pragmatism

Pragmatism - Consider consequences of acting on a belief – beliefs are adapted to a particular context. This in contrast to believing that eternal ideas work everywhere for an idealist.

Knowledge is social for pragmatism. It was heavily influenced by science – which is an open dialog. They were also influenced by the emerging science of statistics. Many truths turned out to be probabilities, not certainties.

The Group By Alan Ryan The Metaphysical Club Louis Menand (from New York Review Books - edited)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pp., $27.00

Pragmatism was in part a reaction to the Civil War as it was experienced by the young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and by his teachers, friends, and intellectual antagonists in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge. The "problem," to which the philosophy of pragmatism seemed eventually to supply a solution, was the problem of conviction. The idea that the nineteenth century was the century of a crisis of faith is familiar enough. Yet pragmatism was a solution to a somewhat different crisis of faith. It was not the loss of conviction but a surfeit of it that pragmatism addressed. In Menand's account of the thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, pragmatism aimed to wean us off religious and ideological convictions—convictions of which the social, political, and moral beliefs of most people are subspecies. The problem of belief to which pragmatism provided an answer was not the familiar Victorian problem of a loss of faith, but the problem of an excess of faith.

John Maynard Keynes memorably expressed his anxiety about the malign impact of ideology when he wrote, "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." Holmes would have agreed, save that it was not so much academic scribblers that he had in mind as the abolitionists whose passionate desire to see an end to slavery had finally provoked the Civil War that killed many of his closest friends, all but cost him his life, and took from him every vestige of a faith in fixed principles for whose sake we might feel duty-bound to get ourselves killed.

The problem, then, might be expressed as that of discovering some way in which we can be in command of our ideas rather than vice versa. The goal is to think clearly, and without illusions—not that we should be disillusioned, since that is the substitution of one obsession for another, but that we should understand how thinking organisms come to have the ideas they do, and should learn to live with that knowledge. Another way of making the point, and one that Menand himself employs, is to observe

that what these four thinkers [Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey] had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea —an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.

In Menand's view, the pragmatists achieved the emancipation of our thinking from outdated straitjackets by an insistence on the social and collective quality of thought:

They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and un-reproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the status quo or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it—was the essence of what they taught.

…………….. If we are to believe that ideas really are the instruments with which we confront the demands of the environment, we should see thinkers thinking in order to understand the ideas being thought. If history is philosophy teaching by examples, the history of pragmatism is—at any rate in part—the biography of an exemplary group of energetic, public-spirited, high-minded, and confident thinkers who felt they owed a duty to themselves and the world at large to rethink their relationship to their environment.

………. The reality of the war had taught him (Holmes) unwelcome lessons about the consequences of big ideas, and the near cynicism with which he later approached even his work on the Supreme Court reflected his determination that he would never again be the victim of large and dangerous certainties.

…………….. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a Unionist, and deeply hostile to the abolitionists; the abolitionist contempt for the preservation of the Union struck him as only slightly less wicked than outright treason would have been. The abolitionists were as difficult to deal with as any group consumed by moral fervor.

The young Holmes became an abolitionist as the result of an intoxication with Emerson

……... he went to war. He was almost killed in his first battle, at Ball's Bluff in October 1861, when a ball struck him above the heart; he was wounded in the neck at Antietam, missed Fredericksburg because he narrowly escaped death from dysentery while the battle was on, and was then shot in the foot in May 1863. Although he was a staff officer when he returned to duty in January 1864, he then took part in the ghastly, grinding campaign in which Grant slowly destroyed Lee's Confederate forces. With hindsight, that campaign seems to be a dress rehearsal for the horrors of World War I, and Holmes loathed the experience.

Although he had thoroughly lost his faith in the easy controllability of events, Holmes did not lose his faith in the professional skills of soldiers— and, in due course, the professional skills of lawyers. It was large statements of moral principle that he had come to despise, with their accompanying willingness to send other people off to get killed for the sake of their implementation. The professional who thinks as far as required for the sake of what has to be done next became a model for a serious approach to the world. It was, in fact, one of the standing concerns of pragmatism to defend professional expertise against philosophical hot air. (Many generals – Shinseki, Zini, etc, Navy and Army War colleges were amng those ignored or purged by the Bush43 true believers who “could not imagine” that their views were not true) Plumbers, mechanics, laboratory scientists had ways of arriving at reliable information about the way things work and the way they go wrong, but philosophers worrying about the materiality of mind or the ideality of matter were wasting their time. Critics of pragmatism have always complained that pragmatists don't take truth seriously, but this has always been wrong. Pragmatists have never impugned the scientist's search for experimental truth, or the novelist's search for psychological truth. The only intellectual discipline they attacked was their own, philosophy; and what they attacked was the pretension of philosophy to stand in judgment over whatever else humankind was thinking and why. …….The world to which Holmes returned was not only wracked by uncertainty whether the cost of the Civil War in lives and money was remotely worth paying, but unsettled by the impact of science on old certainties, especially the impact of Darwinian evolution.

………………By 1865, Agassiz exemplified something other than the easy hypocrisy of someone who deplored miscegenation but enjoyed the sexual attractiveness of mulatto girls; he also exemplified an extinct form of science. Darwin's account of evolution rested on statistical evidence, and appealed to the sheer improbability of any mechanism other than evolutionary pressure accounting for the various kinds of flora and fauna that collectors in the field came up with. Agassiz stuck doggedly to his belief that species first existed as ideas in the mind of God …..

What the pragmatists concurred in was that however things turned out ultimately, human thinking had two crucial properties. One was that it was social rather than individual, and the other that we carve up reality as we need to, not in some fashion that reality itself simply dictates to us.

(end of article)

a case study to illustrate the pragmatic approach to a current problem often discussed in terms of moral absolutes:

Abortion – is in some views a moral absolute.
Either (A) the absolute right of a woman to control her body
or (B) the absolute certainty that the definition of "life" starts with one cell - so any abortion is murdering a "baby". This level of certainty (B) is facilitated by the visceral impact of pictures of bloody babies.
Certainty (A) comes from believing women are free individuals and that the state or family should not tell she and her doctor that their absolute moral rules apply to her.
Pragmatists would look at her particular circumstances -andprobably trust thejudgment of herandher doctor who are close to the situation.

