Thursday, November 11, 2004
BBC NEWS | Middle East | The mystery of Arafat's money
Posted as an interesting ref.
BBC NEWS | Middle East | The mystery of Arafat's money
BBC NEWS | Middle East | The mystery of Arafat's money
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
We've Been Had
Break for News - Your Independent News Source: "We've Been Had
By Edgar J. Steele
8th November, 2004
BreakForNews.com
'It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and incumbency.'
--George W. Bush, June 14, 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson, unaw
By Edgar J. Steele
8th November, 2004
BreakForNews.com
'It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and incumbency.'
--George W. Bush, June 14, 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime Minister Goran Perrson, unaw
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Monday, November 08, 2004
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Friday, November 05, 2004
No Surrender
November 5, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST
No Surrender
By PAUL KRUGMAN
President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.
Democrats are now, understandably, engaged in self-examination. But while it's O.K. to think things over, those who abhor the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country must maintain their intensity; they must not succumb to defeatism.
This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.
I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.
Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that's what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, "We've got to close the cultural gap." But that's a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn't be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats - who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents - need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.
In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. (Heads up to readers: I'll be starting a long-planned break next week, to work on a economics textbook. I'll be back in January.) But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
No Surrender
By PAUL KRUGMAN
President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.
Democrats are now, understandably, engaged in self-examination. But while it's O.K. to think things over, those who abhor the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country must maintain their intensity; they must not succumb to defeatism.
This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.
I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.
Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that's what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, "We've got to close the cultural gap." But that's a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn't be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats - who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents - need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.
In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. (Heads up to readers: I'll be starting a long-planned break next week, to work on a economics textbook. I'll be back in January.) But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Back to Top
Leaked Report Says Gulf War Syndrome Caused by Sarin Exposure (fix)
Leaked document suggests exposure to Sarin gas during the Gulf War is the cause of Gulf War Syndrome. During the war, between 1 & 2 million alarms went off suggesting chemical exposure but all were put down to false alarms. After the amount of chemical weapons sold to Iraq before the war, is it not unreasonable to suggest that there were chemical attacks and the soldiers and Iraqis have suffered since then? After all, psychological damage may explain some things like mood swings etc but not the deformaties in children born to those fought in this war.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Are HISD and Aramark cooking the books to feast on federal breakfast subsidies?
(11/12/2004) Just heard the news that Aramark has the contract to serve Kentucky Prisons
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Day of the Dead: The Haunting of the White House
"The Haunting of the White House"
(Editor's Note: We are pleased on this evening of Nov. 1st to 2nd, known in Mexico as "The Day of the Dead," to publish the following exclusive: a Republican-meets-Democrat, one-two punch editorial by Cynthia McKinney and Catherine Austin Fitts, on "The Haunting of the White House." An earlier version of the piece was written in response to a request from editors of The New York Times. So far the Times has declined to publish, but other print publications are still considering it. Meanwhile, you can feel free to forward it to the nine winds on the Web, with our thanks. - 911Truth.org Staff)
Day of the Dead: The Haunting of the White House
By Cynthia McKinney and Catherine Austin Fitts
November 1, 2004
Something is rising from the ashes of September 11: the spectre of questions that will haunt our country until answered.
Months after the release of the official 9/11 Commission Report - even as Congress moves to implement its proposals for a radical centralization of security forces - growing numbers of Americans are doubting their own government's account of what really happened on September 11, and how.
From the first, the Bush Administration resisted investigation and disclosure. Families of September 11 victims were forced to lobby the administration and Congress for a full and independent inquiry. They fought for 14 months, blocked every step of the way by the White House.
The political games reached such a point that the survivors of the worst attack ever on American soil were forced to hold a candlelight vigil in front of the White House. A vigil for the truth.
The White House finally assented in December 2002 to the establishment of an independent commission, under former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean. Still, the administration pushed for a hand-picked panel, with a narrow focus on intelligence failures and recommendations.
The families demanded a full investigation, posing nearly 400 questions to the Kean Commission. The commissioners said they welcomed these queries. But their final report ignored most of the unanswered questions. Still posted on the website of the September 11 Family Steering Committee, these questions are a stark reminder of the Kean Commission's failures.
Now these same questions have been submitted to the New York Attorney General. Last week, the New York City office of Eliot Spitzer received a citizens' complaint to open a legal inquiry into crimes still unsolved, more than three years later.
So begins the haunting of the White House.
Driven by survivor families, independent researchers, journalists, and a growing number of ordinary citizens, an emergent "9/11 truth movement" has organized several public inquiries into the events of September 11 during the past year. As co-chairs of the first 9/11 Citizens' Commission, held in New York City in September, we were entrusted with answering questions the Kean Commission ignored.
What did we hear? We heard evidence of specific advance warnings about the 9/11 attacks from overseas. We heard about the spiking of FBI terrorism investigations and the lack of response during the attacks by high officials, including George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers.
We heard about air toxicity at Ground Zero still afflicting firefighters, first responders, and New York residents - and how, in the days after September 11, the White House intervened to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing a strong warning that the air in Lower Manhattan was unsafe to breathe.
We also learned that, although there was a stunning abandonment of standard procedure for hijackings and air defense on September 11, the 9/11 Commission Report fails to issue a call for official accountability.
As Kean Commission members travel the country to promote the findings of their report, we know many people are standing up to ask them tough questions about these and many other open issues. But ordinary people lack the subpeona powers necessary for a full discovery of the facts. Citizens' investigations can only go so far.
Some of those who testified before us in New York therefore explored the case for a grand-jury investigation. Possible charges included criminal negligence, failure to perform official duties, criminal facilitation, liability for accessorial conduct, conspiracy and obstruction of justice by high-ranking U.S. government officials.
These charges, now raised in the petition to the New York State Attorney General, may sound extreme. But they reflect a growing concern within the public. A Zogby International poll of New York City residents last August showed that 49 percent believe some high officials knew about the attacks in advance and "consciously failed" to take preventive action. 41 percent of state residents overall shared that view.
A full 66 percent of New York City residents in the survey agreed the case of 9/11 should be reopened by Congress - or by Eliot Spitzer. A Congressional inquiry that respects the pressing nature of these questions is long overdue.
And so now we have no recourse but to stand vigil in front of Eliot Spitzer's office. Until the unanswered questions about 9/11 are laid to rest, by a truly independent investigation that does not declare legitimate avenues of inquiry off-limits, they will continue to haunt our country - and whoever sits in the White House next year.
------------
Cynthia McKinney, a five-term U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia's fourth district from 1993 to 2003, won this year's primary as the Democratic nominee for her former seat and is favored in tomorrow's election. Catherine Austin Fitts is a former Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George Bush Sr. and a former managing director and board member of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc.
The questions of the Family Steering Committee are online at www.911independentcommission.org/questions.htmlThe Complaint and Petition to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is online at www.Justicefor911.org
------------
The above is cleared for free non-commercial republication and distribution by e-mail, if no changes are made and the following URL of the original is included:
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041101130426916
(Editor's Note: We are pleased on this evening of Nov. 1st to 2nd, known in Mexico as "The Day of the Dead," to publish the following exclusive: a Republican-meets-Democrat, one-two punch editorial by Cynthia McKinney and Catherine Austin Fitts, on "The Haunting of the White House." An earlier version of the piece was written in response to a request from editors of The New York Times. So far the Times has declined to publish, but other print publications are still considering it. Meanwhile, you can feel free to forward it to the nine winds on the Web, with our thanks. - 911Truth.org Staff)
Day of the Dead: The Haunting of the White House
By Cynthia McKinney and Catherine Austin Fitts
November 1, 2004
Something is rising from the ashes of September 11: the spectre of questions that will haunt our country until answered.
Months after the release of the official 9/11 Commission Report - even as Congress moves to implement its proposals for a radical centralization of security forces - growing numbers of Americans are doubting their own government's account of what really happened on September 11, and how.
From the first, the Bush Administration resisted investigation and disclosure. Families of September 11 victims were forced to lobby the administration and Congress for a full and independent inquiry. They fought for 14 months, blocked every step of the way by the White House.
The political games reached such a point that the survivors of the worst attack ever on American soil were forced to hold a candlelight vigil in front of the White House. A vigil for the truth.
The White House finally assented in December 2002 to the establishment of an independent commission, under former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean. Still, the administration pushed for a hand-picked panel, with a narrow focus on intelligence failures and recommendations.
The families demanded a full investigation, posing nearly 400 questions to the Kean Commission. The commissioners said they welcomed these queries. But their final report ignored most of the unanswered questions. Still posted on the website of the September 11 Family Steering Committee, these questions are a stark reminder of the Kean Commission's failures.
Now these same questions have been submitted to the New York Attorney General. Last week, the New York City office of Eliot Spitzer received a citizens' complaint to open a legal inquiry into crimes still unsolved, more than three years later.
So begins the haunting of the White House.
Driven by survivor families, independent researchers, journalists, and a growing number of ordinary citizens, an emergent "9/11 truth movement" has organized several public inquiries into the events of September 11 during the past year. As co-chairs of the first 9/11 Citizens' Commission, held in New York City in September, we were entrusted with answering questions the Kean Commission ignored.
What did we hear? We heard evidence of specific advance warnings about the 9/11 attacks from overseas. We heard about the spiking of FBI terrorism investigations and the lack of response during the attacks by high officials, including George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers.
We heard about air toxicity at Ground Zero still afflicting firefighters, first responders, and New York residents - and how, in the days after September 11, the White House intervened to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing a strong warning that the air in Lower Manhattan was unsafe to breathe.
