http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=91551
A Combustible Mix: Politics, Terror, Oil and the Future of the U.S.-Saudi Relationship
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Six-party talks: Strike 3
By David Scofield
With the third installment of the six-party drama set to play out in Beijing from June 23-26, all sides have begun telegraphing their positions as a prelude to talks, with continued US insistence on complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of all facets of North Korea's weapons program increasingly out of sync with the rest of the region.
China, the host of this and the previous two rounds of talks, stated last week that US claims concerning North Korea's highly enriched uranium (HEU) project are, in Beijing's view, unfounded. Last week senior Chinese official Zhou Wenzhong was emphatic that his government had not been privy to any "smoking gun" intelligence indicating North Korea's uranium program.
This is crucially important, as it is the HEU project and not the far more transparent, plutonium-based nuclear-weapons initiatives that pose the greatest threat to regional and, potentially, global security. Plutonium enrichment is a difficult procedure and the process involves the release of krypton-85, a gas that can be monitored and tracked by the United States remotely. While North Korea's strangely public primary reactor site at Yongbyon is easier to monitor and inspect, the plutonium program seems designed to allow maximum visibility - a distraction from the country's secret HEU facilities thought to be buried under a mountain somewhere in the country's northeast. Though the exact location, scope and scale of the HEU project are still mysteries, the North Koreans themselves acknowledged its existence in meetings with US assistant secretary of state James Kelly in 2002, and testimony from Pakistan's nuclear godfather Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, confirms the long-term involvement of Pakistan in the development of this project.
But China seems ready to ignore the growing mountain of evidence, and North Korean's own admission, and focus only on the plutonium issue - a chip North Korea has demonstrated it is quite interested in bargaining away. North Korea would like to negotiate some sort of freeze to its high-profile plutonium program in return for iron-clad security guarantees and massive energy assistance, allowing the HEU program to continue adding atomic weapons to North Korea's arsenal while creating the opportunity for highly lucrative HEU sales to interested buyers around the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the South Koreans have made no secret of their intention to offer "bountiful infrastructure, industrial and energy" aid to North Korea, as South Korea too is more than willing to look the other way concerning North Korea's clandestine nuclear development in the spirit of rapprochement and reconciliation. South Korean officials have made it known that even the most tentative steps toward CVID of the North's plutonium project, not the HEU project, will more than suffice and be rewarded with even greater South Korea largess. Indeed, the state-run Export-Import Bank has started a program using public money to offset losses South Korean companies may incur through their investments in North Korea - more Southern tax dollars (investments in North Korea cannot be made in South Korean currency) sent north in a bid to buy reconciliation.
Though Russia shares a short border along the Tumen River with North Korea, its attention is focused thousands of kilometers away. The threat of North Korea selling weapons-grade uranium or plutonium, for example, to domestic terror groups is small in the minds of Russian policymakers. Historically, North Korea has been careful not to offend the Russians, well aware of the importance of maintaining good relations with both Moscow and Beijing, its key benefactors. Russia's concerns about fissile material falling into the hands of domestic terror organizations do not center on North Korea but rather the relative abundance of such material on offer in former Soviet republics in Central Asia. As far as Moscow is concerned, nuclear black-marketeers within the borders of its former empire pose a far greater threat to Russian security than Kim Jong-il's stockpile.
The staunchest US ally in the region is undoubtedly Japan, but here too we see a shift. The Japanese certainly have no trust in Pyongyang and definitely recognize the inherent threat of the North Korean state, but Japan's view of the threat is increasingly divergent from that held by the United States. The Japanese are more concerned with North Korea's delivery systems, its missiles, than its nuclear program. Japan believes, perhaps rightly, that the chances of North Korea launching a preemptive nuclear strike are slim given the immediate and overwhelming reaction it would elicit and the crushing blow to Kim's rule it would no doubt usher. For Japan it is North Korea's force-projection platforms - its missiles - that are a greater menace.
And it was perhaps with this in mind that the North Koreans conducted an above-ground missile-engine test this month. The engine tested is believed to be the thrust behind the Taepodong-2, a long-range missile capable of reaching not only all of Japan, but potentially the western seaboard of the US, including Alaska, home to 25% of the United States' proven oil reserves.
The Taepodong-2 can carry a larger payload a greater distance that the Taepodong-1, the missile North Korea test fired over Japan in 1998.
The tests this month came only two weeks after Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's May 22 meeting with Kim Jong-Il in which he brokered the release of five Japanese family members kidnapped and held by North Korea for decades. The one-day summit included a pledge by North Korea to maintain the moratorium on missile-flight tests, though US officials believe North Korea is testing its missiles in Iran, a shrewd maneuver that keeps North Korea within the word, if not the spirit, of the moratorium. Though Japan was eager not to appear to be rewarding Pyongyang for releasing the Japanese captives, it was quick to pledge an additional 250,000 tons of food aid and US$10 million worth of medical equipment immediately after the release.
The United States is looking increasingly isolated in its demand for CVID of all components of North Korea's nuclear program and, to make matters worse, politically motivated election-year divisions are forming within the US. Previous policy architects such as Bill Clinton-era energy secretary Bill Richardson, a proponent of the now-failed 1994 Agreed Framework, declared at this week's World Economic Forum's Asia Strategic Insight Roundtable that the US needs to be more conciliatory toward North Korea, and make a deal (no matter how flawed and unworkable) focusing only on "short-term reprocessing and weaponization of plutonium fuel rods rather than broader uranium-enrichment issues".
This, of course, is the same logic that underpinned the now-defunct Agreed Framework, an agreement that called for North Korea to freeze its nuclear program in return for heavy-oil shipment and the construction of two light-water reactors. The North Koreans admitted in 2002 to what had long been suspected by regional policy experts, that they had reneged on their promise, extracted as much as they could from the agreement in the interim, all the while furthering their offensive-weapons capacity. Now, voices from the past sensing blood in US political waters (Richardson is considered a strong candidate for vice president should Democrat John Kerry win the presidency this November) are coming forth again armed with the same failed policy solutions.
Given regional divisions coupled with more immediate threats in the Middle East - including growing concern among US officials concerning the other surviving member of the "axis of evil", Iran, and its nuclear program - it's no wonder North Korea feels secure, unflinching in its demands for a comprehensive security guarantee before any movement on nuclear programs will be discussed. As the alliance strains and fractures, North Korea will use the lack of consensus to create further distance between the United States and the region, offering individual bilateral "agreements", appearing conciliatory while extracting what it can bilaterally, leaving the US very much alone on its side of the table.
The US declared that real progress at this round is crucial, but it seems any progress that does emerge from the meeting will likely be bilateral in nature, not multilateral as Washington had originally hoped. The United States could use another failure in Beijing, the third strike, as the excuse it needs to move the whole matter to the United Nations Security Council, but given the political relationship and geographical proximity of North Korea to two permanent members of the council (China and Russia), it is highly unlikely a resolution with teeth would be forthcoming. As the non-US members of the six-party confab continue to focus on more narrow, domestic agendas in their dealings with Pyongyang, a six-party solution to the North Korean problem seems as remote as ever.
David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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The Malaysia-Sudan Oil-For-Look The Other Way Program
The Malaysian Government regularly rails against Western misconceptions of Islam, and the mistreatment of Muslims by non-Muslims wherever and whenever it happens.
But Muslims are not being oppressed by non-Muslims only; Muslims kick around their fellow believers too. Often, the mistreatment is worse, and in some cases, it borders on madness:
Here's New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reporting on what's happening in Sudan:
The world has acquiesced shamefully in [Sudan's] Darfur genocide, perhaps because 320,000 deaths this year (a best-case projection from the U.S. Agency for International Development) seems like one more boring statistic. So listen to [Magboula Muhammad] Khattar, multiply it by hundreds of thousands, and let's see if we still want to look the other way.
[...] the Sudanese government [has] resolved to crush a rebellion in Darfur, a region the size of France in western Sudan.
Sudan armed and paid a militia of Arab raiders, the Janjaweed, and authorized them to slaughter and drive out members of the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur tribes.
On March 12, Ms. Khattar was performing her predawn Muslim prayers about 4 a.m. when a Sudanese government Antonov aircraft started dropping bombs on Ab-Layha, which is made up of Zaghawa tribespeople.
Moments later, more than 1,000 Janjaweed attackers rode into the village on horses and camels, backed by Sudanese government troops in trucks.
"The Janjaweed shouted: `We will not allow blacks here. We will not let Zaghawa here. This land is only for Arabs,' " Ms. Khattar recalled.
[...] The attack was part of a deliberate strategy to ensure that the village would be forever uninhabitable, that the Zaghawa could never live there again.
The Janjaweed poisoned wells by stuffing them with the corpses of people and donkeys.
They also blew up a dam that supplied water to the farms, destroyed seven hand pumps in the village and burned all the homes and even the village school, the clinic and the mosque.
In separate interviews, I talked to more than a dozen other survivors from Ab-Layha, and they all confirm Ms. Khattar's story.
By most accounts, about 100 people were massacred that day in Ab-Layha, and a particular effort was made to exterminate all men and boys, even the very young. Women and girls were sometimes allowed to flee, but the prettiest were kidnapped.
Most of those raped don't want to talk about it. But Zahra Abdel Karim, a 30-year-old woman, told me how in the same attack on Ab-Layha, the Janjaweed shot to death her husband, Adam, and 7-year-old son, Rahshid, as well as three of her brothers.
Then they grabbed her 4-year-old son, Rasheed, from her arms and cut his throat.
The Janjaweed took her and her two sisters away on horses and gang-raped them, she said.
The troops shot one sister, Kuttuma, and cut the throat of the other, Fatima, and they discussed how to mutilate her. (Sexual humiliation has been part of the Sudanese strategy to drive out the African tribespeople. The Janjaweed routinely add to the stigma by branding or scarring the women they rape.)
"One Janjaweed said: `You belong to me. You are a slave to the Arabs, and this is the sign of a slave,' " she recalled. He slashed her leg with a sword before letting her hobble away, stark naked.
Other villagers confirmed that they had found her naked and bleeding, and she showed me the scar on her leg. [The New York Times Online]
Yes, I know shit happens. And you can't expect Malaysia to get involved in every sad case. I understand that.
But what I don't understand is how we can completely separate our commercial interests from our humanity.
Oil seems to have helped to numb our senses to what's happening in Sudan -- and I'm not talking about "minyak angin Cap Kapak" here.
This is a list of Government-owned Petronas' extensive operations in Sudan, taken from the company's website:
UPSTREAM
Exploration & Production
1.Interest in Blocks 1, 2 and 4.
Partners: China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Sudan's National Oil Company Sudapet under joint operatorship.
Status: Integrated development of oil field and construction of 1,504 km pipeline from the fields to Port Sudan. Reserves estimated at 600 million barrels. Production started in June 1999.
2. Interest in Block 5A.
Partners: Lundin, OMV and Sudapet.
Status: Exploration
3. Interest in Block 5B
Partners: IPC Sudan Ltd, OMV, Sudapet
Status: Exploration
4. Interest in Blocks 3 & 7
Partners: CNPC, Gulf Petroleum Corp., Al-Thani, Sudapet.
Status: Exploration
5. Interest in Blocks 8
Partners: Sudapet, High Tech Group
Status: Exploration
DOWNSTREAM
Product retailing & marketing
1. Operates service stations and markets petroleum products.
2. Owns and operates bulk terminals, depots, aviation depots and bunkering facility.
The other day, the governor of Khartoum was in town for a tour of Putrajaya, at the invitation of Petronas.
Azizan Zainul Abidin, Putrajaya Corporation president and Petronas chairman, showed him around.
Azizan said that:
Petronas' decision to go to Sudan was a good one as it had now become one of the company's major centres of activities among the 32 countries where it operates. [Bernama]
Local private sector oil and gas companies are striking it rich in Sudan too:
Ranhill Bhd through its unit, Ranhill International Inc and Petroneeds Services International of Sudan has secured an oil and gas contract in Sudan worth US$239.4 million (RM909.72 million).
The contract for the "Melut Basin Oil Development -- Upstream Facilities" project was awarded by PetroDar Operating Co Ltd, a co-venture entity that holds the rights for exploration and development in South East Sudan.
Malaysian national oil corporation Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) unit Petronas Carigali Overseas Sdn Bhd holds a 40 percent stake in PetroDar, while China National Petroleum Company International (Nile) Ltd (CNPCI) holds 41 percent.
Sudan, the largest country in the African continent is going to be a major player in the oil and gas sector as it currently produces 300,000 barrels of oil per day.
[...]
"With the Melut Basin coming up it will contribute another 300,000 barrels of oil per day. In the future, we foresee Sudan will hit about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day," said Ranhill deputy chief executive Datuk Zahari Wahab. [Bernama]
Woohoo! 1.5 million barrels! Ranhill is one slick company.
And Iraq? You know, the country that the US invaded to protect its oil interests? It seems Ranhill has similar interests there as well:
Zahari said Ranhill International Inc looked at Petronas as the guiding light to venture overseas but at the same time it had also made its foray into Iraq and Qatar.
In Iraq, Ranhill International Inc has made bids for two projects worth US$325 million.
And it's not just Ranhill. Companies like Scomi Group [where have you heard that name before?] also have operations in Sudan.
For me, it all boils down to this: We scream for blood when the Israelis kill Palestinians, Americans kill Iraqis, Russians kill Chechens.
But we look the other way and let the Sudanese government get away with murder -- the murder of thousands of Muslims by other Muslims; killed simply for the colour of their skin.
Why are we ignoring it? It damn well (pun intended) looks like it's because of oil.
The saddest thing is that unlike Iraq, we can do something about it -- the Malaysian oil industry is one of the largest foreign players, if not the largest, in Sudan. We have a considerable degree of influence in this regard.
And we have to use it, because this is not some one-off clash we are talking about here. They are driving whole villages off the land. They are killing, raping and mutilating the adults; and the children as well.
It is ethnic-cleansing; it is genocide.
And we need to do whatever we can to stop it.
Posted at 02:09 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
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Israel, Russia arms sales to China concern U.S.
June 15, 2004 Posted: 10:23 Moscow time (06:23 GMT)
The United States would face an increasingly lethal Chinese army modernized by Washington's friends and allies if it had to defend Taiwan in a war with Beijing, said a U.S. study released on Tuesday. Russia's arms exports to China are more sophisticated than ever, and Israel - recipient of some of America's most advanced technology - has an increasingly worrisome defense relationship with Beijing, the report said.
Moreover, if the European Union lifts its arms embargo on China as some members want, that could "dramatically enhance China's military capability," added the report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Echoing a recent Pentagon study, the commission said China's military capabilities "increasingly appear to be shaped to fit a Taiwan conflict scenario and to target U.S. air and naval forces that could become involved." China views Taiwan as a rebel province that must be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.
The commission expressed concern political attitudes across the Taiwan Strait had "hardened" and recommended the United States take a fresh look at its "one China" policy, which recognizes the mainland and Taiwan are part of one China, but leaves the meaning ambiguous. The commission, created by the U.S. Congress in 2000, said a key to China's modernization had been "extensive" acquisitions of foreign military technologies, with Russia as the top supplier and Israel as No. 2.
Compared with the early 1990s, recent Russian arms exports showed an "alarming increase in lethality and sophistication," the report said. As for Israel, Commission Vice Chairman Dick D'Amato told Reuters that while Washington had made "strenuous" efforts to restrain it from selling to China, "there's still not the level of cooperation and assurance that has relieved our concerns. We're very worried about this relationship."
Israel annually receives $3 billion in U.S. aid, including advanced technology. Criticism of Israel is sensitive in the United States, its leading ally. The report said Israel in 2003 assured Washington it would not sell items to China that could harm U.S. security.
But the commission "understands that Israel has offered training facilities, including one for urban warfare, to train China's security forces for the Olympics." In the past year, "reports indicate Israeli firms have discussed a range of projects with China, including export of sensor and observation systems, security fences, microwave and optics, training, metal detectors and packages for airport and vital facilities security," the commission said.
Israel also provided China with HARPY unmanned aerial vehicles, radar systems, optical and telecommunications equipment, drones and flight simulators. The commission recommended the government restrict foreign defense contractors that sell sensitive military technology or weapons systems to China from participating in U.S. defense-related cooperative research.
D'Amato said that should not include Israel. Instead, the United States should deal with concerns about Israel's defense ties to China separately. In 2000, under U.S. pressure, Israel suspended the sale to Beijing of four $250 million-a-copy advanced early warning Phalcon aircraft, similar to U.S. AWACS planes. The proposed deal alarmed the Pentagon and angered some members of Congress. GAZETA.RU
Source URL: http://www.russiajournal.com/news/cnews-article.shtml?nd=44212
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Libya still has some explaining to do about its nuke program
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Thursday, June 17, 2004
LONDON -- Libya pledged six months ago to eliminate all elements of its nuclear weapons program. However, U.S. officials said Libya was receiving shipments from the Pakistani nuclear network of Abdul Qadeer Khan as late as March 2004.
The International Atomic Energy Agency continues to seek information on Libya's nuclear weapons program, Middle East Newsline reported.
The IAEA said Libya has yet to supply sufficient details on its procurement of a range of materials and equipment required for the production of bomb-grade uranium.
The IAEA assessment matched that of the United States, which has also sought information on a range of issues regarding Libya's nuclear weapons program.
Libya did report the March shipment to Britain, the United States and the IAEA.
IAEA director-general Mohammed El Baradei told the agency's board of governors that Libya has been working closely with international nuclear inspectors. El Baradei said the agency has been working with Tripoli to obtain what he termed a "complete picture" of Libya's nuclear program.
"We are making good progress in understanding Libya's past nuclear activities but some aspects still need to be assessed, and it is important that Libya provide the necessary information to enable that assessment to be made," El Baradei said.
The IAEA chief cited a series of examples where Libya would be required to demonstrate additional cooperation. They included confirmation of the origin of the uranium hexafluoride, or UF6, Libya received in 2000 and 2001.
UF6 has been described as a key element in the assembly of nuclear weapons. El Baradei also called for verification of Libya's planned capabilities for UF6 production. He also said the agency required understanding of the source of high-enriched and low-enriched uranium contamination on gas centrifuge equipment in Libya.
"Libya has proactively cooperated with the agency by providing information and prompt access to all locations requested," El Baradei said.
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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Iran to develop joint oil fields whatever the new Iraq thinks
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Friday, June 11, 2004
Iran does not plan to wait for Iraqi stability until Teheran develops joint oil reserves.
Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Hadi Nejad Hosseinian said Iran was prepared to develop oil fields shared with Iraq without Baghdad's permission.
Hosseinian said that despite the establishment of a joint panel, Baghdad has not responded to Iran's appeals for joint energy development. "Iran and Iraq share a few joint oilfields," Hosseinian told the Iranian daily Sobh Eqtesad. "We cannot wait and see what government takes power in Iraq, and if it is about to cooperate with us or not. We are ready to cooperate with the Iraqis through mutual coordination or even joint exploitation once they are prepared."
[On Wednesday, the Iraqi Oil Ministry reported an explosion at a key oil pipeline that feeds an Iraqi power station, Middle East Newsline reported. Officials said the blast, attributed to insurgents, forced the ministry to reduce electricity output around the country by 10 percent. They said Iraqi oil exports were not immediately affected.]
The two countries share the oil fields of Azadegan, Dehloran, Kushk-Hosseinieh, NaftShahr and West Paydar. Officials said Iran still intends to pursue joint energy projects with Iraq even if Baghdad awards oil and natural gas contracts to U.S. companies.
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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Iran pulls out of EU uranium deal, says it will enrich again
DPA , TEHRAN
Sunday, Jun 20, 2004,Page 6
Iran proclaimed yesterday that it was no longer committed to the agreements made last October with the EU trio of Britain, France and Germany and would resume uranium enrichment.
"We made an agreement with the European Union trio last October in Tehran, which also included a temporary halt to uranium enrichment, but as the Europeans were not committed to the Tehran Declaration, therefore we also lift the temporary halt to uranium enrichment," Hassan Rowhani, Iran's chief negotiator on nuclear issues, told reporters.
Rowhani gave a press conference yesterday morning after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a resolution on Friday criticizing Iran for failing fully to disclose the extent of its nuclear program.
"Details on Iran's new uranium enrichment program will be announced in the coming days," said Rowhani, who is also secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
"We do not pay much attention to the new resolution as the whole issue has once again been politicized with the final aim to deprive Iran of peaceful nuclear technology," he said.
He blamed the IAEA for poisoning the atmosphere in Vienna against Iran with false information, referring to IAEA charges that Iran had not informed the IAEA about its importation of 150 magnets for gas centrifuges used in uranium enrichment.
The IAEA later admitted that its initial claim about the importation of magnets was not correct and Iran in return demanded a change to the critical resolution.
"We however continue cooperation with the IAEA but stress settling the dispute over Iran's nuclear program at the earliest term and without politicization," said Rowhani, who is also a potential candidate to succeed Iranian President Mohammad Khatami next year.
Rowhani also said Iran would not withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Iran had even agreed on further IAEA inspections in Arak and Isfahan in central Iran, where a heavy water reactor is planned and where nuclear pollution had been reported by the inspectors, he said.
"The new resolution has not created any new commitment for Iran and there will also be no halt to the heavy water reactor plan in Isfahan," he said, referring to an earlier demand by the EU trio.