Laws against abortion can satisfy the moral urges of prohibitionists (as in other moral imperatives imposed on other humans – alcohol, drugs, etc). Historically, in the real world most women decide how many babies to have based on whether they believe they can support the babies – food, jobs, health care.

Pragmatically - Abortion laws in history have not generally reduced the overall frequency of abortions – they have just killed many women by making them less safe..

The book The Pill chronicles similar effects when birth control information was illegal. Starving children, miserable families and lots of dead women.

Pragmatic consequences of laws making abortions illegal:

In many countries, a large proportion of maternal deaths is due to illegal or clandestine abortion: Ethiopia— 54%; Argentina— 35%; Chile— 36%; Zimbabwe— 28%. The estimated number of women worldwide who die from clandestine abortion ranges from less than 100,000 to as many as 200,000 women a year. Most clandestine abortions are performed by non-professionals or are self-induced. And for every woman who dies from an illegal abortion, many more suffer serious (and often lifelong) health problems— among them haemorrhaging, infection, abdominal or intestinal perforations, kidney failure, and infertility.

The abortion need in Western Europe is about five to 10 times lower than in Central and Eastern Europe (which include the former Communist bloc countries). This pattern results from more efficient use of contraceptives among married couples. In Central and Eastern Europe, the contraceptives used by both the married and the unmarried are often of poor quality.

In Denmark, contraceptive services are free and universally available, even to teenagers, resulting in a dramatic drop in teen abortion rates. Pregnancy rates among Danish teenagers are now less than half those in the United States.

A leading Conservative Southern Baptist questions the veracity of the GOP and "Culture

of Life" issues:

Pro-life? Look at the fruits

by Dr. Glen Harold Stassen

I am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis. I am consistently pro-life. My son David is one witness. For my family, "pro-life" is personal. My wife caught rubella in the eighth week of her pregnancy. We decided not to terminate, to love and raise our baby. David is

legally blind and severely handicapped; he also is a blessing to us and to the world.

I look at the fruits of political policies more than words. I analyzed the data on abortion during the George W. Bush presidency. There is no single source for this information - federal reports go only to 2000, and many states do not report - but I found enough data to identify trends. My findings are counterintuitive and disturbing.

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation's abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade.(Clinton years)

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

Three states have posted multi-year statistics through 2003, and abortion rates have risen in all three: Kentucky's increased by 3.2% from 2000 to 2003. Michigan's increased by 11.3% from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania's increased by 1.9% from 1999 to 2002. I found 13 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6% average increase), and five saw a decrease (4.3% average decrease). Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

How could this be? I see three contributing factors:

First, two thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Web site). In the past three years, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed. Child poverty fell about 4 million during the Clinton years – and increased over a million under Bush43 - a few million under Reagan.

Second, half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). Men who are jobless usually do not marry. Only three of the 16 states had more marriages in 2002 than in 2001, and in those states abortion rates decreased. In the 16 states overall, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises. Minority unemployment record low during Clinton – huge rise under Bush

Third, women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency - with women of childbearing age over-represented in those 5.2 million - abortion increases.

The U.S. Catholic Bishops warned of this likely outcome if support for families with children was cut back. My wife and I know - as does my son David - that doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical insurance, special schooling, and parental employment are crucial for a special child. Every mother, father, and child needs public and family support.

What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need policies that provide jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers.

(Glen Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the co-author of Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, Christianity Today's Book of the Year in theology or ethics.)

In Texas Bush43 had less medical coverage for kids than any other state. A big cut in oil taxes left not enuf $ for CHIPs program which provided health care for kids.

environmental collapse

ARED DIAMOND likes his subjects big. His best-known book, “Guns, Germs and Steel”, was in some editions subtitled “A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years”. This was no conventional history; rather, the author tried to explain the environmental factors behind the rise of various human civilisations. It was a terrific read and full of surprising subplots, such as why some animals can be domesticated and others cannot, and why agriculture spread to some societies but not others.

Now Mr Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, attempts to tackle the opposite question, that is, why some societies collapse. Again, he focuses on long-term environmental factors rather than on short-term political ones. Since Mr Diamond is a restless traveller, a ravenous researcher and a sparky writer, the result is gripping.

Among the collapses, he describes the civilisation of Easter Island three centuries ago, whose fall, he argues convincingly, was caused largely by deforestation. Transporting and erecting those extraordinary stone statues required a lot of wood. The early Easter Islanders also used wood to cook their food, cremate their dead and build large canoes. As the population grew, they cut down the big trees.

The ecosystem was wrecked. The soil was rendered infertile, and, with no big logs left with which to build seaworthy craft, the islanders had no means of escape. They could not even paddle far enough out to catch porpoises, which had been a chief source of protein. They ate their land birds to extinction and then they starved. Wars erupted, in which the victors ate the vanquished. A popular insult at the time, apparently, was: “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.”

Jefferson's Religion and thoughts on slavery

Jefferson’s “Religion” Often portrayed as anti-religious, Jefferson didn’t like organized religions but admired Christ a lot. The American “mainline” religion we will be studying later – was like Jefferson’s in many ways. Jefferson and the “mainliners” generally believe in science so do not like the rigidity of Biblical literalists or Fundamentalists. They (quote below) did not approve of public “inquisition” into the details of belief. European history provided Jefferson with many examples of problems with established churches and fights over details of doctrine.

Among recent figures who were relatively “mainline” are Bush41 and Dwight Eisenhower. The “mainline” believes in science like Jefferson. They keep details of their beliefs private. Ike said he preferred leaders who were religious but didn’t care which religion. Bush41 was a Planned Parenthood supporter uncomfortable with public religious posturing. The religious right was never convinced of his ardor for their causes

The “mainline” contrasts strongly with “Fundamentalists” who generally give absolute literal credence to the whole Bible including the Old Testament, and evangelicals who strongly approve of public proclamations of belief and attempts to convert others.