We also learned that, although there was a stunning abandonment of standard procedure for hijackings and air defense on September 11, the 9/11 Commission Report fails to issue a call for official accountability.
As Kean Commission members travel the country to promote the findings of their report, we know many people are standing up to ask them tough questions about these and many other open issues. But ordinary people lack the subpeona powers necessary for a full discovery of the facts. Citizens' investigations can only go so far.
Some of those who testified before us in New York therefore explored the case for a grand-jury investigation. Possible charges included criminal negligence, failure to perform official duties, criminal facilitation, liability for accessorial conduct, conspiracy and obstruction of justice by high-ranking U.S. government officials.
These charges, now raised in the petition to the New York State Attorney General, may sound extreme. But they reflect a growing concern within the public. A Zogby International poll of New York City residents last August showed that 49 percent believe some high officials knew about the attacks in advance and "consciously failed" to take preventive action. 41 percent of state residents overall shared that view.
A full 66 percent of New York City residents in the survey agreed the case of 9/11 should be reopened by Congress - or by Eliot Spitzer. A Congressional inquiry that respects the pressing nature of these questions is long overdue.
And so now we have no recourse but to stand vigil in front of Eliot Spitzer's office. Until the unanswered questions about 9/11 are laid to rest, by a truly independent investigation that does not declare legitimate avenues of inquiry off-limits, they will continue to haunt our country - and whoever sits in the White House next year.
------------
Cynthia McKinney, a five-term U.S. Congresswoman from Georgia's fourth district from 1993 to 2003, won this year's primary as the Democratic nominee for her former seat and is favored in tomorrow's election. Catherine Austin Fitts is a former Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George Bush Sr. and a former managing director and board member of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc.
The questions of the Family Steering Committee are online at www.911independentcommission.org/questions.htmlThe Complaint and Petition to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is online at www.Justicefor911.org
------------
The above is cleared for free non-commercial republication and distribution by e-mail, if no changes are made and the following URL of the original is included:
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041101130426916
Bush's Hidden Campaign Agenda - He Talked Of Invading
Bush's Hidden Campaign Agenda - He Talked Of Invading Iraq While Campaigning In 2000 According To His Own BiographerBy Russ Baker10-29-4
HOUSTON - 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."
That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work - and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war - has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush's unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters - well before he became president.
In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush's ghostwriter after Bush's handlers concluded that the candidate's views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.
According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.
The revelations on Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family.
Herskowitz also revealed the following:
-In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.
-Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."
- Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot's garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.
-Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.
Throughout the interviews for this article and in subsequent conversations, Herskowitz indicated he was conflicted over revealing information provided by a family with which he has longtime connections, and by how his candor could comport with the undefined operating principles of the as-told-to genre. Well after the interviews -- in which he expressed consternation that Bush's true views, experience and basic essence had eluded the American people -- Herskowitz communicated growing concern about the consequences for himself of the publication of his remarks, and said that he had been under the impression he would not be quoted by name. However, when conversations began, it was made clear to him that the material was intended for publication and attribution. A tape recorder was present and visible at all times.
Several people who know Herskowitz well addressed his character and the veracity of his recollections. "I don't know anybody that's ever said a bad word about Mickey," said Barry Silverman, a well-known Houston executive and civic figure who worked with him on another book project. An informal survey of Texas journalists turned up uniform confidence that Herskowitz's account as contained in this article could be considered accurate.
One noted Texas journalist who spoke with Herskowitz about the book in 1999 recalls how the author mentioned to him at the time that Bush had revealed things the campaign found embarrassing and did not want in print. He requested anonymity because of the political climate in the state. "I can't go near this," he said.
According to Herskowitz, George W. 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."
Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.
"I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, 'No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.' Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.
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 destructionI'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s fatherIt 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.
Herskowitz considers himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz, a longtime Houston Chronicle sports columnist designated President Bush's father, then-Congressman George HW Bush, to replace him as a guest columnist, and the two have remained close since then. (Herskowitz was suspended briefly in April without pay for reusing material from one of his own columns, about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.)
In 1999, when Herskowitz turned in his chapters for Charge to Keep, Bush's staff expressed displeasure -- often over Herskowitz's use of language provided by Bush himself. In a chapter on the oil business, Herskowitz included Bush's own words to describe the Texan's unprofitable business ventures, writing: "the companies were floundering". "I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers, he was kind of angry, and he said, 'You've got some wrong information.' I didn't bother to say, 'Well you know where it came from.' [The lawyer] said, 'We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.' "
In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz's account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. "The lawyer called me and said, 'Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.' "
"They took it and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it," he said. A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. However, Herskowitz, who is known for his memory of anecdotes from his long history in journalism and book publishing, says he is confident about his recollections.
According to Herskowitz, Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard - and inconsistent when he did so. Bush, he said, provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to being sent to Vietnam. Herskowitz also said that Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was "excused." This directly contradicts his public statements that he participated in obligatory training with the Alabama National Guard. Bush's claim to have fulfilled his military duty has been subject to intense scrutiny; he has insisted in the past that he did show up for monthly drills in Alabama - though commanding officers say they never saw him, and no Guardsmen have come forward to accept substantial "rewards" for anyone who can claim to have seen Bush on base.
Herskowitz said he asked Bush if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 - which was two years prior to his contractual obligation to fly jets was due to expire. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane - military or civilian - again. That would contradict published accounts in which Bush talks about his days in 1973 working with inner-city children, when he claimed to have taken some of the children up in a plane.
In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz was asked by Bush's father to write a book about the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, after getting a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. "Former President Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his officeHe said, 'I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.' "
"He said to me, 'I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it's amazing how many times something good will come out of it.' I passed it on to my agent, he jumped all over it. I asked [Bush senior], 'Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?' He said yes."
That book, "Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush," was published in 2003 by Routledge. If anything, the book has been criticized for its over-reliance on the Bush family's perspective and rosy interpretation of events. Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate "as-told-to" author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz's other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.
After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, the biographer learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. "I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying 'Watch your back.' "
Reporters covering Bush say that when they inquired as to why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz had personal habits that interfered with his writing - a claim Herskowitz said is unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself - it received largely critical reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection.
So, said Herskowitz, the best material was left on the cutting room floor, including Bush's true feelings.
"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."
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HOUSTON - 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."
That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work - and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war - has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush's unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters - well before he became president.
In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush's ghostwriter after Bush's handlers concluded that the candidate's views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.
According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.
The revelations on Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family.
Herskowitz also revealed the following:
-In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.
-Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."
- Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot's garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.
-Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.
Throughout the interviews for this article and in subsequent conversations, Herskowitz indicated he was conflicted over revealing information provided by a family with which he has longtime connections, and by how his candor could comport with the undefined operating principles of the as-told-to genre. Well after the interviews -- in which he expressed consternation that Bush's true views, experience and basic essence had eluded the American people -- Herskowitz communicated growing concern about the consequences for himself of the publication of his remarks, and said that he had been under the impression he would not be quoted by name. However, when conversations began, it was made clear to him that the material was intended for publication and attribution. A tape recorder was present and visible at all times.
Several people who know Herskowitz well addressed his character and the veracity of his recollections. "I don't know anybody that's ever said a bad word about Mickey," said Barry Silverman, a well-known Houston executive and civic figure who worked with him on another book project. An informal survey of Texas journalists turned up uniform confidence that Herskowitz's account as contained in this article could be considered accurate.
One noted Texas journalist who spoke with Herskowitz about the book in 1999 recalls how the author mentioned to him at the time that Bush had revealed things the campaign found embarrassing and did not want in print. He requested anonymity because of the political climate in the state. "I can't go near this," he said.
According to Herskowitz, George W. 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."
Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.
"I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, 'No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.' Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.
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 destructionI'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s fatherIt 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.
Herskowitz considers himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz, a longtime Houston Chronicle sports columnist designated President Bush's father, then-Congressman George HW Bush, to replace him as a guest columnist, and the two have remained close since then. (Herskowitz was suspended briefly in April without pay for reusing material from one of his own columns, about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.)
In 1999, when Herskowitz turned in his chapters for Charge to Keep, Bush's staff expressed displeasure -- often over Herskowitz's use of language provided by Bush himself. In a chapter on the oil business, Herskowitz included Bush's own words to describe the Texan's unprofitable business ventures, writing: "the companies were floundering". "I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers, he was kind of angry, and he said, 'You've got some wrong information.' I didn't bother to say, 'Well you know where it came from.' [The lawyer] said, 'We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.' "
In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz's account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. "The lawyer called me and said, 'Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.' "
"They took it and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it," he said. A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. However, Herskowitz, who is known for his memory of anecdotes from his long history in journalism and book publishing, says he is confident about his recollections.
According to Herskowitz, Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard - and inconsistent when he did so. Bush, he said, provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to being sent to Vietnam. Herskowitz also said that Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was "excused." This directly contradicts his public statements that he participated in obligatory training with the Alabama National Guard. Bush's claim to have fulfilled his military duty has been subject to intense scrutiny; he has insisted in the past that he did show up for monthly drills in Alabama - though commanding officers say they never saw him, and no Guardsmen have come forward to accept substantial "rewards" for anyone who can claim to have seen Bush on base.
Herskowitz said he asked Bush if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 - which was two years prior to his contractual obligation to fly jets was due to expire. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane - military or civilian - again. That would contradict published accounts in which Bush talks about his days in 1973 working with inner-city children, when he claimed to have taken some of the children up in a plane.
In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz was asked by Bush's father to write a book about the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush, after getting a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. "Former President Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his officeHe said, 'I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.' "
"He said to me, 'I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it's amazing how many times something good will come out of it.' I passed it on to my agent, he jumped all over it. I asked [Bush senior], 'Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?' He said yes."