The cleric reiterated that, contrary to US claims, Iran had no secret plans for nuclear weapons, adding "the IAEA acknowledgement of this fact has left only a few pages left from the rather very thick Iranian nuclear file at the beginning."
The IAEA unanimously passed a resolution on Friday criticizing Iran for failing to fully disclose the extent of its nuclear program.
International investigators from the Vienna-based UN watchdog had been given contradictory and incomplete information, the agency said.
The strongly worded resolution is a stinging rebuke to Tehran but stops short of threatening Iran with UN Security Council sanctions.
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Demolitions Raise Concern Of Nuclear Coverup in Iran
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A14
TEHRAN, June 19 -- Construction cranes stipple the skyline of Iran's capital. A city of 10 million, Tehran has been in a building boom for years.
But in the northeast corner of this sprawling, smoggy metropolis, something was torn down a few months ago, something behind a 20-foot concrete wall.
"It was a municipal sports complex," said a grizzled man who came to the door of the guard house, shrugging and sliding into a camouflage fatigue coat without losing the ash from the cigarette clenched in his lips.
"It wasn't big enough," he said, declining to be identified. "So they demolished it and they want to rebuild it bigger."
The yellow sign posted at the front gate -- clean and new, in contrast to the graffiti-scarred walls -- told the same story: "Sport Cultural Complex of Kowsar."
But in a few days inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will ask to see for themselves. The now-vacant acres facing Shian 7th Alley have raised suspicions that Iran may be building nuclear weapons. Iran insists it harbors no secret weapons program, but fellow members of the IAEA board issued a resolution Friday condemning the country for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into its activities.
Satellite images of the site show that between August 2003 and March at least a half-dozen buildings were pulled down. The IAEA is investigating the images, which suggested to U.S. government analysts that Iran was concealing nuclear activities. Iranian officials have denied that claim and said inspectors are welcome to survey the site.
According to the Institute for Science and International Security, an organization based in Washington that monitors nuclear proliferation, a layer of topsoil was also carted away from the area. A machine that detects radiation, called a whole body counter, was then brought to the site, according to the institute.
"The whole body counter itself is not a clear indication of a nuclear weapons program," said David Albright, president of the institute.
But the site was not included in a list of atomic research facilities Iran was obliged to provide last year to the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, he noted. And by the time inspectors arrive, all they may be able to confirm is a vague sense of unease.
"It'll be hard to do sample work at that site," Albright said. "People will try. But these are the changes you make if you want to defeat the environmental sampling techniques of the IAEA."
Iran has pledged to continue working with the inspectors, who expect be in Iran at least through the summer. But the theocratic government appeared to be still absorbing the impact of the slap by the IAEA -- its second since March for Iran's lack of candor.
On Saturday, the state-run Tehran Times newspaper carried 10 articles on its first two pages about the nuclear issue. But at a news conference, Iran's official on the issue, Hassan Rowhani, declared that the IAEA resolution "does not have much significance."
Rowhani, secretary of Supreme National Security Council, said Iran had not yet decided whether it would resume enriching uranium -- a process that produces fuel for energy or for weapons. Iran agreed last year to suspend enrichment activities after it acknowledged a nuclear program it had kept secret for 18 years.
European diplomats who insist that Iran's cooperation has been erratic, have said they want Iran to give up enriching uranium permanently and back away from plans for a heavy water reactor, which could produce plutonium for a bomb.
Rowhani pledged to continue talks with France, Germany and Britain, the three European countries that coaxed Iran last year to cooperate with the IAEA, but he also implied that the resolution would have unwelcome consequences.
"Since the Europeans have not met their commitment, we may take new decisions and announce them in the coming days," Rowhani said.
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Move over Tiger: N. Korea's Kim shot 38 under par his 1st time out
Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Tiger Woods couldn't hold a candle to North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, if nation's government-controlled media reports are to be believed.
South Korea's Pyeonghwa (Peace) Motors Corporation plans to stage an inter-Korean golf game next month in the North's capital city, Pyongyang, company officials say.
"We have agreed with North Korean authorities to hold a friendly golf competition between the two Koreas from July 30 to Aug. 5 at a golf course in Pyongyang," said an official at Pyeonghwa Motors, which has started a business venture in North Korea.
Fortunately for all entrants, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il will not be playing. If the official government media is to be believed, Kim is easily the greatest golfer, the world has ever seeen.
Pyongyang media say North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il enjoys golf, having shot multiple holes-in-one during his first try at the game. He reportedly aced five holes and finished 38 under par on the golf course. The "Great Leader" routinely shoots three or four holes-in-one per round, the government-controlled media reported.
The event, to be dubbed a "golf game for peaceful unification of Korea," will be attended by South Korea's top 15 female golfers, including LPGA players, 30 businesspersons and 20 singers and movie stars, the official said.
From the North's side, eight female amateur players and dozens of government officials as well as foreign diplomats in Pyongyang would also take part in the friendly game, he said. "They will compete in a 36-hole [competition] for the prize money of 100 million Won ($86,000)," the official said. Park Sang-Kwon, the company's president, was in Pyongyang to work out the details, he said.
North Korea has only one 18-hole golf course in Pyongyang. The North's media have said the 7,000-meter (7,700-yard) course is "in full line with international standards." The course, built in the mid-1980s by North Korean businessmen based in Japan, "bustled with Pyongyang citizens, overseas Koreans and foreigners," the North's official Korean Central News Agency said. Surrounded by a forest and a scenic lake, golfers can enjoy collecting plants and boating during breaks, it said.
"The course is not bad. North Koreans seemed to keep it well-managed," said a Pyeonghwa Motors official who has frequently traveled to the North.
Kim Dong-Wook, general secretary at South Korea's Golf Association, said golf is almost nonexistent in the North. "We believe there are no professional golfers," he said. Outside their country, North Korean golfers have yet to make a mark.
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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Pyongyang uses advanced tech to extend range of No-Dong missile
Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
North Korea has extended the range of its No-Dong missile in a move that could benefit Pyongyang's clients in the Middle East, Iran in particular.
The No-Dong intermediate-range missiles was said to have been extended over the last year in a North Korean research and development effort, Asian intelligence sources said. They said North Korea appeared to have employed advanced technology to reduce the weight of the warheads to extend the range of the No-Dong.
The Japanese business daily Nikkei Shimbun said North Korea extended the range of the No-Dong by reducing the weight of warheads and improving technology. The daily, in a report on June 2, did not elaborate.
Iran's Shihab-3 began as a copy of the No-Dong, but was said to have been enhanced over the last two years to reach a range of 1,380 kilometers, Middle East Newsline reported.
The intelligence sources said Iran was said to have transferred missile expertise that was used in its Shihab-3 intermediate-range missile program.
North Korea's No-Dong was believed to have a range of 1,200 to 1,500 kilometers. But the only test of the No-Dong was in 1991 and the missile was said to have reached a range of 565 kilometers.
U.S. officials said North Korea was certain to offer for export its improved No-Dong. They said the most interested clients would be Iran and Syria.
"It seems to me they've demonstrated a willingness to export anything," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an Asian security conference in Singapore on June 5. "And so to the extent they have the capabilities that they have indicated they have, reasonable people in the world have to assume they'd be willing to sell or use most of those capabilities."
Iranian officials said the Shihab-3 was now capable of reaching a range of 1,700 kilometers.
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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Chavez Tightening Grip on Judges, Critics Charge
Venezuelan President's Reforms Called Threat to Rule of Law, Attempt to Undermine Recall Effort
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A24
CARACAS, Venezuela -- Judge Miguel Angel Luna said he was sitting in his courtroom on Feb. 28, when prosecutors brought in two beer-truck drivers, who had been parked near an anti-government demonstration, and demanded that they be jailed.
But there were no charges against them, Luna recalled. So he set the two men free. Three days later he was fired by the Supreme Court president, without explanation.
"The regime of President Hugo Chavez has turned our democracy into an autocracy," said Luna, 58, who has returned to his private law practice and believes that his only offense was to defy the political wishes of the president and his supporters. "Judicial autonomy has been lost, and that is the foundation of democracy."
Luna's case illustrates how politics has eroded the judicial system, threatening the rule of law in one of the world's most important oil-producing nations. The loss of judicial autonomy could affect an Aug. 15 national referendum on whether to recall Chavez, according to political and legal analysts in Venezuela and a report released last week by the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch.
The Chavez government presides over a judicial system where most judges can be fired at will. The National Assembly has also just passed a law that will allow Chavez and his allies to pack the supreme court with sympathetic justices who could end up deciding any challenges to the recall election, analysts said.
The government argues that it is cleaning up a corrupt and inefficient judiciary it inherited when Chavez was elected in 1998, and trying to reign in the anti-Chavez groups who backed a coup in April 2002 and a strike at the national oil company last year that cost the country billions of dollars. The justice system in Venezuela has historically been corrupt and Chavez fired hundreds of judges immediately after his election, a purge that was widely seen as necessary.
But critics said Chavez, a former paratrooper who led a failed coup in 1992, had gone beyond the changes needed to reform the judiciary. They said he was trying to silence dissent and create an authoritarian government in the style of Fidel Castro's Cuba.
"This is a political assault on the judicial system," said Pedro Nikken, a constitutional lawyer in Caracas. "It's making the judiciary a branch of the executive. They are going to use this to attack the dissidents and guarantee the impunity of any abuses of human rights or acts of corruption by the government."
In its report, Human Rights Watch said the "most brazen" challenge to the rule of law in Venezuela was a new statute pushed through the National Assembly by Chavez allies last month that expands the Supreme Court from 20 to 32 justices and allowed the Chavez-dominated assembly to fire and hire justices with a simple majority vote. Previously, firing a justice required a two-thirds majority.
The report said the new law amounted to a "political takeover" of the court. It said the law would allow Chavez and his allies to "pack and purge the country's highest court," which is currently split 10 to 10 between judges seen as loyal to Chavez and those viewed as his opponents. The report called on the Organization of American States to investigate.
"We are not talking about what could happen, we are talking about what is already happening," Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the group's Americas division, said at a news conference. He noted that on Wednesday pro-Chavez legislators voted to fire one Supreme Court justice and to begin proceedings to suspend two more. All three were widely seen as opponents of Chavez and had ruled against his wishes in recent high-profile cases.
Only 20 percent of Venezuela's 1,732 judges have tenure and job security; the rest are either provisional or temporary judges who can be fired at will by the Supreme Court's six-member administrative council, the report noted.
The Chavez government responded to the report with ferocious rhetoric.
The National Assembly's leadership said it would consider declaring Vivanco a "persona non grata" and demand his immediate departure from the country. Assembly President Francisco Ameliach Orta, quoted in local media, said the report reflected "total and absolute ignorance" and accused Human Rights Watch of "open and unpardonable meddling in the internal affairs of our country." He said the Supreme Court overhaul was passed by the National Assembly and represented the will of the majority of the Venezuelan people.
Tarek William Saab, a key Chavez ally in the Assembly and head of the Foreign Relations Commission, said in an interview that critics failed to give the government credit for its efforts to "create an autonomous and independent judicial branch" and put an end to the "enormous impunity" that existed before Chavez took office.
Saab said it was wrong to say that Chavez controlled the judiciary. If he did, Saab said, the leaders of the 2002 coup against Chavez and those who led the oil company strike would be in jail. "They have not been put in jail because of the lack of ethics on the part of judges linked to the opposition," Saab said.
Still some analysts, including Alberto Arteaga Sanchez, a noted criminal attorney in Caracas, said Chavez and his allies were "using criminal law against their political adversaries."
One of Arteaga's clients is an army general who was involved in the 2002 coup against Chavez. Arteaga said the Chavez government had proposed an overhaul of Venezuela's criminal code that called for up to six years in jail for "publicly or privately instigating disobedience of the laws or hatred among citizens." Arteaga said even a private discussion among friends could result in prison time.
The reform calls for up to five years in jail for "causing panic" by disseminating "false information," even by e-mail. And it would jail anyone who "simply intimidates" or "pressures" public servants. Arteaga and Nikken said that would include the habit of harassing public officials by "casseroling" them: annoying them by banging a spoon loudly against a pot.
"This government is starting to show signs, like we saw in Cuba, of criminalizing political dissidence," said Nikken, noting that last year the Cuban government sentenced 75 non-violent dissidents, including journalists and librarians, to long prison terms.
Potential political influence in the judicial system is especially critical now because of the recall referendum scheduled for Aug. 15. After years of trying to oust Chavez, first by coup and then through the oil strike, his opponents finally managed to gather enough signatures on petitions to force the recall vote.
Noting that Venezuela is deeply and passionately divided between those who support and those who oppose Chavez, Vivanco predicted that the referendum could be so close that it may ultimately de decided by the country's high court, just as the U.S. presidential election in 2000 was by the Supreme Court. Vivanco said it was critical that the court not be stacked with justices acting solely for political reasons.
Luna, the fired judge, filed a written appeal and he was reinstated on April 15. But three weeks later he presided over a procedural hearing involving the case of another Chavez opponent. Following standard practice, Luna granted the man's request to allow two new attorneys to represent him. A week later, he was again fired.
Luna said he was one of nine children of a small-town merchant and the only person in his family to graduate from college. He said he worked as a lawyer for almost 25 years before becoming a judge four years ago. He said he had never been an opponent of Chavez. A soft-spoken man with gray hair and glasses, Luna said he was sad that his career on the bench had ended because of "pure revenge."
"We are waiting for the recall election to change our direction," he said, "to take us toward a horizon of peace and democracy in Venezuela."
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Russia takes North Korea's side in nuclear crisis talks
Oops: State Dept. reports record drop in terrorism
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Sunday, June 13, 2004
WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department has been embarrassed by glaring errors in its report on global terrorism.
The report which was released on April 29, stated that global terrorism had dropped to its lowest level since 1969.
Critics in Congress and in the counter-terrorism community were stunned by the State Department's assertion. They cited statistics that terrorism was at its highest level since the early 1980s.
Officials said the State Department agreed with critics in Congress and the counter-terrorism community and admitted that its annual report, entitled "Patterns of Global Terrorism," was a serious distortion of the global terrorist threat. Revisions are forthcoming, they said.
''Very embarrassing, Sec. of State Colin Powell said this morning on NBC's "Meet the Press."
" I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong,'' he said.
"We got phone calls from people who were going through our report and who said to themselves, as we should have said to ourselves: 'This doesn't feel right. This doesn't look right,'" State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Thursday. "And who started asking us questions."
Officials said Terrorist Threat and Integration Center, which obtains data from the CIA, FBI, Defense Department and Homeland Security Department, would review and revise the statistics for terrorist attacks during 2003. They said the corrections, which officials blamed on the new center, could be issued over the next few weeks.
"We didn't check it or verify it sufficiently," Boucher said. "We took the numbers We did an analysis and we gave you what our assessment was. That analysis and assessment will obviously change with the numbers."
The review and revision of the report marked the first time that the State Department acknowledged deficiencies in its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism." Critics have accused the department of playing down or ignoring insurgency attacks described as terrorist strikes that take place in non-U.S. allies or by organizations and entities that cooperate with the State Department.
"It is deplorable that the report would claim that terrorism attacks are decreasing when in fact significant terrorist activity is at a 20-year high," Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, said in May 17 letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
On June 1, the Congressional Research Service urged the State Department to review the structure and content of its latest global terrorism report.
The department report was said to have ignored acts regarded as terrorist after Nov. 11, 2003 as well as Chechen strikes in Russia.
The report also ignored a Nov. 15 suicide bombing in Istanbul attributed to Al Qaida. That attack killed 61 people and injured more than 300.
The department did not say what would be revised in the report. But a senior State Department official told the Washington Post that corrections in the global terrorism review could fill eight pages.
"I can assure you it had nothing to do with putting out anything but the most honest, accurate information we can," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. "Errors crept in that frankly we did not catch here."
Copyright ? 2004 East West Services, Inc.
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More Saudi Vandalism
The Wahhabis keep tearing down Muslim holy places in Saudi Arabia.
by Stephen Schwartz
06/08/2004 12:00:00 AM
SAUDI ARABIA, in which Wahhabism is the state form of Islam, has a long history of vandalizing and demolishing historical monuments. Wahhabi doctrine holds that raising gravestones or tombs or maintaining graveyards constitutes idolatry, known in Arabic as shirk, a grievous sin. So does preserving buildings--including religious structures such as mosques. To Wahhabis, a beloved building, the tomb of a saintly figure, or a gravestone is an idol. In Wahhabism, prayers to the Prophet are forbidden--above all because Wahhabis see in them a parallel with Christian worship of Jesus.
Thus, the Saudis followed their conquest of Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s with an orgy of destruction. They leveled the "Jannat al-Baqi" or "Heavenly Orchard" at Medina that included graves of the Prophet Muhammad's son Ibrahim, as well as numerous of the Prophet's relatives and original companions. They also looted the Prophet's Shrine in Medina and demolished the cemetery in Mecca that included the graves of Muhammad's mother and grandfather. They completely destroyed mausoleums, mosques, and other honored sites, including Muhammad's own house. It was even said that they wished to uproot the grave of Muhammad himself and tear down the Kaaba, the stone temple at the center of Mecca. They were prevented from this last act by pressure from Muslims in India.
WAHHABI VANDALISM continues today, and its appearance is typically the first sign of aggressive Saudi penetration of Muslim lands. Saudi agents uprooted graveyards in Kosovo even before the war began there in the late 1990s, and Wahhabi missionaries have sought to demolish Sufi tombs in Kurdistan. Late in 2002, the Saudi government tore down the historic Ottoman fortress of Ajyad in Mecca, causing outrage in many Muslim countries.
And now the Saudi authorities are at it again, according to reports from enraged Saudi subjects, who as in earlier instances have requested anonymity. The city planning authorities in Medina, known for their Wahhabi extremism, have ordered the leveling of five of seven mosques built in the city by Muhammad's daughter and four of his companions. These structures are the Mosque of Sayyida Fatima bint Rasulillah, Salman al-Farsi Mosque, Abu Bakr Mosque, Umar ibn al-Khattab Mosque, and Mosque of Ali ibn Abi Talib. The latter three were constructed by figures among the four "righteous caliphs" who immediately succeeded Muhammad in the leadership of Islam. The structures in question are unique cultural assets whose historic value is literally incalculable, to say nothing of their religious symbolism.
Protestors against the decision say the ancient buildings have been covered with black tarpaulins to hide the demolition work going on inside the revered shrines. Other recent actions of the same kind by the Medina authorities have also been reported.
Wahhabi desecration of Islamic sacred relics clash notably with the claims of bin Laden and other ultra-Wahhabis, who argue that the Hijaz, the territory including Mecca and Medina, is "holy Muslim territory" on which no non-Muslim should set foot. Indeed, al Qaeda propaganda would have the West believe that all of Saudi Arabia belongs to this category. That would presumably include Riyadh, where Saks Fifth Avenue and The Body Shop maintain branches.
THE TRUTH is quite different. Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca are a prerogative of Muslims alone, and Muhammad did say that there should not be two religions in Arabia. The caliph Umar ordered the expulsion of Jews and Christians from Arabia. Wahhabis interpret these edicts to forbid adherents of other faiths from practicing their religion within the borders of the Saudi kingdom. But traditional Muslims interpret Muhammad's opinion to mean that monotheism and paganism could not coexist in the country, and Umar's order was never completely carried out.
Indeed, until the Wahhabi takeover in the 1920s, local Christians maintained a church in Jeddah. Thousands of Jews lived in Yemen until the 1950s. The closure of Mecca and Medina to non-Muslims is subject to debate in the Islamic world with regard to its history as well as its appropriateness. At present, Christian churches and Hindu temples function openly in Oman, a country with a more conservative Islamic tradition than Saudi Arabia. Kuwait, the Emirates, and Bahrain also permit open Christian worship--the latter island even boasts a synagogue as well as a Hindu temple.
All of which illustrates that Saudi Islam, or Wahhabism, is not about faith, but about power. And nothing better illustrates the power of the state, in the mind of the Saudi rulers, than the desecration of holy places--including Islamic sites dating from the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself.
Stephen Schwartz writes frequently on Islamic subjects for The Weekly Standard.
? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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Iraqi dinar: Speculators beware
By Cam McGrath
CAIRO - Speculators who stashed away "Bremer dinars" earlier this year in the hope their value would skyrocket are suffering enormous losses as the official Iraqi currency plummets. Hit particularly hard are a high number of Egyptians, who had earlier raced to pick up the currency.
"Many people sold anything they could to buy Iraqi dinars," Mohammed al-Abyad, chairman of the Egyptian Foreign Exchange Association told IPS. "When the dinar went down these people lost a lot of money."
The Iraqi dinar was trading at one Egyptian pound (16 cents) per 50 dinars on the black market before its value dropped sharply earlier this year on news of escalating insurgency in Iraq. The pound is now worth 210 dinars on the black market.
"The black market has narrowed and the currency has no liquidity now," said Shady Sharaf, head of market research at Cairo-based al-Shorouk Brokerage. "The people cannot sell the dinars they bought, which presses on demand."
The new Iraqi dinar banknotes introduced by the US command last October replaced old banknotes bearing images of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Speculators believed the value of the "Bremer dinar" - named after the US civilian administrator of Iraq, L Paul Bremer - would rise as the economy of war-devastated Iraq recovered.