The Old Testament spirit seemed to Jefferson very different from what Christ said as the quotes below suggest.

“…their (Jews) idea of him (God) and his attributes were degrading and injurious” … “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he claimed no other. ……. I am moreover averse to the communication of my religious tenets to the public; because it would countenance the presumption of those who have endeavored to draw them before that tribunal, and to seduce public opinion to erect itself into that inquisition over the rights of conscience, which the laws have so justly proscribed. ……. His moral doctrines, relating to kindred and friends, were more pure and perfect than those of the most correct of the philosophers, and greatly more so than those of the Jews; and they went far beyond both in inculcating universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind, gathering all into one family under the bonds of love, peace common wants and common aids. A development of this head will evince the particular superiority of the system of Jesus over all others” “He taught, emphatically, the doctrines of a future state, which was either doubted or disbelieved by the Jews; and wielded it with efficacy, as an important incentive, supplementary to the other motives to moral conduct . (letter to Benjamin Rush April 21, 1803)

(Jefferson was very concerned that the poor would be oppressed by the rich who grabbed government power. Scriptures have 3000 references to poverty)

(the government) “…. shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor …..” Letter to Colonel Carrington January 16, 1787

Jesus’ 6 commandments (below) – don’t include rules Jefferson thought of as superstitious. He emphasized concern for the poor and the problem of rich people who were not charitable. Jesus and Jefferson could strongly embrace Jewish concern for the poor and disadvantaged however. The family should not suffer for the sins of the father. The Jews had jubilee year when the poor got (in theory) their land back from the rich who had foreclosed on them. Jefferson wants revolt and blood if the rich take over and oppress the poor too much - “liberty fertilized by the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Quotes from Christ suggest why Jefferson would admire him.

Matthew 19 (New King James Version)

¹ Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these sayings, that He departed from Galilee and came to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan. ²And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there. ³The Pharisees also came to Him, testing Him, and saying to Him, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason?" ⁴And He answered and said to them, "Have you not read that He who made^[a] them at the beginning "made them male and female,'^{[b] 5}and said, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?^{[c] 6}So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate." ⁷They said to Him, "Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?" ⁸He said to them, "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. ⁹And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality,^[d] and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery." ¹⁰His disciples said to Him, "If such is the case of the man with his wife, it is better not to marry." ¹¹But He said to them, "All cannot accept this saying, but only those to whom it has been given: ¹²For there are eunuchs who were born thus from their mother's womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He who is able to accept it, let him accept it."

Then little children were brought to Him that He might put His hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked them. ¹⁴But Jesus said, "Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." ¹⁵And He laid His hands on them and departed from there.

¹⁶Now behold, one came and said to Him, "Good Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?" ¹⁷So He said to him, "Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.^[g] But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments." ¹⁸He said to Him, "Which ones?" Jesus said, ""You shall not murder,' "You shall not commit adultery,' "You shall not steal,' "You shall not bear false witness,' ¹⁹"Honor your father and your mother,'^[h] and, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."'^{[i] 20}The young man said to Him, "All these things I have kept from my youth.^[j] What do I still lack?"

²¹Jesus said to him, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." ²²But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. ^{(D) 23}Then Jesus said to His disciples, "Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." ²⁵When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, "Who then can be saved?" ²⁶But Jesus looked at them and said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." ²⁷Then Peter answered and said to Him, "See, we have left all and followed You. Therefore what shall we have?" ²⁸So Jesus said to them, "Assuredly I say to you, that in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. ²⁹And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life. ³⁰But many who are first will be last, and the last first.

Mark 9:33-37 And when they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, "What were you discussing on the way?" But they were silent; for on the way they had discussed with one another who was the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve; and he said to them, "If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all." And he took a child and put him in the midst of them; and taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me."

You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone... Faith without deeds is dead. - James 2:14-26 And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee? And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. - Matt 25:31-40

In this spirit of concern for the poor, one of the worst sins for Jews and Christians (until recently) was “reaping what you did not sew” - collecting interest on debts – USURY. This was the PRIME example of the rich taking advantage of the poor who had to borrow. Jews couldn’t do it to other Jews – Christians were not supposed to do it to anyone. Christians (especially Kings who needed loans) made the Jews do the dirty work. This became a foundation for anti-semitism. Rulers needed bankers which made the Rothchilds rich. Shylock in Shakespeare is an example of the “money hungry” Jew. Jews were usually forbidden to own land so had to be merchants or lenders

OLD TESTAMENT TRIVIA: EXAMPLES OF VIEWS JEFFERSON WOULD CALL “SUPERSTITIOUS” or much worse.

Jefferson thought slavery was a depraved and degrading institution (below). The Old Testament clearly endorsed it. This alone would be enough for him to consider Biblical literalism horribly immoral and disgusting.

Leviticus 25:44 states that we may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. 15: 19. forbids any contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness. eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), Lev. 19:27. no haircuts Lev. 11 – food laws – no shellfish - 6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean. Lev.19:19 forbids planting two different crops in the same field, wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread. Lev.21:16-20 – handicapped – including defects in sight – may not approach the altar of God. Exodus 21 gives detailed instructions for slavery – including selling daughters into slavery (21:7) 35:2 states those working on the Sabbath should be put to death.

JEFFERSON ON SLAVERY

Jefferson’s hypocracy – owning slaves and “all men are created equal” has a few ameliorating features. Jefferson saw sympathy as the most important human faculty, and thought that blacks might be more than equal in “sympathy” or empathy for other humans. He seems to see himself as a horribly weak sinner – unable to give up his fine wines and books or playing with Monticello - to live more frugally and live up to his principles.

Like most Americans in Revolutionary times he thought slavery might fade away. He saw it as horribly corrupting:

““There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. …….. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”(Notes on Virginia Query XVIII – The particular customs and manners that may happen to be received in that state?”

Iraq early planning

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.” ......

Herskowitz also revealed that in 2003, Bush’s father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son’s invasion of Iraq and that Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been “excused.”

....... Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the POLITICAL CAPITAL that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.” ....