That book, "Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush," was published in 2003 by Routledge. If anything, the book has been criticized for its over-reliance on the Bush family's perspective and rosy interpretation of events. Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate "as-told-to" author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz's other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.
After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, the biographer learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. "I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying 'Watch your back.' "
Reporters covering Bush say that when they inquired as to why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz had personal habits that interfered with his writing - a claim Herskowitz said is unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself - it received largely critical reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection.
So, said Herskowitz, the best material was left on the cutting room floor, including Bush's true feelings.
"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."
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Seymour Hersh gives an inside view of Iraq and foreign policy
Seymour Hersh gives an inside view of Iraq and foreign policy
Journalist says insurgency has and will use missiles
By Daniela PerdomoDaily Editorial Board
November 01, 2004Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who most recently broke the story of the abuses at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib with the CBS news program "60 Minutes," gave a scathing portrait of U.S. policy in Iraq in the Terrace Room on Friday.
"Let's begin by questioning the word 'democracy,'" Hersh said by way of introduction, hinting at what would prove to be an animated discussion on current American policy in Iraq.
"Bush is out there every day telling us that everything [in Iraq] is going fine but we can see every day with our own eyes that that's not what's going on," he said.
Hersh accused the Bush administration of using the propaganda to promote fear and instill a mentality of "you're either with us or against us" throughout the nation and around the globe.
He also claimed that many high-level government officials are starkly aware of the differences between fact and what the administration is telling the American public.
"There are people in the FBI, CIA, the White House that care about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and they're increasingly concerned about their violation since Sept. 11," Hersh said. "How did we get to where we are?"
He said the Bush administration suffers from the same infamous "credibility gap" that plagued the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam War.
Hersh is in a position to make the comparison - he famously broke the story of how Charlie Company, 11th Brigade massacred an entire village of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in My Lai.
His coverage of the event and its cover-up prompted worldwide outrage and helped turn the public's opinion against American involvement in the escalating war n Southeast Asia and the administration waging it.
Hersh said the most dangerous aspect of the current administration is that President George W. Bush earnestly sees the war in Iraq as an ideological struggle. "He believes he's doing the right thing for the right reasons - a crusade if you will," Hersh said.
"You could call him an idealist, a utopian - even a Trotskyist. After all, [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz believes in permanent revolution," Hersh said.
Contrary to popular opinion, Hersh said, "Bush didn't go to Iraq for oil, for Israel. He really believes this [ideology] - that's why he's so dangerous. In that sense [Henry] Kissinger was safer - he knew Vietnam was a mistake."
Hersh acknowledged oil as a factor in the Iraq war, but said the Bush administration "is really driven by the idea of democracy, to protect it ... I'm convinced it wouldn't be on such a stupid thing as oil."
He said the events of Sept. 11 provided the Bush administration and its neoconservative advisers, such as former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Commission Richard Perle and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, with the justification they needed to enter Iraq.
Drawing further parallels to the Vietnam conflict, Hersh said that the current Iraqi coalition government is a "puppet government that makes [former South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh] Diem look like a strongman."
"What keeps the Iraqi government [in power] is American bombing - continuous, overnight, daylong bombing," he said, adding that the American media has not brought this escalating bombing to the forefront of public consciousness.
If Bush is re-elected, Hersh said the bombing will continue. He recalled a phrase a U.S. army officer serving in Vietnam told then-Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Though he made it no secret that he is planning on casting his vote for John Kerry tomorrow, Hersh was also clearly skeptical of the challenger's approach to fighting the war in Iraq.
"Kerry wants our allies to play a bigger role - it'll just change the color or nationality of the corpses in Iraq," he said. "At least in 1968 Nixon campaigned to end the war. Neither Bush nor Kerry wants to get out, but the idea is at least Kerry has fresh eyes."
"The world knows there's a difference between Bush and the U.S. people, but if he's re-elected, all bets are off," Hersh said. "If Bush wins again, the Europeans will organize against us - after all they're closer to the madness. They already think it's time to end the U.S. role as the sole broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Hersh was candid about his concern that this war in Iraq will continue to escalate for an indefinite amount of time. "We've never been in a worse position, not even in the Vietnam War," he said.
The situation is complicated by a piece of information Hersh has not yet published in The New Yorker - that reliable sources both inside and outside Iraq confirm that the Iraqi insurgency has missiles. "The next step will be a direct attack on our troops," he said.
Due to the depth and breadth of the insurgency, and its offensive capabilities, Hersh said the United States must be ready to negotiate. "The insurgency isn't just concentrated in the Sunni Triangle - they're all over," Hersh said.
Similarly to the Vietnam War, the current administration does not understand the culture of the people whose country they are fighting in and claim to be fighting for. "There is obvious U.S. racism," Hersh said.
He said that Bill Clinton was the first American president to "bomb white people since World War II," a reference to the Balkan conflict of the late 1990s.
Such statements are what Hersh calls his "alternate history of the United States," which he says he began with his coverage of the My Lai massacre.
When Hersh opened the floor to questions, the room became noticeably tense as a Bush supporter who identified himself as a construction worker working at Tufts said the United States' invasion of Baghdad was necessary to stop terrorism from "coming back home."
Hersh eventually told the man he "agreed to disagree."
He later told the Daily that the man's statements "showed how ignorant the public is, how they don't know what's really going on."
A Daily reporter asked about the multiple anonymous sources in Hersh's Abu Ghraib articles, for which he has been criticized. Hersh replied that quoting anonymous sources "is not a new phenomenon" and the validity of his sources should be judged on how correct his previous articles have been.
When a student questioned Hersh's earlier statement that he has about 200 pictures of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib that were never published, he said, "What more do you need to show?"
He referred to the grisly contents of the unreleased materials, adding that the United States defines torture as excruciating pain resulting in organ loss or death. "The rest is fair game," he said.
"The worst thing is it's not over - Guantanamo [Bay Prison in Cuba] is going to make Andersonville [Civil War Prison] look easy," Hersh said.
Hersh's lecture was sponsored by the Institute of Global Leadership and its Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship program, whose theme this year is "Oil and Water."
He previously spoke at Tufts in 1988 on the Iran-contra scandal.
Journalist says insurgency has and will use missiles
By Daniela PerdomoDaily Editorial Board
November 01, 2004Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who most recently broke the story of the abuses at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib with the CBS news program "60 Minutes," gave a scathing portrait of U.S. policy in Iraq in the Terrace Room on Friday.
"Let's begin by questioning the word 'democracy,'" Hersh said by way of introduction, hinting at what would prove to be an animated discussion on current American policy in Iraq.
"Bush is out there every day telling us that everything [in Iraq] is going fine but we can see every day with our own eyes that that's not what's going on," he said.
Hersh accused the Bush administration of using the propaganda to promote fear and instill a mentality of "you're either with us or against us" throughout the nation and around the globe.
He also claimed that many high-level government officials are starkly aware of the differences between fact and what the administration is telling the American public.
"There are people in the FBI, CIA, the White House that care about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and they're increasingly concerned about their violation since Sept. 11," Hersh said. "How did we get to where we are?"
He said the Bush administration suffers from the same infamous "credibility gap" that plagued the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam War.
Hersh is in a position to make the comparison - he famously broke the story of how Charlie Company, 11th Brigade massacred an entire village of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in My Lai.
His coverage of the event and its cover-up prompted worldwide outrage and helped turn the public's opinion against American involvement in the escalating war n Southeast Asia and the administration waging it.
Hersh said the most dangerous aspect of the current administration is that President George W. Bush earnestly sees the war in Iraq as an ideological struggle. "He believes he's doing the right thing for the right reasons - a crusade if you will," Hersh said.
"You could call him an idealist, a utopian - even a Trotskyist. After all, [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz believes in permanent revolution," Hersh said.
Contrary to popular opinion, Hersh said, "Bush didn't go to Iraq for oil, for Israel. He really believes this [ideology] - that's why he's so dangerous. In that sense [Henry] Kissinger was safer - he knew Vietnam was a mistake."
Hersh acknowledged oil as a factor in the Iraq war, but said the Bush administration "is really driven by the idea of democracy, to protect it ... I'm convinced it wouldn't be on such a stupid thing as oil."
He said the events of Sept. 11 provided the Bush administration and its neoconservative advisers, such as former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Commission Richard Perle and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, with the justification they needed to enter Iraq.
Drawing further parallels to the Vietnam conflict, Hersh said that the current Iraqi coalition government is a "puppet government that makes [former South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh] Diem look like a strongman."
"What keeps the Iraqi government [in power] is American bombing - continuous, overnight, daylong bombing," he said, adding that the American media has not brought this escalating bombing to the forefront of public consciousness.
If Bush is re-elected, Hersh said the bombing will continue. He recalled a phrase a U.S. army officer serving in Vietnam told then-Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Though he made it no secret that he is planning on casting his vote for John Kerry tomorrow, Hersh was also clearly skeptical of the challenger's approach to fighting the war in Iraq.
"Kerry wants our allies to play a bigger role - it'll just change the color or nationality of the corpses in Iraq," he said. "At least in 1968 Nixon campaigned to end the war. Neither Bush nor Kerry wants to get out, but the idea is at least Kerry has fresh eyes."
"The world knows there's a difference between Bush and the U.S. people, but if he's re-elected, all bets are off," Hersh said. "If Bush wins again, the Europeans will organize against us - after all they're closer to the madness. They already think it's time to end the U.S. role as the sole broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Hersh was candid about his concern that this war in Iraq will continue to escalate for an indefinite amount of time. "We've never been in a worse position, not even in the Vietnam War," he said.
