Democracy and its Discontents

This chapter currently opens with an essay that dates to the late 1990s, but is followed by a more current collection of articles.

Members of the establishment, and their collaborators, occupy leadership positions and positions of strategic significance in the following six power structure categories:

1. Academia, institutions of ideology (including foundations and major traditional religions), the news and entertainment media (including ``watchdog'' organizations), and the advertising industry
   
   
2. Banking, finance, and insurance
   
   
3. The intelligence community and militaries
   
   
4. Manufacturing, construction, resource extraction and processing, waste processing, agriculture, transportation, utilities, computer software, and supporting services and industries
   
   
5. Elected office, government bureaucracy, judiciaries, the law enforcement community, prison staffs, law firms, accounting firms, professional organizations, and medical and psychiatric facilities and institutes
   
   
6. Shipping and retail distribution, organized labor, organized crime, citizen militias, and cults
   
   

These six categories are evident in the complete Bilderberg attendance list with affiliations, partial CFR and TLC membership roster with affiliations, complete CFR membership roster without affiliations, and complete Trilateral Commission membership roster without affiliations.

These categories are arranged in a control hierarchy that is intrinsic to the sociological status quo. The architecture and operating system is mostly the product of those in category 1, who in the final analysis are the most powerful. They exert a great influence over the whole of society, including every other category. Those in category 2 control those in category 3 and 4 according to the advice and manipulations of those in category 1. Categories 3 and 4 work hand in hand on tightly integrated manufacturing and technology development projects. They have a thoroughly symbiotic relationship, known as the "military-industrial complex." Those in category 5 and 6 are directed principally by those in category 4, but often directly by those in category 2. The intelligence community portion of category 3 and the law enforcement portion of category 5 also routinely handle coordination of the organized crime and cult portions of category 6 directly. Categories 5 and 6 engage in turf wars with each other when left to their own devices, because they are at the same level of the control hierarchy and have conflicting interests. Those in category 5 are interposed between the public and categories 2-4. In other words, much of the purpose of the visible government (excepting the military) is obstruction of justice.

An individual becomes part of the dominant center of this apparatus through deliberate induction - e.g., by invitation to Skull & Bones or the Bilderberg group. Candidates for induction exhibit acumen for interpersonal manipulation, flexibility of conviction, obedience and dominance, the capacity to studiously sustain elaborate façades and schemes of compartmentalization, susceptibility to bribery and blackmail, lust for and attraction to power, and a predisposition to refrain from forming a conscious, integrated and consistent model of reality. The establishment works to shape society so that this basic personality profile is the norm rather than the exception, and it is naturally prevalent in any case. Often, and more crucially the greater his age, a candidate is in a position of influence or privileged access in one of the power structure categories. Bill Clinton appears to be a case of extreme suitability to the purposes of the establishment, with a very full house of candidate characteristics. George W. Bush appears to be far less suitable from their point of view, as noted for example by Fred Barnes (c.f. “Bush the Insurgent”, below).

An interesting example of someone who is probably not a typical member of the establishment is Alan Greenspan. As Fed Chairman Greenspan was in a position of immense influence. He exhibits the capacity to studiously sustain elaborate façades and schemes of compartmentalization. However, he has very little flexibility of conviction, very little lust for power, and no discernible susceptibility to bribery or blackmail. Thus, despite his position and skills, he is thoroughly unsuited to the usual purposes of the establishment leadership. He could not, however, have occupied his position without their assent. Thus, clearly the leadership deems it advantageous to have an individual of true competence and principle in that position, to expertly hold together an economic house of cards until further notice, as it were (In 1999 he had announced his intention to retire in 2000, and while obviously he did not follow through on this threat, he did retire in 2005). Greenspan can be viewed as an unwitting abettor of their schemes. He is aware of the establishment's program in its pecuniary essence, if not its baroque totality as largely illuminated in this compilation. (See his essay on the subject.) His public support for the Financial Services Act of 1998, which permits and facilitates mergers between banks, securities trading firms, and insurance companies, underscores his alignment with trust-permissive infrastructure in general and the establishment leadership in particular.

What follows is a brief enumeration of the motivations, and hence the commonalities of interest, for each of the six power structure categories. The danger is in the intersection of goals - that set of goals that all six categories share. These common goals are fairly clear.

Those in academia, institutions of ideology (including foundations and major traditional religions), the news and entertainment media (including ``watchdog'' organizations), and the advertising industry include the thinktankers, the Kissingers and Brzezinskis, the spinmeisters, those who gave birth to Mutually Assured Destruction, and those who purvey the blight of communism as a moral imperative. In this category are those who whisper in the ears of hapless figurehead leaders, leaders who are not equipped to recognize, comprehend, or challenge the subtleties, motivations, or indeed, flaws, of the words their so-called advisors deliver to them. This category houses the super-smart super-evil, the social engineers and eugenicists, the architects of slavery and ruin, those who design the curricula which sabotage the youth. It also houses the architects of faith, the cloistered psychological warriors, who adjust the convictions of the flock through the conduit of the church hierarchy, in pursuit of their agenda of control. This category includes the systematicians who, alone in the establishment, have a broad understanding of their endeavor, and of the totality of their evil - though often not recognizing it as such. It is good to realize that the free market system is seen by academics as putting a bunch of amateurs in the driver's seat; thus the superiority of the free market is considered by most academics to be heresy. The academics and ideologues believe they can architect and control a tyrannical world government, because diabolical designs and control are their domain and their aim.

In 1996, I wrote a short essay on the subject of academicians, which I now excerpt here.

``Consider the incessant barrage of instructive experiences that comprise the days of every human from their earliest days of awareness. Most of the time, parents reward obedience and punish independence. When the child is sent to school, be it public or private, he is presented with an environment in which the rewards for obedience and the punishments for independence and defiance are even starker. He is taught that his immediate self-esteem *should* be directly proportional to his grades, both absolutely and relative to the grades of his classmates. He knows the teacher can demand virtually anything of him within the context of the classwork, and he knows the teacher can grade him based upon whimsy alone. If he dreams of achievement, he probably dreams of college. He knows his grades are important if he is to be admitted to, and be able to pay for, a good college. So he is taught year after year that his will is subordinate to other arbitrary wills, and that the means of his personal achievement are predicated on the successful enlistment of support from those he is subordinate to.

``In this artificial pressure cooker, is it not surprising that many students discover they can win, according to the rules set out for them, by being second handers, manipulators, social engineers, and outright cheaters?

``The price they pay at the time is very high, but the horrific reality is that once they realize the high price they have paid, they continue to choose as they have before, believing the price is already paid. They further distance themselves from the world of authentic first-handers.

``By the time these children are adults, they are so completely given over to the world of the second hander that they can experience a first-hander's extension of an olive branch only as an affront. The barrier is psychological, but not "just psychological." This barrier is very real.

``I now return to the specific example of the career academician.

``An academician is a man who has played by the rules to the end, jumping through every hoop, every signature on every thesis, every entrance exam, every plea with every arbitrary referee and advisor, every requirement in every curriculum, every problem set, every lab, and all the right "extra-curricular" activities. Sound tiresome? Sound demoralizing? To be sure! After the child chooses to believe the orthodox definitions of achievement and its means, the child becomes a man who is dedicated to the means and actualities of orthodox achievement.''

Those in banking, finance, and insurance are concerned with the performance of the transnational industrialists, and also directly with the operation and regulation of currency systems, stock markets, commodity markets (particularly precious metals), and government bonds, and laws and regulations that affect loan performance. The insurers are also concerned with laws that directly affect them (laws mandating liability and health insurance, for example), and with the ability to enforce the terms of their policies wherever the claim originates (requiring a transnational regulatory body). A world government that mandates various types of insurance is, obviously, an appealing prospect for insurers. Insurers are intrinsically interested in heavily instrumented and regulated economies, because this provides the information and regularity needed to precisely set their rates to guarantee profit. A heavily instrumented and regulated world economy is such a complex system that accurate statistical models thereof are not feasible except for large existing corporations, so world government inherently perpetuates an existing oligarchy of insurers. Insurance, it is good to note, is inherently socialist, in that it constitutes a system of wealth redistribution from the healthy and successful to the sick and failed. H.R. 10, the Financial Services Act of 1998 (already passed by the full House - download all 293 pages here as PDF or plaintext), eliminates legacy barriers to consolidation of the industries in this category "To enhance competition in the financial services industry by providing a prudential framework for the affiliation of banks, securities firms, and other financial service providers, and for other purposes."

Since transnational banks routinely make large loans to governments across national boundaries, the bankers have a self-evident direct interest in a supreme world government capable of enforcing the terms of the loan. Another obvious example of interest in globalism is currency market activity, since in these markets one is essentially trading in shares of distinct nations. A world government could enforce prohibitions on fiat devaluation actions, for example. In its role as enforcer of so-called austerity measures, a world government often gains substantial control over the internal decision-making process of a nation's economy, and exercises that control as it sees fit. The IMF and World Bank are undiluted incarnations of this theme. The global bankers, financiers, and insurers believe they can influence a world government so that it implements policies favorable to them. This is not an unreasonable expectation at all, especially when one considers that the world's major intelligence organizations are little more than private eyes and foot soldiers for the international banker clique.

The intelligence community and militaries are a power structure category with a special perspective, who command distinguished assets. Of all the people in the world, those working at the highest level of intelligence synthesis in the Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters of the US National Security Agency have the most complete and accurate picture of the state of the human world, and those working at the highest levels of command in the Pentagon and the Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, command the most awful military arsenal in existence. This raw knowledge and power informs and intoxicates those who wield it. In fact, the megalomaniacal and apocalyptic vagaries of one of NORAD's early Commanders in Chief are legendary, and ostensibly brushed perilously close to provoking the Soviets to strike first.

Imagine an organization that watches nearly every TV channel in the world, listens to nearly every radio signal in the world, registers and can monitor nearly any long distance phone call in the world, reads nearly every newspaper and magazine in the world, reads nearly every unencrypted email it wants to, and tracks nearly every WWW query and download including the one you made to retrieve what you're reading right now. Imagine it has eyes and ears - human or machine - in nearly every conference room of nearly every major corporation, and in the chambers of nearly every legislative committee. Imagine it has its own state of the art microchip fabrication facility, and a collection of covert surveillance devices qualitatively more advanced than anyone else's. Imagine it speaks nearly every language in the world, and knows many of the important secrets of history. Imagine it could look at nearly any patch of the planet's surface, in millimeter band radar, polarized optical, raster spectrometer, or thermal infrared, nearly any time it wants to, and pick out (though not identify from a cold start) individual people in the pictures. Imagine it is given the details every time anyone writes a check, uses a credit or ATM card, starts or stops service with a utility, registers to vote, or lodges forms with the DMV or a change of address with the post office. Imagine this is only half of its spectrum of intelligence sources. And imagine it has a farm of supercomputers that are the largest agglomeration of computing power in the world, and all those intelligence sources are automatically digested, and those events, locations, and individuals of interest are automatically and promptly presented. The above, and not one gram less, is the staggering extent of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and their collaborating Canadian, British, Australian, Israeli, and (to lesser degrees) European and Pacific counterparts.

A complex as powerful as that described above is going to consider itself to be peerless. It can blackmail any politician or lawman, and indeed any businessman who isn't positioned favorably inside the total apparatus, because of its vault of secrets, its cloak of secrecy, and its closet of assassins. In its role as supplier of intelligence product to the rest of the government, its filtrations, distortions, and outright fabrications of reality are pronounced with authority. In pursuit of its agenda, it essentially wages psychological war on the rest of the government, thereby waging often not-so-psychological war on the rest of the world. The NSA is not trusted by the Pentagon - in fact, the relationship is acrimonious. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Axis - to coin a term - needs those in the other categories, and those in the conventional military hierarchy, to transduce their agenda into action. Thus there is a massive collaboration. The Axis is also intensely interested in delocalization and globalization, because geographically sprawling empires rely on electronic messaging for the details of daily operations, allowing monitoring by a surveillance apparatus. The Axis, under the control of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, probably now constitutes the real seat of power on the planet, distinguished and above all others, and the inability of an elite cadre of transnational corporations to get outrageous cryptography regulations relaxed is a demonstration of the imbalance of power. Crucially, there is no boundary between the elite inner core of the Intelligence Axis and the elite inner core of the international banker clique, so the power of the Intelligence Axis and the power of the international bankers is essentially the same power.

Read here the Employee's Handbook (O) for the US National Security Agency/Central Security Service. On this website is a mirror of guy@panix.com's Cryptography Manifesto which examines the Axis in great detail. Paul Wolf's Echelon pages are a collection of mainstream press articles on the Axis' monitoring system. The Axis knows it can emplace and maintain a tyrannical world government, because knowing is what it does. They want to do this because they can; because to them, as Orwell put it, "The object of power is power."

Returning to that portion of the military that is not part of the Intelligence Axis, one quickly notices that a swathe of elite command staff, invariably including the Secretary of Defense, are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, about which more below. William Cohen, the current secretary, is also a member of the Trilateral Commission. The non-black-bag portion of the military is quite distinct from the Intelligence Axis, and does not share its arrogance or aloofness. In fact it is transitional between category three and category five.

One will not find any NSA leaders in the CFR roster (though some in the roster might actually be NSA and just not announced as such) - not even the recently succeeded Director, Air Force Lt. General Kenneth Minihan - though importantly, these leaders, including Minihan, do appear at CFR set colloquiums (for example, a summit organized by Bill Gates). Also, according to ParaScope, "During most of its existence, the Central Intelligence Agency has been headed by CFR members, beginning with CFR founding member Allen Dulles. Virtually every key U.S. national security and foreign policy adviser has been a CFR member for the past seventy years." But NSA employees don't get medals from Congress. In fact, in a famous exchange in 1975, General Allen, then Director of the NSA, stated "The law does not allow me to testify on any aspect of the National Security Agency, even to the Senate Intelligence Committee." These sorts of basic acknowledgements and demonstrations of connection and accountability to other power players are common for those in the conventional military hierarchy - the Joint Chiefs, etc. - but mostly absent for the elite in the Intelligence Axis.

Those in manufacturing, construction, resource extraction and processing, waste processing, agriculture, transportation, utilities, computer software, and supporting services and industries are interested primarily in the uniforming of laws that affect their operations and those of potential competitors, though they are also interested in the performance of the transnational banking and insurance concerns. Primary among the laws of concern are commerce and trade regulations (regarding working conditions, wages, benefits, intellectual property, real property, radio spectrum allocation and usage, utilities (intrinsic monopolies, including telephone, cable television, and electricity), contracts, tort exposure, import/export tariffs, taxation, etc.), environmental regulations (regarding atmospheric and aquatic discharge, landfilling and toxic storage, harvesting of natural resources, zoning and sound/light/odor/aesthetic nuisances, etc.), and political process regulations (regarding campaign finance, campaign advertising, balloting and census procedures, political parties, etc.). These industrialists prefer a uniformity of regulation, and of course, prefer that the regulations favor them and hamper actual or potential competitors. In particular, they want to be able to challenge any national law or constitutional tenet, and appeal any judicial decision, to world legislative and judicial bodies with global supremacy. Moreover, they want their sprawling transnational corporate empires to be protected by police and military bodies that are loyal to those world bodies, and not to any particular nation. The World Trade Organization and World Court are nascent incarnations of the policy-making and judicial dimensions of this world government; it is planned that these bodies will evolve so that corporations can bring suits, rather than only nations. Accreditation for a corporation to bring suits in this future world court would be very hard to obtain. Globalization is also intrinsically technology-intensive, and the means of producing this technology are exotic and exclusive (witness the exponentiation of the cost of a competitive microchip fabrication facility). Thus industrialists recognize that globalization intrinsically encourages the perpetuation of monopolies by intrinsic barriers to entry. The global industrialists believe they can influence a world government so that it implements policies favorable to them. This is not an unreasonable expectation.

Those in elected office, government bureaucracy, judiciaries, the law enforcement community, prison staffs, law firms, accounting firms, professional organizations, and medical and psychiatric facilities and institutes, constitute a portion of the establishment which is distinctly subordinate to the above four categories. Politicians are made and unmade at the whimsy of the others. They act as they are instructed by the elite, or they are forced out of office through subtle erosion of their base of support, through blackmail forcing a quiet departure at term's end, through actualized scandal, or as a final option, through framing or assassination.

The clergy are a special type of politician in their role as deliverer of sermons and counselor of the flock, and those who are aligned with the establishment are actually midway between the diabolical ideologues of category 1 and the smarmy, disingenuous politicians of this category. Clergy can reach and monitor sectors of the population that are otherwise detached, and wield special authority among those who have been infected with the religion. They often endorse particular candidates in elections. And most importantly, they routinely promulgate such calculated affronts as uniform civilian disarmament, the continuation and escalation of the so-called war on drugs, the continuation and escalation of socialist policies such as welfare, and various other items on the agenda of the establishment. Clergy are not permitted to innovate ideologies, only to promulgate them, and the church hierarchies assure the enforcement of this prohibition. They are conduits of infection for essentially prefabricated meme-complexes which, in turn, are designed to harness the flock with a yoke of control that can be used whenever needed for whatever purpose within its scope. School teachers, including college-level teachers when they aren't elite academics of category 1, are like the clergy, midway between the ideologues of category 1 and the politicians of this category. They share with the clergy all the activities mentioned above, except that they derive their special authority from affiliation with the state, except in parochial schools where the authority is the same as that wielded by the clergy, and in secular private schools where the authority is simply generic institutional affiliation. Of course, clergy primarily direct their efforts at adults (with the obvious exception of "Sunday School"), whereas teachers primarily direct them at youth.

The work of those in government bureaucracy, the law enforcement community, prison staffs, law firms, accounting firms, professional organizations, and medical and psychiatric facilities and institutes, have boundaries that are sufficiently cloistering and constraining that they are typically incapable of pursuing private plans of any consequence, instead simply following directives - legitimate or conspiratorial - passed to them whenever their particular patch of turf plays a role in the plans of others. It has oft been observed that a study of the formalized and followed professional ethics of medical practitioners is a barometer of that which is, at a given time, the ethical system that is most mainstream and most promoted by authorities in the culture. In short, medical practitioners tend to flock to that which they perceive is least controversial and least likely to evoke the ire of the authorities, an ire which is usually depicted as the ire of the (fictitious) infallible collective.

Law enforcement is similar in its system of constraints. Moreover, in many local police departments, the patrol officer corps is systematically culled of any real brainpower, by rejecting applicants who score above a threshhold on an IQ test administered in the application process. In short, establishment politicians, clergy, lawyers, medical practitioners, bureaucrats, and LEO's, are little more than lackeys who wolf down the scraps tossed to them by the real power elite (though of course, those who are not aligned with the establishment are, in some cases, just good people doing a good job!). Those in the establishment with occasion to consider the matter directly, support totalitarian world government because they know such a government will be freighted with bureaucracy and litigation of unprecedented vastness, and they know that if nothing else such a bureaucracy provides for many, many little patches of turf which they can keep as petty fiefdoms. High bureaucrats in many governments are enticed by the possibility of greater access to advanced technologies of political control. Also, participation in a world government is perceived by the members of this category as a brush with greatness. These establishment collaborators are corrupt, often stupid, usually petty people, after all.

Shipping and retail distribution, organized labor, organized crime, citizen militias, and cults, the final category, is also a subordinate category. They serve those in the first four power structure categories, and occasionally, those in the fifth. The less unsavory components of the category - shipping and retail distribution and organized labor - are used as mechanisms of economic censorship, and in the case of media retail distribution (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.), are mechanisms of informational censorship. With some evident overlap, the more unsavory remainder of the category is recruited to do the dirtiest of the dirty work - directly sabotaging economic segments, supplying votes and campaign donations, executing assassinations, framing targets, strategic robberies, commerce in contraband, mass brainwashing, major domestic terrorism, recruitment of operatives, etc. In special operations, there is a technique known as sterilization, which amounts to the removal of any item of clothing or equipment revealing the affiliations of the personnel. Organized crime, citizen militias, and cults, serve as standing, sterilized special operations forces. A curious parallel to the military/intelligence category crops up here: organized labor is fully represented in the Council on Foreign Relations, like the conventional military hierarchy, but organized crime, citizen militias, and cults, are of course absent, as are the NSA, NRO, and most other black bag Intelligence Axis components.

Cults come in many flavors; the most notable mass cults are the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church. Cults often serve to field-test and bootstrap mechanisms of socio-political control. Generally, each cult targets a particular demographic: Scientology is a pseudotech UFO religion that targets credulous and troubled Hollywood stars and others in the "New Age" crowd; International Churches of Christ is a neo-Catholic religion that targets desperate college students; the Unification Church targets ordinary adults who seek the comfort of traditional moral rigor as a reaction to social and moral disintegration. Some of the cults, such as Skull and Bones at Yale and the All Souls group at Oxford, are breeding grounds for those destined to be leading establishment operatives, and target college students who are seen to be suited to that role. Some of the cults are actually internal to major state institutions; the Night Stalkers (160th Spec. Ops Aviation Rgmt Airborne) and Delta Force ("Combat Applications Group") are killer cults internal to the US Army, and target those soldiers who have demonstrated (while assigned to mainstream special operations units) an unflinching, unreasoning, absolute loyalty to their commanders, and a capacity to subdue and kill enemies of arbitrary designation in close quarters with extreme competence - and with emotional indifference or enjoyment. Some citizen militias are actually cults, complete with rudimentary brainwashing and religious and political mythologies (often involving strange ancestral and racial theories and elaborate conspiracy theories).

The interest of organized criminals in world government is mostly a consequence of the interest of the power elite, and not an actual direct interest. Organized crime routinely operates over national boundaries, but they don't much care about regulatory harmonization, though they do rely on certain regulatory systems - for example, the drug laws - for the survival of their business. Also, organized crime may recognize the magnified corruptability of the huge world government bureaucracy. Organized labor is, as always, interested in the communism that is a salient component of the tyrannical world government being architected in back rooms.

In each of the above categories, those who are establishment collaborators, and a large proportion of those who are not, are people driven by power lust - by greed for the minds of others, a kind of metaphysical headhunting, a signature attitude of the second hander. Though this is obvious, it is good to be explicit. Not everyone in a significant position in one of these categories is aligned with the establishment, of course. One can be a leader in one of the categories, but in fact be working somewhat against the establishment, as does WorldNetDaily to a certain degree. In fact, if the moniker of establishment collaborator is constrained to those with some explicit knowledge of and participation in plans to subvert the law in pursuit of the goal of tyrannical world government, then only a small proportion of those in each of the power structure categories qualifies. Most of the rest unwittingly or by capitulation aid the relatively few at the core of the establishment. Another key is that the establishment is itself a meme-complex, and most members are infected by it as though Bilderberger model world government were a religious prophecy. This provides another ray of hope for the opposition, since people who collaborate only by dint of consumption by a meme-complex are often not determinedly evil, but only haplessly so, fooled to believe they act in the service of good.

Notice also who is missing in the six categories: one does not find any laborers (construction workers, factory workers, sanitation workers, etc.), shopkeepers, farmers, transportation workers (truckers, etc.), repairmen and technicians, engineers, artists (including musicians and composers, and except when they are working in advertising), structural architects, or physical scientists (as opposed to economists and psychologists, who are very strongly represented in power structure category one, of course). All of these belong in category four, but only managerial positions in category four are represented in the establishment. Precisely those people who have no representation in the establishment are precisely those people who actually make the world work (these are the prime movers), and precisely those people who are represented in the establishment are precisely those people who live and thrive as parasites on the prime movers (and hence are known as second handers). Moreover, observe that Marxism purports to benefit the above prime movers, while populating the corridors of power exclusively with second handers not accountable to the prime movers (the establishment loves communism - in a previous generations they invented it). If you believe Marx's assertion, then I assure you my name is John Roebling and I have a bridge to sell you.

Of course, there is no sharp division between the prime movers and the second handers. A teacher or journalist who promulgates his own ideas, or ideas that foment productivity and innovation, can easily be seen as a prime mover, as can an elected legislator who creates novel legislation, or legislation that fosters productivity and innovation. A carpenter, if he is building the same structure over and over because he or his employer is trying to save money and reduce risk by cutting the architect out, is a second hander. The realization that most befuddles, however, is that prime movers are not inherently good, and second handers are not inherently evil. One acts as a prime mover when one brings organized information into the human sphere - by invention, by discovery, or by novel construction - or when one furnishes the material or operational prerequisites (principally, labor and subsistence) for realization of that invention, discovery, or novel construction. One acts as a second hander when one maneuvers and operates within the context of the existing human sphere, and not acting to furnish the prerequisites of invention, discovery, or novel construction. But bringing information into the human sphere is not inherently good: many memes constitute destructive information, many constructions constitute horrible indiscriminate weapons, and the realization of either can be an act of calamitous evil. And maneuvering within the context of the status quo is manifestly not inherently evil. In the introduction, I said "The schism between these two types of men - the innovators and the power brokers - is the greatest division in the human race." Innovators are a distinguished subset of the prime movers, and power brokers are a distinguished subset of the second handers. And indeed, this is the greatest division.

Hypothetically speaking, if the whole lot of prime movers were exterminated, the second handers would have to take their places or perish along with them, whereas the total extermination of the second handers could be shrugged off and ignored by the prime movers - though note that today's prime movers can, with complete certainty, be expected to give birth to many of tomorrow's second handers (hence, any reader who is trying to imagine how to actualize such an extermination is pursuing a futile genocide, doubly horrible. The real solution is to reprogram second handers, on a forward-going basis, using reciprocal psychological warfare). Returning to reality, it is part and parcel of most status quos, including the current one, that most prime movers are broken and saddled by the second handers. A brief examination of the twentieth century reveals something quite profound: the ratio of prime movers to second handers has steadily fallen for the entire century. The vampire that is the second hander is thriving. Taxes rise, innovation falters (as the incrementalism of saddled innovators takes over), morality and real quality of life (emotional and social quality) all but vanish.

Now, to return to that subset of the second handers (and category one super-evil prime movers) who are establishment proper. The primary multicategory meeting places of the establishment are closed-door invitation-only colloquia administered by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg organization, and by a few other organizations and individuals, e.g. the Gorbachev Foundation and Bill Gates. Theories abound of direct connections between these organizations and the secret societies whose nascence predates the twentieth century (and the list of such societies is long). The Roman Catholic Church, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Knights of Malta, and various other old conspiratorial and hierarchical organizations, are very real, and it seems foolish to believe that these two main classes of social control apparatus - the twentieth century councils and the older Orders - can coexist without a complex interaction and cross-fertilization. In fact, there is a history of systematic collaboration. Nonetheless, the role of the older organizations has declined immensely. The Freemasons, for example, had their last big hurrah with the presidency of FDR. The US Constitution is indubitably the product of Freemasons and Freemasonry, so that Freemasonry reaches forward from its heydey to influence the present (mostly in a positive way, evidently).

Those readers who are familiar with J. Michael Straczinski's five year television epic "Babylon 5" may recognize in the establishment the basic character of the Vorlons - and, like the Vorlons, such loci of the establishment as the Carnegie Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the major insurance companies, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), go to great lengths to condition the public to see them as angels of virtue bestowing their graces on a fawning world. Like the Vorlons, those in the establishment are terrified of chaos and equate it with evil, and as a reaction work to install a tyranny of order. Like the Vorlons, virtuous motives once held have long been forgotten by most of the establishment, and their march is now no more than fear, power lust, malice, and Thanatos. And like the Vorlons, the establishment demands obedience. In Straczinski's epic, opposed to the Vorlons, is a race (from ``Z'ha'dum'') that purveys random, senseless confrontation and destruction, to cull the weaker elements. At first it is tempting to assume they correspond to the ``Discordians'' or Erisians, opposed to the Illuminati or their lineal descendents (e.g. the CFR establishment). Clearly, however, this is not the case, since the Erisians are not so much purveyors of wanton provocative destruction as purveyors of the balance that is chaos, and do not demand obedience the way the ``Shadows'' (called ``liberators'' by their minions and thralls) of Z'ha'dum do. The real equivalent of the empire of Z'ha'dum is, in fact, also the establishment. Like the empire of Z'ha'dum, the establishment destabilizes regions (the Kissinger brush war doctrine), funnels arms to both sides of armed conflicts (a long tradition of international bankers, notably the Rothschilds), fosters irrational hate and anger to precipitate violence, and stresses economies past their breaking points, causing immense destruction and confusion, all as part of a Hegelian ploy (misrepresentation of deliberate mayhem as natural, insidious chaos) allowing them to intervene and appear to save the day, in the process seizing control of the region. Importantly, Hegel theorized that the quest for recognition was the essential engine driving history. This is a signature tenet of the second hander, of the establishment, and of the Vorlon and Z'ha'dum empires at once pitifully and belligerantly pleading to the younger races for validation.

Francis Fukuyama, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and consultant at RAND, said the following in a 1992 interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes:

[...] And according to a philosopher like Hegel history starts because of a struggle which begins with a battle, a conflict over recognition, where in a sense, one caveman gets up and says to the next caveman, "I want you to recognize me, that I'm greater than you, I'm your lord and master," and they fight over that. And according to Hegel, the result of that is a relationship of master and slave because one of these early men submits, and the other wins the victory and so you have this very unequal relationship of lord and master, on the one hand, and slave, on the other, that grows up.

When the recognition demanded is respect for rights and autonomy, the demand is valid. When the demand is for subordination, or even for attention or appreciation, it is not. These latter must be offered, not demanded or even expected.

J. Orlin Grabbe has written an essay titled "The Collapse of the New World Order" (September 13, 1998). A couple excerpts:

[...]

The basic vision is described in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992). After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the argument went, the struggle for freedom had been won in both the political and economic spheres. There was now philosophical unity. All civilized people had accepted the idea of the twin pillars of liberal democracy and the market economy.

Fukuyama is a Hegelian. And, like Hegel, Fukuyama wondered if history were at an end because it had reached its logical conclusion. After all, the struggle for freedom and recognition had been won, at least in principle, he noted.

The international elites associated with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the annual Bilderberg conferences broadly concurred. Fundamental disagreement among nations with respect to political ideology and economic organization had disappeared. All civilized people wanted peace, prosperity, and economic growth. And now they could have these, the vision said, as long as there was international stability. Stability meant that civilized nations would join together to contain rogue states like Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea. (George Bush's invocation of the "New World Order" in the crusade against Saddam Hussein prior to the 1991 Gulf War was an example of the emerging view.) International terrorism would likewise be thwarted by international police surveillance mechanisms, which would raise population monitoring to a fine art.

[...]

Within little more than a year, in countries as diverse as Russia and Thailand, the middle classes and their moderating political influence have been financially destroyed through banking crisis, currency devaluation, and recession. Indonesia's economy is expected to contract 15 percent this year, while that of South Korea and Thailand will be down 5 to 7 percent. Economic crisis has driven from office Hashimoto in Japan and Suharto in Indonesia, as well as lesser figures such as Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia. [...] As nuclear India faces nuclear Pakistan, Iranian troops gather at the Afghan border, and Turkey threatens the whole stability of the Middle East because of Russian missiles being delivered to Cyprus, the very notion of a harmonious "New World Order" has likewise come under attack. It's deja vu all over again.

Now, all this doesn't mean it is necessary to head for the hills, to run screaming off into the night like the worst of the "post-tribulation" millennialists and the Year 2000 kooks. While some self-defense is in order, it is important to keep in mind that an apocalypse now and then is good for us, however uncomfortable it might be in the interim. For the alternative is a universally-imposed gray global bureaucracy that relentless squeezes the last iota of individual initiative and freedom out of the system.

But the apocalypse that is now underway cannot be managed and contained and driven away by collectivist voodoo, for it represents precisely a collectivist breakdown. That's good news for those who value individual sovereignty, but bad news for the New World Order.

An important consideration is how those in power structure category 1 are hooked in the first place. As a case study, consider the topic of world population growth.

from http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/19981204_xex_who_what_whe.shtml:

[...] Because Y2K is an international problem, global recession is an imminent possibility, the DISPATCHES report continues. Edward Yardeni, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, currently believes there is a 70 percent chance of a deep global recession in 2000-2001. This is up from 40 percent at the end of 1997. [...]

One interesting consequence of a world economic depression is that the third world will be plagued by truly massive starvation and disease, as the supplies of machinery and spare parts, fuel, seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation water, imported food proper, pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical production equipment and precursor chemicals, and operable vehicles and vehicle spare parts, dwindle away, leaving a huge population but a traditional food production infrastructure capable of supporting only a much smaller population. Some of these populations may be all but annihilated, and the world population may contract more than 50%.

National Security Study Memorandum 200, the results of a government study initiated by Henry Kissinger in 1974, analyzes the issue of accelerating global population growth. The simply awful consequences of runaway population growth, detailed in that report and elsewhere, may have led to a determination among the elite that a correction would be orchestrated - that the medical and informational fertility management strategies recommended by the report are plainly insufficient in any practical deployment, particularly in light of population growth momentum, and that immense die-outs orchestrated through the macroeconomic levers of an extremely (in fact, artificially) interdependent global economy is the only viable means to population control, in the absence of systemic, ubiquitous war and the undesirable chaos and potential indiscriminacy that accompany it.

The matter of population growth, even moreso than the matter of environmental corrosion, challenges the libertarian. The ostensible necessity of forming practical policies to address these matters seems almost unavoidably incompatible with many important libertarian ideals. It would be tempting, if not positively natural, to admire the manner in which the establishment has addressed the population problem, if indeed there were a problem. Rather than using force, the establishment acts as the devil, making a bargain with fools, then at its leisure calling in the favor ("You will die when we say you will die"), without ever needing to force anyone.

In fact, the supposed Population Bomb (as Stanford's Paul Ehrlich titled his book on this subject) situation is one of the key issues by which the establishment eeks out a moral justification for its activities. It impels the intellectual to the (errant) conclusion that the instillment of artificial global interdependency is a manifest necessity. From this point of departure, this atom of RANDthink, the full diabolical richness of the establishment's collectivistic ideology flowers forth, impelled not by perceived moral imperative, but by fear, power lust, malice, and Thanatos, however camouflaged.

There is no present or prospective population or environmental emergency, and sooner or later the crisis-mongers will either admit this or be ignored.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-3, p.A15, by Daniel Henninger:

The Revolt of the Masses
Electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships.

When the political world arrives at the point where even the Japanese rise up to toss a party from office after almost 54 years in power, it's time to see something's happening here, Mr. Jones.

The ever-entertaining Karl Marx described a society's least politically engaged people as the lumpen proletariat. Well, it's beginning to look as if the globe's lumpen proletariat has decided they've had about enough of the lumpen bureaucratariat. It could be a revolution under way, though not the one predicted by the boys at the barricades.

To Mr. Marx, the lumpen proletariat (often slurred into a single word, lumpenproletariat) was the most marginalized, hopeless, faceless swath of the underclass. Were he alive at this moment, it is not beyond imagining that Karl would have joined the charge against what has become a lumpen bureaucratariat—the permanent, often faceless overclass of gerrymandered politicians, bureaucrats for life and the public unions and special interests that swim alongside like pilot fish.

The vote in somnolent Japan suggests that electorates are casting a global no-confidence vote in their leaderships. The same weekend the Japanese unloaded the Liberal Democratic Party, German voters withdrew Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling majorities in the state legislatures of Thuringia and Saarland.

In the U.S., political handicappers are predicting heavy Democratic losses in the House next November. This just four years after ending GOP control of Congress in the 2006 elections and two years after sweeping into office Barack Obama and his Democratic partners.

Congress's approval rating remains stuck around 30%. This number may be more important as an indicator of public sentiment toward the nation's leadership than presidential approval.

Some search for an ideological trend toward the left or right in these votes, but the only evident trend is to strike out at whichever blob is currently in power. Even as Americans turned over their country to liberal Democrats, opinion polls showed that the British people were turning toward the Conservatives for relief from listless Labour.

What accounts for the global electorate's growing disgust with the political overclass? Try this: No matter the ideological cast of these governments, they all hold in common one policy: the inexorable upward march of national indebtedness. It has arrived at the edge of the cliff.

Japan's gross debt is currently estimated at some 180% of its gross domestic product, the highest among the world's theoretically serious economies. Look elsewhere and one sees the same fiscal obesity.

As measured by the OECD, the growth in gross debt as a percentage of GDP since the dawn of the new century is stunning. The data isn't exactly comparable across individual countries, but the trend line is unmistakable.

In the U.S., debt as a percentage of GDP rose to 87% in 2009 from 55% in 2000. In the U.K., to 75% from 45%; Germany, to 78% from 60%; France, 86% from 66%. There are exceptions to this trend, such as Canada, New Zealand and notably Australia, whose debt has fallen to 16% of GDP from 25%. But for all the countries in the OECD's basket the claim of indebtedness on GDP grew to 92% from 69% the past nine years.

In short, the lumpen electorate works, and the lumpen bureaucratariat spends. They get away with it because they have perfected the illusion that no human hand causes these commitments. The payroll tax just happens. Entitlements are "off-budget," presumably in the hands of God. This is government without the responsibility of governance.

Unable to identify who or what has put them in hock to the horizon, national electorates are attempting accountability by voting whole parties out of power. Rasmussen recently found that 57% of voters would throw out Congress en masse if they could. Gerrymandered districts ensure that they can't.

Problem is, the lumpen bureaucratariat can't stop spending and borrowing and won't incentivize growth. Amid the phenomenal spending on the financial mess here, they tried to pass a cap-and-trade bill whose centerpiece was an auction of carbon credits to flow trillions of dollars toward the bureaucracies. Mr. Obama's people seem weirdly oblivious to the scale of their outlays, programs and dreams.

The decision by the voters of Japan to turn out the LDP after 54 years argues that in real democracies, political self-entrenchment and enrichment can arrive at limits. In 2000, more astonishingly, Mexicans defeated the PRI after 71 years in office, then re-elected the new party's candidate in 2006. Now it looks like similar forces are bubbling out of town halls across the United States. If American elections since 2006 (or 1994) tell us anything, it is that the target of their wrath is the party of the Beltway.

This is hardly a fair fight. The political overclass everywhere holds the power to print money and grab it back with taxes and inflation. Still, the election returns suggest that something is stirring. Maybe we should call it the revolt of the masses.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-9, by Daniel Henninger:

Uncle Sam: Too Fat to Fail?
The financial meltdown means government needs a crash diet.

Three weeks before the selection of a U.S. president, we are witnessing a generalized global collapse of confidence in financial and political institutions.

On Tuesday, after another dramatic plummet in the Dow Jones Industrial Average of 508 points, the American people sat down at night to watch the two men running for the U.S. presidency "debate." Foregoing Ambien the first time this nightmarish week, they rose in the morning to learn that the Federal Reserve and four European central banks plus Canada's cut interest rates a half point to boost confidence in their financial markets. Hours later, the Dow in the U.S. opened and fell 250 points.

The rarest coin in the realm now is confidence. Let us posit that John McCain and Barack Obama in their debate or at any given hour are doing next to nothing to raise confidence. They have company in their failure -- 533 other Members of Congress and one president.

President Bush's approval rating hangs at 25%, nearly an unprecedented low. Congress's approval is at historic lows. A Rasmussen poll last weekend said nearly 60% of the public would chuck the entire Congress.

The standard remedy for this in political systems everywhere is throw the bums out. In 2006's off-year congressional election, the American people threw out one set of Republican bums, and if current polls mean anything, replaced them with the Democrats' finest bums.

Maybe it's time for Plan B.

Mark down 2008 as the year that many large public and private institutions hit the wall. Suddenly, in different ways, they were manifestly failing. Why?

Tuesday's presidential debate offered a glimpse. Amid the din of crashing banks in the U.S. and Europe and stumbling government efforts to plug the dikes, Barack Obama and John McCain airily promised to wave into life one grandiose solution after another for health insurance, Social Security, energy supplies and incomes. Do serious voters believe any of this?

Some weeks ago Barack Obama got into trouble for saying a difficult question was "above my pay grade." That plastic droplet of modesty is the beginning of wisdom. Step back and behold how much before us is above anyone's pay grade.

Consider the magnitude of these problems or the sheer, dumb size of the institutions. Another phrase of financial usage familiar everywhere now is "too big to fail." But if something is too big to fail, isn't it . . . too big?

Look in any direction and what you see are institutions that are Too Big. Too big to fully understand, and thus too big to manage efficiently. Faced with Godzilla-sized problems, logic flees: If they're too big to fail, the solution is . . . make them bigger!

The big, fat government we know about, with its $2.942 trillion annual outlays. The problem of unmanageable public bigness is also seen in state legislatures in a condition of permanent nonperformance, as in New York, California or Michigan. We become numb to these outsized and failing public institutions, which grind in circles while the pols purport concern about massive, forward-crawling monoliths like Medicare, Social Security or public pension debt.

By contrast, the starkness and hourly reporting of the financial crisis has made the dilemma of size impossible to duck.

Citigroup, a financial services colossus that can't manage what it's already got, is trying to chow down Wachovia, a slightly smaller colossus. J.P. Morgan absorbed Bear Stearns and now WaMu bank. Bank of America acquired Countrywide Financial and then Merrill Lynch. The concern here is less that these entities are anticompetitive than that they are too big to succeed.

We've all been tutored in economies of scale -- that bigness permits cost savings. Check out its little-known fraternal twin -- diseconomies of scale, wherein size produces a stagnant lake of inefficiency -- and risk. Ever try to fight your way through Merrill's thick voicemail tree? Wait til you call customer service at BoACountrywideMerrill.

Greed isn't the biggest vice staring us in the face. It's gluttony (now known as obesity) in both the public and private spheres. What has been laid on the table with the financial crisis and the loss of political faith is whether the U.S. system and its institutions are up to the future. Like Wall Street, Uncle Sam is not too fat to fail. Even before this crisis, intellectuals and pundits were writing off America as certain to be overtaken -- politically and economically -- by the likes of China and India. What's needed is a crash diet. America isn't in decline, but its too-big-to-fail fatsos are pulling it down.

Both Obama and McCain Tuesday night denounced Washington's "special interests." In fact, those interests are the hungry commercial pilot fish that swim alongside the massive federal Leviathan. If either man wanted to send a signal to the world that the U.S. whale was ready to move past the mortgage crisis to new strength, he would blow up the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Fat chance. Fat's winning.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-29, by Andrew P. Napolitano:

Most Presidents Ignore the Constitution
The government we have today is something the Founders could never have imagined.

In a radio interview in 2001, then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama noted -- somewhat ruefully -- that the same Supreme Court that ordered political and educational equality in the 1960s and 1970s did not bring about economic equality as well. Although Mr. Obama said he could come up with arguments for the constitutionality of such action, the plain meaning of the Constitution quite obviously prohibits it.

Mr. Obama is hardly alone in his expansive view of legitimate government. During the past month, Sen. John McCain (who, like Sen. Obama, voted in favor of the $700 billion bank bailout) has been advocating that $300 billion be spent to pay the monthly mortgage payments of those in danger of foreclosure. The federal government is legally powerless to do that, as well.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt first proposed legislation that authorized the secretary of agriculture to engage in Soviet-style central planning -- a program so rigid that it regulated how much wheat a homeowner could grow for his own family's consumption -- he rejected arguments of unconstitutionality. He proclaimed that the Constitution was "quaint" and written in the "horse and buggy era," and predicted the public and the courts would agree with him.

Remember that FDR had taken -- and either Mr. Obama or Mr. McCain will soon take -- the oath to uphold that old-fashioned document, the one from which all presidential powers come.

Unfortunately, these presidential attitudes about the Constitution are par for the course. Beginning with John Adams, and proceeding to Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, Congress has enacted and the president has signed laws that criminalized political speech, suspended habeas corpus, compelled support for war, forbade freedom of contract, allowed the government to spy on Americans without a search warrant, and used taxpayer dollars to shore up failing private banks.

All of this legislation -- merely tips of an unconstitutional Big Government iceberg -- is so obviously in conflict with the plain words of the Constitution that one wonders how Congress gets away with it.

In virtually every generation and during virtually every presidency (Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland are exceptions that come to mind) the popular branches of government have expanded their power. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the size of your toilet tank, the water pressure in your shower, the words you can speak under oath and in private, how your physician treats your illness, what your children study in grade school, how fast you can drive your car, and what you can drink before you drive it are all regulated by federal law. Congress has enacted over 4,000 federal crimes and written or authorized over one million pages of laws and regulations. Worse, we are expected by law to understand all of it.

The truth is that the Constitution grants Congress 17 specific (or "delegated") powers. And it commands in the Ninth and 10th Amendments that the powers not articulated and thus not delegated by the Constitution to Congress be reserved to the states and the people.

What's more, Congress can only use its delegated powers to legislate for the general welfare, meaning it cannot spend tax dollars on individuals or selected entities, but only for all of us. That is, it must spend in such a manner -- a post office, a military installation, a courthouse, for example -- that directly enhances everyone's welfare within the 17 delegated areas of congressional authority.

And Congress cannot deny the equal protection of the laws. Thus, it must treat similarly situated persons or entities in a similar manner. It cannot write laws that favor its political friends and burden its political enemies.

There is no power in the Constitution for the federal government to enter the marketplace since, when it does, it will favor itself over its competition. The Contracts Clause (the states cannot interfere with private contracts, like mortgages), the Takings Clause (no government can take away property, like real estate or shares of stock, without paying a fair market value for it and putting it to a public use), and the Due Process Clause (no government can take away a right or obligation, like collecting or paying a debt, or enforcing a contract, without a fair trial) together mandate a free market, regulated only to keep it fair and competitive.

It is clear that the Framers wrote a Constitution as a result of which contracts would be enforced, risk would be real, choices would be free and have consequences, and private property would be sacrosanct.

The $700 billion bailout of large banks that Congress recently enacted runs afoul of virtually all these constitutional principles. It directly benefits a few, not everyone. We already know that the favored banks that received cash from taxpayers have used it to retire their own debt. It is private welfare. It violates the principle of equal protection: Why help Bank of America and not Lehman Brothers? It permits federal ownership of assets or debt that puts the government at odds with others in the free market. It permits the government to tilt the playing field to favor its patrons (like J.P. Morgan Chase, in which it has invested taxpayer dollars) and to disfavor those who compete with its patrons (like the perfectly lawful hedge funds which will not have the taxpayers relieve their debts).

Perhaps the only public agreement that Jefferson and Hamilton had about the Constitution was that the federal Treasury would be raided and the free market would expire if the Treasury became a public trough. If it does, the voters will send to Congress those whom they expect will fleece the Treasury for them. That's why the Founders wrote such strict legislating and spending limitations into the Constitution.

Everyone in government takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. But few do so. Do the people we send to the federal government recognize any limits today on Congress's power to legislate? The answer is: Yes, their own perception of whatever they can get away with.

Mr. Napolitano, who served on the bench of the Superior Court of New Jersey between 1987 and 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is "A Nation of Sheep" (Nelson, 2007).

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-29, p.A12:

The Liberal Hour

Dick Cheney is often critical of President Obama, but on one issue we suspect the former Vice President has a grudging admiration: In a mere 100 days, the Democrat has silenced eight years of criticism about the Imperial Presidency. It is once again the liberal hour in American politics, and the media and political classes now see energy in the executive as a national asset.

Though we disagree with much of Mr. Obama's agenda, this turnaround has its benefits. A worried electorate wants to feel better about the country after the bitterness of the Bush years, and his cool confidence has lifted the public mood. He is a likable man who seems open to other arguments, even if he really isn't. His rise to Commander in Chief has sapped the war debate of its partisan animus, and he is now responsible for success or failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has made responsible decisions on both fronts.

We have our doubts about Mr. Obama's faith in diplomacy with enemies, but even here his first three months have had their uses. When Kim Jong Il broke his nuclear promises and tossed U.N. inspectors from North Korea in 2002, Democrats blamed President Bush. Now that Kim is doing the same despite Mr. Obama's open handshake, we know better. Our guess is that Mr. Obama's dalliance with Iran, Syria and other rogues will be similarly instructive, and we can hope the President draws the proper lessons before Iran goes nuclear. It's too early to know if Mr. Obama will turn out to be a tough-minded liberal internationalist, in the Tony Blair mode, or a naive globalist, a la Jimmy Carter.

On the home front, there can no longer be any such doubts. Mr. Obama talks the language of pragmatism, but his program has revealed a man of the left. He clearly views the financial crisis and the liberal majorities in Congress as a rare chance to advance the power of the state in American life. The only two comparable moments in the last century were 1965, which gave us the Great Society, and 1933, which bequeathed the New Deal. Mr. Obama's goals are at least as ambitious, resuming the march toward the European welfare state that was stopped by what Democrats like to call the Reagan detour.

His main method here is to make the federal government the guarantor of middle-class security. He wants to make a college education a new entitlement, regardless of the cost. He wants state-financed health-care available to all, even if it means jamming a $1 trillion bill through the Senate with 51 votes. And he wants a cap-and-trade tax that would punish the main current sources of U.S. energy and hand Washington a vast new source of revenue.

Oh, and by the way, he also wants to fix the financial system, run the auto industry, and build a nationwide, high-speed rail network. And on the seventh day, he rested.

What's striking is that Mr. Obama betrays no sense that maybe all of this isn't achievable, much less affordable, all at once. In contrast to Bill Clinton, he has abandoned any deficit concern, building in red ink of at least 4% of GDP for the next decade. And that's assuming the revival of rapid economic growth, and before counting the real cost of health care.

He claims to believe that the revenue to pay for this can be had merely by tapping the rich, as Democrats did during the 1990s, because he and his advisers assume that higher tax rates don't matter. But growth in the 1990s got going in earnest only after HillaryCare collapsed, Republicans took Congress and at least for a while spending was restrained and taxes were cut. The current arc of spending and taxes is only going up -- and to levels not seen in decades. The Obama program is going to test the liberal faith, not observed since the 1970s, that deficit spending and easy monetary policy are engines of prosperity. If they are wrong, then Mr. Obama will eventually find himself managing the politics of stagflation.

More troubling still is Mr. Obama's leap into managing major U.S. industries. Even the European left got out of the nationalization business as a loser after the 1970s. But the Obama White House and Treasury are nationalizing GM and Chrysler, expanding government's role in the mortgage markets, and widening their ownership of the U.S. banking system. The deeper they dig in, the harder they will find it politically to exit. And as economic policy, the mauling of GM bondholders, the banker-baiting on Capitol Hill, and the refusal to let even healthy banks escape the TARP won't revive animal spirits.

This last point may be more a matter of Mr. Obama's character than his ideology. One lesson from the first 100 days is that the President doesn't like to do things that are politically difficult, such as stand up to Congress. He has abdicated the writing of most legislation to liberal committee chairmen, at the cost of bipartisanship. This means that when he really needs Republicans -- on trade and national security -- they might not be there. And he has bent far too easily to his party's populists on AIG bonuses, Mexican trucks and interrogation memos -- even as they threaten to complicate his other priorities.

Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and sooner or later the twain shall meet. For now, we are living in another era of unchecked liberal government. The reckoning will come when Americans discover how much it costs.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-27, by Peggy Noonan:

He Can't Take Another Bow
An icon of a White House that is coming to seem amateurish.

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment.

From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes for his presidency began to wonder whether they had misjudged the man." They once held "an unromantically high opinion of Obama," and were key to his rise, but now they are concluding that the president isn't "the person of integrity and even classiness they had thought."

Associated Press

President Obama bows as he shakes hands with Japanese Emperor Akihito.

She scored "the Chicago crowd," which she characterized as "a distressingly insular and small-minded West Wing team." The White House, Ms. Drew says, needs adult supervision—"an older, wiser head, someone with a bit more detachment."

As I read Ms. Drew's piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, "Well, I was for Hillary." This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they're not dazzled and head over heels. That's gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock—bottom 20% who, no matter what's happening—war, unemployment—adore their guy, have complete faith in him, and insist that you love him, too.

They're the hard 20 a president always keeps. Nixon kept them! Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn't seem to be love.

***

Just as stinging as Elizabeth Drew on domestic matters was Leslie Gelb on Mr. Obama and foreign policy in the Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and fully plugged into the Democratic foreign-policy establishment, wrote this week that the president's Asia trip suggested "a disturbing amateurishness in managing America's power." The president's Afghanistan review has been "inexcusably clumsy," Mideast negotiations have been "fumbling." So unsuccessful was the trip that Mr. Gelb suggested Mr. Obama take responsibility for it "as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs."

He added that rather than bowing to emperors—Mr. Obama "seems to do this stuff spontaneously and inexplicably"—he should begin to bow to "the voices of experience" in Washington.

When longtime political observers start calling for wise men, a president is in trouble.

It also raises a distressing question: Who are the wise men and women now? Who are the Robert Lovetts, Chip Bohlens and Robert Strausses who can came in to help a president in trouble right his ship? America seems short of wise men, or short on those who are universally agreed to be wise. I suppose Vietnam was the end of that, but establishments exist for a reason, and it is hard for a great nation to function without the presence of a group of "the oldest and wisest" who can not only give sound advice but help engineer how that advice will be reported and received.

***

Mr Obama is in a hard place. Health care hangs over him, and if he is lucky he will lose a close vote in the Senate. The common wisdom that he can't afford to lose is exactly wrong—he can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation. He needs to get the issue behind him, vow to fight another day, and move on. Afghanistan hangs over him, threatening the unity of his own Democratic congressional base. There is the growing perception of incompetence, of the inability to run the machine of government. This, with Americans, is worse than Obama's rebranding as a leader who governs from the left. Americans demand baseline competence. If he comes to be seen as Jimmy Carter was, that the job was bigger than the man, that will be the end.

Which gets us back to the bow.

In a presidency, a picture or photograph becomes iconic only when it seems to express something people already think. When Gerald Ford was spoofed for being physically clumsy, it took off. The picture of Ford losing his footing and tumbling as he came down the steps of Air Force One became a symbol. There was a reason, and it wasn't that he was physically clumsy. He was not only coordinated but graceful. He'd been a football star at the University of Michigan and was offered contracts by the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.

But the picture took off because it expressed the growing public view that Ford's policies were bumbling and stumbling. The picture was iconic of a growing political perception.

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren't playing off a growing perception. If the pictures had been accompanied by headlines from Asia saying "Tough Talks Yield Big Progress" or "Obama Shows Muscle in China," the bowing pictures might be understood this way: "He Stoops to Conquer: Canny Obama shows elaborate deference while he subtly, toughly, quietly advances his nation's interests."

But that's not how the pictures were received or will be remembered.

It is true that Mr. Obama often seems not to have a firm grasp of—or respect for—protocol, of what has been done before and why, and of what divergence from the traditional might imply. And it is true that his political timing was unfortunate. When a great nation is feeling confident and strong, a surprising presidential bow might seem gracious. When it is feeling anxious, a bow will seem obsequious.

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.

It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through '08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you're stupid doesn't mean you're Lincoln.

One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we've got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don't worry.

But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-30, by Daniel Henninger:

100 Days: 'Harry, I Have a Gift'

If opinion polls were real life, Barack Obama would be walking with the immortals. In polls taken as he headed to his 100th day, his numbers are high and heavenly, cruising on issue after issue at 70-plus percent.

One number in last weekend's Washington Post/ABC poll, however, stands out. On whether he is "willing to listen to different points of view," Mr. Obama elevates into hyperspace, hitting 90%. Just behind is "he understands the problems of people like you," at 73%.

An argument made repeatedly during the campaign by converts to the Obama movement was that this guy simply "gets it." If one pressed the argument deeper into the soil of, say, the high costs of green energy or of federalized health insurance, it seemed the details were beside the point. The remarkable ability to put people around him at ease with the feeling that he "gets it" has brought Mr. Obama to this place and into the high ethers of public approval. Even a doubter can marvel.

Permit a doubter, though, to offer a cautionary tale.

Early in the campaign, in January 2007, a New York Times reporter wrote a story about Mr. Obama's time as president of the Harvard Law Review. It was there, the reporter noted, "he first became a political sensation."

Here's why: "Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once." Also: "People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama's words."

Harvard Law Prof. Charles Ogletree told how Mr. Obama spoke on one contentious issue at the law school, and each side thought he was endorsing their view. Mr. Ogletree said: "Everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me."

The reason I have never forgotten this article is its last sentence, in which Al Gore's former chief of staff Ron Klain, also of Harvard Law, reflects on the Obama sensation: "The interesting caveat is that is a style of leadership more effective running a law review than running a country."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, in a book out next week, tells of congratulating freshman Sen. Obama on a phenomenal speech. Without a hint of conceit, Mr. Obama replied, "Harry, I have a gift."

He does. We know from tradition, though, that when the gods bestow magic on mortals, the gift can also imperil its possessor. The first hint of potential peril in Mr. Obama's gift arrived last week with the confusion over where the president stood on the terrorist interrogation memos and prosecution of former Bush officials. Here, as 19 years ago, many on both sides of a contentious issue who heard him speak thought Mr. Obama agreed with them.

First, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday morning there would be no prosecutions of the authors of the Bush interrogation memos. He said this emerged from the president's decision-making process.

Then on Tuesday, Mr. Obama seemingly reversed Mr. Emanuel (as happened earlier to Larry Summers on bonuses) by saying the prosecution decision belonged to Attorney General Eric Holder. Now it may be true, as many concluded, that Mr. Obama decided to tack left to appease the anti-Bush obsessives, who screamed after the Emanuel remark. Most interesting, though, was an account in this paper of the White House's efforts, "as aides struggled to gain control of the message."

According to the Journal, "Aides said that Mr. Obama's seemingly contradictory remarks were misinterpreted, and that the president's view had been conveyed poorly." Misinterpreted? Let's look at what he said.

What follows is the Holder-will-decide part of the answer. By my reading, the first half of it is what the left wanted, and the second half is what conservatives believe. Even inside each side's half, one finds caveats and self-protective hedges:

"With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.

"As a general deal, I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards. I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations."

The new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests the public did its own translation: 61% oppose the prosecutions.

The Gift has been good for Mr. Obama. But in a still-dangerous world, in which one's listeners now have names like Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Putin, Hu Jintao, Netanyahu, Sarkozy and Merkel, the costs for the rest of us of being "misinterpreted" for a compulsive lack of clarity could be high.

As back in January 2007, the key question remains: Is this Hamlet-like style of leadership suited for conducting the presidency of the United States? More bluntly, is it leadership?

As he heads towards the next 1,300 days, Mr. Obama might consider trying a different gift that served an earlier Democratic president, Harry Truman, quite well once in office: Plain speaking.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-30, by Karl Rove:

Obama Outsources His Presidency
He may come to regret letting Congress write his major legislation.

While officials in the Obama White House dismissed yesterday's "100 Days" anniversary as a "Hallmark Holiday," they understood it was what sociologist Daniel J. Boorstin called a "pseudo-event." By that, Boorstin meant an occasion that is not spontaneous but planned for the purpose of being reported -- an event that is important because someone says so, not because it is.

What happens in a president's first 100 days rarely characterizes the arc of the 1,361 that follow. Jimmy Carter had a very good first 100 days. Bill Clinton did not.

Still, a president would rather start well than poorly -- and Mr. Obama has a job approval of 63%. That leaves him tied with Mr. Carter, one point ahead of George W. Bush, and behind only Ronald Reagan's 67%. Four of the past six presidents had approval ratings that ranged between 62% and 67%, a statistically insignificant spread.

Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure, has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives adoring press coverage.

However, there are cautionary signs. Mr. Obama's policies are less popular than his personality, the pace of polarization with Republicans has proceeded faster than ever in history, and independents are thinking more like Republicans on the issues and less like Democrats.

The first 100 days can reveal a pattern of behavior that comes to characterize a presidency. In this respect, there are two emerging habits of Team Obama worth watching.

One is the gap between what Mr. Obama said he would do and what he is doing. His administration is emphasizing in its official 100 days talking points steps he has taken to "deliver on the change he promised." During the campaign, Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as "deficits as far as the eye can see." But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?

From Mr. Obama's Denver acceptance speech through the campaign, Mr. Obama did not publicly utter the phrase "universal health care." Instead, his campaign ran ads attacking "government-run health care" as "extreme." Now Mr. Obama is asking, as he did at a townhall meeting last month, "Why not do a universal health care system like the European countries?" Maybe because he was elected by intimating that would be "extreme"?

Another emphasis in the Obama 100 days talking points is that the president is a decisive leader. However, Mr. Obama is enormously deferential to Democrats in Congress and has outsourced formulation of key policies to them. He appears largely ambivalent about the contents of important legislation, satisfied to simply sign someone else's bill.

On the $787 billion stimulus package, he specified less than a quarter of the bill's spending and let House Appropriations Chairman Dave Obey decide the rest. On cap and trade, Mr. Obama is comfortable to let Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey write that legislation with virtually no White House guidance. On health care, the White House is providing very little detail. Mr. Obama tees up an issue, but leaves its execution to congressional Democrats.

This leadership style may be a carryover from his Senate years, when he was unusually detached from the substance of legislation. Mr. Obama's focus on broad descriptions of a goal will produce laws, but handing over control of the process may produce deeply flawed products.

The stimulus bill turned into a liberal spending wish list that will retard, not hasten, recovery. Already, with mounting job losses the gap between the 3.675 million jobs he said he would create or protect in his first two years and the number of actual jobs in the economy has risen to nearly five million. Reaching his job target now requires creating 249,400 new jobs a month for the next 20 months. Democrats will not fare well in next year's elections if there is a yawning Obama "job gap."

Democratic congressional leaders are ecstatic about Mr. Obama's willingness to outsource major legislation to them. They thrive on sausage making and, with the president's popularity high, they appreciate that his strengths are not their strengths. Yet Mr. Obama clearly did not gain their respect for his legislative abilities during his Senate years.

Mr. Obama is a great face for the Democratic Party. He is its best salesman and most persuasive advocate. But he is beginning to leave the impression that he is more concerned with the aesthetics of policy rather than its contents. In the long run, substance and consequences define a presidency more than signing ceremonies and photo-ops. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Dec-30, by Fouad Ajami:

A Cold-Blooded Foreign Policy
No despot fears the president, and no demonstrator in Tehran expects him to ride to the rescue.

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the "progressives" holding him to account. The false dichotomy has taken hold\u2014either we care for our own, or we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy or of broken nations to build. The decision to withdraw missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic was of a piece with that retreat in American power.

In the absence of an overriding commitment to the defense of American primacy in the world, the Obama administration "cheats." It will not quit the war in Afghanistan but doesn't fully embrace it as its cause. It prosecutes the war but with Republican support\u2014the diehards in liberal ranks and the isolationists are in no mood for bonding with Afghans. (Harry Reid's last major foreign policy pronouncement was his assertion, three years ago, that the war in Iraq was lost.)

As revolution simmers on the streets of Iran, the will was summoned in the White House to offer condolences over the passing of Grand Ayatollah Hussein Montazeri, an iconic figure to the Iranian opposition. But the word was also put out that the administration was keen on the prospect of John Kerry making his way to Tehran. No one is fooled. In the time of Barack Obama, "engagement" with Iran's theocrats and thugs trumps the cause of Iranian democracy.

In retrospect, that patina of cosmopolitanism in President Obama's background concealed the isolationism of the liberal coalition that brought him to power. The tide had turned in the congressional elections of 2006. American liberalism was done with its own antecedents\u2014the outlook of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and Harry Truman and John Kennedy. It wasn't quite "Come home, America," but close to it. This was now the foreign policy of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. There was in the land a "liberal orientalism," if you will, a dismissive attitude about the ability of other nations to partake of liberty. It had started with belittling the Iraqis' aptitude for freedom. But there was implicit in it a broader assault on the very idea of freedom's possibilities in distant places. East was East, and West was West, and never the twain shall meet.

We're weary, the disillusioned liberalism maintains, and we're broke, and there are those millions of Americans aching for health care and an economic lifeline. We can't care for both Ohio and the Anbar, Peoria and Peshawar. It is either those embattled people in Iran or a rescue package for Chrysler.

The joke is on the enthralled crowds in Cairo, Ankara, Berlin and Oslo. The new American president they had fallen for had no genuine calling or attachments abroad. In their enthusiasm for Mr. Obama, and their eagerness to proclaim themselves at one with the postracial meaning of his election, they had missed his aloofness from the genuine struggles in the foreign world.

It was easy, that delirium with Mr. Obama: It made no moral demands on those eager to partake of it. It was also false, in many lands.

Thus Turks who loathed the Kurds in their midst, who denied them the right to their own memory and language, could identify themselves, or so they said, with the triumph of Mr. Obama and his personal history. No one questioned the sincerity with which Egyptians and other Arabs hailed Mr. Obama as they refused to be stirred by the slaughter in Darfur, and as they gave a carte blanche to Khartoum's blatant racism and cruelty.

Surely there was something amiss in Paris and Berlin\u2014the vast crowds came out for Mr. Obama, but there were millions of Muslims in France and Germany, and the gates hadn't been opened for them, they hadn't been swept into the mainstream of European life. Postracicalism, rather like charity, should have begun at home, one would think.

Everywhere there is on display evidence of the rogues taking the Obama administration's measure, and of America's vulnerable allies scurrying for cover. A fortnight ago, Lebanon's young prime minister made his way from Beirut to Damascus: Saad Hariri had come to pay tribute to the Syrian ruler.

Nearly five years earlier, Saad Hariri had insisted on the truth about the identity of his father's killers. It had been a tumultuous time. Rafik Hariri, a tycoon and former prime minister caught up in a challenge to Syria's hegemony in Lebanon, had been struck down by a massive bomb on Beirut's beachfront. It's obvious, isn't it, the mourners proclaimed, the trail led to Damascus.

In the aftermath of that brazen political murder, a Syrian tyranny in Lebanon that had all but erased the border between the two countries was brought to a swift end with what would come to be known as the Cedar Revolution. The Pax Americana that had laid waste to the despotism of Saddam Hussein frightened the Syrian rulers, and held out the prospect that a similar fate could yet befall them.

We're now worlds away from that moment in history. The man who demolished the Iraqi tyranny, George. W. Bush, is no longer in power, and a different sentiment drives America's conduct abroad. Saad Hariri had no choice but to make peace with his father's sworn enemies\u2014that short voyage he made to Damascus was his adjustment to the retreat of American power.

In headier moments, Mr. Hariri and the leaders of the Cedar Revolution had been emboldened by American protection. It was not only U.S. military power that had given them heart.

There was that "diplomacy of freedom," the proclamation that the Pax Americana had had its fill with the autocracies and the rogues of the Greater Middle East. There but for the grace of God go we, the autocrats whispered to themselves as they pondered the fall of the Iraqi despot. To be sure, there was mayhem in the new Iraq\u2014the Arab and Iranian rulers, and the jihadists they winked at and aided, had made sure of that. But there was the promise of freedom, meaningful elections, a new dignity for men and women claiming their own country.

What a difference three or four years make. The despots have waited out that burst of American power and optimism. No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue. To be sure, it was in the past understood that we can't bear all burdens abroad, or come to the defense of everyone braving tyranny. But there was always that American assertion that when things are in the balance we would always be on freedom's side.

We hadn't ridden to the rescue of Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s, but we had saved the Bosnians and the Kosovars. We didn't have the power to undo the colossus of Chinese tyranny when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, but the brave dissidents knew that we were on their side, that we were appalled by the cruelty of official power.

It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. "Ideology is so yesterday," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment.

History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will. He had declared a unilateral end to the "war on terror," but the jihadists and their mentors are yet to call their war to a halt. From Yemen to Fort Hood and Detroit, the terror continues.

But to go by the utterances of the Obama administration and its devotees, one would have thought that our enemies were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not the preachers and masterminds of terror. The president and his lieutenants spent more time denigrating "rendition" and the Patriot Act than they did tracking down the terror trail and the latest front it had opened at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Our own leaders spoke poorly of our prerogatives and ways, and they were heard the world over.

Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We're smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-12:

Democracy's Wane
The world is in a 'freedom recession.'

After the West won the Cold War, democracy flourished in the world as never before. No more. The tide of political and human freedom hasn't merely slowed but in recent years has turned in the other direction. Seeing that the U.S. midwifed the post-1989 world, these trends are of more than passing interest.

Democracy's troubles are summed up in "Freedom in the World 2010," the yearly report card published today by Freedom House. We're in a "freedom recession," the advocacy group says. For the fourth consecutive year, more countries saw declines in political and civic rights than advances, the longest such period of deterioration in the 40 year history of this widely cited report.

Start with the "axis of engagement" states that President Obama sought to butter up diplomatically in his first year in office. The authoritarian regimes in Russia, Venezuela, Iran and China all became more repressive in 2009, according to Freedom House measures. America's attempts to play nice didn't make the other side any nicer.

Military coups rocked four African states. Central Asia's one democratic hope, Kyrgyzstan, was demoted this year from the "partly free" to "not free" category.

The Mideast remains the world's least fertile soil for democracy. Only one nation—Israel—qualifies as "free." Most of its Arab neighbors went further down the path of repression. There were declines even in Jordan and Morocco, whose moderate kings moved in the past year to concentrate political power.

Iraq and Lebanon are notable exceptions. Along with Turkey, both can lay a claim to being Muslim democracies. Both, not incidentally, were beneficiaries of George W. Bush's "democracy agenda" in the mid-2000s.

The picture isn't all gloomy. Eighty-nine countries—which represent nearly half the world's population—are "free," according to the Freedom House measures, and 116 are electoral democracies. Twenty years ago, only 61 and 76 fit those respective categories. Never before have as many people lived without tyranny.

The recent reversals coincide, however, with America's own waning interest in democracy promotion. This didn't start with the Obama ascendancy. Chastened by the 2006 midterm election debacle and sinking public support for his Mideast policies, President Bush took rhetorical and practical emphasis off his own flagship foreign-policy agenda.

The current Administration has changed the focus entirely. In its dealings with Russia and China, strategic issues trump any talk of democracy or human rights, which earlier this year in Beijing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton notably called a distraction to bilateral relations. Ditto in Iran.

If in the days of Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, we worked to fashion the world into a better place guided by the belief that the urge to live in freedom is universal, today we act as if we are resigned to taking the world as it is. We used to nudge countries toward liberal democracy. Now we assume the price of nudging is too high.

Meanwhile, the enemies of democracy have set out to undo the gains of the post-Berlin Wall era, and many are succeeding.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-10, by Eliot A. Cohen:

Taking the Measure of Obama's Foreign Policy
Saying that the U.S. will 'bear witness' to brutality around the word is, in effect, to say that we will send flowers to funerals.

If the first year of President Barack Obama's foreign policy were a law firm in Charles Dickens's London, it would have a name like Bumble, Stumble and Skid.

It began with apologies to the Muslim world that went nowhere, a doomed attempt to beat Israel into line, utopian pleas to abolish nuclear weapons, unreciprocated concessions to Russia, and a curt note to the British to take back the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office. It continued with principled offers of serious negotiation to an Iranian regime too busy torturing, raping and killing demonstrators, and building new underground nuclear facilities, to take them up. Subsequently Beijing smothered domestic coverage of a presidential visit but did give the world the spectacle of the American commander in chief getting a talking-to about fiscal responsibility from a Communist chieftain.

The lovely town of Copenhagen staged not one, but two humiliations: the first when the Olympic Committee delivered the bad news that the president's effort to play hometown booster had failed utterly, before he even landed back in the U.S.; the second when the Chinese once again poked the U.S. in the eye by sending minor officials to meet with Mr. Obama, as they, the Indians and Brazilians tried to shoulder him out of cozy meetings aimed at sabotaging his environmental policy. Even smitten foreign admirers—in the case of the Nobel Prize, some addled Norwegian notables—managed to make him look bad.

It was nonetheless a year of international displays of presidential ego, sometimes disguised as cosmic modesty ("I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war"), but mainly of one slip after another. The decision to reinforce our military in Afghanistan came after an excruciating dither that undermined the confidence of our allies. Mr. Obama's loose talk of withdrawal beginning in 18 months then undid much of the good in his decision to send troops.

Some of these follies stemmed from the inevitable glitches of a new administration settling in—the foreign-policy equivalent of the White House social secretary failing to keep party crashers out. Some of them resulted from sheer naivete, much from the puerile vendetta Mr. Obama waged against the previous administration's record, a bad rhetorical habit that fogged the brains of people who should know better. One hopes that his advisers, and the president himself, recognize the weight of the query reportedly posed last April by the most formidable contemporary leader of a free country, Nicolas Sarkozy: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?). If a year from now world leaders think the answer is "yes," the U.S. will be in deep trouble.

In at least one way, Mr. Obama resembles his predecessor: He has enormous self-confidence. But where George W. Bush's certainty stemmed from moral conviction, Mr. Obama's arises from a sense of intellectual superiority. Given the centrality of his intelligence to his own self-perception, how might he use it to redeem a record of, at the moment, fairly unrelieved failure?

Much of foreign policy consists of a rough and ready game of adaptation to unforeseen, occasionally awful events. Indeed, Mr. Obama has been fortunate that his first year in office did not witness a real foreign-policy crisis. We have yet to see how he will meet that test. But there are large questions that require some high intellectual effort that he might consider tackling.

The first is explaining to the American people, and indeed to the world, what kind of war we are waging against Islamist movements. Neither Mr. Obama nor the predecessor he still complains of have been able to get beyond the trope of "extremists who have perverted a great religion." J. K. Rowling has given her readers a more thorough understanding of Lord Voldemort than the West's leaders have given their populations of whom we fight, what really animates them, and what the challenges that lie ahead will be. In particular, Mr. Obama has not articulated an effective policy of dealing with enemies who are neither criminals nor soldiers. Instead, he has tried to walk down both sides of a street at once, trying some in courts and keeping others in Guantanamo (or, in the future, a Gitmo North in Illinois) for handling by military tribunals.

The second problem is Iraq, the war that the president opposed, but the success of which is a matter of cardinal importance. The U.S. must have a broad policy for the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Such a policy should—must—work Iraq into a broader pattern of relationships. The emergence of a free Iraq offers great opportunities. A relatively stable, representative and secular Iraq would help counterbalance Iran, support moderate regimes such as Jordan, and fuel a world economy that, however climate conscious, will need oil. Simply to talk about "responsibly leaving Iraq to its people" is, in fact, irresponsible. Iraq will need care and attention to stay on its current fragile trajectory to success, but it is also an opportunity not to be neglected.

Part of un-Bushism as foreign policy has been a self-inflicted muteness by this most articulate of politicians on the topic of democracy, freedom and human rights. American foreign policy has always been a long and difficult dialogue between realpolitik and our values, our pursuit of our own interests, and our deliberate efforts to spread freedom abroad. Saying that the U.S. will "bear witness" to abuses and brutality around the world is, in effect, to say that we will send flowers to funerals. Mr. Obama needs to say something considerably more serious. In the case of Iran, for example, he could make it altogether unambiguous that we stand with those risking their lives to confront and, if fortune favors them, overthrow a dangerous, indeed evil regime.

Finally, all the globalist talk of this past year has obscured the importance of our alliances, which are evolving, but above all, need tending. New and rising allies—as different as the United Arab Emirates and Colombia—need to be identified and described as such. But more importantly, they, as well as old allies, need to hear from the U.S. president the importance we attribute to them and a conceptual description of how they fit into our policy.

It's a large agenda, but then, Mr. Obama likes to give speeches. And it still leaves plenty—articulating the need for and meaning of American primacy, for example—for 2011.

Mr. Cohen was counselor of the Department of State from 2007 to 2009. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

from the Washington Post, 2010-Feb-7, p.A17, by Philip P. Pan:

Drop in U.S. aid hits democracy efforts in Ukraine, which heads to polls today

KIEV, UKRAINE -- More than five years ago, a Western-funded exit poll challenged the official results of the presidential election in Ukraine and sparked the drama that became known as the Orange Revolution. Huge crowds protested voting fraud, the courts ordered a new election and the Kremlin's candidate was forced to concede defeat.

When Ukrainians cast ballots for a new president on Sunday, the independent research groups behind that exit poll will be out in force again. But the poll took a hit after the first round of the election last month when it reported results at odds with those of other surveys as well as the final vote tally. What went wrong? A budget shortfall had forced organizers to cut the number of districts covered.

The poll organizers' difficulties illustrate a larger phenomenon: U.S. financial aid intended to bolster Ukraine's fledgling democracy has fallen sharply in recent years despite Washington's rhetorical support for this former Soviet republic after the Orange Revolution.

The decline reflects what some call "Ukraine fatigue," or growing Western impatience with the political infighting that has paralyzed the Ukrainian government since 2005. But analysts say it also highlights Washington's tendency to focus on elections and breakthroughs like the Orange Revolution instead of the difficult, drawn-out work of building institutions such as independent courts, free media and a vigorous civil society.

The temptation -- for policymakers as well as activists -- is to label countries such as Ukraine "democratic enough" and move on to the next dictatorship. But many scholars say the United States could have a greater impact by concentrating on shoring up the dozens of weak democracies worldwide that are so troubled by poor governance that they appear to be at risk of backsliding.

Some say Ukraine, for example, remains vulnerable to an authoritarian comeback similar to the one mounted by Vladimir Putin in Russia. Polls in Ukraine, a nation of 46 million strategically located on the Black Sea between Russia and the West, show deep frustration with democracy, with less than a third of respondents expressing approval of the transition to a multiparty system after the fall of the Soviet Union. Less than half say Sunday's vote will be fair, and nearly three-quarters say Ukraine is headed toward instability and chaos.

"There are some eerie echoes of public opinion in Russia a decade ago," said Samuel Charap, a scholar of the region at the Washington-based Center for American Progress. "Ukrainians are overwhelmingly disillusioned. They're losing faith in democracy."

That faith will be further shaken, he said, if the election is disrupted or ends in dispute. Tensions are running high in the hotly contested race, with the two candidates threatening to send their supporters into the streets after the vote and accusing each other of plotting large-scale ballot fraud.

"There was a sense of complacency after the Orange Revolution that Ukraine had reached some type of irreversible turning point," Charap said. "But there's still a possibility of backtracking, and even if it's not highly likely, it means the West needs to be actively engaged."

Authoritarian comeback?

Although Ukraine's regional divisions and feuding oligarchs would make it difficult for anyone to pull off a Putin-style consolidation of power, both candidates in Sunday's runoff have been criticized as having autocratic tendencies. The front-runner, Viktor Yanukovych, was accused of trying to steal the last election, while his opponent, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, has been renounced as a potential tyrant by outgoing President Viktor Yushchenko, her former Orange Revolution ally.

Both Democrats and Republicans hailed Yushchenko as a hero when he came to power, and President George W. Bush's administration quickly boosted funding to help Yushchenko's government implement political reforms, calling Ukraine "an example of democracy for people around the world."

But as he foundered as a leader, the funding fell from $40 million in 2005 to $20 million in 2008. The decrease mirrored a decline in overall U.S. aid to Ukraine, including funds for securing nuclear facilities, from a high of $360 million in 1998 to $210 million a decade later, according to State Department statistics. The Obama administration has proposed raising spending on democracy programs in Ukraine to $26 million this year.

"Five years ago, it would have been no problem for a group to get money for democratic development," said Oleksandr Sushko, research director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Now people are having severe problems."

Ilko Kucheriv, director of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and an organizer of the national exit poll, said that even as the West has cut aid, Russia has been spending more to undermine the Ukrainian government and thwart reforms. "A democratic Ukraine wouldn't make them happy," he said.

