Number 108 July / Aug 2010 $7.00 APPEASER · 2015-11-10 · historians of the Holy Land. ... brings us to a much darker meaning, that which involves cowardice, abandoning one’s

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APPEASER!

Paul Kennedy on

THE MOST ABUSED WORD

IN HISTORY

David Rieff meditates on Islam ApologiasPatrick Allitt crashes the Tea Party Benny Morris rewrites Palestinian History Ammon Shea learns to Speak Globish

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Number 108 . July/August 2010

Articles

7 A Time to Appease by Paul KennedyAppeaser! The worst insult to emerge from our political lexicon over the past century. Ever harking back to the failures of Neville Chamberlain, the wisdom of avoiding so many potential catastrophes—Berlin, Hungary and Cuba to name a few—is easily forgotten. As America grapples with exhausting overseas commitments and a rising China, bringing our might to bear more intelligently will require a new sort of History lesson.

18 Dreams of Babylon by Ryan CrockerIraq is not yesterday’s war. The surge created room for Iraqi politicians to make major legislative strides. But it continues to be a land governed by fear of those in power. If Obama withdraws too quickly, the tenuous peace will collapse. America cannot afford to have Iraq turn into yet another Lebanon.

26 Grassroots Economics by Raghuram G. RajanNo longer just the lender of last resort for the poor, the imf is much in demand all over the developed world as countries struggle to see themselves clear of the Great Recession. Still, the Fund has become little more than an abettor of bad policymaking. To avoid the next meltdown, the imf must become a global advocacy group, pushing hard to reform deep trade imbalances. Diplospeak is out; punchy prose and clear policy recommendations are in. This is the new imf calling.

36 How to Succeed in Politics by Patrick AllittThe Tea Party movement is blazing its anti-tax and anti-government agenda across the United States, as its adherents brandish placards of Obama as Che Guevara and Adolf Hitler. But this is a movement without a cause. If no less than the Whigs, the Populists and the Feminists can be co-opted by the behemoths that are the Democrats and the Republicans, it is clear this newest third party will suffer the same fate.

47 Latter-Day Sultans by Daniel BymanMonarchy is back. A clique of fortunate sons in the Middle East is set to take over the sclerotic dictatorships of their fathers. Western educated and armed with pitch-perfect talking points for the Facebook set, these new leaders seem poised to remake their backward nations. Do not be fooled. Their rise to power is not regime change. It is just the further entrenchment of the current elites. Washington should be wary of any promises of reform from these paper princes.

DrawingsAP Images: pages 19, 22, 67, 70; Corbis: pages 9, 12, 16, 37, 41, 44, 48, 51, 53, 64, 75, 77, 80; Getty: pages 72, 95; Images.com: pages 59, 62, 93; iStockphoto: page 87; Shutterstock: pages 27, 31, 34, 83, 88.

Reviews&Essays

58 The Fall of an Intellectual by David RieffWestern intellectuals are so blinded by post-imperial guilt, cowardice and cultural relativism that they disparage good liberals to curry favor with closet jihadists. Or so says Paul Berman in his new book. But who are the extremists and who the apologists? The answer is not found in The Flight of the Intellectuals, an all-too-convenient morality play in which everyone is cast as either villain or hero.

66 A Warrior Ethos by Bing WestThere is a real lesson from Vietnam: local allegiances will always trump the might of the invader. And people will tolerate domestic oppression to expel a foreign power. Counterinsurgency as cure-all is nothing more than a salve to Americans wary of an impossible conflict. Washington’s insistence that the troops turn Kabul into a functioning democracy will do nothing more than erode the fighting spirit of our military.

73 Revisionism on the West Bank by Benny MorrisPersecuted refugees searching for a homeland. The battlefield heroism of the Haganah. The pioneer spirit of the kibbutzniks. For many, Israel’s founding is shrouded in mysticism. But there is a battle raging among the historians of the Holy Land. The current stalemate is a story of bad actions on both sides. Beware those who rewrite narratives.

81 Klingon as a Second Language by Ammon SheaEnglish, tongue of freedom, democracy and capitalism, has conquered the world. As it spreads, it is seeping into foreign cultures, mutating into a global language. Having taken its stock from everyone it has met over the past thousand years, English borrowed opossum from Algonquian, klutz from Yiddish and pajamas from Urdu, while donating the less-than-elegant le big mac to the French. Its footprint across the globe is only set to expand.

89 America Under the Caesars by Michael LindAnti-interventionists allege our leaders traded a strong, austere republic for a weak and sprawling empire predicated on a military might that could not match our own ambitions. If Washington only withdrew its legions from the world, they argue, America would once again find itself safe from perils within and without. This narrative negates real threats and real victories. It is not enough to offer an alternative to America’s reigning foreign-policy consensus. The alternative must be plausible.

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7A Time to Appease July/August 2010

Appeasement!” What a powerful term .it has become, growing evermore in ...strength as the decades advance.

It is much stronger a form of opprobri-um than even the loaded “L” word, since Liberals are (so their opponents charge) people with misguided political preferenc-es; but talk of someone being an Appeaser brings us to a much darker meaning, that which involves cowardice, abandoning one’s friends and allies, failing to recognize evil in the world—a fool, then—or recognizing evil but then trying to buy it off—a knave. Nothing so alarms a president or prime minister in the Western world than to be accused of pursuing policies of appease-ment. Better to be accused of stealing from a nunnery, or beating one’s family.

So it is a rather risky enterprise even for an academic to ask, in a scholarly way, whether acts of appeasing a rival might not sometimes be a good thing. You want-ed to continue negotiations with Saddam Hussein? Appeaser. To avoid criticizing Chinese policies in Tibet? Appeaser. To wriggle out of Afghanistan? Appeaser. To give in to French air controllers’ wage de-mands? App . . . Well. Before such abuse of the term gets worse, perhaps we should all take a small History lesson.

Moreover, it seems most appropriate to return to the “appeasement debate” at this moment since we’ve just celebrated the sev-

entieth anniversary of Winston Churchill’s assumption of the office of prime minister of Britain and the Commonwealth. In the evening of May 10, 1940, that pugnacious veteran politician arrived at Buckingham Palace and was asked by King George VI to try to form a new government. Just a short while earlier Neville Chamberlain had ten-dered the resignation of his administration, brought down by the military disasters in Norway, a large-scale revolt by his own Tory backbenchers and a general public demand for a much more decisive conduct of the war. Churchill assented to the king’s request and left the palace to form his own national coalition government. Appeasement shuf-fled off stage left, and anti-Appeasement, the ghost of Saint George and “Action This Day,” entered from the right. Auden’s dull, dishonest decade was over. The difference was total: night versus day; evil versus good; weakness versus courage.

But was the difference really so com-plete? It served well for wartime pro-

paganda purposes and building public morale. It served again, and very well, for McCarthyite criticisms of “weak” U.S. for-eign policies, criticism regarding the loss of China, conduct of the Korean War, the do-nothing posturing in Washington after suc-cessive Soviet crushings of East European uprisings, the loss of Vietnam and so on. The late and very great diplomatic histo-rian at Harvard Ernest May once composed a slim work entitled “Lessons” of the Past:

Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale University.

A Time to Appease

By Paul Kennedy

The National Interest8 A Time to Appease

The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 1973) with a chapter about false analo-gies of the Munich story. It is still worth a read, and perhaps no more so than today, when the American political establishment earnestly debates what should be done not only with regard to the imminent policy conundrums (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea) but also how to handle the more existential questions of the United States’ power and place in the world (see: rising China).

Before delving into the depths of the 1930s, a few general remarks concerning semantics and historical precedents. There was a time when appeasement was an inof-fensive, even a rather positive term. The French word “l’apaisement,” from which it probably derives (or the earlier medi-eval-French apeser), meant the satisfying of an appetite or thirst, the bringing of com-fort, the cooling of tensions. Even today, Webster’s dictionary’s first definition of “ap-pease” is “to bring peace, calm; to soothe,” with the later negative meaning being, well, much later in the entry. Even when it was first employed in political discourse, its meaning was benign; in 1919, hoping to bring Europe from war to peace, Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared that his aim was appeasing the appetites of the peoples of the Continent. That was from a position of strength, not weakness.

Over the centuries, though, some govern-ments have appeased other states out of a sense of vulnerability, or for the purposes of prudence. Thus, many eighteenth-century wars ended inconclusively—often with the

surrender of a province or the handing back of captured territories—because statesmen mutually agreed that compromise was a lesser evil than further bloodshed and losses. Once the archconqueror Napoleon was to-tally defeated by all the other nations in 1813–15, this more moderate temperament returned to Europe. Limited wars, cutting deals, buying off a rival to avoid a conflict were commonplace acts. Even as the great powers entered the twentieth century, one of the most exceptional acts of appease-ment, and repeated conciliation, was oc-curring—yet it is something that very few American pundits on appeasement today seem to know anything about. It was Great Britain’s decision to make a series of signifi-cant territorial and political concessions to the rising American Republic.

For example, in 1895 London decided on a diplomatic solution (read: concessions) regarding the disputed Venezuela–British Guiana border they had spent more than five decades arguing over because of the belligerent language coming out of Wash-ington on the side of Caracas. In 1901, the cabinet overruled Admiralty opinion and agreed that Britain would give up its 50 percent share of a future isthmian (i.e., Panama) canal, to which it was perfectly entitled under the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty signed with the United States in 1850 to guarantee the waterway remained neutral. In 1903, London outraged Canadian opin-ion by siding with the U.S. delegates over the contentious Alaska–British Columbia border. Yet another retreat. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who so eagerly reckoned to benefit from an Anglo-American war that distracted his

Nothing so alarms a president than to be accused of appeasement. Better to be accused of

stealing from a nunnery, or beating one’s family.

A Time to Appease 9July/August 2010

European rival, was bewildered that the British kept giving way—kept appeasing—when it was obvious to most naval observers that the far larger Royal Navy could have spanked the nascent U.S. fleet. London did not see things that way, because it had many other concerns: growing naval chal-lenges from the Continent; a deteriorating situation in the Far East with the Chinese rising up against imperial forces during the Boxer Rebellion; jockeying with France over control of the Nile Valley; a Russian army advancing toward the Hindu Kush and Britain’s shaky Central Asian interests. Far better to buy the American imperialists off,

preserve their enormous mutual trade across the Atlantic and save the cost of defend-ing Canada. Sometimes, giving way made sense. In this case, appeasement worked, and arguably played a massive role in help-ing to bring the United States to an official pro-British stance as the two great wars of

the twentieth century approached. Curi-ously, I have never seen any of our current American neocons and nationalists declare it was a bad thing that Britain essentially surrendered over the isthmian canal, Ven-ezuela, the Bering Sea seal fisheries and the Alaska boundary.

This background is surely worth bearing in mind as we approach the Western

democracies’ history of turning-the-other-cheek or of outright concessions to the revi-sionist nations of Japan, Germany and Italy as the 1930s unfolded. The list, we know, is shameful: Manchuria to Japan, Abyssinia

for the Italians, the Rhineland to Germany, the Spanish Civil War and resultant rise of authoritarianism, Germany’s repeated viola-tions of the Versailles arms-limitations trea-ties, the Japanese attack on China proper, the Anschluss, the Munich deal and annexa-tion of the Sudetenland, the march into


Prague, Italy’s assault upon Albania (and on the Soviet side, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Only in September 1939 did Britain and France decide, rather ironically—since Poland had shared a bit in the slice-up of Czechoslovakia in the previous year—that enough was enough when German forc-es crossed the Polish border, and that war could no longer be avoided.

And yet, hold on, for the historians who research about and teach this story will ex-plain that there is an even-longer list of rea-sons why it took so long for the worms to turn. As Donald Lammers put it in a book many years ago called Explaining Munich (Hoover Institution, 1966) there seem to be so many justifications for Western appease-ment policies that the real difficulty would have been to explain why they did not avoid a conflict with the dictators!

A fuller recitation is a tome unto itself of course. The broadest explanation, and surely still the most understandable, was the long shadow cast by the memories and losses of the First World War, a self-inflicted disaster for Europe of such magnitude that it was impossible to imagine that govern-ments would want to go to war again. The hastily sewn-together peace settlements of 1919–1923 did not help, for they left lots of minorities on the “wrong” side of the newly drawn borders, all pressing that their complaints be appeased in some future set-tlement; and this in turn made the great powers who drew those boundaries uneasy, even guilty, about the many inconsistencies in the Treaty of Versailles. If there was any consolation, they thought to themselves, it was that these grievances could now be handled by the new wonder instrument of international politics: the League of Na-tions. And this despite the fact that it was no more than a shell organization without any military capacities of its own, and that some key larger nations were missing from its membership, above all, the very power-

ful though isolationist United States. While the American Republic had the capacity to bring down the world’s financial and trad-ing system after 1929, it had no appetite for helping to uphold the postwar territo-rial changes. And when the global economy collapsed, well, who in their right minds would turn to armaments and war instead of retrenchment and looking after the home front? The democracies wouldn’t; the re-sentful nations would.

And when the revisionist powers moved, they moved slowly and often appealed to precedents established by the status quo nations. In Manchuria, the Japanese were walloping the Chinese for the attacks (sic) on their railways. But had the British not done a similar thing when they sent a large force to Shanghai in 1926 in response to attacks on their settlements and missions there? Yes, Mussolini was altering the bor-der between Italian Somaliland and Ethio-pia when his troops invaded and finally took control of Addis Ababa in 1936. But that was something a French foreign min-ister like Pierre Laval understood all too well, since shifting colonial borders was an age-old game. One of Hitler’s first foreign-policy acts was to offer a friendship treaty with Poland; and, a year later, to agree to an Anglo-German naval-limitations treaty. Here was a guy you could deal with. The 1935 Saarland plebiscite showed the inhab-itants baying for a return to the Fatherland. The demilitarized Rhineland was merely “Germany’s backyard,” so who would con-test its reintegration? The 1938 Anschluss with Austria was simply Germans joining Germans. The Sudetenland was predomi-nantly German speaking and hadn’t the great Woodrow Wilson himself pushed the principle of national self-determination? These forceful actions were disconcerting indeed, but when exactly did things reach a point where a leader wanted to take his own country into another great war, and


for distant objects? The French were para-lyzed, like a rabbit before a stoat. The Brit-ish government was hopelessly unresolved. The Americans? Apathetic.

Even when the Fascist revisionist moves continued and the League of Nations was fully discredited, and the awful prospect of military conflict at last entered the minds of Western politicians, there was still much cause for procrastination. To begin with, fighting Germany, Japan and Italy all at the same time would be folly. But if you were going to stand and fight one of the aggres-sors, it probably became more pressing to placate the other two. As has been pointed out in many newer studies, the legendary and clear-cut divide between cringing ap-peasers and stalwart anti-appeasers does not seem to exist in the British and French official memoranda and private papers. A politician wishing to stand firmer against Germany was all too often inclined to want to keep on good terms with Italy. British navalists and imperialists who sought a sturdy defense of their Far Eastern posses-sions were hoping that Hitler would stay still or, perhaps better yet, turn eastward against the equally detestable Soviet Union. French statesmen, by contrast, were ex-tremely fearful that Britain would concen-trate on East Asia and thus pay less atten-tion to Central and Western Europe. And those were just the conflicting opinions of the policy makers. Behind them, in the very troubled and class-torn democracies, were publics strongly opposed to fighting anywhere, trade unions who threatened to strike against war and center-left parties still opposing defense increases.

In this confused circumstance, the professional officials in the corridors of power—the Treasury, the defense chiefs, the colonial and trade offices—played a very large part indeed (too large a role, some historians have argued). The finance ministries of Britain and France repeat-edly pointed out that their economies were virtually bankrupt from the paralysis of trade, investment and growth; that U.S. neutrality legislation forbade borrow-ing from across the Atlantic as they had in 1914–1918; and that deficit spend-ing (to pay for an armaments buildup) would lead to a massive run on their cur-rencies. The British Chiefs of Staff, for their part—“Cassandras in gold braid,” English military historian Correlli Bar-nett once called them—pointed out again and again that the army was overstretched across the world (Egypt, Palestine, India, Hong Kong) and had no modern equip-ment for a European war, that the Royal Navy couldn’t be in three theaters at once, that the purportedly great bases of the Em-pire were all horribly unprotected, and, the most important weakness of all, that the Royal Air Force (raf ) had fallen well behind the strength of the intimidating, modern Luftwaffe, with its capacity to deal devastating blows from the air. The Do-minions Office warned that Canada and South Africa would not join a fight, and the India Office appealed for reinforce-ments in the Raj to stave off a simmering independence movement. This was what Neville Chamberlain needed to persuade his worried cabinet that they had to con-tinue to give peace another try.

It was wise for Stalin to stay on reasonable terms with the Japanese. It was wise for de Gaulle to extricate France from Algeria.

It was very wise not to go to nuclear war over the Cuban crisis.


Detailed retrospective analyses, espe-cially those looking at the equally wor-ried memoranda composed by the Ger-man and Italian chiefs at the time, sug-gest these strategic assessments were too gloomy. Not much could be done in the Far East, but the Royal Navy could easily have handled the German and Italian fleets. The British Army in Egypt was far hard-er hitting than the large, unmodern-ized Italian armies of Tunisia. And if raf Bomber Com-mand could hardly reach German cit-ies, no one should have imagined that the Luftwaffe of 1937 or 1938 could do much damage over England. As happens so often in History, the defense planners had that tendency to point to the i r a rmed forces’ own many weaknesses, but as-sumed that the en-emies’ battalions were perfect and ready to fight. Civilian ministers certainly did not have the confidence to go against their own military experts.

But even all this, understandable though it appears, does not get us to the basic problem, which is one of political and ideo-logical understanding: when do you know that the revisionist state is never going to be appeased by small-scale, or even middle-size, concessions? When do you know that Hitler is not like the Weimar-era Strese-

mann, nor Mussolini like the supple For-eign Minister Ciano? When do you know that these dictators’ appetites are never going to be fully sated by compromises within the existing international system? When do you say to yourself, “This guy

can only be stopped by the threat of se-rious armed force and, most prob-ably, having to use that force”? How do you know that the concession you just reluctantly made was not the last one needed? After all, Hitler assured the West that acquir-ing the Sudetenland was his final objec-tive. Was it? By late 1938, Churchil l was arguing that appeasement was just feeding a croc-odile with smaller and smaller tid-bits until it finally turned on you, and many Britons were at last beginning to agree and wanted stiffer actions. But

it really wasn’t until Hitler’s March 1939 conquest of the rump state of Czechoslo-vakia—breaking his Munich promises and seizing a country without any Germans in it—that the die was cast. By the time of his move against Poland six months later, appeasement was finished, and within a year of fighting, the Appeasers, the “guilty men,” were to be execrated for the rest of time. No wonder that policy became the greatest insult you could throw at any later political opponent.


S ince then, the various occasions on which the words Appeaser and Appease-

ment have been used are as countless as the stars in the sky; this poisonous term can be thrown about, from town-hall meetings, to union wage negotiations, to handling imf conditionality offers, at all levels.

So, the broader question remains: can one distinguish between a “good” appease-ment policy and a “bad” one? When the British cabinet, after very considerable de-bate between the pertinent ministers and their highest officials, decided to give way to Washington on the matters of Venezu-ela, the isthmian canal, the Alaska bor-der—all very clear examples of “appease-ment”—were they not good moves? Every one was a surrender, yet such concessions were going to help forge the famous Ang-lo-American “rapprochement” of the com-ing twentieth century. And that conclusion is not only wisdom in retrospect, but it is what senior officials like Arthur Bal-four (prime minister), Joseph Chamberlain (secretary of state for the colonies), Lord Lansdowne (foreign secretary) and Edward Grey (opposition spokesman on foreign policy and later Liberal foreign secretary) argued at the time. It is sometimes very smart to step back. Yet consider a different possibility. What if the more rabid Ameri-can expansionists had succeeded in their push to acquire Canada (a curious idea, I know, but some did argue that), and/or to seize British possessions like Bermuda, Jamaica, Trinidad and the rest? The result would have been to force London’s hand into war—and, without a doubt, to cause many British commentators to conclude that the earlier concessions over the canal and the Alaskan border were a folly, merely encouraging the Yankee appetite.

Certainty about such matters only comes, I suspect, with hindsight; and there we are all wise, because we know what happened. It was wise, we now know, for

the English to give up Calais to France in 1558 because they would no longer be tied to the Continent. It was wise for Stalin to stay on reasonable terms with the Japanese during the 1930s and early 1940s because he couldn’t afford a Far Eastern war while Nazi Germany was preparing to blast its own way eastward. It was wise, clearly, for then-President Charles de Gaulle to extri-cate France from the Algerian bloodbath in the early 1960s—though “clearly” was not a word used by the French nationalists who sought to assassinate the general. It was wise, very wise, not to go to nuclear war over the Korean, Hungarian, Berlin and Cuban crises. It was wise, we can now see, for the United States to abandon the colos-sal encumbrance of Vietnam.

The implications—not conclusions—of all the above for current American

world policies should by now be becoming clear.

America must come to grips with its place in the world as the twenty-first century un-folds and the strategic landscape alters. This great hegemon, like all who have preceded it in that role, cannot escape the constraints of history and geography. Its culture, ideology and domestic politics mean that it can never become Alexandrian, Roman or Napoleonic. Yet its sheer size—the very footprint that the United States places upon our planet—also means that it cannot occupy the small niche that, say, the Norways and New Zealands of the world enjoy: noninterventionist, nonim-perial, prosperous and self-satisfied, carrying limited liabilities. Some years ago, Princeton political scientist Aaron Friedberg wrote a rather wonderful book entitled The Weary Titan (Princeton University Press, 1989). It was about how a worried Great Britain began to come to terms with the chang-ing world order around 1900, including its concessions to America, but it really was a subtle plea for Washington to make a cold-


blooded assessment of how many overseas commitments it could sustain over the long haul. Friedberg’s choice of title was extraor-dinarily clever; it referred to an appeal made by that dynamic Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to the Dominions in 1902. His speech urged them to share some of the military burdens of the home country, which had now become like a “Weary Titan stagger[ing] under the too vast orb of its fate.”

Friedberg was clearly too early in his musings. This is not a country which is comfortable with being compared to ear-lier great powers and empires; the curse of American exceptionalism—“this time it is different”—is too strong here. Statesmen who suggest caution or retrenchment like, say, George Kennan, get ignored; they are deeply respected for their erudition (so it is said), but ignored nevertheless. Even when staunchly conservative figures argue for a hard-nosed appraisal and prioritization of this country’s overseas obligations, they are duly thanked but little else happens. In 1988, Friedberg’s Harvard doktorvater Sam-uel Huntington tried his hand at describing America’s global strategic situation, in very Eyre Crowe language (harking back to that great turn-of-the-twentieth-century Ger-man expert in the British Foreign Office), via a blue-ribbon commission which sent a report to the Reagan White House entitled “Discriminate Deterrence.” This report said many robust and reassuring things, though it did warn of defense weaknesses that need-ed to be addressed, but its chief remark—one of staggering importance—seemed to fall upon deaf ears. And it was this. For the whole of the nineteenth century, the young Republic had been shielded from the world’s great-power troubles by the Royal Navy’s monopoly of the Atlantic routes. And for the first half of the twentieth cen-tury, America had enjoyed the privilege of being always the last to enter the great

wars; always two to three years late, with the massive economic and military benefits that such tardiness brought. Since 1945, however, the country’s strategic disposi-tion had been completely reversed. Its own troops were now, like Kipling’s subalterns and corporals, out on the borders, this time in the dmz, in Berlin, in the Fulda Gap, in Okinawa and along ever more frontiers of insecurity as the Cold War unfolded. This is not a condition which George Washington could have recognized. Even Teddy Roos-evelt might have been amazed. But that is where we are.

This is not a situation that can or will last forever. This privileged nation—one is tempted to say, overprivileged nation—pos-sesses around 4.6 percent of the world’s population, produces about a fifth of world product, and is, amazingly, willing to spend over 40 percent of all the globe’s defense expenditures. At some time in the future, sooner or later, there is going to be what economists call a “convergence,” that is, we are going to have to trim our sails and no longer try to bestride the world like a colossus. As we do so, we shall make a concession here, a concession there, though hopefully it will be disguised in the form of policies such as “power sharing” and “mutu-al compromise,” and the dreadful “A” word will not appear.

Amid the thicket of other serious inter-national challenges (possible collapse

of much of Mexico, constant Russian nib-blings to restore its imperial sway, the Ira-nian nuclear issue, the lunatic regime in North Korea), how to handle the rise of China as a strategic presence, first of all in East Asia and the western Pacific, then, later, across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, stands above all.