The situation is complicated by a piece of information Hersh has not yet published in The New Yorker - that reliable sources both inside and outside Iraq confirm that the Iraqi insurgency has missiles. "The next step will be a direct attack on our troops," he said.
Due to the depth and breadth of the insurgency, and its offensive capabilities, Hersh said the United States must be ready to negotiate. "The insurgency isn't just concentrated in the Sunni Triangle - they're all over," Hersh said.
Similarly to the Vietnam War, the current administration does not understand the culture of the people whose country they are fighting in and claim to be fighting for. "There is obvious U.S. racism," Hersh said.
He said that Bill Clinton was the first American president to "bomb white people since World War II," a reference to the Balkan conflict of the late 1990s.
Such statements are what Hersh calls his "alternate history of the United States," which he says he began with his coverage of the My Lai massacre.
When Hersh opened the floor to questions, the room became noticeably tense as a Bush supporter who identified himself as a construction worker working at Tufts said the United States' invasion of Baghdad was necessary to stop terrorism from "coming back home."
Hersh eventually told the man he "agreed to disagree."
He later told the Daily that the man's statements "showed how ignorant the public is, how they don't know what's really going on."
A Daily reporter asked about the multiple anonymous sources in Hersh's Abu Ghraib articles, for which he has been criticized. Hersh replied that quoting anonymous sources "is not a new phenomenon" and the validity of his sources should be judged on how correct his previous articles have been.
When a student questioned Hersh's earlier statement that he has about 200 pictures of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib that were never published, he said, "What more do you need to show?"
He referred to the grisly contents of the unreleased materials, adding that the United States defines torture as excruciating pain resulting in organ loss or death. "The rest is fair game," he said.
"The worst thing is it's not over - Guantanamo [Bay Prison in Cuba] is going to make Andersonville [Civil War Prison] look easy," Hersh said.
Hersh's lecture was sponsored by the Institute of Global Leadership and its Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship program, whose theme this year is "Oil and Water."
He previously spoke at Tufts in 1988 on the Iran-contra scandal.
Henry Kissinger: What will we face in the next four years? The former secretary of State on the global challenges ahead
America's AssignmentWhat will we face in the next four years? The former secretary of State on the global challenges ahead
By Henry A. Kissinger
Newsweek
Nov. 8 issue - As these lines are being written, the election process is still in full swing. But this week, barring another deadlocked outcome, the campaign that has mesmerized America will be over. What will remain are the challenges that gave rise to this occasionally frenzied battle and the responsibility of dealing with them. No president has faced an agenda of comparable scope. This is not hyperbole; it is the hand history has dealt this generation. Never before has it been necessary to conduct a war with neither front lines nor geographic definition and, at the same time, to rebuild fundamental principles of world order to replace the traditional ones which went up in the smoke of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The newly elected president's task is perhaps most analogous to that inherited by President Truman at the end of the Second World War. In 1945, the Soviet Union was emerging as a threat to the global equilibrium, while the war had left a vacuum in Central Europe. But the Soviet challenge was concrete and geographically definable. Today's principal threats are abstract and mobile. Terror has no fixed address; it has attacked from Bali to Singapore, Riyadh, Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid, Tunis, New York and Washington. In the 1940s, the solution to the crisis was straightforward, albeit difficult: to construct a defensive line in the center of Europe and an economic program to close the gap between public expectation and the reality of shortages that threatened domestic stability.
The contemporary security challenge arises from two unprecedented sources: terror caused by acts until recently considered a matter for internal police forces rather than international policy, and scientific advances and proliferation that allow the survival of countries to be threatened by developments entirely within another state's territory. Truman could take the legitimacy of the international system for granted; the Atlantic alliance rallied America's West European allies from the Second World War. The newly elected president will have to lead an effort to define and then maintain an international system that reflects the new, revolutionary circumstances.
I supported President Bush during the campaign and hope for his success. But whatever the outcome, the United States cannot tackle this agenda except in the context of a commitment by all sides to healing. All concerned with the future of the country must find ways to cooperate so that the world will again see Americans working toward a common destiny both at home and in the community of nations. It is to such an effort that this article seeks to make a contribution.
Next Steps in IraqNo issue requires bipartisanship more urgently than the next phase of Iraq policy. If President Bush prevails, it is important that America's adversaries not confuse the passion of an election period with lack of unity regarding ultimate goals. If Senator Kerry wins, there is an overwhelming need for immediate cooperation between the incoming and the outgoing administration, lest the rhetoric describing the war as unnecessary at the wrong place, coupled with the hiatus imposed by the months of transition, undermine the confidence of the Iraqi authorities and cause a collapse before the new team can even begin to chart a course.
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The seeming agreement on at least immediate objectives between the candidates was reflected in their endorsement of the 9/11 Commission Report, which pointed out that terrorism is a method, not a policy. The basic adversary is the radical, fundamentalist militant fringe of Islam, which aims to overthrow both moderate Islamic societies and all others it perceives as standing in the way of restoring an Islamic caliphate. For that reason, many societies that questioned America's intervention nevertheless have a stake in a successful outcome. If a radical government emerges in Baghdad—because the United States is defeated or tires of solitary exertions, even more if Iraq falls into terrorist chaos—the entire Islamic world will find itself in turmoil. Moderate governments will topple or struggle for their existence; countries with substantial Islamic minorities, such as India, Russia and the Philippines, will witness a mounting challenge. Terrorism will spread across Europe. The challenges to America will multiply.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaToday the U.S. acts as the trustee of global stability, while domestic obstacles prevent the admission—and perhaps even the recognition—of these realities in many countries. But such a one-sided arrangement cannot continue much longer. Other nations should find it in their interest to participate at least in the tasks of political and economic reconstruction. There is no shortcut around the next steps: the restoration of security in Iraq, especially in areas that have become terrorist sanctuaries, is imperative. No guerrilla war can be won if sanctuaries for insurgents are tolerated.
Having witnessed the challenges of creating local security forces in Indochina, I would warn against approaching the security effort in too mechanical a manner. In Vietnam, it took far longer to make units ready for combat than simply fulfilling the requirements of a training manual. The effectiveness of Iraqi forces will depend not only on their military training but on the degree to which the emerging Iraqi institutions gain domestic legitimacy. Units without political allegiance are generally least reliable when most needed.
The first national elections scheduled for the end of January are the next step. They should be viewed not as a culmination but as the first and perhaps least complicated achievement in the quest for Iraqi self-government. Democracy in the West evolved over centuries. It required first a church independent of the state; then the Reformation, which imposed pluralism of religion; the Enlightenment, which asserted the autonomy of reason from both church and state; the Age of Discovery, which broadened horizons; and finally capitalism, with its emphasis on competition and the market. None of these conditions exists in the Islamic world. Instead there is a merging of religion and politics inimical to pluralism. A genuine democratic government has come about only in Turkey, paradoxically through the imposition of democratic forms by an autocratic leader. The emergence of democratic institutions and of the arrangements which hold them together cannot be engineered as an act of will; it requires patience and modesty.
It is particularly important to understand the obstacles to democracy in a multiethnic and multireligion society such as Iraq's. In the West, democracy evolved in homogeneous societies. There was no institutional impediment to the minority's becoming a majority. Electoral defeat was considered a temporary setback that could be reversed. But in societies with distinct ethnic or political divisions, minority status often means permanent discrimination and the constant risk of political extinction.
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• American and British troops killed in Iraq
This is a particularly acute issue in Iraq. The country is composed of three major groups: Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, with the Shiites representing about 60 percent of the population and the other two groups about 20 percent each. For 500 years, the Sunnis have dominated by military force and, during Saddam's rule, with extraordinary brutality. Thus national elections, based on majority rule, imply a radical upheaval in the relative power and status of the three communities. The insurgency in the Sunni region is not only a national struggle against America; it is a means to restore political dominance. By the same token, the political process means little for the Kurds if it does not ensure a large measure of autonomy. The Shiites tolerate the U.S. presence—sometimes ambivalently—to achieve the goal of reversing the historic pattern of Sunni rule and as a first step to Shiite dominance. To what extent they will continue to support our role as the transfer of power progresses remains to be seen.
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NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
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• Listen to the complete On Air showThe January elections in Iraq, therefore, must be regarded as the beginning of an extended contest among the various groups, involving the constant risk of civil war, or of a national struggle against the U.S., or both. All factions maintain militias for precisely such eventualities. It will be necessary to augment the national electoral process with a significant element of federalism and to establish clear-cut constitutional protections for those who might find themselves in the permanent minority. Democracy must not be seen as a suicide pact by the Sunnis and the Kurds. Federalist structures and the assurance that free speech, freedom of conscience, and due process of law are constitutionally beyond the reach of any majority might provide some guarantee for the concerns of the various groups and a safety net if national reconciliation proves impossible.
In the potential cauldron after the January elections, some degree of internationalization is the only realistic path toward stability inside Iraq and sustained domestic support in America. The survival of the political process depends in the first instance on security—for which the United States retains the major responsibility—but ultimately on international acceptance to enable the Iraqi government to be perceived as representing indigenous aspirations.
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• Arms and the ElectionNEWSWEEK's Evan Thomas on whether the news of the missing explosives in Iraq could affect the White House race
NEWSWEEKDuring the political campaign there has been much talk of beginning this process with an effort to induce our European allies to increase their military participation and to lure recalcitrant allies into joining the security effort. Such a course cannot succeed in a time frame relevant to the immediate necessities. Germany and France—the two most difficult allies on Iraq—will not reverse their stand in sending troops to Iraq at the beginning of a process of reconciliation. (The German Foreign Minister has said so explicitly.) And countries that have sent troops have enough domestic difficulties maintaining their participation and little, if any, scope for increasing it.