Though the Bush administration cut aid to many former Soviet republics, shifting resources to Iraq and Afghanistan, the decline in Ukraine is striking because U.S. money had helped make the Orange Revolution possible in the first place. Russian officials go further, arguing that Washington essentially orchestrated and financed a coup.

In addition to supporting the exit poll, U.S. funds helped develop the network of grass-roots groups that later emerged at the forefront of the protest movement. It also financed training and exchange programs that exposed thousands of students, journalists and officials to Western political culture, including many of the judges and lawmakers who took a stand against the bid to fix the election.

Dysfunctional governance

But the momentum for change quickly dissipated after the Orange Revolution despite a one-year boost in U.S. funding. Ukraine today is a fragile and dysfunctional democracy, with free but sometimes corrupt media, courts vulnerable to bribes and political pressure, and weak political parties and policymaking institutions.

Yevgeny Bystritsky, director of the pro-democracy International Renaissance Foundation in Kiev, said U.S. and European leaders made the mistake of romanticizing the Orange Revolution leaders as democrats resisting Russian authoritarianism and did not pressure them to pursue political reforms.

"The problem is our politicians," he said, noting that Washington paid for experts to help craft a sweeping judicial reform bill only to see it stall in parliament because political leaders were unwilling to give up control of the courts. He argued that the West should attach more conditions and demand results in exchange for aid.

Others say there are limits to what Europe and the United States can do.

"Conditionality almost never works, and I'm not sure more money is going to make the difference either," said William Taylor, who pressed Kiev for reforms as the U.S. ambassador from 2006 to 2009. "I don't think you can bludgeon them to do things for their own good."

Deputy Prime Minister Hryhoriy Nemyria said a "real possibility" of European Union membership for Ukraine would have done more to spur reform than any additional aid. He linked the success of democracy in neighboring Eastern European countries to the E.U. accession process.

"That strong anchor was and is absent for Ukraine," he said.

Still, he acknowledged that Europe was waiting "to see Ukrainian leaders who are serious" about reform.

American aid workers and Ukrainian activists say U.S.-backed programs have had successes despite the cuts, including a widely praised overhaul of the nation's college exam system. But a $45 million grant intended to reduce corruption ended recently with Ukraine failing to make enough progress to qualify for a bigger aid package.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Dec-28, by William McGurn:

Obama Puts the Dis in Dissident
The cry going up in China: Where is the president of the United States?

Here's a timely New Year's resolution the president might do well to deliver to his National Security Council: "When it comes to nasty regimes that brutalize their people, we will never again forget that the most powerful weapon in a president's arsenal is a White House photo-op."

The December headlines remind us that we have no shortage of these nasty regimes. In China, the government sentences Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for writing a letter calling for legal and political reforms. In Iran, security forces fire on citizens marching in the streets. In Cuba, pro-government goons intimidate a group of wives, mothers and sisters of jailed dissidents—with President Raul Castro characterizing these bullies as "people willing to protect, at any price, the conquests of the revolution."

In all these cases, the cry goes up: Where is the president of the United States?

For a man whose whole appeal has been wrapped in powerful imagery, President Obama appears strikingly obtuse about the symbolism of his own actions: e.g., squeezing in a condemnation of Iran before a round of golf. With every statement not backed up by action, with every refusal to meet a leader such as the Dalai Lama, with every handshake for a Chavez, Mr. Obama is defining himself to foreign leaders who are sizing him up and have only one question in mind: How much can we get away with?

As Yogi Berra put it, it's déjà vu all over again. In his eagerness to downplay freedom in his foreign policy, Mr. Obama resembles no president so much as Gerald Ford. Barely a year into office, President Ford also made a symbolic choice for realism over rights.

The year was 1975. For its dinner in Washington, the AFL-CIO had invited Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winner exiled from his Russian homeland a year earlier, after publication of the first volume of his "Gulag Archipelago."

Republican senators tried to arrange for a meeting with Ford. Acting on the advice of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ford nixed it.

The pragmatists thought that having the president get together with Solzhenitsyn would sour efforts for détente in a forthcoming meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. As usual the pragmatists were highly impractical. The refusal to meet Solzhenitsyn made Ford look weak. In many ways, the moment would forever define his foreign policy.

One of the leading critics of President Ford's decision was Ronald Reagan. In his own time as president, Reagan met with dissidents. He quoted Solzhenitsyn often. And when he so famously upset the establishment by referring to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Reagan no doubt recalled that night in 1975 at the AFL-CIO dinner—when Solzhenitsyn had referred to the Soviet Union as "the concentration of world evil."

Reagan set a tone that hit the Soviets in their most vulnerable spot: their lack of moral legitimacy. In retrospect, we can more easily see that Reagan's willingness to give voice to freedom-loving dissidents only increased his leverage as president as he dealt with the Soviets and their allies.

George W. Bush also made it a point to meet with dissidents and signal which side America was on. He met with a defector who spent 10 years in the North Korean gulag. He met with persecuted Chinese Christians, marked the 20th anniversary of a famous pro-democracy uprising in Burma by meeting with Burmese dissidents in Thailand, and awarded the Medal of Freedom to a jailed Cuban political prisoner. In 2007, he even spoke to a whole conference of dissidents in Prague organized by another alumnus of the Soviet prison system: Natan Sharansky.

Now it's not easy for a president to meet with dissidents. When you do, some won't think you are strong enough. And even Ronald Reagan was criticized in 1986 for not meeting with Yelena Bonner, wife of jailed Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.

More important are the internal pressures—some key trade deal, some delicate negotiation, some huge foreign policy concession your staff has been working on forever. Yet precisely because all the momentum is in the direction of accommodation, it's important for a president to remember the one argument to the contrary. By meeting with some brave soul whom others want silenced, he sends a signal that cuts through the fog, compels respect from his enemies, and will be remembered long after the concerns of the day are forgotten.

Barack Obama has spent his first year as president determined to prove to the world he is not George W. Bush. He has succeeded. Let's hope that in so doing he has not sent the message that he is the new Gerald Ford.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-19, by Bret Stephens:

Does Obama Believe in Human Rights?
Human rights "interfere" with President Obama's campaign against climate change.

Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama's decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month's 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany's reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its?

To this day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, remains a high-water mark in the march of human freedom. It's a march to which candidate Obama paid rich (if solipsistic) tribute in last year's big Berlin speech. "At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning—his dream—required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West," waxed Mr. Obama to the assembled thousands. "This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom."

Those were the words. What's been the record?

China: In February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Beijing with a conciliating message about the country's human-rights record. "Our pressing on those [human-rights] issues can't interfere on the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis," she said.

In fact, there has been no pressing whatsoever on human rights. President Obama refused to meet with the Dalai Lama last month, presumably so as not to ruffle feathers with the people who will now be financing his debts. In June, Liu Xiaobo, a leading signatory of the pro-democracy Charter 08 movement, was charged with "inciting subversion of state power." But as a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Beijing admitted to the Journal, "neither the White House nor Secretary Clinton have made any public comments on Liu Xiaobo."

Sudan: In 2008, candidate Obama issued a statement insisting that "there must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government. We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing. . . . The U.N. Security Council should impose tough sanctions on the Khartoum government immediately."

Exactly right. So what should Mr. Obama do as president? Yesterday, the State Department rolled out its new policy toward Sudan, based on "a menu of incentives and disincentives" for the genocidal Sudanese government of Omar Bashir. It's the kind of menu Mr. Bashir will languidly pick his way through till he dies comfortably in his bed.

Iran: Mr. Obama's week-long silence on Iran's "internal affairs" following June's fraudulent re-election was widely noted. Not so widely noted are the administration's attempts to put maximum distance between itself and human-rights groups working the Iran beat.

Earlier this year, the State Department denied a grant request for New Haven, Conn.-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. The Center maintains perhaps the most extensive record anywhere of Iran's 30-year history of brutality. The grant denial was part of a pattern: The administration also abruptly ended funding for Freedom House's Gozaar project, an online Farsi- and English-language forum for discussing political issues.

It's easy to see why Tehran would want these groups de-funded and shut down. But why should the administration, except as a form of pre-emptive appeasement?

Burma: In July, Mr. Obama renewed sanctions on Burma. In August, he called the conviction of opposition leader (and fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner) Aung San Suu Kyi a violation of "the universal principle of human rights."

Yet as with Sudan, the administration's new policy is "engagement," on the theory that sanctions haven't worked. Maybe so. But what evidence is there that engagement will fare any better? In May 2008, the Burmese junta prevented delivery of humanitarian aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. Some 150,000 people died in plain view of "world opinion," in what amounted to a policy of forced starvation.

Leave aside the nausea factor of dealing with the authors of that policy. The real question is what good purpose can possibly be served in negotiations that the junta will pursue only (and exactly) to the extent it believes will strengthen its grip on power. It takes a remarkable presumption of good faith, or perhaps stupidity, to imagine that the Burmas or Sudans of the world would reciprocate Mr. Obama's engagement except to seek their own advantage.

It also takes a remarkable degree of cynicism—or perhaps cowardice—to treat human rights as something that "interferes" with America's purposes in the world, rather than as the very thing that ought to define them. Yet that is exactly the record of Mr. Obama's time thus far in office.

In Massachusetts not long ago, I found myself driving behind a car with "Free Tibet," "Save Darfur," and "Obama 08" bumper stickers. I wonder if it will ever dawn on the owner of that car that at least one of those stickers doesn't belong.

from the Washington Examiner, 2009-Oct-25, by Michael Barone:

Obama at odds with his own vision for the world

Barack Obama, who found time to go on a 24-hour jaunt to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to seek the 2016 Olympics games for Chicago, apparently cannot find the time for a 24-hour trip to Berlin on Nov. 9 for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Well, we all have our priorities, and the president can't be everywhere at once, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will surely represent the United States ably in Berlin.

Still, it seemed an odd decision to me -- until I went back and got the speech that candidate Obama delivered on July 24, 2008, to a crowd of 200,000 in the Tiergarten in Berlin. As I reread the text, it struck me that there would be an embarrassing contrast between what Obama said in Berlin 15 months ago and many of the policies he has been pursuing in his nine months as president.

Some conservatives were irritated that Obama introduced himself at the Tiergarten as "a fellow citizen of the world." But before that, he declared himself "a proud citizen of the United States," and of his 46 paragraphs only one was devoted to an apology for America's misdeeds ("our share of mistakes," "times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions"). Quite a contrast here with the more profuse apologies he has made abroad this year.

In addition, Obama in seven stirring paragraphs recounted America's airlift of food and fuel to Berlin when the Soviets cut off land access in 1948. True, at one point he suggested that the Berlin Wall came down because "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." But if that sounds like fuzzy every-nation-has-the-same-dreams rhetoric, he also spoke of "the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate," evidence of Soviet oppression.

These portions of the Tiergarten speech looking to the past could appropriately be repeated, with different phrasing, in a speech commemorating the fall of the Wall. But the portions of the Tiergarten speech looking to the future would pose some problems.

In the Tiergarten Obama spoke of "the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan" and of the need "to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda" there. That doesn't mesh very well with his recent reconsideration of the Afghanistan strategy he announced in March and reiterated in August, nor with the White House spin doctors' suggestions that the Taliban and al Qaeda are not necessarily allies any more.

In the Tiergarten, Obama asserted his "resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must and to seek a partnership that extends across this whole continent." That doesn't mesh very well with the "reset button" policy toward Russia that looks past its attacks on Georgia and Ukraine and propitiates the Putin regime with unilateral withdrawal of missile defense installations from Poland and the Czech Republic.

In the Tiergarten, Obama said the United States must "stand with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions." But that message, if sent, has evidently not had the intended effect on the mullah regime, which is drawing out negotiations while presumably continuing its nuclear program apace.

"Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran or the voter in Zimbabwe?" Obama asked in the Tiergarten. "Will we give meaning to the words 'never again' in Darfur?"

Well, the Obama administration has toughened up a bit on its negotiator's recommendation we give "cookies and gold stars" to the Sudanese regime that has terrorized Darfur, and our diplomats have tried to help out in Zimbabwe. But we haven't done much of anything for the dissident in Burma, and Obama, while truckling to the mullahs, showed stony indifference to the thousands protesting the stealing of the June 12 elections in Iran.

Last year, Obama told Berliners that we and they are "heirs to a struggle for freedom." This year his administration has been busy trying to appease dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. So maybe he was wise to skip a return appearance in Berlin. Let Hillary Clinton gloss over the embarrassing contrast between his rhetoric then and his policies now.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-23, by David Feith and Bari Weiss:

Denying the Green Revolution
The State Department cuts off funding to support Iran's democrats.

You won't hear it from the Obama administration, but there's still a revolution going on in Iran.

Massive protests—which began in June following the sham election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—persisted last month on Quds Day, when the government attempted to orchestrate nationwide anti-Israel marches. Refusing to follow the regime's script, marchers chanted "Death to Russia" and "Death to China" instead. (Russia was the first country to recognize Ahmadinejad as president in June, and China maintains rich commercial ties with Tehran.) State television abruptly stopped airing the marches.

Two weeks ago, the Islamic Republic sentenced three people to death for participating in the post-election protests. Meanwhile, dissidents continue to be tortured and raped in Iran's prisons.

The Obama administration—fixated on negotiating with Tehran to get it to abandon its nuclear-weapons program—has responded mostly with silence. To pursue engagement, President Obama needs his Iranian interlocutors to be durable leaders, not frauds on the brink. Iranian dissidents challenging the regime's legitimacy are thus being treated as obstacles to statecraft.

The Boston Globe reported this month that the Connecticut-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center recently lost its State Department funding. The Center—a nonpartisan group that documents Iran's human-rights abuses—had received $3 million over the past five years. It will shut down in May, said Executive Director Renee Redman, unless private donors save it.

Less widely known is that Freedom House, the nonpartisan watchdog group founded in 1941, also lost State Department funding. It applied in April for significant funds to support initiatives including Gozaar, its Farsi-English online journal of democracy and human rights, and was turned down in July. Since 2006, Freedom House had received over $2 million from the U.S. and European governments for Iran-related efforts. "We might have to close Gozaar if we run out of money," deputy executive director Thomas O. Melia told us this week.

Then there's the International Republican Institute (IRI), which for several years received State Department support to train Iranian reformers and connect them to like-minded activists in Europe and elsewhere. IRI's recent application for funds was denied, an IRI official told us last week.

The Bush administration requested $65 million for the State Department's Iran Democracy Fund in fiscal year 2009. But Congress and the Obama administration replaced it with a Near East Regional Democracy Fund. Though this new, $40 million fund purportedly supports Iranian democrats through "soft power" programs, its mission is not specified in law. The administration, therefore, can use the money however—and in whatever Near Eastern country—it pleases.

In a recent letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about Iran policy, seven congressmen including Chris Smith (R., N.J.), Bob Inglis (R., S.C.), and James Moran (D., Va.), wrote: "We are particularly concerned by reports that the State Department and USAID are being 'extremely cautious' in their funding decisions, have stopped funding projects, and have approved no new strategy for promoting civil society and the rule of law." Mrs. Clinton has not responded.

Several knowledgable sources have told us that White House officials recently refused to meet with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the representative of Iran's lead opposition figure Mir Hossein Mousavi.

"There has been a view within the Obama administration at a senior policy level that this Iran democracy program is a chit, and a chit that can be traded away to the Iranian regime," says J. Scott Carpenter, a State Department official under George W. Bush. As Iran expert and human-rights advocate Mariam Memarsadeghi told us, the Obama team sees the democratic movement "as a wrench in the works of nuclear negotiations."

Some—including Mr. Obama—claim that the U.S. would taint and implicate Iranian democrats by supporting them openly. To this argument, says Iranian democracy activist Roya Boroumand, "Ask yourself why Iranians who protest in the street write things in English. They're not just practicing language skills."

Ignoring activists who exemplify American ideals raises moral questions about U.S. foreign policy, but there is also a key practical question: Will the Obama administration likely succeed in ending Iran's nuclear-weapons program? What, after all, could Iran's mullahs get at the negotiating table that they would value more than the regional power and religious affirmation represented by a revolutionary Islamic nuclear weapon?

Mr. Obama's approach also reduces the chances that, if Iran does get a nuclear weapon, the internal opposition will be healthy enough to check the regime, challenge its adventurism, and champion a better future for the Iranian people.

The Obama team has long called itself pragmatic, open to altering its policies as realities shift. But its approach to Iran has remained unchanged since Mr. Obama was a presidential candidate, despite the Green Revolution.

"Before June's election," says former student leader Akbar Atri, who fled Iran in 2005, "the Obama administration was determined to negotiate about the nuclear issue because it assumed there was no strong democratic opposition inside the country. That was a wrong assumption. The election showed the Iranians want a different approach. They want to live in peace and freedom."

Today's facts don't fit Mr. Obama's theory. While he holds tight to that theory nonetheless, Iran's democrats suffer.

Mr. Feith is assistant editor at Foreign Affairs magazine. Ms. Weiss is an assistant features editor at the Journal.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-5, p.A18:

Obama on Tehran's Democrats
'We do not interfere in Iran's internal affairs.'

Tens of thousands of protestors yesterday braved police batons and tear gas canisters in the streets of Iranian cities to denounce their theocratic rulers and call for a change of regime. In spite of repression by the Basiji thugs and the West's short attention span, the Green Revolution lives on.

On this, the 30th anniversary of the hostage taking at the U.S. Embassy, their message was to a large degree intended for America and President Obama. The opposition hijacked the day, usually an occasion to denounce the Great Satan, to declare their desire to break with that past and build a free Iran. They marched alongside state-sanctioned rallies, before their protests were broken up violently.

For this broad coalition of democrats, America is a beacon of hope and the Iran of the street arguably the most pro-American place in the world. Earlier this year, before the huge demonstrations in the wake of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's brazen theft of the June presidential election, one popular opposition chant was, "O ba ma!"—in Farsi a play on the new American President's last name that translates as, "He with us!"

But the opposition's dreams of American support, moral as much as anything, have been dashed. Mr. Obama was slow and reluctant to speak out on their behalf and eager to engage the Iranian regime in nuclear talks as soon as the summer of protest tapered off. Iran's democrats are now letting their disappointment show. The new chant passed around in Internet chat rooms and heard in the streets yesterday was, "Obama, Obama—either you're with them or with us."

Knowing the opposition was planning to march, Mr. Obama issued his own statement the night before that instead chose to reach out to the regime. America, he said, "seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interest and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran's internal affairs." He went on to list the Administration's various efforts to appease the regime. So far and on all counts, the mullahs have rebuffed these entreaties.

The President made no mention of democracy or reference to the opposition directly, though in the last paragraph he did allow that "the world continues to bear witness to [Iranian peoples'] powerful calls for justice." Is this what he meant when he talked, at the start of his Presidency, about "restoring U.S. moral leadership"?

from the Washington Post, 2009-Nov-6, by Robert Kagan:

How Obama is aiding Ahmadinejad

The New York Times reports that opposition protesters in Iran, in between beatings and tear-gassing from riot police and the regime's hired thugs, have started a new chant: “Obama, Obama -- either you're with them or you're with us.”

In case you were wondering what the answer might be, the statement yesterday from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said it all. Gibbs declared that Obama administration officials were following reports of the unrest and “hope greatly that violence will not spread.” This was a great moment in the annals of diplo-speak. No mention of who might be committing the violence, or who might be its victims. Violence, it seems, has the capacity to spread without any human involvement.

The point of the statement, of course, was to avoid saying anything that might offend the rulers in Tehran or give any encouragement to the regime's opponents. The Obama administration is locked into its approach on Iran and is seemingly impervious to changing circumstances. It has never adjusted to the unexpected rise of a nationwide opposition to the regime and still tries to move forward as if there were no turmoil and unrest in Iran.

But the excuses for remaining silent about the opposition are running out. When the administration first adopted this studiously indifferent stance after the fraudulent election in June, officials insisted it was for the opposition's own good. The opposition allegedly didn't want American support, even rhetorical. Many bought this argument at the time, but it ought to be unsustainable now. The opposition clearly would like support from Obama.

The regime is using the Obama administration's overweening desire to talk -- and refusal to take “no” for an answer -- as a way of deflecting any international pressure regarding its domestic crackdown. And the regime's strategy is succeeding. The longer the Obama administration plays this game, the more time the regime will have to crush its opponents while the West looks on in self-imposed impotence.

Unpleasant as it may be for the president to hear, his policy is objectively aiding the Tehran regime and harming the opposition in their ongoing struggle.

The chanters are right. The United States can either be with them or against them. Right now, President Obama is against them. But it's not too late for him to switch sides.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-8, by Anthony R. Dolan:

Four Little Words
Reagan deliberately confronted criminal regimes with what they fear most: the publicly spoken truth about their moral weakness.

Ronald Reagan would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades. So the National Security Council (NSC) staff and State Department had argued for many weeks to get Reagan's now famous line removed from his June 12, 1987, Berlin speech.

With a fervor and relentlessness I hadn't seen over the prior seven years even during disputes about "the ash-heap of history" or "evil empire," they kept up the pressure until the morning Reagan spoke the line. "Is that what I think it is?" I asked White House communications director Tom Griscom about a cable NSC Adviser Frank Carlucci had been nudging at us across the table during a White House senior staff meeting at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. (Reagan had been attending a G-8 summit there and would shortly fly to the German capital.) With a shake of his head and a smile, Mr. Griscom confirmed the last-minute plea from State to drop the key sentence.

In the Reagan Library archives, similar documents chronicling the opposition's intensity surface from time to time. I was gratified though not surprised to hear a few years back about one NSC staffer's memo to Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell complaining that on multiple occasions, perhaps as many as five or six, I had declined as head of speechwriting—the writer talked about "a heated argument" between us—to remove the offending sentence.

And not only me. Shortly after the speech draft began making its review through the bureaucracy, the speechwriters, as Reagan true-believers, had deployed to do the interpersonal glad-handing that sometimes eases objections to speech passages. The Berlin event for us was the quintessential chance—in front of Communism's most evocative monument—to enunciate the anti-Soviet counterstrategy that Reagan had been putting in place since his first weeks in office.

Well before a draft was circulated, I called the writer who had the assignment, Peter Robinson, and told him I was going to an Oval Office meeting.

Shortly before we walked to the West Wing, Peter told me what he wanted in the draft: "Tear down the wall." I pushed back in my chair from my desk and let loose "fantastic, wonderful, great, perfect" and other inadequate exclamations. The Oval Office meeting agenda went quickly, with little chance to pop the question. But the discussion ceased for a moment toward the end, and I crowded in: "Mr. President, it's still very early but we were just wondering if you had any thoughts at all yet on the Berlin speech?"

Pausing for only a moment, Reagan slipped into his imitation of impressionist Rich Little doing his imitation of Ronald Reagan—he made the well-known nod of the head, said the equally familiar "well," and then added in his soft but resonant intonation while lifting his hand and letting it fall: "Tear down the wall."

I had refused to talk to Peter until I was back in my office, such was my excitement. Slamming the door I shouted: "Can you believe it? He said just what you were thinking. He said it himself."

So it was "the president's line" now. And that made it easier, though not dispositively so, for the speechwriting department to fight off objections. But this is where the Berlin address was about more than the killer sentence.

As commentators have noticed, much of the rest of the speech is also memorable, with enduring ideas and stately cadences. Mr. Robinson, a Dartmouth and Oxford graduate, had been mentored in his career by such writer-luminaries as Dartmouth Prof. Jeffrey Hart and William F. Buckley Jr. This pedigree helped him understand how Reagan's own conservatism, while less formally instructed, was powerfully ideational. Closer historical scrutiny of Reagan's writings before the presidency, as well as the extent of his involvement in his presidential speeches, has revealed that he was more than merely a Great Communicator but also a man of ideas, a cerebral president.

And part of Reagan's caring about larger ideas had to do with the nature of his foreign policy and the often overlooked rubrics he adopted. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the Reagan years show that "containment" worked. In fact, Reagan explicitly and repeatedly rejected containment as too accommodationist, saying "containment is not enough."

As part of this strategy, Reagan established offensive-minded, victory-conscious rubrics like "forward strategy for freedom," "not just world peace but world freedom," and "expanding the frontiers of freedom."

Part of this was Reagan's attempt to codify while in office a Cold War narrative developed by the anti-communist conservative movement that formed him over three decades even as he helped form it. That narrative saw liberal notions about how to handle communist regimes as provoking aggression or causing catastrophe: Franklin Roosevelt's Stalin diplomacy, Harry Truman's Marshall mission to China, John Kennedy's offer of a "status quo" to Khrushchev in Vienna, Jimmy Carter's statement that we have an "inordinate fear of communism."

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran's rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan's. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration's systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what "good vs. evil" rhetoric can do.

Mr. Dolan was chief speechwriter at the Reagan White House for eight years and served in the George W. Bush administration as special adviser in the offices of the secretary of State and the secretary of Defense.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-9, by Fouad Ajami:

From Berlin to Baghdad
Will the peoples of Islam tear down their walls as the people of Central and Eastern Europe tore down theirs?

For all its menace and fanfare, Eastern European communism, one of its countless chroniclers observed, left the theater of history on tiptoe. The simple, surprising end came 20 years ago, Nov. 9, 1989, when an apparatchik of the German Democratic Republic read out a note announcing that the border that had cut through Germany would be opened for "private trips abroad." The Berlin Wall had fallen.

A mere two years earlier, in November 1987, there was a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and even Mikhail Gorbachev—the fourth Soviet leader in three years—gave the appearance of normalcy. But it was too late for such pretense. The subjugation of that "other Europe" had come to an end.

"Gorbachev's role, though honorable, has been exaggerated," British historian Norman Davies writes in his monumental book, "Europe: A History." "He was not the architect of East Europe's freedom: he was the lock-keeper who, seeing the dam about to burst, decided to open the floodgates and to let the water flow. The dam burst in any case; but it did so without the threat of a violent catastrophe."

There were the Hungarians, in October of 1989, on the 33rd anniversary of the crushing of their national rebellion, abolishing the entire ruling Communist apparatus. There were the people in Prague again, a mere two decades after the snuffing out of their freedom, launching their Velvet Revolution. Poland wrote its own distinctive history. Its national church never faltered—a gifted primate of that church, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, rose to the papacy and helped steer his nation's history freedom's way. Its shipyard workers led a movement that made a seamless transition from workers' rights to the cause of national freedom.

It wasn't always pretty, the emancipation of these captive nations. Communism always carried within its doctrine the stern warning that national chauvinisms would spring to the fore were its "internationalism" to give way. Yugoslavia bore out that message. What rose from its graveyard were pitiless nationalisms whose crimes are indelibly etched in our memories. Tito had indeed held together an impossible country. Nor were matters pretty in Romania, no velvet revolution in the twisted, dark tyranny of the Ceaucescus. The march to ballots and free markets was not always an attractive, or a straightforward, tale.

An angry, uncompromising Russian sage, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the oft-told story tells us, came to Washington in the summer of 1975 but was denied the opportunity to meet with President Gerald Ford. The story's significance shouldn't be overdone. Two generations of Americans had done their work "containing" the spread and the appeal of Communism.

But Soviet power seemed at its zenith in the 1970s. The cause of freedom was embattled—Jean-Fran&cxcedil;ois Revel said a "totalitarian temptation" was in the air. Soviet troops and their proxies were deployed in Vietnam, Cuba, Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, etc. A nativist revolution had plunged Iran, America's "pillar" in the Persian Gulf, into a new darkness, and in affluent Western Europe a willful Euro-Communism had resonance all its own.

It was against this dismal background that Ronald Reagan had risen. He may not have known much about the foreign world, he may not have always been a master of his brief—the details and the execution and the discipline were supplied by his gifted collaborator, Secretary of State George Shultz—but he trusted his own instincts. He had his feel for history's march, his faith in human freedom. He had recoiled from all the talk about America's decline. He had boundless belief in the American mission in the world.

"I do have a strategy," Reagan said after one detailed briefing on the challenge of the Soviet Union: "We win, they lose!"

He was to be vindicated. Where political regimes had taken on an authoritarian cast in the 1970s, the number of countries that chose what broadly could be called political freedom increased by 50% between 1980 and 1990. The American strategic build-up in the Reagan years was of a scale that the Soviet Union could not match.

In Afghanistan, the last battle of the Cold War, the Soviet imperial thrust was broken. American weapons and American will, Saudi money, a Pakistani sanctuary, and a ragtag army of volunteers from the wider world of Islam broke the Soviet will. (We thought well of these volunteers then, they were freedom fighters, the mujahideen, and we nicknamed them "the mooj" in affection.)

It would stand to reason that 45 years of vigilance would spawn a desire for repose. The disputations of history had ended, we came to believe. Such was the zeitgeist of the '90s, the Nasdaq era, a decade of infatuation with globalization. The call of blood and soil had receded, we were certain then. Bill Clinton defined that era, in the way Ronald Reagan had defined his time. This wasn't quite a time of peace. Terrorists were targeting our military installations and housing compounds and embassies. A skiff in Aden rode against one of our battleships. But we would not give this struggle the label—and the attention—it deserved.

A Harvard academic had foreseen the shape of things to come. In 1993, amid this time of historical and political abdication, the late Samuel P. Huntington came forth with his celebrated "Clash of Civilizations" thesis. With remarkable prescience, he wrote that the end of the Cold War would give rise to civilizational wars.

He stated, in unadorned terms, the threat that would erupt from the lands of Islam: "The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other's Other. The 20th century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity."

The young jihadists who shattered the illusions of an era practically walk out of Huntington's pages. We had armed the boys of the jihad in Afghanistan. They came to a conviction that they had brought down one infidel empire, and could undo its liberal rival.

A meandering road led from 11/9 to 9/11. The burning grounds of Islam are altogether different than the Communist challenge. There is no Moscow that serves as the seat of Jihadist power. This is a new kind of war and new kind of enemy, a twilight war without front lines.

But we shouldn't be surprised with some of history's repetitions. There are again the appeasers who see these furies of Islam as America's comeuppance, there are those who think we have overreached and that we are riding into storms of our own making. And in the foreign world there are chameleons who feign desire for our friendship while subverting our causes.

Once again, there arises the question in our midst of whether political freedom, broadly conceived, can and ought to be taken to distant lands. In the George W. Bush years, American power and diplomacy gave voice to a belief in freedom's possibilities. A different sentiment animates American practice today.

For the peoples of Islam, the question can be squarely put: Will they tear down their walls in the manner in which the people of Central and Eastern Europe tore down theirs? The people of Islam are thus sorely tested. They will have to show their own fidelity to liberty. Strangers with big guns and ample means can ride into their midst with the best of intentions and skills, but it is their own world, their own civilization, that is now in history's scales.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

from Commentary Magazine, 2009-May-15, by Abe Greenwald:

It's a Good Time to Be George W. Bush

Let's face it, this is shaping up as George W. Bush's best month in years. The last time the 43^rd president enjoyed this kind of vindication was when a bedraggled Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in the ground by American soldiers in 2003. All of Barack Obama's efforts to cast the Bush administration as an immoral stain on American history have not merely collapsed, but collapsed on the heads of Bush's most public and vocal critics.

Here's a non-stammering Nancy Pelosi talking about Bush last July: "God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States -- a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject."

Don't mind if I do. How about national security? It turns out that support for a criminal investigation of Bush policies yielded an important finding after all: Pelosi's own long-standing agreement with the Bush administration's toughest measures. On that point she's in sync with the rest of the country. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp poll found that Americans approve of the interrogation methods Bush okayed by a margin of 50% to 46%. In other words, she didn't have to go through the condemnation charade to begin with.

Then there's Iraq. That July interview with Pelosi is quite a goldmine. When faced with a 14% approval rating for Congress, she counters: "Everything I see says this is about ending the war. . . " Well, that's not happening anytime soon. Everything I see says "ending the war" was as phony as Nancy Pelosi's outrage. Hillary Clinton went to Baghdad three weeks ago to reassure the Maliki government that the Obama administration will not abandon Iraq. On top of that, Gen. Ray Odierno said the U.S. might "maintain a presence" in some Iraqi cities beyond the scheduled draw-down date if the Iraqis request it. Did Pelosi mean the other war, in Afghanistan? Obama has done an outstanding job of taking that challenge seriously, and for those keeping score, his pick of Gen. Stanley McChrystal (the man who hunted down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq) has met with the gushing approval of Dick Cheney.

And speaking of Dick Cheney: Not only has he proved to be an important and articulate defender of the Bush administration's national-security policy; his repeated interviews and statements have done Bush the service of drawing fire away from the former president. Bush not only looks wise these days; he looks modest and thoughtful as well. And Cheney's (denied) request to declassify more CIA interrogation memos explodes the myth of the "most secretive administration in American history."

Let us not forget the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility. For years adduced as a monument to the Bush administration's disdain for due process and human rights, Gitmo was slated to be shut down by Barack Obama as a first order of business. Today, the posture without a plan has come up against a bi-partisan roadblock. Thursday, the House denied the Obama administration a requested $80 million to close the facility. The Senate's version of the bill in question contains $50 million for the Pentagon to shutter the place, but the money can only be tapped 30 days after Robert Gates devises a plan to relocate detainees outside the U.S. -- so far France will take one. To top it all off, on Friday Obama announced the revival of Guantanamo military tribunals.

On Iran, the Obama administration is veering from its stance of bottomless "respect" and "perseverance." This week Obama set early October as a "target" to determine whether Iran is really deserving of all that extended goodwill. Additionally, the administration has drawn up benchmarks to gauge Tehran's cooperation in halting their march toward a nuclear weapon. As Robert Kagan put it, "[Obama's] policy toward Iran makes sense, so long as he is ready with a serious Plan B if the negotiating track with Tehran fails."  The October non-surprise will be the revelation that Bush wasn't merely neglecting to smile at the mullahs and to ask nicely.

Finally, there's the strange and frankly unsettling image makeover of the Saudi royals. The Bush family's alleged intimacy with an extremist monarchy formed the very backbone of the anti-Bush industry. Yet, upon taking office Barack Obama commented on the bravery of King Abdullah and went on to virtually adopt the Saudi Peace Initiative as American policy. The administration is also seriously considering sending released Guantanamo detainees through the Saudi "jihad rehab" program. A week ago, "60 Minutes" aired a prime-time broadcast praising the same absurdity. The free pass Barack Obama gets on his all-encompassing embrace of Riyadh leaves the score of anti-Bush best sellers and documentaries looking a little less than credible.

President Obama, and the country at large, is finding out that George W. Bush's most controversial policies were not born of ideological delusion, American arrogance, or missionary zeal. They were imperfect but sound (with the exception of our ties to Riyadh) responses to complicated threats. But the validation of the last president runs a very distant second to the most compelling aspect of all this: the drama over CIA interrogations and Guantanamo will hopefully serve to set the administration on a more serious national security course. And it would be helpful if the American public finally dropped moral outrage as the preferred mode of political argumentation.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-31:

Tony Blair's Iraq Statesmanship
The former PM reminds the world why Saddam had to go, and the lesson for Iran.

The British media are outraged that Tony Blair still does not regret toppling Saddam Hussein. Pundits from left and right are aghast that the former premier, testifying at yet another Iraq war inquiry on Friday, offered no apology for his role in deposing a man who had repeatedly invaded his neighbors and massacred his own people by the hundreds of thousands.

We're not sure what real purpose the so-called Chilcot Commission—named for its chairman, retired civil servant John Chilcot—is supposed to serve. Ostensibly, its remit is to examine how the decision to invade Iraq was made and consider the lessons learned, rather than the merits of deposing Saddam. But as with the previous two inquiries into the war, it is also political theater designed to shame Mr. Blair and other policy makers who allied Britain with America in March 2003. Judging from his six hours of testimony, it failed to achieve its end.

Instead, Mr. Blair offered a ringing defense of the decision to invade Iraq, and a very different set of lessons for the present. "This isn't about a lie, or a conspiracy, or a deceit, or a deception. It is a decision," Mr. Blair told a packed room that included relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq. "And the decision I had to take was, given [Saddam's] history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons program?"

That's a point worth remembering over all the Monday-morning recriminations about "dodgy dossiers" and missing WMD. We have never for a moment believed that the British or U.S. governments deliberately misled their publics over what they thought they knew about Saddam's weapons. Every Western country, including those opposed to the war, believed Saddam had WMD.

But the important point was never so much about what Saddam did or did not possess so much as it was about what he intended. And as Mr. Blair pointed out Friday, "What we now know is that he [Saddam] retained the intent and the intellectual know-how to restart a nuclear and a chemical weapons program when the inspectors were out and the sanctions changed, which they were going to do. . . .

"Today we would be facing a situation where Iraq was competing with Iran, competing both on nuclear weapons capability and competing more importantly perhaps than anything else . . . in respect of support of terrorist groups. . . . If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are."

Mr. Blair was no less clear-eyed about the threat posed today by Iran and its nuclear program, against which he counseled that the international community had to take a "very hard, tough line." Iranian interference was a large reason why the Iraq war "very nearly" failed. Iran remains a sponsor of terrorism and a cause of instability from Afghanistan to Lebanon. The lesson from the Iraq war isn't to avoid action for fear of unanticipated consequences, which are inevitable in any war. It is to take action to prevent the most foreseeable of disasters, namely the combination, in a single regime, of fanaticism, links to terrorism and nuclear weapons.

"The decision I took—and frankly would take again—was, if there was any possibility that he [Saddam] could develop weapons of mass destruction, we would stop him," Mr. Blair told the commission. Listening to him, we are reminded why he ranks with Margaret Thatcher as a pre-eminent statesman of postwar British politics, an achievement unlikely to be matched by the Lilliputians who seek to embarrass him.

from the Washington Examiner via Rasmussen.com, 2009-Sep-14, by Michael Barone:

Tom Friedman Hails China's One-Party Autocracy

The dwindling number of readers of The New York Times were treated Wednesday to a column by Thomas Friedman extolling China's "one-party autocracy," which, he told us, "is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people."

China's leaders, he reported, are "boosting gasoline prices" and "overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power." All, of course, in the cause of reducing carbon emissions, which so many luminaries assure us are bound to produce global warming and environmental catastrophe.

As Jonah Goldberg, author of the scholarly bestseller "Liberal Fascism," notes, "This is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s." Mussolini, we were told then, made the trains run on time. He drained the Pontine marshes. He got things done while Americans, with their chaotic democratic politics, dithered.

Most of the Mussolini fans of the 1920s didn't really want a dictatorship in America, and any fair reader of Thomas Friedman's oeuvre knows that he doesn't want an authoritarian government here, either. The word limit of his column apparently left him no space to regret the Chinese one-party autocracy's Internet censorship, forced sterilizations, imprisonment of political dissenters and the like.

Even so, Friedman declares that "our one-party democracy is worse" than the Chinese model. He is upset that the minority party, the Republicans, won't go along with Democrats' plans to raise the price of carbon emissions and pass a government health care plan -- though, perhaps wisely, he refrains from praising the Chinese health delivery system. But he does get an essential bit wrong: It's our two-party system he's complaining about, and the fact that the current minority party won't act like it's just one wing of the majority.

China's one-party autocracy has acted decisively two issues, which can be summed up in the phrases the population explosion and global warming. The media, university and corporate elites of not just America but most of the world have been of one mind about these two issues, and in my opinion are being proven wrong on both. Each of them is used by the elites as an excuse to prevent ordinary people from behaving as they would like to.

Back in the 1970s, when the elites were convinced that overpopulation would destroy the Earth, the Chinese acted as only a one-party autocracy or totalitarian state could: It limited women to one child. The result was that millions of female fetuses were aborted so that China now has about 120 males to every 100 females -- a potentially destabilizing imbalance -- and a slow-growing population that means China will get old before most of its people grow rich.

Meanwhile, the population bomb has turned out to be a dud worldwide, as birth rates declined, and the real demographic problem, as Ben Wattenberg and Phillip Longman have pointed out, is population decline. Warren Buffett, who planned to leave his fortune to population controllers, wisely decided to leave it to Bill and Melinda Gates to spend as they think best.

The verdict isn't in on global warming yet, but some alarmist predictions have proved false. The world has been getting a little colder in the last decade, and climate models have been failing to predict the recent past. Moreover, as global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg points out, it's economically much more sensible to spend money on pending problems (like lack of safe drinking water) and on mitigating possible future effects of climate change than it is to reduce carbon emissions, which choke off the near-term economic growth needed to address environmental needs.

China's one-party autocracy can ignore such arguments. Our two-party democracy can't. Thomas Friedman may lament what Barack Obama on Wednesday night called "bickering." But in a democracy, citizens don't always take the advice of their betters, even that of Friedman and the three experts he quotes -- a climateprogress.org blogger, a former Clinton budget official and a "global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College."

The lesson I take from the overpopulation scare is to be wary when media, university and corporate elites warn that we must change our ways or face disaster 50 years hence, and when they insist, as Al Gore does and as Tom Friedman seems to, that the time for argument is over.

In our two-party democracy, it never is. And shouldn't be.

from the New Yorker online, 2009-Sep-29, by George Packer:

Down with Stratcom!

Right after the election last November, I wrote a slightly worried post about the tendency of modern Presidents to treat the press the same way they did when they were (successful) Presidential candidates. It all comes down to message discipline, controlling the news cycle, preventing leaks, strategic communications—or “stratcom,” in the Newspeakish term that I first encountered at occupation authority headquarters in Baghdad, back in 2003. It didn't work very well there. It doesn't work very well in Washington, either.

While reporting my piece on Richard Holbrooke (still subscribers only—so if you can't beat `em, join `em), I learned just how much the Obama White House hates for anything about its policies that doesn't originate with it to appear in print. Especially anything that describes how policies are reached, who argued what position, and, above all, what the President thought. They really hate it. On the other hand, it's not easy to get the White House to discuss such things with a writer—certainly not on the record. As a result, it takes a mighty effort (at least, it took a mighty effort for this not-very-plugged-in New York-based writer) to get rudimentary answers.

A profile of Valerie Jarrett recently appeared in the Times Magazine, quoting several officials, named and unnamed, taking slight shots at the subject of the piece. Afterward, the President decreed that there would be no more profiles of staff (rather than simply that officials should not speak ill of one another). This overreaction to a few nuggets of not-entirely-favorable publicity is bound to be self-destructive.

In a campaign, which is a battle for nationwide perceptions, this kind of control is understandable, and it has a better track record than the alternatives (compare the Obama press operation with Hillary Clinton's or McCain-Palin's and you have at least one part of the reason for his victory). But government is something entirely different. For policies to work, they have to be explained to the country, not once but again and again, and not just by the President in infrequent speeches but by the senior-level officials who helped establish them and are charged with carrying them out. Otherwise, public confidence can turn to dust in a hurry. Afghanistan is a case in point.

People in the Administration tell me that the horror of unauthorized press accounts is of a piece with the no-drama Obama campaign. They say that Obama hates “process” stories because they end up focussing on trivial matters of personality. They also say that the White House wants to give the impression that everything flows from the top.

This last is the one that troubles me most. Even if such a thing were possible, it isn't healthy. I'd even say it's undemocratic. Something as vast and complex as the U.S. government cannot be presented to the public along the same lines as a Presidential campaign. In the end—I saw this happen to the Bush Administration in Iraq—the result is that the White House doesn't seal information in, but, instead, it seals itself off from information. The levers of government eventually stop working because no one in the bureaucracy wants to explain what's going on for fear of the White House press office, which means the ability to think clearly grows sclerotic.

My November worry has now become a September alarm. I want the President to succeed in Afghanistan, and I don't think he's well-served by a philosophy that treats policy as one more variation on stratcom, and that fears a few slips more than an unexplained war.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-15, by Laura Meckler, with contributions by John D. McKinnon and Stephen Power:

'Czars' Ascend at White House

WASHINGTON -- When a president wants to signal that an issue really matters, there is nothing like a czar. President-elect Barack Obama is making clear that many issues matter to him.

The idea is to have someone in the White House with the president's ear to coordinate policy and give the topic the weight it deserves. Such a post gives an issue prominence, allows for coordination among agencies and streamlines decision making. At the same time, however, these arrangements can breed confusion and create conflict with the mammoth agencies that are working on the same issues.

On Monday, Mr. Obama will name former Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner as a White House energy czar, along with other officials to head the Energy Department and EPA. Over the weekend, he announced New York City housing commissioner Shaun Donovan as his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and he is also planning to name an urban-affairs czar to work out of the White House, likely Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion.

He has already named an economic czar, former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, to look at big-picture economic issues -- while he also has a Council of Economic Advisers, a National Economic Council and a large Treasury Department right next door.

He has made former Sen. Tom Daschle a health czar of sorts, in addition to making him secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Congress came close to creating a car czar, and even though that legislation died, the idea could return. And public interest groups are lobbying for a consumer czar.

"There've been so many czars over last 50 years, and they've all been failures," said Paul Light, an expert on government at New York University. "Nobody takes them seriously anymore." He pointed to officials placed in charge of homeland security and drug policy.

The problem is that "czars" are meant to be all-powerful people who can rise above the problems that plague the federal agencies, he said, but in the end, they can't.

"We only create them because departments don't work or don't talk to each other," Mr. Light said, adding that creation of a White House post doesn't usually change that. "It's a symbolic gesture of the priority assigned to an issue, and I emphasize the word symbolic. When in doubt, create a czar."

The rise of the czar can be traced to the rising concentration of power in the White House, said Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton. He said that is partly because the number and size of government agencies have grown so large that they are almost unwieldy. "In a very complex bureaucracy that makes up the federal government, the simplest way to cut through it is to do it at the White House level," he said. As chief of staff, Mr. Panetta established a White House coordinator to handle the aftermath of the bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, a situation that touched many different agencies. It worked well, he said.

For Mr. Obama, the goal is to give special attention to the issues he cares most about, said a transition official. The transition team is currently reviewing campaign promises and options as officials figure out how many more of these jobs are needed.

The official said naming a White Office-level aide to shepherd a policy makes it very clear who is in charge and accountable for results. "That way there's no questions about turf," he said.

But turf battles don't disappear with White House czars and may get worse, say some veterans.

If a czar appears to be dictating policy rather than coordinating it, cabinet secretaries may resent it, said Andrew Card, longtime chief of staff to President George W. Bush. "It will I think have a tendency to cause cabinet members to feel as if they're subordinate," Mr. Card says.

Jay Hakes, a historian of U.S. energy policy, said he thinks Ms. Browner is ideally suited for the energy position, but notes the potential for fallout, having studied the administrations of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, who all had energy "czars" of one kind or another. "A lot of cabinet secretaries end up getting frustrated because aides at the White House wind up telling them what to do," he said.

That was certainly the case for Donna Shalala, HHS secretary under Mr. Clinton, who was on the sidelines during the 1993-94 health-care reform debate. "It obviously didn't work," she said.

So she welcomed that Mr. Daschle will be the White House point on health as well as HHS secretary. "I think they've learned from our mistakes," she said.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-28, by Fouad Ajami:

Obama Tells Arabia's Despots They're Safe
America's diplomacy of freedom is officially over.

"To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America's encounter with that Greater Middle East. As the president told Al-Arabiya television Monday, he wants a return to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Say what you will about the style -- and practice -- of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush's presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress.

True, Mr. Bush's diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.

The argument that liberty springs from within and can't be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power -- or powers -- in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation.

In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies.

Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later.

The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the "parochial" man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor's diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so.

The brief reference to Iraq in the inaugural could not have been icier or more clipped. "We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people," Mr. Obama said. Granted, Iraq was not his cause, but a project that has taken so much American toil and sacrifice, that has laid the foundations of a binational (Arab and Kurdish) state in the very heart of an Arab world otherwise given to a despotic political tradition, surely could have elicited a word or two of praise. In his desire to be the "un-Bush," the new president fell back on an austere view of freedom's possibilities. The foreign world would be kept at an emotional and cultural distance. Even Afghanistan -- the good war that the new administration has accepted as its burden -- evoked no soaring poetry, just the promise of forging "a hard-earned peace." The nation had cast a vote for a new way, and had gotten the foreign policy of Brent Scowcroft.

Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers. His embrace of the "peace process" is a return to the sterile diplomacy of the Clinton years, with its belief that the terror is rooted in the grievances of the Palestinians. Mr. Obama and his advisers have refrained from asserting that terrorism has passed from the scene, but there is an unmistakable message conveyed by them that we can return to our own affairs, that Wall Street is more deadly and dangerous than that fabled "Arab-Muslim Street."

Thus far the political genius of Mr. Obama has been his intuitive feel for the mood of this country. He bet that the country was ready for his brand of postracial politics, and he was vindicated. More timid souls counseled that he should wait and bide his time, but the electorate responded to him. I suspect that he is on the mark in his reading of America's fatigue and disillusionment with foreign causes and foreign places. That is why Osama bin Laden's recent call for a "financial jihad" against America seemed so beside the point; the work of destruction has been done by our own investment wizards and politicians.

But foreign challengers and rogue regimes are under no obligation to accommodate our mood and our needs. They are not hanging onto news of our financial crisis, they are not mesmerized by the fluctuations of the Dow. I know it is a cliché, but sooner or later, we shall be hearing from them. They will strip us of our illusions and our (new) parochialism.

A dispatch from the Arabian Peninsula bears this out. It was learned, right in the midst of the news cycle announcing that Mr. Obama has ordered that Guantanamo be shut down in a year's time, that a Saudi by the name of Said Ali al-Shihri -- who had been released from that prison in 2007 to his homeland -- had made his way to Yemen and had risen in the terror world of that anarchic country. It had been a brief stop in Saudi Arabia for Guantanamo detainee No. 372: He had gone through a "rehabilitation" program there, then slipped across the border to Yemen, where he may have been involved in a terror attack on the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital in September of last year.

This war was never a unilateral American war to be called off by an American calendar. The enemy, too, has a vote in how this struggle between American power and radical Islamism plays out in the years to come.

In another time, the fabled era of Bill Clinton's peace and prosperity, we were mesmerized by the Nasdaq. In the watering hole of Davos, in the heights of the Alps, gurus confident of a new age of commerce pronounced the end of ideology and politics. But in the forbidding mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, a breed of jihadists that paid no heed to that mood of economic triumphalism was plotting for us an entirely different future.

Here we are again, this time led by our economic distress, demanding that the world abide by our own reading of historical challenges. We have not discovered that "sweet spot" where our economic fortunes intersect with the demands and challenges of an uncertain world.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jul-27, by Bret Stephens:

Do Dissidents Matter?
The Obama administration should make common cause with today's brave democracy activists.

You are either for or against apartheid and not by rhetoric. You are either in favor of evil or in favor of good. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor.
You can't be neutral.

—Desmond Tutu, 1984

Make a list of the most inspiring figures of the last 50 years, and it's sure that political dissidents will weigh heavily at the top of it: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa. Now make a list of the most consequential figures of the same period and those same names will also appear. So why is the Obama administration borderline Nixonian when it comes to making common cause with today's dissidents?

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger once recalled his opposition to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked trade privileges for communist countries with their emigration policies. “If [the Kremlin] made the concession [on emigration],” wrote Kissinger, “there was literally no telling what would happen to the Soviet Union.”

Mr. Kissinger's fear was that too much hectoring could put the policy of détente in jeopardy. In a sense he was right: Jackson-Vanik became law, persecuted minorities were allowed to go, human rights was put at the center of the superpower agenda, and the Soviet Union collapsed on the weight of its own moral bankruptcy.

Fast forward to Sunday's interview of Hillary Clinton by NBC's David Gregory, in which the newsman asked the secretary whether negotiations with Iran's government wouldn't betray the country's democracy movement.

“I don't think so, David,” she answered. “We have negotiated with many governments who we did not believe represented the will of their people. Look at all the negotiations that went on with the Soviet Union. That's what you do in diplomacy. You don't get to choose the people [you negotiate with]. That's up to the internal dynamic within a society.”

Mrs. Clinton is certainly right that presidents of both parties negotiated with the Soviets: There's a 40-year record of Soviet treaty violations to prove it. Meanwhile, people like Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov lingered in detention or prison while their respectable jailers cut their deals with the West.

But here's a thought experiment for Mrs. Clinton: If parleying with the Soviet Union then or with Iran now was (or is) the right thing to do, was the Reagan administration also right when it sought a policy of “constructive engagement” with P.W. Botha's apartheid government in South Africa? What would Mrs. Clinton have to say to Bishop Tutu? That he sounds too much like George W. Bush?

Of course the bishop was right. Of course, too, opposing the apartheid regime was not only morally right but smart, since nothing good could have come of persuading black South Africans, as we nearly did, that the U.S. stood by their white oppressors while the Soviets backed the African National Congress.

But the biggest “of course” was that the most important power in South Africa at the time wasn't Botha but rather the old man on Robben Island chipping away in a lime quarry. Just so, the ultimate future of Iran doesn't lie with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei but with his opponents now in Tehran's Evin Prison, just as Burma's future lies with its elected Prime Minister Aung San Suu Kyi and not the ruling junta, just as Russia's future lies with its brave band of opposition activists and not with Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev.

Today, these opposition activists may be little more than uncomfortable reminders of the nature of the people with whom the administration wishes to break bread. Someday, however, they (or their children) will be in power, and they will hold the U.S. to account for whether it helped or hindered the cause of their freedom

Yet there again was Mrs. Clinton in Thailand last week, suggesting the U.S. was willing to make deals with the Burmese junta in exchange for Ms. Suu Kyi's freedom—never mind that a woman who once refused an offer of release to be with her dying husband isn't about to take the same offer at a price of giving the junta an opening to the West. President Obama did better in Russia this month by meeting with some of the opposition. But how do you press the “reset” button with a regime that enforces a rule of terror in Chechnya, where human-rights activist Natalia Estemirova was recently murdered?

In Hong Kong last week, I had breakfast with Martin Lee, the city's best known democracy activist. What keeps him going? “If everyone is holding a candle in the middle of the night, and I blow mine out, then everyone else will blow theirs out,” he explained. The best U.S. foreign policy is the one that helps those like Mr. Lee cradle that candle.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jul-9, by Daniel Henninger:

The Dumbing Down of Democracy
Obama's reluctance to stand up for Western political values is dangerous.

The pivotal foreign policy event so far in the Obama presidency was not this week's summit with Russia. It was instead that rarest of all events: Barack Obama's silence.

When the people of Iran filled the streets of their country demanding a fair election, the U.S. clutched for a week. Uncertain of whether U.S. interests lay with the nuke-building ayatollahs or the democracy-seeking population, the Obama team essentially mumbled sweet nothings through the first days of the most extraordinary world event in this young president's term. That moment of hesitation, when a genuine and strategically useful democratic moment needed support, could prove costly.

When the Group of Eight nations tried to shape a response to the Iranian government's repression, its newest member, Russia, knew what to say about Iran.

"No one is willing to condemn the election process," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, "because it's an exercise in democracy."

Behold the official dumbing down of democracy.

Our purpose here is not to ridicule Foreign Minister Lavrov's absurd description of the Iranian elections. It is instead to show his statement the respect that anything dangerous deserves.

Two years ago in June, Vladimir Putin's main press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, visited the offices of the Journal editorial page. It was a remarkable meeting. The editors asked about the widely discussed criticisms of the Putin government's actions against opposition political parties and individuals and its control of the media. With a calm and confident smile, Mr. Peskov replied: "Ours is a different system of democracy." That was it. He stopped talking but kept smiling, letting the message sink in.

Dmitry Peskov was defining democracy in a way that could hardly be more different than the system of political pluralism developed the past 300 years in the West. His message was clear: We are changing the rules. Get over it.

In this light, President Obama's performance this week in Moscow was disconcerting, to put it mildly. In Mr. Obama's worldview, political systems apparently don't compete. They simply . . . are. "America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country," he said, "nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country."

Mr. Obama's political equivalence, conventional wisdom now among many Western sophisticates, is wrong and dangerous. Unless the West, led by the U.S. under this president offers active push-back against the Russian definition of democracy, their version inexorably will back out ours.

The design of Iran's election was a perfect mirror of Russia's. Foreign Minister Lavrov wasn't ratifying it for our benefit. Like Dmitry Peskov, he couldn't care less what the Americans or Europeans think of his astonishing statement. His audience is the world's other leaders and parties.

Where is it written that American-style democracy will last forever, much less spread to new nations? If the members of the U.N. General Assembly could choose between the democracy of the U.S., Britain and France or that of Russia, Venezuela and Bolivia, likely it would be the latter. Genuine democracy is hard work. Why should the likes of Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Taiwan or Brazil endure that stress if Potemkin Village democracy is okay?

What Putin, Khamenei, Chavez, Morales and Mubarak want is fait-accompli legitimacy. When resistance to their dumbed down democracy stops, they'll have it. Vocal criticism, even as eloquent as Mr. Obama's in Moscow this week or in Cairo, is not resistance. Real resistance requires acts of political push back that all the world's people can see and recognize.

A study released last month by Freedom House, "Democracy's Dark Year," reported democratic erosion in most of the new European Union member states and in the then-inspiring "color revolution" nations -- Georgia's Rose Revolution, Ukraine's Orange Revolution and Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution.

Latin America is also tipping toward dissolved democracies. The 34 nations of the Organization of American States just voted to readmit the Cuban dictatorship. After the vote, the OAS foreign ministers broke into applause, and the summit's host joyously announced, "The cold war has ended." Those words of congratulations for unrepentant anti-democrat Fidel Castro came from Manuel Zelaya, then president of Honduras.

Elected in 2005, Mr. Zelaya has been using his muscle to import the Russian-Venezuelan-Iranian political model to Honduras. That means rigged future elections and the constitution changed by fiat to validate the rigging. After meeting with Mr. Zelaya in Washington Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton off-loaded Honduras's fate to former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias.

Letting genuine democratic aspirants in places like Iran and Honduras lose in front of a watching world will exact a price. The United States and the other John Locke democracies are in an active, long-term competition with fake democrats over whose politics governs the next century. And they will presume to choose which parties should run other counties.

There is the clear sense that anything the Bushies did, the Obama sophisticates will not do. Does the fact that the Bushies pushed democracy mean it would be bad form to support even our own political system?

from Commentary Magazine online, 2009-Nov-9, by Peter Wehner:

The Fall of One Wall

It is an anniversary that should rank among the greatest we recognize: the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with it, the end of Soviet Communism and a successful conclusion to the Cold War. And yet it passes with very little attention, as almost an afterthought. It is an astonishing oversight on our part.

There are many things to take away from the meaning of what unfolded at the Berlin Wall two decades ago — one of which is that the West has many more inherent strengths many of us often forget. As a reference point, think back to the early-to-mid 1980s. One of the influential books of that time was How Democracies Perish by the distinguished French philosopher and journalist Jean-Francois Revel. The first sentence of Mr. Revel's book reads this way: "Perhaps in history democracy will have been an accident, a brief parenthesis which comes to a close before our very eyes." The aim of the book, Revel wrote, "is to describe in detail the implacable democracy-killing machine this world of ours has become. There may be some satisfaction in understanding how it works, even if we are powerless to stop it.

What is even more noteworthy is the theory underpinning Mr. Revel's conclusion. Structural weaknesses enervate democracies. Democratic societies, we were told, are inwardly oriented and self-hating. It was said that we were in denial about the threats we faced and the nature of totalitarian regimes. And there was the failure of Western nerve and courage. Faced with a ruthless, determined, patient enemy, democracies -- including the United States -- were acquiescing in their own defeat. Mr. Revel's bottom line was this: "Communism is a better machine for world conquest than democracy, and this is what will decide the final outcome of their struggle."

Six years after Revel's influential book was published, Soviet Communism was dead and democracy has rarely been more dominant. What are we to make of this?

Perhaps the first thing to recognize is that it has long been said that America and the West face an inherent disadvantage when compared to the discipline, efficiency, and brutality of totalitarian regimes. Freedom leads to softness, decadence and the loss of moral courage. We had become too comfortable and cosseted to endure hardships and the burdens of war. But here is what Winston Churchill said in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, in response to those claims:

Silly people -- and there were many, not only in enemy countries -- might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand blood-letting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyze their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend and foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before -- that the United States is like 'a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.'

It turns out that in the contest between freedom and totalitarianism, freedom does pretty well. Whittaker Chambers, without even knowing it, joined the winning side. There are a number of explanations for this, including the fact that Western democracies are usually technologically superior to, and richer than, their enemies. And democratic regimes are inherently self-correcting; fascist ones are not. But what is striking to me is less that leading Western thinkers (and non-Western thinkers; see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 commencement address at Harvard University) did not recognize that Communism's intrinsic failures would lead to its demise. What is worth noting, rather, is that many defenders of democracy did not fully appreciate the inherent strengths of human liberty.

There are certain human realities that have led to the rise of the democratic idea. Because liberty conforms to human nature, it often leads to human excellence and human flourishing. Freedom leads to advancements not merely in science, art, and literature; it also encourages acts of compassion and valor, and deepens the bonds of loyalty to one's country and affection for one's countrymen. The joyless conformity of totalitarianism eats away at the human spirit; the iron discipline and fanaticism of closed societies masks a hollowness at the core.

This does not mean we are at the end of history, or that democracies are without flaws, or that the success of democratic self-government is foreordained. Liberty can slip into license. Progress that has been made can be lost -- and it is worth remembering that democracies remain a rarity in history.

It's also important to bear in mind that the idea of freedom is alone insufficient; it needs to be backed up by the sword and the shield. "It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake," John Stuart Mill, a great champion of liberty, wrote a century and a half ago. The same point holds true for freedom in its struggle against oppression. It is certainly not inevitable that freedom prevail; it requires will and courage -- and sometimes it requires force of arms.

With those caveats in place, though, there is something about the nature of human beings and our relationship to freedom that is vital and can help us better understand what occurred 20 years ago.

For all the challenges we face, we live in a relatively hopeful time in human history. And it is instructive to look back only a few decades ago, when it was thought by the intellectual class and even among some of our political leaders that the West was in decline and Spenglerian pessimism was in order. A few admirable and prescient leaders -- including John Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and, above all, Ronald Reagan -- would have none of it. They understood that, in Kennedy’s words:

it is clear that the forces of diversity are at work inside the Communist camp, despite all the iron disciplines of regimentation and all the iron dogmatisms of ideology. Marx is proven wrong once again: for it is the closed Communist societies, not the free and open societies which carry within themselves the seeds of internal disintegration. The disarray of the Communist empire has been heightened by two other formidable forces. One is the historical force of nationalism -- and the yearning of all men to be free. The other is the gross inefficiency of their economies. For a closed society is not open to ideas of progress--and a police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

Twenty years ago the Wall came tumbling down. A sadistic, soul-killing police state came to an end. And the United States -- in confronting Soviet Communism, in supporting the forces of liberty across the globe, and in refusing to grow weary in doing good -- added another remarkable and estimable chapter to its record of achievement. That, I think, is in large part the meaning of this anniversary.

from National Review, 2004-Dec-7/8/9, by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer:

The Case for Democracy

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series of excerpts from The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer. They are taken from the book’s introduction.

A Lowering of Arms
Few in the West expected the Soviet Union to collapse.

Our world has changed so much over the last fifteen years that it may be difficult for today’s reader to get a sense of the degree of skepticism there once was in the West over the possibility of a democratic transformation inside the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, when some were actually arguing that the Soviet Union could be challenged, confronted, and broken, the possibility was dismissed out of hand. The distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., expressing the sentiments of nearly all of the Sovietologists, intellectuals, and opinion makers of the time, said that “those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”

An even better measure of the skepticism of the era was the absolute shock that greeted the collapse of the USSR. The most prescient politicians, the most learned academics, the most perceptive journalists did not foresee that hundreds of millions of people could be liberated from decades of totalitarian rule in just a few months. In April 1989, just seven months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Senator J. William Fulbright, who had served for 15 years as chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, co-authored an article dismissing the views of those in the “evil empire school” who believed that Gorbachev’s reforms were “no more than the final, feeble, foredoomed effort to hold off the historically inevitable collapse of a wicked system based on an evil philosophy.”2 Instead, Fulbright offered insight into how the “détente school,” in which he included himself, understood the changes that were then taking place behind the Iron Curtain:

We suspect that the reforms being carried out in the Soviet Union and Hungary may be evidence not of the terminal enfeeblement of Marxism but of a hitherto unsuspected resiliency and adaptability, of something akin to Roosevelt’s New Deal, which revived and rejuvenated an apparently moribund capitalism in the years of Great Depression.

If scholars and leaders in the West could be so blind to what was happening only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, imagine what the thinking was in 1975. Back then, the suggestion that the Soviet Union’s collapse was inevitable, much less imminent, would have been regarded as absurd by everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

In 1969, a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik wrote Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, in which he predicted the collapse of the USSR. Amalrik, to whom I would later have the privilege to teach English, explained that any state forced to devote so much of its energies to physically and psychologically controlling millions of its own subjects could not survive indefinitely. The unforgettable image he left the reader with was that of a soldier who must always point a gun at his enemy. His arms begin to tire until their weight becomes unbearable. Exhausted, he lowers his weapon and his prisoner escapes.

While many in the West hailed Amalrik’s courage — he was imprisoned for years and exiled for his observations — almost no one outside the Soviet Union took his ideas seriously. When he wrote his book, short-sighted democratic leaders were convinced the USSR would last forever, and according to many economic indicators, the Soviet Union appeared to be closing the gap on the U.S. Amalrik must have seemed downright delusional.

But inside the USSR, Amalrik’s book was not dismissed as the ranting of a lunatic. The leadership knew that Amalrik had exposed the Soviet regime’s soft underbelly. They understood their vulnerability to dissident ideas: Even the smallest spark of freedom could set their entire totalitarian world ablaze. That’s why dissidents were held in isolation, dissident books were confiscated, and every typewriter had to be registered with the authorities. The regime knew the volatile potential of free thought and speech, so they spared no effort at extinguishing the spark.

I was arrested in 1977 on charges of high treason as well as for “anti-Soviet” activities. After my own mock trial a year later, I was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. In 1984, my KGB jailers, swelling with pride, reminded me of Amalrik’s prediction: “You see, Amalrik is dead” — he had died in a car accident in France in 1980 — “and the USSR is still standing!”

But Almarik’s prediction had not missed by much. Within a few months of that encounter in the Gulag, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Faced with an American administration ready to confront him and realizing that the Soviet regime no longer had the strength both to maintain control of its subjects and compete with the West, Gorbachev reluctantly implemented his “glasnost” reforms. This limited attempt at “openness” would usher in changes far beyond what Gorbachev intended. Just as Amalrik had predicted, the second the regime lowered its arms, the people it had terrorized for decades overwhelmed it.

The Power of Freedom
What Soviet dissidents, Scoop Jackson, and Reagan understood.

How was one Soviet dissident able to see what legions of analysts and policymakers in the West were blind to? Did Amalrik have access to more information than they did? Was he smarter than all the Sovietologists put together? Of course not. Amalrik was neither better informed nor more intelligent than those who had failed to predict the demise of the USSR. But unlike them, he understood the awesome power of freedom.

Dissidents understood the power of freedom because it had already transformed our own lives. It liberated us the day we stopped living in a world where “truth” and “falsehood” were, like everything else, the property of the State. And for the most part, this liberation did not stop when we were sentenced to prison. Having already removed the shackles that imprisoned our minds, our physical confinement could not dull the sense of freedom that coursed through our veins.

We perceived the Soviet Union as a wooden house riddled with termites. From the outside, it might appear strong and sturdy. But inside it was rotting. The Soviets had enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world ten times over. Over 30 percent of the earth’s surface was under communist rule and the Soviets possessed enormous natural resources. Its people were highly educated, and its children second to none in mathematic and scientific achievement. But forced to devote an increasing share of its energies to controlling its own people, the USSR was decaying from within. The peoples behind the Iron Curtain yearned to be free, to speak their minds, to publish their thoughts, and most of all, to think for themselves. While a few dissidents had the courage to express those yearnings openly, most were simply afraid. We dissidents were certain, however, that freedom would be seized by the masses at the first opportunity because we understood that fear and a deep desire for liberty are not mutually exclusive.

Fortunately there were a few leaders in the West who could look beyond the facade of Soviet power to see the fundamental weakness of a state that denied its citizens freedom. Western policies of accommodation, regardless of their intent, were effectively propping up the Soviet’s tiring arms. Had that accommodation continued, the USSR might have survived for decades longer. By adopting a policy of confrontation instead, an enervated Soviet regime was further burdened. Amalrik’s analysis of Soviet weakness was correct because he understood the inherent instability of totalitarian rule. But the timing of his prediction proved accurate only because people both inside and outside the Soviet Union who understood the power of freedom were determined to harness that power.

For me, and for many other dissidents, the two men leading the forces of confrontation in America were Senator Henry Jackson and President Ronald Reagan. One a Democrat, the other a Republican, their shared conviction that the individual’s desire for freedom was an unstoppable force convinced them of the possibility of a democratic transformation inside the Soviet Union. Crucially, they also believed that the free world had a critical role to play in accelerating this transformation. Their efforts to press for democratic reform did not stem solely from humanitarian considerations. Like Sakharov, these men understood that the spread of human rights and democracy among their enemies was essential to their own nation’s security.

Had Reagan and Jackson listened to their critics, who called them dangerous warmongers, I am convinced that hundreds of millions of people would still be living under totalitarian rule. Instead, they ignored the critics and doggedly pursued an activist policy that linked the Soviet Union’s international standing to the regime’s treatment of its own people.

The logic of linkage was simple. The Soviets needed things from the West — legitimacy, economic benefits, technology, etc. To get them, leaders like Reagan and Jackson demanded that the Soviets change their behavior toward their own people. For all it simplicity, this was nothing less than a revolution in diplomatic thinking. Whereas statesmen before them had tried to link their countries’ foreign policies to a rival regime’s international conduct, Jackson and Reagan would link America’s policies to the Soviet’s domestic conduct.

In pursing this linkage, Jackson, Reagan, and those who supported them found the Achilles heel of their enemies. Beset on the inside by dissidents demanding the regime live up to its international commitments and pressed on the outside by leaders willing to link their diplomacy to internal Soviet changes, Soviet leaders were forced to lower their arms. The spark of freedom that was unleashed spread like a brushfire to burn down an empire. As a dumbfounded West watched in awe, the people of the East taught them a lesson in the power of freedom.

Dazzled by success, policymakers in the West quickly forgot what had provided the basis for it. Astonishingly, the lessons of the West’s spectacular victory in which an empire crumbled without a shot fired or a missile launched were neglected. More than fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the free world continues to underestimate the universal appeal of its own ideas. Rather than place its faith in the power of freedom to rapidly transform authoritarian states, it is eager once again to achieve “peaceful coexistence” and “détente” with dictatorial regimes.

The Great Debate
Why the skeptics are wrong.

Less than two years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and immediately after the first Gulf War ended, I met with the editorial board of one of America’s most influential newspapers. I suggested that the United States, which had just saved Saudi Arabia and Kuwait from extinction, had an historic opportunity. Now was the time to use America’s primacy in the Middle East to start bringing freedom to a region of the world where hundreds of millions are still denied it. I argued that just as the United States had effectively used “linkage” to accelerate changes within the Soviet Union, America should link its policies towards the Arab states to those regimes’ respect for the human rights of their subjects. As a first step, I suggested that America’s newfound leverage in the region might be used to insist that Saudi Arabia accept an opposition newspaper or remove some of its severe restrictions on emigration.

The eyes of my hosts quickly glazed over. Their reaction was expressed in terms that Kissinger easily could have used in 1975 in discussing the Soviet Union: “You must understand,” they replied politely, “the Saudis control the world’s largest oil reserves. They are our allies. It is of no concern to America how the Saudis rule their own country. Saudi Arabia is not about democracy. It is about the stability of the West.”

On September 11, 2001, we saw the consequences of that stability. Nineteen terrorists, spawned in a region awash with tyranny, massacred three thousand Americans. I would like to believe that horrific day has dispelled the free world of its illusions and that democratic policymakers recognize that the price for “stability” inside a nondemocratic regime is terror outside of it. I would like to believe that the leaders of the free world are now unequivocally committed to advancing freedom throughout the region not merely for the sake of the hundreds of millions who have never tasted it, but also for the sake of their own countries’ security. Most of all, I would like to believe that those who are confident of the power of freedom to change the world will once again see their ideas prevail.

But I have serious doubts. There are, to be sure, important signs of hope. I am heartened by the American-led effort currently underway in the region to build democratic societies in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as by President Bush’s determination to see this effort succeed. Moreover, as was true a generation ago, the belief in the power of freedom is not confined to one side of the political and ideological divide. Across the Atlantic, a left of center British prime minister, Tony Blair, appears no less committed than President Bush to a democratic transformation of the Middle East. And to his credit, Mr. Blair has had to make the case for democracy against the views of many in his own Labour Party and the overwhelming doubt of the British public.

But those who believe that a democratic Middle East is possible are few in number. Within certain parts of America, and nearly everywhere outside of it, the voices of skepticism appear ascendant. Many have questioned whether the democratic world has a right to impose its values on a region that is said to reject them. Most argue that military intervention in the Middle East is causing more harm than good. Even within the Bush administration, the president’s words, expressing a profound faith in freedom, are not always translated into policies that reflect that faith.

Freedom’s skeptics have returned. They may couch their disbelief in different terms than they did a generation ago. Then, with Soviet’s nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at Western capitals, the focus was on the inability of the free world to win the war. Now, it is on the inability to win the peace. Nevertheless, the arguments peddled by the skeptics sound all too familiar.

They insist that there are certain cultures and civilizations that are not compatible with democracy and certain peoples who do not desire it. They argue that the Arabs need and want iron-fisted rulers, that they have never had democracy and never will, and that their “values are not our values.”

Once again, it is asserted that democracy in certain parts of the world is not in the best interests of the “West.” While it will be readily admitted that the current regimes in the Middle East suppress freedom, those regimes are believed to also suppress a far worse alternative: the radicals and fundamentalists who might win democratic elections. The message is clear: It is better to deal with a Middle Eastern dictatorship that is our friend than a democratic regime that is our enemy.

Finally, it is said that even if the free world might be made more secure by the region’s democratization, there is little the democracies can do to help. We are told that freedom cannot be imposed from the outside and that any attempt to do so will only backfire, further fanning the flames of hatred. Since democratic reform can only come from within, the prudent role for leaders of the free world, it is argued, is to make the best of a bad situation. Rather than recklessly trying to create a new Middle East that is beyond reach and which will provoke greater hostility toward the “West,” democratic leaders are advised to work with the “moderate” non-democratic regimes in the region to promote peace and stability.

One thing unites all of these arguments: They deny the power of freedom to transform the Middle East. In this book, I hope to explain why the skeptics are as wrong today as they were a generation ago and why the West must not betray the freedoms on which it was built.

I am convinced that all peoples desire to be free. I am convinced that freedom anywhere will make the world safer everywhere. And I am convinced that democratic nations, led by the United States, have a critical role to play in expanding freedom around the globe. By pursuing clear and consistent policies that link its relations with nondemocratic regimes to the degree of freedom enjoyed by the subjects of those regimes, the free world can transform any society on earth, including those that dominate the current landscape of the Middle East. In so doing, tyranny can become, like slavery, an evil without a future.

The great debate of my youth has returned. Once again, the world is divided between those who are prepared to confront evil and those who are willing to appease it. And once again, the question that ultimately separates members of the two camps remains this: Do you believe in the power of freedom to change the world? I hope that those who read this book will count themselves, like me, among the believers.

— Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, is author of the memoir Fear No Evil and currently serves as the Israeli minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs. Ron Dermer is a political consultant and former columnist for the Jerusalem Post.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-May-15, p.A15, by Dan Henninger:

Democracies Don't Let People Die

Next to Hillary Won't Quit, the least surprising news yesterday morning was the headline: China Rejects Quake Aid. Reasons on offer were that China wanted to prove its "self-reliance," difficult roads, blah, blah, blah. A virtual army of high-tech, highly skilled relief teams are ready to go into Wenchuan County, where mountains literally have fallen onto villages.

Meanwhile, even as a second storm headed toward the same Burmese people hit by last weekend's cyclone, its military junta, a government of almost cartoonlike cruelty, continued to tell the helping world to get lost. The U.N. is now talking of a death toll exceeding 100,000. We know that number to be unnecessary because India warned Burma about the cyclone two days before it hit.

When a China or Burma and its people are in the throes of such catastrophe, one is loath to make invidious comparisons.

Let's get to it.

Among the Western intellectual classes in the U.S. and Europe, there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush's proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies. Much of this has to do with the Iraq war and the apparently bottomless, neurotic antipathy to Mr. Bush. But make no mistake: The steady stream of pushback against "exporting democracy" as quixotic or inappropriate has gone far toward throwing out the democratic baby with the Bush bathwater.

Tectonic plates in motion don't distinguish between democracies and autocracies, but the record shows that getting hit by an earthquake or cyclone in an authoritarian government is a high-risk proposition for the survivors.

Communist China's Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was the 20th century's most devastating, killing 255,000. (All data here from U.S. Geological Survey.) Managua under the Somoza dictatorship in 1972: at least 5,000 dead and most of the city destroyed.

Mexico City's 1985 earthquake under the one-party PRI government killed 9,500 according to government estimates, but the toll is believed to have been much higher. Soviet Armenia 1988: 25,000 dead. In 2003 an earthquake in mullahfied Iran destroyed the ancient city of Bam and killed at least 31,000.

Common to all is that their governments never held real elections. In such places, after nature kills people, delay and incompetence kill the rest. Set aside idealism and the flowery rhetoric that must accompany a statement like the 2002 Bush Doctrine. The bottom line is accountability. In democracies, even poor or imperfect ones, public pressure, even outrage, pushes elected officials to act. In nondemocracies, the politicians don't give a damn because they don't have to.

Bureaucracies anywhere are lumpen, but in nondemocracies their sloth can be lethal. Their political masters, in office in perpetuity, are often corrupt, and so too are they. This, not poverty, is mainly why buildings like the Juyuan Middle School collapsed this week. In Bam just five years ago, many died because they were trapped beneath crude houses. Cement up to code isn't that expensive.

Bad people and bad cement exist everywhere. When they kill people in a democracy, the pressure of public outrage calls for heads to roll. After the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina, the head of FEMA went to the block, George Bush's approval rating collapsed and has never recovered. Arguably, one can divide the Bush presidency's status to before and after Katrina.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who saw his fill running Doctors Without Borders, suggested last week that disaster aid to Burma's government would be ripped off. Paul Wolfowitz, a democracy-addicted neocon, came to the World Bank arguing that authoritarian corruption was at the center of many developing-nation horrors. The Bank's bureaucracy drove him out. One wonders how many shoddy buildings their corrupt borrowers have tossed together.

Some will say, sorry, still not our problem. Indeed, Burma's saffron-robed monks last fall put their lives on the line to get a more accountable government. The watching world said little more than, "Good luck." Zimbabweans, their nation beggared and their election defiled by the autocrat Mugabe, also want basic accountability, but the aging democracies of the West have voiced nary a peep of support for these people.

In truth, we're often joined at the hip now to nondemocratic incompetence. Tainted heparin blood thinner from Chinese factories resulted in 81 U.S. deaths. Viruses are politically neutral. In a globalized world, we too are endangered by such governments.

There are no angels in politics. Absent accountability, though, a nation's people are at permanent risk. Democracy's greatest value may well be the average politician's cynical compulsion to survive the next election.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Sep-14, p.B7, by Natan Sharansky:

The Real Russia Problem

As the free world tries to formulate an effective response to Russia's recent incursion into Georgia, the focus understandably remains on how to ensure the withdrawal of troops from Russia's democratic southern neighbor. But policymakers might want to consider for a moment how we got to this point.

