. Those people need our help in the worst way. They are losing the battles for their communities. The militants may not be a majority, but they are a vocal, aggressive minority -- and they are not nearly as much of a small fringe as we'd like to believe.
As an assistant U.S. attorney, time and time again I heard it over the last decade, from ordinary Muslims we reached out to for help -- people we wanted to hire as Arabic translators, or who were potential witnesses, or who were simply in a position to provide helpful information. People who were as far from being terrorists as you could possibly be. "I'd like to help the government," they would say, "but I can't." And it was not so much about their safety -- although there was, no doubt, some of that going on. It was about ostracism.
Repeatedly they'd tell us that the militant factions dominated their communities. These elements were usually not the most numerous, but they were the most vocal, the best networked, the best funded, and the most intimidating. Consequently, people whose patriotic instinct was to be helpful could not overcome the fear that they and their families could be blackballed if it became known that they had helped the United States prosecute Muslim terrorists. The militants had the kind of suasion that could turn whole communities into captive audiences.
This is no small matter. Events of the last decade, throughout the world, are a powerful lesson that the more insular and dominated communities become, the more they are likely to breed the attitudes and pathologies that lead to terrorist plots and suicide bombings. It's true that suicide bombers seem to defy precise psychological profiling; they come from diverse economic and educational backgrounds -- the only common thread seems to be devotion to militant Islam. But while we have not had success predicting who is likely to become a suicide bomber, it is far easier to get a read on where suicide bombers and other terrorists will come from. They come from communities where the militants dominate and those who don't accept their beliefs are cowed into submission.
SAVING OURSELVES, SAVING ISLAM
That militant Islam is our enemy is a fact. That it is the object of our war is a fact. That we need to empower real moderates is a fact. And we need to talk about these facts.
We are not helping the authentic moderates if we avoid having the conversation that so needs to be had if the militants hiding in the weeds we've created are going to be exposed and marginalized. If we fail to be critical, if we fail to provoke that discussion, it will continue to be militants who hold positions of influence and who control indoctrination in communities, madrassas, prisons, and other settings where the young, the vulnerable, and the alienated are searching for direction.
For ourselves too, and for the success of our struggle, we need to be clear that the enemy here is militant Islam. If we are to appreciate the risks to our way of life, and our responsibilities in dealing with them, we need to understand that we are fighting a religious, political and social belief system -- not a method of attack, but a comprehensive ideology that calls for a comprehensive response.
In the 1990s, our response, far from being comprehensive, was one-dimensional. We used the criminal justice system. As an individual, I am very proud to have been associated with the good work done in that effort. Yet, if we are going to be honest with ourselves -- if we are truly going to confront reality -- as a nation, we'd have to call it largely a failure.
We have learned over the years that the militant population is large -- maybe tens of thousands, maybe more. Certainly enough to staff an extensive international network and field numerous cells and small battalions that, in the aggregate, form a challenging military force. Nevertheless, in about a half dozen major prosecutions between 1993 and 2001, we managed to neutralize less than three-dozen terrorists -- the 1993 World Trade Center bombers; those who plotted an even more ghastly "Day of Terror" that would have destroyed several New York City landmarks; the Manila Air conspirators who tried to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky over the Pacific; those who succeeded in obliterating our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the would-be bombers of Los Angeles International Airport who were thwarted just before the Millennium celebration.
In these cases, we saw the criminal-justice response at its most aggressive, operating at a very high rate of success. Every single defendant who was charged and tried was convicted. As a practical matter, however, even with that rate of efficiency, we were able to neutralize only a tiny portion of the terrorist population.
Now, however, combining law enforcement with the more muscular use of military force -- the way we have fought the battle since September 11 -- we are far more effective. Terrorists are being rolled up in much greater numbers. They are being captured and killed. Instead of dozens being neutralized, the numbers are now in the hundreds and thousands.
But I respectfully suggest that this is still not enough, because it doesn't necessarily mean we are winning.
WAR OF IDEAS
When I was a prosecutor in the 1980s, it was the "War on Drugs" that was all the rage. We would do mega-cases, make mega-arrests, and seize mega-loads of cocaine and heroin. It made for terrific headlines. It looked great on television. But we weren't winning. Neighborhoods were still rife with narcotics traffickers and all their attendant depravity. And there was the tell-tale sign: The price of drugs kept going down instead of up. We said we were at war, but with all we were doing we were still failing to choke off the supply chain.
Now I see another version of the same syndrome, and if we don't talk about Islam we will remain blind to it -- to our great detriment. To understand why, all we need to do is think for a moment about the cradle-to-grave philosophy of Hamas. Yes, what blares on the news are suicide bombings that slaughter scores of innocents. But look underneath them, at what Hamas is doing day-to-day. They don't just run paramilitary training for adult jihadists. They start from the moment of birth. From infancy, hatred is taught to children. They learn to hate before they ever have a clue about what all the hatred is over. At home, in mosques, in madrassas, in summer camps -- dressed in battle fatigues and hoods, and armed with mock weapons -- it is fed to them.
And Hamas is not nearly alone. A funding spigot has been wide open for years. We are better about trying to shut it down than we used to be, but we're not even close to efficient yet. And even if we were to shut it down tomorrow, there are hundreds of millions -- maybe more -- already in the pipeline. Dollars that are contributed and controlled by the worst Wahhabist and Salafist elements. Those dollars are funding hatred. Hatred and the demonization of human beings simply because of who they are.
Some suggest that our situation might benefit from making accommodations -- policy concessions that might mollify the militants and miraculously change their attitude toward us. But let's think about a five-year-old Muslim boy who has already gotten a sizable dose of the venom that is found in the madrassas and the Arabic media.
I can assure you that that five-year-old kid does not hate American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf. He does not hate the intractable nature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What he hates is Jews. What he hates is Americans. It is in the water he drinks and the air he breathes. Sure, as he grows, he'll eventually be taught to hate American foreign policy and what he'll forever be told is the "Israeli occupation." But those abstractions are not the source of the child's hatred, and changing them won't make the hatred go away -- the hatred that fuels the killing.
When I say I worry that we could lose this struggle against militant Islam that we keep calling the "War on Terror," it is that fuel and that hatred I am talking about. We have the world's most powerful, competent military -- it can capture and kill large numbers of terrorists. With the help of our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies -- especially cutting off funding and cracking down on other kinds of material support -- our unified government can make a sizable dent in the problem. It can give us periods like the last two years when there have been no successful attacks on our homeland -- although it is hard to take too much comfort in that once you look at Bali, or Casablanca, or Istanbul, or Baghdad, or Madrid.
Yes, we can have temporary, uneasy respites from the struggle. We cannot win, however, until we can honestly say we are turning the tide of the numbers. The madrassas are like conveyor belts. If they are churning out more militants in waiting than we are capturing, killing, prosecuting, or otherwise neutralizing, then we are losing this war.
It's not enough to deplete the militants' assets. We need to defeat their ideas, and that means marginalizing their leaders. That means talking about how Islam assimilates to American ideals and traditions. It means making people take clear positions: making them stand up and be counted -- and be accountable -- not letting them hide under murky labels like "moderate".
As far as recognizing what we're really up against here, the terrorism prosecutions of the 1990s were a powerful eye-opener. We saw up close who the enemy was and why it was so crucial to be clear about it. Those cases are generally thought to have begun with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- a horror that oddly seems mild compared to the carnage we've witnessed in over a decade since. Yet, while that attack -- the militants' declaration of war -- began the string of terrorism cases, it was not really the start of the story.
That actually began years earlier. The men who carried out the World Trade Center bombing spent years training for it, mostly in rural outposts remote from Manhattan -- like Calverton, Long Island, western Pennsylvania, and northern Connecticut. There, they drilled in shooting, hand-to-hand combat, and improvised explosive devices. From about 1988 on, they were operating here, and saw themselves as a committed jihad army in the making.
They were fully convinced that their religion compelled them to brutality. And unlike us, they had no queasiness: They were absolutely clear about who their enemy was. They did not talk in jingos about the "War on Freedom," or the "War on Liberty." They talked about the War on America, the War on Israel, and the War on West. They were plainspoken about whom they sought to defeat and why.
Their leader was a blind Egyptian cleric named Omar Abdel Rahman, the emir of an international terrorist organization called the "Islamic Group." This was a precursor of al Qaeda, responsible for the infamous 1981murder of Anwar Sadat for the great crime of making peace with Israel. Abdel Rahman continues to this day to have a profound influence on Osama bin Laden; his sons have been linked to al Qaeda, and one of bin Laden's demands continues to be that America free the "Blind Sheikh," who is now serving a life sentence.
Abdel Rahman laid out the principles of his terror group -- including its American division -- with alarming clarity: Authority to rule did not come from the people who are governed; it came only from Allah -- a God who, in Abdel Rahman's depiction, was not a God of mercy and forgiveness, but a God of wrath and vengeance, and a God single-mindedly consumed with the events of this world. For the Blind Sheikh and his cohorts, there would be no toleration for other religions or other views. There was militant Islam, and there was everybody else.
All the world was divided into two spheres -- and it is very interesting how those spheres were referred to: the first was Dar al Islam, or the domain of the Muslims; the second was Dar al Harb. You might assume that Dar al Harb would be the domain of the non-Muslims. It is not. It is instead the domain of war. The militants perceive themselves as in a constant state of war with those who do not accept their worldview.
Sometimes that war is hot and active. Sometimes it is in recess while the militants take what they can get in negotiations and catch their breath for the next rounds of violence. But don't be fooled: the war never ends -- unless and until all the world accepts their construction of Islam.
As Abdel Rahman taught his adherents -- and as the bin Ladens, the Zawahiris, and the Zarqawis echo today -- the manner of prosecuting the never-ending war is jihad. This word is often translated as holy war; it more closely means struggle.
We hear a lot today from the mainstream media about jihad. Usually, it's a happy-face jihad, congenially rendered as "the internal struggle to become a better person," or "the struggle of communities to drive out drug peddlers," or "the struggle against disease, poverty and ignorance." In many ways, these reflect admirable efforts to reconstruct a very troubling concept, with an eye toward an Islam that blends into the modern world.
But let's be clear: these are reconstructions. Jihad, in its seventh-century origins, is a forcible, military concept. I realize politesse frowns on saying such things out loud, but one of the main reasons it is so difficult to discredit the militants -- to say convincingly that they have hijacked a peaceable religion -- is this: when they talk about this central tenet, jihad, as a duty to take up arms, they have history and tradition on their side. As Abdel-Rahman, the influential scholar with a doctorate from the famed al-Azhar University in Egypt, instructed his followers: "There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad.... If Allah says: 'Do jihad,' it means jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is jihad. Jihad against God's enemies for God's cause and his word."
So rich is the military pedigree of this term, jihad, that many of the apologists concede it but try a different tack to explain it away: "Sure, jihad means using force," they say, "but only in defense -- only when Muslims are under attack." Of course, who is to say what is defensive? Who is to say when Muslims are under attack? For the militants, Islam is under attack whenever anyone has the temerity to say: "Islam -- especially their brand of Islam -- is not for me." For the militants who will be satisfied with nothing less than the destruction of Israel, Islam is under attack simply because Israelis are living and breathing and going about their lives.
Simply stated, for Abdel Rahman, bin Laden, and those who follow them, jihad means killing the enemies of the militants -- which is pretty much anyone who is not a militant. When your forces are outnumbered, and your resources are scarce, it means practicing terrorism.
Abdel Rahman was brazen about it. As he said many times:
Why do we fear the word terrorist? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. And if the terrorist is the one who struggles for the sake of God, then we are terrorists. We have been ordered to terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of God. The Quran says the word "to strike terror." Therefore, we don't fear to be called terrorists. They may say, "He is a terrorist. He uses violence. He uses force." Let them say that. We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.
It is frightening. But, as this makes clear, it is not simply the militants' method that we are at war with. We are at war with their ideology. Militant Islam has universalist designs. That sounds crazy to us -- we're from a diverse, tolerant, live-and-let-live culture. It's hard for us to wrap our brains around a hegemonic worldview in the 21st Century. But if we are going to appreciate the risk -- the threat -- we face, the reality is: it matters much less what we think about the militants than what they think about themselves.
The militants see terrorism as a perfectly acceptable way to go about achieving their aims. When they succeed in destroying great, towering symbols of economic and military might; when with a few cheap bombs detonated on trains they can change the course of a national election; it reinforces their convictions that their designs are neither grandiose nor unattainable. It tells them that their method of choice works, no matter what we may think of it.
Making our task even more difficult is the structure of Islam. As Bernard Lewis and other notable scholars have observed, there are no synods, and there is no rigorous hierarchy. There is no central power structure to say with authority that this or that practice is heresy. There is no pope available to say, "Sheik Omar, blowing up civilians is out of bounds. It is condemned."
So how does the conduct become condemned? How do we turn the tide? Naturally, only Muslims themselves can cure Islam. Only they can ultimately chart their course; only they can clarify and reform where reform is so badly needed.
There is much, however, that we can do to help. It starts with ending the free ride for the apologists and enablers of terrorists. We need to be more precise in our language. We are not at war with terror. We are at war with militant Islam. Militant Islam is our enemy. It seeks to destroy us; we cannot co-exist with it. We need to defeat it utterly.
We seek to embrace moderate Muslims; to promote them, and to help them win the struggle for what kind of religious, cultural and social force Islam will be in the modern world. "Moderate," however, cannot just be a fudge. It needs to be a real concept with a defined meaning.
What should that meaning be? Who are we trying to weed out? Well, last year, the distinguished Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes proposed a few questions -- a litmus test of sorts. Useful questions, he said, might include: Do you condone or condemn those who give up their lives to kill enemy civilians? Will you condemn the likes of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah by name as terrorist groups? Is jihad, meaning a form of warfare, acceptable in today's world? Do you accept the validity of other religions? Should non-Muslims enjoy completely equal civil rights with Muslims? Do you accept the legitimacy of scholarly inquiry into the origins of Islam? Who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks? Do you accept that institutions that fund terrorism should be shut down?
To be sure, we should have no illusions about all this. We are never going to win every heart and mind. Asking these questions and questions like them, though, would provoke a very necessary conversation. It could begin to reveal who are the real moderates, and who are the pretenders. It could begin to identify who are the friends of enlightenment and tolerance, and who are the allies of brutality and inhumanity. It could begin the long road toward empowering our friends and marginalizing our enemies. Finally, it could make the War on Militant Islam a war we can win -- for ourselves and for the millions of Muslims who need our help.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is an NRO contributor.