Meaningful internationalization requires a focus other than security and the participation of countries other than—or in addition to—NATO. After the January elections, an international contact group, under U.N. auspices, to advise on Iraq's political evolution is therefore desirable. Logical members would be countries that have experience with militant Islam and much to lose by the radicalization of Iraq—countries such as India, Turkey, Russia, Algeria, in addition to the United States and Britain. This is not an abdication to consensus. The United States, by virtue of its military presence and financial role, would retain the leading position. The issue of military contribution by other nations, including NATO, can be raised again at a later stage in a more favorable political environment as a means to protect the governmental process.
Pre-emptionIn its first months in office, the Bush administration challenged conventional wisdom when it proclaimed the concept of pre-emption as if it were an American invention. In fact, pre-emption is inherent in the structure of the new international order, regardless of who serves in the White House. The international system of the 20th century was established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Seeking to avoid a repetition of the Thirty Years' War, during which nearly 30 percent of the population of Central Europe was killed in a conflict nominally over religious belief, the rulers based the new system on the principle of sovereignty within state borders and noninterference across them. Threats to international order were defined as movements of military units across established frontiers. Because weapons were relatively small and technology moved slowly, national security could generally be protected by awaiting the actual aggression.
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September 11 marked the end of that option. Threats, it taught, were no longer identical with state action; they could be organized by private groups operating from the territory of sovereign states for goals transcending the purposes of the host countries. Cold War strategies ceased to apply, since deterrence cannot work against an adversary with no territory to defend; and diplomacy does not work when the adversary rejects any limitation of objective and seeks the overthrow of societies. In the Westphalian system, the balance of power could generally be upset only by conquest. In the world of privatized terror and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the balance can be upset and survival threatened by developments entirely within the borders of a sovereign state.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaInevitably the concept of pre-emption leads to a clash between new realities and traditional notions of order. Countries used to established patterns find it difficult to accept the new necessities, and all nations will seek some rules of conduct that do not leave decisions on pre-emption to the unilateral, unconstrained determination of a single state. When implemented by a power with the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States, the doctrine prompts claims of hegemony by some on the American side and increasing resistance by others, particularly members of traditional alliances.
The new president will want to make a distinction between power and the claims made on its behalf. No nation, no matter how powerful, can organize the international system by itself; over an historical period it is beyond the psychological and political capacity of even the most dominant state. The goal of U.S. foreign policy must be to turn dominant power into shared responsibility—to conduct policy, as the Australian scholar Coral Bell has written, as if the international order were composed of many centers of power, even while we are aware of our strategic pre-eminence. It implies the need for a style of consultation less focused on imposing immediate policy prescriptions than achieving a common definition of long-range purposes.
NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
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• Listen to the complete On Air showIt is not in America's interest to encourage every state to define pre-emption in purely national terms. The response to 9/11 was imposed by requirements of an emergency. The newly elected president could contribute greatly to a new global order by indicating a willingness to discuss international principles of pre-emption—even while reserving the right to defend national security alone as a last resort.
Nuclear ProliferationWhile militant Islam is the most immediate and obvious challenge to international order, nuclear proliferation is the most long-range and insidious threat to global survival. Heretofore nuclear weapons have spread relatively slowly and remained in the possession of countries with everything to lose and nothing to gain from assaulting the international order. But the international system is now confronted by the imminent spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of two countries with a worrisome agenda: the odd, isolated regime in North Korea, which is responsible for multiple assassinations and kidnappings and meets every definition of a rogue regime; and Iran, whose current regime started by holding American diplomats as hostages and has since supported a variety of terrorist groups in the Middle East and continues to declare America its principal enemy.
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The possession of nuclear weapons by these countries would constitute a momentous step towards stripping the international order of the remaining restraints of the Westphalian system. Deterrence will lose its traditional meaning even with respect to state-to-state relations. With such a variety of nuclear powers, it will no longer be clear who is responsible for deterring whom and by what means. Second-order issues can escalate into nuclear conflict. The possibilities of miscalculation grow. Even if the new nuclear countries do not use their weapons, they can become a shield behind which to step up terrorist challenges. Finally, the experience with the so-called "private" distribution of Pakistan's nuclear technology to other countries shows that this may be the last moment to keep proliferation from spinning out of control. North Korea is so short of foreign exchange that its diplomats often revert to counterfeit currency; it might find the temptation to trade nuclear material for foreign exchange irresistible. In Iran, extremist elements have frequently demonstrated their ability to find specious Islamic justification for unconscionable acts in support of terrorism.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaThe international community has been torn between premonition of nuclear catastrophe and the escapism of treating warnings about proliferation as an example of American bellicosity. In some quarters on both sides of the Atlantic, the issue is presented as a case for testing whether pressure or diplomacy should serve as a principal tool. There is a debate as well about appropriate mechanisms for diplomacy. With respect to the North Korean nuclear program, the issue is whether negotiations should be conducted bilaterally between the United States and North Korea or in the existing six-party forum in Beijing, comprised of North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
If progress is to be made, the newly elected president will have to cut through these disputes to impose a unified policy. In practice, the distinction between diplomacy and pressure is academic since diplomacy is never abstract; it inevitably involves an amalgam of both. The challenge is to determine the proper mix.
Invariably, proliferating countries claim that they are seeking merely to participate in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy or to enhance electricity production or both. Countries determined to prevent proliferation are therefore tempted to provide incentives in the form of guaranteed alternative sources of energy or of nuclear fuel for power plants. Yet this approach generally fails, because the ultimate objectives of the proliferating country are political and strategic, not economic. Iran, an oil-producing country, has no economic need for nuclear power plants. What it seeks, as does North Korea, is a shield behind which it can conduct the revolutionary aspects of its foreign policy while reducing the risk of intervention by great powers.
A policy of offering material incentives in return for denuclearization is likely to fail, however appealing it may be in the abstract. For the incentives in one way or another increase the dependence of the proliferating country on the states against which the proliferation is really directed. Progress is unlikely unless it involves, at the least, the implication of pressure and a goal that addresses the security concerns of all interested parties. Multilateral talks, including the proliferating country, are essential.
With respect to North Korea, each of the parties in the six-party talks has special political and strategic objectives in the back of its mind: China, concern about nuclear weapons in all of Korea and the deployment of forces in North Korea in case of unification; Japan, its position as a non-nuclear country in an increasingly nuclear environment; South Korea, its aspirations to unification and the balance it seeks between China and the United States. Thus the technicalities of nonproliferation pale compared with the objective of elaborating a security system for Northeast Asia. A similar analysis could be made in the case of Iran, for which a forum does not yet exist.
Care must also be taken lest the fact of dialogue becomes its only substance, enhancing the prestige of the proliferating country without ensuring its cooperation. In any event, the solution cannot be left to bilateral U.S. talks with the proliferators. The insistence on U.S.-North Korea bilateralism would leave America as the sole enforcer of any agreement at the borders of China. And it would invite Pyongyang to use the new agreement for future blackmail—the pattern it followed after the bilateral agreement of 1994. The same applies in a different context to relations with Iran.
All of this is an academic exercise, meanwhile, if the concerned nations do not recognize that time is short, that the stately process of arms control negotiations is on the verge of being overwhelmed by events. To impart a sense of urgency, an answer must be found to these four questions: How much time do we actually have before the process of proliferation in North Korea and Iran has become irreversible? What incentives and assurances are we prepared to offer? What pressures are we prepared to undertake if incentives do not work? And how do we prevent negotiation and implementation from becoming a means to legitimize proliferation rather than avert it?
NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
• Listen to the audio
• Listen to the complete On Air showReality therefore imposes a time limit on these negotiations—or else the newly elected president is likely to leave a fearsome legacy by the end of his term. The all-consuming queries then will be: How does a society react to a nuclear explosion of undetermined origin? How should the world react to a nuclear war between emerging nuclear countries or the use of nuclear weapons by emerging nuclear countries against non-nuclear adversaries? At what point do the existing nuclear powers decide that a world of unrestrained nuclear proliferation is too dangerous and that they must impose nonproliferation for the survival of humanity?
The Long ChallengeFor all their importance, the regional crises—Iraq, North Korea—are dwarfed by the fundamental transfer of power within the international system. Historians agree that the emergence of a unified Germany over a century ago unbalanced the European system by introducing a state stronger than each of its neighbors. Disraeli called the event of greater significance than the French Revolution, because he sensed that the emerging structure would either imply German hegemony or that equilibrium could be restored only by an increasingly rigid alliance system depriving diplomacy of maneuvering room.
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In our age, the rise of China as a potential superpower is of even greater historical significance, marking as it does a shift in the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To be sure, China is unlikely to rely on military power as its principal instrument to achieve international status. For one thing, China's leaders are (or at least have been) more careful, more deliberate, more prone to accumulate advantages by nuance than the impetuous German leaders after Bismarck's retirement. More importantly, with modern technology war between major powers is an absolutely last resort, not a political option. America should maintain its traditional opposition to hegemonial aspirations over Asia. But the long-term relationship with China should not be driven by expectations of a strategic showdown. China will not conduct as imprudent a policy as the Soviet Union, which threatened all its neighbors simultaneously and challenged the United States to a contest of survival. The special case of Taiwan aside, it will seek influence commensurate with its growth by diplomatic and political means.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaAn interesting recent article compared the difference in the diplomatic style of China and the United States to their intellectual games—the West's chess and Chinese neiji, better known by the Japanese name of go. Chess has only two outcomes: draw and checkmate. The objective of the game is absolute advantage—that is to say, its outcome is total victory or defeat—and the battle is conducted head-on, in the center of the board. The aim of go is relative advantage; the game is played all over the board, and the objective is to increase one's options and reduce those of the adversary. The goal is less victory than persistent strategic progress.