The situation in Georgia is the culmination of a failed post-Cold War policy toward Russia. Central to this failure has been ignoring the inherent connection between internal freedom and external aggression. As democracy was rolled back within Russia, the world abandoned an approach that had been so effective during the later stages of the Cold War, when relations with the Kremlin were linked to the expansion of freedom inside the Soviet Union.

Linkage began in 1974 with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which tied preferential trade terms with the United States to the freedom to emigrate from the Soviet Union. It continued with the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which helped shine an international spotlight on Soviet human rights abuses, and it reached its apogee with the remarkable moral clarity of President Ronald Reagan, who made the level of Soviet tyranny a barometer of superpower relations. This policy was a spectacular success, mobilizing world opinion to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end.

The establishment largely mocked the revolutionary notion that foreign policy pressure could be used to help to transform the U.S.S.R. from within. Fortunately, for me and millions of others, leaders such as Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, and Reagan, a Republican, disagreed. They believed that such a transformation was not only possible but essential to their nation's security. They correctly understood that regimes that do not respect the rights of their own people do not respect the rights of their neighbors.

In late 1987, on the eve of Mikhail Gorbachev's first U.S. visit and less than two years after I was released from the gulag, I helped spearhead a massive rally in Washington to demand freedom of emigration for Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Some of my fellow organizers worried that the rally could undermine hopes for peace that had surfaced in the wake of Gorbachev's ascendance. It was not at all clear to them how Reagan would feel about it, since he had developed a good personal relationship with the new Soviet premier.

So I requested a meeting with Reagan to ask him directly. After I expressed this concern, he minced no words: "Do you think I am interested in a friendship with the Soviets if they continue to keep their people in prison? You do what you believe is right."

Linkage, correctly applied, is as much about saying yes as saying no; a Kremlin moving toward liberalization had to be engaged and supported, while one retreating on that path had to be confronted and penalized. After the Cold War ended, this hardheaded yet principled policy was quickly discarded.

For example, when he first came to power, President Vladimir Putin, who many hoped would continue to move Russia in a positive direction, wanted Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The law had been a spectacular success: Russians were now free to come and go as they pleased. U.S. lawmakers could have recognized the historic changes that the law had helped bring about and repealed it, but instead they let it be used as a weapon by the U.S. agricultural lobby in a petty trade spat with Russia. For those of us who paid a heavy price for supporting this amendment, it was disheartening. For leaders in the Kremlin, it was "proof" that the supposed idealism behind the amendment had been a cover for cynical self-interest all along.

Thus, the "carrot" of the amendment's repeal was foolishly withheld; likewise, "the stick" has not been used. As Putin grew bolder in reversing democratic reforms -- from taking over media outlets to menacing independent journalists to nationalizing industries -- there was barely a hint of protest. When he brazenly arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a billionaire and potential presidential rival, there were those in the Kremlin who warned of serious negative consequences. But such advisers quickly lost credibility when, after Western democratic leaders paid their traditional lip service to human rights and democracy, it was business as usual.

Sadly, a clearsighted policy of linkage was transformed into a strategic and moral muddle that neither rewarded good behavior nor punished bad. Perhaps most egregiously, a regime that would have been willing to pay a high price to join the Group of Eight, let alone to host a summit of the leading democratic powers, was given these privileges for free. Did anyone even consider asking something of the Kremlin?

Now the free world stands at a dangerous crossroads. Restoring Georgian independence and the confidence of Russia's other democratic neighbors is critical. But if the root of the problem is to be addressed strategically, the focus must return not to this or that specific foreign policy action by Russia but rather to the matter of democracy within Russia itself. This linkage must be broad and deep, and it must be reinforced by an international community willing to shine a light on Russia's retreat from democracy.

The threat to Georgia, Russia's other democratic neighbors and America ultimately arises from a lack of democracy within Russia. Changing that should be the focus of statecraft today -- if we want to ensure that the Kremlin poses no threat to peace tomorrow.

The writer, a former Soviet dissident, is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and is the author most recently of the book "Defending Identity."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Sep-9, p.A23, by Bret Stephens:

Democratization and Its Discontents

"Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza," leched Libya's Moammar Gadhafi last week on the eve of his meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State in Tripoli. "I love her very much."

Posterity will surely not record whether the dictator's feelings were reciprocated. But it will remember that Ms. Rice, who began her tenure as secretary with a ringing call for freedom and democracy, is ending it on a more genial note when it comes to the world's despots.

"For 60 years," she said in Cairo in June 2005, "the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither." Yet the U.S. rapprochement with Libya is nothing if not the triumph of the stability agenda over the freedom one. Just ask Libyan democracy activist Fathi El-Jahmi (on whose behalf Sen. Joe Biden has made honorable exertions), assuming you can find him in whatever dark cell Mr. Gadhafi has him.

But let's give Ms. Rice her due. Her return to the realpolitik of onetime mentor Brent Scowcroft is earning rave reviews. In Time magazine, reporter Scott Macleod lauded her visit to Libya as "an unqualified success" and "an example of how violent disputes in the troubled region can be settled through diplomacy rather than war." Former Clinton administration official James Rubin is over the moon over Ms. Rice's reported efforts to establish a U.S. interests section in Tehran. Her push to bring about an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is also being lauded, as is her diplomatic outreach to Syria and North Korea.

Meanwhile, Washington is getting what so far seems a crummy return on its pro-democracy investments. The Bush administration made a notable push for Palestinian democracy and wound up electing Hamas, which will almost certainly win next year's presidential election should it choose to contest it. It pushed the Syrians out of Lebanon, only to get a weak and divided democratic government that crumbled in the face of Hezbollah's (and Syria's) violent provocations.

It looked on as Pakistan democratized its way out of Pervez Musharraf's autocratic -- and relatively clean and competent -- hands and into Asif Ali Zardari's dirtier and clumsier ones. It supported Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili as he blundered his way into a war with neighboring Russia. In Iraq, it has discovered that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a man in the mold of Charles de Gaulle: firm, astute, nationalistic -- and not particularly eager to be seen as America's man, much less George W. Bush's.

So is the freedom agenda a bust? I think not. As in life, so too in foreign policy: The options before us are rarely marked "good" and "bad."

Would the Palestinian Authority be a more peaceable kingdom if a "secular" tyrant like Yasser Arafat were in charge? Was Lebanon better off when Syria terrorized its citizens (and supported Hezbollah) openly, without a murmur of opposition? Would America's influence in Pakistan have been enhanced had we stood in the way of the groundswell of popular opposition to Gen. Musharraf after he began rounding up lawyers, judges and civil-rights activists? Would Georgians have been better off under a Belarus-style regime that did the Kremlin's bidding automatically?

And could the administration have better fought the insurgency in Iraq or defended its political position at home if it had done so in the service of a puppet or military Iraqi government? Previous administrations tried something similar with South Vietnam's Nguyen van Thieu, not to the best effect.

This isn't to say that policies that promote democratization are always and everywhere the better option: The world would have been better off if Jimmy Carter had backed the autocratic Shah instead of acquiescing to the totalitarian Ayatollah. Nor is it to deny that democratization is a fraught, dangerous and reversible process.

On the other hand, a policy that encourages democratic openings wherever they are feasible is at least potentially sustainable, whereas policies biased toward maintaining autocratic stability are invariably unsustainable.

Time will tell whether Iraq is able to maintain its democracy. But it stands a better chance of survival than Egypt's pressure-cooker regime, the Saudi gerontocracy, Iran's theocracy or Libya's cult-of-personality state. Time will also tell whether Georgian democracy will be able to survive the Russian onslaught. But that onslaught is a potent reminder of the neocon notion that the internal character of authoritarian states really does predict their foreign policies.

So let's grant that in normalizing relations with a WMD-free Libya, Ms. Rice has chalked up one of the few wins of her desultory tenure -- so long as we also grant that turning one dictator would never have happened had we not turned out another.

from the Financial Times of London, 2009-Jan-2, by Christopher Caldwell:

Huntington's misunderstood doctrine

Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularised the expression “clash of civilisations”, died on Christmas eve at age 81. Obituaries have been evenly divided about whether he outlived the world he described. The phrase was coined by Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Islam, in 1990, but it was Huntington's essay of that name, published in 1993, that encapsulated the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” Huntington wrote. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”

The early 1990s presented fresh data that did not conform to the cold war rubrics, including the break-up of Yugoslavia, wars in the Caucasus, China's rapid industrialisation, the first Iraq war and the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Huntington's thesis was an admirably simple explanation. But after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001 and western coalitions invaded Afghanistan and Iraq it was used in ways that were simplistic. Half the world hailed Huntington as having foreseen the conflict between Islam and the west and half mistook him for a promoter of it.

Huntington's opponents did not have an alternative idea of where conflicts would arise from. They had the hope – which they tended to mistake for an analysis – that there would be no conflicts at all, because humanity was converging on some uniform set of cultural values. Huntington was sceptical. “The very phrase `the world community',” he wrote, “has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing `the free world') to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other western powers.” Human rights were western provincialism masquerading as universalism. What Huntington saw less clearly was that, while universalism might be an illusion, it was an illusion with a constituency.

Huntington focused on civilisations (Arab, Chinese, western, eastern Orthodox and so on) rather than cities or nations or tribes because they were “the broadest level of identification with which [a person] intensely identifies”. That has been true for most of history, but in the era of globalisation an alternative level of identification emerged (or re-emerged): that of class. The new global “leadership class”, which developed first in Europe and then spread to the business and governmental classes of even the poor nations, followed the pattern of the US social system and was accessible in similar ways – through education and self-promotion. Paradoxically, these global elites identify more readily with suffering humanity than humanity itself does, because elites feel they can speak on humanity's behalf and wield power in its name. For a peasant to proclaim himself a member of “humanity” is to efface and subordinate himself. For a member of an elite it is to exalt himself.

Huntington sometimes believed that elites were becoming more diverse. “A de-westernisation and indigenisation of elites is occurring in many non-western countries,” he wrote, “at the same time that western, usually American, cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of the people.”

That was true in Iran and somewhat true in France. It may become more true in coming years if western economies weaken relative to Asian ones. But in recent years, elites have become more homogeneous. Sometimes Huntington acknowledged this. Almost everywhere, he noted, the International Monetary Fund was more popular among finance ministers than among peoples.

Huntington never arrived at a general explanation of how globalisation got transmitted through (and disrupted) individual nations' class systems. Perhaps no such explanation was possible. But without one, it was unclear to many of Huntington's readers whether the centrepiece of western diplomacy, spreading democracy, would avert inter-civilisational violence or incite it. Most assumed Huntington thought the former. In fact, he consistently thought the latter. The book that made his reputation, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), argued that liberalisation was not an automatic route to either prosperity or peace and could indeed bring penury and violence.

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington noted that no sentence in his 1993 essay had aroused more controversy than: “Islam has bloody borders.” To him, this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam's merits as a civilisation and still less an argument for western meddling.

Anyway, the west's increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilisation, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims' side. It is curious that the west has shown so little inclination to ask whether it did not perhaps back the wrong horse. Western policy towards Islam did considerably more to produce Vladimir Putin than it did to produce Osama bin Laden.

It is bizarre that The Clash of Civilizations has been taken in some quarters as “orientalist” or “imperialist” or even as an endorsement, avant la lettre, of the Bush administration's efforts to reorder the Middle East through political liberalisation. The Iraq war was the supreme expression of the belief that Islamic civilisations are not different from western ones in any fundamental way. It was the expression not of a hard-headed doctrine but of a woolly-minded one and, as such, a repudiation of ideas Huntington held his whole life.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-9, by Bret Stephens:

Obama's Team of Conformists
A 'team of rivals' is of one foreign-policy mind.

Much has been written about the "team of rivals" Barack Obama has assembled to shape his administration's foreign policy. Politically speaking, maybe there's something to this. Policy-wise, the differences are about as clear as those between tap and bottled water.

Here's a blind taste test. "A political dialogue with Iran should not be deferred until such a time as the deep differences over Iranian nuclear ambitions and its invidious involvement with regional conflicts has been resolved."

Was this candidate Obama, urging talks with Tehran without preconditions? Not at all: It is the recommendation of a 2004 Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored task force on Iran, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his erstwhile protege, Robert Gates.

This would be the same Robert Gates who spent months as a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which warned against deploying more troops. In a not-so-small irony of history, Mr. Gates was pulled from the ISG to lead the Defense Department -- and enjoy credit for the surge -- just weeks before the ISG's report became public.

The purpose here isn't to pick on Mr. Gates, who's proved to be a forceful secretary. It's merely to point out that Mr. Gates -- the Republican appointee who supposedly stands furthest politically from the president-elect -- doesn't stand far away at all, at least on two of the most significant issues of the day.

Now for another taste test: "Although we must not shy away from pushing for more democracy and accountability in Russia, we must work with the country in areas of common interest." Is this Mr. Obama's Russia policy, or Mrs. Clinton's? Hard to say, really, since the other candidate is of the identical view that "It is a mistake . . . to see Russia only as a threat. . . . We need to engage Russia selectively on issues of high national importance."

Also a member of Mr. Obama's foreign-policy team is former Marine Commandant James Jones. Not much is publicly known about the incoming national security adviser's views, except that he is said to have authored a paper (reportedly suppressed by the Bush administration) critical of Israel's security measures in the West Bank. Al Hunt of Bloomberg has also reported that Gen. Jones was "never a fan" of the Iraq War and that he advocates a relatively conciliatory line on Russia.

So where are the rivalries? What are the sharp policy disputes Mr. Obama will have to mediate and synthesize, of the kind that divided Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, John Bolton and Nicholas Burns?

Instead, Mr. Obama has assembled a team of intellectual clones. Not only that, it's one that neatly conforms to the same foreign-policy consensus that typified much of President Bush's second term: revival of the Arab-Israeli "peace process"; a diplomatic approach toward Iran; concessions to North Korea (with no serious expectation of genuine reciprocity); abandonment of what was once called the freedom agenda. As for Iraq, whatever differences there might have been are now moot, thanks to the surge and the passage last week of the status-of-forces agreement.

In this connection, it's somewhat startling to observe that if Ms. Rice had been retained by the new administration she would have fit right in. No doubt there are policy differences between the current secretary and her designated successor (though both of them supported the invasion of Iraq and later opposed the surge). But those differences are mainly of degree, or pace.

Thus, if Ms. Rice was edging closer to direct engagement with Iran with the idea of a U.S. interest section in Tehran, the Obama administration is likely to move quickly toward fuller normalization of ties. If re-engagement with Syria was somewhere on Ms. Rice's to-do list, it will move up a notch or two under Mrs. Clinton. If a third Bush term would have meant withdrawal from Iraq in two or three years, the Obama team will probably bring most of the troops home six months earlier.

Some commentators, including many conservatives, find this kind of continuity reassuring. Yet, surge aside, it's worth recalling what a dreary time the last few years have been for U.S. foreign policy: Lebanon's capitulation to Hezbollah; the failure to slow Iran's nuclear programs; the de facto U.S. acquiescence to Russia's Georgia adventure; the betrayal of democracy activists such as Egypt's Ayman Nour, who has languished in prison for the crime of contesting a presidential election.

Yes, this is President Bush's record. But it is not the neocon record that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton ran against in their presidential campaigns and that supposedly accounts for our current predicaments. On the contrary, it is a product of the very foreign-policy "realism" that Ms. Rice gradually made her own as secretary of state, and that the Obama team now looks set to carry forward, with a few adjustments, into the next term.

So much for change we can believe in. So much, too, for the second coming of the Lincoln administration. Say what you will about Mr. Obama's team, it's conformist and conventional. Except, of course, for Joe Biden, the house Cassandra.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Sep-13, p.A17, by Charles Krauthammer:

Charlie Gibson's Gaffe

"At times visibly nervous . . . Ms. Palin most visibly stumbled when she was asked by Mr. Gibson if she agreed with the Bush doctrine. Ms. Palin did not seem to know what he was talking about. Mr. Gibson, sounding like an impatient teacher, informed her that it meant the right of 'anticipatory self-defense.' "

-- New York Times, Sept. 12

Informed her? Rubbish.

The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong.

There is no single meaning of the Bush Doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration -- and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, "In what respect, Charlie?"

Sensing his "gotcha" moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine "is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense."

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush Doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, "The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism," I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush Doctrine.

Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." This "with us or against us" policy regarding terror -- first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan -- became the essence of the Bush Doctrine.

Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It's not. It's the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

This declaration of a sweeping, universal American freedom agenda was consciously meant to echo John Kennedy's pledge in his inaugural address that the United States "shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." It draws also from the Truman doctrine of March 1947 and from Wilson's 14 points.

If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration.

Not the Gibson doctrine of preemption.

Not the "with us or against us" no-neutrality-is-permitted policy of the immediate post-9/11 days.

Not the unilateralism that characterized the pre-9/11 first year of the Bush administration.

Presidential doctrines are inherently malleable and difficult to define. The only fixed "doctrines" in American history are the Monroe and the Truman doctrines which come out of single presidential statements during administrations where there were few other contradictory or conflicting foreign policy crosscurrents.

Such is not the case with the Bush Doctrine.

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

from TCSDaily.com, 2006-Nov-17, by David Boaz:

The World Turner

Milton Friedman died at the age of 94. Over his long life, he had the satisfaction of seeing the world turn in his direction.

Friedman was born in New York in 1912, at the end of a long period of peace and prosperity. The first half of his life witnessed a series of catastrophes for peace and freedom - World War I, the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia, the rise of fascism and national socialism, World War II, communist domination of half the world. Happily, Friedman's parents had left Eastern Europe, avoiding the cataclysms there.

But freedom was under challenge in their adopted home, as well. The federal income tax began in 1913. World War I ushered in government planning on an unprecedented scale. Then came Prohibition, the New Deal, Keynesian economics, and a widespread feeling that the federal government could solve any problem it set its mind to.

Then, after World War II, with the big-government mentality almost unchallenged in the United States, Milton Friedman began writing. He wrote first about technical economic issues and laid the groundwork for a shift in U.S. monetary policy that would come later. Then in 1962, amidst the enthusiasm for John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, he published "Capitalism and Freedom," a book that influenced a whole generation of younger people. He proposed such ideas as school vouchers to bring the benefits of competition to education, a flat-rate tax to make the income tax less burdensome, and floating exchange rates to improve international finance.

After that the brilliant academic economist became a public figure-probably the most important advocate of individual freedom in the United States for the next 40 years. He wrote a column for Newsweek, lectured around the world, and appeared on television, always arguing for the benefits of free markets and free societies. He was enlisted as an adviser to Republican presidents and candidates, yet rejected the label "conservative," insisting that he is a liberal like Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, or a libertarian in modern terms.

His advice was also sought around the world. Most famously, in the 1970s he advised the military government of Chile - for which he received years of abusive criticism - and the communist government of China - which no one seemed to mind. Happily, both governments listened, and both have become "economic miracles." Chile now has the most successful economy in Latin America, and China's path along the "capitalist road" has made it more prosperous than anyone could have dreamed in 1976, the year that Mao Zedong died and Friedman won the Nobel Prize.

In 1980 Friedman broadened his audience further with the publication of a book, "Free to Choose," and an accompanying PBS television series. Millions of people watched "Free to Choose" and came to understand how markets work. One viewer, a young actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger, said in 1994: "In Austria I noticed that people would worry about when they would get their pension. In America, they would worry if they were going to meet their potential. Friedman's books explained to me how a dynamic capitalist system allows people to fulfill their dreams."

That show appeared just after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Great Britain, and just before Ronald Reagan was elected president. Thatcher and Reagan represented a revolution that Milton Friedman had helped to create: a shift away from central planning and the welfare state and toward a renewed appreciation for entrepreneurship, free markets, and limited government. The collectivist ideas that had dominated the 20th century were being replaced by a more libertarian spirit.

And not just in England and the United States. The success of the free market in Chile influenced other Latin American countries to move away from their long tradition of interventionism and tentatively embrace markets. About a decade after Reagan's election, the Soviet empire collapsed, and many of the new leaders in eastern and central Europe turned out to be readers of... Milton Friedman. Estonia quickly became one of the post-Soviet success stories. When its young Prime Minister Mart Laar visited Washington, he was asked where he got the idea for his market-based reforms. Laar replied, "We read Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek." Another successful reformer, Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, was described as a "Friedmanite with a staff of Hayekians."

Friedman was the intellectual father of the all-volunteer army -- in particular, he persuaded a young congressman, Donald Rumsfeld, to become a leader in the successful effort to end the draft -- and has also been an outspoken opponent of the war on drugs, which violates individual rights and fosters crime and corruption.

Millions of people around the world who live in freedom give thanks for the life and accomplishments of the man who said, "My central theme in public advocacy has been the promotion of human freedom."

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and editor of "Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Nov-17:

Capitalism and Friedman
The man who made free markets popular again.

There are some public figures whose obituaries can be written years in advance. Milton Friedman was not one of them.

Arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century, he won his Nobel Prize 30 years ago. His classic “Capitalism and Freedom” was published 44 years ago. He died yesterday at the age of 94, but as the op-ed running nearby [here -AMPP Ed.] attests, he was active in writing about, thinking about and explaining how economics affects our world until the end.

In today's feature, he updates and re-examines conclusions he reached about the Great Depression in “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” a book published with Anna Schwartz 43 years ago. His thesis was that the Great Depression was not, as was once commonly presumed, a “market failure,” but a failure of government policy. Contraction of the money supply in the wake of the stock-market crash of 1929 was what turned a financial event into an economic catastrophe.

This insight flowed from Professor Friedman's conviction that “money matters.” As the Royal Academy of Sweden noted in announcing his 1976 Nobel, Friedman's was a lonely voice in arguing for the importance of the money supply in economics when he began writing about it in the 1950s.

By the late 1970s, stagflation—the combination of high inflation and high unemployment—had made it obvious that the then-dominant Keynesian model had some large holes. These included the effect of the money supply on inflation and the fact that inflation and employment did not move in lockstep as some of Keynes's disciples asserted. It was a seminal insight, creating what became known at the University of Chicago and elsewhere as the “monetarist school” and laying the intellectual basis for central bankers to break the great inflation of the 1970s.

In awarding its Nobel in 1976, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his “achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” The citation covers a huge swath of economic thinking, and suggests both the range and the consistency of Professor Friedman's thought. In layman's terms, the Swedish Academy credited him with nothing less than shredding the Keynesian consensus.

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First, he had shown that men are no fools. People spend money in accordance with their income expectations over the long-term, not in response to one-time “stimuli” from the government. This is known as the “permanent income” hypothesis, and it called into question Keynesian notions of how short-term stimulus affects the economy. In addition to his monetary insights, Mr. Friedman questioned the degree to which fiscal policy could be used to “fine-tune” the economy by adjusting spending, tax or monetary policy. Today we take for granted that all of these operate with a lag, but it was Milton Friedman who first highlighted the problem.

For all of his academic accomplishments, Professor Friedman's role as a popularizer of free-market principles was arguably more important. He wrote a column in Newsweek for 18 years starting in 1966, preaching the importance of economic freedom to a generation that had never heard such things in school. His 1980 book, “Free to Choose,” was a best seller, and the videos that accompanied it were smuggled behind the Iron Curtain like seeds of revolution.

He was among the first to point to Hong Kong as a model of free-market success, a lesson that even today is remaking Communist China. And he first suggested educational vouchers to rescue failing public schools as long ago as 1955; in recent years, he established a foundation to support this idea that continues to advance despite ferocious opposition from unions and other entrenched interests.

This newspaper had the privilege of publishing Milton Friedman's articles on numerous occasions over the years. We've also disagreed with him from time to time, notably on exchange rates and drug legalization. These disputes always gave us cause to reflect, and 20 years ago amid one debate on the benefits of fixed exchange rates we noted that “being spanked by Milton Friedman is one of life's most humiliating experiences.”

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In truth, Professor Friedman always argued with civility and a bracing wit. One of his best barbs on the size of government: “Given our monstrous, overgrown government structure, any three letters chosen at random would probably designate an agency or part of a department that could be profitably abolished.” And he popularized “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”

In “Two Lucky People,” written with his wife, Rose Friedman, who survives him as a distinguished economist in her own right, Mr. Friedman well described the role of a public intellectual: “We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.”

On the death of Ronald Reagan, whom he advised, Mr. Friedman wrote on these pages that “few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom.” The same can and long will be said of Milton Friedman.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Oct-11, by Christopher Demuth:

Think-Tank Confidential
What I learned during two decades as head of America's most influential policy shop.

I have been presiding at the American Enterprise Institute for 21 years. Today I am announcing that I will step down before the end of 2008. The search for a successor has begun--this being AEI, it will be a competitive search, and we expect a happy conclusion long before the target date.

I hope to remain at the institute, if my successor will have me, pursuing my own research and writing. Policy think-tanks such as AEI have become important centers of applied scholarship, and friend and foe alike say we are terribly influential. But our position at the crossroads of politics and academics draws a certain amount of fire from both directions, and the reasons for our success are not widely understood. Here is my kiss-and-tell.

Think tanks are identified in the public mind as agents of a particular political viewpoint. It is sometimes suggested that this compromises the integrity of their work. Yet their real secret is not that they take orders from, or give orders to, the Bush administration or anyone else. Rather, they have discovered new methods for organizing intellectual activity--superior in many respects (by no means all) to those of traditional research universities.

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To be sure, think tanks--at least those on the right--do not attempt to disguise their political affinities in the manner of the (invariably left-leaning) universities. We are "schools" in the old sense of the term: groups of scholars who share a set of philosophical premises and take them as far as we can in empirical research, persuasive writing, and arguments among ourselves and with those of other schools.

This has proven highly productive. It is a great advantage, when working on practical problems, not to be constantly doubling back to first principles. We know our foundations and concentrate on the specifics of the problem at hand. We like to work on hard problems, and there are many fertile disagreements in our halls over bioethics, school reform, the rise of China, constitutional interpretation and what to do about Korea and Iran.

Think tanks aim to produce good research not only for its own sake but to improve the world. We are organized in ways that depart sharply from university organization. Think-tank scholars do not have tenure, make faculty appointments, allocate budgets or offices or sit on administrative committees. These matters are consigned to management, leaving the scholars free to focus on what they do best. Management promotes the scholars' output with an alacrity that would make many university administrators uncomfortable.

And we pay careful attention to the craft of good speaking and writing. Many AEI scholars do technical research for academic journals, but all write for a wider audience as well. When new arrivals from academia ask me whom they should write for, I tell them: for your Mom. That is, for an interested, sympathetic reader who may not know beans about the technical aspects of your work but wants to know what you've discovered and why it makes a difference.

These methods are not new. They were in all essentials invented at AEI in the 1950s by William Baroody Sr., its president, and W. Glenn Campbell, its research director. The two would commission top academics to study front-burner policy issues, publish the results as pamphlets and distribute them around Washington, try to persuade newspapers to run extracts as "op-eds" long before that term existed, and organize conferences and appearances before congressional committees. They hit the big time in July 1954, when The Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of an AEI critique of farm price supports, accompanied by a vigorous editorial applying its teaching to an upcoming Senate vote.

By the measures of participation in political debate and generation of influential policy ideas and proposals, the right-of-center think tanks have been stupendous successes. They appear in the national media, liberal as well as conservative, well out of proportion to their numbers and output. AEI essays appear more frequently than those from other think thanks of all persuasions, not only in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal but also those of the New York Times and Washington Post.

What accounts for this growth and prominence? I have tried to explain it to people who have been setting up liberal and leftist think-tanks in recent years, advising them that the secret of success is to go away and spend 30 years in the political wilderness. They have thought I was joking. Let me try again here.

Every one of the right-of-center think tanks was founded in a spirit of opposition to the established order of things. Opposition is the natural proclivity of the intellectual (it's what leads some smart people to become intellectuals rather than computer programmers), and is of course prerequisite to criticism and devotion to reform. And for conservatives, opposition lasted a very long time--in domestic policy, from the New Deal through 1980.

These circumstances meant that the think tanks in their formative years attracted many contrarian characters who were strongly disaffected by some aspect of politics or policy. One of AEI's founders was Raymond Moley, the FDR braintruster who coined the term "New Deal" and then became disillusioned with the project (a liberal mugged by reality long before the 1960s, he was a proto-neoconservative). Milton Friedman was an active AEIer when he was still considered a crackpot in polite academic circles. Robert Bork and Jeane Kirkpatrick worked at AEI long before they became public personalities.

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These were intellectual outcasts of extraordinary talent, seeking the company of kindred spirits. As dissenters, they were fiercely attached to the principles of intellectual independence, freedom of inquiry, and open debate (AEI's motto was: "Competition of ideas is fundamental to a free society"). And as dissenters with little hope of influencing actual policy, at least in the short run, they were politically independent, too--uninterested in accommodating their views to strategic calculations or partisan interests.

At think tanks such as AEI, that spirit of independence continued after 1980, when conservative, neoconservative and libertarian ideas acquired real purchase in practical politics and our phones started ringing. At AEI, we have spent more time kibitzing with friends in high office and talking about current events on television, and the attention has not been unwelcome. But we are in a different line of work from those on the inside, and have never hesitated to offer blunt criticism when we thought it was justified.

And the most gratifying moments in the think-tank world have come when ambitious ideas, politically out of the question at first, have worked their way through academic and professional debate, got noticed by public officials and legislators, and eventually were adopted as policy. That usually takes at least a dozen years--the period from the publication of Robert Bork's first antitrust critiques to the adoption of his ideas by federal enforcers and courts in the 1980s, and from the publication of Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" to the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

We seem to be on schedule with the idea of reducing or eliminating capital taxation, and moving toward taxing consumption rather than income. (I predict that if Sen. Clinton is elected president the corporate income tax will be further reduced during her tenure). The idea of eliminating the tax exclusion of employer-provided health benefits, scorned for decades as politically infeasible (especially by conservative activists), has now been embraced by President Bush and several smart legislators.

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Think-tank mavens like to point to episodes such as these as evidence that "ideas have consequences," but we know better than anyone how partial and contingent is the role of ideas in the march of politics. Public inattention, well-organized interest groups, anti-social ideologies and sheer happenstance powerfully shape the actions of governments. Think tanks serve as storehouses of ideas, patiently developed and nurtured, waiting for the crisis when practical men are desperately seeking a new approach, or for the inspired leader who sees the possibilities of action before the crisis arrives.

Sometimes the moment comes with astonishing speed. Last December, a group of military specialists closeted themselves at AEI to see if they could devise a new strategy for the war in Iraq, one that might have a reasonable prospect of victory following three years of catastrophic mistakes. Their plan was adopted within weeks by the White House, Pentagon and new commanders in the field, with all credit due to our soldiers in action for their great success to date.

Other times it seems that the moment will never come. That 1954 study of farm price supports is still waiting. Undaunted, AEI published 21 studies of agriculture policy this year, intrinsically as good as our Iraq reports. When I showed them to an ambitious young Republican congressman, he smiled and shook his head.

My own think-tank slogan is: "No one knows when the Berlin Wall will come down." It is imperative to maintain intellectual sanctuaries in a world where Harvard University forbids the discussion of certain important issues and Columbia University welcomes the contributions of a master terrorist. Our sanctuaries have been instrumental to the expansion of human freedom in recent decades. We are laying the groundwork for further advances--as opportunities arise, as they surely will.

Mr. DeMuth is president of the American Enterprise Institute.

from Forbes.com, 2002-Dec-23, by Benjamin J. Stein:

How to Ruin American Enterprise

We're well on our way to squelching what gives this country an edge. What would it take to kill innovation altogether?

As a casual observer of what makes this country work and what stops it cold, I hereby offer a few suggestions on how we can ruin American competitiveness and innovation in the course of this century. I think the reader will agree with me that we are already far down the road on many of them:

1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit. Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics. Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.

2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.

3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.

4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust. Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.

5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.

6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long-term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.

7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish into MTV-land.

8) Mock and belittle the family. Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.

9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.

10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:

First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.

11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.

12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.

My list need not end here. But I stopped at a dozen because I realized that this is already, in large measure, the program of so many of our elected representatives. The debauchery of our tort system is already in place, and the rest of the agenda is under way.

Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, economist, writer and actor, and host of the game show Win Ben Stein's Money.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-24, by Nick Gillespie:

Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster
He expanded the state, and the sense that the state is incompetent.

Now that George W. Bush has finally left office, here's a challenge to a nation famous for its proud tradition of invention: Can somebody invent a machine capable of fully measuring the disaster that was the Bush presidency?

Yes, yes, I know that attitudes towards presidencies are volatile. Harry Truman was hated when he left office and look at him now; he's so highly regarded that President Bush thought of him as a role model. There are, I'm sure, still a few William Henry Harrison dead-enders around, convinced that the 31 days the broken-down old general spent as president will someday receive the full glory they deserve.

In a way that was inconceivable when he took office, Mr. Bush -- the advance man for the "ownership society," smaller and more trustworthy government, and a humble foreign policy -- increased the size and scope of the federal government to unprecedented levels. At the same time, he constantly flashed signs of secrecy, duplicity, ineffectiveness and outright incompetence.

Think for a moment about the thousands of Transportation Security Administration screeners -- newly minted government employees all -- who continue to confiscate contact-lens solution and nail clippers while, according to nearly every field test, somehow failing to notice simulated bombs in passenger luggage.

Or schoolchildren struggling under No Child Left Behind, which federalized K-12 education to an unprecedented degree with nothing to show for it other than greater spending tabs. Or the bizarrely structured Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the largest entitlement program created since LBJ. Or the simple reality that taxpayers now guarantee some $8 trillion in inscrutable loans to a financial sector that collapsed from inscrutable loans.

Such programs were not in any way foisted on Mr. Bush, the way that welfare reform had been on Bill Clinton; they were signature projects, designed to create a legacy every bit as monumental and inspiring as Laura Bush's global literacy campaign.

The most basic Bush numbers are damning. If increases in government spending matter, then Mr. Bush is worse than any president in recent history. During his first four years in office -- a period during which his party controlled Congress -- he added a whopping $345 billion (in constant dollars) to the federal budget. The only other presidential term that comes close? Mr. Bush's second term. As of November 2008, he had added at least an additional $287 billion on top of that (and the months since then will add significantly to the bill). To put that in perspective, consider that the spendthrift LBJ added a mere $223 billion in total additional outlays in his one full term.

If spending under Mr. Bush was a disaster, regulation was even worse. The number of pages in the Federal Registry is a rough proxy for the swollen expanse of the regulatory state. In 2001, some 64,438 pages of regulations were added to it. In 2007, more than 78,000 new pages were added. Worse still, argues the Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy, Mr. Bush is the unparalleled master of "economically significant regulations" that cost the economy more than $100 million a year. Since 2001, he jacked that number by more than 70%. Since June 2008 alone, he introduced more than 100 economically significant regulations.

At this late date, it may be pointless to argue about the grounds for the invasion of Iraq, which even Mr. Bush has (finally) acknowledged were built on sand rather than bedrock. The Iraq war has lasted longer than any American conflict except for Vietnam and has cost more than any shooting match except for World War II. Leave aside for a moment the more than 4,200 U.S. deaths and 30,000 casualties, and ask a very basic question: Did President Bush's prosecution of the war -- he declared an end to major hostilities in May 2003 -- and his direction of the ongoing occupation make you feel better about the government's ability to execute core functions?

Or, like the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina (later made good by shoveling billions of pork-laden tax dollars to the Gulf area) and the rushed, secretive, and ever-changing bailout of the financial sector, did it make you want to simply despair?

Mr. Bush's legacy is thus a bizarro version of Ronald Reagan's. Reagan entered office declaring that government was not the solution to our problems, it was the problem. Ironically, he demonstrated that government could do some important things right -- he helped tame inflation and masterfully drew the Cold War to a nonviolent triumph for the Free World. By contrast, Mr. Bush has massively expanded the government along with the sense that government is incompetent.

That is no small accomplishment -- and its pernicious effects will last long after Mr. Bush has moved back to Texas, and President Obama has announced that his stimulus package, originally tagged at $750 billion and already up to $825 billion, will cost $1 trillion or more. Mr. Bush has cleared the way for President Obama to intervene more and more in the economy and every other aspect of American life.

Last July, the political scientists Philippe Aghion, Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc and Andrei Shleifer wrote a paper titled "Regulation and Distrust." Using data from the World Values Survey, the authors convincingly argue that "distrust influences not just regulation itself, but the demand for regulation." They found that "distrust fuels support for government control over the economy. What is perhaps most interesting about this finding . . . is that distrust generates demand for regulation even when people realize that the government is corrupt and ineffective."

George W. Bush has certainly taught us that government really can't be trusted to be very effective, or open, or smart. He has also taught us that government can always get bigger on every level and every way. It's a sad lesson that we'll be learning for many years to come.

Mr. Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Sep-9, by Paul A. Gigot:

'Most People Want Us to Win'
A president in the fray, more Truman than LBJ.

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

"That's not going to happen," snaps the president of the United States, leaning across his desk in his airborne office. He had been saying that he hoped to revisit Social Security reform next year, when he "will be able to drain the politics out of the issue," and I rudely interrupted by noting the polls predicting Ms. Pelosi's ascension.

"I just don't believe it," the president insists. "I believe the Republicans will end up being--running the House and the Senate. And the reason why I believe it is because when our candidates go out and talk about the strength of this economy, people will say their tax cuts worked, their plan worked. . . . And secondly, that this is a group of people that understand the stakes of the world in which we live and are willing to help this unity government in Iraq succeed for the sake of our children and grandchildren, and that we are steadfast in our belief in the capacity of liberty to bring peace."

Love or loathe President George W. Bush, you can't say he lacks the courage of his convictions. Down in the polls, with the American people in a sour mood over Iraq, Mr. Bush isn't changing his policy or hunkering down in the Oval Office. Instead he's doubling down, investing whatever scarce political capital he has to frame the November contest as a choice over the economy and taxes and especially over his prosecution of the war on terror.

The strategy carries no small risk, because if Republicans lose, Democrats will feel even more emboldened to challenge him on national security. The final two years of his presidency could be dreadful and the chances of a U.S. retreat in Iraq would multiply. On the other hand, his senior aides say, Mr. Bush will be blamed if Republicans lose in any case, so he might as well play his strongest hand to prevent such a result. And if the GOP holds both houses, he'll deserve much of the credit.

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The president is certainly in feisty, even passionate, form as I meet him for 40-some minutes Thursday afternoon, coming off the third of his speeches this week on the lessons of 9/11 and a fund-raiser in Savannah, Ga., for GOP House candidate Max Burns. The critics are saying the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East is dead, but the Beltway coroners must not have talked with Mr. Bush. I pose the frequent complaint that his policy has succeeded only in unleashing the radical Furies in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.

"I would remind the critics of the freedom agenda that the policy prior to September 11th was stability for the sake of stability: Let us not worry about the form of government. Let us simply worry about whether or not the world appears stable, whether or not we achieve short-term geopolitical gain," he says. "And it looked like that policy was working, and, frankly, it made some sense when it came to dealing with the Middle East vis-à-vis the Communists.

"The problem with that philosophy, or that foreign policy, was that beneath the surface boiled resentment and hatred, and that resentment and hatred helped fuel this radical Islam, and the radical Islam is what ended up causing the attacks that killed 3,000 of our citizens. So I vowed, and made the decision that not only would we stay on the offense and . . . get these people before they could attack us again. But in the long run the only way to make sure your grandchildren are protected, Paul, is to win the battle of ideas, is to defeat the ideology of hatred and resentment."

But would he concede that elections have so far empowered mainly the radicals? "It's a part of the process. I think Americans must remember we had some growing pains ourselves. It wasn't all that smooth a road to the Constitution to begin with in our own country. Democracy is not easy," he says, coiled and intense in his presidential flight jacket.

Take the Palestinian elections that elevated the terrorist group Hamas to power. "I wasn't surprised," he says, "that the political party that said 'Vote for me, I will get rid of corruption' won, because I was the person that decided on U.S. foreign policy that we were not going to deal with Mr. Arafat because he had let his people down, and that money that the world was spending wasn't getting to the Palestinian people. . . . They didn't say, 'Vote for us, we want war.' They said, 'Vote for us, we will get you better education and health.' "

Mr. Bush concedes that Hamas's "militant wing," as he calls it, is "unacceptable." But he says he sees a virtue in "creating a sense where people have to compete for people's votes. They have to listen to the concerns of the street." The answer is for other Palestinian leaders to out-compete Hamas to respond to those concerns. "Elections are not the end. They're only the beginning. And, no question, elections sometimes create victors that may not conform to everything we want. . . . On the other hand, it is the beginning of a more hopeful Middle East."

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I try to dig a little deeper on Egypt, where the political opening of 18 months ago seems to have been abruptly closed by President Hosni Mubarak, with a muted U.S. response to the arrest of the moderate opposition leader, Ayman Nour. Has the U.S. given up on promoting reform in Egypt?

"Of course we have not given up," Mr. Bush says. "We were disappointed" about Ayman Nour. Does he believe Mr. Mubarak should release Mr. Nour? "Yes, I do, but he'll make those decisions based upon his own laws." Mr. Bush says he's spoken to Mr. Mubarak's son and heir-apparent, Gamal, about Mr. Nour, "and I have spoken to Mubarak a lot about democracy. And, equally importantly, I've talked to . . . a group of young reformers who are now in government. There's an impressive group of younger Egyptians--the trade minister and some of the economic people--that understand the promise and the difficulties of democracy."

The pace of Middle East reform will vary by country, he adds. In Kuwait, they now let women vote. "And so if you look at the Middle East from 10 years to today, there's been some significant change. Jordan changed, Morocco, the Gulf Coast countries, Qatar," and of course the nascent democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Regarding Iraq, Mr. Bush is a bit reflective, if also insistent about the costs of failure. "I'm not surprised that this war has created consternation amongst the American people," he concedes. "The enemy has got the capacity to take--got the willingness to take innocent life and the capacity to do so, knowing full well that those deaths and that carnage will end up on our TV screens. So the American people are now having to adjust to a new kind of bloody war.

"Now, my view of the country is this: Most people want us to win. There are a good number who say, get out now. But most Americans are united in the concept--of the idea of winning."

On that point, I ask Mr. Bush to address not his critics on the left who want to withdraw, but those on the right who worry that he isn't fighting hard enough to win. "No, I understand. No, I hear that, Paul, a lot, and I take their word seriously, and of course use that as a basis for questioning our generals. My point to you is that one of the lessons of a previous war is that the military really wasn't given the flexibility to make the decisions to win. And I ask the following questions: Do you have enough? Do you need more troops? Do you need different equipment?" The question I failed to ask but wish I had is: Does this mean that, like Lincoln, Mr. Bush should have fired more generals?

With sectarian strife in Iraq, some critics (such as Sen. Joe Biden) are saying the best strategy now is for the country to divide into three--Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni. Mr. Bush says partition would be "a mistake," though he does add that "the Iraqi people are going to have to make that decision." But he says Iraqis didn't vote for partition when they approved their new constitution or new government, and "this government has been in place since June; 90 days is a long time for some, but it's really not all that long to help a nation that was brutalized under a tyrant to get going."

Mr. Bush is most emphatic when he links Iraq to the larger struggle for Mideast reform. "In the long run, the United States is going to have to make a decision as to whether or not it will support moderates against extremists, reformers against tyrants. And Iraq is the first real test of the nation's commitment to this ideological struggle. . . . I believe it strongly. One way for the American people to understand the stakes is to envision what happens if America withdraws." He has been hitting that last point hard in his recent speeches, and it is the linchpin of the argument Mr. Bush will make through November against the Democrats who insist on pulling out immediately.

Intriguingly, the president broke a little news on the subject of Iran, acknowledging that he personally signed off on the U.S. visit this week by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. The trip has angered many conservatives because Mr. Khatami presided over the nuclear weapons development and cheating that Mr. Bush has pledged to stop. Why let him visit?

"I was interested to hear what he had to say," Mr. Bush responds without hesitation. "I'm interested in learning more about the Iranian government, how they think, what people think within the government. My hope is that diplomacy will work in convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions. And in order for diplomacy to work, it's important to hear voices other than [current President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's."

One thing Mr. Khatami has said this week is that because the U.S. is bogged down in Iraq it will never have the will to stop Iran's nuclear program. Is he right? "Well, he also said it's very important for the [coalition] troops to stay in Iraq so that there is a stable government on the Iranian border," Mr. Bush replies, rather forgivingly.

On other hand, Mr. Bush remains as blunt as ever about the nature of the Iranian regime when I ask if one lesson of North Korea is that Iran must be stopped before it acquires a bomb. "North Korea doesn't teach us that lesson. The current government [in Iran] teaches that lesson," Mr. Bush says. "Their declared policies of destruction and their support for terror makes it clear they should not have a nuclear weapon."

The impression Mr. Bush leaves is of a man deeply engaged on the Iran problem and, like several presidents before him, trying to understand what kind of diplomatic or economic pressure short of military means will change the regime's behavior. One way or another, Iran will be the major dilemma of the rest of his presidency, and Mr. Bush knows it.

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Five years after 9/11, I ask the president if he is surprised that--and can explain why--both Iraq and his larger antiterror policies have become so politically polarized. "Well, first of all, I do believe there's a difference between the political rhetoric out of Washington and what the citizens feel," he says.

"But this is a different kind of war. In the past, there was troop movements, or, you know, people could report the sinking of a ship. This is a war that requires intelligence and interrogation within the law from people who know what's happening. . . . Victories you can't see. But the enemy is able to create death and carnage that tends to define the action.

"And I think most Americans understand we're vulnerable. But my hope was after 9/11, most Americans wouldn't walk around saying, 'My goodness, we're at war. Therefore let us don't live a normal life. Let us don't invest.' " Mr. Bush calls it an "interesting contradiction" that he wants "people to understand the stakes of failure" in this conflict. But on the other hand, he also wants "the country to be able to grow, invest, save, expand, educate, raise their children." This is another way of saying how hard it is for a democracy to maintain support for a war without a tangible, ominous enemy such as the Soviet Union or Imperial Japan.

Could he have done more, as president, to win over more Democratic allies? "I met with a lot of Democrats over the course of this war, and"--he pauses for the longest time in our interview--"you know, it's hard for me to tell, Paul, whether I could have done a better job. . . . I don't know. I just don't know."

He then says that he has GOP majorities, and thus Republican leaders, to deal with. "Obviously, I wish that the effort were more bipartisan; it has been on certain issues. It certainly was when it came time for people to assess the intelligence that they had seen and knew about and vote on a resolution to remove Saddam Hussein from power." And it was as well on his policy of pursuing state sponsors of terror. But then the 2004 campaign intervened, he says, and now it's another campaign season.

Mr. Bush is an avid reader of history, and he has a contest with political aide Karl Rove to see who reads the most books. ("I'm losing," Mr. Bush says.) So I ask him if any current Democrat could play the role that Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan played in helping Harry Truman establish new policies in the 1940s at the dawn of the Cold War.

Notably, he talks about Truman first. "I doubt Truman would have been able to predict how long the Cold War would last, but I applaud Truman for beginning to wage the Cold War"--pregnant pause--"for which he was very unpopular, for which the country was viewed as polarized." He never does mention a contemporary Vandenberg, and in truth the only one I can think of is Joe Lieberman, of late and by necessity not a Democrat but an "independent."

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The Truman reference is nonetheless revealing, because it suggests that perhaps Mr. Bush has begun to realize he will get little credit for his Middle East policies during his own presidency. His critics on the left in particular want to portray him as another LBJ, forlorn over a misbegotten war, and destined for historical disdain because of it. But Mr. Bush hardly resembles the LBJ who more or less came to agree with his Vietnam critics. He seems far more like Truman, both in his personal combativeness and also in his conviction that his vindication will come down the road.

One of his main goals now, also like Truman, is to institutionalize some of his antiterror policies by putting them on firmer legal and political ground so future presidents can use them. That's what his speech this week on military tribunals was mainly about, and the same goes for warrantless wiretaps and CIA interrogations of al Qaeda suspects. For all of the controversy they've caused, Mr. Bush is convinced that the next president will be grateful to have these tools. And despite all the partisan rancor surrounding them, Mr. Bush's legacy in defending them is likely to be lasting.

When I put to him the criticism made by Newt Gingrich, among others, that the U.S. security bureaucracy is too slow and unwieldy, he couldn't rebut it fast enough. "I disagree strongly," he says. "We were stove-piped in the past. We had an FBI whose primary responsibility was white-collar crime or criminality. We had a CIA that couldn't talk to criminal investigators. And we've changed all that."

Mr. Bush adds that the intelligence he receives is "quantifiably better" than it was before 9/11. One reason is the warrantless al Qaeda wiretaps, which gather intelligence from what he calls "the battlefield" in this conflict. "And so the data points are becoming richer, and the analysis is more complete, because now the reports I get on analysis have input from different parts of the intelligence community that John Negroponte is overseeing." Mr. Bush isn't likely to call legislation he signed a failure, but this is still the most reassuring thing I've heard about the CIA in years.

This is the fourth time I've interviewed Mr. Bush at length in the last eight years, going back to his time as Texas governor. One of the notable things about him is how similar he seems. He has always been supremely confident in his decisions and focused above all else on pushing forward, not looking back. If he is tortured by doubt, he doesn't show it to journalists. Some see this as obstinance, but he sees it as firmness of conviction.

Whether or not he's right about the elections this fall, you have to respect his willingness to put that conviction on the line. "I said in my Inaugural Address, we should end tyranny in the 21st century," he says. "And I meant that."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Sep-15, p.A22:

Bush's Lonely Decision

Now that even Barack Obama has acknowledged that President Bush's surge in Iraq has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams," maybe it's time the Democratic nominee gives some thought to how that success actually came about -- not just in Ramadi and Baghdad, but in the bureaucratic Beltway infighting out of which the decision to surge emerged.

That's one reason to welcome "The War Within," the fourth installment in Bob Woodward's account of the Bush Presidency. As is often the case with the Washington Post stalwart, the reporting is better than the analysis, which reflects the Beltway conventional wisdom of a dogmatic and incurious President. But even as a (very) rough draft of history, we read Mr. Woodward's book as an instructive profile in Presidential decision-making.

Consider what confronted Mr. Bush in 2006. Following a February attack on a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra, Iraq's sectarian violence began a steep upward spiral. The U.S. helped engineer the ouster of one Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, in favor of Nouri al-Maliki, an untested leader about whom the U.S. knew next to nothing. The "Sunni Awakening" of tribal sheiks against al Qaeda was nowhere in sight. An attempt at a minisurge of U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad failed dismally. George Casey, the American commander in Iraq, believed the only way the U.S. could "win" was to "draw down" -- a view shared up the chain of command, including Centcom Commander John Abizaid and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Politically, the war had become deeply unpopular in an election year that would wipe out Republican majorities in Congress. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, run by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, was gearing up to offer the President the option of a politically graceful defeat, dressed up as a regional "diplomatic offensive." Democrats united in their demands for immediate withdrawal, while skittish Republicans who had initially supported the war, including Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon Smith of Oregon, abandoned the Administration.

From the State Department, Condoleezza Rice opposed the surge, arguing, according to Mr. Woodward, that "the U.S. should minimize its role in punishing sectarian violence." Senior brass at the Pentagon were also against it, on the theory that it was more important to ease the stress on the military and be prepared for any conceivable military contingency than to win the war they were fighting.

Handed this menu of defeat, Mr. Bush played opposite to stereotype by firing Mr. Rumsfeld and seeking advice from a wider cast of advisers, particularly retired Army General Jack Keane and scholar Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. The President also pressed the fundamental question of how the war could actually be won, a consideration that seemed to elude most senior members of his government. "God, what is he talking about?" Mr. Woodward quotes a (typically anonymous) senior aide to Ms. Rice as wondering when Mr. Bush raised the question at one meeting of foreign service officers. "Was the President out of touch?"

No less remarkably, the surge continued to face entrenched Pentagon opposition even after the President had decided on it. Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went out of his way to prevent General Keane from visiting Iraq in order to limit his influence with the White House.

The Pentagon also sought to hamstring General David Petraeus in ways both petty and large, even as it became increasingly apparent that the surge was working. Following the general's first report to Congress last September, Mr. Bush dictated a personal message to assure General Petraeus of his complete support: "I do not want to change the strategy until the strategy has succeeded," Mr. Woodward reports the President as saying. In this respect, Mr. Bush would have been better advised to dictate that message directly to Admiral Mullen.

The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it's easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush's way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq's dramatic turn for the better.

Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln's general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That's a test President Bush passed -- something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.

from Michael Medved on Townhall.com, 2006-Sep-17, by Michael Medved:

The President, Face to Face: In Command, and Enjoying It

When you sit down with George W. Bush in private conversation, he comes across with only a casual resemblance to the famous figure we've all seen on TV.

I had the opportunity to reach that conclusion during a ninety minute "off the record" meeting in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon, September 15th. I'd met the President before (as he duly noted when I came through the door) but only in passing: at a large, formal dinner in Dallas in 1995 when he was Governor of Texas, and at a breakfast gathering of Seattle religious leaders during his first race for the Presidency in 2000.

This situation was different, in part because any individual becomes a different person after he takes over the most powerful job on earth and in part because the setting was unusually intimate. On Tuesday evening, I received an invitation to this Oval Office meeting with the President: Trey Bohn, a capable official from the White House press office, said that the chief executive wanted to communicate his ideas, his view of the world, on a personal basis to a handful of opinion leaders from the world of talk radio. All day Wednesday, we struggled to rearrange my schedule in order to facilitate the trip to Washington: when the Leader of the Free World extends an invitation, it's only appropriate to make every possible effort to accept. I took the red-eye on Thursday night (with my wife Diane) after my normal broadcast, and a screening of a grossly incompetent movie. The schedule allowed time to shower, shave and change in our hotel before walking the three blocks to the White House.

I arrived early, as the President's staff had requested, and sitting in a waiting room in the West Wing with some of the other meeting participants, we could hear snatches of the singularly feisty press conference the chief executive conducted (to my surprise) that morning, immediately before our appointment. The other invited guests for the Oval Office meeting were four fellow national talk show hosts, most of whom I knew reasonably well -- Sean Hannity, Mike Gallagher, Laura Ingraham, and Neal Boortz. While the President grabbed a quick lunch after his press conference (we were told), we sat around a long table in the Roosevelt Room, immediately adjacent to the Oval Office--- inspecting the portraits of Teddy Roosevelt on the wall, and the framed Congressional Medal of Honor he won for leading the charge up San Juan Hill.

After a few minutes, White House press secretary Tony Snow invited us into the Oval Office, where we each greeted the President and his chief-of-staff, Josh Bolten. As we sat down on the couches in front of the President's desk, and he took the chair facing the two couches, Mr. Bolten left the office and the President began to talk. Other than the five guests, the only other people in the room were White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and White House communications director Dan Bartlett.

The first thing I noticed when enterting the Oval Office, by the way, is the superb lighting: the room is bright yellow, and the light is notably brighter than in the other rooms of the executive mansion. Even on a cloudy, overcast morning, you feel as if you're in the midst of a desert in the noonday sun. In a sense, I suppose that brilliant glare reminds the president and his aides that you can't count on any dark corners, any lingering shadows, to obscure what occurs in the Oval Office.

In that unforgiving light, the President also looks larger, more formidable than he looks on television. He often appears to be a slight, unsassuming man, but he's 5'11", notably broad-shouldered, and with a habit of throwing those shoulders back with a West Texas swagger. Standing next to Al Gore (who's 6' 2") or John Kerry (who's 6' 4"), President Bush may look small by comparison, but when expansively welcoming guests into his office he's a commanding and room-filling presence. Part of that, of course, is the air of familiarity and power that surrounds him, but part of that warm and authoritative aura is, inevitably, just him.

I had expected that once we all sat down, the President might ask us some questions about the concerns and opinions of the radio audience, or else he might have opened himself to questions or comments we wanted to pose. In the event, he did neither: he simply began talking about the world situation, and never stopped. We had been scheduled for half an hour with Mr. Bush but he continued to speak-- with increasing energy and focus, as a matter of fact --for some ninety minutes before aides appeared to enforce the rigors of his schedule. Because the conversation was officially "off the record," I'm not supposed to quote specifics of the President's comments, but I can describe the subjects he covered and my general reaction to his conversation. He spoke primarily about the ongoing War on Terror -- showing unexpectedly detailed and meticulous knowledge of progress (or lack thereof) in many specific fronts around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Bush's critics like to deride him as an empty-headed frat boy who knows nothing about other world leaders, but in his lengthy session with us the President told a series of amusing and very revealing stories about a half dozen heads of state. Without breaking the ground rules and providing specifics, I can say that the Leader of the Free World feels hearty affection for Junichiro Koizumi, the out-going Prime Minister of Japan, and he gave a riveting account about meeting the Prime Minister of Spain that would have made any American-- Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal -- feel proud and grateful that this generally under-rated Texan represented the United States of America a that particular moment. His comments about China, and the relationship between the Chinese economy and the nation's foreign posture, were particularly perceptive and persuasive, reflecting a much richer understanding of that confusing and powerful society than most reporters or pundits.

In the past, I've heard Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich show off their brilliant minds with long, discursive, deeply informed rambles that sketch out a free-flowing view of the state of the world. I've never heard anyone suggest that George W. Bush, whatever his virtues of character and resolution, could be capable of a similarly dazzling tour of the horizon-- but he provided precisely that sort of over-view this Friday, full of insight on societies, inviduals, and ongoing struggles. The only significant interruption occured when we all heard a sudden, disturbing sound and looked to the glass doors behind the President's desk. It became apparent that some rudely insistent, or perhaps altogther unauthorized intruder, meant to disrupt our meeting, so the President summoned an aide from the next room who opened the door for Beazly, one of the White House Scots Terriers. A few minutes later, Barney, the more famous member of the Presidential canine corps, demanded entrance with similar scratching insistence. The little dog strode into the room with his own air of command and entitlement and looked around briefly as the President sang his praises to us, then scampered into an adjoining room for a more pressing engagement.

In addition to his exploration of world affairs, the president also spoke about gas prices in the US (lamenting the fact that he's much easier to blame when they go up than to credit when they go down), the ongoing religious revival, or awakening, and the upcoming Congressional elections (about which he maintains complete confidence, despite "stupid moves" by a few specific Republican candidates which he discussed). Asked about the possibility of immigration reform before the election, he expressed passionate concern for establishing better security at the border, but indicated an unwillingness to change his "core principles." He made the important point that if he abandoned his well-known commitments on this or other domestic issues, the nation's enemies (and the rest of the world) would take away the belief that the President could be bullied, prodded, overwhelmed and initimidated -- harming the war effort for which young Americans risk their lives. He deeply believes in the importance of resolution, determination, and consistency in world affairs-- and emphasized several times that he refuses to govern according to trends, polls, or public opinion.

There's nothing grim about this commitment to remain unbending and unafraid in pursuit of his purposes. This President doesn't grit his teeth, or feel beleaguered or forlorn over low opinion ratings, or the angry demonstrators who wait outside the White House fence every day. When I visited the executive mansion, one protestor dressed as the grim reapear, in a black robe with a skeleton mask and scythe, carrying a sign thanking President Bush for the help. Others deployed larger-than-life puppets of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, dressed in striped prison suits, with manacles on their legs. I looked for some angry demonstators carrying signs equating the President to Hitler; they weren't there this trip, but I've seen them before, and so has Mr. Bush. In view of the poisonous nature of the opposition to his leadership, one might expect the President to sink into a self-pitying, paranoid funk, like so many of his predecessors (Wilson, Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Carter) who faced a hostile public during the last years or their terms.

This President, however, feels in no way cowed or discouraged or overwhemed, and that's the most encouraging lesson I took away from my hour-and-a-half in the Oval Office. He looks and sounds energized, and said several times how much he enjoys the Presidency, likes making decisions, and remembers what a privilege and an honor it is to be where he is. He even indicated a determination to go back to an effort to save Social Security after the election --- despite the crushing opposition the last time he tried to perform this public service. The President clearly loves his job and relishes the opportunities it affords him to change the country. He doesn't feel sorry for himself, and with his savvy resolution to make the most of the two years remaining to him after the mid-term elections, he doesn't want anybody else's pity.

Of course, that brightly lit Oval Office is hugely impressive but so, it must be said, is the impassioned individual who occupies it. If some of George Bush's most fervent detractors had been able to sit where I sat on Friday afternoon, they might not have bought the President's arguments, or his defense of his positions, but they couldn't dismiss the man's intellect, energy or information base ever again.

And one more thing: twice during his meandering conversation, the President deployed the word "nuclear." Both times, he pronounced it flawlessly --- as "new- clee-ar," not "nuke-cule-ar." Considering the huge press attention on the mis-pronounciation of this single word, nothing shocked me more about meeting the president than hearing him, in private conservation, avoid a mistake for which he's become celebrated in public.

If he can say "nu-clee-ar" in private, why does he still say, "nuke-cule-ar" when he speaks on camera? Could it be possible that there's some mischievous intent here-- that the President deliberately gives his own spin to the word just to provoke pompous pundits into paroxysms of supercilious rage? It seems like a far-fetched explanation, I'll admit, but after seeing the President's infectiously feisty mood this Friday, I wouldn't put it past him.

from Creators Syndicate via the National Ledger of Arizona, 2006-Jun-5, by Michael Barone:

President Bush Knows His History

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.

George W. Bush has a better sense of history. Speaking last week at the commencement at West Point -- above the Hudson River, where revolutionary Americans threw a chain across the water to block British ships -- Bush noted that he was speaking to the first class to enter the U.S. Military Academy after the Sept. 11 attacks. And he put the challenge these cadets willingly undertook in perspective by looking back at the challenges America faced at the start of the Cold War 60 years ago.

"In the early years of that struggle," Bush noted, "freedom's victory was not obvious or assured." In 1946, Harry Truman accompanied Winston Churchill as he delivered his Iron Curtain speech; in 1947, communists threatened Greece and Turkey; in 1948, Czechoslovakia fell, France and Italy seemed headed the same way, and Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets, who exploded a nuclear weapon the next year; in 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea.

"All of this took place in just the first five years following World War II," Bush noted. "Fortunately, we had a president named Harry Truman, who recognized the threat, took bold action to confront it and laid the foundation for freedom's victory in the Cold War."

Bold action: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947, the Berlin airlift in 1948, the NATO Treaty in 1949, the Korean War in 1950. None of these was uncontroversial, and none was perfectly executed. And this was only the beginning. It took 40 years -- many of them filled with angry controversy -- to win the Cold War.

The struggles against Soviet communism and Islamofascist terrorists are of course not identical. But there are similarities.

"Like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," Bush said. "And like the Cold War, they're seeking weapons of mass murder that would allow them to deliver catastrophic destruction to our country."

The New Republic's Peter Beinart argues that Bush, unlike Truman, has shown no respect for international institutions. But the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were unilateral American initiatives, and Truman used the United Nations to respond in Korea only because the Soviets were then boycotting the Security Council. Otherwise, he would have gone to war, as Bill Clinton did in Kosovo, without U.N. approval. Bush did try to use the United Nations on Iraq, but was blocked by France and Russia, both stuffed with profits from the corrupt U.N. Oil for Food program.

But as Bush pointed out, we have worked with 90-plus nations and NATO in Afghanistan and with 70-plus nations on the Proliferation Security Initiative. We're working with allies to halt Iran's nuclear program.

"We can't have lasting peace unless we work actively and vigorously to bring about conditions of freedom and justice in the world," Harry Truman told the West Point class of 1952. Which is what we're trying to do today -- in Iraq and the broader Middle East, in Afghanistan, even Africa.

Reports of Bush's West Point speech noted that Truman had low job ratings -- lower than Bush's, in fact. But does that matter now? Bush, as Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, has changed American foreign policy more than any president since Truman, and like Truman he has acted on the long view.

"The war began on my watch," Bush told the class of 2006, "but it's going to end on your watch." Truman might have made the same point, accurately as it turned out, to the class of 1952. We're lucky we had then, and have now, a president who takes bold action and braves vitriolic criticism to defend our civilization against those who would destroy it.

from the Guardian of London, 2008-Dec-9, by Peter Walker:

Bush the religious moderate?
The outgoing US president tells an interviewer his faith is not incompatible with evolution, he is not a Biblical literalist and God did not tell him to invade Iraq

While being a committed Christian, Tony Blair did not, in Alistair Campbell's famous phrase, "do God". George Bush is different.

Famously born again from his dissolute, hard drinking ways, the soon-to-depart US president's fervent faith helped make America's large evangelical community the bedrock of his election victories.

With his time in office running out, Bush has been discussing what religion means to him. Here's the précis: he does not believe in the literal truth of the Bible, did not invade Iraq because of his Christianity and does not believe his faith is incompatible with evolution. Bush will not even assert that the Almighty – who, he believes, is much the same one as is worshipped by other religions – chose him to become president.

The insights came last night in a pre-recorded interview for ABC's Nightline show. Here are some of the key quotes:

I think evolution can - you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.

No, I'm not a literalist, but I think you can learn a lot from [the Bible].

When asked if the God he prays to is the same as those worshipped by other faiths:

I do believe there is an almighty that is broad and big enough and loving enough that can encompass a lot of people.

On whether he was chosen by God to be president:

I just, I can't go there. I'm not that confident in knowing, you know, the Almighty, to be able to say, 'Yeah, God wanted me of all the other people.'

On Iraq:

You can't look at the decision to go into Iraq apart from, you know, what happened on September 11. It was not a religious decision.

What's notable about this, apart from the faux modesty ("I'm just a simple president") is the relative moderation of Bush's views compared with those of many ordinary US citizens.

According to opinion polls, around a third of Americans believe the Bible should be taken as a literal history, while almost half say God created humankind "as is" during the past 10,000 years.

Of course, Bush's tolerance for evolution is not necessarily surprising given his background. The polls also show that the more educated you are as an American, the less literal your religious view. Fully three-quarters of those with a postgraduate degree (stand up, George Bush MBA) believe in evolution.

And while the Texas-raised Dubya might style himself a simple-thinking cowboy, let's not forget he was born amid the liberal east coast money of New Haven, Connecticut, to a father whose Episcopalian faith was notably less evangelical than his son's future Methodism.

Is there a sense, perhaps, that Bush junior's faith, while clearly pivotal in his life, has been overplayed in the narrative of his presidency?

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Apr-24, by Natan Sharansky:

Dissident President
George W. Bush has the courage to speak out for freedom.

There are two distinct marks of a dissident. First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures. Give up, they say to themselves, and evil will triumph. Stand firm, and they can give hope to others and help change the world.

Political leaders make the rarest of dissidents. In a democracy, a leader's lifeline is the electorate's pulse. Failure to be in tune with public sentiment can cripple any administration and undermine any political agenda. Moreover, democratic leaders, for whom compromise is critical to effective governance, hardly ever see any issue in Manichaean terms. In their world, nearly everything is colored in shades of gray.

That is why President George W. Bush is such an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability. Even the fiercest critics of these ideas would surely admit that Mr. Bush has championed them both before and after his re-election, both when he was riding high in the polls and now that his popularity has plummeted, when criticism has come from longstanding opponents and from erstwhile supporters.

With a dogged determination that any dissident can appreciate, Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.

I myself have not been uncritical of Mr. Bush. Like my teacher, Andrei Sakharov, I agree with the president that promoting democracy is critical for international security. But I believe that too much focus has been placed on holding quick elections, while too little attention has been paid to help build free societies by protecting those freedoms--of conscience, speech, press, religion, etc.--that lie at democracy's core.

I believe that such a mistaken approach is one of the reasons why a terrorist organization such as Hamas could come to power through ostensibly democratic means in a Palestinian society long ruled by fear and intimidation.

I also believe that not enough effort has been made to turn the policy of promoting democracy into a bipartisan effort. The enemies of freedom must know that the commitment of the world's lone superpower to help expand freedom beyond its borders will not depend on the results of the next election.

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Just as success in winning past global conflicts depended on forging a broad coalition that stretched across party and ideological lines, success in using the advance of democracy to win the war on terror will depend on building and maintaining a wide consensus of support.

Yet despite these criticisms, I recognize that I have the luxury of criticizing Mr. Bush's democracy agenda only because there is a democracy agenda in the first place. A policy that for years had been nothing more than the esoteric subject of occasional academic debate is now the focal point of American statecraft.

For decades, a "realism" based on a myopic perception of international stability prevailed in the policy-making debate. For a brief period during the Cold War, the realist policy of accommodating Soviet tyranny was replaced with a policy that confronted that tyranny and made democracy and human rights inside the Soviet Union a litmus test for superpower relations.

The enormous success of such a policy in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end did not stop most policy makers from continuing to advocate an approach to international stability that was based on coddling "friendly" dictators and refusing to support the aspirations of oppressed peoples to be free.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. It seemed as though that horrific day had made it clear that the price for supporting "friendly" dictators throughout the Middle East was the creation of the world's largest breeding ground of terrorism. A new political course had to be charted.

Today, we are in the midst of a great struggle between the forces of terror and the forces of freedom. The greatest weapon that the free world possesses in this struggle is the awesome power of its ideas.

The Bush Doctrine, based on a recognition of the dangers posed by non-democratic regimes and on committing the United States to support the advance of democracy, offers hope to many dissident voices struggling to bring democracy to their own countries. The democratic earthquake it has helped unleash, even with all the dangers its tremors entail, offers the promise of a more peaceful world.

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Yet with each passing day, new voices are added to the chorus of that doctrine's opponents, and the circle of its supporters grows ever smaller.

Critics rail against every step on the new and difficult road on which the United States has embarked. Yet in pointing out the many pitfalls which have not been avoided and those which still can be, those critics would be wise to remember that the alternative road leads to the continued oppression of hundreds of millions of people and the continued festering of the pathologies that led to 9/11.

Now that President Bush is increasingly alone in pushing for freedom, I can only hope that his dissident spirit will continue to persevere. For should that spirit break, evil will indeed triumph, and the consequences for our world would be disastrous.

Mr. Sharansky spent nine years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. A former deputy prime minister of Israel and currently a member of the Knesset, he is co-author, with Ron Dermer, of "The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror" (PublicAffairs, 2004). You can buy "The Case For Democracy" at the OpinionJournal bookstore here.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Nov-23, by Fred Barnes:

Bush the Insurgent
A president who won't kowtow to DC's establishment.

The scheming in Washington as President Bush prepares for his second term is easily explained. It's the insurgents versus the Washington establishment, and the insurgents are winning.

Mr. Bush finds himself in the unusual position--for a president, anyway--as leader of the insurgents. Unlike other presidents who came to Washington with bold plans, Mr. Bush has not been housebroken by establishment forces. Even Ronald Reagan made peace with Washington. Mr. Bush hasn't. He wants to impose a breathtakingly conservative agenda in his second term, one that has prompted cries of protest from establishment figures like David Gergen, aide to four presidents, and the voice of the Beltway, the Washington Post.

Contrary to the doubters, the establishment does exist and does throw its weight around. It consists of the permanent bureaucracy, much of the vast political community of lobbyists and lawyers and consultants, leftovers from Congress and earlier administrations, trade groups and think tanks, and the media. The establishment can and does shape the zeitgeist in Washington and, importantly, a huge chunk of the Senate is establishment-oriented and dozens of senators themselves members of the establishment. It's become more Republican in recent years but is still center-left in ideological tilt. But it's liberal in a reactionary way, passionately opposing conservative change.

In the eyes of the establishment, the Bush tactics, the Bush agenda, and Mr. Bush himself are over the top. The president is girding for battle. He's aiming to consolidate control of his administration, drive out recalcitrant (read: establishment) elements, and make the permanent government heel, especially at the CIA and State Department. He's kept his White House staff intact, from political adviser Karl Rove to speechwriter Mike Gerson to budget chief Josh Bolten, as a kind of headquarters cadre. The White House aides who've departed, such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and counsel Alberto Gonzales, were dispatched to take over Cabinet agencies.

Mr. Bush's agenda is post-Reagan in its conservatism, which means it's more far-reaching and thus more threatening to the establishment. Mr. Bush would not only reform Social Security and allow individuals to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in financial markets, he would also revamp the entire federal tax code and fill the Supreme Court with judicial conservatives. And those are only his domestic plans. In foreign affairs, Mr. Bush would make aggressive efforts to spread democracy around the world the centerpiece. The foreign policy élite is aghast.

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From the start of his first term, Mr. Bush has been immune to the blandishments of the establishment. When Reagan came to Washington in 1980, he made a point of attending a welcoming party at the home of the late Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. It signified his desire for cordial relations with the establishment. Reagan mostly got along fine, while still pursuing policies (tax cuts, fervent anti-communism) frowned on in Washington. His wife Nancy became his ambassador to the establishment. If Mr. Bush had an ambassador, it was Secretary of State Colin Powell, and he's leaving the administration.

By Washington standards, Mr. Bush is a misfit. He's different. He barely socializes at all and on weekends and holidays makes a beeline for Camp David or his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He'd rather invite Christian musician Michael W. Smith and his wife to the White House for dinner than eat out. If Mr. Bush really wanted to soothe establishment types, he'd invite them to state dinners at the White House, after which their names would be in the paper. But he's held fewer state dinners than any president in memory.

Mr. Bush is also a seriously religious man in a largely secular town. This has brought him no end of criticism. He also refuses to hide his loathing of the press, probably the most dominant force in Washington. In short, Mr. Bush hasn't tried to fit in.

Nor has he been tamed. Domesticating new presidents is the favorite pastime of the Washington establishment. When Jimmy Carter arrived in 1976 and insisted he'd go his own way, he was quickly humiliated by media reports of the crude behavior of his aides. Mr. Carter's policies reflected the conventional liberalism of the establishment, but he never warmed up to Washington. Other presidents (Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson) alienated the establishment even when they weren't trying to. His father, President George H.W. Bush, was himself an establishment figure.

Mr. Bush prefers to infuriate the establishment. His most provocative move was to accept Mr. Powell's resignation, then ease him out of office quickly instead of allowing him a few months to tie up loose ends at the State Department. The establishment regarded Mr. Powell as their lone representative in the upper reaches of the Bush administration, and now he's gone.

Almost as bad, Mr. Powell was succeeded by a Bush loyalist, Ms. Rice. Mr. Powell, of course, differed with the president on practically every issue--Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Israel, Palestinians, democratization--but so did the establishment. Ms. Rice is the epitome of the Bush foreign policy.

The establishment didn't take this lying down. On the day Ms. Rice was named secretary of state, the Washington Post weighed in: "Many experts consider her one of the weakest national security advisers in recent history in terms of managing interagency conflicts." Really? In truth, no national security adviser has ever corralled warring defense and state secretaries.

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That blast was followed three days later by one from Mr. Gergen. Having worked for three Republican presidents and a Democratic one, taught at Duke and Harvard, and worked in the media in Washington, Mr. Gergen reliably embodies establishment thinking. He is cautious. He was leery about the Iraq war. Now, he wrote in the New York Times, "the immediate danger" facing Mr. Bush is "hubris," or overreaching. He likened Mr. Bush's plans to FDR's attempts to pack the Supreme Court and purge Southern Democratic senators. FDR famously failed.

If Mr. Bush is anxious his insurgency might fail, he hasn't let on. On the contrary, he exudes confidence that, despite the establishment, he'll succeed in his second term. Mr. Bush did make one bow to the establishment last week. He showed up in a tuxedo at the British embassy for a party honoring Ms. Rice. "One tux a term," a White House official said. "That's our idea of outreach to the Washington community."

Mr. Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard and co-host of "The Beltway Boys" on the Fox News Channel.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jan-24, by Tom Bray:

The Insider as Outsider
Fred Barnes describes George W. Bush as an "insurgent president."

Soon after the 2004 election, Fred Barnes wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal characterizing George W. Bush as an "insurgent president" who plays by different rules. Now Mr. Barnes has expanded that theme into "Rebel-in-Chief," a compact and readable though surely debatable book.

Debatable because the Bush presidency is still only five-eighths done and because Mr. Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, sometimes strains too hard to fit every action by Mr. Bush into his template. But Mr. Barnes does make a strong case that Mr. Bush plays by different rules--beginning with a distinct lack of interest in being loved by the Beltway establishment.

"President Bush operates in Washington like the head of a small occupying army of insurgents, an elected band of brothers (and quite a few sisters) on a mission," observes Mr. Barnes. "He's an alien in the realm of the governing class, given a green card by voters."

Mr. Bush clearly sees himself that way too. "It's easy to get sucked into the Washington mind-set and echo chamber," he told Mr. Barnes in an interview. Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, have avoided the capital's social whirl, not just because he likes to go to bed early (ducking out of a state dinner for the prime minister of India at 9:30 p.m.) and rise early (5:30 a.m.) but because, as he says, "I've got a lot to do." For relaxation, he heads not to the Kennedy Center but to Crawford, Texas.

In Mr. Barnes's view, this emotional distance makes it easier to break some furniture. And indeed, early in his first term, the president wrecked the equivalent of an entire living room. He abrogated the missile defense treaty. He cold-shouldered Al Gore's Kyoto accords. He insisted from the start that 9/11 was an act of war. He ignored the international community's insistence that the path to peace in the Middle East must involve the aging terrorist in chief Yasser Arafat. He committed the cardinal sin in Washington of explicitly campaigning to reform Social Security. And, read his lips, he cut taxes.

As a result, Mr. Barnes argues, Mr. Bush's "rebel in chief" style has brought Republicans to the political mountaintop. In 2004, Mr. Bush beat John Kerry 51% to 48% in an unusually large turnout--historically a sign that a political realignment may be at hand--and helped congressional Republicans achieve a majority as well. "Clinton got what he worked diligently for: personal popularity," sums up Mr. Barnes. "Bush was willing to surrender personal popularity to get what he sought: a transformation of American politics that made Republicans the majority party."

---

In the course of Mr. Barnes's narrative, we learn some interesting tidbits about the Bush White House. Mr. Bush, contrary to media hysteria on the subject, mentions Jesus Christ less often than Bill Clinton did. Speechwriter Michael Gerson has been a major policy force, one reason perhaps that Mr. Bush's set speeches have been especially effective. Mr. Gerson worked closely with the president on the pro-democracy themes that became the "Bush doctrine" in his Second Inaugural, although Mr. Gerson says that Mr. Bush himself came up with the most memorable line: that liberty is not America's contribution to the world but "God's gift to mankind."

A credentialed historian might naturally, and rightly, respond to Mr. Barnes's assertion of a transformational presidency by saying, in essence: We'll see. Mr. Bush's troubles of late--over Iraq, the huge new drug entitlement, the charges of a "culture of corruption" in Washington--could bring the ascendant GOP back down to earth next fall. Americans may have stood by their bold president in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they may be less than thrilled by a brand-new conflict with Iran and a return to $3-a-gallon gasoline or worse. And the "ownership society," which Mr. Barnes calls Mr. Bush's most radical vision, hasn't gotten much traction.

After pondering the labels that might capture Mr. Bush's philosophical leanings--compassionate conservative, new conservative, big-government conservative and so on--Mr. Barnes settles on "strong government conservative." Mr. Bush owes less to Thomas Jefferson--or the small-government Ronald Reagan--than to Alexander Hamilton, concludes Mr. Barnes approvingly.