China is expanding onto the world stage as its relative share of global material strength steadily increases. It is following


the path of many earlier fast-growing na-tions, and not unmindful of their histories. Political scientists of the realist school like to divide countries within the internation-al system into either “revisionist” states or “status quo” powers. Viewed through this lens, the prc is clearly revisionist and the United States clearly in favor of seeing the Asian status quo maintained—not unlike, obviously, that British position toward the Western Hemisphere one hundred years ago. Hegemons always prefer History to freeze, right there, and forever. History, un-fortunately, has a habit of wandering off all on its own.

Here again, rather niftily, the relevance of the British appeasement debate of the 1930s (and thus the whole moral and po-litical issue of when and where and how appeasement should be carried out—if it should be at all) becomes clear. How, actu-ally, will the United States handle a rising China? Will the Chinese leadership, which has been reasonable and discreet so far (un-less one stands on those bunions like Tibet and Taiwan), become more assertive as its economic heft increases and its armed forces modernize? What is one to make of its push toward Africa and the Persian Gulf, with its accompanying “string of pearls” naval and air bases? Crudely put, is this a Bis-marckian China, which will expand so far, then rest content within its newly reshaped boundaries? Or a Wilhelmine China, which is bent, cautiously at first, then ever more assertively, upon its own version of Welt-politik? And who can tell? Do the Chinese leaders even know? When Sir Eyre Crowe was asked to assess where Kaiser Wilhelm’s

hyperactive Second Reich was headed, he concluded that either it was expanding in an unplanned, clumsy way, like a school-boy growing out of his britches, or there was a purposeful plan to end British naval and imperial predominance. Either way, Crowe argued, it would be wise to remain diplomatically polite toward Germany, but to keep one’s powder dry and increase the fleet. Right now, the best U.S. “China pol-icy” might be diplomatic engagement while simultaneously laying down another dozen supersmart attack submarines. No need to make a fuss about the latter. Beijing will get the message. It has enough spies and ana-lysts in this country, after all.

We will remain extraordinarily influen-tial, and with an unrivaled capacity to push hard military force outward—of that there is no doubt. As to a rising China becom-ing the new global hegemon, I have the most serious doubts; its internal weaknesses are immense, and, externally, it is likely to trip over its shoelaces, just as did Wil-helmine Germany. Simply because America has to adjust to a changing world order does not mean that it is coming close to col-lapse, or cannot leverage its many strengths, given smart policies at the White House (a big “given”). Recently, my distinguished Harvard colleague Niall Ferguson argued that, when America’s collapse comes, it will be fast, and decisive. I could not dis-agree more. Great empires, or hegemons, or number-one powers (whichever term one prefers) rarely if ever crash in some swift, spectacular way. Rather, they slide slowly downhill, trying to avoid collisions, dodg-ing rising obstacles, making an offering here

America will never become Alexandrian, Roman or Napoleonic. Yet its sheer size means that

it cannot be a Norway or a New Zealand.


and there, ever searching for a flatter, calmer landscape. And they often lasted so long—for how many centuries, one has to ask, were the Ottomans and Manchus in “de-cline”?—because they offered concessions to others, which is a polite way of saying that they appeased. It is not a crime, or a moral failing, to recognize where and when it may be best to withdraw from a battlefield and to reduce a commitment. Most great states-men have done that.

And one suspects that though there is no sign—yet—that Washington is thinking of leaving Afghanistan, it would be surprising to me if someone in the nsc or State De-partment hadn’t been secretly charged with devising some get-us-out-slowly-but-steadi-

ly stratagems. That’s what foreign offices are for after all—to get their governments off the hook. Only, please, make sure it can’t be labeled “Appeasement.”

The Afghanistan-Pakistan entanglement is an issue so vexed and complicated

that it would have tested the wisdom of the

greatest leaders and strategists of the past. It is not totally fanciful to imagine Augustus, William Pitt the Elder, Bismarck or George Marshall pondering over a map which de-tailed the lands that stretch from the Bekaa Valley to the Khyber Pass. None of them would have liked what they saw. Probably all of them would have concluded that they were facing that grimmest of dilemmas: “heads, you lose; tails, you don’t win.” The distances, the awful topography, the willing-ness of the other side to accept appalling casualty rates, make a limited war—a finely calibrated war—something of a nonsense. “Can we win in Afghanistan?” I am often asked. And I reply, “Oh, sure. Just take the modern equivalent of those two million

gis who landed in Normandy, and station them in every Afghan village.” But we won’t do that. I don’t think I am alone in harbor-ing this sense of unease, nor do I think it is a par-ticularly left-wing feeling. When I listen, privately, to my former Yale students who have come back f rom f i gh t ing along the front lines, I discover that they think we

can’t win—at least not “win” in the sense that knee-jerk congressmen and rabid Mur-doch newspapers understand that word, a victory grotesquely skewed by their habit of invoking American football language: smash, overrun, crush, annihilate. This is a fantasy world. As one of my U.S. Ma-rine former students ruefully commented,


the most popular saying among the Af-ghan tribesmen is: “The Americans have the watches, but we have the time.” Not for nothing has Thucydides’s History of the Pelo-ponnesian War (especially its chapters on the Sicilian expedition) become a book for U.S. officers to read again and again.

And yet, what if one did pull out, scuttle, appease? After all, we would not be the first to leave those wretched mountains and their defiant tribes to their own devices; indeed, we would simply join that long list of for-mer occupation armies which eventually thought the better of it and made for the exit. And if there is anyone in Washington who feels that our troops should stay forev-er, surging here and surging there, because it is emotionally too upsetting to think of pulling back, then that person should be voted out of office; high emotions and proper realpolitik rarely go well together. As three-time British Prime Minister and four-time Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury once observed, nothing is more fatal to a wise strategy than clinging to the carcasses of dead policies. Yet few administrations have the resolve to let go; and frankly, in the case of Afghanistan, a mushy compromise—half-concealed withdrawal—might be the least-worst way to go, at least for now. But not forever.

L ike it or not, American policy makers, pundits, strategists and high-level mili-

tary officers cannot avoid the Appeasement story. Frankly, the tale of Britain’s dilemma during the 1930s is still far too close. Here

was and is the world’s hegemon, with com-mitments all over the globe but also with pressing financial and social needs at home, with armed forces being worn out by con-tinuous combat, with an array of evolving types of enemies, yet also facing recogniz-able and expanding newer nations bearing lots of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. So, what do you do: Appease, or not ap-pease? Appease here, but not there? Declare some parts of the globe no longer of vital interest?

And, yes, there comes a time when you have to stand and fight; to draw a line in the sand; to say that you will not step backward. As did Great Britain in September 1939. But those British and Commonwealth citi-zens fought the war with such fortitude and gallantry because, one suspects, they knew that their successive administrations had tried, so often, to preserve the peace, to avoid another vast slaughter and to offer fair compromises. After the German attack on Poland, appeasement vanished. And rightly so. Now the gloves were off.

However the American Republic advanc-es through the decades to come, bearing with it so many advantages as well as seri-ous shortcomings, it probably will have to face this key issue of adjusting to a twenty-first-century world order in which it plays a smaller role than it did in the one before. And as the incumbents of the White House and the Congress grapple with the problems of altering their country’s global role, they will undoubtedly come face-to-face with that ugly political word: “Appeasement.” n

18 The National Interest Dreams of Babylon

S ince the March 7 national elections in Iraq, we have watched the high drama and low comedy of the gov-

ernment-formation process: candidates disqualified and reinstated, fraud alleged, recounts ordered and results upheld, co-alitions forming and shifting in bewilder-ing variations. And when all of this is fi-nally concluded and a new government is formed, it will face a huge agenda of unresolved issues: Kurdish-Arab tensions; disputed internal boundaries; corruption; challenges from neighbors; institutional de-velopment; friction among federal, regional and local governments—the list is virtually endless. The truth is that more than seven years after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq is still at the very beginning of this chapter in its long history.

I raq is hard. It has always been hard, and it will go on being hard. In Islam’s

first century, a rebellion of the Khawarij in Iraq (whose fundamentalist theology and inclination to violence resemble that of al-Qaeda) necessitated the dispatch of the Umayyad Empire’s most successful and ruthless general, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. He began a famous speech at the Kufa mosque with these words: “Ya ahl al-Iraq, ahl al-

shiqaq wa al-nifaq” (“Oh people of Iraq, people of disunity and hypocrisy”). Iraqis quote him today with perverse pride—they are the toughest guys on the Middle East-ern block.

Some argue that whether it be Hajjaj at the turn of the eighth century or Sad-dam Hussein in the twenty-first, both were uniquely successful as rulers in the land of the two rivers because there were no limits to their use of terror and violence to main-tain order. I was in Iraq early in my career, from 1978 to 1980. I was there when Sad-dam assassinated the founder of the Dawa Party (of which politician Nuri al-Maliki is a member), Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. His supporters risked torture and death to plaster the walls of Baghdad with post-ers commemorating his death. I still have one. I was there when Saddam ordered the arrest and execution of his minister of plan-ning and protégé, Adnan Hussein, for dar-ing to contradict him at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council, then the supreme executive and legislative body in Iraq. Our driver was taken in the middle of the night and imprisoned for years for the crime of working for the Americans—and for being Kurdish. My neighbors were afraid to talk to me. It was, as Iraqi scholar and former exile Kanan Makiya so accu-rately described it, the “Republic of Fear.” From the highest officials to the everyman in the street, Saddam inspired a culture of terror. I served in police states before and after, but neither the Shah’s Iran nor

Ryan Crocker is dean and executive professor at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. A career foreign-service officer, he served as ambassador to Iraq from 2007 to 2009.

Dreams of Babylon

By Ryan Crocker

Dreams of Babylon 19July/August 2010

the Syria of Hafez al-Assad remotely ap-proached Saddam’s Iraq.

I returned to Baghdad in 1998 as the U.S. representative to unscom’s special t e a m c h a r g e d with inspecting Saddam’s palaces for weapons of mas s de s t r uc -tion—the f irst American diplo-mat in Iraq since 1990. I met Abd Hamoud al-Ti-kriti, Saddam’s personal secre-tary and one of the most feared men in the re-gime. He took delight in show-ing me the pal-aces of his boss’s two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan in 1995 and were brutally murdered follow-ing their return. I knew I was in the presence of the man who had arranged those murders—and countless others. I saw the physical fear on the faces of every Iraqi he encountered. I was back in Iraq in June 2003 when he was arrested. It was a satisfying moment.

Americans forget this heritage of fear. Iraqis do not. Virtually all of the current leadership is scarred by Saddam, in some cases literally. Ayad Allawi, whose coalition emerged from March’s election with the most seats in Iraq’s parliament, survived an ax attack by Saddam’s agents. He walks with a limp. Oil Minister Hussain al-Shah-ristani spent more than a decade in solitary confinement for refusing to assist Saddam’s

nuclear program. Prime Minister al-Ma-liki got out just ahead of regime assassins. Other members of Dawa and his own fam-ily were not so fortunate. Kurdish leaders

Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani survived Saddam’s notorious Anfal campaign against t h e i r p e o p l e . Vice Presidents Tariq al-Hash-emi and Adel Ab d u l Ma h d i were hunted. Al-Hashemi lost two of his siblings to regime death squads. Such ex-periences make men tough. But they also make c o m p r o m i s e s difficult. There is a phrase in Pakistan—“two men, one grave.” It’s you or me. Losing an elec-tion can be far more serious than

being forced out of office. It is a legacy that haunts Iraq.

M y two years in Iraq as ambassador from 2007 to 2009 saw some sig-

nificant developments, a virtuous circle fol-lowing the vicious spiral of 2006 when the February al-Qaeda bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of Shia Islam’s most revered sites, triggered an escalating wave of sectarian violence that brought the country to the verge of civil war. President Bush’s “new way forward,” popularly known as the surge, changed the dynamics. Sunnis in Anbar, confident that we had their backs,

The National Interest20 Dreams of Babylon

turned against al-Qaeda. As this Awaken-ing moved into Baghdad, Iraqi Shia began to notice that Sunnis were now fighting a common enemy. As extremist Shia mili-tias like Jaish al-Mahdi became less neces-sary for security, they became less popular, and in early 2008 al-Maliki could order his forces to confront them in Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City with the full support of the population. Iraqi Sunnis in turn saw al-Maliki behaving as a nationalist rather than a sectarian leader and rejoined his gov-ernment that summer. Landmark legislation on provincial powers (a major step toward resolving Iraq’s states’ rights issues), a re-form of the controversial de-Baathification regulations and budget allocations for the Kurdistan region passed in the National Assembly as political leaders were able to fashion compromises in an atmosphere of dramatically reduced violence.

Iraqis certainly deserve the credit for this transformation; but it would not have hap-pened without intensive, sustained U.S. engagement, particularly by those in the military who carried the surge forward. The hardest months of my life came in the first half of 2007, as our casualties mounted with no guarantee that the strategy would work. But it did, and the people of both nations owe a tremendous debt to those who fought to secure the Iraqi population, one hard block at a time. It was good to see al-Maliki lay a wreath in Arlington Na-tional Cemetery last summer to honor their sacrifice.

But the surge was not the only strategy that helped to bring calm. We were en-gaged at all levels—political, economic and diplomatic. My colleagues and I spent countless hours with Iraqi political figures throughout the country, working to find compromises, suggesting alternatives, even providing drafts. We were in the back-rooms and on the floor of the assembly at key moments. For some time to come, we

will remain the indispensable partner. It is noteworthy that when our two agreements on U.S. troop withdrawal and what the postwar country would look like came to a vote on Thanksgiving Day 2008, they had the support of all Iraqi political factions ex-cept the Sadrists. And even the Sadrists are now publicly acknowledging the success of the surge and U.S. involvement in stabiliz-ing Iraq.

I t is vital that this engagement continue. Iraq is not yesterday’s war. Strategic patience is often in short supply

in this country. It is not a new problem for us, and it is not limited to Iraq. My time in the Foreign Service, from Lebanon in the early 1980s to Iraq twenty-five years later, was in many respects service in a long war. Dates such as 4/18 and 10/23—the bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983—were seared into my memory well before 9/11. I learned a few lessons along the way. One is we need to be careful about what we get into. It is a complex, volatile region with long experience in dealing with outside in-terventions—our adversaries often do not organize for the war until some point after we think we have already won it. But a sec-ond lesson is that we need to be even more careful about what we propose to get out of. Disengagement can have greater conse-quences than intervention.

Our withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984 was a victory for Syria and Iran who cre-ated and used Hezbollah against us with devastating consequences. They drew con-clusions about our staying power, and when I stepped off the helicopter in Baghdad on a warm night in March 2007 as the new American ambassador, I had the eerie feel-ing that I was back in Lebanon a quarter of a century earlier. Iran and Syria had again combined efforts against us, this time sup-porting Jaish al-Mahdi and al-Qaeda in-


Iraq is not yesterday’s war.

stead of Hezbollah (in fact, Hezbollah train-ers were working with Jaish al-Mahdi).

The surge confounded their expecta-tions—we stepped forward instead of back. But they almost succeeded. When then–commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus and I testified before Con-gress in September 2007, the surge was starting to make a difference. But Ameri-cans, and much of Congress, were tired of the war. A major theme in our testimony was that we needed to consider that the costs of disengaging from Iraq could be far greater than those of continued involve-ment. Al-Qaeda would have had a base on Arab soil from which to plan operations throughout the region—and beyond. Iran and Syria would have won a major vic-tory over the United States, fundamentally realigning the entire area with very grave consequences for the security of our allies, as well as our own. We continue to pay for our loss in Lebanon more than a quarter of a century ago. The costs of defeat in Iraq would have been exponentially higher.

Now we need to shore up the accom-plishments of Baghdad. If it is true

that failure in Iraq would have had far-reaching consequences for our interests in the region and beyond, it is also true that the emergence of a stable, prosperous and pluralistic country can have a positive impact far beyond its borders. Since the 1958 revolution that overthrew the mon-archy, successive Iraqi regimes have defined themselves in opposition to the West gen-erally and the United States in particular. For example, Iraq led opec in nationalizing

the oil sector. For the first time in fifty years, we are witnessing an Iraq that wants close economic and strategic ties with the West. Nuri al-Maliki and other Iraqi lead-ers have made multiple visits to Washing-ton and European capitals. Immediately after his campaign against Jaish al-Mahdi in 2008, al-Maliki went to Brussels for meetings with eu and nato representatives. The signal to the West—and to Tehran and Damascus—was clear. Major interna-tional oil companies, including from the United States, are now helping to develop the country’s petroleum resources. An Iraq at the heart of the Middle East, strategi-cally linked to the West could profoundly alter the political calculus of the region. And we now have the blueprint to make this a reality.

In the post-surge climate of relative sta-bility at the end of 2008 we were able to negotiate two historic bilateral accords, the Status of Forces Agreement and the Strate-gic Framework Agreement, which provided for a smooth handover from the Bush to the Obama administration. They are our road map for the future. Perhaps inevitably, most public attention has been on the first, which provides for the full withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011. That agree-ment effectively ended the allegations in Iraq that America sought permanent occu-pation, as it did the debate in this country about our presence there. Although we are no longer involved in combat operations, the fact that our military is on the ground is an important reassurance to Iraqis. The Obama administration’s decision to reduce troop levels to fifty thousand by the end

The National Interest22 Dreams of Babylon

of August will require very careful manage-ment to ensure that Iraqis do not become less inclined to compromise as they wres-tle with the hard decisions ahead of them. And if the new government in Baghdad ap-proaches us about the possibility of extend-ing our presence beyond 2011, I hope we will listen very carefully.

The Strategic Framework Agreement should emerge over time as the model for our long-term relationship. It lays out the parameters for a U.S.-Iraqi partnership in education, trade, diplomacy, culture, and science and technology. It is the outline for an alliance that can fundamentally alter the strategic map of the Middle East. But it will require U.S. commitment. I am heart-ened to see Vice President Joe Biden engage directly and repeatedly on Iraq. That sus-tained, high-level effort will be essential in helping the Iraqis deal with the multiple challenges ahead of them and in cementing our partnership for the future. Over time, these agreements will define an increas-ingly normalized relationship between two

sovereign partners. At present, our active involvement will continue to be vital. We need to be sensitive to Iraqi concerns over sovereignty, but we need to be in country.

While recent progress has brought new hope to Iraqis, the fear hardwired into their society from the Saddam era remains pro-found. The Shia are afraid of the past—that a Sunni dictatorship will reassert itself. The Sunnis are afraid of the future—an Iraq in which they are no longer ascendant. And the Kurds, with their history of suffering, are afraid of both the past and the future. Our sustained presence and involvement works to mitigate those fears.

I raq is in a far better place today than it was before the surge. But it is a long war,

and the need for sustained commitment continues. Increasingly, that engagement will be through civilian rather than military means, but it is vital that we not lose focus. Iran and Syria have had a bad few years in Iraq, but they are willing to wait. Patience is not our strong suit. Over the years, in


the broader Middle East, our allies have come to fear our strategic impatience, and our adversaries to count on it. Our disen-gagement from Pakistan and Afghanistan after the Soviet retreat in 1989 ultimately gave al-Qaeda the space to plan the 9/11 attacks. Now we are back; but in Afghani-stan in 2002 and in Pakistan from 2004 to 2007, I found many who wondered when we would head for the exits again. As it is in Iraq, the continuity in policy from the Bush to the Obama administration in both these countries is welcome and extremely important. We saw what happened the last time the United States decided to leave. We are dealing with the same enemies today, and they have not become kinder or gentler in the interim. n

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26 The National Interest Grassroots Economics

T.....he International Monetary Fund is back in business. And how! The volume of its emergency lending,

meant to tide countries over when private markets are no longer willing to lend to them, is at an all-time high. It is taken se-riously once more at the tables of high fi-nance. Perhaps this is no more clearly evi-denced than in its central role in the recent discussions on stabilizing the euro area. No longer is the imf only the lender of last resort for the poor, weak and struggling nations of the world; to prevent the Greek debt crisis from spreading throughout the eurozone, the imf stepped in with 30 bil-lion euros worth of financing (far greater than any individual national contribution) to help shore up Athens’s balance sheet.

By the metrics of how much its emer-gency lending and its programs for troubled countries are needed, the Fund is indeed a successful organization—much in demand. But this very demand is a measure of its failures in preventing the kinds of policies that lead to crises—especially ones of the global variety.

The imf was set up in 1944 to help re-vive global trade while averting the “beg-gar-thy-neighbor” exchange-rate policies

that characterized the interwar years. Dur-ing that time, one country after another devalued its currency and raised tariffs in order to gain a competitive trade advantage over its neighbors, only to see its neigh-bors respond in kind. The result: the world spiraled downward into depression. The founders of the imf resolved that the body would maintain surveillance over coun-try policies so that such devaluations did not take place. As well, in case a state be-came uncompetitive (for instance, because the government overspent and pushed up wages too rapidly—as in the case of Greece today) and unable to raise financing from the markets or other governments, the imf would lend it money on a temporary basis, so that it could have the time to make the adjustments needed to regain competitive-ness. This emergency lending was meant to limit the pain the country and its people faced as its policies adjusted.

The imf has honed its lending proce-dures, and in many ways it is very effective at putting out fires. And, as an international bureaucracy, it not only has the ability to demand policy changes that are politically unpalatable in the country that needs to adjust, but it can also serve as a convenient scapegoat. Politicians love to blame the imf for dictating policies that they themselves know are necessary to get their country’s fi-nances back in order. The imf has been per-fectly willing to serve in this role and rarely challenges politicians.

But even as its ability to restore stability

Raghuram G. Rajan, a former chief economist at the imf, is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Grassroots Economics

By Raghuram G. Rajan

Grassroots Economics 27July/August 2010

to a country’s finances has improved (of course, there are a number of coun-tries like Argentina and Pakistan whose policies and politics have resisted all attempts at change, and are repeat, al-beit reluctant, clients of the imf), the Fund’s ability to influence more stable policies in normal times, especially pol-icies that will lead to greater global eco-nomic stability, is small. This is because its primary means of leverage is the money it can dole out. For recovering countries, the first order of business is to repay the imf and gain “indepen-dence,” a popular objective since the imf is blamed for the pain the citizenry has had to undergo. Once a country repays the Fund, no domestic politi-cian wants to be seen as heeding its advice—until bad policies drive the country back to the imf. With limited influence over fragile countries when all is largely well, and a willingness to hand out money when all is not (often to rescue irresponsible banks), the imf ends up encouraging bad policies. Perhaps equally problematic, it has no in-fluence over large countries that will never need its money, even if those states’ policies have an adverse global impact.

This is a dangerous weakness at a time when the world is becoming more inte-grated. Countries are agenda setting with only their domestic interests at heart, even though the negative spillovers to the rest of the world will eventually come back to haunt them. The question is: how can the imf change domestic policymaking to take into account the global good, even while respecting the sovereignty of nations? The only feasible answer may be to turn itself into more of a grassroots advocacy organi-zation.

To see why, consider perhaps the most pressing international economic prob-

lem today: global trade imbalances. After

World War II, a number of countries fo-cused on exports as the key to rapid growth. First, Germany and Japan, followed by Korea and Taiwan, Chile, Malaysia and Thailand, and now China, Vietnam and the oil exporters have generated large pro-duction surpluses that have to be absorbed elsewhere. This would not be a problem if countries, once rich, were able to become more balanced. But both Germany and Japan continue to pump out surpluses, sug-gesting the path back to balanced growth is not an easy one.

If some countries produce more than they can spend, of course other countries have to spend more than they produce, financing the difference by borrowing from international private-capital markets. Re-cent history suggests that large-scale spend-ing financed through foreign borrowing has not turned out well. In the 1990s, it was the emerging markets that got into trouble, whether it was the overconsuming Latin American economies or the overin-vesting Asian ones. In both cases, coun-tries found that private foreign finance tended to be undiscriminating in boom

The National Interest28 Grassroots Economics

times, funding irresponsible governments and unviable projects, only to cut and run when the weight of past mistakes proved overwhelming. Frequently, foreign inves-tors did not suffer the full consequences of their mistakes, especially when they had lent to domestic banks or well-connect-ed firms, and the domestic government stepped in, backed by the imf, to bail them out.

In the wake of these disasters, many of these countries decided to behave more wisely, cutting their spending to fit avail-able savings (and some even put aside a little extra in the form of foreign-exchange reserves for future emergencies). The result: these countries only added to the global trade surpluses looking for a home.