No one can predict what judgment leaders will make decades from now. But leaders in both Beijing and Washington have a responsibility to help shape the judgments of emerging generations. With respect to China, the priority should be to keep the nationalism that is replacing Communism from taking a confrontational turn. In America, it is to transcend the temptation to view history through the prism of the most recent experience rather than of the long-range view.
China and the United States require a permanent strategic dialogue at a high level seeking a common definition of long-range purposes—to make them compatible where possible, and to reduce the dangers of confrontation when that effort fails. They need to keep the Taiwan issue from undermining the relationship while remembering the importance of solving it by peaceful means. In Sino-American relations, the future of Korea will play an increasingly prominent role. It is not simply a nonproliferation issue but a challenge for a security system for all of Northeast Asia.
China's renaissance, the rapid growth in India and the globalization in every corner of the world, beneficent as these conditions are for individuals, at the same time bring about massive issues of policy that can be postponed only at peril to the world economy. The equable management of access to energy and raw materials is beyond the capacity of the international system as presently constituted. If nothing is done, there is the real risk of a return to the rivalries of the colonial era—the contest over the direction of pipelines replacing the contest over territory—and a commodity pricing crisis that could drive the world into general recession. These issues must be addressed with great urgency by the newly elected president—in concert with directly affected trading and financial partners.
All this will bring us back to Atlantic relations. The political campaign has cast Atlantic disagreements in terms of American short-term tactical errors. This is a misreading of reality. Tact has not always distinguished every U.S. pronouncement. But the problem goes deeper than personalities. The impasse is partly due to the fact that the generation that formed the Atlantic relationship has passed from the scene. In the United States, the new leadership group is preoccupied with the challenge of radical Islam; our European allies either do not share America's assessment of that threat or, to the extent that they do, believe themselves capable of dealing with it outside the Atlantic framework. In the United States, the political center of gravity has shifted to parts of the country whose representatives have fewer personal connections with Europe and less experience with its internal challenges than their predecessors who created the postwar structure.
Across the Atlantic, leaders have been concentrating on transferring national sovereignty to new European institutions. This involves a host of technicalities and legal issues which are both arcane and elusive for most Americans. More fundamentally, the United States conducts its policies as the sovereign states of Europe did in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The European nations having invented the concept of the nation-state are now in the process of seeking to abandon their sovereignty to a European Union not yet possessing the traditional attributes of the state. They find themselves in a halfway house between their history and a future still in the process of evolving.
All this has generated a witches' brew of mutual misunderstandings. In America, critics describe European attitudes as fainthearted, querulous and, on occasion, duplicitous. In Europe the media (and too many political figures) revel in descriptions of America's racial tension, the death penalty, differences over the environment and mistreatment of prisoners as if aberrations reflected the ultimate meaning of the United States. Shifting their priority from the Atlantic alliance to the U.N. Security Council, Europeans feel no special obligation to support U.S. policy, on occasion actively opposing it.
These conditions cannot be removed by consultation on any one individual issue, and require a fundamental change of attitude on both sides of the Atlantic. The nations bordering the North Atlantic need to ask themselves the fundamental question that has always underpinned the alliance—that is, what will the allies do for the relationship beyond the international consensus reflected at the United Nations? Much of European debate today implies that the answer is "very little." To subject common military action to prior approval of the Security Council is incompatible with the very concept of alliance, which implies a special set of obligations. It spells the ultimate disintegration of a world order with the Atlantic partnership as its centerpiece. The Atlantic relationship, to be meaningful, needs to have a special character. The United States and Europe should be prepared to do things for each other in the sphere beyond the immediate dictates of national interest and without insisting on universal consensus.
A deepening of the dialogue between the two sides of the Atlantic is imperative. In a world of jihad, transformation of the balance of power, demographic change, mass migration and economic globalization, the ultimate challenge to the alliance will be the quest for some common purpose. The dialogue over Iraq and Iran described earlier should be supplemented by a new approach to the Palestine-Israeli problem. For decades the diplomatic stalemate has been deepened because Europe was perceived to champion the Palestinian claims and America the goals of Israel. But new circumstances permit envisaging how the two positions can be brought closer. Israel has implied that settlements beyond its new security fence are negotiable; the fence is already being brought into a relationship to the 1967 frontiers and some compensatory territory from present-day Israel has been discussed in Camp David and Tabba. At the same time, a few moderate Arab leaders have called for new initiatives. An effort to develop a European-U.S. position as part of a reinvigorated peace process might encourage reluctant parties to break the deadlock. In this process, the Atlantic alliance could rediscover its common purpose.
The debate between unilateralism and multilateralism must be transcended with this perspective in mind. Unilateralism for its own sake is self-defeating. But so is abstract multilateralism. The former absorbs purpose into a sense of special national mission; the latter waters down purpose in a quest for a formal consensus. The challenge for America is to reconcile consultation with vast power. The question for Europe is whether it views Atlantic relations as a partnership or as part of an international system of multipolarity very similar to pre-World War I Europe, in which major power centers engaged in shifting coalitions to maximize their advantage from case to case. That system broke down in the early 20th century; its 21st-century version is likely to be even less successful.
NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
• Listen to the audio
• Listen to the complete On Air showOpportunity for world order presents itself to each generation disguised as a set of problems. The dilemma of our age was perhaps best summed up by the philosopher Immanuel Kant over two hundred years ago. In his essay "Perpetual Peace," he wrote that the world was destined for perpetual peace. It would come about either by human foresight or by a series of catastrophes that leave no other choice. Which it will be is the ultimate question the newly elected president will have to face.
By Henry A. Kissinger
Newsweek
Nov. 8 issue - As these lines are being written, the election process is still in full swing. But this week, barring another deadlocked outcome, the campaign that has mesmerized America will be over. What will remain are the challenges that gave rise to this occasionally frenzied battle and the responsibility of dealing with them. No president has faced an agenda of comparable scope. This is not hyperbole; it is the hand history has dealt this generation. Never before has it been necessary to conduct a war with neither front lines nor geographic definition and, at the same time, to rebuild fundamental principles of world order to replace the traditional ones which went up in the smoke of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The newly elected president's task is perhaps most analogous to that inherited by President Truman at the end of the Second World War. In 1945, the Soviet Union was emerging as a threat to the global equilibrium, while the war had left a vacuum in Central Europe. But the Soviet challenge was concrete and geographically definable. Today's principal threats are abstract and mobile. Terror has no fixed address; it has attacked from Bali to Singapore, Riyadh, Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid, Tunis, New York and Washington. In the 1940s, the solution to the crisis was straightforward, albeit difficult: to construct a defensive line in the center of Europe and an economic program to close the gap between public expectation and the reality of shortages that threatened domestic stability.
The contemporary security challenge arises from two unprecedented sources: terror caused by acts until recently considered a matter for internal police forces rather than international policy, and scientific advances and proliferation that allow the survival of countries to be threatened by developments entirely within another state's territory. Truman could take the legitimacy of the international system for granted; the Atlantic alliance rallied America's West European allies from the Second World War. The newly elected president will have to lead an effort to define and then maintain an international system that reflects the new, revolutionary circumstances.
I supported President Bush during the campaign and hope for his success. But whatever the outcome, the United States cannot tackle this agenda except in the context of a commitment by all sides to healing. All concerned with the future of the country must find ways to cooperate so that the world will again see Americans working toward a common destiny both at home and in the community of nations. It is to such an effort that this article seeks to make a contribution.
Next Steps in IraqNo issue requires bipartisanship more urgently than the next phase of Iraq policy. If President Bush prevails, it is important that America's adversaries not confuse the passion of an election period with lack of unity regarding ultimate goals. If Senator Kerry wins, there is an overwhelming need for immediate cooperation between the incoming and the outgoing administration, lest the rhetoric describing the war as unnecessary at the wrong place, coupled with the hiatus imposed by the months of transition, undermine the confidence of the Iraqi authorities and cause a collapse before the new team can even begin to chart a course.
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The seeming agreement on at least immediate objectives between the candidates was reflected in their endorsement of the 9/11 Commission Report, which pointed out that terrorism is a method, not a policy. The basic adversary is the radical, fundamentalist militant fringe of Islam, which aims to overthrow both moderate Islamic societies and all others it perceives as standing in the way of restoring an Islamic caliphate. For that reason, many societies that questioned America's intervention nevertheless have a stake in a successful outcome. If a radical government emerges in Baghdad—because the United States is defeated or tires of solitary exertions, even more if Iraq falls into terrorist chaos—the entire Islamic world will find itself in turmoil. Moderate governments will topple or struggle for their existence; countries with substantial Islamic minorities, such as India, Russia and the Philippines, will witness a mounting challenge. Terrorism will spread across Europe. The challenges to America will multiply.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaToday the U.S. acts as the trustee of global stability, while domestic obstacles prevent the admission—and perhaps even the recognition—of these realities in many countries. But such a one-sided arrangement cannot continue much longer. Other nations should find it in their interest to participate at least in the tasks of political and economic reconstruction. There is no shortcut around the next steps: the restoration of security in Iraq, especially in areas that have become terrorist sanctuaries, is imperative. No guerrilla war can be won if sanctuaries for insurgents are tolerated.