That insight may help explain why, far from closing down the Department of Education, an early Reagan objective, Mr. Bush worked out a deal with Teddy Kennedy--Teddy Kennedy!--that plunged the federal government even more deeply into what had traditionally been a state and local concern. It may also explain why he joyfully signed into law a fantastically expensive Medicare entitlement for drugs.

But this deal-making impulse also undercuts Mr. Barnes's rebel-in-chief thesis. A "bold" president might have battled for real reform of Medicare. A man who was indifferent to causing controversy might have held Teddy Kennedy at bay while using the bully pulpit to focus on a truly transformational idea: school choice. In any case, boldness and a rebellious spirit may be necessary but not sufficient--great presidents must also have the political skills to get lasting things done.

---

Mr. Barnes recounts that, during his interview with Mr. Bush, the president referred to some books about George Washington that he had recently read. All of them, Mr. Barnes quotes Mr. Bush as saying, "analyze [Washington's] position in history. And I'm the forty-third guy, he's the first, and they're still analyzing the first."

Mr. Bush's point is still well taken, though at the very least Mr. Barnes has made a good rough cut at placing "43" in historical context--and has offered a useful corrective to critics who profess to see nothing good, much less historically important, about our current president.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist. You can buy "Rebel-in-Chief" from the OpinionJournal bookstore

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Mar-14, by Michael Novak:

The Case for Bush
Charges of "incompetence" hold him to a superhuman standard.

Shortly after President Bush's State of the Union Address this January, I attended a conservative summit in Washington, where I heard a raft of criticism about the president's falling away from conservative principles. There was hope and energy, of course, but also more demoralization than I expected--a demoralization Joseph Bottum clearly shares.

I am considerably more supportive of President Bush's stewardship. Mr. Bottum's judgments--many of which have force, I admit--require two general remarks. The first involves his claim that the war in Iraq is "already lost" (which he qualifies by adding "in perception"). The second is the criterion of "competence," lack of which in several major areas is Bottum's single most serious charge against President Bush.

As far as perception of the war in Iraq goes, it's worth remembering that perceptions are changeable. As the war began in 2003, the New York Times required less than three weeks before it ran a front-page report by a star correspondent of the last generation, R.W. Apple, which hauled out the heavy word of the Vietnam generation, quagmire--as in the quagmire in which, Apple wrote, U.S. troops were already bogged down. Three weeks later, those same quagmired troops had sped into Baghdad, watching as jubilant crowds pulled down the great statue of Saddam Hussein in the center of the city and organizing a systematic search for the suddenly deposed butcher of Mesopotamia.

Of course, changeable or not, what counts as perception in this country is still defined by the disproportionately liberal media, particularly the New York Times, the Washington Post and the major television networks. But Ronald Reagan taught us that the perceptions promoted by the liberal media do not, in fact, control the way Americans think. As Clare Boothe Luce once explained, from his experience as a B-movie actor Reagan learned the difference between the box office and the critics. If you win over the first, you can be awfully sweet-tempered to the second. He showed that the hostility of all the liberal media could not, finally, drown out commonsense reality.

---

I agree with Mr. Bottum that in the view of the media, the war has been lost. But we may also expect this perception to reverse itself if events in the coming six months unmistakably change direction. Consider three positive possibilities. None of these may turn out to be true, of course, but for one moment assume that they do, just to imagine how perceptions would shift.

Suppose, first, Muqtada Al-Sadr orders his Mahdi followers to keep their arms out of sight, to tear down their checkpoints in the streets, and to cooperate with the Iraqi army and the new American battalions. Al-Sadr may, of course, opt to fight a bloody winner-take-all contest. Yet the record of American soldiers directly engaging Iraqi forces is not likely to tempt him overmuch in that direction. He may wish to save his army to defend Shiites in future years.

Suppose, second, that al Qaeda, which is steadily sweeping all other dissident groups under its wing, abandons Baghdad to take up bases in more remote locations north of Anbar province. It might do so for the same reason that persuaded Al-Sadr: to avoid confrontation with the modern arms, extraordinary skill and well-demonstrated fearlessness of the American battalions. Al Qaeda's way is no longer face-to-face encounters with superior force; its preferred style is sneaky terror by a few. And if they do mass in open battle, all the better for an Iraqi national victory, supported by U.S. firepower.

Suppose, third, that the Sunni tribal leaders and other local authorities in Anbar province come to recognize two realities: that the goal of reclaiming rule in Iraq is so futile that the goal of the Sunnis must be survival (for which American protection is vitally necessary); and that the empty bravado and overweening ambitions of al Qaeda foreigners, Sunni anti-American insurgents, and former Baathists are a curse, having brought down on the Sunnis little but bloodshed, pain and lost hope. With that recognition, the Sunnis could begin to fight back, slowly but with building momentum, turning against the rump insurgency in their midst and also against al Qaeda terror. The people of Anbar province might drive out their own tormentors and begin to feel secure.

With these conditions met, Iraq would come to seem reasonably tranquil. Many countries have experienced steady bombings by dissidents, without losing civil control.

In retrospect, it seems clear that President Bush made a serious mistake in not taking up the Democrats on their insistence in 2006 that he must both enlarge the forces in Baghdad and change leadership at the Pentagon and among the generals in the field. The Democrats were in favor of the surge before they were against it. Mr. Bush ought to have abandoned "sweep and clear and leave." He ought to have changed the mission from "turning it over to the Iraqis as soon as we can." He should have seen, in warfare, the crucial importance of one key goal: victory.

That goal can be achieved, in an insurgency war, only by bringing security to the people, beginning in Baghdad. (Most of the rest of Iraq, from the Kurdish north to the Shiite south, is already reasonably secure, if more sparsely settled.) In any case, the president has now changed strategy, as well as the generals charged with pursuing it. He now has commanders who believe in victory and who, in fact, designed the way to get to it. In war there is no substitute for victory. The ethic of the just war--by requiring "a reasonable hope of success"--also demands it.

---

Mr. Bottum's charge of incompetence is more troubling, although he may expect from government more than government can deliver. A long-established lesson is that even in the best of times, government is mightily incompetent--and the bigger government gets, the more incompetent it becomes. Think of how much time it takes to obtain a building permit, to go through vehicle registration, to correct a government mistake on tax forms or on public utility bills, etc. Recall how few government offices in the same building communicate with the others, and how often you are shuttled back and forth.

This is why President Kennedy used to joke that he would send out executive orders and they would sit in offices, and be pondered and discussed, until no action could be taken. He learned quickly how powerless a president is every time he must go through a bureaucracy. And I seem to recall how incompetent Lincoln's first series of generals were--together with the Department of War, the Department of Justice, and practically everything else. Lincoln himself was frequently charged with incompetence, bumbling and simplemindedness.

By no means should President Bush get a pass for his errors and misperceptions, or his slowness in correcting them. Still, one ought to use standards that are cut to the cloth of human nature. In politics, Aristotle wrote, we must expect "a tincture of virtue." Expectations too high for anyone in the presidential office are no proper criterion for evaluation. Besides, despite enormous blows to our banking, investment and transportation systems, the decisive steps President Bush took allowed our economy not only to recoup the dreadful financial losses of September 11 but also to climb unparalleled heights.

You could see much of this come together in the State of the Union Address this January. All day before his address, the press was picturing a president disrespected, unloved, a helpless failure, one of the worst presidents ever. So it was startling when Bush, from his gracious compliment to the new speaker of the House, faced a suddenly attentive--and frequently applauding--audience. Some, it is true, hated to be applauding him. But the way the president put his points made it very costly for them not to rise.

Two-thirds of the viewing audience, the networks reported, were either Democrats or Independents (probably because of the new speaker). Startling, then, were the polls showing that an astonishing majority--78%--had a positive reaction to the speech. In another surprising turn, those approving the president's decision to increase troop levels in Iraq jumped from 43% to 52%. The president hit on a rhetorical style that he has not quite used before, which suits him very well--a much more plainspoken, direct, unvarnished way of speaking, considerably less poetic than his most famous speeches.

More, he used half his speech to occupy what some think of as Democratic territory: the environment, energy policy, a comprehensive immigration policy and health insurance. True enough, given the new majority in both houses, he seemed to go too far in the statist direction on the first three (although, reading between the lines, one could see his reliance on private enterprise). On the fourth, he did take a large step toward individualizing a more competitive health-insurance system.

---

The single most dominant issue we face remains the threat from jihadism. The ugly words broadcast by the jihadists may seem mad, but they are matched by steady actions upon a world-wide front. Their stated aim is to convert us forcibly to Islam or to exterminate us until the caliphate stretches around the world: one religion, one polity. President Bush addressed this threat with the greatest simplicity and power he has ever brought to the subject. A great many do not see the danger as President Bush does. They certainly do not recognize what bin Laden and his lieutenants have often declared--that Iraq is today the frontline in that jihad. Some in America seem ready to withdraw U.S. troops. They seem willing to prove bin Laden's maxim that in any protracted fight, the United States is the weak horse, and the jihadists are the strong horse, which is the only one that people respect.

I admit that I nearly always love the nuances of political rhetoric, even when delivered by politicians whose policies I oppose. For instance, I was grabbed by this year's response to Mr. Bush's speech by Jim Webb, even though I despise many of his arguments. So I am probably the least exigent of critics of political discourse. Still, I don't remember many addresses in which a president faced such a high mountain of opposition. And I will never forget the scenes afterward, in which even the most intense public opponents of the president lined the exit aisle, holding out their programs for him to sign. For nearly 10 minutes the banter flowed, backs were warmly slapped, and geniality appeared to reign.

Of course, Washington is a city in which (as the old joke goes) no one takes friendship personally. Yet it is also a city in which widely scorned bravery, such as Harry S. Truman's, has appeared in the most modest of persons and years later come to be cherished. Often enough, the nation's public leaders have been burned in effigy on the spots where their gleaming statues are later paid respect. If the reputation of President Bush meets such a fate, his 2007 State of the Union address just might be seen as one of the modest pivots on which that turn began slowly to revolve.

---

Joseph Bottum's criticisms are to be taken seriously, even if they set criteria for angels, not flawed humans, and seem to overlook some stirring initiatives by this much-attacked president--such as his work on AIDS, for the poor in Africa, and against human trafficking. However deficient you think his judgment may have been about what was possible, no president has ever been more openly pro-life.

At the very least, in the face of passionate hostility at home and abroad, George Bush has proved himself a brave and determined man who has staked his presidency on getting democratic momentum underway in the Middle East. Even if in the short run he fails--which many of us are not yet ready to concede--some Muslims in the future will be able to remember that in a difficult time an American president, at heavy cost, cared about their sufferings, their natural rights, and the better angels beckoning in their dreams. He held before them a democratic standard by which they will forever measure other political movements and other leaders.

These are not inconsiderable accomplishments.

Mr. Novak, who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, is a member of the editorial board of First Things, in whose March issue this article appeared. Yesterday: Joseph Bottum made the case against President Bush.

(And now, another view, and a rather AMPPy one at that:)

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jun-1, by Peggy Noonan:

Third Time
America may be ready for a new political party.

Something's happening. I have a feeling we're at some new beginning, that a big breakup's coming, and that though it isn't and will not be immediately apparent, we'll someday look back on this era as the time when a shift began.

All my adult life, people have been saying that the two-party system is ending, that the Democrats' and Republicans' control of political power in America is winding down. According to the traditional critique, the two parties no longer offer the people the choice they want and deserve. Sometimes it's said they are too much alike--Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Sometimes it's said they're too polarizing--too red and too blue for a nation in which many see things through purple glasses.

In 1992 Ross Perot looked like the breakthrough, the man who would make third parties a reality. He destabilized the Republicans and then destabilized himself. By the end of his campaign he seemed to be the crazy old aunt in the attic.

The Perot experience seemed to put an end to third-party fever. But I think it's coming back, I think it's going to grow, and I think the force behind it is unique in our history.

---

This week there was a small boomlet of talk about a new internet entity called Unity '08--a small collection of party veterans including moderate Democrats (former Carter aide Hamilton Jordan) and liberal-leaning Republicans (former Ford hand Doug Bailey) trying to join together with college students and broaden the options in the 2008 election. In terms of composition, Unity seems like the Concord Coalition, the bipartisan group (Warren Rudman, Bob Kerrey) that warns against high spending and deficits.

Unity seems to me to have America's growing desire for more political options right. But I think they've got the description of the problem wrong.

Their idea is that the two parties are too polarized to govern well. It is certainly true that the level of partisanship in Washington seems high. (Such things, admittedly, ebb, flow and are hard to judge. We look back at the post-World War II years and see a political climate of relative amity and moderation. But Alger Hiss and Dick Nixon didn't see it that way.) Nancy Pelosi seems to be pretty much in favor of anything that hurts Republicans, and Ken Mehlman is in favor of anything that works against Democrats. They both want their teams to win. Part of winning is making sure the other guy loses, and part of the fun of politics, of any contest, of life, can be the dance in the end zone.

But the dance has gotten dark.

Partisanship is fine when it's an expression of the high animal spirits produced by real political contention based on true political belief. But the current partisanship seems sour, not joyous. The partisanship has gotten deeper as less separates the governing parties in Washington. It is like what has been said of academic infighting: that it's so vicious because the stakes are so low.

---

The problem is not that the two parties are polarized. In many ways they're closer than ever. The problem is that the parties in Washington, and the people on the ground in America, are polarized. There is an increasing and profound distance between the rulers of both parties and the people--between the elites and the grunts, between those in power and those who put them there.

On the ground in America, people worry terribly--really, there are people who actually worry about it every day--about endless, weird, gushing government spending. But in Washington, those in power--Republicans and Democrats--stand arm in arm as they spend and spend. (Part of the reason is that they think they can buy off your unhappiness one way or another. After all, it's worked in the past. A hunch: It's not going to work forever or much longer. They've really run that trick into the ground.)

On the ground in America, regular people worry about the changes wrought by the biggest wave of immigration in our history, much of it illegal and therefore wholly connected to the needs of the immigrant and wholly unconnected to the agreed-upon needs of our nation. Americans worry about the myriad implications of the collapse of the American border. But Washington doesn't. Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican George W. Bush see things pretty much eye to eye. They are going to educate the American people out of their low concerns.

There is a widespread sense in America--a conviction, actually--that we are not safe in the age of terror. That the port, the local power plant, even the local school, are not protected. Is Washington worried about this? Not so you'd notice. They're only worried about seeming unconcerned.

More to the point, people see the Republicans as incapable of managing the monster they've helped create--this big Homeland Security/Intelligence apparatus that is like some huge buffed guy at the gym who looks strong but can't even put on his T-shirt without help because he's so muscle-bound. As for the Democrats, who co-created Homeland Security, no one--no one--thinks they would be more managerially competent. Nor does anyone expect the Democrats to be more visionary as to what needs to be done. The best they can hope is the Democrats competently serve their interest groups and let the benefits trickle down.

---

Right now the Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem, from the outside, to be an elite colluding against the voter. They're in agreement: immigration should not be controlled but increased, spending will increase, etc.

Are there some dramatic differences? Yes. But both parties act as if they see them not as important questions (gay marriage, for instance) but as wedge issues. Which is, actually, abusive of people on both sides of the question. If it's a serious issue, face it. Don't play with it.

I don't see any potential party, or potential candidate, on the scene right now who can harness the disaffection of growing portions of the electorate. But a new group or entity that could define the problem correctly--that sees the big divide not as something between the parties but between America's ruling elite and its people--would be making long strides in putting third party ideas in play in America again.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

from FrontPageMag.com, 2006-Aug-25, by David Horowitz and Richard Poe:

The Cult of Soros

Has the Democratic Party become a cult? And is leftwing billionaire George Soros its guru? The chorus of hosannas with which leftwing bloggers now greet Mr. Soros' silliest utterances – and the faithfulness with which Democratic leaders repeat them -- suggests that the answer to both questions is yes.

Take the current Democratic mantra that, if there are terrorists in the world, George Bush has created them.  This is a familiar Soros-ism.  As he has done many times before, Soros decried Bush's characterization of the current global conflict as a “war on terror” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “A Self-Defeating War” (8/15). According to Soros “a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world….we can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor.”

In normal times and coming from an ordinary mortal, these would be regarded as the comments of a crackpot. After all, the Islamic jihad was on the march – and killing Americans -- for twenty years before George Bush employed the metaphor. Back in 1979, the streets of Teheran were already filled with a million frenzied Muslims chanting “Death to America,” and the 9/11 attacks were themselves hardly in response to anything that the American president had said.

But because this judgment is the considered wisdom of a megalomaniac billionaire whose network controls the purse strings of the Democratic Party, this is now the foreign policy of the liberal opposition. When George Soros speaks, the left listens.

In a review of Soros' new book The Age of Fallibility, blogger Jane Hamsher hails him as a latter-day Socrates.  Hamsher is the blogger who created a minor scandal by posting a doctored photograph of Joseph Lieberman in blackface on the Huffington Post website. She writes, “Challenging a `false metaphor' such as the `war on terror' is so threatening to everything the power structure of the Bush administration has been erected upon that to do so will certainly draw down the full force of the right-wing bullies… Mr. Soros has done the heavy lifting and dragged the topic into the national debate…”

Blogger Matt Stoller of MyDD concurs. “[This is] the first time a major figure took on the framework of the war on terror, and called it a false metaphor. I think he's right… The war on terror just doesn't exist any more than a child's imaginary friend exists.”

Like Hamsher, Matt Stoller was a leading player in the anti-Lieberman blogswarm.  A long-time Democrat operative, Stoller formerly ran the Corzine Connection blog for Jon Corzine's gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey. Today Stoller co-directs BlogPAC, a political action committee for leftist bloggers founded by Markos Moulitsas Zuñiga of Daily Kos.

Their connection to the anti-Lieberman campaign is, as the Marxists like to say, no accident. The Lieberman ouster – and Soros's role in it – signify the emergence of a new phenomenon in America's political life: the Shadow Party.

During the 2004 election cycle, Soros put together a network of organizations through which he gained effective control of the Democratic Party's campaign apparatus – and thus of the Democratic Party itself – in a silent coup whose ramifications are still unfolding.

Soros's coup was ten years in the making.  Since 1994, he had worked with a network of leftwing foundations to fund a $140-million-dollar lobbying drive in favor of “campaign finance reform.”  The campaign succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which, by outlawing “soft-money” donations, in effect de-funded the Democratic Party. As a result of the Act, the Democratic Party could no longer collect the multi-million-dollar donations from labor unions which were its lifeblood.

Soros stepped in with the Shadow Party to collect the donations instead.

Having driven the Democratic Party to the brink of bankruptcy, Soros then offered to save it.  In effect, he privatized the Party, by setting up a network of privately-owned, non-profit groups which would raise the big campaign contributions the Party was now forbidden to raise itself.

In a new book, which describes Soros's achievement, we call this network the Shadow Party, because it acts as a mirror image or shadow of the real Democratic Party.  During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for the Democrat cause – but spent the money itself. This allowed it to shape the politics of the Democratic campaign and control the party's future. Joe Lieberman now understands what that means.

David Horowitz and Richard Poe co-wrote The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party (Thomas Nelson, 2006)

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Apr-12:

Iraqi Freedom 2.0
Those who flinched in the hard times, and those who didn't.

A year ago, on the first anniversary of the capture of Baghdad, the Boston Globe carried a doleful op-ed by Clinton Administration diplomat Peter Galbraith. In handling the postwar effort, he wrote, President Bush had "transformed a difficult mission into an unachievable one."

The Administration had been unable "to devise--and stick with--a coherent strategy to transfer power to Iraqis." It had inflicted "irreparable" psychological damage on the populace. It had failed to anticipate predictable scenarios, such as the looting in Baghdad. It had mismanaged interethnic rivalries to the point that "civil war [loomed]" between Shiites and Kurds. And so on.

A year on, a freely elected Iraqi parliament has named Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, as president, and Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite, as prime minister, following two months of political horse-trading. Despite the Sunni boycott of January's elections, Sunni politicians will take six cabinet-level posts, including the defense ministry. Insurgent attacks are down in the country, while U.S. training of Iraqi forces is going well enough that commanders may soon reduce U.S. troop levels. In short, we have made great progress toward achieving our original strategic goals in Iraq, with positive ripple effects throughout the Middle East.

We don't single out Mr. Galbraith to underscore how wrong Administration critics turned out to be. Rather, like others who supported the President's decision to go to war in March 2003, he is emblematic of how the U.S. effort nearly came undone: not because of this or that tactical misstep, but because too many among America's elite lost their nerve when the going got tough.

---

This may well be the most important lesson coming out of the Iraq war. The outcome of major combat operations was never seriously in doubt, although plenty of supposedly serious people predicted the siege of Baghdad would be America's Stalingrad. What was in doubt, however, was whether the U.S. could prevail if the war became an extended test of wills against a determined foe using guerrilla and terrorist tactics. This was a test not of the skill or bravery of the American soldier, but of the home front's willingness to see the war through; a test in which the key to victory wasn't competence but perseverance.

President Bush passed that test. He did so by dint of the very characteristics his critics found so objectionable: his certitude that going to war was the right thing to do; his conviction that Iraqis want to be free. To prevail, Mr. Bush had to wager his Presidency on a course of action that, by the summer of 2004, the chattering classes believed was doomed.

The American people also passed the test. We don't buy the myth that Mr. Bush bamboozled the public into believing there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11. Still, most Americans understood that, in their respective but parallel efforts, Saddam and Osama bin Laden were both testing America's credibility, which had been diminished during the Clinton years.

Americans also understood that credibility had to be restored if the war on terror was to be won, above all by not devising "exit strategies" in the face of a jihadist onslaught. As for tactics, whatever the public's qualms about Mr. Bush's handling of the war, they were persuaded that he was committed to seeing it through, a commitment Senator John Kerry did not convincingly share.

---

That leaves America's elite--the politicians, wise men, think-tank experts, academics, magazine and editorial-page editors, big-city columnists, TV commentators. Many opposed the war from the start, and whether they have now reassessed their views in light of recent events is a matter of some interest. But because they never signed on to the war in the first place, the question of their fortitude throughout its ups and downs is less an issue.

The people who really concern us here--the people who did not pass the test--are those who signed up for the war at the beginning only to find one excuse or another to sign out before it was won. Usually, those excuses centered on some Bush bungle, real or alleged, that no "competent" Administration would have made but that was said to have rendered the whole enterprise morally sullied and irremediable. The looting of Baghdad falls into this category, as does the political wallowing in the abuses of Abu Ghraib.

In this respect, Mr. Galbraith and his ilk are heirs to that generation of '60s leaders who took the U.S. into Vietnam only to turn against the war in fits of self-doubt, self-flagellation, excessive fine-tuning and political cravenness, after thousands of servicemen had lost their lives. Sad to say, this time around the doubters included all too many conservatives who supported the war at first but then distanced themselves from it as the insurgency grew. They had their own reputational "exit strategies."

We have had our criticisms of the way the Administration handled the prewar diplomatic and postwar reconstruction and counterinsurgency effort. But no chapter of America's military history has been free of strategic mistakes and tactical disasters, and our lodestar throughout has been the goal of eventual victory. As we wrote at the onset of war, in March 2003, "Toppling Saddam is a long-term undertaking" and "The largest risk is an imponderable: Whether Americans can generate the political consensus to sustain involvement in Iraq."

Two years later we know the answer to that question is yes, thanks to the fortitude and wisdom of a President, our soldiers and the American public. Maybe next time, our best and brightest will show the same character.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Nov-13, by Michael Rubin:

Rumsfeld and the Realists
Consistency is irrelevant to progressives.

On Dec. 20, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then Ronald Reagan's Middle East envoy, met Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. According to declassified documents, the Reagan administration sought to re-establish long-severed relations with Baghdad amid concern about growing Iranian influence. While U.S. intelligence had earlier confirmed Saddam's use of chemical weapons, Mr. Rumsfeld did not broach the subject. His handshake with Saddam, caught on film by Iraqi television, represented a triumph for diplomatic realism.

Iran and Iraq would fight for five more years, leaving hundreds of thousands dead on the battlefield. Then, two years after a ceasefire ended the war, Saddam invaded Kuwait. In subsequent years, he would subsidize waves of Palestinian suicide-bombers, effectively ending the Oslo peace process. Saddam's career is a model of realist blowback.

On Sept. 23, 2002, as Saddam defied international inspectors and U.N. sanctions crumbled under the greed of Paris, Moscow and Iraq's neighbors, Newsweek published a cover story, "How we Helped Create Saddam," that once again thrust the forgotten handshake into public consciousness. Across both the U.S. and Britain, the story provoked press outrage. NPR conducted interviews outlining how the Reagan administration allowed Saddam to acquire dual-use equipment. Mr. Rumsfeld "helped Iraq get chemical weapons," headlined London's Daily Mail. British columnist Robert Fisk concluded that the handshake was evidence of Mr. Rumsfeld's disdain for human rights, and Amy and David Goodman of "Democracy Now!" condemned Mr. Rumsfeld for enabling Saddam's "lethal shopping spree." While 20 years too late, progressives decried the cold, realist calculations that sent people across the third world to their graves in the cause of U.S. national interest.

---

What a difference a war makes. Today, progressives and liberals celebrate not only Mr. Rumsfeld's departure, but the resurrection of realists like Secretary of Defense-nominee Robert Gates and James Baker. Mr. Gates was the CIA's deputy director for intelligence at the time of Mr. Rumsfeld's infamous handshake, deputy director of Central Intelligence when Saddam gassed the Kurds, and deputy national security advisor when Saddam crushed the Shiite uprising. Mr. Baker was as central. He was White House chief of staff when Reagan dispatched Mr. Rumsfeld to Baghdad and, as secretary of state, ensured Saddam's grip on power after Iraqis heeded President George H.W. Bush's Feb. 15, 1991, call for "the Iraqi people [to] take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside." In the months that followed, Saddam massacred tens of thousands of civilians.

While Mr. Rumsfeld worked to right past wrongs, Messrs. Gates and Baker winked at the Iraqi dictator's continuing grip on power. For progressives, this is irrelevant. Today, progressivism places personal vendetta above principle. Mr. Rumsfeld is bad, Mr. Baker is good, and consistency irrelevant.

Progressive inconsistency will only increase with the unveiling of the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations calling for reconciliation with both Syria and Iran. In effect, Mr. Baker's proposals are to have the White House replicate the Rumsfeld-Saddam handshake with both Syrian President Bashar Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The parallels are striking. First, just as Saddam denied Kuwait's right to exist, Mr. Assad refuses to recognize Lebanese independence (Damascus has no embassy in Beirut) and Mr. Ahmadinejad calls for Israel's eradication. Washington realpolitik enabled Saddam to act out his fantasies; evidence suggests both Mr. Assad and Mr. Ahmadinejad aspire to do likewise.

Second, just as the Reagan-era Rumsfeld turned a blind eye toward Iraqi chemical weapons, so too does Mr. Baker now counsel ignoring their embrace by the Syrian and Iranian leadership. Tehran used chemical munitions in its war against Iraq, and senior Iranian officials have also threatened first-strike use of nuclear weapons. Syria is just as dangerous: On April 20, 2004, Jordanian security intercepted Syrian-based terrorists planning to target Amman with 20 tons of chemical weapons. Mr. Assad has yet to explain the incident.

And, third, there is the issue of detente enabling armament. Following his rapprochement with Washington, Saddam transformed investment into replenishment. The cost of ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait was far greater than any benefit borne of engagement.

Trade with Tehran has likewise backfired. Between 2000 and 2005, European Union trade with Iran almost tripled. During this same period, Iranian authorities used their hard currency windfall not to invest in schools and hospitals, but rather in uranium processing plants and anti-aircraft batteries. Mohammad Khatami, Mr. Ahmadinejad's predecessor and a man often labeled reformist by U.S. and European realists, showed the Islamic Republic's priorities when he spent two-thirds of his oil-boom windfall on the military. Said Mr. Khatami on April 18, 2002: "Today our army is one of the most powerful in the world. . . . It has become self-sufficient, and is on the road to further development." Subsequent discovery of Iran's covert nuclear facilities later that year clarified his boast. The Assad regime has shown its willingness to spend its discretionary income on a wide-range of weaponry and terror groups.

Realism promotes short-term gain, often at the expense of long-term security. With hindsight, it is clear that Mr. Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam backfired. While it may have constrained Iran in the short-term, its blowback in terms of blood and treasure has been immense.

---

Why then do so many progressives then celebrate the return of realism? The reasons are multifold. First, having allowed personal animosities to dominate their ideology, they embrace change, regardless of how it impacts stated principles. Hatred of Mr. Rumsfeld became a principle in itself. Likewise, the same progressives who disparage John Bolton seldom explain why they feel forcing the U.N. to account for its inefficiencies or stick to its founding principles is bad. They complain not of his performance, but rather of his pedigree.

Second is a tendency to conflate analysis with advocacy. Progressives find themselves in a situation where they both embrace realism but deny reality. An Oct. 13 Chronicle of Higher Education article regarding a Columbia University professor's attacks on Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," highlighted the issue: "The conundrum, say these [Middle East studies] scholars, is how to voice opposition to the actions of the Islamic Republic without being co-opted by those who seek external regime change in Iran through a military attack." By embracing a canard, intellectuals convinced themselves of the nobility of ignoring evidence. Thus, Western feminists march alongside Islamists who seek their subjection while progressive labor activists join with Republican realists to ignore Tehran's attacks on bus drivers seeking an independent union, even as a Gdansk-type movement offers the best hope for peaceful change in Iran.

Both realism and progressivism have become misnomers. Realists deny reality, and embrace an ideology where talk is productive and governments are sincere. While 9/11 showed the consequences of chardonnay diplomacy, deal-cutting with dictators and a band-aid approach to national security, realists continue to discount the importance of adversaries' ideologies and the need for long-term strategies. And by embracing such realism, progressives sacrifice their core liberalism. Both may celebrate Mr. Rumsfeld's departure and the Baker-Hamilton recommendations, but at some point, it is fair to ask what are the lessons of history and what is the cost of abandoning principle.

Mr. Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

from the Washington Post, 2006-Apr-5, p.A23, by Eliot A. Cohen:

Yes, It's Anti-Semitic

Academic papers posted on a Harvard Web site don't normally attract enthusiastic praise from prominent white supremacists. But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has won David Duke's endorsement as "a modern Declaration of American Independence" and a vindication of the ex-Klansman's earlier work, presumably including his pathbreaking book, "Jewish Supremacism."

Walt and Mearsheimer contend that American national security dictates distancing ourselves from the state of Israel; that U.S. support for Israel has led to such disasters as America's status as the No. 1 target for Islamic terrorists; and that such an otherwise inexplicable departure from good sense can be accounted for only by the power of "The Lobby" (their capitalization), an overwhelmingly Jewish force abetted by some Christian evangelicals and a gentile neocon collaborator or two, who have hijacked American foreign policy and controlled it for decades.

One of Mearsheimer's University of Chicago colleagues has characterized this as "piss-poor, monocausal social science." It is indeed a wretched piece of scholarship. Israeli citizenship rests "on the principle of blood kinship," it says, and yet the country has a million non-Jewish citizens who vote. Osama bin Laden's grievance with the United States begins with Israel, it says -- but in fact his 1998 fatwa declaring war against this country began by denouncing the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia and the suffering of the people of Iraq. "Other ethnic lobbies can only dream of having the political muscle" The Lobby has -- news to anyone advocating lifting the embargo on Fidel Castro's Cuba. The Iraq war stemmed from The Lobby's conception of Israel's interest -- yet, oddly, the war attracted the support of anti-Israel intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and mainstream publications such as The Economist. America's anti-Iran policy reflects the dictates of The Lobby -- but how to explain Europe's equally strong opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions?

Oddly, these international relations realists -- who in their more normal academic lives declare that state interests determine policy, and domestic politics matters little -- have discovered the one case in which domestic politics has, for decades, determined the policy of the world's greatest state. Their theories proclaim the importance of power, not ideals, yet they abhor the thought of allying with the strongest military and most vibrant economy in the Middle East. Reporting persecution, they have declared that they could not publish their work in the United States, but they have neglected to name the academic journals that turned them down.

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends of Israel.

The authors dismiss or ignore past Arab threats to exterminate Israel, as well as the sewer of anti-Semitic literature that pollutes public discourse in the Arab world today. The most recent calls by Iran's fanatical -- and nuclear weapons-hungry -- president for Israel to be "wiped off the map" they brush aside as insignificant. There is nothing here about the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has poured into lobbying and academic institutions, or the wealth of Islamic studies programs on American campuses, though they note with suspicion some 130 Jewish studies programs on those campuses. West Bank settlements get attention; terrorist butchery of civilians on buses or in shopping malls does not. To dispute their view of Israel is not to differ about policy but to act as a foreign agent.

If this sounds personal, it is, although I am only a footnote target for Mearsheimer and Walt. I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation's military affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son -- the third generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Other supposed members of "The Lobby" also have children in military service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.

The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-May-24, p.A1, by Leslie Eaton and Russell Gold:

Rockefeller Rebellion Turns Up Heat on Exxon
John D.'s Heirs Seek Change -- and Respect

Two decades ago, Neva Goodwin Rockefeller grew so tired of all the baggage that came with her fabled family name that she changed it and became plain Neva Goodwin.

But now, Ms. Goodwin, 63 years old, is embracing the powerful Rockefeller name as she publicly challenges the management of Exxon Mobil Corp., successor to the oil company founded by her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller. As Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, she has marshaled four generations of Rockefellers to join her in a campaign to force major changes at one of the most profitable companies in the world. The battle will come to a head at Exxon's annual meeting Wednesday in Dallas.

Some members of the family joined the fight out of a passionate belief in the threat of global warming; others were concerned that Exxon is overlooking business opportunities or risks. Many seem offended that the company appears impervious to the wishes of its shareholders, including those named Rockefeller.

And they have struggled -- not always successfully -- with the feeling that engaging in a public brawl with Exxon was simply not the done thing. After all, David Rockefeller, 92, the former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, had taught them that investor activism was "mostly carried out by nuts," says his daughter, Ms. Goodwin, a Cambridge, Mass., economist.

Fifteen family members, mostly cousins from Ms. Goodwin's fourth generation, have stepped forward to co-sponsor four shareholder resolutions urging change at Exxon. While three address concerns about global warming and renewable energy, the Rockefellers have rallied most enthusiastically around a fourth proposal to name an independent chairman, a plan they say is supported by 73 direct descendents of John D.

STANDARD OIL'S FAMILY TREE When the Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Standard Oil Trust in 1911, 34 companies came out of the split. Many of those companies have since recombined to become some of today's largest oil companies. • Standard Oil of Indiana is spun out of Standard Oil (1911); becomes Amoco in 1954. Acquired by BP (1998). • Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company is acquired by Standard Oil (1874); becomes independent again with breakup of Standard Oil (1911); partners with Richfield Oil Corp. & forms Arco (1966), is acquired by BP (2000). • Standard Oil of California is spun out of Standard Oil (1911); Socal buys Gulf, rebrands as Chevron (1984). • Continental Oil is reincorporated after breakup of Standard Oil (1911); Conoco, as it is later called, becomes part of Du Pont (1981), later is spun out as a separate company; merges with Phillips Petroleum to become ConocoPhillips. • Standard Oil of New Jersey becomes independent with dissolution of Standard Oil Trust (1911); changes name to Exxon (1972); merges with Mobil (1999) -- itself is a descendant of Standard Oil known as Standard Oil Co. of New York (Socony). • Standard Oil Company of Ohio is created by breakup of Standard Oil (1911); BP acquires 25% stake in Sohio (1970) after discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay; BP acquires rest of Sohio, creating BP America (1989). • The Ohio Oil Co. becomes independent after breakup of Standard Oil (1911). Changes name to Marathon Oil Co. (1962); becomes a subsidiary of United States Steel Corp. (1982); splits into independent company known as Marathon Oil Co. (2001)

An independent chairman, they argue, could chart a strategy for Exxon's future, one that many of them hope would include more focus on renewable energy. They also believe an independent chairman -- to whom the CEO would be accountable -- might be more responsive to shareholder concerns.

Focus on Oil

Exxon roundly rejects the need both for an independent chairman and for investing more in alternative energy. Chairman and Chief Executive Rex Tillerson says his job is to protect shareholders' investments by helping the company's thousands of engineers and scientists focus on its core business: oil and natural gas. The company says oil and gas will continue to provide the bulk of energy needs and they are working to provide that needed energy.

"We are a petroleum and petrochemical company," he said in an interview. "In fact, we think we're the best one in the world and our performance would tend to support that."

The odds are long that the family will get its way. As stockholders with only a tiny holding relative to Exxon's 5.3 billion voting shares, the Rockefellers' main clout comes from wielding their name to gain attention and woo other shareholders. The fact that Exxon just finished the most profitable year in American corporate history doesn't help their cause. Last year, Exxon posted a profit of $40.61 billion. The company's shares have more than doubled in the past four years.

Big Push

In the run-up to Wednesday's shareholder meeting, normally limelight-loathing Rockefellers have pulled out the stops to push their proposals -- including holding a press conference at a Manhattan hotel and endorsing a campaign slogan: "Exxon for Owners."

Peter M. O'Neill, 45, the son of one of Ms. Goodwin's cousins, is doing something that is usually anathema in the family: acting as a spokesman and giving interviews to the press.

It's an unprecedented effort by the politically diverse clan, says family historian Peter J. Johnson, who has worked for the Rockefellers for 32 years. "To actually get consensus in the family is rare," he says.

Exxon executives at first belittled the Rockfellers' potential influence by pointing out to reporters that the family members sponsoring the proposals own only .006% of the company's shares.

Family members say they own much more, but won't say how much. They say most of the family investments sit in a thicket of trusts set up starting in 1934 and mostly managed by a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase. Some say they don't even tell other family members how much they own.

On May 12, Exxon sent a letter to shareholders urging them to reject the proposal for an independent chairman, arguing "no one governance model fits all companies."

The Rockefellers are mounting the most serious shareholder revolt against Exxon in recent memory. But they're going up against a company with unrivaled success at finding, extracting and refining fossil fuels. Exxon has managed to make billions of dollars a year whether oil prices were high or low under men who spent their whole careers tending its fields and refineries. That strong culture strikes some outsiders, including the Rockefellers, as insular.

The Rockefellers' ties to Exxon go back to the 1870s, when John Davison Rockefeller Sr. began to put together the cartel that became Standard Oil. Trustbusters later split it into 34 companies, including what became Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips. Two of the largest, Exxon and Mobil, merged in 1999.

A century ago, Mr. Rockefeller was reviled as a rapacious plutocrat. Eventually he and his son, John Junior, developed a reputation for philanthropy on a grand scale. The family was responsible for, among many other things, restoring Colonial Williamsburg and creating Grand Teton National Park.

John D.'s five Rockefeller grandsons were towering figures of the mid-20th Century. Most famous was Nelson, four-term governor of New York and later vice president under Gerald R. Ford. The only survivor of that group is Neva's father, David, who issued a statement offering his support to the family's campaign.

Younger members of the now 232-person clan have generally avoided the spotlight. They live all over the world, but gather twice a year, often at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, up the Hudson River from New York City.

To some Rockefeller watchers, the newfound activism appears to be another outbreak of the unease about their oil-based fortune that periodically grips family members. Those who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s were particularly ambivalent, says Peter Collier, a California writer who has chronicled the Rockefeller, Roosevelt and Ford families.

"For them, Exxon is not only an environmental malefactor, it's also original sin," he said in an interview. By challenging Exxon, "They are trying to remove the stain of oil from the family name."

That's a little melodramatic for many of the Rockefellers, including Ms. Goodwin, who in the 1970s was a friend and colleague of the unconventional inventor and professional visionary Buckminster Fuller. She lives with her historian husband in a baby-blue clapboard house, where a collection of Far Side cartoons sits on a bookshelf near volumes of Charles Darwin's correspondence. A Prius is parked in the garage.

"I don't feel responsible for everything my family has ever done," she says. "Selectively, I look at the really fine things the family has done and am extremely proud."

As co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, Ms. Goodwin's interest in corporate power was mostly academic. But a couple of years ago at Tufts, she met Sister Patricia A. Daly, a shareholder activist, and decided to co-sponsor her resolution, at Exxon's 2003 annual meeting, asking the company to study the impact of climate change.

Looking for Support

Ms. Goodwin then turned to her two-dozen Rockefeller first cousins for support. Five signed an email that read, in part, "Most members of our family will own shares of Exxon for far longer than the present management will be in place, and therefore we have an important interest in and responsibility toward the long-term viability of the company."

The resolution failed, but it ignited interest among the family, which formed a committee to study the issue. Some on the committee were ardent environmentalists; others had a pragmatic business outlook.

Among the latter was Mr. O'Neill, a former social worker who once ran a mental health clinic in Harlem and now sits on the boards of several private companies and philanthropies. A man who speaks carefully and uses "dialogue" as a verb, he says he worries that Exxon isn't positioning itself for a sea change in the energy markets.

"I care about the bottom line," he says, noting that for him, as for most in the family, Exxon is the largest single investment.

Talk with Executives

Twice in 2004, in response to requests by the Rockefellers to meet with Exxon about their concerns, the company sent investor-relations executives to talk to the family in their art-filled offices on the 56th floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. The family wanted to discuss Exxon's assumptions about the future of energy, particularly the company's assertion that alternative fuels will make few inroads into the dominance of oil and gas, Ms. Goodwin says. The Rockefellers were concerned Exxon would be vulnerable if energy markets changed more -- or more quickly -- than the company anticipated.

Exxon managers brought basic presentations to the meetings that the company gives to most shareholders, according to family members, and didn't specifically address their worries.

Exxon didn't respond to requests for information about what happened at those meetings.

The next year, the family held a private conference to educate itself, inviting scientists, engineers, industry executives and activist investors. "This is an advantage to being a Rockefeller," Ms. Goodwin says. "If you want to have a discussion about the future of energy, people are willing to come to it."

Family interest in Exxon was snowballing when Mr. Tillerson took over as chief executive in January 2006, succeeding Lee R. Raymond. But the Rockefellers made little headway with Mr. Tillerson, either.

Congratulatory Letter

Forty-three family members signed a congratulatory letter asking to meet him and the board. Instead, Mr. Raymond and Mr. Tillerson invited only Ms. Goodwin's father, David, to a Manhattan lunch. Although Ms. Goodwin eventually got an invitation, she says she didn't hear "anything they haven't said other times to many people."

Attempts to meet directly with other members of the board were rebuffed, Ms. Goodwin and Mr. O'Neill say. An Exxon spokesman says the requests were handled in the same manner used for all shareholders. Last fall, Exxon arranged for some activist shareholders to meet executives and researchers investigating alternative energy. Mr. O'Neill says he came away still concerned about the company's long-term strategies.

Mr. Tillerson says Exxon monitors potential new fuels, but won't invest in them simply because it's the politically correct thing to do. He says he refuses to support a policy of "casting a lot of corn out on the ground and hoping some of it takes root."

By spring of last year, the family's frustration with Exxon had reached full boil. At their June gathering, in a Tudor-style building on the Kykuit estate known as the Playhouse and hung with portraits of their ancestors, they decided to take action.

One way was to put their ideas to a shareholder vote by co-sponsoring so-called proxy resolutions at Exxon's annual shareholder meeting. The resolutions are nonbinding, although companies seldom ignore those that attract a majority.

Ms. Goodwin filed her own proxy resolution, calling on Exxon to study the effects of global warming on poor communities, and several of her cousins rallied round as co-sponsors. Other cousins and their children opted to support two other environmental resolutions, one on reducing greenhouse gases and the other on investing in alternative energy.

Mr. O'Neill chose to co-sponsor the independent chairman resolution, which had been introduced for several years by Robert A. G. Monks, a longtime activist on corporate governance. They were joined by another Rockefeller, John de Cuevas, a writer and environmentalist whose grandmother was John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s eldest child.

Heavy Support

The chairman proposal has drawn the support of more than 93% of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s 78 direct adult descendents, the family says. (Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia has his holdings in a blind trust, and said in a statement that though supportive, he isn't directly involved).

Mr. Monks, who had gradually been building support for his proposal to 40% of the vote last year, believes an independent chairman can help ensure an independent board, and an independent board is key to a company's evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. As he wrote in a letter to shareholders, "such inner-reflection is difficult when the board is lead by a CEO who has spent most of his adult life at the company, as has the entire executive management team." For Mr. Monks, the Rockefeller support was an unexpected boon that moved the debate outside his world of corporate-governance geeks. "God bless them," he says of the Rockefellers. "They hate the idea of publicity. But they are willing to do it because they think something is wrong at Exxon."

Reticent to Speak Out

Most Rockefellers have been reticent to speak publicly about the effort. One family member who did agree to talk was Michael S. Rockefeller, a grandson of Nelson, who runs an Internet advertising agency called Active Media. The family realized it would take heat for its position, he says, and it has: He says some critics have described the family as "rich, spoiled little kids."

But one criticism, he says, "makes us just boil": The argument that John D. himself would never have agreed to a separate chairman-president arrangement.

According to Mr. Johnson, the family historian, that is exactly what happened in 1896, when the patriarch gave up operating control of Standard Oil while serving in the top board position until 1911.

Mr. O'Neill says he had to do a lot of soul searching before agreeing to go public with their fight. Rockefeller family members sit on a lot of corporate boards, he says, "and we're not known for being meddlers."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2004-Jul-20, p.A11, by George Melloan:

GLOBAL VIEW

Stocks Slumber While The Lawyers Party

Martha Stewart got her expected sentence last week -- five months in the slammer -- for fibbing about why she sold her ImClone stock, not revealing a tip from her broker that insiders were selling. She will appeal and this long-running drama will continue. But a good many people are wondering why a small indiscretion brought down the terrible wrath of the prosecutors and court on this woman.

Indeed, if you asked for a vote from the broad public, a great many might say that Martha didn't receive justice but was a victim of injustice. She herself was not an ImClone "insider" by any definition of that term, so the Feds had to really stretch to find something to nail her with. The best they could do was "obstruction of justice," pretty far-fetched when you ask whose justice she obstructed. They also claimed that she had defrauded her company's shareholders by lying, a strange argument if you happen to notice that the prosecution itself wrecked her company.

John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute wrote on these pages last week that the prospective penalties "were so far out of proportion to the crimes she committed" that the case "illustrates a criminal justice system badly out of whack." But prosecutors love to sock it to big-name entrepreneurs to deter anyone else who might set out to defy their lawyerly power.

Indeed, if anyone still doubts that lawyers have moved from their control of the Congress and the statehouses to now include a mastery of corporate America, he should look again. State attorneys general have seized the tobacco industry and made it into a cartel earning rents on behalf of state treasuries. Plaintiff lawyers are milking corporations for billions with product-liability class actions. The Sarbanes-Oxley "corporate responsibility" law has arguably made the general counsels of companies more powerful than CEOs by giving the lawyers legal responsibility for minding the behavior of other executives.

There's no way of assessing with any accuracy the effects on business vitality of this ascendancy of lawyers. But it is at least an interesting coincidence that these broad-ranging constraints on the "animal spirits" that drive business have been accompanied by a stock-market slump hard to explain by any other means.

The Dow Jones Industrial average is some 300 points below where it started the year, despite a vigorous economic recovery that has created more than a million new jobs. Corporate earnings recovered sharply last year and still are on the upswing this year. Forecasters see growth into next year.

Venture capitalist firms are turning away would-be investors because there aren't enough promising start-ups to satisfy demand for this kind of risky investment. So there's plenty of liquidity out there. But why invest in the stock markets when prices are going down even as earnings are going up? Maybe the best idea is to damn the risk and latch onto a new venture before it becomes big enough to attract the attention of predators.

To a man -- or woman -- the lawyer crusaders who are beating the daylights out of corporate America claim they are doing the Lord's work. The plaintiff lawyers go before juries in chosen venues, like Alabama or Mississippi, to emote over their clients' mistreatment at the hands of greedy corporations, meanwhile pocketing a big chunk of the jury's award. The prosecutors and attorneys general going after "white-collar crime" swear that they are protecting the small investor against management greed and connivance.

There is enough truth in all this to give it some plausibility, particularly for sympathetic populists in the press. Tort lawyers do often recover damage awards for victims of wanton negligence. And prosecutors do sometimes uncover boardroom skullduggery, as evidenced by the successful prosecutions of Enron.

But lawyers themselves are not immune to base motives, whether it be a lust for political advancement by a prosecutor or attorney general, the enjoyment found by a bureaucrat in the exercise of petty regulatory powers, or the simple pleasures some trial lawyers find in making huge piles of money.

Well, America is not only a land of opportunity but a land of opportunists, so why not? But opportunists in the field of law are different from those who seek their fortunes in commerce. The rule of law is vital to the proper functioning of a democracy. If it is corrupted, the system itself is threatened.

One might ask what benefit the prosecution of Martha Stewart had for investors in the company she built, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. The value of their stock fell by over $400 million in eight months after she came under suspicion. MSLO stock rose last week after Ms. Stewart asked her public as she left the courthouse to show their support by continuing to patronize the company's products. Some big retailers, such as K-Mart, are sticking with MSLO brands out of recognition that Ms. Stewart's ordeal has generated sympathetic customer responses. But on the whole, MSLO, its investors and employees have been seriously damaged by the bad publicity. All this for a company whose only crime was bearing the "big name" of Martha Stewart.

Some lawyers see the danger inherent in the abuse of legal processes for private gain or to satisfy political ambitions. Lawyers charged with defending honest businesses from predatory attacks are particularly concerned about the rapacious conduct of their fellow lawyers and the extent to which judges have condoned such practices, or in some cases are suspected of collaborating with them.

But the populist arguments still have a broad appeal. Rich folks are, as ever, an easy mark, even in cases where they have built businesses through hard work and personal risks. Indeed, it would seem that these capitalists are a more frequent target than politicians who have built their careers with the fortunes of a wealthy tycoon parent or partner.

Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards' success in getting his fellow rich trial lawyers to pony up for John Kerry's campaign is the latest invocation of lawyer power. Perhaps the "two Americas" he preaches about should be construed as the one he represents, powerful lawyers, and the rest of us, including the unfortunate Martha Stewart.

George Melloan is the Journal's Deputy Editor, International. He began writing "Global View" in 1990, when he took over responsibilities for the overseas pages after 17 years as deputy editor in New York. During the first five years of his present assignment he was based in Brussels, traveling extensively from there to write about such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet empire and the collapse of the Japan's stock market and real estate bubble. He returned to New York in 1994.

from the New York Times Service via the International Herald Tribune, 2001-Aug-20, by Joseph Kahn and Edmund L. Andrews:

Economic Whiplash: Slump Has No Borders

With Europe and Asia Stagnating, No Region Is Expected to Replace U.S. as Growth Engine

WASHINGTON The world economy, which grew at a raging pace just last year, has slowed to a crawl as the United States, Europe, Japan and some major developing countries undergo a rare simultaneous slump.

The latest economic statistics from around the globe show that many regional economic powers - Italy and Germany, Mexico and Brazil, Japan and Singapore - have become economically stagnant or have fallen into recession, defying many economists' expectations that growth in other countries would help compensate for the slowdown in the United States.

The $33 trillion world economy is still likely to expand this year, as it has every year since the Great Depression. Of the top economies, only Japan's total output seems likely to shrink, and even bearish forecasters say they expect the world to grow at about a 2 percent rate, a bit faster than during international slumps in 1982 and 1991.

Still, many experts say the world is experiencing economic whiplash, with growth rates retreating more quickly and in more of the leading economies than at any time since the oil shock of 1973.

And this time, there is no single outside factor to account for the widespread weakness, persuading some economists that recovery may be slow in coming.

"We have gone from boom to bust faster than anytime since the oil shock," said Stephen Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley. "When you screech to a halt like that, it feels like getting thrown through the windshield."

The biggest surprise is the sluggish performance in Europe, especially Germany, where leaders had until recently thought they could escape the American slowdown.

The German economy, Europe's largest, came to a standstill in the second quarter of this year. Italy and the Netherlands are showing practically no growth. And France's relatively frothy economy has slowed sharply as both consumers and businesses cut back on spending.

The result is that Europe, with a combined economy about as big as that of the United States, is in no position to fill in for the United States as a locomotive of world economic growth.

"On balance, I'd say that the likelihood of continued difficulties here and abroad is higher than the prevailing view of most economists," said Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who is now a co-chairman of Citigroup.

R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, says the slowdown among America's peers is worrying, especially Japan's troubles, which he called "quite severe."

But he also said that the reasons for weakness were idiosyncratic, varying from place to place, and that there was no reason to expect that international problems would drag the United States or Europe into recession.

"It might feel like a recession in some places," he said, "but I don't see an outright recession here or in Europe."

Not long ago the United States hoped to have more help. European policymakers confidently predicted in the spring that the region would grow at about its long-term potential rate of 2.5 percent. But many forecasters now predict that it will be less than 2 percent this year - not much better than the United States.

European leaders also acted as if they were certain their new common currency and the growing economic integration of Europe made the region more independent and less vulnerable to outside economic turbulence.

But they were blindsided by problems at home. European demand for consumer goods and industrial machinery throughout the region is so tepid that it offers no source of growth at all.

European companies seem persuaded that the real future growth markets are not at home but in the United States, Asia and Central Europe, so domestic investment has lagged.

What is striking about Europe's slowdown is that so much of it is linked to internal weakness - what Daniel Gros of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels describes as long-term "speed limits" on European growth.

Exports are running still slightly ahead of last year, which was one of spectacular growth. Yet consumers at home are clutching their pocketbooks.

BMW's worldwide sales were up 9.7 percent in the first half of this year, but up only 1.1 percent in Germany. LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French luxury goods producer, reported that sales of its VSOP Cognac surged 25 percent in the United States in the first half of this year, faster than in Europe.

"Europe's slowdown has very little to do with the United States," Mr. Gros said.

Higher energy and food prices are a big problem for the region. But Thomas Mayer, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, says price shocks are only part of Europe's woes.

He also faults the unwillingness of political leaders to liberalize the labor markets and give employers more freedom in hiring and firing. France and Germany recently have taken steps to bolster the power of unions and make it more difficult to lay off workers.

"That is the sort of thing we should especially try to avoid right now," Mr. Mayer said.

In Latin America, Mexico has been in recession since April, with its economy shrinking for the third straight quarter. Brazil, the largest Latin American economy, has suffered soaring interest rates and a persistent energy crisis. Argentina is seeking further International Monetary Fund aid to support its crumbling economy.

The situation in Asia looks no better. Singapore has tumbled into a severe recession that some economists say is the worst the island country has suffered in at least 15 years. Japan once again has slipped into recession territory as its government battles stubborn deflation.

Nearly every other major economy in the region, with the notable exception of China's, has seen growth plunge despite six months of interest rate cuts.

There are at least two schools of thought suggesting that a more problematic and longer-lasting slump than usual is under way.

The first is the worry that widespread malaise is the flip side of the record-setting U.S.-led expansion of the 1990s. Greater world integration in trade, finance and technology fueled the expansion.

But increased interdependence trade now accounts for about a quarter of world output, double its share 25 years ago, and that means much of the world can move down in tandem just as it moved up together, some economists say.

"This is the first recession in the modern era of globalization," said Mr. Roach of Morgan Stanley. Most of the top industrial economies have similar woes, he said, due mainly to the collapse of the boom in technology spending in both the United States and Europe. That collapse has hurt corporate profits and investment returns.

And without steady earnings from foreign subsidiaries, it may take companies considerably longer to overcome the slump.

"The bubble we had in this country was really a global bubble," Mr. Roach said. "Now it has popped."

Mr. Rubin also said that economic interdependence may have greased the spread of the American downturn. But he added that the world would be better off today if countries, especially in Europe, had done more rather than less to liberalize and integrate their economies.

He said the combined weakness of most of the biggest economies presented a challenge to policy makers. The United States and other leading countries need to energetically defend free trade, fiscal discipline and the spread of technology, he said, or risk a backlash that could cloud long-term prospects.

"The U.S., even more than usual, must exercise leadership," Mr. Rubin said. "Without that we may not have a continuation of these forces of changes and that would have a lasting adverse impact."

Another prevalent concern, popular among conservative commentators, is that policy mistakes have caused investors to lose faith in many individual currencies, undermining confidence broadly. This is particularly true in emerging markets like Turkey and Brazil, both of which recently borrowed money from the International Monetary Fund to help protect their currencies.

But these economists also fault central bankers in the United States, Japan and Europe for failing to keep their currencies stable. The dollar, they say, has been too strong, while the euro and yen have been too weak.

David Malpass, formerly an economics official in the back-to-back Reagan and Bush administrations and now a managing director with Bear Stearns in New York, says that weak currencies and falling commodity prices worldwide are an insidious threat to growth that central bankers have failed to counter.

Consumer prices have been falling in Japan for some time and they have recently begun falling in some especially open economies, like Hong Kong.

While they are rising modestly in the United States and Europe, corporate profits and equity values have sagged, which has a deflating effect on business and consumer sentiment, Mr. Malpass says.

He estimates that the world's nominal economic growth - growth after factoring in price changes, up or down - has fallen into negative territory this year and will stay negative next year.

from Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (1974), by Murray N. Rothbard, from The Ludwig von Mises Institute, from http://www.mises.org/easaran/chap3.asp:

THE ANATOMY OF THE STATE *

What the State Is Not

The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the "private sector" and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.

We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people.[1] But, even if it did, even if 70 percent of the people decided to murder the remaining 30 percent, this would still be murder and would not be voluntary suicide on the part of the slaughtered minority.[2] No organicist metaphor, no irrelevant bromide that "we are all part of one another," must be permitted to obscure this basic fact.

If, then, the State is not "us," if it is not "the human family" getting together to decide mutual problems, if it is not a lodge meeting or country club, what is it? Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.[3] Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity that elaboration is necessary.

What the State Is

Man is born naked into the world, and needing to use his mind to learn how to take the resources given him by nature, and to transform them (for example, by investment in "capital") into shapes and forms and places where the resources can be used for the satisfaction of his wants and the advancement of his standard of living. The only way by which man can do this is by the use of his mind and energy to transform resources ("production") and to exchange these products for products created by others. Man has found that, through the process of voluntary, mutual exchange, the productivity and hence, the living standards of all participants in exchange may increase enormously. The only "natural" course for man to survive and to attain wealth, therefore, is by using his mind and energy to engage in the production-and-exchange process. He does this, first, by finding natural resources, and then by transforming them (by "mixing his labor" with them, as Locke puts it), to make them his individual property, and then by exchanging this property for the similarly obtained property of others. The social path dictated by the requirements of man's nature, therefore, is the path of "property rights" and the "free market" of gift or exchange of such rights. Through this path, men have learned how to avoid the "jungle" methods of fighting over scarce resources so that A can only acquire them at the expense of B and, instead, to multiply those resources enormously in peaceful and harmonious production and exchange.

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the "economic means." The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another's goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed "the political means" to wealth. It should be clear that the peaceful use of reason and energy in production is the "natural" path for man: the means for his survival and prosperity on this earth. It should be equally clear that the coercive, exploitative means is contrary to natural law; it is parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it. The "political means" siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer's incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence. In the long run, the robber destroys his own subsistence by dwindling or eliminating the source of his own supply. But not only that; even in the short-run, the predator is acting contrary to his own true nature as a man.

We are now in a position to answer more fully the question: what is the State? The State, in the words of Oppenheimer, is the "organization of the political means"; it is the systematization of the predatory process over a given territory.[4] For crime, at best, is sporadic and uncertain; the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims. The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively "peaceful" the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.[5] Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a "social contract"; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. The classic paradigm was a conquering tribe pausing in its time-honored method of looting and murdering a conquered tribe, to realize that the time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant, if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.[6] One method of the birth of a State may be illustrated as follows: in the hills of southern "Ruritania," a bandit group manages to obtain physical control over the territory, and finally the bandit chieftain proclaims himself "King of the sovereign and independent government of South Ruritania"; and, if he and his men have the force to maintain this rule for a while, lo and behold! a new State has joined the "family of nations," and the former bandit leaders have been transformed into the lawful nobility of the realm.

How the State Preserves Itself

Once a State has been established, the problem of the ruling group or "caste" is how to maintain their rule.[7] While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a "democratic" government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State-the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility)-must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.[8] ,[9]

Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests. Therefore, the King alone cannot rule; he must have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the prerequisites of rule, for example, the members of the State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy or the established nobility.[10] But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.

It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual's livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the State rulers, of which group they now become a part.[11]

The alliance between the State and the intellectuals was symbolized in the eager desire of professors at the University of Berlin in the nineteenth century to form the "intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern." In the present day, let us note the revealing comment of an eminent Marxist scholar concerning Professor Wittfogel's critical study of ancient Oriental despotism: "The civilization which Professor Wittfogel is so bitterly attacking was one which could make poets and scholars into officials."[12] Of innumerable examples, we may cite the recent development of the "science" of strategy, in the service of the government's main violence-wielding arm, the military.[13] A venerable institution, furthermore, is the official or "court" historian, dedicated to purveying the rulers' views of their own and their predecessors' actions.[14]

Many and varied have been the arguments by which the State and its intellectuals have induced their subjects to support their rule. Basically, the strands of argument may be summed up as follows: (a) the State rulers are great and wise men (they "rule by divine right," they are the "aristocracy" of men, they are the "scientific experts"), much greater and wiser than the good but rather simple subjects, and (b) rule by the extent government is inevitable, absolutely necessary, and far better, than the indescribable evils that would ensue upon its downfall. The union of Church and State was one of the oldest and most successful of these ideological devices. The ruler was either anointed by God or, in the case of the absolute rule of many Oriental despotisms, was himself God; hence, any resistance to his rule would be blasphemy. The States' priestcraft performed the basic intellectual function of obtaining popular support and even worship for the rulers.[15]

Another successful device was to instill fear of any alternative systems of rule or nonrule. The present rulers, it was maintained, supply to the citizens an essential service for which they should be most grateful: protection against sporadic criminals and marauders. For the State, to preserve its own monopoly of predation, did indeed see to it that private and unsystematic crime was kept to a minimum; the State has always been jealous of its own preserve. Especially has the State been successful in recent centuries in instilling fear of other State rulers. Since the land area of the globe has been parceled out among particular States, one of the basic doctrines of the State was to identify itself with the territory it governed. Since most men tend to love their homeland, the identification of that land and its people with the State was a means of making natural patriotism work to the State's advantage. If "Ruritania" was being attacked by "Walldavia," the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of "nationalism" has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles.

Many and subtle are the ideological weapons that the State has wielded through the centuries. One excellent weapon has been tradition. The longer that the rule of a State has been able to preserve itself, the more powerful this weapon; for then, the X Dynasty or the Y State has the seeming weight of centuries of tradition behind it.[16] Worship of one's ancestors, then, becomes a none too subtle means of worship of one's ancient rulers. The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism; there is no better way to stifle that criticism than to attack any isolated voice, any raiser of new doubts, as a profane violator of the wisdom of his ancestors. Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society. For since any given rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one or a few independently-thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea, must needs begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. "Listen only to your brothers" or "adjust to society" thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent.[17] By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of their Emperor's clothes.[18] It is also important for the State to make its rule seem inevitable; even if its reign is disliked, it will then be met with passive resignation, as witness the familiar coupling of "death and taxes." One method is to induce historiographical determinism, as opposed to individual freedom of will. If the X Dynasty rules us, this is because the Inexorable Laws of History (or the Divine Will, or the Absolute, or the Material Productive Forces) have so decreed and nothing any puny individuals may do can change this inevitable decree. It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any "conspiracy theory of history;" for a search for "conspiracies" means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane "social forces," or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible ("We Are All Murderers," proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on "conspiracy theories" means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the "general welfare" reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A "conspiracy theory" can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State's ideological propaganda.

Another tried and true method for bending subjects to the State's will is inducing guilt. Any increase in private well-being can be attacked as "unconscionable greed," "materialism," or "excessive affluence," profit-making can be attacked as "exploitation" and "usury," mutually beneficial exchanges denounced as "selfishness," and somehow with the conclusion always being drawn that more resources should be siphoned from the private to the "public sector." The induced guilt makes the public more ready to do just that. For while individual persons tend to indulge in "selfish greed," the failure of the State's rulers to engage in exchanges is supposed to signify their devotion to higher and nobler causes-parasitic predation being apparently morally and esthetically lofty as compared to peaceful and productive work.

In the present more secular age, the divine right of the State has been supplemented by the invocation of a new god, Science. State rule is now proclaimed as being ultrascientific, as constituting planning by experts. But while "reason" is invoked more than in previous centuries, this is not the true reason of the individual and his exercise of free will; it is still collectivist and determinist, still implying holistic aggregates and coercive manipulation of passive subjects by their rulers.

The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State's intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the "multiplier effect," it unfortunately carries more conviction. And so the assault on common sense proceeds, each age performing the task in its own ways.

Thus, ideological support being vital to the State, it must unceasingly try to impress the public with its "legitimacy," to distinguish its activities from those of mere brigands. The unremitting determination of its assaults on common sense is no accident, for as Mencken vividly maintained:

The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow men-that it is a separate, independent, and hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable of doing him great harm. Is it a fact of no significance that robbing the government is everywhere regarded as a crime of less magnitude than robbing an individual, or even a corporation? . . . What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members. . . . When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before. The notion that they have earned that money is never entertained; to most sensible men it would seem ludicrous.[19]

How the State Transcends Its Limits

As Bertrand de Jouvenel has sagely pointed out, through the centuries men have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the concept of divine sovereignty held that the kings may rule only according to divine law; the kings turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine approval for any of the kings' actions. The concept of parliamentary democracy began as a popular check upon absolute monarchical rule; it ended with parliament being the essential part of the State and its every act totally sovereign. As de Jouvenel concludes:

Many writers on theories of sovereignty have worked out one . . . of these restrictive devices. But in the end every single such theory has, sooner or later, lost its original purpose, and come to act merely as a springboard to Power, by providing it with the powerful aid of an invisible sovereign with whom it could in time successfully identify itself.[20]

Similarly with more specific doctrines: the "natural rights" of the individual enshrined in John Locke and the Bill of Rights, became a statist "right to a job"; utilitarianism turned from arguments for liberty to arguments against resisting the State's invasions of liberty, etc.

Certainly the most ambitious attempt to impose limits on the State has been the Bill of Rights and other restrictive parts of the American Constitution, in which written limits on government became the fundamental law to be interpreted by a judiciary supposedly independent of the other branches of government. All Americans are familiar with the process by which the construction of limits in the Constitution has been inexorably broadened over the last century. But few have been as keen as Professor Charles Black to see that the State has, in the process, largely transformed judicial review itself from a limiting device to yet another instrument for furnishing ideological legitimacy to the government's actions. For if a judicial decree of "unconstitutional" is a mighty check to government power, an implicit or explicit verdict of "constitutional" is a mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance of ever-greater government power.

Professor Black begins his analysis by pointing out the crucial necessity of "legitimacy" for any government to endure, this legitimation signifying basic majority acceptance of the government and its actions.[21] Acceptance of legitimacy becomes a particular problem in a country such as the United States, where "substantive limitations are built into the theory on which the government rests." What is needed, adds Black, is a means by which the government can assure the public that its increasing powers are, indeed, "constitutional." And this, he concludes, has been the major historic function of judicial review.

Let Black illustrate the problem:

The supreme risk [to the government] is that of disaffection and a feeling of outrage widely disseminated throughout the population, and loss of moral authority by the government as such, however long it may be propped up by force or inertia or the lack of an appealing and immediately available alternative. Almost everybody living under a government of limited powers, must sooner or later be subjected to some governmental action which as a matter of private opinion he regards as outside the power of government or positively forbidden to government. A man is drafted, though he finds nothing in the Constitution about being drafted. . . . A farmer is told how much wheat he can raise; he believes, and he discovers that some respectable lawyers believe with him, that the government has no more right to tell him how much wheat he can grow than it has to tell his daughter whom she can marry. A man goes to the federal penitentiary for saying what he wants to, and he paces his cell reciting . . . "Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of speech.". . . A businessman is told what he can ask, and must ask, for buttermilk.
The danger is real enough that each of these people (and who is not of their number?) will confront the concept of governmental limitation with the reality (as he sees it) of the flagrant overstepping of actual limits, and draw the obvious conclusion as to the status of his government with respect to legitimacy.[22]

This danger is averted by the State's propounding the doctrine that one agency must have the ultimate decision on constitutionality and that this agency, in the last analysis, must be part of the federal government.[23] For while the seeming independence of the federal judiciary has played a vital part in making its actions virtual Holy Writ for the bulk of the people, it is also and ever true that the judiciary is part and parcel of the government apparatus and appointed by the executive and legislative branches. Black admits that this means that the State has set itself up as a judge in its own cause, thus violating a basic juridical principle for aiming at just decisions. He brusquely denies the possibility of any alternative.[24]

Black adds:

The problem, then, is to devise such governmental means of deciding as will [hopefully] reduce to a tolerable minimum the intensity of the objection that government is judge in its own cause. Having done this, you can only hope that this objection, though theoretically still tenable [italics mine], will practically lose enough of its force that the legitimating work of the deciding institution can win acceptance.[25]

In the last analysis, Black finds the achievement of justice and legitimacy from the State's perpetual judging of its own cause as "something of a miracle."[26]

Applying his thesis to the famous conflict between the Supreme Court and the New Deal, Professor Black keenly chides his fellow pro-New Deal colleagues for their shortsightedness in denouncing judicial obstruction:

[t]he standard version of the story of the New Deal and the Court, though accurate in its way, displaces the emphasis. . . . It concentrates on the difficulties; it almost forgets how the whole thing turned out. The upshot of the matter was [and this is what I like to emphasize] that after some twenty-four months of balking . . . the Supreme Court, without a single change in the law of its composition, or, indeed, in its actual manning, placed the affirmative stamp of legitimacy on the New Deal, and on the whole new conception of government in America.[27]

In this way, the Supreme Court was able to put the quietus on the large body of Americans who had had strong constitutional objections to the New Deal:

Of course, not everyone was satisfied. The Bonnie Prince Charlie of constitutionally commanded laissez-faire still stirs the hearts of a few zealots in the Highlands of choleric unreality. But there is no longer any significant or dangerous public doubt as to the constitutional power of Congress to deal as it does with the national economy. . . .
We had no means, other than the Supreme Court, for imparting legitimacy to the New Deal.[28]

As Black recognizes, one major political theorist who recognized-and largely in advance-the glaring loophole in a constitutional limit on government of placing the ultimate interpreting power in the Supreme Court was John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was not content with the "miracle," but instead proceeded to a profound analysis of the constitutional problem. In his Disquisition, Calhoun demonstrated the inherent tendency of the State to break through the limits of such a constitution:

A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the power of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance [my italics] will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them. . . . The minor or weaker party, on the contrary, would take the opposite direction and regard them [the restrictions] as essential to their protection against the dominant party. . . . But where there are no means by which they could compel the major party to observe the restrictions, the only resort left them would be a strict construction of the constitution. . . . To this the major party would oppose a liberal construction. . . . It would be construction against construction-the one to contract and the other to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal construction of the major, when the one would have all the power of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered. . . . The end of the contest would be the subversion of the constitution . . . the restrictions would ultimately be annulled and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.[29]

One of the few political scientists who appreciated Calhoun's analysis of the Constitution was Professor J. Allen Smith. Smith noted that the Constitution was designed with checks and balances to limit any one governmental power and yet had then developed a Supreme Court with the monopoly of ultimate interpreting power. If the Federal Government was created to check invasions of individual liberty by the separate states, who was to check the Federal power? Smith maintained that implicit in the check-and-balance idea of the Constitution was the concomitant view that no one branch of government may be conceded the ultimate power of interpretation: "It was assumed by the people that the new government could not be permitted to determine the limits of its own authority, since this would make it, and not the Constitution, supreme."[30]

The solution advanced by Calhoun (and seconded, in this century, by such writers as Smith) was, of course, the famous doctrine of the "concurrent majority." If any substantial minority interest in the country, specifically a state government, believed that the Federal Government was exceeding its powers and encroaching on that minority, the minority would have the right to veto this exercise of power as unconstitutional. Applied to state governments, this theory implied the right of "nullification" of a Federal law or ruling within a state's jurisdiction.

In theory, the ensuing constitutional system would assure that the Federal Government check any state invasion of individual rights, while the states would check excessive Federal power over the individual. And yet, while limitations would undoubtedly be more effective than at present, there are many difficulties and problems in the Calhoun solution. If, indeed, a subordinate interest should rightfully have a veto over matters concerning it, then why stop with the states? Why not place veto power in counties, cities, wards? Furthermore, interests are not only sectional, they are also occupational, social, etc. What of bakers or taxi drivers or any other occupation? Should they not be permitted a veto power over their own lives? This brings us to the important point that the nullification theory confines its checks to agencies of government itself. Let us not forget that federal and state governments, and their respective branches, are still states, are still guided by their own state interests rather than by the interests of the private citizens. What is to prevent the Calhoun system from working in reverse, with states tyrannizing over their citizens and only vetoing the federal government when it tries to intervene to stop that state tyranny? Or for states to acquiesce in federal tyranny? What is to prevent federal and state governments from forming mutually profitable alliances for the joint exploitation of the citizenry? And even if the private occupational groupings were to be given some form of "functional" representation in government, what is to prevent them from using the State to gain subsidies and other special privileges for themselves or from imposing compulsory cartels on their own members?

In short, Calhoun does not push his pathbreaking theory on concurrence far enough: he does not push it down to the individual himself. If the individual, after all, is the one whose rights are to be protected, then a consistent theory of concurrence would imply veto power by every individual; that is, some form of "unanimity principle." When Calhoun wrote that it should be "impossible to put or to keep it [the government] in action without the concurrent consent of all," he was, perhaps unwittingly, implying just such a conclusion.[31] But such speculation begins to take us away from our subject, for down this path lie political systems which could hardly be called "States" at all.[32] For one thing, just as the right of nullification for a state logically implies its right of secession, so a right of individual nullification would imply the right of any individual to "secede" from the State under which he lives.[33]

Thus, the State has invariably shown a striking talent for the expansion of its powers beyond any limits that might be imposed upon it. Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist. In a sense, our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the State is the "executive committee" of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead, the State-the organization of the political means-constitutes, and is the source of, the "ruling class" (rather, ruling caste), and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital. We may, therefore, say with de Jouvenel:

Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of Power's behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings [nationalization, the income tax, etc.] as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at all in their nature from Henry VIII's confiscation of the monasteries. The same principle is at work; the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources; and in all of these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is Socialist or whether it is not, Power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth; in doing so it obeys the law of its nature.[34]

What the State Fears

What the State fears above all, of course, is any fundamental threat to its own power and its own existence. The death of a State can come about in two major ways: (a) through conquest by another State, or (b) through revolutionary overthrow by its own subjects-in short, by war or revolution. War and revolution, as the two basic threats, invariably arouse in the State rulers their maximum efforts and maximum propaganda among the people. As stated above, any way must always be used to mobilize the people to come to the State's defense in the belief that they are defending themselves. The fallacy of the idea becomes evident when conscription is wielded against those who refuse to "defend" themselves and are, therefore, forced into joining the State's military band: needless to add, no "defense" is permitted them against this act of "their own" State.

In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to a State, and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased State burdens upon society. War, moreover, provides to a State tempting opportunities for conquest of land areas over which it may exercise its monopoly of force. Randolph Bourne was certainly correct when he wrote that "war is the health of the State," but to any particular State a war may spell either health or grave injury.[35]

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely-those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'etre.[36]

How States Relate to One Another

Since the territorial area of the earth is divided among different States, inter-State relations must occupy much of a State's time and energy. The natural tendency of a State is to expand its power, and externally such expansion takes place by conquest of a territorial area. Unless a territory is stateless or uninhabited, any such expansion involves an inherent conflict of interest between one set of State rulers and another. Only one set of rulers can obtain a monopoly of coercion over any given territorial area at any one time: complete power over a territory by State X can only be obtained by the expulsion of State Y. War, while risky, will be an ever-present tendency of States, punctuated by periods of peace and by shifting alliances and coalitions between States.

We have seen that the "internal" or "domestic" attempt to limit the State, in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, reached its most notable form in constitutionalism. Its "external," or "foreign affairs," counterpart was the development of "international law," especially such forms as the "laws of war" and "neutrals' rights."[37] Parts of international law were originally purely private, growing out of the need of merchants and traders everywhere to protect their property and adjudicate disputes. Examples are admiralty law and the law merchant. But even the governmental rules emerged voluntarily and were not imposed by any international super-State. The object of the "laws of war" was to limit inter-State destruction to the State apparatus itself, thereby preserving the innocent "civilian" public from the slaughter and devastation of war. The object of the development of neutrals' rights was to preserve private civilian international commerce, even with "enemy" countries, from seizure by one of the warring parties. The overriding aim, then, was to limit the extent of any war, and, particularly to limit its destructive impact on the private citizens of the neutral and even the warring countries.

The jurist F.J.P. Veale charmingly describes such "civilized warfare" as it briefly flourished in fifteenth-century Italy:

the rich burghers and merchants of medieval Italy were too busy making money and enjoying life to undertake the hardships and dangers of soldiering themselves. So they adopted the practice of hiring mercenaries to do their fighting for them, and, being thrifty, businesslike folk, they dismissed their mercenaries immediately after their services could be dispensed with. Wars were, therefore, fought by armies hired for each campaign. . . . For the first time, soldiering became a reasonable and comparatively harmless profession. The generals of that period maneuvered against each other, often with consummate skill, but when one had won the advantage, his opponent generally either retreated or surrendered. It was a recognized rule that a town could only be sacked if it offered resistance: immunity could always be purchased by paying a ransom. . . . As one natural consequence, no town ever resisted, it being obvious that a government too weak to defend its citizens had forfeited their allegiance. Civilians had little to fear from the dangers of war which were the concern only of professional soldiers.[38]

The well-nigh absolute separation of the private civilian from the State's wars in eighteenth-century Europe is highlighted by Nef:

Even postal communications were not successfully restricted for long in wartime. Letters circulated without censorship, with a freedom that astonishes the twentieth-century mind. . . . The subjects of two warring nations talked to each other if they met, and when they could not meet, corresponded, not as enemies but as friends. The modern notion hardly existed that . . . subjects of any enemy country are partly accountable for the belligerent acts of their rulers. Nor had the warring rulers any firm disposition to stop communications with subjects of the enemy. The old inquisitorial practices of espionage in connection with religious worship and belief were disappearing, and no comparable inquisition in connection with political or economic communications was even contemplated. Passports were originally created to provide safe conduct in time of war. During most of the eighteenth century it seldom occurred to Europeans to abandon their travels in a foreign country which their own was fighting.[39]
And trade being increasingly recognized as beneficial to both parties; eighteenth-century warfare also counterbalances a considerable amount of "trading with the enemy."[40]

How far States have transcended rules of civilized warfare in this century needs no elaboration here. In the modern era of total war, combined with the technology of total destruction, the very idea of keeping war limited to the State apparati seems even more quaint and obsolete than the original Constitution of the United States.