But that recovery has yet to take place, with daily reports of further violence, deaths and insurgency making the headlines. In the latest, a car bombing attack hit an Iraqi police car and a civilian vehicle carrying foreigners in the city of Ramadi, some 110 kilometers west of Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least four people. On the same day in Kirkuk, Iraqi security forces said gunmen ambushed and killed the top security official for the state-run Northern Oil Company, dealing another blow to the country's already battered oil industry.
But months ago, unaware the instability would continue to plague Iraq even as the handover date draws near, thousands of investors working in the Gulf region brought bags stuffed with the new Iraqi dinars. They stashed away the currency or sold it for quick profits to other speculators on the black market.
"They remembered what happened in Kuwait, and believed the same thing would happen in Iraq," al-Abyad said.
The value of the Kuwaiti dinar fell to less than 10 cents during the country's occupation by Iraqi forces in 1990, but climbed steeply after its liberation by coalition forces the following year. It now trades at US$3.50.
"The situation in Iraq and Kuwait is very different," said al-Abyad. "Kuwait recovered in little time because its [infrastructure] remained intact."
The speculation was based on credibility, says Alaa al-Shazly, economics professor at Cairo University. "The dinar is backed by the US and people wouldn't have thought the US would get into something that would turn out to be a failure."
Although many countries do not trade the Iraqi currency, Western traders have been doing so through websites. When trading began last October, a dollar bought 420. Now it buys 555 - a 32% drop. The currency has declined 11% against the dollar in the past five weeks alone, and this while the dollar itself has fallen. In downtown Baghdad, though, the exchange rate is 1,400 to the dollar.
Many foreigners in Iraq are also buying up dinars in the hope that it will recover strongly. One analyst commented that the word in Iraq is that at the low end, a dinar could be worth $1. At the top end, more than $4 - many people will become very rich overnight. In its April report, the Economist Intelligence Unit forecast a 60% gross domestic product growth for 2004 and 25% for the following year.
But speculators should perhaps heed the advice of another anlayst: "The only thing the Iraqi dinar is likely to hit is a wall." Perhaps he was thinking of Iraq's huge whopping $120 billion foreign debt, which few countries are interested in writing off.
(Asia Times Online/Inter Press Service)
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Despite Bush speech, U.S. planning long stay in Iraq
May 28, 2004
BY TED GALEN CARPENTER Advertisement
In his speech at the Army War College, President Bush asserted repeatedly that Iraq would receive "full sovereignty" on June 30. But the president seems to have a peculiar definition of that concept. The United States and its coalition partners plan to give Iraqis nothing more than nominal sovereignty, and the ''handover of power'' is little more than an exercise in symbolism.
True, the Coalition Provisional Authority will officially go out of business on June 30. But the interim Iraqi government will exercise few prerogatives of sovereignty. According to earlier congressional testimony by Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, that government will have no authority over coalition military forces operating in Iraq and only limited authority over Iraq's own security forces. Indeed, the United States and its allies intend to be responsible for Iraq's security for the indefinite future.
Grossman also indicated that the interim government would have no power to pass new laws or rescind edicts that the CPA issued. Other U.S. officials confirm that the interim government will not have authority over current or future reconstruction contracts. Even the Iraqi news media will continue to be governed by rules promulgated by U.S. military authorities, not the interim government.
The resolution that the United States and Britain just presented to the U.N. Security Council also provides little indication that Iraq will enjoy real sovereignty anytime soon. There is no date certain for the departure of coalition military forces. The only requirement is that the mandate for the peacekeeping force must be reviewed by the Security Council after one year. And although the resolution officially gives the Iraqi government control over the country's oil revenues, an ''international advisory board'' is to make certain that the revenues are used ''properly.'' That provision suggests more than a little foreign control over the decision-making process.
Washington's plans and actions indicate that the United States is preparing for a long stay in Iraq. The appointment of a four-star general to replace a three-star general as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq suggests that U.S. leaders regard the Iraqi deployment as a critically important mission for the foreseeable future. America's embassy in Baghdad is going to be one of the largest U.S. embassies in the world -- again suggesting that the United States intends to exercise a great deal of influence in that small country.
These actions raise serious questions about how much real authority even a permanent Iraqi government, scheduled to be chosen in national elections in January 2005, will have. Angry Iraqis, including some previously friendly members of the Governing Council, are openly criticizing the transfer of sovereignty on June 30 as a charade. They have a point. Truly sovereign countries have governments that are able to pass and rescind laws. Those governments, not foreign military commanders, control the security forces operating in their territory. And the governments of sovereign countries certainly are not relegated to the sidelines while foreign entities dictate key elements of public policy.
Bush missed an important opportunity to articulate a new and more sustainable Iraq strategy. He needed to emphasize that the United States intended to transfer the substance, not just the form, of sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30. At a minimum, that would require setting a date certain for the withdrawal of all coalition military forces. It also would require allowing the interim government to exercise meaningful authority over the entire range of public policy.
According to the current plan, the Iraqi government after June 30 will have about as much power as the typical 21st century European monarch -- that is to say, not much. The occupation of Iraq will continue in all but name. That is a huge disservice to the Iraqi people, and it threatens to entangle the United States in a thankless mission of indefinite duration. The president owed both Iraqis and Americans a better strategy than he outlined in his Army War College address.
Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and author or editor of 15 books on international affairs.
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Iraq as the 51st state
"He was a patron of terrorism ... He had long-established ties with al-Qaeda." - Vice President Dick Cheney on Saddam Hussein, June 14
"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection." - Secretary of State Colin Powell, June 10
"We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." - 9-11 Commission, June 16
ANN ARBOR, Michigan - Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, has positioned himself as a virtually indispensable voice in the Iraq debate. His Internet weblog, Informed Comment, offers a stark contrast to the cacophony of uninformed armchair punditry on Iraq, not to mention talk-show hosts babbling about "wacky Iraqis". Professor Cole lived in Lucknow, India, and also in Beirut. He's a fluent Arab speaker. The blog is uploaded daily, by himself (no staffers), and also offers extensive quotes from the Arab press. He gets as many as 200,000 fresh hits a week. Cole received this Asia Times Online correspondent in his fourth-floor office at the university's International Institute in Ann Arbor.
ATol: Let's start with the credibility of the Iraqi caretaker government vis-a-vis the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, more than vis-a-vis the US and the UN. Virtually everyone in the Sunni triangle and also in the Shi'ite south used to refer to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) as "the imported government". Will the same happen again to this American face of an Iraqi government?
Juan Cole: Everybody knows it's an appointed government. It doesn't spring from the rule of the Iraqi people. Grand Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which he openly said that. His view in this matter will be widely shared. It's unfortunate that the Iraqi prime minister should have been a known CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] asset. I don't think that it changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a puppet council by many people. There's much more continuity between the IGC and this government than most people seem to realize. It's pretty much the same cast of characters - either with regard to people who actually sat at the council and persons who represent factions who had a seat in that council.
ATol: What are the implications of what you're saying for the Iraqi street?
JC: That nothing really has changed. These people are not getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a publicity stunt - without substance. The real question for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it's credible or not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it's not entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one can be pessimistic ...
Army down, racism up
ATol: On the dissolution of the army: Do you think this was a blunder by proconsul Paul Bremer or was it carried out on purpose?
JC: On purpose in the sense of trying to make the Iraqis dependent on the Americans? Well, what Jay Garner said to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corp], I saw it with my own eyes, is that he believed one of the reasons the army was dissolved was that the Bremer team has as one of their primary goals in Iraq the imposition of Polish-style shock therapy. They wanted to transform Iraq into a capitalist state, as quickly as possible. This was part of the general plan to make Iraq a kind of model for the region.
ATol: This was the original neo-con plan?
JC: Yes, but the primacy of the economic policy is something that I don't think is generally recognized. One of the reasons for getting rid of the Ba'ath army, according to Garner, was that they were afraid that the survival of any large Ba'ath institution like that might be an obstacle to the extreme liberalization of the economy. You can just imagine a situation in which the Americans wanted to denationalize Iraqi companies. If you had kept the Ba'ath army, they would come to the coalition and say, "No, you can't sell off these companies, my cousin helps to run them"... They [the Americans] thought that the army would remain a power center able to intervene in policy debates, on the side of state control of the economy. So they dissolved it not based on security purposes, but to remove a potential obstacle to Polish-style shock therapy. They brought Polish economic advisers - that's the reason for the Polish military involvement in Iraq. They tried to replicate the Polish experience. I don't believe that the neo-cons at the Defense Department wanted to use the US military to supplant the Iraqi army. In fact, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz had told Congress that it's likely the US would be back to having only one division in Iraq by October 2003. They thought they could dissolve the army and just use the police to maintain order, and then they could do whatever they wanted to do with the economy: sell it off, bring in the big companies, open Iraq to Western investment. They hoped that the Iraqi bourgeoisie would emerge, there would be productivity gains, the country would be rich, and everybody else - the Iranians, the Syrians - would want to follow them.
ATol: Was that a mix of arrogance and incompetence, plus lack of knowledge of society and culture in Iraqi and the Middle East?
JC: Certainly the plan was born out of enormous ignorance of the Middle East. Remember, people with training in economics and political science very frequently stay away from knowing details. They have a set of principles, they think they are physicists, so the people planning this out, most of them knew no Arabic or anything really about the history and culture and society of the Arab world. Except for Wolfowitz, who had some knowledge of Indonesia when he was there as an ambassador ...
ATol: But Islam in Indonesia and Southeast Asia has very little to do with Islam in the Middle East.
JC: I would say it's very substantially different. And Indonesia is not a sufficient background for planning out how to run Iraq ... And moreover Wolfowitz was the only one amongst them who had this kind of knowledge. So it's clear to me that first of all they were very ignorant, also extremely arrogant because they were playing with people's destinies. Some of the neo-cons of course are very close to the Likud Party in Israel, and I think that many of them have imbibed this kind of Israeli racism towards Arabs, that Arabs only respect force, that you can get them to inform on each other because of all the internal clan feuds ... People like Douglas Feith and Richard Perle have thought along these lines for a long time. Frankly, Israeli racism towards the Arabs is not a good guide to dealing with a society like Iraq, or with any society. Unlike the Palestinians, Iraq is a society that has not been dominated by a foreign power since 1932.
ATol: And the Iraqis expelled the British.
JC: The British were expelled and very decisively, in 1958. And there were many rebellions before that. This generation of young Iraqis grew up in Ba'ath schools, learning about nationalism, learning about anti-colonialism. What their identity really is about is asserting themselves vis-a-vis the West. The idea that they would be supine before a Western occupation was always crazy, and any of us who knew anything about the region predicted there would be a lot of trouble. Iraq was a modern, industrial society, with relatively high rates of literacy, run down in the 1990s very substantially but still not a society easy for foreigners to come and dominate.
Roads to hell
ATol: Assuming that the neo-con dream - the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad - is now in tatters, would it be the case that now the road through Baghdad leads back to Crawford, Texas?
JC: There's some question of whether that could cost [President George W] Bush the election. A year ago, it didn't seem likely to me that Iraq would be able to affect an election. But the steady drumbeat of violence, the mounting toll of dead and wounded, the miscalculations regarding the siege of Fallujah, provoking the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, and then the Abu Ghraib scandal, the cumulative factor of all these events, according to opinion polls, really have taken a toll on Bush's standing. If he were to be re-elected it would be historic: no one has been re-elected with these kinds of poll numbers. I think Iraq has become an albatross for the Bush administration. This so-called turnover of sovereignty - they're hoping that the US press stops covering Iraq like it is doing now, very intensively, as though it is the 51st state, which essentially is being run by the American government. Everyone will have noticed that when Hamid Karzai was elected by the Loya Jirga, the very next day Afghanistan fell off the front page and went to page 17.
ATol: And now it has fallen off the papers entirely.
JC: Now you can have several American servicemen killed and they are not even reported. I discern an unwritten rule among American journalists, that the American public is not interested in places which have their own government. The real significance of the so-called handover of sovereignty is that the Bush administration and its political advisers are hoping that the American press will take this moment as a cue to turn to reporting about Laci Peterson and other nonsense stories, local murder mysteries.
ATol: Do you think this might work? With Fox News maybe, but what about the Washington Post and the New York Times?
JC: Actually, it might. It might push Iraq off the front page. I don't agree with you that it would work most of all with Fox News. Because of its militarism and its attempt to get viewers from the American right, Fox pays more attention to Iraq than most of the other networks do.
ATol: In terms of sensational images.
JC: Sensational images, but it's just inevitable that if the US military very largely votes Republican, and you want those people watching Fox programming, they're interested in what's going on in Iraq. I think capitalism in a way swings Fox towards doing more Iraq reporting than some of the other networks. If there's a firefight in Baqubah, it seems that Fox is more likely to report it than the other networks.
ATol: But they report only the Pentagon side of the story.
JC: I agree that Fox is very slanted, but the way mass media work can often be ironic. Although Fox thinks it is reporting news of interest to its right-wing viewers, reporting this firefight in Baqubah and the way the US is putting down those insurgents, anybody who actually watches this will come out with a double message: one is the Fox message, and the other message is "Jesus, a lot of trouble in Iraq".
ATol: We have learned from the resistance, from some former Saddam Hussein generals, that the resistance will actually increase after June 30, that the postwar had been planned for years, and that everyone associated in some form or another with the Americans and the new caretaker government will be a target. So there will be even more bloodshed. How will this bloodshed rebound on the US? And what about the media: will they report it?
JC: This is the problem: it's difficult for the insurgency to target the Americans. They can get some RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] against an American base, they do this every day, it usually results in some casualties, relatively light. They've mainly turned to soft targets, Iraqis, so they blow up a market in Baghdad, or police stations. They are attempting to just foment a feeling in the country that the Americans are not actually in control. That will continue and may as well increase. I read a lot about these incidents in the Arabic press - they never get reported in the Western press.
ATol: But the important point is that these incidents are reported on alJazeera and al-Arabiya and watched every night by millions in the Arab world.
JC: AlJazeera is excellent on Iraq news, and it reports all of these incidents where there are casualties. But as far as the American public is concerned, I think that it may well be that casualties among US servicemen in Iraq, that's going to be on page 17. But if you did have an increase in the number of incidents, it's possible that it would get more coverage. It's up to the journalists now. Are they going to take this bait, are they going to be manipulated in this way as they have been manipulated all along?
ATol: Maybe it's the case that everybody has been manipulated: the American press, and now also the United Nations, forced to approve a new Iraq resolution. For millions of Iraqis, the UN is synonymous with sanctions.
JC: This is different from the rest of the Arab world, where they associate the UN with peacekeeping and a more even-handed policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the UN itself is not unaware of this, and they don't want to get heavily involved in Iraq. The problem for the world community is that the US has presented them with a fait accompli. It's not in anybody's interest in Europe, for instance, for Iraq to descend into chaos. Europe is heavily dependent on Persian Gulf petroleum, it could be deindustrialized if things get too bad. So when the Americans come and say, "If you pass a resolution of this sort, we'll set the process back to order," who's going to argue with them?
The Muqtada factor
ATol - Let's examine the move against Muqtada al-Sadr. Was it another blunder by the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority)?
JC: These things are not transparent. It's amazing to me, we supposedly live in a democracy in the United States. And yet, once the election has occurred, the public gives up a lot of right to know. And so the CPA has been run in a very untransparent way, we never know why they do anything, they never say, and they are constantly putting out those kinds of propagandistic statements, they're always trying to find demons to blame everything on, Saddam, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and then Muqtada al-Sadr. My own impression is that the Americans provoked this uprising by Muqtada, that he had not done anything in particular that might suggest he was a military threat. He had given strict orders to his militia not to fire on Americans. When the Americans came after Muqtada, he launched this uprising. I think the Shi'ite clerics made a decision to stay out of it, retreat from their positions and have the Mahdi Army have Najaf and Karbala. The Mahdi Army was not strong in those two places. I still think that it's plausible that it was Muqtada's reaction to the assassination of Sheikh [Ahmed] Yassin that caused the CPA to go after him. We must remember that the CPA is dominated by neo-conservatives, that twentysomething people like [neo-con pundit] Michael Ledeen's daughter [Simone Ledeen] have been running the Iraqi economy. Decision-making would be coming from people who are very close to the Likud Party and who were extremely alarmed when Muqtada al-Sadr said he was like the right arm of Hamas and would avenge the death of Sheikh Yassin.
ATol: Have you read any similar analysis in any of the Arab papers at the time?
JC: No. I haven't. But it's possible. I know Hezbollah called for revenge for the murder, and also did call for Iraqi solidarity about this. But this analysis, I have never seen it in the Arabic press.
ATol: You were arguably one of the few, if not the only one, in the West who wrote that the Shi'ites would never forgive America for the bombing of Karbala, and you also cared to explain why.
JC: Most Americans and Westerners don't understand what Karbala means. During the Iranian revolution there was a slogan that "every day is Ashura". Karbala is what an anthropologist called a paradigm in people's lives. The idea of American GIs firing tank missiles anywhere near the shrine of Imam Hussein in major battle with Shi'ites is unbearable, even considering that the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr are not liked around Karbala, they are considered lower-class thugs. I compare them to gangster rappers. So I'm not saying they were popular. I'm saying that the Shi'ites look at them as their own problem. And if there is a choice between them and the Americans, symbolically at least, regardless of what they actually do, they could never make that choice for the Americans. People are very upset all over the Shi'ite world that there was this desecration of the shrine cities. The amount of rage among the Shi'ites towards the Americans now is greater than I've seen since the Iranian revolution. It's a cost of these kinds of frankly stupid policies the Bush administration has been pursuing in Iraq. I don't believe the general American public is even aware of this. They keep asking things like "Why do they hate us?" ...
ATol: What about the role of Iran in this new Iraqi configuration?
JC: They have been behind Ayatollah Sistani. But the Iranians are badly split - between the hardliners and the reformists. For the reformists, Sistani is a godsend. He rejects the theory of clerical rule, the velayat-e-faqih. And in Iran it is illegal to reject it. Ayatollah [Hossein Ali] Montazeri was put under house arrest for rejecting it. From that point of view, Sistani is much more like the reformists. He's not a Khomeinist. There have been reports of some of the reformists actually declaring themselves as followers of Sistani - because you can choose, in Shi'ite Islam, which ayatollah to follow. So I think this is a problem for [Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and the hardliners if Iraq becomes an alternative center of religious authority and undermines their position. From this point of view, they're nervous about Sistani. On the other hand, he is part of the club, he's got excellent credentials, training, he speaks their language. What he wants for Iraq is something they can live with; he wants a parliamentary government, which would be Shi'ite-dominated, in which the Shi'ite clergy could intervene to shape legislation by their fatwas, by appealing to the consciousness of the Shi'ite legislators. I'd compare this vision of Sistani's for Iraq with 1950s Ireland and the position of the Catholic Church there. There was a secular, elected parliament. If the parliament took up any issue like divorce, the bishops would state their position and put enormous pressure on the representatives to vote their way.
ATol: So it would be nothing like a Khomeinist system.
JC: Nothing like that. On the other hand, from the point of view of the hardline Iranians, it would not be a terrible system either. It would be a Shi'ite-dominated state, it would be friendly to Tehran inevitably, the Shi'ite clergy would have a great deal of influence. And you probably could not get Khomeinism in Iraq because of the 40% of the population which is Sunni. So actually Sistani's vision is the best Iran can hope for. It would be much better than, say, a return of the Ba'ath. Moreover, Sistani wants to eliminate the presence of American troops, and this also pleases the Iranians. These are status quo people: they don't like a lot of trouble. Although the Americans keep depicting Iran as a source of trouble in the world, they haven't gone around beating their neighbors. They've been a much less turbulent revolutionary country than one might have expected, or that Saddam was. What I'm saying about them being status quo is that Muqtada makes them nervous. He's clearly a revolutionary of some sort. He's clearly got in mind to cause a lot of trouble.
The al-Qaeda factor
ATol: Wildly disparate estimates of the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq range from 600 to 7,000. Do you discern any pattern, any strategy of al-Qaeda in Iraq? And do you buy the myth of al-Qaeda as this major SPECTRE-like, all-enveloping evil organization?
JC: First of all you have to begin with the definition of what al-Qaeda is. There's a technical definition of al-Qaeda: fighters who gave their loyalty to Osama bin Laden. Those are very few: a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. Then you could say people oriented towards bin Laden's way of thinking who have been Arab-Afghans, who had fought in Afghanistan: this is a much larger group, like 5,000. I've seen an estimate of 15,000, when you include groups such as the one responsible for the attacks in Casablanca. Relatively few of those had any links with Osama bin Laden - they were local, radical salafi groups. If we're talking about radical, violent salafis, they might reach 15,000. But then again there are 1,2 billion people in the Muslim world. These are small local networks, you cannot talk of an organization. Bin Laden has a general policy of not putting resources into situations that are already in turmoil. He's never done anything in the West Bank. He'd be much more interested in getting something going on in Indonesia or Malaysia. My information is that bin Laden is not interested in Iraq. I don't think there are even 600 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. There are foreign fighters but they are not technically al-Qaeda: rather Muslim Brotherhood types. The vast majority of the resistance is composed by Iraqis: not only ex-Ba'athists, but Sunni nationalists, salafis ... I suspect there are 25,000 or so insurgents in Iraq, doing something at least occasionally. Even if there were 400 or 500 foreign fighters, they would be a drop in the bucket.