Industrial nations, especially those that had limited discipline on government or household spending, stepped up to pro-vide that destination. The countries that ran large deficits—Iceland, Hungary, Lat-via, Greece, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States—now look like a rogues’ gallery of nations that are in trouble. Prudent macroeconomic manage-ment suggests that these countries should be more careful about spending and save more. Indeed, the bond vigilantes (financial speculators who sell the bonds of profligate governments, thus pushing up bond yields and making it more difficult for those gov-ernments to finance themselves) seem to be insisting as much by betting against big spenders like Greece and Spain.

As much as the industrial world might like, the solution to these imbalances is not to get poorer emerging markets or develop-ing nations to step up their spending once more, so that they again run large trade deficits and pull the industrialized countries out of their economic slump. If there is one thing we have learned, large, sustained debt-financed trade deficits are a source of instability. Even more so, what we do not

want is the imf to change its rules to permit more risky borrowing, encouraging foreign private financiers to lend indiscriminately to these countries. In the same way Greece spent its way into trouble, bolstered by the implicit guarantees on its debt from the euro area, foreign lenders are apt to ignore the uses their loans are put to, if they know the domestic government, backed by the imf, will come to their rescue when the loans go south. Irresponsible foreign lenders get bailed out, and because the imf always recovers the loans it has made, the country’s taxpayers eventually have to foot the bill. The answer instead lies in everyone avoid-ing a sustained trade surplus or deficit—es-pecially as they grow rich.

A las, such a shift in trade balances will be politically painful in the short term

for all nations. For those running trade deficits—the United States being the most egregious offender—the policies to bolster household consumption (many of which led to the crisis in the first place) continue apace. The U.S. Federal Reserve is holding interest rates artificially low (especially in loans to the housing market) in the hopes that consumers will start buying more again. After all, that has been the primary source of growth on these shores in recent years.

Certainly as Herbert Stein, the chairman of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, once so sagely commented, “If something is unsustainable, it will stop.” Thus far, the United States has been fortu-nate—it has continued to attract capital on easy terms from the rest of the world. But foreign investors have become increasingly wary about the amount of debt the U.S. government has had to issue to finance its deficits. One way to escape this spiral is for Washington to seek new sources of rev-enue (read: taxes). Yet as a majority of U.S. citizens think that they benefited little from


the boom years of the mid-2000s, they will likely consider this yet more unnecessary punishment.

If foreign investors fear that America can-not achieve political consensus to set its finances in order, they may start worrying that the government will follow the time-honored path of reducing the real value of its public debt through a bout of high infla-tion. If they do eventually take fright, in-vestors will inevitably sell their holdings of U.S. government bonds, causing the value of the dollar to slide. American interest rates would then have to increase substantially to retain foreign investors, thereby reduc-ing growth rates even further. Such a shift would bring down the U.S. trade deficit and spending, but in a way that maximizes pain all around.

On the exporter-nation side of the equa-tion, China’s government has been resisting the appreciation of its currency against the dollar in an attempt to rebuild its exports, which have fallen sharply during the crisis. Although reliance on exports has been very successful at both promoting rapid growth and ensuring stability in the developing world, exporting nations should turn to a more balanced path long before they be-come rich to avoid the kind of stagnation we see in Japan today. For a number of exporters, with China being the most recent example, the initial phase of building capa-bilities is long over. The challenge now is to broaden their sources of growth, gradually withdrawing implicit subsidies to exports (such as an undervalued exchange rate) and explicit subsidies to exporters (such as cheap credit, land and energy). They should also

encourage domestic consumption by shift-ing incomes toward households, while in-creasing competition and productivity in the domestic-oriented production sector so that demand for (and production of ) these goods increases.

On both sides of the importer- and ex-porter-nation coin, myopic actions have helped entrench a longer-term pattern of behavior that only makes it harder to move away from the current unsustainable equi-librium. As ever, change upsets the cozy status quo and the interests that benefit from it. For example, the real-estate lobby in the United States quite obviously has no desire to see government support for hous-ing diminish, and that in spite of the fact that America probably has far more hous-ing stock than it can afford. Similarly, the export lobby in China has no interest in a strong renminbi, even though it is in Bei-jing’s long-term interest to let the currency increase in value.

Unfortunately, the macroeconomic changes countries must make involve ac-tions that even a head of state cannot com-mit to. No American president can unilater-ally agree to reduce the budget deficit; that is a decision for Congress. Similarly, no Chinese president can unilaterally agree to allow the renminbi to appreciate; that is a decision reserved for the various apparat-chiks in the State Council and Communist Party. Moreover, the necessary reforms in both America and China go well beyond these two narrow fixes. They require deep, fundamental changes. So we are caught between a financially unsustainable pattern of global demand and a politically difficult

Politics is always local; there is no constituency for the global economy.


change in domestic policies that would be required to fix the problem.

The leaders of the world’s largest econo-mies seem to believe they will be able

to tackle the challenge of coordinating na-tional strategies to promote global growth through the G-20. At a meeting last Sep-tember, they patted themselves on the back for a “coordinated” fiscal and monetary stimulus in response to the Great Recession and had an unusually brief (for an official communiqué) description of the result: “It worked.” They went on to designate their own group the primary forum for future economic cooperation, stating:

Today we are launching a Framework for Strong, Sustainable, and Balanced Growth. To put in place this framework, we commit to develop a process whereby we set out our objectives, put forward policies to achieve these objectives, and together assess our progress. We will ask the imf to help us with its analysis of how our respective national or regional policy frameworks fit together. . . . We will work together to ensure that our fiscal, monetary, trade, and structural policies are collectively consistent with more sustainable and balanced trajectories of growth.1

I have my doubts whether all this will go beyond facile proclamations. It is very easy to get politicians to spend in the face of a crisis and get central banks to ease monetary policy. No coordination is re-quired, as every country wants to pump up its economy as far as it is able. When the G-20 leaders called for a coordinated stimu-lus, they pushed on an open door. The real difficulties emerge when countries need to undertake politically painful reforms, re-forms that might even seem more oriented toward helping other countries in the short run rather than the reformer itself. Politics is always local; there is no constituency for

the global economy.What, then, will it take to make the imf

successful at fundamentally reordering eco-nomic policy in the future?

Much of the trade-imbalance quandary is a question of creating an incentive

structure that rewards changes to longer-term behavior that outweigh the benefits of short-term domestic-political gratification. (The same is of course true if we want to create greater long-term economic stability more broadly.)

The World Trade Organization (wto), which regulates trade between participating countries, has devised a system in which political short termism in its member coun-tries is reduced. The wto bases its actions on a set of agreements that limit barriers to trade. These accords are signed and rati-fied by member governments after long and arduous negotiations. The wto also has a dispute-resolution process aimed at enforcing participants’ adherence to these promises. Penalties against violators, usually in the form of sanctions on their trade, are easily imposed. Countries certainly sacrifice some of their sovereignty (they relinquish the freedom to set import tariffs and sub-sidize favored industries), but they do so in exchange for others’ doing the same. These concessions promote mutually beneficial trade. And though many of the parties will be adversely affected by the rules here or there, the long-term gains from the frame-work for each one outweigh the downsides. Thus, disagreements in the wto can typi-cally be papered over during the long and tortuous trade-negotiation rounds, with some give-and-take possible in setting the detailed rules. And when industry presses national politicians to protect it, the politi-

1 “Leaders’ Statement: The Pittsburgh Summit,” September 24–25, 2009, www.pittsburghsummit.gov/mediacenter/129639.htm.


cians can simply throw up their hands and blame the wto.

The imf, on the other hand, takes a far less legalistic approach. Unlike the wto, the Fund doesn’t have the luxury of a uni-versally agreed-upon set of rules. The or-ganization practices international macro-economic management and coordination through a process of exhortation. Each in-ternational agreement it manages to con-clude is sui generis, and the Fund cannot make commitments across agreements to try and appease those who feel they may lose out. This means there’s no give-and-take, and the winners and losers are obvi-ous—at both the domestic and interna-tional level.

A t first blush, it would seem apparent that if the hope is to prevent global

harm once again (for example, by reduc-ing trade imbalances) via the imf, the Fund should adopt an approach similar to that of the wto. Given that countries are unlikely to agree to a set of rules or accords that cov-ers all eventualities (macroeconomic poli-cymaking is far more complex than global

trade), they could give discretion to the imf to judge disputes and identify policy viola-tions, with some penalties for noncompli-ance. Indeed, this seems to be the intent of the G-20.

But such a proposal prompts a larger ex-istential question: when do a nation’s eco-nomic policies create global harm? When the Fed cuts interest rates to the bone, and thus sets off a global wave of risk taking, do other countries have the right to pro-test? Couldn’t the Fed claim it is focused solely on U.S. economic conditions, which is its primary responsibility? When China intervenes in exchange markets to hold the value of the renminbi against the dollar, is it using unfair means to gain a competitive

advantage? Some have argued that China’s huge buildup of reserves is evidence of an unfair policy. But unlike developed coun-tries, China restricts its citizens and private firms from holding foreign assets, so it is almost inevitable that its holdings of these assets will show up as central-bank reserves. And even if it were proved that Beijing de-liberately undervalued its currency, what’s


to stop it from stating the obvious—namely that it is a poor country, using exchange-rate undervaluation to offset its other natu-ral disadvantages?

In any case, it is unlikely the imf would get such an expansive portfolio in the first place. Because macroeconomic policy cov-ers such a broad area, a newly empowered imf would require countries to give up a tremendous amount of sovereignty to an international bureaucracy. One need only look at America’s general distaste for the United Nations or the European Union’s myriad problems to understand that this is a very unlikely scenario indeed. Historical-ly, the world’s great powers have been reluc-tant to allow the emergence of strong, inde-pendent multilateral organizations. When they are strong, they have not been inde-pendent (the imf pre-1973); and when they are independent, they have been largely irrelevant (the United Nations General As-sembly). The growing power of developing countries like China and India is unlikely to change this situation. Having worked so hard to attain their newfound status as economic dynamos, why would they let an anonymous bureaucrat snatch away their policy freedom?

And even if the imf could pass all these hurdles, not all countries would be willing to implement the agreed-upon rules of the game. Remember, the wto’s rules are not only backed by the possibility of sanctions, they can also be quietly implemented by governments through executive order (the Commerce Ministry can reduce a tariff here or remove a subsidy there). The reforms the Fund recommends don’t usually favor the ruling party’s electoral calculus. Instead they are things like cutting spending on gov-ernment-employee pensions or increasing competition in the trucking industry (both policies are on the anvil for Greece). As matters stand, finance ministers and heads of state won’t want to put their jobs on the

line by promising to implement highly vis-ible, highly unpopular reforms unless they face an imminent crisis and the imf holds the purse strings.

The imf ’s (apolitical) prescriptions often hit the mark and would likely benefit the global economy in the long term. But, re-gardless of the Fund’s economic acumen, it will not gain wto-like powers of sanction over something as amorphous as macroeco-nomic policy anytime soon, especially for large countries that do not need its money. The fix will come instead from turning the imf into a global advocacy group. If domes-tic political considerations prevent heads of state from listening to the Fund, the organi-zation should seek to win the minds of the global public.

R ather than try to impose its will on national governments by fiat—some-

thing it will never have the authority to do—the imf should strive for influence by appealing more directly to a country’s citizens. This would help the government build support for necessary economic re-forms. In other words, instead of using the legalistic hard power of the wto, the imf should adopt the feel-good soft power fa-vored by ngos like Oxfam.

These movements use pressure from below to convince political leaders that there is domestic support for international agree-ment. The ability of grassroots movements to influence policy is only set to increase. As the power of the Internet spreads through social- and political-networking sites, and as virtual democracy grows, public influence is likely to be even more bottom-up (leaders adopting popular positions) than it is top-down (leaders convincing the public of the merit of their views). Those who want to in-fluence the machinations of political leaders must do so not by appealing to their better instincts but by convincing their masters, the people, directly.


To fix macroeconomic policy the imf needs to be turned into a global advocacy group.

If it can reorient a substantial portion of its activities toward public relations and persuading opinion makers, the imf could have far more impact on global macro-economic policy. For even powerful mem-ber-country governments are fearful of an active and impartial international organi-zation speaking within their borders on economic matters. This isn’t just an issue in undemocratic countries that repress free speech. Democratic countries that preach in public about the need for transparency are often those most worried about being taken to task.

I recall a Washington press conference held to release the semiannual imf World Economic Outlook in the spring of 2005. The British election campaign was in full swing. In response to an anticipated ques-tion from a Financial Times reporter, I re-marked that the United Kingdom would need to do more to raise revenues or cut costs to meet its own fiscal rules, thus im-plying that it might have to raise taxes. My comments were based on impeccable analy-sis by the imf ’s staff, but Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, was furi-ous because it contradicted his own public statements during the campaign. Gordon Brown was also chairman of the imf ’s gov-erning committee and had a press confer-ence scheduled the next day. With the imf ’s managing director, Rodrigo de Rato, sitting embarrassed by his side, he launched into a broadside against the Fund, explaining how it was wrong once again about the United Kingdom. The managing director politely said nothing, but in doing so implicitly backed his staff ’s views. And the imf stood

by its analysis despite immense pressure from the British Treasury. The data since then suggest the Fund was right.

The very fact that governments are con-cerned about the possible public influence of an impartial commentator on their do-mestic policies suggests that a more visible posture on the part of the imf will bear fruit. To do so, it will have to improve its powers of persuasion.

The imf is currently underequipped for this task. If it is to improve its

persuasive capabilities, it will need to make fundamental changes to the way it operates. Viewing its primary audience as finance ministries and central bankers, the Fund has spent years honing special writing skills that ensure reports are produced at regular intervals in which everything important can be inferred by those who know how to read between the lines (typically imf staff and bureaucrats from the member coun-tries), while for everyone else the reports are a perfect cure for insomnia. Its long practice in and propensity for diplospeak has left the Fund with almost no experi-ence in speaking to ngos or the press. The imf needs to learn to become more like grassroots activists with punchy prose, clear policy recommendations and tv-ready talk-ing points. It must go directly to the pub-lic—including political parties, nongovern-mental organizations and influential per-sonalities in each nation—and explain its position. This will require expanding and reorienting its public-relations department. The Fund must do more to enhance its presence on the web to reach the connected


citizen, and must find ways to enter school and university classrooms, as students are often the most receptive cohort to ideas about global citizenship.

But the changes do not stop at creating more influential pr skills. The imf ’s gover-nance structure must be reformed so that it is seen as a fair observer and independent of undue influence by a given country. This means reducing the influence of Western economies, while encouraging emerging na-tions to play a more active role in proposing the imf ’s agenda and building coalitions.

In addition, the imf must not be seen as a prisoner of a specific ideology—typi-cally the mainstream thinking in U.S. uni-versities that is imbibed by imf staff dur-ing their education. Most of the macro-economic principles they are taught derive from the experiences of wealthy countries, where organized markets typically function fairly well. Naturally, the staff favors certain kinds of market intervention, like chang-ing monetary policy, while being critical of other kinds of interventions, like those in the foreign-exchange market. So this leads to well-founded allegations by developing nations of bias, with imf staff willing to tol-

erate damaging ultraloose monetary policy in the United States, while being critical of exchange-rate intervention in China.

For the imf to function with this new mandate, it will have to become more in-ternational internally. This will require the staff to make a conscious effort to broaden the imf ’s intellectual frameworks by recruit-ing more personnel trained outside of the United States. It will also have to better sys-tematize its experience in poorer countries, staying alert to the biases resulting from its training, so that it can do a better job pro-viding advice.

Above all, the Fund must change its very perception of itself—from a wto wannabe, hankering for hard power that it will never get, to an institution that respects the sov-ereignty of each country but works for the global good. The member states will have to accept and facilitate the Fund’s engage-ment with their citizenry as long as it is carried out in good faith. Based primarily on convincing economic research and data analysis, its views should then be protected by international agreement, much as are embassies and their activities. A transparent and fair process will be essential to con-


vincing citizens in each country that the multilateral organization has their interests at heart. The wto’s approach, which largely ignores public opinion, won’t work.

Some of these changes may require im-portant revisions to the articles of agree-ment signed by members of the imf, per-haps even a new historic compact à la Bret-ton Woods.

I have no illusions about how easy change will be. The instinct of global bureau-

crats is to press for clear rules, but even in the European Union, which has some rule-making power and some ability to constrain the domestic policies of mem-bers, relatively homogenous countries have proved unwilling to accept strong external constraints on their policymaking. Rulings from Brussels are growing increasingly un-popular with European voters, conditioned by domestic politicians who frequently blame eu rules for their political problems

and take credit when the union’s initiatives are a success. It is no surprise, then, that when the people are asked if they want a stronger Brussels, they vociferously re-spond, “No!” The travails of Europe today are a salutary warning for international reformers eager to attempt top-down rules that do not have popular support.

Multilateral organizations like the imf should present countries with a course of action that is individually and collective-ly beneficial. Member states must be per-suaded that the collective gain is worth the short-term national pain. When national leaders walk into international closed-door meetings, bolstered by greater domestic un-derstanding, if not political support, for painful reforms, worldwide agreements will become easier (though still less than a cake-walk). If we are to have any hope at all of global cooperation, international multilat-eral organizations will have to work with global democracy rather than avoid it. n

36 The National Interest How to Succeed in Politics

I n 1773, Sam Adams led the Boston Sons of Liberty, thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, onto three British

freighters, seized their cargo of imported In-dian tea and threw it into the harbor. They were afraid that the tea, unexpectedly cheap because it had been exempted from the usual British reexport tariff, would tempt Massachusetts consumers to abandon their principled resistance to taxation without representation. A later historian jokingly referred to the event as the “Boston Tea Party.” Today, anti-big-government agita-tors are channeling their ancestors’ ire as they build a Tea Party movement of their own. Some pundits speculate that the group could end up forming a new political party for the first time in well over a century, to rank with the Democrats and Republicans. They too must be kidding. Everything we know about political parties tells us that the Tea Party is not one and is not going to become one.

For the last year and a half, indignant citizens have been holding rallies around the country to protest the bank bailout, the stimulus package and the health-care bill. At a massive Washington, dc, rally on Sep-tember 12, 2009, and at a Nashville confer-ence this February, Tea Party demonstrators

denounced big government, swelling federal debts, financial rescue for failing homeown-ers and creeping socialism. They carried pic-tures of President Obama, sometimes in the guise of Hitler, sometimes in that of Che Guevara, which suggests an equal-oppor-tunity approach to hating big government. Posters of the clenched fist and references among spokesmen to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, on the other hand, hinted at an affinity for the more libertarian and anar-chic side of the sixties-era New Left. Few of the demonstrators voiced positive political ideas, however, contenting themselves in-stead with old bromides like “Don’t tread on me” and “Just leave us alone.” In April, a press statement from Minneapolis an-nounced the formation of the National Tea Party Federation (ntpf), a center dedicated to countering misinformation in the media. It emphasized the variety and decentraliza-tion of the groups it represented and made no claim to be the voice of a new party.

To be effective, a political party needs to be strong at the center and strong in the grass roots. So far the Tea Party’s members are scattered all over the map, geographi-cally and on the issues. Different groups have different preoccupations and react with varying degrees of annoyance to gov-ernment projects. Few have even a local structure or discipline. Indeed, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s pinup girl, denied that mem-bership in the new movement was incom-patible with membership in the gop.

Still, some activists seem to be hinting

Patrick Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University and author of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History (Yale University Press, 2009).

How to Succeed in Politics

By Patrick Allitt

How to Succeed in Politics 37July/August 2010

at the possibility of a new departure. Palin herself had harsh words for big-govern-ment Republicans and she endorsed chal-lenges to several incumbents later in the spring. She also intimated that the national Tea Party was something more than a mere ginger group reminding the Republicans of their libertarian heritage. What does it want, and what does it tell us about the relationship between ideas and parties in American politics? Why, moreover, is it certain to fail?

The two-party system in America doesn’t take kindly to newcomers.

Nascent political movements find it dif-ficult to get started and even more dif-ficult to trans-form the initial impul s e in to durable election-winning organi-zations. When an important issue emerges, and when its advocates t r y to make it the basis of a new party, either the Democrats or Republicans—s o m e t i m e s b o t h — a d j u s t their posture to preempt it. Po-litical parties are vo t e -w inn ing a n d p o w e r -wielding organi-zations, moving with the times, adjusting their principles as necessary. They speak the language of high morality but concern themselves with the gaining and holding of office.

America has lived through any number

of episodes of political elbowing, partisan machinations and factional learning experi-ences to get to our present stable party sys-tem. In the early days of the Republic, sev-eral political groupings learned that making a stand on principle can be disastrous. One was the Federalists. They enjoyed every ad-vantage in the 1790s. With George Wash-ington at the helm, they bore the glamour of the successful fight against Britain, but after his death in 1799 they did not learn to change with the times. In the new cen-tury, the states began rapidly to reform their constitutions by extending the fran-chise, achieving something pretty close to a one-man-one-vote democracy. Yet many of the Federalists reviled democracy—

President John Adams dreaded it and wrote that he deplored the drunken riotous-ness of election days, while Mas-sachusetts Repre-sentative Fisher A m e s w r o t e : “Our disease is democracy. It is not the skin that festers—our very bones are carious, and their mar-row b l a c k e n s with gangrene.” The Federalists’ inability to em-brace democracy in the early nine-teenth century, and the confine-

ment of their influence to New England, led them to rapid extinction.

In those days, politicians felt uneasy about the very concept of parties (hitherto known, pejoratively, as “factions”). They as-

The National Interest38 How to Succeed in Politics

sumed that none could possibly govern vir-tuously in the interest of the whole popula-tion; all would be narrowly self-interested. Under these conditions it was possible for new groups to emerge even while deny-ing that they were parties. Opposition to “King” Andrew Jackson, for example, was the rallying point of the Whigs in the early 1830s. They depicted themselves as the guardians of republican virtue standing up to the national demagogue who, they said, had ignored the Supreme Court over the fate of the “five civilized [Indian] tribes,” ravaged the economy by destroying the Na-tional Bank, and shamelessly rewarded his relatives, friends and cronies with patron-age appointments.

Historians describe the politics of the 1830s–1850s, when the Whigs faced off against the Jacksonian Democrats, as the era of the “second party system.” The Whigs’ success was short-lived, however; the deepening sectional divide over slav-ery in the 1850s tore them apart. Wait-ing to pick up the pieces was another new party—the Republicans, a bundle of in-terest groups with little in common apart from an aversion to the spread of slavery into the West; some were old Whigs, some abolitionists, some anti-immigrant “Know-Nothings” and some Free-Soilers. Their wrangling convention in 1860 finally came up with a candidate for president, a rus-tic onetime ex-Whig congressman named Abraham Lincoln.

That was exactly a century and a half ago. Since then, no party has been

able to displace either the Republicans or

the Democrats. Each party learned how to adapt to changing political, social and economic circumstances, to discard its posi-tions whenever necessary and to absorb the main ideas of new challengers. The closest approach to a successful new contender came with the People’s Party of the 1890s. In those years, Midwestern and Plains farm-ers were being squeezed by railroad com-panies that charged high freight rates for taking their crops to market and by high storage fees levied by elevator operators. They were also trapped in a deflationary vise as the rate of population growth out-stripped the money supply. Each year their crops brought less money on the market and they became chronic debtors. Southern cotton farmers faced a similar cycle of debt, dependency and deflation. The Farmers’ Alliances, a coalition of agrarian-oriented political groups, grew up in response to these problems, became a political party in the early nineties and scored some local suc-cesses, getting a few of their representatives elected in the farm states. Central to their demands was an inflationary monetary poli-cy, “free silver.” By 1896, a presidential elec-tion year, the People’s Party loomed large on the national political horizon.

By then, however, the entrenched par-ties had learned how to co-opt challengers’ positions. The Democrats headed off the Populist threat by nominating William Jen-nings Bryan of Nebraska, a rising farm-state politician, as their presidential candidate. He accepted his party’s nomination with the famous “Cross of Gold” speech, which, in phrases easily misunderstood today (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor

Campaigns and candidates that insist on sharp distinctions and clear ideas

usually lose. Look at Barry Goldwater.


this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”), blended the rhetoric of evangelical Christianity with advocacy of free silver. In effect, the Demo-crats had adopted a crucial plank of the Populist program as a way of holding on to large numbers of voters who might oth-erwise have checked their ballots for the newcomer. That maneuver left Populist or-ganizers in an agonizing position. To vote Democrat would be to abandon the move-ment they had struggled to build in the foregoing years. Not to vote Democrat was to court the near certainty of defeat for their third party. They made the worst of a bad situation by nominating Bryan as their presidential candidate, a nomination he repudiated. Sure enough, the Populists lost badly and quickly vanished from the politi-cal landscape.