When States are not at war, agreements are often necessary to keep frictions at a minimum. One doctrine that has gained curiously wide acceptance is the alleged "sanctity of treaties." This concept is treated as the counterpart of the "sanctity of contract." But a treaty and a genuine contract have nothing in common. A contract transfers, in a precise manner, titles to private property. Since a government does not, in any proper sense, "own" its territorial area, any agreements that it concludes do not confer titles to property. If, for example, Mr. Jones sells or gives his land to Mr. Smith, Jones's heir cannot legitimately descend upon Smith's heir and claim the land as rightfully his. The property title has already been transferred. Old Jones's contract is automatically binding upon young Jones, because the former had already transferred the property; young Jones, therefore, has no property claim. Young Jones can only claim that which he has inherited from old Jones, and old Jones can only bequeath property which he still owns. But if, at a certain date, the government of, say, Ruritania is coerced or even bribed by the government of Waldavia into giving up some of its territory, it is absurd to claim that the governments or inhabitants of the two countries are forever barred from a claim to reunification of Ruritania on the grounds of the sanctity of a treaty. Neither the people nor the land of northwest Ruritania are owned by either of the two governments. As a corollary, one government can certainly not bind, by the dead hand of the past, a later government through treaty. A revolutionary government which overthrew the king of Ruritania could, similarly, hardly be called to account for the king's actions or debts, for a government is not, as is a child, a true "heir" to its predecessor's property.

History as a Race Between
State Power and Social Power

Just as the two basic and mutually exclusive interrelations between men are peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation, production or predation, so the history of mankind, particularly its economic history, may be considered as a contest between these two principles. On the one hand, there is creative productivity, peaceful exchange and cooperation; on the other, coercive dictation and predation over those social relations. Albert Jay Nock happily termed these contesting forces: "social power" and "State power."[41] Social power is man's power over nature, his cooperative transformation of nature's resources and insight into nature's laws, for the benefit of all participating individuals. Social power is the power over nature, the living standards achieved by men in mutual exchange. State power, as we have seen, is the coercive and parasitic seizure of this production-a draining of the fruits of society for the benefit of nonproductive (actually antiproductive) rulers. While social power is over nature, State power is power over man. Through history, man's productive and creative forces have, time and again, carved out new ways of transforming nature for man's benefit. These have been the times when social power has spurted ahead of State power, and when the degree of State encroachment over society has considerably lessened. But always, after a greater or smaller time lag, the State has moved into these new areas, to cripple and confiscate social power once more.[42] If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up-with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.[43]

In this century, the human race faces, once again, the virulent reign of the State-of the State now armed with the fruits of man's creative powers, confiscated and perverted to its own aims. The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever. Perhaps new paths of inquiry must be explored, if the successful, final solution of the State question is ever to be attained.[44]

---

* Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays by Murray N. Rothbard (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55-88.

[1] We cannot, in this chapter, develop the many problems and fallacies of "democracy." Suffice it to say here that an individual's true agent or "representative" is always subject to that individual's orders, can be dismissed at any time and cannot act contrary to the interests or wishes of his principal. Clearly, the "representative" in a democracy can never fulfill such agency functions, the only ones consonant with a libertarian society.

[2] Social democrats often retort that democracy-majority choice of rulers-logically implies that the majority must leave certain freedoms to the minority, for the minority might one day become the majority. Apart from other flaws, this argument obviously does not hold where the minority cannot become the majority, for example, when the minority is of a different racial or ethnic group from the majority.

[3] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942), p. 198.

The friction or antagonism between the private and the public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact that . . . the State has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the service of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.

Also see Murray N. Rothbard, "The Fallacy of the 'Public Sector,"' New Individualist Review (Summer, 1961): 3ff.

[4] Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926) pp. 24-27:

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. . . . I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the "economic means" for the satisfaction of need while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means". . . . The State is an organization of the political means. No State, therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a definite number of objects for the satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery.

[5] Albert Jay Nock wrote vividly that

the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime. . . . It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.

Nock, On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), p. 143; quoted in Jack Schwartzman, "Albert Jay Nock-A Superfluous Man," Faith and Freedom (December, 1953): 11.

[6] Oppenheimer, The State, p. 15:

What, then, is the State as a sociological concept? The State, completely in its genesis . . . is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group of men on a defeated group, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.

And de Jouvenel has written: "the State is in essence the result of the successes achieved by a band of brigands who superimpose themselves on small, distinct societies." Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power (New York: Viking Press, 1949), pp. 100-01.

[7] On the crucial distinction between "caste," a group with privileges or burdens coercively granted or imposed by the State and the Marxian concept of "class" in society, see Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 112ff.

[8] Such acceptance does not, of course, imply that the State rule has become "voluntary"; for even if the majority support be active and eager, this support is not unanimous by every individual.

[9] That every government, no matter how "dictatorial" over individuals, must secure such support has been demonstrated by such acute political theorists as Étienne de la Boétie, David Hume, and Ludwig von Mises. Thus, cf. David Hume, "Of the First Principles of Government," in Essays, Literary, Moral and Political (London: Ward, Locke, and Taylor, n.d.), p. 23; Étienne de la Boétie, Anti-Dictator (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 8-9; Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1998), pp. 188ff. For more on the contribution to the analysis of the State by la Boétie, see Oscar Jaszi and John D. Lewis, Against the Tyrant (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 55-57.

[10] La Boétie, Anti-Dictator, pp. 43-44.

Whenever a ruler makes himself dictator . . . all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather around him and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant.

[11] This by no means implies that all intellectuals ally themselves with the State. On aspects of the alliance of intellectuals and the State, cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel, "The Attitude of the Intellectuals to the Market Society," The Owl (January, 1951): 19-27; idem, "The Treatment of Capitalism by Continental Intellectuals," in F.A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 93-123; reprinted in George B. de Huszar, The Intellectuals (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 385-99; and Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1975), pp. 143-55.

[12] Joseph Needham, "Review of Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism," Science and Society (1958): 65. Needham also writes that "the successive [Chinese] emperors were served in all ages by a great company of profoundly humane and disinterested scholars," p. 61. Wittfogel notes the Confucian doctrine that the glory of the ruling class rested on its gentleman scholar-bureaucrat officials, destined to be professional rulers dictating to the mass of the populace. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 320-21 and passim. For an attitude contrasting to Needham's, cf. John Lukacs, "Intellectual Class or Intellectual Profession?" in de Huszar, The Intellectuals, pp. 521-22.

[13] Jeanne Ribs, "The War Plotters," Liberation (August, 1961): 13. "[s]trategists insist that their occupation deserves the 'dignity of the academic counterpart of the military profession.'" Also see Marcus Raskin, "The Megadeath Intellectuals," New York Review of Books (November 14, 1963): 6-7.

[14] Thus the historian Conyers Read, in his presidential address, advocated the suppression of historical fact in the service of "democratic" and national values. Read proclaimed that "total war, whether it is hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to play his part. The historian is not freer from this obligation than the physicist." Read, "The Social Responsibilities of the Historian," American Historical Review (1951): 283ff. For a critique of Read and other aspects of court history, see Howard K. Beale, "The Professional Historian: His Theory and Practice," The Pacific Historical Review (August, 1953): 227-55. Also cf. Herbert Butterfield, "Official History: Its Pitfalls and Criteria," History and Human Relations (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 182-224; and Harry Elmer Barnes, The Court Historians Versus Revisionism (n.d.), pp. 2ff.

[15] Cf. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, pp. 87-100. On the contrasting roles of religion vis-á-vis the State in ancient China and Japan, see Norman Jacobs, The Origin of Modern Capitalism and Eastern Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1958), pp. 161-94.

[16] De Jouvenel, On Power, p. 22:

The essential reason for obedience is that it has become a habit of the species. . . . Power is for us a fact of nature. From the earliest days of recorded history it has always presided over human destinies . . . the authorities which ruled [societies] in former times did not disappear without bequeathing to their successors their privilege nor without leaving in men's minds imprints which are cumulative in their effect. The succession of governments which, in the course of centuries, rule the same society may be looked on as one underlying government which takes on continuous accretions.

[17] On such uses of the religion of China, see Norman Jacobs, passim.

[18] H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 145:

All [government] can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

[19] Ibid., pp. 146-47.

[20] De Jouvenel, On Power, pp. 27ff.

[21] Charles L. Black. Jr., The People and the Court (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 35ff.

[22] Ibid., pp. 42-43.

[23] Ibid., p. 52:

The prime and most necessary function of the [Supreme] Court has been that of validation, not that of invalidation. What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. This is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life. And the Court, through its history, has acted as the legitimation of the government.

[24] To Black, this "solution," while paradoxical, is blithely self-evident:

the final power of the State . . . must stop where the law stops it. And who shall set the limit, and who shall enforce the stopping, against the mightiest power? Why, the State itself, of course, through its judges and its laws. Who controls the temperate? Who teaches the wise? (Ibid., pp. 32-33)

And:

Where the questions concern governmental power in a sovereign nation, it is not possible to select an umpire who is outside government. Every national government, so long as it is a government, must have the final say on its own power. (Ibid., pp. 48-49)

[25] Ibid., p. 49.

[26] This ascription of the miraculous to government is reminiscent of James Burnham's justification of government by mysticism and irrationality:

In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of cities were known to be gods or demigods. . . . Neither the source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms . . . why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why should a principle justify the rule of that man over me? . . . I accept the principle, well . . . because I do, because that is the way it is and has been.

James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Regnery, 1959), pp. 3-8. But what if one does not accept the principle? What will "the way" be then?

[27] Black, The People and the Court, p. 64.

[28] Ibid., p. 65.

[29] John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 25-27. Also cf. Murray N. Rothbard, "Conservatism and Freedom: A Libertarian Comment," Modern Age (Spring, 1961): 219.

[30] J. Allen Smith, The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), p. 88. Smith added:

it was obvious that where a provision of the Constitution was designed to limit the powers of a governmental organ, it could be effectively nullified if its interpretation and enforcement are left to the authorities as it designed to restrain. Clearly, common sense required that no organ of the government should be able to determine its own powers.

Clearly, common sense and "miracles" dictate very different views of government (p. 87).

[31] Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, pp. 20-21.

[32] In recent years, the unanimity principle has experienced a highly diluted revival, particularly in the writings of Professor James Buchanan. Injecting unanimity into the present situation, however, and applying it only to changes in the status quo and not to existing laws, can only result in another transformation of a limiting concept into a rubber stamp for the State. If the unanimity principle is to be applied only to changes in laws and edicts, the nature of the initial "point of origin" then makes all the difference. Cf. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), passim.

[33] Cf. Herbert Spencer, "The Right to Ignore the State," in Social Statics (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), pp. 229-39.

[34] De Jouvenel, On Power, p. 171.

[35] We have seen that essential to the State is support by the intellectuals, and this includes support against their two acute threats. Thus, on the role of American intellectuals in America's entry into World War I, see Randolph Bourne, "The War and the Intellectuals," in The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers (New York: S.A. Russell, 1956), pp. 205-22. As Bourne states, a common device of intellectuals in winning support for State actions, is to channel any discussion within the limits of basic State policy and to discourage any fundamental or total critique of this basic framework.

[36] As Mencken puts it in his inimitable fashion:

This gang ("the exploiters constituting the government") is well nigh immune to punishment. Its worst extortions, even when they are baldly for private profit, carry no certain penalties under our laws. Since the first days of the Republic, less than a few dozen of its members have been impeached, and only a few obscure understrappers have ever been put into prison. The number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions of the government is always ten times as great as the number of government officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain. (Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, pp. 147-48)

For a vivid and entertaining description of the lack of protection for the individual against incursion of his liberty by his "protectors," see H.L. Mencken, "The Nature of Liberty," in Prejudices: A Selection (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), pp. 138-43.

[37] This is to be distinguished from modern international law, with its stress on maximizing the extent of war through such concepts as "collective security."

[38] F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Appleton, Wis.: C.C. Nelson, 1953), p. 63. Similarly, Professor Nef writes of the War of Don Carlos waged in Italy between France, Spain, and Sardinia against Austria, in the eighteenth century:

at the siege of Milan by the allies and several weeks later at Parma . . . the rival armies met in a fierce battle outside the town. In neither place were the sympathies of the inhabitants seriously moved by one side or the other. Their only fear as that the troops of either army should get within the gates and pillage. The fear proved groundless. At Parma the citizens ran to the town walls to watch the battle in the open country beyond. (John U. Nef, War and Human Progress [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950], p. 158. Also cf. Hoffman Nickerson, Can We Limit War? [New York: Frederick A. Stoke, 1934])

[39] Nef, War and Human Progress, p. 162.

[40] Ibid., p. 161. On advocacy of trading with the enemy by leaders of the American Revolution, see Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 210-11.

[41] On the concepts of State power and social power, see Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy the State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1946). Also see Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harpers, 1943), and Frank Chodorov, The Rise and Fall of Society (New York: Devin-Adair, 1959).

[42] Amidst the flux of expansion or contraction, the State always makes sure that it seizes and retains certain crucial "command posts" of the economy and society. Among these command posts are a monopoly of violence, monopoly of the ultimate judicial power, the channels of communication and transportation (post office, roads, rivers, air routes), irrigated water in Oriental despotisms, and education-to mold the opinions of its future citizens. In the modern economy, money is the critical command post.

[43] This parasitic process of "catching up" has been almost openly proclaimed by Karl Marx, who conceded that socialism must be established through seizure of capital previously accumulated under capitalism.

[44] Certainly, one indispensable ingredient of such a solution must be the sundering of the alliance of intellectual and State, through the creation of centers of intellectual inquiry and education, which will be independent of State power. Christopher Dawson notes that the great intellectual movements of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were achieved by working outside of, and sometimes against, the entrenched universities. These academia of the new ideas were established by independent patrons. See Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961).

from BBC Online, 1998-Nov-3:

The Christmas truce

Stories tell of the British and German soldiers playing football together in No Man's Land on Christmas day - but is this just a legend? Historian Malcolm Brown separates fact from fantasy.

The Christmas truce of 1914 really happened. It is as much a part of the historical texture of World War I as the gas clouds of Ypres or the Battle of the Somme or the Armistice of 1918. Yet it has often been dismissed as though it were merely a myth. Or, assuming anything of the kind occurred, it has been seen as a minor incident, blown up out of all proportion, natural fodder for sentimentalists and pacifists of later generations.

But the truce did take place, and on some far greater scale than has been generally realised. Enemy really did meet enemy between the trenches. There was for a time, genuine peace in No Man's Land. Though Germans and British were the main participants, French and Belgians took part as well. Most of those involved agreed it was a remarkable way to spend Christmas. "Just you think," wrote one British soldier, "that while you were eating your turkey, etc, I was out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had been trying to kill a few hours before! It was astounding!"

"It was a day of peace in war," commented a German participant, "It is only a pity that it was not decisive peace."

So the Christmas Truce is no legend. It is not surprising, however, given the standard popular perception of World War I, that this supreme instance of "All Quiet on the Western Front" has come to have something of a legendary quality. People who would normally dismiss that far off conflict of their grandfathers in the century's teens as merely incomprehensible, find reassurance, even a kind of hope, in the Christmas truce.

This was not, however, a unique occurrence in the history of war. Though it surprised people at the time - and continues to do so today - it was a resurgence of a long established tradition.

Informal truces and small armistices have often taken place during prolonged periods of fighting and the military history of the last two centuries, in particular, abounds with incidents of friendship between enemies.

In the Peninsula War British and French Troops at times visited each others lines, drew water at the same wells and even sat around the same campfire sharing their rations and playing cards.

In the Crimean War British, French and Russians at quiet times also gathered around the same fire, smoking and drinking. In the American Civil War Yankees and Rebels traded tobacco, coffee and newspapers, fished peacefully on opposite sides of the same stream and even collected wild blackberries together. Similar stories are told of the Boer War, in which on one occasion, during a conference of commanders, the rank and file of both sides engaged in a friendly game of football.

Later wars too have their small crop of such stories. It is rare for a conflict at close quarters to continue very long without some generous gestures between enemies or an upsurge in the 'live and let live' spirit. So the Christmas truce of 1914 does not stand alone; on the other hand it is undoubtedly the greatest example of its kind.

There are certain misapprehensions regarding the Christmas truce. One widely held assumption is that only ordinary soldiers took part in it; that it was, as it were, essentially a protest of cannon-fodder, Private Tommy and Musketier Fritz throwing aside the assumptions of conventional nationalism and thumbing their noses at those in authority over them.

In fact, in many cases, NCOs and officers joined in with equal readiness, while others truces were initiated and the terms of armistice agreed at 'parleys' of officers between the trenches.

There is also some evidence that while some generals angrily opposed the truce, others tolerated it and indeed saw some advantage in allowing events to take their own course while never for a moment doubting that eventually the war would resume in full earnest.

One other misapprehension about the truce calls for rebuttal. There has grown up a belief, even among aficionados of World War I, that the Christmas truce was considered to be so disgraceful and event, one so against the prevailing mood of the time, that all knowledge of it was withheld from the public at home until the war was over.

In fact, the truce was fully publicised from the moment news of it reached home. Throughout January 1915 numerous local and national newspapers in Britain printed letter after letter from soldiers who took part; in addition they ran eye-catching headlines ("Extraordinary Unofficial Armistice", "British, Indians and Germans shake hands"), and even printed photographs of the Britons and Germans in No Man's Land. Germany also gave the event press publicity, though on a smaller scale and for a shorter period of time.

Publishing a year later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his history of 1914 called the Christmas truce "an amazing spectacle" and in a memorable description, saluted it as "one human episode amid all the atrocities which have stained the memory of the war".

The phrase sums up the attraction of the truce: it is the human dimension which means that this relatively obscure event in the fifth month of a 52-month war is still remembered and will continue to catch the imagination.

In a century in which our conception of war has changed fundamentally, from the cavalry charge and the flash of sabres to the Exocet, the cruise missile and the Trident submarine, the fact that in 1914 some thousands of the fighting men of the belligerent nations met and shook hands between their trenches strikes a powerful and appealing note. It is perhaps the best and most heartening Christmas story of modern times.

Adapted from the book Christmas Truce by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton

from The New American, 1998-Jul-20, by Steve Bonta:

Conspiracy Unmasked!

On a hot spring morning in 1831, a strange company was encamped just outside the village of Selohda, in northern India. Several large tents, a number of horses, and some bullock carts contained the provisions for an English officer, a blue-eyed, resolute gentleman in his early 40s, and his young French wife. Attending them were more than a dozen Indian soldiers, or nujeebs, who kept careful watch over a tall, well-built young Indian man with the bearing of nobility, who wore heavy ankle shackles. A small crowd of curious villagers was also gathering.

As the morning sun began to heat the dusty tropical air, mynahs and parakeets chattered in the mango trees growing around the camp. Insects busied themselves around the crimson flame-of-the-forest blossoms. From one of the tents came the sounds of breakfast being prepared.

Yet the attention of the English officer was distracted by none of these things. Instead he was quietly interrogating the handsome young prisoner in fluent Hindi. After a few moments of discussion, the prisoner pointed toward a patch of ground near where the horses were tethered. At a command from the Englishman, the nujeebs began digging in the ground near the horses.

Within a few minutes, they made a grisly discovery: a human skeleton with a few strips of tattered cloth clinging to otherwise bare bones. After a few more spadefuls of earth were tossed aside, a second skeleton was uncovered, lying beside the first. As the sun rose higher, the grim work continued, until five skeletons had been exhumed from the shallow grave.

The skeletons were, the young prisoner revealed, the remains of five minor local police officials who had been killed there seven years previously.

Nor was this all. At a signal from the prisoner, the nujeebs began digging at a new spot, near where several of the ropes of the Englishman's tent had been staked into the powdery soil. Here seven more skeletons were unearthed and laid out in the sun. These unfortunates, a pundit and six attendants, had been murdered there more than a dozen years before.

By this time, the lovely young wife of the Englishman in command had emerged from the tent where she had been preparing breakfast, drawn by the gasps and horrified murmurs of the onlookers. She gazed on the macabre scene without reaction, for this grim pageant had become for her all too familiar in recent months.

Now the tent itself was taken down, and the ground on which the Englishman and his wife had slept the night before was turned over. Before long, five more skeletons were exhumed, the remains of four Brahmins and a woman, who had met their fate at about the same time as the pundit and his attendants.

By this time, the temperature in the mango grove had reached 105° Fahrenheit, and the nujeebs were exhausted and dehydrated. Having done his best to establish the identities of the 17 murder victims, which he carefully recorded in his notebook, the English official ordered the nujeebs to rebury the skeletons and break camp. By midday the party had moved on to a similar grove a few miles down the road, where the gruesome labor resumed.

The above episode was typical of a remarkable and dramatic campaign, carried out in the 1820s and 1830s, to stamp out a terrifyingly ruthless and efficient secret society of murderers whose depredations had made roads in India unsafe for generations, yet whose very existence had gone unsuspected by most Indians and British alike for centuries. The story of their detection and eventual suppression by the British is a textbook case of the routing of an ancient, entrenched conspiratorial enemy, and an instructive example for those who would oppose conspiratorial forces at work today.

India at the turn of the 19th century was not much different from India in previous ages: a vast amalgam of castes, religions, races, tongues, and tribes, overlain by a constantly shifting checkerboard of principalities, feifdoms, enclaves, and territories controlled by foreign interests. The British in particular had been gradually expanding their colonial interests from trading ports originally established in the 17th century - the great cities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Like most outsiders coming to India, the British were baffled by the vastness and complexity of this strange country, coupled with the peculiar impenetrability for outsiders that the Hindu caste system and associated social and religious practices conferred. For the most part, India epitomized the exotic and mysterious East; those Europeans who lived there for any length of time generally preferred to accept the incomprehensibility of Indian society and remain aloof.

There were a few exceptions, however. Late in the 18th century, a brilliant young Englishman, Sir William Jones, was appointed judge in Calcutta. Trained in classical languages at Oxford as well as in the law, Jones became the first Western scholar to recognize the relationship of Sanskrit, the classical language of India, to Latin and Greek in Europe, and to suggest a common linguistic ancestor. As a result of this discovery, the attention of many European scholars was drawn to the vast literature in the Sanskrit language, and much of the recondite lore of the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other ancient Hindu writings became objects of study in the West. Yet a veil of secrecy and exclusion still hung over much of India. For example, the fact had passed almost unnoticed that, every year, for as long as anyone could remember, tens of thousands of travelers disappeared without a trace on highways and waterways throughout India.

Rumors of a secret society of murderers in India were not entirely a novelty, but given the impenetrability of Indian society, as well as the activities of large groups of highwaymen and bandits (known as Dacoits and Pindari), these rumors were not deemed worthy of official concern, and were dismissed by the British. Even when a British officer named John Maunsell vanished while en route to Agra in October 1812, no cry was raised. Yet this indifference was about to change, and the agent of this change was an earnest, sober-minded young English soldier named William Sleeman.

William Henry Sleeman was born in 1788 in Stratton, Cornwall. From a young age William wished to serve abroad in the Army. He had studied both Arabic and Hindustani for three years in England before reaching the minimum age for direct entry, and so was already quite proficient in two difficult Oriental languages when he arrived in Calcutta in October 1809. In the ensuing years, he learned several other Oriental languages, including Persian and Gurkha. He also dedicated himself to the task of mastering the complexities of the many sects and cults that made up the confusing patchwork of Hinduism. In a few years, Sleeman had achieved a unique perspective on India and her culture, a perspective he gained through disciplined scholarship and a strong affection for the Indian people.

Sleeman, it should be noted, evinced no tendency to "go native," despite his sincere love and respect for the Indians and their alien ways. He was noted, even as a young man, for his avoidance of the vices that typically beset British soldiers abroad: He drank very little, eventually abstaining completely, and had nothing to do with the women of easy virtue who abounded in British Calcutta. He was by all accounts an upright, principled, and dedicated soldier, qualities that would serve him well in the trials that lay ahead.

Even in his early years in India, Sleeman must have wondered at the peculiar practices of those Hindus who worshiped the goddess Kali, the dark consort of Shiva who is said to feed on the blood of mortals and to haunt the burning-grounds (or ghats) where Hindus are cremated. Her hideous image is to be seen in temples throughout India. She is typically represented as black (one of her epithets, Kali Ma, means "black mother"), many-armed, and garlanded with human skulls with a long red tongue protruding from a screaming mouth. In temples dedicated to Kali, human sacrifices were once carried out, though by Sleeman's time they had been discontinued in favor of goats. Worshipers invoked her with the words: "Terrific-faced Kali, holding a drawn sword and a noose and a club, wreathed with human skulls, lean, emaciated, and terrible, wide-mouthed, tongue dreadfully protruded, maddened, blood red-eyed, and filling the four quarters of the globe with hideous cries...."

Many devotees allowed themselves to be suspended by hooks inserted into the muscles of their backs, a procedure that is still practiced today. Indeed, the very name "Calcutta" is a shortened version of "Kali Ghat," meaning "burning-ground of Kali."

In association with his study of Hinduism, Sleeman began to hear rumors of a terrible secret society of Kali worshipers, old as India itself, who practiced ritual murder and the spoliation of travelers. Already in the 17th century, one Thévenot, a French traveler, had observed: "Though the road I have been speaking of from Delhi to Agra be tolerable, yet hath it many inconveniences ... one had best not to suffer any body to come near one on the road. The cunningest robbers in the world are in that country. They use a certain slip with a running noose, which they can cast with so much sleight about a man's neck, when they are within reach of him, that they never fail, so that they strangle him in a trice."

In 1816, an article appeared in the Madras Literary Gazette, authored by Dr. Robert C. Sherwood. Sherwood, like Sleeman, was well-versed in Hinduism, and had gotten wind of a mysterious society of assassins from a gang of suspects who had been arrested and then released by an unbelieving judge in Madras in 1815. Sherwood's article was the first major testimony confirming the existence of a cult which committed murder in the name of Kali, and it attracted Sleeman's immediate attention. Among other things, Sherwood wrote:

While Europeans have journeyed through the extensive territories subject to the Government of Fort St. George, with a degree of security nowhere surpassed, the path of the native traveller has been beset with perils little known or suspected, into which numbers annually falling, have mysteriously disappeared, the victims of villains as subtle, rapacious and cruel as any who are to be met with in the records of human depravity. The Phansigars, or stranglers, are thus designated from the Hindustani word Phansi a noose. In the more northern parts of India, these murderers are called Thugs, signifying deceivers: in the Tamul language, they are called Ari Tulucar, or Mussulman noosers: in Canarese, Tanti Calleru, implying thieves, who use a wire or cat-gut noose.... Skilled in the arts of deception, Phansigars enter into conversation and insinuate themselves, by obsequious attentions, into the confidence of travellers of all descriptions.... When the Phansigars determine ... to attack a traveller, they usually propose to him, under the specious plea of mutual safety or for the sake of society, to travel together ... and on arriving at a convenient place and a fit opportunity presenting ... one of the gang puts a rope or sash round the neck of the unfortunate persons, while others assist in depriving him of his life.

Thus an account of the Thugs, as they came to be known, and Thugee, their body of secret beliefs and practices, was first made available to outsiders. Perhaps not surprisingly, the account was all but ignored by British officialdom. Who could give credence to such extravagant rumors? And even if there was an element of truth to them, surely this was a matter for the Indians to resolve among themselves.

Sleeman, however, decided to dedicate his attention to the detection and eradication of Thugee, all obstacles notwithstanding. Before he could tackle the Thugs themselves, though, he faced a stone wall of official indifference, disbelief, and outright opposition. He resolved to alter his circumstances so as to have enough clout to make the system work in his favor. Accordingly, he applied for a transfer from the Army to the Civil Service, and was appointed in 1820 as junior assistant magistrate in the northern territories of Saugor and Maratha.

After two years, Sleeman was appointed magistrate in charge of the Narsinghpur district. At last, equipped with the authority of a magistrate, and backed by a force of more than a dozen thanadars, or Indian policemen, William Sleeman had the authority and the resources to enable him to pursue his long-anticipated campaign against the Thugs. As he rode from town to town within his district to hear cases, he gathered information on reports of bodies found in well shafts, ravines, and dried-up riverbeds, all possessing the same types of cuts on the neck and torso. For the most part, the corpses were quietly buried and grieving friends and relatives maintained frightened silence.

At first, natives were reluctant to give information, suspecting the existence of a dreadful secret evil that would silence any who tried to expose it. Years later, when Sleeman began to appreciate the true scope of Thugee, he found out that, even as he traveled about building his files and gathering information, the cunning killers were plying their ghastly trade literally within yards of his own residence in Narsinghpur. Emboldened by long immunity and a devilishly clever method of killing without leaving evidence, the Thugs doubtless assumed that the upstart foreigner would be easily thwarted.

Bit by bit, Sleeman began to assemble a detailed picture of Thugee and its practitioners. Thugee was primarily a hereditary system associated with Hindus and Muslims that transcended both religion and caste. As mentioned, it revolved around the fanatical worship of the goddess Kali. While not all Kali devotees were Thugs, Sleeman estimated that there were at least 5,000 Thugs in India. The cult was obviously ancient, and Sleeman suggested that a cryptic mention in Herodotus of a people (the Sagartians) in central Asia proficient in strangling with a cord might possibly refer to a source of Thugee more than two millenia earlier. The Thugs themselves believed that their activities were depicted in the eighth-century cave temple carvings at Ellora, but such carvings have not been found. It is established, however, that during the reign of Jalal-ud-din Khilji, the Sultan of Delhi, towards the end of the 13th century, around a thousand Thugs were arrested and deported from Delhi to Bengal. Early in the next century, a leading Thug named Nizam-ud-din assisted in the repulsion of invaders in Delhi. Evidently by this time Thugee was already a powerful, pervasive organization.

The Thug method of killing was strangulation, usually from behind the victim with a skillfully handled yellow silk cloth called a rumal. The name "Thug" came from the Hindi verb thaglana, "to deceive," and reflected the uncanny ability of Thugs to befriend their intended victims and to lure them into a state of complacency and vulnerability. As Sherwood had discovered, they usually did this by posing as traveling merchants in search of security in numbers. Since roads in India were perilous enough owing to bandits like the Pindari, most travelers were only too eager to accept offers of respectable-looking companies to travel together.

Once a group of Thugs had insinuated itself into a company of merchants, religious pilgrims, or even police officials, they would often travel with them for days, earning trust and friendship. Should their intended victims become suspicious of their intentions, and refuse to travel with them, the Thugs often had backup groups who would conveniently meet the company of travelers further on. One way or the other, once an individual had been marked for murder, seldom did he escape the murderous hands of the Thugs.

Thugs typically chose the spot for murder ahead of time, and used certain groves, called beles, repeatedly. When the location chosen for the killing was reached, the Thugs waited until a predetermined moment, when every Thug was conveniently positioned beside or behind his pre-appointed victim. A secret command, such as "Bring tobacco!" was uttered, and, with practiced efficiency, the Thugs sprang into action, casting their rumals around their victims' necks and garroting them, swiftly and silently, from behind. Where victims were strong enough to put up a struggle, three Thugs were typically employed, one to use the rumal, and the other two to throw the victim on the ground, kicking him in the genitalia to nullify resistance. Sometimes Thugs would assault a traveler riding on horseback, yanking him from the saddle with uncommon skill, and then dispatching him on the road. Whatever the individual circumstances of Thug activities, the result was nearly always the same: a group of unsuspecting travelers engaged one moment in pleasant, innocent conversation with charming fellow travelers, and dead by strangulation and a broken neck the next.

Immediately after the murders had been carried out, the Thugs robbed the bodies of their possessions and placed them in graves, which often had been dug in advance. They characteristically cut deep gashes in the bodies to hasten decomposition and thereby reduce the likelihood that jackals or other carrion-eaters would find and uncover the evidence. Then they carried out the tuponee, a sacrificial rite involving the consecration of a type of sugar and the blessing of the sacred pickax or kussee, a totemic object that all Thug gangs carried with them on their forays.

What possible motivation could drive such a horrific organization? Thug lore, as recounted by Sleeman, offered the following rationale:

Once on a time the world was infested with a monstrous demon named Rukt Bij-dana, who devoured mankind as fast as they were created. So gigantic was his stature, that the deepest pools of the ocean reached no higher than his waist. This horrid prodigy Kali cut in twain with her sword, but from every drop of blood that fell to the ground there sprang a new demon. For some reason she went on destroying them, till the hellish brood multiplied so fast that she waxed hot and weary with her endless task. She paused for a while, and, from the sweat brushed off one of her arms, she created two men, to whom she gave a rumal, or handkerchief, and commanded them to strangle the demons. When they had slain them all, they offered to return the rumal, but the goddess bade them keep it and transmit it to their posterity, with the injunction to destroy all men who were not of their kindred.

A tradition is current among Thugs, that about the period of the commencement of the Kali Yug [the 19th century], Kali co-operated with them so far as to relieve them of the trouble of interring the dead bodies, by devouring them herself. On one occasion, after destroying a traveller, the body, as usual, was left unburied; and a novice, unguardedly looking behind him, saw the naked goddess in the act of feasting upon it, half of it hanging out of her mouth. She, upon this, declared that she would no longer devour those whom the Thugs slaughtered, but she condescended to present them with one of her teeth for a pickaxe, a rib for a knife, and the hem of her lower garment for a noose, and ordered them, for the future, to cut and bury the bodies of whom they destroyed.

A more hideous mythology to justify the monstrous evil of Thugee can scarcely be imagined.

While he had learned a great deal about Thugee, Sleeman was for some time unable to make much progress in bringing the Thugs to justice. The Thugs, smugly secure in the belief that their dark benefactress would protect them, continued to exact a terrible toll on India. It is now estimated that a few thousand Thugs, a tiny minority by Indian standards, accounted for 30,000 to 40,000 deaths per year in India.

But in the late 1820s, two pivotal events changed the course of Sleeman's lonely crusade as well as his personal life. The first, in 1828, was the appointment of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck as governor-general of British India. Under Bentinck, proselytizing by Christian missionaries in India, long opposed by a colonial regime studiously committed to non-interference in cultural matters, was legalized. There followed an official prohibition on the practice of suttee - the self-immolation of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres - which had always been regarded as an abomination by the British in India. With Bentinck in office, Sleeman at last found a sympathetic ear for his plans for a concerted anti-Thug campaign.

The second significant event occurred in 1829, when, at the age of 41, Sleeman married Amélie de Fontenne, the daughter of a French nobleman whom he had met in Mauritius. Their marriage was by all accounts a devoted relationship. Amélie came to share her husband's zeal for eradicating Thugee, and accompanied him on many of his expeditions. Aside from the obvious dangers posed by the Thugs themselves, these journeys would have tried the mettle of any human being, let alone a young French woman accustomed to the comforts and sea breezes of Mauritius. No one who has not experienced India firsthand can fully imagine the snakes, leeches, mosquitoes, torrential rains, dust clouds, and, above all, the searing heat that afflict all who live on the Subcontinent. Over time such extremes bring disease, debilitation, demoralization, and death to foreigners from gentler climes. By the time he was in his 40s, Sleeman had already been in India 20 years, and had suffered from malaria and rheumatism. Yet despite all this, by 1830 the Sleemans were aggressively pursuing the Thugs, rounding them up in large groups and assembling mountains of new information on their practices, beliefs, and genealogy.

The plan Sleeman formulated was simple in concept. Backed by the authority of the colonial government, he sent forth his sepoys and nujeebs (both names for Indian soldiers) to arrest Thugs and transport them to a prison facility in Saugor for eventual trial. He used certain captured Thugs, termed "approvers," as informants to identify not only other Thugs, but also the locations of the bodies of murdered victims. Knowing that a death sentence was a likely alternative, more than a few leaders of Thug gangs were willing to turn informer on their partners in crime. In this way, what began as a trickle of arrests turned into a flood. Sleeman learned the names of entire families who had practiced Thugee for generations. His work expanded across India as Thug networks were arrested and imprisoned, from the steamy jungles of the south to the borders of the Himalaya in the north.

As he questioned his Thug approvers, Sleeman discovered the name of the man said to be the Prince of Thugee, one Feringeea, who lived in the independent state of Gwalior, to the northeast of Narsinghpur. Having determined that Feringeea must be apprehended, Sleeman sent an expedition to Gwalior. Feringeea, hearing that he was pursued, fled his home scant hours before Sleeman's men closed in. Frustrated, the sepoys arrested Feringeea's mother, wife, and child, whereupon the Prince of Thugs gave up the game and allowed himself to be captured.

Having taken one of the leading figures in the Thug hierarchy, Sleeman had at last turned the corner. Feringeea immediately offered to become an approver, and cooperated thoroughly with Sleeman's efforts. He was by all accounts an arresting figure: an aristocratic young man, tall, well-built, and charming. To prove his good faith, he directed Sleeman to the mass graves outside Selohda, mentioned at the beginning of this account. He was also, along with several other captured Thugs, astonishingly candid, and responded willingly to all of Sleeman's questions about Thugee. From Sleeman's interviews with Feringeea and other Thug leaders, documented in his copious personal papers, there emerged a remarkable, if shocking, picture of the dark, amoral existence of the Thugs.

The Thugs had developed a secret language, which they called Ramasee, enabling them to converse amongst themselves and discuss their plans even in the presence of outsiders. While some of the morphology, such as auxiliary verbs and infinitive endings, were clearly Hindi, many of the words were of obscure origin. For example, an adhoreea was someone who had escaped being murdered by the Thugs; a bhurtote was a Thug who was a strangler per se, as Thugs were not permitted to strangle until they had participated in many expeditions and had acquired the requisite skill with the rumal; dhurdalna meant "to strangle"; a tonkal was a party of people larger than a gang of Thugs could destroy; and thibana meant "to cause travelers to sit down on some pretense, so they could be murdered."

Thugee completely transcended both religion and caste, normally insurmountable barriers in Indian society. The following remarkable exchange, which took place between Sleeman and a Muslim Thug named Sahib Khan, is revealing in this connection:

Sleeman: You are a Musulman?

Khan: Yes, most of the Thugs of the south are Musulmans.

S: And you still marry; inherit; pray; eat and drink according to the Koran; and your paradise is to be the paradise promised by Mahommud?

K: Yes, all, all.

S: Has Bhowanee [Kali] been anywhere named in the Koran?

K: Nowhere.

S: Then has Bhowanee anything to do with your paradise?

K: Nothing.

S: She has no influence upon your future state?

K: None.

S: Does Mahommud, your prophet, anywhere sanction crimes like yours; the murder in cold blood of your fellow creatures for the sake of money?

K: No.

S: Does he not say that such crimes will be punished by God in the next world?

K: Yes.

S: Then do you never feel any dread of punishment hereafter?

K: Never; we never murder unless the omens are favourable; we consider favourable omens as the mandates of the deity.

S: What deity?

K: Bhowanee.

S: But Bhowanee, you say, has no influence upon the welfare or otherwise of your soul hereafter?

K: None, we believe; but she influences our fates in this world and what she orders in this world, we believe that God will not punish in the next.

The omens mentioned by the Muslim Thug are indicative of the world of meticulously observed rituals and superstitions in which the Thugs lived. Every Thug expedition was planned in careful consultation with omens and signs. The call of a crane betokened good fortune, while owl calls were inauspicious. A wolf crossing the road from left to right was a bad omen, but crossing from right to left was good. The bark of a jackal was also a very bad sign.

During the first week of an expedition, Thugs were not allowed to bathe, shave, clean their teeth, have sexual intercourse, wash their clothes, eat any animal food besides fish, or dress any food in ghee (clarified butter). Throughout the course of their travels, a company of Thugs kept a close eye on the signs and omens, certain of which were considered so severe that they could cause the Thugs to instantly leave an area or discontinue an expedition altogether.

While Thugee was in part a perverse expression of religious faith mingled with primitive superstition, Thugs also were undoubtedly motivated by the immense potential for enrichment. Thugs often targeted large caravans of merchants transporting gold, silver, and jewels from one commercial center to another. Because of the secretive and hereditary character of Thugee, most Thugs did not spend their ill-gotten gains lavishly, but hoarded immense treasures that grew larger with each succeeding generation. Most led double lives, their wives usually unaware of the purpose of their frequent long forays away from home. (All Thugs were men, although Sleeman did document a few cases of wives participating in Thug murders.) They typically held occupations and even political offices that earned them respect in their communities, and were as loyal and compassionate towards family and friends as only upstanding citizens could be.

This macabre masquerade had been perpetuated across generations, as Thug fathers inducted their sons, by small steps, into the mysteries of Thugee in their early teens. Typically sons were first taken on a Thug safari, without being told anything as to its purpose. On a subsequent outing, they were given to know that robbery was the objective. Next they were allowed to view a strangulation. Finally, they were allowed to participate in Thug activities in some limited degree, eventually acquiring the rank of bhurtote, when they themselves became stranglers.

Not all Thugs were born into the brotherhood, however. Ample provision was made in the code of Thugee for the recruitment and induction of outsiders. This was especially the case in areas where the local political leadership was sympathetic to Thugs' activities.

Perhaps the most extraordinary trait shown by the Thugs captured by Sleeman was the rank callousness they displayed as they candidly discussed the details of their appalling crimes and then defended their conduct with the most tortured reasoning imaginable. One Thug named Buhram gave this account of the fruits of 40 years of Thugee as Sleeman questioned him:

"Nine hundred and thirty-one murders? Surely you can never have been guilty of such a number?"

"Sahib," replied this courtly Thug, "there were many more, but I was so intrigued in luring them to destruction that I ceased counting when certain of my thousand victims."

"Do you never feel remorse for murdering in cold blood, and after the pretence of friendship, those whom you have beguiled into a false sense of security?"

"Certainly not! Are you yourself not a shikari (big-game hunter) and do you not enjoy the thrill of stalking, pitting your cunning against that of an animal, and are you not pleased at seeing it dead at your feet? So with the Thug, who regards the stalking of men as a higher form of sport.

"For you, sahib, have but the instincts of the wild beasts to overcome, whereas the Thug has to subdue the suspicions and fears of intelligent men and women, often heavily armed and guarded, knowing that the roads are dangerous. In other words, game for our hunting is defended from all points save those of flattery and cunning.

"Can you not imagine the pleasure of overcoming such protection during days of travel in their company, the joy of seeing suspicion change to friendship, until that wonderful moment when the ruhmal completes the shikar [hunt] - this soft ruhmal, which has ended the life of hundreds. Remorse, sahib? Never! Joy and elation, often!"

Judge Curwen Smith, who oversaw hundreds of Thug trials at Saugor, reported in a letter to Lord William Bentinck an almost overwhelming revulsion: "In all my experience in the judicial line for upwards of twenty years I have never heard of such atrocities or presided over such trials, such cold-blooded murder, such heart-rending scenes of distress and misery, such base ingratitude, such total abandonment of every principle which binds man to man, which softens the heart and elevates mankind above the brute creation."

A major impediment to Sleeman's efforts was the sympathy and outright protection that Thugs often enjoyed from local political figures, especially in territories not under British jurisdiction. Many nabobs saw in the Thugs a way to acquire spoils indirectly, and shielded them from arrest and persecution in return for ample remuneration. In the historical climate of extreme corruption that plagues India even to this day, many Thug bands had apparently enjoyed alliances with political powers for many generations. On several occasions, when confronted with outright defiance from local officials at his request to surrender known Thugs, Sleeman resorted to direct and forceful response. In June 1831, the Raja of Jhansi, who occupied a well-fortified castle on a hilltop defended by two cannons and at least a thousand men, refused to surrender to Sleeman Thugs. In response, Sleeman called on the resources of the Army, and the castle was attacked with artillery and infantry. In the smoke and confusion, the Thugs managed to slip away, but this erstwhile Thug sanctuary was leveled.

More curious still were the shadowy ties that existed between the Thug fraternity and certain prominent members of the Indian banking community. One particularly wealthy and influential banker, Dhunraj Seth, was relieved of a large shipment of gold and silver by Thug marauders. Through his own agents, he quickly discovered the identity of the Thugs responsible, and recovered much of his stolen wealth with the help of Indian authorities. However, Sleeman discovered that this man actually had close ties to the Thugs himself, and was attempting to become (or had succeeded in becoming) a major financial backer of the Thugs. Sleeman wrote:

It is essentially necessary for the success of this or any other plan for the suppression of Thugee that we should prevent Dhunraj Seth, the great banker of Omrautee, or any of his partners or numerous agents from having communication with the Thugs seized; or any attempts to indemnify themselves, to profit by their murders, to effect their release by bribery, corruption, intrigue or solicitation from all the native chiefs in whose dominions they have found them imprisoned; and to send them again upon the roads with advances of money or subsistence till fresh murders have brought them fresh treasure for division.

Had their attempts not been providentially checked by our operations I declare before God that I believe that this House would have become the great capitalists and patrons of murder from Lahore to Cape Comorin; and that the price of blood would have flowed into their coffers from every road throughout this enormous empire.

Comments George Bruce, a modern authority on Thugee: "It is tempting to wonder to what extent the Thug secret societies were dependent on a central banking source for their working funds. Then, as now, bankers worked in concert. It is possible therefore that Dhunraj Seth sought to get a bigger share of Thug profits." Fortunately, Seth's major agent, Bearee Lal, was arrested and imprisoned for collaborating with the Thugs.

Throughout the 1830s, hundreds of Thugs were imprisoned, dozens of gangs broken up, and the roads of India were gradually becoming safe for travelers. Sleeman's method of using Thug approvers yielded spectacular results. By 1838, Sleeman had captured and tried a total of 3,266 Thugs, while several hundred more were in prison awaiting trial. Many had been executed, while many more were serving life sentences. By no means had all Thugs been brought to justice. Yet Sleeman had effectively broken the back of Thugee by aggressively pursuing the leadership and developing such a successful system of getting Thugs to finger other Thugs that those who avoided capture were completely demoralized. The rigid, fatalistic system of idolatry and superstition that had so sustained them over the centuries now turned to their disadvantage, as droves of Thugs became convinced that Kali no longer approved of their devotion, and surrendered in many cases without a struggle.

But the "river Thugs" posed a much greater challenge. These particularly violent and ruthless Thugs, who plied their dark trade on the Ganges River among the riverboat passengers, were probably the direct descendants of the Thugs deported from Delhi by Sultan Jalal ud-din Khilji in the 12th century. Unlike their land-bound brethren, they typically strangled from the front and mutilated the sexual organs of their victims before throwing their bodies into the river. Not only was the evidence of their crimes usually washed away, but river Thugs were more reluctant to betray one another. They were much more scrupulous in observing proscriptions in the Thugee code of behavior, such as the prohibition on the murder of women. Their devotion to Kali and to Thugee was absolute and unshakable.

In spite of these difficulties, however, Sleeman and his agents eventually cracked the river Thug network, bringing to an end the last redoubt of the Thug conspiracy. During the course of 1840 and 1841, a series of letters from magistrates across India revealed that, for the first time anyone could remember, no bodies of strangled travelers had been found in any of their districts. Thugee as an active force had become extinct.

Throughout the 1840s Sleeman worked on the suppression of various gangs of Dacoits, though with less successful results. After four decades in India devoted to stamping out an ancient evil against seemingly impossible odds, Sleeman must have begun to long for the cool sea breezes and the quiet cottages and gardens of his long-ago boyhood home in Cornwall. Finally, in 1856, he and his wife Amélie set sail for England, where Sleeman doubtless anticipated a well-deserved retirement. But it was not to be. After nine days at sea, Sleeman died of heart failure and was buried at sea off the coast of Ceylon.

William Sleeman's life was an odyssey of tremendous sacrifice and determination, sustained by sound scholarship, an irreproachable character, and a love for the people he served. More importantly for today, his life and methods provide instructive examples for modern patriots who would fight the conspiratorial evils that threaten us.

The history of secret societies and conspiratorial organizations seldom offers much cause for optimism as to the likelihood of their exposure and defeat. Their existence and influence are generally marginalized or denied outright by "responsible" scholarship. Yet in Thugee there is solid documentation of an immensely powerful and widespread secret society that lasted for at least 600 years, with possible evidence for much greater antiquity. This in itself is quite significant, inasmuch as the Western view of conspiratorial organizations, when their existence is acknowledged at all, is that they are typically of brief duration and negligible influence.

Moreover, on those rare occasions when conspiracies and combinations have been exposed, they have all too often succeeded in merely going underground, metamorphosing and emerging anew after a "decent" interval, to resume their subversive, murderous activities. This apparently was the case with the Cathars, the Templars, the Bavarian Illuminati, and, of course, with the American communists and their sponsors following the McCarthy era.

Yet the history of the successful British detection and suppression of the Thugs is a significant exception to a generally disappointing record. It is in fact, as has been demonstrated, largely the tale of a single courageous, principled man, who literally gave his life to exposing and wiping out this extraordinarily successful secret society, whose very existence was unknown to the British for the first two centuries of their commercial and colonial relationship with India.

Sleeman's example illustrates the proper way to fight a conspiracy. First, gather evidence to educate the people, especially those wielding legal and political authority, and so expose it. Then, enlist the aid of good men and women to uproot and destroy the conspiratorial organization. It is doubtful that Sleeman could have achieved his aims without the support of his wife Amélie, Governor-General Bentinck, and, most especially, the valiant sepoys and nujeebs in his employ, whose courage Sleeman frequently praised.

The methods Sleeman used sometimes caused him misgivings, since they relied on granting leniency to hardened killers in order to expose the Thug network. Sleeman struggled often with the inadequacy of human justice in this regard. Yet human justice frequently falls short of the mark. In a struggle against a combined enemy, the most important priority is to expose and capture the leadership in order to disrupt the organizational structure and sow demoralization in the ranks of its membership.

Sleeman's example also teaches us the value of character in such a struggle. In addition to the evidences of good character previously mentioned, he was a religious man, though, excepting his righteous indignation at Thugee abominations, he was unusually tolerant of native customs and beliefs. We suppose that his extraordinary perseverance in the face of great adversity and personal danger was a direct outgrowth of his upright, moral, and religious disposition.

We, therefore, must also strive to be men and women of character and dedication as we confront a modern conspiracy that has assumed far greater scope and power than the Thugs of long ago. We must seek to better educate ourselves, to arm ourselves with the truth about the enemy that confronts us. Above all, we must be willing to persevere and endure ridicule and harassment, and to make whatever sacrifices necessary to bring the Insiders outside and expose their secret crimes and devious designs.

from NewsWithViews.com, 2004-Mar-16, by Dennis L. Cuddy:

THE POWER ELITE EXPOSED

There is… little doubt that the American power elite has… planned and plotted….. The power elite is not altogether 'surfaced.' …With the wide secrecy covering their operations and decisions, the power elite can mark their intentions, operations and further consolidation…. New men come into it [the power elite] and assume its existence without question.
--from The Power Elite (1956) by Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills

The nation's immediate problem is that while the common man fights America's wars, the intellectual elite sets its agenda. Today, whether the West lives or dies is in the hands of its new power elite: those who set the terms of public debate, who manipulate the symbols, who decide whether nations or leaders will be depicted on 100 million television sets as 'good' or 'bad.' This power elite sets the limits of the possible for Presidents and Congress. It molds the impressions that move the nation, or that mire it.
--from The Real War (1980) by President Richard Nixon

At the national level, this conditioning of the public might be brought about via certain crises, such as a terrorist attack…. For the sake of peace and security, people may be willing to give up certain of their freedoms to some extent.
--from The Globalists: The Power Elite Exposed (published July 2001, two months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) by Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.

Popular national radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh repeatedly refers to anyone who believes in a one-world government conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as a "kook." However, on his February 7, 1995 program, he remarked: "You see, if you amount to anything in Washington these days, it is because you have been plucked or handpicked from an Ivy League school – Harvard, Yale, Kennedy School of Government – you've shown an aptitude to be a good Ivy League type, and so you're plucked so to speak, and you are assigned success. You are assigned a certain role in government somewhere, and then your success is monitored and tracked, and you go where the pluckers and the handpickers can put you."

While there are conspiracies going on in the world today, the pursuit of world government now is no longer conspiratorial in the sense of being hidden or secret. Rather, it's what socialist author H.G. Wells called "The Open Conspiracy," as prominent people such as Bill Clinton have openly written in support of world government. It will probably be a World Socialist Government, synthesizing western capitalism and eastern communism. In fact, Joseph Stalin in a speech at Sverdlov University in April 1924 pronounced that "the amalgamation and collaboration of nations within a single world system of economy… constitutes the material basis for the victory of socialism." And regarding what world government will ultimately mean, it will be authoritarian and repressive, for as Lord Acton wrote: "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

In 1891, gold and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes formed a secret society, the Society of the Elect, to "absorb the wealth of the world" and "to take the government of the whole world," according to Rhodes. According to Prof. Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton's mentor at Georgetown University, in The Anglo-American Establishment, Rhodes' conspiratorial secret society lasted almost 60 years. By that time, enough members of the society and Rhodes scholars had penetrated the areas of politics, economics, journalism and education, so that the society was simply replaced by a network of power elite, who would openly pursue world government.

According to Quigley, "The [Rhodes] scholarships were merely a façade to conceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which members of the secret society could carry out Rhodes' purpose." And in case anyone doubts the credibility of Prof. Quigley regarding this matter, The Washington Post article (March 23, 1975) about him and his information obtained from the power elite's "secret records" was titled, "The Professor Who Knew Too Much."

Cecil Rhodes' secret society was comprised of a small "Circle of Initiates" and a larger semi-secret "Association of Helpers" which formed Round Table Groups. Members of these groups along with members of the Fabian (Socialist) Society as well as "the Inquiry" (a group formed by President Woodrow Wilson's chief advisor, Col. Edward M. House) formed the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Great Britain, and its American branch, the CFR. Both Prof. Quigley in Tragedy and Hope and CFR member Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in A Thousand Days have referred to the CFR as a "front" for the power elite. And in Men and Powers, former West Germany chancellor Helmut Schmidt referred to the CFR as "the foreign policy elite," which prepared people for "top-level missions" in government and "other centers of international policy" and "had very silent but effective ways of seeing to its own succession."

Members of Rhodes' secret society networked with Fabian Socialists, who established the London School of Economics in 1895. One early Fabian, H.G. Wells, in New Worlds for Old explained what he called "a plot," whereby heads of state would come and go, but bureaucrats trained at the London School of Economics, for example, would remain in government making rules and regulations furthering the goals of the Fabian Socialists. Wells broke with the Fabians, not in terms of goals, but only in believing they should be open about them, as he explained the coming synthesis of western capitalism and eastern communism into a world socialist government. In this regard, he authored The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution (1928) and The New World Order (1939), in which he said sovereign states (nations) would end and "countless people… will hate the new world order… and will die protesting against it."

The power elite understood that it would be difficult to get the people of the world to accept a world government all at once, and so a gradualistic approach was suggested. Association of Helpers member and Canadian Rhodes scholar P.E. Corbett in Post-War Worlds (1942) wrote: "A world association binding together and coordinating regional groupings of states may evolve toward one universal federal government…. World government is the ultimate aim, but there is more chance of attaining it by gradual development." More recently, at Mikhail Gorbachev's first State of the World Forum in 1995, Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor) announced that we "cannot leap into world government through one quick step, but rather via progressive regionalization."

During the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the trend toward socialism was obvious, but even after World War II it continued, as U.S. Rep. Carroll Reece on April 6, 1956 delivered a speech saying, "We approach closer and closer to socialism," and "The foundation-financed cartel promotes the idea of government by an elite." One of the elite was Rhodes scholar Walt Rostow who, in The United States in the World Arena (1960), proposed "an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined." He became Deputy National Security Advisor for President John F. Kennedy, whose Secretary of State was Rhodes scholar Dean Rusk, who in September 1961 issued "Freedom From War: The U.S. Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World."

The same year "Freedom From War" was issued, another Rhodes scholar, Richard Gardner, became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and three years later, while still in that position, authored In Pursuit of World Order. The Foreword to this book was written by Rhodes scholar Harlan Cleveland, who has been a CFR member, Ambassador to NATO, Director of International Affairs at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and Chairman of the U.S. Weather Modification Advisory Board. Cleveland's books include The Third Try at World Order, Birth of a New World, and The Global Commons: Policy for the Planet.

How would "World Order" be pursued? In the April 1974 edition of the CFR's Foreign Affairs, Richard Gardner wrote in "The Hard Road to World Order," that it would involve "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece." He believed that approach would "accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault," and he further explained how GATT could be involved in the process. Gardner would eventually become an advisor on the United Nations to CFR member Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, after which he would become U.S. Ambassador to Spain, from which would come Marxist Javier Solana as the head of NATO with the support of the Clinton administration.

Bill Clinton had become a Rhodes scholar in the late 1960s with support from Prof. Quigley and Rhodes scholar U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright, who had authored Old Myths and New Realities (1964), announcing: "Indeed, the concept of national sovereignty has become in our time a principle of international anarchy…. The sovereign nation can no longer serve as the ultimate unit of personal loyalty and responsibility."

During then Governor Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, his Rhodes scholar roommate at Oxford University, CFR director Strobe Talbott, wrote in Time (July 20, 1992) that "perhaps national sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all…. But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government." For that article, Talbott would receive the World Federalist Association's "Norman Cousins Global Governance Award," and on June 22, 1993, President Clinton would send a congratulatory letter to the WFA regarding the award, saying that previous WFA president Norman Cousins had worked for world peace "and world government." President Clinton ended the letter by wishing the WFA "future success." The WFA's objective is world federal government, and in 1994 it published The Genius of Federation: Why World Federation Is the Answer to Global Problems, in which it strategized: "Let the U.N. establish new agencies such as the International Criminal Court…. National sovereignty would be gradually eroded until it is no longer an issue. Eventually a world federation can be formally adopted with little resistance." In November 2003, the WFA merged with the Campaign for United Nations Reform to form a new organization called Citizens for Global Solutions with the motto "Building a World Community Under Law."

During his presidency, Bill Clinton would also develop a close relationship with British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a vice-president of Socialist International), whose "The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century" calling for "ethical socialism" was published in September 1998 by the Fabian (Socialist) Society. And in The Washington Post (April 7, 1999), Rhodes scholar E.J. Dionne, Jr. wrote "A World Safe for Socialism," describing how the Democratic Leadership Council "found itself playing host… to four Western European leaders whose parties have socialist and social democratic roots…. All subscribe to versions of the 'Third Way' approach to politics that Blair and Clinton have been marketing."

When Bill Clinton was first campaigning for the presidency, he took a "tough" stand concerning policy toward Communist China. However, over the years of his presidency, his policies toward that nation took a dramatically more friendly shift. On ABC's "This Week" (March 15, 1997), Rhodes scholar and former Clinton administration communications director George Stephanopoulos (CFR member) revealed: "There were a lot of reasons the president changed his policy on China…. It had little to do with [Chinese] contributions." And when Cokie Roberts on the same program, said, "It had more to do with American money," Stephanopoulos replied: "Council on Foreign Relations, Lehman Brothers, Goldman-Sachs, absolutely." Quite a few Rhodes scholars have occupied high-level positions with Goldman-Sachs over the years.

At this point, someone might say that they understand that Cecil Rhodes had a secret society to take over the world, and that Rhodes scholars like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, James Woolsey and others played important roles in the Clinton Administration. But, they might say, "That's all over, isn't it, now that Clinton has left office?"

It's important to remember, though, in this regard what Prof. Quigley said in Tragedy and Hope. He noted that William C. Whitney and others of wealth in the late 19th century developed a plan whereby they would control both major political parties through financial contributions, and then have those parties alternate power so that the public would think it had a choice. Prof. Quigley said that Whitney's plan lasted about 16 years, and after that, the "Eastern Establishment" (power elite) moved the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates toward the political center, "assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes." Prof. Quigley also said, "the process was concealed, as much as possible," and Quigley himself believed "the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."

William C. Whitney and his son were members of Yale University’s secret society Skull & Bones. And while Rhodes scholars were penetrating the areas of education, economics, journalism and politics, Skull & Bones member and Fabian Socialist ally Daniel Coit Gilman brought G. Stanley Hall to Johns Hopkins University, where he mentored Fabian Socialist ally John Dewey, the "father of progressive education," who said in Individualism, Old and New that "we are in for some kind of socialism."

In economics, Skull & Bones member Thomas Daniels was Chairman of the Board of Archer-Daniels-Midland transnational corporation, and Fabian Socialist John Maynard Keynes was promoting his debt-laden "Keynesian economics," which President Richard Nixon (CFR member) in a January 4, 1971 interview with Rhodes scholar Howard K. Smith said he had now adopted. On September 30, 2001 on "Fox News Sunday," Skull & Bones member President George W. Bush's chief-of-staff Andrew Card also said he believed a combination of supply-side and Keynesian economics works best.

In journalism, just as Rhodes scholars like Erwin Canham (president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors) and newsmen Howard K. Smith and Charles Collingwood along with Fabian (Socialist) Society members like Walter Lippmann (member of "the Inquiry" and CFR founding member) became prominent, Skull & Bones members Richard Ely Danielson became publisher of Atlantic Monthly, Russell Wheeler Davenport became editor of Fortune, William F. Buckley, Jr. became publisher of National Review, and Henry Luce became the founder of Time. Luce biographer Robert Herzstein wrote: "Early on, young Harry [Henry Luce] learned that a powerful circle of contacts and friends could move the world."

In politics, Skull & Bones member William Howard Taft in 1912 lost his presidential re-election bid in a three-way race similar to that of 1992 when Skull & Bones member George H.W. Bush lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton. In 1912, Taft lost to Gov. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat whose chief advisor Col. Edward M. House had promoted in Philip Dru: Administrator "socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx." And in 1992, President George H.W. Bush lost to Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton, who soon thereafter introduced a health care plan about which Milton Friedman on C-Span (Nov. 20, 1994) said: "You can’t think of a more Socialist program than the health care program that he [Bill Clinton] tried to get us to adopt."

Relevant to Prof. Quigley's reference to William C. Whitney’s plan for an alternation of power and the power elite’s promotion of Democrat and Republican presidential candidates whose foreign policy views are similarly globalist, Skull & Bones member George W. Bush then succeeded Bill Clinton as president, but foreign policy remained basically the same, which is what the power elite want. George W. Bush, his father, and Bill Clinton all supported such things as NAFTA, GATT, the World Trade Organization, U.N. peacekeeping operations, and Most Favored Nation trading status for Communist China. And like his father and Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush (whose website for his presidential campaign of 2000 was with Illuminati Online) has appointed notable CFR members to high-level positions in his administration. They include Colin Powell, Christine Todd Whitman, Elaine Chao, Condoleezza Rice and Robert Zoellick. Vice-President Dick Cheney is also a CFR member, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a former CFR member.

In the presidential campaign of 2004, among the leading Democratic challengers to President Bush were General Wesley Clark (Rhodes scholar from Little Rock, Arkansas) and U.S. Senator John Edwards, whose primary domestic policy advisor was Bruce Reed (Rhodes scholar who was President Clinton’s Domestic Policy Council deputy assistant). Though each of these candidates won a state's primary, U.S. Senator John Kerry has won far more primary states and is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. Like President George W. Bush, Sen. Kerry is also a member of Skull & Bones, so whether the Democratic or Republican nominee wins the election in November 2004, a member of Skull & Bones will be President. And like President Bush, Sen. Kerry has also supported NAFTA, GATT, etc., which are vitally important to the power elite.

At this point, someone might argue that neither President George H.W. Bush nor his son, President George W. Bush, promotes socialism per se, and that is correct. But it should be remembered that what is at work is a "process," and when President George H.W. Bush gave us national education goals and his son's federal education budget is the largest ever, including an element of "accountability" to the federal Department of Education, that cannot be considered a movement away from socialism. Similarly, when President George H.W. Bush and his son both show some deference to the U.N., which is overwhelmingly dominated by socialist nations, that cannot be considered a movement away from a world socialist government. Is there really any substantial difference between President George H.W. Bush saying the Gulf War against Iraq was conducted under the authority of a U.N. resolution, and Bill Clinton saying on October 19, 1993 regarding Somalia that his administration is engaging in a political process "to see how we can… do all the things the United Nations ordered [us] to do"? And in case one doesn't believe the U.N. is pursuing world government status, what else can one call it when the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal claims the right to indict even an elected head of state of a sovereign nation and pursue him anywhere in the world?

Concerning the United Nations, one can find examples of both Rhodes scholar and Skull & Bones involvement. At the suggestion of President Clinton, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali made Rhodes scholar James Gustave Speth head of the U.N. Development Program. This was after Vice-President Bush in 1986 had recommended Skull & Bones member William Henry Draper III for the same position. Incidentally, Draper in 1977 had contributed $93,000 to Skull & Bones member George W. Bush's first company, Arbusto Energy, of which Salem bin Laden (Osama bin Laden's brother) was also a founder. Regarding other Skull & Bones members around George H.W. Bush (whose brother, Jonathan, is a member), Christopher Buckley (William F. Buckley, Jr.'s son) is a member of this Yale University secret society and was a speechwriter for Vice-President Bush. And member Bruce S. Gelb (CFR member) was director of the U.S. Information Agency and later Ambassador to Belgium after Vice-President Bush became President. And regarding President George W. Bush, he appointed a number of fellow Skull & Bones members including Edward McNally (General Counsel to the Office of Homeland Security), William Howard Taft IV (legal counsel to Secretary of State Colin Powell), and William Henry Donaldson (Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission).

In the U.S. Government, there has also been matching Rhodes scholar and Skull & Bones involvement. In the executive branch, at the same time Rhodes scholar Strobe Talbott was becoming number two at the State Department, President Clinton had appointed Skull & Bones member Winston Lord (former CFR president) as an Assistant Secretary of State. And just as President John F. Kennedy had a number of Rhodes scholars at high levels in his administration, Skull & Bones members McGeorge Bundy and brother William Bundy occupied high-level positions then as well. William Bundy also worked for the CIA as have other Skull & Bones members such as William F. Buckley, Jr., his brother James Buckley, William Sloane Coffin, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Bissell, F. Trubee Davison, Amory Howe Bradford (officer of The New York Times from the mid-1940s until 1963), Richard Drain, Howard Weaver, and Hugh Cunningham (also a Rhodes scholar). Skull & Bones member George H.W. Bush actually headed the CIA as have Rhodes scholars Stansfield Turner and James Woolsey.

Regarding the military, Skull & Bones member Henry Stimson (who initiated George H.W. Bush into the same secret society) was Secretary of War in the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt, and President Clinton appointed Rhodes scholar Gen. Wesley Clark as head of NATO forces. President Clinton also appointed Rhodes scholar Richard Danzig as Secretary of the Navy and Rhodes scholar Admiral Dennis C. Blair as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command.

In the legislative branch, a number of Rhodes scholars and Skull & Bones members have been in Congress, and former U.S. Senator David Boren (CFR member) is both a Rhodes scholar and Skull & Bones member, who on August 26, 1992 wrote an article in The New York Times advocating a rapid deployment force for the U.N. to facilitate "the new world order." During the Clinton presidency, Sen. Boren as a Rhodes scholar persuaded President Clinton to make George Tenet head of the CIA, and then Sen. Boren as a Skull & Bones member persuaded fellow Bonesman President George W. Bush to keep Tenet in that important position.

In the judicial branch, the U.S. Supreme Court has included Skull & Bones members Potter Stewart and William Howard Taft (Chief Justice), and Rhodes scholars John Harlan, David Souter, and Byron White. One of Justice White's law clerks was Rhodes scholar David Kendall, who was also President Clinton's attorney during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Outside of government, of course, Rhodes scholars and Skull & Bones members have also been involved in important areas of American life, such as finance. Earlier it was mentioned how quite a few Rhodes scholars have worked for Goldman-Sachs over the years, and Skull & Bones members Averell Harriman, his brother E. Roland Harriman, and Prescott Sheldon Bush (George H.W. Bush's father) were partners in Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co.

These individuals have formed a network of power over the years, and although not every Rhodes scholar and Skull & Bones member has been plotting to take over the world, they are, for the most part, an elite whose globalist goals must be resisted by Americans who oppose any diminution of our Constitutional freedoms or our national sovereignty.

How might this diminution occur? At the top of page 303 of my book, The Globalists: The Power Elite Exposed, published in July 2001, I state: "At the national level, this conditioning of the public might be brought about via certain crises, such as a terrorist attack…. For the sake of peace and security, people may be willing to give up certain of their freedoms to some extent." Then on September 11, terrorists attacked the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., and the World Trade Center in New York City, and a few hours later ABC News/Washington Post released poll results showing two-thirds "say they would sacrifice some personal liberties in support of anti-terrorism efforts." Does this mean the power elite plotted the attacks on September 11? After all, didn't the public affairs website indiareacts.com report on June 26 that the U.S. and Russia plan "'limited military action' against the Taliban if the contemplated tough new economic sanctions don't bend Afghanistan's fundamentalist regime"? And didn't the PBS program "Jihad in America" in 1994 show radical Muslims speaking in the U.S. over a decade ago and saying they would attack our airplanes and go after our high buildings? And in the same year of 1994, didn't Islamic terrorists hijack a plane in Algiers, intending to fly the passenger aircraft full of fuel into a tall prominent structure, the Eiffel Tower, exploding the plane over Paris?

Closer to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, didn’t AirlineBiz.com on June 23, 2001 carry a report by a Muslim who had just interviewed Osama bin Laden and concluded that it was a race to see whether the U.S. would attack bin Laden first or he would attack the U.S. first? Shortly after this report, didn't the Northwest Airlines flight attendants' website carry a "Backgrounder" by Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz referring to Project Bojinka with hijacked airliners flying into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and other buildings? Then on September 10, 2001, didn't some top Pentagon officials suddenly cancel their travel plans for the next morning apparently because of security concerns, according to two reports by Newsweek? And on the evening of September 10, 2001, eight hours before the terrorist attacks of September 11, didn't San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's security people at the airport there call him before his flight to New York City the morning of September 11 and advise him that he and all Americans should be cautious about their air travel (see The San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, page A17)? How could our leaders following the September 11 terrorist attacks here say that no one could have imagined such a thing would occur? I filed a Freedom of Information request regarding any warnings, alerts, or emergency rulings by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) or other government agencies pertaining to transportation between May 2001 and September 15 of that year. The Department of Homeland Security replied they had found 12 relevant Information Circulars, but they would not let me see them.

Wasn't Marcus Mabry's Newsweek Web Exclusive of September 15, 2001, about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath titled, "Welcome to the New World Order"? And didn't Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien say on September 29, 2001, that "there will probably be a new order in the world that will probably be better than we have now"?

No, the power elite actually didn't plot the attacks of September 11. They didn’t have to. Remember that Rhodes' conspiracy ended as such around 1960 because enough like-minded globalists were in key positions in politics, economics, education and journalism, and his conspiracy was no longer necessary (being replaced by a global network of power elite pursuing world government). When a student several years ago went on a shooting rampage, the press rarely reported that he was stopped by a teacher with a gun, because the press is overwhelmingly for gun control. The power elite did not have to call editors of the nation’s newspapers and tell them what to say.

Similarly, the power elite didn't call up terrorists and tell them to fly into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. However, if I could forecast terrorist attacks, so can the power elite.

Rather, there is a dialectic at work here. You may recall that under at State Department contract, CFR member Lincoln Bloomfield in 1962 wrote: "A world effectively controlled by the United Nations is one in which 'world government' would come about through the establishment of supranational institutions, characterized by… some ability to employ physical force…. [But] if the communist dynamic was greatly abated, the West might lose whatever incentive it has for world government." Interestingly, Bloomfield also wrote that the world government could come about by means of "a grave crisis or war to bring about a sudden transformation in national attitudes sufficient for the purpose…. The order we examine may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks."

Relevant to today, it is the reaction (public willingness to give up some Constitutional freedoms) to the action (terrorist attack wherever and whenever and however it occurs) that is important to the power elite. Thus, they don't have to cause the action, but only anticipate that it will occur sometime, and emphasize the public reaction to it to further their goals. And in case anyone doesn't believe the power elite wants a diminution of our Constitutional freedoms and our national sovereignty, just look at Our Global Neighborhood: The Basic Vision, a document produced several years ago by The Commission on Global Governance, whose work was supported by then U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Members of the Commission included Maurice Strong (Secretary-General of the Rio Earth Summit, co-author of the current Earth Charter, and right-hand man of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan) and Barber Conable (former president of the World Bank). Among the Commission’s proposals are that "a new world order must be organized…. In certain fields, sovereignty has to be exercised collectively…. The principle of sovereignty must be adapted in such a way as to balance… the interests of nations with the interests of the global neighborhood…. We strongly endorse community initiatives to… encourage the disarming of civilians…. We would like to see a permanent international criminal court instituted as a matter of the highest priority…. We are… in need of a mobilizing principle… a new world order that secures the ascendancy of global neighborhood values over divisive nationalism."

Of course, the public will have to be prepared to accept world government, and what better way to do that than via education. The primary arm of the U.N. dealing with education is UNESCO, and in its first Director-General Sir Julian Huxley's UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1948), he wrote: "Political unification in some sort of world government will be required." On October 3, 2003, on the occasion of the U.S. rejoining UNESCO (after President Reagan had withdrawn the U.S.), U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige declared: "The United States is pleased to return to UNESCO…. Our governments have entrusted us with the responsibility of preparing our children to become citizens of the world…. UNESCO is a powerful forum for sharing our views, developing a common strategy, and implementing joint action." The problem with the concept of "world citizens" is that just as "citizens" of a state have to obey the laws of that state, "citizens of the world" will be expected to obey world laws. And the clear majority of the world's nations are socialist, so that world laws will reflect a socialist perspective.

The conditioning of the public in the past has been gradual, but as famous author H.G. Wells noted, the process will speed up in the end as the synthesis toward a World Socialist Government gains greater momentum. Hopefully, Americans will wake up before it’s too late and resist this global effort on the part of the power elite.

Dennis Laurence Cuddy, historian and political analyst, received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (major in American History, minor in political science). Dr. Cuddy has taught at the university level, has been a political and economic risk analyst for an international consulting firm, and has been a Senior Associate with the U.S. Department of Education.

Cuddy has also testified before members of Congress on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Cuddy has authored or edited seventeen books and booklets, and has written hundreds of articles appearing in newspapers around the nation, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows in various parts of the country, such as ABC Radio in New York City, and he has also been a guest on the national television programs USA Today and CBS's Nightwatch.

Here is a complete attendance record of Bilderberg 1995-98, including nations of origin, affiliations, and other biographical tidbits.

Here is a membership roster of the CFR, TLC, and the Bilderbergers. Though it contains over 500 names, the roster is far from complete, and is based on 1992 and 1993 information (though I have done some fix-ups to reflect the musical chairs). Affiliations of members are given.

From The Roundtable Pages, here is a complete list of all 3000 CFR members as of 1992.

Here are several overview articles from a special issue of The New American that are an extremely good introduction to the subject of this compilation.

The Elkhorn Manifesto summarizes the shift of the US economy from agricultural to industrial, and the calamatous consequences of the precise manner in which this transpired.

This article (which appears in the body of a later compilation segment) covers a colloquium organized by the Gorbachev Foundation and covers a lot of important ground quite compactly.

This is an article about a colloquium organized by Bill Gates that was actually attended by the director of the NSA, and of course by the usual CFR suspects. This is as good a time as any to reveal that this compilation was produced on a computer that contains absolutely no Microsoft software at all - in fact, I have full source code for all the software used in its production.

Read here A History of the New World Order, a year-by-year timeline of establishment-related events.

prima facie: mug book of global conspiracy is a set of, for lack of a better term, baseball cards of the major players in what has come to be known as "The Octopus," prominents stars within which are George Bush, Barry Seal, Klaus Barbie, Reinhard Gehlen, William Casey, William Colby, Allen Dulles, Pablo Escobar, and behind it all probably the Rockefeller clan (though the name Rockefeller does not occur on the web site!).

Here is a bibliography provided to the editor by Eugene Pasymowski:

BOOKS AND ARTICLES ON THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT

Specific References to Bilderberg, Council on Foreign Relations, Royal Institute for International Affairs, Cliveden Set, Trilateral Commission, etc.

• Gill, Stephen. American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Martin, Malachi. The Keys of This Blood: The Struggle for World Dominion Between Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Capitalist West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
• McManus, John F. Financial Terrorism, Appleton Wisconsin: The John Birch Society, 1994.
• Pasymowski, Eugene. Bilderberg: The Cold War Internationale Congressional Record, Vol. 117, Sept 15, 1971; H.R. pp. E9615 - 24.
• Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, New York: The Macmillan Company,1966 $25 Order: 1-800-543-0486
• Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes To Cliveden. New York: Books in Focus, 1981.
• Robertson, Pat. The New World Order, Dallas: World Publishing, 1991
• Sklar, Holly. The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management. Boston: South End Press, 1980.

Other Related Books on the Establishment

• Bird, Kai. The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of The American Establishment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
• Chernow, Ron. The House of Morgan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
• Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867-1950. New York: Albert A. Knopf, Inc., 1990.
• Isaacson, Walter & Thomas , Evan. The Wise Men: Six Friends and The World They Made.. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
• Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
• Lundberg, Ferdinand, The Rich and The Super-Rich. New York, Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1968.
• Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

What follows are biographical snippets regarding several important seminal members of the establishment.

Standard Oil is gradually being recombined, as evidenced in this article on "Rockefeller's revenge" from the New York Times.

excerpt from "The Rockefellers and the Rothschilds" by Sherman H. Skolnick, from http://www.europa.com/~johnlf/cn/cn8-51:

The press fakers never tell us about the annual secret meetings of secret societies, gathering as the real rulers to plot our destiny. One such is the Bilderberg Group made up of the ultra rich, their puppets, and the press lords, meeting every year in a different country, usually early in June. One of the only places financial enemies come together, such as the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. Soon thereafter are wars, depressions, and political murders.

In July, 1978, right after a Bilderberg meeting, the head of his family empire, John D. Rockefeller III, was murdered, made to look like an accident. Likewise, in July, 1996, the one about to be named head of *his* family banking empire, Amschel Rothschild, was found hanged in Paris -- some say murdered. He was head of Rothschild Asset Management, Ltd., a unit suffering huge losses because of terrible miscalculations. The Rothschilds are facing a financial shipwreck of almost a trillion dollars. (Both the Rockefeller and the Rothschild were killed on about the same day in July. To send a message, assassins like an anniversary.)

We raised questions in 1978. We are raising questions now. Neither the Rockefellers nor the Rothschilds are strangers to political assassinations. To protect their oil and other properties, the Rockefellers have used the American CIA to murder insurgent leaders worldwide. The Rockefellers helped arrange the murder of President Kennedy who opposed tax benefits for oil producers.

The book, "The Lincoln Conspiracy," shows how the Rothschilds arranged the murder of President Abraham Lincoln a few days after the end of the Civil War. Lincoln's post-war policies would have wrecked the Rothschild's commodity speculations. After the war, Lincoln, to bind up the wounds and get the nation together again, intended to go easy on the South, enabling resumption of agriculture production. The Rothschilds and key members of Congress were betting the other way, on high prices caused by a tough policy on the South.

For more than 140 years the Rothschilds have dominated the Chicago markets. They call the shots on the Chicago Board of Trade, setting prices, relayed worldwide, on corn, wheat, and soybeans. The Rothschilds also control the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, setting the prices on world currencies, and through their Chicago Board Options Exchange, on financial instruments.

Through their British relatives, the Rothschilds control the price of gold, set twice each day in London.

Seldom is it mentioned: that the Rothschilds, along with other western bankers and industrialists, financed the rise of Hitler as a bulwark against the Soviets. The ultra-right wing falsely describes the Rothschilds as "Jewish bankers" when, in fact, the Rothschilds are interwoven with the Catholic Church, and, jointly with the traditional mafia and the American CIA, interlocked with the Vatican Bank, which was pro-Nazi.