http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200405130837.asp
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Kingdom Comes to North America
Top Saudi cleric to visit Canada.
By Steven Stalinsky
Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, the Saudi government appointed imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, will give a series of lectures in Canada next week and attend the Islamic Society of North America conference in Toronto. Al-Sudayyis's position is one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam. Thus, his sermons hold significant weight throughout the Islamic world.
The themes of his sermons are characterized by confrontation toward non-Muslims. Al-Sudayyis calls Jews "scum of the earth" and "monkeys and pigs" who should be "annihilated." Other enemies of Islam, he says, are "worshippers of the cross" and "idol-worshipping Hindus" who should be fought. Al-Sudayyis has been consistent in calling for jihad in Kashmir and Chechnya, for Jerusalem to be liberated, and for the "occupiers in Iraq" to also be fought. He often claims that Islam is superior to Western culture.
At the Grand Mosque in Mecca on February 1, 2004, Sheikh Al-Sudayyis called on Muslims everywhere to unite to defeat the world's occupiers and oppressors. "History has never known a cause in which our religious principles, historical rights, and past glories are so clearly challenged.... The conflict between us and the Jews is one of creed, identity, and existence." He told those listening to "read history," in order "to know that yesterday's Jews were bad predecessors and today's Jews are worse successors. They are killers of prophets and the scum of the earth. Allah hurled his curses and indignation on them and made them monkeys and pigs and worshippers of tyrants. These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, evil, and corruption...."
Al-Sudayyis elaborated on the conflict between Muslims and Jews:
O Muslims, the Islamic nation today is at the peak of conflict with the enemies of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with the grandsons of Bani-Quraydah, Al-Nadhir, and Qaynuqa [Jewish tribes in the early days of Islam]. May Allah's curses follow them until the Day of Judgment.
The nation must know that these are people with a disgraceful history and.... They want to establish the Greater Israel with Jerusalem as its capital. They also aspire to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build their alleged temple in its place. They want to liquidate the State of Islam and the Koran, and build the State of the Torah and Talmud on its debris. They will get what they deserve from Allah.... Our Al-Aqsa is crying out saying all mosques have been liberated, while I -- a great holy mosque -- am still being desecrated. Is the aspiration of over 1 billion Muslims to preserve their holy places [to be] considered savagery and terrorism? What a great lie, O Allah, O steadfast brothers in struggler and steadfast Palestine, the land of honor, loftiness, sacrifice, jihad, and bravery. The captivity of our Al-Aqsa in the hands of the tyrants makes us sleepless. May Allah please us with its liberation. Victory is coming soon, Allah willing.
....Here are the flags of victory looming on the horizon. We can smell it. It is crowned by a brave jihad, an intifada, which is still the winning card and the lit candle in the hands of the devout sons of this nation.... O nation of jihad and sacrifice, it is the duty of Muslims to support their brothers in creed in Palestine and elsewhere and to back them with material and moral support. Jihad with money sometimes supersedes jihad with soul, as mentioned in many Koranic verses and the prophet's traditions.
In a sermon on April 23, 2004, regarding Iraq, Al-Sudayyis stated that "our Muslim brothers in the Iraq of history and civilization are facing another bloody chapter, particularly in the brave, steadfast city of Al-Fallujah." He called on Muslims everywhere to unite "to defeat all their occupiers and oppressors" for the destruction of the enemies of Islam, to support "our mujahedeen brothers in Palestine," and to disperse "the unjust Zionists."
Discussing plots by enemies of Islam, who he identifies as Hindus, Jews, and Christians, Al-Sudayyis delivered a sermon on May 31, 2002, which stated:
Those whom Allah cursed, got angry with, and turned into monkeys and pigs, the tyrant worshippers among the Jewish aggressors and criminal Zionists. Their course is supported by the advocates of usury and worshippers of the Cross, as well as by those who are infatuated with them and influenced by their rotten ideas and poisonous culture among the advocates of secularism and Westernization.... The enemies of Muslims among the atheists insist on their arrogance and aggression against our people and our holy places in Chechnya? The idol-worshipping Hindus indulge in their open hatred against our brothers and holy places...in Muslim Kashmir, threatening an imminent danger and a fierce war in the whole Indian sub-continent?... O Allah, support our brother Mujahedeen for your sake and the oppressed everywhere. O Allah, support them in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya. O Allah, we ask you to support our Palestinian brothers in Palestine against the aggressor Jews and usurper Zionists. O Allah, the Jews have oppressed, terrorized, and indulged in tyranny and corruption. O Allah, deal with them for they are within your power.
According to Sheikh Al-Sudayyis, Islam is superior to Western culture. He told worshipers in Mecca in February 2002: "The most noble civilization ever known to mankind is our Islamic civilization. Today, Western civilization is nothing more than the product of its encounter with our Islamic civilization in Andalusia [medieval Spain]. The reason for [Western civilization's] bankruptcy is its reliance on the materialistic approach, and its detachment from religion and values. [This approach] has been one reason for the misery of the human race, for the proliferation of suicide, mental problems...and for moral perversion.... Only one nation is capable of resuscitating global civilization, and that is the nation [of Islam].... While the false cultures sink in the swamp of materialism and suffer moral crises...our Islamic nation is the one worthy of grasping the reins of leadership and riding on the back of the horse of pioneering and world sovereignty."
"Read history," Al-Sudayyis stated in another sermon in May 2002, "and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels, distorters of [others'] words, calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers ... the scum of the human race 'whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs....' These are the Jews, an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...."
The concluding supplications of Al-Sudayyis sermons are often filled with statements concerning current affairs. He consistently calls for "Muslims to humiliate the infidels (non-Muslims)," as well as for their destruction. For example, on November 1, 2002, he stated "O Allah, support our mujahedeen bothers in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya and destroy the aggressor Jews and the tyrannical Zionists, for they are within your power." In a June 21, 2002, sermon, Al-Sudayyis gives supplication: "O Allah, support them in Palestine, Kashmir, and Chechnya. O Allah, deal with the Jews and Zionists for they are within Your power. O Allah, scatter their assemblies, make them a lesson for others, and let them and their property be a booty for Muslims."
In another sermon in May 2003, Sheikh Al-Sudayyis condemned what he termed the "serpents" to "spit their venom" by harming the Islamic religion, ridiculing the pious, and blaming the school curricula and religious and welfare institutions. Al-Sudayyis stated: "O Lord, support our brother mujahedeen for your sake everywhere. O Lord, support them in Palestine. O Lord, deal with the aggressor Jews and sinful Zionists. O Lord, deal with them for they are within Your power. O Lord, deal with the enemies of religion and show us the miracles of Your power on them." Also, on July 11, 2003, he stated: "O Allah, support our mujahedeen brothers everywhere. O Allah, help them score victory over the unjust Jews and aggressive Zionists in Palestine. O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O Allah, destroy them, for they are within your power. O Allah, disperse them and make them prey for Muslims."
According to statements beginning in June 2003 made by Washington D.C. Saudi-embassy spokesman Adel Al-Jubeir, "Hundreds of imams [in Saudi Arabia] who violated prohibitions against preaching intolerance have been removed from their positions and more than 1,000 have been suspended and referred to educational programs." Clearly, this is not the case with Saudi Arabia's leading imam, Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, who continues to preach incitement from the most holy site in all of Islam.