This technique of co-optation continued throughout the twentieth century, with the two main parties beating off every chal-lenger. They adapted as necessary to new circumstances and never let principles get in the way. This is why the identity of both parties has changed beyond recognition. At the start of the twentieth century, for ex-ample, a new “progressive” mood began to affect politics. Citizens’ dissatisfaction with the power of monopolies, the corruption of city government and bribery in the U.S. Senate led to political insurgency move-ments against “Old Guard” politicians. In 1912 a charismatic ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt, organized the new Progressive “Bull Moose” Party, with himself as presi-dential candidate, to give it political expres-sion. In response to this alarming threat, both of the established parties shifted their ground. All three presidential candidates that year (incumbent President William Howard Taft, along with Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt) claimed to be the real pro-gressive, even though they had shown little interest in the concept ten years before. Be-

cause Roosevelt’s candidacy split the Repub-lican vote, Wilson, the Democrat, ended up the winner.

In the same way, the Democrats made a lurching change of direction in the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt, their candidate, cam-paigned against President Herbert Hoover in the election of 1932 by claiming that the Republican incumbent had spent far too much money and that he, by contrast, would restore financial restraint. Com-ing into power, however, and assessing the mood of a Depression-stricken nation, he ignored his own rhetoric and began to in-flate the scale, reach and expenditures of the federal government as never before. The Democrats, party of small yeoman farmers in the antebellum era, and of small busi-nessmen in Woodrow Wilson’s “New Free-dom” era, now became the party of the em-bryonic welfare state and federal gigantism.

fdr understood perfectly what was going on during his long presidency and took pride in his willingness to abandon schemes that were politically unpopular. His job, as he saw it, was to give the voters what they wanted, while keeping his own party in power. Low spending or high spend-ing, isolation or intervention; he always responded to public opinion, whatever it might decree, and never let principle stand in the way. His enemies called him a cynic and a hypocrite. In many ways he was both, but he understood that cynicism and hypocrisy are highly serviceable when it comes to making the American political system work smoothly.

P arty managers, for more than a cen-tury now, have understood that clearly

defined and strongly held ideas will hinder their candidates’ election prospects. Because the United States uses a winner-take-all system rather than proportional representa-tion, the parties have to be coalitions of groups, each representing a wide array of


interests. Constituencies that are big, geo-graphically and demographically, are likely to contain citizens of differing occupations, interests, ethnicities, incomes and faiths. The winning candidates are less often those whose ideas the voters agree with than those who antagonize the fewest.

The parties devote themselves to gaining and holding power. Their candidates have to appear idealistic, dedicated and prin-cipled, without actually becoming too com-mitted to any policy or belief. Candidates know from long experience that they should work more on being attractive and uttering clichés than on debating the real pros and cons of controversial ideas. If they want to be elected and reelected they have to be sure to say what the largest possible number of voters wants to hear. Strong convictions, especially if voiced in public, are likely to get in the way. Hence the most successful politicians combine amiable dexterity with empty yet high-minded rhetoric, and are al-ways able to change their views to coincide with changes in popular opinion. Almost the only ideas they can endorse wholeheart-edly are those shared by their opponents across the spectrum.

Campaigns and candidates that insist on sharp distinctions and clear ideas usually lose. Look at Barry Goldwater, the Repub-lican presidential candidate in 1964. He really wanted to cut back the federal gov-ernment and really wanted to ratchet up the Cold War. He was willing to denounce Social Security in such unambiguous terms that alarmed senior citizens flocked to his opponent Lyndon Johnson on Election Day. Worse still, he declared that “extrem-ism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Maybe it isn’t, but that resonant phrase from his acceptance speech permitted the Democrats to depict him as a self-professed extremist who would provoke a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

The next ostensible conservative to run

a national campaign, Ronald Reagan, had taken part in the Goldwater affair and learned from it. He was a master of the el-liptical phrase and found ways, in 1980, to couple a Goldwater-esque posture of vigor-ous conservatism with a studied vagueness about what he was actually going to do. He claimed to be anti-abortion but was careful, when the time came, not to put any of his political weight behind pro-life legislation or a constitutional amendment barring the procedure. Where Goldwater had prom-ised extremism in defense of liberty, Reagan mildly declared “It’s morning in America.” He flourished.

Inside Reagan’s cabinet, however, was at least one idea man—Secretary of the Interi-or James Watt. The columnist George Will wrote of Watt that:

He has no patience for the to-ing and fro-ing practiced by persons who understand that in politics the straightest line between two points is rarely the easiest route. He speaks almost too clearly, indifferent to the bureaucratic art of constructing whole paragraphs perfectly devoid of substance.

Watt denounced environmentalism un-ambiguously and provoked indignant pro-tests, not just from the Sierra Club, but also from inside the gop. The Environ-mental Protection Agency had been set up by an earlier Republican administration (Nixon’s), bending to the new green wind, and by the eighties concern for the environ-ment was a thoroughly bipartisan matter. Watt therefore became a liability to his party. Reagan threw him away in 1983 and did not blush, from then on, to declare that no one cared more for the environment than he.

You might view Reagan’s reaction as a deeply cynical one—the major environmen-tal organizations certainly did. On the other hand, you might view it as a vindication


of democracy. Reagan was acknowledging that a majority of the citizens appeared to favor environmental sensitivity. Very well; they could have it, and he would mute his personal indifference on the matter. Con-servative think tanks and western “sage-brush rebels,” who had taken heart at the appointment of Watt, were commensurately disappointed at the sudden disappearance of anti-environmentalism in the administra-tion. Was Reagan not the flinty conservative they had taken him for?

The conservative intellectual movement, indeed, found the reality of the Reagan years something of a disappointment. For the thinkers, men like William F. Buckley Jr. and Irving Kristol, ideas really mattered. Convinced on the evidence that a wide

array of welfare and affirmative-action programs were either useless or positively harmful in their effects, it seemed to them imperative that such programs be discon-tinued. But for the political profession-als, considerations of power and popular-

ity always came first. No congressmen or senators wanted to vote for programs that would reduce employment opportunities in their states, and they didn’t want their president to do it either. One of Reagan’s few attempts actually to diminish the reach of the federal government was a plan to abolish the federal Department of Educa-tion. When Reagan discovered that the jeopardized bureaucrats would fight tooth and nail to keep their jobs, and when he reflected that the actual benefit to the tax-payers of its disappearance would be neg-ligible, he gave up the campaign and the department remained. It is with us to this day.

Citizens of tender conscience have always been uneasy about politicians’ moral flex-

ibility. Could it be that democracy actu-ally rewards chameleons and cynics? Yes, it could. And there is something to be said for cynicism in the context of electoral pol-itics. State and national assemblies require their members to compromise and to con-


ciliate one another. Representatives who have demonstrated flexible consciences in getting themselves elected soon learn how to negotiate and exchange favors, so that they can pass legislation and bring home the goods to their constituents. A politi-cian who refused to compromise on prin-ciple would be in a hopeless position. He would have nothing to offer in exchange for accepting favors from other representa-tives. His integrity would make him power-less. It’s true that there are certain lines a Democrat must not cross, and others that a Republican must not even approach, but politicians thrive in a vast middle ground where they exchange chits, vote for one another’s bills and pave the way for mutual reelection. On the one hand, they have to be ostentatious about their moral integrity; on the other, they have to be careful not to let it get in the way of their practical deal making. You could call it hypocrisy, but it’s the kind of hypocrisy from which the na-tion benefits.

I f politicians are more interested in power than principle, nearly always will-

ing to compromise for the sake of popular-ity, where does significant political change come from? It comes from outside the sys-tem, in the form of grassroots movements, of which the current Tea Party is an ex-ample. When enough people make enough noise about an issue, and when they con-vince pollsters that they have real electoral clout and staying power, one or other of the parties will make the new stance its own.

The Democrats, just as they picked up the free-silver issue in the 1890s and pro-gressivism in the 1910s, adopted the civil-rights cause in the 1960s. Segregation was becoming an emotional issue at home and an embarrassment abroad—the activists of the civil-rights movement made sure it was visible and they provoked the defenders of

segregation to act violently and shamefully. For the Democrats to adopt civil rights as their issue was still a calculated risk—until then, most African-Americans who had had the chance to vote at all had voted for the party of Lincoln, the Great Liberator. A shift of African-American voters toward the Democrats had begun in the New Deal era, but President Kennedy dragged his feet on the issue, knowing that to endorse civil rights would cost him white southerners’ votes in 1964.

President Johnson finally took the plunge, estimating that the potentially huge gain of the black electorate more than outweighed the hazard of losing the all-white Democratic “Solid South,” es-pecially if black citizens were actually al-lowed to vote. From the point of view of segregationists, of course, this decision was a horrifying act of cynical opportunism. We tend not to remember it that way be-cause we approve of desegregation, but it is worth recalling that Johnson, in 1964 and 1965, was repudiating one of the most du-rable and defining characteristics of south-ern Democratic politics, as practiced by then for nearly a century.

We recognize the civil-rights movement and the legislation of 1964 and 1965 as po-litical landmarks of the twentieth century. Martin Luther King Jr. was a resourceful orator, leader and figurehead who prompted millions of white citizens to examine their consciences and insist on a new approach to race relations. A man of flinty determina-tion, he was definitely not a politician, or at least not a politician of the kind that gets elected in America. The Democratic Party merely responded to a new reality that he had helped create, and before long so did everybody else. Pragmatic politicians like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had thrived on their support for seg-regation, changed their views to suit new


times. By the early 1970s, an ostensibly nonracist approach to politics had become standard in both parties.

Many other groups in the sixties and seventies with progressive agendas tried to duplicate the civil-rights movement’s achievement of reshaping the political land-scape, with varying degrees of success. The women’s movement, for example, pressur-ing politicians from outside of Congress, largely succeeded in abolishing gender dis-crimination in employment. Politicians who had mocked feminism in the early sixties dutifully clambered onto the band-wagon in the early seventies; Democrats first, then Republicans. The congressional vote for the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 was strikingly bipartisan. By the early eighties President Reagan was adjusting to a changed gender reality, appointing the first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. It was an artful move, nicely upstaging the Democrats on a question they had hitherto regarded as their own, and it showed (like the Watt affair) how well Rea-gan understood the need to adapt to chang-ing social norms.

Outsiders do not necessarily succeed, however. The gay-rights and pro-life move-ments of the 1970s and 1980s, despite theatrical extraparliamentary activism, found it much more difficult to prevail. Each of them borrowed part of the civil-rights movement’s formula. Like African-Americans before them, gay-rights activ-ists claimed they were the victims of dis-crimination. Homosexuals, their argument went, should be given political protection just like African-Americans. Pro-lifers said

something similar: just as African-Ameri-cans were victimized under segregation not for what they did but for who they were, so unborn children were now vulnerable to lethal assault, not for what they had done but solely because of their age. The problem for both groups was that their appeal left large parts of the public uncon-vinced and never corresponded with party lines. Some Democrats were pro-choice and some were pro-life. Likewise with the Republicans. The gay-rights issue found more friends among Democrats than Re-publicans, but also plenty of foes. Both parties, therefore, stayed away from these issues as much as possible, since any state-ment of belief or principle was more likely to cost candidates votes than to gain them. The two movements’ progress was corre-spondingly slow.

The major political parties are vote-gathering machines, not embodi-

ments of distinct and clear ideas. At most, they define tendencies, with plenty of over-lap in the middle. Part of the stability of the United States over the long run comes from its capacity to absorb differences in a political process based on compromise and conciliation. Insincerity, cynicism and hy-pocrisy—horrible at first glance—are im-mensely valuable when it comes to keeping the wheels turning under these circum-stances. We’re so familiar with the fact that elections follow one another in regular cycles that it’s easy for us to forget what an exceptional and unusual achievement they are in world history. Since the American Revolution, nearly every other country has

Tea Partiers need to realize that their candidates will be swallowed up in the bloated

system to which they so strenuously object.


suffered revolutionary upheavals. Think about France, supercharged with divisive idealisms, whose political system was trau-matized in 1789, 1799, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1851, 1870 and so on! Only Brit-ain, Switzerland, and one or two other European states have en-joyed the same kind of institu-tional continu-ity as the United States over the last two centuries.

This political stability is a bless-ing. Even today, d e m o c r a c i e s fail all over the world. The los-ers of American elections do not have to fear for their lives; win-ners don’t abol-ish the system or persecute the losers, and everyone rightly feels confident that they will have another chance a few years down the line. When each scheduled Election Day rolls around, the vote is actually held, and everyone abides by the outcome.

Americans are profoundly unrevolution-ary people. Politics moves through a slow and measured process that is oriented to-ward consensus. It draws on citizens’ con-cerns—usually expressed at first outside the political system—and then peacefully incorporates their insights. On many is-sues, moreover, including many of the most important ones, the two parties are in close accord. As with the continuity of elections, we are so familiar with the extraordinary ideological proximity of the Democrats and

Republicans that we tend to forget about it. It is impossible, by looking at politi-cians, to know which party they belong to. All favor economic growth, all favor

full employment, all deplore terror-ism, all support small business-men, all believe in universal edu-cation, all favor due process of law, all sing “The S t a r - Sp a n g l e d Banner” and so on. The same cer-tainly cannot be said of rival poli-ticians in many other democracies around the world. The American news media and politicians devote themselves untir-ingly to empha-sizing differences wi thout paus-

ing for a moment to admit how much the two parties have in common. But it is the things they share that enable American politicians, on the whole, to work together. Even in the strikingly polarized political en-vironment of 2010, agreement on the ba-sics still outweighs disagreement, which is why the system isn’t breaking down. Every now and then a politician leaves one party and joins the other, without being com-pletely overcome by cognitive dissonance!

These are the realities against which to measure the Tea Party movement,

and to understand why its influence will be slight. It may be able to change the candidate-selection process in some Repub-lican constituencies, but it won’t become an


independent party. If it keeps getting stron-ger, the gop will do what the Democrats did in 1896 and draw its sting by adopting its concerns.

Meanwhile, Tea Partiers need to realize that their candidates, even if elected, will be swallowed up in the great bloated system to which they so strenuously object. Any can-didate who refuses, on principle, to bring home the bacon to his constituency will lose on Election Day, or, if somehow elect-ed, will fail to be reelected. Angry voters may think they want smaller government, but really they don’t. Once they become accustomed to entitlements, and once they start paying for them, they will insist on

actually getting them. Once they or their relatives get on the federal payroll, as mil-lions are, they will want to stay on it. With-out ever phrasing it quite so bluntly, most voters also want the cynicism of American politics. They enjoy making jokes about it, but they recognize, more or less, the ef-fective reconciling function of their politi-cians’ ritualized insincerity.

Everyone complains about the pork bar-rel, but nearly everyone rolls it. The Tea Partiers, whether or not they quite realize it, are asking for an outbreak of heroic self-de-nial, of which history provides few examples and for which the American political system is uniquely ill equipped. n

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47Latter-Day Sultans July/August 2010

As you drive through the streets of .Tripoli, Muammar el-Qaddafi, ...Libya’s Brotherly Leader and

Guide to the Revolution, beams down upon you. From huge billboards to kitschy key chains, the Leader, as Libyans call him, is everywhere. Indeed, for Libyans it is impos-sible to imagine life without him: Qaddafi took power over forty years ago and is now the world’s longest-serving nonroyal ruler. In his prime, he championed a host of revo-lutionary causes and implemented what he declared to be an Islamic form of socialism mixed with Arab nationalism. Qaddafi even christened the term jamahiriya—“state of the masses”—to describe the Libyan system. Yet despite this mix of égalité and fraternité, Libya looks set to become, in practice, a he-reditary monarchy with Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, as the dauphin.

Although Libya is always a bit, shall we say, singular in its politics, in this monarchi-cal shift it is not alone: the transformation of so-called republican regimes into monar-chies is a depressing trend in the Arab world today. They call this jumlukiya, a mix of the words for republic (jumhuriya) and monar-chy (malikiya).

Indeed, most of the Arab world re-mains a stranger to the democratic transfer of power. Ironically, back in the 1950s, military leaders began to overthrow mon-archs—first in Egypt (which served as a model for others), then in Yemen and Libya. The revolutionaries rejected the roy-als as hidebound and aloof from the wishes of the people; yet inevitably the system pro-duced a set of leaders who emphasized sta-bility over revolutionary dynamism.

Syria, the bastion of Arab national-ism, was the first of these states to be-come a de facto monarchy as our century turned; ruled by Hafez al-Assad for almost thirty years, his son, Bashar, took over in 2000. This phenomenon is set to con-tinue. Hosni Mubarak is the longest-serv-ing leader of Egypt since the nineteenth century. At eighty-two and ailing, he has maneuvered to put his son Gamal near his throne, and the chance of Gamal taking power, which seemed slim a decade ago, is now high. Ali Abdullah Saleh began ruling Yemen in 1978, and though the politics there are always murky, his son Ahmed is making a run for power. (Iraq too would have fallen into this category, with Saddam Hussein grooming his sons to take over, if not for the 2003 U.S. invasion.) And as Mubarak, Qaddafi (sixty-eight) and Saleh (sixty-five) die or become incapacitated in the coming years, hereditary monarchy will soon be the dominant form of government in the Arab world, in practice, if not always in title.

Daniel Byman is a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. His next book, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism (Oxford University Press), is due out in 2011.

Latter-Day Sultans

By Daniel Byman

The National Interest48 Latter-Day Sultans

The new leaders are replacing a set of autocrats who are at best sclerot-

ic (Mubarak), often weak and petulant (Saleh), and at times bizarre (Qaddafi). These regimes are all dictatorial, and eco-nomic growth has stagnated. Well-governed countries are all alike; but every poorly gov-erned kleptocracy is unhappy in its own way. Egypt—once the cultural and polit-ical leader of the Arab world—has seen oil wealth and greater openness of several Arab states lead to its increased marginaliza-tion. Libya, despite its oil income, often has the depressing feel of a former-Soviet-bloc country, with a mix of dilapidated infra-structure and onerous security procedures. In Yemen, chaos is growing, while the coun-try’s limited petroleum reserves are steadily being tapped out.

Western observers understandably hope that new brooms, even if from the same family closet, will sweep things clean. Feed-ing this optimism is the fact that the po-tential leaders are all far more at home with the West than their fathers—speaking English, sporting impressive degrees from

Western universities, and often knowing the ins and outs of modern finance. At the very least, these new heirs talk the talk. Often beguiling to Westerners, they do not have the conspiratorial mind-set of some of those they are set to replace and, in flu-ent English, speak eloquently of the need for economic, political and social reform. Though none of these various would-be leaders emerged from the armed forces, and their military backgrounds are weak, they are quite media savvy, adeptly pitch-ing themselves to the younger generation that has benefited from the regimes’ crony capitalism.

Egypt’s heir apparent, Gamal Mubarak (tellingly referred to as “Jimmy” by many Egyptians), was educated at the Ameri-can University in Cairo and for a while was an investment banker for Bank of America in London. In his rhetoric and politics, the younger Mubarak has empha-sized economic growth and openness, and has encouraged commerce-friendly moves such as devaluing the Egyptian pound. Gamal, in interviews with Western jour-

nals, praises Margaret Thatcher for her eco-nomic transformation of the United King-dom. He also created the Future Generation Foundation to pro-mote the economic and political roles of younger Egyptians and ran a private-equity fund. In 2000, he became a leader of the National Demo-cratic Party (ndp), the regime’s vehicle for running the country and controlling Par-liament, eventually becoming its de facto

Latter-Day Sultans 49July/August 2010

head. Three years later, he championed legislation to improve human rights and abolish Egypt’s security courts. In general, he portrays himself as a reformer, empha-sizing the needs and hopes of a younger generation. Recently he has tried to raise his security profile, flanking himself with generals at several public occasions.

The narrative is much the same for Saif al-Islam, the oldest son of Qaddafi’s second wife. Since the Leader’s first marriage ended in divorce, Saif al-Islam is at the top of the family pyramid. He too is Western edu-cated, including a PhD from the London School of Economics. Through the Qaddafi Foundation, which he runs, he has tried to resolve international disputes and has promoted talk of human rights—in many ways, as University of Exeter scholar Larbi Sadiki argues, Saif “provides the function of loyal opposition.” (In 2010, I traveled to Libya for a counterterrorism conference as a guest of the Qaddafi Foundation.) You can poke Saif on his Facebook page, and his rhetoric is loaded with buzzwords designed to appeal to a Western audience: he calls for a flat tax of 15 percent, supports projects dealing with climate change, and his dis-sertation uses wonderful terms like “civil society,” “global governance” and “democ-ratisation” in its title. He has publicly criti-cized the denial of the Holocaust and noted that “Libya has no problems dealing with Israel.” Most importantly, he pushed for the country to abandon its nuclear-weapons program. When asked about how much freedom Libyans should have, Saif told a Western reporter, “I am talking about the level of freedom like in Holland.”

At home, Saif has pushed for economic reform and supported efforts to combat drug abuse. In one of his more daring cam-paigns, he has tried to weaken the power of Libya’s revolutionary committees, a strong bureaucratic force that is dedicated to se-curing Qaddafi’s revolution and thus suspi-cious of any reforms that involve the free market, closeness to the West or implicit criticism of the Leader’s past policies. The committees were involved in some of Lib-ya’s most egregious human-rights viola-tions during the 1990s, when threats to the regime led to bloody crackdowns. Saif al-Islam has also pushed a terrorist-rehabilita-tion program and has served as an emissary for the regime, playing key roles in the free-ing of Western hostages in the Philippines and resolving problems with the United States and United Kingdom related to the 1988 bombing by Libyan agents of Pan Am 103, which killed two hundred seventy people. While these efforts have earned Saif plaudits abroad, he has also helped bring back one of these bombers from jail in Scotland, which enhanced his nationalist credentials at home. Saif ’s family members hold powerful economic and security po-sitions in Libya, further entrenching his power.

Of the three potential heirs, Yemen’s Ahmed Saleh seems the weakest potential leader; he flunked out of Sandhurst and made little impression as a parliamentar-ian after taking a seat in 1997. He heads the country’s Republican Guard and other elite forces, but he has only limited support in the military, in part because he evinces little respect for the officer corps. Perhaps

Hereditary monarchy will soon be the dominant form of government in the Arab world.


inevitably, he too heads an ngo—the Saleh Foundation—which is in charge of build-ing the grand Saleh mosque, supporting the Special Olympics and other charitable activities, like providing medical assistance to Yemenis. Saleh has played up his role in the organization for the media. Cynics believe he is simply trying to worm his way into the foreign humanitarian aid coming into Yemen.

It remains unclear if Yemeni elites would accept him as his father’s heir. As Yemen expert Barak Barfi pointed out:

Though Ahmed has his hands in military, po-litical and business affairs, he is not particularly astute. He lacks palatable strengths and has proved unable to successfully manage the tasks assigned to him. Moreover, he neither has his father’s foresight nor his penetrating under-standing of Yemeni tribes and the need to play various elements of society against each other to survive in the country’s tumultuous political environment.1

Yet, despite all of this, he has steadily en-sconced himself in Yemen’s power structure and has the backing of his, and his father’s, Hashed tribe.

Ahmed’s weakness is troubling, as any successor in Yemen will have his hands full, and some of the country’s dangers directly threaten U.S. security. In both the north and the south, large rebellions challenge the government’s writ. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is also based in Yemen, exploiting the Saleh administration’s lack of control, regularly attacking regime targets and ex-ecuting plots beyond the country’s borders. Ahmed reportedly has tried to take advan-tage of the dismal performance of military commanders who favor his rivals—a way to expand his own role and influence. Such gamesmanship will hinder efforts to reform Yemen’s military to fight al-Qaeda and put down the country’s rebellions.

O f course, nothing is a sure bet. Egyp-tians have long talked of General

Omar Suleiman, who heads military intel-ligence, as an alternative leader. And now the country is abuzz over Mohamed El-Baradei, the Nobel Prize–winning former head of the iaea, as a contender for the presidency. (ElBaradei has over ten times as many “fans” on his Facebook page than Gamal.) In Libya, the focus is often on Mu-tassim el-Qaddafi, Saif ’s brother. In Yemen, Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the country’s key military commander and a possible king-maker, reportedly opposes Ahmed’s acces-sion. Other Saleh family members are talk-ed about as heirs.