Herskowitz’s revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush’s pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe’s David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: “It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam’s weapons stash,” wrote Nyhan. ‘I’d take ‘em out,’ [Bush] grinned cavalierly, ‘take out the weapons of mass destruction…I’m surprised he’s still there,” said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.’s father…It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush’s first big clinker. ”

The notion that President Bush held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further advanced recently by a Bush supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had told him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties. In addition, in recent days, high-ranking US military officials have complained that the White House did not provide them with adequate resources for the task at hand. ......

“He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake,” Herskowitz said. “That was one of the keys to being a leader.” http://www.gnn.tv/articles/article.php?id=761

The Making of a Mess

The Making of a Mess By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet

by James Mann

Viking, 426 pp., $25.95

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies

by James Bamford

Doubleday, 420 pp., $26.95

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order

by Emmanuel Todd, translated from the French by C. Jon Delogu, with aforeword by Michael Lind

Columbia University Press, 233 pp., $29.95

Who got us into this mess anyway—our headlong plunge into preventive war against Iraq? The formal, and facile, answer is George W. Bush. But our president campaigned four years ago on a promise of humility in foreign policy and a rejection of nation-building as social work. Who persuaded him to change his mind? Mann and Bamford agree in their skepticism about the neocon fantasy that the establishment of democracy in Iraq will have a domino effect and democratize the whole Islamic world. Mann attributes the visionary delusions of the neocons to the influence of Leo Strauss (1899–1973), the German refugee philosopher who finally found a home in the University of Chicago. Strauss taught his disciples a belief in absolutes, contempt for relativism, and joy in abstract propositions. He approved of Plato's "noble lies," disliked much of modern life, and believed that a Straussian elite in government would in time overcome feelings of persecution. Strauss's teachings can be found in vulgarized form in Allan Bloom's 1987 best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, a book notable for the total exclusion of the two finest American minds, Emerson and William James.

Strauss's German windbaggery has had much the same effect on more empirical thinkers that Hegel had on William James (see James's "On Some Hegelisms"). "Strauss's influence is surprising," Mann writes, "because his voluminous, often esoteric, writings say virtually nothing specific about issues of policy, foreign or domestic." Yet students of Strauss and Bloom—William Kristol, the editor; Robert Kagan, the anti-Europe polemicist; Francis Fukuyama, the "end of history" prophet; Paul Wolf-owitz, the strategic planner—inspired perhaps by the Straussian vision of philosopher-kings, flocked to the Wash-ington of Ronald Reagan, were discontented during the presidency of the elder Bush, and came into their own under the younger Bush.

Anne Norton, a political theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, did graduate work among the Straussians at the University of Chicago. In her well-informed and witty book, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire,^[1] she lists more than thirty Straussians influential in Washing-ton as of 1999. Given the practice of ideological hiring reminiscent of the Communist Party, there must be more than double that number today scattered among government agencies, military academies, war colleges, and think tanks.

There is a puzzle about the transmutation of traditional conservatives into neoconservative philosopher-kings. "Conservatism reverenced custom and tradition," Anne Norton writes. Conservatives "distrusted abstract principles, grand theories, utopian projects." American conservatism used to be Burkean in its respect for the moeurs, for the wisdom embedded in long-established habits and institutions. But the Straussians changed all this. Appeals to history and memory came to seem antiquated. "In their place were the very appeals to universal, abstract principles, the very utopian projects that conservatism once disdained." ………………

James Bamford in A Pretext for War does not mention Leo Strauss at all. Perhaps he did not encounter Straussians in his tour of the intelligence agencies. On the other hand, he has some blunt pages describing pressures brought by the war party in Washington on CIA analysts—for example, a cynical instruction issued at a CIA staff meeting: "If Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so."

Bamford places considerably more emphasis than Mann does on the role of Israel in getting us into this mess. Mann's index has only ten references to Israel, covering eleven pages. There are twenty-one references covering thirty-seven pages in Bamford's index. Defenders of the hard Israeli line seek routinely to silence criticism of Ariel Sharon and Likud by accusing critics of anti-Semitism. But surely the American identification with Sharon's Israel is a major cause of Arab hatred of the United States, even though Arab governments have not demonstrated much sympathy themselves for the Palestinians. Bamford and Norton confront the Israel question frankly and without a trace of anti-Semitism.

Norton has a chapter, "Athens and Jerusalem," in which she discusses the post–September 11 strategic plan of Paul Wolfowitz as

built conceptually and geographically around the centrality of Israel.... This strategy could be understood as advancing American interests and security only if one saw those as identical to the interests and security of the state of Israel.

An appealing argument can be made that the United States has an obligation to defend a democratic nation against undemocratic forces. But among the Straussians, Norton writes, "Israel is often admired the more for its less than democratic qualities. Israel has the toughness that America lacks." ………………..

despite the fact that Israeli intelligence, like that of the United States, had no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Israeli government, along with the media, deliberately hyped the dangers of Iraq before the war. …………..

. The neocon vision is that the United States as the supreme military superpower is bound to work its will on the rest of the world. Comparisons are often made to the Roman Empire and to the nineteenth-century British and French Empires. Is the so-called American Empire a fitting successor? The neocons expect it will be, and Niall Ferguson, the economic historian, author of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire^[2] and admirer of liberal empires, summons reluctant Americans to rise to their historic responsibility. …………………….

Washington, far from ruling an empire in the old sense, has become the virtual prisoner of its client states.

This was the case notably with South Vietnam in the 1960s, and it has been the case ever since with Israel. Governments in Saigon forty years ago and in Tel Aviv today have been sure that the United States, for internal political reasons, would not apply the ultimate sanction by withdrawing support. They therefore defied American commands and demands with relative impunity.

Pakistan, Taiwan, Egypt, South Korea, and the Philippines are similarly unimpressed, evasive, or defiant. For all our vast military strength, we cannot get our Latin American neighbors, or even the tiny Caribbean islands, to do our bidding. Americans are simply not competent imperial-ists, as we are demonstrating in Iraq in 2004. The so-called American Empire is in fact a feeble imitation of the Roman, British, and French Empires.