-- Steven Stalinsky is executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200405130846.asp
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Zarqawi called 'field commander' of most Islamic terrorists in Iraq
Special to World Tribune.com
GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT.COM
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Abu Musad al Zarqawi, the Al Qaida-affiliated terrorist who U.S. intelligence says conducted the videotaped beheading of American civilian Nick Berg on May 11, also claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing in Baghdad last week. The attack on a coalition forces headquarters was the work of the Tawhid and Jihad Group, a group that is part of the Zarqawi network, officials said.
A poster distributed by the U.S. Army shows different images of Abu Musad al Zarqawi, a Jordanian national. AFP/US ARMY-HO
Zarqawi remains the most dangerous terrorist in Iraq despite a major covert operation to find and kill or capture him and his group.
A communiqu? posted on a Jihadist web site a day after the bombing stated that a terrorist it identified as Abu Mutab, a Saudi national, "departed in a car loaded with 600 kilograms of TNT for the main headquarters of the occupying forces and their apostate quislings, known as the Republican Palace."
The notice stated that the bombing was "a successful operation, in which the brother was granted the chance to harvest many of the infidels and the apostates."
Zarqawi is also linked to the Islamist terror organization Ansar al Islam, which has stepped up operations in post-war Iraq. Many of the group's members had fled to neighboring Iran and are returning to fight the coalition forces.
Kurdish officials in northern Iraq have stated that Zarqawi was recently in the northern part of the country and had a role in plotting the assassination of Barham Salih, a local governing official.
An Ansar terrorist was caught before the attack could be carried out and the man had stated that he had met Zarqawi in the border town of Halabja. Zarqawi is viewed as the field commander of most of the Islamist terrorists in Iraq.

Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.