Some leaders, a few elites and the poten-tial throne takers themselves often dismiss talk of hereditary succession. When Bashar al-Assad was preparing to take power in Syria after his father’s illness, President Mubarak was clear to say a similar father-to-son transfer couldn’t happen in Egypt, noting “we are not a monarchy”; Yemen’s president has also claimed not to be pre-paring his son for succession. Saif al-Islam similarly scoffed at hereditary power trans-fers, saying that his father’s office “is not a farm to inherit.” More colorfully, he noted that Mike Tyson’s son is not a great boxer and Beethoven’s son was not a musical ge-nius (perhaps in a sign of how seriously we should heed such rhetoric, keep in mind that Beethoven did not father any chil-dren): “You can receive a house or a car as an inheritance from your father, but not a leadership.”

For every protestation to the contrary, all evidence suggests that these heirs are set to take power. Over the last decade, Gamal Mubarak has steadily built up his political position and public name, with Egyptian newspapers reporting his utterances on eco-nomic and foreign policy at regular inter-

1 Email exchange with the author, May 12, 2010.


vals. A cabinet reshuffle in 2004 put several figures close to Gamal into key economic positions. More im-portantly, his father has removed or transferred military and policy elites whose résumés made them political rivals.

Saif al-Islam launched a new tv channel and has steadily increased his public profile, both in Libya and overseas, through his work with the Qaddafi Foundation and efforts to rehabilitate Libya’s image as a spon-sor of terrorism. He has also helped bring in government officials who share his outlook on modernization.

Although Ahmed Saleh is the weakest of the three figures, he has made inroads into Yemen’s military, bureaucracy and business commu-nity, while members of his family also hold key security jobs. By default, his position is growing stronger each year.

Bottom line: the heirs will probably take power no matter what disgruntled

elites or ordinary Egyptians, Libyans and Yemenis say. Yet none of the new cohort, no matter their pedigrees and platforms, can easily overturn the old ways. The suc-cessors will have to overcome the problems of entrenched military and elite interests, tribal allegiances, nepotism and corruption. Successful political reform demands more than just a new face of power: it requires reversing the last forty years of political and economic policy.

The most significant barrier to, for lack of a better word, reform, and the one most difficult for outsiders to observe, is the mili-tary and security services. In all these coun-tries, the attitude of the security establish-ment toward the potential heirs is unclear. Any successor needs the blessing of the se-curity apparatus, or at least its tolerance. Also important (though less so even if they

are more visible than their military coun-terparts) are the apparatchiks that are part of the ruling elite. In Egypt, for example, the National Democratic Party is a force for extending Mubarak’s influence rather than a legitimate political group that expresses and organizes public grievances. But over the years, an ndp position and a degree of personal power have usually gone hand in hand. In Libya, the revolutionary commit-tees are often dominated by leading tribal figures, as Qaddafi used the committees to tie the tribes to his political system. In Yemen, Saleh doled out administrative and political leadership positions to key tribal figures, mixing traditional modes of gov-ernance with state forms of authority; any changes therefore must address institutional bodies in the capital and recognize tradi-tional power structures in the provinces.

The militaries and political apparatuses no longer have even a vestige of the esprit that drove their leaders in the heyday of Arab nationalism. Instead, they are bloated and dishonest, dedicated to the defense of


their own privileges. According to Transpar-ency International, these countries are all rife with corruption. Corruption, however, not only enriches a favored few—it also serves political purposes. At the very least, it keeps a set of military, economic and tribal leaders well-disposed toward the regime. They can use their money to dispense fa-vors, shoring up their own power. In turn, under the cover of the rule of law, the sov-ereign can investigate and even jail elites should they cross the government.

To guard against coups, many leaders put relatives in positions of power. Not surpris-ingly, their kin dip into state coffers and often see themselves—and are seen by or-dinary people—as above the law. So reform would mean turning on family as well as other power brokers.

And we should not be fooled by high-profile, but select, purges of old, corrupt officials that have the feel of openness and democratization; too often they are just ways of substituting a set of old thugs and crooks loyal to potential political rivals with younger thugs and crooks loyal to the new leader. While Bashar was being groomed for power, several Syrian elites fell to the charge of “corruption,” including a head of intelligence, a former prime minister and a senior army chief who himself was rumored to be a candidate to replace Hafez al-Assad. Bashar later went after his paternal uncle, Rifaat al-Assad, who had once tried to take power. Even when entrenched elites are not implicated, the occasional purge keeps them fearful and off balance, and thus more likely to be loyal.

No one is truly independent of the cur-rent regimes. The ruling parties, the mili-tary and the business elites all have a sym-biotic relationship with the governments. Change, if it is meaningful, is a direct threat to this system. Ending corruption in the name of economic and political openness thus threatens existing beneficiaries’ power

bases and even raises the specter of prosecu-tion and humiliation.

More so, it is unclear that the soon-to-be leaders truly believe their own

rhetoric. Since they lack revolutionary or military bona fides and, unlike monarchs, do not have generations of tradition to in-still respect, the heirs may seek some level of popular approval, but it will be for their own benefit, not that of the people.

As Middle East scholar Steven Hey-demann at the United States Institute of Peace finds, in many Arab countries, elec-toral laws are designed to make the regimes more secure rather than to open up contes-tation. The governments use election judg-es and monitors to disqualify opponents and ensure that votes from pro-regime sup-porters have more weight than those of their rivals. Laws governing political dis-course and human-rights organizations are opaque and at times deliberately contra-dictory, allowing the regime to favor some groups over others—and to always “legal-ly” punish dissenters when it so chooses. Media access is restricted to government supporters, and of course outright arrests are used to silence a few of the most vocal and intimidate the rest. Civil servants and security officials—a massive portion of the electorate—are “encouraged” to back the administration in voting.

A few Arab regimes are learning to be more subtle: while Bashar won 97.6 percent support in a referendum in 2007 reaffirm-ing his rule in Syria, in 2006, President Saleh of Yemen won just 77 percent, and by regional standards (granted, about the lowest ones you can use) there was actual contestation. Still, as Heydemann acidly points out, “77 is the new 99,” and true de-mocracy is far off.

Economic reform too can be a tool to consolidate power. Liberalization, in theory, creates alternative power bases to the regime


and in general is seen as a way of weak-ening absolutist governments. In practice, however, liberalization in the Middle East is done selectively. Regime supporters get access to newly privatized industries or gov-ernment contracts, tilting the playing field in their favor. Egypt privatized a Coca-Cola bottling plant, but gave the contract to a close government ally, cementing his loyalty to the regime. Foreign aid, whether direct or indirect, passes through regime hands and further abets this process. Even when it comes to education or providing more pub-lic amenities, the leaders can steer those ser-vices to loyalists and keep them out of the hands of rivals.

Looking at t h e h i g h

hopes and bit-ter reality of the first, and so far only, transfor-mation of an Arab republic into a monar-chy is sobering. The current Syr-ian president, Bashar al-Assad, showed all the signs of being a Western, enlightened reformer. Before tak-ing power, Bashar’s path sounded eerily similar to the current crop of candidates: he was educated in London, with a mix of superficial ties to the military establishment and a sprinkling of organizational affilia-tions that all promised greater openness (in fact, he introduced the Internet to Syria). But the power transfer from father to son offered a glimpse of what was to come.

Hafez died when Bashar was only thirty-four. The constitution stipulated that the president had to be forty. This problem, insurmountable for any country that re-spected the rule of law, was solved almost casually. To give Bashar’s elevation to power the patina of legality, Syria’s patsy Parlia-ment met and quickly amended the consti-tution to allow for a younger president. A referendum later confirmed Bashar as the new ruler.

Despite this questionable accession, out-siders still hoped Bashar’s Western educa-

tion would lead him to pry open the closed poli-tics of Syria, and at first this op-timism seemed justif ied. The new ruler ush-ered in the so-called “Damas-c u s Sp r i n g ,” promising more openness in so-ciety and the economy. But Bashar’s rhetoric blinded many outsiders to an important real-ity: he was the consensus can-didate of Syria’s m i l i t a r y and

political elite, who saw him as a means to further entrench their power. Predict-ably, when small, nonthreatening dissent emerged, Bashar quickly halted both politi-cal- and economic-liberalization measures. By 2001 it was over. After some tentative loosening of the rules, restrictions on as-sembly and the press were soon reapplied. Dissidents who called for more openness were met with censorship and arrest. Bashar


has clearly clung to the brutal and undemo-cratic ways of his father.

And, in addition to keeping the screws tight at home, Syria has returned to a for-eign policy that seems as intransigent and hostile as that of Hafez al-Assad at his most truculent. Damascus often worked against the United States in Iraq, knowingly al-lowing foreign fighters and insurgents pas-sage through the country to the front lines. Bashar also continued the nuclear program his father began—though it was destroyed by Israeli bombs in 2007—the surest sign that Damascus is not seeking to embrace the West. To top it all off, Bashar has moved closer to Hezbollah than his father ever did, and in April 2010, Israeli officials claimed Syria transferred Scud missiles to the orga-nization in Lebanon.

A s the new heirs come to power, twelve states in the Middle East will be de

facto monarchies. Yes, we can expect ver-sions of the Damascus Spring from Cairo to Sanaa, but spring is unlikely to become summer, leading to an altogether less vi-brant region, and one that promises any-thing but major political reform.

It all boils down to legitimacy. And Amer-ica will only be able to have an effect on the margins. These neomonarchical accessions will be fundamentally illegitimate, no mat-ter how many referenda are held with large margins of victory. Gamal & Co. cannot claim to have thrown out colonial powers, waged war against Israel or even the respect of colleagues in the military: all they have is their lineage in a system that professes not to value that. If the United States challenges

this ascension through public criticism of a rigged election or backroom coronation, this would only magnify the legitimacy chal-lenge. And it might well embolden oppo-sition voices. Undoubtedly such pressure would push the new leaders to try to exploit opposition to the United States to shore up their nationalistic bona fides.

In Egypt—easily the nearest potential handover—where ties are already strong, particularly with the military establish-ment, Gamal may well be an exception, craving the legitimacy that Western pow-ers, especially the United States, can be-stow. Because of extensive U.S. support for Egypt’s military and security establishment, key parts of the regime want to continue a close if largely behind-the-scenes relation-ship with Washington. This is the time to push Cairo for more serious political reform such as repealing the emergency law that has governed the country for decades and enables almost unfettered executive power. Expanding media freedom and the independence of the judiciary are also good places to push as neither poses an immi-nent threat to the new ruler, but both in the long term are critical to the success of any reform movement.

Because the Libyan system under the elder Qaddafi is so bizarre and stifling, sim-ply making Libya a “normal” Arab power—fairly corrupt, only slightly transparent and moderately brutal—would be an enormous step forward. Saif ’s behavior so far, particu-larly his confrontation with the revolution-ary committees and outreach to the West, suggests he will not necessarily be a clone of his father. U.S. influence in Tripoli is lim-

Well-governed countries are all alike; but every poorly governed

kleptocracy is unhappy in its own way.


ited, however, and we cannot expect to be-stow legitimacy to a new ruler. The United States should continue the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations of gradu-ally bringing Libya back in from the fringe by opening up economic and political rela-tions in exchange for good foreign-policy behavior, counterterrorism cooperation and improvements in human rights.

As Yemen’s government is so weak, the new ruler will be both constrained and des-perate—a bad combination. If the transfer of power happens soon, the new leader will inherit the internal rebellions and Saudi hostility currently plaguing Yemen. The United States should try to ease tension between Riyadh and Sanaa to help the new leader get on his feet, using this as a reward for closer counterterrorism cooperation.

In the end, we should not overstate U.S. leverage. New leaders will look first and foremost to domestic interests, not to Washington. Legitimacy, or at least tol-eration, begins at home, and as Syria’s case shows, the new leaders care less about good relations with America than with shoring up their power bases.

The United States needs to remember that succession is not regime change

but rather its opposite: the entrenchment of the current set of elites, whose comfort zone for change is narrow even in good times. We should hope for the best, but plan for disappointment.

Indeed, the growing dominance of mon-archy in the Middle East, whether heredi-tary or de facto, highlights the political decay occurring across the region. While the good news is that the Middle East is moving away from the destructive Arab na-tionalist and socialist ideologies that caused so much strife and misery for so long, civil society, the judiciary, political parties and other potential counters to tyranny are weak and co-opted. In many countries, at most a semblance of popular consent is what matters, and the elite is entrenched.

Political Islam is the only vibrant alterna-tive ideology that is popular in the region today, and it thrives in part because current elites rule poorly and offer the discontented little hope of change within the system. A better future for the region is that much further away. n

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58 The National Interest Reviews & Essays

Reviews & Essays

The Fal l of anIntel lectualBy David Rieff

Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectu-als (New York: Melville House, 2010), 304 pp., $26.00.

I n 1927, the French writer Julien Benda, then best known for his for-midable critique of the “intuitionist”

philosophy of Henri Bergson, published a short, polemical book called La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). In it, Benda excoriated the leading French intellectuals of the day, accusing them of having forsaken their duty to dispassionate thought in favor of polemics in the service of political passions. His principal targets were thinkers on the French right—fig-ures like Charles Maurras, the leader of the monarchist Action Française movement, and the writer Charles Péguy. But Benda’s polemic was directed at all politicizations of the intellect, and he attacked Marxists and Zionists, whom Benda, a Jew himself, called “idolaters of their blood.” Famous in its

own time, his book itself is little read today, but the expression “treason of the intellectu-als” as a shorthand for intellectual coward-ice is now as embedded in the language as “Brave New World” is for repressive utopian societies or “1984” for totalitarian ones.

Norman Podhoretz staked his claim on Orwell on behalf of his fellow neoconserva-tives back in the early years of the Reagan administration, writing that had the author been alive, he would have been “with [us] and against the left.” From the opposite shore politically, Patricia Williams, a Co-lumbia law professor and columnist for The Nation, wrote in 2007 that “Orwell would have had no trouble cutting through the cowpokey folksiness and spewed malaprop-isms of President George W. Bush.” Such exercises are invariably adventures in special pleading. It is wholly impossible to know what Orwell, who died at the beginning of 1950, would have made of the decolo-nized, U.S.-dominated, far more gender-equal world of our time. The landscape is so different from his own that surely his first challenge, before choosing a political side, would have been to get his bearings.

Benda produces a similar response. A number of European and North American intellectuals—some self-identified neocon-servatives, others “reformed” leftists who would of late call themselves antitotalitar-ians—have found in The Treason of the Intel-lectuals a template for explaining what they view as the incapacity of their contempo-raries to stand up for the Enlightenment values currently under assault by a resurgent Islamism. As Roger Kimball, a coeditor of the neoconservative magazine The New Cri-

David Rieff is the author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2003) and At the Point Of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (2005). His most recent book, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008), is about the death of his mother, the novelist and critic Susan Sontag.

Reviews & Essays 59July/August 2010

terion, put it in his preface to a 2006 edition of Benda’s book, this betrayal has rendered us powerless against the “depredations of in-tellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.” And claims to be the inheritor of his mantle have come from the Left as well. For example, Edward Said, toward whom neoconservative intellectuals bear more animus than perhaps anyone ex-cept my late mother, was a huge admirer of The Treason of the Intellectuals and discussed it at length in his 1993 Reith Lectures for the bbc. It is by no means clear why po-lemicists on either the left or the right be-lieve that they can discern what Benda, with his idealization of dispassionate, “universal” thought at odds with political passions of every kind, would have made of the atti-tudes of Western intellectuals confronted by militant Islamism in their own countries as well as in the Muslim world itself.

Nevertheless, Paul Berman, a writer who, having started on the Democratic left is by now probably America’s best known and certainly its most unrepentant liberal inter-ventionist, clearly believes that he can. For, though he mentions Benda only once in his new book, the title he chose for it, The

Flight of the Intellectuals, is such a clear echo of Benda’s own. Berman’s mimicry has the added advantage of being an I’m-assuming-the-mantle-of twofer in that it also echoes, though he mentions neither the book nor its author, the great French political theorist Raymond Aron’s The Opium of the Intel-lectuals, published in 1955, which Roger Kimball (again!) accurately summarized as being an indictment of leftist intellectuals who were “merciless toward the failings of democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of proper doctrines.”

Aron’s theme would be taken up more than two decades later by the so-called French New Philosophers. Although they were mostly former members of the Far Left who had become anti-Marxists, their ener-gies were principally directed not against Communism itself but rather, in Berman’s own apt formulation, the Western intellectu-als who had “kept on deluding themselves about the Soviet Union, and then about communist China, Cuba, and other such regimes,” even in the face of “ever-growing mountains of evidence over the course of the twentieth century” about the terrible real-

The National Interest60 Reviews & Essays

ity of these societies. In much the same way, Berman’s aim in his book, as he remarked recently in an interview with journalist Mi-chael J. Totten, was to analyze why so many “intelligent people [in the West] are running away from looking at some very influential and pernicious doctrines of our own time.” That doctrine, of course, is Islamism.

B erman’s case study is an exhaustive—not to say, obsessive—exercise in com-

parison between the ways two distinguished Western writers, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, have, in his opinion inexcus-ably, treated the Swiss-born Muslim theolo-gian Tariq Ramadan as an Islamic moderate worthy of respect, while dismissing the So-mali-born former–Dutch parliamentarian and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. By his own account, Berman came to his subject because of his fascination with Ramadan as a figure, whose reputation as “an admirable young reforming moderate in the world of Islamic religious thinkers” had led Berman to think of him as “a good guy.” (Of Ber-man’s fondness for dividing the world firm-ly into “good guys” and “bad guys,” more later.) The more Berman read of Ramadan’s work and the more he learned about him, the more convinced he became that he is anything but a moderate. Ramadan, he argues, has beguiled liberal Westerners des-perate to find a reasonable interlocutor—a “great Muslim hope”—with pronounce-ments that seem to suggest that he up-holds the classic liberal values of women’s rights, democratic liberties and tolerance. But this, Berman argues, is largely window dressing. In reality, Ramadan “wants us to

revere the most vicious and reactionary of Islamist sheikhs—the people who promote violence, bigotry, totalitarianism, and ter-ror.” And yet, Berman laments, too many Western intellectuals refuse to face this, preferring instead “to shut their eyes and hope for the best.”

If the views of a well-known and influ-ential but hardly all-powerful European Muslim intellectual and the reception of those views in the Western mainstream seem so important to Berman, it is because he believes that Ramadan has “become a representative man of our age. . . . a colli-sion point.” The favorable press coverage he has received may have been animated by “earnest good intentions,” Berman allows, but it is inspired at least as much, if not more, “by squeamishness and fear. And by less-than-good intentions.” Berman boasts that in choosing this theme, he has found his way “to a central debate of our mo-ment—the debate over Islamist ideas in the Western countries, and over the reluctance of journalists and intellectuals from Western backgrounds to grapple seriously with the Islamist ideas.” For Berman, just as Rama-dan represents a new and important (and, of course, in Berman’s view overwhelmingly negative) trend among pious Muslims in the West, so the favorable treatment he has received in the Western media serves to il-lustrate an equally negative trend among those Berman describes as “normally im-pious” Western journalists, who, he sug-gests, have abandoned their critical facul-ties, whether out of blindness, postimperial guilt, intimidation, cultural relativism or some combination of all of them.


For all of Berman’s self-infatuation—his book is shot through with braggadocious formulations such as “I have pondered” this, “disentangled” that and “discovered” the other—he is not quite vulgar enough to accuse these Western writers of what in some right-wing circles in the United States, the uk and France is now routinely called dhimmitude (a neologism of French origin that denotes an attitude of surrender, concession and appeasement to Muslim de-mands). But his bill of indictment amounts to pretty much the same thing. Following in the line of the French New Philosopher Pascal Bruckner, whom he cites often and praises with a fulsomeness verging on ab-surdity, Berman insists that, where Islamism is concerned, Western intellectuals like Bu-ruma and Garton Ash can “no longer reli-ably tell black from white.” Berman tends to quote others when he wants to deliver his harshest judgments—an act of “ventrilo-quism” that, for a man obsessed with the need for intellectual courage, is, well, not as courageous as it might be. And we see this rhetorical tactic employed again and again, as when he refers to the German writer Ul-rike Ackermann’s denunciation of Garton Ash as a “fellow traveler” of Ramadan.

But when he is not quoting the fiery pronouncements of like-minded Europe-an writers he admires, Berman employs so mild a tone and so curiously convoluted a sentence structure that it is difficult to know where sincerity ends and sarcasm be-gins. “I have selected Ian Buruma’s journal-ism as my chosen example of the intellec-tual atmosphere of our moment,” he writes, “the atmosphere at its most refined and so-

phisticated, its most admirably engaged.” It is only eighty-four pages later that Berman comes out and says what has clearly been the subtext of his argument all along—that Buruma’s apologia for Ramadan and his criticisms of Berman’s heroine in The Flight of the Intellectuals, the Dutch Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her criticisms of Islam, is emblem-atic of a catastrophically “reactionary turn in the intellectual world.” One that was un-heard of in recent European history “except on the extreme right,” it is a movement now being led by people like Buruma, whom, Berman avers, “until just yesterday, I myself had always regarded as the best of the best.”

Good guys and bad guys again, or rath-er, a good guy gone wrong: oh, the

disappointment! Not that Berman’s hero worship of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is anything new. A previous book of his, Power and the Ideal-ists, portrays its principal subjects, Josch-ka Fischer, Bernard Kouchner and Daniel Cohn-Bendit—three May ’68ers turned mainstream European politicians—in qua-si-hagiographical terms. Berman rejects, in some cases in defiance of the facts (as he does with Kouchner’s sordid involvement in trying to help the French oil company Total whitewash its activities in Burma), any stain on his chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. And as with many drawn to ideal-ization, Berman is drawn to demonization as well. That he denounces without ful-minating proves little; indeed, it illustrates beautifully Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinical description of “the beau-tiful calm of the hysteric.” Eager to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali against what he believes to

To begin reading The Flight of the Intellectuals is to enter a nuance-free zone.


be Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s calumnies and condescension (it is not clear which outrages him more), Berman practically turns her into a Joan of Arc–like figure. In his first reference to Hirsi Ali, Berman sa-lutes the fact that here at last was “someone not afraid to proclaim her opinions.” A bit later, he describes her as a “rebel soul,” even if the journalists Berman is bent on expos-ing fail to appreciate the fact. Further on, she is “a persecuted liberal dissident from

Africa.” And further on still, Berman waxes lyrical about her “commitment to the En-lightenment.”

But Berman’s admiration for Hirsi Ali at times seems almost to depend on his distaste for Ramadan—thesis and antith-esis, to use the old leftist boilerplate. Thus, Ramadan is the proud grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brother-

hood, who, in turn, was an associate of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jeru-salem in the 1930s, who, in his turn, was a Nazi sympathizer who met with Hitler and recruited for the Waffen ss in Bosnia. Ramadan is also an admirer of the medieval Sufi philosopher al-Ghazali, who Berman argues is responsible for causing medieval Islam to turn away from ancient Greek phi-losophy and embrace obscurantism.

Against this festival of ignorance and prejudice, Berman holds up Hirsi Ali as a paladin of the Western Enlightenment. Without irony, Berman writes that Hirsi Ali “nominated herself ” for the role of Voltaire and then adds, “even if, as she has made clear, Locke, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill, Russell and Karl Popper have likewise influ-enced her thinking, not to mention Mary Wollstonecraft, the author, in 1792, of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” How this influence has manifested itself, Berman does not say. But this rota of the great and the good of Western civilization is presented as if it demonstrated something of signifi-cance about Hirsi Ali. It seems unlikely: Voltaire I can believe, and Wollstonecraft too. But Spinoza? Really? And Locke on the nature of reason, Mill on utilitarianism, Russell on mathematics or Popper on his-toricism? If Hirsi Ali has been “influenced” by them, as Berman asserts, it was almost certainly their political opinions, not the work that made people pay attention to those opinions in the first place. Berman is profoundly indignant that people like Bu-ruma and Garton Ash do not take Hirsi Ali seriously enough, but he does not help his cause with such hyperbole.