---

The neocons, with their imperial dreams, might take a look at Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. It is not an anti-American rant by an aggrieved French intellectual. Todd has a formula by which, through an analysis of demographic and economic factors, he accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in his first book, La Chute Finale. This was in 1976 when the neocons' Committee on the Present Danger and the CIA's Team B were predicting that the Soviet Union would very likely win the arms race.

In his new book Todd applies a similar formula to the United States. He may underrate the resilience of the American economy, but in a not unsympathetic way he raises intelligent and disturbing questions about the American future. Regarding the Iraq War, Todd writes, "The real America is too weak to take on anyone except military midgets...such outdated remains of a bygone era as North Korea, Cuba, and Iraq." Even war against a pathetic Iraqi opponent seems to have strained our military manpower to the limit. Todd concludes, "If [the US] stubbornly decides to continue showing off its supreme power, it will only end up exposing to the world its powerlessness." ………………

None of these authors mentions an issue that erupted after their books were written. The disclosures about the torture practiced by US soldiers have intensified the awareness of the mess in Iraq and deepened perspectives on the meaning of the war. Torture escaped the attention of the allegedly intrepid American press and television. We now know that there was considerable debate behind the scenes, with memoranda flowing back and forth among the Departments of Defense and Justice and the White House about stretching the ban on torture to permit coercive techniques of interrogation.

This seemed plausible because George Bush and Tony Blair, as "sincere deceivers" in The Economist's phrase, had honestly believed the tall tales about WMDs. They must have radiated the impression that if interrogators only tried hard enough, they could extract the WMD hiding places from detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. This view must have percolated down the ranks. Hence the appalling episodes that have disgraced the United States and made our talk about human rights appear arrant hypocrisy in the eyes of the world.

At first the Bush administration tried the "bad apples" defense. It was all the fault of a few vicious soldiers acting on their own. In due course a pattern of torture in widespread locations began to emerge. The revelations by the Red Cross and in US reports of systematic abuse undermined the "bad apples" defense; nor did the military act promptly to halt the abuses and punish the abusers. There is an obvious need for a full-scale congressional investigation.

There are at least three reasons that the US should not be involved with torture. The first is that the Geneva Conventions protect American GIs who fall into enemy hands. Terrorists of course do not observe the Conventions, but the revelations about Abu Ghraib fatally weaken our case against terrorism throughout the world and expose the men and women in our armed forces to being tortured themselves. The second is that information extracted by torture is often worthless. Tortured people will say anything that stops the torture. A third reason is that the abuse of captives brutalizes their captors; the heart of darkness can be corrupting and it is contagious. ……………… The Bush administration, fearful that evil states might hide WMDs in hardened bunkers buried deep in the ground, called for a low-yield nuclear weapon known in the patois of the Pentagon as a Robust Nuclear Earth penetrator, a description often abbreviated into Bunker Buster. Mini-nukes of course can be used additionally as tactical weapons for the battlefield. In May 2003, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted for repeal of the prohibition on mini-nuke research. Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Ted Kennedy then submitted an amendment restoring the original language of the Spratt-Purse amendment.

Supporters of the Feinstein-Kennedy amendment pointed out that mini-nukes were not toys, that five kilotons represented one third of the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, that the activation of mini-nuke research would run counter to US anti-proliferation policy and would "release a chain of reactions across the world in nuclear testing" (Kennedy), and that there was "no such thing as a 'usable nuclear weapon'" (Feinstein). Nevertheless the Senate tabled the Feinstein-Kennedy amendment. The fight was resumed on June 3 and 15, 2004. Kennedy made a powerful statement:

America should not launch a new nuclear arms race.... Even as we try to persuade North Korea to pull back from the brink—even as we try to persuade Iran to end its nuclear weapons program, even as we urge the nations of the former Soviet Union to secure their nuclear materials and arsenals from terrorists—the Bush administration now wants to escalate the nuclear threat.

The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, compared the US to "some who have continued to dangle a cigarette from their mouth and tell everybody else not to smoke." ……………… Most observers regard the Bush Doctrine as dead. President Bush does not, as he made clear in the unre-pentant speeches he delivered in June at the Air Force Academy and in July in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. "We must confront serious dangers," he said, "before they fully materialize." But how many nations is he likely to assemble in his next "coalition of the willing"?

Never in American history has the United States been so unpopular abroad, regarded with so much hostility, so distrusted, feared, hated. Even before Abu Ghraib, Margaret Tutwiler, a veteran Republican who was in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee in February 2004, declared that America's standing abroad had deteriorated to such a degree that "it will take years of hard, focused work" to repair it. After Abu Ghraib, it may take decades.

Pentagon's New Map

Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world—and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there’s a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community. Now he gives it to you.

LET ME TELL YOU why military engagement with Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good.

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point—the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.

The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments. Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not.

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Globalization’s “ozone hole” may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military’s next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.

The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.

FOR MOST COUNTRIES, accommodating the emerging global rule set of democracy, transparency, and free trade is no mean feat, which is something most Americans find hard to understand. We tend to forget just how hard it has been to keep the United States together all these years, harmonizing our own, competing internal rule sets along the way—through a Civil War, a Great Depression, and the long struggles for racial and sexual equality that continue to this day. As far as most states are concerned, we are quite unrealistic in our expectation that they should adapt themselves quickly to globalization’s very American-looking rule set.

But you have to be careful with that Darwinian pessimism, because it is a short jump from apologizing for globalization-as-forced-Americanization to insinuating—along racial or civilization lines—that “those people will simply never be like us.” Just ten years ago, most experts were willing to write off poor Russia, declaring Slavs, in effect, genetically unfit for democracy and capitalism. Similar arguments resonated in most China-bashing during the 1990’s, and you hear them today in the debates about the feasibility of imposing democracy on a post-Saddam Iraq—a sort of Muslims-are-from-Mars argument.

So how do we distinguish between who is really making it in globalization’s Core and who remains trapped in the Gap? And how permanent is this dividing line?