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Diplomat's E-Mails Show Berg in Custody
Yahoo!
By JASON STRAZIUSO, Associated Press Writer
WEST CHESTER, Pa. - Family members provided e-mails Thursday that say Nicholas Berg was held by the U.S. military before he was kidnapped and beheaded, but the government contends the messages were based on erroneous information.
Berg's family has called on the U.S. government to tell all it knows about its contacts with the 26-year-old businessman in the weeks before his body was found last weekend in Baghdad and a gruesome video that showed his beheading was posted on the Internet.
To back its claims that Berg was in U.S. custody, the family on Thursday gave The Associated Press copies of e-mails from Beth A. Payne, the U.S. consular officer in Iraq (news - web sites).
"I have confirmed that your son, Nick, is being detained by the U.S. military in Mosul. He is safe. He was picked up approximately one week ago. We will try to obtain additional information regarding his detention and a contact person you can communicate with directly," Payne wrote to Berg's father, Michael, on April 1.
Payne repeated that Berg was "being detained by the U.S. military" in an e-mail the same day to Berg's mother, Suzanne. The next day, Payne wrote that she was still trying to find a local contact for the family, but added that "given the security situation in Iraq it is not easy."
U.S. officials say Berg was detained by Iraqi police March 24 and was never in the custody of American forces. Berg is believed to have been kidnapped days after Iraqi police or coalition forces released him April 6.
The government says the e-mail from Payne was false. State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said Payne's information came from the Coalition Provisional Authority. The authority did not tell Payne until April 7 that Berg had been held by Iraqi police and not the U.S. military, she said.
"As Mr. Berg had been released, the consular officer did not convey this information to the family because he was released, thankfully," Shannon said. "And we thought he was on his way."
Berg's brother called on the government to come clean about its contacts with the slain American before he died. The family has blamed the government for keeping him in custody for too long while anti-American violence escalated in Iraq.
"They're trying to deflect attention to a couple weeks down the road when no one's paying attention," David Berg said. "I think President Bush (news - web sites) needs to be a man about this and tell the truth. I think most, if not all, Americans can figure out who's telling the truth and who's lying."
Meanwhile, the family said Berg had been questioned by the FBI (news - web sites) more than a year ago about a contact he had with a terrorism suspect in 1999, while he was a student at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.
A senior law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the terror suspect appears to have been acquainted with Zacarias Moussaoui, an al-Qaida adherent now in federal custody and awaiting trial on conspiracy charges stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks.
The official said an e-mail address traced to Berg had been used by the unidentified individual with purported terror connections, but a 2002 investigation showed Berg had never met the individual and had not given the e-mail address to that person.
Michael Berg told reporters Thursday that his son was cleared of any wrongdoing. He said Nicholas Berg met the suspect while riding the bus to classes, and had allowed the suspect to use his computer.
A private memorial for Berg was scheduled for Friday at a West Chester synagogue. Family members declined to discuss burial arrangements.
The Bergs said they want to know if the government had received an offer to trade Iraqi prisoners for Nicholas Berg. On the videotape of his death, Berg's killers made a reference to a trade offer, but U.S. officials have said they knew of no such offer.
Michael Berg said he wanted to hear President Bush address the issue.
"I would like to ask him if it is true that al-Qaida offered to trade my son's life for the life of another person," Michael Berg said. "And if that is true, well, I need that information. ... and I think the people of the United States of America need to know what the fate of their sons and daughters might be in the hands of the Bush administration."
Associated Press writers Curt Anderson and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.
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U.S. contractors say they served as interrogators when asked
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Thursday, May 13, 2004
U.S. security contractors said their primary role was translation, not the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Gharib prison north of Baghdad.
But U.S. officials said that under the terms of the Defense Department contract, private security personnel could be asked to serve as interrogators in case of a shortage of U.S. military personnel.
The contractors denied involvement n the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. At least two U.S. contractors were hired to provide services at Abu Gharib.
The two contractors were identified as CACI International and Titan Corp. Both companies said they provided Arabic interpreters to translate for military intelligence during interrogations, Middle East Newsline reported.
"The company's contract is for linguists, not interrogators," Titan said in a statement. "For security and safety reasons, we do not discuss individual assignments, military operations or duty locations."
But Pentagon officials said security contractors agreed to also serve as interrogators at Abu Gharib and other detention centers in Iraq. The officials said interrogations conducted by the private security personnel were under U.S. Army supervision.
"In the theatre we have employed civilian contract interrogators and linguists," Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 6. "The Central Command has done this. And these people have no supervisory capabilities at all. They work under the supervision of officers in charge or non-commissioned officers in charge of whatever team or unit they are on."
Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy chief of U.S. Central Command, said security contractors at Abu Gharib provided a range of services for intelligence officers. Smith said contractors were expected to provide both translation and interrogation services depending on needs of military intelligence.
"In this particular case, there is a tiger team that interrogates and goes through that process," Smith said. "One is an interpreter normally. One is an analyst. And one is an interrogator. And where we have a shortage in the military of interrogators and translators we go to contractors to do that."
Neither CACI nor Titan explained the assertion by the Pentagon officials regarding the use of security contractors in the interrogation of Irarqi prisoners. But the companies said they have ordered their personnel stationed at Abu Gharib to cooperate in the army investigation. So far, neither company reported that its employees had been charged with the abuse of prisoners at the detention facility.
"There is an ongoing investigation underway in which our people have cooperated in the interview process," CACI president Jack London said. "CACI will continue to cooperate with all U.S. government investigations when requested and is now conducting its own analysis and investigation of events."


Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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>> THE STATES...