This hyperbole colors (and to my mind undercuts) Berman’s efforts to impeach

Ramadan’s commitment to a moderate, Eu-ropean Islam and to paint him as a secret Islamist hard-liner largely through guilt-by-family-association (and Ramadan’s un-willingness to disown these links). “Tariq Ramadan,” Berman writes, “is nothing if not a son, a brother, a grandson and even a great-grandson—family relations that ap-pear to shape everything he writes and does, and that certainly shape how other people perceive what he writes and does.” To put it charitably, this is a gross oversimplifica-tion. It is certainly true that being Hassan al-Banna’s grandson guaranteed Ramadan a hearing in the Muslim world, but then one could say with equal certainty that being born to great wealth guaranteed the best known of the New Philosophers, Bernard Henri-Lévy, whom Berman unsurprisingly praises to the skies in The Flight of the Intel-lectuals, a hearing in France. Berman’s argu-ment is that by refusing to repudiate his grandfather, Ramadan must be a partisan of what Berman calls “the Islam of fanaticism and hatred.” Further evidence of his guilt: writing what Berman correctly character-izes as an adulatory biography of al-Banna, glossing over or denying that his grandfa-ther’s political legacy leads directly from the Muslim Brotherhood, through the pro-Nazi sympathies and virulent Jew hatred of the grand mufti, to Hamas and al-Qaeda. For Berman, Ramadan is an extremist—no matter what he says to gullible Westerners like Buruma and Garton Ash.

The problem is that it is a conclusion that does not necessarily follow. The friendship

between al-Banna and the mufti was real enough, as was al-Banna’s anti-Zionism. Whether this was a case of Judeophobia, as Berman insists, or the old adage in war that the enemy of my enemy is my friend is debatable (a faction within Irish republican-ism during World War II not only sympa-thized but also collaborated with the Nazis without anti-Semitism being a factor, and similar examples can be found in a number of anticolonial movements throughout the British Empire). What is unquestionably true is that from the 1940s on, the Arab media generally, not only those elements of it sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and its descendants, has disgraced itself by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. For Berman, Ramadan’s refusal to put this exterminationist anti-Semitism at the cen-ter of his account of his grandfather, and, worse, his denial of this and most, if not all, of his grandfather’s other racist, gynophobic and Muslim-supremacist views is dispositive.

But is it? Berman himself concedes that Ramadan has condemned Islamism’s vio-lent strain, but in effect insists that this condemnation is not credible because, in Ramadan’s The Roots of the Muslim Renewal, he exculpates his uncle and shifts the blame onto Sayyid Qutb, who became one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood only after al-Banna’s assassination in 1949 at the hands of the Egyptian secret police, or even onto Qutb’s disciples. Berman also remarks in passing that Ramadan’s project is not just to preserve but also to “adapt” his grandfather’s ideas. What Berman refuses to engage with is the possibility that there is more to these ideas than Jew hatred and


Islamist totalitarianism. If that is indeed the case, then Berman is right, but apart from pointing to Ramadan’s whitewashing of his grandfather, Berman offers no real evidence that his subject’s condemnation of terror-ism and anti-Semitism, and his embrace of democratic pluralism in Europe, are simply a smoke screen.

And sanitizing the biographies of great leaders (and, for that matter, great philos-ophers) from the past hardly began with Tariq Ramadan or is restricted to the Mus-lim world. We speak, and correctly so, of adapting Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about global affairs to the present, without be-lieving them to be invalidated—and thus demanding of rejection—because Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist figures in all of American history and is also re-sponsible for initiating some of the more sanguinary U.S. imperial ventures in the Caribbean. In any case, Berman does not really even have the courage of his convic-tions on the matter.

A t the end of a long section in The Flight of the Intellectuals on the fascist influ-

ence on the Islamist cause, al-Banna’s fun-

damental totalitarianism and his friend the mufti’s conspiring with the Nazis to exter-minate the Jews of Palestine in the event that Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps defeated the British in North Africa, Ber-man quotes Surah 4, verse 22, from the Koran of all things, to the effect that “what is past is past.” Ramadan, Berman writes, “is not his grandfather, and Rommel was de-feated, and what are we to think of Rama-dan and the meaning of his doctrines and historical interpretations for our own time?”

Good question. It’s a pity Berman choos-es to ask it almost halfway through his book, on page 126. If he really believes this, he should have begun there. If he doesn’t, he should stop trying to cover his ass. In fact, for all his accusations against Rama-dan, and his endorsement of far more stri-dent ones made by people like Ackermann and Bruckner, Berman actually doesn’t know what he thinks of the man. He ad-mitted as much in a recent panel discus-sion sponsored by Guernica magazine, say-ing that Ramadan “remains something of a cipher or mystery to me. . . . On the one hand, Tariq Ramadan is calling for a peace-ful and liberal and admirable adaptation of the old ideas. And on the other hand, he promotes the worst of violent sheiks.”

That’s it? Endless reading, endless re-search, 299 pages of dense, overheated prose, with its tropism toward “logic chop-ping and Talmudic-style micro-exegesis,” to use Christopher Hitchens’s description in his memoir, Hitch-22, of the intellectual style of the Trotskyism of his youth, and this is the best Berman can do? One weeps for the trees. Hyperbole aside, what is so


ridiculous is that Buruma made precisely the point that it is indeed unclear what Ramadan truly stands for in his New York Times Magazine profile of the man that set Berman off in the first place. What’s more, exactly the same question can be found in the writings of those other Western intellec-tuals, like Garton Ash and George Packer, whom Berman so recklessly and unjustifi-ably accuses of complacency either border-ing on, or spilling over into, cowardice.

The elephant having given birth to a flea, all that Berman really has left is fury over the way in which, as he sees it, Buruma and Garton Ash are more critical of Ayaan Hirsi Ali than of Tariq Ramadan. Buruma’s repeated statements—one of which Berman cites, only to impugn it—that he admires Hirsi Ali “‘and agree[s] with most of what she stands for’” cut no ice with him. Berman knows Buruma was attacking her in Murder in Amsterdam, his book on the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker and critic of Islam, Theo van Gogh, by the Dutch-born Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri (though, again speak-ing of “courage” and the lack of it, Berman shifts responsibility for such a conclusion away from himself and onto Pascal Bruckner and unnamed other people). And Berman also knows that Islamist intimidation and the fear of terrorism are behind the “string of bumbles, gaffes, timidities, slanders, mis-comprehensions and silences” put forward by people like Buruma and Garton Ash in their writings about Islamism.

In Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens sums up the sectarian mind-set as one in which

“if your opponent thought he had identified

your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.” This is Berman’s method to a T. Of course, he has a rather different evaluation of what he has done. In his preface, which begins with Berman dedicating the book to The New Republic’s longtime proprietor, Martin Peretz, and its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, Berman praises their long-stand-ing editorial commitment to complexity. While such a commitment is demonstrably and unquestionably true of Wieseltier, it is, with regard to Islam at least, not one often associated with Peretz, who is on record as having compared the Koran to Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto.1

In any case, it is by no means entirely clear what Berman means by this inscrip-tion. It seems as if he views the term “com-plexity” as synonymous with elaboration, which is part of its meaning but hardly all of it. There is certainly no doubt that Berman is an elaborator of Olympic cali-ber. The nucleus of The Flight of the Intel-lectuals was a twenty-eight-thousand-word essay in The New Republic. Now, in book form, Berman has expanded it to more than three times that length, without saying any-thing in the longer form that deepens or, yes, complicates his argument. Instead, he

For Berman, Ramadan is an extremist—no matter what he says to gullible Westerners like Buruma and Garton Ash.

1 The exact quote is: “I’ve read for my sins the Koran myself, actually two and a half times. Of course, I also studied (and taught) the Communist Manifesto, and I suppose that some of my colleagues even saw in it a tract open to very soft interpretation. There are probably humane readings of Mein Kampf.” You can find it at: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-spine/74998/certified-the-new-york-times.


elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates. Complexity also implies nuance, and unfor-tunately in that sense of the word, to begin reading The Flight of the Intellectuals is to enter a nuance-free zone. Hirsi Ali is the book’s heroine; Ramadan is its principal vil-lain—a liar and a closet fundamentalist. In supporting roles, Buruma and Garton Ash are cowards, while Bruckner, Ackermann, French essayist Alain Finkielkraut and Car-oline Fourest, the author of a swingeing book attacking Ramadan in much the same terms Berman employs, are people of cour-age, people who, unlike most of their coun-terparts, have not sold out because of their fear of Islamist terror or because they are in-tellectually and morally crippled by Western guilt. And qed to you too.

Does Berman, who is now well over sixty, really believe in the credibility from a human standpoint of the story he has told? In its utter lack of ambiguity, does it conform to any adult reality he has experi-enced in his private life? And if not, what makes him assume public motivations and actions can be clear-cut in ways that private ones never are? Was he never assailed by the worry that the reality of the situation he wanted to describe was probably far more complex than the morality play he ended up producing? Only Berman can answer these questions (and since he is famous for replying to any criticism of his work, usu-ally at far greater length than the original commentary, doubtless he will). But it is difficult for me to understand how a writer of his intelligence and experience could hew so resolutely to an account so Manichaean that it would make a Parsi blush. n

A Warrior EthosBy Bing West

David J. Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 272 pp., $15.95.

Ted Morgan, Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War (New York: Random House, 2010), 752 pp., $35.00.

Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 272 pp., $26.95.

W....hile dissimilar in style and ..focus, these three books—a his-tory, a memoir and a theory—

address the core of any insurgency: the re-lationship between a government and its people. Pulitzer Prize–winner Ted Morgan has created a masterpiece of research and insights connecting the front lines of Dien Bien Phu with the politics of the 1954 Ge-neva Conference that marked America’s entry into the Vietnam War. Los Angeles

Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs and combat marine, is the author of The Village (Pocket, 2002), a 485-day chronicle of his Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam. He has made two-dozen extended trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, embedded with more than sixty battalions and written five books about small-unit combat against insurgents.


Times reporter Megan Stack presents a dev-astating collection of personal anecdotes about callous, oppressive male rulers in the culture of the Middle East. David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer, reprises from previous lectures and essays his theory about benign counterinsurgency in support of nation building.

The thirteen thousand defenders at Dien Bien Phu, 185 miles west of

the main French garrison in Hanoi, were supplied only by parachute drops. Their mission was to await the assault of the Vietminh and then destroy General Giap’s forces by overwhelming defensive firepow-er. It was the Valley of Death. Morgan limns the colossal ineptitude of the French generals and colonels who deluded themselves while Giap me-thodically whittled down the defenders using barrages from Chinese-supplied artillery combined with wave attacks by fifty thousand soldiers.

Morgan fought in the French Army in Algiers in 1960 and later became an American citizen. In this book, he applies his skills as a soldier, linguist,

reporter and historian to depict in rivet-ing detail the doomed heroics of French, Algerian, Moroccan, Vietnamese and For-eign Legion soldiers slowly squeezed into submission by six months of shelling and trenches that slithered forward, night after night, like giant tentacles.

In 1941, the Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh (later backed by the Soviet Union and the young People’s Republic of China) had begun to push for liberation from co-lonial France and from Japanese occupa-tion forces that had invaded Indochina. After Japan’s defeat, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent and set up a provi-sional government. France made clear its intention to restore its sovereignty over the

country. Indochina qu ick ly became embroiled in battle after bloody battle between French forces and the revo-lutionaries.

Morgan cleverly shifts his narrative back and forth be-tween the exhaus-tive fighting on the front lines and the political machina-tions among the Soviets, Chinese, French, English and Americans at the Geneva Conference that opened on May 8, 1954, when they tried to restore


peace in Indochina. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower shared a deep be-lief that France should not recolonize Viet-nam after World War II. Only grudgingly did they permit some partial military aid to bolster the French effort. And the Ge-neva agreements, instead of unifying the Southeast Asian region, split the country into a Communist North and a French-supporting South. While Eisenhower was proud that he had kept American ground troops out of Indochina, dividing the pen-insula in two guaranteed a second war. (It was the Chinese fear of more active Ameri-can involvement on the side of the French that led to the partition of Vietnam at Ge-neva, the only way to ensure each party had its own sphere of influence.) Geneva was, Eisenhower said, a “terrible agreement,” but there was “no better plan.” And it was fear of Communism and Chinese influence—the domino theory—that led to the disas-trous American military involvement in the South thereafter.

Giap and Ho Chi Minh never forgave China for preventing a full victory after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The grisly fighting and harsh conditions in captivity claimed the lives of ten thousand defenders.

A half century later, forty-one Americans died in an Afghanistan enclave in the Ko-rengal Valley. Vanity Fair magazine dubbed this too “The Valley of Death.” The title, devoid of historical context, was a solipsistic parody. In Vietnam, egotistic French leaders threw away thousands of lives in a tactically stupid and strategically doomed mission to resurrect colonialism; in Afghanistan, the scale of the battle was far smaller and

American military leaders went to extraor-dinary lengths to protect their soldiers. The consequences of abandoning the outpost in the Korengal were not strategic.

The French in Vietnam were colonial-ists fighting nationalists. The American-led coalition in Afghanistan is aiding the mod-erates in a civil war against tribal Islamic extremists. Yet in both cases, foreign forces cannot prevail; the indigenous people must determine their own form of government.

While the force of nationalism doomed the French effort to reimpose co-

lonialism, people are willing to accept op-pression by their own governments. Based on a decade of reporting for the Los Ange-les Times, Megan Stack has written a jer-emiad against oppressive male rulers, giving the reader vivid, sad tales from Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Every Man in This Village is a Liar occa-sionally explores the metaphysical meaning of life in language that reminds the reader of wine labels: “a bouquet of springtime with a tinge of zest.” When she stays fo-cused on other people, her prose is arrest-ing, and the reader shares her outrage at the everyday humiliations and callousness of the ruling classes in the Middle East.

Undoubtedly the book was cathartic to write. Stack is a brave journalist who fought off lechers and thugs. Her narrative arc be-gins with subjugation, reaches a zenith of subjugation and ends with subjugation. An editor might have suggested adding some glimmers of hope to this dark depiction of the human condition:


The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it. . . . there would be no new Mid-dle East because the old Middle East is still here, and where should it go? Only a country as quixotic, as history-free, as America could come up with this notion: that you can make the old one go away.

In observing and reporting about how women—and men without power—are treated in Afghanistan and the greater Mid-dle East, Stack admirably adheres to the tra-dition of the professional journalist. She cap-tures vignettes of the human condition and lets the reader draw the larger conclusions.

When she talks of her encounters with a prominent Afghan warlord, she shows how pervasive was the deceit and lack of core loyalties in Afghanistan when the Taliban fled in 2002—on both sides. The cia sup-ported one armed faction on a Monday and another on Tuesday; meanwhile, the warlords and tribal leaders alternately allied with and fought one another.

S tack plays Thomas Hobbes to Kilcul-len’s John Locke. Where she presents

no heroes, David Kilcullen exudes a spirit of hope. Where she sees oppression, he sees opportunity. Believing that American sol-diers can quell insurgencies by transforming Islamic countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, he advocates persuading indigenous leaders to forswear corruption, provide the people with services, and thus remove the causes of resentment and rebellion. Although that sentiment certainly accords with the prin-ciple of liberal-democratic governance, it is far less than a truism. Governments from

Saudi Arabia to Venezuela thrive with an iron fist, deep pockets and backroom deals that solidify the regime’s rule and keep the masses thoroughly in check. Corruption does not have to lead to insurgency. Stack provides examples from a half dozen Mid-dle Eastern countries illustrating how en-trenched governments reward corrupt and thuggish behavior that solidifies those in power. Eradicating corruption is not the same as defeating an insurgency.

Yet “unless we take drastic action to coun-ter corruption,” Kilcullen writes, “and create legitimate local government structures that can function in the interests of the popula-tion, there’s little doubt that we are even-tually going to lose.” The paradox is that “we”—the American/European military co-alition—must build a “legitimate” govern-ment, while acknowledging the sovereign independence of the indigenous authority. The difficulty in achieving that balancing act is demonstrated by President Hamid Karzai’s erratic actions—the manipulation of the recent election with a million fraudu-lent votes, his rants against America and refusal to remove corrupt officials, etc. The consequence is that coalition battalion com-manders in Afghanistan spend half their time on civil matters, frequently trying to fire officials appointed by Karzai.

According to Kilcullen, the theory that nation building is synonymous with coun-terinsurgency began in 2006 with a “group of intelligent and combat-experienced ju-nior officers working quietly to change the way that military organizations thought and operated.” At that time, too many U.S. battalions were charging around Iraq in

Counterinsurgency-as-democratic-nation-building is a theory in search of a war for validation.


search of an ephemeral enemy, rousting civilians whose retaliation was aiding the in-surgents. Kilcullen’s “intelligent junior offi-cers” wanted to revise doctrine so that U.S. soldiers would protect rather than harass

the population. Their efforts were codified in Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 (fm 3-24), which defined nation building as a military mission and focused on population protection rather than offensives against the enemy.

But while 45 percent of U.S. Army of-ficers believed that the publication of fm 3-24 had significant influence in chang-ing field operations, only 22 percent of the Marine Corps’s upper ranks concurred. Success in Iraq emanated from Anbar, an area assigned to the marines. There, various

Sunni tribes came over to the strongest tribe of them all—the Americans—and turned against al-Qaeda.

In this now-famous province, there was scant “nation building.” The Sunnis in

Anbar distrusted Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shia who ig-nored local officials and withheld funding. When General David Petraeus took command, his bril-liance lay in building on the momentum already created from the bottom up, eventually paying one hundred thousand Sunni “Sons of Iraq” to protect their local neigh-borhoods. The United States was able to turn the tables because the Sunnis tired of fight-i n g we l l - e q u i p p e d , well-trained and well-informed U.S. armed

forces, not because Iraqi politicians put aside their thievery and selfishness.

In Afghanistan, population protection and nation building have been empha-

sized at the unintended expense of aggres-sive war fighting. The top commander there, General Stanley McChrystal, has is-sued severe restrictions on the use of ar-tillery and air support. While there is an admirable moral aspect to this restraint, the strategic rationale is less clear. If nato so alienates the population by accidentally kill-


ing civilians that many more join the Tal-iban, then why do the Taliban deliberately kill three times as many ordinary Afghans without causing three times the backlash, leading to their defeat?

Kilcullen recommends “putting the well-being of noncombatant civilians ahead of any other consideration, even—in fact, es-pecially—ahead of killing the enemy.” That too is a wise and moral admonition. But don’t expect reciprocity. The Pashtun tribes do not betray the Taliban in their midst. Few are arrested, and even fewer are put behind bars, because the police and judges routinely accept bribes in return for releases. The result is that Afghanistan on a per cap-ita basis holds fewer criminals (insurgents included) in jail than does Sweden.

Based on his infantry experience and training, Kilcullen composes doctrinal es-says; they are meant to provide signposts and general guidance. When he writes pre-scriptions such as “focus on the population . . . and fight the enemy only when he gets in the way,” others take him too liter-ally. In southern Helmand Province, for instance, visiting American officials rou-tinely stroll through markets that were until recently under Taliban control. Yet when U.S. troops in Helmand attacked enemy strongholds far from the marketplaces, they were criticized for violating the doctrine of protecting the population.

Their commander, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, in a conversation with me, responded, “Of course we guard the local markets. But I won’t grant the enemy a sanctuary to decide when to attack those markets. Wherever the Taliban run, I’m

coming after them.” Population protection was reduced to

parody when a British general recently sug-gested awarding medals to soldiers who, concerned about endangering civilians, did not return enemy fire. That attitude, com-bined with investigations and rules stricter than those governing police swat teams in the United States, is eroding the warrior spirit of our soldiers. In a recent survey, only 28 percent of army officers believed their service encouraged risk taking.

Because they are partnered with our troops, Afghan soldiers are copying our rules of engagement and risk-avoidance proce-dures. Since they wear our heavy armor, they too cannot pursue the light and mobile Taliban forces. When the enemy initiates contact, the Afghan soldiers are trained to wait alongside our troops until our attack helicopters force the Taliban to flee. The Afghan soldiers will not be able to fight that way as U.S. resources are reduced. The Af-ghan security forces simply cannot take over the fight anytime soon. By not sending in sufficient troops years ago and by pursuing erratic operational strategies since, the U.S. military has prolonged its central task of training Afghans to defeat the Taliban.

Counterinsurgency-as-democratic-nation-building is a theory in search of a war for validation. It will probably succeed if we maintain a combat force and spend about $50 billion a year for the next five years. The alternative is that Karzai, fearful of American inconstancy, will cut some murky deal with Taliban factions.

If our counterinsurgency doctrine pro-tects the population, at least during the


day, but leaves the enemy intact, how does the war end? An earlier Field Manual on Counterinsurgency Operations (8-2) was published in 1980. It contained core concepts that still apply:

Saturation patrolling to locate and fix insur-gent forces followed by offensive operations to destroy them is the essence of tactical op-erations. . . . Concen-trate on destruction or neutralization of the enemy force, not on terrain.

Without relentlessly killing Taliban war-riors, the coalition cannot shatter the morale of the in-surgents. Without systematic arrests, the Taliban paral-lel government cannot be dismantled. The basic tool for population control is knowing where people live and with which ethnicity they are allied. Yet in eight years, the U.S. military has failed to conduct a census using elementary biometric tools. Every day, un-armed Taliban stroll past American soldiers on patrol. The “protected” Pashtun popula-tion does not reciprocate by betraying their insurgent cousins.

Kilcullen is a stalwart warrior who has

experienced combat. His essays in Coun-terinsurgency are thoughtful and spirited, as befits a scholar whose ideas helped to shape

the 2006 fm 3-24. At the same time, the danger inher-ent in indeterminate counterinsurgency, defined as popula-tion protection and fighting “the enemy only when he gets in the way,” is the un-intended enervation of our own warrior spirit.

The civilianiza-tion of the mili-tary’s tasks can eas-ily degenerate into its pacification. The challenge will be re-taining an aggressive spirit as we pull out. President Obama has promised that the U.S. withdraw-al will begin next

year—well before the mission will be com-plete. In 1970, the willingness of our sol-diers to engage in combat in Vietnam ebbed as we made our exit. General James N. Mattis, head of the U.S. Joint Forces Com-mand, recently wrote, “in such a complex game (as counterinsurgency), we must work extra hard to maintain the warrior ethos.”1 Those are wise words. n

1 Email exchange with the author.


Revisionism on the West BankBy Benny Morris

Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 2010), 336 pp., $32.50.

E fraim Karsh’s title is, of course, iron-ic. For close on a century, Palestin-ians and other Arabs have accused

Britain of “betraying the Arabs” and, par-ticularly, the Arabs of Palestine. In the wake of World War I, the British (“Perfidious Al-bion”), so the charge went, failed to uphold their wartime promises to Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif of Mecca and leader of the anti-Ottoman revolt in Hijaz, regarding Arab self-determination and independence. More specifically, according to this interpreta-tion, in a letter from October 1915, Britain promised Palestine to the Arabs—and then went ahead and gave it, in the Balfour Dec-laration of 1917, to the Jews. The British went on to conquer Palestine and in 1920, to establish a mandatory government that promoted and protected the Zionist enter-prise and suppressed Palestinian Arab na-tionalism, thus paving the way for the coup de grâce of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when

the Jews trounced the Palestinians and es-tablished Israel over 78 percent of Palestine’s landmass, and the Jordanians, with British encouragement, took over almost all the rest (the West Bank).

Karsh, a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London, has a radically different take. Pal-estine Betrayed, a review of the history of the years 1920–1948, is strongly focused on the 1948 war between the Jewish community in Palestine, which declared statehood in May 1948, and the country’s Arab popula-tion and the surrounding Arab states. Karsh charges that both (a) the British betrayed the Jews and ultimately reneged on their commitment to support Jewish statehood, and (b) the Arab leaders, both inside and outside Palestine, betrayed Palestine and the Palestinians—by rejecting the various compromises proposed by the international community and leading them carelessly into both a revolt against the British (1936–1939) and then eight years later into a war against the Jews which resulted in disas-ter for both the Palestinians and the Arab states. Instead of looking after the welfare of the Palestinians, their leaders and the heads of the surrounding countries consigned them to a refugeedom that has persisted for the past six decades.

For the uninitiated, there is something commendable about Palestine Betrayed.

For decades a political scientist who, from armchairs in north Tel Aviv and north London, churned out volume after vol-ume about the geopolitics and strategic concerns of the Middle East (Soviet-Syrian

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His most recent book is One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009).


arms deals, Saddam Hussein’s ambitions, etc.) based mainly on newspaper clippings and conjecture, Karsh has now graduated to historiography based, as it should be, on archives. This change of habit or discipline was apparently precipitated by his now-famous assault in the 1990s on Israel’s revi-sionist “New Historians,” which somewhat preceded his actual descent into the bowels of the contemporary documentation.