Understanding that the line between the Core and Gap is constantly shifting, let me suggest that the direction of change is more critical than the degree. So, yes, Beijing is still ruled by a “Communist party” whose ideological formula is 30 percent Marxist-Leninist and 70 percent Sopranos, but China just signed on to the World Trade Organization, and over the long run, that is far more important in securing the country’s permanent Core status. Why? Because it forces China to harmonize its internal rule set with that of globalization—banking, tariffs, copyright protection, environmental standards. Of course, working to adjust your internal rule sets to globalization’s evolving rule set offers no guarantee of success. As Argentina and Brazil have recently found out, following the rules (in Argentina’s case, sort of following) does not mean you are panicproof, or bubbleproof, or even recessionproof. Trying to adapt to globalization does not mean bad things will never happen to you. Nor does it mean all your poor will immediately morph into stable middle class. It just means your standard of living gets better over time.

In sum, it is always possible to fall off this bandwagon called globalization. And when you do, bloodshed will follow. If you are lucky, so will American troops.

SO WHAT PARTS OF THE WORLD can be considered functioning right now? North America, much of South America, the European Union, Putin’s Russia, Japan and Asia’s emerging economies (most notably China and India), Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, which accounts for roughly four billion out of a global population of six billion.

Whom does that leave in the Gap? It would be easy to say “everyone else,” but I want to offer you more proof than that and, by doing so, argue why I think the Gap is a long-term threat to more than just your pocketbook or conscience.

If we map out U.S. military responses since the end of the cold war, (see below), we find an overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of the world that are excluded from globalization’s growing Core—namely the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. That is roughly the remaining two billion of the world’s population. Most have demographics skewed very young, and most are labeled, “low income” or “low middle income” by the World Bank (i.e., less than $3,000 annual per capita).

If we draw a line around the majority of those military interventions, we have basically mapped the Non-Integrating Gap. Obviously, there are outliers excluded geographically by this simple approach, such as an Israel isolated in the Gap, a North Korea adrift within the Core, or a Philippines straddling the line. But looking at the data, it is hard to deny the essential logic of the picture: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U.S. will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces there to restore order to eradicate threats.

Now, that may seem like a tautology—in effect defining any place that has not attracted U.S. military intervention in the last decade or so as “functioning within globalization” (and vice versa). But think about this larger point: Ever since the end of World War II, this country has assumed that the real threats to its security resided in countries of roughly similar size, development, and wealth—in other words, other great powers like ourselves. During the cold war, that other great power was the Soviet Union. When the big Red machine evaporated in the early 1990’s, we flirted with concerns about a united Europe, a powerhouse Japan, and—most recently—a rising China.

What was interesting about all those scenarios is the assumption that only an advanced state can truly threaten us. The rest of the world? Those less-developed parts of the world have long been referred to in military plans as the “Lesser Includeds,” meaning that if we built a military capable of handling a great power’s military threat, it would always be sufficient for any minor scenarios we might have to engage in the less advanced world.

That assumption was shattered by September 11. After all, we were not attacked by a nation or even an army but by a group of—in Thomas Friedman’s vernacular—Super Empowered Individuals willing to die for their cause. September 11 triggered a system perturbation that continues to reshape our government (the new Department of Homeland Security), our economy (the de facto security tax we all pay), and even our society (Wave to the camera!). Moreover, it launched the global war on terrorism, the prism through which our government now views every bilateral security relationship we have across the world.

In many ways, the September 11 attacks did the U.S. national-security establishment a huge favor by pulling us back from the abstract planning of future high-tech wars against “near peers” into the here-and-now threats to global order. By doing so, the dividing lines between Core and Gap were highlighted, and more important, the nature of the threat environment was thrown into stark relief.

Think about it: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are pure products of the Gap—in effect, its most violent feedback to the Core. They tell us how we are doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and which states they would like to take “off line” from globalization and return to some seventh-century definition of the good life (any Gap state with a sizable Muslim population, especially Saudi Arabia).

If you take this message from Osama and combine it with our military-intervention record of the last decade, a simple security rule set emerges: A country’s potential to warrant a U.S. military response is inversely related to its globalization connectivity. There is a good reason why Al Qaeda was based first in Sudan and then later in Afghanistan: These are two of the most disconnected countries in the world. Look at the other places U.S. Special Operations Forces have recently zeroed in on: northwestern Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. We are talking about the ends of the earth as far as globalization is concerned.

But just as important as “getting them where they live” is stopping the ability of these terrorist networks to access the Core via the “seam states” that lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries. It is along this seam that the Core will seek to suppress bad things coming out of the Gap. Which are some of these classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia come readily to mind. But the U.S. will not be the only Core state working this issue. For example, Russia has its own war on terrorism in the Caucasus, China is working its western border with more vigor, and Australia was recently energized (or was it cowed?) by the Bali bombing.

IF WE STEP BACK for a minute and consider the broader implications of this new global map, then U.S. national-security strategy would seem to be: 1) Increase the Core’s immune system capabilities for responding to September 11-like system perturbations; 2) Work the seam states to firewall the Core from the Gap’s worst exports, such as terror, drugs, and pandemics; and, most important, 3) Shrink the Gap. Notice I did not just say Mind the Gap. The knee-jerk reaction of many Americans to September 11 is to say, “Let’s get off our dependency on foreign oil, and then we won’t have to deal with those people.” The most naïve assumption underlying that dream is that reducing what little connectivity the Gap has with the Core will render it less dangerous to us over the long haul. Turning the Middle East into Central Africa will not build a better world for my kids. We cannot simply will those people away.

The Middle East is the perfect place to start. Diplomacy cannot work in a region where the biggest sources of insecurity lie not between states but within them. What is most wrong about the Middle East is the lack of personal freedom and how that translates into dead-end lives for most of the population—especially for the young. Some states like Qatar and Jordan are ripe for perestroika-like leaps into better political futures, thanks to younger leaders who see the inevitability of such change. Iran is likewise waiting for the right Gorbachev to come along—if he has not already.

What stands in the path of this change? Fear. Fear of tradition unraveling. Fear of the mullah’s disapproval. Fear of being labeled a “bad” or “traitorous” Muslim state. Fear of becoming a target of radical groups and terrorist networks. But most of all, fear of being attacked from all sides for being different—the fear of becoming Israel.