States Burning Up Litigation Funds
Posted May 14, 2004
By John Pike
Critics are furious that antismoking funds are being used by states such as North Carolina to purchase tobacco-company stocks.
The cost of the 1998 billion-dollar tobacco-settlement agreement has been put at approximately $246 billion for the first 25 years, or an average of $10 billion annually. To get to this windfall a number of states went so far as to change their laws of civil procedure to tap into the wealth of a politically incorrect group: the U.S. tobacco manufacturers, a worldwide, economy-building industry that goes back to the English colonies of North America and the Native Americans before that.
What the manifoldly mendacious states attorneys general (AGs) did in the 1990s was announce that, for the good of the people, they were suing the cigarette manufacturers to recover Medicaid expenses to pay for smoking-related illnesses and fund smoking-cessation programs. Within five years most of the money the states were receiving from the tobacco settlement was defraying their general budget costs that had nothing to do with tobacco. The plaintiffs' lawyers who cooked up the deal, meanwhile, had received their billions from the settlement.
Former Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger made antitobacco efforts a prominent theme of his administration, and he was the fifth AG to file suit against the tobacco companies. The main reason Harshbarger gave for the lawsuit was to fund smoking-cessation programs. But although Massachusetts soon received $689 million from the manufacturers (excluding the tax on packs), it virtually shut down its celebrated tobacco-control program, say antismoking activists, cutting the funding. According to the Boston Herald, it was funded at $48 million at its height, an amount that quickly fell to $5.7 million, with the program exhausting its annual stipends. Massachusetts now uses less than 1 percent of its tobacco money for tobacco-prevention programs. Much of the tobacco-settlement money in the Bay State is paying for budget expenses unrelated to tobacco.
Other venues that misused the funds include Los Angeles, where, according to the American Medical Association, former mayor Richard Riordan planned to use $100 million in tobacco-settlement funds to deal with lawsuits involving police corruption. In one year the tobacco state of Virginia spent about $15.5 million of these funds to cover its budget deficit. By 2001 just six states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were spending enough money on antitobacco programs to be effective, despite the fact that many of the states received hundreds of millions of dollars from the settlement for that purpose.
In 1997 former surgeon general C. Everett Koop commented for CNN on the tobacco companies and the master settlement, declaring: "It's a big concern for all those of us who worked three decades with the tobacco industry and find you can't trust them. I am sure they will take every effort they can to find loopholes." But as it developed, the states were even more untrustworthy than the demonized tobacco companies.
The government already was taking plenty from the tobacco companies to care for the casualties of tobacco use. In 1999, Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor said that a study by Harvard Law School professor Kip Viscusi "proved that cigarette-tax collections more than offset the cost to government for treating tobacco-related illnesses." He explained that "The main objective of the tobacco lawsuits was to raise revenue. Using lawsuits to raise revenue is far easier than raising taxes the old-fashioned way. This method bypasses the need for representatives of the voters to approve the tax. It shifts the awesome powers of the legislative bodies - commercial regulation, taxation, appropriation and the power to change law - to the judicial branch of government."
Although Alabama was not actively involved in the tobacco-settlement agreement, the manufacturers funded a trust to compensate adversely affected venues that grow tobacco, which include that state, North Carolina, Virginia and others.
As a result, some states have gone so far as to take money from the tobacco settlement - funds that are supposed to fight tobacco use and addiction - and put it toward growing tobacco or into the tobacco companies themselves. According to one published report, the tobacco state of North Carolina spent almost three-quarters of its settlement money on tobacco marketing and production, although some was used to help farmers adjust to growing other crops. One tobacco farmer received $25,000 to help pay for curing bins he installed in 2001. The state used $43 million on items such as constructing a tobacco auction house and $15,000 for a video of the history of the crop. Critics consider it likely that much of the rest of the $4.6 billion North Carolina was expected to receive within 25 years also would help the blindsided tobacco interests, in direct opposition to the declared purposes of the suit.
And according to a March 2002 study by the Washington-based Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC), tobacco-settlement money even has been used by states to purchase tobacco stocks. "Texas, Connecticut, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia are among the states which invested a portion of their tobacco-settlement proceeds in tobacco companies. Much of these state investments ended up in index funds, tracking indexes like the S&P 500, which have tobacco-company representation. For each dollar invested in such funds, usually only about a penny goes into tobacco stocks. But given the huge size of the settlement pool, it still adds up to tens of millions of dollars flowing back into the tobacco industry."
Doug Cogan of the IRRC estimates that by late 2001 about $11 million had been invested in tobacco securities by Texas, and Utah soon had almost $600,000 in Philip Morris Companies Inc., Loews Corp. and UST Inc. "Of the 33 states investing tobacco-settlement proceeds, at least 16 have no restrictions on investing in tobacco companies," the report states.
And remember this was done by means designed to circumvent long-established law. According to Robert A. Levy of Washington's libertarian Cato Institute, Florida, Maryland and Vermont specifically changed their laws to allow for a successful lawsuit against the tobacco manufacturers. The rest of the states asked the judges to ignore common law and pretend the law had indeed been changed. The trick was that higher courts never had to rule on the constitutionality of what amounted to passage of both bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, illegal under the Constitution, because the whole agreement was settled out of court.
"During the past 40 years," Levy states in a 1997 study, "not a single smoker received a single dollar of damages from tobacco companies as juries repeatedly concluded that smokers are responsible for their own behavior and their own losses." Yet under the new laws, "If a smoker happens to be a Medicaid recipient, individual responsibility is out the window," he notes. "The same tobacco company selling the same person the same product that results in the same injury is, magically, liable, not to the smoker but to the state. By legislative fiat, liability hinges on a smoker's Medicaid status, a fortuity totally unrelated to any misdeeds of the industry."
What this means is that, for example, if a person injures himself skiing, the ski manufacturer would not be liable for his medical expenses. But under the changed laws, if the skier was on Medicaid and everything else stayed the same, the manufacturer then would be liable for his medical expenses.
"And it gets worse," Levy's study points out. "The state is not even required to show that a particular party was harmed by his use of tobacco. Instead, causation may be proven by statistics alone (later ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court). The act originally provided that Florida was not required to identify the individual recipients of Medicaid payments; instead, the state could seek recovery for all recipients, anonymously, as a group. One would think that the industry could at least investigate whether patients suffering from 'smoking-related illnesses' ever smoked. Wrong. Incredibly, the industry will be allowed to depose only 25 of 400,000 claimants. These lawsuits retroactively eradicate settled doctrine and deny due process to an industry singled out for its deep pockets and public image, not its legal culpability."
So according to Florida law while it was suing the manufacturers, the man who broke his leg and sues the ski manufacturers, for example, does not have to prove he ever skied at all or show what type of ski he used.
Ordinarily, a link has to be established between a manufacturer's conduct and the injured person's health problems. This settlement resulted in the states receiving damages for some Medicaid recipients when their injuries were caused by other means. And remember this, critics note, if the government can circumvent the Constitution to do this to Big Tobacco, it can do the same to anyone it decides to demonize. And it can get worse, much worse.
So why did the tobacco companies agree to an unconstitutional and expensive settlement? Levy has an answer for that too. "Not even the tobacco companies are big losers," he states. "Even though the four companies have to raise their prices to fund the settlement, they are guaranteed a virtual monopoly. Any new or existing tobacco companies not party to the settlement would have to put up damages for 25 years to guard against the possibility they might be later sued by the states. In effect, a highly competitive industry has been transformed into a cartel. So now we have these barriers to entry, a blatant violation of the antitrust laws."

Something for everyone, you see.

John Pike is a contributing writer for Insight magazine.
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>> ALBANY WATCH...

THEY'RE THE SAME OLD LUSTY LEGISLATORS I KNEW AND DIDN'T LOVE
By ANDREA PEYSER
http://www.nypost.com/commentary/20759.htm
May 13, 2004 -- TAKE it from a survivor of Albany's intern program.
It brings some warped comfort in these uncertain days to know that a few services provided by your taxpayer-paid servants in the state Capitol haven't changed a bit in 20 years.
As sure as you can count on higher taxes and the open bar, you know that your elected officials are hard at work each legislative season, plying eager, young interns with booze and promises.
But I exaggerate.
One important thing has indeed changed in the two decades since I was among the ranks of cuties who tapped eagerly aboard high heels and hair gel up to the New York state capital, pursuing brilliant careers among the most fertile minds tax money could buy - only to discover it wasn't just legislators' heads that were stocked with fertilizer.
Today, after endless scandals involving interns bearing big hair and knee pads, guys who indulge in illicit romps with college-age underlings have - finally - gotten their acts together.
Now, instead of scarfing up hotties at Albany's intern-stocked bars, legislators have staffers to do their recruiting. Who says your tax dollars can't produce streamlined services?
Things were not so organized, back in the day when "out of town or under five minutes" was the only rule for adultery.
It was at a lobbyist's cocktail party that I - broke and anorexic, though not by choice - was offered a job writing newsletters by a homely legislator amused by my singular ability to pack away the chilled shrimp. Little got written, though, as the guy spent most of the day whining to me about his wife. Finally, he made a pass, right in your state capital. I nearly decapitated the runt. Next day, I was fired.
It never even occurred to me to complain.
Years later, an intern nearly toppled a presidency. And nothing has changed.
We don't know what happened behind a locked hotel-room door between Adam Clayton Powell IV and a liquored-up college girl who accuses him of rape.
"But how can people be so stupid, putting himself in that position?" my old SUNY Albany professor Alan Chartock said.
Shelly Silver, you've got a problem. It's called Legislative Democrats, and they're running wild.

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Unipolar Versus Unilateral

By John Van Oudenaren
John Van Oudenaren is chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress and adjunct professor, BMW Center for German and European Studies, Georgetown University. He writes here in a personal capacity. This article is the second part of a two-part analysis of multilateralism in transatlantic relations based on a presentation at Princeton University in October 2002. The first part appeared as "What Is `Multilateral'?" Policy Review 117 (February-March 2003).

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ong before their bitter falling out over the war in Iraq, the United States and France were at odds over unilateralism. In a November 1999 speech in Paris, French President Jacques Chirac fired one of the first salvos in this conflict. He condemned the U.S. Senate's decision not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, setting forth a vision of a multipolar world the chief organizing principle of which was the containment of American power. For Chirac and other French officials, American unilateralism was a product of the post-Cold War imbalance of power and the emergence of the United States as the world's lone "hyperpower." Multilateralism was to be both the ultimate objective of a French-led effort to restore a balance and the means by which to achieve it.