Now, instead of merely taking to task this or that New Historian, Karsh has put together a “history” of his own which, by the way, serves also as a full-throated rebut-tal of the Israeli New Historiography of the late 1980s, which tried to show that the Middle East conflict wasn’t a simple struggle between good (Zionists) and evil (Arabs), and that the Zionists and Israel also had a share in bringing about the tragedy of 1948 and the events on either side of that revolutionary year. Prominent among the objects of Karsh’s attacks—let me put the cards on the table, face up—are Avi Shlaim, an Iraqi-born British historian from Oxford University; the explicitly anti-Zionist Ilan Pappé, formerly of Haifa University and now a teacher at Exeter University; and, of course, yours truly.

In Palestine Betrayed, Karsh takes his read-ers back to a pure Manichaean view of the past, but this time with extensive endnotes. Karsh marshals a vast panoply, which refers the reader to documentation in Israeli, Brit-ish and American archives. (Occasionally, he culls also from Arab memoirs and news-papers.) Many readers, I fear, will feel stifled by the sheer weight of dusty memoranda and correspondence, if only because each

of Karsh’s endnotes, with few exceptions, refers to anywhere between five and twenty particular documents. This uncustomary method of piling up the references usually obviates any possibility of identifying the source of any specific quotation carried in the text. Which is very annoying.

But most historians probably won’t both-er to work out these interminable referen-tial puzzles if only because they will have been put off, long before, by the palpable one-sidedness of Karsh’s narrative. All too often it gives off the smell of shop-soiled propaganda. And, let me quickly note, I say this despite the fact that I am in almost complete agreement with Karsh’s political conclusions (which in some way emerge naturally and, I feel, irrefutably from the history) and in some measure with his his-tory as well.

F irst, to the political implications. Put simply, Karsh argues that throughout its

existence, from (the anti-Semitic) Haj Amin al-Husseini through (the devious) Yasser Arafat to (the forthright and murderous) Hamas and (the seemingly benign) Mah-moud Abbas, the Palestinian national move-ment has rejected every offered compromise with Zionism and has demanded all of Pal-estine as its patrimony—and consistently rejected partition and a two-state solution, at base denying the legitimacy of Zionism. This, unfortunately, remains the outlook of the Palestinian leadership today, as its minor branch, the Palestinian Authority or Palestine Liberation Organization (which, let’s recall, lost the general elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Hamas back


in 2006), enters yet another duplicitous round of negotiations with Israel and the United States.

Moreover, the Palestinians were almost consistently supported in their rejection-ism by the rulers of the surrounding Arab states. Even today, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994 respectively, have maintained a “cold” nonbelligerency with the Jewish state and continue to sup-port the “right of return” of the Palestinian refugees. If implemented, such a refugee return would result in short order in Israel’s demise, as President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan surely must realize.

Now, to Karsh’s history. In all such works, much depends on the histo-

rian’s selection of documents and on his judgments about where the burden of proof lies. It is in these that Karsh fails, and fails dismally.

This is what Karsh tells his readers: The Arabs of Palestine were enamored with the Zionist settlers and appreciated their eco-nomic beneficence—but fanatical or jeal-ous or competitive educated Arabs, clerics, Ottoman officials, urban notables incited them to resist the Zionist influx, which they wrongly depicted as minatory. Later, during the Palestine Mandate, British of-ficials struggled against the Zionist aim of Jewish statehood and pumped up Palestin-ian nationalism. In 1948, most Palestin-ians, just as their leaders launched a war of extermination against the Jewish com-munity in Palestine/Israel, continued to

ignore the call of the extremists. (Indeed, Karsh writes, quoting the Palestine Post, “Arabs joined in [Jewish] celebrations [of the un partition vote of November 29, 1947]”—but is this really representative of how the Arabs greeted the partition vote?) But in the end, the masses were sucked into the cycle of belligerency. And the Arabs’ war was supported by the British. What’s more—and this is really the focus of the book—the Palestinian refugee problem was created mainly by the Palestinian lead-ers themselves and by Arab officials who called on the Palestinians to evacuate their homes; Israeli expulsions, and Karsh con-cedes grudgingly that there were a few, had only a marginal effect. Indeed, according to Karsh, up until May 1948—and even beyond—the Zionist leaders continuously pleaded with the Palestinians to stay put and enjoy life in the emergent, democratic, egalitarian State of Israel. Lastly, Karsh ar-gues, at war’s end the Israelis did all they


could to achieve peace, offering conces-sion after concession; they even favored the establishment of a separate Palestinian Arab state. But the Arab leaders would have none of it. And of the most peace minded of them, King Abdullah I of Jordan, Karsh says, “For all his affability, Abdullah was no more accepting of Jewish national aspira-tions than any other Arab leader.”

Of course, there’s some truth in all of this; but, to employ an out-of-use Brit-ish Mandate word, taken as a whole, it is “tosh.”

K arsh’s portrayal of Britain’s role is one-sided and without nuance. The British

government, between 1917 and 1937, sup-ported and protected the Zionist enterprise. In 1938–1939 the Chamberlain govern-ment indeed reneged on this commitment and adopted an appeasing tack toward the Arabs, severely curbing Jewish immigra-tion (just as the Nazis were closing in on Europe’s Jews, who were desperate for a safe haven) and supporting Arab-majority rule over Palestine. But, in the crunch, the British did not vigorously oppose partition (and Jewish statehood) at the United Na-tions in November 1947 (Karsh says, for instance, that then–British Foreign Min-ister Ernest Bevin “fought tooth and nail” against it; but Whitehall instructed its am-bassadors worldwide not to advise their host countries either way, and Britain itself abstained in the crucial ballot). In February 1948, the British supported the planned Jordanian takeover of the area today called the West Bank and cautioned Jordan not to invade the areas designated for Jewish state-

hood (except for the Negev, which Britain appears to have goaded the Jordanians into seizing), and in May of that year, London cut off arms supplies and ammunition to its Arab client states, in line with the un-imposed arms embargo (which Czechoslo-vakia and the Soviet Union, arming Israel, defied).

Karsh suffers from a clear anti-British bias (though he himself, perversely perhaps for such a gung-ho Zionist, moved from Israel to Britain in the 1970s). He calls the British camps in Cyprus where Jewish illegal immi-grants bound for Palestine were incarcerated during 1945–1948 “concentration camps” (“detention camps,” the common usage, is more accurate).

This lack of nuance extends to the Arab side as well. The Arab objectives in

the 1948 war are not entirely clear given the complete absence of access to the Arab states’ archives. To be sure, the Palestin-ians sought to prevent the emergence of a Jewish nation, and the Arab countries would have liked to crush the Jewish state at inception or at least to badly hurt it. And it is quite possible that had either won the war, the result would have been a mas-sive slaughter of Jews. But was “extermina-tion” their war aim, as Karsh would have it? There is no knowing. Indeed, the Arab leaders going to war in 1948 were very sparing in publicly describing their goals and “exterminating” the Jews never figured in their public bombast. I myself in the past have used the one divergent quote, by Arab League Secretary-General Abdul Rah-man Azzam from May 15, 1948, in which


he allegedly spoke of a “war of extermina-tion” and a “momentous massacre” à la the Mongols. But in my recent history of the war, 1948 (Yale University Press, 2008), I refrained from reusing it after discovering that its pedigree is dubious.

On to the refugee issue (and in par-ticular to Karsh’s unrelenting assertion

that the Jews had only the most benign and noble desire to incorporate the Pales-tinians into their new state). Our author continuously quotes Israel’s first prime min-ister, David Ben-Gurion, and other Zion-ist leaders’ peaceful intentions, desires and

policies. For example, there is Ben-Gurion’s statement that “the Arab[s] [in Israel] will enjoy full civic and political equality,” and so on, as if politicians’ public pronounce-ments should necessarily be taken at face

value. Karsh also repeatedly insists that the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem was mainly the result of orders or advice from the Palestinians’ own leaders or out-side Arab officials, not of Jewish military attacks or expulsions. The Jews, he tells us, wanted and asked their Arab neighbors to stay, certainly during the first four to five months of the war. And they were fairly open to an Arab refugee return thereafter.

We see this one-sided take again in Karsh’s quotation of a communiqué issued from the main Jewish militia, the Haganah (which became the Israeli Defense Forces or idf after the founding of Israel), after

the notables of Jaffa signed a surrender accord on May 13, 1948: “We promised the [remaining] resi-dents a peaceful and dignified life . . . this is a matter of honor and [reflects] the hard moral core of our army.” What Karsh fails to tell his readers is that the agreement allowed for the return of the town’s inhabit-ants, a commitment that Israel failed to honor, and that Jaffa’s few remaining Arabs

were for weeks thereafter subjected to a regime of spoliation (houses were confiscat-ed, residents forcibly moved from place to place), vandalism and, on occasion, physi-cal attack, until the Israeli military police


managed to gain full control. There is not a breath of this in Karsh’s book.

At one point, Karsh tells us:

At the request of the Haganah commander-in-chief [sic], Israel Galili, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top Arab-affairs advi-sors, local notables and municipal heads . . . traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their inhabitants to stay put.

A peek at the relevant endnote indicates that Karsh has based this passage solely on the memoirs of former–senior Israeli intel-ligence officer Ezra Danin, A Zionist Under Any Condition (Kidum, 1987). Karsh adds that the Jewish leaders in the town of Ti-berias later that month “famously pleaded” with the Arabs to stay.

Karsh provides no contemporary docu-mentation to support the story and, as far as I know, it is a complete fabrication. And it flies in the face of everything we know about Danin himself, a preeminent Arab-affairs expert, who from March to April 1948 was a leading proponent of expelling (“transfer-ring”) the Arabs. In fact, he was a member of the shadowy three-man “Transfer Com-mittee,” headed by Yosef Weitz, a leading figure in the Jewish National Fund, the Zi-onist movement’s land-holding institution. As to Tiberias, again, there is no contempo-rary document asserting that the Jews plead-ed with the Arabs to stay, and Karsh’s story appears to be based (he doesn’t actually give the reference) solely on the recollections, many years later, of a local Jewish official.

And while there are one or two instances

in which second-tier Jewish leaders actually appealed to the Arabs to stay (most notably Haifa Mayor Shabtai Levy’s appeal on April 22, 1948), by and large—and with very good reason—the Jews of Palestine were happy to see their neighbors depart, neigh-bors that for weeks and months had been shooting at them.

In fact, from June 1948 onward, Israel’s local and national leaderships were firmly opposed to a refugee return (in my view, quite rightly; the returnees would have been a potential or actual fifth column). Karsh’s description of Israel’s position on this issue is highly misleading and propagandistic. He even quotes Ben-Gurion as saying in October 1948 “we will not close the door to them”—when Ben-Gurion is actually on record, time and again during the preceding and following months, saying flatly that he opposed a refugee return.

Again, leaders say different things at dif-ferent times to different audiences—and it is the historian’s task to elucidate when the leader is speaking pro forma and when he is expressing his real views. If this is a test of the historian’s mettle, Karsh crashes in fly-ing colors.

Where he is illuminating and persuasive, even if one senses occasionally that he is beating a dead horse, is on the disintegra-tion of Palestinian society and the incompe-tence and venality of its ruling class. Karsh tells us, for example, that the members of the leading notable families—those who led the Palestinian national movement—including Husseinis and Nashashibis, sold land to the Zionists while they were busy castigating Zionism and all its works. In

Karsh has put together a “history” of his own which is a full-throated rebuttal of Israeli New Historiography.

Prominent among his attacks is yours truly.


describing the first weeks of the 1948 war, Karsh relates the story of Jaffa mayor Yousef Heikal’s efforts to reach a nonbelligeren-cy agreement with neighboring Jewish Tel Aviv, in order to allow the citrus crop to be harvested and exported. But Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader, vetoed this and called for “jihad against the Jews.” The cross-purposes of the national leaders living in exile and their subordinate military bands inside Palestine and the local leader-ships was to seriously weaken the Palestin-ian cause.

The book provides almost no under-standing of the war’s military develop-

ments, strategic considerations or opera-tions, from either side (surely the key mat-ters in most wars). When Karsh nonethe-less strays into the military dimension, he almost invariably gets it wrong. He writes of the last days of the battle of Mishmar Hae-mek, named after the settlement in north-ern Israel which was the target of the initial Arab assault, that:

For the next five days and nights [i.e., April 11–15, 1948] the two sides battled over these sites, with the Jews taking them by night and the Arabs using their numerical and material superiority to regain them the following day; one stronghold was subjected to no fewer than eleven consecutive Arab attacks.

Actually, the last five days were character-ized by the Haganah simply taking one Arab village after another. I have no idea what Karsh’s description refers to or is based on. He ascribes the January 1948 attack

on Kibbutz Kfar Szold, on the border with Syria, to the Arab Liberation Army. Actu-ally, the attack was carried out by the Arab Fa’ur bedouins.

Karsh tells us that the collapse of the Arab community in Tiberias “triggered” flight from the neighboring Arab village of “Nasr al-Din.” Actually, it was the other way around. The Haganah attack and con-quest of Khirbet Nasir al-Din on April 12, 1948, which depopulated the village, helped trigger the flight of Tiberias’s Arabs six days later.

By “the time of the first truce” (i.e., it began on June 11, 1948), Karsh writes, “only one Israeli kibbutz (Mishmar Ha-yarden, near the Sea of Galilee) fell [i.e., had fallen] to the invading [Arab] forces.” This is a gross piece of ignorance; even Karsh should know better. The fall of each settlement was a major trauma for the Yi-shuv (the Jewish community in Palestine), and Mishmar Hayarden—a moshav (a cooperative settlement), not a kibbutz (a collective settlement)—was not alone. A cluster of settlements, most of them kib-butzim, had fallen by then: the four Etzi-on-bloc kibbutzim, Neve Yaakov, Atarot, Kalia and Beit Ha’arava, all taken by the Jordanian Arab Legion; Masada and Sha’ar Hagolan, taken by the Syrians; and Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim, taken by the Egyptians.

And it’s not just the blow-by-blow that Karsh gets wrong. He also confuses the players involved. For instance, he repeatedly calls Israel Galili the Haganah’s “command-er in chief.” He was no such thing. Here is how the hierarchy broke down: Yaakov


Dori was commander in chief, or chief of general staff as it was called. Yigael Yadin, as head of operations, was his deputy and actually ran the show for most of 1947–1948 since Dori was often away sick. Above them was David Ben-Gurion, who held the defense portfolio in the Jewish Agency Executive, which became the Provisional Government of Israel once the country be-came independent. Galili actually held a slot titled “head of the National Staff of the Haganah,” a political function which meant that he served as Ben-Gurion’s assistant or deputy.

The misinformation is endless. Even the geography of Palestine seems be-

yond Karsh’s ken (which is surprising as he did spend some years in Israel). He speaks of “Hartuv kibbutz” (it was a moshava, not a kib-butz) and of “Mish-mar Haemek kib-butz in the western Galilee” (actually it is at the western edge of the Jezreel Valley). Karsh refers to the Arab villages of “Shumali” and “Mansuriya,” and to “Ard Saris, north of Haifa.” None of these actually exist-ed nor exist; neither did “Arab Quz.” (Haganah/idf doc-

uments often misspelled Arab village names and invented some, but the historian’s task is to check.)

Karsh—and in this he strongly resembles his erstwhile bête noire Pappé—has scant respect for facts. He says that the Arabs in the riots of May 1921 killed “ninety” Jews (actually, the Jewish dead numbered forty-seven). He writes of “scores of Jews” massacred by Arabs in Safad in 1929; actu-ally, eighteen were killed, and so on. The list continues.

And on the last point—Abdullah’s re-jection of peace and Israeli statehood—Karsh, enthralled by the black and white, clearly has it wrong. Ben-Gurion himself acknowledged in 1952 that “he [Abdullah] wanted peace with Israel” (if only because

he feared that, in its absence, the Jews would take the West Bank away from him). True, Abdullah wasn’t a Zionist. Before 1948, he was for-ever trying to per-suade the Jews to accept “autonomy,” or as he called it, a “Jewish republic,” within his expand-ed Transjordanian kingdom. But in 1937 he accepted the proposals of the Peel Commission (the British board of inquiry charged


with examining the future of the Palestine Mandate), which provided for the establish-ment of a Jewish state. And in November 1947, Abdullah reached an “agreement” (heskem, to use Israel Foreign Ministry of-ficial Yaakov Shimoni’s phrase) or “an ar-rangement and an understanding” (sidur vehavana, in Golda Meir’s words) with the Jewish Agency to divide Palestine between himself and a Jewish state. He did not suf-fer from the knee-jerk anti-Semitism and opposition to Jewish nationalism that char-acterized most of his fellow leaders. True, his forces occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in May 1948 and fought fierce battles with the Haganah. But they never invaded Israeli territory as earmarked by the un partition resolution of 1947, which divided the British Mandate into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab (save for some reconnaissance patrols in the Negev). And during late 1948–1951, Abdullah negoti-ated with Israel. But his cabinet and people, now mostly Palestinians, held him back. He refrained from taking the plunge—and in 1951 he was assassinated by a Palestin-ian gunman. Karsh writes that in July, after the 1948 war’s first truce, Jordan “joined the renewed pan-Arab attack on Israel.” This is simply untrue. In July, it was the Israelis who attacked, in Lydda, Ramle and Latrun—all within the area of the un-ear-marked Palestinian Arab state. Jordan, after the first four weeks of the war, cleaved to a completely defensive posture and nowhere attacked Israel.

Why Yale University Press (which printed my last two books) published this title is beyond me. n

Klingon as a Second LanguageBy Ammon Shea

Robert McCrum, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 331 pp., $26.95.

F...ew subjects engender such passion-..ate argument and virulent quibbling as the English language. Its use and

misuse have been the cause of beheadings, burnings at the stake, and innumerable bad report cards and tongue lashings over the past thousand years or so. One imagines that all people must feel strongly about their mother tongue, yet we speakers and writers of this glorious polyglot linguistic mess appear to have exceeded all others in the amount of praise we accord to our particular system of communication, and the abuse we heap upon those who we feel employ it poorly.

There are varying estimates as to how many people in the world speak English (anywhere from 700 million to guesses that there are over 2 billion), and yet unless there is some agreement as to what exactly con-stitutes knowing a language (which seems unlikely), it will remain impossible to get a sense of how pernicious our language is.

Ammon Shea is the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages (Perigee Trade, 2009).


But though the exact numbers may be disputed, what cannot be denied is that the English language, like a metastasizing linguistic tumor, has been remarkably suc-cessful in its growth. There have been any number of movements to ban, or at least to limit, its spread. Perhaps the most cel-ebrated example is that of the Académie Française, the group in France charged with the unenviable task of keeping the Gallic language pure and free from such deleteri-ous terms as le big mac. One can hardly fault these immortals in their desire to pre-vent the distortion of their oh-so-venerable language, but their position appears rather risible when they attempt to prevent the use of English words that come originally from French—as was the case when it was rec-ommended that the business term le cash-flow be banned (cash likely comes to Eng-lish from the Middle French casse, meaning “money box”).

Now, the Office québécois de la langue française (oqlf), an organization in Quebec that was formed in 1961 with the objective of preserving its titular language, has been somewhat more effective in pursuing its Gallic goals. Indeed, the oqlf has served as a vigilant guardian of French language and culture in northern North America, which usually involves fining shop owners for not posting signs in French, or forcing busi-nesses that sell to Quebecois to maintain an entirely separate French web site.

The English-language-as-infection is an idea held by so many it is hard to know where to stop recounting the tales of its out-raged linguistic victims. A recent story in the London Daily Telegraph describes the ef-

forts of Huang Youyi, the Chinese chairman of the International Federation of Transla-tors, to ban the use of English words. Youyi even introduced a proposal at the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference demanding that publications avoid using English names for people, places and com-panies—bizarre (and unmanageable), to say the least.

Besides our mother tongue, it is unlikely that any language has ever been the sub-ject of so many encomiums, exhortations, broadsides and legislation. No other lan-guage has ever had so much ink, if not blood, spilled on its behalf. The Moldovans and the Romanians might debate whether the former is a dialect of the latter, or if they are in fact two distinct languages, but the truth of the matter is that very few people (aside from the Moldovans and Romanians) care much either way. And in any event, neither one of these languages is in great danger of spreading so rapidly as to change the rest of the world’s feelings about it. This is not the case with English.

Robert McCrum’s Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s

Language is an attempt to explain how the world came to find itself overrun by our nouns, verbs and adjectives. His success in the endeavor is decidedly mixed.

The problems begin with the title. “Glo-bish” is in fact the name of a form of sim-plified English “created” (I use this term very loosely) by a Frenchman named Jean-Paul Nerrière. And since McCrum’s of-fering is also titled Globish, and since he spends a good deal of the beginning of the


book talking about Nerrière’s language brainchild, it seems reasonable for the reader to imagine that McCrum in-tends his work to be about this very subject. Except that he introduces us to Nerrière, tells us something about Nerrière’s version of Globish, and then proceeds to more or less stop talking about them both for the rest of the book. It is almost as if Nerri-ère and his system of language are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Glo-bish. They serve as a plot device, and are then sent offstage for the rest of the affair.

One of the great drawbacks to some aca-demic writing (particularly that of students) is the author’s habit of taking what always feels like an ungodly amount of time to define the terms that he will be using. Yet for all its tedium, this practice can come in handy—or perhaps it is just that the absence of definitions can be notable. In McCrum’s case, we are faced with the latter problématique (oh, the Gauls would be so pleased). I finished the book with very little idea of what Globish is.

At one point, McCrum, an associate edi-tor at The Observer, describes the concept as “a metaphor for the novelty of global Eng-lish culture today.” Yet Globish is also de-scribed in the ending pages as both “the dia-lect of Generation Y” and as “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium.” For Mc-Crum, Globish also appears to have great fluidity of meaning—even applying itself to Barack Obama’s appeal (“contagious, adapt-able, populist and subversive—in a word, ‘globish’”).

So what on earth is it? According to Nerri-

è re’s web s i te (www.Globish.com) it is a system of lan-guage that allows you to “communicate in English, using only 1500 words,” employing a “simple, but standard grammatical struc-ture” that will ostensibly “provide a tool for leading a conversation in business or as a tourist, anywhere in the world.”

On the Globish site, there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, a multitude of opportunities to make purchases. One can buy such items as a Globish baseball cap (in either beige or black) or a copy of Not Quite Shakespeare (“9 short, fun plays in Globish-level English for English conversation classes”). And of course, the means of learning how to speak Globish are also for sale, including either a one-time-fee e-book, or a month-by-month lesson plan for use on your cellular phone or computer.

I noticed that a large number of the words utilized by Nerrière, or whoever put his web site together, are not included in his list of terms that make up Globish’s vocabulary. The site describes this simplified language in


a way that decidedly hedges its bets, saying that it “is being noted as perhaps the only possibility for true Global talk.” Perhaps it is, and perhaps Moldovan can make a case for having the same possibility.

The idea of bringing about greater peace, understanding and maybe even

improved trade relations through the cre-ation of a universal language is not a new idea. It was particularly popular in the nine-teenth century, which witnessed the birth of world languages like Volapük, devised by a German priest who believed that God had commanded him to create a means of inter-national communication. Alas, the heavenly Father had his own ideas, and Volapük was largely supplanted by Esperanto, yet an-other global tongue. The twentieth century, too, has seen its share of these inorganic creations, with entries such as Klingon, in-spired by the interstellar (and thorough-ly international) adventurers of Star Trek, which has its own core group of adherents who speak and write in it.

Volapük, Esperanto and Klingon are all constructed languages, and as such, lack what is perhaps the most important char-acteristic of Globish—it is at least in some way a natural language. But its organic qualities do not in and of themselves make it revolutionary.

Even the idea that Globish is not a new idea is itself not a new idea; people have been pointing that out ever since it was proclaimed a language. Mark Liberman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founders of the linguistics blog Language Log, has written about the

concept’s long intellectual history on sev-eral occasions. He points out that polymath Charles Kay Ogden also talked about Eng-lish’s prospects as a world tongue—only he did it over eighty years ago.

In the 1920s, Ogden, along with I. A. Richards, a fellow scholar at the University of Cambridge, came up with the idea, vo-cabulary and structure of a simplified form of our language, which came to be known as Basic English. Within an eighteen-week span during the Second World War, Richards was able to teach Chinese sailors enough Basic that they could run a battle-ship commanded by an English speaker. Al-though Basic has had some lasting influence (it served as the basis for Simplified English, a system created and used by the European aerospace industry in the 1980s), it has fallen far short of uniting the world.