The Middle East has long been a neighborhood of bullies eager to pick on the weak. Israel is still around because it has become—sadly—one of the toughest bullies on the block. The only thing that will change that nasty environment and open the floodgates for change is if some external power steps in and plays Leviathan full-time. Taking down Saddam, the region’s bully-in-chief, will force the U.S. into playing that role far more fully than it has over the past several decades, primarily because Iraq is the Yugoslavia of the Middle East—a crossroads of civilizations that has historically required a dictatorship to keep the peace. As baby-sitting jobs go, this one will be a doozy, making our lengthy efforts in postwar Germany and Japan look simple in retrospect.

But it is the right thing to do, and now is the right time to do it, and we are the only country that can. Freedom cannot blossom in the Middle East without security, and security is this country’s most influential public-sector export. By that I do not mean arms exports, but basically the attention paid by our military forces to any region’s potential for mass violence. We are the only nation on earth capable of exporting security in a sustained fashion, and we have a very good track record of doing it.

Show me a part of the world that is secure in its peace and I will show you a strong or growing ties between local militaries and the U.S. military. Show me regions where major war is inconceivable and I will show you permanent U.S. military bases and long-term security alliances. Show me the strongest investment relationships in the global economy and I will show you two postwar military occupations that remade Europe and Japan following World War II.

This country has successfully exported security to globalization’s Old Core (Western Europe, Northeast Asia) for half a century and to its emerging New Core (Developing Asia) for a solid quarter century following our mishandling of Vietnam. But our efforts in the Middle Ease have been inconsistent—in Africa, almost nonexistent. Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities.

Naturally, it will take a whole lot more than the U.S. exporting security to shrink the Gap. Africa, for example, will need far more aid than the Core has offered in the past, and the integration of the Gap will ultimately depend more on private investment than anything the Core’s public sector can offer. But it all has to begin with security, because free markets and democracy cannot flourish amid chronic conflict.

Making this effort means reshaping our military establishment to mirror-image the challenge that we face. Think about it. Global war is not in the offing, primarily because our huge nuclear stockpile renders such war unthinkable—for anyone. Meanwhile, classic state-on-state wars are becoming fairly rare. So if the United States is in the process of “transforming” its military to meet the threats of tomorrow, what should it end up looking like? In my mind, we fight fire with fire. If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, we field a military of Super-Empowered-Individuals.

This may sound like additional responsibility for an already overburdened military, but that is the wrong way of looking at it, for what we are dealing with here are problems of success—not failure. It is America’s continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us to stick our noses into the far more difficult subnational conflicts and the dangerous transnational actors they spawn. I know most Americans do not want to hear this, but the real battlegrounds in the global war on terrorism are still over there. If gated communities and rent-a-cops were enough, September 11 never would have happened.

History is full of turning points like that terrible day, but no turning-back-points. We ignore the Gap’s existence at our own peril, because it will not go away until we as a nation respond to the challenge of making globalization truly global.

http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm

When Democracy Pays

editor's note: this is a complete excerpt from the NYTimes Magazine, reproduced here for my student's convenience

Democratic Providentialism

By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Published: December 12, 2004 During this year's election campaign, President Bush liked to wind up his stump speech with a peroration about freedom -- and therefore democracy -- being not just America's gift to the world but God's gift to mankind. This line went down well, maybe because it carried the happy implication that when America and its soldiers promote democracy overseas, they are doing God's work, even in Iraq. The name for this idea is democratic providentialism. It has become the organizing vision of an administration that took power in 2001 actively disdainful of highfalutin foreign-policy uplift. All that John Kerry and the Democrats could put up against it was prudent realism, and to the extent that the election was a referendum on vision, prudent realism lost hands down. The 2004 election closed out the final chapter in a fascinating realignment in American politics. Democrats, who once were heirs of big dreamers like Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, risk becoming the party of small dreams, while the Republicans, who under Nixon and Kissinger seemed determined to divest foreign policy of high moral purpose, have become the party that wants to change the world.

Of course, there is nothing necessarily good about dreaming big. Big dreams can be crazy. And dangerous. A lot of people -- including people of Christian faith -- found it alarming that a president could actually claim to know what God's plan might be, and scarier still that there were evangelical Christians divinely certain that George W. Bush was himself part of that plan.

But while you may not like the providential aspect of democratic providentialism, it remains true that the promotion of democracy by the United States has proved to be a dependably good idea. America may be more unpopular than ever before, but its hegemony really has coincided with a democratic revolution around the world. For the first time in history, a majority of the world's peoples live in democracies. In a dangerous time, this is about the best news around, since democracies, by and large, do not fight one another, and they do not break up into civil war. As a result -- and contrary to the general view that the world is getting more violent -- ethnic and civil strife have actually been declining since the early 1990's, according to a study of violent conflicts by Ted Robert Gurr at the University of Maryland. Democratic transitions can be violent -- when democracy came to Yugoslavia, majority rule at first led to ethnic cleansing and massacre -- but once democracies settle in, once they develop independent courts and real checks and balances, they can begin to advance majority interests without sacrificing minority rights.

Democracy has other advantages, some of them chronicled in a persuasive new book called ''The Democracy Advantage,'' by a trio of authors led by Morton Halperin, who had a hand in setting up the ''community of democracies'' during Madeleine Albright's time at the State Department. The real test of democracy is not how it does in countries that are already rich. The richest countries are all democracies, but they're the lucky ones that have cashed in the long-accumulating benefits of good geography, stable institutions and the profits of empire. The test is whether democracy works in poor countries without these advantages. Some analysts, like Fareed Zakaria, question whether you can stabilize democracy in countries where per capita income is below $6,000 a year. If you can't have democracy until development reaches this level, and if you need autocracy to get growth, then, according to some theorists, it might be smart for the U.S. to support growth-oriented autocracies like Vietnam or Singapore.