Policymakers and academics on both sides of the Atlantic have since debated whether a more multipolar world is feasible or desirable. The debate has done little, however, to establish consensus on what both sides have taken to calling "effective multilateralism." Government ministers speak in garbled terms of the need to build a "multipolar and partnership-oriented world order" and to "strengthen all multipolar structures," using the terms multipolar and multilateral almost interchangeably -- and without defining either one. In effect, the debate over unipolarity has been marked by the same rhetorical excess and lack of intellectual rigor that characterize the broader discussion of multilateralism.

Three particular problems stand out in this debate. The first is conceptual and concerns the absence of any logically necessary or historically demonstrable association between unipolarity and unilateralism or between multipolarity and multilateralism. The second relates to the internal American debate and the absence of a dominant "unipolar unilateralist" outlook on the part of those making U.S. foreign policy. The third concerns the course of post-Cold War diplomacy and the difficulty of reconciling the actual record of events since the fall of communism with the thesis that a shift in the balance of power led to increased unilateralism on the part of the United States.



Conceptual confusion

o identify unipolarity with unilateralism and multipolarity with multilateralism is to confuse categories and levels of analysis. Polarity is a system-level concept that relates to the distribution of power, real or perceived, in the international system. Unilateralism and multilateralism are choices about policies that states adopt within a given international system. In principle, there is no reason why the leading power in a unipolar order cannot pursue a multilateralist foreign policy or, conversely, why the great powers in a multipolar system necessarily must be multilateralists.

If anything, history shows that the strongest powers often are the most multilaterally inclined. International relations theorists have been fascinated by the concept of hegemonic stability in which it is the strongest power that underpins the multilateral system in a way that serves both its own interests and provides order as an international public good. Nineteenth-century Britain and late-twentieth-century America were classic hegemons in this regard. Conversely, the persistent unilateralism of French policy for much of the post-1945 period -- the franc devaluations of 1957 and 1958, the refusal to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the European Community "empty chair" crisis of 1965, the withdrawal from the integrated nato command in 1966, the refusal to participate in the us-uk-ussr Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1969, and the decision not to join the International Energy Agency at the time of the 1973 oil crisis -- can only be explained in terms of France's relative weakness and the determination of Paris to preserve its freedom of action by keeping a certain distance from the postwar multilateral order.

Moreover, to identify multipolarity with multilateralism and unipolarity with unilateralism is to overlook the complexity of the U.S. foreign policy debate, reducing it to a one-dimensional conflict between unilateralists and multilateralists. If polarity and multi-/unilateralism are different analytic categories, then foreign policy visions should be analyzed with reference to both these categories: in regard to differing perceptions of the distribution of power in the international system, on one hand, and different preferences for unilateral or multilateral approaches to policy, on the other.

Table 1 attempts a rough classification of a number of participants in the U.S. policy debate and how they view the relationship between power and policy.

TABLE 1
Polarity and Foreign Policy: U.S. Views
Preferred Policy Perception of the International System
Unipolar Multipolar

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Unilateral Kagan
Krauthammer Buchanan
Mearsheimer
Rabkin

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Multilateral Nye
Ikenberry Lind
Kupchan
Calleo



Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan are what might be called unipolar unilateralists. They see the distribution of power in the international system as essentially unipolar. They also embrace unilateral policies as the means by which the United States must protect its interests and act for the greater good of humanity. Krauthammer identified the "unipolar moment" in his seminal article of 1990 and later came to see unipolarity as an enduring feature of the international order. He rejects the multilateral "straitjacket" that in his view threatened to neutralize American power during the Clinton administration and has commended the Bush administration for "adopting policies that recognized the new unipolarity and the unilateralism necessary to maintain it."1

Kagan also sees the United States as possessing unique strengths that make the world unipolar and that account for what he sees as an increasing U.S. tilt toward unilateralism. He argues that the strong are always attracted to unilateral options while the weak seek refuge in multilateral diplomacy -- and that the defining characteristic of the current international order is European weakness. Moreover, he sees little chance that Europe, having let its military capabilities atrophy in the post-Hobbesian paradise that it has built behind U.S. protection, will develop the capabilities needed to function as a credible pole in a multipolar world.

In acute form, unipolar unilateralism informs the much talked-about imperial strain in U.S. thinking about foreign policy -- what one analyst has called "global social engineering" to rid the world of dictators and to promote the spread, by force if necessary, of democracy and free markets.

John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye are similar to Krauthammer and Kagan in that they perceive the international system as essentially unipolar.2 However, they differ over the effect of unilateral policies, which in their view undermine rather than underpin American interests. Ikenberry focuses on the way in which dominant powers -- England after 1815, the Western powers in 1919, and the United States after 1945 -- built institutions that constrained their own power but that also reduced the incentives and opportunities for potential rivals to challenge their dominant positions. Ikenberry essentially updates hegemonic stability theory to post-Cold War conditions, arguing that through restraint and the judicious use of international institutions, the United States can perpetuate its special status in the international system, forestalling the formation of hostile coalitions or the rise of a new hegemon.

Nye acknowledges some elements of multipolarity in the international system -- he argues that international relations has become a three-level game involving military, economic, and so-called soft power, with the United States enjoying unipolar dominance only on the first level -- but he is concerned that a shift to across-the-board multipolarity would be destabilizing. American foreign policy, according to Nye, can and should work to preserve U.S. military dominance through the judicious use of soft power. Like Ikenberry, Nye believes that the dominant power has the option, if it is smart, of shaping the international order in ways that can forestall the rise of competing powers in the system.

Traditional realists such as John Mearsheimer reject both the neoconservative and liberal views of the unipolar world order.3 They argue that the international system is inherently multipolar. Any unipolar imbalance can only be momentary, as competing power centers inevitably rise and seek to counterbalance the dominant power. But Mearsheimer also argues that U.S. policy must be unilateralist for the simple reason that all great powers pursue essentially unilateralist policies. As a realist, he regards international norms and institutions largely as window dressing, the importance of which has been vastly overstated by liberal institutionalists. Under no circumstances can the promotion by the dominant power of such norms and institutions -- no matter how imaginative or judicious -- persuade rulers in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, or Paris to abandon their efforts to counterbalance.

Patrick Buchanan (drawing upon the work of Christopher Layne and other realists) and Jeremy Rabkin are also multipolar unilateralists, albeit for different reasons.4 Like Mearsheimer, they are not dismissive of the power of other countries and blocs. Buchanan not only expects but positively embraces multipolarity: Only a truly multipolar world will eliminate the geopolitical vacuums that drew twentieth-century America into extensive involvement in the affairs of Europe and Asia, with (in his view) harmful effects on the U.S. constitutional order. At the same time, however, Buchanan affirms that U.S. policy must remain true to its nineteenth-century unilateralist roots, precisely to avoid the international entanglements (and resulting domestic spillovers) that multilateralism requires.

Rabkin also sees strong elements of multipolarity -- or at least bipolarity -- in the international system, with the European Union as the chief rival to the United States. Focusing on economics and law rather than military power, he sees Brussels and the United States engaged in a struggle over global governance, with the eu very much threatening to gain the upper hand. Rabkin takes a very negative view of the eu's self-proclaimed status as the champion of a new system of global governance, which he sees as a threat to democratic legitimacy, economic efficiency, and American sovereignty. Resistance to the European governance agenda -- which from the European perspective comes across as U.S. unilateralism -- is the only sensible American response. Rabkin thus differs strongly from Kagan, who does not see a serious bid for power in European multilateralism but merely the tactics of the weak.

Those who see the world as multipolar and embrace genuinely multilateral policies include Michael Lind, who has called for an effort to revive a concert of the great powers, as well as David Calleo and Charles Kupchan, both of whom also embrace a form of multipolar multilateralism, albeit one that is highly Eurocentric.5 Lind argues that the United States should concentrate on working with the other major powers in the United Nations Security Council and the g8, an approach that in his view will spare the United States the need to choose between a reflexive multilateralism that subordinates U.S. interests to the rule of small and weak countries and an arrogant unilateralism that places Washington at odds with the rest of the world. Calleo and Kupchan see the eu as evolving into a great-power counterpart to the United States, one that is neither weak nor necessarily a threat to U.S. interests. Calleo sees a stronger eu as the natural partner of a chastened and more modest United States in building "a cooperative multilateral system, based on rules with an effective balance of power to sustain those rules," while Kupchan heralds the "return of a world of multiple power centers" in which Europe is America's only near-term major competitor.