And then there is Special English, created in the 1950s for the Voice of America radio broadcasts. It consists of approximately one thousand five hundred words, same as Glo-bish, and also has a simplified grammati-cal structure. It’s clear, then, that there is nothing original about creating a simplified grammar and attaching it to a chopped-down vocabulary of words shoehorned into a monosemous existence.

McCrum writes of how Globish “be-came instrumental in bridging the cultural chasm” brought about by Chinese busi-ness investment in Africa in the twenty-first century, and one would be hard-pressed to argue that this is not in some way true. And he also argues that “‘Globish’—simple, in-elegant, and almost universal—first gained currency” at the end of the twentieth centu-


ry. But one man’s Globish is another man’s pidgin, and pidgin English has been bridg-ing cultural chasms and gaining currency for quite some time now.

There are several outright errors in Glo-bish that should have been caught. The

claim that honkie comes from the Senega-lese Wolof word for “pink” is an etymologi-cal fallacy that has largely been discredited.1 He writes that Globalization took on its current meaning in the 1960s—its first use predates that by a decade or more.

But errors afflict every book, and the ones included here are not so egregious that they should be held against it. Far more worri-some is the amount of arguments that are unsupported, unsupportable or not terribly well thought out. It makes little sense to say that “Anglophile Latin Americans adopted soccer while modernising Japanese took up baseball,” when baseball is so popular in many parts of South and Central America.

Similarly, it becomes far more difficult to accept his pronouncements on language, particularly the language of America, after reading “the catchy inflections of Califor-nia’s ‘Valley girls,’ who pioneered a vocabu-lary and a style of speech that has become universal.” The speech of the “Valley girls” of California may be many things, but I think that universal is not one of them.

He maintains as well that English is “sub-versive.” I must confess that this is a fre-quent hypothesis that mystifies me consid-erably:

English has always had this subversive capacity to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,

to articulate the ideas of both government and opposition, to be the language of ordinary people as well as the language of power and au-thority, rock ‘n’ roll and royal decree.

To be sure, there are a number of in-stances throughout history in which English has indeed been subversive. McCrum does touch on some of these, such as the chapter in England’s history during which translat-ing scripture into the vernacular was pun-ishable by death. And there are a number of points in the twentieth century when Eng-lish was unquestionably subversive, such as those Voice of America shows that were broadcast in Communist countries during the Cold War.

But there also have been many points in history when English was not at all subver-sive. And even though most former colonies of English-speaking rulers retained English as a language, it was unlikely that they did so because they valued its surreptitious na-ture. More so, not all countries did main-tain the language of their former colonizers. David Crystal, in his book English as a Glob-al Language (Cambridge University Press, 2003), writes of how English enjoyed joint status with Swahili as the official languages of Tanzania until 1967, when Swahili was declared the one and only. And in that same year, Malaysia removed English from the co-language position it shared with Malay.

And then there are problematic claims such as “the election of Barack Obama con-

1 See Jesse Sheidlower, “Crying Wolof,” Slate (December 8, 2004) at http://www.slate.com/id/2110811.

What cannot be denied is that the English language, like a metastasizing linguistic tumor,

has been remarkably successful in its growth.


cluded some of the unfinished business of the American Revolution, and also sig-nalled the eloquence of the African-Amer-ican tradition and its global appeal.” Even if we can assume that there was a misprint, and he was referring to the unfinished busi-ness of the Civil War (I was unaware that the American Revolution had unfinished business), there are several issues with this statement. I would certainly not make the argument that the African-American tradi-tion is lacking in eloquence, but McCrum makes no mention of what it might be else-where in this book. And furthermore, there is no evidence to support the idea that this African-American linguistic tradition, whether eloquent or not, is what has global appeal. While it is true that a number of terms that have origins in African-Amer-ican speech have indeed spread quite suc-cessfully across the world, there is a notice-able paucity of them in the one thousand five hundred words of Globish as described by Nerrière.

McCrum makes mention of the elo-quence of Barack Obama on a few occa-sions (“Barack Obama was propelled into the presidency as much by the power of his rhetoric as by his programme”). While I do agree that Obama is a masterful speaker, I must confess that I have always found odd the extent to which we judge our presidents to be eloquent, based as it is on how well they are able to read speeches that other people have written for them. McCrum is certainly not the only one to do this, and I am not faulting him for it. I suppose that as a people we find it preferable to think that our commander in chief is a brilliant fellow

than to say that he knows how to hire fine writers and can read text very convincingly.

But it does seem unfair that the people who actually compose these speeches are so infrequently called eloquent. One indica-tion of the short shrift received by presi-dential speechwriters may be found in the spell-check program of my computer, which acts as a sort of CliffsNotes for Who’s Who—it recognizes Obama but assumes that the name of his speechwriter, (Jonathan) Favreau, is a misspelling of either Favre, Foveae or Foveaux. Similarly, the name of President Harding escapes the clutches of spell-check unscathed, yet when I type Jud-son C. Welliver, who wrote speeches for Harding and Calvin Coolidge (and is gener-ally credited with being the first person to occupy this unheralded position), Microsoft asks if I perhaps meant to write Deliver, Wilier or, my personal favorite, Helldiver. I must admit that, while I think Judson C. Welliver is a very fine name, it does lack the panache and rakish charm of Judson C. Helldiver.

There is useful information to be gleaned from Globish—we speak a lan-

guage that has been assembled, over a thou-sand years, from an enormous quantity of sources the world over. And it is possible McCrum meant for the Globish of his title to be separate from Nerrière’s Globish, and that he intends his book to be more of a representation of its subtitle—How the Eng-lish Language Became the World’s Language. His past works were well received, and in-clude a book on English writer P. G. Wode-house and another on McCrum’s recovery,


at the age of forty-two, from a stroke. He is also the author, with William Cran and Robert MacNeil, of The Story of English (Penguin, 2002), an extremely enjoyable historical examination of the language. And he is at his best when he describes the his-tory of English, tracing its labyrinthian path through the ages.

“Our story begins with a human sacri-fice,” so starts his tale of the English and their language, and it strikes just the right note—promises of mayhem and bloodshed to come. And what follows for much of the book is an excellent and highly readable account of the language’s ancient roots. In particular, the story of the reemergence of English during the Middle Ages is one that is not often told outside of academic writ-ing, and McCrum tells it quite well. Even though the vernacular of English, rather than French, began to be used in govern-mental documents as far back as 1258 (when the Provisions of Oxford, one of England’s first constitutional documents,

were finalized), legislation such as the Con-stitutions of Oxford prevented English translations of religious texts for most of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

We read all about Jonathan Swift and his deeply held hatred for the changes the language underwent during his lifetime, and learn that the English have been com-plaining since at least 1735 about American abuse of their mother tongue. The historic aspects of Globish are handled with a profes-sional flair.

And now some might say that English is returning to those roots. This mag-

nificent and versatile language has taken its stock from both those it has conquered and those who have conquered it, and everyone else it has met over the past thousand years.

We’ve received opossum, papoose and raccoon from the Algonquian; golem, ki-bosh and klutz from the Yiddish. From Turkish we get baklava and jackal, and from Urdu come pajamas and cummerbunds.

English speakers have also ad-opted thousands of words from the French, and now are appar-ently attempting to return some portion of them, albeit slight-ly used (and no doubt, in the view of Francophiles, soiled)—think of that infamous cash flow. Some 70 or 80 percent or our word-hoard is composed of terms from either ancient Greek or Latin. In some cases, we can-not even make up our minds which of these ancient wor-thies we want to borrow from,


and thus create what are known as “mule words,” which mash together bits of each. This is the case with “automobile,” which gets its auto from the Greek and its mobile from the Latin—a purist might well argue that we should all be driving around in ip-somobiles.

There is a common myth that Inuit lan-guages have a preposterously large number

of words for “snow” (they do not). English, on the other hand, has a vast array of words for many things—we are always soaking more similarly defined words into our giant sponge of a language, resulting in delight-ful absurdities. We now have two different words for “taking pleasure in the misfor-tune of others” (epicaricacy from the Greek and schadenfreude from the German). This

penchant for new additions from the stocks of other languages helps explain why the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary lists some 248 various synonyms for “stupid” used over the past thirteen hun-dred years.

Empire and commerce brought the Eng-lish-speaking peoples to the corners of the world, and brought back a vocabulary that

is unrivaled (at least in size) by any of the world’s other six or seven thousand lan-guages.

As rain returns to bodies of water, so too is English returning whence it came. Some might say that it is spreading like a not-so-benign tumor, others feel that it is an export of a great linguistic treasure. No matter which, it is a great story. n


America Under the CaesarsBy Michael Lind

Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 304 pp., $25.00.

I n the waning years of the Vietnam War, leftist and liberal opponents of the Cold War discovered that they

shared much in common with the critics of these policies on the libertarian or tradi-tionalist right. The result was a rebirth of a current of thinking about American foreign policy that is usually labeled isolationism but which, out of deference to members of this school who reject such a term as per-haps far too loaded, I shall instead describe as “anti-interventionism.”

This is a tradition that has long dominat-ed American politics, and one that can find its heartland in the small-town America of the Midwest. In fact, its political eclipse lasted for a very short period of time in-deed—from the selection of Dwight D. Eisenhower over Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft for president by the Republican Party in 1952 to the Democratic Party’s nomina-tion in 1972 of George McGovern, with

his slogan “Come Home, America.” Taft and McGovern were both products of the Midwest, which along with much of New England had been the center of opposition to U.S. participation in both world wars and the battle with the Soviet Union. The supporters of these conflicts were dispropor-tionately found in the South and Southwest and among the Atlanticist financial and commercial elites of the northeastern cities. During the Cold War, the former diplomat George Kennan and the scholar William Appleman Williams argued for drastically reducing America’s military interventions and foreign commitments, as the influential historian and Indiana native Charles Beard had done in the 1930s and 1940s. Kennan and Williams, too, were products of the Midwest. Williams was an Iowan; Kennan hailed from Wisconsin and wrote elegantly about his pioneer roots. Whether they were on the left or right, all of these thinkers la-mented the passing of pastoral, small-town Middle America and blamed social change in part on the effects of what they saw as American imperialism.

According to these men, the United States was once a country with a public-spirited, frugal citizenry and a limited gov-ernment that abstained from aggression abroad. Then, at some point, the Republic was betrayed by elites who steered the Unit-ed States on the course to perpetual empire and war. It is a narrative whose origins lie in a parallel between the United States and an-cient Rome, which lost its republican gov-ernment and became an autocratic empire under the Caesars.

Anti-interventionists do not agree on the

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of The American Way of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2008).


exact moment when the American Repub-lic gave way to the American empire. For some, the transition came with the rise of the Cold War “national-security state” dur-ing the administration of Harry Truman. For others, it was William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt’s “splendid little war” against Spain in 1898.

Nor is there universal agreement among anti-interventionists as to the motives of those who turned the Republic into an empire. For Williams, it was the desire of American mass-production industries to obtain foreign markets through a global Open Door economic policy. For Beard, it was the lust for power on the part of politi-cians like Franklin Roosevelt, whom Beard detested and accused of knowing about Pearl Harbor in advance (an accusation only slightly less deranged than the claim of “truthers” that 9/11 was staged by the U.S. government).

Yet whatever their differences, members of this school share the hope that a repu-diation of most or all U.S. foreign-policy commitments and a dramatic reduction in armed forces can make possible a restora-tion of something like the idealized, small-town America of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Midwest.

In recent years, this venerable American tradition has found its most eloquent

and influential champion in Andrew Bacev-ich. Now a professor of international re-lations and history at Boston University, Bacevich served in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, retiring from the army with the rank of colonel. Although he is a traditionalist

conservative, or “paleoconservative,” Bacev-ich has found his audience chiefly on the liberal left, where he has filled the role of Kennan, another conservative and former insider whose views seemed to validate the Left’s critique of U.S. foreign policy.

In a number of books and articles, Bacev-ich has sought to revive the anti-interven-tionist approach. He has written sympa-thetically about Beard and wrote an intro-duction to a reprint of a book by Williams. He has also authored a series of polemics criticizing contemporary U.S. foreign pol-icy, including The New American Milita-rism (Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Limits of Power (Metropolitan Books, 2008). Washington Rules is the latest salvo in this campaign.

Bacevich claims that the foreign policy of both parties is determined by four “Wash-ington rules.” According to him, “Every president since Harry Truman has faith-fully subscribed to these four assertions and Obama is no exception.”

The rules are as follows:

First, the world must be organized (or shaped). . . . Second, only the United States possesses the capacity to prescribe and enforce such a global order. . . . Third, America’s writ includes the charge of articulating the principles that should define the international order. . . . Finally, a few rogues and recalcitrants aside, everyone under-stands and accepts this reality.

Bacevich declares:

Mainstream Republicans and mainstream Democrats are equally devoted to this cate-


chism of American statecraft. Little empirical evidence exists to demonstrate its validity, but no matter: When it comes to matters of faith, proof is unnecessary.

The Washington rules have condemned im-perial America to perpetual “semiwar.”

This new offering portrays Bacevich’s in-creasing alienation from the U.S. foreign-policy consensus in terms of a narrative of awakening and repentance: “In measured doses, mortification cleanses the soul. It’s the perfect antidote for excessive self-re-gard.” His doubts about U.S. foreign policy began, he writes, when he visited the former Communist state of East Germany and discovered it to be run-down and impover-ished. He took this, not as proof that the West’s superior system had prevailed over that of the Soviets, but as evidence that the Cold War threat had been exaggerated or nonexistent.

Like others in the tradition in which he writes, Bacevich views disasters like Viet-nam and Iraq as the all-but-inevitable re-sults of the hubris of America’s postrepub-lican empire builders. “George W. Bush’s decision to launch Operation Iraqi Free-dom in 2003 pushed [Bacevich] fully into opposition” to what he saw as a growing American willingness to adopt an aggres-sive posture across the world. Bacevich’s son Andrew, an army first lieutenant, was killed in Iraq.

In the same vein as Bacevich’s other recent books, Washington Rules is a polemic,

not a dissertation, and should be judged by the standards of its genre. But even as such,

Washington Rules will not persuade those who do not belong to the choir to whom Bacevich is preaching.

Bacevich recycles many of the references used by other anti-interventionist authors. Once again, we read that publishing mag-nate Henry Luce proclaimed the Ameri-can Century. Once again, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American is cited as evidence of the folly of American diplomacy in Vietnam, or elsewhere.

Bacevich also parades the familiar anti-in-terventionist pantheon, ranging from John Quincy Adams’s opposition to the Mexican-American War, through Dwight D. Eisen-hower with his warning about the “military-industrial complex,” all the way to Vietnam War critics Martin Luther King Jr., William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield. Other than providing quotes that could be taken out of context and used as proof texts by later generations of anti-interventionist polem-ics, these figures have little in common—Adams, for example, may have opposed the Mexican War, but he favored the Ameri-can acquisition of Cuba and the Pacific Northwest, and Fulbright was a reactionary segregationist, unlike his fellow Vietnam War critic King. Eisenhower supported the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, a point never mentioned by the anti-interventionists who quote him about the military-industrial complex.

Like the isolationists of the 1930s and early 1940s who quoted George Washing-ton’s warning against “entangling alliances” in his Farewell Address, Bacevich tries to enlist Washington as a patron saint of the anti-interventionist school:

Bacevich claims that the foreign policy of both parties is determined by four “Washington rules” that have

condemned imperial America to perpetual “semiwar.”


Americans once believed—or at least purported to believe—that citizenship carried with it a responsibility to contribute to the country’s defense. In his “Sentiments on a Peace Estab-lishment,” written in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, George Wash-ington offered the classic formulation of this proposition. “It may be laid down, as a primary position, and the basis of our system,” the gen-eral wrote, “that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defense of it.” Out of this proposal came the tradition of the citizen-soldier, the warrior who filled the ranks of citi-zen armies raised for every major war fought by the United States until that system foundered in Vietnam.

Turning George Washington, rather than Thomas Jefferson, into the champion of citizen militias does violence to history. In reality, Washington, like his wartime aide and later political ally Alexander Hamilton, was so appalled by the performance of state militias during the War of Independence that he supported a large and well-equipped standing army. At the Constitutional Con-vention, George Washington allegedly in-spired Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to mock a proposal that the constitution limit the regular army to several thousand men by asking whether invading foreign armies would agree to the same limitation. And Washington was far from a Middle Ameri-can populist. He ruthlessly kicked squat-ters off the vast acreage that he owned as a speculator in the future Midwest, and when frontier farmers rose up against excise

taxes in the Whiskey Rebellion, the wealthy, slave-owning president mounted the saddle and led the U.S. Army to intimidate them into submission. Indeed, late in life, Wil-liam Appleman Williams, one of the prede-cessors whom Bacevich so admires, came to believe that the adoption of the Constitu-tion had set the United States on the course to imperial aggrandizement. Washington was as much a power-mongering imperialist for Williams as fdr was for Beard.

B acevich’s rhetorical technique here re-sembles that found in similar works by

linguist Noam Chomsky, the late historian Howard Zinn, and their imitators on the anti-military left and the anti-intervention-ist right. The heroes in Bacevich’s narrative include Midwesterners who see through the pretensions of the conceited East Coast elite. For example, Bacevich writes the fol-lowing about former–Marine Corps Com-mandant David Shoup, who criticized the Vietnam War:

Like Fulbright, David Shoup was a son of the Middle Border, born and raised in Indiana and carrying to Washington a wariness of East Coast elites. . . . In a speech to a gathering of students in Los Angeles on May 14, 1966, the former marine revealed his own populist inclinations, targeting what he saw as the bogus rendering of U.S. history that Americans had been conditioned to accept. In surveying the landscape of the past, Shoup saw mostly lies.

One senses a self-portrait in this descrip-tion.

When it comes to those with whom he


disagrees, the mock-ing of major figures in U.S. foreign policy following World War II, whether liberal or conservative, Demo-cratic or Republican, that goes on in Wash-ington Rules seems mean-spirited after a while.

A few examples will have to stand in for many others. cia Director Allen Dull-es was “the great white case officer.” One imagines Bacevich’s audience of populists and leftists hissing at his frequent cues: “A cool, urbane, Princeton-educated patri-cian. . . . Breeding and education seem-ingly fitted Dulles for his sensitive post. If the United States was going to dirty its hands in the spy business, at least there was a gentleman in charge.” One American policy maker after another suffers from denigration-by-description. General David Petraeus:

Petraeus was a gifted officer, identified early in his career as someone meant for big things. Among his most prominent gifts were those of a courtier: The young Petraeus displayed a considerable talent for cultivating influential figures, both in and out of uniform, who might prove useful in advancing his own prospects. And he was nothing if not smart.

Now and then Bacevich uses the cartoon-ist’s art to draw caricatures of U.S. foreign-

policy makers as a group. “Beginning with Franklin Roos-evelt , every U.S. president had insisted that at the far side of America’s resistance to total itarianism world peace awaited. The reward for exer-tions today was to be a reduced need for exertions on the morrow.” Bacevich expects his audience

to nod in agreement at the folly of Roos-evelt and his successors, but a critical reader might ask: if that was really their belief, weren’t they correct? After all, the defeat of Nazi Germany allowed the United States to rapidly demobilize up until the Korean War, and the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union allowed Washington and its allies to dramatically draw down their troop num-bers and military spending. Indeed, Bacev-ich’s constant editorializing and sarcasm are used to point the reader to a conclusion that the factual narrative itself does not nec-essarily support.

Nowhere is this more true than in Bacevich’s treatment of the Cold War,

which echoes the polemical literature of the anti-interventionist Left between the 1960s and the 1980s. Those works sought to make U.S. policy toward Korea, Indochina, Cuba and Latin America appear ludicrous and irrational, by insisting that these con-flicts were not what they in fact were—


proxy wars in great-power struggles—but unprovoked attacks by a bullying super-power on small countries whose regimes were really independent of Moscow and Beijing. Much of that writing has been dis-credited since the end of the Cold War, by the partial publication of Soviet archives, which shed light on the workings of other regimes, and the controlled releases of ma-terial by China, North Korea and Vietnam. All tell a far more complicated story than the simple tale of unprovoked American aggression.

Scholars are still sorting through the reams of new information, but already the material has transformed our understanding of the Cold War. For example, during that struggle many American historians claimed that North Korea’s invasion of the South caught Stalin and Mao by surprise. We now know that Stalin and Kim Il Sung arranged the attack and consulted with Mao in ad-vance. We have learned that Soviet pilots took part in air combat with their American counterparts in the skies above Korea, while hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops were stationed in North Vietnam during the mid-1960s, running the North’s infra-structure, manning antiaircraft defenses and enabling North Vietnamese regulars to infil-trate South Vietnam.

One could still make an argument against the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as America’s anti-Castro policy. But even a critic of American foreign policy, in a book on the subject published in 2010, ought to cite some of the voluminous scholarship about the Cold War from the other side that has been published since

1989. Instead, there is not a single refer-ence in Bacevich’s book to this growing body of work.

This demonstrates one of the funda-mental weaknesses of the type of for-

eign-policy thinking which Bacevich has embraced and seeks to revitalize. Its basic article of faith is that since the 1940s or the 1890s (if not the 1790s), U.S. policy makers have invented nonexistent threats or exaggerated real threats in order to justify military buildups and military interventions which, in fact, serve other purposes: open-ing foreign markets, winning elections for hawkish politicians, or padding the resumes of careerist diplomats and soldiers. In order to make that case, however, an anti-inter-ventionist historian must demonstrate—using evidence from the other side, not just from the United States—that Washington’s enemies were never threats at all, except in the imaginations of American policy mak-ers. Simple assertion is not enough.

In the great-power struggles of the twentieth century, America was joined by other great-power allies. Russia, Britain and France fought with the United States against Germany twice, and when the Cold War ended, Washington was formally al-lied with the major European powers and Japan, and informally with the People’s Re-public of China. French President François Mitterrand, a socialist, flew to Bonn to persuade the West German Bundestag to allow the installation of U.S. missiles. If leaders in Washington invented or exagger-ated the threats from Germany and the So-viet Union, were leaders in London, Paris,


Moscow, Bonn, Tokyo and Beijing equally foolish or equally hypocritical, all at the same time? Were America’s allies colluding with Washington to pretend that there were threats to their shared interests when none in fact existed? An older generation of anti-interventionists proposed a solution to this problem: gullible Americans were tricked into fighting on behalf of the British Em-pire in two world wars and the Cold War, with the help of Anglophiles (and, in some versions, Jews) on the East Coast. Bacevich

does not propound such conspiracy theo-ries, but absent some sort of international elite collusion, it is difficult to understand why a number of great powers would en-gage in hot or cold war together against an-other great power or great powers. Unless, of course, the threats were real.

A different problem weakens Bacevich’s arguments against our most recent for-

ays into Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-inter-ventionists always proclaim that not only are the threats themselves ephemeral but also the military spending required to fight them will inevitably lead to our downfall. It is one thing to oppose the Iraq War and the escalation of the Afghan war because they are unnecessary conflicts that have inflicted needless suffering on the people of those countries, as well as American soldiers and

their families—a view I share. It is quite an-other to claim that the United States cannot afford them. Bacevich argues that America’s perpetual “semiwar” policy is on the verge of bankrupting the country. According to Bacevich, “Promising prosperity and peace, the Washington rules are propelling the


United States toward insolvency and per-petual war.” He points to the national debt and deficits:

A study by the nonpartisan Congressional Bud-get Office forecast trillion-dollar deficits for the next decade. Based on that analysis, by 2019 the total size of the national debt is likely to surpass $21 trillion, an amount substantially greater than the nation’s gdp.

But relatively little of that red ink is the result of military spending, even on two simultaneous wars. The chief short-term cause is the collapse of government rev-enues, as a result of the global economic cri-sis. Long-term budget shortfalls are caused partly by the Bush tax cuts and partly by the escalating costs of Medicare, which are driven by industry-wide medical-cost infla-tion in the United States. If America were to adopt measures to ensure that its citizens

pay no more for doctors, hospitals or drugs than those in other industrial democracies, then projected deficits will shrink dramati-cally. Certainly, if medical costs are not con-tained, the U.S. economy will be wrecked, even if the United States radically downsizes the military.

A s a passionate and articulate exponent of the American anti-interventionist

tradition, Bacevich is a worthy successor to Kennan, Williams and Beard. But that tradition is not convincing, either in its portrayal of American foreign policy as an avoidable decline from republic to empire, or its assumption that America’s economic and social problems would be significant-ly different if the United States adopted a minimalist defense strategy. It is not enough to offer an alternative to America’s foreign-policy orthodoxy. The alternative must be plausible. n

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