Having witnessed the challenges of creating local security forces in Indochina, I would warn against approaching the security effort in too mechanical a manner. In Vietnam, it took far longer to make units ready for combat than simply fulfilling the requirements of a training manual. The effectiveness of Iraqi forces will depend not only on their military training but on the degree to which the emerging Iraqi institutions gain domestic legitimacy. Units without political allegiance are generally least reliable when most needed.
The first national elections scheduled for the end of January are the next step. They should be viewed not as a culmination but as the first and perhaps least complicated achievement in the quest for Iraqi self-government. Democracy in the West evolved over centuries. It required first a church independent of the state; then the Reformation, which imposed pluralism of religion; the Enlightenment, which asserted the autonomy of reason from both church and state; the Age of Discovery, which broadened horizons; and finally capitalism, with its emphasis on competition and the market. None of these conditions exists in the Islamic world. Instead there is a merging of religion and politics inimical to pluralism. A genuine democratic government has come about only in Turkey, paradoxically through the imposition of democratic forms by an autocratic leader. The emergence of democratic institutions and of the arrangements which hold them together cannot be engineered as an act of will; it requires patience and modesty.
It is particularly important to understand the obstacles to democracy in a multiethnic and multireligion society such as Iraq's. In the West, democracy evolved in homogeneous societies. There was no institutional impediment to the minority's becoming a majority. Electoral defeat was considered a temporary setback that could be reversed. But in societies with distinct ethnic or political divisions, minority status often means permanent discrimination and the constant risk of political extinction.
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This is a particularly acute issue in Iraq. The country is composed of three major groups: Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, with the Shiites representing about 60 percent of the population and the other two groups about 20 percent each. For 500 years, the Sunnis have dominated by military force and, during Saddam's rule, with extraordinary brutality. Thus national elections, based on majority rule, imply a radical upheaval in the relative power and status of the three communities. The insurgency in the Sunni region is not only a national struggle against America; it is a means to restore political dominance. By the same token, the political process means little for the Kurds if it does not ensure a large measure of autonomy. The Shiites tolerate the U.S. presence—sometimes ambivalently—to achieve the goal of reversing the historic pattern of Sunni rule and as a first step to Shiite dominance. To what extent they will continue to support our role as the transfer of power progresses remains to be seen.
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NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
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• Listen to the complete On Air showThe January elections in Iraq, therefore, must be regarded as the beginning of an extended contest among the various groups, involving the constant risk of civil war, or of a national struggle against the U.S., or both. All factions maintain militias for precisely such eventualities. It will be necessary to augment the national electoral process with a significant element of federalism and to establish clear-cut constitutional protections for those who might find themselves in the permanent minority. Democracy must not be seen as a suicide pact by the Sunnis and the Kurds. Federalist structures and the assurance that free speech, freedom of conscience, and due process of law are constitutionally beyond the reach of any majority might provide some guarantee for the concerns of the various groups and a safety net if national reconciliation proves impossible.
In the potential cauldron after the January elections, some degree of internationalization is the only realistic path toward stability inside Iraq and sustained domestic support in America. The survival of the political process depends in the first instance on security—for which the United States retains the major responsibility—but ultimately on international acceptance to enable the Iraqi government to be perceived as representing indigenous aspirations.
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• Arms and the ElectionNEWSWEEK's Evan Thomas on whether the news of the missing explosives in Iraq could affect the White House race
NEWSWEEKDuring the political campaign there has been much talk of beginning this process with an effort to induce our European allies to increase their military participation and to lure recalcitrant allies into joining the security effort. Such a course cannot succeed in a time frame relevant to the immediate necessities. Germany and France—the two most difficult allies on Iraq—will not reverse their stand in sending troops to Iraq at the beginning of a process of reconciliation. (The German Foreign Minister has said so explicitly.) And countries that have sent troops have enough domestic difficulties maintaining their participation and little, if any, scope for increasing it.
Meaningful internationalization requires a focus other than security and the participation of countries other than—or in addition to—NATO. After the January elections, an international contact group, under U.N. auspices, to advise on Iraq's political evolution is therefore desirable. Logical members would be countries that have experience with militant Islam and much to lose by the radicalization of Iraq—countries such as India, Turkey, Russia, Algeria, in addition to the United States and Britain. This is not an abdication to consensus. The United States, by virtue of its military presence and financial role, would retain the leading position. The issue of military contribution by other nations, including NATO, can be raised again at a later stage in a more favorable political environment as a means to protect the governmental process.
Pre-emptionIn its first months in office, the Bush administration challenged conventional wisdom when it proclaimed the concept of pre-emption as if it were an American invention. In fact, pre-emption is inherent in the structure of the new international order, regardless of who serves in the White House. The international system of the 20th century was established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Seeking to avoid a repetition of the Thirty Years' War, during which nearly 30 percent of the population of Central Europe was killed in a conflict nominally over religious belief, the rulers based the new system on the principle of sovereignty within state borders and noninterference across them. Threats to international order were defined as movements of military units across established frontiers. Because weapons were relatively small and technology moved slowly, national security could generally be protected by awaiting the actual aggression.
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September 11 marked the end of that option. Threats, it taught, were no longer identical with state action; they could be organized by private groups operating from the territory of sovereign states for goals transcending the purposes of the host countries. Cold War strategies ceased to apply, since deterrence cannot work against an adversary with no territory to defend; and diplomacy does not work when the adversary rejects any limitation of objective and seeks the overthrow of societies. In the Westphalian system, the balance of power could generally be upset only by conquest. In the world of privatized terror and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the balance can be upset and survival threatened by developments entirely within the borders of a sovereign state.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaInevitably the concept of pre-emption leads to a clash between new realities and traditional notions of order. Countries used to established patterns find it difficult to accept the new necessities, and all nations will seek some rules of conduct that do not leave decisions on pre-emption to the unilateral, unconstrained determination of a single state. When implemented by a power with the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States, the doctrine prompts claims of hegemony by some on the American side and increasing resistance by others, particularly members of traditional alliances.
The new president will want to make a distinction between power and the claims made on its behalf. No nation, no matter how powerful, can organize the international system by itself; over an historical period it is beyond the psychological and political capacity of even the most dominant state. The goal of U.S. foreign policy must be to turn dominant power into shared responsibility—to conduct policy, as the Australian scholar Coral Bell has written, as if the international order were composed of many centers of power, even while we are aware of our strategic pre-eminence. It implies the need for a style of consultation less focused on imposing immediate policy prescriptions than achieving a common definition of long-range purposes.
NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
• Listen to the audio
• Listen to the complete On Air showIt is not in America's interest to encourage every state to define pre-emption in purely national terms. The response to 9/11 was imposed by requirements of an emergency. The newly elected president could contribute greatly to a new global order by indicating a willingness to discuss international principles of pre-emption—even while reserving the right to defend national security alone as a last resort.
Nuclear ProliferationWhile militant Islam is the most immediate and obvious challenge to international order, nuclear proliferation is the most long-range and insidious threat to global survival. Heretofore nuclear weapons have spread relatively slowly and remained in the possession of countries with everything to lose and nothing to gain from assaulting the international order. But the international system is now confronted by the imminent spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of two countries with a worrisome agenda: the odd, isolated regime in North Korea, which is responsible for multiple assassinations and kidnappings and meets every definition of a rogue regime; and Iran, whose current regime started by holding American diplomats as hostages and has since supported a variety of terrorist groups in the Middle East and continues to declare America its principal enemy.
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The possession of nuclear weapons by these countries would constitute a momentous step towards stripping the international order of the remaining restraints of the Westphalian system. Deterrence will lose its traditional meaning even with respect to state-to-state relations. With such a variety of nuclear powers, it will no longer be clear who is responsible for deterring whom and by what means. Second-order issues can escalate into nuclear conflict. The possibilities of miscalculation grow. Even if the new nuclear countries do not use their weapons, they can become a shield behind which to step up terrorist challenges. Finally, the experience with the so-called "private" distribution of Pakistan's nuclear technology to other countries shows that this may be the last moment to keep proliferation from spinning out of control. North Korea is so short of foreign exchange that its diplomats often revert to counterfeit currency; it might find the temptation to trade nuclear material for foreign exchange irresistible. In Iran, extremist elements have frequently demonstrated their ability to find specious Islamic justification for unconscionable acts in support of terrorism.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaThe international community has been torn between premonition of nuclear catastrophe and the escapism of treating warnings about proliferation as an example of American bellicosity. In some quarters on both sides of the Atlantic, the issue is presented as a case for testing whether pressure or diplomacy should serve as a principal tool. There is a debate as well about appropriate mechanisms for diplomacy. With respect to the North Korean nuclear program, the issue is whether negotiations should be conducted bilaterally between the United States and North Korea or in the existing six-party forum in Beijing, comprised of North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
If progress is to be made, the newly elected president will have to cut through these disputes to impose a unified policy. In practice, the distinction between diplomacy and pressure is academic since diplomacy is never abstract; it inevitably involves an amalgam of both. The challenge is to determine the proper mix.
Invariably, proliferating countries claim that they are seeking merely to participate in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy or to enhance electricity production or both. Countries determined to prevent proliferation are therefore tempted to provide incentives in the form of guaranteed alternative sources of energy or of nuclear fuel for power plants. Yet this approach generally fails, because the ultimate objectives of the proliferating country are political and strategic, not economic. Iran, an oil-producing country, has no economic need for nuclear power plants. What it seeks, as does North Korea, is a shield behind which it can conduct the revolutionary aspects of its foreign policy while reducing the risk of intervention by great powers.