Each of these streams of foreign policy thinking has its strengths and insights, but each also has problems and contradictions. Collectively, they point toward the dilemmas that the United States has faced as it has tried to chart a post-Cold War foreign policy. The unipolar unilateralists are generally not given to self-doubt, but even they display a certain unease at policies that so obviously irritate so many people around the world. Krauthammer has called for what he admits would be an oxymoronic "humble unilateralism." Kagan, even as he insists that the Europeans are too weak to constrain the United States, counsels that Washington should show more generosity of spirit by playing along with multilateralism when the costs of doing so are low.

Ikenberry argues that multilateralism can dissuade would-be rivals from mounting challenges to No. 1 but fails to explain how the self-restraint of the leading power can prevent the ambitious number twos and threes -- particularly those that see themselves in ascendance -- from turning multilateral institutions against the leading power to challenge its hegemony (in the way, for example, that imperial Germany exploited free trade to undercut British preeminence). As a former policymaker, Nye is sensitive to the need for the United States to act unilaterally to protect its interests when inertia or opposition elsewhere in the world precludes multilateral action or when multilateral initiatives do not meet certain tests for U.S. involvement. But he does not explain how a general preference for multilateralism will prevent what Washington might regard as exceptional acts of unilateralism from accumulating into the unilateralist-rogue-state image that the United States has earned in recent years.

The cautions of the realists -- the multipolar unilateralists -- about overextension and excessive engagement are well taken. As policy guidance, however, they have their limitations. While it may be useful for policymakers to remind themselves that in the long run all empires fall and all power is counterbalanced, even the most realpolitik-oriented administration cannot avoid making decisions on a daily basis about the many agreements and institutional arrangements in which the United States is enmeshed.

As regards the multipolar multilateralists, their readiness to think about a world of multiple power centers acting according to some agreed definition of multilateralism is to be welcomed, given the eventual likely emergence of India and China as great powers, Russia's path toward recovery, and Europe's continued drive for a greater role in world affairs. But they confront the same structural dilemmas that arise for Ikenberry and Nye: How can the leading power be sure that cooperation within a concert will not be exploited by potential rivals to establish a new hegemony? Or, conversely, what guarantees do the rising powers have that the erstwhile hegemon will not use the concert to lock them into positions of permanent inferiority? Absent a solution to these dilemmas, it is difficult to see how what Kupchan calls the "devolution" of responsibility from the United States to Europe (or any other power center) can become the chief guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy.



Diplomacy after the Cold War

he link between American unilateralism and the emergence of unipolarity since the end of the Cold War distorts the actual record of international relations in this period. Future historians are unlikely to have much patience with the simplistic view that the United States suddenly took a unilateralist turn in 1991 -- or even in 2001 -- as a consequence of its newfound relative strength. The first Bush and Clinton administrations teemed with multilateral activism -- in economics, arms control, nonproliferation, and selected world-order issues. The descent into what the rest of the world came to see as unilateralism, which began during Clinton's second term and accelerated dramatically after George W. Bush's inauguration, was a much more complex process involving both the rejection of a particular brand of American multilateralism and the rise of competing multilateral initiatives.

As any hegemonic stability theorist would have predicted, the United States entered the post-Cold War era in a decidedly multilateralist frame of mind. The first President Bush declared the establishment of a "new world order," led the U.N.-mandated coalition that expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, completed the Uruguay Round negotiations that established the World Trade Organization, completed the start treaty with the collapsing Soviet regime, and launched the negotiations that led to the treaty banning chemical weapons and the establishment of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The Clinton administration continued in much the same vein. It secured the ratification of the Uruguay Round agreements, took the lead in negotiating a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, backed the establishment of and provided much of the funding for the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia, and, after some initial hesitation, began a campaign to enlarge and reform nato.

As the hegemonic stability theorists also would have predicted, the Bush i and early Clinton policies reflected a tendency to enlist multilateralism in the service of unipolarity. Whether or not they were consciously framed as such, many of these U.S. initiatives had a certain one-sided character that, while they were difficult to oppose outright, made other powers distinctly nervous. The European Union, for example, was initially skeptical of the U.S. push for a mandatory dispute resolution mechanism in the wto, which meant the end of the standard eu practice of using the consensus rule to block any finding that Brussels had violated international trade law. France and Britain were hardly enthusiastic about the criminal trials for the former Yugoslavia, which smacked of American Wilsonianism at its worst and potentially touched upon the pro-Serb leanings in both countries. France and China could not accept a comprehensive test ban treaty until they had completed a final round of tests, while India was incensed by the Clinton administration's early proposals for a ctbt that would have allowed some low-level testing by the nuclear powers in a way that sanctioned and perpetuated the existing inequality between nuclear haves and have-nots. European governments were also quite wary of Clinton's push to enlarge and reform nato, which they saw as an attempt to reinforce U.S. influence on the continent and to upstage the eu, whose widening and deepening they saw as the main act in Europe's post-Cold War transformation.

Not surprisingly, beginning gradually in the early 1990s and gathering strength during Clinton's second term, an increasing number of international actors began to resist American hegemonic multilateralism, less by outright rejection of U.S. initiatives than by assertive counteractions, the eventual effect of which was to deprive Washington of the multilateralist high ground and place it on the unilateralist defensive.

The United States won quick victories over the eu in the wto on beef hormones and bananas, areas in which the eu had long defied international rules. But this encouraged an enraged European Commission to begin scouring the U.S. trade, tax, and antitrust code in search of non-wto-compliant provisions and to file a flurry of lawsuits that Brussels knew it could win. Today, transatlantic trade relations are very much shaped by the unpredicted (but in retrospect entirely predictable) way in which the eu learned to counterpunch against U.S. legal activism in the wto, as Congress struggles to amend tax and antitrust laws that may have little real effect on trade but that from a strictly legal point of view are not wto-compliant.

In the arms control sphere, the non-nuclear powers came to accept the idea of a comprehensive test ban treaty but demanded a steep price in return: The United States and the other nuclear powers had to accept the "true zero yield." President Clinton ultimately made this concession, winning international support for the agreement but doing so in a way that ultimately doomed the treaty in the Senate. As in the case of the wto, the story of the ctbt is one of effective and in some ways unexpected counterpunching by other countries against a multilateral initiative by the United States that other powers saw as one-sided. In the end, Washington was left with an agreement that banned all U.S. testing and was enormously difficult to verify, but that did little to arrest the nuclear ambitions of Pakistan and India -- not to mention Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea.

A key moment in the shift from the "assertive multilateralism" of the early Clinton administration to a new defensiveness about unilateralism was the Ottawa process that led to the signing of the December 1997 treaty banning land mines. This process was driven by a coalition of ngos and "like-minded" states that turned aside the U.S. request for a partial and temporary exception for the Korean Peninsula. Having lost the initiative on this issue, the United States was faced with a simple choice: to accept an immediate and total ban, codified in a treaty that allowed for no exceptions or reservations, or not to sign the treaty and risk being tagged with the unilateralist label.

In the negotiations to establish the International Criminal Court (icc), concluded in Rome some six months later, countries that had never shown much interest in a permanent court became active in the effort to establish such a body, largely in pursuit of unrelated agendas, including undermining the power of the U.N. Security Council. They were joined by a coalition of like-minded countries and ngos that, as with land mines, were determined to push through a treaty that did not reserve a special role for the U.N. Security Council and that at least implicitly was directed at constraining U.S. power. Once again, Washington was forced either to accept an agreement that it feared could be used against it or to reject the treaty and endure the unilateralist opprobrium that doing so would bring.