ATol: How could the neo-cons engineer a victory next November, by using this period of illusion of the next four months in Iraq? Supposing it goes terribly wrong, as it might, how could they still get Bush re-elected?
JC: I know they are upset and depressed by Ahmad Chalabi being sidelined. And there is pressure from the Republican Party: it wasn't a wise thing to drag the president into another war that would then spill over into the election year. However you look at this thing it is a political disaster: even if Bush survives it. Some of the neo-cons at the Pentagon are now thinking of putting the Sunnis and the Kurds together and playing them off against the Shi'ites - as if the Kurds would cooperate with ex-Ba'ath Sunnis ... There is going to be a Shi'ite-dominated Iraq. The neo-cons assumed that the Sh'ites in Iraq might not be so sympathetic towards the Palestinians. Looking at your question, what they may try to do is this: they have managed to get Iyad Allawi as prime minister - although he wasn't the United States' first choice. These last few weeks Bremer has reversed the de-Ba'athification policy, there are a number of ex-Ba'athists in this new government. And they may attempt in some way to bring back the Ba'ath army, as a security instrument for the government to establish control.
ATol: But most of these generals are part of the resistance. They would never work for the Americans.
JC: If you gave them their jobs back to work for Allawi they might not be part of the resistance anymore. Allawi for the past 15 years has been organizing ex-Ba'ath generals. If anybody could handle them, it could be him. I'm not, by the way, saying this would be a bad thing. I think the extreme de-Ba'athification program, pursued apparently at the insistence of the Chalabi clique, was itself a mistake. It wasn't what the US military had planned on doing.
ATol: In sum, another total blunder by the CPA - a Pentagon decision implemented by Bremer.
JC: Yes, I think it was a decision by the Pentagon. I think it was done for many reasons. Initially the Pentagon planned on turning Iraq over to the Chalabi clique. For Allawi to reverse it somewhat, and to succeed in getting back some semblance of a military, three divisions, 60,000 men, this could be a good thing, it could contribute to order. The danger, of course, is that the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI], the Da'wa party, the Shi'ite forces which have spent the last 35 years fighting the Ba'ath, they're not going to like this. It could even cause more trouble.
ATol: So is there a risk of civil war in Iraq?
JC: No, not civil war. I lived in Beirut during the early years of the civil war there, and you had these militias which set pitched battles and so forth - I don't think that can happen in Iraq because the Americans are still powerful enough through their air force to stop it. What the Americans wouldn't be very good at stopping would be if you had mass urban turmoil. If you had Sunni-Shi'ite riots between Adhamiya and Kazamiya for instance, in Baghdad. You can't send attack helicopters to stop that. Or Kirkuk, which seems to me to be a tinderbox. If there is urban turmoil in the country, this is something I think the United States cannot deal with. That seems to me to be the real nightmare scenario.
Iraq as Bush's nightmare
ATol: There's a more realistic scenario of the resistance increasing in the next few months.
JC: It will, but the Americans are hard targets. I don't expect the insurgency to be able to hit the Americans and make a difference. Whether Iraq has a big impact on the election will depend very much on what's going on in Iraq in September and October, because people have short memories in elections. I think the Bush administration will be very careful not to provoke another Fallujah this fall. You could have a low-level guerrilla [war] going on, not terribly well reported in America, Iraq could well fall off the front page, it might not be a big issue in the election, so Bush may get away with it. But if he's re-elected, it's still going to be there. You simply cannot have a big, important oil producer at the head of the Persian Gulf in a state of turmoil. In a way, if Bush is re-elected, it would be poetic justice that he continues to spend a lot of energy [on] putting Iraq back together. If [Democratic presidential candidate John] Kerry were elected, he would have the same problem. Kerry being elected is not a solution.
ATol: Do you detect any Iraq policy at all from the Kerry side?
JC: Well, he says he wants to internationalize, and the real question is whether it's not too late. If Kerry is elected in November and he goes back to France and Germany and says, "OK, it's a new ball game, won't you come in with me?" are the French and German governments really going to be eager to send their troops? By then also, as the Sistani fatwa makes clear, all traces of the occupation should have been erased. There may be a building demand from the Iraqi side that foreigners just get out of their country. So Kerry's internationalization will not even be welcomed in Iraq by that point. The question is: has Bush ruined the situation beyond repair so that Kerry's policy is difficult to implement?
ATol: What would you say?
JC: I think it is very difficult for Kerry to have his policy implemented.
ATol: Finally: Will Osama be captured next October?
JC: If the Bush administration knew how to capture Osama, he would have been captured. If they could do it now, they would do it. It would become a campaign slogan. They don't have good intelligence, and even the Pakistanis don't have good intelligence. So I don't think there will be an October surprise.
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COMMENTARY
Is the US clever enough to rule the world?
By Ian Williams
Will the Iraq debacle cure, or at least ameliorate, the megalomania that has infected the foreign policy of the United States?
During the Cold War, the US often tended toward a position of primus inter pares, first among equals, with its allies. However, the past two years have seen both the culmination and, in Iraq, the catastrophic failure of a trend toward being solus sine paribus, alone without equals. The rest of the world is aware that the US is not equal to the task of ruling the world. In the light of Iraq, is Washington aware?
That the administration of President George W Bush even made the attempt is a demonstration that being a military and economic giant does not necessarily translate into diplomatic or intellectual acuity. We should also point out that this administration is not alone in its hubris; it took a unilateralist trend well established during the two administrations of president Bill Clinton and pursued it to a reductio ad absurdum et tragediam, reduced to absurdity and tragedy.
The overdose of Latin is a partial tribute to the imperial role model that set the standards - of decline and fall as well as triumphalism.
Former United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who unsuccessfully tried to teach US secretary of state Madeleine Albright the art of statecraft, once noted that neither the Roman Empire nor the US had any patience for diplomacy, which is "perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness".
However, as the Goths, Huns and Vandals, among others, demonstrated soon enough, this was a dangerous misperception for the Romans and is currently proving equally dangerous for the Americans.
Even if Bush is defeated for the chaos and casualties that his unilateralism has wrought, a John Kerry administration is at best likely to revert to the Clintonian norm of remaining unilateral in its formation of foreign policy, albeit with a more cosmopolitan and sophisticated attempt at multilateral execution.
There is no doubt that, short of some science-fiction-style cataclysm of the kind that Hollywood is so good at showing, the US is, and will remain, a world power. Whether it will be the world power, capable of independent unilateral action regardless of the views of the rest of the world, is another story completely.
Regardless of the opinions of the rest of the world, we really have to question whether such an ambition is even consonant with the views of most Americans, especially in view of the sacrifices such ambitions may entail.
We are used to a certain cynicism in world affairs, in which national interest often tempers morality. For example, while then French foreign minister (now Interior Minister) Dominique de Villepin's UN speech against the proposed Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was in the best traditions of Cartesian logic, we would need to be very naive indeed not to accept that the interests of Total-Elf-Aquitaine had much to do with French policy on the subject.
Indeed, it would be good if France had practiced in Bosnia, Rwanda, or Western Sahara and West Africa the lofty principles that it was recommending to the US and Britain on this occasion.
However, no one would accuse either the Bush or even the Clinton administration of Cartesian logic in its recent policy formulations. Indeed, what makes recent US foreign policy so anomalous is how often it is in violation of any rational national interest, let alone of abstract moral and legal principles.
In this less than perfect world, real powers with real problems will occasionally bend and stretch the rules, but this administration has gone further. It has challenged the rules themselves, and denied their normative power.
The doctrine of preemptive strikes and unilateral action, and the scorn for the United Nations and its Charter, represented a fundamental threat to the very global order that the US did so much to bring about in 1945.
In 1990, George Bush Sr spoke of a New World Order, which he presented as a revival and continuation of the 1945 settlement that the Cold War suspended. By 2003, Bush Jr was presiding over a Hobbesian disorder, in which his ideologues were telling the world that rules did not apply to the US, and in fact only applied to others when Washington deemed it appropriate.
This scofflaw tendency applies not only to existing normative rules but, in a profoundly disruptive and self-defeating way, to new and developing international conventions and normative rules that the rest of the world considers essential to cope with the growing challenges, military, social, economic and environmental, that threaten global prosperity and even survival.
For example, a small group of conservative ideologues has succeeded in delaying the US signature of the Law of the Sea. It is a hopeful sign that among the factions that want it ratified are Senator Richard Lugar, the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the US Navy. The distressing thing is that a small group of fundamentalists obsessed with sovereignty can stall participation in a treaty that is so self-evidently in the interests of the US.
It reinforces the messages sent by the refusal to honor the Kyoto conventions, to sign the landmines treaty, and to control the small-arms trade. Similarly, the US has expended huge diplomatic capital across the world to sabotage the International Criminal Court. All across the world, US envoys bullied small countries into signing bilateral treaties protecting Americans from a non-existent threat - in the process getting a very bad lesson in international ethics.
One of the major problems with US foreign-policy formulation is that the democratic process of checks and balances does not function effectively, not least because far too many Americans have neither the information about nor the interest in what happens elsewhere, which leaves the field open to obsessive interest groups.
Indeed, there is a satirical dictionary definition of "war" as "God's way of teaching Americans geography". Sadly, it has much truth in it, except that it seems that with the current teaching aids of Fox TV, MSNBC and talk radio, the curriculum does not get beyond Geography 101. It does not bode well for democratic debate of foreign policy, and leaves the field open even more to the lobbyists and fundamentalists.
That is why, for example, while it may seem to much of the Arab world that the invasion of Iraq was an imperial enterprise, we should bear in mind that to most Americans, and certainly to a majority of those reservists drafted to staff the prisons of Abu Ghraib, this was an exercise in self-defense, payback for September 11, 2001. They would not have supported an overtly imperial agenda.
Sadly, not only ordinary Americans are geographically challenged. In many ways, the ideologues of unlimited US hegemony who contrived the Iraq invasion had as little awareness of the realities of the world as those many Americans misled by a potent combination of White House spin and cable-TV collusion.
In the end, the USA is indeed powerful, but in reality, it could not exercise the sole hegemony that the more visionary planners in the Pentagon imagined.
Imperial over-reach
Despite spending as much on defense as the next 10 largest military powers, the US armed forces are hard-pressed to maintain the occupation of Iraq, let alone to attack other countries such as Syria and Iran that seemed to be very seriously in the sights of the Pentagon planners a year ago.
One of the more obvious lessons was that military power could not be effective without "soft" moral factors, such as diplomacy, which in turn are helped by moral legitimacy.
In over-reaching, the US has shown its weaknesses. US abilities to wage conventional war across the globe depend on willing allies abroad and a public at home prepared to make sacrifices. All those military bases are on sufferance from other countries, which have often imposed restrictions on their use for purposes that they disagree with. The Turks and Saudis, for example, severely disrupted US plans to attack Iraq when they refused to host the invasion forces.
Money, and credit, said Daniel Defoe, are "the sinews of war". Paradoxically, in relation to the rest of the world, the US is economically weaker than at any time since the end of World War II. The combination of ideologically motivated tax-cutting and increasing military spending has made the US more vulnerable than ever before. Domestically, it is politically impossible for a US administration to increase taxes.
In a little-reported report it published on the US budget at the beginning of January, the International Monetary Fund hints at a rapidly undeveloping country, whose fiscal irresponsibility is compounded by a political immaturity that tends to ignore geopolitical and economic reality.
Ironically, the globalization that some have denounced as an instrument of US global domination has actually made the United States more vulnerable than ever before. Once a relatively autarkic, self-contained trade system, the US economy is now integrated into world trade systems.
One simple basis of the "Bush boom" is that China is recycling its US$100 billion-plus trade surplus with the United States back into dollars, and especially into Treasury bonds. Almost half of US Treasury bonds are now owned by Asian countries.
Among Asian countries, the Pentagon dreamers have identified China as the major future threat. Yet if Taiwan, for example, became a major crisis, those Chinese T-bonds could do more damage than H-bombs. All Chinese Prime Minister Hu Jintao has to do is shout "sell" down the phone in order to devastate the US economy more than any Chinese nuclear strike.
The US refusal to take the measures necessary to reduce its oil consumption has also made it extremely vulnerable to creeping measures of readjustment, such as a decision by oil states to price their product in euros rather than dollars. There are very good economic and political arguments for them to do just that: why take payment in a depreciating currency from a country such as the US where your holdings are vulnerable to strange tort actions and arbitrary political decisions? In that light, the mystery is really why the oil states still accept dollars.
Globalization, even as it makes the US more vulnerable, also gives it some measure of protection, since anyone who pulls the plug on the dollar would get very wet himself in the resulting splash. Nevertheless, even with that qualification, the fact is you cannot be a solo superpower on borrowed money.
Apart from military and economic power, there is a power of leadership. Opinion polls worldwide show that almost no other country in the world would elect George W Bush.
At one time, the US had high moral stature, certainly in much of the world, although we should remember the trend represented even by Franklin Roosevelt, an undoubted hero, who is on record as calling Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza a "son of a bitch" but excusing him as "our son of a bitch".
Going further, there has been a strong and increasing tendency in US thought toward Manichaean binary thinking, to see the world in terms of absolute good and evil, indeed, one might say, cowboys and Indians. Allegedly in the Levant they say that "my enemies' enemy is my friend", but in the US they take it a stage farther and consider that my enemy's enemy must necessarily be morally superior, a saint.
There is also an adage about knowing people by the company they keep. Support for the Saudi and Uzbek regimes, let alone Israeli practices, does not cover the US with glory.
Above all, to attack Iraq, allegedly for its violation of UN resolutions, in defiance of the wishes of most UN members and the UN Charter is a sin for which the US is now paying penance as it implores the international community to relieve it of its burden there. It will take a long time for Washington to regain international credibility.
Can anything be done?
At the time of the tragic and murderous attacks on New York's World Trade Center, the one consolation was that it would focus the American public on what its government was doing abroad in their name. After all, perhaps for the first time since the British burned the White House in 1813, Americans had foreign policy happening to themselves, rather than it being something that their rulers inflicted on others.
Sadly, that was clearly not the case. There was little or no public debate on the origins of al-Qaeda, no realization that expedient and ad hoc US policies had brought about and indeed financed the organization, that it was a US ally, Pakistan, that with general US support had put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan.
The rest of the world was much more aware of that, and despite that, it was the soon-to-be-hated French who quickly moved the resolution in the Security Council expressing solidarity for September 11, shortly followed by another that in effect provided legal cover for the US to attack Afghanistan in "self-defense".
The rest of the world watched with puzzlement as the US gave up on Afghanistan and finding Osama bin Laden while the American public were, almost subliminally, persuaded that the battleground for the "war on terror" should be Iraq.
It took not much more than a year for the Bush administration to boil away nearly all the unprecedented international support it had immediately after the September 11 attack.
Of course, there are different trends in US foreign policy, with the State Department, which has the unenviable task of explaining it to the rest of the world, much more able to see the benefits for the US from a general support of a normative global structure of law and order, and a predisposition to go along with it principle.
Indeed, it is more likely to recall that the US was the main sponsor of the United Nations and in its drafting of the Charter, and throughout the decades, from Korea to Suez, has invoked its authority whenever it can - and sometimes, as in Iraq, when it really could not.
It is not surprising that for past few years, the leaders of the United Nations and most of the major powers have had as the first item in their bedtime prayers a plea that Secretary of State Colin Powell would stay on at the State Department, and much of their diplomacy has been directed at boosting his position inside the Bush administration.
It is not always successful, since the Pentagon-Powell dualism sometimes looked like a planned good-cop-bad-cop routine. On the other hand, the State Department's attempts to keep some vestiges of multilateralist faith have occasionally been pathetically touching, like the attempt to pull together a list of states that supported the "coalition", most of whom were so vulnerable and weak that initially the department was too embarrassed to name them. However, we should take the attempt as a signal that even in the darkest days of triumphal unilateralism from the Pentagon civilians, there was a flicker, or at least a smolder, of multilateralism in the State Department.
The conundrum is that the US needs counterbalancing, as traditional political theory would suggest, but the question is whether that can be achieved without reverting to some form of antagonistic great power system. However, it is possible if we take into account one of the Anglo-Saxon inventions in domestic politics: the concept of a "loyal opposition". We often forget that for most of history, and across much of the globe even now, this is an oxymoron. Sadly, that is also true of some sections of the US body politic who have shown difficulty in accepting opposition at home or abroad as anything but starkest treachery. Last year's rabid francophobia was very embarrassing to any sophisticated American.
However, a loyal opposition is still a useful concept. If it stood together, the European Union is big enough to insist on a hearing in Washington, and even more so if it teams with Russia and China, although it has to beware of expediency in joining with, let us say, incompletely democratic societies. In conjunction with countries such as India, and many states in Latin America, it could indeed assemble a loyal opposition.
In this connection, perhaps the British were almost as important as Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks they are. Harold Macmillan had fond paternalistic hopes of London playing the role of Athens to Washington's Rome, perhaps forgetting that the Athenians who taught the Romans were often literally slaves.
However, for some years now the British have indeed played a special role with the US. It has been surprising how little contumely the British have attracted over the years for their role as amanuensis for successive US administrations - like Colin Powell, they have functioned at once as a bridge and a fudge between the more outrageous US wants and the realities of the world and norms of international law.
Other countries I suspect saw it as on a par with cleaning sewers: it's a dirty job, but someone has to do it, and much better someone else than us. It also has to be said that the British have done a reasonable job of it most of the time. Their constructive engagement as a reliably loyal ally did indeed give them an occasional hand on the steering wheel, as Tony Blair said.
It seems fairly certain that President Bush would not have gone to the UN at all if were not for the British prime minister's blandishments. Nevertheless, in the end it became clear that what Blair thought was the steering wheel in a car was just the whistle on a runaway locomotive. All he could do was warn that the train was rattling down the tracks and would not stop until it hit Iraq.
Confronted with the realities of the US style of occupying Iraq, and the reaction of the occupied, the British have reverted to their former role. In the various drafts of the resolution to end the Iraq occupation, they have been assiduously supporting a much more sovereign sovereignty for Iraq, even as they draft the successive resolutions.
The British invented the special relationship for their own reasons, once they realized that the empire thing was a dead duck. As they put it at the time, the British foreign minister in the 1945 Labour government wanted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to keep "the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out".
I would question whether that historical basis still exists, and would urge the Europeans, particularly the French and Germans, to work hard on the British, to suborn and turn the British Trojan Horse so that instead of being a source of unilateralist US infiltration into the EU, it takes multilateralism into Washington. That is always assuming that Blair survives his election and that Kerry overlooks the British prime minister's somewhat promiscuously rapid switch from Clinton to Bush.
Will things change if Bush loses?
Returning to the point at the beginning, the present US policy has much continuity with the previous administration's. Remember the conversation between Madeleine Albright and her British counterpart, Robin Cook, over Kosovo, in which Cook cited problems "with our lawyers" over using force in the absence of UN endorsement. Albright's response was, "Get new lawyers."
Certainly, a Kerry policy has to be an improvement over Bush's - but it may be a more marginal improvement than most of us would wish. There is the dreadful possibility that his fudging on foreign policy, his support for Ariel Sharon, is not just a cynical electoral maneuver, it may be the real thing.
However, no amount of internal argument or external exhortation can do as much to change US policy as has now been done by the over-reachers in the Pentagon, whose hubris has reduced the US to begging for international help to get out of the hole they dug in Iraq. Ironically, our best hope for a change of policy is the effect of the cold shower of reality on their fevered apocalyptic visions.
Whoever is elected has to pay the bills for this war, for the tax cuts, for the energy policy and all the other enormities of this administration. In the world councils where it will need help and indulgence, the next president is going to need a lot of forbearance and indulgence from other countries, since bullying has failed so egregiously.
The real battle is to get that message across to US legislators, opinion formers and indeed the electorate to maintain a continuing interest in foreign policy, what it does to others and, most tellingly, what the cost will be to them. Since the US is a world power, this is a global task, an essential task for everyone in the world. Stop pandering. Be firm but friendly. Real allies do not applaud your every move. They shout "Stop!" when you want to run over a cliff edge. Next time Gerhard Schroeder offers a US president advice, the latter should listen.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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The Fate of European Populism
by Ren? Cuperus
In recent years, anti-establishment and anti-immigration populism has unsettled Western and Central Europe. Leaders such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, J?rg Haider in Austria, Silvio Berlusconi and Gianfranco Fini in Italy, Christoph Blocher in Switzerland, and the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands pushed themselves onto center stage in politics. For longer or shorter periods, some were in power. Movements once lodged securely on the far right were thus able to engage a mass electorate and challenge a political establishment that seemed unable to address the fears of ordinary Europeans. Although the political success of right-wing populist parties has ebbed over time-and especially after their failing performances in government-their impact on "intellectual" discourse and the political-cultural climate of Europe remains.
This unprecedented impact of right-wing populism derives from a political identity crisis across Europe. The disruptive effects of globalization and the retrenchment of welfare states have been accompanied by fundamental changes in the party systems. The older mass parties that have ruled most of the region since the end of the Second World War-the Christian or Conservative Democrats and the Social Democrats-have lost members, voters, ?lan, and a monopoly on ideas. Because they are in most countries the pillars of the parliamentary system and the welfare state, their slow but steady decline affects European societies as a whole. At the same time the classical ideological left/right cleavage gave way to unprecedented and unexpected coalitions and cohabitation of former political enemies. This produced political spaces for outsiders who railed against the political establishment.