A policy of offering material incentives in return for denuclearization is likely to fail, however appealing it may be in the abstract. For the incentives in one way or another increase the dependence of the proliferating country on the states against which the proliferation is really directed. Progress is unlikely unless it involves, at the least, the implication of pressure and a goal that addresses the security concerns of all interested parties. Multilateral talks, including the proliferating country, are essential.
With respect to North Korea, each of the parties in the six-party talks has special political and strategic objectives in the back of its mind: China, concern about nuclear weapons in all of Korea and the deployment of forces in North Korea in case of unification; Japan, its position as a non-nuclear country in an increasingly nuclear environment; South Korea, its aspirations to unification and the balance it seeks between China and the United States. Thus the technicalities of nonproliferation pale compared with the objective of elaborating a security system for Northeast Asia. A similar analysis could be made in the case of Iran, for which a forum does not yet exist.
Care must also be taken lest the fact of dialogue becomes its only substance, enhancing the prestige of the proliferating country without ensuring its cooperation. In any event, the solution cannot be left to bilateral U.S. talks with the proliferators. The insistence on U.S.-North Korea bilateralism would leave America as the sole enforcer of any agreement at the borders of China. And it would invite Pyongyang to use the new agreement for future blackmail—the pattern it followed after the bilateral agreement of 1994. The same applies in a different context to relations with Iran.
All of this is an academic exercise, meanwhile, if the concerned nations do not recognize that time is short, that the stately process of arms control negotiations is on the verge of being overwhelmed by events. To impart a sense of urgency, an answer must be found to these four questions: How much time do we actually have before the process of proliferation in North Korea and Iran has become irreversible? What incentives and assurances are we prepared to offer? What pressures are we prepared to undertake if incentives do not work? And how do we prevent negotiation and implementation from becoming a means to legitimize proliferation rather than avert it?
NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
• Listen to the audio
• Listen to the complete On Air showReality therefore imposes a time limit on these negotiations—or else the newly elected president is likely to leave a fearsome legacy by the end of his term. The all-consuming queries then will be: How does a society react to a nuclear explosion of undetermined origin? How should the world react to a nuclear war between emerging nuclear countries or the use of nuclear weapons by emerging nuclear countries against non-nuclear adversaries? At what point do the existing nuclear powers decide that a world of unrestrained nuclear proliferation is too dangerous and that they must impose nonproliferation for the survival of humanity?
The Long ChallengeFor all their importance, the regional crises—Iraq, North Korea—are dwarfed by the fundamental transfer of power within the international system. Historians agree that the emergence of a unified Germany over a century ago unbalanced the European system by introducing a state stronger than each of its neighbors. Disraeli called the event of greater significance than the French Revolution, because he sensed that the emerging structure would either imply German hegemony or that equilibrium could be restored only by an increasingly rigid alliance system depriving diplomacy of maneuvering room.
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In our age, the rise of China as a potential superpower is of even greater historical significance, marking as it does a shift in the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To be sure, China is unlikely to rely on military power as its principal instrument to achieve international status. For one thing, China's leaders are (or at least have been) more careful, more deliberate, more prone to accumulate advantages by nuance than the impetuous German leaders after Bismarck's retirement. More importantly, with modern technology war between major powers is an absolutely last resort, not a political option. America should maintain its traditional opposition to hegemonial aspirations over Asia. But the long-term relationship with China should not be driven by expectations of a strategic showdown. China will not conduct as imprudent a policy as the Soviet Union, which threatened all its neighbors simultaneously and challenged the United States to a contest of survival. The special case of Taiwan aside, it will seek influence commensurate with its growth by diplomatic and political means.
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• Varia: Two Sets of Rules in Bush’s AmericaAn interesting recent article compared the difference in the diplomatic style of China and the United States to their intellectual games—the West's chess and Chinese neiji, better known by the Japanese name of go. Chess has only two outcomes: draw and checkmate. The objective of the game is absolute advantage—that is to say, its outcome is total victory or defeat—and the battle is conducted head-on, in the center of the board. The aim of go is relative advantage; the game is played all over the board, and the objective is to increase one's options and reduce those of the adversary. The goal is less victory than persistent strategic progress.
No one can predict what judgment leaders will make decades from now. But leaders in both Beijing and Washington have a responsibility to help shape the judgments of emerging generations. With respect to China, the priority should be to keep the nationalism that is replacing Communism from taking a confrontational turn. In America, it is to transcend the temptation to view history through the prism of the most recent experience rather than of the long-range view.
China and the United States require a permanent strategic dialogue at a high level seeking a common definition of long-range purposes—to make them compatible where possible, and to reduce the dangers of confrontation when that effort fails. They need to keep the Taiwan issue from undermining the relationship while remembering the importance of solving it by peaceful means. In Sino-American relations, the future of Korea will play an increasingly prominent role. It is not simply a nonproliferation issue but a challenge for a security system for all of Northeast Asia.
China's renaissance, the rapid growth in India and the globalization in every corner of the world, beneficent as these conditions are for individuals, at the same time bring about massive issues of policy that can be postponed only at peril to the world economy. The equable management of access to energy and raw materials is beyond the capacity of the international system as presently constituted. If nothing is done, there is the real risk of a return to the rivalries of the colonial era—the contest over the direction of pipelines replacing the contest over territory—and a commodity pricing crisis that could drive the world into general recession. These issues must be addressed with great urgency by the newly elected president—in concert with directly affected trading and financial partners.
All this will bring us back to Atlantic relations. The political campaign has cast Atlantic disagreements in terms of American short-term tactical errors. This is a misreading of reality. Tact has not always distinguished every U.S. pronouncement. But the problem goes deeper than personalities. The impasse is partly due to the fact that the generation that formed the Atlantic relationship has passed from the scene. In the United States, the new leadership group is preoccupied with the challenge of radical Islam; our European allies either do not share America's assessment of that threat or, to the extent that they do, believe themselves capable of dealing with it outside the Atlantic framework. In the United States, the political center of gravity has shifted to parts of the country whose representatives have fewer personal connections with Europe and less experience with its internal challenges than their predecessors who created the postwar structure.
Across the Atlantic, leaders have been concentrating on transferring national sovereignty to new European institutions. This involves a host of technicalities and legal issues which are both arcane and elusive for most Americans. More fundamentally, the United States conducts its policies as the sovereign states of Europe did in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The European nations having invented the concept of the nation-state are now in the process of seeking to abandon their sovereignty to a European Union not yet possessing the traditional attributes of the state. They find themselves in a halfway house between their history and a future still in the process of evolving.
All this has generated a witches' brew of mutual misunderstandings. In America, critics describe European attitudes as fainthearted, querulous and, on occasion, duplicitous. In Europe the media (and too many political figures) revel in descriptions of America's racial tension, the death penalty, differences over the environment and mistreatment of prisoners as if aberrations reflected the ultimate meaning of the United States. Shifting their priority from the Atlantic alliance to the U.N. Security Council, Europeans feel no special obligation to support U.S. policy, on occasion actively opposing it.
These conditions cannot be removed by consultation on any one individual issue, and require a fundamental change of attitude on both sides of the Atlantic. The nations bordering the North Atlantic need to ask themselves the fundamental question that has always underpinned the alliance—that is, what will the allies do for the relationship beyond the international consensus reflected at the United Nations? Much of European debate today implies that the answer is "very little." To subject common military action to prior approval of the Security Council is incompatible with the very concept of alliance, which implies a special set of obligations. It spells the ultimate disintegration of a world order with the Atlantic partnership as its centerpiece. The Atlantic relationship, to be meaningful, needs to have a special character. The United States and Europe should be prepared to do things for each other in the sphere beyond the immediate dictates of national interest and without insisting on universal consensus.
A deepening of the dialogue between the two sides of the Atlantic is imperative. In a world of jihad, transformation of the balance of power, demographic change, mass migration and economic globalization, the ultimate challenge to the alliance will be the quest for some common purpose. The dialogue over Iraq and Iran described earlier should be supplemented by a new approach to the Palestine-Israeli problem. For decades the diplomatic stalemate has been deepened because Europe was perceived to champion the Palestinian claims and America the goals of Israel. But new circumstances permit envisaging how the two positions can be brought closer. Israel has implied that settlements beyond its new security fence are negotiable; the fence is already being brought into a relationship to the 1967 frontiers and some compensatory territory from present-day Israel has been discussed in Camp David and Tabba. At the same time, a few moderate Arab leaders have called for new initiatives. An effort to develop a European-U.S. position as part of a reinvigorated peace process might encourage reluctant parties to break the deadlock. In this process, the Atlantic alliance could rediscover its common purpose.
The debate between unilateralism and multilateralism must be transcended with this perspective in mind. Unilateralism for its own sake is self-defeating. But so is abstract multilateralism. The former absorbs purpose into a sense of special national mission; the latter waters down purpose in a quest for a formal consensus. The challenge for America is to reconcile consultation with vast power. The question for Europe is whether it views Atlantic relations as a partnership or as part of an international system of multipolarity very similar to pre-World War I Europe, in which major power centers engaged in shifting coalitions to maximize their advantage from case to case. That system broke down in the early 20th century; its 21st-century version is likely to be even less successful.
NEWSWEEK RADIO 10/31/04
Kissinger: Memo to the Next President
Henry Kissinger, President, Kissinger Associates; former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
• Listen to the audio
• Listen to the complete On Air showOpportunity for world order presents itself to each generation disguised as a set of problems. The dilemma of our age was perhaps best summed up by the philosopher Immanuel Kant over two hundred years ago. In his essay "Perpetual Peace," he wrote that the world was destined for perpetual peace. It would come about either by human foresight or by a series of catastrophes that leave no other choice. Which it will be is the ultimate question the newly elected president will have to face.
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