With regard to global warming, the United States had always been somewhat on the defensive, but the first Bush administration was able to sign the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, with its purely voluntary commitments to stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. By the mid-1990s, key European countries and the environmental ngos were demanding that Washington accept the mandatory cuts ultimately imposed by Kyoto and that the U.S. economy experience real pain as it turned away from its energy-wasting ways, which many European ministers saw as much in moral as environmental terms. By the Hague conference of 2000, environmental multilateralism had been turned against the United States by an assertive coalition of weaker powers that, at a minimum, did not want to see Washington come off with any special treatment and that, more ambitiously, hoped to take some of the gloss off the much-heralded U.S. economic boom by highlighting what they saw as its dark environmental underside.

The most triumphalist phase of U.S. policy in the 1990s thus rather awkwardly coincided with the strengthening of external and especially European determination to use multilateral agreements to check U.S. power. In the end, the second Clinton administration was caught between recalcitrant partners who, notwithstanding the administration's essentially Eurocentric and multilateralist instincts, were unwilling to cut it much slack on key world-order issues and U.S. domestic forces (chiefly though by no means exclusively in the Republican-controlled Senate) who had never signed onto the new world order and perhaps were not surprised to see multilateralism turned against U.S. interests in so many areas.

These developments set the stage for the intensified transatlantic clashes over unipolarity and unilateralism that followed the inauguration of the second President Bush. To some extent, the much-decried unilateralism of the new administration was a matter of style, as Washington explicitly and in some cases harshly walked away from arrangements that the Clinton administration had never really embraced but could not bring itself to repudiate. Clinton signed Kyoto but took no steps to ratify or implement it; Bush declared the treaty dead. Clinton voted against the icc agreement, signed it at the last possible moment for procedural reasons, but recommended that the Senate not ratify; Bush went out of his way to "unsign" the agreement. With regard to the use of force, the new administration clearly was more inclined to act without U.N. or European sanction -- hence, the eventual conflict with France and Germany over Iraq. But even this was more a matter of degree than an absolute change, and in any case it was difficult to separate from the extraordinary security challenges that would have confronted any U.S. administration after September 11.



Where to go from here

he evidence does not support the view that American unilateralism is the result of a unipolar imbalance of power and that a return to multipolarity is a necessary or sufficient condition for creating a stronger multilateral order.

Viewed in the light of a vast international relations literature, this argument does not explain why the United States was the consummate multilateralist at the height of its power in the 1940s but then turned unilateralist after the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union more than restored its earlier dominance. Conversely, it does not explain how France, once a weak and prickly unilateralist, suddenly became the world's most fervent multilateralist when confronted 50 years later with the emergence of the new American "hyperpower."

Similarly, the argument does not fit the facts as they relate to post-Cold War diplomacy. The history of this period is yet to be written, but even a cursory review of the wrangling over global warming, the icc, the use of force, and other issues suggests that the usual generalizations about the relationship between polarity and the choice of unilateral or multilateral policies are at best partially correct. Multilateralism is not a politically neutral instrument that, as the hegemonic stability theorists imply, can be used by a right-minded dominant power to cement its advantages. Nor is it, as the unipolar unilateralists argue, a tool of the weak that the leading power can safely ignore. Rather, multilateralism is itself up for grabs in the international system, with both the leading and aspirant powers seeking to define it and use it in ways that serve their interests.

Finally, the argument that unipolarity is the cause of unilateralism vastly simplifies the intellectual debate in the United States and ignores the different strands of thinking that have gone into shaping post-Cold War policy. As has been seen, some influential Americans see unipolarity as an argument for rather than against robust multilateralism. Others doubt the reality, at least for long, of a truly unipolar order but divide sharply on whether this means that the United States should follow unilateral or multilateral policies to advance its interests in what they see as a multipolar world.

Since January 2001, the tendency in Europe has been to see U.S. policy as driven by the unipolar unilateralism associated with prominent neoconservative thinkers. But even under the Bush administration, U.S. policy has reflected a blend of intellectual currents as policymakers have sought to adjust to particular situations and come to grips with American power and its limitations. Clearly, a readiness to act unilaterally and to do so on the basis of an awareness of power is a factor, albeit one that tends to be exaggerated in Europe. But there is also a certain unipolar multilateralist momentum behind the foreign policy of this as of any administration as the sheer weight of the United States shapes multilateral forums and international norms in ways that reflect and help to perpetuate U.S. power, precisely in the way that the hegemonic stability theorists would predict. Perhaps most interestingly, there are adumbrations of a multipolar multilateralism in U.S. policy -- an acceptance of the emergence of new power centers and a willingness to work with these powers cooperatively in international forums. This tendency can be seen, for example, in the recognition of China, India, and Russia as potential great powers in the 2002 National Security Strategy and more recently in Secretary of State Powell's focus on "embracing major powers."6 It is a stance that has historic roots in the Republican Party -- in the Eisenhower administration, for example -- and arguably was reflected in candidate Bush's call for a "humble" foreign policy.

Multilateralism in the service of multipolarity is precisely the high diplomatic ground that the eu has staked out for itself as it goes around the world forming "strategic partnerships" with key countries said to share its commitment to global governance and stronger multilateral institutions in a multipolar world. It remains to be seen, however, whether such a world will emerge and, if so, what it would look like; whether multipolarity in fact would strengthen multilateralism rather than lead to an intensified economic and political rivalry of all against all; and, not least, whether Europe would have more influence and security in such a world.

Many in Europe seem to assume that because the United States is the chief protagonist of the unipolar world, any attenuation of unipolarity will redound to Europe's benefit. This view seems to be based on the assumption that such a world will be exactly like the one that exists at present, except that Europe will have vastly more power relative to the United States. In reality, Europe could emerge as one of the weaker "poles" in such a system, the Austria-Hungary of a new globalized balance of power, its privileged ties with the United States weakened but without the endogenous sources of power -- economic and demographic dynamism, favorable geography, and effective centralized leadership -- that are likely to be needed to exercise real power in the rough and tumble of a true multipolar order.

Alternatively, diffusion of power to Asian giants such as China and India along with a partial revival of Russian power outside Europe's sphere of control could lay the basis for a new transatlantic solidarity as both sides accentuate commonalities of interest, values, and history in a more diverse world. Europe would continue to build its own identity and pursue its interests, but becoming a "counterweight" to the United States would not be the driving rationale behind eu or member-state foreign policies. Both sides would concentrate on finding ways to use multilateralism to solve global and regional problems without artificially seeking to employ it either to consolidate or to reverse power relationships that in the long run will be determined by the internal cohesion and dynamism of each side. Such an outcome is arguably in the interests of both parties in that it neither permanently condemns Europe to a second-tier status in a way that many European elites find difficult to stomach nor exposes the United States to the constant harassment of a Europe seeking to consolidate its unity and enhance its international status by playing the "unilateralism" card.

This outcome can be realized, however, only if both sides of the Atlantic are careful not to make policy on the basis of erroneous assumptions about unipolarity, unilateralism, and the relationship between them.



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Notes

1 Charles Krauthammer, "The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism," Weekly Standard (June 4, 2001); and "The Unipolar Moment Revisited," National Interest (Winter 2002-2003). Robert Kagan, "Power and Weakness," Policy Review 113 (June-July 2002); and Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003).

2 G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001). Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (Oxford University Press, 2002).

3 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Norton, 2001).

4 Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny (Regnery, 1999). Jeremy Rabkin, Why Sovereignty Matters (AEI Press, 1998); Euro-Globalism? (Centre for the New Europe, 1999); and "Is EU Policy Eroding the Sovereignty of Non-Member States?" Chicago Journal of International Law (Fall 2000).

5 Michael Lind, "Toward a Global Society of States," Wilson Quarterly (August 2002). David P. Calleo, Rethinking Europe's Future (Princeton University Press, 2001). Charles A. Kupchan, The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-First Century (Knopf, 2002).

6 Colin Powell, "A Strategy of Partnerships," Foreign Affairs (January-February 2004).



Feedback? Email polrev@hoover.stanford.edu.