The Archbishop of Chicago is also the Treasurer for the Church for the whole Western hemisphere. And he deposits those funds in the Continental Bank of Chicago, owned jointly by the Vatican, the Queen of England, and the Rothschilds, all of whose representatives always sat on the board of directors of Continental.

For many years, Chief Judge of the Federal Appeals Court in Chicago was Walter J. Cummings, Jr., a man of trust for the Vatican, chosen to secretly handle their funds. Cummings and his family were also major owners of Continental Bank, now merged with Bank of America, for many years owned jointly by the Jesuits and the Rothschilds and now joined by the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza.

Most every judge on the Federal Appeals Court here is linked to Continental Bank. The judges *do* *not* disqualify themselves in cases involving Continental. Guess who wins?

The Rothschilds and the Japanese seek to control in the United States by buying up large tracts of land, such as in central Illinois.

All in all, Chicago is a center of corruption -- it is the cheapest place in the nation for bribing Federal Judges. Hence, large corporations prefer to have their important litigation in the Windy City. And Chicago is a center for the Rothschilds.

from Global Access, modtime 2000-Jan-23, from http://goglobalaccess.com/body_partners.html:

Partners

International Executive Services Corporation (IESC),
a not-for-profit company specializing in the cost-effective delivery of industry-specific expertise through a proprietary database of 13,000 senior U.S. industry experts. Founded by David Rockefeller in 1964, IESC delivers technical and managerial assistance in the developing world through volunteers.  Over 20,000 technical and managerial assistance projects have been completed in over 100 countries.  IESC has a network of over 50 offices throughout the developing world and emerging markets. 

First National Bank of New England [FNB],
FNB is a trade finance bank that specializes in financing trade transactions of up to US$1 million.  They are the leading US bank n the number of US Ex-Im Bank backed deals.  Three primary types of financing are offered:

1. Short terms loans to foreign companies to purchase US goods;
2. Mid-term loans to foreign companies to purchase US equipment;
3. Credit facilities that allow foreign producers to provide 180-360 day terms to US buyers of finished goods

Prescott Bush Resources, Ltd.

Founded by Prescott Bush, they specialize in structuring joint ventures in China.  Since 1978, they have completed over 30 deals in China.  Mr. Bush has also facilitated meetings and approvals at the highest levels of the Chinese government

Our Partner in China

China International Economic Consulting (CIEC) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC). Since its inception in 1981, CIEC has grown to be a leading consulting firm in China, providing diversified advisory services to international clients in investments, management, engineering, trading, accounting and legal affairs. CIEC has two branches, four subsidiaries, four equity or contractual joint-ventures and 2 specialized firms with extensive hands-on experience in China and abroad. With broad external business relations, systematic information services, CIEC has completed over 3,000 assignments and won high praise from domestic and foreign clients, from multinationals to medium and small sized companies. CIEC is registered with World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, UNIDO and UNDP.

from http://iseek.com/freerepublic/florida/bestof/quigley.htm:

[...]

Despite many disclaimers as to the existence of such an operation, it was exposed beyond argument with the publication of "Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Times", authored by the United States' most eminent historian, Professor Carroll Quigley. Published by MacMillans in 1966, Quigley's "Tragedy and Hope" revealed evidence of a long-term programme which many had suspected but none had been able to verify with suitable documentation.

Quigley, who was in some sympathy with the objectives of the programme, had been given personal access to the papers of a worldwide banking and finance association working consciously towards world government. His book may well have remained within the confines of a restricted readership had it not been discovered by some populist researchers who were seeking wider empirical evidence for their own suspicions. Quigley's work was regurgitated for a wider readership. Cleon Skousen's "The Naked Capitalist" and particulary Gary Allen's "None Dare Call It Conspiracy", with a print-run in the millions, focussed enormous attention on Quigley's work.

Faced with this unexpected development, "Tragedy And Hope" became almost unobtainable. Quigely's revelation were [sic] obviously considered suitable for a selective readership, but not for wide dissemination. MacMillans announced there were no plans to reprint, although the unprecedented demand was a publisher's dream. Copies vanished from public libraries. The book was changing hands for up to $400 a copy.

With prices like these it was'nt long before pirate editions appeared. Quigley himself was bewildered by what had happened. He could not understand why he could not get the book republished, even though all stocks were exhausted. In a personal letter dated December 9, 1975 he wrote:

"Thank you for your praise of "Tragedy and Hope", a book which has brought me many headaches as it apparently says something which powerful people do not want known.

My publisher stopped selling it in 1968 and told me he would reprint (but in 1971 he told my lawyer that they had destroyed the plates in 1968.) The rare book price went up to $135 and parts were reprinted in violation of copyright but I could do nothing because I believed the publisher and he would not take action even when a pirate copy of the book appeared. Only when I hired a lawyer in 1974 did I get answers to my questions to my publisher..."

In another letter Quigley wrote of his publishers:

"they lied to me for six years, telling me that they would reprint when they got 2,000 orders, which could never happen because they told anyone who asked that it was out of print and would not be reprinted. They denied this to me until I sent them Xerox copies of such replies in libraries, at which they told me it was a clerk's error. In other words, they lied to me but prevented me from regaining publications rights..."

Elsewhere in the same letter he wrote:

"... I am now quite sure that Tragedy and Hope was suppressed although I do not know why or by whom..."

from the Washington Star, 1977-Jan-6:

Carroll Quigley Dies; Revered GU Professor

      Carroll Quigley, 66, a former Georgetown University history professor who received four Faculty Awards for distinguished teaching, died Monday in the university's hospital after a heart attack. He lived on Greenwich Parkway NW.

      Quigley, a history professor for 35 years, retired last June after receiving for the fourth consecutive year the student-voted Faculty Award.

      One of Georgetown's most respected professors, Quigley was awarded the university's Vicennial Medal in 1961, and the 175th Anniversary Medal of Merit in 1964. His course on the development of civilization was cited by the university's foreign service alumni from 1941 to 1969 as the most influential course in their undergraduate careers.

      A COLLEAGUE, Jules Davids, said that Quigley's ``success as a teacher and as a scholar was in his creative intellect, the depth of his perceptions and the wide interdisciplinary range of his interests, which encompassed the fields of history, economics, philosophy, and science.''

      ``Most alumni who look back on their college years at Georgetown say they will never forget him. His influence remains with them, and they recall vividly how much he taught them.''

      In the 1950s Quigley was a consultant to the Defense Department and the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration. He was a consultant for the Navy on development of weapons systems and for the Smithsonian Institution on the layout of the American history section of the Museum of History and Technology.

      He lectured extensively on Africa, not solely to Georgetown students, but also to groups including the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the fellows in public affairs of the Brookings Institution.

      IN THE 1960s he published two major books, ``Evolution of Civilization,'' which was translated into Spanish and Portuguese versions, and ``Tragedy and Hope: The World in Our Time.''

      Quigley, a native of Massachusetts, received his A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He was a history instructor at Princeton University and taught government, history and politics at Harvard before joining the Georgetown faculty.

      He leaves his wife, Lillian; two sons, Denis C. and Thomas F., of the District, and two brothers.

      The family suggests that expressions of sympathy be in the form of contributions to the Carroll Quigley Fund, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 37th and O Streets NW. The fund is for the endowment of a Carroll Quigley professorship in the foreign service school.

by Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), from Following the Equator:

What is the secret of his [Cecil Rhodes's] formidable supremacy? One says it is his prodigious wealth -- a wealth whose drippings in salaries and and in other ways support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassals; another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement of England, his patriotic and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent protection and her just rule over the pagan wastes of Africa and make luminous the African darkness with the glory of her name; and another says he wants the earth, wants it for his own, and that the secret belief that he will get it and let his friends in on the ground floor is *the* secret that rivets so many eyes on him and keeps him in the zenith...

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope as a keepsake... The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him on terms determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old, cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gangs have been following the old ways. They have been chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of "purchase" for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue "regulations" requiring the incensed and harrassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and it is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much; for when the Rhodesian slave is sick, superannuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve -- his master is under no obligation to support him.

The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude "civilization". We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by the swift method of chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over on thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.

from The New American, 1995-Feb-20, by William F. Jasper:

Reviewing the Rhodes Legacy

      "In America, where idealism is the yardstick used to judge a generation's collective virtue, Rhodes scholars are its masters," says Rhodes scholar Peter Beinart. "They are chosen as much for their public-spiritedness as for their academic prowess. Not all want to run for elective office, but the bulk think their talents can be most fully realized through public service. Like Clinton, my peers believe earnestly in government. Above all, they believe in themselves in government."

      Writing in the "My Turn" section of Newsweek's January 16th issue, Beinart, a 23-year-old student now in his second year at Oxford University, offers a perceptive critique of the "Rhodie" tendency to giddily embrace idealism as summum bonum. Beinart notes that "such idealism should be refreshing. Yet after a year at Oxford, it makes me uneasy. The commitment to government my colleagues express so passionately is rarely linked to a clear vision of what government should do... I'm afraid that the idealism for which Rhodes scholars receive praise is less an antidote to the problems of American politics than a symptom of them."

      "Lacking a vision of political service in pursuit of specific ends," observes Beinart, "the rhetoric of idealism allows Rhodes scholars to justify and celebrate political service per se. Idealism masks an ideological vacuum."

Problem Idealism

      On the pernicious potential of misdirected idealism Beinart scores some important points. However, it is not idealism per se, but a particular kind of idealism, of which Rhodies are typically imbued, that is the problem under consideration here. And it is certainly not an idealism proceeding from an "ideological vacuum." If that were the case, we would expect to see idealism manifested and expressed in a diversity of shapes and forms, as for instance: Christian idealism versus humanist/pagan/atheist idealism, individualist versus collectivist idealism, libertarian versus totalitarian idealism, nationalist versus globalist idealism, etc.

      The Oxonian idealism, however, seems to run almost invariably along the humanist/pagan/atheist, collectivist, totalitarian, globalist, elitist lines. Perhaps Beinart's peers do not explicitly subscribe to such a nasty idealism, but, apparently, it is implicit - at least in the formative stages - in their collective world view, and it is this which makes him "uneasy." As he says, they have a passionate "commitment to government," but, "above all, they believe in themselves in government." Which is exactly the kind of "idealism" British empire builder Cecil John Rhodes intended to foster when he established the Rhodes scholarships at the turn of the century.

      We have written previously about the baleful effects of Rhodes' bequest ("A 'Rhodie' in the White House," New American, 1/25/93). However, since the accession of Bill Clinton to the Oval Office, the Oxford influence in the Executive branch of the federal government has attained unprecedented heights. As Rhodes scholar Robert Rotberg noted in the Christian Science Monitor for December 7, 1992, the Clinton Presidency "fulfills Rhodes' deepest aspiration." Rotberg, author of The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power, wrote in his Monitor piece that "Rhodes believed that he had discovered an idea that could lead `to the cessation of all wars and one language throughout the world.' Rhodes also specified fairly clearly the kinds of men who should receive the opportunity to go to Oxford. He had Clinton in mind" - an admission which, by itself, should severely diminish the prestige of the esteemed academic honors. Rhodes' men, said Rotberg, were a special breed: "They were to `esteem the performance of public duties' as their highest aim. Rhodes wanted the best men for `the World's fight'... In the 90 years of scholarships, only Clinton has taken Rhodes' dream to the top."

Government of the World

      Indeed. Which is why we are grateful for the appearance of two recent studies on this important subject: Secret Records Revealed: The Men, the Money, and the Methods Behind the New World Order, by Dennis Laurence Cuddy (Plymouth Rock Foundation, PO Box 577, Marlborough, NH 02455); and The Rhodes Legacy: Are Its Agents Shaping America's Destiny? by Samuel L. Blumenfeld (The Blumenfeld Education Letter, PO Box 45161, Boise, ID 83711). As two of the most perceptive writers on education issues today, Dr. Cuddy and Mr. Blumenfeld are well qualified to tackle the Rhodesian menace to American academe, government, and society.

      Quoting from Professor Carroll Quigley's monumental history, Tragedy and Hope, Blumenfeld recounts the "sensational impact" that socialist professor John Ruskin had on the young Cecil Rhodes while a student at Oxford. Later, "with support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, [Rhodes] was able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa" and put his enormous, ill-gotten fortune in diamonds and gold to work in his plan for world empire.

      To accomplish this end, Rhodes confided to his intimate friend and executor, William T. Snead, it was necessary to (in Rhodes' own words) create "a society copied, as to organization, from the Jesuits." Unlike the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus), however, Rhodes' society would be secret and decidedly un-Christian. Rhodes told Snead that it should be "a secret society, organized like Loyola's, supported by the accumulated wealth of those whose aspiration is to do something."

      And this "something" that Rhodes had in mind for them to "do" with their wealth? Nothing less, said Rhodes, than "a scheme to take the government of the whole world." Thus, Rhodes biographer Sarah Millin noted, "The government of the world was Rhodes' simple desire." Simple, yes, though hardly lacking in ambitious grandiosity. Said Rhodes to Stead: "What scope! What a horizon of work for the next two centuries for the best energies of the best people in the world." And, averred the fabulously wealthy magnate, "The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world, to be devoted to this object."

      These and other revealing statements are found in an important article on Cecil Rhodes in the New York Times of April 9, 1902, which Blumenfeld has reprinted in The Rhodes Legacy.

Stealthy Recruiting

      The secret society of which Rhodes spoke was launched, notes Blumenfeld, on February 5, 1891. Forming the execuitve committee of this society were Rhodes, Stead, Lord Esher, and Alfred Milner. Below them was a "Circle of Initiates" comprised of Lord Balfour, Sir Harry Johnson, Lord Rothschild, Lord Grey, and other scions of Britain's financial and aristocratic elite. According to Professor Quigley, Bill Clinton's mentor at Georgetown Univesity, "The scholarships were merely a facade to conceal the secret society, or more accurately, they were to be one of the instuments by which the members of the secret society could carry out his purpose." "The Rhodes Scholarships," Blumenfeld writes, "as outlined in Rhodes' will, became the main instrument whereby the most promising young people throughout the English-speaking world could be recruited to serve an idea that Rhodes thought would take 200 years to fulfill." And, says Blumenfeld:

      Obviously, the way the secret society would recruit its future leaders from among the Rhodes scholars was to dangle before them the prospects of future advancement in whatever field they chose to pursue, be it education, politics, government, foundation work, finance, journalism, etc. Thus, if you understood the implicit message being given to you by your sponsors you might one day become president of Harvard, President of the United States, a Supreme Court Judge, a US senator, or president of the Carnegie Foundation. The road to fame and fortune was open as long as you played the game and obeyed the rules. The Association of American Rhodes Scholars has an alumni membership of about 1,600. They have become leading figures in the new ruling elite in America.

Rhodie Roll Call

      For gaining an appreciation of just how influential the "leading figures" in this ruling elite have been, and are today, Dr. Cuddy's 50-page booklet, Secret Records Revealed, is of immense value. Utilizing the chronological format he has used in some of his previous studies, Cuddy begins with the year 1890 and traces the perfidious Rhodes influence to the present, outlining not only the "contributions" of Rhodes scholars, but those as well of prominent members in Rhodes' other fronts such as the Council on Foreign Relations.

      The impact of this elect (but in most cases unelected) coterie has been nothing less than incredible. A roll call of the famous Rhodies who have advanced the founder's scheme reads like a Who's Who of American finance, business, academe, journalism, and politics: Whitney Shepardson, John K. Fairbank, Lester Thurow, Erwin D. Canham, Stringfellow Barr, Nicholas Katzenbach, Howard K. Smith, Harlan Cleveland, Carl Albert, J. William Fulbright, Dean Rusk, Hedley Donovan, Walt Rostow, Robert Roosa, Stansfield Turner, Richard Lugar, David Boren, Michael Kinsley, Daniel Boorstin, and many more. Among the more than 20 Rhodies in Clinton's retinue are Strobe Talbott, Robert Reich, James Woolsey, Ira Magaziner, George Stephanopoulos, Stephen Oxman, Sarah Sewall, Walter Slocombe, Joseph Nye, and Richard N. Gardner.

      And what are the characteristics that the Rhodes scholarship selection committees were to look for in candidates and nurture in their scholars? According to Rhodes' own criteria, notes Cuddy, the traits most desired were (and are) "smugness, brutality, unctuous rectitude, and tact." Obviously, as Mr. Rotberg beamed above, Rhodes "had Clinton in mind." After all, his protegés were to be the "best men," the "best people," pursuing his vision of world government run by a socialist aristocratic elite. According to Rhodes' co-conspirator Stead, it was expected that by 1920 there would be "between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each of whom, moreover, would have been specially - mathematically - selected toward the Founder's purposes."

Words and Works

      Dr. Cuddy examines the writings, speeches, policies, and deeds of Rhodes scholars and other members of the Rhodes network over the past century, to reveal what is clearly the sinister nature of "the Founder's purposes." He shares the alarm expressed by Professor Quigley in his posthumously published expose, The Anglo-American Establishment: "The picture is terrifying because such power, whatever the goals at which it is being directed, is too much to be entrusted to any group... No country that values its safety should allow what [the Rhodes-Milner] group accomplished - that is, that a small number of men would be able to wield such a power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period."

from Public Information Research, from NameBase NewsLine, No. 1, April-June 1993:, by Daniel Brandt, from http://www.pir.org/newsline.01:

Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy: What's going on here?

When Bill Clinton delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on July 16, 1992, it didn't contain any surprises, nor were any expected. There were the usual feel-good platitudes: he wanted to talk with us "about my hope for the future, my faith in the American people, and my vision of the kind of country we can build.... This election is about putting power back in your hands and putting the government back on your side.... It is time to heal America." Any speech writer could have pulled boiler-plate from the files and pasted together something similar. Speeches for occasions like this one aren't meant to be long on specifics.

Toward the end of the speech Clinton mentioned that "as a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so."

This was not the first time that Clinton had paid tribute to the memory of his Georgetown professor. A few days earlier, a story on Clinton's background mentioned that he had never forgotten Quigley's last lecture. "Throughout his career he has evoked [this lecture] in speeches as the rhetorical foundation for his political philosophy," according to the Washington Post, which offered another Clinton quotation praising Quigley's perspective and influence.[1] A kindly old professor appreciated as a mentor by an impressionable, idealistic student? This is how it was interpreted by almost everyone who heard it, particularly since Quigley's name was not exactly a household word.

But in certain rarified circles among conspiracy theorists, Clinton's reference to Quigley was surprising. Now that Clinton had one foot in the White House, the conservative Washington Times soon ran an item that tried to clear matters up. Professor Quigley, according to the Times, specialized in the history of a secret group of elite Anglo-Americans who had a decisive influence on world affairs during the first half of this century. Quigley, in other words, was a conspiracy theorist -- but one who had an impeccable pedigree as "one of the few insiders who came out and exposed the Eastern establishment plan for world government." These words belong to Tom Eddlam, research director for the John Birch Society. As someone who had sold two of Quigley's books, Eddlam knew plenty about Quigley. But we can't have a Democratic draft-dodging liberal candidate who admires a Birch Society conspiracy hero, so the Times quickly resolved the issue by noting that Quigley wanted the conspiracy to succeed, whereas the Birchers wanted it to fail.[2] Thus the Times summed matters up, in six column inches.

Clinton's supporters depict him as an intellectual, someone whose heroes traffic in solemn ideals. If so, Clinton presumably read Tragedy and Hope, Quigley's best-known book, which appeared while Clinton was at Georgetown. At any rate, Quigley's work is well worth looking at, along with Clinton's early career, for its possible clues to Clinton's thought.

Reading Quigley may turn you into a student of high-level conspiracy, which is exactly what many influential people around Clinton and elsewhere say you shouldn't be. Almost all of the 3,000 members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) will go on record ridiculing any of the conspiracy theories that, according to all polls, are taken seriously by large majorities of average people. CFR member Daniel Schorr will tell you again and again that Oswald was a lone nut, and CFR member Steven Emerson will write article after article debunking Pan Am 103 and October Surprise theories. It's not that people in high places know better, it's simply that they have more to protect and cannot afford to be candid.

As new research is published about the JFK assassination, for example, it becomes clear that virtually all the high-level players, from LBJ on down, assumed it was a conspiracy from the moment the shots were fired. It took until recently for dedicated researchers to dig this fact out.[3] But thirty years later many journalists still find it useful to defend the Warren Commission or belittle its critics.

Carroll Quigley was a conspiracy historian, but he was unusual in that he avoided criticism. Most of his conspiracy research concerned the role of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups in Britain from 1891 through World War II. His major work, Tragedy and Hope (1966), contains scattered references to his twenty years of research in this area, but his detailed history of the Round Table was written in 1949. The major reason he avoided criticism is because his work wasn't threatening to people in high places. Quigley's research was too obscure, and too much had happened in the world since the events he described. Quigley was also an insider, so his criticisms of the groups he studied are subdued. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard, where he received a doctorate in 1938. He later taught at Princeton and Harvard before settling in at Georgetown's conservative School of Foreign Service in 1941, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was a consultant for the Brookings Institution, the Defense Department, the State Department, and the Navy,[4] and taught western civilization and history. In 1962 the Center for Strategic and International Studies was established on the Georgetown campus, where it maintained close ties with the School of Foreign Service. CSIS included a number of people on its staff who had high-level CIA connections. Quigley moved in these circles until his death in 1977:

I know of the operations of this network [the Round Table Groups] because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies, but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.[5]

In his 1949 detailed look at the Cecil Rhodes - Oxford - Alfred (Lord) Milner - Round Table nexus, published posthumously in 1981 as The Anglo-American Establishment, Quigley was more forceful with his criticism. While endorsing this elite's high-minded internationalist goals, Quigley wrote that "I cannot agree with them on methods," and added that he found the antidemocratic implications of their inherited wealth and power "terrifying." This is as tough as he got with his comments:

No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group accomplished in Britain -- that is, that a small number of men should be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of the documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.[6]

Quigley also avoided criticism because his books are the product of years of painstaking research into primary diplomatic sources. To qualify as a critic of his analysis, someone would have to duplicate that research -- and so far no one has. It also helped that Quigley was doing most of his work at a time when conspiracy theories were considered curious and quaint, but not threatening. Clinton, at any rate, had no reason to feel uneasy about citing the virtually unknown Quigley in his convention acceptance speech.

But serious researchers can hardly afford to pass over Quigley's potential significance so lightly. The Washington Times, to begin with, is clearly mistaken to brush Quigley off as simply one more liberal elitist one-worlder. Certainly he is no streetcorner agitator, whether of the right or left. But his understated critique of his elite colleagues is nevertheless a searching one.

In the years following the publication of Tragedy and Hope in 1966, writers on both the right and left began to recognize this. For example, New Left writer and activist Carl Oglesby came to realize that some of his ideas about elite power in the U.S. had been anticipated by Quigley.[7] On the far right, meanwhile, Quigley found a convert in W. Cleon Skousen, a former FBI agent who later became a star of the John Birch Society's lecture circuit. In 1970, Skousen published a book-length review of Quigley's Tragedy and Hope that was titled The Naked Capitalist. It quoted so heavily from Quigley's work that Quigley threatened to sue for copyright infringement.

Skousen chose to emphasize Quigley's mention of subterranean financial arrangements between certain Wall Street interests and certain groups on the U.S. left, in particular the Communist Party.[8] Oglesby, meanwhile, shared Quigley's interest in the challenge posed to Wall Street's Eastern elite by newer oil and defense-aerospace money concentrated in the Southwest.[9] But as Oglesby recognized, Quigley's meticulous research into elite power shaded insensibly over into the study of "conspiracy":

Am I borrowing on Quigley then to say with the far right that this one conspiracy rules the world? The arguments for a conspiracy theory are indeed often dismissed on the grounds that no one conspiracy could possibly control everything. But that is not what this theory sets out to show. Quigley is not saying that modern history is the invention of an esoteric cabal designing events omnipotently to suit its ends. The implicit claim, on the contrary, is that a multitude of conspiracies contend in the night. Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is a formalized practice of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join. Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.[10]

But it's a bad word for polite editors, so the issues surrounding the "C" word are almost never discussed in print. One needs to tease out Oglesby's observation that there is a qualitative difference between the way that the left and right in the U.S. have addressed this issue. Both tendencies can at least get together on which groups deserve attention: the Council on Foreign Relations, which became the American branch of the Round Table in 1919; Bilderberg, which has held secret meetings in Europe for select participants since 1954; and the Trilateral Commission, a group that began in 1973 and now has 325 members from Japan, Europe, and America. CFR consists of Americans only, whereas Bilderberg adds the Europeans and TC also adds the Japanese. The Americans in Bilderberg and TC are almost always members of CFR also.

But some leftists and left-liberal sociologists prefer to take the curse off their interest in such groups by calling their investigations "power-structure research." The implication seems to be that tracing interlocking directorates, let's say, belongs to science in a way that tracing Lee Harvey Oswald's intelligence connections never could. Still, G. William Domhoff, the most prominent of the "power structure" researchers, admits that attempting to maintain this quarantine can itself become unscientific:

Critics of a power elite theory often call it "conspiratorial," which is the academic equivalent of ending a discussion by yelling Communist. It is difficult to lay this charge to rest once and for all because these critics really mean something much broader than the dictionary definition of conspiracy. All right, then, if "conspiracy" means that these men are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate or react to events and issues, then there is some conspiring that goes on in CFR, not to mention in the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency.[11]

And what makes Domhoff's middle ground on the problem of conspiracy so difficult to maintain is precisely the existence of inconveniently concrete cases like Oswald's. If there was a conspiracy and cover-up, then it was carried out by interested individuals rather than by blind social forces. The best that Domhoff can do with the JFK assassination is to ignore it, which he does.

But this won't do for Michael Albert, editor of the leftist Z Magazine and a Domhoffian "structuralist," who has attempted to finesse this problem. His argument on the JFK assassination, as best I can understand it, goes something like this: JFK was a predictable product of established institutions; these institutions wanted a war in Vietnam; it's inconceivable that JFK would have disagreed with this because his behavior was determined (that is, he could not have changed his mind), and therefore, the assassination of JFK, conspiracy or not, made no difference to our history and is unimportant. The problem with Albert's approach is that he's fairly close to vulgar Marxism, which by now has been thoroughly discredited.

To my thinking, the reason why the JFK assassination is so important is this: It's one thing to believe that there are rich people who become richer because their environment tells them to behave that way, and quite another to believe that there is a powerful, secret government that doesn't have to play by the rules. If you can prove that the assassination was a conspiracy, then the first notion becomes silly and insignificant. Essentially, conspiracy theories restore notions of freedom and responsibility that have been stripped from the "value free" social science establishment. Quigley is between Domhoff and Oglesby on our spectrum, which is not a left-right spectrum but rather a conspiracy spectrum. Oglesby deals seriously with the JFK assassination while Quigley does not. But Quigley at least follows the money trail and believes that human agency and individual actors are important forces in history. Domhoff, on the other hand, is more interested in class distinctions and general behavior.

Skousen is much more conspiratorial than Oglesby. He applies conspiracy thinking to complex issues where a middle ground would be productive (such as CFR, Bilderberg, and Trilateralism), and treats them in an either/or fashion as if they were similar to the JFK assassination. It doesn't work very well. The New World Order may be a bad idea, but to assume as a starting point that it's a Communist plot doesn't help us understand the who or why behind it.

Before returning to Clinton, it will help to fill out our spectrum a bit. So far we have Domhoff, Quigley, and Oglesby in a line, and Skousen off further on the pro-conspiracy end. On the anti-conspiracy end we should add Erwin Knoll, longtime editor of The Progressive. According to Knoll, "none of the conspiracy theories we have scrutinized meets the test of accuracy -- or even plausibility -- we normally apply to material published in The Progressive, so none has appeared in the pages of this magazine.[12] Knoll's advisory board includes three members of the Council on Foreign Relations, so this fits okay. There's also Chip Berlet, who berates unwitting leftists for falling prey to conspiracy theories that the devious right has conspired to foist on them. He isn't critical of conspiracy thinking on the basis of the evidence, but waits until the theorist can be shown to have incorrect political associations.[13] Berlet doesn't fit anywhere on our spectrum; he's running his own show.

A conspiracy bookseller named Lloyd Miller[14] is farther out than Skousen. Miller is aware of Quigley and sells his books. While Oglesby is toying with an American ruling-class Yankee-Cowboy split that goes back a generation or so, Miller dwells on a split between the Knights of Malta and the Knights Templar going back to the year 1307. The modern derivative of this struggle provides his hypothesis that "the overt and covert organs of the Vatican and British Empire are locked in mortal combat for control of the world." In Miller's theory, Jesuit-controlled Georgetown is the Vatican headquarters on the American front, and Quigley is a Vatican agent exposing the Anglo-American connection. Miller is more sophisticated than this description allows, but I have difficulties with him. On a case by case basis, the theory produces as many questions as answers. More importantly, perhaps, my historical interests and imagination don't extend much beyond the last 100 years.

Miller is mentioned because there are similarities between his analysis and the theories of Lyndon LaRouche. For anyone who wants to figure out what LaRouche is talking about, it is necessary to be conversant with esoterica concerning Freemasonry, the Knights of Malta, and British imperialism. The alternative is to see all of the above as code words for Jews, and LaRouche's enemies -- namely Chip Berlet, Dennis King, and the Anti-Defamation League -- tend to take this easy way out. I don't believe that right-wing globalist conspiracy theories in general, or LaRouche's theories in particular, can be dismissed by claiming that they are disguised anti-Semitism -- that is to say, code-word versions of the old international Jewish banking conspiracies. While there is some anti-Semitism on the right, it is no longer the driving force it might have once been. Most right-wing theories are more sophisticated than Berlet, King, or the ADL are ready to believe.

I don't consider any of the people I've mentioned as crackpots, because I'm convinced that there are vital issues at stake. All of them are doing their best with checkered evidence, and for the most part I share their instincts if not always their conclusions. Regardless of where we decide to place Bill Clinton on the spectrum, which will be discussed after a review of his career, at least two other former (and future?) presidential candidates have staked out positions. Ross Perot believes that there is massive corruption and occasional conspiracies in high places; he belongs somewhere close to Quigley. Pat Robertson is a less hysterical version of Skousen, modified for post anti-Communism, and should also be taken seriously. Along with Ross Perot's movement, some see Robertson's Christian Coalition as a populist challenge to our one-party Republocrat system.

Most of Pat Robertson's latest book, The New World Order (1991), is a popularized yet articulate presentation of recent American history as controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, the Federal Reserve System, and Wall Street. Several pages are spent on Quigley's theories, which provide the background for an understanding of the Rhodes Trust, CFR, and the foundations with their "One World agenda." Unfortunately, the only mention of this book in the left press ignores the analytical material that Robertson draws on, and dismisses "its more bizarre conspiracy theories such as those targeting mainstream figures as dupes of the Devil."[15]

Yes, Robertson finally couches his theories in a Biblical context (after keeping the Bible out of it for the first two-thirds of the book), and most of us don't find the Bible necessary or compelling. But when leftists skip to the end in order to belittle his critique, at a time when they have lost the capacity to provide an alternative critique, this is self-defeating. My main objection to Robertson is that he doesn't deserve to have a monopoly on these important issues; his vision is too apocalyptic and too narrow. Unlike the politically-correct "progressive" press, however, I consider him potentially closer to populism than to fascism.

Robertson spends several pages recounting the 1976 campaign of Jimmy Carter, and describes how he concluded that Carter's strings were being pulled by the same Trilateralists who created him. A similar analysis -- much more detailed and convincing -- can also be found from a leftist perspective.[16] It wasn't too many years ago, before politically-correct thinking carried the day, that the left took Trilateralism seriously. Since 1980, the only left perspective on Trilateralism has been written by a Canadian professor.[17] His Gramscian categories tend to be academically overbearing, but he took the trouble to interview 100 Trilateral Commission members.

The Jimmy Carter story is depressing. Hamilton Jordan reportedly said, "If, after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say that we failed." That's exactly what happened, and seventeen other key members of the administration were also Trilateralists. For his entire administration, every move on foreign policy was cleared with the hard-liner Brzezinski.

Robertson's book was written just one year before Clinton's name became a household word. One wonders how Robertson reacted to Clinton's reference to Quigley in his acceptance speech. And then what Robertson thought when he learned that Clinton checked off on almost every group you care to name: he is a Rhodes Scholar, a CFR member, a Trilateral Commission member, a Bilderberg participant, and most of his appointees are at least one of the above. If Clinton's mention of Quigley in July 1992 had been an isolated case, then one might interpret this as simply a ploy to disguise his elitist loyalties. But Clinton has mentioned Quigley many times over the years, and I suspect that on this he is sincere. Then again, it's hard to believe that Clinton is unaware of Quigley's anti-elitist tendencies. What's going on here?

After shaking John Kennedy's hand, they say that William Jefferson Clinton never doubted that he was headed for the White House. A band major in high school, he was favored by his school principal, who encouraged him to run for class offices and to participate in a leadership program that sponsored his trip to Washington. He attended Georgetown from 1964-1968, majoring in international affairs and immediately running for student office ("Hello, I'm Bill Clinton. Will you help me run for president of the freshman class?"). When he wasn't listening to Quigley or networking and glad-handing his way through a student council election, he was working in the Senate Foreign Relations Office of Senator J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and former Rhodes Scholar who started criticizing the CIA and Vietnam policy in 1966. During his first two years, Clinton was a trainee in Georgetown's ROTC unit, and could be seen around campus in Army fatigues.

Between Quigley and his Georgetown connections, Fulbright and his Rhodes Trust connections, and Clinton's keen interest in his own political power, it's not surprising that the big, bearded, amiable Clinton became a Rhodes Scholar in 1968 and went off to spend two years at Oxford. Another power behind Clinton was Winthrop Rockefeller (1912-1973), two-time Republican governor of Arkansas, who reportedly functioned as a father figure. At Oxford, Clinton participated in one or more demonstrations against U.S. policy in Vietnam in front of the American embassy, and used his connections to stay out of the draft. After Oxford he went to Yale Law School. In the fall of 1972 he directed McGovern's campaign in Texas. He ran for Congress in Arkansas in 1974 after finishing Yale, but barely lost. Then he taught law in Arkansas until 1976, when he was elected state attorney general after running unopposed. That year he also headed up the state campaign for Jimmy Carter. Two years later he won the race for governor.

The anti-war sentiments among Clinton's Oxford colleagues did not produce an antipathy toward the CIA. Robert Earl, later an assistant to Oliver North at the National Security Council, was one of these colleagues. And while governor, Clinton was aware that an airfield in Mena, Arkansas played a major role in secret contra logistics involving gun and drug running. Clinton's security chief is being sued for an alleged Mena-related frame-up, and many believe that there were cover-ups by both state and federal agencies.[18]

Bill Clinton is promoted as the first baby boomer and anti-war activist in the White House. Yet I was also these things, and I cannot identify with Clinton at all. In order for this piece to make any sense, it's important that I show how two different anti-war protesters might have stood together in a demonstration for different reasons, after arriving from different directions.

To begin with, one has to divide the student movement into two periods, before and after 1968. This year was pivotal: the McCarthy campaign, the RFK and MLK assassinations, the police riot in Chicago. Anti-war protesters on conservative campuses such as my University of Southern California and Clinton's Georgetown, were almost always bona fide prior to 1968. There was no percentage in it otherwise, as the polls were overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At USC I organized a peaceful draft card turn-in ceremony in 1968. We were physically ejected from the campus by fraternity boys, and had to continue in a church across the street, where the frat rats feared to tread. A poll by our student newspaper showed that most students agreed with the fraternity. At USC, and the same was probably true of Georgetown, a student politician couldn't get more than a handful of votes by taking an anti-war position.

In 1969 everything suddenly changed. Major anti-war organizing efforts appeared on campus, coordinated through national networks. I guessed that these new activists, who seemed to come out of nowhere to organize the Vietnam Moratorium, were former McCarthy-Kennedy campaign workers. Although I had been co-chairman of our SDS chapter the previous year, these were all new faces to me. I was astounded and a little suspicious. Everything had turned around completely: now no student politician could hope to win without the long hair, the beads and sandals, and speaking at freshmen orientation by abandoning the lectern and sitting on the edge of the stage, "rapping" to them movement-style.

When it came time to confront the draft, these same student politicians used their mysterious connections to get out the easy way. Sometimes they pulled strings to secure a place in the overbooked National Guard, but most got out clean. Almost half of all undergraduate men were released when the first lottery was held at the end of the year, which of course brought our anti-draft movement to a halt. I now refer to my 1969 experience as the "Sam Hurst syndrome," after the articulate and good-looking student body president who sat on the edge of the stage and rode into power on the post-1968 wave. It's my euphemism for slick, well-disguised self-interest and a great head of hair.

I noticed that new students could not tell the difference between Sam Hurst's activism and mine. Students with safe lottery numbers sadistically inquired about my number -- they would find it amusing if my number was also safe, now that I had been convicted for refusing induction. It was every man for himself. Then it got worse. By September 1970 the big movement on campus centered on Timothy Leary's old colleague Richard Alpert, who now called himself Baba Ram Dass and told overflow crowds that the best way to do revolution was to sit in the lotus position and do nothing. Soon Rennie Davis of Chicago Eight fame was spending his time puppy-dogging a teenaged guru from India. Within another year there was no discernible movement at all, just embarrassing burnouts like the Weather Underground and eventually the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped and brainwashed Patty Hearst.

Bill Clinton is even slicker than Sam Hurst. His anti-war activism, as well as everything else he did, developed from a focused interest in his own future. After 1968 it would have been unthinkable for Clinton to ignore the anti-war movement and face political obsolescence -- not because of his revulsion over carpet bombing, but because it was time to hedge his bets. Clinton is not an intellectual, he's merely very clever. A clever person can manipulate his environment, while an intellectual can project beyond it and, for example, identify with the suffering of the Vietnamese people. But this involves some risk, whereas power politics is the art of pursuing the possible and minimizing this risk. Almost everything that happened to the student movement is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn't amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening -- the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:

• Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
  
  
• Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
  
  
• The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
  
  
• Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton's, didn't hurt his career either.)
  
  
• Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
  
  
• The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.

The major point here is that by 1969, protest was not necessarily anti-Establishment. When thousands of students are in the streets every day, and the troops you sent to Vietnam are deserting, sooner or later it's going to cut into your profits. If you can't beat them, then you have to co-opt them. Clinton's mentors and sponsors realized this, Clinton himself sensed the shift, and until more evidence is available it's fair to assume that his anti-war activity was at a minimum self-serving, and perhaps even duplicitous.

How else can we explain why he has recently embraced the very organizations who got us into Vietnam in the first place? He joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1989, attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1991, is currently a member of the Trilateral Commission, and has appointed numerous Rhodes Scholars, CFR members, and Trilateralists to key positions. These are the very groups whose historical roots, according to Quigley, are essentially conspiratorial and antidemocratic. A cynic would say that Clinton appropriated from Quigley what he needed -- which was a precise description of where the power is -- and ignored those aspects of Quigley that did not fit his agenda. He may have read a book or two by Quigley, but he didn't inhale them.

On February 2, when Clinton's nominee for CIA director was asked some polite questions, Senator John Chafee (R-RI) joked about what he called "a Mafia that's taking over the administration."[26] Be sure to smile when you say that, Senator. The new director, R. James Woolsey, was an early supporter of the contras and served as defense attorney for Michael Ledeen and Charles E. Allen, he has Georgetown-CSIS connections, and he's a Rhodes Scholar, CFR member, and Yale Law School graduate, several years ahead of Clinton. Yale, of course, is thick with CIA connections.[27] The new CIA director was close to Brent Scowcroft at the Bush White House, and is a director of Martin Marietta, the eighth-largest defense corporation, whose contracts include the MX missle and Star Wars weapons.

It's becoming clear that on inauguration day we merely had a changing of the guard. But it's still the same old team at headquarters, wherever that is, and you won't find any television cameras there. Ultimately, then, Clinton's references to Quigley are worth as much as his anti-war record. And both are worth nothing at all.

1. David Maraniss, "Bill Clinton: Born to Run...and Run...and Run. Washington Post, July 13, 1992, p. A1.
   
   
2. "Clinton a Bircher?", Washington Times, July 22, 1992, p. A6. For a more useful discussion of the right and Quigley, see Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy and Culture (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 145-51.
   
   
3. This conclusion in inescapable after reading Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992).
   
   
4. Who's Who in America, 1976-1977 (Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1976).
   
   
5. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 950.
   
   
6. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in Focus, 1981), pp. xi, 197.
   
   
7. Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1977), pp. 6-7.
   
   
8. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pp. 945-9.
   
   
9. Ibid., pp. 1245-6.
   
   
10. Oglesby, p. 25.
    
    
11. G. William Domhoff, "Who Made American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963?" In David Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War (New York: Monthly Review, 1969), p.34.
    
    
12. Erwin Knoll, "Memo from the Editor," The Progressive, March 1992, p. 4.
    
    
13. Chip Berlet, Right Woos Left (Political Research Associates, 678 Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 205, Cambridge MA 02139), July 28, 1992, $6.50.
    
    
14. A-albionic Research, P.O. Box 20273, Ferndale MI 48220.
    
    
15. Kate Cornell, "The Covert Tactics and Overt Agenda of the New Christian Right," Covert Action Quarterly, No. 43, Winter 1992-93, p. 51.
    
    
16. Laurence H. Shoup, "Jimmy Carter and the Trilateralists: Presidential Roots"; Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, "Shaping a New World Order: The Council on Foreign Relations' Blueprint for World Hegemony, 1939-1945"; and several other relevant articles. In Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980).
    
    
17. Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
    
    
18. Association of National Security Alumni, Unclassified, February-March 1992, pp. 6-9.
    
    
19. James Simon Kunen, The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary (New York: Avon Books, 1970), pp. 130-1.
    
    
20. Steve Weissman, Big Brother and the Holding Company (Palo Alto CA: Ramparts Press, 1974), pp. 298-9.
    
    
21. AP in San Francisco Examiner, June 21, 1986.
    
    
22. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
    
    
23. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy, The Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 483-4, 727.
    
    
24. Richard Cummings, The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
    
    
25. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990), p. 337.
    
    
26. Douglas Jehl, "CIA Nominee Wary of Budget Cuts," New York Times, February 3, 1993, p. A18.
    
    
27. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1987).

by Ray Jamieson, from http://www.aero-vision.com/~rayj/ma01006.htm:

An Introduction to Carroll Quigley

It is not hard to understand why President Clinton gave tribute to Carroll Quigley in his nomination speech at the Democratic Party Convention. Quigley graduated magna cum laude with MA and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard. He was even in Ripley's Believe It or Not for being Harvard's youngest person to receive a Ph.D. After teaching at Harvard and Princeton he went to Georgetown where for 28 consecutive years alumni selected him as their most influential professor. Dean of The School of Foreign Service, Dr. Peter F. Krough aptly states, 'He was one of the last of the great macro-historians who traced the development of civilization...with awesome capability.' With his teachings, Clinton and other aspirants have aligned themselves in positions of influence. As Quigley espoused, 'Look at the real situations which lie beneath the conceptual and verbal symbols.'

As of his death in 1977 Dr. Carroll Quigley is no longer with us, yet Tragedy and Hope is a hallmark of history, a classic to be owned by those who care to know of the forces that have shaped and are shaping history.

Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History Of The World In Our Time.

When Carroll Quigley was still living in April of 1971, Phyllis Schlafly in The Phyllis Schlafly Report wrote a commentary on Tragedy and Hope.

Who is really running things in America? What is the hidden, powerful force that seems to control U.S. policies no matter who is elected? The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose foreign giveaways. What is the hidden force that persuades Congress to vote at least $10 billion in foreign giveaways year after year after year, in direct opposition to the wishes of their constituents?

Dr. Quigley is an authority on the world's secret power structure because HE IS ONE OF THE INSIDERS. He boasts that he has been associated with many of the dynastic families of the super-rich. He writes approvingly of their power, influence, and activities. To assure his readers of his own unique qualifications for the writing of this book, Dr. Quigley states: 'I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies. . . but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.'

In other words, Dr. Quigley is one of those on the inside of the 'network,' and his chief disagreement with his associates is that he wants to tell what the 'network' is doing, and the others want to remain secret. Hence the book, Tragedy and Hope, in which Dr. Quigley 'tells all,' thereby exposing one of the best-kept secrets in the world. The 'Hope' in the title represents the man-made millennium of a collectivist one-world society which the world will enjoy when the 'network' achieves its goal of ruling the world. He says the 'network' already has such power and influence that it is now too late for the little people to turn back the tide. All who resist represent the 'Tragedy.'

He urges us not to fight the noose which is already around our necks, because if we do we will only choke ourselves to death.

1.Who Runs The Establishment. The greatest value of Tragedy and Hope is that it constitutes a bold and boastful admission BY ONE ON THE INSIDE of the Establishment that there actually exists a relatively small but powerful group which has succeeded in acquiring a choke-hold on the affairs of America and Europe. Dr. Quigley identified this group as the 'international bankers,' men who are quite 'different from ordinary bankers in distinctive ways: they were cosmopolitan and international; they were close to governments and were particularly concerned with questions of government debts. . .; they were almost equally devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence in political life. These bankers came to be called international bankers and, more particularly, were known as merchant bankers in England, private bankers in France, and investment bankers in the United States.'

Dr. Quigley shows that the core of control is in the financial dynasties of Europe and America who have exercised political control through the formation of international financial combines. These monopoly money dynasties learned the elementary lesson that all governments must have sources of revenue from which to borrow in times of emergency. By providing such funds, the international bankers could make both kings and democratic leaders tremendously subservient to their will. Quigley names who they are. He tells how they hid the extent of their immense wealth from the public by keeping their firms unincorporated, usually partnerships, offering no shares, no reports, and usually no advertising.

Dr. Quigley traces the immense power and control exercised by the Rothschilds, the Bank of England, J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefellers. By 1900, according to Dr. Quigley, 'the influence of these business leaders was so great that the Morgan and Rockefeller groups acting together, or even Morgan acting alone, could have wrecked the economic system of the country.'

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the American economy had become so dynamic that the major banking dynasties found it increasingly difficult to maintain a tight control. Furthermore, their control was being challenged as a major political issue in national elections. So the Morgan and Rockefeller dynasties decided to follow the pattern of monopoly control over finance established by the Bank of England, that is a PRIVATELY controlled institution which had the APPEARANCE of an official government institution. The result was the Federal Reserve Act, originally plotted in a secret meeting on Jekyl Island in 1910 attended by representatives of the Morgan and Rockefeller banks. The Federal Reserve bill was introduced into the Senate by Senator Nelson Aldrich, grandfather of Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. The original bill failed because Aldrich was too closely connected with Morgan and Wall Street.

The Morgan-Rockefeller group then realized they had to have Democratic backing in order to erase the Wall Street taint of the bill. The opportunity presented itself during the election of 1912. Desperate to defeat President William Howard Taft (who opposed the Aldrich bill), Wall Street poured funds into the campaigns of both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, in order to split the Republicans and assure the election of Wilson.

The operation of the Federal Reserve is one of the most interesting and mysterious combines in the country. Since it was founded in 1913, it has successfully resisted every attempt to conduct an audit of its affairs. Its most recent political activity was to manipulate the interest rates during 1970 to the highest in 100 years which quickly caused a recession. This was blamed on the Republicans, and insured the election of a Democrat Congress. When David Kennedy, the Nixon Secretary of the Treasury, was asked about the credit-tightening policies of the Federal Reserve, he replied: 'It's not my job to approve or disapprove. It is the action of the Federal Reserve.'

2. How the Tax-Exempt Foundations are the Base of Operations. Dr. Quigley tells of the panic the Establishment went into at the formation of the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations in 1953 with Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee as chairman. In substance, Dr. Quigley admits the truth of the excellent book by Rene A. Wormser called Foundations: Their Power and Influence which detailed the facts about foundations as uncovered by the Reece investigation. Here are some criticisms of tax-exempt foundations given in the Wormser book: a) How they interlock into a monolithic monopoly of power to carry out globalist policies. b) How they develop an elite corps of social engineers with a compulsive drive to remake the world along Socialist lines. c) How the foundation-sponsored Kinsey report was deliberately designed as an attack on Judaic-Christian morality. d) How they imported a Swedish Socialist to produce a study on American Negro which has been used to justify revolutionary activities. e) How they use the ultimatum 'conform or no grant' to subvert and American education. f) How they finance and promote Socialist textbooks. g) How they push Rhodes scholars into Government service. h) How they produce history books which keep Americans from learning the truth. I) How they promote the United Nations as the home base for the Socialist-Communist coalition.

Dr. Quigley explains why the Reece investigation did not have the impact it should have had: 'It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the most respected newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worthwhile, in terms of votes or campaign contributions.'

GSG offers Foundations: Their Power and Influence, see books.

3. How The Establishment Helped Give China to the Communists. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 16 volumes of hearings documented beyond any doubt that China was lost to the Communists by the deliberate actions of a group of academic experts on the Far East, and Communist fellow travelers whose work was controlled and coordinated by the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Dr. Quigley adds a new dimension to the China story. He says: 'The influence of the Communists in IPR is well established, but the patronage of Wall Street is less well known.' He shows how the IPR money came from the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and specific Wall Street interests, adding, 'The financial deficits which occurred each year were picked up by financial angels, almost all with close Wall Street connections,' including Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Thomas Lamont, the senior head of J.P. Morgan and Company, and his son, Corliss Lamont.'

Dr. Quigley, in talking about the loss of China, admits the thesis of the great book by John T. Flynn, While You Slept, who was the first to expose how the leading book review journals are loaded to aid the Communists. Dr. Quigley states: 'It is also true that this group, from its control of funds, academic recommendations, and research or publication opportunities, could favor persons who accepted the established consensus and could injure, financially or in professional advancement, persons who did not accept it. It is also true that the established group, by its influence on book reviewing in The New York Times, theHerald Tribune, the Saturday Review, a few magazines, including the liberal weeklies, and in the professional journals, could advance or hamper any specialist's career. It is also true that these things were done in the United States in regard to the Far East by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this organization had been infiltrated by Communists, and by Communist sympathizers, and that much of this group's influence arose from its access to and control over the flow of funds from foundations to scholarly activities.'

4. The Role of the CFR in the Establishment. Dr. Quigley describes the Council on Foreign Relations as one of several 'front' organizations set up by the inner group for the purpose of advancing its conspiratorial schemes. Dr. Quigley explains more specifically that the Council on Foreign Relations 'was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company.' [The "and Company" means the House of Rockefeller -Ed.] Some idea of the influence of the Council of Foreign Relations may be gleaned from the fact that there were 74 CFR members in the American delegation to the United Nations Conference at San Francisco in 1945, including Alger Hiss (Communist spy), Harry Dexter White (Soviet agent), Owen Lattimore ('a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet international conspiracy'), John J. McCloy (formerly head of the Rockefeller Chase-Manhattan Bank), Harold Stassen, Nelson Rockefeller, John Foster Dulles, Philip Jessup and Dean Acheson.

Internationally, the CFR is interlocked with the Bilderbergers, the Pugwash Conferences, the English-speaking Union, the Pilgrims Society, and the Round Table. Within the United States, CFR members are interlocked with the American Association for the United Nations, the Foreign Policy Association, the World Affairs Council, the Committee for Economic Development, Business Advisory Council, Commission on National Goals, American Assembly, National Planning Association, and Americans for Democratic Action.

5. How the Establishment Controls the Universities. Dr. Quigley explains in detail how for generations the international financiers have dominated American universities through their control of university endowment money.

He tells how Columbia University was dominated by J.P. Morgan and Company. and 'its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was Morgan's chief spokesman from ivied halls.' Butler once said, 'The world is divided in to three classes of people: a very small group that makes things happen, a somewhat larger group that watches things happen, and the great multitude which never knows what happened.' Dr. Quigley gives many examples of how the international bankers placed their men as presidents of leading universities, including the placement of Dwight Eisenhower as president of Columbia.

Columbia University was the intellectual rostrum of the father of Progressive Education, John Dewey, and his favored disciples, William H. Kilpatrick, Harold O. Rugg, and George S. Counts, author of Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? which urged teachers to 'deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest.'

6. Establishment Influence on the Election of Presidents. Dr. Quigley tells how and why the Establishment was determined to defeat and destroy Barry Goldwater in 1964, unleashing a torrent of rage against him with such epithets as 'extremist,' 'racist,' 'atomic bomber,' 'trigger happy,' 'warmonger,' and 'psychologically unfit.'

Dr. Quigley tells how the international financiers manipulated the nomination of Dwight Eisenhower at the Republican National Convention in 1952. As Quigley explains, 'The lower-middle-class groups had preferred Senator Taft as their leader. Eisenhower, however, had been preferred by the eastern establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League, semi-aristocratic Anglophiles whose real strength rested in their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.'

Dr. Quigley explains Establishment support of John F. Kennedy like this: 'Kennedy, despite his Irish Catholicism, was an Establishment figure. This did not arise from his semi-aristocratic attitudes or his Harvard connections . . . These helped, but John Kennedy's introduction to the Establishment arose from his support of Britain, in opposition to his father, in the critical days at the American Embassy in London in 1938- 40. His acceptance into the English Establishment opened its American branch as well.'

In describing the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers who took over in the United States under the Roosevelt Administration, Dr. Quigley says: 'It must be recognized that the power that these energetic left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie.'

7. The Influence of Cecil Rhodes. The great and lasting influence of the Englishman, Cecil Rhodes, who had the money to propagandize for the strange ideas he believed in, is spelled out in detail by Dr. Quigley: 'In the middle of 1890s Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year (then about $5,000,000) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes that he was usually overdrawn on his account . . . These purposes centered on his desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control. For this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford . . .'

Rhodes formed a secret society called the 'Circle of Initiates,' along with other fronts for those who were not on the inside. According to Dr. Quigley, 'The power and influence of the Rhodes-Milner group in British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889, although not widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated.' For example, Dr. Quigley goes on to show how this group dominated The London Times from 1890 to 1912 and 'has controlled it completely since 1912 (except for the years 1919-1922)

What we call the Eastern Establishment is the American branch of the Rhodes organization. J.P. Morgan and Company was the inner core of command [Another reminder: "and Company" means the House of Rockefeller, which amusingly is the power behind the CIA, which is called "The Company." -Ed.], and the Council on Foreign Relations is its principal front. The Eastern Establishment extended its influence in the press in the same way in the United States as the Rhodes group did in England. According to Dr. Quigley, 'The American branch of this English Establishment extended much of its influence through five American newspapers (The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, and the lamented Boston Evening Transcript).'

Dr. Quigley also shows how the Establishment reached out to control the left-wing press as well. He names the Wall Street fortunes which established the New Republic, and says that 'the original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. . . . This latter task was entrusted to . . . Walter Lippmann . . . the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs.'

8. The One Thing the Establishment Fears. Dr. Quigley describes the conflict between grassroots Americans and the Establishment as 'the Midwest of Tom Sawyer against the cosmopolitan East of J.P. Morgan and Company, of old Siwash against Harvard, of the Chicago Tribune against the Washington Post or The New York Times . . .' He leaves no doubt as to where the real power centers are.

Dr. Quigley admits that nothing panics the international Establishment like the possibility of a threatened exposure. Whenever the public became somewhat aware of the conspiratorial processes, the vast, interlocking power structure of the whole London-Wall Street combine immediately shifted into high gear to cover up their agents and their tracks.

This is why the Establishment has viciously attacked nearly every Congressional investigation. Congressional hearings are the best sources of unvarnished truth we have had in America in the last 35 years. The Establishment turned all their heavy guns against Democrat Congressman Martin Dies, Republican Congressman Carroll Reece, Democrat Senator Pat McCarrran, and Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy because they were opening up the secrets of the conspiracy for the American people to see.

The American people had been nationally alerted to the fact of Communist infiltration of our Government by the Alger Hiss conviction in 1950, and to the fact that our boys were sent off to fight no-win wars in which the Communists had privileged sanctuaries by the Korean War of 1950-52. By the time of the Communist takeover of Cuba in 1959, nearly everyone knew something had to be terribly wrong at the top.

Unfortunately, the Establishment counteroffensive spearheaded by the Reuther Memorandum and the Fulbright Memorandum has been very successful in intimidating American citizens from taking action and spreading information.

However, there has been a steady growth in the number of informed patriots. They are the true 'Hope' of the country. In 1964, 27,000,000 of them proved that they could resist intimidation and insult of every vicious kind, and still stand up and be counted for their convictions.

See books for how to attain Tragedy and Hope or continue reading about The Anglo-American Establishment where Carroll Quigley unravels the story of people who have been a force behind shaping British and American history. Though The Anglo-American Establishment was completed in 1949, it was not published until 1981. Even as a renowned scholar with a best selling book the Evolution of Civilizations, The Anglo- American Establishment was rejected by 15 publishers.

Carroll Quigley states in the preface and introduction:

The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes's seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire. And what does not seem to be known to anyone is that this secret society was created by Rhodes and his principal trustee, Lord Milner, and continues to exist to this day. ...This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. ... This Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century. . . .

Facts came to me from sources which I am not permitted to name, and I have mentioned them only where I can produce documentary evidence available to everyone. . . . I feel that the truth has a right to be told, and, once told, can be an injury to no men of good will.

One wintry afternoon in February 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance to the British Empire and to the world as a whole. ... The leader was Cecil Rhodes, fabulously wealthy empire-builder and the most important person in South Africa. The second was William T. Stead, the most famous, and probably also the most sensational, journalist of the day. The third was Reginald Baliol Brett, later known as Lord Esher, friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V. . . .

This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history.

a speech given by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute and editor of LewRockwell.com, in 1996 in Washington, DC, and later published in The Rothbard-Rockwell Report and Chronicles magazine, from http://www.lewRockwell.com/rockwell/prez.html:

Down With the Presidency

The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture towards decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell schools kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It's not an inspiration; it's a threat.

The presidency - by which I mean the executive state - is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while its steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, the business, the charity, and the community.

I'll go further. The U.S. presidency is the world's leading evil. It is the chief mischief-maker in every part of the globe, the leading wrecker of nations, the usurer behind third-world debt, the bailer-out of corrupt governments, the hand in many dictatorial gloves, the sponsor and sustainer of the New World Order, of wars, interstate and civil, of famine and disease. To see the evils caused by the presidency, look no further than Iraq or Serbia, where the lives of innocents were snuffed out in pointless wars, where bombing was designed to destroy civilian infrastructure and cause disease, and where women, children, and the aged have been denied essential food and medicine because of a cruel embargo. Look at the human toll taken by the presidency, from Dresden and Hiroshima to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and you see a prime practitioner of murder by government.

Today, the president is called the leader of the world's only superpower, the "world's indispensable nation," which is reason enough to have him deposed. A world with any superpower at all is a world where no freedoms are safe. But by invoking this title, the presidency attempts to keep our attention focused on foreign affairs. It is a diversionary tactic designed to keep us from noticing the oppressive rule it imposes right here in the United States.

As the presidency assumes ever more power unto itself, it becomes less and less accountable and more and more tyrannical. These days, when we say the federal government, what we really mean is the presidency. When we say, national priorities, we really mean what the presidency wants. When we say national culture, we mean what the presidency funds and imposes.

The presidency is presumed to be the embodiment of Rousseau's general will, with far more power than any monarch or head of state in pre-modern societies. The U.S. presidency is the apex of the world's biggest and most powerful government and of the most expansive empire in world history. As such, the presidency represents the opposite of freedom. It is what stands between us and our goal of restoring our ancient rights.

And let me be clear: I'm not talking about any particular inhabitant of the White House. I'm talking about the institution itself, and the millions of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who are its acolytes. Look through the U.S. government manual, which breaks down the federal establishment into its three branches. What you actually see is the presidential trunk, its Supreme Court stick, and its Congressional twig. Practically everything we think of as federal - save the Library of Congress - operates under the aegis of the executive.

This is why the governing elites - and especially the foreign policy elites - are so intent on maintaining public respect for the office, and why they seek to give it the aura of holiness. For example, after Watergate, they briefly panicked and worried that they had gone too far. They might have discredited the democratic autocracy. And to some extent they did.

But the elites were not stupid: they were careful to insist that the Watergate controversy was not about the presidency as such, but only about Nixon the man. That's why it became necessary to separate the two. How? By keeping the focus on Nixon, making a devil out of him, and reveling in the details of his personal life, his difficulties with his mother, his supposed pathologies, etc.

Of course, this didn't entirely work. Americans took from Watergate the lesson that presidents will lie to you. This should be the first lesson of any civics course, of course, and the first rule of thumb in understanding the affairs of government. But notice that after Nixon died, he too was elevated to godlike status. None other than Bill Clinton served as high priest of the cult of president-worship on that occasion. He did everything but sacrifice a white bull at the temple of the White House.

The presidency recovered most of its sacramental character during the Reagan years. How wonderful, for the sake of our liberties, that Clinton has revived the great American tradition of scorning tyrants. In some ways, he is the best president a freedom lover can hope for, more well known for his private parts than his public policies. Of course, someday, Clinton too will ascend to the clouds, and enter the pantheon of the great leaders of the free world.

The libraries are filled with shelf after shelf of treatises on the American presidency. Save yourself some time, and don't bother with them. Virtually all tell the same hagiographic story. Whether written by liberals or conservatives, they serve up the identical Whiggish pap: the history of the presidency is the story of a great and glorious institution. It was opposed early on, and viciously so, by the anti-federalists, and later, even more viciously, by Southern Confederates. But it has been heroically championed by every respectable person since the beginning of the republic.

The office of the presidency, the conventional wisdom continues, has changed not at all in substance, but has grown in stature, responsibility, and importance, to fulfill its unique mission on earth. As the duties of the office have grown, so has the greatness of the men who inhabit it. Each stands on the shoulders of his forerunners, and, inspired by their vision and decisiveness, goes on to make his own contribution to the ever-expanding magisterium of presidential laws, executive orders, and national security findings.

When there is a low-ebb in the accumulation of power, it is seen as the fault of the individual and not the office. Thus the so-called postage-stamp presidents between Lincoln and Wilson are to be faulted for not following the glorious example set by Abe. They had a vast reservoir of power, but were mysteriously reluctant to use it. Fortunately that situation was resolved, by Wilson especially, and we moved onward and upward into the light of the present day. And every one of these books ends with the same conclusion: the U.S. presidency has served us well.

The hagiographers do admit one failing of the American presidency. It is almost too big an office for one man, and too much a burden to bear. The American people have come to expect too much from the president. We are unrealistic to think that one man can do it all. But that's all the more reason to respect and worship the man who agrees to take it on, and why all enlightened people must cut him some slack.

The analogy that comes to mind is the official history of the popes. In its infancy, the papacy was less formal, but its power and position were never in question. As the years went on and doctrine developed, so too did the burdens of office. Each pope inherited the wisdom of his forbears, and led the Church into fulfilling its mission more effectively.

But let's be clear about this. The church has never claimed that the papacy was the product of human effort; its spiritual character is a consequence of a divine, not human, act. And even the official history admits the struggles with anti-popes and Borgia popes (and someday Vatican II popes).

Catholics believe the institution was founded by Christ, and is guided by the Holy Spirit, but the pope can only invoke that guidance in the most narrow and rare circumstances. Otherwise, he is all too fallible. And that is why, although allegedly an absolute monarch, he is actually bound by the rule of law.

The presidency is seemingly bound by law, but in practice it can do just about anything it pleases. It can order up troops anywhere in the world, just as Clinton bragged in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. It can plow up a religious community in Texas and bury its members because they got on somebody's nerves at the Justice Department. It can tap our phones, read our mail, watch our bank accounts, and tell us what we can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke.

The presidency can break up businesses, shut down airlines, void drilling leases, bribe foreign heads of state or arrest them and try them in kangaroo courts, nationalize land, engage in germ warfare, firebomb crops in Columbia, overthrow any government anywhere, erect tariffs, round up and discredit any public or private assembly it chooses, grab our guns, tax our incomes and our inheritances, steal our land, centrally plan the national and world economy, and impose embargoes on anything anytime. No prince or pope ever had this ability.

But leave all that aside and consider this nightmare. The presidency has the power to bring about a nuclear holocaust with the push of a button. On his own initiative, the president can destroy the human race. One man can wipe out life on earth. Talk about playing God. This is a grotesque evil. And the White House claims it is not a tyranny? If the power to destroy the entire world isn't tyrannical, I don't know what is. Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow it? Why isn't this power immediately stripped from him?

What prevents fundamental challenge to this monstrous power is precisely the quasi-religious trappings of the presidency, which we again had to suffer through last January. One man who saw the religious significance of the presidency, and denounced in 1973, was - surprisingly enough - Michael Novak. His study, Choosing Our King: Powerful Symbols in Presidential Politics, is one of the few dissenting books on the subject. It was reissued last year as - not surprisingly - Choosing Our Presidents: Symbols of Political Leadership, with a new introduction repudiating the best parts of the book.

Of course, none of the conventional bilge accords with reality. The U.S. president is the worse outgrowth of a badly flawed Constitution, imposed in a sort of coup against the Articles of Confederation. Even from the beginning, the presidency was accorded too much power. Indeed, an honest history would have to admit that the presidency has always been an instrument of oppression, from the Whisky Rebellion to the War on Tobacco.

The presidency has systematically stolen the liberty won through the secession from Britain. From Jackson and Lincoln to McKinley and Roosevelt Junior, from Wilson and FDR to Truman and Kennedy, from Nixon and Reagan to Bush and Clinton, it has been the means by which our rights to liberty, property, and self government have been suppressed. I can count on one hand the actions of presidents that actually favored the true American cause, meaning liberty. The overwhelming history of the presidency is a tale of overthrown rights and liberties, and the erection of despotism in their stead.

Each president has tended to be worse than the last, especially in this century. Lately, in terms of the powers they assumed and the dictates they imposed, Kennedy was worse than Eisenhower, Johnson was worse than Kennedy, Nixon was worse than Johnson, Carter was worse than Nixon, and Reagan - who doubled the national budget and permanently entrenched the warfare state - was worse than Carter. The same is true of Bush and Clinton. Every budget is bigger and the powers exercised more egregious. Each new brutal action breaks another taboo, and establishes a new precedent that gives the next occupant of the White House more leeway.

Looking back through American history, we can see the few exceptions to this rule. Washington made an eloquent farewell address, laying out the proper American trade and foreign policy. Jefferson's revolution of 1800 was a great thing. But was it really a freer country after his term than before? That's a tough case to make. Andrew Jackson abolished the central bank, but his real legacy was democratic centralism and weakened states rights.

Andrew Johnson loosened the military dictatorship fastened on the South after it was conquered. But it is not hard to make the country freer when it had become totalitarian under the previous president's rule. Of course, Lincoln's bloody autocracy survives as the model of presidential leadership. James Buchanan made a great statement on behalf of the right of revolution. Grant restored the gold standard. Harding denounced U.S. imperialism in Haiti. But overall, my favorite president is William Henry Harrison. He keeled over shortly after his inauguration.

There have been four huge surveys taken of historians? views on the presidents: in 1948, in 1962, in 1970, and in 1983. Historians were asked to rank presidents as Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average, and Failure. In every case, number one is Lincoln, the mass murderer and military dictator who is the real father of the present nation. His term was a model of every despot's dream: spending money without Congressional approval, declaring martial law, arbitrarily arresting thousands and holding them without trial, suppressing free speech and the free press, handing out lucrative war contracts to his cronies, raising taxes, inflating the currency, and killing hundreds of thousands for the crime of desiring self-government. These are just the sort of actions historians love.

The number two winner in these competitions is FDR. Moreover, Wilson and Jackson are always in the top five. The bottom two in every case are Grant and Harding. None bothered to rate William Henry Harrison.

What does greatness in the presidency mean? It means waging war, crushing liberties, imposing socialism, issuing dictates, browbeating and ignoring Congress, appointing despotic judges, expanding the domestic and global empire, and generally trying his best to be an all-round enemy of freedom. It means saying with Lincoln, that "I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy."

The key to winning the respect of historians is to do these things. All aspirants to this vile office know this. It's what they seek. They long for crisis and power, to be bullies in the pulpit, to be the dictators they are in their hearts. They want, at all costs, to avoid the fate of being another "postage-stamp president." Madison said no man with power deserves to be trusted. Neither should we trust any man who seeks the power that the presidency offers.

Accordingly, it is all well and good that conservatives have worked to discredit the current occupant of the White House. Call him an philander, a cheat, and a double dealer if you want. Call him a tyrant too. But we must go further. The answer to restoring republican freedom has nothing to do with replacing Clinton with Lott or Kemp or Forbes or Buchanan. The structure of the presidency, and the religious aura that surrounds it, must be destroyed. The man is merely a passing occupant of the Holy Chair of St. Abraham. It is the chair itself that must be reduced to kindling.

It was never the intention of the majority of framers to create the mess we have, of course. After the war for independence, the Articles of Confederation had no chief executive. Its decisions were made by a five-member Confederation. The Confederation had no power to tax. All its decisions required the agreement of nine of the thirteen states. That is the way it should be.

Most of the delegates to the unfortunate Philadelphia convention hated executive power. They had severely restricted the governors of their states, after their bitter experience with the colonial governors. The new governors had no veto, and no power over the legislatures. Forrest McDonald reports that one quarter of the delegates to the convention wanted a plural executive, based loosely on the Articles model. But those who planned the convention - including Morris, Washington, and Hamilton - wanted a single, strong executive, and they out-maneuvered the various strains of anti-federalists.

But listen to how they did it. The people of the several states and their representatives were suspicious that Hamilton wanted to create a monarchy. Now, there's much mythology surrounding this point. It's not that the anti-federalists and the popular will opposed some guy strutting around in a crown. It was not monarchy as such they opposed, but the power the king exercised.

When they said they didn't want a monarch, they meant they didn't want a King George, they didn't want a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat, an executive. It was the despotic end they feared, and not the royal means.

Indeed, formally, the Constitution gives few powers to the president, and few duties, most of them subject to approval by the legislature. The most important provision regarding the presidency is that the holder of the office can be impeached. It was to be a threat constantly hanging over his head. It was, most framers thought, to be threatened often and used against any president who dared gather more power unto himself than the Constitution prescribed.

In one famous outburst, Hamilton was forced to defend himself against the charge that the new office of the presidency was a monarchy in disguise. He explained the difference between a monarch and a president. But as you listen to this, think about the present executive. Ask yourself whether he resembles the thing Hamilton claimed to have created in the office of the presidency, or whether we have the tyrant he claimed to be repudiating.

Among other points, Hamilton said in "Federalist 69":

"The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction...removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected...

"The President will have only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be called into the actual service of the Union.... [The power] of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies - all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature....

"The President is to have power, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the senators present concur. The King of Great Britain is the sole and absolute representative of the nation in all foreign transactions. He can of his own accord make treaties of peace, commerce, alliance, and of every other description....

"The President is to nominate and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint ambassadors and other public ministers.... The king of Great Britain is emphatically and truly styled the fountain of honor. He not only appoints to all offices, but can create offices. He can confer titles of nobility at pleasure...and...[even] make denizens of aliens.

"[The president] can prescribe no rules concerning the commerce or currency of the nation; [the king] is in several respects the arbiter of commerce, and in this capacity can establish markets and fairs, can regulate weights and measures, can lay embargoes for a limited time, can coin money.... What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other?"

Well, we can debate all day whether Hamilton was naive about the imperial office he was in fact creating, or whether he was a despicable liar. But the fact remains that in his writings, despite his reputation as a backer of the exalted presidency, he is by today's standards a Congressional supremacist. For that matter, and in comparison with today's presidency, so was the British king.

Most historians agree that there would have been no presidency apart from George Washington, who was trusted by the people as a true gentleman, and was presumed to understand what the American revolution was all about. But he got off track by attempting to suppress the Whisky Rebellion, although he at least acknowledged that his actions went beyond the strict letter of the Constitution. But though the presidency quickly spun out of control, at its antebellum worst it had nothing in common with today's executive state.

In those days, you could live your life and never even notice that the presidency existed. You had no contact with it. Most people couldn't vote anyway, thank goodness, and you didn't have to, but certain rights and freedoms were guaranteed regardless of whoever took hold of this - by today's standards - largely ceremonial position. The presidency couldn't tax you, draft you, or regulate your trade. It couldn't inflate your money, steal your kids, or impose itself on your community. From the standpoint of the average American, the presidency was almost invisible.

Listen to what de Tocqueville observed in 1831: "The President is...the executor of the laws; but he does not really co-operate in making them, since the refusal of his assent does not prevent their passage. He is not, therefore, a part of the sovereign power, but only its agent.... The president is placed beside the legislature like an inferior and dependent power...."

The office of president of the United States is "temporary, limited, and subordinate.... [W]hen he is at the head of government he has but little power, little wealth, and little glory to share among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or the ruin of a faction to depend up his elevation to power.... The influence which the President exercises on public business is no doubt feeble and indirect."

Thirty years later, all this would be destroyed by Lincoln, who fundamentally changed the nature of the government, as even his apologists admit. He became a Caesar, in complete contradiction to most of the framers? intentions. As Acton said, he abolished the primary contribution that America had made to the world, the principle of federalism. But that is an old story.

Less well known is how Wilson revived Lincoln's dictatorial predilections, and added to them an even more millennial cast. Moreover, this was his intention before he was elected. In 1908, while still president of Princeton, he wrote a small book entitled The President of the United States. It was a paean to the imperial presidency, and might as well be the bible of every president who followed him. He went beyond Lincoln, who praised the exercise of power. Wilson longed for a Presidential Messiah to deliver the human race.

"There can be no successful government," Wilson begins, "without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action.... We have grown more and more from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system.... To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention."

The president must be a "man who understands his own day and the needs of the country, and who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon Congress.... He is not so much part of its organization as its vital link of connection with the thinking nation...he is also the political leader of the nation.... The nation as a whole has chosen him.... Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people.... the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber. Its instinct is for unified action, and it craves a single leader."

"...The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit...he is the only spokesman of the whole people. [Finally, Presidents should regard] themselves as less and less executive officers and more and more directors of affairs and leaders of the nation, - men of counsel and of the sort of action that makes for enlightenment."

This is not a theory of the presidency. It is the hope for a new messiah. That indeed is what the presidency has come to. But any man who accepts this view is not a free man. He is not a man who understands what constitutes civilized life. The man who accepts what Wilson calls for is an apostle of total state and a defender of collectivism and despotism.

Conservatives used to understand this. In the last century, all the great political philosophers - men like John Randolph and John Taylor and John C. Calhoun - did. In this century, the right was born in reaction to the imperial presidency. Men like Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and Felix Morley called the FDR presidency what it was: a U.S. version of the dictatorships that arose in Russia and Germany, and a profound evil draining away ry life of the nation.

They understood that FDR had brought both the Congress and the Supreme Court under his control, for purposes of power, national socialism, and war. He shredded what was left of the Constitution, and set the stage for all the consolidation that followed. Later presidents were free to nationalize the public schools, administer the economy according to the dictates of crackpot Keynesian economists, tell us who we must and who we must not associate with, nationalize the police function, and run a egalitarian regime that extols non-discrimination as the sole moral tenet, when it is clearly not a moral tenet at all. Later conservatives like James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, and Robert Nisbet, understood this point too.

Yet who do modern conservatives extol? Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. Reagan spoke of them as gods and models, and so did Bush and Gingrich. In the 1980s, we were told that Congress was the imperial branch of government because Tip O'Neill had a few questions about Reagan's tax-and-spend military buildup, and his strategy for fostering global warfare while managing world affairs through the CIA. All this was bolstered by books by Harvey Mansfield, Terry Eastland, and dozens of other neoconservatives who pretended to provided some justification for presidential supremacy and its exercise of global rule. More recently even Pat Buchanan repeated the "Ask not..." admonition of John F. Kennedy, that we should live to serve the central government and its organizing principle, the presidency.

What the neocon logic comes down to is this. The U.S. has a moral responsibility to run the world. But the citizens are too stupid to understand this. That's why we can't use democratic institutions like Congress in this ambition. We must use the executive power of the presidency. It must have total control over foreign affairs, and never bow to Congressional carping.

Once this point is conceded, the game is over. The demands of a centralized and all-powerful presidency and its interventionist foreign policy are ideologically reinforcing. One needs the other. If the presidency is supreme is global affairs, it will be supreme in domestic affairs. If it is supreme at home, there will be no states rights, no absolute property rights, no true liberty from government oppression. The continued centralization of government in the presidency represents the end of America and its civilization.

A key part of the theory of presidential supremacy in foreign affairs is the idea that politics stops at the water's edge. If you believe that, you have given up everything. It means that foreign affairs will continue to be the last refuge of an omnipotent scoundrel. If a president can count on the fact that he won't be criticized so long as he is running a war, he will run more of them. So long as he is running wars, government at home cannot be cut. As Felix Morley said, "Politics can stop at the water's edge only when policies stop at the water's edge."

Sadly, the Congress for the most part cares nothing about foreign policy. In that, it reflects the attitude of the American voter. The exception is the handful of Congressmen who do speak about foreign issues, usually at the behest of the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the increasingly global FBI. Such men are mere adjuncts of presidential power.

In fact, it is the obligation of every patriot not only denounce a president's actions at home, but to question, harass, and seek to rein in the presidency when it has sent troops abroad. That is when the watchful eye of the citizenry is most important. If we hold our tongues under some mistaken notion of patriotism, we surrender what remains of our freedoms. Yet during the Gulf War, even those who had courageously opposed this intervention in advance mouthed the old cliches about politics and the water's edge and "supporting our the troops" when the presidency started massacring Iraqis. Will the same happen when the troops are sent to China, a country without a single aircraft carrier, in retaliation for some trumped-up incident in the tradition of the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin?

If there is ever a time to get behind a president, it is when he withdraws from the world, stops wars, and brings the troops home. If there is ever a time to trip him up, question his leadership, and denounce his usurpations, it is when he does the opposite. A bipartisan foreign policy is a Napoleonic foreign policy, and the opposite of that prescribed by Washington in his farewell address.

In the midst of America's war against Britain in 1812, John Randolph wrote an open letter to his Virginia constituents, pleading with them not to support the war, and promising them he would not, for he knew where war led: to presidential dictatorship: "If you and your posterity are to become hewers of wood and drawers of water to the modern Pharaoh, it shall not be for the want of my best exertions to rescue you from cruel and abject bondage."

Sixty years ago all conservatives would have agreed with him. But the neoconservative onslaught has purged conservatives of their instinctive suspicions of presidential power.

By the time 1994 had come around, conservatives had been thoroughly indoctrinated in the theory that Congress was out of control, and that the executive branch needed more power. The leadership of the 104th congress - dominated to a man by neocons and presidential supremacists - bamboozled the freshmen into pushing for three executive-enhancing measures.

In one of the Congress's first actions, it made itself subject to the oppressive civil rights and labor laws that the executive enforced against the rest of the nation. This was incredibly stupid. The Congress was exempted from these for a reason. It prevented the executive from using its own regulatory agencies to lord it over Congress. By making itself subject to these laws, Congress willingly submitted itself to implicit and explicit domination by the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, and the EEOC. It imposed quotas and political correctness on itself, while any dissenters from the presidential line suddenly faced the threat of investigation and prosecution by those they were attempting to rein in.