Halperin and his colleagues disagree with this ''development first, democracy later'' thesis. Democracy's advantage, they show, becomes apparent when you compare countries below $2,000 in per capita G.D.P. that have turned to democracy -- like the Baltic states, Mozambique, Senegal and the Dominican Republic -- with authoritarian states like Syria, Angola, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe. The poor democracies deliver more growth, lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy. And the recent sight of tens of thousands of people out in the freezing streets of Kiev, night after night, reminded jaded democrats everywhere that democracy is the one political system that says to every individual: you matter and your vote matters. So bad leaders can't treat democrats like fools and expect to get away with it.

While everyone likes the dignity conferred by democracies -- public-opinion surveys of Arab countries, for instance, indicate a clear preference for democracy -- not everyone believes they can deliver the goods. Disillusionment with democracy is growing in Latin America because the new democracies that replaced military rule in the 1990's failed to deliver promised growth. Some economists charge that democracies run up social spending to please voters, then get into trouble with deficits and can't sustain tough economic policies. Halperin and his co-authors argue that democracies tend not to run higher deficits, and while democracies sometimes lack discipline, they invariably avoid the worst errors -- like China's forced industrialization, which cost millions of lives in the 50's and 60's.

Despite the mistakes they have made, the Chinese pose a problem for the thesis that democracy works better than autocracy. Nasty, corrupt single-party rule in China has managed spectacular economic growth, with incomes growing nearly fivefold, from $186 to $944, between 1982 and 2002. Compare this with democratic India, which managed only to double its per capita income in the same period. China continues to attract an extraordinary share of investment going to developing countries. Its market is huge, its labor is cheap and the government keeps things stable. The question, however, is how long growth and autocracy can be combined. The Communist Party now represents no more than 5 percent of the population, its corruption angers millions of people and sooner or later both the winners and losers of the Chinese boom will demand a say in how they are governed. Democracy may take a while to arrive in China, but unless it does, it is not obvious how the party is going to manage China's growing tensions -- between city and country, classes, regions and sectors -- peacefully. In the recent Indian election, by comparison, the Hindu-dominated B.J.P. government kept claiming credit for the Bangalore-led software and call-center booms of the 1990's, but poor voters, who had not seen any trickledown, threw them out of office. If the incoming Congress Party government keeps its promises to these voters, democracy will show how it can balance growth with greater equity, a lesson China had better learn fast. Promoting democracy -- not just good governance -- is such a good idea that Halperin and his colleagues even suggest that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund abandon the technocratic pretense that they just dispense economic advice and start promoting democracy as a prerequisite for economic progress. The Bush administration's ''millennium challenge account'' does just that: it aims to distribute up to $5 billion of U.S. overseas assistance for the first time to those countries that ''govern justly'' and ''invest in their people.''

For Americans, the problem is what to do when democracy and national interest conflict. Speaking to the National Endowment for Democracy last year, the president acknowledged that America won't have a viable political strategy against Islamic terrorism unless it stands up for democracy in the Islamic world. The problem is that if the U.S. does so, new regimes voted into power after elections in Egypt or Pakistan might be violently anti-American. ''One man, one vote, one time'' is another genuine concern: Islamists (or secular authoritarians) using electoral democracy to abolish democracy itself.

So promoting democracy is risky, but propping up autocrats only delays the day of reckoning with popular anger. Throughout the cold war, the U.S. backed authoritarians like the shah in Iran, which put America on the wrong side of a genuinely popular uprising against tyranny, the Shia revolution of 1979. The United States has been paying the price in terrorism, nuclear proliferation and hostility ever since.

Trying to set elections aside when they go against your interests is another mistake, as France learned when it supported the Algerian military in canceling an election that would have brought Islamists to power in 1992. It's better to have the Islamists in office -- making mistakes, learning the disciplines of serving electorates -- than to back autocracies that fail their people. The ruling party in Turkey is Islamic, and democracy, plus the hope of joining Europe, has disciplined its radicalism.

The hardest lesson of all for a powerful democratic people to learn, however, is not whom to back but how to manage their own grandiose expectations. The United States can promote, encourage and sustain democracy, but it cannot impose it. In 2000, adroit American assistance to the Serbian opposition helped topple Slobodan Milosevic, but that is bound to remain an exception. The United States can help give people a chance at free elections, but it is the people themselves who must anchor free institutions in their own soil. Democratic providentialism feeds the illusion that America is the driver of world history. America has power and should use it, but history does not always serve American grand designs.

The pessimists say democratic providentialism, having apparently squeaked by in Afghanistan, will meet its Waterloo in Iraq. Already, influential Sunni parties are calling for a postponement of the elections, lest widespread Sunni abstention and the difficulty of holding elections at all in Sunni areas combine to bring the Shia masses to overweening power. The insurgency is trying to strangle democracy at birth by killing any Iraqi who signs up to work for the Allawi government. If the insurgency succeeds, the cost of failure -- to ordinary Iraqis, let alone to the U.S. -- will be enormous. Unless Iraq gets semilegitimate institutions next year, and a constitution that allocates resources and powers to each of Iraq's constituent peoples, the U.S. invasion will have traded a dangerous dictatorship for a failed state and terrorist enclave.

Pessimists say the U.S. is imposing democracy at gunpoint in Iraq, but the evidence is that millions of Kurds and Shia, and some Sunnis as well, passionately want free elections in their country. There is no reason that American soldiers cannot help them ensure a relatively free electoral process just as they have helped out in Afghanistan. This moment, frightening and precarious as it is, is the last chance Iraqis have to exit from the black tunnel of Ba'athist rule and the chaos of incipient civil war.

Giving them this chance requires the administration to live up to its rhetoric. The president's faith that God is on the side of freedom and democracy may be one reason that he has been so casual about detail and was so astoundingly assured in claiming ''mission accomplished'' in Iraq when the mission had barely begun. Another question mark over the administration's commitment to democracy abroad is its attitude toward democracy at home. Democracy is something more than red-state majority rule. The democratic faith also requires respect for the judiciary, deference to constitutional separation of powers, decent respect for the opinions of mankind, not to mention democratically ratified treaty law like the Geneva Conventions and, last but not least, the humility that goes with knowing that you serve the people, not a providential design that only you and other true believers can understand.

Michael Ignatieff is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author, most recently, of ''The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror.''