Another complicating factor might be called the paradox of the Holocaust trauma. Europeans seem unable to cope with ethnic diversity. Intellectual discourse was long characterized by a species of political correctness that praised "the foreigner" for enriching society while turning a blind eye to the de facto segregation of many new immigrants and the stresses they placed on social welfare systems. These circumstances did much to provoke populist-xenophobic reactions. Consequently, Europe faces two dilemmas: how to maintain communitarian welfare states under conditions of ongoing immigration and whether the ethnic future of Europe will be characterized more by multiculturalism or assimilation.
There is also widespread unease over the process of European integration. What should have been a proud achievement of cosmopolitan cooperation between nations has become, instead, a cause of insecurity and alienation. Despite the claims of Eurocrats in Brussels, many people see the European Union not as the shield against, but as the "ugly face" of globalization because of its one-sided market liberal approach. Ten states, mostly from the ex-Soviet bloc, are about to join, and their impact on the European Project as a whole in terms of power shifts and socioeconomic imbalances is uncertain. "Old" Europe is nervous. Nervousness, discontent, and loss of national identity are easily channeled through right-wing populist movements. They tap into xenophobia, express protests against the difficulties of contemporary representative democracy, and chastise the "political correctness" of elites.
Populists present "the people" as a homogeneous entity facing a closed, technocratic, "corrupt elite" that has betrayed the interest of the majority. Their protest can be read as a fever signaling that problems are not being dealt with effectively. This explains the popularity of sound bites such as, "We are down-they are up." "We should be in, they should be out." These statements are from Austria, but you can find similar ones in Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark in right-wing movements that claim to represent "the people" and to defend and shield national, cultural, or ethnic identity against "outsiders" and stress leadership, law and order, and nostalgia for a "lost world."
Some of these populist movements originated on the extreme right or contain neo-Nazis and fascists. Many of them tried to transform themselves into "normal" democratic organizations. The Italian Alleanza Nazionale of Gianfranco Fini, with roots in fascism, has tried to become something more "responsible" by serving as a governing party (in coalition) in contrast to the French Front National split over such "responsible" prospects. Some parties developed out of older parties (for example, Haider's FP?, Pia Kjaersgaard's People's Party in Denmark). Others are new creations, such as Berlusconi's Forza Italia, Fortuyn's List in the Netherlands, or Carl Ivar Hagen's Progress Party in Norway.
Populist movements are almost by definition unstable. The best example is the meteoric rise and fall of the Front National in the elections of 2002. To everyone's surprise, Le Pen finished second in the first round of presidential elections, surpassing Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. This may have been due to electoral fragmentation on the left, but it caused political shock waves and led the mainstream left to support tacitly the re-election of Gaullist president Jacques Chirac. This led to a remarginalization of Le Pen on the national level, although he has regional support.
A somewhat similar story of "climax and anti-climax" took place in both the Netherlands and Austria. After Fortuyn was murdered, his party served disastrously in the government. Internal struggles between cabinet ministers and within the beheaded party led to a governmental crisis after eighty days and then to elections, which produced a new government. In Vienna, Haider's party was ravaged by internal struggles and splits resulting in electoral losses, even though the FP? returned to government as the shaky junior partner of the Christian Democrats.
These patterns suggest that populist movements are poorly equipped for institutional longevity. Their aversion to traditional party structures deprives them of political machines built around "cadres" that enable a degree of continuity and consistency in programs. Instead, populists often rely on charismatic and authoritarian leaders. "The empty heart of populism," writes social scientist Paul Taggart, "the lack of key values, means that it is particularly liable to the politics of personality. . . . Populism prefers the simple solution of leadership itself over the complex process of politics to resolve problems." Ironically, leadership conflicts are endemic to populist parties as the splits in Haider's and Le Pen's parties show. Fortuyn's murder sapped what had been the fastest growing political force in the Netherlands. These parties are far better at sounding alarms than at becoming partners in a stable government. They are able to affect the political debate and can propagate themselves without sustaining powerful and normal party structures. Mainstream parties are forced to adopt or even internalize parts of their populist agenda.
The right-wing populists push a litany of themes to the forefront of public debate. They challenge the "illusion" of a multicultural society and link it to crime and insecurity. They call for the restoration of standards and values, for order and authority. They chastise abuses by governing elites and the established "cartel" of political parties. They denounce the shortcomings of representation in today's parliamentary democracies, and they rail against the apparently unstoppable unification of Europe. They complain about tolerance of immigrants and libertine behavior. They object to upheaval caused by neoliberal globalization and the linked "crisis" in the public sector. And they have a simple solution to all problems: halt all new immigration and compel "old" immigrants to adapt or to assimilate.
A cruel sociology helps to explain the appeal of this populism of disenchantment. The rise of a "knowledge society" has alienated those who have been unable to keep up with the change, the so-called "losers of the modernization process." Mass media proclaiming continual crisis and social drama have also increased mass insecurity and encouraged a cynical view of institutions, especially those of the struggling welfare state. Additional factors contributing to the grief of the less educated include a decline of manufacturing jobs, the increasing market value of those who accumulate cultural "capital," the evaporation of the "socialist" dream of a more egalitarian world, the rise of "multiculturalization," and accompanying "ethnocultural" tensions on the micro-level.
Elites in the academy and state bureaucracies generally ignored these rumbles, assumed that everyone accepted cosmopolitan, relativist norms, and paid no attention to the growing desire to preserve familiar ways of life and forms of identity. Where does all this leave European social democrats? In difficult straits. The "revolt of the little man" (and, to a lesser degree, woman) highlights an old-but often unadmitted-divide in the democratic left between the well educated and less educated, between "postmateralists" and "materialists." In a sense, right-wing populism is the cultural revenge of the "working class" against the intellectual elites who run "workers' parties." This friction between the "chattering Establishment" and the common man is the Achilles' heel of contemporary social democracy.
A major reason for the "populist momentum" of the 1990s was the decline of ideological confrontation. Consider what happened when the Italian political system imploded and disrupted both the Christian Democrats and the parties of the left. Space opened for Silvio Berlusconi's media-populist domination of public life. In other countries-Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, France-the moderate, mainstream right and left "cohabitated" in governments, retrenching and reshaping the arrangements of the European welfare states. The new populists did fill the new vacuum of left/right-depoliticization. Their target seemed to be the worried working classes, but they also sought support from segments of the middle-class and "nouveaux riches" who don't feel represented by today's political system.
If social democrats still regard themselves as champions of a solidaristic liberal democracy, then they must pay far more attention to the darker aspects of the "modernization" processes that are now sweeping the world. They must learn how to keep in touch again with its "less educated constituents" and recognize that it must begin to make demands that may be at the expense of the more powerful group of the left-the intellectual "knowledge class." Right-wing populism is wrong, but it articulates real problems and insensitivities that the left has not faced adequately.
This means a reorientation of social democratic policy. Social democrats must focus on the less educated and the displacement on poorly qualified workers. They must reconsider how profoundly crime injures working-class communities and, most controversially, social democrats must begin to appreciate the disruptive impact of immigration when there is no serious program for integrating newcomers. How much anti-populism can a mass social democratic party allow itself? How long can a social democratic party that depends on the support of educationally deprived voters continue to favor liberal penal policies? Can European social democracy be both cosmopolitan and culturally relativist (as the defender of minority cultures) at the same time? Can it retain its allegiance to a European supranationalism that undermines the vitality of democratic representative politics and thereby invites right-wing populists to be the defenders of national identity against cosmopolitan elites?
I am not making an argument for "Haidering" the left, that is, adopting the rhetoric and program, let alone the anti-democratic and anti-humanistic solutions of right-wing populism. I am suggesting that the left had better take seriously the underlying causes for the rise of populism in contemporary Europe. "The desire to transcend populism is shortsighted," Michael Kazin observes. "It is only when leftists and liberals themselves talked in populist ways-hopeful, expansive, even romantic-that they were able to lend their politics a majoritarian cast and help markedly to improve the common welfare." He is thinking of America, but this is also true of Europe. A civilized democracy can only survive in the long term when moderates sing more appealing tunes, and keep on doing so. European social democracy cannot allow populist discontent to become a monopoly of the right.
Ren? Cuperus is senior research fellow and director of international relations at the Wiardi Beckman Foundation, think tank of the Dutch Labor Party (PvdA), and editor-in-chief of the review Socialisme & Democratie. He is co-editor and author of Multiple Third Ways, European Social Democracy facing the Twin Revolution of Globalisation and the Knowledge Society.
? 2004 Foundation for Study of Independent Ideas, Inc
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Clinton Friendship With Corrupt Union Boss
by Linda Chavez
Posted Jun 17, 2004
Bill Clinton's memoir will hit bookstores later this month, but one story you're not likely to read in its pages involves Clinton's friendship with Arthur A. Coia. The debonair former president of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) was one of the Democratic Party's biggest contributors when Clinton was in office. In the first four years of the Clinton administration alone, LIUNA gave $4.8 million to Democrat candidates and the Democratic Party. Although Clinton had contact with Coia no fewer than 120 times, their association is an awkward memory for the former president given the latter's ties to organized crime and that of the union he once headed.
In 1986, President Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime identified LIUNA as one of the "bad four" -- the most corrupt unions in the nation -- along with the Teamsters, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Workers, and the International Association of Longshoremen. According to Congressional testimony by the FBI, each of these union's presidents at the time had been "handpicked by La Cosa Nostra." Angelo Fosco, who served as LIUNA president from 1975-1993, won reelection while he was under federal indictment for union racketeering -- a victory won through "the use of force and threats of violence against potential competitors," according to the Reagan Crime Commission.
And Coia was no exception. He became secretary treasurer of LIUNA in 1987, the No. 2 job in the union, with the blessings of the Chicago mob, according to Coia's own admissions in sworn testimony. When Clinton tried to reward Coia for his political contributions by appointing him to a prestigious presidential commission, the Council on Competitiveness, the appointment set off alarm bells at the FBI. In a memo, investigators doing a background check wrote, "Coia is a criminal associate of the New England Patriarca organized crime family." The bureau also warned the White House that "within the next several weeks" the Department of Justice "will accuse Coia of being a puppet of the LCN (La Cosa Nostra)." Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis even tried calling the White House to warn officials not to get too close to the alleged mob-controlled union boss -- to no avail.
Although Clinton dropped plans to name Coia to the Council on Competitiveness, he continued to meet with the union leader, exchanged expensive gifts and frequent notes with him, and invited him to travel aboard the presidential aircraft on a trip to Rhode Island. All of this went on while the Justice Department was preparing a racketeering complaint against Coia and his union. On Nov. 4, 1994, the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section served Coia with a 212-page draft complaint.
"Then something strange happened," noted the liberal muckraking magazine Washington Monthly at the time. Instead of indicting Coia, the Justice Department worked out a sweetheart deal that allowed Coia to avoid prosecution and keep his job, while a federally appointed investigator pursued lower-level mobsters within the union. Just days before the Justice Department offered the deal, Hillary Clinton traveled to Miami to address the annual LIUNA conference on Feb. 6, 1995, despite warnings from the Justice Department that the trip was ill advised.
The decision not to move forward with its complaint shocked everyone, except perhaps Coia himself. The Justice Department had previously filed racketeering charges in 15 other union cases, taking over the corrupt unions' operations. But Clinton couldn't protect his union benefactor forever -- especially when Coia himself couldn't keep his hands out of the union cookie jar. In January 2000, Arthur Coia pled guilty for failing to pay taxes on the purchase of three Ferraris from a Rhode Island car dealer who held a million-dollar leasing agreement with the union. As part of his plea agreement, Coia stepped down as LIUNA president but was allowed to keep his $250,000 yearly salary for life.
If the Clinton administration's dealings with Arthur Coia and the Laborers Union were an isolated incident, it would be bad enough, but the corrupting nexus between union money and Democratic political power was especially tight during the Clinton years. But the unions' role in financing Democrats didn't end when Bill Clinton left office.
This election cycle, unions will spend an estimated $800 million, much of it hidden in the form of salaries for union officials assigned to work on political campaigns, member communications, get-out-the-vote efforts, and other unregulated contributions that go overwhelmingly to elect Democrats. But don't expect to read about it on the front page of the New York Times or in Clinton's memoir.
Copyright ? 2003 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040705&s=ireland
Dick Cheney and the $5 Million Man
by DOUG IRELAND
[posted online on June 18, 2004]
The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into allegations that Halliburton (in partnership with French petro-engineering company Technip) funneled $180 million into a slush fund to pay bribes in the construction of a $6 billion Nigerian gas refinery--a scandal that French authorities have been probing for a year (for background, see Doug Ireland, "Will the French Indict Cheney?" December 29, 2003).
The energy conglomerate formerly headed by Dick Cheney disclosed the SEC probe (as it was required to do by law for any legal action potentially affecting the company's stock) on June 11. The timing of the disclosure was no accident--it was a Friday, the last day of the interminable Reagan funeral ceremonies, and Wall Street was thus closed. The national press corps focused on little else but the burial, so the SEC investigation got scant attention in the weekend papers (even the New York Times ran only a brief AP dispatch on its website).
Although the US media have shown little interest in the story, the investigation of the Halliburton Nigeria scandal by France's most celebrated investigating magistrate, Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, has continued making headlines in Paris--where the latest revelations bring the scandal right to the front door of Halliburton's Houston headquarters.
The Journal du Dimanche (JDD, a large Sunday paper) revealed on June 13 that Judge Van Ruymbeke's investigation has uncovered how Albert "Jack" Stanley, the president of huge Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) at the time of the alleged bribery, received so-called "commissions" of 3 percent of the deal from the slush fund. The total amount Stanley received is some $5 million, according to reports in the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere. The Nigerian oil minister at the time, Dan Entete, got $2.5 million, reported the JDD. The slush fund was set up with Halliburton money by a London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler--who worked for Halliburton at the same time he was financial adviser to the notoriously corrupt late Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha--as a shell-company front called TriStar, which Tesler established in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. Stanley, the 5 Million Dollar Man, is a close friend and associate of Dick Cheney.
In mid-May, after Judge Van Ruymbeke threatened to issue an international warrant to bring Tesler to France to testify, Tesler "voluntarily" came to Paris for two days of testimony under oath. Confronted by Van Ruymbeke with documents obtained through international search warrants targeting banks in Switzerland, Monaco, Madeira and elsewhere, Tesler admitted having made the highly unusual payments from the slush fund to then-KBR president Stanley, which Stanley had sent to a numbered bank account in Zurich baptized "Amal" (according to the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné). Another huge payment of $350,000 was made to a top KBR executive, William Chaudran, which Chaudran had routed to an anonymous bank account in the island fiscal paradise of Jersey, Tesler testified. (Stanley, who is retired from KBR but maintains an office and secretary in Halliburton-KBR's Houston headquarters, did not return calls requesting comment, and neither did Halliburton-KBR's flack, Wendy Hall.)
The obvious question is: If the payments to the KBR execs were legitimate, why route them through secret foreign bank accounts? And where did the rest of the $180 million go? To the dictator Abacha, whose money adviser Tesler was, and other Abacha cronies?
Statements given by Halliburton to Le Figaro and other French papers covering the scandal claim the conglomerate had no knowledge of the payments to the KBR execs--and appear to be setting up Stanley as the fall guy. Is this to keep the scandal from touching Cheney?
The final contract for construction of the Nigeria refinery, one of the world's largest, was signed in 1999, on Cheney's watch (Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000). Bribes of the sort under investigation by the SEC and the French are illegal under statutes of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of whose international conventions both the United States and France are signatories-members; and under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In disclosing the SEC investigation, Halliburton said it did not believe it had violated the FCPA, while adding, "There can be no assurance that government authorities would not conclude otherwise."
Indeed.
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Halliburton sacks KBR chairman as probe continues
AFP , WASHINGTON
Sunday, Jun 20, 2004,Page 11
Oil services giant Halliburton said Friday it sacked a consultant and former chairman of one of its subsidiaries after a probe into a Nigeria project revealed he got "improper personal benefits."
The company, once headed by US Vice President Dick Cheney and facing criticism for its contracts in Iraq, said it was "terminating all of its relationships with Mr. A. Jack Stanley."
Stanley had been a consultant and previously had served as chairman of Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root engineering subsidiary.
Stanley had served in several management capacities since joining M.W. Kellogg, which was acquired by Dresser Industries Inc, a firm that became part of Halliburton in 1988.
Halliburton said one additional consultant and former employee, whose name was not disclosed, was terminated due to "violations of ... codes of business conduct that, to Halliburton's knowledge, involve the receipt by these persons of improper personal benefits."
Halliburton had previously acknowledged a probe by US and French authorities into possible bribes of as much as US$180 million paid in connection with a multibillion dollar Nigeria natural gas project.
"Halliburton continues to cooperate with the United States Department of Justice and the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] in connection with these matters, and its own internal investigation is continuing," the statement said.
The statement added that Halliburton "does not believe it has violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" -- which bans bribes to foreign officials -- but could not guarantee that the probe would show otherwise.
The investigation is believed to be focused on whether a Halliburton joint venture broke US anti-bribery laws in order to win construction contracts for the gas plant.
A French investigating magistrate has uncovered evidence of payments to KBR executives.
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Copyright ? 1999-2004 The Taipei Times. All rights reserved.
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L'enqu?te sur Halliburton s'approche de M. Cheney
LE MONDE | 16.06.04 | 13h52 * MIS A JOUR LE 16.06.04 | 14h27
Les annales et corrig?s du baccalaur?at depuis 1995.
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Le vice-pr?sident am?ricain aurait favoris? l'entreprise parap?troli?re qu'il avait dirig?e.
New York de notre correspondant
Le directeur de cabinet du vice-pr?sident am?ricain Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, et d'autres membres de l'administration seraient impliqu?s dans l'attribution ? la soci?t? Halliburton, ? la fin de l'ann?e 2002, d'une ?tude pr?liminaire secr?te sur la remise en ?tat des infrastructures p?troli?res irakiennes.
Ces accusations sont port?es par le repr?sentant d?mocrate Henri Waxman. Il demande au vice-pr?sident, dans une lettre rendue publique le 13 juin, de remettre tous les documents et enregistrements en sa possession li?s aux contrats irakiens de Halliburton. M. Cheney a ?t? PDG de cette soci?t? d'octobre 1995 ? ao?t 2000.
"Les derni?res r?v?lations, ?crit M. Waxman, semblent contredire vos affirmations selon lesquelles vous n'?tiez pas inform? des contrats de Halliburton. Elles semblent ?galement contredire les d?clarations r?p?t?es du gouvernement selon lesquelles des politiques n'ont jamais ?t? impliqu?s dans l'attribution de march?s ? Halliburton." La commission des r?formes administratives de la Chambre des repr?sentants, ? laquelle appartient M. Waxman, a interrog? ? huis clos, la semaine derni?re, des fonctionnaires du d?partement de la d?fense sur les contrats d'Halliburton.
En novembre 2002, un groupe constitu? au Pentagone pour pr?parer l'avenir ?conomique de l'Irak en cas de guerre sollicite Halliburton afin d'?tablir un plan secret de remise en ?tat de l'industrie p?troli?re de ce pays. Il verse pour cela 1,9 million de dollars ? la soci?t? texane. Le 8 mars 2003, le corps du g?nie de l'arm?e de terre am?ricaine choisit KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root, filiale de Halliburton) pour r?parer les infrastructures p?troli?res irakiennes selon les modalit?s que sa soci?t? m?re a d?finies trois mois auparavant. Le march? est confi? ? l'issue d'une proc?dure discr?tionnaire sans appel d'offres ou mise en concurrence. Un courrier ?lectronique du 5 mars 2003, ?manant d'un directeur r?gional du corps de g?nie, Stephen Browning, laisse entendre que l'attribution du contrat est "coordonn?e" avec le cabinet de Dick Cheney. Ce march? s'est av?r? ?tre une excellente affaire pour Halliburton. Sa valeur est pass?e de 71,3 millions de dollars en mars ? 2,4 milliards en d?cembre 2003.
L'administration a r?v?l? l'existence du contrat ? la fin du mois de mars 2003, mais elle l'a alors d?crit comme consistant seulement ? ?teindre les puits en feu. Elle a reconnu plus tard qu'il ?tait d'une tout autre ampleur et s'est engag?e alors ? ce qu'il soit temporaire. De nouveaux contrats ont ?t? attribu?s ? l'issue d'une proc?dure concurrentielle, le 16 janvier, ? raison de 800 millions de dollars ? la soci?t? californienne Parsons et 1,2 milliard ? Halliburton.
M. Cheney nie avoir jou? le moindre r?le dans le choix de Halliburton. "En tant que vice-pr?sident, je n'ai absolument aucune influence, aucune implication et aucune connaissance d'aucune sorte sur les contrats du corps du g?nie", avait-il d?clar?, fin 2003, sur la cha?ne de t?l?vision NBC. Selon le Pentagone, le sous-secr?taire ? la d?fense, Douglas Feith, responsable de la planification de l'apr?s-guerre en Irak, a averti des membres du cabinet de M. Cheney de l'attribution, en mars 2003, du march? ? Halliburton.