The imposition of these laws against Congress is a clear violation of the separation of powers. But it would not be the last time that this Congress made this mistake. It also passed the line-item veto, another violation of the separation of powers. The theory was that the president would strike out pork, pork being defined as property taken by taxation and redistributed to special interests. But since pork is the entirety of the federal government's $1.7 trillion budget, this has given the president wide latitude over Congress. It takes away from Congress the right to control the purse strings.

Also part of the Contract with America was term limits for Congress. This would represent a severe diminution of Congressional power with respect to the presidency. After all, it would not mean term limits for the permanent bureaucracy or for federal judges, but only for the one branch the people can actually control. Thank goodness the self-interest of the politicians themselves prevented it from coming into being.

After that initial burst of energy, this Congress surrendered everything to the Clinton White House: control of the budget, control of foreign affairs, and control of the Federal Reserve and the FBI. The Justice Department operates practically without oversight, as does the Treasury, HUD, Transportation, Commerce, EPA, the SEC, the FTC, and the FDA.

Congress has given in on point after point, eventually even granting the presidency most of what it demanded in health-care reform, including mandated equal coverage of the mentally ill. Chalk it up to long-term planning. They came into office pledging to curb government, but are as infatuated with the presidency as Clinton himself. After all, they hope their party will regain the office.

Then the Republicans had the audacity to ask in bewilderment: why did the president beat Dole? What did we do wrong? The real question is what have they done right? James Burnham said that the legislature is useless unless it is curbing the presidency. By that measure, this Congress has been worthless. It deserves to lose its majority. And its party deserves to lose the presidency, whose powers they are so anxious to grab for themselves.

The best moments in the 104th Congress were when a few freshmen talked quietly of impeachment. Indeed it is their responsibility to talk loudly, openly, and constantly of impeachment. Today's presidency is by definition in violation of the Constitution. Talk of impeachment ought to become routine. So should ridicule and humiliation. For if we care about liberty, the plebiscitory dictatorship must be reined in or tossed out.

John Randolph had only been a Senator for a few days when he gave an extraordinary speech denouncing John Quincy Adams. "It is my duty," said Randolph, "to leave nothing undone that I may lawfully do, to pull down this administration.... They who, from indifference, or with their eyes open, persist in hugging the traitor to their bosom, deserve to be insulted...deserve to be slaves, with no other music to sooth them but the clank of the chains which they have put on themselves and given to their offspring."

John Randolph said this in 1826. This was a time, writes Tocqueville, when the presidency was almost invisible. If we cannot say this and more today, when the presidency is dictator to the world, we are not authentic conservatives. Indeed, we are not free men.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2005-Oct-27, by Peggy Noonan:

A Separate Peace
America is in trouble--and our elites are merely resigned.

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It's harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."

I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.

But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

---

Let me focus for a minute on the presidency, another institution in trouble. In the past I have been impatient with the idea that it's impossible now to be president, that it is impossible to run the government of the United States successfully or even competently. I always thought that was an excuse of losers. I'd seen a successful presidency up close. It can be done.

But since 9/11, in the four years after that catastrophe, I have wondered if it hasn't all gotten too big, too complicated, too crucial, too many-fronted, too . . . impossible.

I refer to the sheer scope, speed and urgency of the issues that go to a president's desk, to the impossibility of bureaucracy, to the array of impeding and antagonistic forces (the 50-50 nation, the mass media, the senators owned by the groups), to the need to have a fully informed understanding of and stand on the most exotic issues, from Avian flu to the domestic realities of Zimbabwe.

The special prosecutors, the scandals, the spin for the scandals, nuclear proliferation, wars and natural disasters, Iraq, stem cells, earthquakes, the background of the Supreme Court backup pick, how best to handle the security problems at the port of Newark, how to increase production of vaccines, tort reform, did Justice bungle the anthrax case, how is Cipro production going, did you see this morning's Raw Threat File? Our public schools don't work, and there's little refuge to be had in private schools, however pricey, in part because teachers there are embarrassed not to be working in the slums and make up for it by putting pictures of Frida Kalho where Abe Lincoln used to be. Where is Osama? What's up with trademark infringement and intellectual capital? We need an answer on an amendment on homosexual marriage! We face a revolt on immigration.

The range, depth, and complexity of these problems, the crucial nature of each of them, the speed with which they bombard the Oval Office, and the psychic and practical impossibility of meeting and answering even the most urgent of them, is overwhelming. And that doesn't even get us to Korea. And Russia. And China, and the Mideast. You say we don't understand Africa? We don't even understand Canada!

Roiling history, daily dangers, big demands; a government that is itself too big and rolling in too much money and ever needing more to do the latest important, necessary, crucial thing.

It's beyond, "The president is overwhelmed." The presidency is overwhelmed. The whole government is. And people sense when an institution is overwhelmed. Citizens know. If we had a major terrorist event tomorrow half the country--more than half--would not trust the federal government to do what it has to do, would not trust it to tell the truth, would not trust it, period.

It should be noted that all modern presidents face a slew of issues, and none of them have felt in control of events but have instead felt controlled by them. JFK in one week faced the Soviets, civil rights, the Berlin Wall, the southern Democratic mandarins of the U.S. Senate. He had to face Cuba, only 90 miles away, importing Russian missiles. But the difference now, 45 years later, is that there are a million little Cubas, a new Cuba every week. It's all so much more so. And all increasingly crucial. And it will be for the next president, too.

---

A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls--bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn't wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They're thrown all over her desk and bureau. She's not rich, and they're inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, "It's affluence," and someone else nodded, but I said, "Yeah, but it's also the fear parents have that we're at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They're buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case."

This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment. Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be.

Let me veer back to the president. One of the reasons some of us have felt discomfort regarding President Bush's leadership the past year or so is that he makes more than the usual number of decisions that seem to be looking for trouble. He makes startling choices, as in the Miers case. But you don't have to look for trouble in life, it will find you, especially when you're president. It knows your address. A White House is a castle surrounded by a moat, and the moat is called trouble, and the rain will come and the moat will rise. You should buy some boots, do your work, hope for the best.

---

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford's lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It's called "Symptoms of Withdrawal." At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford's mother's apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn't gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. "Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta." Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy "took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. 'I'm glad I'm not going to be around when you guys are my age.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.' "

Mr. Lawford continued, "The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of 'maybe we shouldn't go there.' Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on."

Lawford thought his uncle might be referring to their family--that it might "fall apart." But reading, one gets the strong impression Teddy Kennedy was not talking about his family but about . . . the whole ball of wax, the impossible nature of everything, the realities so daunting it seems the very system is off the tracks.

And--forgive me--I thought: If even Teddy knows . . .

---

If I am right that trolley thoughts are out there, and even prevalent, how are people dealing with it on a daily basis?

I think those who haven't noticed we're living in a troubling time continue to operate each day with classic and constitutional American optimism intact. I think some of those who have a sense we're in trouble are going through the motions, dealing with their own daily challenges.

And some--well, I will mention and end with America's elites. Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don't think that's our elites' problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

Not all of course. There are a lot of people--I know them and so do you--trying to do work that helps, that will turn it around, that can make it better, that can save lives. They're trying to keep the boat afloat. Or, I should say, get the trolley back on the tracks.

That's what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don't even express it to themselves, wonder if they'll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," forthcoming in November from Penguin, which you can preorder from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

from National Review, 1997-Sept-1, by Ronald Bailey, from http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html:

INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY:

Who Is Maurice Strong?

The adventures of Maurice Strong & Co. illustrate the fact that nowadays you don't have to be a household name to wield global power.

"The survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man," declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the "Custodian of the Planet." He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations. This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, of course. Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of "global governance" that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans' lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the "indispensable man" at the center of this creeping UN power grab.

Not that Mr. Strong looks particularly indispensable. Indeed, he exudes a kind of negative charisma. He is a grey, short, soft-voiced man with a salt-and-pepper toothbrush mustache who wouldn't rate a second glance if you passed him on the street. Yet his remarkable career has led him from boyhood poverty in Manitoba to the highest councils of international government.

Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute; Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota's International Advisory Board. As advisor to Kofi Annan, he is overseeing the new UN reforms.

Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development -- the so-called Earth Summit -- held in Rio de Janeiro, which gave a significant push to global economic and environmental regulation.

"He's dangerous because he's a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system]," comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. "I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left."

"This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. "If he is whispering in Kofi Annan's ear this is no good at all."

Strong attracts such mystified suspicion because he is difficult to pin down. He told Maclean's in 1976 that he was "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology." And his career combines oil deals with the likes of Adnan Khashoggi with links to the environmentalist Left. He is in fact one of a new political breed: the bi-sectoral entrepreneur who uses business success for leverage in politics, and vice versa.

Strong started in the oil business in the 1950s. He took over and turned around some small ailing energy companies in the 1960s, and he was president of a major holding company -- the Power Corporation of Canada -- by the age of 35. This was success by any standard. Yet on more than one occasion (including once in Who's Who), Strong has been caught exaggerating. He claimed, for instance, to have forfeited a $200,000 salary when he left Power. The real figure, said a company officer, was $35,000. Why this myth-making? Well, a CEO is just a CEO -- but a whiz-kid is a potential cabinet officer.

And it is in politics that Strong's talents really shine. He is the Michelangelo of networking. He early made friends in high places in Canada's Liberal Party -- including Paul Martin Sr., Canada's external-affairs minister in the Sixties -- and kept them as business partners in oil and real-estate ventures. He cultivated bright well-connected young people -- like Paul Martin Jr., Canada's present finance minister and the smart money's bet to succeed Jean Chretien as prime minister -- and salted them throughout his various political and business networks to form a virtual private intelligence service. And he always seemed to know what the next political trend would be -- foreign aid, Canadian economic nationalism, environmentalism.

In 1966, by now a Liberal favorite, Strong became head of the Canadian International Development Agency and thus was launched internationally. Impressed by his work at CIDA, UN Secretary General U Thant asked him to organize what became the first Earth Summit -- the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The next year, Strong became first director of the new UN Environment Program, created as a result of Stockholm. And in 1975, he was invited back to Canada to run the semi-national Petro-Canada, created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC's oil shocks.

Petro-Canada was a sop to Canada's anti-American Left, then denouncing American ownership of the country's oil companies. Strong talked a good economic-nationalist game -- but he himself was a major reason why Canada's oil companies were U.S.-owned. Ten years before, while at Power Corporation, he had enabled Shell to take over the only remaining all-Canadian oil company by throwing a controlling block of shares in its direction. As Maclean's wrote, he now returned "amid fanfares" to rectify this.

After a couple of years, Strong left Petro-Canada for various business deals, including one with Adnan Khashoggi through which he ended up owning the 200,000-acre Baca ranch in Colorado, now a "New Age" center run by his wife, Hanne. (Among the seekers at Baca are Zen and Tibetan Buddhist monks, a breakaway order of Carmelite nuns, and followers of a Hindu guru called Babaji.) Not for long the joys of contemplation, however. In 1985, he was back as executive coordinator of the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa, in charge of running the $3.5-billion famine-relief effort in Somalia and Ethiopia. And in 1989, he was appointed Secretary General of the Earth Summit -- shortly thereafter flying down to Rio.

Strong's flexibility, however, must not be mistaken for open-mindedness. His friends, his allies among Canadian Liberals, his networks in the UN and the Third World, even his long-term business partners (like the late Paul Nathanson, wartime treasurer of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Committee) all lean Left. He has said the Depression left him "frankly very radical." And given his ability to get things done, the consistency of his support for a world managed by bureaucrats is alarming. As Elaine Dewar wrote in Toronto's Saturday Night magazine:

It is instructive to read Strong's 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain, and Europe.

IN the meantime, Strong continued the international networking on which his influence rests. He became a member of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). He found time to serve as president of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, on the executive committee of the Society for International Development, and as an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. Above all, he served on the Commission on Global Governance -- which, as we shall see, plays a crucial part in the international power grab.

Sometimes, indeed, it seems that Strong's network of contacts must rival the Internet. To list a few:

-- Vice President Al Gore. (Of course.)

-- World Bank President James Wolfensohn, formerly on the Rockefeller Foundation Board and currently on the Population Council Board; he was Al Gore's favored candidate for the World Bank position.

-- James Gustave Speth, head of the Carter Administration's Council on Environmental Quality, crafter of the doomladen Global 2000 report, member of the Clinton - Gore transition team; he now heads the UN Development Program.

-- Shridath Ramphal, formerly Secretary General of the (British) Commonwealth, now Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.

-- Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute -- which works closely with the World Bank, the UN Environment Program, and the UN Development Program -- and Co-Chairman of the President's Council on Sustainable Development.

-- Ingvar Carlsson, former Swedish prime minister and Co-Chairman of the Commission on Global Governance.

But Strong is no snob; he even counts Republican Presidents among his friends. Elaine Dewar again:

Strong blurted out that he'd almost been shut out of the Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been overruled by the White House because George Bush knew him. He said that he'd donated some $100,000 to the Democrats and a slightly lesser amount to the Republicans in 1988. (The Republicans didn't confirm.)

I had been absolutely astonished. I mean yes, he had done a great deal of business in the U.S., but how could he have managed such contributions?

Well, he'd had a green card. The governor of Colorado had suggested it to him. A lawyer in Denver had told him how. 

But why? I'd asked. 

"Because I wanted influence in the United States." 

So Strong gave political contributions (of dubious legality) to both parties; George Bush, now a friend, intervened to help him stay in charge of the Rio conference; he was thereby enabled to set a deep green agenda there; and Bush took a political hit in an election year. An instructive tale -- if it is not part of Strong's mythmaking.

Most of Strong's friends are more obviously compatible, which may explain why they tend to overlap in their institutional commitments. For example, James Wolfensohn (whom Strong had hired out of Harvard in the early Sixties to run an Australian subsidiary of one of his companies) appointed him as his senior advisor almost immediately upon being named chairman of the World Bank. "I'd been involved in . . . Stockholm, which Maurice Strong arranged," says Wolfensohn, who, more recently, has been credited with co-drafting (with Mikhail Gorbachev) the Earth Charter presented for consideration at the Rio + 5 meeting in Brazil earlier this year. As head of the Earth Council, Maurice Strong chaired that meeting.

It's not a conspiracy, of course: just a group of like-minded people fighting to save the world from less prescient and more selfish forces -- namely, market forces. And though the crises change -- World War II in the Forties, fear of the atom bomb in the Fifties, the "energy crisis" in the Seventies -- the Left's remedy is always the same: a greater role for international agencies. Today an allegedly looming global environmental catastrophe is behind their efforts to increase the power of the UN. Strong has warned memorably: "If we don't change, our species will not survive. . . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse." Apocalypse soon -- unless international bodies save us from ourselves.

LAST week, Secretary General Annan unveiled Maurice Strong's plan for reorganizing the UN. To be sure, the notoriously corrupt and inefficient UN bureaucracy could do with some shaking up. Strong's plan, however, mostly points in a different direction -- one drawn from a document, Our Global Neighborhood, devised by the interestingly named Commission on Global Governance.

The CGG was established in 1992, after Rio, at the suggestion of Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and head of the Socialist International. Then Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali endorsed it. The CGG naturally denies advocating the sort of thing that fuels militia nightmares. "We are not proposing movement toward a world government," reassuringly write Co-Chairmen Ingvar Carlsson and Shridath Ramphal, ". . . [but] this is not to say that the goal should be a world without systems or rules." Quite so. As Hofstra University law professor Peter Spiro describes it: "The aim is not a superstate but rather the establishment of norm-creating multilateral regimes . . . This construct already constrains state action in the context of human rights and environmental protection and is on a springboard in other areas."

The concept of global governance has been fermenting for some time. In 1991, the Club of Rome (of which Strong is, of course, a member) issued a report called The First Global Revolution, which asserted that current problems "are essentially global and cannot be solved through individual country initiatives [which] gives a greatly enhanced importance to the United Nations and other international systems." Also in 1991 Strong claimed that the Earth Summit, of which he was Secretary General, would play an important role in "reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance." In 1995, in Our Global Neighborhood, the CGG agreed: "It is our firm conclusion that the United Nations must continue to play a central role in global governance."

Americans should be worried by the Commission's recommendations: for instance, that some UN activities be funded through taxes on foreign-exchange transactions and multinational corporations. Economist James Tobin estimates that a 0.5 per cent tax on foreign-exchange transactions would raise $1.5 trillion annually -- nearly equivalent to the U.S. federal budget.

It also recommended that "user fees" might be imposed on companies operating in the "global commons." Such fees might be collected on international airline tickets, ocean shipping, deep-sea fishing, activities in Antarctica, geostationary satellite orbits, and electromagnetic spectrum. But the big enchilada is carbon taxes, which would be levied on all fuels made from coal, oil, and natural gas. "A carbon tax," the report deadpans, ". . . would yield very large revenues indeed." Given the UN's record of empire-building and corruption, Cato's Ted Carpenter warns: "One can only imagine the degree of mischief it could get into if it had independent sources of revenue."

Especially significant for the U.S. was the CGG's proposal for eventual elimination of the veto held by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Commission knew that the current permanent members of the Security Council, including the U.S., would not easily surrender their vetoes, and so it recommended a two-stage process.

In the first stage, five new permanent members (without a veto) would be added to the Security Council -- probably Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, and Nigeria -- along with three new slots for non-permanent members. But the real threat to U.S. interests is the second stage: "a full review of the membership of the Council . . . around 2005, when the veto can be phased out." These plans are advancing. In March, the president of the UN General Assembly, Razali Ismail of Malayasia, unveiled his own formula for reforming the Security Council. It closely tracks the CGG's proposals. In particular, Razali proposed "urg[ing] the original permanent members to limit use of the veto . . . and not to extend [it] to new permanent members." He wanted to make the veto "progressively and politically untenable" and recommended that these arrangements be reviewed in ten years.

In July the State Department compromised -- accepting five new Security Council members but remaining silent on the veto. It plainly hopes that the veto issue will go away if the U.S. concedes on enlarging the Council. Yet the CGG's report makes clear that we are facing a rolling agenda to expand the power of UN bureaucrats. The veto issue may be postponed for ten years -- but what then?

"This is an initiative that should be resisted by the United States with special vehemence," says Ted Carpenter. For if the veto were eliminated, the United States would face the prospect of having other countries make key determinations that affect us without our consent.

THE Commission also wants to strengthen "global civil society," which, it explains, "is best expressed in the global non-governmental movement." Today, there are nearly 15,000 NGOs. More than 1,200 of them have consultative status with the UN's Economic and Social Council (up from 41 in 1948). The CGG wants NGOs to be brought formally into the UN system (no wonder Kenneth Minogue calls this Acronymia). So it proposes that representatives of such organizations be accredited to the General Assembly as "Civil Society Organizations" and convened in an annual Forum of Civil Society.

But how would these representatives be selected? This June, the General Assembly held a session on environmental issues called Earth Summit +5. President Razali selected a number of representatives from the NGOs and the private sector for the exclusive privilege of speaking in the plenary sessions. "I have gone to a lot of trouble with this, choosing the right NGOs," he declared. So whom did he choose?

Among others: Thilo Bode, executive director of Greenpeace, to represent the scientific and technological community; Yolanda Kakabadse, the president of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and "from the farmers, I have chosen an organic farmer, Denise O'Brien from the United States, who is a member of the Via Campesina." In what sense are these people "representative"? Whom do they represent? Were the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of Toshiba, and the president of the Farm Bureau all too busy to come talk to the General Assembly?

Another example of how this selection process operates was the "great civil society forum" convened at the behest of Strong's Earth Council and Mikhail Gorbachev's Green Cross International this past March. Some five hundred delegates met, supposedly to assess the results of the Earth Summit, but in reality to condemn the "inaction" of signatory countries in implementing the Rio treaties. The delegates were selected through a process based on national councils for sustainable development, themselves set up pursuant to the Earth Summit. Membership in these councils means that an organization is already persuaded of the global environmental crisis. So you can bet that the process did not yield many delegates representing business or advocating limits on government power.

This kind of international gabfest is, of course, a sinister parody of democracy. "Very few of even the larger international NGOs are operationally democratic, in the sense that members elect officers or direct policy on particular issues," notes Peter Spiro. "Arguably it is more often money than membership that determines influence, and money more often represents the support of centralized elites, such as major foundations, than of the grass roots." (The CGG has benefited substantially from the largesse of the MacArthur, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations.)

Hilary French, Vice President of the alarmist Worldwatch Institute, justifies this revealingly as "a paradox of our time . . . that effective governance requires control being simultaneously passed down to local communities and up to international institutions." Paradoxically or not, the voters hardly appear in this model of governance. It bypasses national governments and representative democracy in order to empower the sort of people who are willing to sit in committee meetings to the bitter end. Those who have better things to do -- businessmen, workers, moms -- would be the losers in the type of centralized decentralization envisioned by Worldwatch. The result would be decisions reached by self-selecting elites. In domestic politics, we have a name for such elite groups -- special interests.

ANOTHER CGG recommendation is that the old UN Trusteeship Council "be given a new mandate over the global commons." It defines the global commons to include the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and the related environmental systems that contribute to the support of human life. A new Trusteeship Council would oversee "the management of the commons, including development and use of their resources . . . [and] the administration of environmental treaties in such fields as climate change, biodiversity, outer space, and the Law of the Sea."

It is hard to see what this expansive definition would exclude from the jurisdiction of the Trusteeship Council. Biodiversity encompasses all the plants and animals on the earth, including those that live in your backyard. Will UN troops swoop in to stop you from cutting down trees on your property? Doubtless not. But a recent case near Yellowstone National Park may be a foretaste of how international agencies can meddle in U.S. domestic affairs.

Yellowstone has been designated a "World Heritage Site." These Sites are natural settings or cultural monuments recognized by the World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as having "outstanding universal value." Sites are designated under a Convention ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1973, and it is possible to place such sites on a "List of World Heritage Sites in Danger."

In this case, a mining company wanted to construct a gold mine outside the boundaries of Yellowstone. The normal environmental review of the project's impact was still proceeding under U.S. law. But a group of environmentalist NGOs opposed to the mine were not content to wait for that review to take its course. They asked that members of the World Heritage Committee come to Yellowstone to hold public hearings. George Frampton, the Clinton Administration's Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, wrote to the WHC saying: "The Secretary [Bruce Babbitt] and the National Park Service have clearly expressed strong reservations with the New World Mine proposal." Frampton added: "We believe that a potential danger to the values of the Park and surrounding waters and fisheries exists and that the committee should be informed that the property as inscribed on the . . . List is in danger." Four officials of the WHC duly came to Yellowstone and held hearings. And at its December 1995 meeting in Berlin, the Committee obligingly voted to list Yellowstone as a "World Heritage Site in Danger."

"It was, in my opinion, a blatantly political act," declared Rep. Barbara Cubin (R., Wyo.) during congressional hearings about the listing. "It was done to draw attention, public reaction, public response, and public pressure to see that the mine wasn't developed." Jeremy Rabkin, a Cornell political scientist, agrees that the international listing of such sites "provides an international forum through which to put pressure on U.S. policy."

Would the mine really have endangered Yellowstone? We'll never know. The environmental-impact statement was never issued, and, under pressure, the mining company accepted a $65-million federal buyout plus a trade for unspecified federal lands somewhere else. Thus, even with no enforcement power, this UN dependency was able to make land-use policy for the United States.

These events prompted Rep. Don Young (R., Alaska) to introduce the American Land Sovereignty Act. With 174 co-sponsors to date, the Act aims to "preserve sovereignty of the United States over public lands and . . . to preserve State sovereignty and private property rights in non-federal lands surrounding those public lands." Congress would have to approve on a case-by-case basis land designations made pursuant to any international agreements.

But is U.S. sovereignty really in danger? In an interview, Strong dismissed Young's anxieties. "I do not share his concern. It is no abdication of sovereignty to exercise it in company with others, and when you're dealing with global issues that's what you have to do." He continues: "If you put yourself in a larger unit, of course, you get some advantages and you give up some of your freedom. And that's what's happening in Europe, that the states of Europe have decided that overall they're better off to create a structure in which they give up some of their national rights and exercise them collectively through the Union."

This example of the European Union, however, worries Ambassador Lichenstein. The EU's bureaucracy in Brussels, he complains, "is responsible to no one. Governments get together -- foreign ministers, finance ministers -- they presumably hand down the guidelines, but don't kid yourself, the bureaucrats are running things."

The Yellowstone case is an example of how "feel-good" symbolism about the environment can be transformed into real constraints upon real people imposed outside the law, with no democratic oversight and no means of redress. Ironically, Strong himself had a run-in with Colorado environmentalists over local water rights. They did not have the wit to call in an international agency against the New Age rancher -- or maybe they realized that Strong was one property owner whose rights the UN would respect.

AS troubling as the Yellowstone incident is, much greater potential for mischief lies in a new series of "framework treaties" designed to handle global environmental issues. Initially, the treaties called for voluntary actions by governments and set up a consultative process. But environmental activists like Hilary French know very well how this process works. "Even though it can look disappointing, the political will created [by these framework conventions] can lead to commitments of a more binding nature," she said. This is already happening. "Although its declaration of principles was transparently aspirational, the 1972 Stockholm world conference on the human environment is generally recognized as a turning point in international environmental-protection efforts," wrote Peter Spiro. "From it emerged a standing institution (the UN Environment Program); weak but more focused 'framework' treaties followed, which in turn are being filled out by specific regulatory regimes. The 1985 Vienna Convention on the Protection of the Ozone Layer itself included no obligations, but the 1987 Montreal protocols and subsequent amendments set a full phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other ozone-depleting substances by 1996. The regime covers 132 signatories with a total population of 4.7 billion people. Between 1987 and 1991, global CFC consumption was in fact reduced by half. A similar filling-out process is likely to occur with the biodiversity and climate-change conventions signed at Rio."

The "conventions" that Spiro was talking about emerged from the Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong. They deal with two of the alleged global environmental crises -- global warming and species extinction.

At the time of the Earth Summit, some scientists predicted on the basis of climate computer models that the earth's average temperature would increase by 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century because of the "greenhouse effect." These predictions are controversial among scientists. And as the computer models are refined, they show that the atmosphere will warm far less than originally predicted. Furthermore, more accurate satellite measurements show no increase in the average global temperature over the last two decades. Finally, an important study published in Nature concluded that even if the warming predictions are right, it could well be less costly to allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise for a decade or more because technological innovations and judicious capital investment will make it possible to reduce them far more cheaply at some point before they become a significant problem. In other words, we needn't take drastic and costly action now.

The process forges ahead anyway. The Framework Convention on Global Climate Change signed by President George Bush at the Rio Earth Summit is already beginning to harden. Initially, countries were supposed voluntarily to reduce by the year 2000 the "greenhouse gases" to the level emitted in 1990. Then, a year ago, at a UN climate-change meeting in Geneva, the Clinton Administration offered to set legally binding limits on the greenhouse gases the United States can emit. In June of this year, at the UN's Earth Summit +5 session, President Clinton reaffirmed this commitment. And mandatory limits on carbon emissions are to be finalized at a global meeting of Convention signatories in Kyoto this December.

Estimates of the costs to the United States of cutting emissions range from $90 billion to $400 billion annually in lost Gross Domestic Product and a loss of between 600,000 and 3.5 million jobs. Global costs would be proportionately higher.

Yet while the U.S. may be committing itself to limits, 130 developing nations, including China and India, are excluded under the Framework Convention from having to reduce their emissions, which, on present trends, will outstrip those of the industrialized world early in the next century. If the U.S. and other industrial countries have to limit energy use while the Third World is exempt, many industries will simply decamp to where energy prices are significantly lower.

If they are permitted to do so. For, as Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) asked at a conference on "The Costs of Kyoto" held by the Competitive Enterprise Institute: "Who will administer a global climate treaty? . . . Will we have an international agency capable of inspecting, fining, and possibly shutting down American companies?" Sen. Hagel is not alone is his concern. In July the U.S. Senate passed 95 to 0 a resolution urging the Clinton Administration not to make binding concessions at the Kyoto conference.

But the climate-change treaty is not the only threat to U.S. interests. Though Mr. Bush refused to sign the Bio-diversity Convention at the Rio Earth Summit -- chaired, remember, by GOP contributor Strong -- that only delayed things. The Clinton Administration signed shortly after its inauguration. Since the treaty obliges signatories to protect plant and animal species through habitat preservation, its implementation could make the World Heritage Committee's activities on U.S. land use seem penny-ante by comparison.

MEANWHILE, how much further down the path sketched out by the CGG will the UN reforms developed by Maurice Strong and announced by Kofi Annan last week take us?

The most important initiative is the recommendation that the General Assembly organize a "Millennium Assembly" and a companion "People's Assembly" in the year 2000. (The "People's Assembly" mirrors the CGG's "Civil Society Forum" idea -- among other things, only accredited NGOs would be invited to advise the General Assembly.) But what would these grand new bodies actually do? The Millennium Assembly would invite "heads of Government . . . to articulate their vision of prospects and challenges for the new millennium and agree on a process for fundamental review of the role of the United Nations [emphasis added]." That last innocuous phrase is diplomatese for opening up the UN Charter for amendment. If that happens, so could anything -- notably eliminating the veto in the Security Council.

The Millennium Assembly would also consider adopting Strong's Earth Charter. For the most part the Charter reads like another feel-good document -- its draft says that "we must reinvent industrial-technological civilization" and promises everybody a clean environment, equitable incomes, and an end to cruelty to animals -- but we have seen how such vacuous symbolism can have real consequences down the line. Inevitably, the Charter advocates that "the nations of the world should adopt as a first step an international convention that provides an integrated legal framework for existing and future environmental and sustainable-development law and policy." This is, of course, a charter for endless intervention in the internal affairs of independent states.

Which leaves external affairs. Hey presto! In line with the CGG's plan, Annan/Strong urge that the UN Trusteeship Council "be reconstituted as the forum through which member states exercise their collective trusteeship for the integrity of the global environment and common areas such as the oceans, atmosphere, and outer space."

For the time being, however, Annan and Strong have avoided calling for global taxes or user fees to finance the UN. One spokesman said that the issue was simply "too hot to handle right now." What they propose is a Revolving Credit Fund of $1 billion so that the UN will have a source of operating funds even if a major contributor (e.g., the U.S.) withholds contributions for a time. In short, the CGG's blueprint for a more powerful UN closely resembles the movement to expand the requirements of the Framework Convention on Global Climate Change. While the process may be piecemeal, the goal is clear: a more powerful set of international institutions, increasingly emancipated from the control of the major powers, increasingly accountable not to representative democratic institutions but to unelected bureaucracies, and increasingly exercising authority over how people, companies, and governments run their affairs -- not just Americans, but everyone. In short, Col. Qaddafi's definition of his leftist Green Revolution: "Committees Everywhere."

If so, the future looks good for Maurice Strong. One UN source suggested that, at the very least, he would like to be made Secretary General of the Millennium Assembly or the People's Assembly. Others suspect that, even at age 68, Strong is angling to be the next UN Secretary General.

Such eminence may help explain a puzzling incident in his early career. Having long had political ambitions, he decided to enter the Canadian Parliament. A candidate was evicted from a safe constituency by the Liberal leadership, and Strong moved in. Then, with only a month to go before the 1979 election, he suddenly pulled out of the race. Strong's business deals were especially complicated at the time -- he was setting up a Swiss oil-and-gas exploration company with partners that included the Kuwaiti Finance Minister and the Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation -- and that is the explanation usually given. But maybe he just decided that for a man who wants power, elections are an unnecessary obstacle.

Mr. Bailey is a freelance journalist and television producer in Washington, D.C. He is author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martin's) and The True State of the Planet (Free Press).

Here is a brief interlude: a vignette of a remarkable individual who is simply not in the establishment, who is in fact very much opposed to the establishment and aligned with this editor:

from TPD 1999-Oct-11, from the San Francisco Examiner 1999-Oct-10, by Christopher Matthews:

Capt. Ventura begins damage control

Cambridge, Mass.

JESSE VENTURA pictures himself as a ship's captain in rough seas.

The job description refers to his Reaganesque manner of governing the state of Minnesota.

"I realize I'm like the captain of a ship, a Navy ship. The captain doesn't actually run the engines . . . (or) steer the ship," he said during a rousing public interview at Harvard last week. "I try to put in the most qualified people . . . that know more than I about that particular department."

The "rough seas" refers to a recent interview Ventura did with Playboy. The main cause of the turbulence was his comment that "organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers."

Despite a bit of zig-zagging - "there's not necessarily a bad connotation on being weak-minded," he told the wide-eyed audience of Harvard students - Ventura has stuck to that same rough course he set in the Playboy interview. Asked what goes through his head and heart when he walks past a church, he offered this:

"I have nothing at all against religion, people's beliefs and the freedom that we're allowed to practice them. What goes through my heart is that it's a sanctuary that, if people desire or need it, is there for them. I don't generally need it."

It's this readiness to shove the establishment, including organized religion in this country, that provides Ventura his star quality.

Also his authenticity. Place Ventura's stark honesty, just to take an obvious example, alongside that of the nation's top office-holder, a president who hosts "prayer breakfasts" but also has been known to caress his Bible, again for the cameras, on the same Easter he's penciled in time on his calendar for a certain White House intern.

"Freedom of speech is not there to protect popular speech," Ventura told the 800 awe-struck students surrounding him Wednesday night, "but also unpopular speech."

He said, "I want to live in a country that supports all the amendments to the Constitution. I think they're very important."

He's especially vigilant about the Second Amendment, believing that the Constitution protects the right to bear arms not for hunting animals but for protection against the government in Washington.

"It was written to protect we, the citizenry, from an oppressive government, that if government ever became oppressive we would have the right to bear arms and the right to battle our government if it ever got to that point."

Ventura openly admits his sympathy for any American out there who believes there is a clear and present danger of such oppression from Washington, whether it be the fellow who owns an assault rifle, men who don fatigues to march each weekend with a militia group or those armed cult members who stood barricaded at Waco. He believes the second FBI assault was driven by government "revenge" for the killing of four ATF agents during that first tragic rush of the Texas compound.

Ventura's anti-establishment language is both rough-hewn and unfamiliar. The carpools and bar stools of America are packed with middle-aged, undereducated guys who think like him, who hate not just the IRS but every alphabet agency of the federal government. They see "the government" as an alien force comprised of bureaucrats and betrayers.

Now the younger, well-educated folk are buying the anti- government line. Ventura, for all his warts, impresses them.

Why wouldn't he? The old Navy SEAL charting his course through what he calls the "rough seas" of his post-Playboy existence, the perfect answer to the slick politician with blow-dried hair pandering to us with well-groomed, poll-tested banality.

Jesse Ventura's got something, and the rougher the seas the better he's going to look - most of all to those young Americans who are, even now, so blithe to cheer him.

from MSNBC, 2000-Mar-14, by Tom Curry:

Libertarian mulls campaign lawsuit
Browne ponders strategy of civil disobedience to protest donor limits

In the spirit of Libertarianism, the party's presidential candidate is asking supporters to consider breaking campaign finance laws, which he says suppress free speech. One legal expert says Harry Browne doesn't stand a chance in his quest to get the Supreme Court to overturn the laws. But Browne says he has the Constitution on his side.

In a message posted on his Web site, Browne tells supporters he may ask them to engage in civil disobedience by deliberating exceeding the $1,000-per-donor limit imposed by federal law.

Browne says he is trying to raise $25,000 to hire a law firm to do the necessary legal spadework as a prelude to a court test of the 1974 campaign finance laws which, he contends, violate the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Browne's views put him in sharp contrast to the two major presidential candidates.

Democratic standard-bearer Al Gore supports the current limits on donors, but also wants taxpayers to bear the cost of political campaigns. Gore also calls for a ban on “soft money” contributions to political parties. Soft money refers to funds ostensibly used for party-building and get-out-the-vote efforts instead of individual candidates.

Republican George W. Bush wants to raise donor limits to $3,400, ban soft money contributions to political parties from labor unions and corporations, and require instant disclosure of contributions on the Internet.

WEIGHING LIKELY PENALTIES

Browne says he will not decide whether to move forward with his civil disobedience strategy until lawyers can give him some guidance. ``We must tread carefully,'' Browne writes. ``We must have realistic estimates of the likely penalties if we should lose, we must determine whether we could pay those penalties, and we must judge whether that cost and the associated legal bills are outweighed by the publicity gained.''

Kelly Huff, a spokeswoman for the Federal Election Commission, said in cases where donors violate federal campaign contribution limits, the FEC can levy a civil penalty.

The maximum civil penalty would be $11,000 or 200 percent of the amount exceeding the $1,000-per-donor limit. The FEC could also refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.

GENERATE NEWS MEDIA COVERAGE

Browne sounds enthusiastic about the prospect of litigation that could overturn the 1974 limits.

``An act of civil disobedience against these repressive laws will truly be a `man bites dog' story,'' Browne says. ``Announcing our intention to willfully violate these regulations might generate more national media coverage than anything the LP (Libertarian Party) has ever done.''

Browne says this is the perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule on the central issue: ``Do politicians have the right to make rules that restrict the ability of their political opponents to compete?''

Browne argues that the Libertarians are especially hobbled by the current campaign finance laws. ``They limit the money we can legally raise to counter the enormous free publicity the Democrats and Republicans receive — not to mention the tens of millions of dollars they confiscate from taxpayers to run their presidential campaigns. If we win the case, the end of contribution limits would go a long way to level the playing field,'' Browne says.

But this does not seem to be the most opportune time to litigate such a test case: On Jan. 24, in a case called Nixon vs. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, the Supreme Court upheld by a 6-to-3 ruling its 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo decision, which said that Congress did have the constitutional authority to impose limits on donors to political campaigns, except where the donor finances his own bid for public office.

In the Buckley decision, the Court found that ``the prevention of corruption and the appearance of corruption'' was a ``constitutionally sufficient justification'' for curtailing First Amendment rights by imposing limits on donors.

Based on the court's January ruling, the chances of its current membership deciding in Browne's favor seem nil. ``I don't see any prospect he will succeed,'' said James Bopp, a constitutional lawyer who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of the National Right to Life Foundation in the Missouri case. ``These issues have been litigated and I don't see any prospect of this court changing its ruling on disclosure or contribution limits.''

Browne's only hope, jokes Bopp, is ``divine intervention.''

There is, however, one other hope: that the court's membership changes, and that the three dissenting justices in the Missouri case —Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy— are joined by two new justices who'd vote to strike down contribution limits.

In his dissenting opinion in the Missouri case, Thomas was in wholehearted accord with Browne, writing that limits on donors were ``the suppression of free speech'' and that the free exchange of political ideas ``should receive the most protection when it matters the most —during campaigns for elective office.''

PRIVACY CONCERNS

Browne says he wants to challenge not only the $1,000 limit on donors but the law's requirement that those citizens who donate more than $200 to a candidate must reveal their names, their addresses, their occupations and their employer's name, and that campaigns must forward this data to the Federal Election Commission where it is available to the public.

The rule that contributors must identify themselves and reveal how much they give to a candidate, Browne contends, violates the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution, which says ``The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.''

Browne argues that the Ninth Amendment ``makes it very clear that you retain any right not specifically taken away by the Constitution.''

``The right to privacy can be inferred as well from the secret ballot,'' he says. ``If a voter can support a candidate with a secret vote, why can't he make a secret contribution?''

from TPDL 2000-Nov-6, from The Libertarian, by Vin Suprynowicz (Las Vegas Review-Journal):

'Where we'd have the Haves and the Have-nots'

Candidate endorsement interviews at the Review-Journal are a tag-team affair. As my partner this year I drew political columnist Steve Sebelius.

It's been years since we allowed ourselves to be surprised by the lack of any clear-cut political or economic philosophy among the main body of candidates who come trooping through. Most of these souls can't even imagine why anyone would want one, attempting to spin their lack of any moral or philosophical rudder into an asset, insisting it's better to "judge each matter on its merits as it comes along" than to be "doctrinaire" or captive to any "hidebound ideology" ... as though the shipping line would be more likely to hire a captain who, instead of avoiding rocks as a matter of principle in a dull and plodding way, made a fresh decision each morning whether to risk the lee shoals, depending on whether the first lobbyist to get to him that day managed to present that course of action as "moderate" and "reasonable" and "well-received by our focus groups."

Oct. 4 was a good day. First in the door was incumbent Republican Assemblyman Dennis Nolan, whose daytime job sees him supervising the administration of drug-testing programs to 30 different transit systems.

Mr. Nolan, a Republican who believes the salaries of state bureaucrats are too low, thinks state government "runs pretty tight" in delivering its services, and can't imagine anyplace where the state payroll could be cut.

"You keep using the word 'services,' " I noted. "If I wait in line down at the DMV and someone finally takes my money to register my car, they're rendering me a 'service,' is that right?"

"That's absolutely right," responded the neatly coiffed, diminutive lawmaker.

Advised that Mr. Nolan believes the War on Drugs can still be won, Mr. Sebelius asked how we're going to keep drugs off the streets, if we can't even keep them out of the prisons.

"I think we can keep drugs out of the prisons" Mr. Nolan responded. "You have personnel bringing them in."

The answer is to institute random drug testing for corrections officers, as well as for the prisoners themselves, Mr. Nolan says. Also -- since "People object; it doesn't look good" to have over-eager police dogs knocking over small children in the prison waiting rooms, the new electronic "sniffing" wands should be used to check visitors for drugs, including the tiniest tots.

"Sometimes they sneak the drugs in in the babies' bibs, or the women hide them in a balloon in their mouths and then pass them to the prisoner in a kiss," Mr. Nolan explains, his eyes widening with enthusiasm as he warmed to his subject.

"But how are you going to punish prisoners when you catch them with drugs?" asked Mr. Sebelius. 'I mean, they're already in jail, right? What are you going to do, put them in 'jail' jail?"

"You have to find some way to discipline them, there's no doubt about it," replied Mr. Nolan, enthusiastically.

What about the schools, I asked. Should the new electronic sniffer technology be used to randomly sweep our schoolchildren and their lockers?

"No," Mr. Nolan replied. However, "One of the states -- I can't remember which one right now -- has adopted a voluntary 'no drugs' contract from the fourth grade on; both the kids and their parents sign this contract, and in the contract they volunteer for random drug testing. ... I think that's a good idea, it's a great program, because if they don't sign then they can't participate in computer labs and after-school activities and so forth."

So the kids, already dragooned under threat of jail for mom and dad if they don't report to the mandatory government propaganda camp nearest them, now further see their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure neatly sidestepped as they're requested to "voluntarily" sign please-take-my-pee "contracts," with those who refuse to sign being sent home in ignominy while other kids get to go on field trips and play soccer after school and act in the school play.

Sounds plenty "voluntary" to me. After all, it's not as though little kids tend to ridicule and ostracize anyone who won't go along with the program. Surely no little kid is ever going to be asked why his parents are the only ones who refuse to "volunteer" him for the pee tests, unless, of course, they're ... on drugs, or something.

No sooner had we sent Mr. Nolan on his merry way, than Democrat Terrie Stanfill showed up to fill our door.

Ms. Stanfill -- recruited by the capital Democrats to challenge Ray Rawson, a solid and hard-working state senator, though not exactly Mr. Showbiz -- got off to a fast start, waxing enthusiastic about the many wonderful things she hopes to accomplish up in Carson City with all our tax money, from college scholarships for poor children to visiting nurses for the infirm. The casinos "probably need to be taxed more" -- though perhaps not as much as an additional 5 percent, right now -- and no one should be allowed to escape from paying "their fair share," she insisted.

"So no one should get out of paying for the public schools?" even if they spend their own money to send their kids to private schools, asked Mr. Sebelius.

"No, because then we'd have the Haves and the Have-nots; if we take money away from the public schools things would be worse."

"What is the purpose of state government?" I asked Ms. Stanfill.

"To be sure we're doing what the people are wanting, running the state business, that we're introducing laws that should be voted on by the people," she replied. "You're there for the people; at the state level you're introducing the bills."

Not a sentence, not a word (needless to say) about just governments being instituted among men to secure for us our God-given rights and liberties.

"Are there any things that the state Legislature might like to do, that it can't do?" I asked.

"I'm not sure I'm understanding your question," Ms. Stanfill replied.

"Are there any matters in which the state lawmakers might think it was a good idea to get involved, but where they're not allowed to?" I tried again.

"I'm not sure I'm understanding the question," she repeated.

Mr. Sebelius tried his hand at translating for me.

"Let's say a constituent went to a lawmaker, and wanted him to, say, outlaw machine guns in Nevada, but the lawmaker said, 'Gee, I've looked at the list of powers granted to us by the state Constitution, and while I agree that's a good idea, I just don't find that we have any delegated power to do that.' What would you think about a lawmaker who said that?"

"Oh, that would be a cop-out," replied the state senate candidate.

I do not mean to imply that, when these candidates go home after a hard day knocking on doors and promising everyone a share of my purloined paycheck, Mr. Nolan changes into tall shiny boots and a sharply creased black uniform with silver skulls on the collar, nor that Ms. Stanfill secretly sneaks out late at night to attend Communist cell meetings.

I'm sure most of their neighbors would testify these are both fine folk who love their children and are always willing to bring cookies to the bake sale.

But so too were the faceless clerks and functionaries who kept the trains running on time in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, pleasant and uncomplicated folk who loved their dogs and brought flowers to church on Sunday. They did their jobs, and never gave a thought to which trains were headed where, or who had been loaded aboard.

Because, after all, they didn't mean any harm. Obscure, theoretical notions like governments of limited power, or the endowment of the People with certain inalienable rights -- among them the right to keep what we earn -- were best left to the eggheads up at the university. These were not the concerns of the kind of practical folks who merely wanted to make sure no one was ever allowed to decide what substances to put into his or her own body, while guarding against anyone who would dare "take any money from the public schools," lest the nation find itself in a situation "where we'd have the Haves and the Have-nots."

from TPDL 2000-Mar-30, from the Orlando Sentinel, by Charley Reese:

Just a reminder that government is bad -- if you didn't know

Martin L. Gross's new book, The Government Racket 2000, is now out in paperback, and I recommend it. The publisher is Avon Books. Those familiar with government waste won't be surprised, but it is a fine reminder of how bad government is.

And by "bad" I mean inefficient, wasteful and basically dishonest. We have some service families on food stamps, but government builds a third 18-hole golf course at Andrews Air Force Base because that's where Washington politicians and bureaucrats like to play.

There are more than 160 separate job-training programs. Between 1965 and the present, more than $7 trillion in current dollars have been spent on myriad welfare programs. Yet there are as many poor people today as there were in 1965.

It's worthwhile to remind ourselves how far off the track of sensible government we've gone. And, of course, Gross explains why all this talk about a surplus is pure baloney. The federal government is still running a deficit, and the public debt is still increasing. In this case, politicians in both parties are just plain misleading folks with accounting tricks.

In keeping with the Clinton era, it depends on what you mean by surplus. In this case, it means taking $857 billion from Social Security by fiscal 1999. Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina has exposed this budget-surplus fraud but gotten virtually no attention from the news media, which have, frankly, become government lap dogs, for the most part.

All Americans -- Democrats, Republicans, Independents, liberals or conservatives -- agree that whatever government does it should do as efficiently as possible. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the Senate barber shop to the tune of $360,000 a year. Let the politicians get their haircuts at their own expense in a regular barber shop like everybody else.

Some people think I exaggerate when I refer to the federal government as the imperial government, but I don't. There is a very bad atmosphere in Washington that causes ordinary people, when they go there, to lose perspective and, in some cases, to lose touch with reality. It's as if the power and perks and being surrounded by lackeys and flatterers poison their minds. They begin to see themselves as a sort of chosen people, better than everybody else. That reeks of imperial not republican government.

The change in the past 50 years has been enormous. If you ever get the chance, visit Warm Springs, Ga., and look at the little cottage where Franklin Roosevelt went for rest and therapy. Compare that most modest place with the palatial places where contemporary presidents unwind.

Can you imagine any contemporary president, after his term is over, catching a cab down to the train station to go home at his own expense?

Harry Truman did that, and, other than Dwight Eisenhower, there hasn't been a president since Truman who was one-tenth the man Truman was.

Mental and moral midgets who have delusions of grandeur are governing us.

But what does that say about us?

There isn't one politician in Washington who wasn't elected. We are simply making bad choices, and I think that, in part, it's because neither the people nor the politicians have any clear idea any more about what government ought to do and not do.

Both voters and politicians seem to approach the idea of government from a purely selfish point of view -- what can I get out of it and what is it going to give me?

Well if you're a politician or rich guy with a good lobbyist, the answer is a lot. If you're on the middle to the bottom rung of the ladder, the answer is nothing much. People have the power to change. Do they have the will?

from PDL 1999-Mar-20, from Investor's Business Daily, 1999-Mar-22:

What'd You Expect?

The world has watched as once-respected institutions have been rocked by scandal. The International Olympic Committee, the European Union and the Japanese Finance Ministry have all lost their luster as keepers of the public trust. But no one should be surprised.

There is, of course, much hand wringing over these and other scandals involving public and quasi-public officials.

How could these fine people suffer the temptations of corruption? After all, bureaucrats, politicians and members of appointed committees are unselfish by virtue of their positions of public trust. They're more concerned with things higher than themselves.

Nonsense. They're concerned with the same things we all are.

Public choice economics explains why public officials become corrupt. Like everyone else, they have a self-interested agenda.

Being in a position of public trust doesn't automatically make one altruistic, as we've been led to believe. People entrusted with the public interest have the same self-interest as the stockbroker trying to make his next million.

There's nothing wrong with self-interest. Our progress from cave dwellers and nomadic plainsmen was due to man's self-interest in survival and comfort. Self-interest is the fuel of capitalism, as both parties to a transaction see the deal as enhancing their self-interest. This motivation puts food in our mouths, roofs over our heads and clothes on our backs.

But when self-interested people aren't held accountable, then corruption surely follows. The proof is clearly seen in the institutionalized bribery of IOC members, the graft in the Japanese Finance Ministry and the fraud that's left the European Union leaderless.

In most areas of life, people are held accountable for their actions. Politicians are limited by constitutional checks and balances and can be voted out of office. Criminals are sent to jail. Indolent workers lose their jobs.

Even those who are motivated by profit in the private sector have their excesses curbed by market forces. Reckless business and personal behavior is never rewarded for long.

Yet we have groups like the EU and IOC that are left to remain largely unaccountable to anyone. We shouldn't wonder why there are so many abuses. Maybe we should wonder why there aren't more.

Like the poor, corruption will be with us always. It's in man's nature to maximize his existence. And some men and women do so outside the bounds of acceptable behavior.

That doesn't mean we're all corrupt by nature. It simply means that corruption can - and should - be avoided by making sure that men are held accountable through familiar institutions. And we must stop believing in the myth that men shed their self-interest when they take public-trust positions.

Until we do these things, expect the IOC, EU and Japanese Finance Ministry scandals to be replaced by new ones. As long as men are allowed to answer to no one, that's what we'll get.

from the Economist email political summary, 1999-Mar-18:

HEADS ROLL

All 20 commissioners of the EUROPEAN UNION resigned after a report claimed that fraud, nepotism and mismanagement were rife in the commission. EU leaders, meeting in Berlin this weekend to sort out the budget and agricultural reform, must now also discuss a replacement for Jacques Santer, the commission's president.

from TPD 1999-Oct-1, by Ann Coulter, 1999-Sep-21:

Even the Paranoid Lunatic Fringe Have Enemies

"Every conspiracy theorist in America is now going to give credence to whatever ideas they have about government conspiracies"
-- Senator John McCain (R-AZ) "Late Edition," CNN, 9/12 on the recent revelations that the FBI has been lying for 6 years on the use of incendiary devices at Waco.

In home videos made by the Davidians during the 51-day siege with a video camera provided by the FBI, and excerpted in the documentary, "Waco: Rules of Engagement," one of the women killed in the siege describes how men just came in and started shooting, asking -- "This is America?" Echoing her, another Davidian says, "I thought this was the country of freedom of speech, freedom of religion."

Not as long as the Left can call you a "conspiracy theorist" or "religious fanatic," it isn't.

Indeed, whatever reservations the Left might have about the federal government storming a private home and gassing and shooting the civilians within, is quickly quelled by invocations of the various liberal talismen. Merely mention "conspiracy theorists," "lunatic fringe" or "cult leader," and the civil libertarian instinct is squelched. Invocations of the National Rifle Association are also inspiring epithets for the Left.

The documentary "Rules of Engagement" shows Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) during the 1995 congressional hearings on Waco, stating to the satisfaction of the elites, that "this is the approach of what I call the lunatic fringe, [which] still clings to the notion that there was a gigantic government conspiracy that brought about this nightmare. It is difficult to see how any rational human being subscribes to such a notion, but obviously many do."

(But not a rational human being like Tom Lantos, who has, at other times, compared the House of Representatives to "Hitler's parliament" and "Stalin's parliament.")

Representative Lantos continued -- rationally -- by blaming the siege and resulting carnage on "the apocalyptic vision of a criminally insane charismatic cult leader who was hellbent on bringing about this infernal nightmare, in flames, and the extermination of the children, and the women, and the other innocents is not an explanation that should be cast aside."

At the same hearings on August 1, 1995, then-Representative Chuck Schumer was more concerned about someone, somewhere believing a "conspiracy theory" than the possibility that the federal government staged a military assault on American citizens.

Straight away, he announced that one of only two "criteria" for judging the hearings a "success" was whether they avoided giving "new life to conspiracy theorists." He took a shot at this worthy goal by inanely perseverating denunciations of the mythical "conspiracy theorists" throughout the hearings. He variously demanded that the committee "refute . . . conspiracy theories that surround Waco" -- the ones "that some from the conspiracy theory industry have put out" -- prattled incomprehensibly about (and I quote) "Darth Vader helmets," and concluded, "we need help from everyone in refuting outlandish charges and conspiracy theories."

And none too soon either, what with "conspiracy theorists" gassing people's homes and shooting Randy Weaver's wife, son and dog - - oh, whoops! -- no, that was the FBI. But just mention the mythical "conspiracy theorists" out there, and the facts are irrelevant. Schumer ultimately judged the hearings a qualified success, incidentally, because charges "about the ATF agents with Darth Vader helmets . . . are not leveled anymore."

I, too, am not so worried about the federal government staging a military attack on American citizens. I'll be able to sleep better tonight simply knowing that none of my fellow citizens continues to harbor the illusion that ATF agents were wearing "Darth Vader helmets."

Representative Schumer went on to demonstrate his mastery of grenades when he contemptuously sneered during the hearings that "flashbang" grenades are harmless. As Representative Bob Barr (R-GA) soon pointed out -- with the concurrence of the ATF agent testifying -- flashbang grenades can blow off a face or a limb. Indeed, flashbang grenades are classified as "destructive devices" under federal law.

Perhaps Representative Schumer had been too busy practicing saying "conspiracy theorist" over and over again before the hearings to have time to brush up on his flashbang grenades.

But just in case "conspiracy theorist," was beginning to lose its sting through overuse, Representative Schumer made sure to denounce the committee's final report with another liberal talisman -- the dreaded NRA. "What the Republican majority is doing, once again," he said inexplicably, "is kissing the ring" of the NRA.

Well, well. So now it turns out the conspiracy theorists and lunatic fringe were on to something. The FBI has, it now admits, been lying about the use of incendiary devices at the raid, for six years now. Though it was a lie when the FBI claimed that no incendiary devices were fired into the compound, the FBI now says it is not lying when it maintains that these devices did not start the fire.

Maybe. But let it not go unremarked upon that one would have been closer to the truth six years ago listening to the "conspiracy theorists" ably identified by Representatives Lantos and Schumer than by listening to Representatives Lantos and Schumer themselves.

On the Davidians' home-made videos, one of the Davidians says, "`We the people' don't run the government anymore. They do. And they tell all the lies they want." She might be able to explain further, but she died on April 19, 1993.

Note regarding the following item: though some of Johnson's points are quite accurate, he also dismisses many views that are themselves quite accurate, and documented in this compilation. I have annotated the article with notes separating fact from fiction.

from the New York Times, 1995-Apr-30, by George Johnson:

The Conspiracy That Never Ends

WHILE most of the world waited for news of the official investigation into the Oklahoma bombing, callers and talk show hosts on World Wide Christian Radio, the Nashville shortwave station that has become the shrill voice of the far right, had it all figured out: the Federal Building was destroyed as part of a plot by the United States Government [credibly sourced evidence, as discussed by Telegraph writer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in his book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, indicates the Murrah building terrorist attack was probably the result of an FBI/ATF sting, spearheaded by an agent provacateur, spun out of control], acting on behalf of a secret international cabal [I am aware of no evidence that this is the case, except insofar as the Clinton Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, is obviously run by militant internationalists - men such as Strobe Talbott], the New World Order, whose symbol, the cold staring eye in the pyramid [The eye-capped pyramid is the flip side of the Great Seal, which was designed by Benjamin Franklin with other founding fathers who were Freemasons. The symbology is well established as Masonic in character. In 1934, Henry A. Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, proposed to FDR on a whim that the flip side be added to the dollar bill. Wallace was particularly impressed with the motto "Novus Ordo Seclorum", which he felt could be translated roughly as "New Deal of the Ages" (it actually means "New Order of the Ages"). Wallace and Roosevelt were both Freemasons. The back side of the Great Seal symbolizes the Masonic ideal of designing and building a society that will last as long as the pyramids, and the missing cap symbolizes the building yet to be completed. The eye symbolizes the vigilance of the Great Architect, the Masonic god. In 1945 Roosevelt installed the wretched Wallace as his Secretary of Commerce by ejecting Jesse Holman Jones, the spectacularly successful director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, from the position. To illustrate the difference between Wallace and Jones: when farmers were being crushed by a price collapse, Wallace proposed that the government pay farmers to till under (destroy) their crops, while Jones proposed that the government loan the farmers money, store the excess grain, and take full repayment with interest from the farmers when market conditions made it profitable to return the stored grain to the market. Jones had his way, and his plan - as usual - was successful.], mocks Americans from the back of every one dollar bill. [Obviously it's an inside thing. Is it mocking? Quite possibly, at least for some insiders.]

Within days, the bombing had been tightly woven into the sprawling conspiracy theories that have obsessed some Americans since the beginning of the Republic. The historian Richard Hofstadter coined the phrase "the paranoid style in American politics" to describe this pathological world view in which history is a Manichean struggle between the forces of light and of darkness. The conspiratorial fantasies are not simply an expression of inchoate fear. There is a shape, an architecture, to the paranoia.

Rule No. 1: The conspirators are internationalist in their sympathies. [No one doubts that the establishment agenda is internationalist. It is a truism.] In this century the main targets of conspiracy theories have been Jews, depicted as people whose loyalty to fellow Jews makes them endemically antipatriotic, and international Communism. The United Nations is suspect, as is the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Interpol and even the Red Cross because they supposedly place international agendas above patriotic concerns. In the 19th century, the chief conspirators were said to be the Vatican and the Freemasons. In the mind of today's political paranoiacs, which include some militia members, followers of the Liberty Lobby (the Holocaust-is-a-myth crowd) and the Ku Klux Klan, all these groups are mushed together into the New World Order, or One World Government. [This supergenius at the New York Times has just committed precisely the intellectual sin of which he accuses his perceived enemies: he has grouped together legitimate critics of the establishment, with Holocaust revisionists and the KKK, in the hope of discrediting the former. It didn't work. Charles Manson's family was militantly environmentalist, but that hardly means all environmentalists are Mansonites!]

The first rule is of more than academic historical interest because of Rule No. 2: In a conspiracy theory, nothing is ever discarded. [Well this is just a silly unsupportable assertion, as I shall prove forthwith.] Right-wing mail order bookstores still sell the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the anti-Semitic fantasy hatched in Russia a century ago. [This publication has never appeared on this web site, because I, whom this fellow at the New York Times would certainly describe as a conspiracy theorist, was aware of its fraudulent pedigree.] Another big seller is "Proofs of a Conspiracy, " a 1797 book reprinted by the John Birch Society, which fueled speculation that a Freemasonic group called the Order of the Illuminati plotted with the Jeffersonians to turn over the fledging United States to followers of French Enlightenment philosophy -- the 18th century equivalent of secular humanism. [The historicity of Adam Weishaupt's Illuminati is not disputed by serious historians, and the correspondence between Weishaupt's canon and the Communist Manifesto is striking.]

This brings us to Rule No. 3: Seeming enemies are actually secret friends. As evil as the Communists, in the right-wing mind, are the Rockefellers and international bankers (often a synonym for Jews). Through the lens of the conspiracy theorists, capitalists and Communists work hand in hand. [The collaboration of US industrialist Armand Hammer is a widely acknowledged fact. Antony Sutton, erstwhile faculty member at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, documents a more encyclopedic collaboration in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. This book, published by the Hoover Institution, opens with a reprint of a 1911 St. Louis Post-Dispatch cartoon by Robert Minor, showing John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, John D. Ryan (National City Bank of Cleveland) and Morgan partner George W. Perkins shaking the hand of Karl Marx while Theodore Roosevelt looks on and is "Dee-Lighted". The collaboration of US capitalists with the National Socialists in Germany is widely accepted, and regularly covered by the BBC, Associated Press, and the Washington Post. Curiously, I have yet to find such coverage in the pages of the New York Times.]

To what end? That's Rule No. 4: The takeover by the international godless government will be ignited by the collapse of the economic system. [This is not in fact the way the establishment plans to consolidate their control. They plan an incremental campaign, and are extremely wary of anything so disordered as an economic collapse.] In an elaborate decades-long check-kiting scheme since the dollar was removed from the gold standard, the Federal Reserve has been creating money out of thin air [The gold standard was rescinded in 1933, but the fiat currency system was erected with the legislative passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Since 1913, money has been created out of thin air. No if's, and's, or but's - it's the law.]. Once the conspirators give the word, the bankers will yank out the rug from this house of cards and your money will be worthless. [This was already done once, in 1929. It is a risky proposition and will not be done unless the establishment has grown disorganized and desperate.]

As a sign that the conspirators have taken over the currency, they had printed on the back a Freemasonic symbol: the all-seeing eye of the enlightened ones perched atop the pyramid. And there, under the emblem, is their name: Novus Ordo Seclorum.

Finally, Rule No. 5: It's all spelled out in the Bible. [No it's not, of course. Once again, the New York Times writer is trying to tar all power structure researchers with a brush applicable only to irrational fanatics.] For those with a fundamentalist bent, the New World Order or One World Government is none other than the international kingdom of the Antichrist, described in the Book of Revelation. Revelation also speaks of the "mark of the beast," a symbol of the satanic leader that will be imprinted on everyone's forehead and right hand. Fundamentalist preachers like Hal Lindsey have popularized the notion that the mark of the beast is the zebra-striped Universal Product Code, which will be tattooed on everyone by laser to increase the acuity of the panoptic big eye.

We may never know what went through the real conspirators' minds when, as investigators say, they rented a truck, packed it full of fertilizer and fuel oil, and ignited it where it would do the most harm. But if they hung out at militia meetings, or even just tuned in occasionally to WWCR, they would have been exposed to this kind of thinking, over and over and over again.

[Here, the New York Times writer makes his agenda clear as crystal: the criminals who built and detonated the bomb, and the agent provocateur supplied by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, do not finally shoulder the blame for the terrorism in OKC, in the writer's conception. Instead, the writer blames power structure researchers, those who expose the machinations of the establishment, in the hope that in time their speech can be judicially reinterpreted as criminal and so be throttled on pain of incarceration, helping assure the smooth onward march of establishment tyranny. -AMPP Ed.]

A primer on the Company:

from NameBase NewsLine, No. 6, July-September 1994, by Steve Badrich:

Cold Warriors Woo Generation X:
As the world turns, history hits the spin cycle

      After more than three decades of down-and-dirty operations for the CIA, San Antonio resident Kenneth Michael Absher has come in from the cold.

      Sitting in the sun-drenched living room of his house in the upscale Alamo Heights district, Absher, 59, seems glad to be back in friendly, patriotic South Texas, glad to reminisce about the many Cold War crises he saw close up. The Cuban missile crisis. Vietnam. Running agents in foreign countries he's not even allowed to name.

      Spies in John le Carre novels often doubt themselves, and their side. Absher, apparently, does neither. He's Texas-friendly and seemingly quite at ease in his own skin. In a low-key way, he's also quite eloquent, the kind of natural explainer and storyteller one is glad to encounter at the front of a classroom.

      Boink, Absher's graying black tomcat, keeps his master under lazy surveillance as one Cold War tale suggests another.

      "It's my favorite subject," Absher says, disarmingly, about the often-maligned trade of intelligence. Now Absher hopes to pass his enthusiasm on.

      Retired as of last year from the CIA's Operations Directorate, Absher has introduced a historically-oriented course at a local university on the enduring value of "espionage," the covert stuff -- apparently the only declassified college-level course on this subject in the United States.

      More than a hundred colleges and universities nationwide offer courses on national security or intelligence. For example, the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where Absher now teaches, also offers a "big picture" course on "the intelligence community" taught by James Calder, a UTSA criminal justice professor with a background in military intelligence.

      But Absher's course, uniquely, concentrates on the potential value to policymakers of intelligence obtained through covert means like spying.

      It's a declassified version of a course Absher once taught at the Defense Intelligence College at Bolling Air Force Base. At Bolling, Absher's students were military personnel with at least "top secret" clearances. At UTSA, they're South Texas representatives of Generation X -- most of them politically a notch or two to the right-of-center, but without being diehard ideological conservatives. Nor are many of them overburdened with historical knowledge.

      UTSA's big, airy campus, just south of the Texas Hill Country, is far more "Anglo" than the rest of San Antonio -- spiritually, the northernmost major city in Mexico. Land for the campus was donated to the state by big-dog developer friends of former Texas governor John Connally. Connally's friends expected the value of their surrounding property, which is extensive, to ratchet up. It has.

      The CIA's Publications Review Board duly cleared Absher's syllabus as posing no threat to the CIA's interests. But the Agency has no other official link to Absher's teaching. Texas taxpayers rather than the Agency are paying his part-timer's salary. Nor is Absher part of the CIA's often- criticized Officer-in-Residence program, which places active CIA personnel on campus as temporary professors -- and unofficial goodwill ambassadors for spookdom.

      Absher acknowledges, but shrugs off, the fact that his course takes as its point of departure the existence of state secrecy. "There are always," he says mildly, "going to be secrets."

      Absher's students swear by his course. "He's a gifted instructor and a wonderful, enthusiastic man," says Elaine Coronado, a Washington-savvy UTSA senior working on a second UTSA degree in political science. Her first is in history.

      Coronado plans eventually to return to "the policy arena" in Washington, D.C., where she has already worked for the Hispanic Alliance for Free Trade, a pro-NAFTA lobbying group. Coronado's group project for Absher's course, in fact, wound up recommending an expanded CIA role in monitoring world trade.

      Absher also wins praise from UTSA colleagues, even out-and-out CIA critics. Absher was hired by Dr. David Alvirez, Director of UTSA's Division of Social and Policy Sciences. Alvirez minces no words in blasting CIA interventions in Chile, El Salvador, and elsewhere.

      But Alvirez thought UTSA students could benefit from Absher's "special expertise," and feels vindicated by the course's reception. Alvirez praises Absher's ability to attract high-level former CIA colleagues as guest lecturers. Absher's spring-semester course was visited by such figures as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence William Studeman, a four-star admiral, and Dawn Eilenberger, a deputy to CIA General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf.

      (Eilenberger was a last-minute replacement for Rindskopf herself, who was forced to stay in Washington to put out fires started by the Aldrich Ames "CIA mole" case. Perhaps it's just as well that Rindskopf never made it to UTSA. Absher, without consulting local feminists, had scheduled Rindskopf's visit to coincide with UTSA's Women's History Week. Students who met with Eilenberger found her engaging -- whereas Rindskopf, a former General Counsel for the National Security Agency, was a never-give-an-inch stonewaller during the Iran-contra affair. According to published accounts, aides to Lawrence Walsh eventually found it difficult even to be in the same room with her.)

      Absher, for his part, is glad to have a forum to address issues he considers important. He sees his course as part of a new era of "demystification" of intelligence issues, of CIA glasnost (if not yet of perestroika).

      Such issues, he says, are not only intrinsically important, they're grist for the mills of future scholars. He cites the case of one of his former UTSA students, who is contemplating writing a master's thesis based on newly-declassified CIA documents on the Bay of Pigs debacle.

      "The last thing I want to do," Absher says, "is to be intellectually dishonest in any way. I've pulled no punches in this course. I've talked about intelligence failures, policy failures, everything. I've encouraged my students to make arguments against the continued existence of the CIA."

      Elaine Coronado confirms this last statement. In conversation, furthermore, Absher deplores what he considers CIA failures and abuses -- and loose cannons like Ollie North.

      Nevertheless, Absher remains, at bottom, a believer: someone who looks back on his almost thirty-two years in the CIA without regrets. He has no doubts that the right side won the Cold War, nor that CIA espionage helped.

      He also believes that espionage continues to be necessary in a world in which the Russian mafia has replaced the Politburo, trade wars are supplanting most large-scale "hot" and "cold" wars, and tinhorn dictators in backwater capitals think about going nuclear.

      Absher is stoical about the Ames case, which he calls "a wake-up call for everybody about what life is going to be like in the post-Cold War period." Ames's unmasking proves only, Absher says, that "there's never going to be a total symmetry of national interests" between the U.S. and the new Russia.

      Nor is Absher an enthusiast for "open source intelligence" (OSCINT), the hottest new topic within the hermetic world of theorists of intelligence. There's more useful information to be gleaned from a good library, as serious students of intelligence have always acknowledged, than there is from almost any meeting in a back street in the Casbah. This fundamental principle explains why intelligence agencies took an interest in the academic world in the first place.

      But in a wired world, libraries and other vast archives of information are rapidly going on-line. A skilled net-surfer with a fast modem can routinely download volumes of the kind of high-grade information that old-style intelligence services once had to pay for with time, sweat, and money, if not blood. Or so say the proponents of OSCINT.

      Robert David Steele, the champion of OSCINT, still believes in a strong intelligence community. Too young for Vietnam, he is a CIA veteran with three back-to-back postings in Latin America (including El Salvador from 1980-1981), and in 1988 became the senior civilian responsible for establishing the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Center. But Steele nevertheless foresees, in an age of tight budgets, the death of intelligence dinosaurs like the bloated, centralized CIA of the 90s. In Steele's vision, many U.S. intelligence needs of the near future will be met by decentralized, shoe-string bands of cyberspooks tapping into a digitized sea of "open-source" information.

      Steele and his Open Source Solutions, Inc. have a lot to say on these topics, and his ideas seem to be riding a wave that will take them, possibly soon, into closed Congressional hearing rooms. But it's a wave Absher declines to get on.

      "We have tried 'open source intelligence,'" Absher maintains, "and it does not work. Anybody who thinks George Washington could conduct a revolution on the basis of `open source intelligence' hasn't read history."

      The syllabus to Absher's UTSA course suggests the historical reasoning behind this remark. Called "The Role of Espionage in Foreign Policy," Absher's course blends history and political science to examine cases in which espionage helped policymakers make history. Absher insists the course is no exercise in CIA self-glorification.

      He maintains, for example, that D-Day succeeded, in part, because of a bogus military buildup -- complete with phony, inflatable "tanks" -- that fooled the Germans into thinking that the Allies had targeted Calais rather than Normandy. Eisenhower's "Operation Fortitude," which created this phantom invasion force, is only one of the case studies Absher's course considers.

      Absher can cite a laundry list of similar cases to support his contention that the U.S. still needs espionage, still needs a CIA.

      Not everyone agrees with this contention. Absher is well aware that back in Washington, the CIA's detractors are enjoying another of their periodic revivals. The Ames scandal revealed that despite the Cold-War- cowboy bravado of William Casey, the Soviets have spent years pipelining burn-before-reading secrets out of the inner sanctum of the CIA -- a fact that resulted in the execution of a number of U.S. agents overseas -- while presumably spoon-feeding the CIA's own agents a steady diet of disinformation.

      Ames, who may not be the last Soviet mole inside the Company, is a creepy enough character. Still, his courtroom denunciation of U.S. intelligence as a "cynical sideshow" seems to have struck a nerve with many in Congress.

      Is this, many have asked, what the U.S. public gets in return for its umpty-ump-billion-dollar classified "intelligence" budget? Could these misspent dollars be related to the fact that nobody in the big-ticket U.S. intelligence establishment seems to have foreseen the smashup of the Soviet system?

      Such questions, furthermore, revive Congressional memories of CIA failures and scandals of previous decades. It's a familiar litany, at least for Americans who predate MTV.

      In the 1960s, radical journalists from the magazine "Ramparts" revealed that CIA officers had used Michigan State University cover to help create the security forces -- and the government -- of South Vietnam.

      And although this fact wasn't widely known at the time, such covert CIA involvement with a university wasn't unique, or even particularly unusual. Michigan State's "international studies" program, like similar programs across the U.S., was a Cold War creation. The granddaddy of such programs was the School of International Affairs at Columbia University, founded in 1946, and soon a virtual nursery of future CIA employees and intelligence.

      Such "international studies" programs came into existence as part of a massive, wide-ranging effort by the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Carnegie Corporation to enlist the U.S. academic community in the Cold War. There's not enough space here to detail everything they did. But it's worth noting that the CIA and its handmaidens in the private sector regularly funded research and programs designed to address perceived "political problems" of the Cold War.

      The leaders of the bloody 1965 coup in Indonesia, for instance, were able to draw on the expertise of Indonesian elites trained at Ford Foundation expense by faculty members from MIT and Cornell, Berkeley and Harvard. Indonesian students at MIT attended CIA-funded Harvard seminars led by Henry Kissinger.

      And university involvement didn't stop there. Sympathetic faculty members on many campuses acted as "spotters" of potential future CIA employees. And the CIA, as "Ramparts" also revealed in 1967, essentially bankrolled the supposedly-independent National Student Association, and used student leaders to carry out operational tasks. Feminist media star Gloria Steinem, who later said she had been "duped," was one such student leader.

      In the 1970s, Congress's Church Committee revealed for the first time that the CIA had earlier tried to assassinate foreign leaders such as the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and (with Mafia help) Fidel Castro.

      But the Church Committee also revealed that the CIA was even then making use of several hundred "academics" (professors, administrators, and propagandists). In a related, mind-bending revelation, the Committee disclosed that the CIA was even a factor in the psychedelic revolution of the 60s. A CIA "mind control" project called MK-ULTRA had funded 1950s LSD research -- including experimentation on unwitting subjects.

      And even this thumbnail sketch must at least take note of the often-bloody overseas coups in which CIA involvement is either known or suspected. Iran. Guatemala. Indonesia. Chile. The list goes on, and the target governments, often enough, had been democratically elected.

      This checklist of horrors is enough to suggest why legions of people who remember the 60s and 70s will believe anything about the CIA.

      The CIA's latest crop of critics tend to be "mainstream," which makes them all the more dangerous to the CIA's future. This summer's Congressional debate over the 1995 intelligence budget, for instance, could get intense. R. James Woolsey, Clinton's cantankerous CIA director, has adopted a hard-charging attitude that has alienated many in Congress.

      Even with the Cold War over, Woolsey has called for an expanded CIA budget -- in part to upgrade the aging U.S. armada of spy satellites.

      But Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) complains that given its large (classified) annual budget, the CIA should have foreseen the implosion of the Soviet Union. Moynihan is pushing a bill that would shut down the CIA and spin off its functions to the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. Unlikely to pass, Moynihan's bill nevertheless reflects one mood in Congress.

      Absher deplores past CIA abuses as vehemently as anyone. Given CIA compartmentalization, Absher says he learned about them through the same newspapers and books as anybody else.

      But Absher counts on learning more from the ongoing declassification of intelligence documents. When more is known, Absher suggests, the public may find that bad policy was sometimes driven by the White House rather than the CIA.

      Absher suspects this may have happened during the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980s. Given Absher's CIA role at the time, he should have known everything about Col. Ollie North's activities, if only North had been going through channels. In fact, says Absher, North "was running his own private intelligence operation" out of the White House.

      Even as he acknowledges past abuses, Absher charges that Moynihan's bill would return the U.S. to "the situation we were in on Saturday, December 6, 1941" -- the day before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

      Despite everything, Absher retains a bedrock faith in the U.S. intelligence establishment to which he has devoted his life. That life was shaped by a Cold War world that is rapidly passing out of existence, and even out of memory.

      Perhaps this explains why Absher is so avid for his students to come into contact with the human reality behind intelligence work.

      "We don't have horns," Absher says at one point, almost plaintively, referring to himself and his fellow spooks.

      Yet Absher's own life, even though it doesn't officially figure in his syllabus, makes a story as striking as anything his students are likely to hear from visiting CIA lecturers.

      Take, for example, the interview that led to Absher's career in the CIA.

      The date was 1961, a vintage year for Cold War paranoia. A CIA- directed invasion force had folded up on the beaches of Castro's Cuba -- an event that first alerted many Americans to the fact that the CIA even existed.

      As a Princeton philosophy major five years before, Absher had closely followed the student-led Hungarian revolt that drew workers and others into the streets before being suppressed by Soviet tanks.

      "We were students at Princeton," Absher says today. "We felt a kinship with the students who were dying in the streets of Budapest. And we could do nothing."

      As 1961 unfolded, Absher felt dissatisfied working at his promising job in the San Antonio city manager's office. He had already served in the Army, where he did his first teaching. But he wanted to do more. So Absher paid his own way from San Antonio to Washington to enlist in the Cold War.

      His Congressman gave him some addresses to try. Absher's rounds eventually brought him to a dark corner office in the ramshackle wooden barracks that were the CIA's first headquarters.

      With a glance, Absher pegged the interviewer sitting behind the plain wooden desk. The man looked like "a stern prep school dean," but was obviously one of the aristo cowboys of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's wartime predecessor.

      Absher's interrogator was cradling something in one hand. It turned out to be a mound of birdseed.

      As the interview proceeded, Absher's interrogator would periodically fling a seed across the room. In a cage against the opposite wall sat a huge-beaked bird -- a toucan? -- as brilliantly colored as a parrot, only four times as large and ugly as sin.

      "The bird," Absher recalls, "never missed a thing. Line drives. Fly balls. Grounders. He caught them all."

      Absher himself, he admits today, was also caught -- as he says his interviewer must have intended. Before there were batteries of psychological tests, there were CIA mind-games.

      So, Mr. Absher, his interviewer eventually got around to asking, do you think you want to come to work for us?

      I'm not sure, Absher admitted. I don't know much about you guys.

      This was true, and Absher wasn't alone. A Barnes and Noble how-a- bill-becomes-law handbook Absher had brought with him on the train didn't even mention the CIA.

      Good answer, Mr. Absher! responded his interviewer. You'll be hearing from us. We'll be offering you a job.

      And they did. The letter Absher received offered such-and-such a salary, but never specifically mentioned the CIA.

      Absher completed his training (which, because of the CIA's general secrecy agreement, he still can't talk about) just in time to go to work as a junior intelligence analyst during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. It was to prove a defining event in Absher's life, a crisis Absher thinks revealed to him "the unquestioned value of espionage."

      Absher found himself working under Sherman Kent, a legendary figure widely considered the father of modern CIA analysis.

      Just one month before, the CIA had predicted that the Soviets would probably not introduce missiles into Cuba. But the documents Absher was asked to read indicated otherwise. So did the U-2 "spy plane" photos Absher got to study almost as soon as JFK did.