Tout aussi g?nant pour le vice-pr?sident, Halliburton fait l'objet d'enqu?tes judiciaires sur d'?ventuelles malversations ayant eu lieu pendant la p?riode o? il dirigeait l'entreprise. Elle a inform? ses actionnaires, la semaine pass?e, de l'ouverture d'une proc?dure officielle par la SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), l'autorit? am?ricaine des march?s financiers, au sujet de paiements douteux effectu?s dans le cadre de la construction d'un important complexe gazier au Nigeria.
L'op?ration de 4 milliards de dollars a ?t? r?alis?e entre 1995 et 2002 par un consortium comprenant KBR, le groupe fran?ais Technip, l'italien ENI et le japonais Japan Gasoline Corp. Le juge fran?ais Renaud Van Ruymbeke et le minist?re de la justice s'int?ressent notamment ? un paiement de 180 millions de dollars effectu? ? la soci?t? Tristar, ? Gibraltar, appartenant ? l'avocat britannique Jeffrey Tesler. Selon le directeur financier de Halliburton, Christopher Gaut, M. Tesler ?tait l'agent du consortium au Nigeria et a re?u une commission "habituelle". Mais environ 5 millions de dollars provenant de cette somme ont ?t? retrouv?s sur un compte bancaire en Suisse appartenant ? Albert Stanley, ancien pr?sident de KBR et conseiller de l'entreprise.
Par ailleurs, une enqu?te a ?t? ouverte aux Etats-Unis sur de possibles surfacturations de KBR ? l'arm?e en Irak et dans les Balkans, o? cette soci?t? fournit une grande partie de la logistique aux troupes am?ricaines. Selon un audit du Pentagone fait en mai et rendu public par M. Waxman, le syst?me de facturation de la filiale de Halliburton est "inad?quat". KBR avait remport?, en d?cembre 2001, un contrat tr?s important aupr?s du Pentagone. Il concerne l'approvisionnement en nourriture et l'entretien des troupes am?ricaines ? l'?tranger, et donc, aujourd'hui, des 150 000 soldats dans le Golfe et 17 000 en Afghanistan. Ce contrat aurait rapport?, jusqu'? pr?sent, pr?s de 5 milliards de dollars.
Eric Leser
* ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 17.06.04
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Reducing Uninsurance by Reforming Health Insurance in the Small-Business Sector
by Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D.
Backgrounder #1769
June 17, 2004 | Executive Summary | |
Families lacking health insurance is a persistent problem in the United States. According to projections based on a sampling for the Kaiser Family Foundation, approximately 43 million non-elderly Americans were uninsured at any point during 2002.1 According to the Congressional Budget Office, based on survey figures for 1998, between 21 million and 31 million people lacked insurance for the entire year, while nearly 60 million were uninsured at some point during the year.2
For some of these people, a short spell without insurance poses no real hardship. Some are "voluntarily" uninsured, in that they consciously decide to forgo insurance that they can afford and take the financial risk. Many of these individuals pay directly for routine care and/or use the emergency room. But millions of others desire insurance, yet cannot afford it or otherwise obtain adequate coverage. For these Americans, a major illness or accident could mean financial ruin or going without necessary care.
According to the Kaiser survey, about two-thirds of the non-elderly uninsured are from low-income families (less than 200 percent of the poverty level, or approximately $29,000 for a family of three). Moreover, about 80 percent (including children) come from working families, and 70 percent have a family member working full-time.3
Small-Business Insurance Is Dysfunctional
While most uninsured people are in working families, they are not spread evenly across the workplace. Instead, they are heavily concentrated in the small-business sector. The Kaiser survey4 indicates that:
Almost half (48.7 percent) of all uninsured workers are either self-employed or work for firms with fewer than 25 workers.
The highest rates of uninsurance are also among these workers. Some 26.3 percent of self-employed workers are uninsured, as are nearly one-third (31.2 percent) of all workers in firms with fewer than 25 employees. Analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute underscores this general pattern: the smaller the firm, the higher the probability that workers will be uninsured.5
Meanwhile, just 12.6 percent of workers in firms with 1,000 or more employees lack insurance--typically low-paid individuals who decline offered coverage.
The concentration of uninsurance in small-business and lower-income households helps to explain the high level of uninsurance among non-managers in such occupations as agriculture (42.7 percent of non-managers uninsured), construction (37.8 percent), and services (34.6 percent), where small firms and lower-income households are disproportionately represented.
The preponderance of minorities in small firms also helps to explain the high levels of uninsurance among Hispanic workers (38.7 percent) and black Americans (23.7 percent), compared with relatively low rates among whites (13.2 percent).6
Thus, while uninsurance occurs in every stratum of American society, even among highly paid households, it is heavily concentrated in households in the small-business sector.
Less than 30 percent of low-income, full-time workers in firms with fewer than 25 employees have insurance.7
There are certainly weaknesses in using the large-business sector to provide insurance, but it does function as a workable system; however, for close to a majority of workers in small firms, the system of health insurance in the small-business sector is practically dysfunctional.
To address the inherent weakness of employer-sponsored coverage in the small-business sector, policymakers should not try to force or induce small employers to act like large-firm sponsors of insurance. That will never be effective. Instead, they should empower employees of small firms to make the same choices as employees of large firms while enabling small employers to facilitate those choices. Specifically, Congress should:
Create a refundable tax credit for workers in small firms in order to eliminate the bias against employees choosing their own coverage and to subsidize those who need the most help.
Create alternative pools for employees of small firms--including plans offered through churches, unions, and other intermediaries--so that these workers and their families can access a wide range of affordable plans.
Make it easier for employees of small firms to sign up for insurance at the workplace--even when the employer does not sponsor insurance--by removing tax and regulatory obstacles.
Why Small-Business-Based Insurance Is in Deep Trouble
Surveys indicate that working Americans generally prefer employer-based health coverage to other ways of acquiring health insurance, and many experts maintain that employment-based coverage has many advantages.8 However, most of the generic advantages of employment-based insurance apply far less, or not at all, to the self-employed and to workers in small firms.9
There are several reasons for the general popularity of employer-sponsored coverage and several reasons why small firms are the exception.
Employment-based coverage is the only way for most families to obtain a very large tax benefit for insurance costs. This tax benefit is smaller and less available for workers in small firms. When part of a worker's compensation is provided in the form of health insurance, the value of that compensation is exempt from all income taxes (state as well as federal) and all payroll taxes (i.e., Social Security and Medicare taxes). The total value of this "tax exclusion" in 2004 is projected by analysts at the Lewin Group to be about $188.5 billion in federal and state income and payroll taxes.10
But there are two snags with this form of tax subsidy:
It favors high-income households over low-income households. For an insured family with an annual income over $100,000, the average value of the tax benefit in 2004 is estimated by Lewin Group analysts at $2,780. For lower-income but insured families, the tax benefit is a small fraction of that amount because their marginal tax rate is lower. Families with household incomes of from $20,000-$30,000 receive a tax benefit averaging just $725.11
If the employer does not offer insurance (or affordable insurance) for a particular worker, the family typically does not receive a tax break or other subsidy to help purchase insurance. If the employer does not offer insurance, or if the worker cannot afford to enroll in the available plan, there is of course no tax subsidy. But if such an uninsured person considers buying coverage for himself and his family, he normally receives no tax benefits at all. The whole cost is in after-tax income.
A small firm is far less likely to offer insurance, which means employees of such a firm would receive no tax break, and lower-income workers are more commonly employed in smaller firms. According to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, while 98 percent of firms with at least 200 employees offered insurance in 2003, only 65 percent of firms with fewer than 200 offered insurance. Not surprisingly, in 2001, some 64 percent of uninsured workers were not even offered insurance through their own job.12 According to a survey of firms in 1999, only 55 percent of firms with fewer than 10 employees offered insurance.13
Employment-based insurance is very convenient--if it is available. The workplace is a convenient location for many transactions. For instance, most Americans pay their income tax through withholding available at their workplace. Many employees also contribute to their own IRA-type pension savings plan--typically a 401(k) plan--by having their employer make a deduction from their paychecks.
Similarly, when an employer provides health coverage, an employee can easily participate in the plan, assuming the worker can afford it. Premiums are paid directly by the employer, and the worker does not even have to apply for a tax exclusion. The W-2 form, which indicates the worker's income for tax purposes, simply makes no mention of the employer's contribution to the worker's health insurance. Moreover, if the worker has to pay something toward the cost of the plan, this is usually done through a convenient payroll deduction during each pay period.
This "automatic" way of obtaining health insurance works well for larger firms; but because smaller employers are far less likely to offer insurance, they are also far less likely to set up a payroll deduction system for employees who wish to arrange their own coverage.
Large firms provide a large and stable insurance pooling. Small firms do not. A company with a large work force obviously also has a large pool for insurance purposes. This means that the insurance risk for healthier and sicker employees can be spread across the large group and that the insurer (sometimes the firm itself, functioning as a "self-insurer") can predict average usage more accurately. Thus, an insurer can estimate the expected total claims cost for the group fairly accurately.
Moreover, if a new employee poses particularly high--or low--insurance risk (and therefore incurs particularly higher or lower medical expenses), this will not significantly change the group's expected total cost, and an insurer can offer a group premium that will not change drastically over time (other than tracking the general growth rate for medical expenditures), despite possibly wide variations in medical risks among employees. Large companies also have the economies of scale and sophistication to provide insurance at a low administrative cost per employee.
Small firms, however, are by definition small insurance pools. A retail store with a handful of employees is a dismal pool for insurance purposes. Hiring a new employee with a disability, or the diagnosis of a chronic heart problem in an older worker, can dramatically change insurance costs for the employer from one year to the next. States and the federal government recognize this and are exploring various ways to group small firms together to form larger insurance pools. But the need for these efforts only underscores the fact that small firms are a poor basis for pooling employees' insurance risks.
Three criteria for risk pools. It is also important to recognize that the size of a risk pool is only one of three important criteria for a good insurance risk pool. The other two are randomness and stability, which also present problems for small employers and even groups of small employers. In other words, the group must be in line with the health risk associated with a random cross section of the population from which the employees are typically drawn, and the group's composition must not change frequently. Unfortunately, the employee turnover rate in small business is relatively high, as is the tendency of firm-owners to withdraw from multi-employer groups if they can obtain less expensive coverage somewhere else.
Advantages in bargaining and administration depend on firm size. Larger firms can bargain quite effectively with insurers and providers and thus are able to deliver cost-effective coverage that is often tailored specifically for their work force. Moreover, because they have a large group available to the insurer (or the plan administrator if they are self-insured), administrative costs per worker tend to be relatively low.
Again, this advantage does not exist with small firms. Small firms face relatively high administrative costs, and many small-business owners consequently do not see it as efficient to organize insurance. Precisely because they lack the economies of scale and the management resources of larger firms, small businesses tend to face high costs when administering plans. According to data collected by the Congressional Budget Office, overhead costs for providing insurance can be over 30 percent of premium costs for firms with fewer than 10 employees, compared with about 12 percent for firms with more than 500 employees.14
In addition to simple economies of scale, other things such as higher staff turnover contribute to this difference. Moreover, many small-business owners have little desire to engage in the demanding task of organizing health insurance to meet the often-varied needs of their employees.
The degree of choice is related to the size of the employer. Because of the size of their insurance pools and their sophistication, large companies can more easily provide a choice of health plans, making it more likely that their workers will be reasonably satisfied with their coverage. Small firms, however, can rarely offer a choice of plans. If a small employer provides coverage, it tends to be a single "one-size-fits-all" plan. While 61 percent of workers with insurance in firms of 5,000 or more employees had a choice of at least three plans in 2003, only 20 percent of covered workers in companies with fewer than 100 employees had a similar choice of at least three plans.15
Small firms cannot provide the same quality of benefits. Even if a small employer decides to offer a plan, that employer typically cannot offer the same quality of benefits as a larger employer. High administrative costs, low bargaining clout, small and unstable pools, and the other obstacles combine to reduce the quality of benefits that can be offered.
A recent study by Jon Gabel and Jeremy Pickreign for the Commonwealth Fund underscores this disadvantage. The study used 2002-2003 survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation and other sources and found that, although premiums charged to firms were comparable between firms of different sizes, the premiums bought fewer benefits for the workers and their families in small firms.16
For example, only 38 percent of workers in firms with fewer than 25 employees were offered dental benefits, compared with 87 percent in firms of 200 or more. Meanwhile, 100 percent of employees in the large firms had access to prenatal care benefits, compared with 93 percent in the smaller firms. Moreover, employees of the small firms faced far higher deductibles for single or family coverage.
Goals for Addressing Uninsurance in the Small-Business Sector
With such a heavy concentration of the uninsured employed and their dependents in the small-business sector, it makes sense to focus efforts on addressing the obstacles facing families in that sector.
A good way to approach the task is first to consider the overarching goals that one would want to achieve, not just for these families, but also in the long term for all Americans.
Goal #1: Financial assistance to families for health insurance coverage should be based on need.
As noted earlier, many lower-paid employees in small firms face a subsidy double-whammy. Those who are offered insurance are paid less and thus get a much smaller tax benefit than upper-income employees through the exclusion from taxable income of employer-sponsored health benefits. Many have no employer-sponsored insurance at all, and if they purchase their own insurance, they typically receive no tax break.
A sensible reform would be to provide similar tax breaks or other assistance to families whether or not they obtained their insurance through the workplace. Rather than a tax exclusion or a tax decision, which gives the most help to those with the highest income, a more efficient and fairer approach would concentrate more help on lower-paid Americans, perhaps through a tax credit.
Goal #2: The available choices of health insurance should not depend on the place of employment.
Unlike the employees of large firms, workers in small business currently have little or no choice of coverage, even if they are offered tax-advantaged insurance.
A sensible reform would be to permit workers in small firms to use any tax break or other subsidy available to them to purchase a plan of their own choice, not just the one (if any) selected by their employer. This reform would allow workers in small firms to obtain insurance through large pools or organizations equivalent in size and sophistication to large employers. It would also mean that employees could retain their chosen coverage if they changed employers.
Goal #3: While workers would continue to sign up for coverage in the workplace and obtain tax subsidies through the workplace, employers should not have to sponsor health insurance for workers in order to be eligible for tax subsidies.
Changing the nature of today's tax subsidy and widening the choice of insurance plans for workers in small firms means rethinking the role of small employers in the provision of health insurance. Large firms typically both sponsor insurance (i.e., select the plans or self-insure) and facilitate insurance (i.e., arrange for employees to sign up and pay for insurance).
Given the obstacles that make it very uneconomic for small firms to offer coverage, divorcing the sponsor and facilitator roles--and leaving smaller firms with only the facilitator role--would reduce the burden and risk for many small employers and make it more likely that they would help their employees to select and sign up for coverage.
Three Steps to Increase Coverage for the Employees of Small Firms
The inherent weaknesses of small firms as sponsors of health insurance require policymakers to think differently about the role of small employers. Thinking of them as just small versions of large firms overlooks the different nature of the small-business workplace.
Instead, policymakers need to construct a health insurance infrastructure for workers in the small-business sector that achieves--or exceeds--the insurance advantages of large firms by altering the role of the small employer and changing how benefits are subsidized. (For an overview of the proposed changes, see Figure 1 and Figure 2 in the Appendix.) Congress needs to take three steps to do this:
Step #1: Create a refundable tax credit for workers in small firms in order to eliminate the bias against employees choosing their own coverage and to subsidize those who need the most help.
Unlike a tax deduction or tax exclusion, which favors upper-income workers, a tax credit provides either the same level of assistance to each recipient or even more help for lower-paid individuals. It can be designed in various ways. A credit can be in the form of a fixed dollar credit; a percentage of the premium and/or out-of-pocket, perhaps with a maximum credit amount; or a combination--a base fixed amount plus a percentage of the premium. Each has different effects and financial consequences.17
Making a credit refundable means that if the available credit exceeds the tax liability of an individual or family, the government would remit the difference. Hence, a refundable credit is in effect a health insurance voucher available through the tax system.
A refundable credit could be limited to workers who are not offered a plan by their employer. A criticism of this approach is that it might induce some small employers now offering insurance to end their plans in favor of allowing their employees to qualify for a credit. While, in most cases, this would actually make the employee better off, it remains a widely held criticism. On the other hand, giving the same tax credit to all workers in small firms--whether or not they are offered employer-sponsored coverage--means that workers with employer-sponsored coverage would enjoy "double-dip" tax relief in the form of the tax credit and the exclusion for their employer-directed compensation.
To avoid either situation, a "full" tax credit could be given to workers who are without sponsored insurance and a smaller tax credit to those who have a sponsored plan; the amount of the latter credit, when combined with the tax value of the exclusion, would be designed to be approximately equal to the full credit. In this way, the tax credit would not be biased either for or against an employer-sponsored plan.
Delivering the Credit Through the Withholding System
The simplest way to deliver the subsidy to workers would be through an adjustment in tax withholdings, much as deductions (such as mortgage interest) or credits (such as the child care credit) are typically handled today with the employer remitting tax payments to the government that are net of the credits. This means that workers would receive the tax benefit in increments throughout the year when they receive their paychecks.
Employers could also institute a system of payroll deductions for health premiums, perhaps through the existing rules for flexible benefit plans, so that the money would be available when premiums were due. Employers could pay premiums directly from these accounts on behalf of employees. In this way, the credit-premium transaction would be relatively simple for both employer and employee.
An Alternative: Assigning the Credit to a Health Plan
Another option would be to permit families to assign the value of their credit to their insurance plan in return for a lower premium. With the assignment, the employee signs a document allowing the insurer to claim the credit on his behalf and the insurer agrees to reduce premiums by the same amount. Insurers would normally obtain the credit through an adjustment in their tax payments to the government. Thus, rather than deal with the withholding system, a family would only have to establish its eligibility for a fixed or simple percentage credit.
This alternative would be particularly attractive to those lower-income families that do not even file tax returns and would address the concern that the tax subsidy might not be available when premiums are due. The process would mirror the premium payment system in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), under which Members of Congress and other federal employees are quoted premiums net of the government contribution.
Boosting Coverage Through Automatic Enrollment
Whether or not they sponsored insurance, employers could institute an automatic enrollment and payment system to make health insurance premium payments and obtain health-related tax benefits. This means that employees would automatically be enrolled in a health plan unless they explicitly declined to enroll, perhaps by signing a document indicating that they understood the possible consequences of not enrolling in a plan. Alternatively, a state could establish a default bare-bones health plan in conjunction with a private insurer, to which anyone not otherwise choosing a plan would be assigned.
Evidence from pension plans indicates that an automatic enrollment system for health insurance could sharply increase sign-up rates.18
Tax Credit Proposals in Congress
Several recently introduced legislative proposals are based on the health care tax credit concept. With some variation, the proposals focus primarily on providing tax credits to lower-income individuals and families without coverage.
These proposals have also garnered bipartisan and even tripartisan support. For example, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Representatives Mark Kennedy (R-WI) and William Lipinski (D-IL) introduced similar legislation in the Fair Care for the Uninsured Act (S. 1570 and H.R. 583). Representatives Kay Granger (R-TX) and Albert Wynn (D-MD) introduced the Securing Access, Value, and Equality (SAVE) in Health Care Act (H.R. 1236). In 2001, Senator James Jeffords (I-VT) introduced S. 590, the Relief, Equity, Access, and Coverage for Health (REACH) Act, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans--including Senators Bill Frist (R-TN) and John Breaux (D-LA).
Some proposals have integrated tax credits with other health care initiatives. Both President George W. Bush and Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) have integrated tax credits into their overall health care proposals. Representative John Shadegg (R-AZ) has introduced the Small Business Access and Choice for Entrepreneurs Act (H.R. 3423), and Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) have introduced the Health Coverage, Affordability, Responsibility, and Equity Act (S. 1030 and H.R. 2402). All three combine the tax credit approach with an overall health reform proposal.
Step #2: Create alternative pools for the employees of small firms--including plans offered through churches, unions, and other intermediaries, as well as through the FEHBP--so that these workers and their families can access a wide range of affordable plans.
Providing a health insurance subsidy to employees who lack adequate help today is only one part of the solution to a lack of coverage. Affordable coverage that can be purchased with the help of a credit is the other part. For younger and healthier individuals and families, the individual insurance market offers affordable policies; but for many with poor health, obtaining affordable private coverage is difficult or impossible.
A solution to this problem is to construct forms of group insurance, in essence mimicking the large pools of employees available to the biggest employers. This would spread high risks across the pool so that sicker individuals and families would not face unaffordable premiums.
Enhancing the Stability of Groups
Creating such pools, however, poses a number of challenges that require careful design decisions. (Bringing several small employers together as a group poses similar challenges.) A major worry is the stability of voluntary insurance groups. The danger in bringing individuals together and establishing a group insurance premium--in effect, an average premium--is that healthier individuals would have the incentive to leave the group to get cheaper individual coverage reflecting their low risk. Meanwhile, sicker individuals would wish to join the group to get relatively inexpensive coverage. The group could then face a "death spiral" of ever-higher group rates.
Certain steps can reduce this problem to a degree. For example, some combination of higher rates, waiting periods, and pre-existing condition exclusions could be imposed on those seeking to join such a group who did not have prior coverage. Thus, individuals would be rewarded for buying and maintaining coverage when they are healthy and would be penalized if they sought coverage only when they needed medical care. Long-term contacts with penalties for dropping coverage could also make the group more stable.
A Reinsurance Pool with a Risk Adjuster
Although steps can be taken to improve the stability of pools, for long-term success and for equity reasons, an effective risk adjustment mechanism needs to be incorporated into group coverage for families in the small-business sector. A risk adjuster can take different forms, but the basic idea is to ensure that there are appropriate cross-subsidies between high-risk and low-risk enrollees within the pool, regardless of which insurance plan individuals choose.
An example would be a mandatory reinsurance pool in a state or other area, in which all insurers would pay a percentage of their premiums into a reinsurance pool and the member insurers would receive payments from the pool according to whether they had an above-average or below-average share of high-cost enrollees relative to the other carriers in that market. In this way, an insurer attracting a disproportionate share of high risks (perhaps because of good coverage for cancer) would be subsidized through the reinsurance pool by an insurer that attracted a disproportionate share of low risks (perhaps by offering a leaner policy with a lower premium).
Of course, if all carriers in the market were attracting about the same share of high-risk enrollees, then little--if any--cross-subsidy would occur through the reinsurance pool, since no single carrier or group of carriers was being disadvantaged in the market.
New Intermediaries in the Insurance System
Large firms are more effective than small firms in offering insurance not only because they can assemble large pools, but also because they are sophisticated negotiators and buyers of insurance. Insurance groups based on large organizations could achieve many of the marketing and administrative economies of scale that are normally available only to the employees of large firms. Typically, such organizations would not get into the business of insurance themselves, but would act much as a buyers club does by negotiating an arrangement with existing insurance companies. Organizations that might function in this way include groups of churches, trade unions, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), professional and trade associations, farm bureaus, and credit unions.
Some organizations (e.g., many farm bureaus) already offer plans, but working families who join these plans typically are not eligible for tax relief. Tax credits for health insurance would change that by making it more economical to offer insurance because far more potential enrollees would be able to afford premiums. For years, many African-American church congregations have organized various forms of insurance and other services for their members. Moreover, in many inner-city communities, these churches are typically larger, more stable, and more sophisticated--as well as more trusted--than the typical employer, making them a natural avenue through which many families armed with tax credits could obtain their health insurance.
The FEHBP System as a Possible Model
The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program could be another model of an alternative intermediary for workers in small firms. The FEHBP is an example of an insurance arrangement that offers group rates for individuals and also incorporates plans offered through voluntary associations, primarily employee organizations and unions. An FEHBP "look-alike"--organized by states and that has a separate risk pool--could be one way to provide an insurance infrastructure.
The FEHBP provides federal workers and their dependents (nearly 10 million covered individuals) with a wide choice of plans.19 There have been many proposals in recent years to open it up to non-federal workers under various conditions, typically using a separate insurance pool. To make the FEHBP available to non-federal workers using tax credits, Congress would need to amend federal law governing the FEHBP to permit a separate insurance pool for non-federal employees (so that premiums for federal employees would not be affected), with the exact structure in each state negotiated between the state and the federal government. Plans currently available in the FEHBP might be allowed to market to the new state pool if they wished, and other plans could market exclusively to the new pool provided they met the general requirements of the state-based version of the FEHBP.
Unions organize several of the leading FEHBP plans. For example, the Mail Handlers even offers associate membership to non-union members who wish to gain access to the health plan. These unions do not carry the insurance risk themselves; instead, they organize a group and negotiate an insurance package from an insurer for a fee. CNA Insurance organizes the Mail Handlers Benefit Plan, which has roughly 10 times as many enrollees as the union has regular union members. This "friendly society" role of unions has a long history in this and other countries.
Many union-sponsored plans also operate under the Taft-Hartley Act, where union-sponsored plans are a rational way to provide coverage when there is only a weak relationship between employer and worker. They flourish in markets that have fewer tax and regulatory obstacles to union-sponsored plans and where enrollees can receive tax or other subsidies--such as the FEHBP.
State governments could also charter FEHBP-style purchasing groups to act as intermediaries in their states, and a number of states are already experimenting along those lines with various purchasing group designs.
Step #3: Make it easier for employees to sign up for insurance in the workplace--even when the employer does not sponsor insurance--by removing tax and regulatory obstacles.
Most Americans pay their taxes through the workplace. This is a convenient system under which employers withhold income and Social Security taxes and send the money to the government. In addition, employees typically adjust their withholdings to take advantage of any tax breaks for which they may be eligible (e.g., the mortgage interest deduction). In a sense, the employers are actually operating the basic income tax system, but they do not in any sense design the tax code for their employees or "sponsor" the tax system. They could more appropriately be considered a clearinghouse for tax payments.
The place of employment is likewise particularly convenient and efficient for handling health insurance payments. Workers with employer-sponsored health insurance benefits typically sign up for the firm's plan when they take a job and arrange for a payroll deduction to cover premium costs for them and their families.
With individual tax credits for employees available, a small employer who is reluctant to sponsor coverage could instead carry out the critical clearinghouse role for the plan choices of his or her employees, making tax adjustments and premium payments. The employer might also decide to make a cash payment toward the plan chosen by the employee, as a fringe benefit.
Commonly, the payroll firm handling wages and benefits for the small firm would conduct these transactions. In this way, smaller employers could either directly or indirectly take responsibility for the mechanical aspects of arranging for payroll deductions and premium payments (similar to their role in the tax collection system) without having to sponsor a plan.
With tax credits, in principle, eligible employees could join any plan available in their area, not just one sponsored by their employer, and still obtain tax benefits. Thus, a small employer could play an important role in facilitating coverage without having to organize coverage by such things as providing information and making sign-up simple, instituting a payroll deduction and payment system (as many small firms do today for employee-directed savings plans), and making withholding adjustments to reflect available credits.
The government could spur the "facilitator" role of small firms that are disinclined to sponsor coverage themselves by clarifying the status of employer contributions to plans that are chosen by the employee and not sponsored by the employer. An employer wishing to set up such an arrangement today faces a dilemma. If the employer helps to pay for coverage chosen by the worker, that coverage is deemed to be an employer-sponsored plan under federal employee benefit law, and both the employer and the coverage issued to the worker by the insurer become subject to federal employer-sponsored plan regulations. To avoid such regulation, the employer must pay the worker taxable cash, which the worker can then use to purchase coverage. But that means the worker must forgo the tax benefit derived from his employer's making pre-tax contributions toward the cost of his coverage.
If the plan is interpreted as an employer-sponsored plan, the employer could face a regulatory nightmare under state insurance rules or the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (the federal law affecting certain employers) since any plan chosen by the employee would embroil the employer in complex insurance rules. However, if the arrangement is not considered an employer-sponsored plan, both employer and employee lose favorable tax benefits.
Thus, to encourage smaller employers to play the role of insurance facilitator--with or without a tax credit available to employees--federal and/or state employee benefit law needs to make clear that favorable tax benefits are available at least to the employee for an employer's contribution toward coverage whether or not the insurance is deemed an employer-sponsored plan.
Conclusion
High rates of uninsurance among working families in small firms are a testament to the limitations of the employment-based health system in the small-business sector. Yet both the tax system and government insurance rules discourage other insurance arrangements for these uninsured working families.
Proposals for individual tax credits for health coverage would help to remove this barrier to alternative insurance arrangements. In addition, taking steps to build an insurance infrastructure with affordable choices would enable these families to have coverage that is similar to--or even better than--the insurance available to employees of large firms.
With these reforms in place, new forms of coverage--including plans offered through churches, large corporations, and the FEHBP--would become available to working Americans in the small-business sector. For this to occur, however, Congress must recognize that an important distinction exists between using the workplace as a convenient location to obtain insurance and making tax relief to families contingent upon employer sponsorship of their health insurance.
Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D. , is Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Appendix
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1. Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Health Insurance Coverage in America: 2002 Data Update (Washington, D.C.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003), p. 6.
2. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, "The Uninsured and Rising Health Insurance Premiums," Congressional Budget Office testimony before the Subcommittee on Health, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, March 9, 2004. See also Congressional Budget Office, How Many People Lack Health Insurance and for How Long, 2003.
3. Kaiser Commission, Health Insurance Coverage, pp. 9 and 10.
4. Ibid., pp. 19 and 34.
5. "Sources of Health Insurance and the Characteristics of the Uninsured: Analysis of the March 2003 Current Population Survey," Employee Benefit Research Institute Issue Brief No. 264, December 2003.
6. Kaiser Commission, Health Insurance Coverage, pp. 19 and 34.
7. Ibid., p. 19.
8. For a summary of the advantages of employer-sponsored coverage, see William S. Custer, Charles N. Kahn III, and Thomas F. Wildsmith IV, "Why We Should Keep the Employment-Based Health Insurance System," Health Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 6 (November/December 1999), pp. 115-122.
9. For a summary of the pros and cons of employer-sponsored coverage, see Uwe E. Reinhardt, "Employer-Based Insurance: A Balance Sheet," Health Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 6 (November/December 1999), pp. 124-132.
10. John Sheils and Randall Haught, "The Cost of Tax-Exempt Health Benefits in 2004," Web exclusive, Health Affairs, February 25, 2004, at content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/hlthaff.w4.106v1.pdf.
11. This figure averages workers with and without insurance, so the tax subsidy for an insured lower-income worker would be higher than this. Nonetheless, a worker in the lowest federal tax bracket would receive only just over half the subsidy for insurance received by an upper-income worker.
12. Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, The Uninsured: A Primer (Washington, D.C.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003), p. 13, at www.kff.org/uninsured/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=29345.
13. Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, Uninsured in America: A Chart Book (Washington, D.C.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2000), p. 41, at www.kff.org/uninsured/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=14629.
14. Congressional Budget Office, The Tax Treatment of Employment-Based Health Insurance, 1994, p. 8.
15. Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Educational Trust, Employer Health Benefits, 2003 (Washington, D.C.: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), at www.kff.org/insurance/ehbs2003-6-set.cfm. See also "Exhibit 2.6: Percentage of Employers Providing a Choice of Health Plans, by Firm Size, 2003," in Trends and Indicators in the Changing Health Care Marketplace, 2004 Update, Kaiser Family Foundation, April 2004, at www.kff.org/insurance/7031/ti2004-2-6.cfm.
16. Jon R. Gabel and Jeremy D. Pickreign, "Risky Business: When Mom and Pop Buy Health Insurance for Their Employees," Commonwealth Fund Issue Brief, April 2004, at www.cmwf.org/programs/insurance/gabel_riskybusiness_ib_722.pdf.
17. Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D., "Time for Bipartisan Action to Help Families Without Health Insurance," He
18. A recent study found that automatic enrollment for 401(k) plans boosted participation rates from 37 percent to 86 percent for such voluntary pensions, with even sharper increases for young and lower-paid employees. See Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea, "The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 7682, May 2000, p. 51.
19. For descriptions of the FEHBP, see Harry Cain, "Moving Medicare to the FEHBP, or How to Make an Elephant Fly," Health Affairs, Vol. 18, No. 4 (July/August 1999), pp. 25-39; Stuart Butler and Robert Moffit, "The FEHBP as a Model for a New Medicare Program," Health Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Winter 1995); and Craig Caplan and Lisa Foley, Structuring Health Care Benefits: A Comparison of Medicare and the FEHBP (Washington, D.C.: AARP Public Policy Institute, May 2000).
? 1995 - 2004 The Heritage Foundation
All Rights Reserved.
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The Future of Ground Zero
By John Rosenthal
John Rosenthal has taught modern European philosophy and political philosophy at schools in the United States and France. He is presently writing a book on ethnic-national politics and the principle of "self-determination."
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n architect from Berlin has received the commission for the most spectacular and surely also the most delicate building project in the world," a news anchor announces. The "architect from Berlin" is Daniel Libeskind, and his commission is "to put something new in the place of the World Trade Center." There follow the well-known images of the World Trade towers imploding. "It was a murderous visitation as on September 11, 2001 the twin towers of the World Trade Center were reduced to rubble," the voiceover explains in distinctly religious tones: "The limitless drive upwards, the optimistic vitality of this city seemed broken. Now it has a new vision -- thanks to Daniel Libeskind, the winner of the competition for the reconstruction of Ground Zero." The earlier scenes of destruction are replaced by images of glittering skyscrapers encircling a verdant field where happy families stroll -- this is no mere reconstruction, it would seem, but the veritable resurrection of New York. "The decision was made unanimously by the jury," the voiceover continues. The report dates from February 27, 2003, and it comes from the German public television channel zdf. It was recently shown in a continuous loop as part of the exhibition "Counterpoint: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind" at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
But there is one problem with the report: As most New Yorkers will recall, the decision in favor of Libeskind was hardly unanimous. Indeed, on February 25, just two days before the announcement of the selection of the Libeskind design, the site planning committee of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the body specifically created to oversee the reconstruction of downtown Manhattan in the aftermath of 9-11, decided against the latter and in favor of the rival proposal from Raphael Vi?oly and Frederic Schwartz's "think" architectural team. Despite a massive and sometimes sordid public relations effort by the Libeskind camp -- including a campaign to get a prominent critic in the press fired and an apparent attempt to pad support for the Libeskind entry in two high-profile web-based polls -- this choice seemed to reflect the tendency of public opinion, which the lmdc had been specifically tasked to canvas. Although neither of the two design competition finalists ever managed to generate much enthusiasm among New Yorkers, when, for instance, Jennifer Rainville of the local television news station ny1 reported from the opening of an lmdc-sponsored exhibition of the two models on February 4, she found a strong movement of support toward the think design and its lattice-work invocation of the old twin towers. Yet, belying repeated assurances about the "open" and "democratic" character of the process of deliberations on the future of Ground Zero, New York Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose to ignore the lmdc recommendation and go with the Libeskind design anyway.
Why was there this misrepresentation in the zdf report, and why was it allowed to stand in the Libeskind exhibition at Berlin's Jewish Museum when the curators surely were aware of the controversy surrounding the selection? To answer that question is to consider the exalted status enjoyed by Daniel Libeskind in contemporary German public discourse. It was his work in Germany, after all, that established Libeskind's "worldwide renown," as Jewish Museum director Michael Blumenthal has put it. In fact, up until now Libeskind has been known, first and foremost, as the designer of the Jewish Museum itself. Before winning the design competition for the latter, Libeskind's designs had been widely regarded as unbuildable. Still today, his resume of built designs includes only museums or museum extensions and an artist's studio on Mallorca.
To reflect on the sources of Libeskind's German success might also help us understand how a supposed architectural "visionary" with no relevant experience in urban planning or skyscraper design should have been entrusted with devising the "master plan" for a massive complex of high-rise office buildings and pedestrian spaces upon which the revitalization of southern Manhattan and, to a certain extent, the future of New York itself will depend. The consequences of this odd choice have already been somewhat attenuated thanks largely to the interventions of developer Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center site. It was Silverstein who brought in architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to "give form" to Libeskind's "idea" for the so-called Freedom Tower, the soaring "skyline element" included in the Libeskind site plan in accordance with lmdc specifications. At the December 19, 2003 news conference unveiling the revised Freedom Tower model, Libeskind stated flatly (whether out of graciousness, as some have suggested, or in an outburst of spleen), "I'm not the architect of this building." Nonetheless, he has insisted that his signature remain visible on the tower in certain stylistic or ostensibly "symbolic" details: the off-center spire meeting the "need" for asymmetry, the sloping roof topping off the solid part of the structure, and, of course, the seemingly all-important and patriotic requirement that the building plus its spire measure out to exactly 1,776 feet in order to mark the year of the Declaration of Independence. "It's not a date," Libeskind has remarked cryptically, "a number that will ever be surpassed in world history." That an adequate proportion be maintained between the spire and the subjacent building structure is another point on which Libeskind has insisted: this too by reason of Libeskind's novel brand of esoteric Americana, since only thus can the off-center spire be regarded as mirroring the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty.
In all these regards, Libeskind, not so subtly evoking the threat of legal action by bringing his lawyer to design meetings and with the apparently unwavering support of Governor Pataki, has had his way. Furthermore, casting himself in the role of defender of the common man, Libeskind has promised to continue to assert his authority as the "guardian" of the "master plan" for the World Trade Center site as a whole: "When the politicians and architects and developers have all gone home, I'll still be there making sure that everything that is built on this site is right because it is . . . Ground Zero."
There are numerous indications that the lmdc is prepared to indulge Libeskind's pretensions on this head. Thus, just days after his "Reflecting Absence" design was announced as the winner of the World Trade Center memorial competition last January, Michael Arad put in a visit to Libeskind's Rector Street office to discuss modifications of his proposal. The placement of the new downtown Path Station is even said somehow to reflect the requirements of the famous "Wedge of Light" where, Libeskind has promised, "Each year on September 11th between the hours of 8:46 am, when the first airplane hit, and 10:28 am, when the second tower collapsed, the sun will shine without shadow." Architect Eli Attia has long since demonstrated that the "Wedge" was a hoax and that, supposing the sun shines at all between the appointed times, the area demarcated in Libeskind's original model will be increasingly covered in shadow. But this fact seems not to have diminished the willingness of city officials to play along. Further compromises between Daniel Libeskind's "vision" and the real needs of downtown redevelopment are presumably yet to come.
It is, then, long overdue that New Yorkers and Americans generally come to know something about the sources of Libeskind's prestige in the country that made him famous. Along the way, we will also learn more about the "philosophy" ostensibly underlying his architecture. As we will see, the mystical or metaphysical bent that is so much celebrated by Libeskind's admirers and that recently has had him seeking some occult significance in shapes and numbers and angles in lower Manhattan also had him perceiving a cosmic significance in the 9-11 attacks themselves. In fact, the meaning that the "master planner" of the new World Trade Center finds in the destruction of the old is seemingly no different from the meaning that virtually all apologists for the attacks claim to have found therein.
The Jewish Museum in Berlin
t was berlin's Jewish Museum that created the Libeskind aura. He won the competition to design it in 1989, whereupon he moved to Berlin to oversee the project. It was thus that Libeskind, an American citizen who was born in Poland and whose only "architecture" consisted of sketches, became an "architect from Berlin." In fact, Libeskind's original brief was to design an extension to the already existing Berlin Museum. The extension was intended to house a museum division specifically devoted to Jewish history in Berlin. In the intervening years, however, the extension came to overshadow, with regard to both form and function, the original building. By the time Libeskind's extension was completed, the erstwhile Berlin Museum, a dignified specimen of Berlin baroque dating from 1735, had been downgraded to the entry hall for the Jewish Museum, and its contents had been shipped out.
The Jewish Museum opened for public viewing in January 1999 without any exhibition yet installed. Libeskind's building was supposed itself to be the attraction, and indeed over the next two years hundreds of thousands came to wander through its empty spaces. Many commentators in the German media pleaded for the building to be left empty, sometimes admitting that its irregular layout made it unsuitable for a museum but arguing that in its emptiness it nonetheless provided a fitting memorial to German-Jewish history and its violent consummation in the Holocaust. That Libeskind had not been commissioned to design a memorial seemed not to matter. The seriousness with which the suggestion was entertained at the outset revealed that the museum's management did not have any clear idea of how the building should be used -- or even any collection to put in it. In an architectural variation on Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum "the medium is the message," here the building was evidently supposed to be the function of the building -- or, more precisely, the building was the message.
Libeskind gave ample encouragement to the notion that his design meant something, which is not to say merely that it symbolized something, but rather that it was itself the crystallization of some profound historical meaning -- the crystallization of nothing less than the entirety of German-Jewish history. Calling the project "Between the Lines," as if it were an independent artwork requiring a title, Libeskind claimed to have sensed in the area of the Berlin building site "an invisible matrix . . . of relationships, which I discovered not only among German and Jewish figures, but also between the municipal history of Berlin and the history of Jews in Germany and in Berlin. I recognized that certain people, in particular certain scientists, composers, artists, and poets, were the links between Jewish tradition and German culture. I found these connections and I plotted an irrational matrix in the form of a system of right-angled triangles, which would yield reference to the emblematics of a compressed and distorted star: the yellow star that was so frequently worn on this very site."1 In order to uncover this "matrix," Libeskind claimed even to have sought out the Berlin addresses at which various "famous Germans" and "famous Jews" had once lived. Throughout, Libeskind employed the categories "German" and "Jew" as if they were mutually exclusive -- thus, in a macabre reflection of Nazi racial ideology, stripping figures like Heinrich Heine or Walter Benjamin, whose names he mentioned, of their "Germanness." "I was astonished," he says, "that it was not at all difficult to hear and to note the addresses of these people: they formed a wholly specific urban and cultural constellation of world history" -- which is apparently to say that the configuration of the physical locations of their addresses formed this constellation.
The outcome of this seemingly intricate procedure is the elongated, zigzagging structure of the Jewish Museum, which contains no recognizable right angles and which no one would know "yields reference" to a Star of David -- much less a "yellow" Star of David as worn by Jews under the Third Reich -- who had not been so informed by the architect or other cognoscenti. To the uninitiated the shape of the building will appear like a simple doodle: the product not of the careful "plotting" of an "irrational matrix," but of arbitrary scribbling. But this doodle is seemingly so revered by the members of Germany's cultural establishment that museum management has seen fit to elevate it to the status of the emblem for the museum itself. It is featured on the signposts leading to the museum, on the museum stationery, and on the museum homepage. It even serves as the motif on the red silk scarves worn by the youthful guides stationed throughout the museum (and which are also available to visitors in the Museum Shop starting at ?19,90). Inasmuch as it is the emblem of the "Jewish Museum Berlin," it is almost as if Daniel Libeskind's doodle had replaced the traditional symbol of Judaism to which it allegedly "yields reference" or, perhaps more precisely, had some sort of superior and runic significance all its own: presumably, the significance of German-Jewish history, which Libeskind himself claims to have "found" but does not pronounce.