      Espionage, he says, was delivering intelligence that was both surprising and unwelcome -- but also unquestionably important.

      Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles based in Cuba had a range of 2,200 miles. They could have hit any location in the U.S., except Alaska and one small corner of the Pacific Northwest. The Soviets, Absher believes, had seriously misjudged Kennedy.

      Some critics have expressed horror at the superpower face-off that followed, seeing the entire episode as scary testosterone-driven brinksmanship that almost blew up the world.

      Absher disagrees.

      "I happen to think," he says today, "that Kennedy handled this crisis about as well as anybody could have." Absher is prepared to argue this case on the historical record. The Cuban missile crisis, in fact, is one of the episodes examined in Absher's course.

      Unfortunately, Absher can't very well argue for what he and his colleagues accomplished during his subsequent CIA postings overseas. Absher can't even say where he went.

      His resume acknowledges that Absher served in "Europe" and in the "Caribbean," that he was CIA "Chief of Station" in two different countries, and that he was awarded numerous medals, including the Intelligence Medal of Merit (twice). Between overseas postings, Absher also spent "four tours" in CIA headquarters, where he supervised U.S. intelligence operations going on in (unnamed) foreign countries.

      Given these gaps, it seems odd that Absher feels free to talk, as he apparently does, about 1972-73 in Vietnam. Once again, Absher has his own line on the subject.

      "There were many wars in Vietnam," Absher acknowledges. The one Absher fought was "a conventional war" against battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars operating at battalion strength. Absher zipped around his province in a helicopter, and when necessary called in B-52 strikes against suspected NVA troop concentrations.

Vietnam Sets War's Toll at 3 Million Dead HANOI (Kyodo) -- Three million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died in more than two decades of fighting during the Vietnam War, and defoliants and other chemicals turned another 2 million into invalids, a government report says.       It is the first time the Vietnamese government has published an overall estimate of the number of Vietnamese killed in the war that ended with the country's unification under Northern control in 1975.       The United States, which joined the war on the side of South Vietnam in 1961, sprayed large parts of the Vietnamese jungle with Agent Orange and other defoliants to fight the communist North from the air.       The herbicides are believed to have caused some illnesses suffered by veterans and their children.       The Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Welfare said the survey of war deaths and invalids it released Tuesday is in its "initial stage."       About 1 million of the war dead were North Vietnamese soldiers, and the remaining 2 million were soldiers and civilians of the South, it said.       In addition, more than 4 million civilians and soldiers sustained injuries. The report, which decried the use of defoliants as "an extremely shocking fact," put the number of people suffering from their effects above 2 million. -Washington Times, June 23, 1994

      In the interrogations he supervised, Absher says, "I never saw any brutality." It was the Viet Cong, Absher says, who went in for wholesale assassinations of South Vietnamese teachers, officials, and others. Or rather, Absher says, the competent and honest were assassinated. The incompetent and corrupt were left in place.

      But what about alleged CIA assassinations, Absher is asked? What about the notorious CIA "Phoenix Program" that became public knowledge in the 1970s?

      Absher agrees that some such program did exist. Former CIA director William Colby has said as much. But Absher thinks "Phoenix" had apparently been phased out before his Vietnam tour.

      "You'll have to talk to somebody else," he says. "I haven't read very much about Phoenix."

      Freelancer Doug Valentine has. In fact, Valentine says he interviewed the CIA creators of "Phoenix" for his massive 1990 study "The Phoenix Program." Interviewed by phone from his Massachusetts home, Valentine calls Absher's comment on "Phoenix" technically correct, but misleading.

      "There were two CIA-created 'Phoenix' programs," says Valentine. The second was the "Phoenix Program" in the narrower sense, which had in fact been turned over to the Vietnamese before Absher arrived in Vietnam. This program used CIA resources to identify and target Vietnamese civilians that the American-created establishment in Vietnam considered "subversive."

      According to Valentine, this vast group included students, labor organizers, and politically-active Vietnamese of all kinds. In American- dominated South Vietnam, says Valentine, virtually every kind of political and community activity whatsoever was illegal. After these "subversives" had been identified, they were then assassinated by local death-squads which had been organized by the CIA.

      No one knows for sure, Valentine says, exactly how many people were assassinated. But Valentine notes that former CIA director William Colby, who still defends the program, puts the total at 25,000. Other estimates run much higher.

      But according to Valentine, there is another, more inclusive meaning of "Phoenix." In this larger sense, "Phoenix" can stand for a whole style of counterinsurgency warfare that the CIA brought to Vietnam, and to many other places. (Unlike Absher, Valentine regards the nation of South Vietnam itself as the creation of Americans, who stepped into the imperial role abdicated by the French in 1954.)

      The CIA, Valentine says, maintained paid agents within the heart of the South Vietnamese government. Any South Vietnamese politician who deviated from the CIA line was himself in danger of being denounced as a "subversive" -- and then being killed.

      Seen in the larger context of the CIA's history, Valentine maintains, those B-52 strikes Absher was calling in on South Vietnam were part of the larger "Phoenix" counterinsurgency strategy. So were the interrogations Absher oversaw at the local Provincial Interrogation Center (PIC). The entire PIC program, Valentine maintains, was a creation of the CIA's original "Phoenix."

      Valentine, obviously, is no CIA-critic-as-Congressional-penny-pincher. He's an old-style radical critic who turns Absher's contention that there "are always going to be secrets" on its head.

      "If there are always going to be secrets," Valentine contends, "then power is always going to reside with the people who keep the secrets. Secrets are antithetical to democracy. But if there's no more need to keep secrets, then there's no need for a CIA."

      Valentine comes from a military family, and says that he has plenty of CIA-officer friends with whom he agrees to disagree. He says he's sure he could get along with Absher the man.

      "But you have to remember," Valentine says of Absher, "he cannot tell you the truth. All he can tell you is the cover story -- which is designed to be plausible."

      One voice that might be expected to echo Valentine's is that of John Stockwell, one of the top three CIA critics who became an author and lecturer after resigning or retiring as an operations officer (the other two are Philip Agee and Ralph McGehee).

      Stockwell is both a decorated military veteran and a former top- ranking CIA officer. He ran massive, covert CIA operations in Africa before resigning over some of the revelations of the 1970s.

      One thing that bothered him, Stockwell says today, was being asked to lie to Congress -- like certain figures in the Iran-contra scandal. Another was knowledge that the CIA was being asked to carry out assassinations.

      For decades now, Stockwell has been a well-known writer, lecturer, and CIA critic. In 1986, he even spoke to a large student-and-faculty audience at UTSA.

      Reached by telephone at his home in Elgin, Texas, however, Stockwell has some surprising news.

      "Intellectually," he says, "I'm probably not too far from Absher today."

      The end of the Cold War, Stockwell says, "swept all the pieces from the board." Continuing to repeat his old criticisms in a changed situation, Stockwell says, would turn him into a "sorehead" instead of the serious intellectual critic he aspires to be.

      The Cold War CIA, Stockwell suggests, has lost its traditional rationale. And although Moynihan's bill will never pass, the CIA's critics have been heard. Imperfect as it necessarily is, the existing system of Congressional oversight is probably as good an instrument as can be devised. The trick is to make it work, to curb the inevitable abuses of power.

      But in the meantime, Stockwell says, Absher is right. The world swarms with threats. He cites the case of vastly-overpopulated Rwanda, a country he once kept track of for the CIA. The U.S., says Stockwell, does need a streamlined, high-quality intelligence capability pretty much like the one Absher calls for.

      "The next fifty years," he says, with no evident pleasure, "may be much more violent than the last fifty."

      His words virtually echo Absher's warning about tinhorn dictators and their "weapons of mass destruction."

      "We've got a window of opportunity," Absher says. "Let's not blow it."

      It's strange to find these two agreeing about anything -- the notorious CIA critic and the unrepentant former spook now openly defending his craft to a new generation of college students -- a generation which needs someone to explain why anyone was ever out in the cold in the first place.

opening passage from The Secret Wars of the CIA, by John Stockwell, 1987-Oct-10:

      "I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done....

      I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us....

      What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.

[...]

opening passage from The Opal File: The Round Table Financial Takeover of Australia and New Zealand:

18th May, 1967: Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, using a sophisticated satellite technique to detect global deposits, discovers a huge oil source south of New Zealand in the Great South Basin.

10th June, 1967: Hunt and New Zealand Finance Minister reach an agreement: Hunt will receive sole drilling rights and Muldoon will receive a $US100,000 non-repayable loan from the Placid Oil Co (Hunt's).

8th September, 1967: Placid Oil granted drilling rights to the Great South Basin.

10th May, 1968: Hawaiian meeting between Onassis and top lieutenants, William Colby and Gerald Parsky, to discuss establishment of a new front company in Australia - Australasian and Pacific Holdings Limited - to be managed by Michael Hand. Using Onassis-Rockefeller banks, Chase Manhattan and Shroders, Travelodge Management Ltd sets up another front to link the operations to the US.

Onassis crowned head of the Mafia; Colby (head of CIA covert operations in S.E. Asia) ran the Onassis heroin operations in the Golden Triangle (Laos, Burma, Thailand) with 200 Green Beret Mercenaries - ie the Phoenix Programme.

Gerald Parsky deputy to ex-CIA/FBI Robert Maheu in the Howard Hughes organisation, took orders from Onassis and was made responsible for laundering skim money from the Onassis casino operations in Las Vegas and the Bahamas.

Mid-July, 1968: Placid Oil Co and the Seven Sisters (major oil companies) begin Great South Basin oil exploration - hunt finances 45.5% of exploration costs, Gulf Oil 14.5%, Shell (US) 10%, B.P. Oil 10%, Standard Oil California 10%, Mobil 6.5% and Arco 6.5%.

12th October, 1968: Hunt and Seven Sisters announce confirmation of new oil source comparable to the Alaskan North Slope - gas reserves estimated at 150 times larger than the Kapuni Field.

Early 1969: Mafia consolidates its banking operations; David Rockefeller becomes Chairman of Chase Manhattan; Wriston at Citibank and Michele Sindona captures the Vatican Bank, Partnership Pacific launched by Bank of America, Bank of Tokyo and Bank of New South Wales.

[...]

excerpt from The Truth (1997), by Pauline Hanson, from http://www.gwb.com.au/onenation/truth/elite.html:

The New Class Elites

"Australians have never given their consent to the dangerous experiment of turning their country into the utopian dream of the multinational state. This dream, as yet unsuccessful in any corner of the globe, is being ruthlessly imposed on Australians in lieu of their informed consent. As some of the results of multiculturalism begin to emerge, the experiment, already unpopular, grows daily less poplar but the social engineers continue to insist that multiculturalism works in much the same way that they slavishly admire the emperor's clothes."
E J Kempster

"Australian Leadership elites in politics, the bureaucracy, academia, big business, the churches and the media have effectively cut themselves adrift from the interests of a majority of Australians. Many have betrayed the trust of the people they are supposed to represent.

"As part of this process the elites, while they may mouth concern for the country, have given up thinking in terms of the national interest to pursue an internationalist agenda. This agenda is eroding the foundations of our nation and marginalising the majority, which has less and less say in its destiny.

"The bulk of the media, charged with a watchdog role in the public interest, have become active agents in this process. Academics, artists and others who are supposed to be independent-minded have become propagandists and intellectually corrupt hirelings."
Graeme Campbell and Mark Uhlmann

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gate is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. for the traitor appears not traitor - he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation - he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city - he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be found."
Cicero 42 BC

The idea that there exists a new class, ruling elite that controls, not only by armed force and money, but also by ideas, is viewed, unsurprisingly enough by many of its members as a right wing conspiratorial idea. It is no such thing. The idea of a `new class', a new ruling class, has been discussed by a number of mainstream writers. Christopher Lasch's The revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy argues that democracy is threatened not by the masses, as Jose Ortega y Gasset thought in The Revolt of the Masses (1932), but by the best and the brightest, who have become arrogant internationalists, forming a community of elite professional and managerial contemporaries stretching across the globe, with little sense of civic and moral virtues.

This idea has been expressed by scores of writers since the early 19th century, so this process has been going on for some time (usually in debates over free trade vs protectionism, but in the 20th century over immigration). For example C Wright Mills in the Power Elite and Alvin Gouldner in the Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, develop this thesis, the latter theorist being used by Katharine Betts in her critique of Australia's immigration policy.

The new class elites are coercive utopians, a term first used by the social theorist Peter Metzger. They believe that humans are perfectible, human nature is essentially good and that the evils that exist are the products of a corrupt social system. An ideal social order [can be] realised. But this ideal has to be imposed - it is not freely and democratically accepted. In particular, coercive utopians see their own culture and society as deeply flawed. This technocratic manipulation of the ordinary people is discussed by John Ralston Saul in his book Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, David Ehrenfeld's The Arrogance of Humanism, B E Brown, Intellectuals and other traitors and Paul Johnson's Intellectuals.

Earlier in this chapter we quoted Ian Viner QC claiming that Mainstream values had led to the Holocaust. John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses has shown that the founders of modern culture viewed the masses as ripe for examination. The masses were viewed as corrupt by such intellectual heroes as George Bernard Shaw, Ezre Pound, D H Lawrence, E M Forster, Virginia Woolf, H G Wells, Aldous Huxley, W B Yeats and others. W B Yeats recommended the proto-Nazi philosopher Nietzsche as a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity.

George Bernard Shaw believed that Neitzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra was the first modern book that can be set above the Psalms of David. And Nietzsche's view of the masses: `Many too many are born, and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and wormeatenness from the tree. Great writers such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesses and Andre Gide are all in debt to the novelist Knut Hamsun, but Hamsun was a supporter of Adolf Hitler and said in a obituary of Hitler that he was a warrior for man kind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. His fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism which finally felled him. All of that from one of the so-called great writers of the 20th century!

Yet the view of the masses as unliving is made by T S Eliot in the Wateland and is an idea accepted by George Orwell (who should have known better) and D H Lawrence. Lawrence's correspondence is full of holocaust-style remarks. (`Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.) He looked forward to the extermination of the human race. Nietzche, a hero of the postmodern movement which dominates the arts faculties in Western universities, said in The Will to Power: the great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.

He looked forward to the same annihilation of millions of failures. In that same book, Nietzsche proposes the establishment of international racial unions to rear a tremendous aristocracy so that the will of philosophical men of power and artistic tyrants will be made to endure for millennia. Carey sees Hitler's Mein Kampf as firmly rooted in the intellectual traditions of the time. Ian Viner QC could not be more mistaken.

New class elites or cognitive elites are creatures primarily created by university system. In the American context George Roche in his book The Fall of the Ivory Tower argues that the entire system of American higher education is academically, morally, and quite literally going bankrupt. He identifies two villains: (1) the radicals of the 1960s who have now become the liberal-left establishment and given the US multiculturalism and political correctness and (2) a federal government motivated by economic rationalist concerns. The same is truth of Australia.

Further, if Roche is right that much of the research being done and published is worth little or nothing is true of the US, then it is certainly true of Australian academic work in the arts, social sciences and humanities which remain essentially a neo-colonial US product. In both societies the intelligentsia have viciously attacked the societies that have supported them and fed them.

In the Australian context, John Carroll has written of the treason of the upper middle class' a remissive class fuelled by paranoia and hatred. The rebellion of the 1960s expressed itself in direct attacks on the institutions of traditional Australia. They are the generation who regard John Lennon as a profound philosopher. According to Professor R Gaita (Australian Catholic University) there is an untruthfulness that pervades nearly all the institutions which we now call universities. M C Conner correctly observes that our universities are horrible lefty, authoritarian places brimful of nonsense subjects and crazy PC rules.

The qualification that we would add to this is that the left/right distinction is no longer of mush significance since the so-called fall of communism. We have instead a new religion of internationalism - of anti-white racism, multiculturalism, feminism and Asianisation - that can be approached either from the dreadlock direction (Hanson's rent-a-crowd arts graduate dole bludgers) or from above, (the elite economic rationalist men-in-slimy-grey-suits). There is little philosophical difference between them. In both cases they hate old Anglo-Australia and wish to see it destroyed.

Les Murry, Australia's most reveres living poet has recognised this in his award-winning Subhuman Redneck Poems, In the poem The Suspension of Knock he speaks of the very uniqueness of a racism. Unfortunately Murry interprets Pauline Hanson as betraying us by turning the debate in to racism, indicating that Murry himself is duped by the new class.

It is not possible or necessary to conduct a detailed study of the operation of the Australian new class but we shall give three brief examples to illustrate our these. From the left, consider that case of Manning Clark. At the time of writing, a debate rages about whether Clark was a soviet agent of influence, being recipient of the Soviet Union's highest honour, the Order of Lenin. These revelations were published by Brisbane's The Courier-Mail on August 24, 1996. Following Colebatch we believe that it is probable that Clark was a Soviet agent of influence but not a Soviet spy.

Clark's History promoted the view that Australia was a nation of bastards a kingdom of emptiness and that its traditions and values are worthless. This new class view of history survives today in Paul Keatings anti-Anglo, anti-English view of Australian history. Colebatch notes that in the hypothesis that Manning Clark deliberately attempted to explain a lot: the nonsense about The Man from Snowy River being participation in a blood sacrifice, the recurring image of the sinister people in black, the sneer at Jewish money lenders. Indeed Clark's anti-Semitic comments should be an embarrassment to the left but their hypocrisy and deceit is so great that they choose to ignore it.

Clark's real damage was to Australian history. Beyond this Clark had a particularly strong hatred for science and technology. He was in bed with the radical feminists (God help him) who believe that white male science is an organ of oppression and domination and that technology rapes nature. In his Boyer Lectures of 1976, he sees the coming of the white man to Australia as a curse for the land. Clark contributed to the situation where Australian history has become Australian anti-history, a historical revisionism of feminism, Asianism, multiculturalism and Aboriginalism.

Consider for another example of the new class in action Professor Allan Patience's recent contribution to Quadrant. Professor Patience has the Chair in Political Science and Asian Studies at the Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne.

He has been held (according to his article) academic appointments in the UK, Japan, Singapore, China and Burma. His article is an attempt to come to grips with a failed love affair with a Japanese male `Y'. Patience claims that his story is taken by Patience to be significant in the way it challenges Australian multiculturalism as we seek to be part of, or remain apart from, Asia. The details of the failed relationship need not concern us.

Patience takes some of the blame but puts the rest upon the yoke of Australia's hard culture, characterised by secularism, populism, racism and masculinism. Well, is any of this true? Australia has one of the highest male youth suicide rates in the world - even Germaine Greer is coming to believe Australian males may be in trouble. Second, as Sydney is one of the homosexual capitals of the world, it hardly seems reasonable to say that Australia is not tolerant in this respect. Third, Asian culture has a much harder, almost cruel, view of women's destiny and social place.

Things have not changed much in modern times. According to a report by the UN's Children's Fund, Progress of Nations (1996), SE Asia has the world's most malnourished children. The Asia Syndrome is not due to poverty - sub - Saharan Africa is poorer. The report places the blame on the poor care given to women in Asian societies. In our opinion it is an instructive failure of Patience's essay that he does not consider whether Asian cultures are hard, instructive because in the new cargo cult religion of Asianisation, all that is Asian is sacred and all that belongs to Anglo-Australia is evil.

For a final example of the new class in action, consider the recent writings of Robert Manne, editor of Quadrant, and the voice of ethnically assimilated Australian neo-conservatism. He claims in his November 4 article in The Australian that Hanson is our first anti-politician representing hostility to parliamentary politics. Hanson has negative charisma, she is painfully inarticulate and ignorant. Manne and his ilk are of course the opposite. In fact he seems to support a form of Platonic authoritarianism where an enlightened elite rule over the benighted mass of serfs (Opinion, The Australian, December 16, 1996).

As a consequence of the Hanson debate not only Australians of Asian birth but all Australians are likely to be harmed. But there is no problem of Hanson developing a populist right party because if she tries the danger to us of her limitations will eventually become transparent. Manne is sympathetic to the Hawke position of explaining to Anglo-Australia why they have reached their use by date. Well aware of the gulf of opinion between the liberal-left-ethnic ruling elite and the ordinary people, Manne's support comes down firmly in favour of his class, as would be expected.

Having outlined the position of Hanson's critics and having conducted an imminent or internal critique of their views, showing their international inconsistency and irrationality, we turn now to the task of giving positive support for Hanson's position. In the next chapter we address the separate issue of the Aboriginal Question and Mabo.

Let Us Now Praise Social Climbing

No one wants to be called a social climber. It's not a pretty term. It suggests that you are grasping and opportunistic, and a vulgarian to boot. A decade ago, Gayfryd Steinberg and Susan Gutfreund became the showy symbols of social climbing, two women who painted every lily in an attempt to convert cash into cachet.

Today's social climbers are less conspicuous. The reason is that there is no longer any agreed-upon social establishment to impress. Today, fame and celebrity represent the highest rung of social status, and the bluest blood and the biggest bank account are just tools to make the acquaintance of the movie star or mogul of the moment. Vanity Fair's New Establishment of media barons has taken the place of Mrs. Astor's 400. Today, the same social swells vie to be at a party given by Jay-Z or Blaine Trump.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of social climbing. America was founded on it. The self-evident truth that all men are created equal was a license to climb higher than your neighbor. Unlike the Old World, America gave everyone the same starting line. The result is what we have today, an aristocracy based not on birth or bloodlines, but on wealth and fame.

In fact, when it comes to social climbing, we don't have a choice. Social climbing is in our genes. "During evolution social status correlated with reproductive success, so genes conducive to social climbing did better than genes that counseled indifference," Robert Wright says in his book "The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology."

In other words, if it were not for social climbing, we would all still be stuck in the primordial ooze.

In those days, survival of the fittest often meant the triumph of the most obsequious. When the human species made what anthropologists call the Great Leap Forward 50,000 years ago, it was the smaller, craftier fellows who triumphed. Human history is just an eternal high school lunchroom, where everyone wants to sit at the cool kids' table. We're all programmed to climb. It's just that some of us are better and a little more shameless about it.

We less successful climbers look at those who have painstakingly scaled great social summits and think, Those poor tortured souls; they can't be happy. Au contraire. Sociologists tell us that people are happy when they climb just a wee bit higher than their neighbors do. An old Yiddish proverb makes the same point: when does a hunchback rejoice? When he sees another hunchback with a larger hump.

Think about it. You are pleased with your raise until you find out that the woman with the office next door got a slightly larger one.

Successful social climbers do feel superior. After all, that's why they climb. Neurobiologists have shown that those who ascend to dominant groups have more serotonin in their nervous systems than the rest of us. Serotonin makes us happy. [Absolute unmitigated claptrap - see e.g. Serotonin reverses dominant social status; Larson ET, Summers CH; Behav Brain Res 2001 Jun;121(1-2):95-102 (though note that this study is with lizards:-) -AMPP Ed. (and MIT-trained brain scientist)]

One study of college students showed that the fellow who became the president of the fraternity had more serotonin coursing through his veins than the also-rans.

A triumphant social ascent can hide much of the crass maneuvering on the way up. Even the oldest money was once new. The Kennedys were bootleggers. Anne Getty was a streetcar ticket taker before she married Gordon. What is Jeffrey Katzenberg but a boffo version of Sammy Glick? It's not where you start, but where you finish. Successful social climbers become the object of other climbers' aspirations. That's progress.

Social climbing these days revolves around celebrity. Yes, there are more and more glitzy charity dinners for more and more worthy causes, but the lure these days is celebrity. That's what we mean by royalty in the 21st century.

More than wealth, more than titles, fame confers the highest status. To be a successful climber, you must either win fame yourself or cozy up to it. Since cozying up to fame is a good deal easier than winning it, here follows a short course for social toadies.

Piggyback on Other People's Prominence: In Victorian England, if you managed to clamber into the right clubs, you became a de facto gentleman. In New York, the only association anyone cares about is your association with the famous. One of Andy Warhol's less-known dictums was, You can use other people's status to increase your own. Once dubbed the Edmund Hillary of social climbers, Warhol was extremely serious about getting in the right social circles. (His goal was also practical: socialites bought a lot more of his pictures.) Warhol was a master at parlaying one invitation into another even more exclusive one, using one social summit to scale another. In his diaries, Warhol, the grocer's son from Pittsburgh, often mentioned how he would invite socialites to his studio to garner invitations to their homes.

Be a Celeb Hag: These days, there is status and mini-celebrity by virtue of being friends with a celebrity. People are famous for being friends with the famous: "Oh, look, there's that woman who's Madonna's best friend." Of course, people who are friendly with celebrities always emphasize the ease and old-shoeness of the relationship. "We just hang out, you know." It wouldn't do to be so blunt as to say: "I'm friends with Madonna to increase my status. She's an incredible pain, but I'll do absolutely anything to maintain the relationship."

Hire a Publicist: Before the time of Martha Stewart, when the demarcations of status were both more rigid and less distinct, men like Baldassare Castiglione and Lord Chesterfield wrote handbooks that taught people how to behave at court. These days, publicists are the sherpas of social climbing. They help guide the ambitious but inexperienced up the steepest social cliffs. They do not offer advice, like a Renaissance courtesy manual, or even charm, which they tend to lack. They provide invitations to dinners and parties, where they perform introductions that are more like deal memos than salutations: "This is Joe, whose internet I.P.O. took place last year. He's now on the board of six companies. And this is Caroline, she's a friend of Leo's." Want to go to the right parties? Want to be invited to the right charity events? Then you need to be on the right lists. And the way to get on those lists is to hire a publicist. You can increase your status overnight by putting the highest-status publicist on retainer. You can't climb to the top unless you're on the right mountain.

Sell, Sell, Sell: Product You! If you don't have a publicist to herald your arrival on the scene, I am afraid you have to do it yourself. My wife, who is not American, is always put off by how New Yorkers give their own or others' curricula vitae when they are introduced. But this is a conversational form of the peacock's tail, a description of one's fitness to ascend the social ladder. It is so much more seemly if you can have someone like Peggy Siegal blow your horn for you. Her job is to name-drop so you don't have to.

Don't Worry, Be Shameless: Traditionally, the best way to scramble up the ladder was not to seem to be doing so. The social climber's conundrum is that the greater your desire to ascend, the more transparent are your efforts to do so. Once upon a time, the obviousness of your effort was the very thing that prevented you from achieving your goal. But that is no longer true. Nobody cares anymore that Judy Taubman was a beauty queen before she married Alfred Taubman, the majority owner and former chairman of Sotheby's. (Although they do care if he gets indicted.) The very ostentatiousness of Gayfryd Steinberg's social climbing did not disqualify her but became her signature. Wanting to succeed is no longer a disqualification for success. Self-promotion is no longer a demerit or a disqualifier. Madonna was applauded in both social and showbiz circles for being a "genius" at self-promotion. No one even gives it a second thought anymore. It's just the price of doing business.

Do Unto Others: The trick of social climbing is to let the object of your status cravings know that you can offer something that that person is interested in. Let's say you can introduce your quarry to a movie star she does not know. Or you can get her into a very trendy restaurant where she has not been. This is the favor exchange of social climbing: I do a favor for you, and you lift me into your social circle. Evolutionary biologists call it reciprocal altruism, but there is really nothing altruistic about it. It is simply a quid pro quo that advances both of our interests.

So don't be ashamed of your social cravings. It is the most natural thing in the world. It is a sign that you are ambitious and that you are setting goals for yourself. And do not relax. Remember, you can always go a notch higher. The Duchess of Windsor married a prince, but she never snared the title she really coveted, Royal Highness. Happy climbing, and don't look down.

Once again, the above channelling of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has been brought to you by the New York Times.

a 1997 essay by Des Griffin, from http://www.midnight-emissary.com/truth.htm [Nota bene: this fine essay has been brushed up to repair some typos and trivial dated phrases, and purged of references to the thoroughly loathsome Christianity to which Griffin unaccountably adheres. The excised passages are still there in the source, rendered invisible using HTML comment directives.]:

Truth is Fallen in the Street

By

Des Griffin

      One of the saddest characteristics of modern American life is the basic reality that - regardless of the facts - the mesmerized multitudes will cling, with the tenacity of pit bulls, to their fantasies and preconceived ideas. The truth may be laid out in the most vivid manner, it may be expounded upon in great detail, and documented to the nth degree. But unless it falls on open, enquiring, and receptive minds it will have little if any impact on the illusions and delusions so warmly embraced by society at large. Particularly at the end of the twentieth century, when most people have been seduced into jettisoning any concept of right and wrong, of good and bad, truth - or basic reality - is so psychologically disruptive and ego-shattering to most that it must be denied and rejected on contact. To a large extent, this is a new phenomenon in America. Simply put, it is one of the most devastating results of the "education" (read brainwashing) system that has been foisted off on the American public over the last 70 years. Most peoples' mental antennas have thus been short circuited and their minds reprogrammed to skip the "reality" channel; they now focus on those channels which massage their egos and pander to their baser instincts. Ours is a very bad era for substance. What we are witnessing is a victory of "touchy-feely" symbolism over raw reality.

      The public have never been trained in logical deduction. They have never been taught to analyze, to reason, and to consider the end from the beginning. Unrecognized by most, through the agency of national brain laundries (euphemistically called public schools), fraudulent concepts and a multitude of politically motivated deceptions have been skillfully woven into the fabric of their minds by highly-trained change agents. In this manner these mind manipulators have brought about a condition whereby large segments of the population are relentlessly - but unwittingly - exploited for political purposes. The obscene concept of "political correctness" is specifically designed by the change agents and their hidden political masters to further control the masses - and direct them, in lock-step, towards the fulfillment of their own political agenda.

      The problem is compounded by the fact that America's political charlatans and social engineers have conned most of the dumbed down sheep into believing there are no lessons to be learned from the past. The majority have been duped into concluding that most beliefs embraced prior to the 1960s are ridiculously archaic - and unworthy of serious consideration. Thus, most are left floundering in a turbulent ocean of confusion and uncertainty, without an anchor or moral compass. As they stand for nothing but will fall for anything, most fall easy prey to still further manipulation by unscrupulous politicians or religious shysters.

OUR "SOPHISTICATED" SOCIETY

      In today's "sophisticated" society (one which, by definition, prides itself on its "fallacious reasoning" and "counterfeiting and debasing" of truth (Webster, 1828), truth is not only an almost unsaleable commodity, it can hardly be given away. Truth is ignored and trampled into the ground. In many quarters it is even seen as a bizarre form of prejudice - something to be condemned. The declaration of a wide range of historically accurate, thoroughly documented, and ultimately undeniable truths has, in fact, now been classified as a "hate crime."

REVERTING TO PAGANISM

      Religiously and philosophically, we have steadily reverted - over the last few decades - to the paganism of the pre-Christian era, or the gnosticism that followed. Twentieth century socialism, communism, "New" Ageism, etc., for example, are certainly not new. At the heart of each is the belief that there is a unique or elite group of individuals who, alone, are capable of governing mankind and establishing a New World Order - of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite. President Clinton's Georgetown University mentor, Dr. Carroll Quigley - in Tragedy and Hope, page 324 - declared it to be a planned return to feudalism.

      Since the 1930s many long-term programs, devised and set in motion by the real leaders of both "democratic" and "republican" administrations, have been working steadily towards the accomplishment of that goal. Every aspect of modern society - social policies, judicial decisions, education, welfarism, foreign policy, federal debt, the media, etc. - reflects this politically-inspired trend. The foundational underpinnings of our once free nation have thus been eroded to the point of virtual non-existence.

      Devastating as these programs have proven to be to "America" as envisioned by our founding fathers, little would have been possible had it not been for the simultaneous debauching of the currency of nations worldwide.

      To pave the way for Dr. Quigley's prophesied "feudal" system in America, it was necessary for our hidden masters (dubbed The Invisible Government by former FBI Agent Dan Smoot) to implement a plethora of interlocking social programs masquerading as altruism. These were, however, designed to revolutionize American society - to destroy self-government, personal responsibility, and constitutional government based on set standards. They were devised to decimate the free enterprise system, destroy our national sovereignty, and ultimately bring us into total servitude to the international ruling elite.

CAMPAIGN OF VILIFICATION

      For decades, close examination of these programs - and their clearly foreseeable consequences - has been conveniently avoided by a ruthless and relentless campaign of vilification against all who raised their voices in warning. They were condemned as being, among other things, right wing extremists and "paranoid." In the words of of Dr. Carroll Quigley, their "neo-isolationist discontent was a revolt of the ignorant against the informed and educated ... of the Midwest of Tom Sawyer against the cosmopolitan East ... of old Siwash against Harvard ... of simple absolutes against complex relativisms." These simpletons, according to the learned professor, favor "a nostalgic return to the simplicities of 1905, and above all a desire to get back to the inexpensive, thoughtless and irresponsible international security of 1880" (Tragedy and Hope, p.979-980). (Please note: By implication, only the elite are capable of being informed and educated or thoughtful and responsible, i.e. capable of knowing what is best for the dumb peasants).

      In the face of such tactics (non-stop pressure, coercion, harassment, and intimidation) many would-be critics of this program for national disaster decided to keep their mouths shut - and go along to get along. Who, after all, wants to be branded and ridiculed as "uninformed, uneducated, thoughtless and irresponsible"? Such an experience would be emotionally devastating to anyone who craves social "acceptance" more than truth and personal integrity. It's a matter of basic values!

THE INEVITABLE IS HAPPENING

      But now the inevitable it happening - and the birds are coming home to roost. The seeds of the elitist's "we shall be as god" philosophy are bearing their superabundant fruit. Liberal lunacy prevails.

      American society is a twisted and tangled web of everything that is a stench in the nostrils of righteous men and women. We love lies and practice deceit. We are like empty shells. Our lives are so devoid of meaning that we spend endless hours watching television while idolizing and worshipping jet setting moral tramps. Our moral condition is reminiscent of that which prevailed in France at the time of their Revolution. Individually, we are devoid of purpose. Collectively, we are morally corrupt, and socially and economically bankrupt. No matter how hard we try, our many bizarre forms of escapism will never outdistance the long arm of reality!

CUNNING TREACHERY

      Internationally, the whole present system is tied together by a massive interlocking mesh of unpayable debts and unpublicized agreements - not to mention political blackmail and cunning treachery at every level. Around the globe, all nations are striving desperately to stay afloat in a world gone politically and fiscally insane.

      Financially, after many decades of the most blatant fiscal irresponsibility, the United States has passed the point of no return. Our leaders on Capitol Hill have sold us out; they have led us inexorably down the path towards a feudal society. They have squandered our national wealth with reckless abandon. They have not only amassed an unpayable federal debt of nearly $6 Trillion ($6,000,000,000,000), but have also looted an additional $460 Billion ($460,000,000,000) from the Social Security Trust Fund to help cover up the enormity of their crimes against the American people.

      On the business front, through heavy taxes, regulations, mandatory programs, environmentalism, and a wide variety of other pressures the federal government has created - nationwide - conditions whereby it is becoming increasingly difficult to be successful. Many businessmen feel they are in a straitjacket - with little room to maneuver. Corporate and personal debt in the United States presently exceeds $15 Trillion ($15, 000,000,000,000). Wages in many sections are shrinking, while the cost of living continues to climb. No wonder foreclosures and bankruptcies are continuing to soar. Ours is clearly a proverbial house of cards waiting to collapse.

      Much of this staggering debt burden is owed - through a variety of agencies - to the international bankers. Over the years these predators, described by Louis T. McFadden, former Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee, as a "dark crew of financial pirates," have created the fiat (irredeemable in specie) money out of thin air at a cost to them of 2-3 cents per note regardless of denomination. This virtually worthless currency (irredeemable funny money) is then loaned at par - full face value - to national governments (in exchange for bonds), corporations, and private individuals alike at high rates of interest. Globally, they totally monopolize the banking scene. They own the game - and control it through their bought-and-paid-for political hacks who go through the motions of "representing the great American people" while stabbing them in the back.

      Through credit manipulation - credit expansion and contraction - they create booms and busts at will. Through the former, they help create wealth. Through the latter they create poverty and social unrest by means of withdrawing credit, thus creating monetary crises. Through subsequent foreclosures they "clean up" (as if with a giant vacuum cleaner) everything of value that remains. The suckers - oblivious to both financial and political reality - are left holding the bag - and cursing their luck! This racket is particularly profitable as the big bankers have the political leaders, the judicial system, and the media in their hip pocket.

THE BOTTOM LINE

      What now? How could the international bankers and their Anglo-American Establishment partners-in-crime possibly create what Dr. Quigley described as "a world system of financial control in private hands ... [that would be] controlled in a feudal fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences"?

      The answer to that question emerged as a result of the Fourth World Wilderness Conference held in Colorado, September 13-18, 1987. The convention was attended by such international luminaries as Edmund de Rothschild, David Rockefeller, and then-U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker. Later, official host George Hunt blew the cover on plans, revealed at the conference, to create a fraudulent banking entity to be known as the World Conservation Bank. Under the WCB, nations around the world, including the once-proud "land of the free and home of the brave," are being required to give up title to multiple millions of acres in their countries (and the natural resources they contain) to collateralize loans made to them by the international bankers. These are known as "debt for nature swaps." That is why "our" government is designating vast regions of our country "federal wilderness lands" and "wilderness areas" and placing them off-limits to the American peasants. These lands are part of the collateral on our national debt.

      Let's take one further step in a possible scenario. Suppose the financial music stops, the grotesquely bloated stock market dives into oblivion, and the patently fraudulent banking system - presently sustained by the most deceitful political manipulation - collapses. What then? The federal government - stripped of all its fraudulent means of deceiving the American people - would no longer be able to honor any of its innumerable promises and obligations. The states, also, unable to meet their obligations, would be insolvent. Most corporations, already heavily in debt, would fold. Businesses and individuals, no longer able to pay their day-to-day expenses - not to mention the interest on their already mounting debts - would be thrown into total confusion. Commerce would grind to a halt. Tens of millions, insolvent and without hope of financial recovery, would be forced into bankruptcy. Suicides would skyrocket.

      Where would that leave the United States and the people thereof? The answer may be revealed by "following the money" to its source of origin. Who holds the mortgages of most property in the United States? The banks! Who controls the banks and loans them money when necessary? The privately owned but falsely named Federal Reserve System! Who owns and controls the Federal Reserve? The International Bankers headquartered in "The City" of London!

      Now, suppose the banks foreclose on all the mortgages, then the Fed forecloses on the banks, and finally the international bankers foreclose on the Fed. Who, then, owns the United States of America, lock, stock, and barrel? Obviously, almost everything would end up in the hands of the international bankers and their elitist cohorts - the "financial pirates" (Congressman McFadden) who were responsible for creating the crisis in the first place.

      A feudal system is basically one in which the land owners own and control everything ... including the peasants!

      Can you now see the distinct possibility of such a scenario leading to the fulfillment of their plans as revealed by Dr. Carroll Quigley - "a world system of financial control in private hands ... [that would be] controlled in a feudal fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences"?

      Such a diabolical system, if it unfolds as planned, could be enforced by a World Army formed under the auspices of the United Nations. Reports from around the nation reveal that hordes of foreign troops are presently stationed on American soil, while hundreds of thousands of our troops are based in nations around the world. Did this just happen by chance, or is there something more machiavellian to be read into the situation?

      It is clear that a world police force is being formed through the agency of the United Nations. As demonstrated by the case of Michael New, our troops are being made to swear allegiance to the United Nations, not the United States. New was thrown out of the Army because he refused to take such an oath.

      Will the future unfold in this manner? I don't know, but it certainly could! All the ingredients are present and with us today.

TRYING TIMES AHEAD

      There can be no doubt that trying times lie ahead. It is inevitable that we pay for our lawlessness - our rebellion against everything logical, sane, and lawful. It's not a matter of if, it's merely a matter of when. However, note well: Rebellious man hasn't broken the laws - social, educational, financial etc. - written eternally. He has just violated them. Those laws are still in full force and affect. They are perfect. They are immutable. They work. They will inevitably break and crush underfoot all who violate them - from the greatest to the least of us. The wheels of justice turn slowly but relentlessly. In the end, "Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap."

from Steamshovel Press, by Uri Dowbenko, from http://www.steamshovelpress.com/skulls.html:

'The Skulls': Insider Secrets of the New World Orderlies

      What if you were tapped -- invited to join the world's most powerful secret society -- the Order of Skull and Bones -- a membership so exclusive that it virtually guarantees success in the material world?

   What if you could join the ranks of global movers and shakers like George Herbert Walker Bush (Director of CIA, US Ambassador to the UN, and President of the United States), George W. Bush (party animal and cokehead screw-up, Governor of Texas and future President of the United States), and other members of the Power Elite of industry, education, banking and media?

    Would you do it? And what would be the consequences?

   Written by John Pogue (US Marshalls) and directed by Rob Cohen (Dragonheart, Daylight), "The Skulls" is an entertaining albeit cursory look at the hidden world of secret societies.

   Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson, "Dawson's Creek") is a working class guy, who happens to be the varsity crew team captain at an Ivy League school, obviously Yale University.

   His best friends are Will (Hill Harper), a student journalist, and the rich and blonde Chloe (Leslie Bibb).

   Invited to join a super-secret society called the Skulls, Luke's priorities and friendships start to change.

   His soul-mate -- he's bonded to a Skulls' chum by revealing his most intimate secrets -- is Caleb Mandrake (Paul Walker), a rich kid with a strong track record for getting into trouble and getting bailed out by his father, Litten (Craig T. Nelson). It's really hard not to think of Bush Jr. and Bush Sr.

   Senator Leveritt (William Petersen) is Litten's own soul-mate, who is blackmailed when he doesn't want to play ball with Mandrake anymore.

   When his friend Will is killed, Luke's world is turned completely upside down.

   The real life analogue of the Skulls is the Order of Skull and Bones, a Yale-based secret society which has spread its tentacles throughout the highest echelons of government, finance and industry.

    America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones (Liberty House Press, Box 80650, Billings, MT 59108) by former Hoover Institution historian Antony C. Sutton remains the classic must-read history of this group and its inordinate influence in global affairs.

   "Those on the inside know it as the Order," Sutton begins. "Others have known it for more than 150 years as Chapter 322 of a German secret society. More formally for legal purposes, The Order was incorporated as The Russell Trust in 1856. It was also known as the Brotherhood of Death. Those who make light of it, or want to make fun of it, call it Skull and Bones, or just plain Bones."

   "The American chapter of this German order was founded in 1833 at Yale University by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft who in 1876 became Secretary of War in the Grant Administration. Alphonso Taft was the father of William Howard Taft, the only man to be both President and Chief Justice of the United States."

    "The Order is not just another campus Greek letter fraternal society with passwords and handgrips, common to most campuses," Sutton continues. "Chapter 322 is a secret society whose members are sworn to silence. It only exists on the Yale campus. It has rules. It has ceremonial rites. It is not at all happy with prying probing citizens known among inititiates as outsiders or vandals. Its members always deny membership... Above all the Order is powerful, unbelievably powerful. If the reader will persist and examine the evidence to be presented [in the book] which is overwhelming, there is no doubt his view of the world will suddenly come sharply into focus with almost frightening clarity."

   In real life, The Order meets on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River and "the most likely potential member is from a Bones family who is energetic, resourceful, political and probably an amoral team player. A man who understands that to get along you have to go along. A man who will sacrifice himself for the good of the team."

   According to Sutton, who in 1983, received an eight-inch batch of documents including the membership list, the Order is a secret society dominated by old line American families and new wealth which has existed from 1833 to the present.

   These families include: Lord (1635, Cambridge, Mass), Bundy (1635, Boston, Mass) Phelps (1630, Dorchester, Mass), Whitney (1635, Watertown, Mass), Perkins (1631, Boston, Mass), Stimson (1635, Watertown, Mass), Taft (1679, Braintree, Mass) Wadsworth (1632, Newtown, Mass), Gilman (1638, Hingham, Mass), Payne (Standard Oil), Davison (JP Morgan), Pillsbury (Flour Milling), Sloane (Retail), Weyerhaeuser (Lumber), Harriman (Railroads) and Rockefeller (Standard Oil).

    Sutton writes that The Order has penetrated every segment of American society -- law, education, media, publishing, business, industry, commerce, church, banking, Federal Reserve System, foundations, think tanks, policy groups, legislatures, political parties and the White House-executive branch of the US Government.

   "Among academic associations, the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association were all started by members of the Order or persons close to the Order," writes Sutton.

   "These are key associations for the conditioning of society," Sutton emphasizes. "The phenomenon of The Order as the first on the scene is found especially among foundations."

   The Carnegie Institution, the Peabody Foundation, Slater Foundation, Russell Foundation, Sage Foundation and Ford Foundation were all associated with Daniel Coit Gilman, a member of the Order who was also the first president of Johns Hopkins University.

   Interestingly enough Sutton points out that "during the past one hundred years any theory of history or historical evidence that falls outside a pattern established by the American Historical Association and the major foundations with their grant making power has been attacked or rejected -- not on the basis of any evidence presented, but on the basis of the acceptability of the argument of the so-called Eastern Liberal Establishment and its official historical line."

   Likewise, alternatives to the politically correct version of news events and history is typically condemned as "conspiracy theory."

   The reality, however, remains that despite the Big Media Cartel's cover stories, alternative history provides an independent appraisal of realpolitik and the real-life criminal conspiracies, treacheries and intrigues of the Power Elite.

   "There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves," writes Sutton. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can never be the result of a conspiracy. They can never result from premeditated planned group action. An excellent example is the Kennedy assassination when, within 9 hours of the Dallas tragedy, TV networks announced the shooting was not a conspiracy regardless of the fact that a negative proposition can never be proven and that the investigation had barely begun."

   Every thinking man and woman must now decide between two paradigms -- the Randomness of History (taught by Establishment teachers) vs. the Conspiracy of History (taught by Real Life experience).

   Do events just happen? Or are they often "programmed" by unseen hands?

   The most important point of Professor Sutton's book is his contention that the Order can manipulate history itself through the control of the so-called Hegelian dialectic process.

   "The operations of the Order cannot be explained in terms of any other philosophy," Sutton affirms. "Therefore the Order can not be described as 'right' or 'left,' secular or religious, Marxist or Capitalist. The Order and its objectives are all of these and none of these."

   The current world situation has been deliberately created by these elites who manipulate both the so-called "right" and the so-called "left." By controlling the resulting "synthesis" -- the end result of Hegelian "thesis" and "antithesis" -- a Globalist New World Order is produced. You can call it techno-fascism or techno-feudalism, but the result is the same -- a global consolidation and mega-corporate transnational centralization of power, capital and resources.

   And how does it work? By using "managed conflict" or "crisis management." a crisis or problem is produced. Then the crisis is "managed" and the problem is "solved" with an outcome that is invariably favorable to the goals and agendas of the Global Power Elite.

   "College textbooks present war and revolution as more or less accidental results of conflicting forces," writes Sutton. "The decay of political negotiation into physical conflict comes about, according to these books, after valiant efforts to avoid war. Unfortunately, this is nonsense. War is always a deliberate creative act by individuals."

   "Revolution is always recorded as a spontaneous event by the politically or economically deprived against an autocratic state," he continues. "Never in Western textbooks will you find the evidence that revolutions need finance and the source of finance in many cases traces back to Wall Street."

   Professor Sutton's prodigious body of work includes the heavily referenced history, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, which explains how investment bankers, including Skull and Bones member Prescott Sheldon Bush, fatherof George H.W. Bush and partner of investment banking firm Brown Brothers, Harriman, financed the Nazi War Machine through New York City-based Union Banking Corporation, a joint Thyssen Bank-Harriman operation.

   Professor Sutton's landmark history entitled Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution describes how Wall Street bankers initially financed the communists, and The Best Enemy Money Can Buy describes how the Power Elite continued to financially support the Soviet Empire during the historical charade called "The Cold War."

   In America's Secret Establishment, Professor Sutton writes that "just as we found the Bush family involved with the early development of the Soviet Union, then with financing the Nazis and behind the scenes in Angola, so we find a Bush active in construction of the new dialectic arm: Communist China."

   When President Nixon appointed George "Poppy" Bush (The Order 1948) as US Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971, the scene was set for the development of China as the next superpower -- with the help of advanced American technology.

   Note: The Order specializes in long-range global planning.

   Since then, "Poppy" George's older brother, Prescott Bush, has been managing Bush Family investments in China. Using Asset Management International Financing & Settlement, Ltd and other corporate fronts, he has brokered deals with Los Angeles based Hughes Aircraft as well as other joint ventures with the repressive, human-rights abusing, murderous Chinese government.

   Sound familiar? Remember the Bush Family's involvement with the thugocracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Empire. It's all in the family -- so to speak.

   "Are you ready to be reborn?" the secret society's initiate is asked in the movie.

   Then the elaborate rituals and male-bonding ceremonies of illuminati-style networking begin -- being caged with your fellow 'soul-mate" and asked to reveal your worst fears, then covering up the crimes and murders of your secret society buddies. After all even the younger Mandrake confesses, "My father always covers for me."

    Though disparaged by mainstream reviewers, "The Skulls"is an entertaining look at a dark and disturbing subject. With the golden hues of an affluent youth, the film reflects the charmed lifestyle of the young and the elite -- expensive cars, unlimited bank accounts and even the ubiquitous sex slaves, babes in illuminati land, who march in during the Skulls' festivities.

    And, for the eternally optimistic, it even has a happy ending. You can walk away from the illuminati. And even live.

    "If it's secret and elite, it can't be right," Luke concludes. As author C. Wright Mills says in The Power Elite, these are the elite groups which network for the rest of their lives.

   "He was a Skull the day he was born," says a talent scout in the film. He could have been referring to 3rd generation Bonesman, George W. Bush, the soon-to-be Emperor of America. His father George Herbert Walker Bush, as well as his grandfather, Prescott Bush, are both Boodleboys, i.e. members of the Order of Skull and Bones.

   Don't hold your breath for Barbara Walters to ask George Bush Jr. about his membership in the Order.

   He really can't answer that question -- you know.

   It's against the rules.

Uri Dowbenko is CEO of New Improved Entertainment Corp.

from Little Red Hen, 1999-Jul-6, by Kris Millegan:

An interview with Antony C. Sutton, Researcher Emeritus

Antony C. Sutton, 74, has been persecuted but never prosecuted for his research and subsequent publishing of his findings. His mainstream career was shattered by his devotion towards uncovering the truth. In 1968, his Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development was published by The Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Sutton showed how the Soviet state's technological and manufacturing base, which was then engaged in supplying the North Vietnamese the armaments and supplies to kill and wound American soldiers, was built by US firms and mostly paid for by the US taxpayers. From their largest steel and iron plant, to automobile manufacturing equipment, to precision ball-bearings and computers, basically the majority of the Soviet's large industrial enterprises had been built with the United States help or technical assistance.

Professor Richard Pipes, of Harvard, said in his book, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (Simon & Schuster; 1984) "In his three-volume detailed account of Soviet Purchases of Western Equipment and Technology . . . [Antony] Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as 'extreme' or, more often, simply ignored."

The report was too much and Sutton's career as a well-paid member of the academic establishment was under attack and he was told that he "would not survive".

His work led him to more questions than answers. "Why had the US built-up it's enemy? Why did the US build-up the Soviet Union, while we also transferred technology to Hitler's Germany? Why does Washington want to conceal these facts?"

Sutton, following his leads, proceeded to research and write his three outstanding books on Wall Street: and FDR; and the Rise of Hitler; and The Bolshevik Revolution.

Then, someone sent Antony a membership list of Skull and Bones and- "a picture jumped out". And what a picture! A multi generational foreign-based secret society with fingers in all kinds of pies and roots going back to 'Illuminati' influences in 1830's Germany.

And what a list of members, accomplishments and . . . skullduggery!

For the full story, check-out Sutton's book America's Secret Establishment, in print for 14 years and available from Liberty House Press, 1-800-343-6180. My short essay on The Order of Skull and Bones is available at http://www.parascope.com/articles/0997/skullbones.htm

Here, in a rare, recent e-mail interview, are Antony Sutton's own reflections and answers to questions from myself and other researchers

Pre-interview note from Antony Sutton:

Remember all my papers on this are in deep storage 1000 miles away and cannot be accessed and I've not even thought about S&B for 15 years. I had no idea that any interest had been aroused out there. I know the book is a steady seller from the royalty reports; but that is all.

For the last 10 years I have been in complete seclusion working on future technology... I'm more engineer than historian. The only visitors I've had or meetings have been with three-letter agency people, who arrive on the doorstep unannounced and complain I am hard to find. Big Brother has the ability apparently to find anyone.

Nothing mysterious about this, I just dislike publicity and social interaction. You will see from the Dutch TV episode that my work still upsets the "powers that be" so these are merely reasonable precautions.

KM - Can you tell the story of how you learned of Skull & Bones? And how you felt?

AS - I knew nothing of S&B until I received a letter in the early 80's asking if I would like to look at a genuine membership list. For no real reason I said yes. It was agreed to send the package by Federal Express and I could keep it for 24 hours, it had to be returned to the safe. It was a "black bag" job by a family member disgusted with their activities.

For the benefit of any S&B members who may read and doubt the statement; the membership list is in two volumes, black leather bound. Living members and deceased members in separate volumes. Very handsome books.

I spent all night in Kinko's, Santa Cruz , copied the entire volumes and returned within the 24 hour period.

I have never released any copies or identified the source. I figured each copy could be coded and enable S&B to trace the leak.

How did I feel? I felt then (as I do now} that these "prominent" men are really immature juveniles at heart. The horrible reality is that these little boys have been dominant in their influence in world affairs. No wonder we have wars and violence. Skull and Bones is the symbol of terrorist violence, pirates, the SS Deaths Head Division in WW Two, labels on poison bottles and so on.

I kept the stack of Xerox sheets for quite a while before I looked at them-when I did look-a picture jumped out, THIS was a significant part of the so called establishment. No wonder the world has problems!

KM - What is the percentage of active members?

AS - I haven't checked for 15 years...it used to be about one quarter. With the rise of the Bush dynasty it will increase somewhat, as they climb on the bandwagon. The Demos had their turn with Harriman in the 40's and 50's.

KM - How many active members are there?

AS - Usually about 600 alive at any one time . . . recently more active.

KM- What is your take on the grandfather clock that each member allegedly receives?

AS - They do get a clock I've had that confirmed and you will see it in the photos in ASE (America's Secret Establishment). Might be symbolic, perhaps to state their organization goes on timelessly.

KM - Has Skull and Bones lost its clout?

AS - Well look at the recent fund raiser for George Bush...Republicans are stuffing money into his pockets...I suggest members recently got behind one of their own and decided to push George all out for presidentand Democrats can't do a thing because Democrat Bones are not going to allow the Party to use the ultimate weaponGeorge's membership in a foreign secret society.

KM - What do you know of George ' W.' Bush?

AS - He is a third generation Bonesman. My personal impression is that he doesn't have the drive of his father or the skills of his grandfather.... but I could be very wrong. He can beat anyone hands down - except Ventura.

If Bush handlers allow a face to face debate between Bush and Ventura, Ventura will win. Remember Ventura has admitted to his so-called "sins". Bush has a closet full waiting to emerge. People are getting bored with cover ups and spin. 2000 may see the end of the Bones influence or - reality that these Bones people are powerful.

KM - Is the 'name' of the German group known?

AS - Almost certainly Illuminati.

KM - Some people say that there are other 'cells'; what do you think?

AS - There are many other secret societies. I've only looked at S&B. Unfortunately no historian will keep his job if he tries to explore conspiracy...this is taboo for the American Historical Association. Sooner or later outsiders will take a look. I've long thought that S&B fits the legal definition of a conspiracy and needs to be officially investigated.

Yes there should be other cells. No secret society worth anything is going to keep its inner actions written down on paper. If the gigantic electronic monitoring apparatus is for national security purposes; then it should be monitoring these people 24 hours a day.

KM - What are your thoughts on Wolf's Head? Scroll & Key? And the other Senior societies at Yale?

AS - Wolfs Head, Scroll and Key seem to be pale imitations of S&B, but they have the same objective of deliberately building discrimination into a society. I listened to Jesse Ventura last night and he made the point that the Founding Fathers intended for citizens to represent the people. I agree, a trucker, a farmer, a teacher-represents the people not a bunch of professional pols or a secret society like S&B. All these societies place their own members ahead of the pack and give preference to their own members; this is discrimination par excellence.

KM - Have you read Cathy O'Brian's book Tranceformation Of America? What do think of it?

AS - The book does not contain one piece of hard physical evidence.. I think Cathy O'Brien BELIEVES SHE IS TELLING THE TRUTH . . . but remember that Mark Phillips is A skilled neuro-linguistic-programmer.

Another point that really concerns me is this...where did this story originate? It originated in Communist Chinese Intelligence and Mark Phillips had a contractual relationship with the ChiComs. This could be an attempt to destabilize the US.

No doubt these Washington pols are fully capable of these weird practices, just look at Bohemian Grove but that doesn't mean that the book is an accurate portrayal. If the book is credible I would think the police would have raided Bohemian Grove long ago.

My best guess is that the Chinese picked up whispers of Washington scandals and blew them out of proportion for their own purposes. This is a GUESS...I don't know.

One thing that puzzled me, with all these sexual shenanigans how do Washington politicians find time to do anything else? According to the book this is a full time occupation for Senator Byrd and others.

KM - What did your study of elites, economics, secrecy and technology do for your career?

Depends what you mean by "career"? By conventional standards I am an abject failure. I've been thrown out of two major Universities (UCLA and Stanford), denied tenure at Cal State Los Angeles. Every time I write something, it appears to offend someone in the Establishment and they throw me to the wolves.

On the other hand I've written 26 books, published a couple of newsletters and so on...even more important I've never compromised on the truth And I don't quit.

In material terms...hopeless failure. In terms of discovery...I think I've been successful. Judge a man by his enemies. William Buckley called me a "jerk". Glenn Campbell, former Director of the Hoover Institution, Stanford called me "a problem".

KM - Do you believe that there has been suppression of technology? Has it been major or minor?

AS - Yes there has been suppression but its going to be impossible to suppress the new emerging paradigm.

KM - The Federal Reserve, the House of Morgan, House of Rothschild and Skull and Bones are they related?

AS - Best source for this is a book by me The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, 1995 CPA, PO Box 596, Boring OR 97007

KM- On Skull and Bone's influencing John Dewey and Horace Mann; are there good source materials to follow that story?

AS - Depends what you want to find. You could explore the 10 (?) volume works of Dewey...outrageous Hegelianism, the state is supreme, the individual merely a pawn to be trained. This is the basis of our 'educational system" ...or you could go and explore the members of S&B who brought the system to the US.

This trained "sausage mind" outlook has thoroughly permeated our universities that's why we have the peer review system...we are all supposed to think alike and find the same answers. This political correctness garbage is another step to total thought control.

KM - Did any of Hitler's economic policies threaten the interests of the international bankers, and if so did that play a role in his downfall?

AS - Hitler's economic policies were OK'd by the bankers right through the war...ITT, Chase, Texaco and others were operating in Nazi-held France as late as 1945. In fact Chase in Paris was trying to get Nazi accounts as late as 1944. When we got to Germany in May 1945, I remember seeing a (bombed-out) Woolworth store in Hamburg and thinking, "What's Woolworth doing in Nazi Germany?" While we were bombed and shelled it was "business as usual" for Big Business. Try the Alien Custodian Papers.

See my Best Enemy Money Can Buy for more.

Union Banking is very important. I made a documentary for Dutch National TV some years ago. It got all the way through the production process to the Dutch TV Guide...at the last minute it was pulled and another film substituted. This documentary has proof of Bush financing Hitler-documents. Maybe my Dutch friends will still get it viewed, but the apparatus reaches into Holland.

KM - What is the story that was going to be told on Dutch TV? And what is the story of it's censorship?

Couple of years back, a Dutch TV production company from Amsterdam- under contract to Dutch National TV-came to the US to make a documentary on S&B. They went to the Bones Temple and other places and interviewed people on East Coast. On the West Coast, they interviewed myself and one other person.

I saw extracts from the original and it is a good professional job. They had documents linking Bush family and other S&B members to financing Hitler through Union Banking of New York and its Dutch correspondent bank. More than I have in Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler.

The first version was later upgraded into a two part documentary and scheduled for showing this last March. It was pulled at last minute and has never been shown.

KM - Who has been financing Milosevic, and what role has the international banking community played in the Balkans?

AS - I haven't looked at this one. Of course the notorious Black Hand society is located in the Balkans. See WW One.

KM - What is the importance of your work on Skull and Bones?

AS - The potential is extraordinary. If we find that secret societies are indeed significant the entire history of the last two centuries will have to be re-written.

At this point in 1999, the potential has not been explored by others and I've moved back to my original interest-technology. Apparently people see some merit in the work. It is never advertised. It is an underground word of mouth distribution but has sold steadily from 1986 to date. Every month I get a royalty check, so I know it is selling. But my original enthusiastic statement has not been fulfilled.

KM - What do you see for the future?

AS - Chaos, confusion and ultimately a battle between the individual and the State.

The individual is the stronger; and will win. The state is a fiction sanctified by Hegel and his followers to control the individual.

Sooner or later people will wake up. First we have to dump the trap of right and left, this is a Hegelian trap to divide and control. The battle is not between right and left; it is between us and them.

The message is getting through. ASE has sold for 15 years, small but steady. No advertising. It's an underground work. But the breadth of interest is amazing. From Africa, to Russia (12,000 copies), right, left...it cuts across all ethnic, political, social lines..

The spirit of God is within us as individuals. Skull & Bones represents death. It has no life spirit and pretends that the State "is the march of God on earth".

The thinking of immature juveniles, deadly and destructive and has almost totally infected Washington.

What to do? Find yourself and then go to work..... tell your friends and put out the message.

The answer is within you.

Antony Sutton, is the author of 26 books, many of which can be purchased on-line at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Liberty House Press at 1-800-343-6180 has copies of America's Secret Establishment and Best Enemy Money Can Buy for sale.

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Kris Millegan, is a radical; a singer-songwriter; and conspiracy theory researcher who may be reached at RoadsEnd@aol.com

excerpt from The Order of Skull and Bones, by Kris Millegan (1997-Sep):

[...]

3. Networks of Power

In his book "America's Secret Establishment," Antony Sutton outlined the Order of Skull and Bones' ability to establish vertical and horizontal "chains of influence" that ensured the continuity of their conspiratorial schemes.

The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy links represent the "vertical chain".

W. C. Whitney ('63), who married Flora Payne (of the Standard Oil Payne dynasty), was Secretary of the Navy. His attorney was a man named Elihu Root. Root hired Henry Stimson ('88), out of law school. Stimson took over from Root as Secretary of War in 1911, appointed by fellow Bonesman William Howard Taft. Stimson later became Coolidge's Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, Hoover's Secretary of State, and Secretary of War during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

Hollister Bundy ('09) was Stimson's special assistant and point man in the Pentagon for the Manhattan Project. His two sons, also members of Skull and Bones, were William Bundy ('39) and McGeorge Bundy ('40) -- both very active in governmental and foundation affairs.

The two brothers, from their positions in the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department, and as Special Assistants to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, exercised significant impact on the flow of information and intelligence during the Vietnam "War."

William Bundy went on to be editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential quarterly of the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR). McGeorge became president of the Ford Foundation.

Another interesting group of "Bonesmen" is the Harriman/Bush crowd. Averil Harriman ('13), "Elder Statesman" of the Democratic Party, and his brother Roland Harriman ('17) were very active members. In fact, four of Roland's fellow "Bonesmen" from the class of 1917 were directors of Brown Brothers, Harriman, including Prescott Bush ('17), George Bush's dad.

Since the turn of the century, two investment bank firms -- Guaranty Trust and Brown Brothers, Harriman -- were both dominated by members of Skull and Bones. These two firms were heavily involved in the financing of Communism and Hitler's regime.

[...]

excerpt from Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, by Antony C. Sutton:

CHAPTER TWELVE

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Conclusions

We have demonstrated with documentary evidence a number of critical associations between Wall Street international bankers and the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany.

First: that Wall Street financed the German cartels in the mid-1920's which in turn proceeded to bring Hitler to power.

Second: that the financing for Hitler and his S.S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I.G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944.

Third: that US multi-nationals under the control of Wall Street profited handsomely from Hitler's military construction program in the 1930's and at least until 1942.

Fourth: that these same international bankers used political influence in the U.S. to cover up their wartime collaboration and to do this, infiltrated the U.S. Control Commission for Germany.

Our evidence for these four major assertions can be summarized as follows:

In Chapter One we presented evidence that the Dawes and Young Plans for German reparations were formulated by Wall Streeters, temporarily wearing the hats of statesmen, and these loans generated a rain of profits for these international bankers. Owen Young of General Electric, Hjalmar Schacht, A. Voegler, and others intimately connected with Hitler's accession to power had earlier been the negotiation for the US and German sides, respectively. Three Wall Street houses - Dillon, Read; Harris, Forbes; and, National City Company - handled three-quarters of the reparations loans used to create the German cartel system, including the dominant I.G. Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which together produced 95 percent of the explosives for the Nazi side in World War II.

The central role of I.G. Farben in Hitler's coup d'etat was reviewed in Chapter Two. The directors of American I.G. (Farben) were identified as prominent American businessmen: Walter Teagle, a close Roosevelt associate and backer and an NRA administrator; banker Paul Warburg (his brother Max Warburg was on the board of I.G. Farben in Germany); and Edsel Ford. Farben contributed 400,000 RM directly to Schacht and Hess for use in the crucial 1933 elections and Farben was subsequently in the forefront of military development in Nazi Germany.

A donation of 60,000 RM was made to Hitler by German General Electric (A.E.G.), which had four directors and a 25-30 percent interest held by the U.S. General Electric parent company. This role was described in Chapter Three, and we found that Gerard Swope, an originator of Roosevelt's New Deal (its National Recovery Administration segment), together with Owen Young of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Clark Minor of International General Electric, were the dominant Wall Streeters in A.E.G. and the most significant single influence.

We also found no evidence to indict the German electrical firm Siemens, which was not under Wail Street control. In contrast, there is documentary evidence that both A.E.G. and Osram, the other units of the German electrical industry - both of which had US participation and control - did finance Hitler. In fact, almost all directors of German General Electric were Hitler backers, either directly through A.E.G. or indirectly through other German firms. G.E. rounded out its Hitler support by technical cooperation with Krupp, aimed at restricting U.S. development of tungsten carbide, which worked to the detriment of the US in World War II. We concluded that A.E.G. plants in Germany managed, by a yet unknown maneuver, to avoid bombing by the Allies.

An examination of the role of Standard Oil of New Jersey (which was and is controlled by the Rockefeller interests) was undertaken in Chapter Four. Standard Oil apparently did not finance Hitler's accession to power in 1933 (that part of the "myth of Sidney Warburg" is not proven). On the other hand, payments were made up to 1944 by Standard Oil of New Jersey, to develop synthetic gasoline for war purposes on behalf of the Nazis and, through its wholly owned subsidiary, to Heinrich Himmler's S.S. Circle of Friends for political purposes. Standard Oil's role was technical aid to Nazi development of synthetic rubber and gasoline through a U.S. research company under the management control of Standard Oil. The Ethyl Gasoline Company, jointly owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey and General Motors, was instrumental in supplying vital ethyl lead to Nazi Germany - over the written protests of the U.S. War Department - with the clear knowledge that the ethyl lead was for Nazi military purposes.

In Chapter Five we demonstrated that International Telephone and Telegraph Company, one of the more notorious multi-nationals, worked both sides of World War II through Baron Kurt von Schroder, of the Schroder banking group. I.T.T. also held a 28-percent interest in Focke-Wolfe aircraft, which manufactured excellent German fighter planes. We also found that Texaco (Texas Oil Company) was involved in Nazi endeavors through German attorney Westrick, but dropped its chairman of the board Rieber when these endeavors were publicized.

Henry Ford was an early (1922) Hitler backer and Edsel Ford continued the family tradition in 1942 by encouraging French Ford to profit from arming the German Wehrmacht. Subsequently, these Ford-produced vehicles were used against American soldiers as they landed in France in 1944. For his early recognition of, and timely assistance to, the Nazis, Henry Ford received a Nazi medal in 1938. The records of French Ford suggest Ford Motor received kid glove treatment from the Nazis after 1940.

The provable threads of Hitler financing are drawn together in Chapter Seven and answer with precise names and figures the question, who financed Adolf Hitler? This chapter indicts Wall Street and, incidentally, no one else of consequence in the United States except the Ford family. The Ford family is not normally associated with Wall Street but is certainly a part of the "power elite."

In earlier chapters we cited several Roosevelt associates, including Teagle of Standard Oil, the Warburg family, and Gerard Swope. In Chapter Eight the role of Putzi Hanfstaengl, another Roosevelt friend and a participant in the Reichstag fire, is traced. The composition of the Nazi inner circle during World War II, and the financial contributions of Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiaries, are traced in Chapter Nine. Documentary proof of these monetary contributions is presented. Kurt von Schroder is identified as the key intermediary in this S.S. "slush fund."

Finally, in Chapter Ten we reviewed a book suppressed in 1934 and the "myth of 'Sidney Warburg.'" The suppressed book accused the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, and the major oil companies of financing Hitler. While the name "Sidney Warburg" was no doubt an invention, the extraordinary fact remains that the argument is the suppressed "Sidney Warburg" book is remarkably close to the evidence presented now. It also remains a puzzle why James Paul Warburg, fifteen years later, would want to attempt, in a rather transparently slipshod manner, to refute the contents of the "Warburg" book, a book he claims not to have seen. It is perhaps even more of a puzzle why Warburg would choose Nazi von Papen's Memoirs as the vehicle to present his refutation.

Finally, in Chapter Eleven we examined the roles of the Morgan and Chase Banks in World War II, specifically their collaboration with the Nazis in France while a major war was raging.

In other words, as in our two previous examinations of the links between New York international bankers and major historical events, find a provable pattern of subsidy and political manipulation.

The Pervasive Influence of International Bankers

Looking at the broad array of facts presented in the three volumes of the Wall Street series, we find persistent recurrence of the same names: Owen Young, Gerard Swope, Hjalmar Schacht, Bernard Baruch, etc.; the same international banks: J.P. Morgan, Guaranty Trust, Chase Bank; and the same location in New York: usually 120 Broadway.

This group of international bankers backed the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequently profited from the establishment of a Soviet Russia. This group backed Roosevelt and profited from New Deal socialism. This group also backed Hitler and certainly profited from the German armament in 1930's. When Big Business should have been running its business operations at Ford Motor, Standard of New Jersey, and so on, we find it actively and deeply involved in political upheavals, war, and revolutions in three major countries.

The version of history presented here is that the financial elite knowingly and with premeditation assisted the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in concert with German bankers. After profiting handsomely from the German hyper-inflationary distress of 1923, and planning to place the German reparations burden onto the backs of American investors, Wall Street found it had brought about the 1929 financial crisis.

Two men were then backed as leaders for major Western countries: Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States and Adolf Hitler in Germany. The Roosevelt New Deal and Hitler's Four Year Plan had great similarities. The Roosevelt and Hitler plans were plans for fascist takeovers of their respective countries. While Roosevelt's NRA failed, due to then-operating constitutional constraints, Hitler's Plan succeeded.

Why did the Wall Street elite, the international bankers, want Roosevelt and Hitler in power? This is an aspect we have not explored. According to the "myth of 'Sidney Warburg,'" Wall Street wanted a policy of revenge; that is, it wanted war in Europe between France and Germany. We know even from Establishment history that both Hitler and Roosevelt acted out policies leading to war.

The link-ups between persons and events in this three-book series would require another book. But a single example will perhaps indicate the remarkable concentration of power within a relatively few organizations, and the use of this power.

On May 1st, 1918, when the Bolsheviks controlled only a small fraction of Russia (and were to come near to losing even that fraction in the summer of 1918), the American League to Aid and Cooperate with Russia was organized in Washington DC to support the Bolsheviks. This was not a "Hands off Russia" type of committee formed by the Communist Party U.S.A. or its allies. It was a committee created by Wall Street with George P. Whalen of Vacuum Oil Company as Treasurer and Coffin and Oudin of General Electric, along with Thompson of the Federal Reserve System, Willard of the Baltimore a Ohio Railroad, and assorted socialists.

When we look at the rise of Hitler and Nazism we find Vacuum and General Electric well represented. Ambassador Dodd in Germany was struck by the monetary and technical contribution by the Rockefeller-controlled Vacuum Oil Company in building up military gasoline facilities for the Nazis. The Ambassador tried to warn Roosevelt. Dodd believed, in his apparent naivete of world affairs, that Roosevelt would intervene, but Roosevelt himself was backed by these same oil interests and Walter Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey and the NRA was on the board of Roosevelt's Warm Springs Foundation. So, in but one of many examples, we find the Rockefeller-controlled Vacuum Oil Company prominently assisting in the creation of Bolshevik Russia, the military build-up of Nazi Germany, and backing Roosevelt's New Deal.

Is the United States Ruled by a Dictatorial Elite?

Within the last decade or so, certainly since the 1960s, a steady flow of literature has presented a thesis that the United States is ruled by a self-perpetuating and unelected power elite. Even further, most of these books aver that this elite controls, or at the least heavily influences, all foreign and domestic policy decisions, and that no idea becomes respectable or is published in the United States without the tacit approval, or perhaps lack of disapproval, of this elitist circle.

Obviously the very flow of anti-establishment literature by itself testifies that the United States cannot be wholly under the thumb of any single group or elite. On the other hand, anti-establishment literature is not fully recognized or reasonably discussed in academic or media circles. More often than not it consists of a limited edition, privately produced, almost hand-to-hand circulated. There are some exceptions, true; but not enough to dispute the observation that anti-establishment critics do not easily enter normal information/distribution channels.

Whereas in the early and mid-1960's, any concept of rule by a conspiratorial elite, or indeed any kind of elite, was reason enough to dismiss the proponent out of hand as a "nut case," the atmosphere for such concepts has changed radically. The Watergate affair probably added the final touches to a long-developing environment of skepticism and doubt. We are almost at the point where anyone who accepts, for example, the Warren Commission report, or believes that the decline and fall of Mr. Nixon did not have some conspiratorial aspects is suspect. In brief, no one any longer really believes the Establishment information process. And there is a wide variety of alternative presentations of events now available for the curious.

Several hundred books, from the full range of the political and philosophical spectrum, add bits and pieces of evidence, more hypotheses, and more accusations. What was not too long ago a kooky idea, talked about at midnight behind closed doors, in hushed and almost conspiratorial whispers, is now openly debated - not, to be sure, in Establishment newspapers but certainly on non-network radio talk shows, the underground Press, and even from time to time in books from respectable Establishment publishing houses.

So let us ask the question again: Is there an unelected power elite behind the U.S. Government?

A substantive and often-cited source of information is Carroll Quigley, Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University, who in 1966 had published a monumental modern history entitled Tragedy and Hope. Quigley's book is apart from others in this revisionist vein, by virtue of the fact that it was based on a two-year study of the internal documents of one of the power centers. Quigley traces the history of the power elite:

"... the powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less that to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole."

Quigley also demonstrates that the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Planning Association, and other groups are "semi-secret" policy-making bodies under the control of this power elite.

In the following tabular presentation we have listed five such revisionist books, including Quigley's. Their essential theses and compatibility with the three volumes of the "Wall Street" series are summarized. It is surprising that in the three major historical events noted, Carroll Quigley is not at all consistent with the "Wall Street" series evidence. Quigley goes a long way to provide evidence for the existence of the power elite, but does not penetrate the operations of the elite. [Quigley offers a "limited hangout" -Ed.]

Possibly, the papers used by Quigley had been vetted, and did not include documentation on elitist manipulation of such events as the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's accession to power, and the election of Roosevelt in 1933. More likely, these political manipulations may not be recorded at all in the files of the power groups. They may have been unrecorded actions by a small ad hoc segment of the elite. It is noteworthy that the documents used by this author came from government sources, recording the day-to-day actions of Trotsky, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, J.P. Morgan and the various firms and banks involved.

On the other hand, such authors as Jules Archer, Gary Alien, Helen P. Lasell, and William Domhoff, writing from widely different political standpoints, are consistent with the "Wall Street" evidence. These writers present a hypothesis of a power elite manipulating the US Government. The "Wall Street" series demonstrates how this hypothesized "power elite" has manipulated specific historical events.

Obviously any such exercise of unconstrained and supra-legal power is unconstitutional, even though wrapped in the fabric of law-abiding actions, We can therefore legitimately raise the question of the existence of a subversive force operating to remove constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The New York Elite as a Subversive Force

Twentieth-century history, as recorded in Establishment textbooks and journals, is inaccurate. It is a history which is based solely upon those official documents which various Administrations have seen fit to release for public consumption.

But an accurate history cannot be based on a selective release of documentary archives. Accuracy requires access to all documents. In practice, as previously classified documents in the U.S. State Department files, the British Foreign Office, and the German Foreign Ministry archives and other depositories are acquired, a new version of history has emerged; the prevailing Establishment version is seen to be, not only inaccurate, but designed to hide a pervasive fabric of deceit and immoral conduct.

The center of political power, as authorized by the U.S. Constitution, is with an elected Congress and an elected President, working within the framework and under the constraints of a Constitution, as interpreted by an unbiased Supreme Court. We have in the past assumed that political power is consequently carefully exercised by the Executive and legislative branch, after due deliberation and assessment of the wishes of the electorate. In fact, nothing could be further from this assumption. The electorate has long suspected, but now knows, that political promises are worth nothing. Lies are the order of the day for policy implementors. Wars are started (and stopped) with no shred of coherent explanation. Political words have never matched political deeds. Why not? Apparently because the center of political power has been elsewhere than with elected and presumably responsive representatives in Washington, and this power elite has its own objectives, which are inconsistent with those of the public at large.

In this three-volume series we have identified for three historical events the seat of political power in the United States - the power behind the scenes, the hidden influence on Washington - as that of the financial establishment in New York: the private international bankers, more specifically the financial houses of J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank, and in earlier days (before amalgamation of their Manhattan Bank with the former Chase Bank), the Warburgs.

The United States has, in spite of the Constitution and its supposed constraints, become a quasi-totalitarian state. While we do not (yet) have the overt trappings of dictatorship, the concentration camps and the knock on the door at midnight, we most certainly do have threats and actions aimed at the survival of non-Establishment critics, use of the Internal Revenue Service to bring dissidents in line, and manipulation of the Constitution by a court system that is politically subservient to the Establishment.

It is in the pecuniary interests of the international bankers to centralize political power - and this centralization can best be achieved within a collectivist society, such as socialist Russia, national socialist Germany, or a Fabian socialist United States.

There can be no full understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century American politics and foreign policy without the realization that this financial elite effectively monopolizes Washington policy.

In case after case, newly released documentation implicates this elite and confirms this hypothesis. The revisionist versions of the entry of the United States into World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam reveal the influence and objectives of this elite.

For most of the twentieth century the Federal Reserve System, particularly the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (which is outside the control of Congress, unaudited and uncontrolled, with the power to print money and create credit at will), has exercised a virtual monopoly over the direction of the American economy. In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power center that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obviously subversive - foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits, if you will), for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families.

Through foundations controlled by this elite, research by compliant and spineless academics, "conservatives" as well as "liberals," has been directed into channels useful for the objectives of the elite essentially to maintain this subv