The greatest irony is that virtually no one will ever actually see the celebrated shape of Libeskind's building first-hand -- unless, that is, by somehow hovering over it. Nothing expresses more clearly just how detached is the abstruse metaphysics of Libeskind's architecture from the ordinary requirements of building design -- which is to say from the practical needs of human beings, for whose purposes a building is ordinarily built, and their aesthetic sensibilities, to which its form would ordinarily be expected to respond. The shape of Libeskind's Jewish Museum constitutes an outright nuisance for visitors, who walk through seemingly interminable halls before retracing their steps, descending and ascending two enormous stairwells, to reach the exit. For passers-by, on the other hand, it is an irrelevance. Even admirers of Libeskind have conceded that from street level the building, with its boxish facades and drab grey-silver siding, resembles a bunker. The sliver-like windows, which like so many gun holes criss-cross the building, give further sustenance to this comparison. (Unlike the layout of the building as such, the pattern formed by the windows on the museum's most prominent surface on the Lindenstrasse does seem to "refer to" a Star of David.) Nonetheless, a more accurate comparison might be a warehouse, such as those one sees driving past the cargo area of almost any large municipal airport.
Libeskind's esoteric interpretation of spatial configurations is also on evidence in the interior of the Jewish Museum. The basement of the museum is arranged into three intersecting corridors, which are designated the "Axis of Holocaust," the "Axis of Exile," and the "Axis of Continuity." To help orient visitors, diagrams on the walls display the arrangement of the three axes with a red dot indicating "you are here." The "Axis of Holocaust" contains several display cases exhibiting personal artifacts of Jews who perished in the death camps. Under the title "The Number of Murdered Jews in Europe," a map of Europe hangs on a wall, on which is indicated how many Jews from each European country were killed. Strangely, one of the orientation maps of the museum basement hangs directly next to it and, more strangely, the outline of the arrangement formed by the three axes on the orientation map reappears dimly superimposed on the map of the "Murdered Jews in Europe" -- as if the former had something to do with the latter. Since indeed there is no other explanatory information given regarding the map of "Murdered Jews" (on its other side, there is a plaque concerning the fate of specifically German Jews), it would seem that Libeskind's system of "axes" is all the explanation required. This impression is reinforced by the fact that plaques found throughout the museum refer to "symbolic" features of the building itself and what, seemingly by the personal fiat of the architect, they should inspire visitors to "think about," as in "The Axis of Exile and the Axis of Holocaust cut across your path and lead to the Garden of Exile and the Holocaust Tower. [Here] Architect Daniel Libeskind asks us to think about the Holocaust and those people deported to their deaths."
The Jewish Museum's own blurb on the "Counterpoint" exhibition speaks of Libeskind as a "visionary" whose "philosophical approach connects architecture and urban planning with their social function and develops them in constant dialogue with the people" -- though the German reads "den Menschen," literally "human beings" and with the connotation here of "ordinary people." In light of his inexperience in the matter, the reference to "urban planning" is curious. The Jewish Museum is conspicuously located in a huge otherwise empty lot, such that there is no possibility of its winding design interfering with its environment as in any built environment it invariably would. Libeskind did submit a design proposal -- titled, characteristically, "Ten Thunderbolts of Absolute Absence" -- for the rebuilding of Berlin's central Potsdamer Platz, which, lying at the fault line between East and West Berlin, had fallen into disuse for over 40 years. But while Berlin's cultural elites may be thrilled that Libeskind won the competition to rebuild downtown Manhattan, Berlin's city planners knew better than to entrust him with an analogous responsibility in their own city.
Far from showing solicitude for the human occupants of built space, moreover, Libeskind's "philosophical approach" to architecture, precisely by so brazenly disdaining function in favor of "meaning," shows persistent contempt for them. Perhaps the most telling example of such contempt in the Jewish Museum is provided by the so-called Garden of Exile, to which the Axis of Exile leads. The Garden consists of 49 square concrete columns, six meters high and arranged into a closely packed 7x7 square grid. What appears from below like shrubbery -- in winter dead shrubbery -- juts out over the top of each column. The ground is paved in smallish cobblestones, and a narrow path goes around the perimeter of the Garden, itself partially enclosed by a low angular concrete barrier over which there is a drop onto another stone surface bordered by concrete walls. In case it was not already hazardous enough to have visitors walking outdoors on a cobblestone surface among concrete slabs or between them and something like a pit, Libeskind has placed the Garden on a dual set of inclines.
An informational plaque explains: "Here, architect Daniel Libeskind asks us to think about the disorientation that exile brings. The 49 columns are filled with earth in which willow oak grows. Forty-eight of the columns contain earth of Berlin and stand for 1948 and the formation of the state of Israel. The central and forty-ninth pillar is filled with earth from Jerusalem and stands for Berlin itself." The German version implies more strongly that it is the Garden itself that will induce us to "think about" the requisite topic, if not necessarily the associated numerology. Visitors will find some more immediately relevant practical advice on a paper sign posted directly in front of the door leading to the "Garden": "Enter the Garden of Exile at your own risk! Slippery underfoot. Please walk carefully."
Ground Zero
hatever inconveniences or worse may have been created by the architecture of Libeskind's Jewish Museum, they pale in comparison to the damage that New York and New Yorkers would suffer if his "master plan" for the World Trade Center site were ever to be implemented. The modifications to aspects of the Libeskind design that have been quietly made as planning advances, and the notably loose interpretation that has been given to others, suggest that city planners are not wholly insensitive to its practical failings and risks. Libeskind's original submission famously called for the excavated "bathtub" of the old World Trade Center to be left empty: a 70-foot-deep, 4.7-acre crater, replete with an exposed slurry wall flanking the Hudson on its western edge. The latter element was supposed to serve as a symbol for the resilience of American democracy, according to Libeskind, even though engineers warned that without the lateral support formerly provided by the basement levels of the World Trade Center it was destined to collapse. The morbidly permanent crater was Libeskind's response to the lmdc's requirement that submitted designs include an appropriate context for a World Trade Center memorial. Libeskind, however, spoke of it as if it were, without further ado, already such a memorial. Indeed, he titled his overall site design "Memory Foundations," as if the point of downtown reconstruction as a whole was eternally to remind people of the death and destruction caused by the 9-11 attacks -- to invite them to "think about" it, in the style of Libeskind's Jewish Museum -- rather than to rebuild and to revitalize a part of the city that had been decimated by the attacks. By the time the Libeskind proposal was anointed the winner of the design competition, the floor of the crater had been brought up to a "mere" 30 feet below ground level. But as critics pointed out, even at a more modest depth, Libeskind's crater would represent a massive obstacle to pedestrian flow on the southern tip of Manhattan and as such a permanent impediment to downtown redevelopment.
Mercifully, Michael Arad's winning design proposal for the World Trade Center memorial now brings the memorial site up to street level. The crater, however, continues to be invoked by the memorial itself, consisting of two reflecting pools embedded 30 feet below street level into the footprints of the twin towers. In a single gesture, Arad's design manages simultaneously to satisfy the lmdc's requirement that the tower footprints remain visible and to limit the harmful effects of Libeskind's original proposal. It can nonetheless be wondered how leaving any void where the towers once stood represents a tribute to the victims of the 9-11 attacks rather than to the perpetrators, who are, after all, the real architects of that void. Following World War ii, Poles did not leave the void created by the German Wehrmacht where Warsaw once stood. In defiance of their aggressors, they rebuilt their capital to its former condition. By contrast, the "absence" preserved in the World Trade Center memorial site suggests a certain indulgence toward the aggressor.
Arad has been compelled to make a more obvious concession to the cultish spirit of Libeskind's original design by adding a deep ravine along the site's western edge in order to permit viewing of the slurry wall. An adjacent stairwell will lead 70 feet down to a so-called interpretive center at bedrock level, where visitors will be able to "view many preserved artifacts from the twin towers: twisted steel beams, a crushed fire truck, and personal effects." Furthermore, whereas Arad's original submission included a long, thin "cultural building" along the site's western perimeter, the revised version made public after his consultations with Libeskind includes instead two squat angular buildings on the site's northeast quadrant. These rudely occupy almost half the space that Arad's original model had reserved for pedestrian use and they feature Libeskind's signature sloping roofs.
Like the Freedom Tower, the other four buildings in the so-called spiral of skyscrapers surrounding the memorial site in Libeskind's "master plan" are also supposed to have sloping roofs. Given the potential risks from sliding snow and ice in winter, this arrangement displays a remarkable callousness toward the well-being of pedestrians below. But there is a further consideration militating against the use of sloping roofs on high-rise structures that one could have imagined would be especially obvious to planners in this specific context. Flat roofs, unlike sloping ones, permit evacuations in the event of an emergency. Indeed, when the first attack on the World Trade Towers occurred in 1993, members of the nypd transported by helicopter entered the buildings and evacuated occupants from their roofs. Governor Pataki has stated, "All that we do in Lower Manhattan is in memory of those we lost on September 11th and in the 1993 bombing." If city and state officials permit fidelity to the "vision" of Daniel Libeskind to override basic safety considerations, there will be reason to doubt that this is in fact so.
More than mere museum
ddly enough, the Jewish Museum Berlin, now finally outfitted with an exhibition, was scheduled to have its opening on September 11, 2001. The opening was postponed on account of the attacks in the United States. Two days before, a "gala dinner" was held to mark the occasion. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the few German papers willing to maintain a certain ironic reserve in its treatment of Libeskind and the museum project, ran a photo essay on the event under the title "The First General Assembly of a Happier World." The guest list of some 850 luminaries included German Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der, President Johannes Rau, Chief Justice of the German Supreme Court Jutta Limbach, and Interior Minister Otto Schilly, as well as prominent members of parliament from all of Germany's major parties and the ceos of leading German firms such as Siemens, Daimler-Chrysler, Deutsche Telekom, and Bertelsmann. Having reportedly been personally urged to attend by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Henry Kissinger was also on hand. Munich's S?ddeutsche Zeitung, the daily paper of choice for Germany's Social Democratic establishment, identified him as one of "several very prominent representatives of American Jews" in attendance. The paper seemingly included under this heading several other people whose only apparent representative function vis-?-vis "American Jews" was that they are American and Jewish.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described the event as "the unofficial founding act of the New Germany" and went on to explain, "Even if the museum portrays the entire history of Jews in Germany, its focal point is, nonetheless, the remembrance of the Holocaust. It is in this remembrance that the recovery of national sovereignty begins, of which the evening was supposed to provide a discreet but firm demonstration." In these words, the irony was gone. The unusually frank and dispassionate assessment accurately reflected the importance of the museum for the political ambitions of post-reunification Germany or, more precisely, its elites. Germany had not only to commemorate. Germany had to be seen to commemorate by the rest of the world. In the early 1990s, the museum project had in fact foundered and even seen its funding briefly cut by the financially strapped Berlin municipal government. Meanwhile, however, reports of mounting attacks on Turkish "guest workers" and foreign asylum seekers were again sullying Germany's image abroad, and class-action suits in American courts related to Nazi-era claims were threatening the balance sheets of German firms at home. The fate of the Jewish Museum could not be left to the parochial calculations of local Berlin politicians. Just as much as the "slave-labor fund" devised by the Schr?der government in an attempt to limit German corporate liability, and indeed in a certain measure as the symbolic counterpart to the latter, Berlin's Jewish Museum had become an affair of state.
The Jewish Museum did not only respond, however, to the political exigencies of the German elites. As attested by the hundreds of thousands of Germans who have flocked to it, with or without an exhibition, it also seemed to respond to an affective need of large segments of the German public. Whereas the Nazi past represented a political burden to German elites hoping for Germany again to play a forceful role in world affairs, it represented a psychological burden to many ordinary Germans hoping finally to be released from the sins of their parents' and grandparents' generation. By paying spectacular homage to Jews as the archetypal victims of Nazi crimes, the Jewish Museum held out the promise of the burden being lifted. "The Germans are crazy about this museum," an unnamed German scholar of anti-Semitism was quoted as saying in the Jewish Press. When asked why, he explained that it represented for them a "final act of absolution."
In remarks that were appreciatively cited in the German papers, museum director Michael Blumenthal spoke to the aspirations of his powerful guests at the opening ceremony: "Inasmuch as you face the past, attempt to make amends, support this museum and other similar institutions in the capital, you have given a sign and earned the moral right to figure among the leaders in the worldwide struggle against racism, for religious tolerance, for the rights of all minorities and human rights. I hope that the Federal Republic will assume this role with energy and determination." "The war," Blumenthal concluded, "has been over for more than 50 years; modest diffidence is no longer called for in this area."
Blumenthal, U.S. secretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration, was born in the Oranienburg suburb of Berlin and fled Germany with his parents after the 1938 Kristallnacht. Before being appointed director of the Jewish Museum, he had neither a curatorial background nor any particular expertise in German-Jewish history. But he had the right biography for the symbolism with which the project was being invested. Indeed, it was another former American secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, who on account of the so-called Morgenthau Plan -- denounced by Goebbels in a 1944 tirade as a plan to turn a conquered Germany into "one big potato farm" -- had long incarnated the role of the "avenging Jew" in German popular mythology. Now, however, Blumenthal was returning home not in a reprise of this latter role, but in a role which had hitherto been imagined only in the most extravagant of German fantasies: Absolution was wanted, and Michael Blumenthal was dispensing absolution.
Perhaps not coincidentally, only some two months and a day after the Jewish Museum building first opened for viewing in January 1999, German Tornado fighter jets were bombing Belgrade in the first deployment of German combat forces outside of Germany since the end of World War ii and in the name precisely of the "struggle for minority rights." Amidst so much state-sponsored "remembrance," the fact that German Jews had not by and large considered themselves a "minority," nor demanded any "minority rights," but struggled under the Third Reich quite simply to retain their rights as Germans seemed to have been forgotten. It was likewise forgotten that the defense of allegedly "oppressed minorities" -- notably, the ethnic German "minorities" of Czechoslovakia and Poland -- had also been a leitmotif of Nazi foreign policy and served as the major pretext for Nazi aggression.
The iconography of victimhood
t was the complex of political and affective expediency described above that assured the success of Libeskind's "commemorative architecture" in Germany. As in the case of Blumenthal, the assumed appropriateness of Libeskind's biography clearly contributed to the expiatory effect that the museum project was supposed to produce. The very first plaque a visitor sees upon entering the Jewish Museum is devoted to the building's architect and specifies that he lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The statement, which Libeskind himself frequently repeats, is rather puzzling, since he was born after the war. His parents were Polish Jews who escaped to Soviet territories and survived.
But while his identity imbued his ostensible work of commemoration with the aura of authenticity, it was the grandiose and mystifying character of the work itself that secured for Libeskind the adulation of so much of the German public. The pathetic iconography of victimhood he built into the Jewish Museum poses no uncomfortable questions about perpetrators. Indeed, the plaques installed along the "axes" of the museum's basement tactfully avoid using the word "Germans" in connection with the persecution of the Jews, speaking only of "Nazis" as if the latter had been alien to German society or only card-carrying party members were implicated in the actions of the Nazi state.
Above all, the mysticism involved in both the attribution of some transcendent "meaning" to the slaughter of European Jews and the pretense that this meaning could somehow be evoked by -- or even condensed into -- the physical contours of a building short circuits any effort at rationally grasping the direct political antecedents, historical roots, and ideological underpinnings of the Third Reich's exterminationist Jewish policy. In the absence of such an effort, the Holocaust gets sacralized into a kind of negative miracle whose very incomprehensibility leaves it perfectly sealed off from the rest of German history and even from all other aspects of the Nazi regime. By attributing "meaning" to the Holocaust, moreover, the sacred history which Libeskind substitutes for mundane history constitutes, in effect, a sort of divine justification for it. The convoluted symbolism of Libeskind's "Garden of Exile" -- with its 48 "Israeli" pillars filled with "earth from Berlin" and its 49th "and central" pillar "standing for Berlin" and filled with "earth from Jerusalem" -- seems to suggest finally that the Nazi persecution of the Jews served some sort of higher redemptive purpose, since without it, after all, Israel might never have been created.
The sacralization of 9-11
ut if the sacralization of the Holocaust in Libeskind's Jewish Museum offers expiation for the German public, the sacralization of the September 11 attacks on New York in his "master plan" for the new World Trade Center has very different implications for Americans. Americans were, after all, the targets of the September 11 attacks. If the attacks served some higher redemptive purpose, then it is the deaths of those who were trapped in the towers that is, in effect, provided a transcendent justification. On the other hand, it is precisely the members of al Qaeda, i.e. the perpetrators of the attacks, who must have worked here as the presumably unknowing instruments of some divine plan. The overwrought symbolism proposed by Libeskind for the World Trade Center site suggests just such a perverse metaphysical interpretation of 9-11. Why, after all, supposing Libeskind's "Wedge of Light" was what he said it was, should the sun be compelled to "shine without shadow" from 8:46 am to 10:28 am on every September 11? Why should New Yorkers -- or even nature itself -- be made to commemorate with such morbid precision the darkest moments in the city's history?
In his original submission, moreover, Libeskind proposed to include what he called a "museum of the event" at the "epicenter" of the World Trade Center site. The idea is retained in the revised site plan in the form of the underground "interpretive center," with its "crushed fire truck" and "personal effects." The stylization of the September 11 attacks into "the" event, singular and definitive, seems to elevate them to the status of a sort of New Age apocalypse, presumably possessed of some revelatory significance. But what could this significance be? Why should New Yorkers and Americans have required such a rude awakening?
An interview Libeskind gave to the S?ddeutsche Zeitung in June 2002 -- i.e., before the announcement of the World Trade Center design competition -- provides some clues. In it, the interviewer reminds Libeskind that he had elsewhere remarked that after September 11 "everything must change." A sort of muddled millenarianism has, of course, been extremely common in the aftermath of 9-11. It has been especially so among those who, either ignoring the stated motivations of the assailants or tacitly approving of them, locate what they call the "causes" of the attacks in some perceived iniquity of the world or the United States or, typically, both -- inasmuch as global order is assumed in this style of discourse to be merely an extension of American "empire." But commenting on what the interviewer called a "longing for spirituality," Libeskind also indicated wherein the iniquity of the world might be supposed to lie: "Materialist capitalist culture calls forth in human beings a demand for something different. The excesses of capitalism and globalization elicit a radical response. The spiritual is always tied to the political. It is always bound together with the emergence of totalitarian powers, which give the human soul the impulse to unveil itself and its forces."
Note that Libeskind here, some nine months after the 9-11 attacks, uses the expression "totalitarian" not in connection with Islamism, an ideology whose totalizing pretensions could hardly be more explicit, but rather in connection with "materialist capitalist culture" -- the very "materialist capitalist culture" which, according to the screeds of anti-globalization militants worldwide, is epitomized by America and is supposed to have been symbolized by the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. The allusion to the "radical response" elicited by capitalist "excesses" is particularly chilling. Although the immediate context for the remarks is a discussion of "spirituality" in art, it should be noted that the interview closes with Libeskind, who has recently taken to directing opera, enthusing over the prospect of being able to stage a series of operas by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen -- the same Karlheinz Stockhausen who famously pronounced the 9-11 attacks "the greatest work of art there has ever been."2
It is perhaps clearer now why Daniel Libeskind wanted the sun "to shine without shadow" from 8:46 am to 10:28 am on every September 11, why he proposed to leave a crater in downtown Manhattan where the World Trade Center once stood, and why he insists that visitors to the new World Trade Center should view artifacts of the destruction wrought by the 9-11 attacks. These and other features of his "master plan" for the site suggest a special sort of memorialization that in German is called Mahnung, implying not just an incitement to remember, but to remember and take heed. A Mahnmal serves at once as reminder and warning: like the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm church on the Breitscheidplatz in downtown Berlin, which stand to this day as a reminder of the devastation that German militarism once brought down upon Germany itself. Stripped of the pseudo-patriotic packaging in which he sought to market it, the basic conception of Libeskind's World Trade Center "master plan" addresses a similar message to New Yorkers and Americans, implying that they were themselves responsible for the fate that befell them on September 11, 2001 and that they must atone for the wrongs which elicited the catastrophe. It is a tribute to America's enemies and an insult to the memory of those who were killed in the attacks.
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Notes
1 From a December 12, 1989 lecture at the University of Hannover, reproduced in Kristin Feireiss, ed., Daniel Libeskind: Erweiterung des Berlin Museums mit Abteilung J?disches Museum (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1992). Libeskind has used essentially the same formulation in numerous lectures and published works.
2 Symptomatically, when, in a more recent interview with the Neue Z?richer Zeitung (April 7, 2003) the interviewer remarked that "as the nodal point of global finance" the old World Trade Center "was certainly not a place of innocence," Libeskind did not protest, but merely noted that in his design he had tried to master "all the contradictions . . . of the site."
Feedback? Email polrev@hoover.stanford.edu.
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